Archives for July 2014

Yesterday I wrote about the limits of nostalgia, which put me in mind of the fact that I graduated from high school in 1974, the year that Richard Nixon resigned the presidency and Gerald Ford succeeded (and pardoned) him. To put these latter events in historical perspective, I’m as far away from them now as I was in 1974 from the killing of Bonnie and Clyde.

Here are some other things that happened in 1974:

• One hundred seventy-eight American soldiers were killed in action in Vietnam.

• Alexander Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union and Mikhail Baryshnikov defected from there to Canada.

• The Episcopal Church ordained its first women priests.

• Chicago’s Sears Tower was opened, becoming the world’s tallest building.

• Ernő Rubik invented Rubik’s Cube.

• Arpad and Giorgio Fischer invented liposuction.

• Art Fry of 3M invented the Post-It Note. (The company’s records, strangely enough, make no mention of Romy White or Michele Weinberger.)

• Henry Heimlich published an article describing what came to be known as the “Heimlich maneuver.”

• Barcodes were first used to sell products in stores.

• People magazine was launched.

• The number-one hit single was Carl Douglas’ “Kung Fu Fighting.” The year’s top-selling album was Band on the Run, by Paul McCartney and Wings. The record-of-the-year Grammy went to Roberta Flack for “Killing Me Softly With His Song.”

• The top-rated American TV series was All in the Family.

• The top-grossing (!) American film was Blazing Saddles.

• The best-picture Oscar went to The Sting.

• Monty Python’s Flying Circus went off the air in England and was shown for the first time in this country by KERA-TV, Dallas’ PBS affiliate.

• W.H. Auden’s Forewords and Afterwords, Peter Benchley’s Jaws, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, Pauline Kael’s Deeper into Movies, Stephen King’s Carrie, Philip Larkin’s High Windows, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and P.G. Wodehouse’s Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen (the last Jeeves novel) were published.

• Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land and Tom Stoppard’s Travesties were written. The best-play Tony went to Joseph A. Walker’s The River Niger.

• No Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in fiction or drama.

• Dmitri Shostakovich composed his fifteenth and last string quartet.

• Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s lifetime home-run record. (He held the record until Barry Bonds passed him in 2007.)

• Amy Adams, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jimmy Fallon, and Miranda July were born.

• Jack Benny, Duke Ellington, Charles Lindbergh, Sam Goldwyn, Darius Milhaud, and Ed Sullivan died.

• The U.S. unemployment rate was 5.3%.

• A McDonald’s Big Mac cost sixty-five cents, $3.14 in today’s dollars. (The same sandwich now costs, on average, $4.62 in the U.S.)

• A movie ticket cost, on average, $1.87.

• A gallon of regular gas cost, on average, fifty-three cents.

• A first-class postage stamp cost ten cents.

* * *

Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke speaks in 1974 about what the world will be like in 2001:

From 2004:

To memorize something effectively, you have to expend some interpretive effort on it, and with this effort you wind up in something like a conversation with the text. Grasping at least the literal meaning–not necessarily as easy as you might think, I’ve learned in my teaching–is the most efficient way of mastering a poem, so you can’t help but learn something more than just the words in the process. And the richer the text, the more there is to absorb. It’s sad that such a truly mind-expanding practice has been saddled with a reputation as just the opposite….

Read the whole thing here.

“The likelihood of typographical errors in spite of rigorous proofreading was going to be the subject of an essay that he would write one day, Vic thought. There was something demoniacal and insuperable about typographical errors, as if they were part of the natural evil that permeated man’s existence, as if they had a life of their own and were determined to manifest themselves no matter what, as surely as weeds in the best-tended gardens.”

Patricia Highsmith, Deep Water (courtesy of Levi Stahl)

Charlie Haden and Horace Silver, two immensely influential jazz musicians who first came to prominence in the Fifties, died in recent weeks. I took no note of their passing in this space because it was remarked widely and well in other places, and because, to put it bluntly, it isn’t surprising that the great jazzmen of that generation should be dropping like flies. Haden, after all, was seventy-seven, Silver eighty-five. Their time had come—and gone.

I first heard their music in the Seventies, a decade that I remember with near-perfect clarity. To the millennials, on the other hand, it is, quite literally, history. As important as Silver and Haden were, the news of their deaths cannot possibly mean to any of my young friends what it does to me, especially now that jazz is no longer a significant part of the postmodern cultural landscape.

To be sure, I’ve always spent more time thinking about the past than most people. I graduated from high school in 1974, the year of Court and Spark and Pretzel Logic and Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal. While I bought all of those albums when they came out and listened to them closely and excitedly, I was no less interested in the jazz and pop of my parents’ day. I still am.

Mrs. T thinks that I might possibly have been happier had I been born forty years earlier. Every once in a while I think she’s right. Radio Classics, one of SiriusXM’s many channels, is devoted to what fans of the genre call “old-time radio,” meaning recorded broadcasts of pre-1962 network radio series. Whenever I rent a car that has satellite radio, as I did the other day, I always set one of the buttons to “Radio Classics.” Usually it delivers up tiresome dross, but once in a while I hit the jackpot. As I drove back to Connecticut from New York last weekend, I listened to two consecutive episodes of the radio versions of Dragnet and Gunsmoke, both of which were better on radio than in their later, more widely remembered small-screen incarnations, and rejoiced at my good fortune. I wonder how many other people driving up I-95 that fine summer day were doing the same thing.

Probably nobody, I can hear Mrs. T saying sharply in my mind’s ear. I expect she’s right about that, too. Nor would I care to spend more than an occasional hour on the road partaking of the purely commercial entertainment of the now-distant past. About that much my beloved wife is wrong: I would never dream of taking a one-way trip in a time machine. I don’t always rejoice in the present, but it’s where I live, and for the most part I wouldn’t have it any other way.

As I once wrote in this space:

I feel the temptation to live in the past, but one can truly live only in the moment, and the last thing I want to do is end up like the pathetic narrator of “Hey Nineteen,” the Steely Dan song about a no-longer-young baby boomer who tries to tell his teenaged girlfriend about Aretha Franklin but discovers that “she don’t remember/The Queen of Soul,” subsequently realizing that “we got nothing in common/No, we can’t talk at all.”

I wrote those words in 2003, very early in the life of this long-lived blog, and I stand by them eleven years later. It would be an understatement to say that I don’t like everything about the present, but I accept it. What’s more, I don’t idealize the past: I also like Twitter and texting and Pomplamoose and Justified and being able to buy really good bread at the grocery store whenever I want. I miss my mother something fierce, but I’m grateful that I’ll never to have to choke down another helping of her boiled-gray canned asparagus.

That said, I hope that my millennial friends will forgive me for my occasional lapses into the nostalgia that is surely a normal part of growing older. While my mother’s asparagus was pretty awful, Steely Dan was and is pretty damned good, and I’m glad that I grew up with songs like “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” (whose piano intro, lest we forget, was “sampled” from Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father”) and movies like Chinatown and The Godfather Part II. To accept the inescapability of the present is not to deny the pull of the past. You can have, and love, both.

As William Faulkner said in Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I know that’s true for me.

* * *

“Claustrophobia,” a 1954 episode of the original radio version of Gunsmoke, starring William Conrad as Matt Dillon:

Donald Fagen talks about the creation of “Peg,” a track from Steely Dan’s Aja:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“Any innocent pleasure is a real good: there are not so many of them.”

Patrick O’Brian, Post Captain

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review regional revivals of The Devil’s Disciple and Last of the Red Hot Lovers. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

It’s far from true that nobody does George Bernard Shaw’s plays anymore, but surprisingly few of them get done other than sporadically in this country. Take “The Devil’s Disciple,” which at one time was popular enough to have been turned into a film starring Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and Laurence Olivier. The Irish Repertory Theatre gave it a splendid miniature staging in 2007, but otherwise it hasn’t received a high-profile production in the New York area since Circle in the Square’s 1988 Broadway version. Now the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, one of the top classical companies on the East Coast, has mounted a revival so entertaining that you’ll go home asking yourself why “The Devil’s Disciple” isn’t a summer-festival staple….

You need not subscribe to Shaw’s subversive anti-morality to enjoy the wit with which he chips away at the Victorian hypocrisy that was his real target. And while Paul Mullins’ staging might possibly have profited from a touch more effervescence, it lacks nothing at all in comic assurance….

Neil Simon’s “Last of the Red Hot Lovers” opened on Broadway in 1969, ran for 706 performances and continues to be performed to this day in regional theaters all over America. It’s never been revived on or off Broadway, though, no doubt because Mr. Simon is now thought to be a joke-spewing theatrical lightweight whose time has come and gone. Yet his best comedies, “Lost in Yonkers” foremost among them, are full of telling touches of pathos that make them more than mere applause machines. That’s what lured me up to New Hampshire to see what Gus Kaikkonen’s ever-excellent Peterborough Players would make of “Last of the Red Hot Lovers,” a three-act farce about a nebbishy 47-year-old restaurateur (“The sum total of my existence is nice”) who seeks to assuage his midlife crisis by joining the sexual revolution and committing serial adultery with a jaded cynic, a ditsy nightclub singer and the sad-sack wife of one of his best friends.

Sure enough, “Last of the Red Hot Lovers” proves to be both very funny and genuinely touching, and Mr. Kaikkonen, a superior director who is at home with an unusually wide range of theatrical styles, takes care to give both sides of the dramatic coin their due. Yes, the punch lines connect, but they’re played for truth, not laughs, which makes them even funnier. Moreover, this revival features a dazzling new twist: The three women are played by the same actor, Beverly Ward, whose characterizations are so boldly varied and unfailingly convincing that you’ll wonder whether it’s really her up there in all three acts….

* * *

To read my review of The Devil’s Disciple, go here.

To read my review of Last of the Red Hot Lovers, go here.

The 1959 film of The Devil’s Disciple, starring Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, and Laurence Olivier, freely adapted from Shaw’s play by John Dighton and Roland Kibbee and directed by Guy Hamilton. The score is by Richard Rodney Bennett:

An excerpt from the 1972 film of The Last of the Red Hot Lovers, directed by Gene Saks and starring Alan Arkin and Sally Kellerman. Their roles were created on stage by James Coco and Linda Lavin:

“Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.”

Bertrand Russell, “Recrudescence of Puritanism”