Archives for April 2006

There’s little in twenty-first-century life more mind-numbing than a blogger’s excuses for not blogging, so I’m going to skip them. Suffice it to say I’ve been busy. The usual things have been especially demanding, and I’ve added a few new commitments to the weekly schedule. One of these is the return of The Sopranos after its long hiatus. Another is worrying about the playoffs, which isn’t a scheduled activity but gnaws at the edges and center of each waking minute. But the most time-consuming and preoccupying of my new pursuits, by far, is indirectly related: I’m learning to ice-skate.

Yeah, I’m finally doing it. Why now, I couldn’t tell you, but it had something to do with another birthday approaching and passing. For a few years at least, I’d talked about this, but after a few cursory web searches that didn’t turn up any nearby adult beginning skating lessons, I’d put the idea away. Well, this year my searching was more determined and I turned up lessons at a rink that’s almost within a reasonable distance of where I live and work. But not quite. So early Saturday mornings and late Monday afternoons, I take to the road and spend more time than I’m willing to admit driving to and from a northwest suburb, all in order to spend a significantly shorter amount of time on the ice. It’s utterly worth it. Fortunately, I’ve roped a friend into joining me; she’s Canadian, and appeals to her national pride proved effective. And thanks to my dad–and unlike her–I’ve got hockey skates.

I’ve got hockey skates! They’re almost three weeks old, but possessing them still makes me feel like some different, cooler person. Never let it be said of me that I don’t care about my image–I’m especially fond of carrying my skates to the car. Especially if it’s parked far away or my neighbors are around. And I’m totally making progress with the things on my feet, which is really, really thrilling.

I didn’t realize how long it has been since I set out to acquire a brand new skill–hell, in graduate school I think I unlearned a fair number of them–and at this point, anyway, the learning curve is nice and steep. Every week I learn to do something new and get demonstrably better at everything I learned previously. Progress is better than steady, and skating just keeps getting more fun as I test and stretch my limits. My class, which is full of friendly moms and only a couple of guys, is geared toward figure skating, but since I need to build a foundation of skills and get really comfortable on the skates, that’s fine. It’s Sasha Ovechkin, not Cohen, I’m thinking about out there, but right now I just want to keep learning new moves of whatever kind. I’m not picky.

I think this new adventure of mine nicely parallels Terry’s recent forays into painting. He got the bug from looking at so many paintings for so many years with wonder and delight and, in the end, a wish to experience firsthand the process of making something like that. I certainly got here from watching way too much hockey, until mere spectatorial connoisseurship was no longer satisfying. I don’t know whether his taking up painting has changed the way he looks at pictures, but already I’m watching hockey differently, my eyes more on the players’ feet than the puck sometimes (especially their backward skating, since mine hasn’t progressed beyond swizzles yet). I’ve never played an instrument or danced or pursued a visual art form in any sustained way, and in fact I’ve never followed something as it’s performed at the highest level while practicing it at the lowest level (not that I’m yet playing hockey, but in my mind I’m taking the first steps toward so doing). It’s true that at moments, the experience unsettlingly makes me long to be an eight-year-old Minnesotan boy–what wouldn’t be possible!–but for the most part, it’s illuminating and transporting. Count another recruit to the ranks of the passionate amateurs.

Somewhat to my surprise I find that I’ve written the first 1,500 words of the fourth chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. As you may recall, I wasn’t planning on doing any work yesterday, but when you’re hot, you’re hot, so I guess I’ll lay off the blog for another day or two and keep pumping it out.

In the meantime, here’s a little taste of the day’s work:

Harlem in 1924 was as much an arena for sexual opportunism as it was a center of cultural ferment. Duke Ellington euphemistically described it as “a very colorful place….an attraction like Chinatown was in San Francisco.” Some well-heeled Manhattanites treated it more like Storyville East, and some Harlemites were more than glad to oblige them. Carl Van Vechten, who would celebrate Harlem two years later in his controversial novel Nigger Heaven, was already bringing parties of nightclubbers there, both to revel in the black entertainment and, as often as not, to troll for sex. Though he was a true believer in the Harlem Renaissance, Van Vechten was also a gay man in search of adventure, and there was no lack of it in Harlem, no matter what your tastes might encompass. Langston Hughes would later write sardonically of how “thousands of whites came to Harlem night after night, thinking the Negroes loved to have them there, and firmly believing that all Harlemites left their houses at sundown to sing and dance in cabarets, because most of the whites saw nothing but the cabarets, not the houses….The ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any. As for all those white folks in the speakeasies and night clubs of Harlem–well, maybe a colored man could find some place to have a drink that the tourists hadn’t yet discovered.”

Once again, later.

“He was perhaps a cynic, and his withers were unwrung at many of the misfortunes that affect men, but he had a peculiar feeling for youth, perhaps because it promised so much and lasted too short a time, and it seemed to him that there was in the bitterness it experience when reality breaks upon its illusions somehting more pathetic than in many graver ills.”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Narrow Corner

In case you’re wondering, I overdid it, though not drastically, and definitely not according to the lunatic standards of my pre-illness days. In a nutshell, I stayed up very late Sunday working on Hotter Than That, then spent most of Monday editing what I’d written and turning out this week’s drama column for The Wall Street Journal. Smoke is now coming out of my ears.

My plan for Tuesday is threefold: (1) Spend a nice long chunk of time at the gym. (2) Sit on the couch and watch three or four episodes of the first season of The Equalizer, currently airing on the Sleuth Channel. (3) Do no work. (That includes blogging.)

Later.

“Because of the doctor’s remark while they were up in the old Portuguese fort, Erik put on the beginning of the last act of ‘Tristan.’ The recollection gave an added poignancy to the music. The strange and subtle little tune that the shepherd played on his reed, when he scanned the wide sea and saw no sail, was melancholy with blighted hope. But it was another pang that wrung the doctor’s heart. He remembered Covent Garden in the old days and himself, in evening clothes, sitting in a stall on the aisle; in the boxes were women in tiaras, with pearls round their necks; the King, obese, with great pouches under his eyes, sat in the corner of the omnibus box; on the other side, in the corner, looking over the orchestra, the Baron and the Baroness de Meyer sat together, and she catching his eye bowed. There was an air of opulence and of security. Everything in its grand manner seemed so well-ordered, the thought of change never crossed the mind. Richter conducted. How passionate that music was, how full and with what a melodious splendour it unrolled itself sonorously upon the senses! But he had not heard in it then that something shoddy, blatant and a trifle vulgar, a sort of baronial buffet effect, that now somewhat disconcerted him. It was magnificent, of course, but a little frowsty; his ear had grown accustomed in China to complications more exquisite and harmonies less suave. He was used to a music pregnant with suggestion, illusive and nervous, and the brutal statement of facts a trifle shocked the fastidiousness of his taste.”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Narrow Corner

“He was not very fond of idealists. It was difficult for them in this workaday world to reconcile their professions with the exigencies of life, and it was disconcerting how often they managed to combine exalted notions with a keen eye to the main chance. The doctor had often found here cause for amusement. They were apt to look down upon those who were occupied with practical matters but not averse from profiting by their industry. Like the lilies of the field they neither toiled nor spun, but took it as a right that others should perform for them these menial offices.”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Narrow Corner

I got back from Connecticut on Saturday, having spent most of the preceding week working on the third chapter of Hotter Than That, my biography of Louis Armstrong. “All Those Tall Buildings: Leaving Home, 1919-1924” takes Armstrong from the St. Louis-based riverboats on which he cruised up and down the Mississippi, playing jazz for the residents of the sleepy harbor towns immortalized by Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi, to Chicago, where he joined King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, made his first recordings, got divorced and remarried, and started thinking of himself not as a sideman but a soloist.

I was staying with a friend who lives out in the country, and I devoted most of my waking hours to the book. No sooner did I return to New York than I resumed work on Hotter Than That, knocking off only to attend a performance of Lisa Kron’s Well on Saturday night and get some sleep.

On Sunday morning I awoke at eight, descended from my loft, booted up my iBook G4, and started writing again. Within a few minutes I was lost to the world, having previously taken the precaution of setting my alarm for one p.m. so that I wouldn’t forget to put on my clothes, go down to Forty-Second Street, and see a preview of another new play, David Marshall Grant’s Pen.

At 12:55 the phone rang. It was my friend Meg, whom I would be meeting at Playwrights Horizons in fifty minutes.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Sitting at my desk, writing,” I said.

“The play starts in five minutes,” she said.

“No, it doesn’t,” I said. “The curtain is at two o’clock.”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “Daylight Savings Time starts today. It’s five till two.”

“Damn,” I said. (Actually I said something of much higher voltage, but this is a family blog.) “Tell the press guy what happened. I’ll get there as fast as I can.”

I hung up, threw on Saturday’s clothes, ran downstairs, stole a cab from an unwitting woman on the corner, and told the driver to step on it. Nine minutes later, unfed and unshaved, I sat down in my aisle seat, and ten seconds after that the house lights went down and the play started.

“I can’t believe you made it on time,” Meg whispered.

“I can’t believe I made it on time,” I whispered back.

Four hours later I was back at my desk, and eight hours after that the third chapter of Hotter Than That was finished, footnotes and all. It’s 10,044 words long.

Here’s a little taste of what I wrote last week:

A month after Armstrong came to Chicago, F. Scott Fitzgerald published Tales of the Jazz Age, giving a name to the period of postwar cultural ferment that was fast transforming America. “It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,” Fitzgerald later wrote. The art was no small part of it, for the coming of the Jazz Age was the moment when modernism hit America like a shrieking tornado. In 1920 Eugene O’Neill won the Pulitzer Prize for Beyond the Horizon; in 1921 Alfred Stieglitz held the first public exhibition of his nude studies of Georgia O’Keeffe; in 1923 Ernest Hemingway’s first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in Paris; in 1924 H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan launched The American Mercury and Paul Whiteman premiered George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Contrary to popular belief, jazz was both discussed widely (the Mercury was one of the first magazines to cover it) and taken seriously in America as well as Europe, where classical composers as dissimilar as Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, and Darius Milhaud were incorporating its thrillingly asymmetrical rhythms into their music. By 1925 W.J. Henderson, the most discerning American music critic of the day, was informing the readers of the famously sedate New York Times Book Review that jazz embodied “our carefree optimism, our nervous energy and our extravagant humour.”

Yet even then most Americans still thought of ragtime, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and Whiteman’s decorous dance music when they thought of jazz. To be sure, Shuffle Along, the first Broadway musical to be written, directed, and performed by blacks, had opened three years earlier, and the Harlem Renaissance was well under way. But the music of Joe Oliver, Armstrong’s mentor and boss, was as yet unknown outside the urban ghettoes, save to the handful of nervy white boys who went there to listen and learn, and unless you happened to live in certain sections of Chicago or New Orleans, Louis Armstrong himself wasn’t even a vaguely remembered face, much less a celebrity. You had to look closely to find his name on the labels of the Creole Jazz Band’s records:

DIPPER MOUTH BLUES

(Oliver-Armstrong)

KING OLIVER’S JAZZ BAND

His new wife Lil was right. Second cornets don’t get great enough–not until they go out on their own.

And now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll take a little nap….