Quote of the Day (Alexander Pope, on “True Wit”)

“True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest,

What oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest,

Something, whose Truth convinc'd at Sight we find,

That gives us back the Image of our Mind:

As Shades more sweetly recommend the Light,

So modest Plainness sets off sprightly Wit:

For Works may have more Wit than does 'em good,

As Bodies perish through Excess of Blood.”—Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711)

This Day in Rock History (JT’s “Fire and Rain” Enters Charts, and Legend)

August 12, 1970—James Taylor’s quiet but pitch-black meditation on friendship, failed dreams, life and death, “Fire and Rain,” appeared for the first time on Billboard’s “Hot 100” list, driving sales of his Sweet Baby James LP—and propelling the emotionally fragile musician to the forefront of the confessional “singer-songwriter” movement of the early Seventies.

JT didn’t invent the genre, of course. Joni Mitchell, a future lover, had already come out with three confessional LPs (including Ladies of the Canyon earlier in the year), and songs from Carole King’s first solo album, Writer (recorded earlier in the year while JT was fine-tuning SBJ), were already familiar to many listeners who had been hearing her hit tunes for the past decade co-written with former husband Gerry Goffin.

Taylor himself forthrightly—and accurately—has pointed to other great musician-composers who preceded him, including Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Cisco Houston, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Huddie Ledbetter and Harry Belafonte.

But Taylor’s success (triple-platinum sales for the album, a top-10 hit for the song) made record-company execs not only support projects and artists waiting in the pipeline for their chance, but led these execs to hunt down others in the hinterlands. The next two generations of musician-heroes looked to Taylor for a model on how to craft such songs, including the likes of Jackson Browne, John Mayer, David Gray, and Taylor’s future wife, Carly Simon.

I wonder if Taylor has ever chuckled at the assumptions of omniscience by so many of these major-label execs? Even those supposedly gifted with the Midas touch are not necessarily all they’re cracked up to be (see my post on how Clive Davis nearly deep-sixed a career-changing album, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison).

In Taylor’s case, the powers-that-be at Warner Brothers decided that the sophomore effort by this newcomer (he had already released an LP for the Beatles’ Apple label) could be most effectively promoted with another song they believed would make a more congenial single, the lilting lullaby “Sweet Baby James.”

A nice strategy, except that it didn’t work: “Sweet Baby James” didn’t get close to cracking the “Hot 100.” Perhaps it was because in that year of Kent State and other shocks to the national psyche, young audiences wanted something that addressed their fears. “Fire and Rain,” the follow-up single, did so.

At the two concerts when I saw Taylor perform, in the summer of 1975 and September 1986, audiences greeted the opening chords of “Fire and Rain” with giddy applause. Seldom in the history of popular music has such a downbeat song given so many people so much happiness.

In a music genre that celebrates youth, “Fire and Rain” is unusual in that it squarely confronts mortality, in the form of suicide. It was triggered by how Taylor heard of the death of a female friend from Long Island, Suzanne Schnerr, who had come to know the singer when he was living briefly in New York.

For a time, Taylor’s friends—concerned that having already been confined to the mental-health facility McLean Hospital, outside Boston, he might react catastrophically to bad news—had concealed from him the facts about Schnerr. Informed at last while he was recording in London, Taylor attempted to make sense of the shattering event in this haunting song.

Unlike the kind of socially conscious tunes that, for instance, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were releasing at the time, “Fire and Rain” didn’t deal with major social issues. But the manic depression strongly implied in the song’s lyrics made this neglect understandable: How could you think of others’ plight when your own situation was so grim?

Taylor’s warm baritone and smooth guitar licks offered a musical reassurance that was at odds with the song’s foreboding lyrics (“My body’s aching and my time is at hand,” a reference to this addict’s continuing struggle with heroin).

Or maybe there’s another way of viewing the song’s success that makes better sense, one offered years later by JT himself, in a 2006 interview with the Boston Globe: “A song like 'Fire and Rain' takes something internal that you're struggling with and lays it out in front of you in such a way that you can at least see it. It's a way of working through it and coming to rest with it. Yes, most of my work is, for better or worse, self-referred and autobiographical. I think everybody's writing music about themselves, essentially. But mine is admittedly so, and if it has value, it's that it's emotionally useful to people.”

Quote of the Day (Samuel Pepys, on London’s Great Plague)

“The people die so, that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by daylight, the nights not sufficing to do it in. And my Lord Mayor commands people to be within at 9 at night, all (as they say) that the sick may have liberty to go abroad for ayre.”—Samuel Pepys, Diary of Samuel Pepys, describing the Great Plague of London, August 12, 1665

Let’s get this straight immediately: the image accompanying this blog post is not a mistake.
Look past the somewhat archaic diction of this entry in the famous diary of English naval bureaucrat Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) and you’ll discover he’s describing a situation that couldn’t be more contemporary: a health emergency confronting a major metropolis and world capital.

At one point in the Great Plague that gripped London from 1664 to 1666, an estimated 8,000 people died in the British capital in a single week. The dreaded disease was, in fact, the bubonic plague, spread by rats in some of the poorest sections of the city. Ultimately, an estimated 75,000-100,000 of London’s population of 460,000 succumbed to the plague.

Pepys’ diary entries paint a vivid picture of how the rapidly morphing health crisis affected contemporary culture (many people wouldn’t buy then-fashionable wigs because, they feared, the hair had been cut off the heads of disease victims). Most of all, though, what strikes you is that the panic spread because so little was known about the disease’s cause and transmission.

Contrast that with a news item that I wish had drawn more attention and outrage than it did this week: the blistering heat that has doubled Moscow’s normal daily mortality rate, devastated Russia’s stores of grains and, in a series of unforgettable images (like the one in this post), put thousands out on the street of that nation’s capital wearing masks to guard against smog.

I’d like to borrow now a line from an otherwise inarticulate former Presidential candidate, Bob Dole: “Where’s the outrage?” As Russians suffered, many American cities also endured heat waves that for awhile badly strained electrical grids and threatened the lives of the elderly and those with poor bronchial conditions. Yet the U.S. Congress did precisely nothing to move forward a global-warming bill with any sort of teeth.

In a way, we are worse off—and certainly more morally culpable—than the Londoners of Restoration England. Lacking understanding of what plagued them, Pepys and his contemporaries were powerless to stop it.

On the other hand, the first use of the term “global warming” (coined by geochemist Wallace Broecker, in an article for the journal Science) occurred 35 years ago this past Sunday, and, especially in the last two decades, evidence for this climatic change has risen with the temperatures. Yet somehow, we haven’t been able to summon the will to do anything about it.

Quote of the Day (R.W. Church, on Cardinal Newman)

“Cardinal Newman is dead, and we lose in him not only one of the very greatest masters of English style, not only an eminent example of personal sanctity, but the founder, we may almost say, of the Church of England as we see it. What the Church of England would have become without the Tractarian movement we can faintly guess, and of the Tractarian movement Newman was the living soul and the inspiring genius. Great as his services have been to the communion in which he died, they are as nothing by the side of those he rendered to the communion in which the most eventful years of his life were spent….He will be mourned by many in the Roman Church, but their sorrow will be less than ours, because they have not the same paramount reason to be grateful to him.”—R.W. Church, in The Guardian, August 13, 1890, quoted in Nicholas Lash, “Waiting for Dr. Newman,” America, February 1-8, 2010

John Henry Cardinal Newman died of pneumonia at age 89 on this date in 1890, having resoundingly responded to aspersions on his character and that of Roman Catholicism with his autobiography, Apologia pro Vita Sua. His influence was also powerfully felt in his own day—and continues to be—with The Idea of a University.

This Day in Film History (“Sunset Boulevard” Premieres)

August 10, 1950—Billy Wilder’s mordant melodrama about Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard, premiered at Radio City Music Hall, on its way to an all-time house record for a non-holiday release there with a box-office take of $166,000.

What audiences at the famous New York film palace didn’t realize, however, as they greeted the movie with rapture, was that the bitter satire had come perilously close to becoming one of the great Tinseltown bombs, courtesy of a preview audience that laughed uproariously—at all the wrong places.

The key scene in this regard was the opening, which can be seen now on recent DVD releases of the movie: “Conversing Cadavers.” In the Los Angeles County Morgue, we hear the voice of a corpse. Soon others are joining in, explaining how they got there, too.

Wilder loved this scene, but in Evanston, Ill.—chosen especially as an ideal Middle American audience that would serve as a lab test for the film’s racier themes—the audience was so busy laughing that they didn’t know what to expect from the rest of the film.

So Wilder and co-screenwriter Charles Brackett (this would be their last collaboration) huddled and came up with the iconic opening we know today: also featuring a corpse in voice-over, but this time alone, face down in a swimming pool. I don’t know if Wilder and Brackett had this in mind or not, but it echoed one of the closing scenes of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, where another young man pays dearly for his dreams by being shot in a pool.

Sunset Boulevard is a cinephile’s delight, of course, from its brilliant dialogue (“I am big. It's the pictures that got small”) to the multiple ricocheting ironies of the casting (Erich von Stroheim, playing the chauffeur who used to be Norma Desmond’s director, was star Gloria Swanson’s director in real life, and a scene from the disastrous production that short-circuited both their careers, Queen Kelly, is briefly glimpsed).

For me, however, the film gains much of its power as a study in desperation. Silent-screen star Desmond’s mad desire to get back into the movie industry, of course, drives the plot, but the two men who made the film work were Swanson’s director and male co-star, both of whom were intimately familiar with despair.

As a 20-year-old transplant from Vienna, waiting for writing jobs to turn up, Billy Wilder allegedly supplemented his income as a “taxi dancer”, or paid dancing partner, in Berlin’s Eden Hotel. He went into exile from Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power, and later his mother and grandmother died in the Holocaust. He knew all too well exactly what a human being would do to survive when hungry and/or hunted (Lena Wertmuller’s Holocaust film, Seven Beauties, would have been ideal subject matter for him—if it hadn’t been too personal).

If Wilder’s knowledge of desperation derived from a painful past, William Holden’s came from much more immediate experience. After his star-making turn in 1939’s Golden Boy, his good looks had become something of a liability, as he became continually cast in boy-next-door roles. He had taken to drinking heavily, and Wilder, none too impressed with the actor’s recent work, was not thrilled that Montgomery Clift’s rejection of the role of failed screenwriter-gigolo Joe Gillis had led him to this second choice. (Make that third choice—Fred MacMurray had turned down the role, too.)

Instead, Holden channeled all of his pent-up self-loathing into the role and revived his career, and he would go on to make two other films with Wilder (Sabrina and the actor’s Oscar-winning Stalag 17) that would make him one of the box-office champions of the 1950s.

Quote of the Day (Norris Church Mailer, on Bill Clinton)

“I would have so liked to be able to talk to him about world affairs and politics. But we frankly never talked much.”—Norris Church Mailer, on her short-lived but intimate relationship in the 1970s with Bill Clinton, rising young Arkansas politico (and fiancée of Hillary Rodham), in A Ticket to the Circus: A Memoir (2010)

President Clinton gave a famous explanation for why he became involved in the relationship with Monica Lewinsky that, for a time, imperiled his Presidency: “Because I could.”

Norman Mailer, whom the model Norris Church would eventually marry, gave a far more interesting—creative, if you will—explanation of his philandering. To get in the proper mood for his doorstopper of a novel about the CIA, Harlot’s Ghost, “He said he needed to live that kind of double life, to know what his characters were going through,” according to his widow.

Nearly 30 years ago, listening to Mailer address a college writing class, I marveled that he could speak so fluidly and extemporaneously. I imagine that I would feel the same way if I heard the ex-President in a small setting, too.

With that said, I think I would find Ms. Mailer to be far more congenial company than the two charming but narcissistic rogues with whom she was involved. She has met all kinds of interesting people, carved out a career as a model, actress, and now, writer--but at least she has never had pretensions about surpassing Hemingway or JFK.

Quote of the Day (Robert Townsend, on Sex-Crazy Execs)

“It’s interesting that otherwise competent businessmen, capable of budgeting a complex operation, can't figure out that the cost of maintaining two women is twice the cost of one plus certain fringes. An early symptom of the mistress is a sudden surge of creativity in an executive's expense account. I once had a personnel vice-president who had taken up with one of our executive secretaries. If it had been outside the company I wouldn’t have minded unless it interfered with his work. But a personnel man with his arm around an employee is like a treasurer with his hand in the till.”—Robert Townsend, Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation From Stifling People and Strangling Profits (1970)

A while back, I was lamenting to someone experienced in outplacement about how certain corporate executives paint overly rosy scenarios about their financially strapped firms that they peddle not only to outsiders but even to their employees. “These guys are in the moment, so they can convince even themselves about what they’re saying,” he explained.

That’s the best explanation I know for Robert Townsend’s continually relevant, pungent assessment of executives’ turbo-charged testosterone levels. Townsend was talking specifically about corporate mistresses—the type of situation masterfully satirized in Billy Wilder’s 1960 Oscar-winning film The Apartment.

But, as I read the part in the above quote about a “sudden surge of creativity in an executive’s expense account,” its obvious application to the sexual harassment claim that brought down Hewlett-Packard’s Mark Hurd was all too apropos. Against all odds, Hurd (in the image accompanying this post) had to believe that his (mis)behavior would either never be noticed or simply excused. He was “in the moment.”

Sexual harassment, of course, was not a recognized realm of corporate law during Townsend’s days as CEO of Avis five decades ago. Nor were reality shows and soft-core straight-to-video/DVD flicks—the two movie genres in which Hurd’s accuser, Jodie Fisher, specialized before she crossed paths with the H-P head honcho—a recognized part of the entertainment landscape of his time.

But Townsend pinpointed a certain fatal instinct common to leaders of men, a tendency to self-destruct in ways one would not normally expect. Even if we take at face value the insistence by Hurd and contracto-consultan-whatever Fisher that nothing physical happened between them, then Hurd didn’t get much for those lavish dinners he inaccurately expensed.

(I suppose there is one sense in which Hurd’s conduct constituted a departure from the usual alpha-male behavior in these situations. Over the years, a number of female colleagues have pointed to executives from other companies they’ve known over the years. These men not only don’t want anything to do with women over 30, but even with those older than 25. Hurd is unique in that he seems to have been attracted to a woman who, at 50 years old, was close to his age.)

Oh, by the way: Did you notice that H-P’s board of directors dispatched Hurd with a $28-million severance package? Paying someone for their sins—not to mention embarrassing the company and sending its stock value plunging overnight—was not something Townsend anticipated. However, in this case, he was prescient about the role of board of directors: “Directors and the like spend very little time studying and worrying about your company. Result: they know far less than you give them credit for.”