"My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely."–Truman Capote
The Truman Capote I grew up watching and reading was the Capote who appeared, usually drunk or drugged, odd but always interesting, on afternoon and evening talk shows, spinning stories about the fabulously famous and wealthy crowd with whom he ran. He was a professional personality by the time I was aware of him, but I also knew that he'd written much-admired stories that had been turned into very famous and popular films. I knew that my mother admired his work, and that he had written "A Christmas Memory," one of the most beautiful, understated, tender stories I've ever read. The fact that it was based in his own experience made it all the more lovely to me. I felt sad for and protective of him at a young age, because I knew that the man who had written that story had been a tender and hyperaware child, like I had, and had seen the fear and pain in life as clearly as the joy and the secret beauties of it.
My mother taught "A Christmas Memory" to her high school English students for many years and she introduced it to me when I was about ten. I was completely taken with this story of a young boy abandoned by his parents and living with his disapproving southern aunts. This boy's best friend was the childlike old-maid cousin with whom he also lived, a woman who flew handmade kites with him and took him to buy moonshine whiskey from Mr. Haha Jones so they could make their annual batch of fruitcakes, one of which they sent to President Franklin Roosevelt every year. Capote had taken the littlest details and moments in what others might see as an unexceptional situation and spun them into a rich and compelling story, simple and straightforward but with every word in place, every emotion sparely but elegantly woven into the words. I think it's a short masterpiece; it is perhaps my favorite short story, and the one I've read more often than any other.
It was immediately clear to me that Capote got the tone, the subtleties, the story, and the total devotion of the characters for each other exactly right. That he was the model for the boy Dill in his friend Harper Lee's story To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel that I find close to perfect, made him all the more special to me. I have read and reread "A Christmas Memory" to myself and others most of the Christmases of my life, and cry as regularly as clockwork when I come to the last bittersweet page. This was a man who clearly understood loss and loneliness, and who understood empathy and tender connection to another like few writers I'd come across. There was something beautiful and tender and true in him and in his art that I, and millions of other people, were drawn to, and wanted to believe in.
When Capote died in 1984 among swirling stories of long-term drug and alcohol abuse, he also left behind him a parade of disaffected friends who felt he'd used and abused them, that he'd betrayed their friendship and their secrets in order to steal their souls so that he might make not only his party anecdotes but his writing come to life. He had been such a wildly successful New York socialite, courting and collecting the loveliest, richest, and most prominent socialites as his "swans," as he called them, for years. He hosted the New York social event of the decade, the famous and successful Black and White Ball, in 1966. Best-dressed list icons like Lee Radziwill and Babe Paley attended parties with him and had him to their summer homes, traveled with him and relished his delicious gossip. He wangled his way into the hearts of dozens of people who felt he understood them intimately and would respect and love them not only despite but because of their foibles. When he wanted to be charming, nobody could outcharm him. He made people of all types and of any social standing believe he loved them for the tender, misunderstood people they were inside their suits of shiny invincibility; they felt not only understood by him but safe with him. And then he spilled out their secrets for everyone to see.
For years he gathered their lives into his short stories and promised a splendid, insightful book to his publisher, talk show hosts, and the world, and we all waited with bated breath, knowing that when Capote had the time to build a work, like In Cold Blood, he would carefully piece it together just so and make the wait worthwhile. He had shown his mastery of the short story form very early in life, and, when sober, he was an insightful and entertaining fellow. He was also extraordinarily catty when he wanted to be, and, when one wasn't on the receiving end of that acid tongue, he could be shockingly funny. But his charm was so extreme and his magical power of diverting attention from the things that everyone should have known that he was a sponge who missed no details, a writer first and foremost, insightful and ruthless when exposing the hidden motivation, the raw nerve.
So he gathered his swans' secrets and then poured them out onto the page with such clarity, and so little effort at concealing the identities of his characters' inspirations, that he immediately and permanently drove most of his friends and their associates away and turned their feelings for him from indulgent and loving exasperation to anger, fear, and resentment. To learn of how almost all the doors of society slammed on him one by one after he had been the toast of New York, the shining star of literary society, was to feel that, no matter how much he deserved what he got, it was still a terrible shame, that there must have been some mistake somewhere, some misunderstanding.
Knowing his downward trajectory during the last 15 years of his life makes "Capote," the outstanding new film about his years researching and writing In Cold Blood, even more riveting. The film constructs, with not one extraneous scene or unnecessary bit of dialog, an understanding of his place in literary society, and his chameleon-like ease at blending into the lives of the people whom he wanted to capture and luring them into trusting him with their lives and stories. His ability to say exactly what a publisher, a murderer, his lover, his oldest friend wanted to hear in order to court their love or trust, and seem to mean each word he said, is juxtaposed rivetingly with his ability to cut them off at the knees, dismiss them, insult them, or ignore them when their needs don't suit his. The performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman is astonishing, not only because his impersonation of Capote's strained, high, tiny voice and his fussy mannerisms is so remarkably good, but because he moves effortlessly between charm and seemingly endless empathy to self-absorption of enormous proportion so smoothly and naturally. We both admire and revile him. In their roles, excellent actors Chris Cooper and Catherine Keener show indulgence and affection for him, as well as wariness and disgust with his deceit of others, of them, of himself. The script is often spare and the pacing, while perfect, is never rushed; what is not said by the characters is as important and full of meaning as the well-crafted dialog. We learn just enough about any character, any situation, to be able to piece together what its meaning will be to those involved. His actions and the reactions of others are carefully calibrated so that we are never in the dark as to what is going on or how his actions will reverberate, but we are trusted to be able to let the story build in our minds; the writer, director, and actors don't spoonfeed us but deftly piece the feelings, words, and actions of the characters together so that the story builds and intermeshes exactly as it should. This is how a subtle story should be told.
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Thursday, October 06, 2005
The Mirror Crack'd
My first passport photo was taken for a dual passport I shared with my mother when I was 12 and she was 33. In 1975, the U.S. Passport Office allowed a parent and child to travel on the same passport, so my mother and I went to Europe for a whirlwind 15-day, seven-country guided tour carrying the same drab green passport and staring solemnly out of the same black and white photograph. Since my mother and I were nearly always together in those days, finishing each other’s sentences, answering the phone in voices with identical inflections, and harmonizing perfectly when singing together at the piano almost nightly, it made sense that we’d share an international identity and that our two images would meld into one on our most important official and universally-recognized document.
My mother was a high school English teacher for 37 years. She began at age 23, straight out of Cal Berkeley, freshly divorced from my father, with a toddler to care for and almost no money. She was a very talented pianist and singer as well as an enthusiastic and vivacious young teacher, so she never lacked for friends, activities, or boyfriends. I spent a lot of time with my wonderful grandmother while my mother was teaching, dating, or performing, and Grandma was the infinitely patient and loving influence in my childhood, the gentle hand, the quiet homebody at the center of my world, while my mother was the dynamic, exciting spitfire zooming in circles around me. I adored them both. But while my grandmother was devoted to me and could only see the best in me, my mother was exciting but mercurial, generous with praise but also with criticism, laudatory of my talents yet loudly dismissive of my feelings, quick to embarrass me with her bragging about my accomplishments and with public commentary about what she considered my oversensitivity and klutziness. She saw me as an extension of herself, her talents, her interests, and her public face.
As a school teacher who taught only a mile from her home, my mother considered herself something of a public figure and an example to the community, and she made it clear to me that I must always be above reproach in order to reflect well on her. I was never to correct her before others (or in private, actually), and I had better look good and behave appropriately at all times. She wangled any secret thoughts or feelings out of me and then berated me for having them when they were not in accord with hers. To disagree was disloyal, to tell others of my disagreements with her was betrayal. I learned more of her secrets than is appropriate for a child to know about a mother; it was my job to hear her troubles and bear them with her, build her up, support her, soothe her and humor her. I was there to give her strength during her weakest, scariest moments and then help her present to the world the illusion that she was always strong and happy. And she presented herself to the world with panache; she was an excellent and exciting teacher, upbeat and bubbling over with enthusiasm and warmth for her students, pushing them to work harder and better than was expected of them elsewhere. As long as she was undisputed queen of the classroom and her mastery was acknowledged, she was a generous, bold, and confident monarch and a fine educator.
Mom built me up and took great pleasure in my accomplishments, as I did in hers. She provided me with beautifully tailored clothing created by her own hands, and I received compliments on my clothes regularly from the time I was a toddler until I was in college. I joked with her that my reply to the hundreds of compliments I received over the years on my mother-made wardrobe had become rote: "Thanks-my-mother-made-it." She showered me with gifts at birthdays and Christmas, and she took me with her on trips and to plays and special events. She shared her enthusiasms with me and loved me devotedly, but she loved me as an extension of her own being and expected me to mirror the best of herself back toward her and out toward the world. She took great umbrage at any attempts on my part to express an opinion or taste or feeling that did not accord with hers, and punished me for diverging from her path.
She would not acknowledge her lack of boundaries or her inappropriateness, of course. Nor would she admit to being self-absorbed or insensitive to me when she ran roughshod over my plans or opinions. She would instead tell me how unkind and hurtful I was to question the perfect sensitivity and understanding behind her actions. For her to acknowledge that she sometimes based her actions on self-serving motives and was not always aware of or sensitive to the needs or desires of others would have been on a par with declaring herself to be a serial killer. In her mind, I must agree that she was exceptionally and exquisitely aware of all her motivations and of the needs of others, or, if I were to disagree or challenge her behavior, I must be implying that she was a grasping, selfish, cold-hearted user. To try to discuss with her the pain she caused by her behavior was to be accused of callousness and cruelty toward her. There could be no middle ground: I was either for her or against her.
That is the way of the narcissist.
As I grew older, my mother would come to my home and rearrange my furniture while I was out of the room. She cut me off in mid-sentence when she found my opinions too intricate for her attention span or too tiresome for her mood. She questioned me on my choices of food, clothing, furnishings, and decorative items, and would expect me to justify any opinion that differed from hers, often repeatedly, wondering when I would finally see the error of my ways and see the wisdom in valuing her choices above my own. She refused to refer to a new baby born to a relative by his true name for over a year because she did not care for his parents’ choice, and, even in the presence of his parents, she would only call him by his middle name until I finally insisted that she was being disrespectful and thoughtless and could not rename people at will to suit her tastes.
My mother’s need to have me mirror her tastes and thoughts, and her fear of my disagreement with her (even when I was silent), led to my feeling great internal conflict at an early age, and to fearing that I had only two choices: I could be true to my mother and have her on my side, or I could be true to myself and be seen by her as betraying her, and be punished and lonely as a result. Since I had been her astonishingly apt protégée and had basked in the glory of her approval by being as agreeable, hard-working, supportive, academically successful, talkative, and mature as I possibly could throughout my childhood, I had endeared myself to her and grown exceptionally close to her at the expense of fitting in with my peers. I had to choose her over them, to fit in with her needs and to see the world through her adult eyes, and that had made me ill suited to the job of appealing to other children. I had to choose whether to be loyal to children, whose tastes and behaviors were nothing like those of my mother and her friends, and who were more directly nasty to me than my mother was, or to be loyal to my mother and her needs. I had no siblings, and my only nearby cousins were either significantly older or much younger and showed little more than tolerance of my company. My vocabulary and interests set me apart from other children, and my physical ineptitude and love of food made my body feel unwieldy and traitorous, and other children who envied my ease with schoolwork and comfort with the teachers latched on to my failings and would not let go. The more they tripped and taunted me, spread lies about me, hurled wet newspapers at me as I walked home, spit in my hair, or broke into my locker to steal my books and ruin my gym clothes, the less I wanted to be a child, and the more I wanted to be an adult and in adult company.
Though my mother berated me regularly, she also praised me often. She humiliated me before others but she also told me how exceptional I was, how bright, how kind, how talented, and I felt needed and important to her happiness even as I feared not being good enough to merit her approval. I fought to keep her wobbly spirits afloat and her mood high enough to avoid being berated again as she felt into a funk. I felt frightened but valuable when called into service as her therapist while she wept on my shoulder about her very grown-up personal problems. I hid my own depression from her to try to avoid bringing her down, and out of fear that she would not buoy me up as I did her.
Over time I came to believe that a nightlong migraine was an unfair and extreme price to have to pay for an afternoon’s visit with my mother, and that it wasn’t actually my job to look after her anymore at the cost of my own health and happiness. To recognize the pain she had caused me by forcing me to run interference with the world on her behalf, and to have her refuse to acknowledge what she had done, made it hard for me to forgive her for putting me into such an inappropriate and damaging role. I tried to discuss it with her, but her defenses and fears were such that she could not acknowledge any error without feeling she must take all the guilt of the world on her shoulders. Those with narcissistic personalities share this trait: for them to acknowledge any chinks in their armor is to see themselves as completely unarmed against the world; to apologize for any error is to accept responsibility for all the world’s suffering. There is so much fear that a bit of empathy with others will flood them with more suffering than they can handle that they put up intricate barriers against such feelings. I could write her ten-page letters and have her ignore the eight pages in the middle entirely, or, worse, have her put them away unopened, or throw them in the trash if she didn’t want to see what I had written. I hedged my feelings with kind words, praise for all she had done well, gave careful and lovingly reasoned explanations of why things she’d done were problematic, and offered hope about the future happiness we could share once she chose to discuss our history honestly, but she would ignore my every expression of difficulty or desire for discussion or acknowledgement, talk around the problems, or, more frequently, refuse to engage with me in any discussion of them.
Right up until the sad end of her life when she died of lung cancer, there were still some days when we meshed wonderfully, finished each other’s sentences, laughed loudly over shared memories. There has never been anyone else in my life with whom I could toss out favorite lines from plays or poems and know they would be recognized and enjoyed. Nobody else has swooned over and stood crying before beloved paintings with me, or sung a duet with me with great passion while sight-reading an intricate Leonard Bernstein score and accompanying me on the piano at top speed with barely an error. On those days I loved feeling like we were extensions of each other, cherished having had so exuberant and expressive a mother with such lavish tastes and grand talents. I miss having been so important to someone of such intensity. I still grieve my difficult childhood, the fear I learned from knowing too much about the world and its sorrows at too early an age, and the sadness that came with feeling I could not count on anyone else to prop me up when I was sad, or keep me safe from loneliness and humiliation. But I also miss those glorious days I shared with my mother, our shared history, and the feeling of being connected with another human being on so many levels. I grieve what I lost when she died, and I grieve what she could never give me while she lived.
My mother was a high school English teacher for 37 years. She began at age 23, straight out of Cal Berkeley, freshly divorced from my father, with a toddler to care for and almost no money. She was a very talented pianist and singer as well as an enthusiastic and vivacious young teacher, so she never lacked for friends, activities, or boyfriends. I spent a lot of time with my wonderful grandmother while my mother was teaching, dating, or performing, and Grandma was the infinitely patient and loving influence in my childhood, the gentle hand, the quiet homebody at the center of my world, while my mother was the dynamic, exciting spitfire zooming in circles around me. I adored them both. But while my grandmother was devoted to me and could only see the best in me, my mother was exciting but mercurial, generous with praise but also with criticism, laudatory of my talents yet loudly dismissive of my feelings, quick to embarrass me with her bragging about my accomplishments and with public commentary about what she considered my oversensitivity and klutziness. She saw me as an extension of herself, her talents, her interests, and her public face.
As a school teacher who taught only a mile from her home, my mother considered herself something of a public figure and an example to the community, and she made it clear to me that I must always be above reproach in order to reflect well on her. I was never to correct her before others (or in private, actually), and I had better look good and behave appropriately at all times. She wangled any secret thoughts or feelings out of me and then berated me for having them when they were not in accord with hers. To disagree was disloyal, to tell others of my disagreements with her was betrayal. I learned more of her secrets than is appropriate for a child to know about a mother; it was my job to hear her troubles and bear them with her, build her up, support her, soothe her and humor her. I was there to give her strength during her weakest, scariest moments and then help her present to the world the illusion that she was always strong and happy. And she presented herself to the world with panache; she was an excellent and exciting teacher, upbeat and bubbling over with enthusiasm and warmth for her students, pushing them to work harder and better than was expected of them elsewhere. As long as she was undisputed queen of the classroom and her mastery was acknowledged, she was a generous, bold, and confident monarch and a fine educator.
Mom built me up and took great pleasure in my accomplishments, as I did in hers. She provided me with beautifully tailored clothing created by her own hands, and I received compliments on my clothes regularly from the time I was a toddler until I was in college. I joked with her that my reply to the hundreds of compliments I received over the years on my mother-made wardrobe had become rote: "Thanks-my-mother-made-it." She showered me with gifts at birthdays and Christmas, and she took me with her on trips and to plays and special events. She shared her enthusiasms with me and loved me devotedly, but she loved me as an extension of her own being and expected me to mirror the best of herself back toward her and out toward the world. She took great umbrage at any attempts on my part to express an opinion or taste or feeling that did not accord with hers, and punished me for diverging from her path.
She would not acknowledge her lack of boundaries or her inappropriateness, of course. Nor would she admit to being self-absorbed or insensitive to me when she ran roughshod over my plans or opinions. She would instead tell me how unkind and hurtful I was to question the perfect sensitivity and understanding behind her actions. For her to acknowledge that she sometimes based her actions on self-serving motives and was not always aware of or sensitive to the needs or desires of others would have been on a par with declaring herself to be a serial killer. In her mind, I must agree that she was exceptionally and exquisitely aware of all her motivations and of the needs of others, or, if I were to disagree or challenge her behavior, I must be implying that she was a grasping, selfish, cold-hearted user. To try to discuss with her the pain she caused by her behavior was to be accused of callousness and cruelty toward her. There could be no middle ground: I was either for her or against her.
That is the way of the narcissist.
As I grew older, my mother would come to my home and rearrange my furniture while I was out of the room. She cut me off in mid-sentence when she found my opinions too intricate for her attention span or too tiresome for her mood. She questioned me on my choices of food, clothing, furnishings, and decorative items, and would expect me to justify any opinion that differed from hers, often repeatedly, wondering when I would finally see the error of my ways and see the wisdom in valuing her choices above my own. She refused to refer to a new baby born to a relative by his true name for over a year because she did not care for his parents’ choice, and, even in the presence of his parents, she would only call him by his middle name until I finally insisted that she was being disrespectful and thoughtless and could not rename people at will to suit her tastes.
My mother’s need to have me mirror her tastes and thoughts, and her fear of my disagreement with her (even when I was silent), led to my feeling great internal conflict at an early age, and to fearing that I had only two choices: I could be true to my mother and have her on my side, or I could be true to myself and be seen by her as betraying her, and be punished and lonely as a result. Since I had been her astonishingly apt protégée and had basked in the glory of her approval by being as agreeable, hard-working, supportive, academically successful, talkative, and mature as I possibly could throughout my childhood, I had endeared myself to her and grown exceptionally close to her at the expense of fitting in with my peers. I had to choose her over them, to fit in with her needs and to see the world through her adult eyes, and that had made me ill suited to the job of appealing to other children. I had to choose whether to be loyal to children, whose tastes and behaviors were nothing like those of my mother and her friends, and who were more directly nasty to me than my mother was, or to be loyal to my mother and her needs. I had no siblings, and my only nearby cousins were either significantly older or much younger and showed little more than tolerance of my company. My vocabulary and interests set me apart from other children, and my physical ineptitude and love of food made my body feel unwieldy and traitorous, and other children who envied my ease with schoolwork and comfort with the teachers latched on to my failings and would not let go. The more they tripped and taunted me, spread lies about me, hurled wet newspapers at me as I walked home, spit in my hair, or broke into my locker to steal my books and ruin my gym clothes, the less I wanted to be a child, and the more I wanted to be an adult and in adult company.
Though my mother berated me regularly, she also praised me often. She humiliated me before others but she also told me how exceptional I was, how bright, how kind, how talented, and I felt needed and important to her happiness even as I feared not being good enough to merit her approval. I fought to keep her wobbly spirits afloat and her mood high enough to avoid being berated again as she felt into a funk. I felt frightened but valuable when called into service as her therapist while she wept on my shoulder about her very grown-up personal problems. I hid my own depression from her to try to avoid bringing her down, and out of fear that she would not buoy me up as I did her.
Over time I came to believe that a nightlong migraine was an unfair and extreme price to have to pay for an afternoon’s visit with my mother, and that it wasn’t actually my job to look after her anymore at the cost of my own health and happiness. To recognize the pain she had caused me by forcing me to run interference with the world on her behalf, and to have her refuse to acknowledge what she had done, made it hard for me to forgive her for putting me into such an inappropriate and damaging role. I tried to discuss it with her, but her defenses and fears were such that she could not acknowledge any error without feeling she must take all the guilt of the world on her shoulders. Those with narcissistic personalities share this trait: for them to acknowledge any chinks in their armor is to see themselves as completely unarmed against the world; to apologize for any error is to accept responsibility for all the world’s suffering. There is so much fear that a bit of empathy with others will flood them with more suffering than they can handle that they put up intricate barriers against such feelings. I could write her ten-page letters and have her ignore the eight pages in the middle entirely, or, worse, have her put them away unopened, or throw them in the trash if she didn’t want to see what I had written. I hedged my feelings with kind words, praise for all she had done well, gave careful and lovingly reasoned explanations of why things she’d done were problematic, and offered hope about the future happiness we could share once she chose to discuss our history honestly, but she would ignore my every expression of difficulty or desire for discussion or acknowledgement, talk around the problems, or, more frequently, refuse to engage with me in any discussion of them.
Right up until the sad end of her life when she died of lung cancer, there were still some days when we meshed wonderfully, finished each other’s sentences, laughed loudly over shared memories. There has never been anyone else in my life with whom I could toss out favorite lines from plays or poems and know they would be recognized and enjoyed. Nobody else has swooned over and stood crying before beloved paintings with me, or sung a duet with me with great passion while sight-reading an intricate Leonard Bernstein score and accompanying me on the piano at top speed with barely an error. On those days I loved feeling like we were extensions of each other, cherished having had so exuberant and expressive a mother with such lavish tastes and grand talents. I miss having been so important to someone of such intensity. I still grieve my difficult childhood, the fear I learned from knowing too much about the world and its sorrows at too early an age, and the sadness that came with feeling I could not count on anyone else to prop me up when I was sad, or keep me safe from loneliness and humiliation. But I also miss those glorious days I shared with my mother, our shared history, and the feeling of being connected with another human being on so many levels. I grieve what I lost when she died, and I grieve what she could never give me while she lived.
Monday, September 26, 2005
Uninsulated Wires Laid Bare
In 1993, Joni Mitchell painted an impressive self-portrait in the style of Van Gogh, with Joni wearing the same clothes, in the same position, and even with the bandaged ear shown in one of Van Gogh's most famous self-portraits. The following year, she released an impressive album with this self-portrait on the cover: "Turbulent Indigo." The song of the same title is a dark, angry, stunning homage to Van Gogh with bold strokes of surprising bass, marvellously brooding undercurrents in Joni's guitar playing, and Wayne Shorter's splashes of golden sax shimmering in places throughout the song, sparkling as Van Gogh's yellows do against his swirls of indigo. Even without the lyrics it would be delicious to listen to, with the roiling darkness and the occasional splash of reedy sax, but the lyrics are some of Joni's best. She taunts the people who know Van Gogh only for his cheering sunflowers and golden wheatfields and who want a mindless, untortured, chirpy version of Van Gogh in their homes, an easy, breezy Vincent. She mocks those who can afford to collect him now, who have his work in their homes and feel as if they're somehow close to him as a result, but who would have bolted their doors against the actual man, the depressive, angry, brooding Vincent who sometimes fell into bouts of insanity. In the final verse, she lets him speak:
"I'm a burning hearth," he said
"People see the smoke
But no one comes to warm themselves
Sloughing off a coat
And all my little landscapes
All my yellow afternoons
Stack up around this vacancy
Like dirty cups and spoons
No mercy Sweet Jesus!
No mercy from Turbulent Indigo."
Some found her bold to paint herself into his most pained self-portrait and to allow herself to speak in "his" voice, as if she were equating her genius or her pain to his. I thought it was brilliant and wonderfully executed. The self-portrait is startling, but I find it witty, and the song is evidence that she is a genius in her own right. Those who only paid attention to Joni when she had big radio hits in the 1960s and early 1970s and found her too hard to follow later missed out on a whole world of tastiness. The reedy soprano of her "Blue" album (sometimes touching, sometimes painful for me to listen to) has mellowed over the years into a burnished, glowing alto. I can hear the cigarettes in her voice, which saddens me, but I do love the richness and warmth of the register she slid slowly into over the years like a hot, perfumed bath. Her lyrics are intricate, dark and often angry, but they're true poetry, not just singsongy filler like so many songwriters' words. Some of them work better for me than others; several songs on the "Turbulent Indigo" album have lyrics that feel forced in places (such as "You Were Not to Blame" in which she lashes out at men who abuse women), while one, co-written with her old friend David Crosby, is a real gem: "Yvette in English." The tune and words are lyrical and lovely, but the lyrics are especially captivating and poetic. Mitchell and Crosby write of a "wary little stray," a woman who slips into a Paris café and catches the eye of a man who falls for her instantly, taken by her fragility, her insecurity, the delight of dancing with her, and his sadness at having her leave him by a "bony bridge between left and right," one of the lovely, slender bridges that cross the Seine between the left and right banks. The words and images of this song, the rhythms of Mitchell's guitar, and again, Wayne Shorter's ethereal sax floating above it all, make it a song I can rarely listen to without listening to it again, immediately afterward, because I so hate hearing it end. A little taste of it:
"Burgundy nocturne tips and spills
They trot along nicely in the spreading stain
New chills, new thrills
For the old uphill battle
How did he wind up here again?
Walking and talking
Touched and scared
Uninsulated wires left bare
Yvette in English going,
'Please have this
Little bit of instant bliss.'"
Joni Mitchell writes so movingly, so painfully, so hauntingly about depression and loss. She can write with humor and joy and raw power, too, but the deep understanding she has of pain and vulnerability, of those uninsulated wires laid bare, and the way she underscores them with that slightly ravaged voice, those amazing tunings and chord voicings on her guitar, the surprising rhythms, the way she leaves us hanging with unresolved lyrics or chords at the end of a line—she's so much more than the folkie of "Both Sides Now" or the esoteric jazz fan of her Mingus years. I haven't even mentioned my two favorites among all her albums: "Wild Things Run Fast" from 1982, and "Night Ride Home" from 1991. "Wild Things Run Fast" was a revelation after hearing the sometimes screechy, folky Joni of the 1960s. It was an delightful, sometimes funny, sometimes pensive mix of rock and jazz and pop, not what I expected at all. I've listened to it so many times and it still satisfies. "Night Ride Home" is an album I can listen to endlessly without tiring of it, especially "Passion Play (When All The Slaves Are Free)," a surprising song about the relationship between Mary Magdalen and Jesus; "Cherokee Louise," about having a best friend from the wrong side of the tracks who lives a life in turmoil; and the lilting, contented "Night Ride Home," about the joy of riding through a dark night with a lover over the open road, with the thrumming of crickets all around. The poetry of that album touches me every time I hear it. When I haven't heard the rolling, insistent guitar that ripples through "Passion Play" for a few months and I listen to it again, I get chills all over at the reminder of how remarkable Joni Mitchell is.
"I'm a burning hearth," he said
"People see the smoke
But no one comes to warm themselves
Sloughing off a coat
And all my little landscapes
All my yellow afternoons
Stack up around this vacancy
Like dirty cups and spoons
No mercy Sweet Jesus!
No mercy from Turbulent Indigo."
Some found her bold to paint herself into his most pained self-portrait and to allow herself to speak in "his" voice, as if she were equating her genius or her pain to his. I thought it was brilliant and wonderfully executed. The self-portrait is startling, but I find it witty, and the song is evidence that she is a genius in her own right. Those who only paid attention to Joni when she had big radio hits in the 1960s and early 1970s and found her too hard to follow later missed out on a whole world of tastiness. The reedy soprano of her "Blue" album (sometimes touching, sometimes painful for me to listen to) has mellowed over the years into a burnished, glowing alto. I can hear the cigarettes in her voice, which saddens me, but I do love the richness and warmth of the register she slid slowly into over the years like a hot, perfumed bath. Her lyrics are intricate, dark and often angry, but they're true poetry, not just singsongy filler like so many songwriters' words. Some of them work better for me than others; several songs on the "Turbulent Indigo" album have lyrics that feel forced in places (such as "You Were Not to Blame" in which she lashes out at men who abuse women), while one, co-written with her old friend David Crosby, is a real gem: "Yvette in English." The tune and words are lyrical and lovely, but the lyrics are especially captivating and poetic. Mitchell and Crosby write of a "wary little stray," a woman who slips into a Paris café and catches the eye of a man who falls for her instantly, taken by her fragility, her insecurity, the delight of dancing with her, and his sadness at having her leave him by a "bony bridge between left and right," one of the lovely, slender bridges that cross the Seine between the left and right banks. The words and images of this song, the rhythms of Mitchell's guitar, and again, Wayne Shorter's ethereal sax floating above it all, make it a song I can rarely listen to without listening to it again, immediately afterward, because I so hate hearing it end. A little taste of it:
"Burgundy nocturne tips and spills
They trot along nicely in the spreading stain
New chills, new thrills
For the old uphill battle
How did he wind up here again?
Walking and talking
Touched and scared
Uninsulated wires left bare
Yvette in English going,
'Please have this
Little bit of instant bliss.'"
Joni Mitchell writes so movingly, so painfully, so hauntingly about depression and loss. She can write with humor and joy and raw power, too, but the deep understanding she has of pain and vulnerability, of those uninsulated wires laid bare, and the way she underscores them with that slightly ravaged voice, those amazing tunings and chord voicings on her guitar, the surprising rhythms, the way she leaves us hanging with unresolved lyrics or chords at the end of a line—she's so much more than the folkie of "Both Sides Now" or the esoteric jazz fan of her Mingus years. I haven't even mentioned my two favorites among all her albums: "Wild Things Run Fast" from 1982, and "Night Ride Home" from 1991. "Wild Things Run Fast" was a revelation after hearing the sometimes screechy, folky Joni of the 1960s. It was an delightful, sometimes funny, sometimes pensive mix of rock and jazz and pop, not what I expected at all. I've listened to it so many times and it still satisfies. "Night Ride Home" is an album I can listen to endlessly without tiring of it, especially "Passion Play (When All The Slaves Are Free)," a surprising song about the relationship between Mary Magdalen and Jesus; "Cherokee Louise," about having a best friend from the wrong side of the tracks who lives a life in turmoil; and the lilting, contented "Night Ride Home," about the joy of riding through a dark night with a lover over the open road, with the thrumming of crickets all around. The poetry of that album touches me every time I hear it. When I haven't heard the rolling, insistent guitar that ripples through "Passion Play" for a few months and I listen to it again, I get chills all over at the reminder of how remarkable Joni Mitchell is.
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
There's No Place Like New Orleans
Though it's my goal to share something new in this space at least twice a week, I haven’t written a thing here for nearly two weeks, during which it looked like the bottom was dropping out of a part of my personal life and entire homes were dropping out of the lives of a few hundred thousand people along the Gulf Coast. Between crying for myself and my non-Katrina-related troubles, and crying for the people who have lost everything to the Hurricane and its aftermath, it’s been hard for me to focus on art or culture or other writings fit for this space. I’ve written a great deal during this time, but it’s largely been in an effort to understand the unfathomable and wouldn’t make good reading for you. Fortunately, sometimes the deep end of life’s pool is more fathomable than we give it credit for, and I see a lot more hope for myself now, as well as for many of the people whose lives were upended two weeks ago. But I'm still angry and sad for what the people along the Gulf Coast have lost, and for the long slog they still face before their lives can be again rooted and secure.
I am so deeply saddened by the lives lost and the fear and suffering of so many thousands who made it through by the skin of their teeth. I worry especially for the children whose security and families were washed away, who have lost friends and the comfort of family nearby and all their toys, clothes, books, and the trappings of home that used to bring them a feeling of safety and belonging. I worry for them, for the years of fallout and fear and the holes in their lives that will be left because of this natural calamity, and the unnaturally slow response to it made by those in whom we all entrust our security.
The loss of so much of New Orleans’ history and beauty is inconceivable. What was lost in New Orleans is a huge and precious part of our history. Documents, photographs, artwork, craftwork, and historical artifacts and knowledge washed away during and after Katrina. Many years’ worth of data from long-term medical studies was destroyed. Of course, the loss of medical records, family heirlooms, snapshots, cars and vital records is more immediately important and crucial to the living, as it should be, but our world will be so much poorer in the long term for having lost so many beautiful, meaningful, or important links to our collective past.
I spent a wonderful week in New Orleans 15 years ago, and when, over the years, I’ve heard people speak only of the gritty, dirty, dangerous aspects of the city, and how they couldn’t find anything there to like but only ugliness to revile, I’ve had to shake my head in wonder. New Orleans was, and I think will be again, such a gloriously fascinating, beautiful, baroque, flawed, yet resilient city, unlike any other I’ve seen anywhere. It’s hard for me to imagine how it could fail to catch others’ fancy in at least some small way. The history of the city is enthralling; the mixture of African, Caribbean, Acadian, Spanish and Creole cultures and languages, among so many others, makes it so rich and vibrant, lively and surprising. The wonderful combinations of rhythm and passion and blues and joy spill out in the music, which itself spills out into Bourbon Street from the open doors of the bars. There are memories and stories about the frightening power of Marie Leveau’s voodoo magic, and we all know about the dangerously rich food and too-readily-available drink, swilled out of plastic cups day and night by tourists and locals weaving their way down the middle of the street. The wildly elaborate wrought iron filigree that floats above the streets of the French Quarter looks both fragile and eternal, and the facades of the elegant old homes in the Garden District are exquisite. I visited a grand plantation within an hour’s drive of the city, and floated on a bayou with a Cajun man whose lilting speech announced with each new alligator that floated by us and every bird that flew overhead, “Now, dese t’ings is edible.” Through openings between the trees along the swamp, we could see the New Orleans skyline, only about a half-hour’s drive from us, as we floated by tiny homes perched on stilts brushed by hanging Spanish moss. On another day, I floated around the bends in the mighty Mississippi on a paddleboat, which, clichéd though it may be, did indeed look and feel truly mighty, even on a calm autumn afternoon on a boat built for tourists like me. I ate hot beignets (which put even the freshest Krispy Kreme donuts completely to shame) and chicory coffee at the Café du Monde, and as I touched the actual, physical streetcar named Desire that was pulled from active duty and perched on a street corner, I got choked up thinking of Tennessee Williams walking those streets and soaking up the sad, decadent, shimmery, drunken, pathetic, beautiful aura of the city and spilling it into the story of Blanche DuBois and Stella and Stanley Kowalski.
Jackson Square felt so much more European than any American square I’ve ever stood in, and the shopkeepers of the French Quarter didn’t have the tourist-weary glaze to their eyes that such people do in other places. Southern graciousness, another cliché, did indeed feel real there; there was a warmth to interactions, even hellos shared by strangers in the street or in lobbies, that didn’t have the chill that such encounters bring in other places. The tradition of the lagniappe, a unexpected gift given out of a desire to please, was still strong. The desire of New Orleanians to please and give back a little extra something to a stranger reminded me of the way I was treated in Japan in 1980. I find real delight in receiving unexpected and gracious gestures from others for no real reason, and such kindnesses do engender warm feelings and happy memories.
I’m told by a native New Orleanian that when tourists cross Rampart Street, locals would as soon shoot the tourists as look at them, and sometimes do. I know that the amount of wanton ugliness and violence in New Orleans was extreme compared to other American cities long before Katrina hit. But somehow in my cautious, well-heeled tourist’s shoes, keeping to safer places or traveling with companions to iffier but fascinating places (like New Orleans’ famous cemeteries with their above-ground graves, jokingly referred to as “ovens”), and being able to stay in a B&B well within the Vieux Carré, I missed seeing most of the darker side of the city. I found more than enough beauty to make me fall for the place, and to see why locals love it so.
I’m not making light of the seediness of the city; that’s as famous an element of the place as Mardi Gras and the long-corrupt local police and politicos. I’m not saying it was a wonderland to live for the huge numbers of poor residents who lived there, underserved as they’ve been by an underfunded educational system that left them inadequately prepared for the world and unprotected from its harshest elements. I’m only saying that in my short time there I found so much to love and admire that I can only imagine how much love and how many memories those who have actually lived in New Orleans can feel, and how much they have lost.
Yesterday I heard a piece on National Public Radio about the Red Cross, and how it has become the default charity to which the vast majority of donors give after disasters. While it is a fine agency that has cleaned up its system of allocating funds after making some errors in judgment in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, it cannot do everything after a disaster. It helps to clothe and feed and shelter people in the aftermath of a disaster, but it’s really focused on immediate assistance. After September 11, 2001, the Red Cross received so many donations that it diverted some to other programs, which made a lot of people who donated specifically to help those affected by the attacks very upset and caused Red Cross leadership to change and the way it handles donations to alter to better serve the expectations of donors. NPR’s piece focused on the fact that many other agencies who help victims to get on with their lives after a crisis, such as helping children get medical attention or get back into to (like Mercy Corps and UNICEF), or aiding poor people in building new homes (like Habitat for Humanity), have not received the number of donations one might expect because people are so much more aware of the Red Cross than of other aid organizations. People are constantly bombarded with reminders to give to the Red Cross, and they feel good about the Red Cross's size and the respect it garners internationally, so that’s where most of the funds and attention go. I feel strongly about the alternative organizations mentioned above, and while my first donation went to the Red Cross, I have felt good spreading the support around to other organizations, too. I’m glad to know that the Red Cross will help people right away, and that groups like Mercy Corps, Habitat for Humanity, and UNICEF will help people later on down the line, when the initial attention and good will have passed but people’s needs to reestablish their lives are just as great.
I am so deeply saddened by the lives lost and the fear and suffering of so many thousands who made it through by the skin of their teeth. I worry especially for the children whose security and families were washed away, who have lost friends and the comfort of family nearby and all their toys, clothes, books, and the trappings of home that used to bring them a feeling of safety and belonging. I worry for them, for the years of fallout and fear and the holes in their lives that will be left because of this natural calamity, and the unnaturally slow response to it made by those in whom we all entrust our security.
The loss of so much of New Orleans’ history and beauty is inconceivable. What was lost in New Orleans is a huge and precious part of our history. Documents, photographs, artwork, craftwork, and historical artifacts and knowledge washed away during and after Katrina. Many years’ worth of data from long-term medical studies was destroyed. Of course, the loss of medical records, family heirlooms, snapshots, cars and vital records is more immediately important and crucial to the living, as it should be, but our world will be so much poorer in the long term for having lost so many beautiful, meaningful, or important links to our collective past.
I spent a wonderful week in New Orleans 15 years ago, and when, over the years, I’ve heard people speak only of the gritty, dirty, dangerous aspects of the city, and how they couldn’t find anything there to like but only ugliness to revile, I’ve had to shake my head in wonder. New Orleans was, and I think will be again, such a gloriously fascinating, beautiful, baroque, flawed, yet resilient city, unlike any other I’ve seen anywhere. It’s hard for me to imagine how it could fail to catch others’ fancy in at least some small way. The history of the city is enthralling; the mixture of African, Caribbean, Acadian, Spanish and Creole cultures and languages, among so many others, makes it so rich and vibrant, lively and surprising. The wonderful combinations of rhythm and passion and blues and joy spill out in the music, which itself spills out into Bourbon Street from the open doors of the bars. There are memories and stories about the frightening power of Marie Leveau’s voodoo magic, and we all know about the dangerously rich food and too-readily-available drink, swilled out of plastic cups day and night by tourists and locals weaving their way down the middle of the street. The wildly elaborate wrought iron filigree that floats above the streets of the French Quarter looks both fragile and eternal, and the facades of the elegant old homes in the Garden District are exquisite. I visited a grand plantation within an hour’s drive of the city, and floated on a bayou with a Cajun man whose lilting speech announced with each new alligator that floated by us and every bird that flew overhead, “Now, dese t’ings is edible.” Through openings between the trees along the swamp, we could see the New Orleans skyline, only about a half-hour’s drive from us, as we floated by tiny homes perched on stilts brushed by hanging Spanish moss. On another day, I floated around the bends in the mighty Mississippi on a paddleboat, which, clichéd though it may be, did indeed look and feel truly mighty, even on a calm autumn afternoon on a boat built for tourists like me. I ate hot beignets (which put even the freshest Krispy Kreme donuts completely to shame) and chicory coffee at the Café du Monde, and as I touched the actual, physical streetcar named Desire that was pulled from active duty and perched on a street corner, I got choked up thinking of Tennessee Williams walking those streets and soaking up the sad, decadent, shimmery, drunken, pathetic, beautiful aura of the city and spilling it into the story of Blanche DuBois and Stella and Stanley Kowalski.
Jackson Square felt so much more European than any American square I’ve ever stood in, and the shopkeepers of the French Quarter didn’t have the tourist-weary glaze to their eyes that such people do in other places. Southern graciousness, another cliché, did indeed feel real there; there was a warmth to interactions, even hellos shared by strangers in the street or in lobbies, that didn’t have the chill that such encounters bring in other places. The tradition of the lagniappe, a unexpected gift given out of a desire to please, was still strong. The desire of New Orleanians to please and give back a little extra something to a stranger reminded me of the way I was treated in Japan in 1980. I find real delight in receiving unexpected and gracious gestures from others for no real reason, and such kindnesses do engender warm feelings and happy memories.
I’m told by a native New Orleanian that when tourists cross Rampart Street, locals would as soon shoot the tourists as look at them, and sometimes do. I know that the amount of wanton ugliness and violence in New Orleans was extreme compared to other American cities long before Katrina hit. But somehow in my cautious, well-heeled tourist’s shoes, keeping to safer places or traveling with companions to iffier but fascinating places (like New Orleans’ famous cemeteries with their above-ground graves, jokingly referred to as “ovens”), and being able to stay in a B&B well within the Vieux Carré, I missed seeing most of the darker side of the city. I found more than enough beauty to make me fall for the place, and to see why locals love it so.
I’m not making light of the seediness of the city; that’s as famous an element of the place as Mardi Gras and the long-corrupt local police and politicos. I’m not saying it was a wonderland to live for the huge numbers of poor residents who lived there, underserved as they’ve been by an underfunded educational system that left them inadequately prepared for the world and unprotected from its harshest elements. I’m only saying that in my short time there I found so much to love and admire that I can only imagine how much love and how many memories those who have actually lived in New Orleans can feel, and how much they have lost.
Yesterday I heard a piece on National Public Radio about the Red Cross, and how it has become the default charity to which the vast majority of donors give after disasters. While it is a fine agency that has cleaned up its system of allocating funds after making some errors in judgment in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, it cannot do everything after a disaster. It helps to clothe and feed and shelter people in the aftermath of a disaster, but it’s really focused on immediate assistance. After September 11, 2001, the Red Cross received so many donations that it diverted some to other programs, which made a lot of people who donated specifically to help those affected by the attacks very upset and caused Red Cross leadership to change and the way it handles donations to alter to better serve the expectations of donors. NPR’s piece focused on the fact that many other agencies who help victims to get on with their lives after a crisis, such as helping children get medical attention or get back into to (like Mercy Corps and UNICEF), or aiding poor people in building new homes (like Habitat for Humanity), have not received the number of donations one might expect because people are so much more aware of the Red Cross than of other aid organizations. People are constantly bombarded with reminders to give to the Red Cross, and they feel good about the Red Cross's size and the respect it garners internationally, so that’s where most of the funds and attention go. I feel strongly about the alternative organizations mentioned above, and while my first donation went to the Red Cross, I have felt good spreading the support around to other organizations, too. I’m glad to know that the Red Cross will help people right away, and that groups like Mercy Corps, Habitat for Humanity, and UNICEF will help people later on down the line, when the initial attention and good will have passed but people’s needs to reestablish their lives are just as great.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Attack of the Creepy Guy
The worst part of my 1980s temporary employment experiences, and later, of my general corporate experience, was having interactions with the endless permutations of the workplace character I'll call Creepy Guy. He morphs into different shapes and sizes and ages, but in most businesses there's been a version of Creepy Guy to bother me. I've been lucky in my last few freelance positions, and in general I think the hysterical fear of litigation drummed into agitated managers by the mandatory sexual harassment awareness training that's swept across America in the past 15 years has led to a huge improvement. Now Creepy Guy is more often just Inappropriate Guy with No Social Skills, and even he seems to be harder to find.
In my own experience, Creepy Guy has been a gawky 20-year-old who hung out under a staircase so he could look through the slats up my dresses when I walked upstairs to the lunchroom, and who refused to stop peeping even when I confronted him (so I moved my lunch breaks to my car); a Paul Williams look-alike who called the secretaries in his ad agency (including me) "Sweet Buns" and handed out what he said were company-sponsored questionnaires that would help a bra manufacturer make better products if we filled in questions about our breasts and gave them to him to pass along (I read him the riot act and he never spoke to me again); and there was that turtle-like fellow who offered all the young women in the department unwanted neck massages, which always ended up with his hands sliding down toward the unwilling participant's sternum until she pushed him away. Eeeew.
Another time, Creepy Guy was a wholesome-looking guy with a stiff, Mr. Spock-like mien, who would change the direction in which he was walking in order to follow me if I passed anywhere near him, and would follow me into elevators and around the building until I turned and asked him to stop. One day this particular Creepy Guy grabbed my hand while I stood in a nearby cubicle writing a note to someone and quickly brought my hand to his lips and then licked my wedding ring before I could voice my disgust. I reported him; he got a mild reprimand. That same year, Creepy Guy took the form of the guy who asked me to babysit for his kids several times, which I did, happily, thinking we had a nice, easy-going office rapport; once I knew his wife and kids better, he figured it was a good time to invite me to babysit him when his wife was away.
Creepy Guy was once the coworker who stopped sleeping at night because he was convinced aliens would abduct him while he slept unless he worked all night and only slept during daylight hours. He'd be twitchy and irritable during the day, and hopped up on coffee and huge helpings of sweet desserts consumed in front of his computer throughout the night. Creepy Guy also took the form of the guy who recommended a religious cult with a sexual emphasis to me, and who offered to give me personal instruction. There was the other time when Creepy Guy was a Yukio Mishima fanatic and martial arts devotee who owned every book and movie related to Mishima's life or writings, and was eager to share them with me and tell me why Mishima's blend of S&M, fascism, and poetry was a beautiful mix. He rather scared me.
Sometimes Creepy Guy's a nervous, shy, little guy; sometimes he's tall and menacing, like the coworker who had frenzied outbursts complete with flailing arms and flying spit as he hurled loud sentences full of obscene invective at me when he didn't think one of the articles I edited for a newsletter was sufficiently edifying. He made it clear that he thought my work, and by extension I, was a form of time- and space-wasting excrement because I wouldn't alter the article to include a sentence vilifying a coworker with whom he'd had a tiff.
The Creepy Guy who sneaked into my cubicle after hours and read and commented on reminders I had written to myself on Post-It notes by affixing other, smaller Post-It notes with his own observations to my private notes, was the same Creepy Guy who accused me of wearing too much perfume on days when I wore none. The only Creepy Gal I can think of with whom I've worked could have used that perfume; her body odor was so extreme it could be detected from three cubicles away. Honestly. She had a voice like a drunken, belligerent Greta Van Susteren crossed with a moaning Janis Joplin, even at 11 o'clock in the morning, when she finally bothered to show up at work: it was whinging and nasal and loud. At least Janis Joplin had an excuse: kick-ass blues pipes. And Janis was down-to-earth and nice to my dad when she bought a sandwich from him at the San Francisco deli at which he worked in the 1960s. But that's another story.
Creepy Gal was clueless, yes, but not the walking, twitchy, screaming invitation to HR to intervene and set boundaries that the Creepy Guys were. Not that HR ever did intervene in any of those cases, even when notified. I think now they would in a heartbeat, but in the 1980s and 1990s, even at places like Apple Computer that had a more open-minded, modern, progressive world view, there was still way too much tolerance of that kind of numbing, disrespectful, humiliating garbage around. When I read or hear (mostly young) women say that feminism's dated and unnecessary, I want to take them back in time to see what women used to have to go through before feminists started holding society accountable for the way we treat women. And most people weren't as willing to stand up, complain, shove back, and stand their ground as I was, because they feared losing their jobs more than I did and didn't want to be seen as being pushy, difficult feminists. But my pushing back and speaking up always seemed to surprise these guys, partly because I'm sure they'd always gotten away with it before, but partly because they didn't expect a short, perky, friendly chick in girly clothes who brought homemade cookies to meetings to have a spine and fight back when dissed. Joke's on them.
In my own experience, Creepy Guy has been a gawky 20-year-old who hung out under a staircase so he could look through the slats up my dresses when I walked upstairs to the lunchroom, and who refused to stop peeping even when I confronted him (so I moved my lunch breaks to my car); a Paul Williams look-alike who called the secretaries in his ad agency (including me) "Sweet Buns" and handed out what he said were company-sponsored questionnaires that would help a bra manufacturer make better products if we filled in questions about our breasts and gave them to him to pass along (I read him the riot act and he never spoke to me again); and there was that turtle-like fellow who offered all the young women in the department unwanted neck massages, which always ended up with his hands sliding down toward the unwilling participant's sternum until she pushed him away. Eeeew.
Another time, Creepy Guy was a wholesome-looking guy with a stiff, Mr. Spock-like mien, who would change the direction in which he was walking in order to follow me if I passed anywhere near him, and would follow me into elevators and around the building until I turned and asked him to stop. One day this particular Creepy Guy grabbed my hand while I stood in a nearby cubicle writing a note to someone and quickly brought my hand to his lips and then licked my wedding ring before I could voice my disgust. I reported him; he got a mild reprimand. That same year, Creepy Guy took the form of the guy who asked me to babysit for his kids several times, which I did, happily, thinking we had a nice, easy-going office rapport; once I knew his wife and kids better, he figured it was a good time to invite me to babysit him when his wife was away.
Creepy Guy was once the coworker who stopped sleeping at night because he was convinced aliens would abduct him while he slept unless he worked all night and only slept during daylight hours. He'd be twitchy and irritable during the day, and hopped up on coffee and huge helpings of sweet desserts consumed in front of his computer throughout the night. Creepy Guy also took the form of the guy who recommended a religious cult with a sexual emphasis to me, and who offered to give me personal instruction. There was the other time when Creepy Guy was a Yukio Mishima fanatic and martial arts devotee who owned every book and movie related to Mishima's life or writings, and was eager to share them with me and tell me why Mishima's blend of S&M, fascism, and poetry was a beautiful mix. He rather scared me.
Sometimes Creepy Guy's a nervous, shy, little guy; sometimes he's tall and menacing, like the coworker who had frenzied outbursts complete with flailing arms and flying spit as he hurled loud sentences full of obscene invective at me when he didn't think one of the articles I edited for a newsletter was sufficiently edifying. He made it clear that he thought my work, and by extension I, was a form of time- and space-wasting excrement because I wouldn't alter the article to include a sentence vilifying a coworker with whom he'd had a tiff.
The Creepy Guy who sneaked into my cubicle after hours and read and commented on reminders I had written to myself on Post-It notes by affixing other, smaller Post-It notes with his own observations to my private notes, was the same Creepy Guy who accused me of wearing too much perfume on days when I wore none. The only Creepy Gal I can think of with whom I've worked could have used that perfume; her body odor was so extreme it could be detected from three cubicles away. Honestly. She had a voice like a drunken, belligerent Greta Van Susteren crossed with a moaning Janis Joplin, even at 11 o'clock in the morning, when she finally bothered to show up at work: it was whinging and nasal and loud. At least Janis Joplin had an excuse: kick-ass blues pipes. And Janis was down-to-earth and nice to my dad when she bought a sandwich from him at the San Francisco deli at which he worked in the 1960s. But that's another story.
Creepy Gal was clueless, yes, but not the walking, twitchy, screaming invitation to HR to intervene and set boundaries that the Creepy Guys were. Not that HR ever did intervene in any of those cases, even when notified. I think now they would in a heartbeat, but in the 1980s and 1990s, even at places like Apple Computer that had a more open-minded, modern, progressive world view, there was still way too much tolerance of that kind of numbing, disrespectful, humiliating garbage around. When I read or hear (mostly young) women say that feminism's dated and unnecessary, I want to take them back in time to see what women used to have to go through before feminists started holding society accountable for the way we treat women. And most people weren't as willing to stand up, complain, shove back, and stand their ground as I was, because they feared losing their jobs more than I did and didn't want to be seen as being pushy, difficult feminists. But my pushing back and speaking up always seemed to surprise these guys, partly because I'm sure they'd always gotten away with it before, but partly because they didn't expect a short, perky, friendly chick in girly clothes who brought homemade cookies to meetings to have a spine and fight back when dissed. Joke's on them.
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Pushing Up Daisies
You know how, when you finish a satisfying novel, the characters wander around in your head for a few days afterward, and you feel a longing for them, an ache and an empty place in your heart that comes with the realization that you can never know more of them and their stories than you know now? There's that bitter knowledge that you'll never get to look forward to the next scene, the next interaction, the next terrible mistake or death or epiphany on the part of the characters. The pleasure of immersing yourself in a fresh piece of their lives and history for a while is now over. When the story ends there's some sense of closure and peace in finishing the book, but if it's a good enough story, it is, in a way, more painful than satisfying, and you want to open to the first few pages again and remind yourself of the self you were when you last read those words, and of how it felt to be invited into that world the first time around. Which you can never do again with that story.
That's how I feel now that the television series "Six Feet Under" has ended. The last episode was very satisfying, since we did get to see that there was a way out of the difficult present into the hopeful future for all the characters. But it also underscored my feelings of loss and sadness about the end of the characters' lives, since the ten-minute "valedictory," as some have called it, which ended the show and the series was a fast-forward skip through time to the highlights of the characters' lives to come, and to the deaths of each of the remaining major characters. The show centered on the people who live and work in a family-owned funeral home and the continual requirement that they focus on and deal with the deaths of others, as well as their own debilitating pain and inability to cope with the deaths of those they love. Thus, the natural, appropriate, and organic resolution to their stories is the brief but solid and final ending of each of their lives, whether in the present day or in a future glimpsed through a montage during the final moments of the series. The ending was wonderfully, sadly appropriate to the subject matter of the show, and, as the show did every week, it forced viewers to acknowledge the inevitable yet mysterious end of life, the one certainty we all face.
I loved that aspect of "Six Feet Under." Every week's show began with a death, often presented in a shockingly humorous way. Sometimes it was a stranger whose funeral arrangements would be dealt with during the show; sometimes, as in the very first episode, it was the death of someone dear and integral to the lives of the characters in the story. There was no escaping the specter of death; the characters sometimes courted death, sometimes cheated it, but always had to deal with it, ultimately.
Sometimes the inability of the Fisher family (and most of the people with whom they created relationships) to face emotion straight-on and work through it made them do reckless or thoughtless things out of their own fear and denial of their feelings or desires. Nate, the one family member who was devoted to working through his pain and considering it carefully, ended up wallowing in it, citing it as an excuse for egregiously bad behavior, and he became a narcissistic pain in the ass. But Nate also brought other fascinating characters into his orbit, and one could sympathize with the universality of his concerns at times, when he wasn't being such a selfish, careless S.O.B. His navel-gazing, his constant questioning about whether this is all there really is to life, and his whining about whether we should give up and live with what we have or whether we should always strive for something more meaningful, were presented in a way that made me and, it seems, almost everyone else lose whatever tender feelings we had for him. But he felt real. His questions were annoyingly asked and the answers he found led him to ignore the needs and rights of others when they got in the way of his own personal vision quest, but who among us hasn't asked himself or herself variations on those same questions? The imperfections in his character, his choices and his lashing out at others, made him fascinating to watch, and he often acted as a catalyst who set other emotional fires burning in other characters.
All of the characters in "Six Feet Under" could be quite wonderfully, humanly appealing in one scene, then maddenlying selfish and carelessly destructive in another. This fluidity of behavior was always well grounded in a carefully constructed understanding of each character, though; their actions could be surprising, but they were always understandable and had some weird internal logic given what we knew of the character. They were fully rounded, fleshed out, so well understood by the writers and directors of the show that there was a satisfying consistency to them that allowed me to enjoy it when they acted out and did surprising things when under pressure, because whatever craziness they indulged in was a natural outgrowth of their experience, their personalities, their well-established patterns of behavior and choice when faced with problems.
Some people gave up on the show along the way because they found the disasters, deaths, pain, and bad fortune too unrelenting and therefore either overwhelmingly sad or laughingly unbelievable. But the show was never meant to be a perfectly realistic, day-to-day depiction of actual lives. There were elements of fantasy and the supernatural in it from day one. Dead characters come back and have conversations with living ones regularly, and it's never made crystal clear whether they're actual ghosts or just the darker sides of other characters' own natures who are asking the questions or exposing the fears or insecurities that we all share. They serve as catalysts who force characters to face demons, to get angry at those who have left them, to remember what's important, and to come up with cogent arguments against their worst fears.
Sometimes characters have conversations with the bloody corpses they're cleaning up in the basement of the funeral home before a viewing, and these conversations are jarring and disturbing, and the visuals are occasionally more than I want to watch. But I love the realizations that come from these conversations with the dead, and the reminder that our relationships with others don't end just because one of us dies before the other; we continue to consider what those whom we've lost meant to us and mean today. We can get angry or forgive or question or understand them differently for the rest of our lives, and alter our understanding of our relationships as a result. I have found this very true, and both painful and helpful in considering my relationships with my late parents. My relationships with them continue to change and deepen, though one has been dead for four years and the other for over ten.
The writing on "Six Feet Under" was exceptional. It was witty and wicked and often vulgar or shocking, but, I felt, refreshingly so. There were many well-crafted lines, but ultimately the words sprung from each character's lips for a reason and in line with what we knew of the character's motivations and means of expression. The dialog grew out of the characters, the characters didn't have to bend themselves around the dialog in order to stroke the egos of the writers, directors, or producers.
The acting was first-rate. It was a pleasure to be introduced to so many fine actors, many with a strong theatrical background, most of whom I was not familiar with. I'm especially fond of the work Lauren Ambrose (Claire) and Michael C. Hall (David) did in this show. David was my favorite of all the characters; I loved his uptight prissiness and his hatred of himself for being uptight and prissy. When he unclenched his fists and let go of his grimace and showed that wonderful, open, loving face to the people he loved, I believed totally in his character and his essential goodness. I loved his devotion to his lover (and, eventually, husband), Keith (played wonderfully by Mathew St. Patrick), and felt his angst and agony and his self-loathing over being gay, and his constant battle to be respected by others, and by himself, despite and sometimes because of his being gay. When he got to take on crazy fantasy sequences or let his hair down in sex scenes, his relief (and my own) was palpable. I would love to have seen his portrayal of the Emcee in "Cabaret"—he took over from Alan Cumming (whom I also love) in the extra-bawdy Broadway revival a few years ago. The revival of "Cabaret," one of my all-time favorite musicals, was directed (to wild acclaim) by Sam Mendes, who directed the film "American Beauty," which was, of course, written by Alan Ball, the creator of "Six Feet Under." (So now we see how it all comes together....)
Alan Ball has made it to the pantheon of great television writers and directors for what he did with this show. He directed and wrote many of the episodes, including the final one. His ability to look ugliness straight in the face, turn it sideways, and find the beauty in it for us is uncanny. I fell in love with his work when I saw "American Beauty," which he wrote. So many people loved that movie instantly when it came out that it has suffered a backlash. Some now call it pompous or mannered, a good outlet for middle-brow angst, which is just what the few critics who don't like "Six Feet Under" have said about it. I say, what's wrong with wonderfully presented angst? How could I not love a show which shows families in all their ugly disfunction and trauma, which drags us into people's breakdowns and bad behavior and cruelty, but also shows us how much pain people are willing to go through because they refuse to stop loving, stop trying, stop hoping? There was a great deal of pain in this show, but there was also immense heart, much laugh-out-loud humor, delight, hope, and, most of all, love.
Ball's "American Beauty" has violence, inappropriate sexual desire, casual drug use, a lovable pusher, a harridan of a wife, transgenerational discord, and murder. But Lester Burnham, played so beautifully by Kevin Spacey, leads us through the movie to the death he has prepared us for by showing how, oddly and surprisingly, he made his way to a place of great love and happiness in the moment of his death. The disturbing and unexpected deliverance of Lester, of his daughter Jane and her boyfriend Ricky, and even of Angela, the teen object of Lester's obsession, are, like Ricky's videotape of a plastic trash bag swirling in the wind, oddly, disturbingly, incongruously, and, at the same time, perfectly beautiful. Ball's insistence on finding treasures in the mundane, and hope and love among the frightening and painful, raise his talent above most other Hollywood writers. He makes me think, ask myself big questions, and care deeply about his characters. And I love that.
That's how I feel now that the television series "Six Feet Under" has ended. The last episode was very satisfying, since we did get to see that there was a way out of the difficult present into the hopeful future for all the characters. But it also underscored my feelings of loss and sadness about the end of the characters' lives, since the ten-minute "valedictory," as some have called it, which ended the show and the series was a fast-forward skip through time to the highlights of the characters' lives to come, and to the deaths of each of the remaining major characters. The show centered on the people who live and work in a family-owned funeral home and the continual requirement that they focus on and deal with the deaths of others, as well as their own debilitating pain and inability to cope with the deaths of those they love. Thus, the natural, appropriate, and organic resolution to their stories is the brief but solid and final ending of each of their lives, whether in the present day or in a future glimpsed through a montage during the final moments of the series. The ending was wonderfully, sadly appropriate to the subject matter of the show, and, as the show did every week, it forced viewers to acknowledge the inevitable yet mysterious end of life, the one certainty we all face.
I loved that aspect of "Six Feet Under." Every week's show began with a death, often presented in a shockingly humorous way. Sometimes it was a stranger whose funeral arrangements would be dealt with during the show; sometimes, as in the very first episode, it was the death of someone dear and integral to the lives of the characters in the story. There was no escaping the specter of death; the characters sometimes courted death, sometimes cheated it, but always had to deal with it, ultimately.
Sometimes the inability of the Fisher family (and most of the people with whom they created relationships) to face emotion straight-on and work through it made them do reckless or thoughtless things out of their own fear and denial of their feelings or desires. Nate, the one family member who was devoted to working through his pain and considering it carefully, ended up wallowing in it, citing it as an excuse for egregiously bad behavior, and he became a narcissistic pain in the ass. But Nate also brought other fascinating characters into his orbit, and one could sympathize with the universality of his concerns at times, when he wasn't being such a selfish, careless S.O.B. His navel-gazing, his constant questioning about whether this is all there really is to life, and his whining about whether we should give up and live with what we have or whether we should always strive for something more meaningful, were presented in a way that made me and, it seems, almost everyone else lose whatever tender feelings we had for him. But he felt real. His questions were annoyingly asked and the answers he found led him to ignore the needs and rights of others when they got in the way of his own personal vision quest, but who among us hasn't asked himself or herself variations on those same questions? The imperfections in his character, his choices and his lashing out at others, made him fascinating to watch, and he often acted as a catalyst who set other emotional fires burning in other characters.
All of the characters in "Six Feet Under" could be quite wonderfully, humanly appealing in one scene, then maddenlying selfish and carelessly destructive in another. This fluidity of behavior was always well grounded in a carefully constructed understanding of each character, though; their actions could be surprising, but they were always understandable and had some weird internal logic given what we knew of the character. They were fully rounded, fleshed out, so well understood by the writers and directors of the show that there was a satisfying consistency to them that allowed me to enjoy it when they acted out and did surprising things when under pressure, because whatever craziness they indulged in was a natural outgrowth of their experience, their personalities, their well-established patterns of behavior and choice when faced with problems.
Some people gave up on the show along the way because they found the disasters, deaths, pain, and bad fortune too unrelenting and therefore either overwhelmingly sad or laughingly unbelievable. But the show was never meant to be a perfectly realistic, day-to-day depiction of actual lives. There were elements of fantasy and the supernatural in it from day one. Dead characters come back and have conversations with living ones regularly, and it's never made crystal clear whether they're actual ghosts or just the darker sides of other characters' own natures who are asking the questions or exposing the fears or insecurities that we all share. They serve as catalysts who force characters to face demons, to get angry at those who have left them, to remember what's important, and to come up with cogent arguments against their worst fears.
Sometimes characters have conversations with the bloody corpses they're cleaning up in the basement of the funeral home before a viewing, and these conversations are jarring and disturbing, and the visuals are occasionally more than I want to watch. But I love the realizations that come from these conversations with the dead, and the reminder that our relationships with others don't end just because one of us dies before the other; we continue to consider what those whom we've lost meant to us and mean today. We can get angry or forgive or question or understand them differently for the rest of our lives, and alter our understanding of our relationships as a result. I have found this very true, and both painful and helpful in considering my relationships with my late parents. My relationships with them continue to change and deepen, though one has been dead for four years and the other for over ten.
The writing on "Six Feet Under" was exceptional. It was witty and wicked and often vulgar or shocking, but, I felt, refreshingly so. There were many well-crafted lines, but ultimately the words sprung from each character's lips for a reason and in line with what we knew of the character's motivations and means of expression. The dialog grew out of the characters, the characters didn't have to bend themselves around the dialog in order to stroke the egos of the writers, directors, or producers.
The acting was first-rate. It was a pleasure to be introduced to so many fine actors, many with a strong theatrical background, most of whom I was not familiar with. I'm especially fond of the work Lauren Ambrose (Claire) and Michael C. Hall (David) did in this show. David was my favorite of all the characters; I loved his uptight prissiness and his hatred of himself for being uptight and prissy. When he unclenched his fists and let go of his grimace and showed that wonderful, open, loving face to the people he loved, I believed totally in his character and his essential goodness. I loved his devotion to his lover (and, eventually, husband), Keith (played wonderfully by Mathew St. Patrick), and felt his angst and agony and his self-loathing over being gay, and his constant battle to be respected by others, and by himself, despite and sometimes because of his being gay. When he got to take on crazy fantasy sequences or let his hair down in sex scenes, his relief (and my own) was palpable. I would love to have seen his portrayal of the Emcee in "Cabaret"—he took over from Alan Cumming (whom I also love) in the extra-bawdy Broadway revival a few years ago. The revival of "Cabaret," one of my all-time favorite musicals, was directed (to wild acclaim) by Sam Mendes, who directed the film "American Beauty," which was, of course, written by Alan Ball, the creator of "Six Feet Under." (So now we see how it all comes together....)
Alan Ball has made it to the pantheon of great television writers and directors for what he did with this show. He directed and wrote many of the episodes, including the final one. His ability to look ugliness straight in the face, turn it sideways, and find the beauty in it for us is uncanny. I fell in love with his work when I saw "American Beauty," which he wrote. So many people loved that movie instantly when it came out that it has suffered a backlash. Some now call it pompous or mannered, a good outlet for middle-brow angst, which is just what the few critics who don't like "Six Feet Under" have said about it. I say, what's wrong with wonderfully presented angst? How could I not love a show which shows families in all their ugly disfunction and trauma, which drags us into people's breakdowns and bad behavior and cruelty, but also shows us how much pain people are willing to go through because they refuse to stop loving, stop trying, stop hoping? There was a great deal of pain in this show, but there was also immense heart, much laugh-out-loud humor, delight, hope, and, most of all, love.
Ball's "American Beauty" has violence, inappropriate sexual desire, casual drug use, a lovable pusher, a harridan of a wife, transgenerational discord, and murder. But Lester Burnham, played so beautifully by Kevin Spacey, leads us through the movie to the death he has prepared us for by showing how, oddly and surprisingly, he made his way to a place of great love and happiness in the moment of his death. The disturbing and unexpected deliverance of Lester, of his daughter Jane and her boyfriend Ricky, and even of Angela, the teen object of Lester's obsession, are, like Ricky's videotape of a plastic trash bag swirling in the wind, oddly, disturbingly, incongruously, and, at the same time, perfectly beautiful. Ball's insistence on finding treasures in the mundane, and hope and love among the frightening and painful, raise his talent above most other Hollywood writers. He makes me think, ask myself big questions, and care deeply about his characters. And I love that.
Friday, August 19, 2005
Can't Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me
I’ve never cared much for clowns. I don’t have coulrophobia (fear of clowns), though this fear is apparently surprisingly common. I just find pretty much everything they are and most of what they stand for annoying. I don’t hate them, but I avoid them when I can, and I’ve been sorely tempted to buy myself a “Can’t sleep, clowns will eat me” T-shirt. Apparently many of my fellow Americans agree with me.
My beloved Uncle Steve is the exception to my anti-clown rule. He finally retired from his recurring role as Tidy the Clown in the annual Redwood City (California) Fourth of July Parade this year after about 25 years of clowning around in public, and I must say I did enjoy him. But he was a gentle clown who pushed a bottomless garbage can down the street, popping junk into it and leaving a trail of trash behind him as the debris went right through the bottom of the can. When he's a clown, the joke's on him, and the audience gets to giggle at his cluelessness.
Steve's alter ego, Tidy, recruited elementary school kids to be his clown sidekicks every year, and the result was charming and sweet. Tidy stuck flowers into piles of pucky left by the horses of the mounted police that went before him, and only approached people if they seemed open to it; he'd never force himself on a child. He's more the sweet, Chaplinesque Little Tramp sort of clown, not the barrelling, bamboozling, freakazoid clown one finds on, say, ice cream cone packaging. (That is one horrifying dude.) I can make exceptions for someone like Tidy, but in general, keep Bozo and his ilk faaaar away from me.
The sort of clown my uncle represents is endearing and enjoyable, a sort of old-style, mid-20th-century, fun-loving clown. But nowadays such cuddly clowns are rather rare. The cheerful, perky clown toys of the past have given way to more garish and ghoulish representations in the general media.
The general idea of the American clown, a white-faced social misfit clad in oversized and odd clothing, ignoring people’s personal space, attacking them with seltzer bottles or squirting flowers, and using them as the butt of public jokes as a way of seeking attention, pretty much sums up the worst of American behavior in one self-parodying, campy, over-the-top package. It’s nearly everything I hate about our embarrassingly accurate national stereotype: garish, self-absorbed, pushy, willing to trod on other’s toes, thinking our needs are greater than everyone else’s, ever ready to laugh at others’ humiliation but in a touchy, bad-humored funk when the table is turned and the joke’s on us.
To be fair, clowns of other cultures (e.g., buffoons like Pantalone and Arlecchino in the commedia dell’arte tradition, or Britain’s Punch and Judy puppet versions of clowns) are also caricatures with distinct, overscaled features, costumes, and gestures, all of which predate the founding of the United States by many years. I’m being unjust in blaming American culture for the American clown tradition, I know. They come from a long and, to my sensitivities, annoying tradition of making the audience the straight man, barrelling over others for laughs, and making light of humiliation and slapstick violence. It’s the sort of thing that Roberto Benigni did in his Holocaust-lite Oscar-winning crowd-pleaser, “Life is Beautiful,” a few years ago—much to my disgust and dismay. (Though I couldn't stand the film, you can find a well-written, carefully researched, and generally supportive article recounting critical reactions to the film and describing the film's place in Italian cinematic history, as well as its place among movie depictions of the Holocaust, here. For a description of the film that agrees with my take on it, see David Denby's article, "In the eye of the beholder," published in The New Yorker, March 15, 1999. Sadly, I can't find the full article on the Web.) I found nearly everything Benigni did in that film either offensive, maudlin, self-aggrandizing, disrespectful, or embarrassing—or all of those things rolled into one.
I’m not actually a humorless prig; I can cackle and guffaw with the best of them, and I laugh so hard I snort more often than I care to admit. I can enjoy dark humor, tacky humor, vulgar humor, but I can rarely appreciate or enjoy slapstick physical comedy or farce, unless they’re so bizarrely irrational (e.g., my beloved Monty Python) that it’s impossible to empathize with the person playing the butt of the joke. Otherwise, I usually become uncomfortable when the laughs come at the expense of someone else’s pride, safety, or happiness. Even when the straight man is set up to seem an unpleasant sort who deserves his comeuppance, I generally don’t like seeing others derive happiness from the suffering of others. But then, I don’t appreciate most light romantic comedies, either. I can watch “Six Feet Under” or “The Sopranos” all day long (gimme that angst!), but ask me to watch ditsy women trip over themselves to get the attention of pretty boys with great abs for an hour and really, I’d rather floss my teeth or weed my garden, thank you very much.
Of course, I’m not alone. A quick search of eBay will find you scores of scary clown puppets, figurines, and posters that the sellers recognize as distinctly creepy. A walk through the aisles of your local Blockbuster shows DVD covers emblazoned with killer clowns in the horror section. "The Simpsons" even featured an episode in which Bart is so frightened by the clown-inspired bed Homer makes him that he stays up all night chanting, “Can’t sleep, clown’ll eat me.” This is apparently the genesis of the refrain now printed on T-shirts worn by proud coulrophobes across the nation. (Leave it to Matt Groening to explore odd undercurrents of our nation in such a fun and funky way.)
I don't know whether it's worth it to resurrect cheerful, inoffensive clowns, since even they had elements that have scared children for centuries; outsized features, crazy make-up, and disturbingly child-like behavior coming from an oversized adult are just odd. I prefer my comedians to take the forms of everyday people, I guess. I like my fantasy worlds to feel as close to a world I can believe in as possible, so I can get lost in them more easily. Some like fantasy characters and scenarios to be as outlandish as possible in order to feel truly immersed in another world and way of thinking, but I'd rather have some emotional connection to fictional characters so that I can care about them and identify with them, and for me, that usually involves making them feel as much like realistic human beings as possible. I also prefer it if they don't step out of their boundaries and squirt me in the face with a shot of seltzer water. I'm funny that way.
My beloved Uncle Steve is the exception to my anti-clown rule. He finally retired from his recurring role as Tidy the Clown in the annual Redwood City (California) Fourth of July Parade this year after about 25 years of clowning around in public, and I must say I did enjoy him. But he was a gentle clown who pushed a bottomless garbage can down the street, popping junk into it and leaving a trail of trash behind him as the debris went right through the bottom of the can. When he's a clown, the joke's on him, and the audience gets to giggle at his cluelessness.
Steve's alter ego, Tidy, recruited elementary school kids to be his clown sidekicks every year, and the result was charming and sweet. Tidy stuck flowers into piles of pucky left by the horses of the mounted police that went before him, and only approached people if they seemed open to it; he'd never force himself on a child. He's more the sweet, Chaplinesque Little Tramp sort of clown, not the barrelling, bamboozling, freakazoid clown one finds on, say, ice cream cone packaging. (That is one horrifying dude.) I can make exceptions for someone like Tidy, but in general, keep Bozo and his ilk faaaar away from me.
The sort of clown my uncle represents is endearing and enjoyable, a sort of old-style, mid-20th-century, fun-loving clown. But nowadays such cuddly clowns are rather rare. The cheerful, perky clown toys of the past have given way to more garish and ghoulish representations in the general media.
The general idea of the American clown, a white-faced social misfit clad in oversized and odd clothing, ignoring people’s personal space, attacking them with seltzer bottles or squirting flowers, and using them as the butt of public jokes as a way of seeking attention, pretty much sums up the worst of American behavior in one self-parodying, campy, over-the-top package. It’s nearly everything I hate about our embarrassingly accurate national stereotype: garish, self-absorbed, pushy, willing to trod on other’s toes, thinking our needs are greater than everyone else’s, ever ready to laugh at others’ humiliation but in a touchy, bad-humored funk when the table is turned and the joke’s on us.
To be fair, clowns of other cultures (e.g., buffoons like Pantalone and Arlecchino in the commedia dell’arte tradition, or Britain’s Punch and Judy puppet versions of clowns) are also caricatures with distinct, overscaled features, costumes, and gestures, all of which predate the founding of the United States by many years. I’m being unjust in blaming American culture for the American clown tradition, I know. They come from a long and, to my sensitivities, annoying tradition of making the audience the straight man, barrelling over others for laughs, and making light of humiliation and slapstick violence. It’s the sort of thing that Roberto Benigni did in his Holocaust-lite Oscar-winning crowd-pleaser, “Life is Beautiful,” a few years ago—much to my disgust and dismay. (Though I couldn't stand the film, you can find a well-written, carefully researched, and generally supportive article recounting critical reactions to the film and describing the film's place in Italian cinematic history, as well as its place among movie depictions of the Holocaust, here. For a description of the film that agrees with my take on it, see David Denby's article, "In the eye of the beholder," published in The New Yorker, March 15, 1999. Sadly, I can't find the full article on the Web.) I found nearly everything Benigni did in that film either offensive, maudlin, self-aggrandizing, disrespectful, or embarrassing—or all of those things rolled into one.
I’m not actually a humorless prig; I can cackle and guffaw with the best of them, and I laugh so hard I snort more often than I care to admit. I can enjoy dark humor, tacky humor, vulgar humor, but I can rarely appreciate or enjoy slapstick physical comedy or farce, unless they’re so bizarrely irrational (e.g., my beloved Monty Python) that it’s impossible to empathize with the person playing the butt of the joke. Otherwise, I usually become uncomfortable when the laughs come at the expense of someone else’s pride, safety, or happiness. Even when the straight man is set up to seem an unpleasant sort who deserves his comeuppance, I generally don’t like seeing others derive happiness from the suffering of others. But then, I don’t appreciate most light romantic comedies, either. I can watch “Six Feet Under” or “The Sopranos” all day long (gimme that angst!), but ask me to watch ditsy women trip over themselves to get the attention of pretty boys with great abs for an hour and really, I’d rather floss my teeth or weed my garden, thank you very much.
Of course, I’m not alone. A quick search of eBay will find you scores of scary clown puppets, figurines, and posters that the sellers recognize as distinctly creepy. A walk through the aisles of your local Blockbuster shows DVD covers emblazoned with killer clowns in the horror section. "The Simpsons" even featured an episode in which Bart is so frightened by the clown-inspired bed Homer makes him that he stays up all night chanting, “Can’t sleep, clown’ll eat me.” This is apparently the genesis of the refrain now printed on T-shirts worn by proud coulrophobes across the nation. (Leave it to Matt Groening to explore odd undercurrents of our nation in such a fun and funky way.)
I don't know whether it's worth it to resurrect cheerful, inoffensive clowns, since even they had elements that have scared children for centuries; outsized features, crazy make-up, and disturbingly child-like behavior coming from an oversized adult are just odd. I prefer my comedians to take the forms of everyday people, I guess. I like my fantasy worlds to feel as close to a world I can believe in as possible, so I can get lost in them more easily. Some like fantasy characters and scenarios to be as outlandish as possible in order to feel truly immersed in another world and way of thinking, but I'd rather have some emotional connection to fictional characters so that I can care about them and identify with them, and for me, that usually involves making them feel as much like realistic human beings as possible. I also prefer it if they don't step out of their boundaries and squirt me in the face with a shot of seltzer water. I'm funny that way.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
My Roundabout Introduction to Blossom Dearie
When I was a child, ABC's Saturday morning cartoon line-up was punctuated with wonderful short musical cartoons sponsored by Nabisco: the famous "Schoolhouse Rock" cartoons. The educational songs created for these cartoons were so clever, catchy, and memorable that they were all rereleased on video in the 1990s for the children of the children who enjoyed them over 30 years ago. I grew up on the "Multiplication Rock" and "Grammar Rock" videos; my daughter loved them 30 years later.
Much of the appeal of these videos was that each was just the length of a pop song, and the music and lyrics were written by proven and talented professional musicians, not by earnest professional pedagogues. They were quick and full of information, and had busy, funny animation. And they were the only regular music videos for kids on TV then; there were weak shows with live-action singers or talentless oafs in bad costumes doing pathetic songs, like on "New Zoo Revue," and there were catchy theme songs on the somehow compelling yet also vaguely disturbing Sid and Marty Krofft kid shows like "H.R. Pufnstuf" (which starred Jack Wild, who played The Artful Dodger in the musical film "Oliver!"), "The Bugaloos" (whose villain was played by comedian Martha Raye, probably most famous to people my age as a denture adhesive pitchwoman) and "Liddsville," that bizarre show about the land of talking hats starring Charles Nelson Reilly and Butch Patrick (a.k.a. Eddie Munster). But MTV didn't exist yet and catchy musical TV ads for dolls or games (from "Life" to "Mystery Date") were no match for three-minute musical cartoon masterpieces like "Three is a Magic Number" or "Conjunction Junction" or "I'm Just a Bill." These songs were so good that a number of popular rock bands covered them on the album "Schoolhouse Rock Rocks."
Of all the songs in the "Schoolhouse Rock" oeuvre, there was one that shone out as a particularly elegant little gem: "Figure Eight." My mother loved it so much that she bought the "Schoolhouse Rock" album on vinyl many years ago just to listen to that song. This ode to the number eight was illustrated by a figure skater and the song was sung by a woman with an unbelievably darling name and voice: Blossom Dearie. The dearest part is that she was born with that name. And the best part is that sweet, small, clear voice has sung some of the lightest, crispest, most refreshing versions of a number of jazz standards I've ever heard. She also has a fresh, spare style of piano playing that underscores that little pussycat voice.
I remember seeing Blossom Dearie interviewed on TV in the 1970s; she had wit and sparkle, and I was rather amazed that her tiny little voice seemed not to be a put-on but the real deal. When I started listening to her recordings of jazz standards years later, I found there was less cutesiness than I expected, and more of a wistful, light yet wry quality to her singing. I love the way she delivers Dorothy Fields' lyrics in "I Won't Dance" ("For heaven rest us, I'm not asbestos") and the light but knowing quality of "They Say It's Spring." "Rhode Island is Famous for You" makes my daughter and me laugh, and it's fun to compare her version of that song to Michael Feinstein's. While I love Feinstein's direct, swoony, passionate if sometimes campy treatment of lyrics, and think he does that song well, Blossom Dearie's delivery has a quiet humor and a conspiratorial wink, whereas Feinstein's is more of a showman's romp, bigger and bolder and more obvious. Both have their place, but Dearie's intimacy makes me feel like I'm in on a more sophisticated joke.
Much of the appeal of these videos was that each was just the length of a pop song, and the music and lyrics were written by proven and talented professional musicians, not by earnest professional pedagogues. They were quick and full of information, and had busy, funny animation. And they were the only regular music videos for kids on TV then; there were weak shows with live-action singers or talentless oafs in bad costumes doing pathetic songs, like on "New Zoo Revue," and there were catchy theme songs on the somehow compelling yet also vaguely disturbing Sid and Marty Krofft kid shows like "H.R. Pufnstuf" (which starred Jack Wild, who played The Artful Dodger in the musical film "Oliver!"), "The Bugaloos" (whose villain was played by comedian Martha Raye, probably most famous to people my age as a denture adhesive pitchwoman) and "Liddsville," that bizarre show about the land of talking hats starring Charles Nelson Reilly and Butch Patrick (a.k.a. Eddie Munster). But MTV didn't exist yet and catchy musical TV ads for dolls or games (from "Life" to "Mystery Date") were no match for three-minute musical cartoon masterpieces like "Three is a Magic Number" or "Conjunction Junction" or "I'm Just a Bill." These songs were so good that a number of popular rock bands covered them on the album "Schoolhouse Rock Rocks."
Of all the songs in the "Schoolhouse Rock" oeuvre, there was one that shone out as a particularly elegant little gem: "Figure Eight." My mother loved it so much that she bought the "Schoolhouse Rock" album on vinyl many years ago just to listen to that song. This ode to the number eight was illustrated by a figure skater and the song was sung by a woman with an unbelievably darling name and voice: Blossom Dearie. The dearest part is that she was born with that name. And the best part is that sweet, small, clear voice has sung some of the lightest, crispest, most refreshing versions of a number of jazz standards I've ever heard. She also has a fresh, spare style of piano playing that underscores that little pussycat voice.
I remember seeing Blossom Dearie interviewed on TV in the 1970s; she had wit and sparkle, and I was rather amazed that her tiny little voice seemed not to be a put-on but the real deal. When I started listening to her recordings of jazz standards years later, I found there was less cutesiness than I expected, and more of a wistful, light yet wry quality to her singing. I love the way she delivers Dorothy Fields' lyrics in "I Won't Dance" ("For heaven rest us, I'm not asbestos") and the light but knowing quality of "They Say It's Spring." "Rhode Island is Famous for You" makes my daughter and me laugh, and it's fun to compare her version of that song to Michael Feinstein's. While I love Feinstein's direct, swoony, passionate if sometimes campy treatment of lyrics, and think he does that song well, Blossom Dearie's delivery has a quiet humor and a conspiratorial wink, whereas Feinstein's is more of a showman's romp, bigger and bolder and more obvious. Both have their place, but Dearie's intimacy makes me feel like I'm in on a more sophisticated joke.
Monday, August 08, 2005
Monsieur Ibrahim
I just watched the lovely 2003 French film "Monsieur Ibrahim et les Fleurs du Coran" ("Mr. Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran") over the weekend, and I found it a real gem. It's a story of a 16-year-old boy, Moise (known as Momo) living in a working-class Jewish district of Paris in the 1960s. He looks after his father, a selfish, depressive man who is never satisfied by anything Momo is or does. Abandoned by his mother as a small child, Momo has never known parental love or kindness, so he seeks womanly tenderness from the prostitutes who work the streets of his neighborhood, and he filches money from his father so he can afford to buy some pleasure. He's rather sullen and quiet, with no real friends and no one to help him learn about life's possibilities and love's responsibilities.
Momo makes daily visits to the local grocery owned by Monsieur Ibrahim (Omar Sharif), a Turkish Sufi who seems to know more about what is in Momo's heart than should be possible. The two strike up a friendship, and Monsieur Ibrahim teaches Momo about loving kindness, about how to make himself more appealing to others so he can get what he wants out of life, about enjoying the world and the people in it. It could have been a paint-by-numbers sort of coming-of-age story, but instead the interactions feel very real and subtle, and Sharif's performance is extraordinary. He brings a real joie de vivre to the role, but in a quiet, understated fashion. Monsieur Ibrahim is a nonjudgmental, spiritual man who finds beauty in his Koran and keeps that beauty in his heart at all times, and his connection with this drifting young Jewish man gives Momo's life meaning and roots while still broadening his horizons, both literally and figuratively.
The religions of the two characters impact the story very little. Momo and his father appear to be secular Jews, and Monsieur Ibrahim's Sufi Muslim beliefs are important to him but are flexible and nonjudgmental enough to allow him to show kindness and appreciation for prostitutes, as well as a desire and willingness to understand the beauty in other religions' houses of worship, to which he takes Momo on fieldtrips. But some have chosen to read a lot more meaning into the fact that the characters are of differing religions than actually exists in the movie. There will always be those who cannot handle a story of kindness between people of differing beliefs.
There is some argument on the internet among a few viewers of the film who dislike the fact that Momo's Jewish father is so unlikeable and careless about the boy, and that Momo's true teacher and father figure is a Muslim. They have chosen to read anti-Jewish sentiment into the story which I do not believe exists. My take on the film is shared by the vast majority of people who have seen it, apparently, but a couple of outspoken critics find the idea that a film that shows a sympathetic Muslim and an unsympathetic Jew must therefore have a message of hidden hatred of Jews, as if art can never show people of one religion or another having unattractive characteristics without painting all of their ethnicity or religion as bad. This sort of sweeping condemnation has as its basis a sort of bigotry of its own, and assumes that viewers are too stupid to recognize that an individual character does not have to represent an entire ethnic minority.
I had no idea that Omar Sharif could give a performance of such subtlety and beauty; he was perfectly cast in the role and he brought much of his own personal experience to it. I always think of Sharif in his blockbuster days, from "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Doctor Zhivago" and "Funny Girl," in which he gave fine and capable performances, but none of which allowed him moments of introspection. His international playboy persona didn't help me to believe him capable of the sort of intimate gestures and nuanced emotions that flash across his face in this role. The DVD commentary by Sharif is thoughtful and articulate as well. I love getting a whole new perspective on an artist after having my eyes opened to his talents and possibilities. This film was a very pleasing surprise.
Momo makes daily visits to the local grocery owned by Monsieur Ibrahim (Omar Sharif), a Turkish Sufi who seems to know more about what is in Momo's heart than should be possible. The two strike up a friendship, and Monsieur Ibrahim teaches Momo about loving kindness, about how to make himself more appealing to others so he can get what he wants out of life, about enjoying the world and the people in it. It could have been a paint-by-numbers sort of coming-of-age story, but instead the interactions feel very real and subtle, and Sharif's performance is extraordinary. He brings a real joie de vivre to the role, but in a quiet, understated fashion. Monsieur Ibrahim is a nonjudgmental, spiritual man who finds beauty in his Koran and keeps that beauty in his heart at all times, and his connection with this drifting young Jewish man gives Momo's life meaning and roots while still broadening his horizons, both literally and figuratively.
The religions of the two characters impact the story very little. Momo and his father appear to be secular Jews, and Monsieur Ibrahim's Sufi Muslim beliefs are important to him but are flexible and nonjudgmental enough to allow him to show kindness and appreciation for prostitutes, as well as a desire and willingness to understand the beauty in other religions' houses of worship, to which he takes Momo on fieldtrips. But some have chosen to read a lot more meaning into the fact that the characters are of differing religions than actually exists in the movie. There will always be those who cannot handle a story of kindness between people of differing beliefs.
There is some argument on the internet among a few viewers of the film who dislike the fact that Momo's Jewish father is so unlikeable and careless about the boy, and that Momo's true teacher and father figure is a Muslim. They have chosen to read anti-Jewish sentiment into the story which I do not believe exists. My take on the film is shared by the vast majority of people who have seen it, apparently, but a couple of outspoken critics find the idea that a film that shows a sympathetic Muslim and an unsympathetic Jew must therefore have a message of hidden hatred of Jews, as if art can never show people of one religion or another having unattractive characteristics without painting all of their ethnicity or religion as bad. This sort of sweeping condemnation has as its basis a sort of bigotry of its own, and assumes that viewers are too stupid to recognize that an individual character does not have to represent an entire ethnic minority.
I had no idea that Omar Sharif could give a performance of such subtlety and beauty; he was perfectly cast in the role and he brought much of his own personal experience to it. I always think of Sharif in his blockbuster days, from "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Doctor Zhivago" and "Funny Girl," in which he gave fine and capable performances, but none of which allowed him moments of introspection. His international playboy persona didn't help me to believe him capable of the sort of intimate gestures and nuanced emotions that flash across his face in this role. The DVD commentary by Sharif is thoughtful and articulate as well. I love getting a whole new perspective on an artist after having my eyes opened to his talents and possibilities. This film was a very pleasing surprise.
Thursday, August 04, 2005
The Wham of Sam
A few months ago, I was doing a difficult job that lasted six weeks instead of the two I thought I'd signed on for. I was commuting about 10 hours a week (and I hate driving), and the job required intense focus on thousands of important details. I learned a lot, the people were kind and helpful, and the work they did was important, but I felt out of place, frustrated, and blue.
I tried reminding myself of all the things going right with the job: I was employed, working with good folks at an institution that improves people’s lives, making enough so that I didn’t have to work two jobs, and setting a good example for my daughter by showing that sometimes we do things we don’t enjoy in order to pay our dues, fulfill our obligations, be helpful, and earn a living. Of course, while my brain understood all this, my heart felt cranky and sad. I was frustrated that the talents I feel are the most valuable and worthy ones I have to offer weren’t being used to the extent I'd like to use them. And then I had my Sammy Davis Jr. epiphany.
To try to make the hours in stop-and-go traffic feel less gruesome, I realized I needed to find fresh and uplifting tunes. I love NPR, but sometimes focusing on the latest events in Fallujah while stuck on a bridge for 30 minutes just feels too nasty and I need music. I rummaged through my CDs and found one I’d bought a few months back but hadn’t listened to much yet. It was a CD of songs performed by a man I must now admit I used to think of as one of the poster children of Vegas kitsch: Sammy Davis Jr. But the best part is the name of the album: “The Wham of Sam.”
I must digress at this point. Are you already asking yourself, why would Laura buy Sammy CDs in the first place? Well, because I heard one of his songs in a store somewhere and was reminded what a fine voice and a great sense of expression, style, and warmth he had at his best moments. The many TV appearances he made during the 1960s and 1970s were so filled with Vegas schlock and corny overstylization that he was almost a self-parody by the time I started listening to music in earnest. He was doing campy, obvious, cool cat riffs during his showy performances on Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas and The Tonight Show, and I couldn’t be bothered. I knew I’d loved his portrayal of Sportin’ Life in the film “Porgy and Bess” when I’d seen it on TV as a tiny kid, but I don’t think it’s been on TV since about 1970 so my memory is now faint, and I loved his voice of the Cheshire Cat singing “What’s a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This?” in a strange 1966 animated parody variation of “Alice in Wonderland.” His turn as groovy evangelist Big Daddy in “Sweet Charity” was a kick and featured a fun song, “The Rhythm of Life,” but somehow I forgot about that. The big hits he had when I was a kid, like “The Candy Man,” felt too cutesy and pat to me, and I dismissed him, with his goofy hipster patois and giant diamond rings, his membership in the Rat Pack, and his public support of Nixon was too bizarre. (I still shudder when I remember the much-publicized photo of Sammy’s adoring, awkward, full-body hug of Nixon.)
But when I heard him singing over the speakers at some chain store I thought, damn, no wonder this man was so popular. Listen to the feeling he puts into that line! What clear, clean enunciation! What sophisticated, tasty phrasing! So I swallowed my pride and hung out at a CD store listening station for a half hour, listening to selections from a number of his albums. I bought two, one of ballads and one of swingier songs. What a good move that was. But then I got distracted and hardly listened to them.
Anyway, back to my commute-hour epiphany. I popped “The Wham of Sam” into my CD player, and right there, boom, I was hooked with the first song, the star of the album, “Lot of Livin’ to Do.” The horns grabbed me immediately, and the energy, which starts out high, somehow continues to build with every measure of the song. The band arrangement by Marty Paich is fabulous, swingy in the style of Sinatra’s terrific “Ring-A-Ding-Ding” album (one of my favorite albums of all time, by anyone--it was arranged by the legendary Nelson Riddle).
"Lot of Livin' to Do" is big and brassy and has something new going on at every turn, but the band never outshines Sammy, whose phrasing is exactly right. His syncopation is so sure and it builds right up to the payoff moments. He knows when to pull back a little and when to let it rip. The intonation and enunciation are beautiful, but beyond his technical chops, he works the lyrics just right. He’s thinking about what he’s saying, he means what he’s singing, and I believe every word. He was sizzling and I was thrilled, sitting right there in a traffic jam at 8:30 a.m., bouncing up and down in my seat.
I must have listened to that song six times in a row on the way into work. The words crept into my brain and Boom! I had a revelation. The words aren’t Shakespeare; they’re standard upbeat lyrics, and the song was originally written for the musical “Bye Bye, Birdie,” which is fun but not Sondheim, you know? But somehow, sung with that bravado and joy and excitement and underscored by that hot band, the lyrics spoke to me:
"... [T]here’s wine all ready for tasting / And there’s Cadillacs all shiny and new / Gotta move ’cause time is a-wastin’ / There’s such a lot of livin’ to do. / There’s music to play, places to go and people to see / Everything for you and me / Life’s a ball if only you know it / And it’s all waiting for you / You’re alive, so come on and show it / There’s such a lot of living to do.”
I heard it, and I believed it. I figured, hey, this tiny little man had a four-pack-a-day cigarette habit, a glass eye, grew up without his mom, had to deal with racism from day one, and had to perform in hotels that he was barred from sleeping in because of the color of his skin (until he became a big name and helped break the color barrier in show business). And man, did he love life. He ate it up and went right over the top, drinking and smoking and skirt-chasing too much, and hanging out with some unsavory folks, yes--but he also took a song like “Lush Life” and sang it like he’d lived it. Damn, he sang every song as if he lived it. And meant every word.
He brought fun and swing and life into everything he sang. Sometimes the hipster kitsch of it was too much for me, and sometimes the low-brow, I'm-gonna-please-everybody style of his later years felt like he'd dumbed-down his act, especially considering what sophistication he was capable of. His desire to please everybody and be up, up, up all the time cheapened his rep in the eyes of many of us, but the joy he brought to life, the beauty he found in it and made for others, and that devotion to wringing every drop from it reminded me how lucky I was and how many wonderful things are around for me to enjoy. I thought it seemed a sin to waste another day in disappointment that I’m not doing more exciting work, and I vowed I’d make good things happen, find them, make sure they’re a part of every day of mine, and every one of my daughter’s days, too. I figured if Sammy, who had so much garbage to contend with, could take his talent and shoot it off like fireworks, why can’t I take whatever gifts I have and make something fine and exciting of them, too? I may not be the dynamo Sammy was, but I don’t have his struggles either. And one doesn’t have to be a superstar to find something splendid in each day, or to make fine things happen.
So from that day forward I've reaffirmed my dedication to finding and doing good work, to making beauty, to learning something good and doing something kind each day, to being grateful for the opportunities to enjoy life more and to worry less about my dwindling savings (and how long it takes to find good jobs), and to writing regularly and with purpose. So, in a roundabout way, I have Sammy to thank for getting me off my tush and starting this blog. The wham of Sam, indeed!
I tried reminding myself of all the things going right with the job: I was employed, working with good folks at an institution that improves people’s lives, making enough so that I didn’t have to work two jobs, and setting a good example for my daughter by showing that sometimes we do things we don’t enjoy in order to pay our dues, fulfill our obligations, be helpful, and earn a living. Of course, while my brain understood all this, my heart felt cranky and sad. I was frustrated that the talents I feel are the most valuable and worthy ones I have to offer weren’t being used to the extent I'd like to use them. And then I had my Sammy Davis Jr. epiphany.
To try to make the hours in stop-and-go traffic feel less gruesome, I realized I needed to find fresh and uplifting tunes. I love NPR, but sometimes focusing on the latest events in Fallujah while stuck on a bridge for 30 minutes just feels too nasty and I need music. I rummaged through my CDs and found one I’d bought a few months back but hadn’t listened to much yet. It was a CD of songs performed by a man I must now admit I used to think of as one of the poster children of Vegas kitsch: Sammy Davis Jr. But the best part is the name of the album: “The Wham of Sam.”
I must digress at this point. Are you already asking yourself, why would Laura buy Sammy CDs in the first place? Well, because I heard one of his songs in a store somewhere and was reminded what a fine voice and a great sense of expression, style, and warmth he had at his best moments. The many TV appearances he made during the 1960s and 1970s were so filled with Vegas schlock and corny overstylization that he was almost a self-parody by the time I started listening to music in earnest. He was doing campy, obvious, cool cat riffs during his showy performances on Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas and The Tonight Show, and I couldn’t be bothered. I knew I’d loved his portrayal of Sportin’ Life in the film “Porgy and Bess” when I’d seen it on TV as a tiny kid, but I don’t think it’s been on TV since about 1970 so my memory is now faint, and I loved his voice of the Cheshire Cat singing “What’s a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This?” in a strange 1966 animated parody variation of “Alice in Wonderland.” His turn as groovy evangelist Big Daddy in “Sweet Charity” was a kick and featured a fun song, “The Rhythm of Life,” but somehow I forgot about that. The big hits he had when I was a kid, like “The Candy Man,” felt too cutesy and pat to me, and I dismissed him, with his goofy hipster patois and giant diamond rings, his membership in the Rat Pack, and his public support of Nixon was too bizarre. (I still shudder when I remember the much-publicized photo of Sammy’s adoring, awkward, full-body hug of Nixon.)
But when I heard him singing over the speakers at some chain store I thought, damn, no wonder this man was so popular. Listen to the feeling he puts into that line! What clear, clean enunciation! What sophisticated, tasty phrasing! So I swallowed my pride and hung out at a CD store listening station for a half hour, listening to selections from a number of his albums. I bought two, one of ballads and one of swingier songs. What a good move that was. But then I got distracted and hardly listened to them.
Anyway, back to my commute-hour epiphany. I popped “The Wham of Sam” into my CD player, and right there, boom, I was hooked with the first song, the star of the album, “Lot of Livin’ to Do.” The horns grabbed me immediately, and the energy, which starts out high, somehow continues to build with every measure of the song. The band arrangement by Marty Paich is fabulous, swingy in the style of Sinatra’s terrific “Ring-A-Ding-Ding” album (one of my favorite albums of all time, by anyone--it was arranged by the legendary Nelson Riddle).
"Lot of Livin' to Do" is big and brassy and has something new going on at every turn, but the band never outshines Sammy, whose phrasing is exactly right. His syncopation is so sure and it builds right up to the payoff moments. He knows when to pull back a little and when to let it rip. The intonation and enunciation are beautiful, but beyond his technical chops, he works the lyrics just right. He’s thinking about what he’s saying, he means what he’s singing, and I believe every word. He was sizzling and I was thrilled, sitting right there in a traffic jam at 8:30 a.m., bouncing up and down in my seat.
I must have listened to that song six times in a row on the way into work. The words crept into my brain and Boom! I had a revelation. The words aren’t Shakespeare; they’re standard upbeat lyrics, and the song was originally written for the musical “Bye Bye, Birdie,” which is fun but not Sondheim, you know? But somehow, sung with that bravado and joy and excitement and underscored by that hot band, the lyrics spoke to me:
"... [T]here’s wine all ready for tasting / And there’s Cadillacs all shiny and new / Gotta move ’cause time is a-wastin’ / There’s such a lot of livin’ to do. / There’s music to play, places to go and people to see / Everything for you and me / Life’s a ball if only you know it / And it’s all waiting for you / You’re alive, so come on and show it / There’s such a lot of living to do.”
I heard it, and I believed it. I figured, hey, this tiny little man had a four-pack-a-day cigarette habit, a glass eye, grew up without his mom, had to deal with racism from day one, and had to perform in hotels that he was barred from sleeping in because of the color of his skin (until he became a big name and helped break the color barrier in show business). And man, did he love life. He ate it up and went right over the top, drinking and smoking and skirt-chasing too much, and hanging out with some unsavory folks, yes--but he also took a song like “Lush Life” and sang it like he’d lived it. Damn, he sang every song as if he lived it. And meant every word.
He brought fun and swing and life into everything he sang. Sometimes the hipster kitsch of it was too much for me, and sometimes the low-brow, I'm-gonna-please-everybody style of his later years felt like he'd dumbed-down his act, especially considering what sophistication he was capable of. His desire to please everybody and be up, up, up all the time cheapened his rep in the eyes of many of us, but the joy he brought to life, the beauty he found in it and made for others, and that devotion to wringing every drop from it reminded me how lucky I was and how many wonderful things are around for me to enjoy. I thought it seemed a sin to waste another day in disappointment that I’m not doing more exciting work, and I vowed I’d make good things happen, find them, make sure they’re a part of every day of mine, and every one of my daughter’s days, too. I figured if Sammy, who had so much garbage to contend with, could take his talent and shoot it off like fireworks, why can’t I take whatever gifts I have and make something fine and exciting of them, too? I may not be the dynamo Sammy was, but I don’t have his struggles either. And one doesn’t have to be a superstar to find something splendid in each day, or to make fine things happen.
So from that day forward I've reaffirmed my dedication to finding and doing good work, to making beauty, to learning something good and doing something kind each day, to being grateful for the opportunities to enjoy life more and to worry less about my dwindling savings (and how long it takes to find good jobs), and to writing regularly and with purpose. So, in a roundabout way, I have Sammy to thank for getting me off my tush and starting this blog. The wham of Sam, indeed!
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Laura's Answer to Proust's Madeleine
Oh, how I've hated not being able to blog this past week! I've wanted to write about David Lean's 1948 version of "Oliver Twist," about Blossom Dearie's voice, about my Sammy Davis Jr. epiphany, the nickel-sized frog that jumped in my shoe for a ride last week, why I can't stand Picasso, why I love "Six Feet Under." Instead of writing about any of that, I've been snowed under with time-sensitive, must-do, much less inspiring writing that had to be done. So until I make a space in my day for more concentrated thought, I thought I'd share something unexpected and delicious with you. So, how about my favorite cookie recipe?
Proust's Remembrance of Things Past is famously based on memories evoked by madeleines, those lemony, shell-shaped spongecakes. (People call them cookies, but they really aren't.) I quite enjoy a good madeleine, though I find them a bit trickier to make than they should be, and while they can be sublime, they can also be dull and rubbery if not done right. They're time-consuming and fussy, need to be baked in special pans that are difficult to remove them from and hard to clean, and half the time they come out disappointing.
I much prefer the perfect crumb, slightly salty sweetness, and intoxicating almond aroma of my favorite almond cookie recipe. I've probably made over a hundred types of cookies in my lifetime, but these get more consistent raves than any other I make, and they're perhaps the easiest cookies I make as well. Simple as they are, they're a little different from the average cookie and they feel more sophisticated despite their simplicity. I think of them as the little black dress of cookies.
My almond cookies are simple to make, delicious, popular across age and cultural divides, inexpensive, the recipe makes a ton, and they even freeze well (double bagged in Ziploc freezer bags). What's not to like?
I'll write more very soon. I promise. Cross my heart. Until then, have a cookie.
ALMOND COOKIES
3 cups flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1-1/2 cups shortening
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon almond extract
Blanched almonds (optional)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Sift flour with sugar, baking soda, and salt into a large bowl. Mix in shortening and knead thoroughly for several minutes. Combine egg and almond extract; mix well into flour mixture. Roll a tablespoon of dough into a ball, place on ungreased baking sheet, repeate a zillion times. (I line baking sheets with parchment paper; it makes cleaning up so fast.) To make these look more like the tasty almond-flavored tea cookies I used to love at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park when I was a child, make a depression in the top of each cookie with your thumb. A blanched almond may be pressed into the center of each. (If you just roll these into balls and bake them just like that, they come out great, too.) Bake for 14 to 18 minutes. Makes six dozen.
Proust's Remembrance of Things Past is famously based on memories evoked by madeleines, those lemony, shell-shaped spongecakes. (People call them cookies, but they really aren't.) I quite enjoy a good madeleine, though I find them a bit trickier to make than they should be, and while they can be sublime, they can also be dull and rubbery if not done right. They're time-consuming and fussy, need to be baked in special pans that are difficult to remove them from and hard to clean, and half the time they come out disappointing.
I much prefer the perfect crumb, slightly salty sweetness, and intoxicating almond aroma of my favorite almond cookie recipe. I've probably made over a hundred types of cookies in my lifetime, but these get more consistent raves than any other I make, and they're perhaps the easiest cookies I make as well. Simple as they are, they're a little different from the average cookie and they feel more sophisticated despite their simplicity. I think of them as the little black dress of cookies.
My almond cookies are simple to make, delicious, popular across age and cultural divides, inexpensive, the recipe makes a ton, and they even freeze well (double bagged in Ziploc freezer bags). What's not to like?
I'll write more very soon. I promise. Cross my heart. Until then, have a cookie.
ALMOND COOKIES
3 cups flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1-1/2 cups shortening
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon almond extract
Blanched almonds (optional)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Sift flour with sugar, baking soda, and salt into a large bowl. Mix in shortening and knead thoroughly for several minutes. Combine egg and almond extract; mix well into flour mixture. Roll a tablespoon of dough into a ball, place on ungreased baking sheet, repeate a zillion times. (I line baking sheets with parchment paper; it makes cleaning up so fast.) To make these look more like the tasty almond-flavored tea cookies I used to love at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park when I was a child, make a depression in the top of each cookie with your thumb. A blanched almond may be pressed into the center of each. (If you just roll these into balls and bake them just like that, they come out great, too.) Bake for 14 to 18 minutes. Makes six dozen.
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
My Architect: A Beautiful Documentary
Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974) was one of the 20th century's most influential and well-regarded architects. He designed such important structures as the Exeter Library at Philips Exeter Academy, and the Capital Complex in Dhaka (Dacca), Bangladesh, and his work was revered by high-flying architects such as I. M. Pei, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry. But his habits of overwork and overextension, bidding for too many projects and becoming obsessive about his all-consuming passion for architecture, led him to die of a heart attack, bankrupt and alone, in a Penn Station bathroom as he was on his way home to Philadelphia from New York. When he died, he left not only a wife and their daughter, but also a mistress and his second daughter, as well as a second mistress and his third child, his 11-year-old son, Nathaniel, who made a beautiful documentary about his father, "My Architect: A Son's Journey."
Nathaniel Kahn's documentary visits and discusses the works of his father, some of which Nathaniel had never seen before, and shows the emotional and artistic impact that Louis Kahn and his work made on others, both architects and clients. But more than being a simple homage to his father and his works, the film shows Nathaniel's search to understand his secretive, mysterious father's compartmentalized life and to strengthen his connection to the father he lost so early. Louis Kahn's charisma and charm, his love for his children and the feelings of great love and loyalty he engendered in the women in his life are all made clear, as are his self-absorption, his need to make every commitment in life secondary to his commitment to his work, his flashes of arrogance, and his lack of empathy for others. The question which underpins the whole film is whether the gifts of an artistic genius whose work engenders tears of appreciation from his clients and fellow architects can justify his remote, selfish, and disconnected life.
To his credit, Nathaniel Kahn doesn't try to answer any of these questions once and for all; he interviews his two half sisters and talks with his mother, who still nurses the belief that Louis Kahn was about to leave his wife and come to live with Nathaniel and his mother before he died. He asks difficult questions and presses his mother to be honest about his father's failings and selfishness. The responses are at times surprising and always sad and touching.
Although he admires his father's work, Nathaniel Kahn doesn't like every one of his father's buildings. As he makes his pilgrimage to each one, he asks the people who live with and use the buildings how they feel about them, and admits when he finds one cold or impractical. When he visits the Exeter Library or the Institute of Public Administration at Ahmedabad, India, or when he goes to Bangladesh and sees how the Capitol and Parliament Buildings in Dhaka are enjoyed and made into the center of life for the local people, he is clearly moved. Sometimes the technical mastery of his father's work, its appropriateness in shape, form, and function and its original and spare use of light and materials awe him, and we see him surprised and touched by the effect that his father's work had on others.
It's difficult to express what makes this film so watchable, moving, and fascinating. I suppose it boils down to three things I find endlessly illuminating: artistic masterworks, biographies of unusual and influential people, and bad family dynamics. This documentary is worth watching on any of those counts; as a work of art encompassing all three, it's extraordinary.
I found a lovely site with beautiful photographs of Louis Kahn's work; do check out "The Works of Louis I. Kahn: A Visual Archive by Naquib Hossain." Hossain describes Kahn's work elegantly as "A purposeful knot of complements and contradictions in a rich fabric of brick, mortar, and concrete, woven to being by natural light." "My Architect" is a purposeful knot of complements and contradictions, too, and a lovely work of art in its own right.
Nathaniel Kahn's documentary visits and discusses the works of his father, some of which Nathaniel had never seen before, and shows the emotional and artistic impact that Louis Kahn and his work made on others, both architects and clients. But more than being a simple homage to his father and his works, the film shows Nathaniel's search to understand his secretive, mysterious father's compartmentalized life and to strengthen his connection to the father he lost so early. Louis Kahn's charisma and charm, his love for his children and the feelings of great love and loyalty he engendered in the women in his life are all made clear, as are his self-absorption, his need to make every commitment in life secondary to his commitment to his work, his flashes of arrogance, and his lack of empathy for others. The question which underpins the whole film is whether the gifts of an artistic genius whose work engenders tears of appreciation from his clients and fellow architects can justify his remote, selfish, and disconnected life.
To his credit, Nathaniel Kahn doesn't try to answer any of these questions once and for all; he interviews his two half sisters and talks with his mother, who still nurses the belief that Louis Kahn was about to leave his wife and come to live with Nathaniel and his mother before he died. He asks difficult questions and presses his mother to be honest about his father's failings and selfishness. The responses are at times surprising and always sad and touching.
Although he admires his father's work, Nathaniel Kahn doesn't like every one of his father's buildings. As he makes his pilgrimage to each one, he asks the people who live with and use the buildings how they feel about them, and admits when he finds one cold or impractical. When he visits the Exeter Library or the Institute of Public Administration at Ahmedabad, India, or when he goes to Bangladesh and sees how the Capitol and Parliament Buildings in Dhaka are enjoyed and made into the center of life for the local people, he is clearly moved. Sometimes the technical mastery of his father's work, its appropriateness in shape, form, and function and its original and spare use of light and materials awe him, and we see him surprised and touched by the effect that his father's work had on others.
It's difficult to express what makes this film so watchable, moving, and fascinating. I suppose it boils down to three things I find endlessly illuminating: artistic masterworks, biographies of unusual and influential people, and bad family dynamics. This documentary is worth watching on any of those counts; as a work of art encompassing all three, it's extraordinary.
I found a lovely site with beautiful photographs of Louis Kahn's work; do check out "The Works of Louis I. Kahn: A Visual Archive by Naquib Hossain." Hossain describes Kahn's work elegantly as "A purposeful knot of complements and contradictions in a rich fabric of brick, mortar, and concrete, woven to being by natural light." "My Architect" is a purposeful knot of complements and contradictions, too, and a lovely work of art in its own right.
Monday, July 25, 2005
Mud-luscious and Puddle-wonderful
Here's the thing about works of art that we all grow up with, have to analyze as kids, and dismiss because they seem dated or obvious, hackneyed or over-explained:
Sometimes they're actually wonderful after all.
For example, the poems of E. E. Cummings. I love them. During my junior high and high school years (think 1970s) he was one of the more frequently taught poets, largely because his acrobatics with punctuation and wordplay are fun and accessible even to people who claim to hate poetry. I know a lot of critics and readers think him too over-exposed and expect to find him too cute to want to go to him afresh to find pleasure or insight. What a shame.
I reread his poems every few years (and even more often nowadays) in the expectation that, at last, I'll find them somehow embarrassingly old-fashioned and obvious. But they never feel that way to me. They still have those great lines that punch me or move me when I don't expect it, the casual colloquialisms, the thoughts that beg to be combined into one word to emphasize their speed or oneness. All of those devices can be found in "Buffalo Bill's," for example.
One of the most anthologized of his poems is the fresh, light poem "in Just-" which evokes the way children explode out into the world and splash and stomp and whirl through it in springtime. I still love its cadences, the way friends bettyandisbel and eddyandbill are so constantly with each other that they merge into single entities, the bittersweet everpresence of that little lame balloon man as he whistles far and wee.
The bitterness of the young Cummings, disillusioned by his experiences during World War I and unable to leave what he learned behind upon his return home, pops up regularly in his work. When we think of the "lost generation," the disillusioned postwar youth of the 1920s who populate the work of writers like Fitzgerald, we think of novels full of ennui, anger, and feelings of betrayal. We think of heavy works like Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front or the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen. But Cummings made his own jabs, often in wisecracking, cynical asides, such as in "my sweet old etcetera." In"next to of course god america i" his sarcasm and disgust for jingoism and militarism get considerably darker and more obvious. By the time one reads "Humanity i love you" Cummings' anger and disillusionment with not only his country but with humanity are made completely plain. But so are his ambivalence and sense of humor (dark though it is). This isn't the Cummings we were taught to consider so harmlessly affable and nonchalant, too easy, too fun or fey.
My favorite Cummings poem remains the one most people would probably consider the obvious choice, "anyone lived in a pretty how town," which so many high school anthologies have reprinted for decades with the same dull set of talking points and questions. Yet it's surprising how many different interpretations I've seen for this supposedly obvious poem. In my reading of it, I always find it terribly moving, in its sweet and small way. The poem contrasts the vastness of time with the anonymity of the little characters who populate it, including dear little anyone and noone. Seasons pass as the poem lengthens, children forget the essentials as they grow older, and while "anyone" and "noone" mean nothing to the world at large, they are everything to each other. The inevitability of death and anonymity are softened by the fact that, while busy folk bury the dead side by side, "little by little and was by was," and forget them (if they ever knew them in the first place), anyone and noone loved each other and were each other's everything, and in their little lives, that's all anyone and noone required.
This poem feels anything but gimmicky to me. Like Shakespeare's "Seven Ages of Man" speech in As You Like It, "anyone lived in a pretty how town" boils the stages and essence of life down quickly, with bittersweetness, humor, a touch of cynicism, but also a touching empathy for the littleness and vulnerability at the heart of every human being. That's why children still learn these works today; because they're beautiful, because they're funny, because they're a little dark and surprising, and because they're true.
For my last two years of college, I had to commute an hour each way to Mills and back home again, and I found I could make good use of those hours on the road if I borrowed spoken word records from the library, taped them, and then listened to the tapes in the car. (This was in the olden days of the early 1980s when one rarely found prerecorded books on tape but all sorts of wonderful things could be found on record at public libraries.) I was introduced to some fine plays this way (Ibsen's The Master Builder and An Enemy of the People, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, lots of Shakespeare) and a lot of poetry. One of my favorite records was of Cummings reading his poems in the late 1950s. Often I find listening to poets reading their own work painful; so often they adopt a false tone and awkward phrasing, with self-conscious over-emphasis or an odd near-monotone, or a bouncing lilt at the end of each phrase, in a sort of questioning manner, like a Valley Girl? putting a question mark? at the end? of each small phrase? It's been many years since I listened to E. E. Cummings read, but I remember finding his readings surprising and a great relief from the artificial, stentorian tones of so many other readers and writers of poetry.
By the way, the long-standing stories that Cummings signed his own name e. e. cummings and hated capital letters are myths; Cummings signed his name with the usual capitals and often used capitalization in his poetry, just not always in the obvious or expected ways. He did like to be inventive and a bit subversive in his use of language, but not to the extent that he felt it necessary to take on the affectation of using non-standard punctuation for his own name. I think this oft-repeated error serves to underline the common (and I believe erroneous) belief that he was a gimmicky writer of sing-song verse. To my mind, he was an original thinker with a light touch and a sense of humor who influenced a lot of (often bad) poets by snubbing long-established convention in ways that grab attention. Nowadays nearly every school child is asked to mess with English a little after reading a bit of Cummings in hopes that this mild subversion of all he or she has been taught will shake loose some creativity and instant love of poetry: Drop your capitals, Betty! Start a verse in the middle of the line, Isbel! Scrunch those words together into one long line, EddyandBill! We've all seen and done it so many times it feels quaint. It wasn't in the 1920s when Cummings did it. And it still feels fresh to me, 80 years later.
Sometimes they're actually wonderful after all.
For example, the poems of E. E. Cummings. I love them. During my junior high and high school years (think 1970s) he was one of the more frequently taught poets, largely because his acrobatics with punctuation and wordplay are fun and accessible even to people who claim to hate poetry. I know a lot of critics and readers think him too over-exposed and expect to find him too cute to want to go to him afresh to find pleasure or insight. What a shame.
I reread his poems every few years (and even more often nowadays) in the expectation that, at last, I'll find them somehow embarrassingly old-fashioned and obvious. But they never feel that way to me. They still have those great lines that punch me or move me when I don't expect it, the casual colloquialisms, the thoughts that beg to be combined into one word to emphasize their speed or oneness. All of those devices can be found in "Buffalo Bill's," for example.
One of the most anthologized of his poems is the fresh, light poem "in Just-" which evokes the way children explode out into the world and splash and stomp and whirl through it in springtime. I still love its cadences, the way friends bettyandisbel and eddyandbill are so constantly with each other that they merge into single entities, the bittersweet everpresence of that little lame balloon man as he whistles far and wee.
The bitterness of the young Cummings, disillusioned by his experiences during World War I and unable to leave what he learned behind upon his return home, pops up regularly in his work. When we think of the "lost generation," the disillusioned postwar youth of the 1920s who populate the work of writers like Fitzgerald, we think of novels full of ennui, anger, and feelings of betrayal. We think of heavy works like Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front or the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen. But Cummings made his own jabs, often in wisecracking, cynical asides, such as in "my sweet old etcetera." In"next to of course god america i" his sarcasm and disgust for jingoism and militarism get considerably darker and more obvious. By the time one reads "Humanity i love you" Cummings' anger and disillusionment with not only his country but with humanity are made completely plain. But so are his ambivalence and sense of humor (dark though it is). This isn't the Cummings we were taught to consider so harmlessly affable and nonchalant, too easy, too fun or fey.
My favorite Cummings poem remains the one most people would probably consider the obvious choice, "anyone lived in a pretty how town," which so many high school anthologies have reprinted for decades with the same dull set of talking points and questions. Yet it's surprising how many different interpretations I've seen for this supposedly obvious poem. In my reading of it, I always find it terribly moving, in its sweet and small way. The poem contrasts the vastness of time with the anonymity of the little characters who populate it, including dear little anyone and noone. Seasons pass as the poem lengthens, children forget the essentials as they grow older, and while "anyone" and "noone" mean nothing to the world at large, they are everything to each other. The inevitability of death and anonymity are softened by the fact that, while busy folk bury the dead side by side, "little by little and was by was," and forget them (if they ever knew them in the first place), anyone and noone loved each other and were each other's everything, and in their little lives, that's all anyone and noone required.
This poem feels anything but gimmicky to me. Like Shakespeare's "Seven Ages of Man" speech in As You Like It, "anyone lived in a pretty how town" boils the stages and essence of life down quickly, with bittersweetness, humor, a touch of cynicism, but also a touching empathy for the littleness and vulnerability at the heart of every human being. That's why children still learn these works today; because they're beautiful, because they're funny, because they're a little dark and surprising, and because they're true.
For my last two years of college, I had to commute an hour each way to Mills and back home again, and I found I could make good use of those hours on the road if I borrowed spoken word records from the library, taped them, and then listened to the tapes in the car. (This was in the olden days of the early 1980s when one rarely found prerecorded books on tape but all sorts of wonderful things could be found on record at public libraries.) I was introduced to some fine plays this way (Ibsen's The Master Builder and An Enemy of the People, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, lots of Shakespeare) and a lot of poetry. One of my favorite records was of Cummings reading his poems in the late 1950s. Often I find listening to poets reading their own work painful; so often they adopt a false tone and awkward phrasing, with self-conscious over-emphasis or an odd near-monotone, or a bouncing lilt at the end of each phrase, in a sort of questioning manner, like a Valley Girl? putting a question mark? at the end? of each small phrase? It's been many years since I listened to E. E. Cummings read, but I remember finding his readings surprising and a great relief from the artificial, stentorian tones of so many other readers and writers of poetry.
By the way, the long-standing stories that Cummings signed his own name e. e. cummings and hated capital letters are myths; Cummings signed his name with the usual capitals and often used capitalization in his poetry, just not always in the obvious or expected ways. He did like to be inventive and a bit subversive in his use of language, but not to the extent that he felt it necessary to take on the affectation of using non-standard punctuation for his own name. I think this oft-repeated error serves to underline the common (and I believe erroneous) belief that he was a gimmicky writer of sing-song verse. To my mind, he was an original thinker with a light touch and a sense of humor who influenced a lot of (often bad) poets by snubbing long-established convention in ways that grab attention. Nowadays nearly every school child is asked to mess with English a little after reading a bit of Cummings in hopes that this mild subversion of all he or she has been taught will shake loose some creativity and instant love of poetry: Drop your capitals, Betty! Start a verse in the middle of the line, Isbel! Scrunch those words together into one long line, EddyandBill! We've all seen and done it so many times it feels quaint. It wasn't in the 1920s when Cummings did it. And it still feels fresh to me, 80 years later.
Friday, July 22, 2005
Horror Vacui
I’ve heard jazz pianist and singer Shirley Horn say that her mentor, trumpet legend Miles Davis, always liked the way she uses space in her singing and playing. I liked that description so well, since Shirley Horn is a master of slow, careful, pared down musical expression. There’s never an extraneous note in her playing, and she could never be accused of playing anything too fast. Sometimes there are such long rests between her lyrics that I worry, Shirley, may, never, get, to, the, end, of, the, phrase. But I have to admit that her singing and playing are very elegant, and the lack of adornment does focus the ear and the mind on the sound and the meaning. (And her version of Kermit the Frog's anthem, "Being Green" is exquisite; check it out on iTunes.)
I admire minimalism in architecture and fashion, too, but I’d be bored out of my mind living in minimalist clothing and surroundings all the time. My stays at the W Hotel in San Francisco and Ian Schrager’s Paramount and Hudson hotels in New York have left me thinking how fun it was to be in such a stark, angular space for a little while, and how chic and clean the lines are, how pure and streamlined the sensibility was, and how I could never live like that at home.
In autumn and winter I wear a lot of black, and I feel very good in it. I love to travel in black so that strangers can’t tell that I’m a tourist, or where I come from, or what I sat in on the subway. I love the classic, crisp, elegant anonymity of it. But my lavender shoes and my bright pink coat and the crazy, oversized floral patterns on some of my favorite skirts are just as necessary to my wardrobe, and to the vision I have of myself and how I must sometimes present myself to the world.
I think a lot of us fill up the spaces in our lives carelessly to make ourselves and those around us less afraid. We feel we have to talk through an entire visit with a friend, have the TV on in the background, fill every shelf, and try every dish at the buffet. (And I include myself very honestly and openly in that "we.") My mom, who found the study of art and art history thrilling, as I do, laughed with me when she realized that the Latin term “horror vacui,” which describes the fear of empty space which makes some artists decorate every inch of a surface, applied to her and to her life as well. She feared too much quiet or extended contemplation in much the same way that she feared a bare wall. She found it too easy to project her fears of inadequacy, loss, and emptiness into those spaces, both literal or metaphorical. A lack of adornment meant a lack of value to her; less was less and more was always more. I’m often guilty of this sort of thinking, too. I collect too many things and crave too many distractions, accumulate to fill up voids in my life and avoid winnowing my collections so I can focus on novelty and expansion, on all the things I might do with them in the future, all the possibilities open to me because I have such a collection of stuff. Winnowing would mean admitting that there are limits to my life and its possibilities, that I may never need that unused German language workbook, might not create a work of art incorporating vintage mah jongg tiles and dominoes after all, probably won't review my Chinese history notes from 1983 again, and don't need a dozen Depression glass candlestick holders after all, even if they are 70 years old and very cool.
I think there’s an optimism to accumulation and void-filling, a belief that I’ll use this, I’ll enjoy that, my life will be better if I expand and decorate and dress it up with one more thing. I really will be fluent in French someday! It's not too late to learn to become a goldsmith! Those broken plates could make an amazing mosaic facade for a bedside table! I'd always be sad if I got rid of that Singer sewing machine from 1924! But of course, this sort of self-confidence through accumulation bases value on the ephemeral and external rather than on the lasting and innate. Emphasizing that expansive optimism is how our culture justifies binge spending, over-extended credit (both personal and governmental) and constant expansion. It’s a sign of fear and a lack of discipline or forward thinking, I believe; evidence of a fear of growing older, of growing bored or boring, of appearing outdated to others, of having to make do or invest more energy or time in something or someone, of facing what we really are, have, need, or are capable of. Stuff dulls the senses and brings comfort. I love it and buy too much of it every week. But I think it’s time to stare down that horror vacui a little bit, and see what riches I’m missing in my life by focusing too much on the riches that cost me money.
I admire minimalism in architecture and fashion, too, but I’d be bored out of my mind living in minimalist clothing and surroundings all the time. My stays at the W Hotel in San Francisco and Ian Schrager’s Paramount and Hudson hotels in New York have left me thinking how fun it was to be in such a stark, angular space for a little while, and how chic and clean the lines are, how pure and streamlined the sensibility was, and how I could never live like that at home.
In autumn and winter I wear a lot of black, and I feel very good in it. I love to travel in black so that strangers can’t tell that I’m a tourist, or where I come from, or what I sat in on the subway. I love the classic, crisp, elegant anonymity of it. But my lavender shoes and my bright pink coat and the crazy, oversized floral patterns on some of my favorite skirts are just as necessary to my wardrobe, and to the vision I have of myself and how I must sometimes present myself to the world.
I think a lot of us fill up the spaces in our lives carelessly to make ourselves and those around us less afraid. We feel we have to talk through an entire visit with a friend, have the TV on in the background, fill every shelf, and try every dish at the buffet. (And I include myself very honestly and openly in that "we.") My mom, who found the study of art and art history thrilling, as I do, laughed with me when she realized that the Latin term “horror vacui,” which describes the fear of empty space which makes some artists decorate every inch of a surface, applied to her and to her life as well. She feared too much quiet or extended contemplation in much the same way that she feared a bare wall. She found it too easy to project her fears of inadequacy, loss, and emptiness into those spaces, both literal or metaphorical. A lack of adornment meant a lack of value to her; less was less and more was always more. I’m often guilty of this sort of thinking, too. I collect too many things and crave too many distractions, accumulate to fill up voids in my life and avoid winnowing my collections so I can focus on novelty and expansion, on all the things I might do with them in the future, all the possibilities open to me because I have such a collection of stuff. Winnowing would mean admitting that there are limits to my life and its possibilities, that I may never need that unused German language workbook, might not create a work of art incorporating vintage mah jongg tiles and dominoes after all, probably won't review my Chinese history notes from 1983 again, and don't need a dozen Depression glass candlestick holders after all, even if they are 70 years old and very cool.
I think there’s an optimism to accumulation and void-filling, a belief that I’ll use this, I’ll enjoy that, my life will be better if I expand and decorate and dress it up with one more thing. I really will be fluent in French someday! It's not too late to learn to become a goldsmith! Those broken plates could make an amazing mosaic facade for a bedside table! I'd always be sad if I got rid of that Singer sewing machine from 1924! But of course, this sort of self-confidence through accumulation bases value on the ephemeral and external rather than on the lasting and innate. Emphasizing that expansive optimism is how our culture justifies binge spending, over-extended credit (both personal and governmental) and constant expansion. It’s a sign of fear and a lack of discipline or forward thinking, I believe; evidence of a fear of growing older, of growing bored or boring, of appearing outdated to others, of having to make do or invest more energy or time in something or someone, of facing what we really are, have, need, or are capable of. Stuff dulls the senses and brings comfort. I love it and buy too much of it every week. But I think it’s time to stare down that horror vacui a little bit, and see what riches I’m missing in my life by focusing too much on the riches that cost me money.
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