Author Archives: Lloydville

SHOW BOAT

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Edna Ferber's Show Boat isn't a great novel but it's great fun — a good story told in a lively way.

It's easy to see, too, why it appealed to Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern as material for a musical play.  It's a book infused with a sentimental love for theater and nostalgia for the romance of its bygone days.

The era of the show boat, coming to an end when Ferber published the book in 1926, is presented as a kind of lost Eden of American show business, somehow magically recovered by modern performers who remember the old ways.

It also deals quite explicitly with the most crucial but often disguised conversation at the heart of American popular entertainment — that between whites and blacks.  (Above is a portrait of Jules Bledsoe, the stage musical's original Joe.)  Ferber is sensitive to the dynamic quality of this conversation and also to the injustice and hypocrisy that inform it.  Julie Dozier, the actress of mixed race expelled from the Eden of Captain Andy's Cotton Blossom, is both an emotional and theatrical inspiration to the novel's (white) female protagonist, Magnolia Hawks.  It is only race that condemns Julie, along with all African-American performers, to a life on the margins of show business, and Ferber's book bristles with outrage over this.  (The poster below features Helen Morgan, the stage musical's original Julie, who reprised her role in the 1929 part-talkie film version.)

Hammerstein and Kern, like most show folk, were clearly sentimental about “the business”, and like most lovers of American music, they were both inspired and instructed by black musical culture.  It remains astonishing, some eighty years on, that they had the ambition to deal with these themes in such a mature and serious way in their stage production of Show Boat.  It was ahead of its time in 1927, and in some ways it remains ahead of our time, too.

Kern's music, of course, exists outside of time, and would have been a miracle in any age.

I FEEL A CHANGE COMING ON . . .

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. . . and the fourth part of the day is already gone.

That's a line from the new Dylan album, Together Through Life, due out on the 28th of this month.

The song, “I Feel A Change Coming On”, has been seen by some commentators as reflecting the dawn of the Obama era, and that might be part of it — but I think it's mostly about the possibility of change in old age.

There was a time, back in the Sixties, when young folks might say, with some truth, that older folks couldn't really get what Dylan was singing about.  Today, older folks might say that young folks can't really get what Dylan is singing about now — that you need some serious mileage on your odometer to feel the depth of the ragged wisdom roiling around in his new work.

I mean, could any young person fully comprehend what these lines from the same song mean:

Well now what's the use in dreaming?
You got better things to do.
Dreams never did work for me anyway,
Even when they did come true.

I don't think so.


                                                                                                                                    Image©Bruce Davidson

The photo by Bruce Davidson on the cover of the new album has some relationship to this idea.  The kids making out in the back seat of the car have no idea where they're going — they aren't looking out to see.  They don't know yet, to paraphrase another song on the album, that beyond their embrace lies nothing.

A NIGHT (AND A DAY) ON THE TOWN IN LAS VEGAS

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Almost as soon as my friend Mitch rolled out of town, Eli, an even older friend, rolled in.  Eli is a very successful manager and producer in Hollywood, but I first met her when she was a 16 year-old undergraduate at Yale.  She was, in those days, a hellcat — a wild woman sowing her oats before settling down to marriage, motherhood and a rather spectacular career in movies.

She took me to dinner last Saturday night at Mix, the restaurant on top of The Hotel at Mandalay Bay, with its stunning view of Las Vegas and its equally stunning food.  (I apologize for the fuzziness of the picture above, but when I tried to use my flash inside Mix the background was totally blacked out — and the image does give a good sense of how Eli and I were seeing the world halfway through a superb bottle of wine, preceded by a couple of Martinis and beers.)

After our dinner we headed uptown to Tao, where Eli had used her connections to get us on “the list”.  At Tao we took to the empty dance floor to show off our moves just as the club's night was getting going.  (My moves were somewhat pathetic, Eli's much more impressive.)  Our example started the whole crowd dancing, and the whole crowd consisted mostly of packs of young girls dressed like hookers, with a few decidedly colorless young men hovering timidly around them.

My Western box-back frock coat was the coolest item of male attire anywhere in sight.  Let's face it, folks, I've seen better days, but at least I can still make an effort.  On the other hand, Eli's cool clubbin' shoes mirrored the sense of style shown by almost all the women out cruising the town.

What is our world coming to?  Has the matriarchy arrived?  Have young men just given up?

When I dropped Eli off at her hotel, The Mirage, I was pretty drunk, and I knew I should head straight home on a route that did not include a detour through the Mirage's card room.  On the other hand, I was a little too drunk to heed my own advice.

I sat down at a no-limit Hold-'em game, which broke up around three in the morning, but even this was not enough to bring me to my senses.  I headed across the street to the card room at the Venetian, and played for twelve more hours.

It was a shameful episode.  However, there were two mitigating factors.  One, I had a blast, and, two, I staggered home at three in the afternoon having made a clear profit of over three hundred dollars.  I was clearly inspired to daring acts of card play by my earlier dash about town with a hot babe in cool shoes.

In Las Vegas, bad behavior is often richly rewarded . . . and everywhere, the Eternal Feminine leads us on.

REAL AND IMAGINARY FRIENDS

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My friend Mitch was in town for a few days recently.  Mitch is a wonderful fellow, but a bit eccentric.  He has an imaginary friend, “Michaela” — actually a cut-out paper doll — who shares all his adventures.  He talks to her and even insists on ordering extra food for her when we're out at a restaurant.

Mitch and I played some poker — we both had some good runs and some bad runs.  It was great fun but far from profitable.  The photograph of Mitch above, putting a brave face on things, is fuzzy because I couldn't use my flash, since taking pictures in a card room is forbidden.

The real problem was Michaela, who kept sneaking off to play the slots while we puzzled over the cards.  She lost a small fortune in quarters during the times it took us to track her down.

On the bright side, she made friends with a showgirl who was dancing, for some obscure reason, under the Welcome To Fabulous Las Vegas sign at the end of The Strip.  Michaela says she feels right at home in Las Vegas, because it's an imaginary town.

ANNIE OAKLEY JUMPS

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Here’s something you don’t see every day — a picture of Annie Oakley jumping
over a table.  It’s hard to be sure, because of the condition of the
photograph, but it seems she’s flashing a little garter in the process.

Oakley was not just exhibiting high spirits here.  Although the proximity of
the tents makes it clear that this photograph was not taken in the
arena during a show, Oakley was recreating or practicing one of her
performance routines.  An assistant would launch a glass ball into the
air, Oakley would jump over a table, bare-handed, grab her gun and
shoot the ball out of the air before it hit the ground.

What a gal.

OBAMA CALLS FOR THE PUBLIC EXECUTION OF WALL STREET CEOS

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To the shock of some and the delight of many others, President Obama has called for public executions of the Wall Street CEOs whose “extreme avarice and irresponsibility have taken to the world to the brink of economic disaster”.

“These people have gone beyond moral depravity, beyond criminality, into the realm of treason against their own country and the community of nations,” the President said.  “We have a death penalty in place for traditional forms of treason — it ought to be applied equally to those whose selfishness and greed have led them to place the security of the whole world in jeopardy.”

Obama has proposed setting up special tribunals to try the accused under military law, with a greatly abbreviated appeals procedure.  “Justice in these cases needs to be swift, untempered with mercy, and pursued publicly,” the President said, “with nationally televised executions, so that all Americans, young and old, can contemplate the consequences of sociopathic behavior by those entrusted with the financial well-being of the nation.”

Obama has directed the Attorney General to study the feasibility of conducting the executions on Wall Street, in front of the New York Stock Exchange building, so that they will become part of the history of that fabled center of American and world finance.

“Let them die,” Mr. Obama said, “staring at piles of cash representing their executive bonuses for the years in which they were conducting their transgressions — taking one last look at the money for which they sold their honor and integrity as human beings and as citizens of a great republic.”

The ACLU, which initially expressed skepticism about the Constitutionality of Obama's proposal, has formally withdrawn its objections.  “Some actions,” said an ACLU spokesman, “transcend the issue of civil liberties.”

Meanwhile, the National Council Of Churches, an ecumenical organization representing a wide range of Christian denominations in America, issued the following statement on behalf of all its members:

All those who transgress against the laws of God and man, even Wall Street bankers, need to be forgiven — and we do forgive them, in a spirit of humility and true Christian charity.  However, we accept the urgent necessity of publicly executing these particular sinners, as long as the executions are conducted with dignity and humane swiftness.  May God have mercy on their souls.

JULIUS LEBLANC STEWART: A VICTORIAN PAINTER YOU SHOULD KNOW

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Julius LeBlanc Stewart, whose work I discovered via Femme Femme Femme, was an American artist who studied and worked mostly in Europe.  He was a pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme and Raimundo de Madrazo.  He absorbed Gérôme's technical skills, to a degree, but generally followed de Madrazo in his choice of subjects, contemporary interiors and portraits, mostly of women, that usually featured a sensual treatment of fabrics.  These portraits remind one strongly of John Singer Sargent's and are often very fine:



Stewart, like Sargent, was a late Victorian — he lived until 1919 — and like Sargent was attracted to the free brush-strokes of the Impressionists, always allied, however, with a rigorous academic draftsmanship and a concern for the evocation of space for dramatic effects.

Like many Victorian academic painters, Stewart sketched very freely, with an eye to the surface effects of paint on canvas, preserved in a limited way in the more finished work he exhibited.  Degas struck a different balance between sketch and “finish”, but the dynamic was exactly the same.  Below is a Stewart sketch:



He did a series of nudes in outdoor settings that evoked mythological subjects, but only nominally.  They have the frankness and the contemporary feel of Anders Zorn's very similar scenes:



Like Tissot, Stewart loved the spatial dramatics of figures on ships, as with the painting at the head of this post.

The late Victorians influenced by Impressionism but still not seduced away from academic formalism constitute a fascinating group, though Sargent is the only one of them who has any kind of reputation today, alas.

THE SUBTERRANEANS, PART 2

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In my earlier post on the film version of The Subterraneans, I suggested that its producer Arthur Freed was probably attracted to Kerouac's novel because it offered him a chance to do a modern-day version of La Bohème, with modern-day music, specifically the be-bop jazz that so inspired Kerouac and the people he wrote about in the book.  I can't imagine that Freed himself was much inspired by be-bop, but he had a collaborator at MGM who was, in the person of André Previn.  Previn had recently been the musical supervisor on Gigi, Freed's last great conventional musical, but also performed progressive jazz as a pianist with small combos in clubs.  He was someone who could bridge the gap, musically at least, between the Freed unit at MGM and the world of the beats.



On one level it was a canny commercial calculation.  Twenty-eight years later playwright Billy Aronson had the idea of doing a contemporary musical based on La Bohème and began collaborating with composer Jonathan Larson on what became Rent, one of the most successful musicals in Broadway history.

The difference between the The Subterraneans and Rent was that Rent was written, eventually almost entirely by Larson, from inside a modern Bohemia, as Kerouac's novel was.  Larson was employed as a waiter in a diner in downtown Manhattan while he worked on the play and Kerouac was pretty much perennially beat, even when he became famous, mostly due to his heavy drinking.

The film version of The Subterraneans, by contrast, was written from the outside looking in — it simply reeked of inauthenticity.



This is a bit surprising, since the script's credited author was Robert Thom (above), who went on to achieve a kind of immortality as the writer of several cult-movie classics, including Roger Corman's Crazy Mama and Death Race 2000.  He had a wild, transgressive vision, much like Kerouac's, and it's odd that he was so tone-deaf to Kerouac's voice and milieu.

Perhaps Thom was heavily rewritten, but in any case the result was dreadful.  Kerouac's (and Puccini's) tragedy was given a happy ending, and Kerouac's interracial couple was transformed into an international couple, the Mardou Fox of the novel, half black and half American-Indian, becoming the exotically French Leslie Caron.

Those changes alone wouldn't have been necessarily fatal — the real disgrace was that the actors were given preposterous cornball pseudo-beat poetic lines to spout — lines that would have made Kerouac gag, and that branded the film as irredeemably square . . . irredeemable even by the music, which is quite wonderful.

Sarah Vaugn and Gerry Mulligan and Previn himself appear as performers on-screen, and Previn's underscoring has a plausible jazz feel, fresh and original.  (A soundtrack album, below, was released on LP and is now available, with additional material, on CD.)

The rest of the film is just an embarrassing reminder of what might have been.

You have to give Freed some credit, though, for ambition and intuition, if nothing else.  He knew a good idea when he saw it — a radical one for its time — even if, in this case, he didn't quite know how to pull it off.

THE FUNNY PAPERS: TERRY AND THE PIRATES, 1934

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This is the beginning of Milt Caniff's comic-strip masterpiece and he was just starting to flex his muscles as a visual stylist, but check out the sudden shift to the night-time silhouette of Terry at the end of this Sunday page and the three dynamic panels that follow it.  They have the rhythm and surprise of a well-edited shot sequence in a movie, ending in the beautiful but vaguely ominous overhead view of the junks heading for their fateful rendezvous with the steamer.

It's brilliant stuff.

More to come.

IF IT WASN'T FOR THE IRISH AND THE JEWS

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On Patrick's Day I wrote about Mick Moloney's wonderful album of Harrigan and Braham songs, McNally's Row of Flats.  (You can buy it here, and you should.)

I hear from the artist that a follow-up album is due out in October, called If It Wasn't For the Irish and the Jews, covering songs from later in Edward Harrigan's extraordinary career as a creator of musical shows.

I can't wait!

THE SUBTERRANEANS, PART 1

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As a producer, Arthur Freed worked to strike a balance between old-fashioned show-business values, which he revered, and formal innovations which would keep those values alive and accessible to contemporary audiences.  When he swung too far towards innovation he produced what might be called “interesting failures” — like Yolanda and the Thief, for example.

One of his most interesting, and most reviled, failures was The Subterraneans, from 1960 — the first Hollywood film ever made from a Jack Kerouac novel.

Kerouac wrote the novel in three days in the early Fifties and couldn't get it published for several years.  It eventually emerged above-ground as a 35-cent Avon paperback original.  It got a drubbing from critics but apparently sold well enough.   We think of Kerouac as an avant-garde artist today, forgetting that On the Road was a national best-seller.  In the Fifties he wasn't necessarily thought of as an “uncommercial” artist.

Still, it's easy to see why The Subterraneans scared off publishers and annoyed critics — it reads like a novel written in three days, which has its advantages and disadvantages.  On the one hand it has the hurtling energy of a great jazz improvisation.  On the other hand it's messy, uneven and often self-indulgent.  Even Charlie Parker never tried to improvise a solo for three days running.

You might well ask what Freed, a producer of MGM musicals, the creator of Meet Me In St. Louis, saw in this material, but the answers are actually fairly obvious.  For one thing, he saw La Bohème.  The story and setting of Kerouac's novel, consciously or unconsciously, mirror the story and setting of Puccini's opera, a show-biz perennial.  Kerouac wrote an obliquely romantic tale of doomed loved among modern Bohemians — the “subterraneans” of Frisco in the Fifties, a particular clique of beats.

For another thing, Kerouac's book, like the subterraneans he wrote about, was obsessed with be-bop jazz, which suggested musical possibilities for the film.  It was never planned as a musical, per se, but it featured on-screen performances by some high-powered West-Coast jazz musicians and a jazz-inflected score by André Previn.

A genuine wunderkind, Previn was part of the Freed unit at MGM.  He could do conventional arranging and composing for musicals in the MGM house style, but was also attracted to contemporary jazz.  As a pianist he performed progressive jazz himself, quite respectably, in club settings very like the ones depicted in The Subterraneans.  (Previn actually appears in the film leading a jazz trio.)

A contemporary La Bohème with contemporary music was clearly what Freed was after, and it wasn't a bad or uncommercial idea at all, as Rent was to prove several decades later — even if Freed failed to pull it off in the case of The Subterraneans.

In an upcoming post I'll discuss what went wrong, so dreadfully, dreadfully wrong, with the film, and why it didn't become the Rent of its day.  In that post you'll meet, perhaps for the first time, Robert Thom, who wrote the very bad script for The Subterraneans but later went on to a kind of immortality as the author of several cult-movie classics, including Roger Corman's Crazy Mama and Death Race 2000.

THE WARNER ARCHIVE

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Warner Home Video has just announced what I think may be the most important development in home video since the introduction of the DVD — The Warner Archive.  It is making available, online and for U. S. customers only, selected titles that Warner doesn't plan to release widely but that will be manufactured on demand for customers who order them, at $19.99 each.

The DVDs will be burned, rather than pressed, with no extras, but Warner promises professional-quality transfers, with 16×9 enhancement for the widescreen films.  The site provides sample clips from most of the films offered and the quality is indeed impressive.

Many films that would otherwise fall between the cracks will see the light of day, opening up, I suspect, a whole new customer-driven market, much as Netflix did.  Netflix made certain assumptions about what kinds of films their customers would want to see (i. e. mostly new ones) which turned out to be totally wrong (people wanted to see mostly older films), but they had a system in place which allowed the market to define itself.

Warner is also co-opting the black market for films unreleased on DVD, which can almost always be found somehow online, usually in barely watchable versions burned from tapes of old TV broadcasts.  With luck, the Warner model will find its way into the world of public film archives, encouraging them to make their holdings available cheaply to a wider public than the occasional theatrical screening could ever reach.

I placed an order on the Warner site the first time I visited it and can't wait to see the two Garbo silents in that order — Love (above) and Wild Orchids — and a talkie, Westbound, the only Scott-Boetticher Western still unavailable on DVD.  I'm sure you'll find something among the first 155 films offered that will tempt you, too — and Warner is encouraging people to submit their own requests for future offerings, which will be announced at the rate of about 20 new titles each month.

Early reports indicate that the site has been flooded with orders in its first hours of operation, in numbers far greater than Warner anticipated, all but overwhelming its system.  George Feltenstein, the Warner Home Video executive responsible for the project, is said to be thrilled by this response — and so am I.

Let's hope that Feltenstein's little experiment earns him a place alongside Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, and Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings, of Netflix — visionaries whose willingness to listen to consumers, rather than dictate to them, created new markets and made their companies tons of dough.

In any case, we're clearly looking into the future here.  How close that future is rests entirely in the hands of consumers.  So order something from The Warner Archive today and speed the plough.

THE AMERICAN GALLERY UPDATE

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The author of The American Gallery art blog, like the author of the Femme Femme Femme art blog, has switched hosts from Google to WordPress, fleeing Google's mindless and insulting “Content Warning”.  Other folks with Google-hosted blogs should consider doing the same, as a preventive measure and as a protest.

Both the above sites are well worth visiting.

The nude studies above are by Paul S. Brown, whose work I discovered via The American Gallery.  You can see more of his work here.

THE GOOGLE-ROT SPREADS

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Yet another totally unobjectionable art-history blog has been branded with a “Content Warning” by Google, in response to unnamed readers' complaints.  The complaints presumably were directed against the sites (including Femme Femme Femme, which I wrote about earlier) because they sometimes feature paintings of female nudes, like the fine one above by Paul S. Brown.

Shocking, isn't it?

Brown also deals in food-related pornography, as in the scandalous still-life below, with its provocative depiction of “virgin” olive oil.  At least he had the decency to leave the skins on the onions.

The latest victim of Google's slander is The American Gallery, where I first encountered Brown's work, but I'm sure it won't be the last.  I suspect that the complaints come from either pranksters or religious kooks, but Google should be roundly condemned for letting them get away with it.  The blogging community really needs to rally around and put a stop to this nonsense.  Trust me, if you have a blog hosted by Google, this could happen to you.

Personally, I'm worried that impressionable young children will run across these “content warnings” and get the idea that there's something shameful about the female body and its celebration by artists throughout history.  The female nude in fine-art history is about the only thing our culture has left to set against the iconographic degradation of women in most modern popular entertainment.