Of all the pop psychology detritus that litters our culture, none bothers me more than the fatuous idea of “closure.” People talk about it as if it were not only a real thing, but an obvious one. But “closure” is a purely literary concept, ill suited to describe the actual events of our lives.

By “literary,” I mean that it fulfills the esthetic necessity we humans feel to round out a story. A story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end (“but not necessarily in that order,” said French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard). For each of us, our “life story” is a kind of proto-fiction we create from the remembered episodes of our lives. We are, of course, the hero of our own life story, and the supporting characters all fit into a tidy plot.

But, of course, actual life is not like that. Rather it is a bee-swarm of interconnecting and interacting prismatic moments seen from the billion points of view of a riotously populated planet. There is no story, only buzzing activity. Eight billion points of view — and that is only counting the human ones. One assumes animals and even plants have their own points of view and no narrative can begin to encompass it all. It is all simply churn.

Of course, there are anecdotes, which are meant to be stories, and end, usually, with a punchline. Like a joke, they are self-contained. But our lives are not anecdotes, and tragedies, traumas, loss, are not self-contained. There is no punchline.

So, there is a smugness in the very idea that we can write “fin” at the completion of a story arc and pretend it means something real. It is just a structure imposed from outside.

In his recent book, Knife: Meditations After and Attempted Murder, author Salman Rushdie notes the meaninglessness of the concept of “closure.” After he was attacked by a would-be assassin in 2022, he came desperately close to death, but ultimately survived. The thought that he might face his attacker in court might bring some sort of closure is dismissed. He went through medical procedures and therapy, and even the writing of the book. “These things did not give me ‘closure,’ whatever that was, if it was even possible to find such a thing.” The thought of confronting his attacker in court became less and less meaningful.

Writers, in general, are put off by such lazy ideas as “closure.” Their job is to find words for actual experience, words that will convey something of the vivid actuality of events. Emily Bernard, author of Black is the Body was also the victim of a knife attack, and her book is a 218-page attempt to come to terms with her trauma: The book opens up a life in connection with the whole world. She never uses the word “closure.”

Both Bernard and Rushdie to their utmost to describe their attacks with verbal precision and without common bromides. It is what all serious writers attempt, with greater or lesser success. It is easy to fall into patterns of thought, cultural assumption, cliches. It is much harder to express experience directly, unfiltered.

The need to organize and structure experience is deeply embedded in the human experience. And art, whether literary, musical, cinematic or visual, requires structure. It is why we have sonnets and sonata-form, why we have frames around pictures, why we have three-act plays.

The fundamental structure of art is the exposition, the development, and the denouement. Stasis; destablization; reestablishment of order. It is the rock on which literature and art is founded. When we read an autobiography, there is the same tripartite form: early life; the rise to success with its impediments and challenges; and finally, the look back at “what we have learned.”

We read history books the same way, as if U.S. history ended with the signing of the Constitution, or with Appomattox, or the Civil Rights movement, or the election of Reagan. But history is a continuum, not a self-contained narrative. Books have to have a satisfying end, but life cannot.

Most of us have suffered some trauma in our lives. It could be minor, or it could be life-changing. Most often it is the death of someone we love. It could be a medical issue, or a divorce. We are wrenched from the calm and dropped into a turmoil. It can leave us shattered.

And the story-making gene kicks in and we see this disruption as the core of a story. We were in steady state, then we are torn apart, and finally we “find closure.” Or not. Really no, never. That is only for the story. The telling, not the experience.

In truth, the trauma is really one more blow, one more scar on the skin added to the older ones, one more knot on the string. We will all have suffered before, although the sharpness may have faded; we will all suffer again.

Closure is a lie. All there really is is endurance. As Rushdie put it, “Time might not heal all wounds, but it deadened the pain.” We carry all our wounds with us, adding the new on top of the old and partly obscuring what is buried.

There are myriad pop psychology tropes. They are like gnats flying around our heads. Each is a simplifying lie, a fabricated story attempting to gather into a comprehensible and digestible knot the infinite threads of a life.

I have written many times before about the conflation of language and experience, and how we tend to believe that language is a one-to-one mirror of reality, when the truth is that language is a parallel universe. It has its own structure and rules — the three-act play — while those of non-verbal life are quite other. And we will argue — even go to war — over differences that only matter in language (what is your name for the deity?)

Most of philosophy is now really just a branch of philology — it is about words and symbols. But while thoughtful people complain about the insular direction that philosophy has taken, it has really always been thus. Plato is never about reality: It is about language. His ideal bed is merely about the definition of the word, “bed.” As if existence were truly nouns and verbs — bits taken out of context and defined narrowly. Very like the question of whether something is a particle or a wave, when in truth, it is both. Only the observation (the definition) will harness it in one form or the other. It is all churn. πάντα χωρεῖ

A story attempts to make sense of the senseless. I’m not sure life would be possible without stories, from the earliest etiology of creation myth to the modern Big Bang. All those things that surpass understanding can only be comprehended in metaphorical form, i.e., the story.

But stories also come in forms that are complex or simple, and are true or patently silly. My beef with “closure” is that it isn’t a story that reflects reality, but a lie. A complacent lie.

Like most of popular psychology, it takes an idea that may have some germ of truth and husks away all the complex “but-ifs” and solidifies it into a commonly held bromide. It is psychobabble.

That is a word, invented by writer Richard Dean Rosen in 1975, which he defines as “a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It’s an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems.”

And afternoon TV shows, self-help books and videos, and newspaper advice columns are loaded with it. It is so ubiquitous that the general populace assume it must be legitimate. We toss around words such as co-dependent, denial, dysfunctional, empowerment, holistic, synergy, mindfulness, as though they are actually more than buzz words and platitudes. Such words short-circuit more meaningful understanding. Or a recognition that there may be no understanding to be had.

(In 1990, Canadian psychologist B.L. Beyerstein coined the word “neurobabble” as an extension of psychobabble, in which research in neuroscience enters the popular culture poorly understood, with such buzz words as neuroplasticity, Venus and Mars gender differences, the 10-percent-of-the-brain myth, and right- and left-brain oversimplifications.)

As a writer (albeit with no great claim to importance), I know how often I struggle to find the right word, phrase or metaphor to reach a level of precision that I don’t find embarrassing, cheap, or an easy deflection. Trying to find the best expression for something distinct, complex and personal — to try to be honest — is work.

This is true in all the arts: trying to find just the right brown by mixing pigments,; or the right note in a song that is surprising enough to be interesting, but still makes sense in the harmony you are writing in; or giving a character in a play an action that rings true. We are so mired in habits of thought, of culture, that finding that exactitude is flying through flak.

Don’t blame the actor

May 6, 2024

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Recently, Turner Classic Movies ran a cheesy science-fiction film I had never seen before. I grew up on bad sci-fi movies from the 1950s and always enjoyed them, in the uncritical way a 9-year-old watches movies on television: Quality never entered the picture. At that age, oblivious there even was such a thing. It wiggled on the screen; I watched.

But this film was released in 1968, too late for me. When I had gone off to college, the only films I watched were snooty art films. And so I never got to see The Green Slime. Now, here it was, and it was prodigiously awful. Actor Robert Horton fights an alien invasion of tentacled, red-eyed monsters.

Everything about The Green Slime was awful: the acting, the lighting, the set design, the special effects — and, of course, the science. Or lack of it. There was the garish color of sets and costumes and the over-use of the zoom lens, the way of made-for-TV movies of the era. I have outgrown my open-hearted love of bad science fiction. I stared in wonder at the horribleness I was seeing on the TV screen.

And it was the acting, more than anything, that appalled me. Why were these actors so stiff, wooden, even laughable? And something I guess I had always known, but never really thought about jumped to mind: Actors are at the mercy of writers. The dialog in Green Slime was stupid, awkward and wooden.

There is some dialog so leaden, so unsayable, that even Olivier can’t bring it off. Robert Horton, while no Olivier, was perfectly fine on Wagon Train, but here he looked like he was lip-synching in a foreign tongue.

“Wait a minute — are you telling me that this thing ‘reproduced’ itself inside the decontamination chamber? And, as we stepped up the current, it just … it just grew?”

I remember, years ago, thinking that Robert Armstrong was a stiff. I had only seen him in King Kong and thought he was a wooden plug of an actor (not as bad, perhaps as Bruce Cabot, but still bad. But years later, I’d seen him in other films where he was just fine. Even in Son of Kong, he was decent. But no one, absolutely no one can pull off a line like “Some big, hardboiled egg gets a look at a pretty face and bang, he cracks up and goes sappy!”

Even in a famous movie, clunky dialog can make an otherwise fine actor look lame. Alec Guinness and James Earl Jones may be able to pull off the unspeakable dialog of the original Star Wars, but for years, I thought Mark Hamill was a cardboard cut-out. It was only when seeing him in other projects I realized that Hamill could actually act. I had a similarly low opinion of Harrison Ford because of what he was forced to mouth in those three early franchise films. George Lucas did them no favors.

There is certainly a range of talent in movies and some genuinely untalented actors who got their parts by flashy looks or sleeping with the producer. But I have come to the opinion that most (certainly not all) actors in Hollywood films are genuinely talented. Perhaps limited, but talented, and given a good script and a helpful director, can do fine work.

One thinks of Lon Chaney Jr., who is wooden, at best, as the Wolfman. But he is heartbreaking as Lenny in Of Mice and Men — perhaps the only chance he ever got to show off what he was actually capable of.

“Lon Chaney was a stiff, but he had Lenny to redeem him,” said my brother Craig, when we discussed this question. Craig can be even more critical than me.

He continued, “I’ve been trying to think of the worst actors ever — someone who has never said a word like a human being. There are a lot of people who got into a movie because they were famous for something else (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Joe Louis, Audie Murphy) so it’s hard to judge them fairly as actors, like you can’t criticize a pet dog for barking the national anthem but not hitting the high notes. But even Johnny Weissmuller was pretty effective in the first Tarzan; Elvis had Jailhouse Rock where he actually played a character; and Madonna can point to Desperately Seeking Susan without shame. (Everything else, shameful. There just isn’t enough shame in the world anymore.)

“There are any number of old cowboy stars who couldn’t speak a believable line of dialog and that can’t be totally blamed on the writing. (Gabby Hayes rose above it.) There are bad actors who still had some life and energy about them that made them fun to watch. Colin Clive was silly, and he made me giggle, so he was entertaining. And Robert Armstrong. But there’s just no excuse for Bruce Cabot.

“I’ve never actually seen a Steven Seagal movie,” Craig said, “but I know enough to say with conviction that he should have been drowned as a baby.”

I said Craig can be tougher than me, but here, I have to concur.

“It’s probably not fair to pick out silent movie actors for being silly and over the top, but there is Douglas Fairbanks to prove you can be silent and great.”

Silent acting was a whole different thing, and hard to judge nowadays. As different from modern film acting as film acting is from acting live on stage. The styles don’t often translate. John Barrymore was the most acclaimed Shakespearean actor in America in the early years of the 20th century, but his style on celluloid came across as pure ham. (Yes, he was often parodying himself on purpose, but that doesn’t gainsay what I am saying about acting styles).

Every once in a while, I see some poor slob I always thought was a horrible actor suddenly give an outstanding performance. Perhaps we have underestimated the importance of the casting director. A well-placed actor in a particular part can be surprising perfection. There is creativity in some casting offices that is itself an artform. You find the right look, voice, or body language, and a minor part becomes memorable. Some actors are wonderful in a limited range of roles. I can’t imagine Elisha Cook as a superhero, but he is perfect as a gunsel.

And Weissmuller was the perfect Tarzan before his clumsy line reading became obvious in the Jungle Jim series. I am reminded of Dianne Wiest in Bullets Over Broadway: “No, no, don’t speak. Don’t speak. Please don’t speak. Please don’t speak.”

Keep in mind, actors are subject to so many things that aren’t in their control. In addition to good writing, they need a sympathetic director, decent lighting, thoughtful editing, even good costume design. Filmmaking is collaborative and it isn’t always the actor’s fault if he comes across like a Madame Tussaud waxwork. I’ve even seen Charlton Heston be good.

In reality, I think of film actors much as major league ballplayers. The worst baseball player on a major league team may be batting under the Mendoza line, and even leading the league in fielding errors, but in comparison with any other ballplayers, from college level to minor leagues, he is superhumanly talented. Even Bob Uecker managed to hit a home run off Sandy Koufax. I doubt any of us could have done that. And so, we have to know who we’re comparing them to.

I saw a quote from Pia Zadora the other day (she just turned 70) and with justifiable humility, she said, “I am often compared to Meryl Streep, as in ‘Pia Zadora is no Meryl Streep.’” Still, compared to you or me, she is Bob Uecker.

I have had to reassess my judgment of many actors. I had always thought of John Wayne as a movie star and not an actor. But I have to admit, part of my dislike of his acting was disgust over his despicable political beliefs. And I thought of him as the “cowboys and Indians” stereotype.

But I have now looked at some of his films with a clearer eye, and realize that, yes, most of his films never asked anything more from him than to be John Wayne — essentially occupying a John Wayne puppet suit — but that when tasked by someone such as John Ford or Howard Hawks, he could actually inhabit a character. “Who knew the son-of-a-bitch could actually act!” Ford himself exclaimed.

But there it is, in The Searchers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Red River, The Quiet Man, Rio Bravo, The Shootist. Those were all true characterizations. (Does all that cancel out The Alamo or The Conqueror or The War Wagon, or balance all the undistinguished Westerns he made? We each have to judge for ourselves).

Even in his early Monogram oaters, playing Singing Sandy, he brought a naturalness to his presence that is still exceptional in the genre (and researching Wayne, my gasts were flabbered at how good looking he was as a young man. So handsome he was almost pretty. And that hip-swinging gait that predates Marilyn Monroe. “It’s like Jell-O on springs.” It seems notable that so much feminine could become the model of such lumpen masculinity.)

And even great actors have turned in half-ass performances, or appeared in turkeys. In Jaws: The Revenge, Michael Caine has to utter things like, “Remind to tell you about the time I took 100 nuns to Nairobi!” Caine famously said, “I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.”

Even Olivier had his Clash of the Titans.

Actors have to work, and they don’t always get to choose. “An actor who is not working is not an actor,” said Christopher Walken. The more talented actors sometimes get to be picky, but the mid-range actor, talented though he or she may be, sometimes just needs the paycheck.

I sometimes think of all the jobbing actors, the character actors of the 1930s, working from picture to picture, or the familiar names on TV series from the ’50s and ’60s — the Royal Danos, the John Andersons, the Denver Pyles, dressed as a grizzled prospector for a week on one show, going home at night for dinner and watching Jack Benny on the tube, and then driving back to the set the next morning and getting back into those duds. And then, next week dressing as a banker for another show, putting together a string of jobs to make a living. And all of them complete professionals, knowing what they are doing and giving the show what it needs. A huge amount of talent without ever having their names above the title.

Royal Dano times four

And so, I feel pity for those actors of equal talent who never broke through, or who were stuck in badly-written movies and couldn’t show off their chops. When I watch reruns of old episodic TV, I pay a good deal more attention than I ever did when I was young, to all the parts that go into making such a show. I notice the lighting, the editing, the directing, and most of all, the writing. The writing seems to separate, more than anything else, the good series from the mediocre ones. And how grateful those working actors must feel when they get a script that gives them a chance to shine.

Es ist genug

April 20, 2024

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Is just being alive enough? It is a question I have been facing, with continued difficulty, ever since I retired a dozen years ago after 25 years as a newspaper writer.

For all those years, and for the many years before, I held jobs that contributed, in some way — often small, even negligible — to the business of society. I had a sense of being productive. This is not to make any major claim about how important my production was. It was admittedly quite minor. But it was a contribution.

Doing so was a part of my sense of self, that being a productive member of society was not merely a way of occupying my time, but was actually a moral duty. If I were slacking off, I would be harming my society. And even worse, harming my immortal soul (something I don’t actually believe in).

This is not something I thought much about on a conscious level. In fact, when I do think about it, I realize it’s quite silly. Society gets along quite well without my input. But it is buried deep down somewhere in my psyche that I must be productive.

The opposite of being productive is being lazy. And I can’t help but feel that laziness is a moral failing. I have tried to excavate my brain to discover where this sense comes from and I cannot be sure.

The easy answer comes up, “Protestant work ethic,” and it is true that I was raised in such an environment. But religion has never played an important part of my life. As I have said before, I have no religion; I’m not even an atheist.

But somehow, I seem to have been injected with this guilt about not always doing something. Making something; teaching something; selling something; performing something.

It is true that my grandparents, on both sides of the family were quite religious. My father’s parents were even infected with a kind of Lutheran religious mania. They went to church three times a week, prayed constantly, and when they were young, before World War II, my father and his siblings were not allowed to listen to the radio, to music or to dance. In fact, this church-craziness led my father to promise never to inflict this kind of joyless religion on his children.

And so, although we all went to church on Christmas and Easter, it was only to make my mother’s mother happy. She was religious in a more normal way, and was always kind and loving. But I and my two brothers managed to escape our childhoods without any religious sentiment at all.

Or so it seems. While I have no supernatural beliefs — the whole idea of a god or gods seems pointless — something of the culture seems to have leaked in.

For all of my 25 years at the newspaper, I averaged about three stories per week. I always felt as if I were slacking off and that I should be writing more. My editors constantly told me I was the most productive member of the features staff. But it never felt that way. Even on vacations, I took daily notes before going to bed, and used those notes to write travel stories for the paper when I got back to the office.

Before I retired, I used the computerized data base to check on my output and discovered I had written something like 3 million words during my tenure. If an average novel is about 90,000 words, it means I wrote the equivalent of more than 30 novels in that time. My last project for the paper was a 40,000 word history of architecture in Phoenix.

And so, when I left my job, it was like stepping off a moving bus, racing to a halt and trying to keep my balance.

My colleagues at the paper bought me a blog site as a retirement gift, and I began writing for it instead of the newspaper. At first, I was writing an average of three blog posts per week, unchanged from my time at work.

I have slowed down greatly since then, and am now aiming for about three posts a month. I don’t always make that many. But I have written more than 750 blog entries in the 12 years since I left the newspaper. which is still more than one a week. And I also write a monthly essay for the online journal of the Spirit of the Senses salon group of Phoenix. That’s an additional 103 essays, each averaging about 1500 words. Blog and journal, it all adds up to about an additional million and a half words written since giving up employment. Old writers never really retire, they just stop getting paid.

And none of this is paid work. I write because I cannot not write. When I am not blogging, I am writing e-mails. Old-fashioned e-mails that are more like actual letters than the quick one- or two-sentence blips that constitute most e-mails. Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Nilsen?

But that all brings me back to my original concern: Is just being alive enough? Can I in good conscience spend an hour or two sitting in my back yard and listening to the dozens of birds chattering on, watching the clouds form and reform as they sail across the sky dome, enjoying the random swaying of the tallest tree branches in the intermittent wind? Thinking unconnected thoughts and once in a while noticing that I am breathing?

In 1662, Lutheran composer Franz Joachim Burmeister wrote a hymn titled Es ist genug (“It is enough”) that Johann Sebastian Bach later wrote into one of his more famous cantatas. It is notable for including a tritone in its melody. And, in 1935 Alban Berg incorporated it in his violin concerto, written “in memory of an angel” after the death of 18-year-old Manon Gropius, daughter of Alma Mahler. It is one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful musical compositions of the 20th century. Es ist genug.

I remember reading that in India, the idealized life is understood to be a youth of play, and adulthood of work and an old age of seeking spiritual truths. That one is meant to lay down one’s tools and contemplate what it has all been about. And I take some comfort in the possibility that, at the age of 76, it is now my job no longer to produce, but to absorb all those things that were irrelevant to a normally productive life. To notice my own breathing; to feel the air on my skin; to recognize my tiny spot at the axis of my own infinitesimal consciousness in an expansive cosmos. To attempt to simply exist and to feel the existence as it passes.

Revisiting old friends

April 8, 2024

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There is a class of movie that deserves special mention. The films aren’t necessarily the best, although they tend to be decent. They don’t usually show up on Top 10 lists or all time greats. But the fact is, that when they show up on TV, often late at night, we will watch them over and over. I don’t necessarily tune in on purpose, and don’t set the DVR to record, but if I tune in halfway through, I’ll see them out to the end.

These are movies we know almost by heart. There is an amiability to them. Like a favorite tune we like to hum along with, I’ll recall the dialog or the set pieces. A good tune never wears out its welcome.

I thought about this one night when I was clicking the clickerator and came upon Support Your Local Sheriff. It was bedtime and I was about to turn off the tube, but instead, I sat back down and saw the thing through. Not a notably good movie, but just so pleasant, that I watched yet again to see Walter Brennan do his Walter Brennan imitation. And there’s Bruce Dern and Jack Elam, and Gene Evans and Henry Jones and Harry Morgan and Walter Burke. All great character actors doing what they do best: carefully etched characters, albeit caricatures, but all memorable and distinct.

This is not a claim that the movie is one of the great classics of cinema, but I can’t help but just enjoy the heck out of it whenever it’s on. Old friends I’d drop in on and visit.

And it’s far from the only such film. There’s a whole class of them. Among notable “rewatchables” are My Cousin Vinny or Key Largo or The Blues Brothers. Such a list will be entirely personal, although there are probably movies that show up on a majority of lists, the consensus rewatchables.

There are movies I will choose to watch again and again. They are favorites and I will seek them out. But this list isn’t about that, but about happening on one when channel surfing and finding one that is an old shoe, comfy, familiar. I have the dialog memorized, and no matter if it’s just starting or soon ending, I will keep it on and watch, under various levels of engagement, until it ends. Not so much movies I choose to watch, but that I happen upon and stay with.

There are movies that, because of this habit, I have seen the end of many times, but seldom see the beginning. For all the times I’ve seen the beginning of Airplane! or The Fifth Element, I’ve seen their endings at least a dozen times. You catch these films mid-flight and ride until they land.

(There is a subset of films where it is only the beginning that I watch over and over — If Turner Classic Films is showing 2001: A Space Odyssey, I will watch the prehistoric beginning but then tune out. Not that I don’t think the rest of the movie is good, but because it is only the opening that has this over-and-over quality of a favorite song that scratches a certain cinematic itch.)

When I consider what makes a movie rewatchable by this standard, there are a few things that seem to be true.

First, plot doesn’t matter much. Movies that I will stay to watch are composed of memorable set pieces rather than a story with a goal-oriented ending. It is the set-pieces that I want to see, each scene a mini-story in itself.

Second, they feature memorable dialog. Snappy chatter and witty responses.

Third, they feature memorable characters, whether germane to the plot or not, and usually played by memorable character actors.

Sometimes the attraction is none of the above, but just how bad the movie is. My brother says, “Growing up, I’d watch any movie with robots in it. Still will. I’ll visit most any ’50s movie with a monster or a rocket ship (or monster in a rocket ship). Stupid and cheesy and incompetent don’t matter.”

And so, Plan 9 From Outer Space is a Class-A dip-in-at-any-time film (I hesitate to even use the word “film” in this context, as the word implies a certain level of craftsmanship famously missing in this “classic.”) But it has memorably dippy dialog (“We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friend: Future events such as these will affect you in the future.”) It has memorable characters, like Vampira or Tor Johnson. And it has character actors, such as Lyle Talbot and cowboy star Tom Keene, doing their best with the unspeakable script.

At the opposite end of the quality spectrum is Citizen Kane, which is the acme of episodic great dialog with wonderful actors. Lots of scenes to remember in discrete chunks, any of which can be pulled out and dissected line by line and feel complete in themselves.

I came up with a list of about 40 films that fill the bill and I know there are at least that many again I have forgotten to include. Among them are The Bride of Frankenstein (mostly for the scenes with Ernest Thesiger), Them!, Duck Soup, Dracula, Rio Bravo, and Beetlejuice. There is no average quality level, they run from Seventh Seal to Harold and Kumar Go to the White Castle.

The most important quality of most of the films on my list (although not all of them) is that episodic structure. Francis Coppola’s Godfather is often described as “operatic,” and that is dead-on: Like opera, the rewatchable film is made up of recitatives, arias and choruses. And the same way you can make a concert program of favorite arias, you can do the same with favorite movie scenes.

I will watch any black-and-white Fred Astaire film for the dance scenes. And any film with a Busby Berkeley extravaganza in it, although, once the plot creaks back into action, I’ll tune out. Each Berkeley choreography is an esthetic whole complete in itself.

The opening 20 minutes of Tarkovsky’s Solaris is intensely beautiful and I will set my DVR for it, just for those minutes, I don’t often take on the whole, long film that trails behind.

Bogart and Charles Waldron, upper left; with Sonia Darrin, upper right; with Dorothy Malone, lower left; with Lauren Bacall, lower right

The essential set-piece rewatchable film is Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep. You cannot watch it for the plot. As a whodunnit, it is hopeless. But each scene is a carefully crafted gem, beginning with perhaps my favorite, Bogart’s interview with the old General Sternwood. (“If I seem a bit sinister as a parent, Mr. Marlowe, it’s because my hold on life is too slight to include any Victorian hypocrisy. I need hardly add that any man who has lived as I have and who indulges, for the first time, in parenthood, at my age, deserves all he gets.”) Includes verbal fencing with Lauren Bacall and Martha Vickers (“Your not very tall, are you?” “I try to be.”) Snappy parrying with Sonia Darrin (“You do sell books. Hmm?” “What do those look like, grapefruit?”) A racy scene with Dorothy Malone skirting the boundaries of the Code, and lines with the cab driver Joy Barlow, John Ridgely (Eddie Mars), Regis Toomey, Charles D. Brown (Norris) and Louis Heydt (Joe Brody), to say nothing about some really cruel lines given to Bob Steele as Canino.

In the end, you don’t really care who did what to whom, but you are grabbed by the gloss and flash of the individual scenes. Which makes Big Sleep the champ of rewatchable movies.

Pulp Fiction is another film built from scene-blocks, in this case all shuffled around. Is there anything more memorable — or more extraneous to the plot — than Christopher Walken explaining the provenance of a watch? It seems that the best parts of the film are all those that are completely unnecessary for the story. “You know what they call the Big Mac in France?”

A film like North by Northwest might seem to be about a through-driven story, but really, it is also just a series of memorable scenes strung together. Each scene — the cropduster attack; the auction scene; the Mount Rushmore scene; and the final dirty joke — are all just pearls on a string.

Many of the series movies from Hollywood in the ’30s and ’40s are endlessly rewatchable, in part because what plots they have are practically interchangeable. “I’ll watch any Charlie Chan,” says my brother, and TCM devotee, Craig. ”I’ll watch Mr. Moto, but they are a rung below Charlie Chan, and the Falcon movies are a rung below that, and Boston Blackie, another rung down, but, hell, I’ll still watch them.”

You just want to soak up the cinematic ambience of their docksides and back alleys. The fog, the boat horns, the apartment staircases, the eavesdropping at closed doors.

“Mostly, my list taunts me, saying ‘You are a man of Low Tastes,’ and I guess it’s true,” Craig says. “And my list seems to be almost all American, and old. But these are just the movies that occur to me off the top of my old and balding head. There are a ton of movies that could be on my list, if I could remember them.”

The first movie I began watching endlessly was King Kong, which I first saw when I was in first or second grade and was shown over and over on New York’s Channel 9 (WOR-TV). In the seven decades that have followed, I must have seen it close to a hundred times — maybe more. I will still watch it whenever I catch it being played. And that despite the creaky borrowed plot (mainly from the silent Lost World) the stilted dialog, and the acting, where Bruce Cabot shows off all the acting prowess of a loblolly pine.

It was Kong that showed to me the possibility that a movie was worth watching multiple times. There are those who don’t partake, for whom the main interest in the film is the plot and having once seen it, “I know how it ends, so why would I watch it again?” And, indeed, there are many movies for which that is the main draw: The story line pulls you along and having once satisfied your need to know “what happens next,” you have emptied the film of its meaningful content.

But, for me, the movies I’m talking about are more like music. You can listen to Beethoven’s Fifth many times, drawing something fresh from it with each hearing. Or listen to the Beatles’ Hey Jude over and over, and each time, it tickles just the spot that needs the stimulus. Bingo. Dead on.

Who ever heard of someone who didn’t want to hear their favorite song again because “I’ve already heard it?” (I remember that bastion if intellectual curiosity Ronald Reagan saying “You’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all.”)

I will never get enough of any of the Thin Man movies, even Song of. Nor will I turn down The Thing with James Arness, nor M with Peter Lorre, nor Touch of Evil, nor Time Bandits.

You see this is an eclectic list of movies, and not based on quality alone, nor on subject matter or genre, but entirely on that subjective and personal sense of rewatchability.

What is on your list?

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Loop de Louvre

March 24, 2024

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I’ve been to the Louvre in Paris a number of times, but no matter how long I spend there, I never feel as if I’ve seen more than two percent of it. It is vast. It is the largest museum in the world, with 782,910 square feet of floor space (topping the No. 2 museum, St. Petersburg’s Hermitage, by more than 60,000 sq. feet) and a collection of more than 600,000 pieces.

It’s where you go to find the Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo.

It’s one of the oldest museums around, but never seems quite finished. It began as a royal palace in the 12th century, and has been added on to, parts burned down, parts replaced, and even a glass pyramid added to the top.

When Louis XIV moved the court from the Louvre to Versailles in 1682, the building became a warehouse for kingly treasures and much of his art collection. in 1699, the first “open house,” or salon was held, and for a century, the royal academy of art was located there.

The French Revolution ended the monarchy, and all the art once owned by the king became public property, and in 1793, the new government decreed that the Louvre should be open to the citizens as a free art museum.

But soon after, the collection expanded exponentially, as Napoleon Bonaparte conquered half of the continent, and sent back to Paris a good deal of the art from conquered lands. He even had the museum renamed Musée Napoléon. That didn’t last, but neither did Napoleon.

Over the 19th century, the museum collection grew, from bequests, purchases and colonial expropriations. For a while, it included a whole section of Pre-Columbian art from the New World, but that spun out into its own museum, leaving the Louvre for the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in 1887; in 1945, the Louvre’s extensive collections of Asian art were moved to the Guimet Museum; and by 1986, all the museum’s art made after 1848, including Impressionist and Modernist work, was transferred to the Musée d’Orsay, a refurbished railways station. It seemed the Louvre kept bursting its seams.

Then came François Mitterrand. Serving as French president from 1981-1995, Mitterrand conjured up the Grand Project to transform the cultural profile of Paris, with additional monuments, buildings, museums, and refurbishment of existing locations. Taxes were raised to accomplish this project, said to be on a scale that only Louis XIV had attempted.

Part of this plan was the Grand Louvre, to remodel and expand the museum, and to regularize (as much as possible) the maze and warren of galleries in the old accretion of palace rooms. The most visible of the changes was the addition of the glass pyramid in the center courtyard of the palace. It was designed by architect I.M. Pei and although it has long become part of the landscape of the museum, it still angers many of the country’s more conservative grouches. In 2017, The American Institute of Architects noted that the pyramid “now rivals the Eiffel Tower as one of France’s most recognizable architectural icons.”

The entire central underground of the courtyard was remodeled to create a new entrance, and to attempt to make sense of the confusion of corridors, rooms, staircases and doorways. It was completed in 1989.

Now, one cannot think of the Louvre without its pyramid, but speaking as a visitor, while the Hall Napoléon (the underground foyer) has made some sense of the confusion, I cannot honestly claim the chaos has been tamed. The museum remains a labyrinth and you can be easily lost.

And, unless you have budgeted a month or more to spelunk the entire museum, you will need to prioritize what you want to see in a visit — or two, or three.

Quick word: Forget the Mona Lisa. It’s a tiny little painting of little artistic note, buried under a Times Square-size crowd of tourists all wanting to see the “most famous painting in the world.” It is what good PR will get you. It may be a historically noteworthy piece as one of the very few paintings Leonardo completed, but there is much better to be seen in the museum. Don’t exhaust yourself in the mêlée.

Seek out the unusual, like Jan Provost’s Sacred Allegory, from about 1490, which I like to call “God’s Bowling Ball;” or The Ascension, by Hans Memling, from the same time, which shows Christ rising into heaven, but shows only his feet dangling from the clouds. There’s some quirky stuff on the walls of the Louvre.

One of the goals of the museum is to collect, preserve, and display the cultural history of the Western world. This is our art, the stuff we have made for more than 3,000 years, from Ancient Sumer and Egypt, through classical Greece and Rome, wizzing past the Middle Ages and brightening with the Renaissance and the centuries that followed. You get the whole panoply and see what tropes have persisted, the ideas that have evolved, the stuff of our psychic landscape.

(See how the fallen soldier in Jacques-Louis David’s Intervention of the Sabine Women echoes in Picasso’s Guernica. One way of looking at all cultural history is as an extended conversation between the present and the past. The reverberations are loud and clear.)

You can look at the paintings on the wall and see them for the beauty of their colors and brushwork, or the familiar (or not-so-familiar) stories they depict; or you can see them as the physical embodiment of the collective unconscious.

I have always been a museum-goer. From my earliest times as a boy going to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, through my days as an art critic, rambling through the art museums of the U.S. and abroad. There is little I get more pleasure from.

One soaks up the visual patterns, makes connections, recognizes the habits of humankind. Recognizes the shared humanity. The differences between me and Gilgamesh are merely surface tics. When I see the hand of the Roman emperor, it is my hand. I feel kinship with all those whose works and images appear in the galleries.

And so, if it is two percent of the Louvre I have managed to absorb, I know the rest is there, and that it is me, also.

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Springtime

March 16, 2024

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It was 74 degrees today in the Blue Ridge Mountains and spring is edging its way in. There is still some cold weather coming — Monday night is predicted to drop to the mid-20s. But the signs of shifting seasons are all over.

The daffodils have popped, the Bradford Pears are white lace, and the empty winter tree branches are feathering out with buds.

According to the calendar, the new year begins mid-winter, but in practical terms it is the reawakening of nature that lets us know that we can all start over again. The year circles around to the beginning and we can put our overcoats back into the closet.

It is a comforting thought, but the fact is, the recurrence of spring sits in equipoise with the hurtling forward of age. The trees come alive again, but I only get older.

I have seen 76 springs, and when I was a boy, each season lasted years. Summer vacation seemed endless and the next school year might as well begin in a science-fiction future, eons away. As a grown-up, the year passed by almost unnoticed. Winter just meant sloppy roads; summer just meant sweat and iced tea. I went to my job every day, no matter.

But I am old now, and the season change has yet another meaning.

One of the impenetrable facts of being 76 years old, even in decently good health, is that I have a limited number of springs ahead of me.

I have to face the possibility that this one now could be the last; there is no counting on next year or the year after that.

It’s not that I am anxious over the likelihood of my existence being cut short, after all, over eight decades, from 1948 to now, it has been a long and I hope fruitful life.

But the uncertainty of future springs makes this one more necessary. I am paying attention more than ever before, and although I have always enjoyed the spring, it feels closer to the bone this year.

I don’t want to miss a moment of it.

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Epiphanies

March 9, 2024

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We were camping at Huntington Beach in South Carolina, and I woke up before dawn and walked down to the ocean. The sky was beginning to brighten to the east and I watched for the coming sunrise.

When the sun broke the horizon, its motion was noticeable and I watched it slowly lift from the water. But then, something happened: The sun stopped dead in its tracks and my frame of reference shifted involuntarily and instead of the sun moving up, the earth I was standing on jerked forward, as if I were coming over the top of a ferris wheel and I nearly lost my balance. It seemed the ground was moving away from under my feet, toward the immobile sun.

At the same time, seawaves reflected the bright copper sheen and the shadowed portions of the water formed a network of glossy black, making the entire landscape before me into a shimmering enameled lattice and more, it seemed not so much to reflect the sun, but rather to be glowing from within.

The magic lasted only a few moments and the earth stood still again and the sun began climbing once more. I felt that I had been given a chance to see how things really were — a stationary sun and a rotating earth — and the whole, with its copper and black waves, was unutterably beautiful.

Such visions are epiphanies.

Of course, “Epiphany” means different things. In the Roman church, it is the name for the visitation of the wise men; in the Orthodox churches, it marks the baptism of Jesus and the descent of the dove; according to some early Church fathers, it marks the miracle at the wedding feast at Cana; and for Syriac Christians, it celebrates the rising light of dawn, as expressed in Luke 1:78. In all these versions, it refers to the recognition of divinity as it shines forth.

But I take the word for its otherwise secular meanings. It is a sudden recognition of reality, or the momentary transformation of the ordinary into something strange, or the psychological state of overlaying the personal in registration with the objective world, the way you might orient a map to match the landscape in front of you. Then the two meld into a single thing. In any version, you experience a moment out of time.

It is the word James Joyce used when referring to such experiences, usually something quite ordinary, but seen in a new, illuminating way. A theophany with no theos.

In his early novel, Stephen Hero, he defined these epiphanies as “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.” And he “believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.”

In an early manuscript, Joyce collected 22 pages of these moments he found in his own life, and used many of them later in his finished works. At one point, there were at least 71 epiphanies written down in Joyce’s own handwriting.

Later in his career, the term grew in meaning and significance, and tends to mean moments of behavior observed or experienced that seem to metaphorically summarize some insight or contain “meaning” in some way or other.

In ordinary usage, “meaning” is a term of translation: “This means that,” but it has another purpose: significance. An experiences doesn’t have to “mean” something that we can express in paraphrase, or take as a lesson we have learned, but can have meaning, unexplainable except in terms of itself, as when a dream feels meaningful even if you don’t know why.

I believe we all have such moments. They tend to stick with us. I know I have had them throughout my life. The first one I can remember was at the age of four or five and driving with my family along the Palisades at night, looking across the Hudson River at the constellation of lights in the darkened Manhattan buildings. It was my first remembered experience of something I would call beauty. I couldn’t wait for the next time we visited my grandparents so I could see those lights again.

Often we function as actors in a stage set, with the world as backdrop. Our focus is on the particular action or conversation, with the set merely happenstance; it could easily be some other set. But the epiphany is when you step back and see actor, set, words, as a single unit, all of a piece. We can live our lives barely noticing the world we walk through, except as it helps or hinders us — it is functional. But that moment comes when the boundary between us and the rest of it all evaporates and we sense ourselves as part of a whole. That instant is the epiphany and for it, time stops, even as the clock keeps moving. It is an uncanny feeling.

It feels as if you are taken out of the real world for a moment, but actually, you are dropped into it. The illusion of separateness is dispelled and you become face to face with something bigger.

When I was about 10, my younger brother, Craig, and I thought to follow the brook that ran through our property in New Jersey, through the woods behind the house, to see where it went. It ended as it fed into the Hackensack River. We then followed the river to the Oradell Reservoir and followed the railroad tracks. We were crossing a little bridge when a train arrived and we ducked under the bridge, sitting on the concrete abutment not more than a couple of feet from the screaming wheels of the train as it passed over. Time may have stopped, but the train didn’t. It was thrilling. It was untameably real.

In high school, I spent one summer vacation in Europe, crossing over the Atlantic on a steamship. After days of faceless unchanging ocean horizon, one night came when on deck I looked out and saw pinpricks of light in the darkness, maybe 8 or ten miles away. It was the Orkney Islands and I was dumbstruck at their remoteness. They were ghostly lights strung out along the horizon in a seemingly infinite blackness. They seemed unmoored to this now.

There is often sense of the uncanny, of something we don’t quite see, but feel it is there.

On night, I was driving up the Big Sur, between San Luis Obispo and Monterey. With the sun finally below the horizon, it was completely black, but with grades of black showing in front of me. The blackest black is rock, rising in cliffs to the right side of the road. The glossiest black was the ocean on the left below. As I whipped along the road with my up-beams gleaming back at me from the reflectors on the road stripe, I could occasionally see a flash of light in the corner of my eye. When I looked, there is nothing, but when I turned back to the road, it flashed again. But there seemed to be something riding beside my car. I called it the “God of the Nighttime Highway.”

It turned out to be my own running lights reflecting off the guard rail at the edge of the road. But for 10 minutes or so, until I figured it out, the experience was eerie and I almost believed in a spirit world that I don’t believe in.

I imagine it must be episodes like this that gave rise to the myths and folklores of the ancients. The experience feels so real, it must be real.

And these epiphanies are not especially rare. I’ve had many in my life. My wife and I had left Yellowstone National Park early on a gray, rainy day, driving eastward on the North Fork Highway through Wyoming’s Shoshone Canyon. At the canyon’s mouth the land broadened out and dipped down into vast plains with the Buffalo Bill Reservoir in the distance. We had just turned on the radio and the skies suddenly parted and the scene before us was drenched in sunlight just as the radio began pouring out the early morning sign-on music of “America the Beautiful,” and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang, “Oh beautiful for spacious skies and amber waves of grain…” And there it was, before us, just as in the song, and we had to laugh, but also we had to recognize the emotional power of what we were seeing.

Once, camping at the Outer Banks with my friend Sandro, we walked along the beach at Hatteras Point at night, carrying a Coleman lantern. The air was so humid that it was on the edge of becoming fog. And the light we carried threw our shadows up into the sky, among the stars, and we could see we were giants.

Or, visiting Verdun in France, my wife and I drove through the old World War I battlefields that had been blasted into moonscape by artillery fire, but now had grown back into woodlands. But there, between the tree trunks, the shell craters were still there, pock-marking the ground nearly a hundred years later.

I’ve had that strange recognition many times when visiting old battle sites — as if the past is always present. I’ve had it at Antietam, at the Little Bighorn, at Shiloh, at the Normandy beaches, at Wounded Knee, at Appomattox. The epiphany that breaks through isn’t just history as you read it in books, but rather the persistence of events: that what once happened is still happening; wave ripples running out through time.

I once spent the night alone on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. My campsite was a good 30 miles from any other human being and the sky was darker than any I had seen before or since and the stars were spilled like beach sand across the expanse, with the Milky Way splitting the dome in two. About 3 in the morning, I woke up, left the tent and sat on the hood of my car, staring up at the infinity. I stared for maybe 20 minutes or a half hour, and a kind of hypnosis took over and I no longer felt like I was on my back staring up, but rather as if I were at the forward point of a planet racing through infinite space toward those stars. The planet was at my back, and I could almost feel the wind on my face as this planetary vehicle was racing forward toward the lights.

And, of course, this is exactly what was happening. The ordinary sense of terra firma under a wide sky is the illusion. The recognition of a giant ball of earth and water raging through an infinite void is the reality. Sometimes we see it that way.

And that is the epiphany.

Covering your budget

March 3, 2024

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When I was a young and poor college student and wanted to buy a classical music LP, I was faced with a choice. Most of the biggest names in the field recorded for one of the major labels: Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, Columbia, RCA or Angel (aka EMI). And those disks were pricey.

In some cases, I would just have to suck it up and spend more than I really should have. But there was an alternative. There were budget labels, offering their records at cheapie prices.

Most were sub-labels of the pricier brands, as Seraphim sold older versions of Angel releases, or Victrola from RCA and Odyssey for Columbia. And Vanguard Everyman. And there were some bottom of the barrel labels, with really poor recordings of Eastern European, and Russian musicians, such as Melodiya and Urania. Those sounded awful.

And their album covers were usually cheaply designed, or copies of how the premium brands showed themselves, with photos of the conductors or musicians, or with pretty landscapes. After all, classical music was serious. It was art.

But then came the Baroque revival, and instead of Beethoven symphonies, we were offered Vivaldi, Telemann and Monteverdi madrigals. The Sixties were in full swing, the budget labels dove into bright, colorful, more lively album covers, often with whimsical illustrations.

These were Nonesuch recordings and the Vox budget label, Turnabout. My collection was full of them

There were two labels in particular that went for the comic and the hip. Westminster and Crossroads. The created memorable cover art, but took very different paths.

Westminster Records began life in 1949 as a high-end audiophile label, but by the time I came to know them, they were a low-end budget brand, and their covers were as simple and unadorned as the “plain brown wrapper” that used to hide racy novels. Those red covers, with a horizontal black line were easy to spot in the record store bins, and for those of us on a limited budget, an instant look-see. The performances were generally very good, if by musicians more noted more in Hungary or Poland than in Carnegie Hall. They were dependable. I owned bunches.

But, the label was bought out by ABC-Paramount and by 1970, they began marketing their back-issue catalog with sometimes ridiculous and campy cover art. To attract the kids, I guess.

They included a Beethoven concerto with a busty brunette, whose busts were those of the composer, strategically placed. Or Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite with a faux Georgia O’Keeffe cow skull, or — my favorite — a Barbarella knock-off of cheap sci-fi for Gustav Holst’s Planets.

(Click on any of these images for a clearer look)

These covers are now collector items for a memorable gallery of time-stamp art. I have gathered images of well over a hundred of these gems, and thought I should share a few of them.

Westminster sold the 1968 Hans Swarowsky Nuremberg Ring Cycle with Carnaby Street Valkyries, Rhine Maidens and Norns.

And there was the two-disk recording of Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet, coming out hot on the heels of the Franco Zeffirelli film starring Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting. Could this cover be a coincidence? See the image at the top of this column. The album folds open to give us the whole picture (Love those socks).

Then, there is organist Virgil Fox’s “Greatest Hits,” with the baseball player; traditional Italian songs with, of course, just the kind of mafiosi who regularly croon such tunes; and to round out the ethnic stereotypes, there is Albert Ketelby’s In a Chinese Temple Garden. Subtlety is no object.

Then, there’s the sex and death contingent. Although what a cast-off bra has to do with Mozart is hard to tell. Tosca, though, surely liked to show off her décolleté, although I am unaware she ever had a tattoo. The obvious follow-up is a requiem.

For some reason, the recording of Baroque flute and harpsichord sonatas shows us a bassoon and cello. And if you are going to have opera without words, you need a horned helmet and bandaged mouth. And there’s the merry widow drinking wine on a coffin.

Haydn’s clock symphony, some Beethoven trios (apparently for teddy bears), and Bach cello sonatas.

An American in Paris, selling risque pictures, a lipstick Bolero, and a gang of Russians selling us Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky.

Judas Maccabaeus was known as the Jewish Hammer, so, OK. The William Tell Overture has its connotations, and the Skaters’ Waltz is obvious.

Pictures at an Exhibition needs a camera; Porgy and Bess share a disk — and eyeglasses — with an American in Paris; and, if the composer is Matthew Locke, you clearly had no choice.

There are many more, just as hokey, corny, and campy. As I said, I have about 130 of them in my files.

But, it is the other label I really like better. Crossroads was a subsidiary of Epic Records. Epic dealt mostly in popular music and jazz, but in the late 1960s, they licensed reams of Supraphon recordings, mostly recorded with Czech musicians, and sold them under the Crossroads label, with often quite witty cartoon album art. The level of performance was top-notch, with some of the world’s best soloists and orchestras.

I have gathered about 70 Crossroads album cover images, and offer a few here.

The Prague Madrigal Singers recording of Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes was the perfect performance, light, with a happy amateur feeling of a group of friends singing together. Other recordings I have owned were too operatic and artsy for Brahms’ gemütlich bourgeois lovesongs. And the cover art perfectly reflected the tone of the performance, and of the music Brahms wrote:

Unfortunately for me, this performance has never shown up on CD and I long ago got rid of all my LPs.

Many of the other Crossroads releases have subsequently been rereleased on other labels, including the original Supraphon recordings. But the album covers of the CDs never quite match the joie of these LP covers. It is also obvious that these came out about the same time as the animated Yellow Submarine movie. The style is unmistakeable.

There’s a bit of Hokusai’s Great Wave in this Debussy. More Yellow Submarine for unknown classical-era composers and Someone has to vacuum up all the dropped notes.

There is, of course, a lot of Dvorak and Smetana in these Crossroads releases.

But it’s not all Czech. Here’s some Franck and a great Schubert “Trout” quintet. And even some of the musicians are not Czech. There are Germans, too.

The covers are a delight, even for heavier music: Dvorak’s most Germanic symphony, Bartok raucous Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion and the deep slog of going through Brahms’ string quartets.

Villa-Lobos, Milhaud and others; Schubert’s giant op. 99 Trio; and 18th century Bohemian composer Jan Voríšek, apparently having his tooth pulled.

Listening to the Loud Classics on earphones; two Brahms violin sonatas (you cannot find a better performance than the great Josef Suk and pianist Jan Panenka; I owned this LP for years — a delight); and Haydn’s “Chase” symphony.

The tradition of budget recordings continued into the CD era, with some super-cheapie labels, such as Pilz and Laserlight, and there was a deluge of rare repertoire items that came out on Naxos, before that label went upscale. And the classical music recording industry has just about collapsed with fewer new recordings, but a raft of back-catalog items being issued in budget boxes by Sony, Warner, and Brilliant, often for as little as a buck a disk.

And now that I am retired, I find myself back in the same situation I was when I was newly graduated from college and making $50 a week at a retail store (well, not quite that bad off), and I find myself again stocking up on piles and piles of budget issues.

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Me, my shelf, and I

February 24, 2024

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If you’re reading this, and read blogs, it suggests you are a reader, and probably love books as much as I do. In fact, you may be a bookaholic, or have gone over the edge to become a bibliopath. Books are a central foundation of who I am, who I used to be and who I am still becaming. How can it be otherwise for anyone with a pennyweight of curiosity about people and about the world?

I’ve written about books in my life in many blog entries, and one of the most often-read is the piece I posted on Oct. 10, 2020, called “Shelf life,” in which I chose a single rung of a bookshelf in the house and discussed all the volumes resting on it. We are, at least in part, what we read: The books become internalized. And so, as I wrote then, I wanted: “to search for myself among my books.” I decided to take a single shelf from a single bookcase, “to see if they were in any way a mirror in which I could discover my own physiognomy.”

I didn’t want to pick a neatly organized shelf, but one where books were randomly scattered, left uncatalogued after casually unpacking after a move, or after re-reading, or just was too lazy to put back where it made sense. The bookcase next to the bed seemed the proper choice.

And so, I thought I might do so a second time. I looked at the shelf above the one I wrote about and it also seemed to be a mirror: That was me, there, in those pages, however jumbled it seemed to be.

What surprised me the most was how many of these books have been with me for most of my life — books I read when young that still take up space in my brain and on my shelf. And also how many were only recently bought and opened.

I should start with the three matched volumes at the right of the shelf: James Joyce’s Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. This handsome set replaced the many earlier versions I have owned in various editions. (I still have at least four other Ulysses on various shelves in the house, including a very special cheapie pirated paperback printed by Collectors Publications, a publisher most known for printing porn — which I suppose Ulysses was thought of when this version was published — ads at the back of the book offer The Incestual Triangle, Four Way Swappers, and All Male Nudes, among other things.)

I first read Portrait of the Artist when I was in eighth grade, in the dark green paperback Viking Compass Book edition. I’m not sure how much I could have comprehended reading it at the age of 13, but I knew I loved the way the words looked and sounded: “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo …” There was the mud of the rugby field, the great hellfire of the sermon, and the “forged in the smithy of my soul.”

I reread the book every four or five years, and every time, it hits the spot. In the habit readers always have, I soon jumped on all the other Joyce I could find. I bought a copy of Viking’s A Portable James Joyce, and have given up or lost several versions over the years, but still have one, a hardcover one, now in a library binding — in fact, it sits on a lower shelf of this selfsame bookcase I’m writing about. I tackled the play, the poetry, Stephen Hero, the essays — even Finnegan, although, at the age of 76, I am still defeated by the whirl of the whorl of the world of Finnegan. I will leave it to the next life.

Ulysses was a harder nut to crack after Dubliners, when I was a scrub-faced kid; Ulysses problems were verbal; Dubliners was harder to understand because of the complexity of the human emotions written about. You have to have some life pushing behind you to grasp the complexities of human experience and emotions written about in those short stories. As a teenager, I knew pimples better than I knew people. I re-read Dubliners last year and was blown away, especially by the final “The Dead.” It broke my heart.

Ulysses I did get into years later, and it is now my favorite novel of all, although, to be fair, I don’t always read it cover to cover, but rather, read again and again the bits that I most love. It astounds me: It is filled with some of the most beautiful prose I have ever encountered. No, I take that back: The most beautiful prose.

Next to Joyce on the shelf is James Michener: Tales of the South Pacific, and Return to Paradise. I remember, in my 30s and still something of a snob, looking down my nose at Michener as a best-selling author of doorstop bricks. But one day, in a book store, I picked up a copy of Tales and thought I would read a page, maybe two, to catch the flavor of Michener’s prose. It was 30 pages later I was standing there ready to flip the next page. This was a special kind of talent: to make you need to find out “what happens next.”

The prose was simply not the point. It was invisible; you read through the words as if looking through glass. This was story-telling, and Michener really has a value I had failed to understand. I’m not saying he didn’t eventually turn into an industrial manufactory, but in his first book, he made magic. It was also nothing like the South Pacific musical I had expected. Rather it gave me a real sense of what the war in the Pacific must have been like for those who experienced it.

A few years ago, after re-reading it, I found a copy of its sequel, Return to Paradise. I got through a few of the stories, maybe a third of the way in, but lost interest. The magic had gone. It was OK — it wasn’t just junk — but it didn’t grab me the way the first book did. It was more like a book of short stories that a short story writer might write. Something, perhaps, that a publisher might request after a best-seller. The two sit together on the shelf nonetheless.

I’m going out of sequence on the shelf to mention the other Michener book sitting there. In 1958, Michener published The Hokusai Sketch-Books: Selections from the Manga. Hokusai, of course, was the famous Japanese 18th-19th century artist. In 1814, he published a multi-volume sketchbook, called manga, in which he drew everything he saw in the world around him: people, plants, animals, ghosts, architecture. It was an encyclopedic venture. Michener selected enough of these drawings to fill out a thick book. I have owned it since college. It is one of my holy-of-holies.

From high-school days, I was fascinated with all things Asian; I read books on Zen Buddhism, listened to Noh Plays, took my girlfriend to restaurants with hibachis. There were Kurosawa movies and sumi ink paintings, which I attempted with my own shizuri and brush.

The non-Western way of looking at the world opened my world view and I have been looking beyond the horizon ever since.

Next on the shelf some The Great Gatsby and nothing proves how little youth knows, than what I made of the book — or didn’t make of it — when I was required to read it in eighth grade. I never then figured out who this Gatsby guy was; I thought the book was about Nick Carraway; and what the heck was all that about green light?

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the book then, but that I had no clue about its depths. I bought an excellent edition three years ago and reread it for maybe the third or fourth time and loved every second of it. It is a deep, rich book, with prose that is delectable.

I believe for most young readers with a ripe curiosity, we tend to want to read beyond our abilities. We believe, as teenagers, we are grown-ups and want to partake of the adult world. And so we — and I — took to reading much that we had no business attempting. I read Saul Bellow, Henry Miller, John Updike, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Pynchon, James Purdy — a whole host of writers that I thought proved I was now in the company of the heavyweights.

And among those books was Jean Paul Sartre’s The Words, his autobiography. I knew he was an existentialist and that all the most intellectual people (this was the mid-1960s) were hot on existentialism. Not that I knew what that meant (I’m not sure anyone really does — it encompasses so many different things, but back then, it pretty much meant berets and espresso). But I read it, enjoyed it, thought I understood it, and flashed a few words around to let anyone know. I got a subscription to Les Temps Moderne, although I couldn’t read French (and also a subscription to The Evergreen Review — I was one hip 16-year-old). I re-read Les Mots last year and it’s a fine enough autobiography, but not exactly world-shaking.

Getting back on track along the bookshelf: In the 1970s, I was living with a redhead and we wanted to travel. We hiked a good portion of the Appalachian Trail, and drove, amongst other destinations, to Maine and New England. I was fascinated by geology and I had a book by Neil Jorgensen called A Guide to New England’s Landscape. I had by then, an interest in all things under the heading of “Nature.” I had a raft of Peterson Guides, could name dozens of plants and birds by their scientific names (“Know-atia Dudiflorum,” my wife teased me), collected rock samples, and could name dozens of constellations in the night sky.

The Jorgensen book accompanied us as we drove past monadnocks and till, varved clays and drumlins. I admit I haven’t read the book since then, but I still have it, as a memento of meaningful times.

I was by then active a photographer, and so I had another guidebook: Illustrated Guide to Yosemite, by Ansel Adams and his wife, Virginia Best Adams. I so wanted to visit Yosemite, but never had at those years the time or money for such a long trip. The book is loaded with Adams images, and so, it functioned more as a picture book than a useful guide. It was only many years later that my wife and I drove up the east slope of the Sierra Nevada along the Tioga Road and got to see the stunning Valley. The book is another that I’ve owned for 50 years and is a piece of me.

If I could choose to write like anyone, it would be James Joyce, but if I couldn’t have that, I would want to write like P.G. Wodehouse. He is magic with words, although of a more comic variety. I have bunches of Wodehouse lying around, but three years ago, I bought a new edition of A Pelican at Blandings, mostly because these new hardback versions, by Overlook Press, were so seductively handsome. If I had the money, I would buy all the volumes in this set, but this one will have to do.

All the Blandings books are a hoot. He may be most famous for his Jeeves stories, but I like Lord Emsworth and his pig and his sister Connie, just as much as Jeeves and Wooster. This is the kind of book I read when I just want to have fun.

The Complete Southern Cookbook, by Tammy Algood is not one I bought. It was a gift from my daughter. I seldom use cookbooks. And when I do want one to check on some Southern specialty, I head for the old standby, Henrietta Dull’s Southern Cooking, originally published in 1928.

I was born in New Jersey, but left there when I was 17. I’ve lived in four corners of the country, with 25 years in Arizona, and a year in Seattle, but the longest soujourn has been in the South, in North Carolina and Virginia, where my years add up to 33. I feel like an adopted Southerner.

And while I still miss the foods I grew up with, such as a good pastrami on rye, real pizza, or a kaiser roll, I have to admit that I’ve come to love those things a Yankee will never understand, like greens, pulled pork, or fried okra. I count on Mrs. Dull for those (although, to be honest, no one uses a recipe for such things).

The funniest book I have ever read is Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. It is one of the few I find myself actually laughing out loud at. So, thought I, perhaps his other book, A Sentimental Journey, must we worth looking into. It is much more straightforward, less surreal, and while it has its moments, doesn’t quite catch fire for me. The edition I have is however quite handsome to look at.

The next two books are by Jean Renoir. Renoir is probably my favorite filmmaker. His films are so genuinely humane and wise. Nick Carraway, from Gatsby, relays that his father gave him advice to live by: “Remember that not everyone has had the advantages you have had.” That’s all well and fine, but the words that most illuminate my life are from Renoir’s Rules of the Game, when Octave, played by Renoir himself, says “The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons.” It isn’t usually malice or conspiracy that mucks things up, but rather, “Everybody has their reasons.” You learn to be less judgmental from that.

He wrote about his work in My Life and My Films, from 1974. It is filled with anecdotes and pictures, and the quiet acceptance that is the core of his being. But even better is the biography he wrote about his father, Renoir. I was never a big fan of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. I find his paintings a little blowsy. He is the least of the major Impressionists. But, as his son writes about him, he comes off as one of the kindest, sweetest, most understanding and generous of men. I came to love old Pierre-Auguste not through his art, but through his biography.

I said we readers have a tendency to find authors we like and then plow through the whole corpus willy-nilly. About five years ago, I came across Clive James, the late Australian-English writer and critic. I tore through everything, including his poetry. And when I found his book Cultural Amnesia, I couldn’t stop myself. Subtitled Necessary Memories from History and the Arts, it makes the case that too much important history has been forgotten, ignored, or misrepresented, and that if we need an understanding of the past to navigate the future, then the men and women he writes about in this book, deserve to be remembered.

He writes about more than a hundred of them, in alphabetic order from Anna Akhmatova to Stephan Zweig. Some are hardly obscure, like Charlie Chaplin or Leo Tolstoy, but he brings to mind aspects that may have more cultural impact than you might remember, or other facets to their work.

I love the grim joy of Dimitri Shostakovich; his music speaks volumes about misery and dictatorship. His Seventh Symphony, the “Leningrad Symphony” was partly written and later first performed in that city during the 900-day siege by the German Wehrmacht during World War II. It is a sprawling work, lasting well over an hour, and its first movement has a grinding passacaglia representing the jackboots of oppression.

My wife gave me a copy of Leningrad: Siege and Symphony, subtitled “The Story of the Great City Terrorized by Stalin, Starved by Hitler, Immortalized by Shostakovich,” by Brian Moynahan. Its well-researched 500 pages cover everything one needs to know about the siege, the horrors, and its legacy. But, I confess, I have not read it. It sits there on the shelf, waiting. But I really feel I am told everything I need to by the music itself.

I went through a D.H. Lawrence period, where I read everything I could get my hands on. But not the novels or short stories. For some reason, they never much appealed to me. But his essays and travel writing, and his poetry, I adored. It’s the best travel writing I know, partly because it isn’t the usual version of the kind, but his personal, very idiosyncratic way of looking at the world.

Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine is an anthology of seven of his essays, including the title piece, which starts as thoughts on having to shoot a porcupine on his New Mexico ranch, and goes through the issue of all life dependent on devouring other life, and ends, in a disturbing turn that, for him, justifies “superior” existence having its way with “inferior.” Lawrence is capable of a good deal of piffle.

But it is the particularity of his observation that I love, the detail. Even crazy talk can be well written.

Next, the best writing, the most original use of word and sentence, since, at least Joyce, was penned by Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita is an absolute brilliance, despite is subject. And so I read Speak, Memory, his 1951 autobiography, which recounts his life in Russia, before leaving in 1940.

It begins, “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” So, you know you are not just getting a sequence of entertaining anecdotes. The book is a dialog, essentially, between existence and memory, the memory of a pre-Revolution Russia, as recalled by a child, and then a young man.

Finally, I have an omnibus edition of four Maigret novels by Georges Simenon. I have moments when I devour Simenon like chocolate-chip cookies, one after the other. But it can get expensive buying volume on volume, one at a time. This edition, once in the collection of the Ypsilanti District Library in Michigan, was bought used on Amazon, cost less than $5 and gave me four novels. I have read three. I am holding the fourth unread so far, in order to experience the delicious anticipation of reading it.

And so, with that shelf catalogued, I look at the books and think, do I see myself in their spines, lined up? I certainly see a bit, like seeing a face through partially opened Venetian blinds. It’s me, all right, but only a bit. I look at the book case from top to bottom and see more of the rest of me. I walk down the hall and into other rooms with other bookcases and the picture fills up. The oldest books among them all speak of the boy that remains in the core, the newest of the weary old man I am now that covers it all in wrinkles. It is that “brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

It’s not all the same

February 21, 2024

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No, classical music doesn’t all sound the same. In fact, sometimes it’s hard to find any relationship at all between the far corners of the field. What do Gregorian Chant and Karlheinz Stockhausen have in common?

When someone complains that “it all sounds the same,” you can be pretty sure that the reason is simply lack of exposure. A sample group too small to generalize from. So, I thought, as a followup to my previous blog entry about classical music, I should try to stretch the boundaries of the subject, to stretch out the definition tightly from end to end to see how far it spreads.

If you listen to the items on this catalog, you will find music so different as to be hard to assign a common category.

In the previous blog entry, I attempted to move from one suggestion to the next in the most contrasting way, from, say, Renaissance polyphony to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring — a clear jerk from one mode of hearing to the other.

This time, I hope to provide some framework to see how what we call classical music, or art music, developed over time. You may object that about half of the music comes from the 20th- and 21st-centuries, but that is only being fair: You should remember that the Rite of Spring — which is the traditional mark for the beginning of Modernism in music — is actually closer in time to the death of Haydn than it is to us today. Twentieth Century music is no longer new — it is classical.

(I’ve chosen a single piece from each of the large clumps of music history, varying both style and genre, including keyboard, chamber, vocal, choral and symphonic. From each period, I have supplemented the examples with two contrasting pieces for further listening.) Beginning with:

Vivaldi: Gloria in D Major, RV 589

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) wrote at least three settings for the Gloria, but this one is the version everyone remembers, with its chugging motoric drive and its brassy fanfares. It is built from 12 short movements split between choral numbers, solos and a duet for soprano and contralto.

Its catchy opening “one-TWO-three-four, one-TWO-three-four” with its octave leaps, returns later to unify the work. The Baroque era ran from roughly 1600 to 1750, although styles evolve slowly and overlap. It’s not like everyone stops writing one way and begins writing the new way. This piece, from 1715 lasts about 30 minutes and exemplifies the energetic forward motion of the Baroque.

Alternates:

J.S. Bach (1685-1750), The Goldberg Variations (1714), a set of 30 variations on a repeating bass line, for keyboard; and George Friedrich Handel (1685-1759), Musick for the Royal Fireworks (1749), a suite for a large band of wind instruments, for outdoor performance during a famous fireworks display meant to celebrate the end of the War of Austrian Succession. The crowd loved the music, but the fireworks caused a building to burn down, blinded a soldier and injured several others. Later performances often added strings to the wind band, with no further reported injuries.

Haydn: Quartet in D major, op. 64, no. 5 “The Lark”

It is often said that Joseph Haydn and Mozart wrote music in the classical style (roughly 1750-1828), but in fact, they created the classical style. If Haydn didn’t singlehandedly invent the symphony, he made it what we think of today; and he did the same for the string quartet — music for two violins, viola and cello.

This is music generally less cluttered or fussy than the earlier Baroque, and seeks a kind of modest tastefulness, along with, in Haydn’s case, a witty sense of humor, as in the imitation bird calls at the start of this quartet, which was written in 1790 and has the usual four movements: an opening allegro, a dance movement, a slow movement and a jaunty finale.

Alternates:

W.A. Mozart (1756-1791) Serenade No. 10 for 13 Winds in B-Flat, known as the Gran Partita (1781), which, in Peter Shaffer’s play, Amadeus, he has Antonio Salieri react by saying, “It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.” Or Franz Schubert’s (1797-1828) Symphony No. 5 in B-Flat (1816), which is a really tuneful symphony built on Haydn’s model.

Liszt: Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-Flat

Franz Liszt (1811-1886) is the perfect Romantic composer, the greatest piano virtuoso of his time, and a matinee idol that all the ladies were in love with — something of which he took great advantage. His music, as in this 1855 concerto, is filled with all the wild emotion that the classical era avoided: over the top, loud, brash, and with a solo part for the triangle — it scandalized its first audiences. The jangle of the triangle was considered bad taste — but bad taste is the goal of much Romanticism. Audiences loved being scandalized.

Alternates:

Robert Schumann (1810-1856) wrote a cycle of songs, telling a sad love story, called the Dichterliebe, or “A Poet’s Love,” in 1840, and includes a song claiming over and over, “I’m not angry,” to some of the angriest music ever. Clever. Or Bedrich Smetana’s (1824-1884) Moldau, an orchestral portrait of the Czech river (now usually called the Vlatva or Voltava), which is a perfect example of the Romantic Nationalism that swept over Europe. Great tunes.

Debussy: Images for Piano, Book II

In the late 19th century and the 20th century before the First World War, music went through several changes. One of them is a rejection of Romantic excess, and the French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918) came up with his own style — usually called Impressionism — of ambiguous tonality, exotic scales, and an approach to the piano that was soft and non-percussive.

He wrote a great deal of piano music, including the famous Clair de Lune, but I’m offering the three pieces in his Images, second series (1907): Cloches à travers les feuilles (“Bells through the leaves”); Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (“And the moon descends on the temple that was”); and Poissons d’or (“Golden fish”).

Alternates:

Some composers went in the opposite direction, with larger orchestras, more chromatic harmonies of profound longing, in what is often called Late Romanticism, or Post-Romanticism. Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) often added voices to his orchestral music, or wrote orchestral song cycles, such as his Songs of a Wayfarer (1885). Richard Strauss (1864-1949) used huge orchestras and explodes out of the gate with Don Juan (1889), a musical version of a Don Juan more idealistic than lecherous. It is an avalanche of sound, with a huge six-horn signature that, in live performance, you feel through you fundament as much as hear with your ear.

Janáček: Sinfonietta

Now we are ripe in the 20th Century, and Leos Janáček’s Sinfonietta (1926), a five-movement piece for huge orchestra, including 25 brass instruments. The first movement has 10 trumpets alone, playing a hair-raising fanfare.

All five movements are built from catchy tune-bits, extended and repeated. And although the music is clearly modernist, I’ve never come across anyone who didn’t instantly love the Sinfonietta.

Alternates:

French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was imprisoned by Nazis during World War II, and in prison camp, wrote his Quartet for the End of Time, for piano, clarinet, violin and cello (the instruments available in the camp). It is a hugely idiosyncratic piece, written to Messiaen’s own music theories, but can be overwhelmingly emotional in a good performance. And for the double-dip experience of atonal music, try Alban Berg’s (1885-1935) Three Pieces for Orchestra (1914), for something like what people used to call “modern music.”

Penderecki: Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima

Classical music, or art music, is still being written, and responds to life in the current world. We live in a post-Hiroshima age, and Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki (1933-2020) summarized the feeling in his 1961 string-orchestra piece, Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, although you may have some difficulty recognizing it as string music made by violins, violas, cellos and double basses. It shrieks of the horror.

It masses its 52 string players in tone clusters and dissonances, various vibratos and odd bowings, for 8 and a half minutes, that is not meant to be beautiful, but to evoke intense emotions. It is, nevertheless, beautiful. (Remembering Tom Robbins notion: “The ugly may be beautiful; the pretty, never.”)

Alternates:

Minimalist composer Philip Glass (b. 1937) also reacts to the modern world in his film score for the Godfrey Reggio film, Koyaanisqatsi (1982). The modern world is a crazy world, as the film and music underline, but with quite a variety of minimalist techniques. The horrors of war fill Henryk Gorecki’s (1933-2010) Third Symphony (The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) (1976), in which a soprano sings Catholic laments and words by victims of the Nazis, all to music so slow and so inexorable as to be almost a force of nature. Its 1991 recording by the London Sinfonietta sold more than a million copies. Gorecki, surprised at the popularity of such a sorrowful piece of music said, “perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music…. something they were missing. Something, somewhere had been lost to them.”

Epilogue

Of course, this diversity is among the European tradition of art or concert music. Most cultures have their own classical musics, such as the sitar or sarod music of India, the Chinese opera music, and Japanese flute music. Each is a tradition handed down from master to student and carried forth, with development and variation. That is what makes it classical.

If I were to think of a purely American classical music, it would be jazz. It, likewise, has a wide range of styles and sounds, from Louis Armstrong through Duke Ellington and down through Ornette Coleman.

But it is what we call classical music in the West that I am best familiar with and love. And writing this has given me the chance to listen once more to each of the pieces I’ve written about, and more joy me.