Yearly Archives: 2009

A NIELS BOHR QUOTE FOR TODAY

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A friend once asked the physicist Niels Bohr why he had a horseshoe over the entrance to
his house, for luck, since it was an example of a superstition, and he
didn't believe in superstitions.  “I have it there,” said Bohr,
“because I was told it works even if you don't believe in it.”

Bohr did pioneering work on the structure of the atom and also conceived the principle of complementarity, the idea that items could be analyzed separately as having several contradictory properties . . . that light, for example, could be both a wave and a stream of particles simultaneously.

This idea has obvious spiritual implications, as the anecdote above suggests.

SKYLARK

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Richard “Wendell” Cordtz died last year.  He was only in his fifties, about my age, so it came as a shock and still seems very strange.

He was one of the genuine characters I knew in New York for most of the years I lived there — an actor and stage director and singer.  I didn't know him well but I saw him fairly regularly because he did a cabaret act with another friend of mine, Hugh McCarten.  They billed themselves as Dr. Wendell and Mr. Hugh, Hugh providing piano accompaniment to Wendell's song styling.

Wendell had a wry and often very subtle sense of humor, characterized by a kind of sly irony hinting at the outrageous and delivered deadpan.  It was a kind of mask, which would fall away when he smiled his sweet smile and suddenly seemed like a child.  He was always very mysterious to me.

When musician friends visited from out of town there would sometimes be musical soirées at Wendell's loft.  The last time I saw him was at one of these, not long before I moved away from New York.  He sang a song I always associated with him, “Skylark” by Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael.  He sang it beautifully, without any irony at all.

I have a recording of Dr. Wendell and Mr. Hugh performing the song, about a year before Wendell died.  Listening to it it's impossible to imagine that Wendell is dead — easy to imagine that he's just gone off to follow the skylark somewhere . . .

HONOLULU

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Jack Cummings was MGM's third-string producer of musicals from the late Thirties to the mid Fifties (after Arthur Freed and Joe Pasternak.)  He was unimaginative but reliable, able to churn out respectable product with occasional passages of sublime magic.  One such bit of product from 1939 was Honolulu, an Eleanor Powell vehicle.

The film has an amiable but uninspired sit-com plot, centering on a Hawaiian pineapple grower and a big movie star who look exactly alike and decide, for various preposterous reasons, to switch places for a few weeks.  Robert Young plays the dual role.  As the movie star seeking a respite from hysterical fans he falls in love with Powell, a dancer with a gig at a Honolulu night spot.

In the dialogue scenes, Powell is every bit as bland and pleasant as Young — they're acceptable company for a bit of romantic comedy fluff.  So far so good.  When the Hawaiian drums start to throb, however, and Powell starts dancing, she sizzles with an intense sexuality that leaves Young wailing on the margin of non-entity, both dramatically and as a cinematic presence.  After Powell's first big number, the film no longer makes any sense as a love story.

Powell's three big numbers in the film, all solos, two with a corps of other dancers behind her, are stunning, though — they make the film worth watching, and revisiting.  In the first, she partners with a jump-rope, and makes it look sexier than Young.  In the last she does a fierce hula in a grass skirt, first barefoot then in tap shoes.  It has to be seen to be believed — her hip movements are simply indecent.

Another of the film's delights is Gracie Allen, who plays Powell's partner in her nightclub act.  She flits in and out of the plot delivering some first-rate vaudeville gags with her usual brilliance.  If you think of Honolulu as a program of vaudeville turns, rather than as a book musical, it's much easier to enjoy.  Powell, like Allen, was a product of the variety stage, so it's really not that much of a leap.  (George Burns is also in the film, but has no scenes with Allen, and flounders a bit with the less-than-amusing material he has to work with here.)

The film has some problematic racial stereotypes.  Eddie Anderson is made to do a gibbering “I'se just seen a ghost!” turn, which is doubly offensive because it clashes so markedly with Anderson's wry and skeptical comic persona, which Jack Benny exploited so well in his radio and TV shows.  Using Anderson as he's used in Honolulu is just an example of the mindless demeaning of blacks.  Willie Fung does a more amusing stock Chinaman turn, in which he gets to engage in a bit of one-upsmanship over his patronizing boss.

Then there's Powell's blackface number, in which she dances an imitation of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.  This cannot be simply dismissed, however disturbing the very idea of blackface has become.  There is no trace of condescension in Powell's tribute to Robinson — it's more an act of admiration, even envy.  Powell took lessons from the great black tapper and she imitates him convincingly — though her version of his tapping up and down stairs is just a faint echo of Robinson's signature routine.  She would probably have enjoyed dancing a romantic tapping pas de deux with Robinson — he's one of the few dancers who could have held his own with her, and then some — but that would have been inconceivable in 1939, probably even in 1969 in any mainstream showcase.

So Powell became Robinson for a few minutes.  It's hard to see the impersonation as anything but an act of tenderness and love.

The film was directed by journeyman Edward Buzzell.  Bobby Connelly did the simple but effective choreography — he did the simple but effective choreography for The Wizard Of Oz that same year.  Sadly, Honolulu is not yet available on DVD, though it's shown from time to time on TCM.

ANNIE OAKLEY’S EYES

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There had never been anyone quite like Annie Oakley and there will never be anyone quite like her again, because no American girl will ever again have to travel the path Oakley negotiated between female respectability and female empowerment.  Oakley dominated the traditionally male arena of target shooting but said her highest aim in life was to be thought of as a “lady” — as having transcended a childhood of desperate poverty and abuse, risen from the ranks of “white trash” to hob-nob with presidents and kings and queens.

Her act, as both a performer and a woman, was finely calculated.  She supported equal pay for equal work by women and believed that all women who could should learn to handle firearms, for self-protection and healthful exercise, but would not endorse women’s suffrage — that, she felt, would take her one step beyond the limits of female Victorian propriety.

She always performed fully covered from head to toe, with leggings that hid even her ankles, but also with her long hair unbound — a daring style in her time, which she got away with by adopting a childlike deportment that made the long hair seem less brazen (but still sexy.)  She never apologized for beating men at their own game but never gloated over it either.  In almost all the fictional accounts of her life she is shown deliberately missing a shot to sooth the ego of a male competitor but the real Annie Oakley would never have done such a thing — she would certainly have seen it as demeaning, both to herself and to her competitor.

She pulled no punches and gave no quarter when she had a gun in her hands, but was always gracious in victory.  That’s what being a lady meant to her.

She shot, unusually, with both eyes open, and she examined the world she lived in with both eyes open, too.  You can get a sense of the clarity of her vision in the portrait above — I imagine she could make an insecure male feel like a live pigeon just released from the trap as she drew a bead on it.

A FEARFUL AGGREGATE OF WOE

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I can't exactly recommend this book, because it's so grim and harrowing, but I can report that it's one of the most important books ever written about the Civil War, and about war in general.  It takes a frank and even brutal look at the phenomenon of mass death on American soil between 1861 and 1865, and allows you to get in touch, at least partially, with the unspeakable horror of it.  It's certainly an indispensable book for anyone, like myself, who's ever been infected with the “romance” of the Civil War, or of war in general.

About 600,000 soldiers died in the Civil War, plus an uncounted and today uncountable number of civilians.  As a percentage of the U. S. population now that would work out to over 2,000,000 people.  Faust does her best to give us a sense of how the survivors tried to cope with this ghastly slaughter — emotionally, spiritually, politically, philosophically and physically.  It was an epic endeavor.  On the most basic level, the physical, no one was prepared for the task of disposing of so many tons of rotting meat that had once been human beings.  On a higher level, there were no rituals of mourning in place for loved ones who died so far from home, often suddenly, without warning, and so conceivably “unprepared” to meet their Maker, and whose bodies in tens of thousands of cases remained unidentified and unrecoverable.

Faust, for once, deals equally with the mechanics of death and with its lasting consequences for those survivors who had to manage its effect on their own lives.

The Civil War dead cast long shadows, and we stand among those shadows today, whether we know it or not.

BARNUM’S VOICE

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P. T. Barnum’s circus went through a lot of configurations before he formed his final co-equal partnership with James Bailey.  Bailey was an organization guy, Barnum was a ballyhoo guy, and between them they offered the public some dazzling shows, more complicated than any circuses which have survived into our own time, with the usual clowns and trapeze and juggling acts and exotic animals but also including exhibits of exotic people from around the world, including human freaks, and vast historical pageants, like “Nero”, staged by Imre Karalfy, complete with chariot races and the burning of Rome.  All that and a musical donkey to boot.

In 1890, on a trip to London where he’d taken his great show, Barnum was recorded on an Edison cylinder.  It’s scratchy and the words are hard to make out, but it’s still thrilling to hear the old showman’s actual voice.

A BIG PICTURE FOR TODAY

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One of the coolest sites on the Internet is The Big Picture, hosted by The Boston Globe.  It offers high-resolution photographs of various newsworthy or human-interest subjects, and brings back the days of photojournalism as it used to be practiced by weekly magazines like Life and Look.  Television seems to offer us a more comprehensive window onto the visual world than older media, but the fleeting nature of its images makes for a shallower experience most of the time.  The stillness of a photograph continues to provide its own unique kind of revelation.

The Big Picture is always worth a visit.

The image above shows Vertie Hodge, 74, as she weeps during an Inauguration Day
party near Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. in Houston on Tuesday, 20 January 2009, after President Barack Obama delivered his inaugural speech.  It's an AP/Houston-Chronicle photo by Mayra Beltran.

OVER THE BARRICADES: AN INAUGURATION EXCLUSIVE!

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Our Washington correspondent, Dr. P. F. “Maleva” Zahl, was on the Mall in Washington yesterday with his wife and some friends to witness the Inauguration of the 44th President of the United States.  The good doctor is my oldest friend — we met in seventh grade, in Washington, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, and had many adventures in the very places shown on television yesterday, so he was in my thoughts as I watched the inauguration coverage.  He was kind enough to send this special report of the day:

O HAPPY (LONG) DAY

by Paul Zahl

 
Mary and I and our friends from Philadelphia left our house in the
near suburbs of Washington very early, taking the Inauguration shuttle
down Connecticut Avenue.

The crowds were not too bad as we walked from Farragut Square over to the Mall entrance nearest the Washington Monument.

[Correspondent Zahl stands on the left, next to his wife Mary with friends.]

It was extremely cold and everyone was bundled up.  The
cold never let up; and in the place where we stood for most of the
morning, at the top of hill by the Monument, the wind was unendingly
sharp.

Starting around 9:30 the crowd began to build. By 11 the space was absolutely packed.


 
Most of the baby-boomers present, like ourselves, were white; but
the overwhelming majority of the crowd were young, between 20 and 30. 
Where we were, the people were 90% under 30.  African-Americans were a
large but not majority proportion, although our friends with tickets
much nearer the Capital said the crowd there was 70% African-American. 
Very interesting it was to us that when Rick Warren recited the Lord's
Prayer, the African-Americans around us said it with him, but the
younger white people mostly did not.  I wasn't quite sure what I should
do at that moment.
 
We liked Pastor Warren's prayer as a whole, but he seemed to be
'imposing' the Lord's Prayer at the end.  We liked the name of Jesus
the way he did it, and there were no 'murmurs' anywhere near us that we
could hear.


 
When the cold became simply unbearable by the Monument — and we
all had at least five layers on, plus hand warmers — we moved down to
a jumbo-tron screen for President Obama's Inaugural Address.  He had
the complete attention of the thousands on every side of us.  Not one
word avoided being heard.  Mary and I were struck especially by his
listing of virtues such as courage and tolerance and compassion under
the positive adjective “old”.  He appealed to history, and even
primeval history.  We are not people who mind God-talk, so his
invocation of God's Grace seemed to us sincere and helpful.
 
Mary and I are religious people, and would be on the 'traditional
Christian' side of much (but not all) that is discussed today.  But we
also felt that Barack Obama more truly reflected the Christian
heart-ideas and experience which mean the world to us, than the other
side.  That may sound like a 'no-brainer', but for us it was not.  We
might normally have voted for a Republican given the degree to which
our own lives have been affected, and shattered in truth, by the
culture wars of recent times.  We have felt no more warmth from the Left,
religiously at least, than the secular world feels from the Right. 
Nevertheless, we could not vote for someone whose foreign policy
involves a “doctrine” of pre-emption . . . and no talking
with our enemies, and so forth.

We also see in Barack Obama something
that our little Episcopal Church culture wars never produced, neither
from the Left nor from the Right: a statesman, who listens without condescension, i.e.,
with felt interest and even sympathy, to those with whom he disagrees. 
If only our own context professionally, which is a denomination of
Christians in 21st Century America, had produced a person like this man
seems to us to be.  If only that, we would not be, with many, many of
our old friends and colleagues, in a broken, split, and bitter
aftermath.

 
I am glad, therefore, to be living and working in Washington this
year.  It meant that we could witness these things with our own eyes. 
It means, too, that we can aspire to the statesmanship and grace which
live only a few miles away from us down Connecticut Avenue. 
 
P.S. The one truly uncomfortable moment of the Day had nothing to
do with the Main Event.  The crowd control as people began to leave the
Mall was awful!  No one had any idea of where to go and what exits were
not blocked.  So you had at least 100,000 people jammed together all
trying to move out but with no idea where they could go.  For a moment
or two it could have been a soccer-stadium disaster.  But then people
just started to climb over the barricades.  Which felt exactly right.

THE CARRY

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A painting by Andrew Wyeth, who died today.  He and Norman Rockwell kept the art of painting alive in a barbaric age.

A “carry” is a rocky part of a stream where one's canoe needs to be portaged to smoother water.  From the rocks Wyeth looked downstream, towards a bend he couldn't see around.  We can be pretty sure, though, that he's there now, on his way to the sea.