This Ain’t Your Whistler’s Mother-Traipsing Through The National Gallery Of Art In Sunnier Pre-Shutdown Times-James McNeill Whistler’s “The White Girl,” Symphony In White Whatever Hustle They Are Pulling Now With The Title

This Ain’t Your Whistler’s Mother-Traipsing Through The National Gallery Of Art In Sunnier Pre-Shutdown Times-James McNeill  Whistler’s “The White Girl,” Symphony In White Whatever Hustle They Are Pulling Now With The Title  

By Laura Perkins      

Some people apparently, at least in the art work have a hard time moving on, letting things go. That is the case with one Arthur Gilmore Doyle (hereafter Doyle sine I utterly refuse to buy into the late 19^th fashion among the bluebloods and their wannabes to set themselves apart from the plebian Tom, Dick and Harrys with the three- name moniker to prove I think that they were not illegitimate, foundlings or could trace their genealogy back to the “Mayflower”). Doyle has been my upscale upstart nemesis since I took on this assignment under duress (when my longtime companion Sam Lowell balked on the assignment to pursue other interests I was “ratted out” by Leslie Dumont for having taken a couple of art classes and gone to an art museum making me candidate number one against the rest of the field here).

First Doyle challenged my assertion that the famous, or infamous, Madame X (Madame Guiteau) of John Singer Sargent’s (ditto on the trifecta names) The Portrait of Madame X where she flouted her stuff was a tramp, originally, I said a whore but we are being a little more high-toned now working against a blue-blooded scion. I replied, taking up way too much time away from my commentary on John White Alexander’ Isabella and the Pot of Basil at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (see, Archives, January 15, 2019) in my second foray, that all the documentation, all the memoirs and biographies not basically done by her press agents, then or now, pointed to her sleeping her way up the food chain into French high society. And with all regard to the #MeToo movement today what of it. History is replete with woman who have used their beauty to get ahead in the world, professional beauties who we hope don’t have to do so in the future. Doyle to the contrary argued showing his knowledge of the class as well as sex line, that if Sargent painted her she must be as pure as the driven snow or he would not have truck with tramps, whores, professional beauties. We have gone over that so enough said except I still find it strange that he or anybody else wanted to spill their bile over my comment about Madame’s horrendous bird-like nose. Apparently that was a sign of beauty back then although today nothing by sorrow for her ghastly condition.                      

Now Mr. Doyle, seemingly with plenty of time on his hands indicative of the leisure class has after reading my screed on Alexander’s Isabella has challenged my claims to be an art critic, that I am a disgrace to the profession for stating that this Isabella was some kind of doped up Johns the Baptist-initiated cultist for being sexually aroused by her murdered lover’s head (by her fearful brothers) in that so-called pot of basil. Doyle apparently had not read the fine print or was so bilious about my take on Madame X that he “forgot” that I am not an art critic, not a member of the art museum curator, art gallery owner, high-end art collector, or art journal fraternity which runs the art world. I have already mentioned that I took this art assignment under duress when Greg Green approached after hearing what Leslie Dumont has said about my art “resume.” I took this assignment with the understanding that I would following my muse, my art muse, and pepper my comments with ideas, with my take, which would not be found in the vocabularies of the curators, gallery owners, collectors and journal editors. And I have not.     

What has made Doyle’s temperature rise this time, why he felt the need to foul up cyberspace was my comments about dear Isabella’s drug problem and about her devotion to that bizarre “head in a pot” cult (or platter, bowl, in hand I have seen many variations on how the severed head was handled but they all shared that fetish to worship at the shrine with sensual, sexual desire hence bizarre). He challenged my assertion based on Sam Lowell’s expertise that the plants in the jar were not harmless if symbolic basil but poppies, the stuff of opium and heroin. Sam rechecked the plants at my request and asserted that definitely the plants were poppy. Here is where the class and sex issues totally go over Doyle’s head. Like with the purity of Madame X argument he believes that Alexander would never stoop, his word, to painting some twisted dope fiend hung up on a bizarre cult. That could be left to those Frenchman of the day who made their money by titillating the plebes. Doyle seems to have been obvious to among other things in high Victorian times sniffing dope, snuff boxes, mixing up lanadum was an everyday occurrence to get through the day, especially but not exclusively by women. What about it though if it got them through the day, or through their sorrows. Beyond that I cannot educate the man, nor will I.

On to finally Whistler’s Woman in White, Symphony in White, Number 1, The White Girl or whatever name some curator or high-toned art critic wants to put on one of James McNeill Whistler’s great mood painting in order to argue that the model is either the Madonna, a whore, no, a tramp, somebody’s kept woman, a streetwalker or a nymphomaniac. I will stop there although I have not run out of names for the poor gal depending on the theory being presented. Some Earth mother thing connected with the Pre-Ralphelite Brotherhood being the most popular, although the most ludicrous since her lips are not nearly Angela Joie-full enough for Rosetti and the brethren, a sure tip off Whistler was in some deep opium funk when he created this piece and messed up the lips. Or ran out of ruby red paint. What it is not though is Whistler’s mother, oh, excuse me Symphony in Gray and Black if we want to humor the guy in his funk, and in his bogus art for art’s sake hustle like some preternatural colorist (meant to bring in big bucks from unknowing but rabid collectors looking for something for the wall above the fireplace mantle with cachet).

Let’s get real though this is not down at the heels shop girl who didn’t know the score, didn’t know a certain truth that would forever haunt her image, her reputation.   It took about my fifth time down at the National Gallery of Art in sunnier times when it was open, now closed by government shutdown to figure what was going on here. The deep symbolism which puts Brother Whistler right in vortex as the precursor of the Surrealist movement of the next century. Maybe as one art critic speculated this was a tip of the hat to the coming storm in Whistler’s America, the gathering storm when they had painter’s bloc.  Doyle is not going to like my comments on this one any more than my sexual suggestiveness regard three-name moniker Singer and Alexander and Madame X and Isabella respectively. This portrait has nothing to do with first communion-like virginity, bride of Christ or lost innocence after the Edenic fall, far from it.

What this painting is though is a homage to the Whole of Babylon, the queen bee of courtesans which is how Whistler saw his model, his girlfriend what did they call their relationship in polite society then, yes, consort. Don’t be fooled like all the high-brow Victorian art critics with their handy snuff boxes and be taken in by the white dress, the too skinny red lips, the white curtain, that very convenient white rose. That is all show. That is for the gullible art collectors and museum patrons. The key is the wolf’s head, and I am surprised nobody else has caught the naked symbolism. Although I don’t read or speak Aramaic there is a clear reference in the Book of the Dead according to the Babylonian history scholar James Cee about the wolf’s head and the Whore of Babylon. That the wolf’s head and fur were both an advertisement for a high-born courtesan and as an aphrodisiac for her clients. Nice work, James. For those who have me written down as some Freudian sexual reference cretin or frustrated post-menopausal matron well go to work. As for Doyle when he comes out of his dead faint after reading this give it your best shot. Give it your best shot.    

          

This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind.

This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind.                   

     

Some songs, no, let’s go a little wider, some music sticks with you from an early age which even fifty years later you can sing the words out chapter and verse. Like those church hymns that you were forced to sit through (when you would have rather been outside playing before you got that good dose of religion which made the hymns make sense), like the bits of music you picked up in school from silly children’s songs in elementary school to that latter time in junior high school when you got your first does of the survey of the American and world songbook once a week for the school year, or more pleasantly your coming of age music, maybe like me that 1950s classic age of rock and roll when certain songs were associated with certain rites of passage, mainly about boy-girl things. One such song from my youth, and maybe yours too, was Woody Guthrie surrogate “national anthem,” This Land is Your Land. (Surrogate in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America in the throes of the Great Depression that came through America, came through his Oklahoma like a blazing dust ball wind.    

Although I had immersed myself in the folk minute scene of the early 1960s as it passed through the coffeehouses and clubs of Harvard Square (and got full program play complete with folk DJs and for a time on television via the Hootenanny show) that is not where I first heard or learned the song. No for that one song I think the time and place was in seventh grade in junior high school where Mr. Dasher would each week in Music Appreciation teach us a song and then the next week expect us to be able to sing it without looking at a paper. He was kind of a nut for this kind of thing, for making us learn songs from difference genres (except the loathed, his, rock and roll) like Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific, Stephen Foster’s My Old Kentucky Home, or Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade and stuff like that. So that is where I learned it.

Mr. Dasher might have mentioned some information about the songwriter on these things but I did not really pick up on Woody Guthrie’s importance to the American songbook until I got to that folk minute I mentioned where everybody revered him (including most prominently Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott) not so much for that song but for the million other songs that he produced seemingly at the drop of a hat before the dreaded Huntington’s disease got the better of him. Almost everybody covered him then, wrote poems and songs about him, sat at his feet in order to learn the simple way that he took song to entertain the people with.                 

It was not until sometime later that I got the drift of his early life, the life of a nomadic troubadour singing and writing his way across the land. That is what the serious folk singers were trying to emulate, that keep on moving thing that Woody perfected as he headed out of the played-out dustbowl Oklahoma night, wrote plenty of good dustbowl ballads about that too, evoking the ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath  as he went along. Wrote of the hard life of the generations drifting West to scratch out some kind of existence on the land, tame that West a bit. Wrote too of political things going on, the need for working people to unionize, the need to take care of the desperate Mexico braceros brought in to bring in the harvest and then abused and left hanging, spoke too of true to power about some men robbing you with a gun others with a fountain pen, about the beauty of America if only the robber barons, the greedy, the spirit-destroyers would let it be. Wrote too about the wide continent called America and how this land was ours, if we knew how to keep it. No wonder I remembered that song chapter and verse.             

Once Again On The 1960s Folk Minute-The Cambridge Club 47 Scene

Once Again On The 1960s Folk Minute-The Cambridge Club 47 Scene

By Sam Lowell 

I am not the only one who recently has taken a nose-dive back in time to that unique moment from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s when folk music had its minute as a popular genre. People may dispute the end-point of that minute like they do about the question of when the 1960s ended as a counter-cultural phenomenon but clearly with the advent of acid-etched rock by 1967-68 the searching for and reviving the folk roots had passed. As an anecdote in support of that proposition that is the period when I stopped taking dates to the formerly ubiquitous home away from home coffeehouses, cheap poor boy college student dates to the Harvard Square coffeehouses where for the price of a couple of cups of coffee, a shared pastry, and maybe a couple of dollars admission charge you could hear up and coming talent working out their kinks, and took them instead to the open-air fashion statement rock concerts that were abounding around the town. Some fifty years out in fits of nostalgia and maybe to sum up life’s work there have been two recent documentaries concerning the most famous Harvard Square coffeehouse of them all, the Club 47 (which still exists under the name Club Passim in a similar small venue near the Harvard Co-Op Bookstore).

One of the documentaries put out a few years ago (see above) traces the general evolution of that club in its prime when the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Rush, Eric Von Schmidt, the members of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band (the forming of jug bands itself a part of the roots revival we were in thrall to), and many others sharpened up their acts there. The other documentary, No Regrets (title taken from one of his most famous songs) which I have reviewed elsewhere in this space is a biopic centered on the fifty plus years in folk music of Tom Rush. Both those visual references got me thinking about how that folk scene, or better, the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene kept me from going off the rails, although that was a close thing.        

Like about a billion kids before and after in my coming of age in the early 1960s I went through the usual bouts of teenage angst and alienation aided and abetted by growing up “from hunger” among the very lowest rung of the working poor with all the pathologies associated with survival down at the base of society where the bonds of human solidarity are often times very attenuated. All of this “wisdom” of course figured out, told about, made many mistakes to gain, came later, much later because at the time I was just feeling rotten about my life, my place in the sun, and how I didn’t have a say in what was going on. Then through one source or another mainly by the accident of tuning my life-saver transistor radio on one Sunday night to listen to a favorite rock and roll DJ I found a folk music program that sounded interesting (it turned out to be the Dick Summer show on WBZ, a DJ who is featured in the Tom Rush documentary) and I was hooked by the different songs played, some mountain music, some jug, some country blues, some protest songs. Each week Dick Summer would announce who was playing where for the week and he kept mentioning various locations, including the Club 47, in Harvard Square. I was intrigued.         

One Saturday afternoon I made connections to get to a Redline subway stop which was the quickest way for me to get to Harvard Square (which was also the last stop on that line then) and walked around the Square looking into the various clubs and coffeehouses that had been mentioned by Summer and a few more as well. You could hardly walk a block without running into one or the other. Of course during the day all people were doing was sitting around drinking coffee and reading, maybe playing chess, or as I found out later huddled in small group corners working on their music (or poetry which also had some sway as a tail end of the “beat” scene) so I didn’t that day get the full sense of what was going on. A few weeks later, having been hipped to the way things worked, meaning that as long as you had coffee or something in front of you in most places you were cool I always chronically low on funds took a date, a cheap date naturally, to the Club Blue where you did not pay admission but where Eric Von Schmidt was to play. I had heard his Joshua Gone Barbados covered by Tom Rush on Dick Summer’s show and I flipped out so I was eager to hear him. So for the price of, I think, two coffees each, a stretched-out shared brownie and two subway fares we had a good time, an excellent time (although that particular young woman and I would not go on much beyond that first date since she was looking for a guy who had more dough to spend on her, and maybe a “boss” car too.

I would go over to Harvard Square many weekend nights in those days, including sneaking out of the house a few time late at night and heading over since in those days the Redline subway ran all night. That was my home away from home not only for cheap date nights depending on the girl I was interested in but when the storms gathered at the house about my doing, or not doing, this or that, stuff like that when my mother pulled the hammer down. If I had a few dollars make by caddying for the Mayfair swells at a private club a few miles from my house I would pony up the admission, or two admissions if I was lucky,  to hear Joan Baez or her sister Mimi with her husband Richard Farina, maybe Eric Von Schmidt, Tom Paxton when he was in town at the 47. If I was broke I would do my alternative, take the subway but rather than go to a club I would hang out all night at the famous Harvard Square Hayes-Bickford just up the steps from the subway stop exit. That was a crazy scene made up of winos, grifters, con men, guys and gals working off barroom drunks, crazies, and… almost every time out there would be folk-singers or poets, some known to me, others from cheap street, in little clusters, coffee mugs filled, singing or speaking low, keeping the folk tradition alive, keeping the faith that a new wind was coming across the land and they, I, wanted to catch it. Wasn’t that a time.          

I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With Odetta In Mind

I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With Odetta In Mind

They say that the blues, you know, the quintessential black musical contribution to the American songbook along with first cousin jazz that breaks you out of your depression about whatever ails you or the world, was formed down in the Mississippi muds, down in some sweat-drenched bayou, down in some woody hollow all near Mister’s plantation, mill, or store. Well they might be right in a way about how it all started in America as a coded response to Mister’s, Master’s, Captain’s wicked perverse ways back in slavery times, later back in Mister James Crow times. I do believe however they are off by several maybe more generations and off by a few thousand miles from its origins in hell-bent Africa, hell-bent when Mister’s forbears took what he thought was the measure of some poor grimy “natives” and shipped them in death slave boats and brought them to the Mississippi muds, bayous and hollows. Took peoples, proud Nubians who had created very sharp civilizations when Mister’s forbears were wondering what the hell a spoon was when placed in their dirty clenched fingers seemed, still wondered later how the heck to use the damn thing, and why and uprooted them whole.          

Uprooted you hear but somehow that beat, that tah, tat, tah, tah, tat, tah played on some stretched string tightened against some cabin post by young black boys kept Africa home alive. Kept it alive while women, mothers, grandmothers and once in a while despite the hard conditions some great-grandmother who nursed and taught the little ones the old home beat, made them keep the thing alive. Kept alive too Mister’s forced on them religion strange as it was, kept the low branch spirituals that mixed with blues alive in plain wood churches but kept it alive. So a few generations back black men took all that sweat, anger, angst, humiliation, and among themselves “spoke” blues on juke joint no electricity Saturday nights and sang high collar blues come Sunday morning plain wood church time.  Son House, Charley Patton, Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt and a lot of guy who went to their graves undiscovered in the sweat sultry Delta night carried on, and some sisters too, some younger sisters who heard the beat and heard the high collar Sunday spirituals. Some sisters like Odetta, big-voiced, who made lots of funny duck searching for roots white college students mainly marvel that they had heard some ancient Nubian Queen, some deep-voiced Mother Africa calling them back to the cradle of civilization.           

The New Breed Of Sci-Fi Adventure-“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” (2015)-A Film Review

The New Breed Of Sci-Fi Adventure-“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” (2015)-A Film Review    

DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (VII), starring Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, 2015

         

Science Fiction movies sure aren’t what they used to be. Although I was, am not a great fan of the genre and have taken this assignment to review one of the seemingly never-ending Star Wars sagas (number 7 if you can believe it) that ripple through the cinematic universe every few years to give flagging studio tickets sales a boost as our boss Greg Green said when he assigned this beast to “broaden my horizons” I sat through my fair share of them growing up. Growing up just outside of Albany, New York my older brother would in the interest making his “baby-sitting” of me woes lighter take us in his car to the Majestic Theater in downtown Albany on Saturday afternoon’s to the matinees.

Of course since the average film was much shorter then usually around an hour and one half there would be a double-feature, sometimes a horror movie and a sci fi or sometimes two sci fi’s for the afternoon. What has struck me as amazing according to my recollections (and some “cheap sheet” research via invaluable for movie summaries if not for everything Wikipedia) after viewing this chapter of Star Wars was how differently these films have tracked society in their respective times.  Then, the late 1950s maybe early 1960s these sci fi films had “aliens” (not earthly aliens seeking shelter from earth’s storms in places like America to work and raise families without fear of death and disaster from the forces controlling their home societies) who were inevitably scary and ready to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting earth. Were in those deep freeze Cold War days foreboding when we were not quite sure we would make it from one day to the next if the “big one,” the nuclear bombs we rightly feared would blow us away. And the storylines and bad guy monsters and weird forces from outer space left no room for compromise-it was earthly civilization, us, such as it was or them.

Naturally the earthly civilization won out over the mutants and creeps who tried to do us in (read in newspeak the Soviets). Naturally as well in those days the leaders, usually one leader, who figured out how to tame the alien menace was an All-American, uh, guy who as Si Lannon loves to say went mano a mano with these unearthly forces. Saved civilization and grabbed the good-looking young woman in the fall-out (some things haven’t changed witness the younger versions of Hans Solo and Princess now General Leia and their courting ritual in the first three Star War sagas from about a million years ago it seems). Alternatively beat down the mad scientist who created some kid scary stuff, usually grossly radioactive and had to take the fall.      

That was then though. Maybe it is the intervening years where the Soviet menace has turned to dust and those “alien” enemies, the “them” have gone from outer space to around the corner and the world having explored the skies and found nothing unfriendly or otherwise (the cynic would say thus far) that has changed things. Add in a little what I would call sarcastically “universal multi-culturalism” and you have a very different mix. Now those scary monsters who populate the Star Wars alternative planets are just regular guys and gals who hang around bars mixing in with humans and whatnot.

Gruesome monsters that still scare me who I wouldn’t want to run into in daylight much less a dark alley at night but who we can’t offend because they might be allies, and besides “body-shaming” is socially taboo these days. More hopefully real live earthling minorities as in this film actually do good in the struggle against what is now not just earthly evil but universal. But perhaps the biggest difference, surprise is that those delicate passive young women of the 1950s have been transformed into righteous warriors in their own right kicking ass and taking numbers just like the good guys of yore. Here the warrior Rey played by Daisy Ridley showing her metal to good effect and throwing down bad guys left and right.  

All of those changes are basically pluses but that does not stop the story line from being the same old same old-here the latest incarnation of the bad guys, the First Order, looking for universal dominance against the gnat-like Resistance (a very appropriate term these days in America). Here the line-up is a young woman, a young black man, a gung-ho pilot, Hans Solo, General Leia against that mass of incompetent soldiers in that silly white armor aided by massive firepower which would make the Pentagon generals green with envy, led by General Huk, directed by ugly Supreme leader Snoke with the ringer being an imitation Darth Vader dressed in Johnny Cash black Kylo.

The ringer part-this Kylo aka Ben is none other than the progeny of Hans and Leia when they were doing their own version of mano a mano. Get this though Kylo aka Ben is so enamored of the dark side that he kills his Oedipal father Hans. Nothing but mourning all around. Except the Resistance is able to crush the First Order (for now) and that young woman, that Rey, gets to Luke Skywalker which is what this whole trip was all about. Stay tuned for the next one (2017 already filmed and shown) and the next one for 2019 just in time once again to boost flagging studio ticket sales. Nothing here made me want to grab onto the genre for dear life.               

Traipsing Through The Ghost Of Tin Pan Alley Looking For The Muse Of Music-Looking For A Melody Too-With Drew Barrymore And Hugh Grant’s “Music And Lyrics” (2007)-A Film Review And More

Traipsing Through The Ghost Of Tin Pan Alley Looking For The Muse Of Music-Looking For A Melody Too-With Drew Barrymore And Hugh Grant’s “Music And Lyrics” (2007)-A Film Review And More

DVD Review

By Leslie Dumont

Music and Lyrics, starring Drew Barrymore, Hugh Grant, 2007

Very seldom has a movie theme and moment in my life come together but that is the case with the theme of the film under review Music and Lyrics. In the film Alex, who I give more detail on in a moment, played by boyish Hugh Grant, is struggling to keep his head above water in the music business and needs to find a lyricist badly and Sophie, ditto on the details, is just struggling to be a writer but who is a natural born lyricist who is not looking at the start to do lyrics.

How does that dilemma apply to me. Well let me tell you in a few thousand words, just kidding. As the reader may know and if not, I will mention that I have relatively recently retired from the day to day grind of writing a by-line for Women Today a publication I was associated with for some thirty plus years. I am sure that the average reader does not know that I started out as a free-lance stringer at this publication as did many others. After a couple of years though my fellow writer and then companion (and we are friendly again now too and let’s leave it at that) advised me that I needed to move on, get myself a by-line at a publication which would value my skills more than as a long-term free-lancer here. Good advice. When a change of leadership came through a couple of years ago and to keep my hand in the business the current site manager Greg Green on Josh’s recommendation hired me to do a general assignment by-line. Meaning I could write on any subject that might interest me.               

That information gives you an idea about my career but does not give an understanding on what my youthful dreams had been. That is where the theme of this movie comes in and why I strongly related to it beyond the charming acting of the two principals. I grew up in New Jersey close to New York City, close enough to imbibe in the folk music revival on the weekends that swept the bohemian clots and campuses around the country in the early 1960s. I had a good voice and a fair knowledge of that folk part of the American Songbook. Moreover I could write songs, lyrics anyway and had something of an amateur’s success in the coffeehouses around the Village on “open mic” nights and when I went to college up in Saratoga Springs I grabbed some gigs at the famous and still going Caffe Lena’s. Here’s the rub though I like many other “folkies” had to make some kind of decision when that folk minute faded, or at least became something for aficionados meaning only a few could make a living out of their art. My big problem then, and now, which is the opposition problem Alex had was that I never was good at putting a fine finish on my lyrics, needed a never found melody maker to go up the next step.     

I always, as Josh could testify back when we were an item, kept that musical interest up, kept writing lyrics even while working as a stringer and with my by-line when I had spare time. I was always dissatisfied with the melodies, with meshing the two together as Josh could tell you then, and now too that I have time to work some on those lyrics that had piled up in drawers. I need a melody maker, a person who could hone my lyrics into something good. Josh, did I say we are now friends again and let’s leave it at that, offered to help me. Problem, big problem is that Josh doesn’t have a musical bone in his body. No, that is not true, he knows more of the American Songbook than I do, has written more about music than any other subject in his own long career as a free-lancer and then here. But that take is more about the place of different kinds of music in the American experience or about the stuff that he and his corner boys up in Olde Saco, Maine listened to growing up, stuff like that. What I need is a melody maker, end of story.

Well not quite end of story since I have been very frustrated not being able to find somebody to work with, someone like in the old days of the mythical Tin Pan Alley when one person wrote lyrics and the other did the melody, common practice and for the times a good one before the superstar kids who could write and make music all in one fell swoop, in one person like say Bob Dylan, guys like that came on the scene. I brought the issue of my frustrations to my chiropractor who has helped me with stress management and other troubles who recommended this film which I was totally unaware of. So, I, well, Josh and I watched, and while it didn’t solve my own musical problems it was as Josh said, “just what the doctor ordered.”

Of course from minute one when Sophie comes to water “has been” rock star Alex’s plants as a substitute for a friend you know that this is going to be the inevitable “boy meets girl” or vici versa story that has saved many a lame Hollywood plot (this one in the “so-so” category saved by the main characters’ performances more than anything else). And they will get under the inevitable silky sheets.  With a twist-“has been” Alex is looking via the next generation superstar Cora (although how and why was beyond me except I plead guilty to not understanding what thirteen-year olds, my grandkids, listen to currently) to “get well” to make something of a comeback, since this Cora is the conduit to that return. Problem, big problem again, Alex hasn’t written anything but trash for a long time, since he was king of the hill in the famous 1980s rock group Pops-you may remember them if you are from Generation X. He needs, maybe not as desperately as I need a melody maker, a lyricist.                         

Turns out that Sophie is not just a spaceshot plant-tender but a spaceshot writer with a few credentials who beyond that seems to have a grasp for writing appropriately endearing lyrics.

Naturally there have to be some ups and downs like Alex even getting spaceshot serious writer Sophie to write bubble gum lyrics for this teen idol Cora. They do, do a good job too as the romantic attraction builds. Then it all comes crashing down-almost. Seems Cora has a very different take on how to present this well-crafted song to her audience. Alex desperate to move back up the music food chain (Seth Garth’s forever term) is willing to let Cora do whatever butchery she wants to the song as long he gets back into the limelight or at least moves up from playing for his once youthful now aging audiences at state fairs and conventions. Split issue. Well almost since they are smitten, and all is well once Alex realizes he can’t sellout and keep his dear Sophie. And they compose and write happily ever after. Well I have had my say-except if any melody maker is out there you know where to find me.

[I was not sure where to put this but Josh and I had a conversation recently, really going back to the 1970s and just revisited by this film about “has-beens” like Alex, like me at a more amateur level and what you do when the flame burns out, when the music that made you goes out of fashion and you wind up playing conventions and coffeehouses. I decided, a right decision to move on to a professional career. Alex decided to stick it out no matter how far down in the mud he went. Josh reminded of a series he did covering two folk icons-Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, the media-anointed king and queen of the folk minute. His take was what happened to those who had maybe not as much fame as that pair but who were famous for the moment but who decided to move on when it looked like they were not going to be able to make a career out of their youthful dreams. Or did not want to trek the awful miles in some rundown car staying on the road at some broken down motel in order to play to twenty people in Kingstown, Pennsylvania or someplace like that. Josh is thinking of asking Greg to okay an encore performance of that series in light of this film-L.D.]   

      

A Tale Of Two…Sisters- Down And Dirty Among The Mayfair Swells-Katharine Hepburn And Cary Grant’s “Holiday” (1938)-A Film Review

A Tale Of Two…Sisters- Down And Dirty Among The Mayfair Swells-Katharine Hepburn And Cary Grant’s “Holiday” (1938)-A Film Review

DVD Review

     

By Leslie Dumont

Holiday, starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, directed by George Cukor so you know it will be some kind of romantic comedy, 1938

Sam Lowell, the former Senior Film Editor in this space under the old regime where the situation had evolved that every writer had some kind of title now discarded, told me to start this little film review, Holiday, with an idea attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald who did know a thing or two about the species that the rich, no, the very rich, the don’t ask the price rich, are different from you and me. I was not familiar with that particular quote but after viewing this film there is a certain truth to that old saw. So thanks Sam for giving me a lead-in since this is really my first review of old time black and white movies of which I was never really a big fan. Never like it when college guys with no money would ask me if I wanted to see some feature in the latest campus film festival retrospective although I went if I liked the guy. Moreover I was, and the jury is still out for me on this earlier effort, not a big fan of Katharine Hepburn in her later 1960s and 1970s films. I was however quite enamored of Cary Grant in his later pictures although that may have taken a little beating in this film where he is not quite so dashingand decisive.

Sam, who was crazy for, was spoon-fed on these 1930s screwball romantic comedies, also told me to mention at least in passing that those were the golden days of the genre with the likes of the director here George Cukor, Preston Sturgis and Howard Hawks blazing the trail.  That while this film was in the genre it was not the best by either main star. But onward to the “why” of the difference between the very rich, those who owned “museum” mansions on exclusive streets in New York City then, or now. Seems poor little rich girl, silver spoon fed and bred, Julia, was on the prowl for a husband while she was slumming on the post-1932 Olympic ski slopes of Lake Placid in upstate New York. Bingo she finds up and coming up by the bootstraps Johnny, Johnny Case, played by Cary (who looks good in any kind of tie by the way if you wind up seeing this film you will get the reference)  and after a short whirlwind romance on the slopes they get engaged.

Of course whirlwind or not, among the upper set, maybe lower down the class ladder too, in those days at least a proper young man and woman would seek the blessing of the family. That is where the action starts for real when our boy Johnny shows up at that swanky museum mansion to face the inspection of Julia’s rich as Midas banker father. That is where things begin to unravel as well. The old man is dubious about young man Johnny’s wherewithal, clearly not sure of the boy’s bloodlines and so there is a round and round between father and daughter until she gets her way. As usual.       

Enter older sister Linda, played by Ms. Hepburn, who is something like the antithesis of Julia but who can see from minute one that Johnny is the real thing. Real whether he will fit the expectations of Julia and the old man or not. That is a dicey thing and Johnny’s determination/hesitancies somewhat out of character for dashing Cary is what makes me feel a little less kindly toward Cary’s abilities after viewing this one. So the whole circus of a family and Johnny go round and round until the decisive New Year’s Eve night when proud Papa gets to announce the engagement publicly to New York society, to the swells at a big bash at his house. That is kind of the tipping point for Johnny, for Linda who is madly in love with her free spirit side Johnny, and even Julia who begins to have doubts about whether her Johnny can toe the mark, can fit in high society. The answer, after going the extra mile to bring Julia to his side, no on the latter question. And Linda is there to help Johnny put up the Julia rejection pieces. Maybe Linda is just a little too dizzy, too ephemeral and other-worldly but she is ready to break out of the high society rat race which is a good sign. Not a great film but one which I could see myself cheering for Linda and Johnny if I had been in a 1938 movie seat.             

The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind

The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With B.B. King’s 

Lucille In Mind

  

By Bradley Fox, Jr.  

Here is the drill. I started out life listening to singer like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby (and his brother Bob), Miss Patti Page, Miss Rosemary Clooney, Miss Peggy Lee, the Andrew, McGuire, Dooley sisters, and all the big swing bands from the 1940s like Harry James, Tommy Dorsey (and his brother Jimmy) as background music on the family radio in the 1950s which my mother had always during the day to get her workaday daytime household world and on Saturday night when my father joined in. Joined in so they could listen to Bill Marlowe on local radio station WJDA and his Memory Lane show from seven to eleven where they could listen to the music that got them (and their generation) through the “from hunger” times of the 1930s Great Depression and then when they slogged through (either in some watery European theater or Pacific one take your pick) or anxiously waited at home for the other shoe to drop during World War II. I am not saying that they should not have had their memory music after all of that but frankly that stuff then (and now although less) made me grind my teeth. But I was a captive audience then and so to this day I can sing off Rum and Coca Cola and Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree from memory. But that was not my music, okay. 

Then of course since we are speaking about the 1950s came the great musical break-out, the age of classic rock and roll which I “dug” seriously dug to the point of dreaming my own jailbreak dreams about rock futures (and girls) but that Elvis-etched time too was just a bit soon for me to be able unlike my older brother, Prescott, to call that the music that I came of age to. Although the echoes of that time still run through my mind and I can quote chapter and verse One Night With You, Sweet Little Sixteen, Let’s Have A Party, Be-Bop-a-Lula, Bo Diddley, Peggy Sue and a whole bunch more.   

The music that I can really call my own is the stuff from the folk minute of the 1960s which dovetailed with my coming of chronological, political and social age (that last in the sense of recognizing, if not always acting on, the fact that there were others, kindred, out there beside myself filled with angst, alienation and good will to seek solidarity with). You know the mountain tunes of the first generation of the Carter Family, Buell Kazell, Jimmy Rodgers, the old country Child ballads (Northwest Europe old country), the blue grass music , and the protest songs by the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk and Phil Ochs. The latter songs being what drove a lot of my interest once I connected their work with the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene (and the adjacent hanging out at the Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria which I have written plenty about elsewhere on poverty nights, meaning many nights).

A lot of the drive toward folk music was to get out from under the anti-rock and rock musical counter-revolution that I kept hearing on my transistor radio during that early 1960s period with pretty boy singers and vapid young female-driven female singer stuff. Also to seek out roots music that I kept hearing in the coffeehouses and on the radio once I found a station (accidently) which featured such music and got intrigued by the sounds. Part of that search, a big search over the long haul, was to get deeply immersed in the blues, mainly at first country blues and later the city, you know Chicago, blues. Those country guys though intrigued me once they were “discovered” down south in little towns plying away in the fields or some such work and were brought up to Newport to enflame a new generation of aficionados. The likes of Son House, Skip James, Bukka White and of course Mississippi John Hurt. But those guys basically stayed in the South and it took a younger generation like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and the guy whose photograph graces this sketch, B.B. King, to move north, to follow the northern star to the big industrial cities (with a stop at Memphis going up river) to put some electric juice in those old guitars and chase my blues away just by playing like they had made their own pacts with the devil. Praise be.               

The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind

The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With B.B. King’s 

Lucille In Mind

  

 By Bradley Fox, Jr.  

Here is the drill. I started out life listening to singer like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby (and his brother Bob), Miss Patti Page, Miss Rosemary Clooney, Miss Peggy Lee, the Andrew, McGuire, Dooley sisters, and all the big swing bands from the 1940s like Harry James, Tommy Dorsey (and his brother Jimmy) as background music on the family radio in the 1950s which my mother had always during the day to get her workaday daytime household world and on Saturday night when my father joined in. Joined in so they could listen to Bill Marlowe on local radio station WJDA and his Memory Lane show from seven to eleven where they could listen to the music that got them (and their generation) through the “from hunger” times of the 1930s Great Depression and then when they slogged through (either in some watery European theater or Pacific one take your pick) or anxiously waited at home for the other shoe to drop during World War II. I am not saying that they should not have had their memory music after all of that but frankly that stuff then (and now although less) made me grind my teeth. But I was a captive audience then and so to this day I can sing off Rum and Coca Cola and Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree from memory. But that was not my music, okay. 

Then of course since we are speaking about the 1950s came the great musical break-out, the age of classic rock and roll which I “dug” seriously dug to the point of dreaming my own jailbreak dreams about rock futures (and girls) but that Elvis-etched time too was just a bit soon for me to be able unlike my older brother, Prescott, to call that the music that I came of age to. Although the echoes of that time still run through my mind and I can quote chapter and verse One Night With You, Sweet Little Sixteen, Let’s Have A Party, Be-Bop-a-Lula, Bo Diddley, Peggy Sue and a whole bunch more.   

The music that I can really call my own is the stuff from the folk minute of the 1960s which dovetailed with my coming of chronological, political and social age (that last in the sense of recognizing, if not always acting on, the fact that there were others, kindred, out there beside myself filled with angst, alienation and good will to seek solidarity with). You know the mountain tunes of the first generation of the Carter Family, Buell Kazell, Jimmy Rodgers, the old country Child ballads (Northwest Europe old country), the blue grass music , and the protest songs by the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk and Phil Ochs. The latter songs being what drove a lot of my interest once I connected their work with the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene (and the adjacent hanging out at the Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria which I have written plenty about elsewhere on poverty nights, meaning many nights).

A lot of the drive toward folk music was to get out from under the anti-rock and rock musical counter-revolution that I kept hearing on my transistor radio during that early 1960s period with pretty boy singers and vapid young female-driven female singer stuff. Also to seek out roots music that I kept hearing in the coffeehouses and on the radio once I found a station (accidently) which featured such music and got intrigued by the sounds. Part of that search, a big search over the long haul, was to get deeply immersed in the blues, mainly at first country blues and later the city, you know Chicago, blues. Those country guys though intrigued me once they were “discovered” down south in little towns plying away in the fields or some such work and were brought up to Newport to enflame a new generation of aficionados. The likes of Son House, Skip James, Bukka White and of course Mississippi John Hurt. But those guys basically stayed in the South and it took a younger generation like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and the guy whose photograph graces this sketch, B.B. King, to move north, to follow the northern star to the big industrial cities (with a stop at Memphis going up river) to put some electric juice in those old guitars and chase my blues away just by playing like they had made their own pacts with the devil. Praise be.               

The Lady In The Bell Jar-The “One Life: Sylvia Plath” At The National Portrait Gallery

By Frank Jackman

I have known the name Sylvia Plath for a long time, maybe since the time of her suicide when I was still in high school and my senior year English who was a great influence on all her charges especially about literature was pretty broken up about that tragic event. While I may have known about Sylvia Plath and her well-known (and still well-known) book The Bell Jar and of her poetry in those days what she had to say, what poetry she wrote did not “speak” to me.

How could such a sensitive soul (but also much else as the exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery points out including a sense of humor, a wry sense) speak to a hard-bitten corner boy whose literary heroes if he had any centered on guys like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Tough guys writing for a tough hard-shell world. Even later, college later, when I had a girlfriend who was crazy for whatever Ms. Plath wrote (she did her senior thesis on Ms. Plath if I recall) and who endlessly coaxed me to at least read The Bell Jar I bucked her. (Needless to say that relationship did not last too long). It was not until later, not until after a whole bunch of Army experiences during the Vietnam War kind of broke a lot of my youthful prejudices did I finally read her work. That is when I got why that Plath-crazed young women was so insistent that I take the plunge. And it is not too late for you as well.   

    

When The Blues Was Dues- The Guitar Of Elmore James-About Who Put And When The Rock In Rock And Roll

When The Blues Was Dues- The Guitar Of Elmore James-About Who Put And When The Rock In Rock And Roll

I will get to a CD review of Elmore James’ work in a second. Now I want to tell, no retell, the tale that had me and a few of my corner boys who hung out in front of, or in if we had dough for food or more likely the jukebox, Jimmy Jack’s Diner in Carver where I came of age in the early 1960s going for a while. On one lonesome Friday night, lonesome meaning, no dough, no wheels, no girls, or any combination of the three, with time of our hands Billy Bradley, Jack Dawson and I went round and round about what song by what artist each of us thought was the decisive song that launched rock and roll. Yeah, I know, I know now, that the world then, like now, was going to hell in a hand-basket, what with the Russkies breathing hard on us in the deep freeze Cold War red scare night, with crazy wars going on for no apparent reason, and the struggle for black civil rights down in the police state South (that “police state" picked up later after I got wise to what was happening there) but what were three corner boys to do to while away the time.  

Here is the break-down though. We knew, knew without anybody telling us that while Elvis gave rock and roll a big lift in his time before he went on to silly movies that debased his talent he was not the “max daddy,” not the guy who rolled the dice. For one thing and this was Billy’s position he only covered Big Joe Turner’s classic R&B classic Shake, Rattle, and Roll and when we heard Joe’s finger-snapping version we flipped out. So Billy had his choice made, no question. Jack had heard on some late Sunday night radio station out in Chicago on his transistor radio a thing called Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour where he first heard this guy wailing on the piano a be-bop tune. It turned out to be Ike Turner (without Tina then) blasting Rocket 88. So Jack had his position firm, and a good choice. Me, well I caught this obscure folk music station (obscure then not a few years later though) which played not just folk but what would be later called “roots music.” And the blues is nothing but roots music in America. One night I heard Elmore James slide guitar his way through Look On Yonder Wall. That is the song I defended that night. Did any of us change each other’s mind that night. Be serious. I later, several years later, saw the wisdom of Jack’s choice and switched but old Elmore still was a close second. Enough said.       

CD REVIEW

The History of Elmore James: The Sky Is Crying, Elmore James, Rhino Records, 1993

When one thinks of the classic blues tune “Dust My Broom” one tends to think of the legendary Robert Johnson who along with his “Sweet Home, Chicago” created two of the signature blues songs of the pre-World War II period. However, my first hearing of “Dust My Broom” was on a hot LP vinyl record (the old days, right?) version covered and made his own by the artist under review, Elmore James. I have heard many cover versions since then, including from the likes of George Thoroughgood and Chris Smither, and they all reflect on the influence of Elmore’s amazing slide guitar virtuosity to provide the "heat" necessary to do the song justice. Moreover, this is only the tip of the iceberg as such blues masters and aficionados as B.B. King and The Rolling Stones have covered other parts of James’ catalog.

Perhaps because Elmore died relativity young at a time when blues were just being revived in the early 1960’s as part of the general trend toward “discovering” roots music by the likes of this reviewer he has been a less well-known member of the blues pantheon. However, for those who know the value of a good slide guitar to add sexiness and sauciness to a blues number James’ is a hero. Hell, Thoroughgood built a whole career out of Elmore covers (and also, to be sure, of the late legendary Bo Didderly). I never get tired of hearing these great songs. Moreover, it did not hurt to have the famous Broom-dusters backing him up throughout the years. As one would expect of material done in the pre-digital age the sound quality is very dependent on the quality of the studio. But that, to my mind just makes it more authentic.

Well, what did you NEED to listen to here? Obviously,” Dust My Broom". On this CD though you MUST listen to Elmore on "Standing At The Crossroads". Wow, it jumps right out at you. "Look On Yonder Wall" (a song that I used to believe was a key to early rock 'n' rock before I gravitated to Ike Turner's "Rocket 88" as my candidate for that role), "It Hurts Me Too" and the classic "The Sky is Crying" round out the minimum program here. Listen on.

Lyrics To "Dust My Broom"

I'm gonna get up in the mornin',

I believe I'll dust my broom (2x)

Girlfriend, the black man you been lovin',

girlfriend, can get my room

I'm gon' write a letter,

Telephone every town I know (2x)

If I can't find her in West Helena,

She must be in East Monroe, I know

I don't want no woman,

Wants every downtown man she meet (2x)

She's a no good doney,

They shouldn't 'low her on the street

I believe, I believe I'll go back home (2x)

You can mistreat me here, babe,

But you can't when I go home

And I'm gettin' up in the morning,

I believe I'll dust my broom (2x)

Girlfriend, the black man that you been lovin',

Girlfriend, can get my room

I'm gon' call up Chiney,

She is my good girl over there (2x)

If I can't find her on Philippine's Island,

She must be in Ethiopia somewhere

Robert Johnson