Orchestral Arcana

Recently, in listening to records and attending concerts, I've become more aware of differences in orchestral layout, and in particular the advantages of dividing the violin sections: first violins on the conductor's left, second violins on his right. This is not the standard layout, but it's becoming more and more popular, and I'll sometimes find that a conductor and/or orchestra has "converted" to the seating.

Up until the early part of the 20th century, most composers would have expected the violin sections to be divided left and right, and they accordingly wrote in a lot of antiphonal effects, with themes thrown back and forth between the violin sections. Elgar's "Enigma Variations" has many such effects; the second variation, "H.D.S-P.," begins with the first violins playing a phrase that is then echoed by the seconds, and the variation mostly consists of the firsts and seconds bouncing phrases back and forth. When the violins are divided, as they would have been in Elgar's time, this is a great antiphonal effect, as you can hear in recordings by Adrian Boult and Pierre Monteux. When the first and second violins are seated together on the conductor's left, this effect doesn't really come off, and on a recording, it's completely lost (because it's hard to hear the first and second violins as distinct sections). There are many other examples, e.g. Mahler's ninth symphony, where the opening theme is begun by the second violins, not the first violins, which -- with divided violins -- has an element of surprise built into it, because the tune isn't coming from the side of the hall that we subconsciously expect a violin melody to come from.

As illustrated here, Leopold Stokowski (in the '30s with the Philadelphia Orchestra) was the one who really popularized the practice of seating all the violins together on the left; he did it, in part, to create a big, rich, string-heavy sound. Record producers liked the seating because it made an orchestra easier to record (I'm not sure of the technical reasons for this). More importantly, violinists liked it because it made it easier for one section to hear the other, and because it didn't require the second violinists to sit, in effect, with their backs to the audience. I think the split-violin seating became more and more inconvenient as orchestras got bigger and bigger.

So with a combination of pressure from the musicians and the record companies, and probably other factors that I'm not remembering right now, more and more conductors started switching to the massed-violin setup. But it was kind of gradual. For example, in Fritz Reiner's earliest stereo recordings with the Chicago symphony, you can hear that the violins are divided left and right; a few years later he stopped doing it. The ironic thing is that by the time stereo recording came in, there were few split-violin setups around to take advantage of stereo separation.

There were a few holdouts who just refused to give up the divided-violin seating. Toscanini did it to the end of his life (though he didn't get to record in stereo, so you can't tell this on his recordings); so did Otto Klemperer; so did Pierre Monteux; and so did Adrian Boult. Boult actually wrote a letter to the GRAMOPHONE magazine in the '60s, soliciting readers' opinions on whether he should continue with the seating; he'd gotten so many complaints from orchestral violinists who didn't like the seating that he was unsure whether it was worth going on with it. Among younger conductors, Rafael Kubelik was one who liked the divided-violin seating enough that he tried to use it with any orchestra that would let him (all his recordings with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, including his Mahler cycle, use the seating).

The seating started to creep back in in the late '70s/early '80s, but it was a haphazard thing. Now it seems to be gradually on its way to becoming the norm again. Most of the period-instrument groups use the setup most of the time. Among the modern-instrument conductors who have adopted the setup are James Levine (with the Met orchestra), Michael Tilson Thomas (in San Francisco), Riccardo Muti (at La Scala) and Daniel Barenboim (in Chicago).

You All Remember the Catchphrase

One of the many interesting things about the late Rodney Dangerfield is that he was an old-fashioned comic who became a star at a time when his kind of comedy was all but dead. He became famous late in life, and the style of stand-up comedy he practiced was the style associated with, say, Bob Hope: go out on stage and make a series of pre-packaged, traditionally structured jokes, one after the other. By the time Dangerfield's comedy career really got on track, stand-up comedians were in rebellion against this joke-oriented, vaudeville-influenced type of comedy, and leaning more toward lines that got laughs from observation or sheer sound and rhythm, rather than jokes and patter. Dangerfield seemed like a throwback; he'd come out and make jokes that could have been told by Henny Youngman, and some of which probably were.

What kept Dangerfield from seeming creaky or too old-fashioned was that he took the joke-oriented style and turned all the jokes on himself. Most traditional jokes are about other people, about the awfulness of the joke-teller's wife/mother-in-law/friends/boss. A Henny Youngman line like "My wife divorced me for religious differences -- she worshipped money and I didn't have any" is somewhat self-depracating but it's more of a put-down of the wife. Dangerfield turned almost every joke on himself, putting himself down constantly and making his own failings, not other people's failings, the point of the joke. He came off as the dark side of the Greatest Generation, the older guy who has the same depression and lack of self-esteem that you do. He's the old-fashioned comic for the post-1960s era, the jokester who tells jokes not out of a sense of cultural confidence but out of insecurity. He'll be missed.

...Who Lives On a Ranch With His Mom

And speaking of bad men: While I was sick, I rented the first two seasons of Dallas. First things first, here's my attempt to put lyrics to the theme song*:

J.R., J.R., deceit is his hobby,
He's always up for a scam.
J.R., J.R., he'll stick it to Bobby,
Maybe he'll sleep with Pam.
J.R., J.R., he's truly a Ewing,
Doing harm near and far.
You'll be destroyed if you get him annoyed,
So try to avoid J.R.

I really hadn't watched Dallas when it was on, though I found, when I watched some of the episodes, that I was nonetheless familiar with most of the essential points: J.R.'s scheming, Cliff's wussiness, Pam's bug-eyed fits, Bobby's terrifying hair. These are things that are so much a part of the pop-culture consciousness that we can't help being aware of them, at least on a subconscious level; it's like people who have never watched Friends can probably still describe it fairly accurately.

Nobody needs me to describe the pros of Dallas (J.R., the backstabbing, the over-the-top emotion, the sheer fun) and the cons (cheesy dialogue, cheesy plots, Victoria Principal's acting, Patrick Duffy's hair). The one thing I have to say is that, after watching some episodes, it occurs to me that Dallas not only revived the prime-time soap, it might have helped to change the prime-time drama.

For most of the '50s, '60s and '70s, TV dramas consisted entirely of self-contained episodes, with no overlap from one to the next. This was partly something the networks insisted on, not wanting characters to change too much and not wanting people to be confused if they were tuning in for the first time. But it was also an aesthetic thing: the gold standard of TV drama was considered to be the anthology show, with self-contained stories, and the lowest of the low was the lowly soap opera, with stories that continued on and on. The makers of prime-time TV drama aspired to be more like anthology shows than soaps, and that meant avoiding "soapiness," including any attempt to carry over a storyline into subsequent episodes.

Dallas started out with more or less self-contained stories, and got soapier as the years went on. But it was never as much a pure soap opera as previous prime-time soaps. Peyton Place was a soap opera, through and through: the episodes didn't even have titles, and they consisted of a bunch of scenes advancing separate storylines that would never end. Dallas was more a hybrid of drama and soap: each episode had its own overall story that would be more or less resolved within the hour (J.R. hatches some scheme. Flip a coin whether this is "J.R. succeeds" week or "J.R. gets his comeuppance" week), but strung through that story would be soap-style ongoing story points that would be continued and developed in future episodes. That basic format was picked up by many of the "arc" dramas that arrived in the '80s and '90s, shows like Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere and The Sopranos and Buffy: soap-style story arcs strung through a series of self-contained episodes. What had once been scorned as too soapy -- and there were other reasons for scorning the arc format; some TV veterans felt taht the story-arc format gave the showrunner too much power to set stories, and froze out freelance contributors, and I think they may have had a point -- bacame the preferred format for the TV show with high-art aspirations. Did that start with the gleefully low-art Dallas? I don't know, but it would be interesting to look more closely into that.

*I should give props to the episode of King of the Hill where a character sings his own parody version: "J.R., J.R., he's a really bad guy/Who lives on a ranch with his mom."

The Bad Man Theory

I was going to write this after the U.S. presidential election, but by then everyone will be preoccupied with the inevitable recount in several counties in Delaware. So I might as well write something now. (By the way, "Delaware" is the state that has, for some reason, become a comedy punchline. You just say "Delaware" and people laugh.)

It's no secret that political art -- specifically, anti-Bush art -- has become big in the last, well, four years. For example, I read a magazine story about political plays currently being mounted around the U.S.; different titles, different stories, but every single one of them was about how much the author hates a) Bush, b) Halliburton, c) Christians, d) White guys in suits. Anyway, what interests me is, what's going to happen if the Democrats get in? Well, the answer is that there will probably be "political" plays and books dealing with the evils of b) c) and d). But some of the fervour will go out of political art, all around the world, and if the Republicans are ever voted out of control of the House and Senate, still more of that fervour will evaporate.

The tone of recent political art is usually described as "Bush-hating," but that's not wholly accurate; Tony Kushner doesn't hate Bush any more than he hates anyone else to his right. The characteristic of political art in the last decade or two has been what I would call the "Bad Man Theory" of political art. This states that society's problems are caused by bad people doing bad things out of bad motives, and the purpose of political art is to expose the bad people and the bad things. "Balance" is achieved by showing that maybe the good people are too complacent and not doing enough to stop the bad people. And the grand theme is that if only there were fewer bad people doing bad things, the world wouldn't be so bad.

This kind of art is inevitably created along party-political lines: inevitably because if you postulate that Republicans are bad people with bad motives, then the solution is to replace them with someone who doesn't have bad motives. This particular kind of political art has always been around, of course, but I think it really got off the ground in the '80s, with anti-Thatcher plays in England (one or two of them even created by theatre professionals who didn't vote for her the first time around). These plays surveyed the immense, complicated, decades-in-the-making problems in British society and concluded that they were all caused because the British people voted in the wrong party in 1979. American culture, late as usual, didn't really catch up with this kind of political art until 1994, when the ascention of the Republican House and Senate created a convenient target, setting the stage for the global explosion of Bad-Man art since January 2001.

The problem with this kind of political art is, first of all, that it dates really quickly. This is because when you associate society's problems with a bad man, or even a bad political party, you wind up turning art into policy-wonkery. Good political art acknowledges that there are no easy answers. Policy analysis in a democratic society, by its very nature, has an easy answer: vote this guy out. Or even: change this policy. With the exception of a few songs here and there, I can't think of a good piece of art from the '60s that's dedicated to a policy analysis of the Vietnam War. But the '60s did produce several fine anti-war movies, including The Americanization of Emily, which is not anti-war in a policy-analysis kind of way (as in "stop this war"), but in a more theoretical and complicated way, questioning the wisdom of war, not of a war.

The other problem with Bad-Man art is that it's not even particularly effective propaganda. Good propaganda art must convince people that the artist's preferred position is right, and the other side is wrong. But Bad-Man art is so hung up on motives -- on the idea that the Bad Men are doing that they do for bad reasons -- that it spends too much time on questioning motives and not enough time questioning actions. Put it this way: even if you can prove that a politician did something for a bad purpose (making money, controlling the supply of black gooey stuff), this does not, in itself, prove that it was a bad thing to do. In other words, exposing someone's "hidden motive" is a poor substitute for questioning the wisdom of the official, stated motive. The hang-up with motives, the belief that anything bad has to be done for bad motives, is both ahistorical -- some very good things have been done out of greed; some very bad things have been done out of noble intentions -- and irrelevant. Again, take The Americanization of Emily: Paddy Chayefsky isn't concerned with showing us that wars are fought for less-than-noble reasons. He's more interested in the opposite point -- that the "noble" and "good" stuff about war doesn't make it any better, but worse, a prettified justification for slaughter.

Rejecting the Bad Man Theory doesn't mean that political art shouldn't have a point of view or that it should bend over backward to show the "other side." What it means is that good political art is not about good people vs. bad people, let alone my political party vs. yours. It's about serious political ideas embodied in a story or picture -- and when dealing with ideas, as opposed to political platforms, the artist often discovers that the idea leads him to conclusions that would please neither political party. (See under Shaw, George Bernard.) And perhaps most importantly, it's about acknowledging that some problems are bigger than just the ascention of people you don't like, and that they will continue no matter what political party is ascendant.

After writing some of the above, I found an old article by Andrew Ferguson that says some of the same things, though more about journalism than art. Ferguson, whose work has heavily influenced writers like P.J. O'Rourke and Christopher Buckley, is primarily a journalist, albeit a funny one (he wrote a great long piece a decade ago about "diversity training" in corporations: a hilarious study of rich white people paying other rich white people to tell them how horrible rich white people are). He writes political punditry as well, but he's not a hack at it; he's willing to criticize Bush, albeit from the right.

Anyway, one of my favorites among Ferguson's articles was one he wrote in January of 2001, just as George W. Bush was about to assume office. Noting that the Clinton era was rarely referred to as a "decade of greed," and that many of the problems that worried commentators during the Reagan years seemed to fade from view during the Clinton years, Ferguson predicted -- quite accurately -- how stories about homelessness and income inequality would become more prevalent with a Republican in the White House. The point of the piece is not that these things aren't worth worrying about, and I don't even think of it as a partisan political piece. It is, rather, a satire of the way we tend to assume that everything depends on the identity of the man at the top, and that everything changes when we change leaders. Again, it's the Bad Man theory: the political situation is defined primarily by whether we like to politicians or not. Some excerpts:

For the last decade we have been without a Mark Twain or Upton Sinclair, a Mencken or Sinclair Lewis or Dos Passos, without even a Christopher Lasch or some other jowly Jeremiah worrying aloud about the debilitations of affluence. In place of the adversary culture a small army of courtier journalists arose, panting to celebrate the newly rich, to sing hymns to their taste and sensitivity, to their compassion, their self-knowledge, their spirituality, their dynamism, their willingness to "think outside the box," their egalitarianism, their refusal to wear ties to work -- all the admirable traits that earlier rich guys, from John D. Rockefeller to Michael Milken, had somehow lacked. Baby boomer rich people, we learned, were "dynamists" operating in the realm of "pure possibility." They were wise, they were visionary, they struggled admirably under the mighty weight of their social consciences. Plus they had pots and pots of money.

All of this is about to end. And not merely because of the weary stock market and the slowly deflating economy. For psychological reasons that I am not qualified to diagnose, it is difficult for the verbal class to criticize the accumulation of wealth when the country is being presided over by a liberal Democrat -- and, more importantly, when it is liberals who are piling up the wealth. (Liberals pile up wealth much more tastefully than right-wingers.) The actual facts of the situation are irrelevant; this is a matter of how the national life is presented and interpreted. The billions wasted in the Clinton years on the dot-com delusion, for example, were surely as misdirected as the billions sunk into "junk bonds" in the 1980s; yet one was daring and bold (if overenthusiastic), while the other was intolerable, wasteful, even immoral. The difference lay not in the facts but in the attitude of the people who presented them.

Journalists, you can be sure, are about to rediscover greed. Avarice is on the comeback trail. There will be something suspect -- something gross and declasse -- about the first fortunes to be made in the era just beginning. With the new President Bush in the White House, we're going to see the reemergence of all kinds of things we haven't seen since -- well, since the old President Bush was in the White House. Avarice and selfishness are just the beginning. Say hello to homelessness, for instance: We are about to see a horrifying deterioration in the plight of our nation's street people. We haven't heard much -- anything, really -- about the homeless since, oh, roughly January 20, 1993. As it happens, the number of people living on steam grates has remained pretty much constant from the middle 1980s, when they filled the airwaves and graced the cover of countless magazines, to the present day, when they are all but forgotten. They are about to be remembered.

Twinned with homelessness, hunger will quickly become intolerable in the United States -- which is, as we are doomed to be often reminded, the richest country in the history of humankind... Curiously, and greatly to their credit, the only public figures in the past decade who have tried to draw attention to hunger in Bill Clinton's America have been functionaries of Bill Clinton's Department of Housing and Urban Development. They were ignored. Soon, though, they'll find work in privately financed organizations with names like the Emergency Coalition for Feeding the Children. And at last their cries will be heard.

Hunger and homelessness -- scandalous though they will suddenly be -- will be mere symptoms of what will be understood as the defining problem of the Bush era: the gap between rich and poor. This is yet another affliction that almost vanished in the last decade. Only a few left-wingers, consigned to the margins of the political conversation, were rude enough to note that the gap remained obdurately large. Their day, too, has finally come. They will point out that X percent of the population (the figure will vary, depending on whether you're reading the cover story in Business Week, the six-part series in the New York Times, or the special pull-out report in Newsweek; but the number will be teeny-tiny) owns XX percent of the nation's wealth (again the figure will vary, but it will be surprisingly close to 100 percent). And it will be getting worse. The statistic will also appear high up in stories about "deindustrialization." Tough, brawny old industries began to wither away in the 1980s, causing much human anguish and inspiring several Pulitzer Prizes for feature writing. The process of deindustrialization was then put on hold for eight years. It is poised to resume, as once-proud breadwinners are pressed into jobs flipping hamburgers...

Then again, the Bush era may not begin so quickly. It may take a couple of years. But gradually a picture will emerge, and the newly revitalized adversary culture will paint it in the most lurid colors. We will find ourselves in a divided nation, torn between a decadent and meretricious elite and a lower class struggling just to get by, afflicted with homelessness and rampant hunger, preyed upon by corporate raiders at home and sinister forces from abroad, while a heartless government in Washington obsesses over imagined threats. (Did I mention that the Pentagon is about to start wasting money again?) The picture will be one of a nation in decline, and without much prodding Prof. Paul Kennedy and maybe even Kevin Phillips (authors, respectively, of the Reagan-era classics The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and The Politics of Rich and Poor) will be coaxed from retirement. In time our unhappy social critics will look to a leader -- a politician, a governor, perhaps a United States senator -- who will reluctantly come forward to offer a means of rescue, who will argue that the decline doesn't have to continue forever, who will boldly assert that America's greatest days are still ahead.

And she'll be right.

It Couldn't Please Me More

Has any hit musical been re-worked, revised and overhauled as often as Cabaret? I guess the prize goes so some of the pre-Oklahoma! musicals, like Anything Goes, which is always revived in a form that has little relationship to the original show (the original version is better, by the way). But shows from the '60s are usually revived with more or less the original text; a revisionist approach to Fiddler on the Roof involves some dialogue and staging tweaks, not a rewrite. But even though Cabaret was a big hit, ran for three years and got great reviews, it keeps getting rewritten; the most recent revival, the Sam Mendes version, completely changed the staging concept, dropped several songs and added several others, and so on.

The strange thing about this is that the original version of Cabaret is not in desperate need of revisal. Joe Masteroff's book is probably the best of any '60s musical,balancing humor and drama in the best tradition of the Serious Musical Comedy; the score is a solid mix of character songs and ironic cabaret numbers commenting on the plot scenes; there's even a spectacular dance number, "The Telephone Song," that is usually cut these days. It's a true ensemble show, with four parts of more or less equal stature -- Cliff and Sally are the nominal leads, but in terms of time onstage and musical opportunities they're about even with the nominal supporting couple, Herr Schultz and Fraulein Schneider -- and a juicy supporting part, the M.C. In most revivals, the parts of Sally and the M.C. are artificially inflated by adding new songs, including songs from the movie version, so that the sense of balance among the cast members and stories is completely lost, and what should be a supporting device (the ironic interludes with the M.C.) somehow becomes the focus of the show.

Other indignities afflicted on Cabaret include the cutting of "Why Should I Wake Up?" Cliff's only solo and a thematically essential song, about giving in to the temptation to shut your eyes to what's really going on around you. It's also a brilliant bit of character writing on the part of the lyricist, the late Fred Ebb; it's a love song, but one appropriate for a character who's self-consciously in denial, consisting of questions that he doesn't answer, and doesn't want answered:

Why should I wake up?
Why waste a drop of the wine?
Don't I adore you
And aren't you mine?

Part of the reason Cabaret gets rewritten so much is the desire to bring it in line with the movie version. I don't like the movie version much; I think it has a dull script, too much cutting in the musical numbers, not enough musical numbers, and Liza Minnelli -- all major liabilities. But the movie was hugely acclaimed as the risky, gritty piece of work that the Broadway show should have been, and it created the desire, still ongoing, to make Cabaret "grittier." I don't see why it should be; Cabaret is about the way show business glitz -- and that includes Broadway musicals as much as Weimar cabaret -- distracts us from a society going to hell, just as the characters find their own ways to keep themselves distracted or in denial. To make the cabaret a seedy, sleazy place is to miss that point, and to kill the self-conscious parallel with Broadway musicals (the M.C. welcomes us not to "The Cabaret," but just "to Cabaret": he's the host of a cabaret within a Broadway show called Cabaret). In the original production, the cabaret was a rather glamorous place, the girls really were beautiful, even the orchestra was beautiful. It was only gradually that the audience caught on to the way the cabaret numbers, in all their glamour, re-enforce the bad things that are going on in the plot scenes: a scene of Cliff agreeing to do something wrong for money is followed by the M.C. singing "The Money Song" (not the version from the movie), praising the joy of making all the money you can and not caring about anyone else. The cabaret is a triumph of style over substance -- much like a lot of Broadway musicals. That parallel goes out the window when you try to make the cabaret ugly and decadent.

I sometimes get the feeling, reading articles and such on Cabaret, that the original, real version is not so much evaluated as assigned a place in a pre-set storyline (critics and historians love to impose a storyline on theatre history). In this storyline, Cabaret is the show that tentatively introduced some innovations, but copped out from its sworn duty to be "advanced" by including stuff like two romantic couples, comedy scenes, charm, and by not being grubby and ugly. Along came the movie to display the "courage" that the original Cabaret should have had, and finally the new, improved, super-gritty Sam Mendes version.

The problem with this storyline, quite apart from the issue of what the hell being "advanced" has to do with quality (critics should be barred from using terms like "old-fashioned" or "forward-looking" as terms of praise or blame) is that some of the best parts of the original Cabaret are the character songs and lighthearted scenes and other old-fashioned stuff that the movie trashed.

Of course, this blinkered view of the original Cabaret comes as much from Hal Prince, the show's producer-director, as anybody. In his autobiography, Contradictions, Prince writes:

We persuaded ourselves that the musical comedy audience required a sentimental heterosexual love story with an beginning, middle and end to make the concept palatable. Not content with that, we added Lotte Lenya and and Gilford in a subordinate love story...in my opinion we were wrong. The plotless musical might not have worked, but had it, the whole project would have been consistent with its aspirations. If we had Cabaret to do all over again, I believe we would have made the audacious choice.

Not long after Cabaret, Prince made the "audacious choice," teaming up with Stephen Sondheim for a series of musicals that were "consistent with their aspirations" and, not coincidentally, didn't enjoy anything like the success of Cabaret. But success aside, Prince's comments, like quite a few other comments in his memoirs, strikes me as a load of pretentious crap, an elevation of "aspirations" over achievement. It reveals one of Prince's annoying traits that carries over into a lot of his work after Cabaret: The tendency to think that being audacious is more important than being good. Much of Prince's work has to do with overbearingly "audacious" concepts that he sticks to whether they work or not; whether it's inflating a nasty little melodrama into a gigantic, over-expensive production on an ugly set (Sweeney Todd), or slowing down a bittersweet romantic comedy with pretentious commentative asides (A Little Night Music), Prince is the master of effects without causes; the miracle of the original Cabaret is that the effects actually serve the story.

Anyway, to my mind the "conventional" parts of Cabaret are some of the best things about it, and it doesn't matter whether they're audacious or not. Even Prince doesn't argue that the Schneider-Schultz plot isn't good; he just doesn't like it because it's conventional. What a terrible reason to dislike something.

Similarly, at an earlier point in Contradictions, Prince more or less apologizes for including a comic subplot in Fiorello! (which he produced but didn't direct), but then goes on to explain why the subplot works in the context of the show: It provides some fictional characters with whom the authors could take more liberties than the real people; the subplot allows for dance in a mostly non-dancing show; it lightens up the show in spots where it threatens to get heavy. But then he adds: "How to achieve all this without [the subplot]? I have yet to figure that out, but if we were doing Fiorello! again today, we would have to." My question is (and was, when I wrote some of this on a message board -- if you read some of this before, sorry for the recycling), why would they have to? Because it's conventional? Because it's old-fashioned? These are not good reasons. But it does sum up why the original Cabaret isn't performed much: instead of being openly audacious and dull, it chooses to be subtly audacious and theatrically effective. A theatrically effective show? Not on Sam Mendes's watch.

Oh, I should probably bring up the issue of how the original musical makes Sally/Cliff into a conventional heterosexual romance. Except I really don't see why it should be considered an issue. This is Cabaret, not Christopher Isherwood's stories, let alone his life. Changing Cliff around to bring him in line with Isherwood just confuses and weakens Masteroff's well-written, well-structured script. Leave it alone.

Queenan on the Civil War

Here's a link to my favorite piece on Civil-War buffery (buffdom?), Joe Queenan's The Civil War Sucks! Since this piece was published in 1994, Queenan has kind of run his guy-who-hates-everything schtick into the ground; most of his books and essays in the last decade are basically rehashes of his early work for Spy (which no longer exists) and Movieline (which has changed its name). For a while, his literary persona, as a smart guy enraged by the feeble bromides and second-rate tastes of Middle America (tm), was extremely entertaining; the problem is that it's a limited target, and because Queenan doesn't have much ability to make fun of things he actually likes -- he can mock Merchant-Ivory or Woody Allen or other midcult bores, but when it comes to moviemakers he likes, he mostly just nods respectfully and becomes another bland thumbs-upper -- he doesn't have a lot of material to work with. But his best stuff, like the Civil War piece and "Mickey Rourke For a Day," an account of a day he spent imitating Mickey Rourke (dark glasses, angry attitude, copious use of the word "motherfucker"), is still extremely funny, as long as you're not too attached to his chosen target.

DVD Review: TAXI: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON

I borrowed an advance copy of Taxi: The Complete First Season, due from Paramount on October 12. As with Paramount's other recent TV-on-DVD sets, there are no extras, which seems a shame when so many interesting people were involved with the show; who wouldn't like a commentary by co-creator James L. Brooks, or Danny DeVito (Louie), or Andy Kaufman (assuming he really did fake his own death)? However, the lack of extras allows these older shows to be marketed at a relatively low price, and unlike Columbia -- which puts out a lot of old sitcoms in bad-looking DVD versions -- Paramount seems to know what's what when it comes to remastering its older shows for DVD.

Taxi was always one of the best-looking sitcoms ever made; director James Burrows found ingenious ways to overcome the limitations of the three-camera, studio-audience format and give the show a realistic look, almost more like a movie where most sitcoms look like stageplays. On this DVD set, it looks splendid: clean, bright, well-defined, obviously taken from the best possible prints. The episodes are at their original length -- about 24 minutes and 30 seconds. And that's the point of TV on DVD: to see a favorite show without syndication cuts, and looking better than it does in syndication. The 22 episodes are presented in production order, as opposed to airing order.

Since, as I said in another post, all Hollywood projects can be described as "X meets Y," Taxi can be described as "Mary Tyler Moore meets Barney Miller." It was created by a group of people from MTM productions who had jumped ship for Paramount: Brooks, Ed. Weinberger, Stan Daniels, and David Davis were all from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. James Burrows, the director for all 22 episodes of season 1, had directed for MTM's The Bob Newhart Show, and Taxi's most prolific writers, Glen and Les Charles, had written for Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart. (The Charles brothers and Burrows would go on to create the heavily Taxi-influenced Cheers.) Having spent so many years doing shows focusing on women, like Mary and Rhoda, Brooks said at the time that he wanted to do an ensemble sitcom focusing primarily on men, like Barney Miller. Set in the most ethnically-homogenous cab company in New York, Taxi was definitely a show about guys; there's a token female character, Elaine (Marilu Henner), but, in many of the first-season episodes, she's less a character than the designated spokesperson for all the things that the guys have trouble with: being honest, expressing their emotions, and generally doing the right thing.

But Taxi was primarily a show about lovable losers. It was a bit darker than most sitcoms of the time, especially in the first season. Most sitcoms are about people who are more or less happy, but face a problem and have to resolve it by the end of the half-hour. Taxi is about people who aren't particularly happy, and a lot of episodes deal with them getting their hopes up, only to see them crushed: in an early episode, "One-Punch Banta," pathetic wannabe prizefighter Tony Banta (Tony Danza) thinks he's finally won a fight, only to discover that his opponent took a dive. What keeps the characters from being depressing is that none of them have given up hope of getting out of cab driving and fulfilling their dreams, and that's the optimistic note that is struck at the end of some episodes: they may not have made the big time, but they still have hope. Alex (Judd Hirsch), the central character, is one who comes the closest to giving up hope altogether -- he's the only character who defines himself as a career cab driver, rather than someone who just happens to be doing this as a sideline -- but in the pilot, he acknowledges that giving up is just a way of taking the easy way out; it's hard but more fulfilling to keep on trying. When, at the end of the pilot episode, Alex has a tender moment with his estranged daughter (who is the subject of the first of the show's many jokes about Judd Hirsch's nose), it sort of sums up the theme of Taxi: life may not give you what you want, but it's worth trying and taking chances just to get a moment's worth of happiness or victory. These aren't winners, but they have their winning moments.

The first season of Taxi is a bit different from the later seasons. Partly because it's darker; there are more of those lovable-loser stories, whereas as the show went on it started to include more wacky and surreal humor. It's a similar trajectory to that of Brooks' The Simpsons: it starts as a fairly realistic series with a harder edge than most sitcoms, and then gets a little nuttier and sillier every year. The source of much of the nuttiness was Reverend Jim (Christopher Lloyd), and he only appears in one episode, as a guest character in "Paper Marriage," where Latka marries a call girl in order to keep from being deported. Lloyd was so funny in this role that he became a regular in season 2, displacing John Burns (Randall Carver), an innocent-in-the-big-city character who wasn't very interesting; the two episodes focusing on him are two of the weakest of the season.

The best episodes tend to be the ones written by the Charles Brothers; they include two terrific Latka episodes, the aforementioned "Paper Marriage" and "Mama Gravas," where Alex sleeps with Latka's mother (Alex: "What we did was indiscreet." Latka: "You mean not even indoors?"), and a strange and weirdly touching Elaine episode, "Elaine and the Lame Duck," about Elaine's relationship with a clumsy U.S. congressman with low self-esteem, hilariously played by Jeffrey Tambor. The set concludes with the two-parter "Memories of Cab 804," the first of several two-part episodes where each cabbie tells his or her own story (they would later do episodes with each cabbie's fantasies, the job each cabbie does while laid off, and so on).

While I definitely think that Taxi got better as it went on -- the increasingly surreal humor, combined with the realistic setting, made it different from any other sitcom, and the addition of Reverend Jim really strengthened the cast -- the first season is still well worth picking up; it looks great, contains many excellent episodes, and contains the one thing without which life is not complete: the sight of Louie DePalma (DeVito) in his cage, screaming at people.

Also, in case this is a deciding factor for some of you, Marilu Henner goes bra-less in several episodes. This was de rigeur on ABC shows in the late '70s: Charlie's Angels, Three's Company, possibly Barney Miller (you think Fish wore a bra when he dressed up as a woman for mugging detail?)... basically, if there wasn't at least one bra-less person on an ABC show, they got a personal reprimand from Fred Silverman.

Special Edition Fever

The news that Fox is preparing a special edition DVD of Mike Judge's Office Space has pleased a lot of people -- particularly those who, like me, held off on buying the not-very-special-edition DVD in the belief that a special edition would come soon. There's a joke on DVD discussion forums that if you want a special edition of a movie, all you have to do is buy the "bare-bones" DVD, and a special edition will automatically be announced the next day.

The terms "special features" and "special edition" have been, shall we say, devalued over the last few years; I've seen DVDs where subtitles and closed captions are listed under "special features." But they've become a near-essential part of the DVD experience, and I think, to be honest, that sometimes I buy a disc more for the special features than for the movie. Not that I'd buy a movie I don't like enough to watch more than once (I'm a compulsive re-watcher and re-reader, so DVD is perfect for me: pop in my disc of Foreign Correspondent, skip a few chapters, and watch that guy getting shot in the face for the umpteenth time). But when buying a movie that I've already seen, I naturally start with the "new" stuff on the disc: the commentaries, the documentaries, the other frills. I especially like it when a DVD finds some extras to include that aren't commentaries or documentaries, standard making-of stuff; I like extras that are related to the movie but are about something other than how the movie got made. For example, the Office Space special edition will presumably include the animated cartoon that the movie is based on. Warner Brothers DVDs often includes cartoons and short films from the WB and MGM vaults; one that's actually related to the film is a short musical film on the DVD of Meet Me in St. Louis, featuring a jazzy rewriting of "Skip to My Lou" written and performed by the Martins, a quartet led by Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin (the master of wacky '40s vocal arrangements). Martin and Blane incorporated this arrangement, almost unchanged, into Meet Me in St. Louis, which explains why the guests at a turn-of-the-century party wind up scat-singing.

Anyway, the point, assuming there is one, is that interesting special features can sometimes make the difference between a purchase and a non-purchase. And, psychologically, there's a tiny bit of stigma that attaches to buying a "bare-bones" disc. It's sort of: this movie didn't get any special features; they didn't find anybody to do a commentary on it, not even some dull movie critic; they just gave us the movie. What's wrong with this movie? Of course there are great movies that don't get special features and lots of terrible movies that do; but still, special features and "special editions" in general have become kind of a status symbol for a movie and those of us who buy them on DVD. That's part of the reason why we're willing to buy a special edition of a movie we already own; if we love a movie, we want to see it given some respect. And nothing says respect like an overpriced Crtierion DVD featuring audio commentary by some tenured film-school professor reading from pre-prepared notes. Right?

Out of Context

One of my favorite scenes in the movie Clueless is the scene where a pretentious college student quotes Shakespeare to back up some asinine point she's trying to make: "It's like Hamlet said, 'To thine own self be true.'" Cher (Alicia Silverstone), who saw the Mel Gibson version of Hamlet, points out that it was Polonius who said that, exposing the college student as a poseur who quotes works that she doesn't even remember accurately.

Anyway, "To thine own self be true" has to be the number-one "out of context" quotations -- literary quotations that are presented ironically or even unfavorably in context, but which are taken out of context and quoted as if they were supposed to be the author's pearls of wisdom. Polonius's big speech in Hamlet is one big collection of vapid cliches; "To thine own self be true," coming right at the end of the speech, is at once the biggest cliche of all and a perfect punchline (after many lines of setting out exactly how Laertes is supposed to behave, he tells him to be true to himself). To quote it as Shakespearian wisdom is to overlook the fact that Shakespeare didn't present the line as wisdom, he presented it as a joke.

Number two out-of-context quote is probably Shakespeare again: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers," which, as was pointed out on the TV version of -- yes -- Clueless, is spoken by a bad guy. (Though even in context, it's still a funny lawyer joke.) Number three is Browning's "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world," which comes off rather differently in the bizarre dramatic poem it appears in, since it's sung by an innocent mill-worker and overheard by a man in bed with a woman whose husband they just murdered (sort of Double Indemnity in Victorian verse and set in Italy).

She's a Fraud!

Getting sick is a good excuse to watch DVDs, because germs make you light-headed and disoriented, and therefore allows you to watch drug-trip movies in the proper frame of mind, but without the subsequent eating binges. However, I don't have any drug-trip movies on hand, so I had to settle for the 1938 film of Shaw's Pygmalion, with Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller.

The movie is half as long as the bloated film version of My Fair Lady and much more entertaining. The only real problem I have with it is the decision to update the setting to the time when the movie was made (so everybody dresses in 1938-type clothes, and "motor-bus" becomes just plain "bus"). I suppose it kept the budget down to be able to use contemporary settings instead of having to create old-fashioned sets and costumes, and I suppose that the updating was supposed to emphasize the timelessness of the story -- but the problem is, the story isn't all that timeless, or at least certain aspects of it feel anachronistic in the London of 1938, as opposed to the London of 25 years earlier.

For example, in 1913 you could accept that Colonel Pickering's well-meaning politeness -- "won't you sit down, Miss Doolittle?" -- is perhaps less of a solution to society's problems than Higgins' ruthlessness and rudeness; Pickering's a nice guy, but treating a flower girl as if she were a duchess just reinforces the class system, whereas Higgins' treating a duchess as if she were a flower girl is the kind of thing that could help break down the class system. Well, the class system still existed in 1938, of course, but in a 1938 context, Pickering's manners seem positively old-fashioned and quaint, not a status quo kind of thing but a nice throwback to a better-mannered age. With England's culture starting to become more ill-mannered, it's no longer clear that Higgins is a rebel; he's just another rude guy in a rude age. And if you tried to update Pygmalion to the England of 2004, Pickering would be the rebel and Higgins, at least in terms of his manners, would be firmly on the side of the status quo.

Another thing about the movie is that it was the basis for My Fair Lady; all the scenes that are in My Fair Lady but not in the play -- the ball scene, the "Rain in Spain" lesson, the ending -- come from the movie. I bring that up because Alan Lerner, in talking about how he adapted Pygmalion into a musical, always used to say that he solved the problem of adaptation by deciding to "show what was merely mentioned in the play"; in most of his interviews, he never mentioned that all these "new" scenes were from the movie version. (In his autobiography, he finally admitted that he had been "following the movie more than the play.") Another unacknowledged movie adaptation is The King and I: Oscar Hammerstein based his script directly on the script of the movie Anna and the King of Siam, yet the writers of that movie didn't get credit anywhere on the program, and most likely didn't get any royalties for the use of their material in the stage show (the Anna movie was owned by Fox, and Hammerstein got to use the material in exchange for Fox getting the movie rights). It seems as though writers like Hammerstein and Lerner didn't want to admit drawing on movie scripts for the musical versions, but I'm not sure why -- maybe they just wanted to get credit for doing such a good job of "opening up" the source material, and that meant not saying too much about the fact that the "opening up" had already been done by someone else.

One more word about the infamous ending of the Pygmalion movie (people often attack My Fair Lady for "tacking on" this ending, not realizing that it's lifted directly from the 1938 movie version). As is generally known, Shaw didn't want a romantic ending for Higgins and Eliza; his most famous statement about this is "I cannot conceive a less happy ending to the story of Pygmalion than a love affair between the middle-aged, middle-class professor, a confirmed old bachelor with a mother-fixation, and a flower girl of 18." For the movie version, producer Gabriel Pascal decided to create the romantic ending anyway, or at least a suggestion of possible romance. What I always find clever about the way he did this was that he managed to do it without writing any new dialogue -- and therefore, without violating Shaw's contract that "all dialogue" had to be written by Shaw. The final scene of the movie, and of My Fair Lady, consists entirely of lines from earlier in the play: Eliza's voice on a recording, followed by Eliza repeating one of her earlier lines ("I washed my face and hands before I come, I did"), followed by Higgins repeating one of his earlier lines ("Where the devil are my slippers?"). Voila, a whole new ending, the audience is happy, and the author can't sue.

Things That Sort of Suck: Testify, Archie!

Do you remember those vaguely religious Archie stories in the digests you read as a kid? The ones where Archie would meet an angelic girl who identified herself as "Gabriel," or where Betty ended the story by telling the others that we all need to learn to love and trust each other? Those stories were written and drawn by a cartoonist named Al Hartley, who became a born-again Christian in the late '60s and went to work for Archie comics around the same time -- in part, it seems, because he was no longer willing to draw violent or suggestive comics. He started working religious themes into his stories; when management asked him to cut it out, he did, but somehow got permission to license the Archie characters for an infamous series of Christian comics for the publisher Spire.

I found a link to a PDF Version of one of these comics. It's a pretty big file, so it may take awhile to load. It's a pretty spooky experience, especially because it starts out more or less like a regular Archie story and slowly, gradually, brings in all the religion until we're drowning in a sectarian sea. I never really read Christian comics before -- I have, mercifully enough, never even seen a Jack Chick tract -- and I don't know that I want to read one again. The combination of the drawing style Hartley used in his regular Archie comics (any kid could identify his work, though not his name, because of trademarks like having the characters throw tantrums with puffs of "anger smoke" around them) with that relentlessly happy religious message... well, it's not necessarily badly done, but it's certainly deeply, deeply strange and disturbing.

While I'm posting this under my usual label of "Things That Suck," this isn't really fair; I don't know enough of the Christian-comics world to be able to judge this kind of thing. Besides, it doesn't seem like a hellfire kind of thing, the sort of thing that would make me really nervous; it's more of a happy, upbeat, God-loves-us-all message. Hartley's regular Archie stories were like that; he was always putting in not messages about sin and stuff like that, but just about how we're all supposed to love each other. As a child, reading those stories and not realizing that they were supposed to be promoting Christian messages, I thought they were supposed to be hippie flower-power, universal-love messages. (A function of going to a Jewish school is that you wind up knowing more about hippies than Christians.) Since Hartley became a born-again Christian in the late '60s and started working for Archie about the same time, maybe that interpretation wasn't far off. I've always wanted to research whether the boom in born-again Christianity coincided with the rise of the flower-power movement; the two have more in common, culturally, than is now apparent.

But anyway, though I have to admit that Christian comics make me nervous, they are what they are: comics aimed at a particular audience. Nothing wrong with that, really. After all, when I was a kid I read Mendy and the Golem, and I turned out all right. Oh, wait -- no, I didn't. Well, I blame Mendy and the Golem comics for that.

Not Again!

So my Montreal Expos may become Washington Senators. Or, rather, "Washington Senators III: New Nightmare." I can't say I'm particularly sorry, because I haven't really followed the Expos for awhile. And I don't agree with this article that Montreal supported the Expos "loyally" until the 1994 debacle; unimpressive crowds were a staple of Olympic Stadium long before that. (The fact that the stadium kept falling apart didn't help.) It's time for the Expos to leave Montreal; the problem is that this seems like the worst possible move: a city that lost two teams already, a city with another major league team a short drive away, a stadium being built with a gun to the taxpayers' heads... geez. The only good thing about this is that it will allow for an updated revival of Damn Yankees, since the "Washington Senators" stuff will no longer be dated, and the stuff about the Yankees being evil and always winning, well, that never goes out of style.

More Underblogging

I'm fighting a cold (actually, the cold already won the fight, but I'm just too stubborn to accept it), which makes my already light blogging even lighter. I'll have some new stuff fairly soon, though.

An Honest Politician

I'm hardly going against the grain (choose whichever grain you prefer) by saying that I like Bob and Ray. During election season, one routine that always comes to my mind as one of their best is one called "Corrupt Mayor." Bob and Ray were primarily mass-media parodists -- they made their name by coming onto the radio and making deadpan fun of all the terrible stuff that you'd just heard on the radio that day: the soap operas, the sports programs, and, especially, news programming. Bob and Ray are the forefathers of the routines on shows like The Daily Show, where the correspondents play on our knowledge of the cliches of broadcast journalism, and of the lengths to which reporters and interviewees alike will go to keep from speaking plainly.

Anyway, the "Corrupt Mayor" routine, like many of Bob and Ray's routines, is set up as a mock news interview, with Bob as the interviewer and Ray as the interviewee. It's partly a parody of the typical bland interview where a politician discusses his life, except the politician happens to have led a life of total corruption. But the premise is also something like: what would happen if the people in a news interview really did speak plainly, without "spin" words (or whatever it used to be called before the term "spin" became popular) or denials? Some excerpts:

BOB: The story of this man's trial has been on the front pages of most of our nation's newspapers for several weeks now. He is the corrupt mayor of Skunk Haven, New Jersey, Mr. Ralph "Moody" Thayer. Mayor Thayer... to go back over your checkered career: you were a petty forger, a master swindler, a convicted embezzler --

RAY: Convicted of perjury several times.

BOB: ...Then after you completed your formal education, I believe you developed an interest in financial matters? Lending money?

RAY: Loan sharking. Yes, I did that for several years, until the criminal element in town asked me to run for public office. I took that as a mandate.

BOB: I remember that first election. It still stands as the crookedest in Skunk Haven history.

RAY: Thank you.

BOB: That was only the beginning, and now, through your various administrations, you've managed to riddle each and every department with corruption, from the top all the way through even to the visiting nurse association... Do you think it's easier to be corrupt now than it was, say, ten or fifteen years ago?

RAY: Oh, my, yes! Ten or fifteen years ago it was a disgrace to be corrupt. Now it's a rich, fertile field. I would recommend it to anyone with a devious mind, who is willing to put in long hours without working hard.

The routine was incorporated into Bob and Ray's Broadway show Bob and Ray, the Two and Only, though I would assume they'd done it on radio before that. There was a recording of The Two and Only -- that's where I heard it and most of Bob and Ray's other famous routines, like "Slow Talker" -- but now I notice that it no longer seems to be available from the Bob and Ray website. Oh, well. Here's a good overview of the work of Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding.

The MTM Kitten Meows Again

Randy Salas of the Minneapolis Star Tribune has a new article reporting that The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the most notorious sales flop in the short history of TV shows on DVD, is finally on track for a season 2 release, though whether it'll have extras -- extensive extras were prepared, but that was before season 1 under-performed -- is another question.

Salas also included a chart of how various classic TV shows have sold on DVD; it turns out that the first season of MTM didn't really sell that badly -- 85,000 copies, which isn't that far out of the usual figure for the first season of an older TV series. The problem, I think, was that Fox had had a big hit with the first season of M*A*S*H, which has now sold 550,000 copies (that's just the first season alone), an extraordinary figure for a show from 1972, bigger than most current shows. I'm not a big M*A*S*H fan, but its continued popularity is extraordinary and impressive, and probably set impossible expectations for other "classics" from Fox. So Fox released Mary Tyler Moore with the copious extras and marketing that they would give to a current show, only to find that it sold at the levels of, well, an old show. Hopefully they've now figured out how to make these releases work, and hopefully this will lead to the rest of Mary Tyler Moore as well as the other series from the MTM library.

Truth be told, though, I'm less fond of Mary Tyler Moore and the other MTM sitcoms than I used to be. In the '70s, MTM became synonymous with the "quality" sitcom, shot on film, dealing with youngish or at least vaguely hip people (even Bob Newhart wore plaid pants, which were apparently supposed to make him look cool to a '70s audience), more sophisticated and less loud and brash and obvious than the videotaped Norman Lear sitcoms. When I was growing up, MTM sitcoms were everywhere in syndication and the Lear stuff was almost nowhere to be seen; I remember one cable station ran All in the Family sometime in the '80s and then pulled it, and everyone I knew seemed to feel that all the yelling and topical references made it seem very dated. But now it seems that All in the Family is much more popular in reruns than The Mary Tyler Moore Show; the Lear sitcoms have sold well on DVD, and more and more sitcom producers talk about All in the Family, not Mary Tyler Moore, as their ideal of a sitcom: politically incorect, bold, loud, tough.

Mary Tyler Moore still holds up for me, at least from the third season onward (once they added several key writers, including David Lloyd and Ed. Weinberger, the overall quality of the writing took a big step forward). But a lot of the MTM shows now seem to drown in their own sophistication; they're so determined to be the thinking person's sitcom that they eschew physical comedy, farce, suggestive humor, and basically everything except a stream of not-terribly-funny one-liners. The early seasons of The Bob Newhart Show strike me as not funny at all (once Tom Patchett and Jay Tarses took over as showrunners, it got funnier), and Rhoda is kind of a trainwreck with or without the pathetic Joe (who vies with Stanley from Golden Girls as Most Emasculated Sitcom Husband).

In my opinion MTM's finest achievement, at least in sitcoms, was WKRP in Cincinnati, a show that sort of fused the MTM style (sophisticated ensemble workplace humor) with the Lear style (videotape, socially-conscious humor). That show will probably never come out on DVD, but because of music issues; in terms of popularity, it's probably ahead of any of the other MTM sitcoms, and -- according to MTM's founder, Grant Tinker -- made more money in syndication than any of them. And yet WKRP, because it wasn't in the "pure" MTM style, was looked down on by others at MTM, starting with Mary Tyler Moore herself, who, asked about WKRP, replied "Let me put it this way: I wouldn't watch it." A huffy TV Guide article from 1978 basically accused MTM of selling out by producing the show, and the charge was more or less repeated in various articles and books on MTM, including one called MTM: Quality Television. But to a large extent the sitcoms that hold up well are not the ones that have the slightly stultifying reputation of "Quality" sitcoms; "Quality," at least as critics apply the term to sitcoms, often comes across as meaning doing without all the lowbrow, vaudevillian, silly stuff that makes sitcoms what they are. That's not true of all MTM shows, but it's certainly true of some of them.

Even The Dick Van Dyke Show, the stylistic father of MTM, has this problem sometimes, with the lesser episodes featuring a string of lukewarm one-liners hung on a slim "realistic" story, the sort of thing that makes you long to change the channel to a dopey but funny show like The Beverly Hillbillies. However, Dick Van Dyke holds up better than most of the MTM shows, in part because of its generous helping of physical comedy; Rhoda or Bob Newhart could have used a few pratfalls to liven up the setup-punchline monotony.

Land of the Brave and Free

While talking about national anthems the other day, I mentioned -- and I know I'm not the only one to point this out -- that several countries have unofficial national anthems that are probably more popular than their official ones. "God Bless America," of course, is where Americans turn when they need a national anthem with actual singable lyrics (none of that "the bombs burting in air" stuff), though Berlin always opposed the idea of its becoming the official anthem. And England's unoffical anthem, "Rule Britannia" by Thomas Arne and James Thomson, is much more rousing and inspiring than "God Save the Queen." The "unofficial" anthems tend to supply something that the official one doesn't have. So "God Bless America" makes up for the obliqueness of "Star-Spangled Banner" (which doesn't actually say anything nice about the country until the last line of the refrain) with direct, simple expression: land that I love, my home sweet home. And though "God Save the Queen/King" was introduced almost at the same time as "Rule Britannia," the latter now almost seems like it's making up for something that the former doesn't have; instead of a solemn prayer for God to bless England, "Rule Britannia" is a joyous celebration of all the blessings England already has, and how much cooler she is than "The nations not so blessed as thee." That's why the official anthems can't and shouldn't be supplanted by the alterna-anthems: the songs compliment each other.

Anyway, I don't know whether other countries have alterna-anthems; France, perhaps, doesn't need one, because La Marseillaise fulfils both jobs of a national anthem: it's a rousing military song and an expression of hope that the country will fulfil its destiny. Also, Casablanca pretty much established it as the coolest national anthem. I've always thought of "The Volga Boatman Song" as Russia's anthem, but I doubt that the Russians would agree.

As for Canada, our current national anthem, like so much else about us, comes off as a bland attempt to evade expressing any kind of cultural identity; both in the original French and in the English translation, it says very little about us except our country's name. At least "God Save the Queen," being a British anthem whose tune is also used by the Americans, sort of says something about English Canada's identity as an Anglo-American hybrid (off-topic, but while I used to think that Canada had lost a lot by denying its English heritage, I've decided that Israel is the country that lost the most on that score: in trying to make itself less English, Israel wound up saddled with a new identity in the eyes of the world, as a de facto American colony). Maybe we need an Irving Berlin to write a song that does something different from our official anthem, but the problem is, I'm not sure exactly what it is that our official anthem actually does.

Thank God I'm Not Hip

Whew! Now that the New York Times Magazine has done an article on blogging, that makes blogging officially unhip. Good news for me. As a determinedly retro person who started a determinedly retro blog, I'd hate to think that I was associated with anything trendy.

Chaps Who Did Taps Aren't Tapping Anymore

So Terry Teachout has a new book about choreographer George Balanchine. I don't know a great deal about ballet -- I'm familiar, say, with Stravinsky's "Apollo" but not the Balanchine dances that go with it -- so I first heard of Balanchine in connection with his Broadway work, choreographing many shows for Rodgers and Hart -- On Your Toes, Babes in Arms, Boys from Syracuse -- and others; I think the last hit show he was associated with was George Abbott and Frank Loesser's Where's Charley? in 1948, after which he concentrated mostly on his ballet work. Balanchine's Rodgers and Hart shows were instrumental in introducing the idea that ballet, as opposed to hoofing or tapping, had a place in Broadway musicals. There had been ballets in musicals before, usually to accommodate a dancing star, like Marilyn Miller; but Balanchine was the first Broadway choreographer to make a specialty of it, as well as the first Broadway choreographer who was prestigious enough to be as important as the dancers, if not more; most Broadway choreographers before Balanchine weren't even billed as choreographers, but as "dance directors," implying someone who just worked out the steps and drilled everyone in how to step together. He was also perhaps the first choreographer to be so important that his work influenced the casting; the role of the angel in Rodgers and Hart's I Married an Angel was originally written as a singing role (they intended it for Jeanette MacDonald, who in fact wound up doing it in a really bad movie version with Nelson Eddy), but wound up as a dancing role for Vera Zorina.

This had its good points and bad points; the Big Ballet soon became a cliche of musicals, and prompted one critic to write "Cripes, what I wouldn't give for a good old hoofing chorus!" But through his Broadway work, Balanchine expanded the scope of what dance could do in a musical, and made it possible to view dance not as a diversion, but as part of the story. And by bringing his own highly distinctive style to the shows he choreographed, Balanchine established the idea that a Broadway musical could have choreography just as distinctive and creative as the ballet, and borrow from "serious" dance without losing its showbiz savvy (On Your Toes even makes this into the basis of the story: a hoofer, played by Ray Bolger, and a ballet dancer, Tamara Geva, pool their talents in a fusion of ballet and showbiz, classical and jazz, "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue"). It's Balanchine who paved the way for the Broadway careers of such choreographers such as Agnes De Mille and Jerome Robbins.

One thing I noticed, when typing those names, is that while many choreographers were able to cross over between ballet and Broadway, few of those choreographers did much work in Hollywood. The odd thing about that is that Hollywood musicals aren't less dependent on dance than Broadway musicals; if anything, they're more dependent on dance. The greatest Hollywood musicals tend to be dance-heavy, and the two biggest stars of movie musicals, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, both gave up Broadway stardom for Hollywood. The big Broadway stars, with occasional exceptions (Ray Bolger, Gwen Verdon), were usually singers (Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Ethel Merman, Mary Martin) or comedians who could sing better than they could dance (Bert Lahr, Phil Silvers). Yet there aren't many famous movie choreographers; under the influence of Gene Kelly, MGM did a few Big Ballets in the early '50s, but mostly the dancing in movie musicals is an expression of the dancer's personality, rather than the choreographer's; Fred Astaire may have worked out the steps with Hermes Pan, but it's still a Fred Astaire dance, whereas "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" is unmistakably Balanchine's dance, not Ray Bolger's -- the proof being that people can, and do, perform "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" without Bolger; you can't do the "Cheek to Cheek" dance without Fred and Ginger.

I suppose I've just answered my own question about why choreography never took off in movie musicals: stage musicals need to have dances that can be performed by someone other than the star, so the choreographer's vision becomes more important; and as shows started to run longer, became still more important (as musicals needed to run longer to make back their money, it became more important to have choreography that could hold up under multiple cast changes). This doesn't apply with movie musicals, where everything happens just once. There was one movie choreographer who became famous -- Busby Berkeley -- but Berkeley had not particular distinction purely as a choreographer; in his Broadway work, he was a pure "dance director," specializing in unison dances with the boys and girls repeating the same step over and over, and he carried that style over into his movie work; he became famous, and deservedly so, for what he did with the camera, not for what the dancers were doing.

Another point in this rambling post: I get the impression that by the '50s, there was a bit of a backlash against "arty" choreography. Maybe 1951, with the double-punch of Gene Kelly's interminable Big Ballet in An American in Paris and Jerome Robbins' very long "The Small House of Uncle Thomas" ballet in the year's big hit musical, The King and I, was the moment when people started thinking that these big dances were eating up too much time. In any case, the '50s brought fewer and fewer ballets in musicals, more old-fashioned showbiz dancing, more choreographers like Bob Fosse who cultivated non-balletic styles, more musicals like My Fair Lady with relatively little dancing (even Robbins, who created the ultimate dance musical with West Side Story, followed it up with Gypsy). The backlash was even written into a couple of movie musicals by old hands who had lived through the dance revolution; Irving Berlin, in a not-particularly-good song for his not-particularly-good movie musical White Christmas, lamented, "Instead of dance, it's choreography," while Cole Porter added some new lines to the movie version of Silk Stockings:

It's not enough today to see a dancer at his ease --
He's got to throw his back out and come sliding on his knees.
He's got to have glorious Russian ballet or Chinese ballet or Hindu ballet or Bali ballet or any ballet
And stereophonic sound.

Finally -- and forgive me for writing such a disorganized post, but chalk it up to post-Yom-Kippur disorientation -- the booklet for the cast album of House of Flowers, a 1954 show (written by Truman Capote, with music by Harold Arlen), has an anecdote about Balanchine, who was originally hired as the choreographer but -- like the director, Peter Brook -- wasn't the right choice for a show about rival Haitian brothels. Geoffrey Holder, one of the lead dancers in the show, recalled that Balanchine's approach was a bit over-formal:

We waited two days for Mr. Balanchine to teach us the mambo. All he had to say was "Mambo!" and we would have done it because we did it every night at the Palladium. But all of Balanchine's ballets are mathematical. So it took him two days to break it down.

Balanchine quit or was fired during tryouts, and was replaced by a younger choreographer, Herbert Ross (who also took over the direction when Brook was fired, making House of Flowers a possible contender for the record of "most distinguished list of creative staff who bombed out and got fired").

The Sound of Silents

Silent movies need music, and there are all kinds of ways to provide it. Sometimes there's a live musician, or, on special occasions, a live orchestra. Sometimes there's a pre-recorded score, with a full orchestra, a small band, an organ, a piano, whatever. Sometimes the score is totally original music; sometimes it's based on familiar music from the public domain. The silent-movie scores I've heard have one thing, and only one thing in common: they suck.

Okay, "suck" is too strong. I just said it to get attention. (I do so need attention.) But honestly, I've never been satisfied with a new score for a silent movie. Even the scores that are professionally done, well-played and don't sound anachronistic -- there are way too many scores that try to provide a postmodern sound for what is the cinema equivalent of the pre-modern era -- don't seem to add anything to the movie, and don't really seem to match the onscreen action. I could never quite figure out why I thought this, or what I thought a good silent movie score should be, until I saw a non-silent movie: Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise. This movie -- one of the greatest film comedies ever made -- is a talkie, made in 1932. But unlike most talkies of the era, which used no background music at all on the mistaken belief that if you have sound you don't need music (some of the early sound horror movies, like Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, are severely weakened by their lack of music), Trouble in Paradise makes extensive use of background music, composed by Franke Harling . In an effort to give the movie some of the fluidity that his best silent films had possessed, Lubitsch did many shots and even some entire scenes without any sound, and few if any sound effects; instead he used music to take the place of sound, just as it does in a silent film. Basically, then, the silent scenes in Trouble in Paradise demonstrate what Lubitsch expected music to do in otherwise silent scenes; and by watching and listening to these scenes, we can get an idea of what a great silent-film director would want a composer to do.

In the opening scene of Trouble in Paradise, the first time we hear music on the soundtrack is when Edward Everett Horton is trying to stand up (after having been knocked unconscious). The music isn't melodic; it's just a series of halting repeated phrases that mimic the action: Horton is slowly trying to get up. As he loses his balance and falls to the ground, a chord on the soundrack mimics that action as well.

That's the way it goes through the whole movie: in the scenes with no sound, composer Harling doesn't do what we would now expect a composer to do, which is to set the overall mood of the scene or enhance its emotional impact. What he does is follow the action: the music imitates movements, gestures, even footsteps. When Herbert Marshall runs up and down the stairs (actually, a stunt double is used for these scenes, since Marshall had lost a leg in World War I), there are no sound effects of feet hitting the floor; instead there's a rising musical figure for running up, and a descending figure for running down. In other words, it's the kind of music known as "Mickey-Mousing." You can see why people who compose scores for silent movies don't do this kind of thing, since directly following the action is considered gauche. And it is gauche -- in a scene that already has sound effects to go with those actions. But in a scene without sound effects, "Mickey-Mousing" works: it adds solidity to the actions, adds rhythm to the scene. That's what Lubitsch was looking for in silent scenes, and -- I'm going to assume -- in his silent movies: music that could connect actions to sounds, in the absence of any other sound to do that job.

Now, if you have the Criterion DVD of Trouble in Paradise -- and you should -- compare the new piano score that is used for the Lubitsch silent film included as a bonus, The Merry Jail. It's not a bad score; it's professionally put together and all that. But aside from the fact that it uses the wrong tunes (the film is based on Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus, yet the score doesn't use any of Strauss's music; presumably Lubitsch would have expected Die Fledermaus tunes to be played to go with the movie, just as he would have expected Sigmund Romberg's music to be used for his silent version of The Student Prince), it's mostly just a series of melodies, a lot of mood music that sets the general tone of the scene; it almost never follows the action or mimics the characters' movements in that direct, Trouble in Paradise way. It just seeks to follow mood, rather than action; it's "underscore" music. The problem is, in a silent film there's nothing to underscore; the music is the only sound you hear, and it has to do the work that is done by dialogue and sound effects in a talkie.

Without that kind of action-specific music, the images just kind of float there onscreen, because there's nothing to solidify them. In this way, good silent movie music is a lot like traditional cartoon music. Carl Stalling, the composer for Looney Tunes (and, before that, for Disney), started as an organist for silent movies, and he carried that experience over to the vocabulary of cartoon music. Looney Tunes cartoons have sound effects for important actions, like explosions and falling anvils and such. But when it came to less spectacular actions, like walking, sound effects wizard Treg Brown (who worked closely with Stalling) would not put in sound effects for footsteps; instead Stalling's score would follow the characters' footsteps. Before the cartoons went into production, Stalling also set a rhythm for each scene, which the animators could animate to. This is, again, the kind of thing that you need in a silent movie: the music needs to set a strong rhythmic foundation for the scene, and where there are no sound effects, the music must in essence become a "sound effect" in itself, providing musical equivalents of physical actions.

So I say to anyone composing a silent-movie score -- and after all, who isn't? -- forget everything you know about good movie music; those rules are for talkies, movies where the rhythm is carried by sound effects and where you hear words when characters talk. Silent movies are different; your music has to do the work that is normally divided in three (between music, sound effects, and dialogue). Don't just play a tune or set a mood, because all that creates is a feeling that a bunch of people are walking too fast while some tinkly music appears out of nowhere. In a silent movie, the music must be tied to the action. If you're scoring, say, The General, it's not enough to play "Dixie" on the soundtrack; you need to follow Buster Keaton's walk, create music that suggests the roar of the train; when a puff of smoke appears, the music should play a chord to suggest that. In other words, don't be afraid of Mickey-Mousing. Because that's exactly what a silent movie needs.

Quote of the Day

"The spirit killeth, the letter giveth life."
-- T.S. Eliot