Went with a longtime friend to see Fame outdoors in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. A film I’d seen several times as a kid, especially summers in Boise where my brother and I spent two months each year as part of a child custody agreement and where neither of us knew any peers. No friends but my brother meant a lot of watching Fame, My Favorite Year, The Making of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, and Purple Rainon VHS (especially Purple Rain, stopped counting after 50+ views).
Memorized
Watched the Thriller VHS so often that I learned the choreography for that music video, and “Bille Jean” and “Beat It” (also included in the VHS). At 14, I got second place in a MJ dance-alike contest (losing to an adorable toddler – several strangers said I should have competed in the 15+ age category). The Summer of 1985 I danced to “Thriller” on the center of Autzen Stadium’s football field during the July 4 fireworks show in Eugene. It came together spontaneously. My Mom got calls from friends the day after and she had no idea it had happened. Stories for a later time.
The crowd dug this super-New York-y movie on this comfortably warm not-too-humid night. Sing Harlem was the opening act. Hadn’t seen this movie in decades. Still charming.
Averted my eyes during that scene with Coco. If you know the scene, you know. Talking at the screen fails to change Coco’s situation. I’ve tried.
Most of the cast ended up having long careers. Gene Anthony Ray, fiery and sly and compelling as Leroy Johnson would continue the role into the Fame television show. During the film, his mother got caught trying to sell illegal drugs on the set. Her behavior continued into the production of the television show and she got arrested running a drug ring. Gene Anthony himself struggled with addiction, was often absent, and ended up dying in 2003 at age 41. Still managed to have a varied career. The Wikipedia page linked above is worth reading.
Gene Anthony attended the school Fame is based on. In this introductory scene, he helps a friend with her dancing audition, while he himself is not interested. Then he gets interested and steals the moment. (Clip is dubbed in French, quel dommage. But Debbie Allen’s asst. dance teacher describes his style as “wicked”.)
As you can see, it’s one of those entertainments where none of the high school students seem to be under 25 years old.
Directed by Alan Parker, whose career includes similarly shot films like Midnight Express, Pink Floyd: The Wall, Birdy, Angel Heart, Mississippi Burning, on and on, his style really conveys the vitality and dark of late 70s New York City. Watching it in Brooklyn conveyed nostalgia for that era. Not that anyone wants that back, necessarily, but it’s a palpable and compelling vibe.
I didn’t watch much of the television show. I liked Debbie Allen, had crushes on Janet Jackson (Willis’ girlfriend from “Different Strokes”!) and Cynthia Gibb. But, just couldn’t get there. If you watched the show I’d like to hear about it.
Prospect Park was a great, low-key location. Lightning bugs flitted on and off in the woods just a few steps away. And it was a delight to see that “Hot Lunch Jam” still slaps.
Tip: The Good Batch’s Chocolate Chunk ice cream sandwich served in Prospect Park is better than the Confetti Cake (sprinkles) one.
I was allergic to musicals growing up. Didn’t see ‘Grease’ until the mid 80s. Didn’t watch ‘Sound of Music’ until the late 80s. Around ’90 became obsessed with ‘Singin’ in the Rain’, later ‘An American in Paris’. The musical form struck me as ridiculous when the world was full of David Lynch and cult classics and massive blockbusters.
In ’85 I was subjected to the movie of ‘West Side Story’. Well, it played in the background while something extraordinary was going on. Let’s say the first major engagement of Eros and with someone I adored. I recall the whiteness of Tony’s overbite. Cries of “Maria!” and co-marveling at the can-you-believe-this-dorky-musical-keeps-playing? moments.
What was really happening was an imprinting process.
I had a self-imposed ban on ever seeing the movie again, out of respect for that one time I barely watched it (we heathens have our rituals, too) and a few times was a bit of a pain in the ass about it. “Oh, no! We have to rent something ELSE! I shall NEVER…” blah blah.
As couples smash plates and glasses after a wedding under the premise those objects would never serve a higher function, I mentally smashed VHS copies of ‘West Side Story’ out of pop culture psychoemotional sanctimony.
And then, ENOUGH!
I rented. No, hold up, I BOUGHT ‘West Side Story’ on VHS and watched it.
Me: “I’ve decided NO FEAR and I am going to watch ‘West Side Story’!”
My apartment mate (reasonably): “…”
In 1993 or ’94 I watched it, all the way through. Of course, I laughed as most everyone does at the dorky gangs.
Sharks (L) nattier dressers, Anita’s on their side. Jets (R) a bunch of smart-alecks. Go Sharks!
Think of what gang members have worn in the decades of your life. Aren’t those fashions ridiculous? No way for gangs in the 60s to look cool now. Hoodlums are trite. Go ahead and tell them I said it. I don’t care.
Of course the movie’s music, some of the bite, and the supporting performances got to me. I watched it over and over. Not perceiving the imprinting it had done under primal circumstances a decade before, I defensively mocked the movie to vainly assert an ironic distance. The precision and number of ways I was soon able to cite the movie would make the bond plain to all but the one snarking.
KING LEAR
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back;
Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind
For which thou whipp’st her.
I was hot for the movie, but was not aware enough to admit it. Like any tedious moral zealot having to stand before microphones to confess lust toward those he publicly rebuked/abhorred.
Chita Rivera, the original Anita on Broadway. Ooof!
I don’t know the movie best in a room of people. I was baffled by a colleague a few years ago who made reference to “Puerto Rico, island of tropical breezes.” WTF? I looked at him. “It’s from the song ‘America’.” “No, it isn’t” I said haughtily while mentally running through the lyrics. He was right. It’s in the musical, but is not a line in the MOVIE. He was being friendly, and inadvertently my erudition totally GOT SERVED!
Now, however, I get there are significant differences between the lyrics, order of the songs, and arrangement between the Broadway production(s) and the movie. Some lyrics are improved in the movie. And the song order makes more sense to me in the movie with “Cool” sung by Ice (!) after Riff is dead, and “America” is better as an interplay between Bernardo and Anita, the two best performers in the movie. So glad they both got Oscars.
Rita Moreno is an idol from ‘The Electric Company’ t.v. show (“Hey you guys!” was her catch-yell). That she also played Zelda in ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ makes her all-time. One of the few EGOTs ever.
Once reminded of one song, they come not single-spies but in batallions. I end up reminiscing, humming, bellowing, jumping octaves while traipsing over the whole soundtrack.
John Barrowman, mensch, gives a really solid perfomance of “Maria” below. He miffs the last note (who wouldn’t?) but he sings like he means it. So many use it to show off without trying to convey any emotion. “Check out the runs I can make!” kinda crap that induces saccharine shock on television singing contests like ‘American Idol’.
But when I sing, it’s not held to one character. Or the dude characters. Once I’m in, I’m in full throttle singing mostly all of the parts. Sometimes I invoke a heavenly/hellish daydream where I perform the entire soundtrack (at least the songs with lyrics) as a one-person revue. Keep the paddy wagon parked right outside the theater.
I know in the clip above Natalie Wood’s singing is overdubbed. I know that, crazily, the Grammy-winning (and Tony-winning, and Emmy-winning, and Oscar-winning) Rita Moreno is overdubbed. On a commentary track, Moreno politely, but rightly, nitpicks about the overdub, including its use of a faked Mexican accent instead of a Puerto Rico accent.
I know the movie is melodrama. I know neither one of their arguments makes sense. Anita: “Stick to your own kind!” Maria: “Right or wrong, what else can I do?” Both have ROTTEN advice and LOUSY proclamations!
Yet, even though the role of Maria can be a trilling soprano extravaganza at the expense of articulation (the version above is modest on this count) and expression, Could be the crying sound of ecstatic, despondent female voices, the urgency of the music. But I am moved most every time I hear the song, especially the end lamentation/surrender/boast. Decades away from such high drama in my own life, the coda makes me solemn and brings the adolescent urgency and surging of hormones and hope for metaphysically impossible things and deflation and euphoria like nothing else.
I’m not entirely rational, is what I’m saying.
[Originally posted in October 2011. Haven’t seen the new Spielberg movie yet, but the soundtrack is fantastic. Listening to it now as I type. Rita Moreno sings a solo “Somewhere” in her own voice!]
From the start, the finale of Prince’s Purple Rain album bored me. Not the movie (which, thanks to remote summers as a teen I’ve seen 50+ times), but the final tracks “Baby I’m a Star” and “Purple Rain”.
See, doesn’t Prince himself look a little bored?
“Baby I’m a Star” sounds off-key, like someone playing with the pitch dial. For instance, in the chorus Prince sings “Oh baby I’m a” and the Revolution wanly warbles “…staaaar” like a cat wanting to get let in the house. I’ve spent 37 years trying to like it. But life only allots us a finite number of heartbeats, so I’m done trying.
People who have seen the movie feel obliged to languidly point one finger or whole hand upward then slowly sway their arm back and forth as “Purple Rain” plays. The First Avenue club extras in the movie did. But it feels like a shallow duty, like reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or standing respectfully while a foreign nation’s unfamiliar anthem plays. Are people genuinely moved beyond nostalgia, by resonant, personal emotions? Or do they mostly experience fondness for the movie or the album? Granted, the audience participation element feels great. But, oh, the ongoing repetitive guitar and basic drums that cycle for too many measures. The long fade out with synth strings into tinkling sounds that goes…so…long…
Waiting for you and far more moving, playful, charming, and shorter is “Adore”, the culminating song of Prince’s Sign o’ the Times album. He infused it with a range of genres (including doo wop & testimonial gospel) that run above and below and circles around a basic slow jam groove. His vocal harmonies and dissonances reflect the many facets of romantic feelings, yet soar at the end with warm, united enthusiasm. Outright lovely.
These lines at the midpoint always make me laugh:
This condition I got is crucial (crucial). You could say that I’m a terminal case. You could burn up my clothes, smash up my ride. (Well maybe not the ride.)
He’ll love you for all time, pour his soul into this song and sacrifice most anything. But, please don’t mess with his car. He needs that.
Great, just great.
Listen below:
See? Hear? Isn’t that better than the song “Purple Rain”?
The first examples of art criticism I heeded growing up were Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on Sneak Previews on PBS. “Gene Siskel, film critic from the Chicago Tribune” and “Roger Ebert, film critic from the Chicago Sun-Times” introduced one another each week sitting across the aisle in a movie theater balcony set. Rediscovering their reviews has been a comfort in these bunkered times.
It was thrilling to watch grown-up programs on Oregon Public Broadcasting “No commercials? Yay!” having graduated from Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Zoom, on and on. Miraculously, my parents also let me watch I, Claudius, the sensational BBC/PBS mini-series on Masterpiece Theater. That experience amplified my interest in classical history (at least the violence, sex, and political parts) and provided the namesake for one of my children (no, not named Claudius). In the era of three major channels, PBS was a miraculous fourth option that could be more dry and square than the major networks, yet other times more vital and sublime.
Both Siskel and Ebert could exude enthusiasm, both could seethe with disdain. They could like low-key movies I would never choose to see but inspired me to seek out. They could validate the big event pictures I just saw or was about to see so I got to feel more adult liking what they did, with pointers on discernment in film. Check out their exuberance over Superman II when they were still on PBS and had the luxury of nine minute reviews:
When they became sensations they graduated from PBS stations to syndication, creating the program At the Movies as lesser reviewers [e.g. Michael Medved – barf!] took over their Sneak Previews PBS gig. Then they left At the Movies, also subsequently taken over by lesser reviewers, to finally occupy Siskel & Ebert, their syndicated home until Siskel’s death in early 1999. After Siskel’s death, Ebert wrote about their early days:
“We both thought of ourselves as full-service, one-stop film critics. We didn’t see why the other one was quite necessary. We had been linked in a Faustian television format that brought us success at the price of autonomy. No sooner had I expressed a verdict on a movie, my verdict, than here came Siskel with the arrogance to say I was wrong, or, for that matter, the condescension to agree with me. It really felt like that. It was not an act. When we disagreed, there was incredulity; when we agreed, there was a kind of relief. In the television biz, they talk about “chemistry.” Not a thought was given to our chemistry. We just had it, because from the day the Chicago Tribune made Gene its film critic, we were professional enemies. We never had a single meaningful conversation before we started to work on our TV program. Alone together in an elevator, we would study the numbers changing above the door.”
When they disagreed, it was a lesson in dialectic. Generally, Siskel tended to be more prude, Ebert more epicurean. But sometimes they would flip. Look how they disagree over the stupendously pulpy Rocky IV in a six minute review:
Siskel surrenders to the sensations and emotional hooks of the movie and seems enraptured. Ebert, for once, cluck clucks and wonders how his colleague got so suckered in. Siskel grabs Ebert’s hand at one point (!) which is unusual for someone who carefully projected aloofness.
In time I realized they weren’t genius film critics, though Ebert’s writing sometimes burned with a hard, gemlike flame. But as I got to know their traits I could assess from their reviews – what one liked and why, what the other hated and why – where I would stand.
I suggest going down the YouTube rabbit hole and watching their reviews of movies you know. It can be delightful. I was surprised how vivid my recall was of some of their movie reviews. Before the internet, their t.v. shows often had a minute or more of a movie one wanted to see that wasn’t shown in commercials or trailers. The adrenaline could kick in for some of those moments and maybe that made them etch into memory.
Here’s a gem among many gems: their review of the movie Dune. No question it’s an incoherent movie without having crammed for it (I have a glossary of terms they gave ticket buyers to help them get oriented, though I had read the book and could follow it). But Siskel’s bewilderment and repulsion by the whole thing (reasonable) and Ebert’s perverse delight in the absurd waste and indulgence of the project (also reasonable) wonderfully sums up why I’ve probably watched the movie a dozen times:
Although eventually I outgrew their movie insights, I remain grateful to both of them and was saddened by Siskel’s death in 1999 and Roger Ebert’s death in 2013. Both of them were terrific public presences and talk show guests over their decades together. Ebert, in particular, was vulnerable and witty and compelling on The Howard Stern Show. If you want to amuse yourself a few minutes at a time, seek out their videos. I’d be delighted to get your observations and memories in the comments below.
Let’s hope to get back to movies in theaters again someday. “Until then, the balcony is closed.”
Michael Cohen has many observations through his tell-all: Trump and his team expected he would lose in 2016. Trump welches on everyone and is bad at deals. Trump has no friends. Trump is a racist whose hatred (envy?) of Obama sent his rage to the stratosphere.
A contrite Michael Cohen, serving time for a crime that Trump directed, wants us to know most especially that Trump will not leave office unless forced. Trump is too much of a child, and does not want to face consequences.
I enjoy unreliable narrators. The past couple of years I have tended to a little Nabokov, books about Nabokov, books about other books about Nabokov, 1990s books from the big Critical Theory backlash on sex & culture, and pulpy political memoirs/exposés.
Disloyal by Michael Cohen combines an unreliable narrator with a pulpy memoir. It’s chewy stuff. He has good analysis of how the Trump orbit makes people into the worse version of themselves. The lure of power, no matter how tacky and cruel and dumb, becomes intoxicating and a person just wants more, more, more.
“That is what it feels like to lose control of your mind — you actually give up your common sense, sense of decency, sensitivity, even your grip on reality. […] I was in a cult of personality. And I loved it.”
Cohen’s spouse, and eventually his two children, know that Trump is corrosive from the start. And the contrast of Cohen’s sensible family at home, compared to the delusions in the Trump club, runs throughout the book. A few quick chewy bits, then I want to get to the real point:
Cohen downplays the connections to Russia (which I think are lower than reported, but not as low as Cohen conveys), but the financial reliance of Trump on Russia and Putin remain strong. Trump has a crush on Putin and sees a daddy figure to earn approval from.
Putin hates Hillary Clinton, and Trump saw a campaign as an opportunity to attack Clinton and thus curry Putin’s favor. He perceived Putin as the richest man in the world, and if Trump noticeably antagonized Clinton maybe Putin would be more inclined to funnel him money.
After a 2014 meeting that Trump had with evangelicals (often amoral grifters themselves) in Trump Tower where they laid hands on him and prayed (mirrored later on in a post-election Oval Office photo-op), Cohen reports Trump saying:
“Can you believe that bullshit? Can you believe people believe that bullshit?”
Cohen makes a compelling case that Trump is a snob and holds great contempt for the people who form his base. But since they’re the only ones who show up, he’s compelled to play to them, and often derides them post-rally. Cohen writes:
“The cosmic joke was that Trump convinced a vast swathe of working-class white folks in the Midwest that he cared about their well-being, […] The truth was that he couldn’t care less.”
But the most compelling part – the molasses nightmare part – is to view through Cohen’s eyes the Trump Presidential campaign. Its launch as a sloppy, hammy, gaudy publicity stunt for his brand and The Apprentice game show with no plan to win the election. Yet the media gave Trump free airtime. Airtime worth, conservatively, billions of dollars.
Even on Election Night 2016, the Trump family and campaign staff did not think he would win. Many did not want to win, including Trump. Being President represented a big hassle. Yet, there he was. Winner of the Electoral College, having spent little money and few staff on his campaign team.
24-hour news networks (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc.) have too much airtime to fill with too little news, and too few reporters. So they are in the habit of 2-3 minutes of genuine information followed by 10-12 minutes of redundant commentary from people who usually affirm the points already made in the 2-3 minute reportage.
Spending hours and months and years airing Trump rallies with their fawning crowds and loathsome, galling moments was easy for networks to do. It made Trump supporters happy. It made others angry. Adrenaline and emotional engagement up, viewers locked in. Ratings rose and held steady so long as the story was Trump. Cheap content and a great revenue source.
With his rallies and his Twitter tantrums, Trump became the lazy mainstream media’s National Assignment Editor. It was such a flood of coverage that Trump, with the help of weird lucky bounces in the Electoral College, became President even though he didn’t want to.
Mainstream media simplifies issues to: our side and the other side. Establishment Republicans versus Establishment Democrats. Rather than present a reasonable middle, or simply report facts, they narrow their focus to marketing to one of these two groups and entice them to stay for more confirmation of their viewer’s feelings. Matt Taibbi’s book Hate, Inc. is essential context for how things ended up this way.
Everyone is cynical about the media. We sense that a big part of it is junk. Yet, we watch.
Third or alternate or fuller narratives rarely intrude. Neither party truly makes changes for people who aren’t wealthy. Both pander to Wall Street more than people. Trump claimed to want to drain the swamp, but filled his high-turnover administration with so many crooks and D-list figures he pumped the swamp full of sewage.
I voted for Biden because he’s not cruel. I don’t expect greatness from him, but I expect him to at least slow our tumbling toward ruin, maybe even make things better here and there although our people sorely need more.
BUT BACK TO COHEN’S BOOK, here’s a money quote:
“Trump saw politics as an opportunity to make money”
So does the media looking at Trump.
Aaron Sorkin’s series The Newsroom was largely mediocre, often groan-inducing, sometimes on the nose. It’s important to know that it aired before the Trump Administration, so its cynicism about lazy news networks comes across as a rosy depiction of a time before a big whiny baby’s Twitter rant led to 30 minutes of airtime coverage.
One scene from The Newsroom that sticks in my mind. No, not from the premiere where a middle-aged guy growls a condescending rant to a young female college student (oh, Sorkin…). But a scene when there’s a scandal at the centrist cable network. A reporter is fired for distorting an important interview, more heads need to roll. The boss of the network, the lead anchor, and the anchor’s producer are deflated and resigned to resigning.
Jane Fonda plays the owner of the network (after marriage to CNN owner Ted Turner, fun!) and breezes in after a society function. She plays this scene marvelously. Masterfully. The network head laments: “We don’t have the trust of the public anymore!”
Fonda’s character commands: “Get it back!” Cut to black. End of episode.
We should insist that mainstream media stop pandering to our emotions and earn our trust back.
Only now, after owning Peter Gabriel’s album Up for eighteen years and having listened to it, conservatively, dozens and possibly a hundred times, did I notice the blurred image in the background.
My eyes, from the moment of purchase, were on the falling (rising?) droplets. Today, listening to the album for the first time in a while, the album art came up on the player in a thumbnail. And, not catching it in the first place back in 2002, I thought “Wait. Is that Peter Gabriel’s face?”
Indeed it is. A later remastered version with a zoomed-back image made this even more obvious.
Later edition of Up that says “Hey, dummy. Get it now?”
No particular wisdom to offer here. I felt obliged, after not posting for a while, to share my delight and shame at realizing something I probably should have gotten three U.S. Presidents ago.
He’s been hollow within for decades, arguably since age 7. He’s profoundly insecure and not good at stuff. Not in a small way, in a chronic way. He doesn’t have the confidence to admit failing and instead lies and blames other people. These traits render him incapable of solving problems.
Looks like a nice, principled guy, right?
Mary Trump, niece to Donald Trump with a PhD. in psychology, has written a deep analysis of her family. The throughline is how Donald and his siblings grew up with odd and undemonstrative parents. How the siblings branched out from the same weird trunk provides interesting contrasts to one another. Donald, full of bluster and ambition and blundering, easily surpassed his siblings at the top of his father’s affections because his father, Fred Trump, was awkward in public and liked having a charismatic son as a front for the family business. Fred Trump did not view his son as competent, just a front, and Fred continued to run things and rescue his son from failures over and over.
Once Fred died, the bankruptcies accelerated. The tacky branding of Trump steaks or the Trump airline or the demonstrable fraud of Trump University merely starts a long list of fiascos and evidence of Donald’s horrible inability to make deals or even know what’s in the books with his name on them. He ruins his projects and robs his business partners and contractors. He was a financial wreck when he got a t.v. show that pretended he was a financial success and much of the public thought, well, if they saw him on t.v. getting into a helicopter on a skyscraper helipad, he must be a rich guy.
I listened to the audiobook, which Mary Trump capably narrates. Her tone is measured and calm throughout. She has decades of research and pinpoints the factors at play far better than pundits who pad their analyses with armchair psychology.
The pathologies she describes are not surprises. But she capably makes the case that at this point her uncle Donald’s behavior cannot change and will not change. It is foolish to wait for any reflection by him. He has no multi-layered strategy. He is a creature of appetite and impulse.
She diagnoses uncle Donald as incapable of ever being happy. The main things that give him pleasure are bullying others and getting away with things. He boasts and preens to win the approval of his father, who is dead and can never give him the praise he so desperately needs. Donald desperately clamors for attention and approval from a phantom. He is a failure who claims to be self-made but has gone bankrupt five times and been bailed out by his father with a total of $413 million (she is the primary source of Trump family financial records in the New York Times’ epic “Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches Off His Father” in October 2018). He is a tax cheat, cruel, indifferent to family and has contempt for the people who voted for him, but they’re the only ones who give him praise so he taps them over and over to fill the void within.
He is dumb about history and does not understand government. He wants to be perceived as a success, no matter the cost or the lies, and the rest of us are disposable.
There is no person to recover at this point. There is only whether to allow him and his enablers to further ruin and rob us.
“Head Over Heels” is a sumptuous, colorful jukebox musical that blends the music of The Go-Go’s and Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th Century Arcadia. The same-sex romance at the center is added, but much of the transvestism belongs to Sidney in the 1500s.
The humor is bawdy and sly and exuberant. Relationships of all kinds abound and treated with the usual conventions of period romantic comedy with many wry quarter-twists here and there. There’s wrestling with a lion!
The central figure is Philanax, the royal fool, who functions as chorus, narrator, and playwright’s proxy. Like a combination of the characters Autolycus and Time in Shakespeare’s ‘The Winter’s Tale’ (though the Oracle in ‘Head Over Heels’ also serves a role similar to Time).
I have a distinct memory of Professor Robert Grudin in an Advanced Shakespeare class discussing ‘The Winter’s Tale” and going into detail on how the character Autolycus was a proxy/metaphor and asked what he represented. Silence. Grudin then prompted with pain in his voice: “He’s a peddler of tales, celebrated for his creativity, a comic and creative character.” More silence. He swallowed and after an inward moment of palpable existential/career despair before the couple dozen of us dullards: “He represents the artist.” The memory of this still makes this dullard laugh, 28 years later.
Notes on the playwright, Jeff Witty. He was an acquaintance in college. Fast forward more than a decade to 2004. I am channel flipping and stop on the Tony Awards. I never watched the Tony Awards. Within a couple minutes, Jeff Whitty takes the stage for winning Best Book for his work on “Avenue Q”. I freak out. Did I mention never watching the Tonys, then this person I recognize is onstage having fucking WON! I go nuts. I call my friend that he dated, enthusiastic that a good guy earned a premiere award. In the decade plus since then, I do watch a few MORE minutes of the Tonys every few years, but that high will likely never be matched.
Narrator in LDS Missionary garb, Mormon Temple. Photo by my daughter at age 9.
Jeff continues to do thoughtful, fun work. To my shame, I still haven’t seen “Avenue Q”. Yes, I should because the composer later won a Tony for his work with Trey Parker & Matt Stone on “The Book of Mormon”, a musical I have seen in person THREE TIMES and have listened to the soundtrack about a HUNDRED MILLION TIMES, even dressing like a Mormon missionary for Halloween 2011, then wearing that same costume and posed in front of the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City (making my kids take the photo) in June 2012. “Avenue Q” essentially calls out to me as plainly as possible. Still, hermit-like, haven’t made it.
I was delighted by Whitty’s play “The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler” in 2008. It built on the same lead actress, Robin Goodrin Nordli, as the previous production of “Hedda Gabler” put on in Ashland. “The Further Adventures” resumed with the dead Hedda Gabler simply getting up from the stage she had died on a few years before and we were rolling.
Musidorus makes Philanax bloom. Photo: Jenny Graham.
Two older people next to me left “Head Over Heels” at the intermission, one muttering “Too much. It’s too much.” I smirked. The majority of people stayed. And the majority of people’s spirits stayed high, and it was an older crowd (older than me). Was the adolescent part of me amused by my instinct to sneer and the older folks around me (so, like, 47 years or older) who apparently DIDN’T know that the clapping part of “We Got the Beat” goes clap-clap, clap, clap-clap, clap? Yes. But even without everyone catching that subtlety, the crowd clapped in time.
POSTSCRIPT: I drafted this in 2015 but spaced-off posting it. Since then, “Head Over Heels” got to Broadway. I read a New York Times article about the incoming production, excited this idiosyncratic and bouncy musical by a good person with an English degree from the same fond but mid-level state university I did. All seemed right with the world. Then the article mentioned Whitty left the project before it got to Broadway. No idea why. I live on the other side of the continent and far, far from theater circles. But it was a WTF moment. The Broadway show opened July 2018 and closed January 2019.
Since then, Whitty earned an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for the comedy Can You Ever Forgive Me.
You know what the funniest thing about Canada is? It’s the little differences. Wonderful place it is, the message could not be clearer: if you want unsweetened ice tea at any store or restaurant, fast food or fancy, you can drink lemonade-sweetened Nestea or fuck right off you wimp.
Given that it’s a British Commonwealth, or something, I’d thought Canada would have more sensitivity to the variations of tea people like to drink.
Breezed through with only part of a day in Toronto and two days in Montréal. In French-speaking Québec I fought the instinct to gush out my halting high school French freshman year skills. Kept the clumsily composed phrases to myself, sometimes whispering them when the moment passed. Did break out a few “Merci” without shame. Increased resolve to some day get to France and of course apologize to all around for George W. Bush-era and now Trump-era buffoonery done by Republicans des états-unis.
Basilique Notre-Dame De Montréal on Canada Day en route to the fireworks show at Old Port.
I unknowingly scheduled us to arrive in Montréal on Canada Day (July 1). I got to the Old Port where a 10 p.m. fireworks display was the crescendo to a day-long event. The city was active, weather great, and a lot of human activity.
I missed the first minute of fireworks as I was still walking down a street to get within sight. The music was not the national anthem of “Oh, Canada”. It was the main music theme to the “Lord of the Rings”. Then after about 10-12 minutes of medium trajectory fireworks, the show was over. Disney-trained me expected spectacle, grandeur, patriotism, boasting, expense! Fireworks in shapes! Hearts! Mickey Mouse heads! Fireworks bursting inside other fireworks then becoming another kind of fireworks!
Instead it was a modest “Here are your fireworks. Got ‘em? Good. Now let’s all go home. The police are working late and most of you probably have got work tomorrow. It’s Monday night.”
Others leisurely and pleasantly walking back didn’t seem to be as bewildered and underwhelmed as I was. Then I started laughing and I’m still chuckling on & off about it now.
“Autoportrait” (2016) by Yannick Pouliot. A two-way mirror. [Left] Your narrator. My daughter and I marveled at this exchanging places. [Right] Daughter sits to rest as I stand on the other side.
Within the first few minutes of watching Canada television, my daughter remarked during a commercial break for a local show & tell programm(e) that most every element seemed to not yell or want to rattle the t.v. in the way that we were used to. Typically that’s attributed to a Canadian trait/stereotype of modesty (“Sorry”). But Canada has national healthcare. The U.S. does not. Canada seems better in attending to general well-being. Increasingly I don’t think the tone is attributed to modesty so much as we in the U.S. are accustomed to feeling so on edge, working to exhaustion, aware that a major health event could bankrupt us and put us on the street, that we need to get screamed at to get our attention. Stress and worry has made us collectively dumber and more selfish and unable to identify our true sources of stress. Our media often whips us up then directs us to the wrong causes for why life/society isn’t working for us like it could. In the wealthiest nation in human history.
As we wrapped up watching the “Good Omens” series finale (fun – ups & downs – but fun!), Room Service (ehm, I mean “Service Aux Chambre”) knocked on our door tonight and accidentally gave us extra sheets and blankets. So our teens made a pillow & blanket shelter.
Le Forte du Portland Famillie en Montréal, Québec.
Yes, we had poutine in Montréal. Two different kinds. La Banquise seves 30 different kinds and is open 24 hours a day. Charming place, tasty. Back to the States tomorrow!
“[My mother] wasted nothing of what she felt” — Frieda Hughes, daughter of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
I’m reading Ariel: The Restored Edition by Sylvia Plath. Published in 2004, it presents the full set of poems that Sylvia Plath intended for her collection Ariel. Initially, Sylvia Plath’s widower, poet Ted Hughes, had removed 12 poems from Ariel when published in 1965, two years after Plath’s suicide, mostly because they were directed at particular family members and friends that would have been hurtful. He selected 12 other poems and an introduction by poet Robert Lowell. The Restored Edition removes the 12 Ted Hughes added and restores the 12 Plath left in a black notebook with her manuscript.
This book has a facsimile of her manuscript with several edits by Plath. It’s interesting to look at her notations and process.
Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath
Some people who project themselves into Sylvia Plath’s poetry and biography have long viewed Hughes as a misogynistic villain looking to suppress his gifted wife. Frieda Hughes, one of Plath & Hughes’ daughters, defends her father throughout the Forward:
In considering Ariel for publication my father had faced a dilemma. He was well aware of the extreme ferocity with which some of my mother’s poems dismembered those close to her — her husband, her mother, her father, and my father’s uncle Walter, even neighbors and acquaintances. He wished to give the book a broader perspective in order to make it more acceptable to readers, rather than alienate them. He felt that some of the nineteen late poems, written after the manuscript was completed, should be represented. “I simply wanted to make the best book I could,” he told me.
All of the poems Ted Hughes removed showed up in Plath’s Collected Poems, published in 1981 and edited by Ted Hughes. In that book, Ted Hughes listed the original poems in Ariel that Plath had left in her manuscript.
My father had a profound respect for my mother’s work in spite of being one of the subjects of its fury. For him the work was the thing, and he saw the care of it as a means of tribute and a responsibility.
Frieda Hughes then becomes devastating toward family interlopers. It took me a long time to read Sylvia Plath because oa cult of possession and preciousness got in the way of my ability to value the work (and I struggle with poetry anyway — and, okay, this silly-ass reason, too). But this section provided a direct connection where she sums up people who attack her father and reshape her mentally imbalanced and astonishingly talented mother into a golem:
But the point of anguish at which my mother killed herself was taken over by strangers, possessed and reshaped by them. The collection of Ariel poems became symbolic to me of this possession of my mother and of the wider vilification of my father. It was as if the clay from her poetic energy was taken up and versions of my mother made out of it, invented to reflect only the inventors, as if they could possess my real, actual mother
The Forward is fascinating. With thought and care it fans away the fog of melodrama. It tethered me from a person still living to passionate, caring, flawed people. On the role of her father, Frieda Hughes sums up:
When she died leaving Ariel as her last book, she was caught in the act of revenge, in a voice that had been honed and practiced for years, latterly with the help of my father. Though he became a victim of it, ultimately he did not shy away from its mastery.
Frieda Hughes, a painter and a writer with several volumes, maintains that she did not read either parent’s poetry until she was 35, save for a few instances where her father read children’s verse to her or played recordings. She wanted to establish her own identity away from her parents’ work. Intellectually, avoiding your famous parents’ poems is possible. When they came up as a subject of study, Frieda says she was able to develop another course of study with her tutors. Bad marks would be devastating, good marks would lead to her being thought as having an advantage. Though, Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence howls at this claim at decades-long avoidance. Frieda Hughes in a speech also describes holding her mother’s books in bookstores, presumably without opening them, thinking of what if her mother had lived, and setting the books down and leaving.
Frieda Hughes wrote the furious poem “My Mother” on the verge of the movie Sylvia, a BBC production starring Gwyneth Paltrow released in 2003. Frieda Hughes, her mother’s literary executor after the death of her father in 1998, denied the use of her mother’s poetry in the film. Biography can add color to art, but there’s a balance to be struck between sublime absorption and ghoulishness.
MY MOTHER
by Frieda Hughes
They are killing her again. She said she did it One year in every ten, But they do it annually, or weekly, Some even do it daily, Carrying her death around in their heads And practising it. She saves them The trouble of their own; They can die through her Without ever making The decision. My buried mother Is up-dug for repeat performances.
Now they want to make a film For anyone lacking the ability To imagine the body, head in oven, Orphaning children. Then It can be rewound So they can watch her die Right from the beginning again.
The peanut eaters, entertained At my mother’s death, will go home, Each carrying their memory of her, Lifeless – a souvenir. Maybe they’ll buy the video.
Watching someone on TV Means all they have to do Is press ‘pause’ If they want to boil a kettle, While my mother holds her breath on screen To finish dying after tea. The filmmakers have collected The body parts, They want me to see. They require dressings to cover the joins And disguise the prosthetics In their remake of my mother. They want to use her poetry As stitching and sutures To give it credibility. They think I should love it – Having her back again, they think I should give them my mother’s words To fill the mouth of their monster, Their Sylvia Suicide Doll, Who will walk and talk And die at will, And die, and die And forever be dying.
