tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29561387099747978462024-03-16T02:22:41.593-05:0060x5060x50 is an experiment in invention and discovery. I've taken William Stafford's observation from his book Writing the Australian Crawl: the existence of this blog is dedicated to Stafford's insight that a writer "is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them."Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.comBlogger539125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-34691951320720021612023-11-02T12:39:00.001-05:002023-11-02T12:39:20.317-05:00Hard Purple Rain<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin9bTFrgROZBMYEe7WuAVumdXcefvIYOW1E9qd87bQ2bHtepPlQwQ4r-ugaXPNIF1vfYQwz0kAyH26x3Dzjkg78-VoEsgdlaQs2CVsHl8MXdC_Dc5yREgaUF5S6V6L7bCeF3qlzPYZgY0IVaVAV6gZfLbCRp8Hka3NzRVkNk-Ck-rFUYZhJkCrJrYlYtA8/s590/Ventura.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="585" data-original-width="590" height="198" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin9bTFrgROZBMYEe7WuAVumdXcefvIYOW1E9qd87bQ2bHtepPlQwQ4r-ugaXPNIF1vfYQwz0kAyH26x3Dzjkg78-VoEsgdlaQs2CVsHl8MXdC_Dc5yREgaUF5S6V6L7bCeF3qlzPYZgY0IVaVAV6gZfLbCRp8Hka3NzRVkNk-Ck-rFUYZhJkCrJrYlYtA8/w200-h198/Ventura.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><p></p><p><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;">There are many songs with the word “purple” in the title: Prince’s “Purple Rain,” The Jimi Hendrix Experience’ “Purple Haze,” Marvin Gaye’s “Purple Snowflakes,” Van Morrison’s “Purple Heather,” Sheb Wooley’s “The Purple People Eater,” and, of course, the oft-recorded standard, “Deep Purple,” originally written as an instrumental by pianist Peter DeRose in 1933. So, what then are we to make of the line in America’s “Ventura Highway,” “Sorry boy, but I’ve been hit by a purple rain”?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif">I have been asked this question many times, and my answer has as much to do with metrics as it does with the way lyrical content in rock music may be rooted in the way songwriters construct lyrics nonsensically and/or <a href="https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/onomatopoeic" target="_blank">onomatopoeically</a>. Consider Paul McCartney’s original words for “Yesterday”: “Scrambled eggs, oh my baby, how I love your legs...” In other words, nonsense words and phrases are substituted as syllabic “place holders” during the composition of the melody on the assumption that the actual set of lyrics will be finalized later. There is a wonderfully comic enactment of this process in David Byrne’s film</span><span face="Verdana, sans-serif"> </span><i>True Stories</i><span face="Verdana, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Verdana, sans-serif">(1987), in a scene in which <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FODLjjHkUUQ" target="_blank">John Goodman previews a song</a> he is writing titled “People Like Us.” As he sings the unfinished song to a female friend of his, he is forced to substitute phrases and monosyllables for the unfinished lyrics while attempting to maintain the melody: “In 1950 when I was born, papa...I haven’t written this verse quite yet...Six feet tall in size 12 shoes...na, na, na, na, na, na, people like us.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif">In the case of “purple rain,” a monosyllabic word (color) does not fit the metrical rhythm, for instance, “Sorry boy, but I’ve been hit by a blue rain.” Or, “Sorry boy, I’ve been hit by a green rain.” While “yellow rain” works metrically, the phrase may have certain unintended connotations. In The Grateful Dead's "Unbroken Chain," the phrases "blue light rain" and "lilac rain" appear, but given that "blue light rain" is "light," one cannot be "hit" by it, and "lilac rain" suggests a particular scent or aroma more than a kind of rain. Before America recorded “Ventura Highway,” of course, there was Jimi Hendrix’ “Purple Haze,” “haze” in this context suggesting a confused state of mind, drugged, metaphorically “stoned.” More importantly, though, was Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” recorded in 1962. Without pushing the analogy too hard, “Ventura Highway” loosely employs the question-and-answer refrain pattern of Dylan’s song, as in “Sorry boy, but I’ve been hit by a purple rain/Aw, c’mon Joe, you can always change your name/Thanks a lot son, just the same.” The problem, though, is that “Sorry boy, but I’ve been hit by a hard rain,” does not work metrically, but also—and most importantly—because the songwriters are deliberately</span><span face="Verdana, sans-serif"> </span><i>avoiding</i><span face="Verdana, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Verdana, sans-serif">the explicit allusion to Dylan’s famous song. “Purple rain” thus avoids any direct allusion to "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," but like “hard rain," to be "hit" by "a purple rain" metaphorically suggests some kind of adversity, calamity, or hardship.</span></span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-86073478374925136112023-10-26T18:10:00.001-05:002023-10-26T19:34:59.330-05:00Passe-partout<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl_Nr2HuKfnfjpiuDXHDNKzubXXWaw6npqJ0WB5-ESu_GPWwfCqOBRJP09iGkSq9ct96Hp5ZfDAA3vcZMdFOFUTViJP2k5Sqkdh-vp1Zqonh7KY7hBciiOzLdFQbGvoba2cKyaRdMviMNHb8qaOGiI_epgAdR8SpyyTuZExr42fcEK6i5ShqQZGtAlUBuP/s375/key1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="375" data-original-width="319" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl_Nr2HuKfnfjpiuDXHDNKzubXXWaw6npqJ0WB5-ESu_GPWwfCqOBRJP09iGkSq9ct96Hp5ZfDAA3vcZMdFOFUTViJP2k5Sqkdh-vp1Zqonh7KY7hBciiOzLdFQbGvoba2cKyaRdMviMNHb8qaOGiI_epgAdR8SpyyTuZExr42fcEK6i5ShqQZGtAlUBuP/w170-h200/key1.jpg" width="170" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">After watching Alexandre O. Philippe's<span> </span></span><i style="font-family: verdana;">Lynch/Oz</i><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">(2022), a multi-chaptered film essay that just started showing on </span><a href="https://www.criterionchannel.com" style="font-family: verdana;" target="_blank">The Criterion Channel</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> exploring David Lynch's putative obsession with</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">The Wizard of Oz</i><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">(1939), I was reminded of Walter Benjamin's observation about the power of allegory: “Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else.” Allegory eradicates the detail: “it is . . . a world in which the detail is of no great importance.” Hence, for Benjamin, to allegorize is to perform an act of imposture: it replaces a particular detail by another with a similar structure. The appeal of</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">The Wizard of Oz</i><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">is due to its parabolic (allegorical) drift, meaning its conclusion contains a simple moral lesson: there’s no place like home. In </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">Lynch/Oz</i><span style="font-family: verdana;">, we are asked to believe that if you allegorize, say, a David Lynch film such as</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">Blue Velvet</i><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">(1986)—which, like</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">The Wizard of Oz</i><span style="font-family: verdana;">, has a character named Dorothy—it concludes with the same moral lesson as</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">The Wizard of Oz</i><span style="font-family: verdana;">: there’s no place like home. Such moments are presented as hard-earned insights, but hardly as enlightening as the filmmakers seem to believe. There are moments of keen insight, but they are few and far between, and there are discussions in which various sequences in Lynch's films are, oddly, compared to films other than <i>The Wizard of Oz</i>.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">While it may be that <i>The Wizard of Oz</i> is one of David Lynch’s most “enduring obsessions,” so, too, is <a href="https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/17512/1/cult-vault-20-david-lynch-on-sunset-boulevard" target="_blank"><i>Sunset Boulevard</i> </a>(1950), a Hollywood movie (movie about Hollywood) that has been referenced many times in Lynch’s films. As any fan of the <i>Twin Peaks</i> series knows, Lynch’s character is named Gordon Cole, an allusion to the Paramount executive to whom Norma Desmond speaks on the telephone. And, in a strategic shot in <i>Mulholland Drive</i>, we see the street sign, “Sunset Boulevard.” Director Karyn Kusama, in perhaps the best essay in the film along with Amy Nicholson’s, recalls a screening of <i>Mulholland Drive </i>(2001) at New York’s IFC Center. In a Q&A afterward, Kusama reports Lynch said, “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about <i>The Wizard of Oz</i>.” Certainly an over-exaggeration on Lynch’s part, but even if the film inhabits a permanent place in his psyche, his confession provides no passe-partout, or pass key, to understanding his work. Except, of course, by allegorization. In fact, I would argue that <i>Sunset Boulevard</i> is <a href="https://lamag.com/featured/mulholland-drive-locations" target="_blank">far more important</a> to understanding <i>Mulholland Drive</i> than <i>The Wizard of Oz</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Also, I am surprised that none of the commentators mentioned or discussed the sequence in <i>The Straight Story </i>(in which there is a character named Dorothy!) when Alvin invites the hitchhiking, runaway girl to shelter overnight at his camp. In <i>The Wizard of Oz</i>, Dorothy, who has run away from home in order to protect Toto, happens upon Professor Marvel (Frank Morgan, in yet another iteration of the titular wizard), a charlatan fortune-teller. Like Alvin, Professor Marvel tells the runaway girl to go home because her family wants her and is worried about her. <i>The Straight Story</i> is a road movie, like <i>The Wizard of Oz</i> (if you want to make that argument</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">—</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">not a stretch), and does conclude with a scene extolling the virtues of family. Beyond such broad comparisons, though, the two films are much different. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In addition to Amy Nicholson and Karyn Kusama, whose contributions are the most interesting and insightful in the movie, the film’s essayists are John Waters, filmmakers Rodney Ascher (<i>Room 237</i>) Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson (<i>The Endless</i>), and David Lowery (<i>The Green Knight</i>).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Showing now on <a href="https://www.criterionchannel.com" target="_blank">The Criterion Channel</a>.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-30718484696626436952023-10-24T10:49:00.005-05:002023-10-26T08:43:28.004-05:00Sideshow Attractions<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBQ2eIrnTuQFEQ5VYo7Wl-wurEJVUFoNmD7fPkIsKnh1j60l9RnpVekdVzSY2cL8ljbYSjvS-R5iP-e9nYIP-cyCPei_hLKgu4FVfTjWDV9UIUmj09BtBBDpKSVNgwqhAqSHyKTcnyPitO-a1YftQeASSg-flZ2tRgx5UHeSjHxLeM3KgyKQerDvt8uYFr/s638/Freaksproductionsstill.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="638" height="271" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBQ2eIrnTuQFEQ5VYo7Wl-wurEJVUFoNmD7fPkIsKnh1j60l9RnpVekdVzSY2cL8ljbYSjvS-R5iP-e9nYIP-cyCPei_hLKgu4FVfTjWDV9UIUmj09BtBBDpKSVNgwqhAqSHyKTcnyPitO-a1YftQeASSg-flZ2tRgx5UHeSjHxLeM3KgyKQerDvt8uYFr/w320-h271/Freaksproductionsstill.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><p>One of the great myths in the history of the cinema is that late nineteenth-century audiences, upon seeing the Lumière Brothers’ film <i>L’arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat</i> (<i>The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station</i>) (1896), ran in terror because they confused the moving image of a train with a real train coming directly at them. Although it never happened, the myth persists, in various forms, to this day. Apparently, the myth of the Lumière Brothers’ screening had circulated widely enough so that within a few years it was re-created in a film directed by Edwin S. Porter, <i>Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show</i> (1902), in which a country yokel, or rube, Uncle Josh, dives for safety when he sees on the movie screen the image of a train speeding toward him.</p></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">When it comes to the cinema, it seems that at least some audience members are always running in terror from something. Writing about the preview of <i>Freaks</i> in early 1932, Melvin E. Matthews, Jr. cites Hollywood art director Merrill Pye, who recalled: “Halfway through the preview [of <i>Freaks</i>], a lot of people got up and ran out. They didn’t walk out. They ran out.” (<i>Fear Itself: Horror on Screen and in Reality During the Depression and World War II</i>. McFarland, 2009.) Thus, by the early 1930s, the myth popularized by “Uncle Josh at the moving picture show” had become less a matter of history than a form of “common knowledge,” defined by Robert B. Ray as an “evolving assemblage of myths, half-truths, lies, and approximations” (<i>The ABCs of Classic Hollywood</i>, p. 296).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Too often, “common knowledge” passes as film history. The notion that the appearance of sideshow attractions in a moving picture show “shocked” audiences so profoundly that they fled the theater appeals to the contemporary <i>cognoscenti</i> who believe they are far more sophisticated movie viewers than the rubes who emerged during the Uncle Josh era. But audiences at the time were not as naïve as the above anecdote about <i>Freaks</i> suggests. As <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Freak-Show-Presenting-Oddities-Amusement/dp/0226063127" target="_blank">Robert Bogdan</a> has shown, freak shows had been a popular form of entertainment across the United States since 1840, in towns both big and small. Dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, “wild men,” fire eaters, microcephalics (“<a href="https://www.etymonline.com/word/pinhead" target="_blank">pinheads</a>,” a word that peaked in usage from 1890 to 1940) and other sideshow attractions had been widely known for almost a hundred years before Tod Browning made <i>Freaks</i>. Moreover, the “<a href="https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=geek" target="_blank">geek</a>,” or “sideshow freak,” was used as a central image in William Lindsay Gresham’s novel <i>Nightmare Alley</i>, published in 1946, just over a decade after the release of <i>Freaks</i>. The film adaptation of Gresham’s novel (1947) is now considered a classic.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In addition, many (though certainly not all) of the performers in <i>Freaks</i> were known in Hollywood and to popular audiences as well by way of carnival attractions such as Coney Island. For instance, the dwarf siblings who appear in <i>Freaks</i>, Harry and Daisy Earles (actual names Harry and Daisy Doll, members of the German-born Doll family) had been in California since the early 1920s. Harry Doll (“Hans”) had appeared in Tod Browning’s <i>The Unholy Three</i> in 1925, and all four of the Doll siblings would appear a few years later as Munchkins in <i>The Wizard of Oz</i> (1939). Angelo Rossitto (“Angeleno”) had first appeared on screen in the John Barrymore silent, <i>The Beloved Rogue</i> (1927), and the conjoined twin sisters Daisy and Violet Hilton (“Siamese twins”), born in Britain in 1908, were exhibited as children in Europe and were widely known in the United States by the 1920s. The timid, affectionate, microcephalic Schlitze had been employed by the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus since the early 1920s, and had made his film debut in Earle C. Kenton’s circus sideshow melodrama, <i>The Sideshow</i>(1928), starring Marie Provost, Ralph Graves, and “Little Billy” Rhodes. (“Little Billy” Rhodes would later appear in the Western spoof, <i>The Terror of Tiny Town</i> (1938), as well as <i>The Wizard of Oz</i>.) Prince Randian, the “living torso,” had lived in the United States since 1889, and was a popular Coney Island and circus attraction for decades.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The word “<a href="https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=attraction" target="_blank">attraction</a>,” used to refer to something “which draws a crowd, interesting or amusing exhibition,” dates from 1829. As Tom Gunning points out in his study of “the cinema of attractions,” the source of the word “attraction” is significant precisely because it is “a term of the fairground,” or carnival. While Gunning’s primary interest is in the roots of early cinema, he also observes, “The relation between films and the emergence of the great amusement parks, such as Coney Island, at the turn of the century provides rich ground for rethinking the roots of early cinema.” (“The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” 383) I would suggest that the relation of films and the great amusement parks also provides a productive way of reimagining <i>Freaks</i>, and provides a way to get beyond the common knowledge perception of the film as a sort of simple <i><a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/épater%20le%20bourgeois" target="_blank">épater le bourgeois</a></i>. Born in 1880, director Tod Browning’s early life coincides with the invention of the cinema and its rise as a popular entertainment, even as his later life as a carnival barker coincides with the rise of the major amusement parks. A critical reappraisal would have to begin with the assumption that the cinema is a theatrical form of exhibition rather than merely a form of voyeurism.</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-56164712095375287352023-10-15T13:33:00.003-05:002023-10-18T12:27:10.411-05:00Schmaltz<p><span face="Verdana, sans-serif"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3K26P8-BKe3uzJ-qWclNX13dfm2fKVpXEMZRuNpQ5Wrwoe_hZzeSUJ9tWgo69TBIOZg5weFjK19EIBIC6l3s7p4XGzwXlnpsrNps7XQiYNu05RYTYImMpvtd1mkDvEgngiZrsg67i4BXxC1PCAApob7rXsJnKyKxfKl3BYPDksz8JLZeUaoZDWo3klOiE/s600/Dreams.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3K26P8-BKe3uzJ-qWclNX13dfm2fKVpXEMZRuNpQ5Wrwoe_hZzeSUJ9tWgo69TBIOZg5weFjK19EIBIC6l3s7p4XGzwXlnpsrNps7XQiYNu05RYTYImMpvtd1mkDvEgngiZrsg67i4BXxC1PCAApob7rXsJnKyKxfKl3BYPDksz8JLZeUaoZDWo3klOiE/w320-h320/Dreams.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In the 1930s, “icky” referred to any popular music (jazz, big band, swing) that was considered overly “sweet.” For someone to dismiss a band’s music as “sweet” was a gesture of utmost contempt, meaning the music was “commercial,” that is, commercially compromised and “schmaltzy.” Decades later, the term “saccharine” had replaced “icky” to describe music that was overly sweet, although the term “saccharine” dates back to the late nineteenth century. The popular meaning of “schmaltz” is used to described something that is excessively sentimental, or “maudlin.” Maudlin, <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/maudlin" target="_blank">an alteration of Magdalene</a> (as in Mary Magdalene) is used to describe someone who expresses sadness or sentimentality in an exaggerated way, as in a “maudlin drunk,” someone whose heavy alcohol consumption has caused them to be tearful, histrionic, and perhaps morbid. An analogous term for excessive sentimentality is “corn” or “corny.”</span></p><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif">To be clear, an expression of sentimentality is not “saccharine.” It is “saccharine” when it is inauthentic, when it is <i>manufactured</i> authenticity. </span><span face="Verdana, sans-serif">Both movie and music critics tend to disparage sentimentality, for reasons Charles Affron describes in <i>Cinema and Sentiment </i>(1982): “Art works that create an overtly emotional response in a wide readership are rated inferior to those that engage and inspire the refined critical, intellectual activities of a selective readership” (1). But as Affron correctly points out, it is the <i>affective</i> (emotional) power of cinematic narrative that has been responsible for the cinema’s massive popular appeal. “Their [the movies’] promptness to elicit feeling offends those who consider being moved equivalent to being manipulated, victimized, deprived of critical distance” (1).</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Affron’s insight applies to popular music as well, which also has based its popular appeal on its affective or emotional power. The sentimentality expressed in songs such as The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” (for example) stands in stark contrast to songs that seek “to manufacture authenticity—to signify belief in the face of unbelief—through intense virtuosity . . . [these songs] create rampant ‘affective inflation’ that subverts its own efforts . . . and become audible expressions of what Lawrence Grossberg calls ‘sentimental inauthenticity.’” (Michael Jarrett, <i>Sound Tracks</i>, 82-83)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">While I am fully aware that lists are made in order to provoke, I offer the following list only to illustrate the idea of commercially compromised music, of sentimental inauthenticity. Most all of them were commercially successful, but the reasons for that will have to be explored in a future post:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Beatles – Love Me Do<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Debbie Boone – You Light Up My Life<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Carpenters – (They Long to Be) Close to You<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Vikki Carr – With Pen in Hand<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Bobby Goldsboro – Honey<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Whitney Houston - I Will Always Love You<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Cyndi Lauper – True Colors<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">John Lennon – Imagine <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Wayne Newton – Dreams of the Everyday Housewife<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Minnie Ripperton – Lovin’ You<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Tommy Roe – Sweet Pea<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #fcff01;">For Further Reading</span>: H. Brook Web, "The Slang of Jazz." <i>American Speech</i> 12: 3 (October 1937), pp. 179-184.</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-37988715796394338082023-10-11T18:01:00.003-05:002023-10-11T18:04:55.826-05:00What the Dead Men Say<p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-Fu5afk2ETcBCfehjPnqqURAuKa7VDBxMyFKcg-dCw6CajwJlE2g8wZKUaY9xuEEcoYceajXpYYDdvYnb2mUCXhAcDRoLOtbfhOhgxNZEDIU_X22GXaxc_4c5yvI5sgOygRbVc3wYZtTJAz-1yCLka9KlSy9NuX9wPLODLNLaXKtE1SEiRLrGA0v68VAZ/s877/ELPASO.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="877" data-original-width="868" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-Fu5afk2ETcBCfehjPnqqURAuKa7VDBxMyFKcg-dCw6CajwJlE2g8wZKUaY9xuEEcoYceajXpYYDdvYnb2mUCXhAcDRoLOtbfhOhgxNZEDIU_X22GXaxc_4c5yvI5sgOygRbVc3wYZtTJAz-1yCLka9KlSy9NuX9wPLODLNLaXKtE1SEiRLrGA0v68VAZ/w198-h200/ELPASO.jpg" width="198" /></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">In Philip K. Dick’s short story, “What the Dead Men Say” (1964), businessman Louis Sarapis dies unexpectedly. According to the terms of his will, his corpse is to be deposited in a mortuary where his consciousness can be immediately (but only temporarily) restored, a post-mortem state similar to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_animation" target="_blank">suspended animation</a>. Dick termed this post-mortem state “half-life.” He later used the idea of “half-life” in one of his greatest novels,<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><i>Ubik</i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> (1969).</span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Eventually, the consciousness of those in half-life begins to deteriorate, becoming garbled and incoherent—rather like <a href="https://crimereads.com/the-strange-poetry-of-a-notorious-gangsters-last-words/" target="_blank">the dying words of gangster Dutch Schultz</a>, whose delirious non-sequiturs and novel collocations such as "French-Canadian bean soup" inspired William Burroughs to write a screenplay about Schultz's dying moments.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Consider the following songs as occurring during the singer’s half-life, or alternatively, concluding at the moment of death; "D.O.A." is the classic example. There is, of course, a certain degree of self-consciousness in these songs, unlike the last words of Dutch Schultz.</span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: verdana;">What the Dead Men Say:</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Lefty Frizzell – <span style="color: #04ff00;">Long Black Veil </span>(1959)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Marty Robbins – <span style="color: #04ff00;">El Paso</span> (1959)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Porter Wagoner – <span style="color: #04ff00;">Green, Green Grass of Home</span> (1965)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Fleetwood Mac – <span style="color: #04ff00;">Blood on The Floor</span> (1970)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">R. Dean Taylor – <span style="color: #04ff00;">Indiana Wants Me</span> (1970)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Bloodrock – <span style="color: #04ff00;">D.O.A. </span>(1971)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Al Kooper – <span style="color: #04ff00;">Nightmare #5</span> (1971)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-31279808981598310052023-10-07T15:24:00.000-05:002023-10-07T15:24:12.629-05:00Fashion<p><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3qIXlb7J_8ZH1XXZzEFol1kLHeKesdUo4zqNd7e_KV5m4QKR6Rnx0a_Od7cW0BqRJACDpggKQakOnQRnRvVsTygnRIzNJWZ15_QQUYX2taEduRdAnR19VcdMHrhJ7VpEDWMgXz4bm82w7QLxroEzvkAq0Db6HZMefRYLJKkxh9A2HuUzdQ5dqBw2v_54A/s599/Kinks.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="598" data-original-width="599" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3qIXlb7J_8ZH1XXZzEFol1kLHeKesdUo4zqNd7e_KV5m4QKR6Rnx0a_Od7cW0BqRJACDpggKQakOnQRnRvVsTygnRIzNJWZ15_QQUYX2taEduRdAnR19VcdMHrhJ7VpEDWMgXz4bm82w7QLxroEzvkAq0Db6HZMefRYLJKkxh9A2HuUzdQ5dqBw2v_54A/w200-h199/Kinks.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>Oscar Wilde reportedly said, “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” Typical Wildean wit, perhaps addressed to the smart London world of snobs and social climbers, in which worth and station were not given, but asserted. They were asserted through notions about clothes (“fashion”), but also attitudes toward illness. As Susan Sontag observes in<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Illness as Metaphor</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">(1978), “Both clothes (the outer garment of the body) and illness (a kind of interior decor of the body) became tropes for new attitudes toward the self.”</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Sontag goes on to write:</span></p><p><span style="color: #01ffff;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Shelley wrote on July 27, 1820 to Keats, commiserating as one TB [tuberculosis] sufferer to another, that he has learned “that you continue to wear a consumptive appearance.” This was no mere turn of phrase. Consumption was understood as a manner of appearing, and that appearance became a staple of nineteenth-century manners. “Chopin was tubercular at a time when good health was not chic,” Camille Saint-Saëns wrote in 1913. “It was fashionable to be pale and drained; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristina_Trivulzio_Belgiojoso" target="_blank">Princess Belgiojoso</a> strolled along the boulevards…pale as death in person.” Saint-Saëns was right to connect an artist, Chopin, with the most celebrated</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">femme fatale</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">of the period, who did a great deal to popularize the tubercular look. The TB-influenced idea of the body was a new model for aristocratic looks—at a moment when aristocracy stops being a matter of power, and starts being mainly a matter of image. (“You can never be too rich. You can never be too thin,” the Duchess of Windsor once said.)</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #01ffff;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Indeed, the romanticizing of TB is the first widespread example of that distinctively modern activity, promoting the self as an image. The look of TB had, inevitably, to be considered attractive once it came to be considered a mark of distinction, of breeding. “I cough continually!” <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Bashkirtseff" target="_blank">Marie Bashkirtseff</a> wrote in the once widely read <i>Journal</i> which was published, after her death at twenty-four, in 1887. “But for a wonder, far from making me look ugly, this gives me an air of languor that is very becoming.” What was once the fashion for aristocratic</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">femmes fatales </i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">and aspiring young artists became, inevitably, the province of fashion as such. Indeed, twentieth-century women’s fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><span style="color: #fcff01;">For Additional Reading</span></i>: Susan Sontag, <i>Illness as Metaphor.</i> Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.</span><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><span style="color: #fcff01;">A Few Songs About Fashion And Self As Image:</span></i><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">David Bowie – Fashion</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Lady Gaga – Fashion!<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Green Day – Fashion Victim<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Kinks – Dedicated Follower of Fashion<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Suede – She’s In Fashion</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Kanye West – Dark Fantasy<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">ZZ Top – Sharp Dressed Man</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-79968492776295406202023-10-01T15:38:00.002-05:002023-10-13T21:30:04.815-05:00On the Road to Shambala<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW3uzd_knUTiqd3XLDCisPgRIzLg3W7W7fswQlW1ZN4xHG-3fHwJKTGzELB-3FOFkPU20Rmh5j1S9a7EfsjHo5MSUv87EvCpbzB7U8vIB0PhP4NgmDm2JPQq9aLa5-yYqH4Ww0o0NQkWItyG2ix2fpJV_5MFqzWrNaZKY4GAJ3H6km623uEo1Ba1RNUxZK/s300/Mathis.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="299" data-original-width="300" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW3uzd_knUTiqd3XLDCisPgRIzLg3W7W7fswQlW1ZN4xHG-3fHwJKTGzELB-3FOFkPU20Rmh5j1S9a7EfsjHo5MSUv87EvCpbzB7U8vIB0PhP4NgmDm2JPQq9aLa5-yYqH4Ww0o0NQkWItyG2ix2fpJV_5MFqzWrNaZKY4GAJ3H6km623uEo1Ba1RNUxZK/w200-h199/Mathis.jpg" width="200" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">As is well-known, James Hilton's <i>Lost Horizon</i> (1933) is the origin of Shangri-La, the fictional utopia nestled high in the remote mountains of Tibet. Apparently, President Franklin D. Roosevelt admired the novel—and perhaps the 1937 Hollywood film adaptation as well. In 1942, given increased German submarine activity along the Atlantic coast, the Secret Service, concerned about the President’s safety, requested FDR discontinue his frequent cruises aboard his yacht, the USS Potomac, along the eastern waterways. Seeking a retreat that would not interfere with the President’s medical conditions of asthma and polio, FDR's physician recommended a summer camp for federal employees as well as Boy Scout groups called <a href="https://www.nps.gov/cato/learn/historyculture/shangri-la.htm" target="_blank">Camp Hi-Catoctin</a>, located in Maryland’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Upon seeing his mountain retreat in 1942, President Roosevelt named it Shangri-La. In 1953, several years after President Roosevelt’s death, the retreat was renamed Camp David by President Dwight Eisenhower, after his father and grandson, the name it retains to this day.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">That the utopian promise represented by Shangri-La (Shambala) captured President Roosevelt’s imagination is certain. Pure speculation, but I wonder whether the film adaptation of <i>Lost Horizon</i> (1937), directed by Frank Capra, was perhaps more influential on Roosevelt in its conception of Shangri-La than the novel. Capra’s adaptation makes several (important) changes to the novel, one of them being to intensify Conway’s internal conflict about whether to stay in Shangri-La. In Hilton's novel, Mallinson is his protégé, vice-consul to Robert Conway’s role as consul in the British diplomatic service, but in the film adaptation he is replaced by George, Conway’s brother. In the film adaptation, there are two women who live in Shangri-La, Maria and Sondra. Maria’s role is similar to that of Lo-Tsen’s in the novel, but Sondra is introduced in order to develop a love interest for Conway. Robert Conway’s love for Sondra makes his decision to leave even more difficult: he is torn between his protective and filial affection for his younger brother and his romantic yearning for Sondra, along with his conviction that he has found his utopia and place in the world. Hence, the stakes for Conway are far higher in the adaptation than in the novel.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Perhaps the most important change in Capra’s film adaptation, though, is the addition of the character of Gloria, who replaces the kind but largely ineffectual missionary, Miss Brinklow. As the terminally ill, cynical consumptive, Gloria recovers her health, an indication of the restorative quality of the (magical) “air” in Shangri-La (mountain cures were a common belief). The magical quality of Shangri-La is represented by the High Lama, who dies at the age of 249. He was originally a Christian missionary monk who became converted to the east, although Shangri-La, with its motto of “moderation,” is ecumenical rather than dogmatic in its approach to spiritual tenets. I believe it was these features of Shangri-La, its restorative, healing powers, and its ecumenicalism, that appealed to the polio-stricken Roosevelt. I am sure this is not a startling new insight. Rather, what it does suggest is the power of Frank Capra’s film adaptation in influencing our (mis)conceptions about James Hilton’s Shangri-La. Certainly we can see it in popular music, such as “Shambala” (1973), in which the healing powers of Shangri-La are invoked: "</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain / </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">With the rain in Shambala / </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Wash away my sorrow, wash away my shame / </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">With the rain in Shambala."</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Here are some other songs inspired by Shangri-La/Shambala (not to mention the 60s pop group, The Shangri-Las):</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><i style="font-family: verdana;">Shangri-La</i><span style="font-family: verdana;"> – Matty Malneck and Robert Maxwell (1946) (covered by numerous artists)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Shangri-La</i> – The Kinks (1969) (from the album<i> Arthur</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Shambala</i> – Daniel Moore (covered by B. W. Stevenson and The Three Dog Night, 1973)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Shangri-La</i> – Electric Light Orchestra (from the album, <i>A New World Record</i>, 1976)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Our Shangri-La</i> – Mark Knopfler (from the album, <i>Shangri-La</i>, 2004)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I must not neglect Johnny Mathis’ album, <i>The Wonderful World of Make Believe </i>(pictured, 1964), a collection of songs largely about imaginary, utopian places (Shangri-La, Camelot), the longing for a place in the world (I’m Always Chasing Rainbows, When You Wish Upon a Star), and the hope for everlasting love (Beyond the Sea, Beyond the Blue Horizon) </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">– </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">all fulfilled by a utopian Shangri-La.</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-85367120174408821632023-09-27T14:28:00.000-05:002023-09-27T14:28:42.987-05:00Hollywood Before the Code<p><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvWHmGBAq_OJcJlWMYvhHofdpesvZiB0mnGkDHNFzSs1T_qJRGDBtLolQCf_NpzVHUuA4tXggR9UzvDkt-ila8NSgQdl9vJ9x4ageLf8i7SC1fDFDSZNwS74BbSlmlPjA8nEprzS6wakC5FYxpZjTkkV8kpH_IOEODvcjFNDsOVD8YXqq3tV0a1xVNHqSr/s320/LC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="320" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvWHmGBAq_OJcJlWMYvhHofdpesvZiB0mnGkDHNFzSs1T_qJRGDBtLolQCf_NpzVHUuA4tXggR9UzvDkt-ila8NSgQdl9vJ9x4ageLf8i7SC1fDFDSZNwS74BbSlmlPjA8nEprzS6wakC5FYxpZjTkkV8kpH_IOEODvcjFNDsOVD8YXqq3tV0a1xVNHqSr/w200-h150/LC.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>Depending upon which pop cultural dilettante you choose to read, “Pre-Code Cinema” is confined to the first few years of the sound era, the period from the industry adoption of sound in 1929 to the enactment of the Motion Picture Production Code that began on July 1, 1934. Some may expand the period to include Hollywood’s early silent era, arguing the pre-code era should include films made from 1921 through 1934. In any case, the term has become synonymous with a time period (narrowly) characterized by cinematic expressions of the forbidden, daring subject matter, and certain deliberate provocations. In this view, the Hollywood movies of the so-called “pre-code era” blended a daring social consciousness with a certain frankness in its portrayals of the American social scene, not unlike the “problem pictures” of the post-World War II era (e.g., <i>The Best Years of Our Lives, The Pride of the Marines, Crossfire, Pinky, The Snake Pit</i>). Warner Brothers in particular made such pictures in the pre-code era, with “hard-hitting,” “socially conscious” films such as <i>I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang</i> and <i>Wild Boys of the Road</i>.<p></p><p><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">However, unlike many of the “problem pictures,” the most daring pre-code films never made the yearly Top 25 box office hits list. For example, the “problem picture,” <i>The Best Years of Our Lives</i> (1946), won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. Thus, the designation, “Pre-Code Cinema,” seems perilously close to a marketing ploy, the assumption being that the daring, socially conscious films of the pre-1934 period are valuable precisely because they were, if not exactly avoided, neglected by moviegoers, who preferred more traditional, old-fashioned entertainment. The Criterion Collection’s forthcoming box set, <a href="https://www.criterion.com/boxsets/6911-freaks-the-unknown-the-mystic-tod-brownings-sideshow-shockers">Freaks / The Unknown / The Mystic: Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers</a>, trades on the pre-code era as having a certain cultural cachet, the films’ significance a consequence of their daring, <i>outré</i> subject matter (a tautology), but—most importantly—due to the fact that they were neglected at the time of initial release (always an essential feature for any project of rehabilitation). I have seen two of the three films in the “Sideshow Shockers” box, <i>Freaks</i> (many times), and <i>The Unknown</i> (I have taught the film on a couple of occasions in order for students to study the performance of Lon Chaney, above), but I have never seen <i>The Mystic</i> (1925) and look forward to seeing it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The reduction of “Pre-Code Cinema” to “forbidden” topics or to “hard-hitting” provocations impoverishes the films, ignoring how film genres evolved due, in part, to experimentation—the aforementioned films of Tod Browning were made possible because there was not yet a tendency toward genre consolidation or homogenization. If one wants to make the argument that “pre-code” Hollywood films differ from the films made after July 1, 1934, then it is possible to argue that genre homogenization (stereotypical narrative units, predictable conclusions, etc.) may have been an unintended consequence of the production code. It is naïve to believe that sex and violence vanished from Hollywood films after 1934; after all, sex and violence was (and is) Hollywood’s bread and butter, and the studio heads knew it. It is important to remember that the Motion Picture Production Code came about because the Hollywood studio heads endorsed it: the Hollywood film industry chose self-regulation as a way to protect itself from government regulation and censorship. “Pre-Code Cinema” simply names an earlier way of doing the same old business.</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-25892904455424831642023-09-24T13:25:00.001-05:002023-09-24T16:30:27.396-05:00The Matrix at 25<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8AXJzEc36YJnY5ZP7Jz1a5hW9H40oQ1k3LYjwicdCepDwPBrkyF0_KixmvZeAk9x6_EV9rdMmQi3dPmAi5r-WGlucvFHDxfurHHp-ARGdjUJVJRWOsY3lTuB1X419GiOKNOQ9puWi7qv1t88xFptXJAf_dUqbVqnZr3Er3TKHfPotkx4rDsHFdUyfLL3H/s1296/mopen2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="719" data-original-width="1296" height="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8AXJzEc36YJnY5ZP7Jz1a5hW9H40oQ1k3LYjwicdCepDwPBrkyF0_KixmvZeAk9x6_EV9rdMmQi3dPmAi5r-WGlucvFHDxfurHHp-ARGdjUJVJRWOsY3lTuB1X419GiOKNOQ9puWi7qv1t88xFptXJAf_dUqbVqnZr3Er3TKHfPotkx4rDsHFdUyfLL3H/s320/mopen2.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />Filmed in the first half of 1998, released in 1999, <i>The Matrix</i> is now 25 years old. The movie that was once considered the exemplar of avant-garde pop cinema has become <i>déclassé</i>. In his <i>Variety</i> <a href="https://variety.com/2021/film/reviews/the-matrix-resurrections-review-keanu-reeves-1235140736/">review</a> of <i>The Matrix Resurrections</i> (21 December 2021), Peter Debruge observed, “a property that was once so appealing for being cutting-edge is now being mined for its nostalgia value.” Clearly, in the pop cinema world, a quarter of a century is a long time: heavy-handed symbols such as red pills, blue pills, and disposable batteries have aged <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/nfts-worthless-researchers-find-1234828767/" target="_blank">as poorly as non-fungible tokens</a>. Few of those born after 1999 understand what a phone booth was for, the purpose or function of a (telephone) “operator,” or why this “operator” has to search for an available telephone in order to enable a character’s “exit” from the matrix (or “insertion” for that matter). The dial-up internet access that informed <i>The Matrix</i> is now as antiquated as a 1960s telephone switchboard. The green numerals of the opening credits, inspired by archaic CRT computer monitors, now appear self-consciously arty, and the greenish hue that influenced the color scheme of the film now seems quaint and affected. The virtual reality plot can now be seen for what it is, a variation of the time-travel plot, or asynchronous parallelism—co-existing parallel worlds on different time tracks—one time track being “subjective” reality, the other “objective.” The cumbersome dial-up access to the matrix occasionally gave rise to narrative implausibility, for instance, the betrayal scene, in which Cypher secretly meets with Agent Smith: how is Cypher able to insert himself into the matrix without the aid of an operator, and subsequently extract himself from the matrix without an operator’s assistance? However, given that its plot shifts are as abrupt as someone cutting the hard line, and given that its visual stylizations (e.g., "bullet time") take precedence over narrative coherence, one lasting achievement of <i>The Matrix </i>has made asking such questions seem improper.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-66191964607624224802023-09-21T14:16:00.001-05:002023-09-21T17:18:51.753-05:00A Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy (Conclusion)<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZQJkbr4Ip4uwWGqUYYJzv2gETRjYExifE-wS0peRpZZr4JQt6CfN8vVR3lPf2YgY0Da6cyv14ow_k73cdjLuGpNwGJ5T4B2m-WlmyvvosEAhm252aaA6ulqtvoiMV1anc_c8S3QMo9H1w2pPI9QvYRoKmaFUR2ZrG08QWJZogtX5q3Kbgh7yOQPP0S9OC/s1007/Burlesque.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1007" data-original-width="782" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZQJkbr4Ip4uwWGqUYYJzv2gETRjYExifE-wS0peRpZZr4JQt6CfN8vVR3lPf2YgY0Da6cyv14ow_k73cdjLuGpNwGJ5T4B2m-WlmyvvosEAhm252aaA6ulqtvoiMV1anc_c8S3QMo9H1w2pPI9QvYRoKmaFUR2ZrG08QWJZogtX5q3Kbgh7yOQPP0S9OC/s320/Burlesque.jpg" width="249" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">After roughly a decade, Angelique Pettyjohn resumed her career as a supporting actress in the movies. In 1979, for instance, she appeared as an extra in the comedy, <i>Going in Style</i>, but by then she was better known as a Las Vegas showgirl. In the mid-1970s, she had been a featured showgirl in the Vive Paris Vive show at the Aladdin Hotel, and by 1978 had teamed with comedian Bob Mitchell in an “Olde Tyme Burlesque” show at the Maxim Hotel & Casino which, at the time, was the only fully nude strip club in Las Vegas. (The advertisement is taken from the <i>Vegas Visitor</i> paper, October 5-11, 1979.) She was photographed by <a href="https://www.rscotthooper.com/bio/bio.html" target="_blank">Robert Scott Hooper</a> for the February 1979 <i>Playboy</i> pictorial, “The Girls of Las Vegas,” and beginning in the early 1980s, she began to make appearances at <i>Star Trek</i> conventions, appearing in her Shahna costume from “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” selling signed pictures for fans. She also appeared in several movies in the 1980s, and also married for the fifth time (not fourth), a marriage that also ended in divorce (1984-1989). Dr. Flynn met her on the <i>Star Trek</i> convention circuit in the early 1980s and became a friend of hers, remaining so until her death on February 14, 1992, at age 48. It was his friendship with her that prompted him to write the book, <i>The Sci-Fi Siren Who Dared Love Elvis and Other Stars</i>, although by the time of the book's publication, in 2020, the subject of his book had been dead 28 years.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Despite the argument put forth in Dr. Flynn’s book, there is no factual evidence that Elvis Presley was in Las Vegas in March 1961. There is not one shred of factual evidence in Dr. Flynn's book proving without doubt that Dorothy Perrins was in Las Vegas in March 1961, either</span><span face="Verdana, sans-serif">. </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">In 1967, she did indeed appear in <i>Clambake</i> with Elvis Presley, that is factually true. And she may indeed be the mother of the man who now calls himself Elvis Aaron Presley, Jr. About that matter, I can say nothing. For additional information about Elvis's activities in 1961, there is a several hundred-page, exhaustively detailed book by Peter Guralnick and Ernst Jorgensen, titled <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Elvis-Day-Definitive-Record-Music/dp/0345420896/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3PY7K60DRRM9B&keywords=Guralnick+Elvis+Day+By+Day&qid=1695318506&sprefix=guralnick+elvis+day+by+day%2Caps%2C104&sr=8-1" target="_blank">Elvis Day By Day</a></i> (Ballantine, 1999), that provides additional evidence to support my claims. Ironically, Elvis's one child, Lisa Marie Presley (1968-2023) is now deceased, but the "zombie lie" of Elvis's supposed love </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">children lives on.</span></p><p><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-12043493185688621492023-09-18T15:13:00.004-05:002023-09-18T21:28:11.356-05:00A Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy, Pt. 3<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIX2P35bt2h30yog_ueBwSrNvZmnHLQejPFZFj-ELZMk9fPk379ydbU_5TyjZne5C7EK6p0NYmhnkVhZf3UTJksF_gfw21oWXQJBrEF8F5AFlJaLZ9KlNxsmqi7b3ZWtt1LFs97TQ-8BJA6jmfpnQDR6e3-uIMyp60wy-UabH5f47CqkW01H0en0tZBh7r/s1054/CLAMBAKE.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="834" data-original-width="1054" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIX2P35bt2h30yog_ueBwSrNvZmnHLQejPFZFj-ELZMk9fPk379ydbU_5TyjZne5C7EK6p0NYmhnkVhZf3UTJksF_gfw21oWXQJBrEF8F5AFlJaLZ9KlNxsmqi7b3ZWtt1LFs97TQ-8BJA6jmfpnQDR6e3-uIMyp60wy-UabH5f47CqkW01H0en0tZBh7r/s320/CLAMBAKE.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />Unmentioned in any account of her life that I have come across, Angelique Pettyjohn had been married and divorced before she married Otho A. Pettyjohn, Jr. in May 1966. Her first marriage was to William Krebs (NOT his actual name; I am withholding his name out of respect for his privacy), which took place on April 6, 1963, in Elko, Nevada. Both of them were 20 years old. Did the couple impulsively choose to elope? The marriage lasted only two months. She and William Krebs separated shortly after the marriage, on June 10, 1963, with William Krebs, the plaintiff, filing for divorce on October 8, 1963, on grounds of “Extreme Cruelty.” The Certificate of Divorce indicates her address as Salt Lake City, where she may have been living with her parents. I am not precisely sure how “Extreme Cruelty” was defined by the courts sixty years ago, but after two months married to her, he had apparently endured all he could take, and the plaintiff’s divorce petition was granted under “Absolute” conditions.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Interestingly, the divorce certificate lists their “Kind of occupation or business” as “university,” which I take to mean they were university students, not necessarily university employees. They possibly may have met as undergraduate students. Dr. Flynn avers that Dorothy Perrins spent two years attending Salt Lake Community College in the early 1960s, where she took drama classes and showed a keen interest in acting (p. 79). However, taking classes there would have been impossible since Salt Lake Community College did not exist in the early 1960s. What is now Salt Lake Community College was, until 1967, Salt Lake Trade Technical Institute. In 1967, by which time Dorothy Perrins' acting career had begun, it changed its name to Utah Technical College at Salt Lake. It did not become the Salt Lake Community College until 1987. She could not have enrolled in the Salt Lake Trade Technical Institute in order to study drama, since the institute’s aim and mission was strictly limited to those entering trade and technical vocations.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I found the name and picture of “William Krebs” in the 1962 Utah State University year book (called the <i>Buzzer</i>), but I did not, however, find any mention of Dorothy Perrins in the <i>Buzzer</i> or other year books of the time period. Pure speculation, but perhaps she and her first husband met at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, which is located about 67 miles from Salt Lake City. Although established as an agricultural college, she could have taken courses in drama and dance at Utah State if she were enrolled there as a student. Alternatively, it is possible she studied drama at the University of Utah, much closer to home. In any case, I do believe that she met her first husband while enrolled in courses on one of those two campuses.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In addition, an article published in the May 2, 1967,</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">Salt Lake City Tribune</i><span style="font-family: verdana;">, titled “Former Salt Lake Girl Makes Good in Films,” unmentioned in Dr. Flynn’s book, reveals that she returned home to see her family in Salt Lake after her film career had begun just a year earlier. She had only just finished filming <i>Clambake</i> with Elvis Presley about a week before the article was published. (She appears in a <i>Clambake</i> lobby card above next to actor Bill Bixby on her right.) The article tells us that she had driven her new sports car from California to Salt Lake “for a visit with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Claude Herbert, and two sisters, at 549 Colorado St. (1340 West).” The 549 Colorado St. address is the same address as listed in the 1950 census, and it is the street address listed in her mother’s 1973 obituary notice as well.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXlmkvCg8AVQoaqGI5A7m9eoSApNYdW6VJXLanhnMVFk077pb4h1euQ0BTrnHGLCPEHAmx4x7YGfzrJW39LxsEVvms9PdqBsoJ0MNnRj4Ty1LaNu_bKZE9vzChEzJ7gS9BUBtsMtBQhWwtJglcuJrE2lXC2w0eZsm9ercZOKcwcGMrSD6KwNE7LFcASO3C/s1034/1TRIBUNESCAN.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="754" data-original-width="1034" height="291" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXlmkvCg8AVQoaqGI5A7m9eoSApNYdW6VJXLanhnMVFk077pb4h1euQ0BTrnHGLCPEHAmx4x7YGfzrJW39LxsEVvms9PdqBsoJ0MNnRj4Ty1LaNu_bKZE9vzChEzJ7gS9BUBtsMtBQhWwtJglcuJrE2lXC2w0eZsm9ercZOKcwcGMrSD6KwNE7LFcASO3C/w400-h291/1TRIBUNESCAN.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><p>As for the expected “reunion” with her lover Elvis during the making of <i>Clambake</i>, we are told by Dr. Flynn that “Elvis didn’t remember the eighteen-year-old showgirl that he met so many years earlier when they were re-introduced” (p. 74). “Met” is a profoundly misleading choice of euphemism after the reader had been informed in the preceding chapters that she and Elvis not only had a sexual encounter in Las Vegas, but subsequently spent several days together in Hawaii while Elvis was filming <i>Blue Hawaii</i>. While he was making <i>Clambake</i> a mere six years later, we are asked to believe that Elvis has no memory of her whatsoever. If it is not clear by now, the alleged brief "love affair" she had with Elvis Presley is a hoax.</p></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The newspaper article also indicates that, among other roles, she had appeared as the “bad girl” in <i>Tale of the Cock</i>, a film directed by John Derek and David Nelson starring Don Murray and John Derek’s then wife, Linda Evans, released in 1967. <i>Tale of the Cock</i> was re-released in 1969 under the title <i>Childish Things</i>, and so far as I know, the film is available only on VHS under the title <i>Confessions of Tom Harris</i>. I believe <i>Tale of the Cock</i>, filmed in 1966 and released the next year, is the first movie in which Dorothy Perrins appeared billed as “Angelique Pettyjohn.” Interestingly, her character’s name in the film is “Angelique.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">By 1967, Angelique Pettyjohn seems to have begun a career in Las Vegas as well. The newspaper article states that she was to appear “in a musical at the Silver Slipper in Las Vegas for a 12-week engagement beginning May 9.” The “musical” referred to here is, I suspect, <a href="https://www.library.unlv.edu/speccol/finding-aids/MS-00290.pdf">Minsky’s Burlesque</a>, a “family burlesque” show which was a popular entertainment at the Silver Slipper for many years. (Incidentally, it was Harold Minsky who introduced the topless showgirl to Las Vegas, at the Dunes Hotel in 1957.) If the “musical” in which she was appearing opened on May 9, a 12-week run would conclude on August 1. At the time of the newspaper article’s publication, she had not yet filmed “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” filmed later that year during the week <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Gamesters_of_Triskelion_(episode)">October 17-24, 1967</a>, airing on television January 5, 1968.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Later that year, in December 1968, filming began on the AIP biker picture <i>Hell’s Belles</i>, in which Angelique Pettyjohn appeared as the female co-star. The movie opened in Los Angeles on April 16, 1969. Although reviews of the movie were mixed, the April 8, 1969, <i>Daily Variety</i> and the April 16, 1969, <i>Los Angeles Times</i> both considered the film to be a superior motorcycle drama, with both reviews praising co-star Angelique Pettyjohn’s performance, one of the rare instances of her performance being singled out for praise. <i>Hell's Belles</i> opened just over a year later in New York, on April 29, 1970, by which time her film career, for the next several years, had essentially come to an end.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">To be continued...</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-80789718095341345782023-09-17T11:00:00.007-05:002023-09-17T13:34:28.036-05:00A Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy, Pt. 2<p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaUuLGVx_FxSwS1jYu24SXhkcSXjr1CfCFLFfA68SR0EHot53wM-iNFln7ycdPabsabAtt8-texulTQT3u_VHAhuhnnyUdN54oXMG5QlmzttEA3L4DI54yMuKUWxqe7_C9ZamBgdZ2Ee0Kt2wco2Sy5QonFXV-JXGLwAVaKnZ8PWwnzLUM6pOfTh_Jpxfd/s806/2Shahna.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="642" data-original-width="806" height="159" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaUuLGVx_FxSwS1jYu24SXhkcSXjr1CfCFLFfA68SR0EHot53wM-iNFln7ycdPabsabAtt8-texulTQT3u_VHAhuhnnyUdN54oXMG5QlmzttEA3L4DI54yMuKUWxqe7_C9ZamBgdZ2Ee0Kt2wco2Sy5QonFXV-JXGLwAVaKnZ8PWwnzLUM6pOfTh_Jpxfd/w200-h159/2Shahna.jpg" width="200" /></a></span></div><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">According to Dr. Flynn, Dorothy Perrins graduated high school early, at age 17, immediately moved to Las Vegas, and immediately became a showgirl. Serendipitously, shortly after she arrived, and a few days after her eighteenth birthday on March 11, 1961, Elvis showed up in Las Vegas looking for some action, and immediately singled her out from the many pretty girls swirling around him. Upon learning she was a virgin, he was immediately attracted to her, and subsequently had sex with her. She became pregnant and subsequently gave birth to a son, who now calls himself Elvis Aaron Presley, Jr.</span><p></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">There is no evidence given to support this series of events other than her own testimony, as my previous post makes clear. Moreover, there is additional evidence that exists, in print, that contradicts it. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnum_Opus_Con">Magnum Opus Con 4 Convention Program</a> from 1989 contains a short, one-page biography of Angelique Pettyjohn stating that she first moved to Las Vegas at age 19: “Her love affair with audiences . . . began at age 19 when she left Utah to find summer work in Las Vegas.” Which is to say, summer 1962, contradicting the information in Dr. Flynn’s book, that she moved there at age 17 early in 1961. The program biography suggests that her initial move to Las Vegas was not a permanent one, essentially temporary summer employment. I believe this to be true, and will indicate why I think so.</span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">But to return to Dr. Flynn’s account, the romance between Dorothy and Elvis doesn't end with an early morning kiss goodbye on the streets of Las Vegas after a brief session of lovemaking. We are told by Dr. Flynn that Elvis, while lounging around backstage waiting to go on for the U.S.S. Arizona charity event in Honolulu on March 25, phoned Dorothy Perrins in Las Vegas and asked her to fly to Hawaii to spend some time with him during the filming of</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Blue Hawaii</i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">. She, of course, said yes, and immediately boarded a plane for Oahu. As I mentioned before, we are not told when she gave Elvis a slip of paper with her name and phone number on it, but this is a minor omission in a confabulation that is so utterly preposterous that it does not merit any further discussion. She did not fly to Hawaii to spend a few days with Elvis while he was filming</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Blue Hawaii</i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">.</span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">But we may have already suspected what happens next, and it comes as no surprise. Having become pregnant with Elvis's child, now enters the villain of the story, although his sudden entrance from stage right should come as no surprise either: Colonel Tom Parker. As Elvis's handler, he has Elvis’s career to think about, and no eighteen-year-old tramp from Las Vegas is going to destroy it. We are told that Dorothy “managed to contact the Colonel and set up a meeting through a series of backdoor maneuvers worthy of a top spy. Her number one concern was she didn't want Elvis to know of her pregnancy, until Parker agreed” (pp. 64-65). Secretly, behind Elvis’s back, she and the Colonel worked out a deal in which she would move into a small apartment on the far south side of Chicago, “modestly furnished and stocked with everything the expectant mother would need” (p. 66). So accommodating and sentimental was the Colonel that near Christmas 1961“he brought her a small fake tree” (p. 67). Of course, everything depended upon her keeping her mouth shut, and being the good girl she was, she did. Although eighteen, unmarried, and alone, she was apparently transported by the Colonel to the far south side of Chicago and put up in an apartment all by herself. We are never told the month she was transported to Chicago and installed in an apartment in the south side of Chicago, whether her parents knew of her pregnancy or whether her parents were informed of the arrangement. In fact, although she was barely eighteen, they are completely absent from narrative, vanishing from the narrative as soon Dorothy graduates high school “early" and hightails it to Las Vegas. Fast forward to the day her baby boy is born: Christmas Eve, 1961. Given up for adoption, the boy is adopted by circus people and given the name Phillip Stanic. Years later, he would legally change his name to Elvis Aaron Presley, Jr.</span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">Why the south side of Chicago, of all places? Why an anonymous hospital in Gary, Indiana? The latter location is explained by Dr. Flynn: the Colonel “secretly bribed several officials at a nearby hospital” located in Gary. (p. 66). Bribed these corrupt officials to do what, to keep the whole thing quiet? Destroy the birth certificate, pretend the whole thing never happened? As should be increasingly apparent, Dorothy Perrins’ claim about her brief affair with Elvis is a fantastic confabulation designed to cover up the father’s true identity, whoever that person may be.</span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">Assuming she ever gave birth to a child in the first place.</span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">Marty Lacker:</span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">There's some guy making the rounds of the tabloid TV shows saying he's the love child of Elvis and Dolores Hart, who played his girlfriend in <i>Loving You</i> and <i>King Creole</i>. She left show business in 1963 and became a nun, and this guy claims she dropped out because she was pregnant and that she kept quiet about it for the love of Elvis and his career. All of us were around all the time then, and if something like that had happened, Elvis would have talked about it He would have been scared as hell. (Nash, <i>Elvis and the Memphis Mafia</i>, pp. 76-77)</span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">One thing we do know, with absolutely certainty, is that Dorothy Perrins never became a nun.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Let us flash forward to May 11, 1966, Dorothy Perrins’ twenty-third birthday, her alleged fling with Elvis now five years in the past. On this day, she wed Otho Albert Pettyjohn, Jr., and in less than a year will henceforth become known as Angelique Pettyjohn. They met in Las Vegas, Dr. Flynn tells us, Dorothy Perrins having resumed her career as a showgirl, and he, unsurprisingly, a gambler, but a nice gambling man though, from Glendale, California. My research indicates that Otho A. Pettyjohn Jr. was born on December 11, 1921, and by 1966 had been married and divorced twice. He was 44 years old when he married Dorothy Perrins; he was a World War II veteran who would die at age 59 in 1980. Her marriage to Mr. Pettyjohn would last slightly over two years, by which time her film and TV career was established and her most famous role, Shahna, in “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” was behind her. She was 24 years old when she played Shahna, and as Fate would have it, her life was half over. The marriage was dissolved two years later, finalized on May 31, 1968. By this date her movie and TV roles had become fewer, the production budgets more parsimonious. Her film credits vanish for about a decade after 1970, although she did resume her career in 1979, as an extra in the Las Vegas sequence in the George Burns comedy, <i>Going in Style</i>. Dr. Flynn states that she made a film released in 1974 titled <i>Bordello</i>, but I have been unable to find out much information on this film. I am not especially inclined to do so.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">To be continued...</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-85501407095916590312023-09-14T16:44:00.008-05:002023-09-17T22:01:01.547-05:00A Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy, Pt. 1<p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: left;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif0ukDpvWUh__NtG12yiVy5AQxNFyeUplS9KoIjurc4j9Af2WKA5nrHYwhyYD9Ohg3e68J98k1G7H1Eb9kzk35rUb_lU_SriLINgCAhlA77Z2i3o8DRMzUxAh07t2aZuzmZDUvPN4V1EN0FBrDtBCxKA_soUeKc6DiKQWSzCxM_6Mp8F0EA0hJi6uWW7_G/s906/Shahna2.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><img alt="Angelique Pettyjohn in "The Gamesters of Triskelion"" border="0" data-original-height="776" data-original-width="906" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif0ukDpvWUh__NtG12yiVy5AQxNFyeUplS9KoIjurc4j9Af2WKA5nrHYwhyYD9Ohg3e68J98k1G7H1Eb9kzk35rUb_lU_SriLINgCAhlA77Z2i3o8DRMzUxAh07t2aZuzmZDUvPN4V1EN0FBrDtBCxKA_soUeKc6DiKQWSzCxM_6Mp8F0EA0hJi6uWW7_G/w200-h171/Shahna2.jpg" title="Angelique Pettyjohn in "The Gamesters of Triskelion"" width="200" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">They say rock ‘n’ roll will never die. If so, then neither will the myths about it. Among the most persistent myths are those that claim during a concert Alice Cooper bit the head off of a chicken and drank its blood, that Michael Jackson once owned the skeletal remains of the “Elephant Man,” and that in 1968 Jimi Hendrix introduced the ring-necked parakeet to the isle of Britain. Recently, I heard a phrase used that I had not heard before: “zombie lie.” A “zombie lie” is a lie that everyone knows to be a lie, but despite it being a lie, it lives on, everyone acting as though it were true. One of these so-called “zombie lies” is that Elvis Presley fathered children outside of marriage. Such rumors first swirled around young actress Dolores Hart, the love interest of Elvis Presley in<span style="text-align: left;"> </span><i style="text-align: left;">Loving You</i><span style="text-align: left;"> </span><span style="text-align: left;">(1957), and who appeared with Elvis a second time in</span><span style="text-align: left;"> </span><i style="text-align: left;">King Creole</i><span style="text-align: left;"> </span><span style="text-align: left;">(1958). The gossip mill held that she left the Hollywood spotlight at the height of her career in 1963 after Elvis impregnated her. In fact, she joined the Abbey of Regina Laudis and became a nun, a story that has been well documented.</span></span><p></p><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">Now in his early 60s, many years ago a man having the adopted name <a href="http://elvisaaronpresleyjr.com/bio.htm" target="_blank">Phillip Stanic</a> came forward alleging his father was Elvis Presley. As if to proclaim the name of his father, he had his name legally changed to Elvis Aaron Presley, Jr. At issue is the identity of his biological mother, whom he believes to be the actress Angelique Pettyjohn (pictured above, in the <i>Star Trek: The Original Series </i>episode "The Gamesters of Triskelion"). His assertion possibly may be true, that she may be his biological mother. I am not saying it is true, I am simply saying it may be possible. I don't know. That is one issue. The other issue is the identity of his biological father, whom he believes, or once believed, or once thought possible, to be Elvis Presley. While I believe Elvis Presley is not his father, and will show why I do not believe it, according to John L. Flynn, Ph.D., author of <i>The Sci-Fi Siren Who Dared Love Elvis and Other Stars</i> </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">(Galactic Books, 2020), Elvis is his father. I will hereafter refer to John L. Flynn, Ph.D. as Dr. Flynn. In his book, Dr. Flynn claims that Elvis Presley is Elvis Aaron Presley, Jr.’s father—or to be clear, that is what his friend and the subject of his book, Angelique Pettyjohn, claims to be true. However, simply because Phillip Stanic changed his name to Elvis Aaron Presley, Jr., does not thereby point to the identity of his biological father. As far as I can tell, his current occupation is that of an Elvis imitator, so I suppose one could argue that the name change was, in a way, justified, given the way he earns his livelihood.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">My actual subject is Angelique Pettyjohn, a minor actress who became famous because of an episode of <i>Star Trek: The Original Series</i> </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">titled “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” filmed in October 1967 and which aired on television in January 1968. In his book, Dr. Flynn discusses her troubled life and provides a useful catalogue of the films and TV shows in which she appeared prior to her death in 1992, at the young age of 48. In truth, she was an actress for a very short period time, because Angelique Pettyjohn was primarily a Las Vegas showgirl, a burlesque dancer and stripper, and it was in Las Vegas that she spent much of her life. At issue is not her chosen career as a burlesque dance and stripper, since it is widely known that many current celebrities, both male and female, have been strippers. The issue is whether her claim that she gave birth to Elvis Presley’s son is true. I do not believe her claim is true, and I will present evidence to prove that it cannot be true.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Angelique Pettyjohn was born Dorothy Lee Perrins on March 11, 1943, in Los Angeles. Her father was Richard Lee Young Perrins (1909-1983). Richard Lee Young Perrins’ father, Ross Young (born 1885) died in 1919, and his mother, Rosa Dodson (1890-1979) subsequently remarried. Angelique Pettyjohn's mother, Maia Irene (Enke) Herbert (1921-1973), was a German immigrant, who married Richard Lee Perrins in 1942. Richard Perrins' marriage to Maia Enke was his third marriage. They divorced soon after Dorothy Lee Perrins’ birth in 1943, and Maia Perrins subsequently married Claude Herbert, living the remainder of her life in Salt Lake City, Utah. In the 1950 U. S. census report, Dorothy Perrins is listed as Dorthy [sic] L Herbert, age 7 years. At some point, she chose to take her biological father’s surname, not her adoptive father’s. Her high school yearbooks show that she was active in the drama and dance clubs at West High School in Salt Lake City, where she graduated in 1961.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Dr. Flynn, however, claims—almost certainly based on information given to him by Angelique Pettyjohn—that Dorothy Perrins graduated high school early, but if so, the West High year books do not support this claim. The entire narrative that unfolds about her alleged meeting with Elvis Presley in Las Vegas in 1961 rests on this one critical point, that she graduated high school “early.” Below are pictures of Dorothy Perrins from the 1960 and 1961 West High yearbooks, her junior picture below left and her senior picture below on the right.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyXDAUVcXpEnbWqRv-ML61e0wvruz57VIuv-uEQqzvGudnIokwURfL5QMdZecNa2d9mW1XEVPq9bASxGujDPk-uAy3Y04uVQNsMJeVglu-5slBO2xkYozO1zIP6QKLtRXZIzjbbRyLO-d_WLU961i1pzQY5L1QXdy4uxp-6DoHpiqy_EAE2NDOYNFlTGTT/s583/Junior.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><img border="0" data-original-height="583" data-original-width="466" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyXDAUVcXpEnbWqRv-ML61e0wvruz57VIuv-uEQqzvGudnIokwURfL5QMdZecNa2d9mW1XEVPq9bASxGujDPk-uAy3Y04uVQNsMJeVglu-5slBO2xkYozO1zIP6QKLtRXZIzjbbRyLO-d_WLU961i1pzQY5L1QXdy4uxp-6DoHpiqy_EAE2NDOYNFlTGTT/w160-h200/Junior.jpeg" width="160" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><br /></span></span><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4tfASq8M8-eWPXwruO18aB9kqzezc3Hgs4Pf7VY5C8bUJRsTSeh5-RmAhaPCtQuIkZwQJ6qwzxvtlJoLOVL_PCqmCb1LEZesVRaIpihYISBiGobNeJdGmOp4Rxf4xHS5Y9zNVPZh6TMXF6Vo7DDcE0x9oO3um0TxnObW3CBtQ3wmSsIsMqbkars2AL8yI/s546/Senior.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><img border="0" data-original-height="546" data-original-width="466" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4tfASq8M8-eWPXwruO18aB9kqzezc3Hgs4Pf7VY5C8bUJRsTSeh5-RmAhaPCtQuIkZwQJ6qwzxvtlJoLOVL_PCqmCb1LEZesVRaIpihYISBiGobNeJdGmOp4Rxf4xHS5Y9zNVPZh6TMXF6Vo7DDcE0x9oO3um0TxnObW3CBtQ3wmSsIsMqbkars2AL8yI/w171-h200/Senior.jpeg" width="171" /></span></a></div><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">Dr. Flynn avers (p. 42) that Dorothy Perrins appeared in the school play,</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><i>Arsenic and Old Lace</i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">, in 1960, but cast and performance pictures from the play appear in the 1961 year book, not the 1960 year book. Below is Dorothy Perrins’ cast picture from</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><i>Arsenic and Old Lace</i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">in the 1961 West High year book. In addition, she appears in group pictures of both the drama club and the dance club in the same 1961 year book.</span></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXbVwdUFEVa9cshAPg61xLHVmTQ7wEMvNKli8zGmJcwRPDH66kkGnI20akZXZjFbT6cRNQ8hjrqeZpbKwNg18G9inLuHXVf-u_ALNGLIgvujyYYgIjq1EmRb-FwgeaQjwLtj9nrMp1NJ2iOIInhze3M2R7CIYOQfjwwPArx2NUHdYFJfeeCZq5xL7mB3rV/s894/ARSENIC.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><img border="0" data-original-height="894" data-original-width="612" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXbVwdUFEVa9cshAPg61xLHVmTQ7wEMvNKli8zGmJcwRPDH66kkGnI20akZXZjFbT6cRNQ8hjrqeZpbKwNg18G9inLuHXVf-u_ALNGLIgvujyYYgIjq1EmRb-FwgeaQjwLtj9nrMp1NJ2iOIInhze3M2R7CIYOQfjwwPArx2NUHdYFJfeeCZq5xL7mB3rV/w137-h200/ARSENIC.jpeg" width="137" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">If we are to accept the narrative offered by Dr. Flynn, Dorothy Perrins graduated high school early (December 1960, presumably? We are not told) at age 17. Eager to get away from home and start a career, she immediately moved to Las Vegas, presumably in January or February of 1961, since she allegedly met Elvis Presley there in March. According to Dorothy Perrins’ account, as told to Dr. Flynn, she met Elvis Presley shortly after her 18th birthday, that is, sometime after March 11, 1961, and became pregnant with his child. She was selected by him from among lots of pretty Las Vegas showgirls, apparently because she was young, just 18, and a virgin:</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><span style="color: #01ffff;">I think he [Elvis] singled me out from all the other girls because I was so young—I had just turned eighteen only a few days before—when most of the other showgirls were in their twenties and thirties. . . . Later, when I told him Iwas [sic] still a virgin, which most people find pretty hard to believe when you’re a showgirl, it just blew his mind. I thought it would be great to have him as my first lover.</span></i> (pp. 57-58)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">There are a number of problems with her account. One is that Elvis was not in Las Vegas at the time. Another is her assumption that Elvis was sexually attracted to her because she was a virgin: this is merely conjecture. Marty Lacker, one of Elvis’s bodyguards and a member of the so-called “Memphis Mafia,” said, “Elvis didn’t think virginity was really all that important” (Alanna Nash, <i>Elvis and the Memphis Mafia</i>, p. 170 [UK edition]). And, according to Lamar Ficke, “When it comes to sex, you've got to remember that Elvis was more interested in titillation than anything else. He didn’t like penetration that much because he was uncircumcised, and sometimes intercourse tore his foreskin and he'd bleed. But he was a stone freak, and don’t ever think different. He had every fetish there was” (<i>Elvis and the Memphis Mafia</i>, p. 170). In Dr. Flynn’s account, we are also told that on the evening she confessed her virginity, the chivalric Elvis volunteered to walk her back to her (shared) apartment at the Flamingo Hotel. If so, presuming they met at the Sahara Hotel (Milton Prell, its owner, was a friend of the Colonel's, and Elvis usually stayed there in the early Sixties) the distance between the Sahara Hotel and the Flamingo Hotel would have been a walking distance down the Las Vegas Strip of about 2.5 miles (one-way). Moreover, we're also supposed to believe that as the two of them strolled leisurely hand in hand for over two miles, they were unaccompanied by any of Elvis’s bodyguards. There is no mention in her account of meeting Elvis that his bodyguards were anywhere near. This is highly improbable, as Elvis didn't even go to the bathroom in a public place without at least two of his bodyguards accompanying him (see <i>Elvis and the Memphis Mafia</i>).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I will return to my central question: Is there any evidence that Elvis was in Las Vegas during the time period from March 11 to March 20, 1961? No. There is no evidence to support this claim. One reason is that on March 12 and 13, 1961, <a href="http://www.elvisrecordings.com">Elvis was in Nashville</a>, recording several tracks at RCA Studio B. These tracks would soon be included on the album, <i>Something For Everybody</i>, released in May 1961. Once these recording sessions were finished, Elvis returned to Memphis. From there, according to the chronology published in <i>Inside Blue Hawaii</i> (Elvis Unlimited Productions, 2009), Elvis boarded a plane for Los Angeles on Saturday, March 18, and had a layover in Chicago, where he stayed at the O'Hare Inn (p. 18). The next day, March 19, he stayed at his home on 525 Perugia Way in Bel Air. On Monday, March 20, he had a preproduction meeting at Paramount Studios. According to Dr. Flynn's account, Elvis left Las Vegas for Los Angeles on Saturday, March 18 (p. 58), which contradicts the known facts. As one might expect, he provides no source or sources for this piece of information. Dr. Flynn gets many other details wrong as well. For instance, he writes, "On Monday, March 20, 1961, Elvis Presley began work on <i>Blue Hawaii</i>, splitting his time between the location filming and at the recording studio, doing the film’s soundtrack” (p. 59). (We are told this because during his down time, Elvis was calling Dorothy Perrins in Las Vegas. We're not told when, precisely, she gave him a slip of paper with her name and phone number.) The <i>Blue Hawaii</i> recording sessions took place March 21 through March 23 in Los Angeles, not in Hawaii (the "location"), and Elvis did not begin location shooting until March 27. He also states that Elvis, the Colonel and the members of the so-called “Memphis Mafia” flew from Los Angeles to Kauai and stayed at the Coco Palms Hotel, where they were “mobbed” by eager fans. This assertion also contradicts the known facts: Elvis landed at the Honolulu International Airport on March 25, 1961. Here is a detailed account of Elvis’s arrival:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">The morning of March 25, 1961, Elvis boarded a Pan American Airways jet in Los Angeles to start what he knew would be a long, tiring day for him. Even before the plane took off from LA, an estimated crowd of 3,000 began gathering at Honolulu International Airport to greet Elvis on his arrival. At 12:15 p.m. the plane carrying Presley touched down in Honolulu, and at 12:27 Elvis, wearing a black suit and a ruffled white shirt, appeared at the rear door. “For 10 minutes the handsome lad with the baby blue eyes passed in review,” reported a local newspaper, “just like they do in the Army--up and down before the crowd with the wire screen and a cordon of Honolulu and military police between him and the fans. Some of them looked as though they were ready to tear him limb for limb, and take home the pieces for souvenirs.... Then Elvis jumped into a waiting car and was escorted by police to the Hawaiian Village Hotel, where he would stay for three weeks while filming Blue Hawaii.</span> (Source: http://www.elvis-history-blog.com/elvis-uss-arizona.html)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Coco Palms Resort [to refer to it by its proper designation], to which Dr. Flynn refers, is indeed on the island of Kauai, but the Coco Palms Resort is where Elvis and Joan Blackman’s characters are married in <i>Blue Hawaii</i>. It is also the site of other key scenes in the movie, including the final scene in which Elvis sings the “Hawaiian Wedding Song” and holds Joan Blackman’s hand while they board a raft to cross the lagoon. While it is true and well documented that Elvis and his entourage would party in Las Vegas for a few days, the partying occurred almost always <i>after</i> a movie had been completed, not before it was made. <i>Blue Hawaii </i>wrapped on May 23, 1961. I have not taken the time to find out whether Elvis and his buddies did, in fact, stop in Las Vegas on the long way back to Memphis. Did he take time for a clandestine liaison with Dorothy, his latest flame? No, Dr. Flynn tells us, because “by then, the romance had started to cool down" (p. 60). By the end of May, however, she would have been two months pregnant, at least according the narrative we are asked to believe.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">However, Dorothy Perrins would indeed meet Elvis Presley, that much is true. She would also have a role in one of his films; that is also true. But that was six years later, and the movie was not <i>Blue Hawaii</i>, but <i>Clambake</i>, released in 1967.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">To be continued...</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;"><o:p></o:p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-91609245294702243652023-09-09T10:28:00.004-05:002023-09-17T16:17:16.300-05:00Sweet Songs<p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjceUw68wTWlvCbPShoMzHr9Wop9r8K-E409BiFY9hR44xJh6UQbzcCrhxodNdGOR3fkPctKJmOf5yzOF1R37JSviDJq3RY5GhhPxQvjFFJBVVZCFOzhjJv74rBFSJGDa6hg46x2BmNSmfM5LTqNymzMXPvOZZMi9dlHg0c138o5o-vUiuQAmWeuhaCxznL/s500/OHIO.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="500" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjceUw68wTWlvCbPShoMzHr9Wop9r8K-E409BiFY9hR44xJh6UQbzcCrhxodNdGOR3fkPctKJmOf5yzOF1R37JSviDJq3RY5GhhPxQvjFFJBVVZCFOzhjJv74rBFSJGDa6hg46x2BmNSmfM5LTqNymzMXPvOZZMi9dlHg0c138o5o-vUiuQAmWeuhaCxznL/w200-h200/OHIO.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Who can take tomorrow / Dip it in a dream / Separate the sorrow / And collect up all the cream?”, asks Bill, the candy store proprietor (played by Aubrey Woods) in “The Candy Man,” the famous song from<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><i>Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory</i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> (1971). Like the children who fill his store as he sings, we know the answer: “The candy man can cause he mixes it with love and makes the world taste good.” Here, the candy man is represented as a benign figure from an imaginary land of plenitude, where our wishes for endless bounty come true, and the idea of scarcity is unknown, a place of luxury and ease and comfort, without sorrow. He comes from an idyllic place which might well be nestled in “The Big Rock Candy Mountains”:</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: #01ffff; font-family: verdana;">There’s a land that’s fair and bright,<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: #01ffff; font-family: verdana;">Where the handouts grow on bushes<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: #01ffff; font-family: verdana;">And you sleep out every night<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: #01ffff; font-family: verdana;">Where the boxcars all are empty<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: #01ffff; font-family: verdana;">And the sun shines every day<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: #01ffff; font-family: verdana;">On the birds and the bees<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: #01ffff; font-family: verdana;">And the cigarette trees<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: #01ffff; font-family: verdana;">The lemonade springs<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: #01ffff; font-family: verdana;">Where the bluebird sings<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">In the Big Rock Candy Mountains</span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">But there’s another kind of candy man, the one who we can hear in the materialistic world of Roy Orbison’s “Candy Man”: “C’mon baby, let me take you by the hand / C’mon sugar, let me take you by the hand,” ‘cause he wants to be her candy man—an appeal to her avarice. “I met him at the candy store,” sing the Shangri-Las in their quaint 1964 hit, “Leader of the Pack,” the band named after an imaginary paradise, not unlike the one to be found in the Big Rock Candy Mountains. The candy store is a site of innocence, just as it is in Johnny Cash’s fable, “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” (1958), a song about a beauty queen who “loved the boy next door who worked at the candy store.” Not so in “Leader of the Pack”: the father does not approve of his daughter hanging out with a juvenile delinquent, the leader of a pack of motorcycle-riding hoodlums. And why wouldn’t the father be suspicious, for isn’t there a hint of danger in a figure who hangs out in a candy store, tempting innocent young women with sweets?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The candy man is a culturally ambivalent figure. The candy man makes his candies with love and makes the world taste good, but isn’t Willy Wonka also a vaguely sinister figure, luring children to his factory with a Golden Ticket that promises the lucky winner with a lifetime supply of chocolate? It is not clear that the odd and mercurial Wonka actually likes children, even though, paradoxically, he makes “scrumdidilyumptious” candy bars. The mystery that surrounds Willy Wonka fits a larger tradition of works such as Edward Fenton’s <i>Penny Candy </i>(illustrated by Edward Gorey, 1970), with its uncomfortably strange candy shop owner.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The candy man can remove the sorrow from tomorrow, and make his candy with love, but he also seeks to control us through our <i>gastër</i>, our ravenous stomach, our gluttony. The candy man’s shadow self is the witch from “Hansel and Gretel,” who lures the unsuspecting children by appealing to their infantile, insatiable appetites for candy and sweets. Here is a passage from Robert Coover’s revision of “Hansel and Gretel” titled “The Gingerbread House” (<i>Pricksongs & Descants</i>, 1969), a <i>tour de force</i> of the image of gluttony. The “black rags flapping” is, of course, a metonymy for the witch:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: #01ffff; font-family: verdana;">The children approach the gingerbread house through a garden of candied fruits and all-day suckers, hopping along on flagstones of variegated wafers. They sample the gingerbread weatherboarding with its caramel coating, lick at the meringue on the windowsills, kiss each other's sweetened lips. The boy climbs up on the chocolate roof to break off a peppermint-stick chimney, comes sliding down into a rain barrel full of vanilla pudding. The girl, reaching out to catch him in his fall, slips on a sugarplum and tumbles into a sticky rock garden of candied chestnuts. Laughing gaily, they lick each other clean. And how grand is the red-and-white chimney the boy holds up for her! how bright! how sweet! But the door: here they pause and catch their breath. It is heart-shaped and bloodstone-red, its burnished surface gleaming in the sunlight. Oh, what a thing is that door! Shining like a ruby, like hard cherry candy, and pulsing softly, radiantly. Yes, marvelous! delicious! insuperable! but beyond: what is that sound of black rags flapping?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The difference between plenitude and gluttony, need as opposed to excess, is a very fine line.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #fcff01;">Here is a big box of sweet songs</span>:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Harry McClintock</span> – The Big Rock Candy Mountains (1928) (Frank Luther recorded a version at about the same time under the title, “That Big Rock Candy Mountain,” released on the Banner label)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Haywire Mac</span> – The Big Rock Candy Mountains (1939) (as “Haywire Mac,” Harry McClintock apparently re-recorded “The Big Rock Candy Mountains” for Decca in 1939; the song went to #1 on the “Hillbilly” charts and helped to popularize the song; this is possibly the 1928 recording reissued on Decca)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Harry McClintock with Hal Borne & His Orchestra</span> – The Big Rock Candy Mountains (1942) (McClintock re-recorded the song yet again, in 1942, with modified “swing era” lyrics, for RCM Productions’ “Soundies” series; “Soundies” were musical shorts capable of being viewed on “Panorams,” coin-operated, 16mm rear-projection machines—<i>not</i> “jukeboxes”)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Burl Ives</span> – Big Rock Candy Mountain (1945) (Burl Ives’ version, recorded in March 1945 for Decca, with bowdlerized lyrics, widely popularized the song in the years after the war; the “mountains” of Harry McClintock’s version, where plentitude can be found, has become a singular “mountain,” which is how the song is popularly known now—even the Grammy Award-winning soundtrack to <i>O Brother, Where Art Thou? </i>(2000) removes the definite article and uses the singular “mountain” in the title, as if the song refers not to a paradisiacal land to be found hidden within the mountains, but a big, candy-colored free-standing mountain)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">The Chordettes</span> – Lollipop (1958) (also a hit by Ronald & Ruby the same year)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Dorsey Burnette</span> – Big Rock Candy Mountain (1960) (an audible expression of what Lawrence Grossberg calls “sentimental inauthenticity”)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Roy Orbison</span> – Candy Man (1961)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">The Drifters</span> – Sweets for My Sweet (1961) (one should listen to this song every day)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">The Searchers</span> – Sweets for My Sweet (1963) (please see my blog post on Timbre below, and then decide which version of “Sweets for My Sweet” you prefer; I prefer The Drifters’ version)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Elvis Presley</span> - Cotton Candy Land (1963) (covered by Stevie Nicks & Chris Isaak, 2022)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons</span> – Candy Girl (1963)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Lesley Gore</span> – Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows (1963) (an example of what is called “affective inflation”)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">The Strangeloves</span> – I Want Candy (1965) (covered by Bow Wow Wow 1982) (an example of appellatization, when a proper noun, Candy, is confused with a common noun, candy; think: Kleenex)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Roy Orbison</span> – Sugar and Honey (1965)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">The Strawberry Alarm Clock</span> – Incense and Peppermints (1967)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">The Archies</span> – Sugar, Sugar (1969)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">The Clique</span> – Sugar on Sunday (1969)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">The Ides of March</span> – Vehicle (1970)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Aubrey Woods</span> – The Candy Man (1971) (from <i>Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory</i>, lyrics and music by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">The Rolling Stones</span> – Brown Sugar (1971) <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Sammy Davis, Jr. with the Mike Curb Congregation</span> – The Candy Man (1972) <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Montrose</span> – Rock Candy (1973)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Barry White</span> – Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe (1974) (included here because it easily could be about candy, simultaneously invoking hunger, insatiable appetite, and oral gratification)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Ohio Players</span> – Sweet Sticky Thing (1975)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Led Zeppelin</span> – Candy Store Rock (1976)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">The Cars</span> – Candy-O (1979)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Mary Jane Girls</span> – Candy Man (1983)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Sheena Easton</span> – Sugar Walls (1984) (written by Prince—enough said)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Def Leppard</span> – Pour Some Sugar on Me (1987) (the lyric, “I’m hot, sticky sweet,” suggests this song’s likely inspiration was Montrose’s hard-rocking “Rock Candy”)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Counting Crows</span> – Hard Candy (2002)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">50 Cent</span> – Candy Shop (2005)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Rihanna</span> – Sell Me Candy (2007)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Madonna</span> – Candy Shop (2008) (impossible to miss the many similes for insatiable appetite in the lyrics for this one)</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-64264011579758735382023-09-04T12:26:00.004-05:002023-09-17T16:18:39.984-05:00Assay Office<p><b style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><i></i></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigJrowZFup_U4ivkICDHHgU1mR2ESjaSfdp_NZ3M_UBQBQ6HwTiYVn1T6feFtsbdARNH0hxbE6rSbIklMf1sOFj3UOWaGKLtWnnefQ484606qfN5B2YBc_3rAvs4yzEvSoLIsV_hzGA_T40FG4WoIhKYl2nyCCiOoe0t1iPme8Mf_3u1737nj3tg6GklY0/s1095/BOP.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1095" data-original-width="746" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigJrowZFup_U4ivkICDHHgU1mR2ESjaSfdp_NZ3M_UBQBQ6HwTiYVn1T6feFtsbdARNH0hxbE6rSbIklMf1sOFj3UOWaGKLtWnnefQ484606qfN5B2YBc_3rAvs4yzEvSoLIsV_hzGA_T40FG4WoIhKYl2nyCCiOoe0t1iPme8Mf_3u1737nj3tg6GklY0/s320/BOP.jpeg" width="218" /></a></i></b></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><i>Assay office</i></b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">[from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assay_office" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a>]: “Institutions set up to assay (test the purity of) precious metals . . . . often done to protect consumers from buying fake items.”</span></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Music critics are motivated by opposing, mutually exclusive, desires. On the one hand, they strive to identify and distinguish the very best albums currently being marketed to mass audiences. On the other, they seek to shelter those same albums from mass consumption—from a homogenizing process that consists of assimilation or “popularization.” The critic’s sorting process is predicated on an epistemology that makes real/fake distinctions, its aim to vilify the counterfeit and praise the genuine item. Because of the critic’s status as an expert in the field, the critic’s discourse, merely descriptive or impressionistic, has the rhetorical force of science (applicable to critics of the arts in general, in fact).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Fortunately, the authenticating discourse of the critic can be subject to parody, undermining the critic’s epistemological certainty. Jazz critics have been especially subject to parody, and rightly so. Steve Allen’s spoken-word recordings, “Cinderella” and “Crazy Red Riding Hood,” issued on record in 1953 prior to the publication of his collection <i>Bop Fables</i> (1955), satirize hipster bop talk. Marshall Brickman’s hilarious “What, Another Legend?” (1973), mocks the jazzographer’s tendency to erect a jazz hall of fame. Perhaps the best parody of critics’ attempts to transform jazz into language is Donald Barthelme’s short story “The King of Jazz.” In Barthelme’s humorous story, a jazz fan responds to a question about how to describe the peerless sound of trombonist Hokie Mokie, the current king of jazz:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: #01ffff; font-family: verdana;">“You mean that sound that sounds like the cutting edge of life? That sounds like polar bears crossing Arctic ice pans? That sounds like a herd of musk ox in full flight? That sounds like male walruses diving to the bottom of the sea? That sounds like fumaroles smoking on the slopes of Mt. Katmai? That sounds like the wild turkey walking through the deep, soft forest? That sounds like beavers chewing trees in an Appalachian marsh? That sounds like an oyster fungus growing on an aspen trunk? That sounds like a mule deer wandering a montane of the Sierra Nevada? That sounds like prairie dogs kissing? That sounds like witchgrass tumbling or a river meandering? That sounds like manatees munching seaweed at Cape Sable? That sounds like coatimundis moving in packs across the face of Arkansas? That sounds like—“</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Barthelme’s metaphorical feat, in fact, illustrates “the normal practice of music criticism,” translating “a work (or its performance) . . . into the poorest of linguistic categories: the adjective" (Roland Barthes, <i>Image-Music-Text</i>, p. 179). </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-47131172932681957342023-08-29T16:13:00.002-05:002023-09-18T16:08:53.082-05:00Whistling A Different Tune<p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIeZXkZnrlpo5SXmwIda93eb1X_3Y7PDBNktqxKkLDGUsqBzyh3BLBbw-rGniKYV_OhwAuc3HXUmFvfqwhFgX8eE4QYmi0dCtCXwEfmLdCLSceRb_aBqy5OJRwuFuWUz-teZUX4Swx-xriMX4jA_kIU5UL5N45wg87mZtgk1nGBW9FyPQtn7JQN3MZ0PTl/s600/Twisted.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIeZXkZnrlpo5SXmwIda93eb1X_3Y7PDBNktqxKkLDGUsqBzyh3BLBbw-rGniKYV_OhwAuc3HXUmFvfqwhFgX8eE4QYmi0dCtCXwEfmLdCLSceRb_aBqy5OJRwuFuWUz-teZUX4Swx-xriMX4jA_kIU5UL5N45wg87mZtgk1nGBW9FyPQtn7JQN3MZ0PTl/w200-h200/Twisted.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">Several years ago, I published a <a href="http://www.60x50.com/2008/04/whistle-while-you-read.html" target="_blank">blog post</a> on songs that feature whistling. At the time, I wrote about the many significations of whistling: contentment (“Don't Worry, Be Happy”), solitary, melancholy contemplation (“(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay”), self-absorbed autoeroticism (“Centerfold”), pleasant, relaxing idleness (the theme from <i>The Andy Griffith Show</i>), or simply to pass the time, to avoid monotony when speech is either impossible or forbidden (“Colonel Bogey March”; “Whistle While You Work” from <i>Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs</i>). Whistling can also simply represent an individual’s <i>joie de vivre</i> ("Daydream").</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">But there's another aspect of whistling that I ignored when I wrote the earlier post, that whistling can bring bad luck. A popular superstition holds that <a href="http://folklore.usc.edu/whistling-at-night-2/" target="_blank">whistling at night</a> is dangerous and may bring unwanted attention from creatures that stalk the night, or perhaps may attract evil spirits. There are some world cultures that believe whistling is a means to summon supernatural beings.</span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">Perhaps because of the association of whistling with certain morbid superstitions, movies have used whistling as means to establish an ominous mood or atmosphere. Each of</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">the films in Columbia's 8-film</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><i>Whistler</i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">series (1944-1948) begins with the slightly sinister narrator whistling an eerie tune, soon to introduce himself as The Whistler: “I am the Whistler and I know many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes, I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak.” A few years prior to the debut of the</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><i>Whistler</i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">series, in Fritz Lang’s</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><i>M</i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">(1931), throughout the film the child murderer, Hans Beckert, identifies himself off-screen by whistling Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” An inspired cinematic use of whistling is Bernard Herrmann’s haunting score for the psycho-thriller</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><i>Twisted Nerve</i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">(1968), widely known as the “</span><i>Kill Bill</i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">whistle song,” having been appropriated by Quentin Tarantino for a sequence in</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><i>Kill Bill Vol. I</i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">(2003). Tarantino follows Fritz Lang’s lead in having the whistler introduced off-screen prior to the character’s actual appearance. The “whistle song” was again used by Tarantino as a phone’s ringtone in</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><i>Death Proof</i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">(2007).</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">I find Herrmann’s melodic theme for</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><i>Twisted Nerve</i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> powerful and </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">haunting because, to use a linguistic analogy, it is like an <b><i>antonym</i></b>: it is both tranquil and foreboding at the same time. It is the sonic equivalent of</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><i>M</i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">’s Hans Beckert, whose jolly smile and jaunty whistle cloaks his murderous intent. I hear</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><i>Twisted Nerve</i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">’s whistle in many songs that use whistling but are musically much different. I hear it in Roy Orbison’s “Here Comes the Rain, Baby,” the beginning of Billy Joel’s “The Stranger” (1977), the whistling that closes Peter Gabriel's masterful “Intruder,” Roxy Music's cover of “Jealous Guy,” and Scorpions’ “Wind of Change," among others.</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #fcff01;">Here are a few songs to listen to and think about in the way they use whistling:</span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">A Fistful of Dollars (Main Title) – Ennio Morricone (1964) (Alessandro Alessandroni, whistler)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Here Comes The Rain, Baby – Roy Orbison (1967) (Mickey Newbury)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong – Leonard Cohen (1967) (Features Cohen using a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R1lIuB52oU" target="_blank">hand whistle</a>)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Twisted Nerve (Main Title) – Bernard Herrmann (1968) (Gareth Williams, whistler)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life – Monty Python’s <i>Life of Brian</i> (1979) (Eric Idle)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Intruder – Peter Gabriel (1980)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Generals and Majors – XTC (1980)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Roxy Music – Jealous Guy (1981) (John Lennon tribute)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Patience – Guns N' Roses (1988) <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Wind of Change – Scorpions (1990)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Big Bang – Rock Mafia featuring Miley Cyrus (Video, 2010)</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-76588764479149817612023-08-27T17:33:00.002-05:002023-09-18T16:09:22.474-05:00The New School<div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEtkmVvZyd-AjoUnMlGAOQBHSTpMddhLRGgtQSzOJ6gVyVMi7WXsVW268vCKZcWcquRIMJOmbFGm7A6mDL3ntybK4ea9cUFanmSqqQT9JcGknpp1I_V4eseyg-S03-E3S9fc77ClISDlLayRDIXd0yx9iG6i019Os62qkI7z7SSmOMjTZieVQbDKigRBIA/s568/VUCover.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="567" data-original-width="568" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEtkmVvZyd-AjoUnMlGAOQBHSTpMddhLRGgtQSzOJ6gVyVMi7WXsVW268vCKZcWcquRIMJOmbFGm7A6mDL3ntybK4ea9cUFanmSqqQT9JcGknpp1I_V4eseyg-S03-E3S9fc77ClISDlLayRDIXd0yx9iG6i019Os62qkI7z7SSmOMjTZieVQbDKigRBIA/w200-h199/VUCover.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">How many critics—of the theater, movies, music, contemporary fine arts—wake up each morning with the uncomfortable feeling that someday they will be wrong in their critical judgment? After all, what is a critic’s deepest fear? To have erred in judgment, to have made the wrong call, <i>to have missed the boat</i>. Certainly, no movie critic wants to miss the boat—to have critically underestimated, or what’s worse, to have dismissed the next <i>Citizen Kane</i> (1941), for instance—so in order to avoid making such an unwitting mistake, the critic engages in what Robert Ray, employing a term taken from Max Ernst, calls critical <i>overcomprehension</i> (<i>How a Film Theory Got Lost</i>, Indiana University Press, 2001, p. 82). Ray writes:</span></div><p></p></div></div></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p> </o:p><span style="color: #01ffff;">Aware of previous mistakes, reviewers become increasingly afraid to condemn anything....Hence ... [one] ... of modern criticism’s ... great dangers, what Max Ernst called “overcomprehension” or “the waning of indignation”.... (82)</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">No critic, of course, can see beyond the curtain of Time. Time is the ultimate critic, and the critic’s limited perspective doesn’t <span face="-webkit-standard"></span>allow him to see beyond his own pitifully narrow moment in history. Critical overcomprehension—the act of giving every new movie an equally glowing reception—is a result of the critic’s deep fear that history may prove him wrong. No one wants to be, for instance, television critic Jack Gould, who reviewed <i>The</i> <i>Milton Berle Show </i>appearance of Elvis Presley for the <i>New York Times</i> in 1956:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability. His specialty is rhythm songs which he renders in an undistinguished whine; his phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner's aria in a bathtub. For the ear, he is an unutterable bore, not nearly so talented as Frank Sinatra back in the latter's rather hysterical days at the Paramount Theater. (qtd. in Robert Ray, 80)</span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">However, as Ray points out, Gould’s kind of critical misjudgment has its own unintended consequences: such gross critical mistakes have led to “rejection and incomprehensibility as promises of ultimate value” (82). For instance, if a record album sold poorly, or the artist who recorded it was given little or no attention—or worse, completely neglected in his or her own time, the record must therefore be great, perhaps even a masterwork. The initial neglect of 1967’s <i>The Velvet Underground & Nico</i> serves as a useful example. Ignored upon release, it is now considered a classic. Initial neglect as a sign of greatness is a powerful myth and governs much of modern criticism of the arts.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">According to <a href=" https://selfstyledsiren.substack.com/p/bye-bye-babylon" target="_blank">Self-Styled Siren</a> (critic and film historian Farran Smith Nehme), whose knowledge of silent era Hollywood is nothing short of encyclopedic, the practice of critical overcomprehension is currently being applied to <i>Babylon</i> (2022), a box-office failure upon release last year that also divided critics<span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span>(“Bye, bye Babylon,” August 23, 2023). While the Siren believes it is a “lousy movie<span style="font-size: 12pt;">,” </span><span face="-webkit-standard"></span>nonetheless she has noticed that there are <span style="font-size: 12pt;">“</span>ongoing attempts to enshrine last year's <i>Babylon</i> as some kind of masterwork,<span style="font-size: 12pt;">” </span>which is to say, for some, the movie's initial rejection is a surefire guarantee of its ultimate value. The myth serves to shield such movies from negative reviews.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">In addition, the Siren refers to a recent <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/15/movies/tiktok-movie-reviews-critics.html?unlocked_article_code=bzZvCT0sR2I8qx-4IK-2BlH3SWXB7w_xKPNw9cO6rYYw4MznMyDwXXkUVKW5dEN33-EfqPRf87W9dStYmz8VnDKssNaxvErO2rYpDMpX85UvJBCllk-u0uAD3iYKgRa_lTW6vHYsz8yLYkyd5WkzWRYmSea7RZ3A9mQpvGwHKqa9fimuYgJp80RzHCoCFBCPksjzs1NAqrRsFdLWbgTLP7wnndiyDFrL2ZFy751fDW95XCoVbngUy9VoHPGPTCH07F3oTkM5SzlMqvelbkEM-KLMozyG1TL2yvtTqxvVVTrLPKNTG0e23iGTaawzRBXzdFIB1kHkq8EV4PHQDQAxVbYhKW0e&smid=url-share" target="_blank"><i>New York Times</i> </a>article about the new phenomenon of “MovieTok” influencers. The <i>Times</i> calls them “the new school of film critic,” observing that “some tenets of the profession—such as rendering judgments or making claims that go beyond one’s personal taste—are now considered antiquated and objectionable.” Critics of the new school are never going to make an egregious mistake like Jack Gould made with Elvis Presley. More than that, by insisting that the tenets of a previous generation of critics have become antiquated—meaning they are <i>too old</i> to get what’s really going on—the new school of film critics seeks to shield itself, not simply certain films, but from criticism as well. The new school influencers have little concern for the movie itself. Instead, they are far more interested in the multiple ways they can attribute significance to the movie, e.g., “outrageous,” “extravagant,” “over the top,” “mind-blowing,” “thought-provoking,” on and on. Criticism is simply a form of publicity, and the film itself a commodity.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-75646032050422844622020-06-25T12:42:00.001-05:002023-09-18T16:11:59.578-05:00Timbre<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xNUYEloapXs/XvTfotubw-I/AAAAAAAAB8U/Xkdi5YLK6q8lR6xAMPH0GTGyDS4th6ovQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/LOUIE.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="558" data-original-width="712" height="156" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xNUYEloapXs/XvTfotubw-I/AAAAAAAAB8U/Xkdi5YLK6q8lR6xAMPH0GTGyDS4th6ovQCLcBGAsYHQ/s200/LOUIE.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;">According to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Louie">Wikipedia</a>, there are well over a thousand cover versions of “Louie Louie.” Question: Given the many hundreds of versions available, why is it that the Kingsmen’s cover version the one most widely known? As we all know, Paul Revere & the Raiders recorded the song a week or two after the Kingsmen, but the Raiders’ version failed to become a hit. Why did the Kingsmen’s version succeed and the Raiders’ version fail? After all, it’s the same song. Or is it?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;">In <i>Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock</i>, Theodore Gracyk asks a relevant question: Why do rock fans “listen again and again to the same records”? Why did a student that Gracyk knew wear out “a new Neil Young cassette in a month”? In answer to these questions, Gracyk writes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: cyan;">What is needed is a plausible account of how “Louie Louie” can retain its impact when the record is played over and over. The answer must be that song structure is often an incidental framing device for something further; a “coathanger,” as John Sheperd puts it, upon which other qualities and “significant personal statements” are hung. Alan Durant proposes that recording shapes listening by locating the corresponding pleasure in “precise recollection and anticipation: knowing sounds, movements, and instrumental textures by memory and familiarity, rather than by extrapolation from perceived patterns, symmetries and learned musical structures.” But <i>why</i> should this anticipation please us? </span>(58)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;">The short answer to this question, Gracyk says, is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbre">timbre</a> (“what makes a particular musical instrument or human voice have a different sound from another, even when they play or sing the same note”). The problem is that timbres “fade” after a short period of time, “becoming more imprecise with the passage of time” (60). In other words, our auditory memories, when it comes to musical timbres, are poor. We can’t remember a song’s timbres precisely, so we want to hear it again (and again). So why is the Kingmen’s version of “Louie Louie” the one that became the most widely known? The short answer is the song's timbres.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif">In film studies, the closest analogy to timbre is <i>mise-en-scéne</i>, that magical dimension of a movie that is generated by the gap between a director’s (<i>auteur</i></span><span face=""trebuchet ms", sans-serif"><i>’</i></span><span face=""trebuchet ms", sans-serif"><i>s</i>) intentions and the camera’s automatism (André Bazin). When discussing the role of the music producer in the creation of a record, music critic Michael Jarrett writes:</span></span></div>
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<span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: cyan;">When Owen Bradley produces Patsy Cline’s massive hits, he records a sonic concept just as much as he records an artist. In the vocabulary of film studies, the producer’s purview is the mise-en-scéne, in all of that term’s mystery.</span> (<i>Producing Country: The Inside Story of the Great Recordings</i>, 37).</span><span face=""calibri" , sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-29334687910939498122020-06-09T15:57:00.001-05:002020-06-09T15:57:49.381-05:00My Huckleberry Friend<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ryi574_JqOk/Xt_pX-iv4wI/AAAAAAAAB8A/4IjOHC1SKS4khnaM5jS4AqaKV5vTfTKCgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/78137-2400-0.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="320" height="150" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ryi574_JqOk/Xt_pX-iv4wI/AAAAAAAAB8A/4IjOHC1SKS4khnaM5jS4AqaKV5vTfTKCgCLcBGAsYHQ/s200/78137-2400-0.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Search the web, and you’ll find various meanings attributed to “My huckleberry friend,” the penultimate line from Mancini and Mercer’s “Moon River.” For the sake of convenience I reproduce the lyrics in question here:</span><br />
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<span style="color: cyan; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Two drifters off to see the world</span></div>
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<span style="color: cyan; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">There</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 255, 255); color: cyan; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="color: cyan; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">s such a lot of world to see</span></div>
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<span style="color: cyan; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">We’re after the same rainbow’s end<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: cyan; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Waiting round the bend<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: cyan; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">My huckleberry friend<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: cyan;">Moon river and me</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">As sung by Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) in <i>Breakfast at Tiffany’s</i>, the song reveals her rootlessness, her yearning to take flight, to <i>get</i> <i>away</i>—unusual characteristics for the heroine of what is essentially a romantic comedy with a few screwball elements. Childlike and often childish (as the heroines of this genre frequently are), “free-spirited,” she has escaped an unfulfilling life in rural Texas, abandoned her husband and step-children, and moved to New York City. Her reinvention takes the form of a revolt against conventionality—defying social convention is a characteristic trait of the screwball heroine. Subject to whims and tantrums, impulsive, a “kook” (derived from “cuckoo,” late 50s-early 60s lingo for someone who flaunts convention, individuality expressed through eccentricity), she seeks to avoid the confines of responsibility and in order to maintain her independence she avoids commitment, seeking to prolong her adolescence as far into adulthood as she possibly can. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Perhaps this is why <i>Breakfast at Tiffany’s</i> has that wistful, melancholic mood that I identified in my last post. After thinking about this movie for several years, it seems to me that the ending, in which Holly and Paul famously kiss in the rain as the music swells, cannot conceal what seems to me to be a hint of sadness. Why? Because inevitably, like Huckleberry Finn, Holly is going “to light out for the Territory.” Critic Judith Crist expressed a similar idea (without invoking Huck Finn) during an interview in 2009:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: cyan;">But what’s clever about the way they ended <i>Breakfast at Tiffany’s</i>—this is, of course, my own feeling—is that you don’t get the sense that the two of them will last forever. About George Peppard’s character, I remember thinking, ‘Well, he’s not long for it. Just because you’re going to give the cat a name doesn’t mean that the cat isn’t going to go back to the alley.’ </span>(Quoted in Sam Wasson’s book on the making of <i>Breakfast at Tiffany’s</i>, <i>Fifth Avenue, 5:00 a.m.</i>, p. 168)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Like Judith Crist, I can</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">t shake the feeling that the couple’s relationship will not last, either. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Perhaps Crist felt that Paul Varjak (George Peppard) wanted to control Holly, to suppress her, that he isn’t the “right” match, rather like having the wrong couple end up married at the end of a screwball comedy</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">—imagine </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Johnny Case (Cary Grant) married to Julia Seton (Doris Nolan) at the end of George Cukor</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">s <i>Holiday</i> (1938). Yet the sadness I’m trying to identify isn’t simply an issue of compatibility, or certain hesitations about George Peppard</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">s performance (it is no secret that director Blake Edwards was strongly against casting him in the role), but something deeper than that, having to do with the underlying motivations of Holly’s character. Leslie A. Fiedler wrote about Huck Finn in a way that is applicable to Holly Golightly:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: cyan;">[H]e does not know to <i>what</i> he is escaping, except into nothing: a mere anti-society, in which he is a cipher, a ghost without a real name. “All I wanted was to go somewheres,” he tells Miss Watson, “all I wanted was a change, I warn’t particular.” Huck is heading for no utopia, since he has heard of none; and so he ends up making flight itself his goal. He flees from the impermanence of boyhood to that of continual change; and, of course, it is a vain evasion except as it leads him to understand that <i>no</i> society can fulfill his destiny. </span>(<i>Love and Death in the American Novel</i>, pp. 464-65)</span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Perhaps Fiedler</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">s observation is more applicable to the Holly Golightly as portrayed in Truman Capote</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">s novel rather than the Hollywood </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">adaptation. Nonetheless, the diegetic use of </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“M</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">oon River</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">” requires an explanation, and there is nothing in the movie that interests me more.</span></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-81475784638488849982020-06-06T09:22:00.001-05:002020-06-06T09:58:26.066-05:00Moon River and Me<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HYUCF6Val5Y/XtufpWQ8j8I/AAAAAAAAB7w/vs7PYYvUxms51DCLtawurwGpwBHkQyqPgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/moon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="798" data-original-width="800" height="199" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HYUCF6Val5Y/XtufpWQ8j8I/AAAAAAAAB7w/vs7PYYvUxms51DCLtawurwGpwBHkQyqPgCLcBGAsYHQ/s200/moon.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">According to legend, after a successful preview of <i>Breakfast at Tiffany’s</i> (1961), the then supervisory chief of production at Paramount, Martin Rackin, although happy with the test audience’s positive assessment of the film, insisted that the scene of Audrey Hepburn singing “Moon River” be cut from the picture. Some accounts aver that Rackin had been an opponent of the song all along. Others say that he preferred a different composer than Henry Mancini. Is there any truth to these rumors? Composed by Henry Mancini with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, “Moon River” went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song, and additionally received the 1962 Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. Given the song’s huge success and popularity, could the production head at Paramount really have been so obtuse? How could he have failed to recognize the song’s greatness?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Pure speculation, but perhaps the reason why he wanted the song cut was because he felt the scene was narratively unnecessary. For the sake of argument, I might even say that I agree with him: the scene doesn’t advance the plot. However, plot is only one dimension of a movie. The “Moon River” scene is essential to the film—imagine <i>Breakfast at Tiffany’s</i> with the scene omitted. What is lost? Holly singing “Moon River” contributes nothing to the plot, but has everything to do with <i>mood </i>or <i>atmosphere</i>. The song’s subject</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">—</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">wanderlust, the lure of the river</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">—</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">deepens our understanding of Holly’s character and also invokes a wistful, melancholic mood that haunts the rest of the movie. The scene is an instance of </span><a href="http://filmsound.org/terminology/diegetic.htm" style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif;">diegetic music</a><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">, music that is actually played within the fictional space of the film’s story.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Of course, the movies are loaded with such moments, and the best of these moments remain indelibly etched in our memories. For author and critic Umberto Eco (1985’s “’Casablanca’: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage”), the greatest movies are </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“g</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">reat</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">”</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> precisely because they contain such moments. The challenge presented to us is how to write about such moments in a way to do them justice. As Christian Metz stated in his now famous epigraph (cited by James Monaco in <i>How to Read a Film</i>), “[M]ovies are difficult to explain because they are easy to understand.</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">”</span></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-88459822343521059642020-06-02T18:25:00.000-05:002020-06-02T18:25:35.826-05:00Nancy & Lee, Part V: Pop vs. Rock<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jBX_ZuSKb20/XtbaWEBoasI/AAAAAAAAB7Y/CXsl6oXcf90oELSA5OSZ7NeL3bvrHq8eQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/unnamed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="500" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jBX_ZuSKb20/XtbaWEBoasI/AAAAAAAAB7Y/CXsl6oXcf90oELSA5OSZ7NeL3bvrHq8eQCLcBGAsYHQ/s200/unnamed.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The summer of 1967 became known as the “Summer of Love,” in effect an opportunity to market new fashions, rock music, and alternatives to Western (or European) thought and religion to the young people of America. As a moment in history, the designation was supposed to signal a profound shift in consciousness. A pop song was written to announce this shift, John Phillips’ “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” sung by Scott McKenzie. Thousands of young people, celebrating the American values of freedom and the open road enabled by the automobile, flocked to San Francisco, later to Monterey (for the Pop Festival), where that summer “bohemian chic” was all the rage. Fashion designer <a href="https://agnautacouture.com/2015/12/13/thea-porter-godmother-of-bohemian-chique/">Thea Porter</a> was responsible for most of the bohemian chic fashions of the 60s and 70s—caftans, diaphanous patterned shifts, and Middle Eastern (or Oriental) influenced dresses and blouses.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“The hippie look started out as more of a political statement, a type of anti-fashion, but it soon became the fashion itself,” states Laura McLaws Helms in her book, <i>Thea Porter: Bohemian Chic</i>, co-written with Venetia Porter, the designer’s daughter. Changes in fashion allowed for new, exotic, and, occasionally, bizarre expressions of individuality. The Fall of the Summer of Love began on October 17, 1967, when the musical <i>Hair</i> had its off-Broadway debut at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in New York, later opening on Broadway in April 1968. The Monterey Pop Festival was to rock (a noun that once had been a verb) what <i>Hair</i>’s “tribe” was to Bohemian chic. The entertainment industry realized that it was time to market products specifically for the counterculture.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Pink Floyd’s </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The Piper at the Gates of Dawn</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">, released in August 1967, featured the band members in jackets designed by Thea Porter on the album cover.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JhELoLhrdU0/Xtbb-0XVEBI/AAAAAAAAB7o/RIUM7x_5bdsUA8EhebhIzhvX5weuZe1EQCEwYBhgLKs4DAL1Ocqxlp78URLzzFcCib6uH7DN17HsPtGPGNA2sYELqJ5272w7bApc6StnfkcZqF4-FOlAFwb7wHA6WbCHDmPTJZBhAIdbyOasBV_zPds0EM8PusPWOudyMV0RbdN2ybQa1I3k0FyMb04kNaabeZBSNmg-9ShoD_ElGqseZpQfk8YHP-b6I13mcR9OgEISpKOiuzM4XRGRGfookNml_vw6F5cUKmccQITtOteV5xMIvT1lOgfE-anbAovvwFa0eQuNnFZSsveMhPorQssza6tRoJbjQEVn7_dKVT6F-e-MiJOrJ23KIW8DfHRdtqzrueZ7t97O9a8deZqX5wznsVDyKt9JGseS3wAyjeU4pYc-SH2cmJLTEQpdkH4JhohrM0rGdXycD7HApNJDWJsGxpsrW3srVF7RJVsdcgtconiVGcCnSHaAnBbapQjK-Jzdrm29S8lZwo3sUEEKmUNRg58UZTY56hvHeiYAfvKOJkSluqwJMSTwBiwlj7lvP0JXB9GkmwIEPBL2cqhnVLDHup1fD6ExYzbjqmibJbxP4hzskIx3v84hEU-dGffnX7yhJieg0R8oB6WTAzBIgaF0RD5Mhe0VrbFti5CK8pHlVMJ3A2_YF/s1600/PinkFloyd-album-piperatthegatesofdawn_300.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="300" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JhELoLhrdU0/Xtbb-0XVEBI/AAAAAAAAB7o/RIUM7x_5bdsUA8EhebhIzhvX5weuZe1EQCEwYBhgLKs4DAL1Ocqxlp78URLzzFcCib6uH7DN17HsPtGPGNA2sYELqJ5272w7bApc6StnfkcZqF4-FOlAFwb7wHA6WbCHDmPTJZBhAIdbyOasBV_zPds0EM8PusPWOudyMV0RbdN2ybQa1I3k0FyMb04kNaabeZBSNmg-9ShoD_ElGqseZpQfk8YHP-b6I13mcR9OgEISpKOiuzM4XRGRGfookNml_vw6F5cUKmccQITtOteV5xMIvT1lOgfE-anbAovvwFa0eQuNnFZSsveMhPorQssza6tRoJbjQEVn7_dKVT6F-e-MiJOrJ23KIW8DfHRdtqzrueZ7t97O9a8deZqX5wznsVDyKt9JGseS3wAyjeU4pYc-SH2cmJLTEQpdkH4JhohrM0rGdXycD7HApNJDWJsGxpsrW3srVF7RJVsdcgtconiVGcCnSHaAnBbapQjK-Jzdrm29S8lZwo3sUEEKmUNRg58UZTY56hvHeiYAfvKOJkSluqwJMSTwBiwlj7lvP0JXB9GkmwIEPBL2cqhnVLDHup1fD6ExYzbjqmibJbxP4hzskIx3v84hEU-dGffnX7yhJieg0R8oB6WTAzBIgaF0RD5Mhe0VrbFti5CK8pHlVMJ3A2_YF/s200/PinkFloyd-album-piperatthegatesofdawn_300.jpg" width="200" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The vaguely Oriental jackets, coupled with the band being photographed using a prism lens, all suggested an hallucinatory “trip.” As purveyors of Bohemian chic, the band announced itself through the album cover as playing a new kind of music signaling a new form of consciousness. Any number of terms were applied, correctly or incorrectly, at the time to the band’s music—psychedelic, hallucinatory, “mind-expanding,” “trippy.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: yellow;">NANCY SINATRA</span>: <span style="color: cyan;">My music was left behind in a way…since I was never embraced by my peers. I was stranded, on my own, to fend for myself . . . . I remember, years later, meeting Stevie Nicks and Sheryl Crow at the Clinton White House. They virtually snubbed me. I was hurt.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">An interesting comment, to be sure. However, I’m not sure that it was Nancy Sinatra’s music that was left behind. She represents a pop music aesthetic that signifies values that certain individuals, such as those named above, hold in disdain. She is a representative of a fashion style that was considered conservative—miniskirts, go-go boots, simple A-line dresses—that was rejected by rock culture’s adoption of the values represented by Bohemian chic—non-Western, Oriental, and superficially radical. Anti-fashion became fashion, earnestness became pessimism, and the supposed shift in consciousness became an obsession with sex and hallucinatory drugs. Pop music was for so-called “empty people,” superficial in thought and feeling. In contrast, rock was for those who felt deeply, those who adhered to the fundamental modernist values: individuality, spontaneity, inspiration. By associating itself with modernist values (previously adopted by jazz culture), rock leveraged itself into the position of being the superior pop musical form.</span></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-51003769995862752862020-05-28T18:37:00.000-05:002020-05-28T18:37:48.362-05:00Nancy & Lee, Part IV: Movin’ Beyond<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">An old adage warns never judge a book by its cover. What about an album cover? Music critic Michael Jarrett observes, “[album] covers not only represent—encode in visual form—the myths associated with music, they contribute to the construction of those myths. They are part of the process that imbues music with meaning, giving it both a face and a voice.” (<i>Sound Tracks</i>) Record covers mirror back our perceptions of particular types of music, perceptions that are to a great extent visually and not musically determined, perceptions that are shaped by our past experiences with other texts representing aural “events.” Album covers are essential to our consumption of pop music; they shape our reception of the music the album contains.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>Nancy & Lee</i>’s cover photo was taken by Ron Joy (1931-2013), a prolific photographer whose celebrity photos appeared on the covers of magazines, books, and album covers from the 1960s through the 1990s. Joy had previously taken the cover photos for Nancy Sinatra’s albums <i>Sugar </i>(1966), <i>Nancy in London</i> (1966), <i>Country, My Way</i> (1967), and the <i>Movin’ With Nancy</i> soundtrack LP (1967). In contrast to the cover photographs of other records released during the same time period featuring couples, the minimalist, burnt orange background of <i>Nancy & Lee</i> is an interesting innovation. The cover of Sonny and Cher’s <i>In Case You’re in Love</i> (1967), for instance, features the laughing couple sitting back to back on a large boulder that sits above an expanse of water, likely a lake. <i>Carryin’ On with Johnny Cash and June Carter</i> (released later in 1967) features the smiling couple sitting together within a forest clearing, leaning against each other at the </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">shoulder. Question: is the use of natural landscapes on these album covers intended to be an idealized visualization of an idyllic, untroubled, and pastoral life dating back to the Edenic world of Adam and Eve?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The Ron Joy photograph of Nancy and Lee eschews a natural setting in favor of the controlled lighting of a photography studio. The color of Nancy’s jacket and Lee’s shirt, as well as their sun-tanned faces, is enhanced by the minimalist burnt orange background. They are bent very slightly forward, Nancy leaning into him as if they are sitting atop a horse that’s not visible within the frame. The minimalist background accentuates their eyes as they both stare directly at the viewer, breaking the theatrical “fourth wall.” The tops of their heads are at the same level, as are their eyes. They imitate each other’s pose as well. Are they to be perceived as boy/girl fraternal twins (dizygotic), one light, one dark? We return their gaze, our eyes moving from to left to right and back again, caught by the surprising ambiguity of their facial expressions: is this photograph an artfully created spectacle, or a documentary-like portrait? Is the photograph pop music’s citation of the doubling scene of Liv Ullman and Bibi Andersson in Ingmar Bergman’s <i>Persona</i> (1966), released in the U.S. in 1967? <i>Persona</i> is a film that Susan Sontag said is about doubling: “...it is...pertinent to treat <i>Persona</i> as relating the duel between two mythical parts of a single self....” She goes on to say, “A sub-theme of doubling is the contrast between hiding and showing forth. The Latin word <i>persona</i>, from which the English ‘person’ derives, means the mask worn by an actor. To be a person, then, is to possess a mask.” (<i>Styles of Radical Will</i>).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Sontag’s reference to the actor reinforces the observation I made in my previous post, that songs—especially duets—are more like plays than poems. The singers are like characters in a play. As I also suggested last time, the male-female duet is like a conversation overheard by a listener who is put in the position of being a voyeur. And yet, while Nancy and Lee’s duets are charged with an erotic undercurrent, they are not love songs. “Sand,” “Summer Wine,” “Some Velvet Morning “Lady Bird” and “Sundown,” invoke atmosphere and mood like good film music, but the meaning of their lyrics remains open to interpretation, to the performers (see the liner notes) and listeners alike. The ambiguous cover photograph on <i>Nancy & Lee</i>—is it a documentary-like portrait of the couple, or is it an image of doubling, an image that both reveals and masks simultaneously?</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">—</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">contributed to the construction of the powerful myth of Nancy and Lee that endures to this day.</span><br />
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<div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-16877413546642996752020-05-25T09:36:00.001-05:002020-05-25T11:48:20.060-05:00Nancy & Lee, Part III: Movin’ With Nancy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: cyan; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>You don’t walk through life anymore. You run. You dance. You drive a car. You take a plane, not a train. Clothes must be able to move too. </i></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">— </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Fashion Designer André Courrèges (1923-2016)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The pop charts in 1967 belonged to Nancy Sinatra. The year began with the success of the soon-to-be RIAA gold single, “Sugar Town”/“Summer Wine”, followed by “Somethin’ Stupid,” a duet with her father Frank that spent a month at #1 and months more on the chart. “Somethin’ Stupid” was later nominated for a Grammy Award for Record of the Year, losing to the 5th Dimension’s “Up, Up And Away,” a song she was to perform in <i>Movin’ With Nancy</i>. At one point, for the week ending April 22, she had three singles on Billboard’s Hot 100: “Somethin’ Stupid,” “Love Eyes,” and “Summer Wine.” She would repeat this rare feat the next week as well. During the Summer of Love, her single featuring the title track to the latest James Bond film, “You Only Live Twice,” was released, followed by another hit single, “Lightning’s Girl,” followed in turn by yet another hit single with Lee Hazlewood, “Lady Bird”/”Sand.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">At the end of the year, she starred in a successful TV special. Broadcast on NBC December 11, 1967, the Emmy Award-winning <i>Movin’ With Nancy</i> is a kind of road movie filmed in and around Los Angeles—e.g., Leo Carrillo State Park, The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power—with one sequence shot at Big Sur and a short sequence at Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco. The Beatles’ attempt at a road movie, <i>Magical Mystery Tour</i>, would show on British TV later that month (in black & white) and in early January 1968 in color. (<i>Movin' With Nancy</i> would repeat as well, in April 1968, shortly after the release of the <i>Nancy & Lee</i> LP.) In contrast to the critical and commercial success of <i>Movin’ With Nancy</i>, the Beatles’ avant-garde road movie was a flop. <i>Movin’ With Nancy</i> features appearances by “special guests” Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Lee Hazlewood. Choreographer David Winters (who was nominated for an Emmy Award for his work in this show) is also acknowledged as a special guest, as is Frank Sinatra, Jr., who makes a cameo appearance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The show opens with a medium long shot of a brick red ’57 Ford Thunderbird convertible parked in a driveway. Residence behind. Close on a white entry door. It opens, revealing a pair of brick red leather boots—<i>not</i> flat-heeled ankle “go-go” boots, these boots have spiked heels and rise above mid-calf, these boots are strictly non-utilitarian and represent above all style and fashion—instantly reminding us of the song to which Nancy Sinatra is most famously linked, “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” a song about a woman who ain’t gonna take any more shit from her man, a two-minute-forty-two-second proto-feminist anthem. Pull back to reveal Nancy Sinatra in checkered miniskirt, not a micro-mini, but plenty short, in a white sweater with a wide black stripe at the waist and leather gloves matching the brick red color of her boots and her Thunderbird. The impression is that of a confident young woman embracing her body and style. She strolls over to her stylish vehicle—this car is <i>hers</i>—climbs in, starts it up, throws it in gear, and speeds off down the driveway, singing “I Gotta Get Out of This Town.” Opening credits over a Vorkapich montage. She passes through residential streets onto Ocean Blvd. in Santa Monica, and soon she’s rolling on the 405 heading north to Moorpark to take a ride in a balloon (“Up, Up and Away”) before doing some hiking at Big Sur (“Sugar Town”).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: yellow;">NANCY SINATRA</span>: <span style="color: cyan;">I knew it [“These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”] would be important from the moment the band played it through. I had shopped at Mary Quant’s boutique before the record was released, and the clothes fit the attitude the song portrayed.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The opening sequence is surprising: a woman hitting the road, going where she pleases. It’s not Kerouac in the car, it’s not Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters searching for the Kool Place, it’s not four blokes roaming the countryside in a bus, it’s not those two fellas driving around in the Corvette from <i>Route 66</i> (1960-64)—she’s got a convertible, too, like those guys, but her T-Bird has a big Dodge engine with a McCulloch blower and eats Corvettes for lunch. She is in her automobile and she is autonomous, free, mobile—moving—and looking to have some fun. “My Thunderbird was totally restored and rebuilt by my friend George Barris of Batmobile fame. It had a Borg-Warner 5-speed stick transmission and a Dodge engine with a McCullogh [sic] supercharger. . . . I took great pleasure in beating Corvettes away from red lights in my innocent looking little T-Bird.” (Liner notes included with the Image DVD release of <i>Movin’ With Nancy</i>.) She may be diminutive (5’ 3”, 90 pounds) and look innocent, but like the singer in “These Boots,” she doesn't take any crap.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: yellow;">NANCY SINATRA</span>: <span style="color: cyan;">The timing was perfect. . . . I think Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton and I captured the fashion of the time best.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Famed British fashion designer Mary Quant is among those credited with introducing the miniskirt (and perhaps responsible for making it shorter and then shorter again), but where did the boots come from? What attitude is represented by the boots? In 1964, the year before “These Boots” was recorded, when the women’s movement and the space program were just beginning to take off, French fashion designer <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1KJWRFVJTp6lJ0TMF0VRlCp/from-moonwalk-to-catwalk-andre-courreges-and-space-age-style">André Courrèges</a> unveiled his highly influential “Space Age” or futuristic collection of minimalist designs—drop-waist miniskirts, simple A-line dresses, and flat-soled white leather ankle boots with a zipper down back and a Velcro placket. A <a href="http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O135020/pair-of-boots-courreges-andre/">pair of boots</a> “were essential for girls emulating the ‘moon-girl’ image, a new version of femininity, inspired by youth, sportswear, and space travel.” It is perhaps good to remember that Oklahoman Lee Hazlewood originally wrote “These Boots” for a male vocalist, not a moon-girl, recording his version of the song for his 1966 MGM album, <i>The Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood</i>. The boots in his version therefore aren’t futuristic go-go boots, but the old-fashioned cowboy variety.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">After ballooning and visiting Big Sur, the “Sugar Town” sequence ends with Nancy strolling away up a slight hill (white leather boots now) into the woods, her back to us. Cut to Lee Hazlewood on a sandy rise at Leo Carrillo State Beach, riding a black horse—the sequence featuring “Some Velvet Morning,” one of Nancy & Lee’s most frequently covered duets. Lee delivers his vocals as he rides, Nancy delivers hers as she strolls somewhere else on the beach. Now dressed all in ghostly white, she is in loose slacks and a diaphanous blouse, holding some flowers. Intercutting between one and the other as they sing. The two are never in the same shot together.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Lee’s voice:<br /><span style="color: cyan;">Some velvet mornin’ when I’m straight<br />I’m gonna open up your gate<br />And maybe tell you ’bout Phaedra<br />And how she gave me life<br />And how she made it end<br />Some velvet mornin’ when I’m straight</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Nancy’s voice:<br /><span style="color: cyan;">Flowers growing on a hill, dragonflies and daffodils<br />Learn from us very much, look at us but do not touch<br />Phaedra is my name</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: yellow;">FROM THE BACK COVER LINER NOTES ON NANCY & LEE</span>: <i>What Does “Some Velvet Morning” Really Mean?</i> We don’t know. The words “Velvet” and “Morning” rhyme in our heads. Phaedra sounds like an “upper” that doesn’t quite make it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: yellow;">THE PHAEDRA MYTH</span>: In one version, Phaedra marries Theseus but falls deeply in love with Hippolytus, Theseus’ son. Horrified by her declaration of love, Hippolytus rejects her. In revenge, Phaedra writes Theseus a letter, falsely accusing Hippolytus of raping her, after which she commits suicide. Angered, driven by revenge, Theseus curses Hippolytus. Frightened by a sea monster, Hippolytus’ horses drag the falsely accused man to his death.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">If Nancy is Phaedra, who is Lee? Theseus? If so, to whom is he singing? Certainly not Phaedra (“And maybe tell you ’bout Phaedra”). During the sequence in <i>Movin’ With Nancy</i>, he’s riding his black horse along the seashore. Wouldn’t that suggest that he’s in fact supposed to be Hippolytus? What if Lee Hazlewood only partially knew the Greek myth, or imperfectly remembered it if he knew it at all? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In his essay, “Why Do Songs Have Words?” (included in his collection of essays, <i>Music For Pleasure</i>), British critic Simon Frith writes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: cyan; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“In the best of songs,” according to Christopher Ricks, “there is something which is partly about what it is to write a song, without in any way doing away with the fact that it is about things other than the song.” Sociologists of pop have been so concerned with these “other things”—lyrical content, truth and realism—that they have neglected to analyze the ways in which songs are about themselves, about language. (121)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Certainly the above observation is applicable to “Some Velvet Morning.” The song consists of the interplay of sound and language, the contrast of voices, and is more redolent of meaning than having any clearly defined meaning. What does it really mean? <i>We don’t know.</i> It seems to tease at meaning, promising more than what it actually says, as if the lyrics are fragments of some longer manuscript, now lost, an ancient, mythic narrative of which only a few pieces survive. Commentators have remarked upon the two different time signatures, 4/4 (Lee) and 3/4 (Nancy), but as I remarked in a previous entry, recording by the mid-60s resembled filmmaking, with a single song consisting of multiple takes seamlessly edited together. The best analogy I can think of is to The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever,” a track that resulted from two (or more) takes played at different tempos and in different keys, subsequently cut together, with one take sped up and the other slowed down. “Some Velvet Morning” does something similar. It splices different takes which have different tempos, different rhythms. Perhaps it is not as sonically dense as “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but it shares the same spirit of inventiveness, and rises and falls like a masterful drama.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">One final comment. In the same essay referred to above, Frith makes the observation—especially apt as a description of Nancy & Lee’s duets—that songs are “more like plays than poems.” Singers are like actors performing a role. They are like characters in a play. Changes in tone, a pleading voice, sighs and hesitations (to name only a few) are non-verbal devices that carry meaning every bit as much as the semantic connotations of the words themselves. Because male-female duets are rather like conversations, listening to a duet is similar to eavesdropping, forcing the listener into the role of the voyeur. The result is that the conversation is charged with erotic overtones, even if that is not overt or intended.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Question to be explored: What is the basis of rock's claim to a superior pop music status?</span></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-9931208441347650112020-05-21T13:11:00.000-05:002020-05-21T14:39:57.465-05:00Nancy & Lee, Part II: Noncommutativity<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Zu6LopJDcz8/XsaSAzDjTqI/AAAAAAAAB6k/oI3hbRNnWtcY9abOIval9uwxftus8hWxgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Some_Velvet_Morning.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="300" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Zu6LopJDcz8/XsaSAzDjTqI/AAAAAAAAB6k/oI3hbRNnWtcY9abOIval9uwxftus8hWxgCLcBGAsYHQ/s200/Some_Velvet_Morning.jpg" width="200" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Nancy Sinatra’s and Lee Hazlewood’s successful duets can be understood by yet another analogy to filmmaking. Greta Garbo made twenty-four movies in Hollywood, with fourteen different directors. Of these two dozen films, William Daniels, her preferred cameraman, shot all of them but five. Proposal: William Daniels was to Greta Garbo what Lee Hazlewood was to Nancy Sinatra. As the producer of her albums from 1966 to 1968, Hazlewood was like an <i>auteur</i>, in control of the sonic equivalent of the <i>mise-en-scène</i></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">—the cinema’s elusive essence. Their best duets, including </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“Summer Wine,”</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“Sand,” </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Lady Bird,</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">”</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> and most famously, </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“Some Velvet Morning,</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">”</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">were like haunting mysteries, drawn from the exotic lands of the imagination.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The special alchemy of Nancy and Lee’s collaboration was made possible by Nancy Sinatra’s vocal <i>noncommutativity</i>. In cinema studies, semioticians suggest that an actor’s most significant features become identifiable when audiences attempt to imagine another actor playing the same role, a practice referred to as the “commutation test,” or game of substitution. For an example, replace Humphrey Bogart in <i>Casablanca</i> (1943) with George Raft, Warner Brothers’ first choice to play the character of Rick Blaine. Had Raft played the role rather than Bogie, would <i>Casablanca</i> even be remembered? As another example, replace Johnny Depp in <i>Edward Scissorhands</i> (1990) with Fox’s preferred choice for the role, Tom Cruise.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">A commutation test in pop music might consist of replacing Nancy Sinatra as Hazelwood’s duet partner with, say, Brenda Lee (the fourth highest charting pop artist of the 1960s behind The Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Ray Charles), or with another highly successful singer of the period, Dusty Springfield. Fortunately, such a commutation test was actually performed. Hazlewood had previously recorded duets with other female vocalists, with both Suzi Jane Hokum and Ann-Margret, without commercial success. These recordings were made at the same time he and Nancy Sinatra were recording their hit records and with some of the same songs. Hazlewood recorded “Summer Wine” and “Sand” as duets first with Suzi Jane Hokum, and these versions were released as MGM singles with no success. Likewise, in 1967 Hazlewood produced another single version of “Summer Wine,” using vocalists Virgil Warner and Suzi Jane Hokum. This version, too, failed to chart. And apparently, in August, 1966 Hazlewood recorded a version of “Sundown,” later included on <i>Nancy & Lee</i>, with Suzi Jane Hokum as well, but that recording is now lost. We can also turn the experiment around: in 1981, Nancy Sinatra recorded an album of country duets with Mel Tillis, titled <i>Mel & Nancy</i>, and while the album sold reasonably well, it has never achieved the legendary status of the recordings she made with Lee Hazlewood, and has not yet been issued on CD.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The soundscape on <i>Nancy & Lee </i></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">demonstrates the duo</span></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">s unique approach to the pop music duet form. </span>At the time they began recording, the biggest recent hit by a duet in pop music had been Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” a #1 single in the summer of 1965. Marvin Gaye and Tammy Terrell’s successful string of duets began somewhat later, in April 1967 with the release of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” As a producer, however, Hazlewood took a more experimental approach to recording. Inspired by the Beatles</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Norwegian Wood</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">” (US release December 1965)</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> but unable to get hold of a sitar, that instrument's sonic replacement became a guitar recorded normally and then played backwards (starting at 1:58 in </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Sand</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">”), yielding an unusual sound. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Recorded March 8, 1966, “Sand,” was their debut as a vocal duo. About the song, Nancy Sinatra has said, “A running theme in his songs from that point was the young girl with the older guy. That was his fantasy and he captured it beautifully in song. But you have to remember that he had already done those songs. I was the second woman to sing them with him. Suzi Jane Hokum was the first. Suzi Jane’s interpretations were good, but different. With me, he took the little girl quality and put it with adult ideas and something very interesting happened.” (Nancy Sinatra to Al Quaglieri in an interview reprinted in the liner notes for Sundazed’s CD reissue of her 1966 LP, </span><i style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif;">How Does That Grab You?</i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">While “Sand” was the duo’s debut, it remained unreleased as a single for over a year. “Summer Wine,” recorded at London’s Pye Studios for the the album <i>Nancy in London</i> (July 1966), became Nancy & Lee’s chart debut, but somewhat by accident. Reprise placed “Summer Wine” on the B-side of Nancy’s “Sugar Town” single released late in 1966, resulting in a double-sided hit record and an RIAA gold single certification. “Sand” was not released as a single until it was used as the B-side of “Lady Bird” in October 1967, several months after the chart success of “Summer Wine.” Prior to the release of the “Lady Bird” single, on April 16 1967, Nancy and Lee made their first appearance as a duo, on <i>The Ed Sullivan Show</i>, performing “Summer Wine” (Nancy Sinatra also performed her latest single, “Love Eyes,” solo). That summer, Reprise released the title song for “You Only Live Twice,” the latest James Bond film, recorded by Nancy Sinatra, with another popular tune by the duo as the B-side, “Jackson.” The latter, recorded in Nashville earlier that year and included on Nancy’s album <i>Country, My Way</i> (1967), the album also included yet another duet by the duo, Don Gibson’s “Oh Lonesome Me,” later to be issued as the B-side to “Some Velvet Morning.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">For many fans, the pinnacle of Nancy and Lee’s collaboration is “Some Velvet Morning,” often (mis)labeled as “cowboy psychedelia.” Significantly, “Some Velvet Morning” was first introduced in Nancy Sinatra's TV special, <i>Movin’ With Nancy</i>, that aired on NBC December 11, 1967. A popular and critical success, the show was nominated for three Emmy Awards.</span><br />
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<span style="color: yellow; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Co-Authored with Rebecca A. Umland</span></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2956138709974797846.post-67142004987340004142020-05-18T11:51:00.000-05:002020-05-18T11:51:55.203-05:00Nancy & Lee, Part I<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood (1929-2007) are to pop music what Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg are to the cinema: two different artistic temperaments who needed each other to achieve greatness. Like the singular films made by Dietrich and von Sternberg, the iconic songs of Nancy and Lee, among them, “Summer Wine,” “Lady Bird,” “Sand” and “Some Velvet Morning,” draw power from the quality of strangeness mixed with beauty—richly evocative and mysterious, like a dream, set in the exotic lands of the imagination, and distinctive also for their melancholy, minor-key melodies enhanced by the arrangements of chamber pop master Billy Strange. Hazlewood’s deep baritone served as the perfect complement to Sinatra’s sweet mellow tone, but his role as producer was equally important for their success. It is important to acknowledge that by the time the two began recording together in the late summer of 1965, the figure of the record producer had become a distinctive part of the musical equation, distinguishing himself less by what he captured<i> </i>than by the performance he artfully created, or rather, one he <i>staged</i> in order to capture. When Lee Hazlewood produced Nancy Sinatra’s massive hits in the mid-60s, he was not only recording an artist, but a sonic concept as well.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">To t</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">hink of Hazlewood as a director and Sinatra as his star challenges one of pop music’s foundational myths: that performances are “captured,” not made. But with the introduction and rise of magnetic tape (mono, three-track and four-track), recording began increasingly to resemble cinematic acting. In the 1960s, for instance, Glenn Gould shocked the world of classical music when he openly acknowledged that the recordings on his LPs were spliced together from multiple “takes,” comprised of different recorded versions of the same material. The best of these takes were spliced together to create the final release. Gould compared the process of recording to that of filmmaking, in which scenes are frequently shot out of sequence and then pieced together in the editing room. (See Glenn Gould, “The Prospects of Recording.”</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">High Fidelity Magazine</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">16.4 (1966), pp. 46–63) “In the vocabulary of film studies,” writes music critic Michael Jarrett, “the [record] producer’s purview is the </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">mise-en-scéne</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">, in all of that term’s mystery.” (See Michael Jarrett’s excellent book,</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Producing Country: The Inside Story of the Great Recordings</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2014, p. 37)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Others in the music industry concur that the record producer is, in key ways, analogous to a film director. Bobby Braddock, producer of Blake Shelton’s first five albums, elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame as a songwriter—and who wrote “Did You Ever,” a hit for Nancy and Lee in 1972—remarks: “I always tell people, if they want to know the job of a music producer, I say, ‘Think of it this way: a director is to film as a producer is to recording.” Pete Anderson, guitarist and producer for Dwight Yoakam, insists that a record producer wears “a multitude of hats, but basically, it’s two jobs. One, you’re very much like the director of a film. You work on the script or the songs. You choose the cinematographer or the engineer. You get the locations or the studio. You help cast the actors or the musicians. You work with their performances. Everything that a director would do in a film is very much what a record producer does.” Similarly, Craig Street, who has produced records for both k. d. Lang and Norah Jones, notes that while the artist is “always the boss,” it is to the producer that others on the project turn for answers, and individual producers, like film directors, have different styles. “Some producers lead with an iron fist, just like some film directors—Hitchcock. ‘This is how it goes. This is how it is storyboarded. This is exactly what we do.’”</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Finally, songwriter, musician, and music archivist, Marshall Crenshaw, likens record producer Billy Sherrill’s production of Tammy Wynette’s hit songs to Alfred Hitchcock’s films. “The records rise and fall and have so much drama in them,” also “exploding at certain moments.” (Quotations from Braddock, Anderson, Street, and Crenshaw are taken from Michael Jarrett,</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Producing Country, </i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">pp. 33-36)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">During the making of the great Nancy and Lee records, Lee Hazlewood was not only frequently her fellow performing artist; he served as writer, too, and—in his role as producer (director)—chose the location (the particular studio) for Nancy Sinatra, his star. For these productions, the recording or sound engineer, analogous to the cinematographer, was Eddie Brackett, Jr. (a “brilliant” recording engineer, according to legendary music producer, Jimmy Bowen). (Jimmy Bowen and Jim Jerome,</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Rough Mix: An Unapologetic Look at the Music Business and How It Got That Way</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997, p. 89) The art/set director was arranger/conductor, Billy Strange. Since this was a period before bands commonly played on their own records, the supporting cast of performers consisted of top L.A. session musicians. All of these individuals were essential to the success of Nancy and Lee’s records.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Nancy Sinatra, however, enjoyed considerable control over the recording process, as well. It was she, for instance, who insisted on recording what would become her most famous hit of all time, a song composed by Hazlewood, “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” (1965), despite Hazlewood’s initial protestations that the song was written to be sung by a man. Nancy Sinatra prevailed, and “Boots” became her first No. 1 pop hit—the song’s appeal, insists Richie Unterberger, deriving from the fact that it is “half-menace and half-camp.” (Richie Unterberger, <i>Unknown Legends of Rock’n’Roll: Psychedelic Unknowns, Mad Geniuses, Punk Pioneers, Lo-Fi Mavericks & More</i>. San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1998, p. 132) It was this song that established Nancy and Lee's long, lucrative creative partnership.</span></div>
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<span style="color: yellow; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Co-Authored with Rebecca A. Umland</span></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright 2020 by Samuel J. Umland</div>Sam Umlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14327376115570876540noreply@blogger.com0