Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Tuscadera, wheel-a barra, some place in Mexico. . .
Did somebody say Tom Waits? Did somebody say Bob Dylan? This guy combined the best of both. I mean. . . "Wheeling, West Virginia, with everythin' that's in ya. . . " This was the first, and possibly last master of verbal jazz. (And he sang just as badly as both-a dem guys.)
She don't look back
(So howcum I'm posting this-all? I got reading Positively 4th Street again, maybe due to taking the guitar out of its dusty case for the first time in a dozen years. Or not? Anyway, these were kind of cool books, reviewed for an internet publication so's I can rerun them any time I want. They do go back a few years, but I heard-tell that Bob Dylan just performed at the 2011 Grammys, so I looked at the clip. It wasn't good news. He sounds like Tom Waits on Draino, a growling monotone that bespeaks shredded vocal chords. Is it finally time to wind up the Never-Ending Tour?)
Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina by David Hajdu
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 328 pages ISBN: 0-374-28199-8
Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan by Howard Sounes
Grove Press 527 pages ISBN: 0-8021-1686-8
During a weekend retreat at a Benedictine monastery earlier this year, I reconnected with one of the idols of my youth in a setting which was both wildly unlikely and oddly appropriate. “I’d like to play you some of the most spiritual music ever written,” Father John told us as he switched on the CD player to the howling bark of the greatest visionary popular music has ever known, Bob Dylan.
Appropriate, because after all, Dylan the master trickster pops up everywhere these days – on TV commercial jingles, in an audience with the Pope (in which he sang “Blowin’ in the Wind”), at the Kennedy Center as an awkward but grateful honoree, and even at this year’s Academy Awards.
He has been nominated for a Nobel Prize for literature and booed off the stage by hostile audiences for the sin of “going electric”. Throughout his monumental career as a troubadour of conscience, Bob Dylan has not reflected the times so much as predicted them, keeping one eerie step ahead of whatever way the wind blows.
It’s not surprising that on the occasion of his 60th birthday, various writers would attempt to capture his enigmatic presence in biography. This is a nearly impossible task, like picking up a blob of mercury that scatters into a million glittering bits. The problem is that Dylan has lived so many lives in one, all of them radically intense: the idealistic young folkie visiting Woody Guthrie in the hospital, the jaded rocker crashing his motorbike, the family-oriented country squire, the born-again Christian zealot, the actor (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Dharma and Greg), the grizzled survivor on his famous Never-Ending Tour.
Just when critics were about to write him off as a has-been, he recorded the amazing 1997 Grammy-winner Time Out of Mind, followed up by the ultimate Dylan hurting-love song, Things Have Changed. Receiving his Oscar for best song, he looked frayed around the edges, exhausted by a life at the fringes of normalcy. But he still has those hypnotic, penetrating eyes – eyes that can see for a thousand miles, deep into the heart of life’s most fragile, compelling mysteries.
New York journalist David Hajdu has come as close as any writer to nailing Dylan’s mercurial soul to the page – a curious fact, given that POSITIVELY 4TH STREET does not center on him exclusively (but then, perhaps enigmas are best glimpsed out of the corner of your eye). The book recreates a charmed time, the era of the ‘60s folk boom with its burning idealism and compelling personalities. It was the perfect cultural milieu for a gifted, ambitious artist like Dylan to make his debut.
But as Hajdu points out, he wasn’t the only opportunist in the crowd. Joan Baez comes across as a curious mixture of brash confidence and quaking insecurity, using the ‘60s to her advantage in a way which in retrospect looks quite ruthless. “She just devoured everybody’s things,” a friend recalls of her ability to expropriate song material and make it her own. “I knew I could do what (the folk singers) were doing and a lot better than them,” Baez claimed.
Her Anglo-Mexican background made her a bit of an exotic, and she soon graduated from the coffeehouses of Cambridge to the Newport Folk Festival in 1959. Musician Bob Gibson gave her a push, but it was hardly necessary: “If I hadn’t ‘introduced’ Joan Baez, someone else would have. It was like ‘discovering’ the Grand Canyon.”
Such a force of nature seemed to be on a predestined collision-course with another astral body, a tightly-wound Minnesotan minstrel-boy newly renamed Bob Dylan. The former Bobby Zimmerman, a baby-faced Jewish rock musician from a small town, had remade himself in Woody Guthrie’s image and was busy charming the socks off people (particularly young women) all over New York’s Greenwich Village.
Dylan even mimicked Guthrie’s tics from Huntington’s chorea, causing fellow singer Eric von Schmidt to describe him as “a spastic little gnome”. But with all his charm, Dylan was paradoxically an extreme introvert; as Theodore Bikel reminisced, “He didn’t reach out to touch you. You had to come where he was.”
When these two supernatural beings joined forces, they immediately went supernova. Dylan’s embryonic talent to capture the political zeitgeist was cheered on by an enthralled, deeply infatuated Baez.
Meanwhile her little sister Mimi, still in high school, was developing a quieter but beautifully polished musical gift of her own. Destined to live forever in Joan’s giant shadow, she even ended up with a sort of faux Bob Dylan in the person of Cuban-Irish writer Richard Farina, whom she married at the tender age of seventeen.
The Farina of Hajdu’s account was not so much an original as a badly-smudged photocopy of Dylan’s blazing genius (“I could kind of see the strings,” one friend put it), a hanger-on who would stop at nothing to further his ambitions. While Dylan turned out such searing masterpieces as A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, Masters of War and The Times They Are A-Changin’, Farina fiddled with a dulcimer and rehashed traditional folk tunes, winning over a surprising number of people on charm alone.
“He walked and talked as if he had been born wearing a cape,” a friend remembers.
Many believed he went after Mimi just to get to Joan, and the ploy worked. For a time there was a strange sort of romantic formation, not a triangle so much as a rectangle, Bob and Joan on one side, Mimi and Richard on the other, with flirtations flying dangerously in all directions.
Though Hajdu is very good at recreating all the fizz and spark of the folk era, he drops names at such a thick rate that it can make for hard going: “Carolyn and Richard had never met Mimi and Todd, and Mimi and Todd had not met Alex Campbell, a Scottish folk singer whom Carolyn , Richard and John knew.” There must be a less-awkward way to introduce the huge cast of players on the folk scene.
But like the magazine reporter he is, Hajdu just has to tell us who was there and what was said, giving some passages a distinct gossip-column flavor. Still, he does show us a Dylan bristling with paradox: stumblingly inarticulate in person, but a master communicator on stage; a protest-song writer par excellence who had virtually no interest in politics; a man both vicious (as in the slashing Positively 4th Street, a diatribe against all his old Greenwich Village friends: “I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes,/You’d know what a drag it is to see you”) and deeply compassionate, as in the Ballad of Hollis Brown and Chimes of Freedom.
And he traces the inevitable falling-out between the King and Queen of folk, as Baez comes to realize that Dylan “criticizes society, and I criticize it, but he ends up saying there is not a goddamned thing you can do about it, so screw it. And I say just the opposite.” Dylan’s scandalously poor treatment of Joan on his tour to London further undermined the romance, which was destined to blaze briefly, then collapse.
A far worse disaster struck Mimi Baez Farina when her husband was killed in a motorcycle crash on her 21st birthday in 1966. Suddenly it was all over. Dylan abandoned folk and went electric; Joan Baez remained glued in the ‘60s, forever associated with that all-too-brief time when anything seemed possible.
For a more blow-by-blow account of the life of Bob Dylan, you couldn’t do much better than British writer Howard Sounes’ DOWN THE HIGHWAY. This book is as detailed and relentless as one of Dylan’s marathon-length songs (say, Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands or Desolation Row) and seems to go on as long as the fabled Never-Ending Tour. For Dylan addicts hungry for trivia tidbits, this is fine fare, but there is a certain fineness missing from the writing, a subtlety which would have helped capture the mystery of the man.
Here we learn that Bob’s nickname in high school was Zimbo, and that he piled his hair on top of his head in deliberate imitation of Little Richard. We find out that the last thing his mother said when he left home was, “Don’t keep writing poetry, please don’t.”
Though Sounes does acknowledge the greatness of Dylan’s lyrics (citing such classic lines as “he not busy being born is busy dying” and “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”), he tends to focus more on his subject’s messy, convoluted personal life with its dozens of complicated love affairs. Though Dylan made a brave attempt at marriage to Sara Lowndes and has been a loving father to his six children, he is not good husband material, and can’t even seem to hang on to his friends for long.
What emerges in Sounes’ book is a portrait of a desperately lonely man, isolated by his genius and an almost pathological social awkwardness. In some ways Bob Dylan is a bit of an idiot savant, supremely gifted in his words and music but handicapped everywhere else. But as Sounes points out, his strange charisma is so strong that these flaws only add to his mystique. As one record executive put it, “Is he a regular guy? No. Why would you want him to be?”
The baffling way he has always played with the press reflects a deep shyness and a reluctance to share private details. It would be interesting to know what Dylan would make of a book that probes his personal life so deeply, sometimes at the expense of what should be the main focus, his art.
Still, I was intrigued to learn that “Lay, Lady, Lay” was originally written for Midnight Cowboy (typically, Dylan missed the deadline), and that Woodstock legend Wavy Gravy remains a close friend. And yes, the musicians really were stoned on the infamous Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 (which, like a lot of Dylan classics, was done in a single take).
But let the master have the last word. In preparing to write this piece, I plunged back into those songs again and was astounded at their freshness and power, even decades later. This is the real reason Dylan is worthy subject matter for books like these. The man still has the capacity to move me to tears, especially in my personal favorite, his ringing anthem of the dispossessed, Chimes of Freedom:
“Tolling for the aching, whose wounds cannot be nursed,
For the countless confused, accused, misused
Strung-out ones, and worse,
And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe –
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashin’.”
To that I say – amen, Bob; amen.
Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina by David Hajdu
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 328 pages ISBN: 0-374-28199-8
Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan by Howard Sounes
Grove Press 527 pages ISBN: 0-8021-1686-8
During a weekend retreat at a Benedictine monastery earlier this year, I reconnected with one of the idols of my youth in a setting which was both wildly unlikely and oddly appropriate. “I’d like to play you some of the most spiritual music ever written,” Father John told us as he switched on the CD player to the howling bark of the greatest visionary popular music has ever known, Bob Dylan.
Appropriate, because after all, Dylan the master trickster pops up everywhere these days – on TV commercial jingles, in an audience with the Pope (in which he sang “Blowin’ in the Wind”), at the Kennedy Center as an awkward but grateful honoree, and even at this year’s Academy Awards.
He has been nominated for a Nobel Prize for literature and booed off the stage by hostile audiences for the sin of “going electric”. Throughout his monumental career as a troubadour of conscience, Bob Dylan has not reflected the times so much as predicted them, keeping one eerie step ahead of whatever way the wind blows.
It’s not surprising that on the occasion of his 60th birthday, various writers would attempt to capture his enigmatic presence in biography. This is a nearly impossible task, like picking up a blob of mercury that scatters into a million glittering bits. The problem is that Dylan has lived so many lives in one, all of them radically intense: the idealistic young folkie visiting Woody Guthrie in the hospital, the jaded rocker crashing his motorbike, the family-oriented country squire, the born-again Christian zealot, the actor (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Dharma and Greg), the grizzled survivor on his famous Never-Ending Tour.
Just when critics were about to write him off as a has-been, he recorded the amazing 1997 Grammy-winner Time Out of Mind, followed up by the ultimate Dylan hurting-love song, Things Have Changed. Receiving his Oscar for best song, he looked frayed around the edges, exhausted by a life at the fringes of normalcy. But he still has those hypnotic, penetrating eyes – eyes that can see for a thousand miles, deep into the heart of life’s most fragile, compelling mysteries.
New York journalist David Hajdu has come as close as any writer to nailing Dylan’s mercurial soul to the page – a curious fact, given that POSITIVELY 4TH STREET does not center on him exclusively (but then, perhaps enigmas are best glimpsed out of the corner of your eye). The book recreates a charmed time, the era of the ‘60s folk boom with its burning idealism and compelling personalities. It was the perfect cultural milieu for a gifted, ambitious artist like Dylan to make his debut.
But as Hajdu points out, he wasn’t the only opportunist in the crowd. Joan Baez comes across as a curious mixture of brash confidence and quaking insecurity, using the ‘60s to her advantage in a way which in retrospect looks quite ruthless. “She just devoured everybody’s things,” a friend recalls of her ability to expropriate song material and make it her own. “I knew I could do what (the folk singers) were doing and a lot better than them,” Baez claimed.
Her Anglo-Mexican background made her a bit of an exotic, and she soon graduated from the coffeehouses of Cambridge to the Newport Folk Festival in 1959. Musician Bob Gibson gave her a push, but it was hardly necessary: “If I hadn’t ‘introduced’ Joan Baez, someone else would have. It was like ‘discovering’ the Grand Canyon.”
Such a force of nature seemed to be on a predestined collision-course with another astral body, a tightly-wound Minnesotan minstrel-boy newly renamed Bob Dylan. The former Bobby Zimmerman, a baby-faced Jewish rock musician from a small town, had remade himself in Woody Guthrie’s image and was busy charming the socks off people (particularly young women) all over New York’s Greenwich Village.
Dylan even mimicked Guthrie’s tics from Huntington’s chorea, causing fellow singer Eric von Schmidt to describe him as “a spastic little gnome”. But with all his charm, Dylan was paradoxically an extreme introvert; as Theodore Bikel reminisced, “He didn’t reach out to touch you. You had to come where he was.”
When these two supernatural beings joined forces, they immediately went supernova. Dylan’s embryonic talent to capture the political zeitgeist was cheered on by an enthralled, deeply infatuated Baez.
Meanwhile her little sister Mimi, still in high school, was developing a quieter but beautifully polished musical gift of her own. Destined to live forever in Joan’s giant shadow, she even ended up with a sort of faux Bob Dylan in the person of Cuban-Irish writer Richard Farina, whom she married at the tender age of seventeen.
The Farina of Hajdu’s account was not so much an original as a badly-smudged photocopy of Dylan’s blazing genius (“I could kind of see the strings,” one friend put it), a hanger-on who would stop at nothing to further his ambitions. While Dylan turned out such searing masterpieces as A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, Masters of War and The Times They Are A-Changin’, Farina fiddled with a dulcimer and rehashed traditional folk tunes, winning over a surprising number of people on charm alone.
“He walked and talked as if he had been born wearing a cape,” a friend remembers.
Many believed he went after Mimi just to get to Joan, and the ploy worked. For a time there was a strange sort of romantic formation, not a triangle so much as a rectangle, Bob and Joan on one side, Mimi and Richard on the other, with flirtations flying dangerously in all directions.
Though Hajdu is very good at recreating all the fizz and spark of the folk era, he drops names at such a thick rate that it can make for hard going: “Carolyn and Richard had never met Mimi and Todd, and Mimi and Todd had not met Alex Campbell, a Scottish folk singer whom Carolyn , Richard and John knew.” There must be a less-awkward way to introduce the huge cast of players on the folk scene.
But like the magazine reporter he is, Hajdu just has to tell us who was there and what was said, giving some passages a distinct gossip-column flavor. Still, he does show us a Dylan bristling with paradox: stumblingly inarticulate in person, but a master communicator on stage; a protest-song writer par excellence who had virtually no interest in politics; a man both vicious (as in the slashing Positively 4th Street, a diatribe against all his old Greenwich Village friends: “I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes,/You’d know what a drag it is to see you”) and deeply compassionate, as in the Ballad of Hollis Brown and Chimes of Freedom.
And he traces the inevitable falling-out between the King and Queen of folk, as Baez comes to realize that Dylan “criticizes society, and I criticize it, but he ends up saying there is not a goddamned thing you can do about it, so screw it. And I say just the opposite.” Dylan’s scandalously poor treatment of Joan on his tour to London further undermined the romance, which was destined to blaze briefly, then collapse.
A far worse disaster struck Mimi Baez Farina when her husband was killed in a motorcycle crash on her 21st birthday in 1966. Suddenly it was all over. Dylan abandoned folk and went electric; Joan Baez remained glued in the ‘60s, forever associated with that all-too-brief time when anything seemed possible.
For a more blow-by-blow account of the life of Bob Dylan, you couldn’t do much better than British writer Howard Sounes’ DOWN THE HIGHWAY. This book is as detailed and relentless as one of Dylan’s marathon-length songs (say, Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands or Desolation Row) and seems to go on as long as the fabled Never-Ending Tour. For Dylan addicts hungry for trivia tidbits, this is fine fare, but there is a certain fineness missing from the writing, a subtlety which would have helped capture the mystery of the man.
Here we learn that Bob’s nickname in high school was Zimbo, and that he piled his hair on top of his head in deliberate imitation of Little Richard. We find out that the last thing his mother said when he left home was, “Don’t keep writing poetry, please don’t.”
Though Sounes does acknowledge the greatness of Dylan’s lyrics (citing such classic lines as “he not busy being born is busy dying” and “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”), he tends to focus more on his subject’s messy, convoluted personal life with its dozens of complicated love affairs. Though Dylan made a brave attempt at marriage to Sara Lowndes and has been a loving father to his six children, he is not good husband material, and can’t even seem to hang on to his friends for long.
What emerges in Sounes’ book is a portrait of a desperately lonely man, isolated by his genius and an almost pathological social awkwardness. In some ways Bob Dylan is a bit of an idiot savant, supremely gifted in his words and music but handicapped everywhere else. But as Sounes points out, his strange charisma is so strong that these flaws only add to his mystique. As one record executive put it, “Is he a regular guy? No. Why would you want him to be?”
The baffling way he has always played with the press reflects a deep shyness and a reluctance to share private details. It would be interesting to know what Dylan would make of a book that probes his personal life so deeply, sometimes at the expense of what should be the main focus, his art.
Still, I was intrigued to learn that “Lay, Lady, Lay” was originally written for Midnight Cowboy (typically, Dylan missed the deadline), and that Woodstock legend Wavy Gravy remains a close friend. And yes, the musicians really were stoned on the infamous Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 (which, like a lot of Dylan classics, was done in a single take).
But let the master have the last word. In preparing to write this piece, I plunged back into those songs again and was astounded at their freshness and power, even decades later. This is the real reason Dylan is worthy subject matter for books like these. The man still has the capacity to move me to tears, especially in my personal favorite, his ringing anthem of the dispossessed, Chimes of Freedom:
“Tolling for the aching, whose wounds cannot be nursed,
For the countless confused, accused, misused
Strung-out ones, and worse,
And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe –
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashin’.”
To that I say – amen, Bob; amen.
Guitar lessons
Caitlin's musical tastes are along the lines of American Idol and Taylor Swift, whereas mine are steeped in classical music (from childhood, whether I wanted it or not) and the folk craze of the mid-'60s. So who knows where this musical experiment will end up. I think she's a little young (7) to be starting, so I hope Mom doesn't Craigslist the guitar due to lack of storage space.
Monday, February 28, 2011
February, you may be little, but you're small!
"February is pitiless, and it is boring. That parade of red numerals on its page adds up to zero: birthdays of politicians, a holiday reserved for rodents, what kind of celebrations are those? The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine’s Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine’s Day on February’s shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed." Tom Robbins basically had it right, for in spite of its weeny meanness, this month can seem endless. But even March is a half-assed month, not really knowing what season it belongs to; and April is like an old bicycle seat: "just enough spring in it to give you a pain in the ass". (This one is from my father!).
But there are compensations, if fleeting ones. Yesterday my four grandchildren went bounding out into a rare late-February snowfall (rare because we basically live in a rain forest) and created like mad: snowmen, snow forts, snow girls, castles, angels, freeform sculptures, Easter eggs, hockey pucks. And their Grandma and Grandpa similarly frolicked, in up to their knees.
But the difference is, Monday brings preschool and kindergarten, which they like a lot, and for me. . . just Monday.
We've nearly broken February's back. That should be good news for me, and I guess it is. But it's the same old blues. Is the universe trying to tell me something? Like. . .to shut up?
It could be that I just don't know how to "work" my contacts. Do I seem too hungry? Not hungry enough? Whenever this particular rule book was passed out, I either didn't get one, or lost my copy somewhere.
It was noteworthy to me that Kevin Brownlow, with whom I recently/briefly exchanged emails, appeared on the Oscars last night, having received an honorary award for a lifetime of devotion to the then-nearly-lost cause of silent film. It was cool to see.
What wasn't so cool is that the four men receiving honorary Oscars for their lifelong contribution to the movies weren't actually presented with their statues, just trotted out (three of them, anyway) for a brief moment of applause, then whisked away. It was all done so briskly that it caused a bit of confusion.
Soooooooo. . . it's the last day of this interminable month, the snowmen are melting, the Oscar analyses are fulminating away, the best-and-worst-dressed lists dissected. Soon it'll all go away, as everything always goes away.
And I'll be left facing the glowing screen, and wondering what is next.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Friday, February 25, 2011
Kathy from Consort
I confess I am a recovering k. d. lang addict. Recovering, because I'm starting to think she's falling into her own cliches: the little groan at the beginning of the phrase; the breathless/breathy passages, the upswoop like a coyote or a cowboy yell, and (less frequently) the half-yodel. When she sang Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah at the opening of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver (a very big deal for us: we live there!), she was on a big pedestal and dressed in a baggy men's suit. My husband said, "She looks like Wayne Newton."
It was true. She looks sort of puffy, and she doesn't smile much. I never expected her to stay androgynously waiflike (if there is such a thing), boyish with knife-trimmed nails, and cheekbones to die for. But I never pictured her getting this bulky, stolid like a middle-aged businessman at a Shriner's convention, getting lost in her (always-ugly) clothes. Long ago she was in a Canadian-made movie called Salmonberries in which she appeared, for a split-second, in the nude, and everyone revelled in the fact that she looked like a woman. Well, she IS, folks, no matter how gay or lesbian or woman-loving she may be. The physiological underpinnings are the same.
So, how does this affect my feelings for her? I don't know when I started to get turned off. Nothing ever matched her breakout Ingenue album, which I listened to about a billion times. Still Thrives This Love was my fave (and I'll try to find it), though there were no duds in it at all.
She's not quite phoning it in now, but the lang cliches are wearing a deeper and deeper groove, so that something has fallen down in and gotten lost. I think. She still has that legendary flexible voice, but it doesn't seem to speak to me any more. She doesn't produce the overtones that make a voice jump alive, and God, that swooooooping up to every note. Once in a while, attack it head-on, will you?
Nevertheless, this one is pretty good.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
The Doors - Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)
So. This Alabama song has nothing to do with Alabama, surprisingly, but is the best-known ditty from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's dark vision of social corruption, Mahagonny. It's not exactly the kind of tune you can tap yer toe to.
When I found out the Doors had done it, I nearly fell over. The Lotte Lenya version isn't exactly what I remember either, but it's close. See, when I was a kid, I was a misfit, an outcast, a square peg (as in another brilliant song by The Doors, "When you're Strange"). I was just odd. But my sister, thirteen years older than me, was odder.
She was always going off to Munich as an exchange student, spoke fluent German (why? No one in our connection was even remotely German or Teutonic or anything), and wrote her Master's thesis in German on this strange, incomprehensible Mahagonny. It was plenty weird, but no weirder than the brick-and-board bookcases in the den that groaned under the weight of Schiller, Goethe and Freud.
In those days, everybody who was anybody had a hi-fi, and you played your hi-fi extremely loud. The louder it was, the more the bass rattled your teeth, the better your hi-fi was. When I brought friends home from school, the Moon of Alabama song would be on the hi-fi, and I'd have to try to explain.
But I didn't understand it myself. There was a lot I didn't understand, because nobody explained it to me. So I concluded that everyone else in the world already understood these things, and I didn't because I was feeble-minded and intellectually inferior (even though I was in a special advanced educational stream, for which I received no family praise at all). As a result, in order to compensate, I became very entertaining.
Things got even more confusing when my sister's drunken married friends groped me at adult parties, at which my glass of gin was always kept topped up. I was fifteen years old and they were something like thirty and it was supposed to be all right. My parents were sure it was all right: my older siblings were looking after me! They were doing me a favor, giving me a social life which I could never have on my own, and I was supposed to be grateful. It nearly destroyed me, but I figured I didn't understand that, either, and kept silent. Just as well, because if they didn't listen to me then, they sure don't want to listen to me now.
Oh, don't ask why. Oh, don't ask why.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Words from the master
In making inquries about my Harold Lloyd novel (The Glass Character), I scraped up my nerve and sent an email to Kevin Brownlow, who is without a doubt the world's foremost authority on silent film. Not only that: he knew Harold Lloyd personally.
I was quite taken aback that he responded so quickly, and with such detailed commentary, which I can't help but share here.
Dear Margaret Gunning
I am fascinated that you are so keen on Harold Lloyd. Me too, but it’s strange how people repeat the old cliches about his being ‘mechanical’ You will love John Bengtson’s book – it tells you so much about the places in which he worked.
You are a good writer, and it was a pleasure to read your extract. I would take issue with you on one subject – did they use obscenity when they swore in those days? T E Lawrence, in his account of barrack room life THE MINT, had his book banned because he repeated the swear words, which he was finally compelled to reprint like this; ---
But in talking to scores of silent film veterans, I heard plenty of swearing, but it was all profanity – ‘Jesus Christ’ – or ‘God almighty’ - presumably because of the strong Irish Catholic tradition in Hollywood.. When they got worked up it was ‘Son of a bitch’ I notice you use both for Hal Roach – ‘Jesus, Harold! Do you want to be fucking killed?’ (Roach’s family was from Cork, by the way.) You may be right, but I would be interested to know if you have any evidence.
I noticed, when I researched a script about silent era Hollywood (never made) how many words they used that have fallen out of fashion. ‘Everything’s jake!’ ‘Twenty-three skidoo’
By the way, motion picture makeup was yellow, not white. (The cameramen hated white )
As for the money earned by the top comics, Chaplin made three comedies to Lloyd’s eleven in the 1920s, but Chaplin’s still made more money overall.
Did you know there was a film magazine publisher and producer called Wid Gunning? Are you any relation?
I have written a book about making THE THIRD GENIUS, but as the rights for the documentary have lapsed, it won’t be possible to bring the programme out on DVD with the book as I did with the Chaplin and as I planned with the Keaton book. What a shame,
I wish you the best of luck with the book.
Warmest wishes
Kevin Brownlow
I was quite taken aback that he responded so quickly, and with such detailed commentary, which I can't help but share here.
Dear Margaret Gunning
I am fascinated that you are so keen on Harold Lloyd. Me too, but it’s strange how people repeat the old cliches about his being ‘mechanical’ You will love John Bengtson’s book – it tells you so much about the places in which he worked.
You are a good writer, and it was a pleasure to read your extract. I would take issue with you on one subject – did they use obscenity when they swore in those days? T E Lawrence, in his account of barrack room life THE MINT, had his book banned because he repeated the swear words, which he was finally compelled to reprint like this; ---
But in talking to scores of silent film veterans, I heard plenty of swearing, but it was all profanity – ‘Jesus Christ’ – or ‘God almighty’ - presumably because of the strong Irish Catholic tradition in Hollywood.. When they got worked up it was ‘Son of a bitch’ I notice you use both for Hal Roach – ‘Jesus, Harold! Do you want to be fucking killed?’ (Roach’s family was from Cork, by the way.) You may be right, but I would be interested to know if you have any evidence.
I noticed, when I researched a script about silent era Hollywood (never made) how many words they used that have fallen out of fashion. ‘Everything’s jake!’ ‘Twenty-three skidoo’
By the way, motion picture makeup was yellow, not white. (The cameramen hated white )
As for the money earned by the top comics, Chaplin made three comedies to Lloyd’s eleven in the 1920s, but Chaplin’s still made more money overall.
Did you know there was a film magazine publisher and producer called Wid Gunning? Are you any relation?
I have written a book about making THE THIRD GENIUS, but as the rights for the documentary have lapsed, it won’t be possible to bring the programme out on DVD with the book as I did with the Chaplin and as I planned with the Keaton book. What a shame,
I wish you the best of luck with the book.
Warmest wishes
Kevin Brownlow
Ryan's Fifth
You wouldn't believe how long it takes (and how much experimental printing it requires) to make one of these little "Grandmark" cards ("Made with Love"). I got into it a couple of years ago, and now do it four times a year. Ryan is obsessed with cars. That's all you need to know!Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Haunted, haunted (and haunted: the trifecta)
I want it to stop, but it won't. Today I found out about the winner of the Westminster Kennel Club Best in Show: a Scottish deerhound named Hickory. But that wasn't the thing that grabbed me. It was the owner's name.
(From the news story)
This news came almost immediately after I watched a story on Dateline NBC about a young woman brutally murdered by a military hero gone mad. But it was her name that grabbed me:
(From the news story)
Hundreds of people filled a Belleville, Ont., funeral home Saturday afternoon as the community came together to honour Jessica Lloyd, the 27-year-old woman whose body was found on a rural road on Monday.
Before the service began, several members of the Canadian Forces entered the funeral home in uniform and wearing black armbands.
Small groups of people clustered outside the funeral home during the service, with one group of young women carrying a sign that said: "Rest in peace sweet angel."
Col. Russell Williams is facing first-degree murder charges in the death of Jessica Lloyd, 27, of Belleville, Ont.
On Friday, long lines of people had waited patiently outside the funeral home to attend the visitation for Lloyd, one of the alleged victims of Col. Russell Williams, the former commander of CFB Trenton.
Lloyd's cousin and brother both spoke at the service Saturday, and her brother paused to thank local law enforcement officials for their work on the case.
Before the service began, several members of the Canadian Forces entered the funeral home in uniform and wearing black armbands.
Small groups of people clustered outside the funeral home during the service, with one group of young women carrying a sign that said: "Rest in peace sweet angel."
Col. Russell Williams is facing first-degree murder charges in the death of Jessica Lloyd, 27, of Belleville, Ont.
On Friday, long lines of people had waited patiently outside the funeral home to attend the visitation for Lloyd, one of the alleged victims of Col. Russell Williams, the former commander of CFB Trenton.
Lloyd's cousin and brother both spoke at the service Saturday, and her brother paused to thank local law enforcement officials for their work on the case.
(P.S.: Less than half an hour after I posted this, I was washing dishes with the TV on in the background. A newsmagazine show I almost never watch called W5 came on, and the host announced himself: "Hi, I'm Lloyd Robertson."
Three? Well, yesterday there were two. Only.
Tell me there are no coincidences.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)