March 2008 Archives

Do Children Still Hunger for the Past?

My brother and I were early TV-babies, and the family's first set, a blond-wood Zenith, had a screen the size and shape of a salad plate. Although he did the usual little-brother things like bite me on the leg when he was mad, Les and I watched everything together, making fun of sitcom characters (like handsome but prim Mr. Boynton in Our Miss Brooks) or singing dirty-word versions of theme songs and jingles.

All that seems normal, but we also did something with TV that I really can't explain. When those jerky but wildly surreal Max Fleischer cartoons came up as afternoon kiddy fare, and Fred 'n' Gingery black-and-white movies were shown on New York's Million Dollar Movie or The Early Show (anyone recall its "Syncopated Clock"?), we'd both leap from the sofa and put our runny noses to the screen so we could make out the tiny Roman-numeral copyright date beneath the titles before it vanished. Then we'd scream the number, and the earlier the year, the happier we were.

That was in the '50s, whose contemporary Douglas Sirk-ish products could easily serve the same purpose now -- they're decades more distant than our antique trophies were -- to history-hungry tykes. But are online boys ands girls interested in pictures and sounds from the past?

A newspaper story jogged me into retrospection, the one in the Times last week about the ostensibly earliest recorded sound. When I began to comprehend that French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville had produced sonic representations called phonautograms 17 years before Thomas Edison received his phonograph patent, and a team of "audio historians" converted the sooty images into actual sounds, I nearly fainted with the same copyright delight that had grabbed me as a child.

Phonautograms weren't playback-able, yet their ignored inventor deserved some sort of credit. And though there's reportedly no evidence that Edison knew anything about Scott, we are well aware that the American hero was an American thief of ideas; just read Wizard, Marc Seifer's fine biography of Nikola Tesla, or even the poetic libretto of the recently produced opera Violet Fire, to see how Mr. Light Bulb wrested credit and a fortune for the invention of alternating current from the gay, Croatia-born genius (at left).

I hurriedly looked online for a button, and yes! There it was, an 11-second mp3 file of a probably female voice singing "Au Clair de la Lune" that the detectives say was recorded on April 9, 1860 -- almost exactly 148 years ago.

In what type of room was it sung? In what color gown, of what rustling silk, was the vocalist clad? At just what time of day? A boy's inquiring mind wants to know.

And then I remembered something from those saucer-TV days, an episode from a science fiction series -- called, conveniently, Science Fiction Theater -- with a plot about a kidnapped scientist:

Enemy espionage obtains a record of a physicist's top-secret conversation with the Secretary of Defense in a completely sealed room. The secret of the leak lies in a bottle of ant poison containing a mysterious crystal -- a crystal with the power to record entire conversations!

"The Frozen Sound" first aired on July 29, 1955, and the program ended with something that has never left my imagination. Two scientists take a chunk of Vesuvius lava from Pompeii and place it in the ant-poison machine that frees the captured sound. They wait, and ... screams, shrieks, moans of a population burned and buried suddenly two millennia before. Their listening faces show an unforgettable hybrid of fascination and horror.

Decades of haunting yard sales and flea markets have led me to understand that I require dusty, worn, hand-holdable evidence that daily life existed before I was born -- even better if the original price tag, as it were, is still attached. I don't know why the mounds of traditional cultural evidence heaped under me, the world's books, art and music, never fully suffice. I have a modern, life-affirming desire to see the actual menu, and the bill, for The Last Supper.

Or a moving image, vital and seminal, of Isadora Duncan, drapery flying.

Or a sound, steeped in ghostly gray Parisian ether, of a still recognizable song. Who was she?

Now I have another button to press, and more of the proof of a lived-in past I seem to need.

Sascha Radetsky of ABT. He'll meet you outside.

Tight Deadline

There's a peculiar first-person piece in the latest issue of Newsweek, odd as much from an editing point of view as from a writer's or reader's. "Don't Judge Me by My Tights," offered as a "My Turn" column, is a credo by American Ballet Theater soloist Sascha Radetsky that can be summed up in one short swipe: Don't think I'm a sissy because I dance ballet.

Those limp, nancy cliches, he writes, have nothing to do with what he really does:

On an average day at the job, I handle lithe, lovely women, engage in duels and delight in the experience of an exotic locale. I move like a gymnast or martial artist and embody the vilest of pimps or the most chivalrous and passionate of lovers.

Yes, that's the beat beat beat of the jackhammers you hear in the pit.

And if I were you, great unthinking public, I'd be careful to keep any doubts to myself:

But for you out there who still feel compelled to malign male dancers with half-truths and petty stereotypes, well, maybe we need to step outside. I'll leave my tights on.

Jamie Bell as Billy Elliot

The Third Gay

At first I looked to see if a mistake had been made and the piece really came from a Newsweek "Last 25 Years" special issue. Billy Elliot, after all, was released in 2000 and won its three Oscar noms the next year. You don't remember this U.K. gem, one of the most appealing queer-stereotype smashers -- and dance-invigorating narratives -- ever on screen, in which a miserable working-class straight boy discovers his happiness and core self in an inescapable zeal for ballet? Well, neither does the Newsweek staff.

Editors, maybe there are ways to butch up this sort of tired stuff. Sure, defend the boys who want to dance. Yet make a wee effort and find a nongay toe-shoe guy who doesn't whine about moronic bigotry, but slaps it down with a pliant wrist instead; discover the guy who likes, even loves, to be taken for a sissy. How about a couple of lesbian and gay dancers to back him up? There's gotta be a George Clooney in ballet somewhere. ("No, I'm gay, gay. The third gay -- that was pushing it.")

If he really knows his subject, this winning fellow could also demonstrate how a great part of the magnetism of his vocation comes from activating the cross-gender power and sensuousness of bodies in motion, male and female.

By the way, Mr. Radetsky, no matter what role you take or costume you don, you can't strip from dance the surprise of erotic desire.

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Unforgettable TV phrase of the week:

"Yes, that was from my Joan of Arc cocktail line."

An Out There award not even worth the paper it isn't written on goes to the reader who can name the speaker and program.

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For an automatic alert when there is a new Out There post, email jiweinste@aol.com.