Is Michael Jackson really THAT important? More important than protestors in Iran? Famine? What about the millions of AIDs deaths in Africa? OK, music provides a soundtrack for our lives and Michael’s music has touched many millions of lives, and yes, death is sad for those of us still here, especially when death comes early in life. But really, can any one person be so important as to obliterate all other concerns?
At first I was sickened by the overabundance of Michael everywhere I turned, and admittedly, to some extent I still cringe, but reading Sarah Weinman’s June 25th post on Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, I found her perspective to be more in keeping with my thoughts, and the comments from her readers gave me hope as well. Readers commented on his “troubled life” and hoped that in death he would be at peace. “The guy only seemed to come fully alive onstage,” wrote J.D. Rhoades. “In front of a crowd, he was damn near superhuman. But you can’t live life onstage 24/7, and he could ever seem to adjust to life on Earth.”
Weinmn saves her greatest appreciation for his dancing, writing that Jackson
“represented the ultimate American narrative, reared from an early age to work hard and produce, to support a family rife with internal tensions and jealousies and to appease the hangers-on, trapped by his penchant for excess and flaws tragic and monstrous….But when it comes right down to it, what brings me back to MJ’s classic songs, his groundbreaking videos and those breathtaking live performances is the way he moved, his total command over space, the upward slope of his arch and downturn onto the balls of his feet.”
For many years now, when I hear Michael’s name his music is the last thing to come to my mind. Media attention has focused on his private life more than his music, and the videos that capture his dancing prowess are somehow overshadowed in my memories by his crotch-grabbing. But last night, Johnny Pate called and mentioned a beautiful song by Michael that he heard at the end of Ann Curry’s NBC report. The song was Gone Too Soon from his Dangerous album. I don’t own any MJ recordings, but I do remember this beautiful song in the context of Michael dedicating it to Ryan White and shining a spotlight the importance of AIDs research. (It also garnered a lot of attention when Princess Diana died and was on a compilation CD titled Diana Princess of Wales Tribute.)
It’s sad that Michael lived such a tortured life, and it is sad that he died, but even sadder to me is the current state of our culture that feeds more on celebrity-gawking and not enough on arts appreciation.
DevraDoWrite readers may remember the name Thomas French, a masterful narrative writer I admire. (Disclosure: he was my mentor in the Creative Nonfiction masters degree program at Goucher College.) I am delighted to find that OGIC over at About Last Night has recommended one of Tom’s long articles “Elegy For The King And Queen.” This is actually a short piece in the world of Tom French and was a precursor to his 9-part “Zoo Story“ series that ran in December 2007.
One of Tom’s earlier series, “Angels and Demons,” chronicling the murder of an Ohio woman and her two teenage daughters on vacation in Tampa Bay, won a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1998.
The online version of these narratives afford the inclusion of extensive audio and video extras, including interviews and commentaries from reporters and participants as well as many more photographs than ever get to run on newsprint. As a reader I love the extra photos and added perspectives, tho as a writer I sometimes chastise myself for this pleasure thinking that the idea of “a picture paints a thousand words” might encourage lazy writing — on my part, not in Tom’s case!
“South of Heaven,” a 1991 series about a year with students at Largo High School, also became a book bearing the same title.
Sadly, this type of long-form narrative journalism, which was already a rarity in newsrooms across the country, is now being deemed economically unsustainable. Tom is no longer at the St Pete Times, but he is one of he lucky ones — lucky for him, and for us. As noted above, several of his serials found their way to full-length books, and such is the case for Zoo Story, slated for release later this year. Meanwhile, students at the Indiana University School of Journalism are also very lucky as Tom has joined their faculty.
The executive producer of HBO’s critically-acclaimed show THE WIRE, David Simon talks with Bill Moyers about inner-city crime and politics, storytelling and the future of journalism today. After a dozen years covering crime for the BALTIMORE SUN, David Simon left journalism to write books and tell stories for NBC and HBO, including his Peabody-winning cop show THE WIRE, which looked at the drug wars and the gritty underbelly of the inner-city. Simon is now producing the pilot for a series about musicians in post-Katrina New Orleans, called TREME.
Though not an avid watcher of The Wire, I have appreciated Simon’s past work at the Baltimore Sun, and am now intrigued by this potential new series.
Also worth noting is his testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee kindly reposted here by ReclaimTheMedia
Thanks, Ken, for bringing these links to my attention.
On August 15, 2005, at 11 AM, Bea Arthur buzzed me through the gate to her Brentwood home on North Rockingham. When she opened the font door wearing a terry-cloth robe and skippers I thought perhaps she had been out by a pool. “Forgive me,” she said, “I forgot you were coming. Make yourself comfortable.” It took her only a few moments to throw on a jogging suit and fold her 6-foot-9-plus-inch frame into the pillows of a comfortable couch. “Good thing this was not a video interview. Looking good takes so much effort these days.” Bea Arthur shared a few personality traits her most famous characters, Maude Findlay and golden girl Dorothy Zbornak, so I easily imagined each of them explaining that the golden years are not always so golden.
I had met Ms. Arthur almost a year earlier at a memorial service for Luther Henderson. He had played a major role in the careers of many singers. From 1947 to 1950, he worked as pianist and musical director for Lena Horne, and during that time, and for decades to follow, all the singers wanted him to write their shows, Bea Arthur, Robert Goulet, Diahann Carroll, Nancy Wilson, Goldie Hawn, and Florence Henderson among them.
At the memorial, Bea Arthur told us a story about her invitation to sing a song called “It Amazes Me” at an affair honoring Cy Coleman twenty-five years earlier.
“I thought, ‘I know there’s going to be a lot of terrific talent honoring Cy,’ and I decided that rather than just slide in and go to rehearsal next day, I thought, ‘No. I’m going to go a day earlier and work with Luther and really kill the people.”
“So I did, and we worked; we worked all that day. Quite wonderful. And then the night of the event, which was, I remember, at Peacock Alley at the Waldorf – black tie, oh, I mean it was fabulous – a number of people got up and performed Cy’s stuff. And then Tony Bennett came and started singing and, of course, he leveled the place, just tore the place up to such a degree that – I don’t know if you remember this, Billy – that he had to do an encore. So Cy sat down at the piano and Tony sang…“It Amazes Me.” I never in my life … I was so devastated! So after that, we just went to the bar and got loaded.”
And after telling the story, Ms. Arthur, then casually dressed in white pants, tunic top, and sandals, regal as ever, began to sing, accompanied by Billy Goldenberg. Even without a microphone, her voice was strong and sure, her delivery, striking.
I wanted to know more about her relationship with Luther Henderson and that is what had brought me to her house for an interview. She was very apologetic about her memory, but she provided a few pieces to the the jigsaw puzzle of Luther’s life. He first worked with Ms. Arthur in her ingenue days (late 1940s) and she remembered going to his studio:
I was told about Luther, who was a coach and had an arrangement with a voice teacher. I forget exactly what street it was on. I was going to say 48th. No, the theater, the New School theater was there. But I started working with Luther who saw something in me because he never charged me because I didn’t have any money anyway.
It was the time when everyone was emulating Lena Horne. And Luther taught me, among other things, to play the lyrics, to make sure you hear the lyrics, which of course was Lena’s big thing.
And he took me, I don’t know, some place up in Harlem to some black club there where I sang. I, with Luther’s help, auditioned for one night club called One Fifth Avenue. I remember they billed me as “Bea Arthur, Songs from the Heart.” I think I lasted one night. I mean I was fine when I was singing, but I never knew what to do in between songs. I was so up tight, I couldn’t say, ‘Thank you ladies and gentlemen … for my next number I’d like ….’ I just kind of froze there with a shit-eating grin on my face, you know?
This reminiscence corroborates other accounts. Luther’s notes about studying the Schillinger method at the NYU Graduate School of Music (1946-47) included a mention: “During this time I had set up a studio as a freelance arranger/orchestrator and vocal coach on 47th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues.” That would have been Vamp Studios. According to a newspaper advertisement saved in Luther’s papers at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, VAMP stands for “Voice Action Music Production,” and Luther, along with Richard Camillucci and Buster Newman, offered “songs, arrangements, and special material written.”
After the initial coaching, Ms. Arthur remembered only two other professional interactions — an episode of Maude required her to sing, so they brought in Luther for a guest appearance, and the Cy Colman story told at Luther’s memorial — but they remained friends throughout the years. I asked her when she last saw Luther and to describe him for me.
“When we played Broadway and I was in New York for three or four months, I had a couple of dinners with Luther and Billie at Picholine, I think. … Luther was fuzzy. Kind of fuzzy and ticklish. You know, his humor was very low key and impish.”
Those dinners took place in 2002. Ms. Arthur remarked on how old Luther looked (“I was rather surprised to see him older”) but I doubt that she knew about his ongoing cancer battle as that was something Luther did not often discuss. She also mentioned a recent Ellington project (“he really got slammed”). The bad review actually occurred in at the end of September, 2000, almost 18 months before these dinners. Ms. Arthur may or may not have read the review in The New York Times from her Southern California home, but around the time of those dinners Luther was actively seeking funding for a follow-up project, Classic Ellington II, so his endeavors and the bad review were very much on his mind and likely discussed over meals with friends.
Piecing together snippets of someone’s life story and interviewing all sorts of people is the fun part of writing biographies. Many snippets never find their way into the final product, and whether Luther’s brief encounters with Ms. Arthur merit more than a mention in the final Seeking Harmony manuscript remains to be seen. Yet knowing all sort of seemingly trivial details informs the big picture, even if in intangible ways.
I have interviewed all sorts of people that I would never had met otherwise, and I am grateful that Ms. Arthur allowed me to spend a few hours with her.
The first was at the home of a friend of hers in New York City on the upper west side. I was living in the same neighborhood at the time. This person was also a friend of Sweets Edison, and it was Sweets who had invited me to join him for dinner. Dorothy was there too, and after dinner, we all went upstairs to the music room. Dorothy said she was just beginning to practice classical pieces as she was slated to appear some months later with a Symphony. She started playing a Chopin Nocturne, this one (no, that’s not her playing):
but she stopped midway in the second section, saying she didn’t remember the rest. I was in my early 20s. My conservatory-trained classical chops were in pretty good shape back then, and as befitting my know-it-all ultra-confident age, I said “move over.” I will always wonder if Sweets might have rolled his eyes, but I wasn’t looking and everyone was quiet; Dorothy gave way. I had just begun studying the Ballades and the Nocturne seemed easy by comparison. It’s not a difficult piece and I acquitted myself quite well. Dorothy was gracious, and then she sat down and played the Nocturne to perfection, and then some.
A handful of years later I ran into Dorothy at a bar. I had since moved to Los Angeles and used to meet Ernie Andrews at Tommy Tucker’s Playroom for drinks in the late afternoon when i got off work from my office gig. The Playroom was catty-corner to the old Parisian Room, a nightclub that used to sit on the south-west corner of La Brea and Washington. One day, Ernie and I were siting at the bar, and Dorothy came in and sat down next to Ernie. They started talking, and talking, and talking. She didn’t say a word to me and I was sure she didn’t even know me. Why should she? Two scotches later, Ernie excused himself for a moment and while he was gone, Dorothy leaned over and said, “So, are you still playing the F minor Nocturne.?” I nearly fell off my barstool and we remained friendly ’til the end.
This story never would have happened if I had ever heard Dorothy play Rachmaninoff’s Prelude In C Sharp Minor back in 1944. Take a listen from an Armed Forces Radio broadcast.
Scott’s reflections also include links to two YouTube videos: one from 1945, and one from 1993 at the White House. She was a show-woman from start to finish.
While I much lament what I feel is the demise of essential elements of journalism - shoe-leather and insightful reporting - I will not lament the loss of physical newspapers, should that eventuality come to pass. I remember my grandfather showing me how to fold The New York Times so as to manage the size and page turns, but I never learned to like the feel of newsprint nor the ink it left on my hands.
What I am enjoying these days is the online incarnation of some newspapers, particularly those that employ multimedia and narrative writing. One of my mentors, Tom French, has done several huge serial reports for the St Petersburg Times*, but the one-off stories such as the March 8th New York Times article Riding The Rails are just as inspiring and more easily consumable when pressed for time. This piece is an interesting short-form narrative, well-reported with occasional first-person interjections for that being-there-with-you feel. The multimedia portion includes images of the amazing landscapes seen while rolling across country and short video clips that allow us to meet some fellow travelers. Is it really just coincidental that only a few days ago I spoke of wanting to travel cross country by train?
Of course multimedia need not be reserved only for narratives. It is not surprising that art reviews are greatly enchanced by visuals. I still refer friends to the slides accompanying a review of Calder works at the Whitney — Calder at Play: Finding Whimsy in Simple Wire (October 2008).
More recently a March 5th New York Times article “The Unheralded Pieces in the American Puzzle” caught my attention, perhaps because last weekend I went to The Getty Museum for the first time in eons and found myself wondering how I might manage to visit there much more often (but that rumination is for another blog post). While the slides with this particular article are fewer and less intriguing to me than those of Calder, I did “discover” artists unfamiliar to me. My favorite is slide number 5, a 1911 painting by George Bellows titled “New York” with this description: “crowded with buildings, vehicles and people in the street, it is thought to depict Union Square in the snow, slightly reimagined and looking west toward the Sixth Avenue El.” Apparently Bellows died young (age 42). His wikipedia entry says “Bellows’ urban New York scenes depicted the crudity and chaos of working-class people and neighborhoods, and also satirized the upper classes.” Had he been of our generations, I wonder what his canvases would portray of life today.
I received phone call last week from a publicist at Burson-Marsteller. This was unusual on many counts.
1. it was a phone call (I miss that)
2. I don’t have any personal contacts with flacks there
3. she was calling about a medical story, not my usual beat
At first I assumed she found me because of my blog, but I noticed when she followed up via email that she had my writer email address, not my blogger address. Hmmm… She led right off with Deep Vein Thrombosis and she sounded surprised that I knew what that was.
Deep Vein Thrombosis and Pulmonary Embolisms can be lethal. I’ve never had one, but I well remember the scare. It was during my cancer war days and I, an in-patient, fainted while seated in a wheelchair enroute to my room following a CT scan. When I came to, moments later, I was on a gurney and already on my way to Intensive Care because the doctors feared that I might have thrown a clot. They kept me there for 48-hours, just in case. In addition to the chemo lines, trachea and gastro tubes, I was now connected to the EKG, pulse, oxygen, and other monitors; tethered in every possible way. Those 48 hours were scarier than the cancer.
DVT occurs when a blood clot forms in a deep vein, usually in the lower limbs. A complication of DVT, pulmonary embolism, can occur when a fragment of a blood clot breaks loose from the wall of the vein and migrates to the lungs, where it blocks a pulmonary artery or one of its branches.
Anyway, six years ago, March was proclaimed National DVT Awareness Month and the Coalition to Prevent Deep Vein Thrombosis is on a mission to educate Americans about the dangers. Their National Patient Spokesperson is Melanie Bloom, widow of NBC news correspondent David Bloom who died in Iraq due to complications of DVT, and they’ve recently announced Driving to Reduce the Risks of DVT, a nationwide mobile campaign designed to encourage dialogue between healthcare professionals and patients about this serious but preventable condition.
The customized recreational vehicle is currently visiting hospitals and local communities. They started off on March 3rd in Washington DC. On Tuesday the 10th they’ll be in the big apple, stopping first at Rockefeller Center for The Today Show and then the Weill Cornell Medical Center. Another highlight will be a stop at the Metrodome for a Minneapolis Twins baseball game on May 12th, but mostly they’ll be visiting hospitals and universities. Other strops include Richmond, Atlanta, Orlando, Dallas, San Antonio, Pheonix, Sacramento, Las Vegas, Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Columbus, ending in Pittsburgh on May 23rd.
Here are a few more scary facts:
Complications from DVT kill more people each year in the U.S. than breast cancer and AIDS combined.In the United States, DVT affects up to 2 million people annually.Approximately 300,000 Americans die each year from a pulmonary embolism, the majority of which result from DVTDVT-related pulmonary embolisms are the most common cause of preventable hospital death
February’s Black History Month is over and April’s Jazz Appreciation Month is coming soon, meanwhile March 8th is International Women’s Day and NPR’s Take Five: A Weekly Jazz Sampler is celebrating with It’s A Woman’s World: Six Jazz Trailblazers featuring Mary Lou Williams, Shirley Scott, Marian McPartland, Geri Allen, Regina Carter, and Maria Schneider. Three of these women are good friends of mine, and from conversations with them over the years I know that they don’t particularly care to be singled out for their gender — “you sure play great” looses something when the unspoken end of the sentence is “for a girl” — but the past-publicist in me says any angle that helps to gain exposure is a good angle.
Birthdays this month include: Carol Sloane, Shirley Scott, Marian McPartland, Eliane Elias, and Sarah Vaughan.
This really cracked me up, especially now that I’m Mac-enamored. I’m not one who usually passes around jokes via email. A few are indeed funny, but most are just so-so. And who among us has enough time to read them all anyway? Anyway, I found this enactment on YouTube awhile back and I’m still enjoying it.
I can assure you that this is all too plausible. Here’s the script:
COSTELLO CALLS TO BUY A COMPUTER FROM ABBOTT . . . .
ABBOTT: Super Duper Computer Store. May I help you?
COSTELLO: Thanks. I’m setting up an office in my den and I’m thinking about buying a computer.
ABBOTT: Mac?
COSTELLO: No, the name’s Lou.
ABBOTT: Your computer?
COSTELLO: I don’t own a computer. I want to buy one.
ABBOTT: Mac?
COSTELLO: I told you, my name’s Lou.
ABBOTT: What about Windows?
COSTELLO: Why? Will it get stuffy in here?
ABBOTT: Do you want a computer with Windows?
COSTELLO: I don’t know. What will I see when I look in the windows?
ABBOTT: A desktop and wallpaper.
COSTELLO: I already have a desk with a large top, so never mind the windows with the computer. I just need a computer and software.
ABBOTT: Software for Windows?
COSTELLO: No. For the computer! I need something I can use to write proposals, track expenses and run my business. What have you got?
ABBOTT: Office.
COSTELLO: Yeah, for my office. Can you recommend anything?
ABBOTT: I just did.
COSTELLO: You just did what?
ABBOTT: Recommend something.
COSTELLO: You recommended something?
ABBOTT: Yes.
COSTELLO: For my office?
ABBOTT: Yes.
COSTELLO: OK, what did you recommend for my office?
ABBOTT: Office.
COSTELLO: Yes, for my office!
ABBOTT: I recommend Office with Windows.
COSTELLO: I already have an office with windows! OK, let’s just say I’m sitting at my computer and I want to type a proposal. What do I need?
ABBOTT: Word.
COSTELLO: What word?
ABBOTT: The Word in Office.
COSTELLO: The only word in office is “office”.
ABBOTT: The Word in Office for Windows.
COSTELLO: Which word in office for windows? I told you I don’t want windows installed in my computer.
ABBOTT: The Word you get when you click the blue “W”.
COSTELLO: I’m going to click your “blue ‘W’” if you don’t start with some straight answers! OK, forget
that. Can I watch movies on the internet on this computer?
ABBOTT: Yes, you’ll want Real One.
COSTELLO: Maybe a real one, maybe a cartoon. What I watch is none of your business. Just tell me what I need!
ABBOTT: Real One.
COSTELLO: If it’s a long movie I also want to see reel 2, 3 & 4. Can I watch them?
ABBOTT: Of course.
COSTELLO: Great! With what?
ABBOTT: Real One.
COSTELLO: OK, I’m at my computer and I want to watch a movie. What do I do?
ABBOTT: You click the blue “1″.
COSTELLO: I click the blue one what?
ABBOTT: The blue “1″.
COSTELLO: Is that different from the blue “W”?
ABBOTT: The blue “1″ is Real One and the blue “W” is Word.
COSTELLO: What word?
ABBOTT: The Word in Office for Windows.
COSTELLO: But there are three words in “office for windows”!
ABBOTT: No, just one. But it’s the most popular Word in the world.
COSTELLO: It is?
ABBOTT: Yes, but to be fair, there aren’t many other Words left. It pretty much wiped out all the other Words out there.
COSTELLO: And that word is “real one”?
ABBOTT: Real One has nothing to do with Word. Real One isn’t even part of Office.
COSTELLO: STOP! Don’t start that again. What about financial bookkeeping? You have anything I can track my money with?
ABBOTT: Money.
COSTELLO: That’s right. What do you have?
ABBOTT: Money.
COSTELLO: I need money to track my money?
ABBOTT: It comes bundled with your computer.
COSTELLO: What’s bundled with my computer?
ABBOTT: Money.
COSTELLO: Money comes with my computer?
ABBOTT: Yes. No extra charge.
COSTELLO: I get a bundle of money with my computer? How much?
ABBOTT: One copy.
COSTELLO: Isn’t it illegal to copy money?
ABBOTT: Microsoft gave us a license to copy Money.
COSTELLO: They can give you a license to copy money?
ABBOTT: Why not? THEY OWN IT!
A FEW DAYS LATER . .
ABBOTT: Super Duper Computer Store. May I help you?
COSTELLO: Your people set up this computer in my den and turned it on, but how do I turn it off?
Lukas Foss, Composer at Home in Many Stylistic Currents, Dies at 86 (The New York Times obit) Back in June of 2007 Laurie (my girlfriend from elementary school days) was in the chorus of the revival of Lukas Foss’s major cantata, “The Prairie.” It had been decades since this work was heard in a New York performance.
The concert at the Rose Theater celebrated Foss’s 85th birthday, and he was present for the concert celebration. Professional soloists were backed by the Brooklyn Philharmonic and The Greenwich Village Singers (Laurie has been a longtime member) with the Choral Society of the Hamptons forming a chorus of over 100 voices.
Laurie said the piece reminds her a bit of Gershwin, with some Copeland-esque sounds, “but it is not at all derivative–in fact, it’s wholly original and just a very cool piece of music. Very difficult not to like, even for those of you who do not ordinarily listen to choral music.”
You can read more about An American Awakening: The Rediscovery of a Choral Masterpiece on The Prairie Project website. The text, which was adapted by the composer from Carl Sandburg’s “The Prairie,” is posted there, along with the composer’s commentary a seen in the program from the 1944.
