Who’s Afraid of Touré?
What does it mean to be black in an era that has brought us both the presidency of Barack Obama and the tragedy of Trayvon Martin? At a time when the possibilities for blacks have never seemed greater, while the prison population has never been darker? Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now is an attempt to address these questions, and if his book feels a tad disjointed, his answers at times contradictory, it’s less a reflection of his approach than of the nature of the subject matter. Touré is just trying to stay on top of this Taurus, not tell it where to go.
“Post-black,” here, means neither nonblack nor post-racial. Instead, it represents a decision to acknowledge the burdens of being black while refusing to add to those burdens by placing limits on ourselves. Post-blackness means that instead of disdaining the fencing team as the kind of group white boys join, you pick up a sword, discover you’re good with it, and show the world what you can do. Post-blackness means that you don’t revoke a person’s membership in the black race because of his or her proper speech or white spouse. It means that there are as many ways to be black, to celebrate the culture, as there are black people.
Having ably defined post-blackness, Touré proceeds not only to shift gears, slipping back into plain old blackness, but to forget what he has already written. After agreeing with one of the 105 prominent blacks he interviewed that the term “oreo” should be abolished, he carefully assures us in a later chapter that during his freshman year of college, “I was no oreo, I got along with my Black classmates,” even if he “spent way more time with my white friends.” When he refers to the “social mistakes” he made as a freshman, it’s not clear whether or not he is being ironic, but my sinking feeling is that the answer is no.
The part of the book I personally found the most strange was the chapter “The Most Racist Thing That Ever Happened . . .” Airing his own feelings, sharing the thoughts of his interviewees, he essentially equates contemporary blackness with a state of perpetual self-consciousness, fear, and suspicion, with being stuck in the Harrison Ford/David Janssen role in a version of The Fugitive that has no ending. From wondering what plum job racism may have cost you without your knowledge, to worrying that you’ll confirm stereotypes if you eat fried chicken or watermelon in front of white people, blackness is presented here as one blood-pressure-raising moment after another, from the time of waking until your head hits the pillow. I read this chapter with rising discomfort, feeling as if I were having dinner with someone who kept turning to address a third person I couldn’t see. I know, everyone knows, that racism has not gone away. Like every black person, I think about it; sometimes I think about it a lot. Does the subject make me angry? Damn right it does. But it is not the center of my life, which means, to my mind, that it has not defeated me. So who is the fool — me, or my dinner companion?
That is not a rhetorical question; I honestly wondered what the answer was, until I had an epiphany. Touré writes that when he was a boy in just about the only black family in his neighborhood, his parents constantly warned him against confirming white people’s worst ideas about blacks. My parents, in my all-black neighborhood, did nothing of the kind. I was not, in other words, mentally hampered from the word “go,” and I realize that I have one more thing to thank my late parents for. I can’t say I haven’t run into problems as a black man; but with regard to that job I was surely if theoretically denied because of racism, I ask: Why would I want to work for racists? What would my blood pressure be like then? I love fried chicken, and I can take or leave watermelon, but I would eat both in front of whites as quickly as I would in the company of blacks. A person who sees me enjoying a drumstick and thinks “Yep, black people really do love chicken” is an idiot, plain and simple, and I don’t give a rusty goddamn what he thinks.
So I give Touré credit for this: he has written a work that led me to look at myself and the world and draw conclusions I might not have otherwise. A book that makes someone do that cannot be said to have failed.
Touré concludes his book with a description of the tightrope that Barack Obama, Deval Patrick, and other successful black politicians have walked on the way to power. As he urges other blacks to take the same tortuous, torturous path, one that no white politician would have to follow, his message is both inspiring and, by its very nature, sad — an apt description of the state of black America.
Nothing But the Movies
Occasionally, you see – I do, anyway – films so different from each other that you could almost forget they belong to the same medium. I had that experience recently, with two works that I’m very glad I saw, even if one of them is a little hard to recommend.
In Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man (1964), which is set in a small town in the Deep South and has a mostly black cast, the words “civil rights” do not pass any character’s lips; but the movie is a powerful reminder of why that movement mattered so much, and an even more powerful evocation of attitudes that no legislation could penetrate. Above all, it’s a deeply human and moving story. Ivan Dixon plays Duff, an itinerant laborer who, in spite of himself, is so smitten with a schoolteacher, Josie (played by the singer Abbey Lincoln), that he decides to settle down with her. That’s when his troubles start, not because he isn’t suited to marriage – it turns out that he is – but because he must now hold a steady job; in this town, for a black man, that means swallowing a daily dose of humiliation, and as Duff tells his preacher father-in-law, “It’s not in me.” As Duff loses one job after another for refusing to take crap from racists, his frustration grows, to the point where his marriage suffers; he starts to treat his wife in ways that are beneath him, because he is, after all, not a saint – he is nothing but a man. The ending pulls off the trick of being positive but unforced. Dixon and Lincoln are both very good, and the supporting players inspire a round of “Oh, him!” – black actors I recognize from 1970s TV shows and movies, but younger here than I’ve ever seen them. There was Mel Stewart, Archie Bunker’s neighbor on All in the Family; there was Yaphet Kotto, later of Homicide and other fame; there was Julius Harris, from too many shows and films to count; and in the credits, though I missed her, is Esther Rolle from Good Times.
And now for the film I loved but am reluctant to recommend: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig) is an attractive widow living in an apartment in Brussels with her high-school-age son. This experimental, three-hour-plus film has a form but not a plot. The action, if it can be called that, is divided into days. For long, often wordless stretches we watch, sometimes from beginning to end, as Jeanne performs the chores that take up but don’t fill her days: washing dishes, making meatloaf, shopping. The only activities treated elliptically and discreetly are Jeanne’s appointments with men – sex clients – in her home. Perhaps you’re starting to understand why I’m not urging you to rush out and rent this.
And yet. Jeanne Dielman’s extremely slow rhythms operate as a kind of hypnosis. (The moment I became aware of the magic at work here was when I paused the DVD to heat up something in the microwave and felt as if I were still watching the film, or had stepped into it.) Stripped of the surface conflict that is the currency of most movies, Jeanne Dielman creates an atmosphere so hermetic that you feel the slightest accident – a slip of a kitchen knife, say – might stop your heart; watching Jeanne peel potatoes is excruciating, and not for the reason (i.e., boredom) you might think. If you make it to the end of Jeanne Dielman, there is a payoff and a half. In the meantime, as you watch Jeanne’s solitariness, listen in on her limited communication with the son she clearly loves, and see the stoicism that ever so slowly cracks, you begin to feel an inexplicable affection for this character whom you barely even hear speak.
* * *
Just to prove I actually live in the twenty-first century I saw this year’s Best Picture winner, The Artist. I enjoyed it, at least while I was watching it; but from the distance of a few days, I’d say the prize went to the wrong movie. Of the nominees I saw, I’d give it to The Tree of Life.
The Battle of Algiers
Finally got around to seeing The Battle of Algiers (1966), Gillo Pontecorvo’s black-and-white, quasi-documentary-style classic set in 1954, during the uprising that led to Algeria’s independence from France eight years later. It is stylishly shot and does not suffer — quite the contrary — from having a cast of nonprofessional actors. It retains its power, and it is amazingly relevant today. At a time when most U.S. troops are finally coming home from Iraq, when there are rumblings in some corners about a similar — and similarly rock-headed — adventure in Iran, this film should be required viewing; in fact, I’m told that Donald Rumsfeld screened it for troops heading into Iraq, though the good secretary himself would appear to have learned the wrong lessons from it. The Battle of Algiers, while not leading the viewer to condone indiscriminate slaughter committed by some Muslims, will make one reconsider what prompts violence against those whom the insurgents can see only as occupiers — whatever the occupiers may call themselves.
The film’s most pertinent point, for me, is made not by an Algerian freedom fighter but by the French lieutenant colonel in charge of rooting out the revolutionaries. At one point the lieutenant colonel is grilled during a press conference about his troops’ use of torture. (The film’s torture scenes are none the less powerful for being mercifully brief.) The colonel’s reply, in essence, is that if you accept that France should be in Algeria, then you should accept what follows from that. That was exactly my reaction several years back, when the photos from Abu Ghraib came to light: Why is anyone surprised by this? No, I do not condone torture. But if you supported the Iraq War (I’m proud to say that I took to the streets to protest it and dragged my children with me), if you turned on coverage of the “shock and awe” and thought it made for good TV, then you should not have been shocked when the war played out as wars do. Iran? Let’s think this through.
* * *
I concluded a recent post on John Updike’s fictional creations Rabbit Angstrom and Henry Bech by writing that both characters “live, and let live.” Imagine my embarrassment, then, on discovering in the third and final Bech volume — Bech at Bay — that my man Bech becomes a murderer! Once you get over the shock, the whole thing is pretty funny.
Pointing the Way, Obscurely
I’m fascinated by artistic movements whose seeds are found in earlier genres or works that, on the surface, do not resemble those movements at all. One example is from pop culture. The original Star Trek series is thought of (at least by me) as ringing in the modern era of science fiction, but take a look sometime at those old episodes with Kirk and Spock: the clunkiness of their futuristic gadgets, the papier-maché look of the rocks and boulders on the distant planets, and the high heels worn by female crew members bring to mind nothing so much as 1950s sci-fi “B” movies.
But there are also examples in areas under the purview of this here blog:
LITERATURE. Think “New Journalism,” which brought dialogue, short-story-like description, metaphors, intrusion of the author’s viewpoint, and other elements of fiction to reporting, and you think of Tom Wolfe. But Wolfe himself cites a magazine piece by another writer — one that today remains interesting but hardly seems revolutionary — as pointing the way toward New Journalism: a 1962 Esquire article by Gay Talese, “Joe Louis: The King as a Middle-Aged Man.” The piece begins with (gasp) dialogue between Louis and his fourth wife, which is followed by a kind of flashback, a description of his first wife’s living room — leading Wolfe, raised on a diet of who-what-when-where-why-how news stories, to wonder in his Wolfean way, as he wrote in The New Journalism, “What inna namea christ is this?”
ART. I learned in an art-history class that the paintings of Cezanne, those wonderful still lifes with their occasionally playful approach to perspective, had a large influence on Cubism — an idea that seemed to me more abstract than visual. And then, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, I saw Picasso’s “Carafe, Jug and Fruit Bowl,” from 1909. Here, plain as day, was the link between the overwhelmingly — if eccentrically — representational style of Cezanne and the multiple-angles-at-once craziness of Cubism most strongly associated with Picasso:
"Carafe, Jug and Fruit Bowl," by Pablo Picasso, 1909
JAZZ. To listen hard enough to the piano work of Duke Ellington is to realize that Thelonious Monk, revolutionary though he was, did not in fact come from outer space. The dissonance with which Ellington often spiced his playing served as a point of departure for Monk’s keyboard style, described best by Frank Rich, who called it “splintery.” For a truly interesting listening experience, then, check out Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington.
Tradition dictates that I write something pithy here, sagely revealing the larger point of what you’ve just read. I’m not coming up with much, though. I leave it to you — feel free to build on my ideas . . .
The Mail-Order Santa Claus of Jazz
I listen to a lot of classic jazz. (Anyone who knows me is now thinking, “This is news?”) But I have a friend – I’ll call him David, since, actually, that’s his name – who makes a concerted effort to expose me to more living and breathing players. We’ve been to clubs together, and three times now, I’ve gotten CDs from amazon.com that I didn’t remember ordering – turned out they were from David. It’s probably no accident that all three are by trumpet players, since David is a particular fan of the instrument and takes lessons on it. I hope he’ll let me hear him one day. In the meantime, here are thoughts on those records:
Introducing Triven (2010), by Avishai Cohen (trumpet), Omer Avital (bass), and Nasheet Waits (drums). Cohen plays a grounded, balanced line, a base from which he occasionally takes fast flights into a high register or launches sustained, commanding single notes; he gets good backing from Waits and especially from Avital, whose two-strings-at-once passages evoke thoughts of Jimmy Garrison from that celebrated Coltrane quartet.
Jim Rotondi Quintet Live at Smalls (2009), with Rotondi on trumpet, Eric Alexander (tenor sax), David Hazeltine (piano/Rhodes), John Webber (bass), and Joe Farnsworth (drums). Unlike Avishai Cohen, Rotondi often trades balance and clarity for urgency, a little like the late Lee Morgan – and, like Morgan, he gets the good end of the bargain. Alexander’s tone on sax calls to mind Joe Henderson.
Terell Stafford: This Side of Strayhorn (2011), with Stafford on trumpet, Tim Warfield (tenor and soprano sax), Bruce Barth (piano), Peter Washington (bass), and Dana Hall (drums). This album consists of interpretations of nine classics by Duke Ellington’s master tunesmith, Billy Strayhorn. Stafford’s precise lines often have a lightness and reflectiveness reminiscent of Bix Beiderbecke’s; Warfield on sax, meanwhile, is a chameleon, sounding here like Stan Getz, there like Tina Brooks, and, on slow-blues numbers, a bit like Ben Webster. On “Multicolored Blue,” Stafford and Warfield in unison somehow manage to re-create that creamy sound of Ellington’s big band.
These three very fine works, which I look forward to exploring more deeply, are all from trumpeters who began recording in the late 1990s. It’s possible that their future records will have more of what separates great jazz from good jazz: the merging of player and instrument, whose result is not just technique but voice. For a latter-day example of that, listen to a work from a trumpeter who got a recording head-start on Cohen, Rotondi, and Stafford: Amongst the People – Live at the House of Tribes (2005), by Wynton Marsalis. Here, the iconic Marsalis – who had released plenty of good records – makes a breakthrough, playing with looseness and fire on one of the swingingest records I’ve ever heard.
Rabbit Resumed, Bech Begun
When I was in college I read (instead of whatever I was supposed to be reading) the first two novels in John Updike’s Rabbit series, Rabbit, Run (1960) and Rabbit Redux (1971). One of my literature/writing professors, the estimable David Young, had reservations about those books; the prodigiously gifted Updike, he said, could describe a peanut butter sandwich more eloquently than you ever would have imagined possible, but in the end it was still a peanut butter sandwich, and you felt cheated by it all. Well, I thought, if that’s being cheated, this is one time I don’t mind playing the sucker. The beauty and wonder in those books lie not so much in Updike’s observations and similes themselves as in the reaction they inspire in the reader — which is not “How did he come up with that?” but “Why didn’t I think of it?”; we have the almost certainly mistaken sense that the comparison Updike has made was under our noses the whole time, ready to be made by us, if we could only have gotten our thoughts in order. “Harry can’t stop studying, in the cold kitchen light, the old woman’s skin. The dark life of veins underneath that gave her her flushed swarthy look . . . has been overlaid with a kind of dust of fine gray threads, wrinkles etched on the lightstruck flat of the cheek nearest him like rows and rows of indecipherable writing scratched on a far clay cliff.”
Odd, then, that I stopped in the Rabbit series after the second novel; I guess I became fascinated by other writers, and knew, after all, that Rabbit would be waiting when I was ready. In that way nearly three decades passed. This year, when I read Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and — written in the interim — Rabbit At Rest (1990), I was amazed at how easily I picked up where I had left off, a testament to the vivid impression the first two books had made on me. The four novels follow the blue-collar, seemingly average former high-school basketball star Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom at ages 26, 36, 46, and 56, respectively, as he observes some things about himself and the world changing while others stay the same.
Hungry for more Updike after reading those books, I checked out the adventures of another character, the famous though not-recently-heard-from novelist Henry Bech. Bech: A Book (1980) and Bech Is Back (1982) contain interconnected stories. (I’m still waiting for Bech At Bay from paperbackswap.com, a site you should visit if you haven’t.) In several ways Rabbit and Bech could not be more different. Bech runs in literary circles, while Rabbit is a gadget salesman, then a Linotype worker, then a car dealer; Rabbit, a onetime athlete, was (like Updike) born and raised in Pennsylvania, beyond whose boundaries he barely strays, while Bech, a native New Yorker and nonathlete, travels the world; Rabbit, a father, is in a long if sometimes severely strained marriage (strained largely by adultery), while the childless Bech marries for the first time, briefly, at fifty; Rabbit is Protestant, Bech Jewish. ((Updike, the only gentile among the so-called Big Four writers of his generation — the others being Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow — had to have seen Bech as a way of including himself among his Jewish brethren. Interestingly, when the semi-retired Rabbit begins spending half the year in Florida, he has a regular golf game with three Jewish men.)
The styles of the books differ, too. Through his close-third-person narration of Rabbit’s life, Updike is an exhaustive observer of detail, landscape, and American culture — Laugh-In and the moon landing at the end of the ’60s, George H. W. Bush and The Cosby Show at the close of the ’80s. In the stories about the somewhat more inward-looking Bech, also written in third person, glimpses of the outside world are more selective. (Jazz fans: think Coleman Hawkins vs. Lester Young.) That selectiveness leaves room for a new element — humor: “Ann’s and Judy’s boyfriends struck him as a clamorous and odorous swarm of dermatological disasters . . .” Like a bright light pointing up shadows, the humor in the Bech books brings home the unspoken sadness at their core.
Those things aside, Rabbit and Bech are oddly alike. There is a pronounced passivity to both characters. Rabbit becomes a Linotype worker because that’s what his father is, and then, when his job is eliminated, joins his father-in-law’s car dealership. Bech works on a new book only when his new wife all but physically sets him down in a chair; before that, unable to summon the will to write, he traveled the country and the world, making author appearances wherever anyone asked him to go. In each character, passivity is inseparable from his most endearing quality: an openness to people and things. For all their prejudices, they are both, each in his way, accepting of those different from them. Both are too skeptical to embrace other cultures (or their own) wholly or blindly, but both are too gentle to intend any harm. They live, and they let live.
Cliff, Film Hunter
My wife likes to use the red-flag-in-front-of-a-bull metaphor to describe what happens when I see a mention of a well-regarded book, film, or jazz record I’ve never heard of. I plead guilty with extenuating circumstances, the circumstances being that I’m, well, me.
So there I was, reading a New York Times article about a film from 1970 I planned to see, Hal Ashby’s The Landlord, when I came across a mention of one from the same year by Brian De Palma: Hi, Mom!, starring Robert De Niro. What was this? I can now tell you that it is a very odd, slightly misshapen, and frequently hilarious little movie in which De Niro shows the comedic skills he would display again decades later. He plays a young man trying to interest a porn-movie producer (a very funny Allen Garfield) in the footage he secretly shoots of his across-the-street neighbors. Halfway through Hi, Mom! the porn plot gets scrapped as De Niro becomes intrigued by one of his unwitting performers, who has organized a band of black actor-revolutionaries; that is how De Niro lands a part in an ultimately funny if rather horrifying black-and-white film-within-a-film that has to be seen to be appreciated.
Red Flag #2 was waved when the Mrs. and I saw Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which I thoroughly enjoyed. (A side note, though: I could just about hear some of Wilson’s lines being spoken by a young Woody, who would have made them funnier.) In it, Owen Wilson plays a writer who happens onto a way to visit Paris of the 1920s; there, he meets the creative geniuses of that time and place, including the Spanish filmmaker Buñuel. “I have an idea for a film for you,” the Wilson character tells Buñuel, going on to describe a story about a fancy dinner party at which the guests find that they can’t leave. “But why can’t they leave?” a confused Buñuel asks the departing Wilson. The subject of that in-joke turns out to be Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962), an intriguing take on unexplained aspects of the collective human consciousness that feels a little like an extended Twilight Zone episode — but hey, I always liked that show.
Sometimes I charge at the flag a little slowly. There are three films that I have long associated with one another, even though they have almost nothing in common beyond the facts that (1) they came out within a few years of one another and (2) I never saw any of them — until recently: Gilliam Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979), Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985). Brazil is equal parts brilliant and, from the perspective of 2011, dated; that is the risk run by any dystopian story set in the near future. The parts that hold up, though, hold up very well, including some funny bits where Bob Hoskins and De Niro — him again! — sneak in. The standard-issue political drama Year of Living Dangerously is worth seeing for one thing: Linda Hunt’s heart-rending performance as a (male) photojournalist in Indonesia. My Brilliant Career has similarly good work from a very young Judy Davis as an aspiring writer in early-twentieth-century Australia, and it’s good for once to see a female character whose ambition disrupts her relationships, which makes it frustrating that this film is so, well, dull at times.
On that topic: for better or worse, I’ve found that the speed of contemporary life — and contemporary cinema — makes some older films harder to sit through. I was excited, for example, when elder daughter and I sat down to watch John Sayles’s Brother from Another Planet, which I had remembered fondly; all I could think this time was how slow it seemed.
Were these films always slow, or has our new pace just made them seem that way? You know whom to tell . . .
Memoir Was the Rage
Recently, in working on a long nonfiction project of my own, I sought inspiration and insight by re-reading three books I remember loving: Stop-Time, by Frank Conroy, Kafka Was the Rage, by Anatole Broyard, and The Devil Finds Work, by James Baldwin. Each is a memoir (with the arguable exception of Baldwin’s book), and together they illustrate how many different kinds of works the word “memoir” can emcompass.
Published in 1967, Stop-Time has the most traditional form of the three, covering Conroy’s life from early childhood to the age of eighteen, a period he spent alternately in the Northeast and Florida with his mother and his amiable ne’er-do-well of a stepfather. Maybe for that reason it is the most hermetic of the three, focusing on Conroy’s life rather than his times; and, paradoxically, for that reason it is the most universal, too, as it concerns something everybody has one of – childhood, in all its aimlessness, terror (there is one passage that, as a father, I found terrifying), and wonder:
“Is it the mindlessness of childhood that opens up the world? Today nothing happens in a gas station. I’m eager to leave, to get where I’m going, and the station, like some huge paper cutout, or a Hollywood set, is simply a façade. But at thirteen, sitting with my back against the wall, it was a marvelous place to be. The delicious smell of gasoline, the cars coming and going, the free air hose, the half-heard voices buzzing in the background – these things hung musically in the air, filling me with a sense of well-being. In ten minutes my psyche would be topped up like the tanks of the automobiles.”
By contrast, Kafka Was the Rage provides both vignettes from Broyard’s life and snapshots of a different era – the late 1940s,when Broyard was in his twenties and trying to find his footing among the intellectuals and lost souls of Greenwich Village. Broyard was to become a book critic for the New York Times. He was also, as absolutely nothing in his memoir indicates, black – a fact he went to fantastic lengths to hide in his personal life as well, at least partly because he wanted to be a writer and not a “black writer.” (His badly kept secret inspired both a New Yorker piece by Henry Louis Gates and Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain, and it grandfathered, you might say, the film based on the novel. Once, at a writers’ and artists’ salon organized by the redoubtable Martha Southgate, I found myself talking to Broyard’s daughter Bliss. The conversation turned to books, and without thinking, I mentioned one I had enjoyed recently: The Human Stain. “Did you like that?” she asked. “Yes!” I said, “I – um . . . uh . . .”)
But as for the memoir itself: for someone who loves good writing, Kafka Was the Rage is like a box of chocolates. Broyard’s live-in girlfriend in the late 1940s, he wrote, had “something striking about her. She was a preview of things to come, an invention that was not quite perfected but that would turn out to be important, a forerunner or harbinger, like the shattering of the object in Cubism or atonality in music. When I came to know her better, I thought of her as a new disease.”
Your memory plays tricks on you, which is why I remembered The Devil Finds Work as being devoted equally to Baldwin’s life and his takes on movies. After a while, and somewhat regrettably, Baldwin stops writing about himself and focuses purely on films. That said, his analyses are compelling. For the most part he sees the movies as sad reflections of the American state of mind. There is, for example, his conclusion about The Exorcist: “The mindless and hysterical banality of the evil presented in The Exorcist is the most terrifying thing about the film. The Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying, and any black man, and not only blacks – many, many others, including white children – can call them on this lie; he who has been treated as the devil recognizes the devil when they meet.”
Another trick played by my memory: I had forgotten the way that Kafka Was the Rage doesn’t so much end as stop. That was because Broyard became ill when he was writing it, began work on another book that was about his illness, and never returned to Kafka (hence its brevity), which was later published anyway.
But then maybe Kafka has something in common with all autobiographical writing. Once, talking to a Cineaste editor, I mentioned a draft of a novel I had written. “What’s it about?” the editor asked. “It’s sort of autobiographical,” I said. “Then,” he replied, “it’s not finished.”
The Other Me: a True Story
Turns out you don’t have to be Superman, Batman, or Captain Marvel to have an alter ego. A book/film/jazz über-nerd like me can have one, too, as the following story proves:
It is ten years ago, give or take, and I’m standing in Last Exit, a second-hand bookshop, one of three in Park Slope during that era — this one run by Alan, a bearded white guy whose voice shouts, along with whatever else he happens to be saying at a given moment, I’m from Brooklyn! There is one other customer: black like myself, though of a different shade and build. We get to talking; he’s looking for a book related to a scholarly piece he’s writing on Ralph Ellison. Around this same time I have written an essay that appears in The Threepenny Review — a piece about Ellison. Two black guys in a bookshop, both writing about the author of Invisible Man; no big deal. But then . . .
It is a year later, maybe two. I am in Holy Cow!, a second-hand record shop, one of two music stores in Park Slope at the time — this one run by Steve, an easy-going, olive-skinned fellow with short black hair. I have picked out a CD by Lennie Tristano, a pianist well-known in the jazz world but very far from being a household name. There is one other customer near the register: the Ellison scholar. He looks at my CD and says matter-of-factly, “Lee Konitz plays on that.”
Okay: so this guy, who is black, hangs out in places where I alone (of the people I know) hang out, he writes about things I write about, he listens to music that I alone (of the people I know) listen to. So what? Ralph Ellison — very popular writer; a lot of people read him, and some of them write down their thoughts. The music of Lennie Tristano — yes, that’s a little specialized, but hey, a niche has room for two people. No cause for alarm; the Twilight Zone theme music is premature.
After all, if you really want to talk obscure, we should talk about another magazine I’ve done a lot of writing for: Cineaste. This is a publication for serious film geeks. Two or three years after the Holy Cow! episode, I am invited to a party at the Cineaste offices, hosted by the magazine’s friendly, grizzled veteran hard-core movie-guy editors. Standing among those good souls when I show up, calmly holding his drink, as if he expects to see me, is . . . the Ellison scholar/Tristano fan.
This is too much. I walk up to him and say, “What are you doing here?”
He says with what I consider to be, given the circumstances, outrageous calmness: “I write for Cineaste.”
And so he did. His name turns out to be Geoffrey Jacques; he is an accomplished essayist, poet, and college teacher.
Every so often, in the years that follow, I run into Geoff on the street in Park Slope. We say hi, chat a minute or two, keep going. I write a novel and publish it myself. To publicize it, I produce a YouTube video of its first scene; I need someone to play the father in the story, someone with the look and bearing of . . . Geoff. I ask him. He graciously agrees. We’re both in the two-minute video (though not together — just as Clark Kent is never around when Superman shows up . . .).
This summer Geoff moves to the West Coast (keep that geographical designation in your mind) to be with the woman he loves. I am invited to his goodbye party. He invites the guests to go through the boxes of CDs he can’t take with him. I come away with good stuff, all, of course, jazz: Charlie Christian, Antonio Hart, Phineas Newborn . . .
. . . and Stan Getz. Now we’re up to yesterday: I listen to one of the Getz records, a lovely work, and find myself transported to the world shaped by his warm, mellow but sinuous tone. I pick up the CD case to remind myself of the name of the world where I have been taken: Stan Getz – Best of the West Coast Sessions . . .
Films of Hal Ashby
In the post “The Unsung Hero of the 1970s,” I wrote about the movies of that decade — my favorite period of American filmmaking — that for all their success in tossing the formulaic out the window, their one predictable element was the unhappy ending. But there is an exception to that general rule: the films of Hal Ashby (1929-88).
There aren’t that many of them, but, as Spencer Tracy once put it (on a different subject altogether), what’s there is choice: The Landlord(1970), Harold and Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), Coming Home (1978), Being There (1979) . . . there are a few I haven’t seen, and of those, I hear Bound for Glory (1976), with David Carradine as Woody Guthrie, is very good.
What I appreciate about Ashby’s work is that, in his determination to avoid sugarcoating the human experience (a mantra of the era), he did not — as his contemporaries sometimes did — throw out the baby with the bathwater: the genuine sweetness of the characters is not always punished as a matter of principle, and while the films’ endings are poignant, sometimes downright sad, there is something to take away, and someone left in good enough shape to do the taking. (For contrast, see Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow, from 1973, with Al Pacino and Gene Hackman, or the same director’s Panic in Needle Park, from ’71, also with Pacino — very good films, but don’t expect to come away feeling high on life.)
Ashby’s films are chock full of fine actors giving memorable performances as honest-to-God human beings, in big and small parts. There is Beau Bridges’s starring role as a good-hearted but naïve brownstone owner in a black neighborhood in the somewhat-hard-to-find but wonderful Landlord; Pearl Bailey as one of the tenants; Randy Quaid as a pitiful Navy thief in The Last Detail; Carol Kane as the prostitute to whom he loses his virginity, sort of; and I hardly need add to what’s been written about Harold and Maude. Give ’em another look.
