“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”—British novelist and religious author C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Four Loves (1960)
Tuesday, October 3, 2023
Monday, October 2, 2023
TV Quote of the Day (George Carlin, on ‘The Mystery of the Supermarket’)
“You know the nice thing about putting things back in the supermarket, when you return an item— you know where you put it, don’t you? You put it anywhere you want! They expect that. ‘Eh, put it anywhere, Marge.’ They don’t care, they don’t give a shit. They have guys who straighten that out—guys with purple fingers come around at midnight. In the morning everything is back. It’s the mystery of the supermarket.”—American stand-up comic and actor George Carlin (1937-2008), “George Carlin at USC,” originally aired Apr. 8, 1977, on HBO
Sunday, October 1, 2023
Spiritual Quote of the Day (Blaise Pascal, on Grace)
Saturday, September 30, 2023
Quote of the Day (T.H. White, on Where Division May Lead)
“The destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees." —English novelist T.H. White (1906-1964), The Once and Future King (1958)
Ladies and gentlemen, on the brink of a government
shutdown, I present to you the mightily dysfunctional House of Representatives—or,
to borrow a Kurt Vonnegut title, “Welcome to the Monkey House.”
Friday, September 29, 2023
Flashback, September 1998: Costello, Bacharach Release Searing Songs of Heartbreak
Twenty-five years ago this month, two songwriters who few could have predicted, two decades before, would ever collaborate released Painted From Memory, a CD that won a Grammy and recharged their creative energy.
The album yielded a dozen tightly crafted pop songs and considerable creative satisfaction for Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach. If their artistic union went swimmingly, the same could hardly be said of the romantic betrayal, pain, hurt, and regret present on every song in this collection, courtesy of this unlikely duo’s relationships with the six wives they had already had to this point.
Understandably, Costello has made no bones about these songs being “excessively personal.”
When Costello burst on the music scene in the late 1970s, he quickly gained a reputation for rapid-fire, blistering tunes that matched his reputation at the time as a surly young new wave artist. In the same period, Bacharach found himself experiencing a case of the middle-aged crazies, having split from his second wife, actress Angie Dickinson, and his longtime lyricist, Hal David.
Twenty years later, they were in different places, musically and mentally. Costello had gained a well-deserved reputation for being among the most versatile and musically adventurous musicians of his generation, collaborating with country, jazz, hip-hop, classical music, and R&B artists. Bacharach was seeing something of a career revival, with his songs from three decades before receiving renewed exposure in film hits like My Best Friend’s Wedding and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.
Costello had long been a fan of Bacharach, more than 25 years his senior, and had even played “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself” early on in concert. He finally met Bacharach in 1989 when the two recorded at the same studio.
But what brought the pair together to work was the 1996 film Grace of My Heart, set in the Brill Building songwriting factory of the late Fifties and early Sixties—an environment that had bred, among others, Bacharach and David.
Bacharach had already been engaged to write the music for the song intended for the movie’s Carole King-like protagonist when Costello came on board to write the lyrics. They worked long distance, exchanging lyrics and arrangements via fax.
The result, “God Give Me Strength” (featuring the voice of Kristen Vigard but lip-synched by Illeana Douglas), was a distinct high point in the movie. Thankfully, it didn’t stop there.
As Costello noted in his 2015 memoir, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, “To have written a song like ‘God Give Me Strength’ and simply stopped would have been ridiculous, so about a year later we began a series of writing sessions, the first at Burt’s work studio near Santa Monica and later in a hotel suite on Park Avenue… One of us would lead the way with an opening statement, perhaps a verse or even all the way through a refrain, and the other would naturally follow with an ever more elaborate bridge of resolution, but as the exchange of ideas got faster and faster, we found ourselves completing each other’s musical sentences at the piano.”
If two words could summarize the creative fusion between the two, it would be “painstaking” and “accommodation.”
The two song craftsmen were used to creating the most intricate examples of their specialties: Costello, twisty lyrics spitting out satire, sarcasm, and wordplay; Bacharach, irresistible hooks that masked complicated arrangements filled with changing time signatures and irregular phrasing, all somehow refined from his classical music training and love of bebop.
In Bacharach, Costello found a master of the studio whose compositions were so complex that they required musicians who could meet his exacting standards. On the other hand, he had to find a way to place his own words naturally into this sumptuous sound.
As he told Chris Willman in a March interview for Variety Magazine, his first thought was: “‘How am I ever gonna make sense with something so, so, so spaced out?’… So this was more of a challenge for me, to make those words really land on the (minimal beats), and have it still make sense and have it still sound like me. It took a bit of puzzling.”
At the same time, the relationship agonies expressed in the songs required Costello to convey a naked, soul-baring emotion he had rarely had to summon to date. Each song, after all, was a character study in which a complex character ranged across betrayal, being cuckolded, feeble self-justification, self-recrimination, hatred and heartbreak.
And here’s the thing: beneath its shimmering orchestral pop surface, replete with tinkling piano, French horn, and muted strings, the lyrics did not deviate in the slightest from the CD’s first note to last. The first song is not titled “In the Darkest Place” for nothing—not with Costello singing, “I'm lost, I have abandoned every hope.”
Costello and Bacharach chose the song that brought them together, “God Give Me Strength,” to close out their CD. But if the protagonist has chosen to reach out past himself, it’s because he has to: he is in such despair that God is his only hope.
Few moments in pop music describe the searing loss of a lover with the outburst that Costello lets loose at the song’s climax:
Fracture the spell, as she becomes my enemy
Maybe I was washed out like a lip-print on my shirt
See, I'm only human, I want her to hurt.
Marinated in melancholy, Painted From Memory masterfully expressed what Wall Street Journal critic Marc Myers called this past March “the anguish of failed relationships—creating a new breed of saloon song minus the saloon.”
"I Still Have That Other Girl" brought Costello and Bacharach a 1999 Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. But it turned out to be the last studio album they put out during Bacharach’s lifetime.
Bacharach died in February, only a few weeks before the release of a 4-CD box set, The Songs of Bacharach and Costello. The set includes a remastered version of Painted From Memory; Taken from Life, a song cycle reflecting the development of Painted from Memory into an abortive Broadway musical that would have been co-produced by Big Bang Theory showrunner Chuck Lorre; a collection of concert performances, mostly piano-and-vocal from Costello and another Bacharach collaborator, Steve Nieve; and other live Costello performances of scattered Bacharach and David songs over the years.
Recently I blogged about another artist—director Martin Scorsese—moving in a direction not expected by longtime fans with his adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence. In a similar radical overturning of expectations, Costello, with Bacharach’s plush orchestration in Painted From Memory, could not have more astounded listeners who wanted no part of collaboration with one of the prime purveyors of Sixties MOR music.
Yet Costello, like
Scorsese, created what many now regard as a distinct highlight in a career full
of them. And Painted From Memory, like The Age of Innocence, continually
rewards those who return to it to find new subtleties each time.
Quote of the Day (Judith Viorst, on How a Hershey Bar Indicates Strength)
“Strength is the capacity to break a Hershey bar into four pieces with your bare hands—and then eat just one of the pieces.”— American humorist, newspaper journalist, children’s book writer, and psychoanalysis researcher Judith Viorst, Love and Guilt and the Meaning of Life, Etc. (1979)
Thursday, September 28, 2023
Quote of the Day (Michael Chabon, on How Life is Like Baseball)
“And in that moment he felt for the first time that optimistic and cheerful boy allowed himself to feel- how badly made life was, how flawed. No matter how richly furnished you made it, with all the noise and variety of Something, Nothing always found a way in, seeped through the cracks and patches. Mr. Feld was right; life was like baseball, filled with loss and error, with bad hops and wild pitches, a game in which even champions lost almost as often as they won and even the best hitters were put out 70 percent of the time.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Michael Chabon, Summerland (2002)
This week, fans of the two New York major league baseball teams—so often at odds—share a common emotion: misery. Within days of each other, the Mets and Yankees—two squads with the highest payrolls in the game—were officially eliminated from post-season contention, even with a playoff roster swollen to laughably lengthy size over the past four decades.
From Opening Day to the fadeout of “The Summer Game,” this season became for our hometown anti-heroes like Michael Chabon’s Mr. Feld observed: “filled with loss and error, with bad hops and wild pitches”—not to mention one freakishly disastrous injury after another.
Forget about
Mudville—these days, there’s no joy in Metville or Yankeeville, either.
Wednesday, September 27, 2023
Quote of the Day (Saul Bellow, on a ‘Great, Great Crowd’ Thronging Midcentury Broadway)
“On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was almost motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay about the doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores. And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every race and genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence - I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally.”— American novelist Saul Bellow (1915-2005), Seize the Day (1956)
Tuesday, September 26, 2023
Quote of the Day (Vivian Gornick, on the Healing Power of a Walk Through the City)
“As I saw myself moving ever farther toward the social margin, nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through the city. To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human—the variety and inventiveness of survival techniques—was to feel the pressure relieved, the overflow draining off. I felt in my nerve endings the common refusal to go under.”—American critic, journalist, essayist, and memoirist Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir (2015)
This week seven years ago, I took the picture
accompanying this post while walking through the Clinton Hill neighborhood of
Brooklyn—a section of the New York borough filled with tree-lined streets and
brownstones. At least for me, it held some of the restorative powers that Ms.
Gornick praises.
Monday, September 25, 2023
TV Quote of the Day (‘The Odd Couple,’ As Felix Explains Why He Worries About Oscar’s Health)
Felix Unger [played by Tony Randall] [on why he’s concerned about the health of slob roommate Oscar Madison]: “I watched him eat eight hot dogs today and only saw him chew two.”—The Odd Couple, Season 2, Episode 8, “Fat Farm,” original air date Nov. 12, 1971, teleplay by Albert E. Lewin, directed by Mel Ferber
Sunday, September 24, 2023
Spiritual Quote of the Day (Ann Patchett, on Religion and Storytelling)
“I suppose my ability to tell a story came from my good nature and a desire to keep everyone [in the family] together. Catholicism also was the perfect prep. Religion, in general, is story-based and teaches you to believe in what you can't see, and I did.”—American novelist and bookstore owner Ann Patchett, quoted by Marc Myers, “House Call: Ann Patchett—A Late Reader, She Made Up Stories,” The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 25, 2023
Saturday, September 23, 2023
Song Lyric of the Day (Don Henley, on Love in ‘A Graceless Age’)
How can love survive
In such a graceless age?”—American rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriter Don Henley, “The Heart of the Matter,” from his CD, The End of the Innocence (1989)
Quote of the Day (Edna St. Vincent Millay, with a Different Experience of Fall)
I walked the road beside my dear.
The rooks went up with a raucous trill.
I hear them still, in the fall of the year.
He laughed at all I dared to praise,
And broke my heart, in little ways.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), “The Spring and the Fall,” in The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1922)
Friday, September 22, 2023
Quote of the Day (Brooke Shields, Suffering a Case of Massively Mistaken Identity)
“The other day, I was in the airport and the flight attendant came up to me and said, ‘Oh my God, you’re Caitlyn Jenner!’”—Actress Brooke Shields, during her debut show at Manhattan’s Café Carlyle, quoted by Jacob Bernstein, “‘Fame Is Weird,’ and She Knows It,” The New York Times, Sept. 21, 2023
(The accompanying picture of Brooke Shields was taken
Feb. 21, 2018, by Greg2600.)
Thursday, September 21, 2023
Quote of the Day (Feist, on the ‘Quiet Little Line’ Between Writing Music and Listening to It)
“I always think about how I'm in my room alone writing it, and eventually most people listen to music alone. So there's actually a quiet little direct line between writing and listening. It's a strange bubble of solitude, because you're linked, but you don't know each other, yet you're communicating.''—Canadian singer-songwriter Feist in Jon Pareles, “The Bounty of Solitude,” The New York Times, Sept. 18, 2011
The image accompanying this post, showing Feist at Day
2 of Coachella, was taken April 21, 2012 by Jason Persse.
Wednesday, September 20, 2023
Quote of the Day (Michel de Montaigne, on Needing a Good Memory Before Lying)
“It is not without good reason said ‘that he who has not a good memory should never take upon him the trade of lying.’ I know very well that the grammarians distinguish betwixt an untruth and a lie, and say that to tell an untruth is to tell a thing that is false, but that we ourselves believe to be true; and that the definition of the word to lie in Latin, from which our French is taken, is to tell a thing which we know in our conscience to be untrue; and it is of this last sort of liars only that I now speak. Now, these do either wholly contrive and invent the untruths they utter, or so alter and disguise a true story that it ends in a lie. When they disguise and often alter the same story, according to their own fancy, ’tis very hard for them, at one time or another, to escape being trapped, by reason that the real truth of the thing, having first taken possession of the memory, and being there lodged impressed by the medium of knowledge and science, it will be difficult that it should not represent itself to the imagination, and shoulder out falsehood, which cannot there have so sure and settled footing as the other; and the circumstances of the first true knowledge evermore running in their minds, will be apt to make them forget those that are illegitimate, and only, forged by their own fancy. In what they, wholly invent, forasmuch as there is no contrary impression to jostle their invention there seems to be less danger of tripping; and yet even this by reason it is a vain body and without any hold, is very apt to escape the memory, if it be not well assured.”—French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), “On Lying,” in The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, translated by Charles Cotton and edited by William Carew Hazlitt (1877)
Tuesday, September 19, 2023
Quote of the Day (Somerset Maugham, on Strength and Circumstances)
"There are very few of us who are strong enough to make circumstances serve us." — British man of letters W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), The Circle: A Comedy in Three Acts (1921)
Monday, September 18, 2023
Quote of the Day (Kenneth Branagh, on Creating Hercule Poirot’s Mustache)
“We had nine months of preparation that started from something that was a slither of what Charlie Chaplin might have had, passed through Hitler, went via Errol Flynn, turned the other side of Kurt Russell in Tombstone and landed in a world that tried to justify Christie’s description of his mustache as having a ‘tortured splendor.’”—Actor-director Sir Kenneth Branagh, on finding the perfect mustache for iconic sleuth Hercule Poirot, quoted by Alex Ritman, “Man and Mustache: Kenneth Branagh Takes on Agatha Christie’s Poirot,” The Hollywood Reporter, Oct. 18, 2017
After so much time creating such a look, it would be a
waste never to use it again, wouldn’t it?
That’s the most likely explanation I can think of why,
after spending so much time crafting this famous bit of facial hair for Murder
on the Orient Express, Sir Kenneth Branagh came back to this look for Death
on the Nile and the just-premiered A Haunting in Venice.
That, and the fact that the first two films were
either somewhat successful at the box office or they didn’t lose a fortune.
Because the only crime Hollywood studios will never forgive a filmmaker is a
box-office bomb.
Sunday, September 17, 2023
This Day in Film History (Scorsese’s ‘Age of Innocence’ Harks Back to Golden Age of Period Drama)
Sept. 17, 1993— The Age of Innocence, an adaptation of the 1920 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Edith Wharton, opened to general release in New York, on its way to disappointment both at the box office and at the Academy Awards.
But in the
three decades since, this piercing examination of conscience and conformity versus the promise of freedom and self-fulfillment
has become celebrated as an example of bravura cinema, as well as representing a
high point in the careers of its three principal actors: Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle
Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder.
The 30th anniversary of this plush period
drama coincides with the release this fall of Killers of the Flower Moon,
the latest entry in the half-century career of Innocence director Martin Scorsese, as well as Season 2 of The Gilded Age, the HBO series that
occurs in the “Old New York” milieu that Wharton chronicled with such irony and
insight.
All of this provides an opportunity to examine how The
Age of Innocence relates to and departs from Scorsese’s larger work; why
its initial reception fell short of expectations; and why it nevertheless
repays repeated viewings.
Underappreciated at the time
Coming off the acclaimed Goodfellas, Scorsese had
now turned to the costume drama genre that had long interested him. Friend Jay
Cocks had been urging Scorsese to see this as next project for nearly a decade,
but it was only after the controversy over the alleged “blasphemy” of The
Last Temptation of Christ had died down that the director decided to collaborate
with Cocks on the script.
But the choice puzzled and mystified fans that were
awaiting another in his line of urban dramas often laced with violence and
profanity, dating back to Mean Streets and Taxi Driver in the
Seventies. (They would have to wait another two years to get what they wanted: Casino.)
The reception might have been different if, as
planned, the movie had debuted in the fall of 1992, when its principal
competition at the Academy Awards would have been Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.
But it was held back by over a year to allow Scorsese
more time to edit, so that what would have been prestige Oscar bait would now
enter awards season facing Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust drama Schindler’s
List.
In an interview for a Criterion Collection DVD from2018, Scorsese said that Vincent Canby’s negative review in The New York
Times “killed” The Age of Innocence. That is probably overstating
matters.
Variety reviewer Todd
McCarthy was closer to the mark in predicting, “For sophisticated viewers with
a taste for literary adaptations and visits to the past, there is a great deal
here to savor…But it is difficult to picture general audiences warming up to
these representatives of the old ruling class.”
Even the opening scene brings audiences face to face
with this situation: a sequence from Gounod’s opera Faust that segues
into a sweeping reaction shot of the audience.
It sets up that the upper-crust spectators are less
interested in the onstage spectacle than the drama in the seats: the presence
of Countess Ellen Olenska, a scandal-shadowed member of the socially prominent
Mingott family. It also foreshadows the doomed relationship that will
eventually develop between Ellen and lawyer Newland Archer.
Yet casual viewers, unfamiliar with the Faust source
material, are unlikely to grasp the symbolism. Moreover, as the scene lingers
for a couple of minutes without subtitles, it tests viewer attention and
patience from the start.
Moreover, Wharton’s characters speak in code—approaching
sensitive subjects but using silences and facial expressions fill in the gaps
left by words they dare not utter.
The similarities between Gilded Age aristocrats
and Mafia gangsters
Viewers taking in this atmosphere of physical opulence
and verbal repression, then, are likely to be astonished by Scorsese’s claim
that this was “the most violent film I ever made.” What could he possibly mean
by this?
The best answer might come in one of the film’s
best-remembered set pieces: a dinner at which Archer, moving toward breaking
away from his affectionate but passionless marriage to the judgmental,
unimaginative conformist May, finds his path blocked by the entire mass of
aristocratic New York.
Like Goodfellas’ Tommy DeVito finding too late
that his initiation as a Mafia “made man” will not in fact transpire, Archer
discovers a cadre that will punish him for defying its code, with the camera
sweeping past the guests and their sumptuous even as narrator Joanne Woodward
intones Wharton’s words:
Archer, who seemed to be assisting at the
scene in a state of odd imponderability, as if he floated somewhere between
chandelier and ceiling, wondered at nothing so much as his own share in the
proceedings. As his glance travelled from one placid well-fed face to another
he saw all the harmless-looking people engaged upon May's canvas-backs as a
band of dumb conspirators, and himself and the pale woman on his right as the
centre of their conspiracy. And then it came over him, in a vast flash made up
of many broken gleams, that to all of them he and Madame Olenska were lovers,
lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to "foreign" vocabularies. He
guessed himself to have been, for months, the centre of countless silently
observing eyes and patiently listening ears, he understood that, by means as
yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt
had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on
the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined anything,
and that the occasion of the entertainment was simply May Archer's natural
desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and cousin.
The images, in combination with the foregoing
description, eliminate the need to include onscreen this Wharton passage that may
have capped the resemblance between the genteel aristocrats and the crude
gangsters of Goodfellas:
It was the old New York way of taking life
"without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal
more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that
nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of
those who gave rise to them.
A cinematic feast
This dinner scene is an example of how Scorsese sought
visual and aural counterparts to Wharton’s verbal splendor. The aural component
was supplied by Woodward’s voiceover narration and a memorable, Brahms-influenced
soundtrack by Elmer Bernstein, while the visuals came through Gabriella
Pescucci’s Oscar-winning costume design and Dante Ferretti’s production design.
In focusing on the themes of money and marriage in
Victorian Age, Scorsese had one obvious antecedent: William Wyler’s The
Heiress. In a February 1994 interview with Ian Christie of Sight and
Sound Magazine, Scorsese acknowledged that the 1949 adaptation of the
Broadway play of the same name and its source material, Henry James’ Washington
Square, “made a strong impression on me as a child.”
Yet, though he admitted that it still “holds up well,”
he criticized it for being “theatrical,” with a “three-act” structure—and “no
narration, no montages, no flashbacks or flashes forward and no visual
interpolations such as letters”—all devices he employed in The Age of
Innocence.
These were not the only methods that helped make this
one of Scorsese’s most controlled movies: Vibrant colors, dissolves,
transitions, and similar visual motifs echo and reinforce each other, or subtly
reinforce characterizations:
*Fireplace scenes building slowly in intensity parallel
the growing emotional intimacy of Archer and Ellen;
*Archer bangs a pen violently at one point to force
the ink out—encapsulating his frustration with bottled-up social norms;
*Demure young May is dressed early on in virginal
white, while her more unconventional, passionate older cousin Ellen is dressed
in red;
*And one scene that Scorsese made sure to carry over
from the book depicted May as skilled at archery—a sly representation of how
she will hit her target, Archer himself.
Unlike The Gilded Age, which in its first
season leaned heavily on New York stage actors, Scorsese relied heavily on
British actors.
Scorsese and Cocks have explained that such casting
made sense, as New York aristocrats of the Victorian Era still retained strong verbal
influences from their English ancestors. I think the choice also might derive
from a belief that British actors came with appreciation for texts and a verbal
dexterity springing from their intensive stage training.
Even so, to be fair, it’s hard to argue with what Lewis,
Richard E. Grant, Alec McCowen, Michael Gough, Geraldine Chaplin, Stuart
Wilson, Siân Phillips, and Miriam Margolyes did with their dialogue.
I think that The Age of Innocence is one of
Scorsese’s overlooked masterpieces. Far more than most movies, it yields new
insights each time viewed to go with scenes that will never fade from the memory.
Only the third time around, for instance, did I notice
that a portrait of a woman bearing a striking resemblance to Woodward hangs on
the wall in one scene. And only on this latest viewing did I pick up on how the
camera, having focused for several minutes on the dogs climbing over Miriam
Margolyes as Mrs. Mingott, mocks her further by moving towards other objects in
the room: paintings, drawings, and sculptures featuring even more dogs.
At the same time, fans like me recall how Archer’s
unbuttoning of Ellen’s glove in a horsedrawn carriage leads to a passionate
encounter, or how the nimbus of light in which he beholds Ellen from a distance
as he waits for a sailboat to pass a lighthouse at sunset.
Enhancing appreciation of Wharton
I am also grateful that Scorsese’s adaptation has
fostered renewed appreciation of Wharton, one of my favorite writers, after an
extended period of popular neglect.
In the 1920s and 1930s she had enjoyed significant
attention, not only in sales but also in royalties from theatrical and
cinematic adaptations. The Age of Innocence itself became a 1928
Broadway vehicle for Katherine Cornell, as well as a 1924 silent film (now
lost) and a 1934 talkie starring John Boles as Archer, Julia Haydon as May and
the incomparable Irene Dunne as Ellen.
Given the reverence accorded Scorsese and his greater
faithfulness to the source material (approximately an hour longer than the
Dunne version), this adaptation was not only more high-profile than these earlier
efforts, but more successful than Hollywood’s other attempts to explore Wharton
in the 1990s.
The Children
(1990), with Kim Novak and Ben Kingsley, took on one of the novelist’s
bestselling but less critically acclaimed works of the 1920s, and Ethan
Frome (1993) featured Liam Neeson and Patricia Arquette in Wharton’s
tale of thwarted romance in the Berkshires. The decade closed with Gillian
Anderson movingly depicting doomed Gilded Age beauty Lily Bart in The House
of Mirth (2000).
In November, Apple TV+ will begin a series based on Wharton’s
The Buccaneers, a novel completed several decades after her death in
1937 by Marion Mainwaring. Although Sofia Coppola’s attempt to develop another
Wharton novel, The Custom of the Country, has temporarily hit a roadblock,
there is always the hope that this biting satire will also find its audience.
Nevertheless, it would be difficult for any of these past, present,
or future adaptations to match the art, depth of feeling, and appreciation for
the source material shown by Scorsese’s Age of Innocence.
Spiritual Quote of the Day (P.D. James, on How Religious Faith is Like Musicality)
"I certainly have found faith important, but I do have friends who are totally without it and who cope admirably with life, sometimes under difficult circumstances, and who live extremely good lives. It isn’t a given that if you have faith, you’re happy, and if you don’t have it you’re miserable; or that you have it and you’re good, and you don’t have it and you’re less good; or even that you have it and you’re comforted, and you don’t have it and you’re not comforted. I sometimes think that religious faith is rather like musicality. You’re either born with it or not. Some of my friends who haven’t got faith find it rather a surprising thing to have. Religion is a dimension of life of which they have no understanding, really.” —English novelist of crime and dystopian fiction P.D. James (1920-2014), quoted by Trudy Bush, “Reasons for Writing: An Interview with P. D. James,” The Christian Century, Sept. 27, 2000
Saturday, September 16, 2023
Quote of the Day (Tom Bligh, on Cover Songs)
“Movies get remade, songs get covered. A cover song comes with history attached. The song’s past blends with its present to create something surprising yet recognizable: two stories in one, two contexts, two visions. Covers are familiar enough that we know what to expect, plus there’s opportunity for the unexpected, an appealing combination of same/different. Our favorite songs slip away from us when overplayed. The familiarity does breed contempt. They become routine. We hardly notice what makes them special. A friend of mine says these songs don’t register until you’re drunk. Then they come through, fresh and strange; you appreciate them all over again. I propose another way to make old songs new: the cover song. The best covers show both artists in a new light.”— Fiction writer and Mount St. Mary’s Univ. English Professor Tom Bligh, “A Treatise on Cover Songs,” The Oxford American, Issue 54, Fall 2006 (Music Issue 2006)
Growing up, I never cared much to know if a song was a
cover version or not. But as I’ve grown older, having witnessed the whole
cavalcade of American rock ‘n’ roll and more fascinated by its history, cover
songs have fascinated me more and more.
In fact, I’ll even search YouTube for songs by artists
I enjoy, but covered by others.
Tom Bligh’s article From The Oxford American—which
I came across again the other day—has some interesting things to say about this
phenomenon, including that the “original artist” doesn’t refer to the
songwriter, but rather the person who made the first public recording. (Case in
point: Frank Sinatra, who did not compose songs himself but often was the first
to release songs created by some of the prime names in the Great American
Songbook, notably Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen.)
He also makes a telling observation about how performers
“make the song their own”:
“When people like a cover, the common saying is that
the artist ‘made it his/her own.’ That’s never entirely true. Bits of
associative residue cling to even the best covers. The relationship of cover to
original is not wax-museum dummy to real person. We don’t listen to a cover
song because we can’t find the original—we listen to experience the pleasure of
a familiar song in a different way.”
I think you might also like this article listing “75 Greatest Cover Songs by Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductees.” Yes, this
list is entirely subjective, so I’m sure it’ll start more than a few arguments
about what gets included, what doesn’t, and whether certain artists deserve to
be ranked so high or low.
But I’m also sure nearly everyone will find songs that
they will nod along in agreement with—and maybe sing along to. My personal favorites
on the list, for what it’s worth, are (to list the cover artists with original
performers in parentheses): George Harrison’s “If Not for You” (Bob Dylan), David
Bowie’s “China Girl” (Iggy Pop), Rod Stewart’s “I Know (I’m Losing You)” (The
Temptations), Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Got To Get You Into My Life” (The
Beatles), and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Woodstock” (Joni Mitchell).
Over the years, I have created mixtapes for friends of
cover songs. At some point I’ll share one or more of those lists—and maybe even
the “liner notes” I included.
Friday, September 15, 2023
TV Quote of the Day (‘The Golden Girls,’ on Handling an Academic Lecher)
Blanche Devereaux [played by Rue McClanahan]: “I asked my teacher for help like you all told me to. He said the only way I would get an A on his final is if I sleep with him.”
Rose Nylund [played
by Betty White]: “No!”
Blanche: “Oh yes!
I just don't know what to do!”
Sophia Petrillo [played
by Estelle Getty]: “Get it in writing.”— The
Golden Girls, Season 1, Episode 20, “Adult Education,” original air date Feb. 22, 1986, teleplay by James Berg and Stan
Zimmerman, directed by Jack Shea
Thursday, September 14, 2023
Quote of the Day (John Galsworthy, on Beginnings and Endings)
"The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy."— Nobel Prize-winning English novelist and playwright John Galsworthy (1867-1933), Over the River (1933)
Wednesday, September 13, 2023
Quote of the Day (Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Freedom)
Disown the knave and fool;
Each honest man shall have his vote,
Each child shall have his school.
For what avail the plow or sail,
Or land, or life, if freedom fail?”—American essayist, poet, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), “Boston,” in The Atlantic Monthly, February 1876
Tuesday, September 12, 2023
Quote of the Day (Anthony Powell, on Human Relationships)
“Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.” —English novelist Anthony Powell (1905-2000), A Dance to the Music of Time: A Question of Upbringing (1951)
Monday, September 11, 2023
TV Quote of the Day (Steve Martin, on Jimmy Fallon’s ‘Clean Image’)
“You have such a clean image. And that’s hard to do in today’s world. I suggest that whatever you’re paying the National Enquirer, you should double.”—Actor-comedian Steve Martin, to late-night host Jimmy Fallon, appearing with Martin Short on The Tonight Show, February 14, 2019
In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the
“two-minute hate” is a public screaming session in which members of a
totalitarian state vent their anguish and frustration toward a politically
expedient enemy. It becomes a “hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a
desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer.”
In the age of shortened attention spans and social
media, that tendency to express one’s suppressed hate has spilled over from
politics to entertainment.
When, it’s discovered, performers behind the scenes
are not as genial as their public image, the vitriol directed in their
direction becomes too much to handle, and damage-control doctors (formerly
known as publicity agents) justify their salaries by working overtime and
taking any headache remedy at hand.
Rosie O’Donnell, dubbed “The Queen of Nice” by Time
Magazine as a daytime talk-show host in the early years she was on, can relate.
So, even more so, can Ellen DeGeneres.
The latest TV star to experience this phenomenon is Jimmy Fallon—the subject, you may have heard, of a Rolling Stone expose
of his show’s toxic environment.
Fallon is now in a situation in which every utterance
that he or a guest makes is likely to be scrutinized on the spot or
reinterpreted at some point in the not-so-distant future, at least sometimes in
a manner not originally intended. It’s happening already, in the Tonight
Show episode featuring today’s “Quote of the Day.”
Fallon’s critics are citing Steve Martin’s joke as a
sly way of pointing out the host’s phoniness—especially since it came right
after friend Martin Short’s remark in a similar vein: “This is the greatest
show on television because there’s no host on late night that pretends to care
the way you do. I mean, no one captures phoniness the way you do.”
A close look at the Martin-and-Short segment in which
this exchange took place shows how out of context such criticism is (especially
since the two comics lobbed increasingly absurd remarks not only at Fallon but
also each other). But that won’t seem so to Fallon haters.
“There’s no business like show business,” advised
Irving Berlin, but that adage is only true to an extent. Money passes through
show business like all other kinds, bringing with it greed, insecurity,
ruthlessness, and the arrogance of power.
If show business does differ from other professions,
it is because its members are more glamourous and more charming than the rest
of us—and, thus, more adept at concealing their less savory character traits.
The Fallon Fiasco is, in a sense, an outgrowth of the
#MeToo movement—which, far more than an attack against the misuse of sex in
employment, was an outburst against the misuse of power.
In the wake of these scandals, employees have grown
more accustomed to bringing their grievances to journalists. What toxic
entertainers and their enablers may have counted on previously—silence—no
longer works so well.
In years past, biographers would have to wait at least
several days following their subjects’ burial before they could safely state
with little fear of recrimination, for instance, that Jackie Gleason was
far from “The Great One” to Honeymooners writers, or that Johnny Carson could be variously drunk, verbally abusive, or aloof when not in
front of an audience. Quite a difference from today.
Will Fallon be canceled as a result of these
revelations? Not necessarily. With the writers’ strike putting TV production on
hiatus, he will have more time to work out an apology to the public and not
just to his staffers.
If the not-so-subtle hints in the article are true, he
could also take the time to go into rehab, in order to deal with the substance
abuse that, the Rolling Stone article strongly hints, may have
contributed to his moodiness.
In one sense in his remark above, Steve Martin was
being more correct than he may have realized with his reference to The
National Enquirer. In 2016, a
Presidential aspirant arranged to have Enquirer publisher David Packer
pay for, then kill, a story that could have damaged his candidacy.
Only now has that “catch-and-kill” program put the
candidate in any sort of legal jeopardy—but I’d still bet that he is less
likely to face the consequences of that than Jimmy Fallon, whose conduct did
far less damage to the American republic.
Sunday, September 10, 2023
Spiritual Quote of the Day (Jimmy Carter, on the Unseen ‘Guiding Lights of Life’)
“One of the most interesting verses that I know in the Bible, for instance, is when the Romans ask Paul, ‘St. Paul, what are the important things in life? What are the things that never change?’ And Paul said, interestingly, ‘they're the things that you cannot see.’ What are the things that you can't see that are important? I would say justice, truth, humility, service, compassion, love. You can't see any of those. You can't prove they're there, but they're the guiding lights of life.” —Former American President Jimmy Carter, remarks from a 1996 appearance on The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer quoted in Tom Bearden’s report on the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Carter, The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, Oct. 11, 2002
Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on ‘Everybody’s Youth’)
“ ‘Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.’
‘How pleasant then to be
insane!’"—American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald
(1896-1940), “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” in Tales of the Jazz Age
(1922)