If the World Really Were Coming to an End, This Is Probably What It Would Look Like.

2012 is awesome. You buy into it. Like all great science fiction, it kind of works like this: You have no idea if the premise is well-founded (neutrinos or something from the sun are acting like a microwave oven to heat up and melt the earth’s core, and the earth’s core is the cement that holds the whole surface of the earth together, so now we’re all screwed), but you don’t care; the movie has a gravity that makes you want to accept it, and once you do, everything else has internal consistency. The characters behave as they very well might. The destruction plausibly could happen exactly as the film depicts it. Etc. It’s very easy to get caught up in this film, and not only because the effects are convincing (which they are). Special effects are cool, but unless you build them on a foundation of dramatic verisimilitude, they’re stupid. 2012’s delivering on both is why I found myself involuntarily muttering “Oh, my God” more than once.

The shots in the movie are extraordinarily well planned and laid out by director Roland Emmerich. You are never confused for a second about what’s happening in the many action sequences. Whatever your own imagination or unconscious dream-state could conjure up if you were trying to terrify yourself — whatever visual information you need to get totally freaked out — Emmerich anticipates that and shows it to you.

Plus, you want a disaster movie to contain lines like, “All our scientific knowledge, and the Mayans called this right a thousand years ago.” 2012 doesn’t deprive you of them.

The movie resonates on another level. Even if the scientific principles behind it are absurd, it taps into our fear of terrorism. You know that if our enemies ever have the means, something not far afield from what you see in the movie might just happen in real life. 2012 is a safe way to see your world destroyed, because afterward you can go get a hamburger.

A layer of religious symbolism also seems embedded somewhere in the movie’s crust. After all, if the earth’s core is melting, that’s rather like “all hell breaking loose,” isn’t it? And after a while one notices that the central character, a science-fiction novelist named Jackson Curtis whose book espouses the basic goodness of man, has the initials J.C. (For that matter, so does the actor who plays him, John Cusack.) That’s fine.

Cusack is very good in the film, and Oliver Platt deserves a Best Supporting Actor nomination.

The Dream Happens One More Time This Month.

Although I expected to like the TCM documentary Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me (which I caught last night), I didn’t expect to be floored by it. But I was.

The film exists because Clint Eastwood willed it into existence. He produced the film (occasioned by the centennial of the great lyricist’s birth this month) and it bears his stamp in several ways. One of those ways is that it contains all sorts of amazing clips that never would been unearthed and never would have been licensed were it not for Eastwood’s clout. Written and directed by Bruce Ricker, who has worked with Eastwood a long time on various music and film projects (including Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser), the film is beautifully constructed (I give Eastwood credit for that as well as Ricker) and is a surprisingly satisfying account of Mercer’s life and work. Perhaps the highest praise you can give any documentary biography is that it makes you not just know the man, but feel him. This film does.

And Mercer was a really cool guy, as well as being our greatest poet. (Take that, Walt Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.) Knowing him, and feeling him, is a good thing.

The doc contains about a minute-and-a-half of unfortunate “vanity project” flavor when Eastwood’s teenage daughter sings a Mercer song in a recording studio (she sings pleasantly but amateurishly, and I’m not sure what Eastwood was thinking other than to do something nice for his daughter), but the other 88 ½ minutes of the film are at a level of excellence seldom seen in the documentary genre. That vanity moment occurs fairly early on, so when you see it, just persevere and get past it. You will be rewarded.

While patriotism is not the subject of the film, this thorough picture of the man from Savannah made me, yes, proud to be an American. Any country that could produce a Johnny Mercer can’t be all bad. Just one more showing of the film is scheduled this month: tomorrow, Wednesday November 18 (the date of Mercer’s hundredth birthday), at 5 PM Central, on TCM. Then not again until December 19. A DVD comes out on December 8. Get it. But don’t wait for it.

Fecal Matters.

Last night SNL had January Jones as Grace Kelly in a Rear Window sketch in which she kept ruining takes because couldn’t control her flatulence. Many realistic and varied fart sound effects painted (if that’s the unfortunate word) the picture.

Last year, January’s Mad Men co-star Jon Hamm did a “commercial” on the show for John Ham, perforated slices of pre-cooked deli ham in cylindrical rolls to be placed on toilet-paper dispensers in mens’ rooms.

I don’t understand why stars agree to this. It’s great for SNL hosts to be “game” and up for anything, but to associate your name and image for all time with wet flatulence and asswipes? It’s not good for the brand. From now on, no one can think of these two great Mad Men stars without these unpleasant associations coming along for the ride. I hate to see them damaged this way. Especially when all it would take to have prevented it is for them to say to the writers, “Come on guys. It’s funny…but you can do even better without resorting to bathroom humor. Let’s shoot a little higher, huh?”

I wouldn’t be surprised if the SNL writers are “inspired’ to write these sorts of fecal sketches precisely when they have a host who brings glamour to the show, as Hamm and Jones did. It’s as if they need to bring this sort of host down several pegs, not for the audience’s sake, but as a way to boost their their own bitterly sick self-esteem. Defiling  Jones and Hamm by dragging them through the mud must make the writers feel better, somehow. Note to future SNL hosts in that situation: Just poo poo it.

With a Capital “T” and That Rhymes with “B” and That Stands for “Book.”

Back in the summer of ’08, I saw (and wrote about) a production of The Music Man at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. The production was revelatory to me, because (although I’d seen, as a child, the national touring company starring Forrest Tucker as Professor Harold Hill), my main experience of the show came from the movie. Seeing the show, the real show, that Meredith Willson created the book, music and lyrics for — and which Stratford’s production served so well — gave me an appreciation for Willson’s level of invention. The Music Man is not always remembered as a particularly innovative musical, perhaps because its small-town, 1912 Iowa setting doesn’t immediately put one in mind of “innovation.” The adjective is more often applied to another musical that opened in 1957 just three months before The Music Man, West Side Story. But, without taking anything away from the Bernstein-Sondheim show, it’s possible to appreciate that The Music Man was also unlike any musical that had come before it. The opening number, “Rock Island,” performed by traveling salesmen on a train, isn’t even sung, yet it is music, so rhythmic is the dialogue Willson wrote, and so well does it capture the rhythm of the train that is the number’s setting. And then the show takes off from there. Willson strove to write dialogue so rhythmic it could become music, and song lyrics so conversational they could become speech, so that one could blend into the other with the audience scarcely being aware of the difference.

Two years after The Music Man opened, Willson wrote a book about the experience of creating the show. The show’s birth was not easy. It took years, and many false starts; Willson’s script went through forty drafts in all. Not surprisingly (given the surplus of charm and wit Willson was able to put into The Music Man), the book about the creation is a fun and fascinating read. Titled But He Doesn’t Know the Territory, it went out of print and stayed that way for a long time, but this past summer it came back into print, and if you like musical theater, you should get it and read it.

Chutzpah.

Maybe it will take longer than 70 or 80 years for Holocaust-induced paranoia to fully disappear from the minds of American Jews; I know that one recent episode of a TV show, and one current movie, have reawakened it in me.

Both works were created by Jewish writers. The TV show stuck a thumb in the eye of the Christian majority, while the movie exposed to the world as unattractive a picture of a Jewish community as I have ever seen. (I have to say, however, that I have not seen any Nazi propaganda films.)

Both the TV show and the movie are daring. Daring in two senses. First, in the sense of brave. Second, in the more literal sense that they actually dare the Christian majority to hate us, and to do something about it.

On a recent episode of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry’s urine backsplashes from the toilet in the home of a fundamentalist Christian onto a painting of Jesus hanging on the wall, so that a droplet appears to the homeowner to be a tear falling miraculously from Jesus’s eye. The Catholic League last week complained, and I can see why. If Christian characters in a sitcom defiled a Jewish symbol in a way remotely like this, there’d be an uproar like you wouldn’t believe. Of course, the fact that Christians are a huge majority in the population and Jews a tiny minority alters the calculus of the whole thing, and makes the offense somehow more “permissible” (perhaps), but still. Can we actually get away with this stuff?

In A Serious Man, set in the Jewish community of a Minneapolis suburb in 1967, Joel and Ethan Coen display for us a gallery of grotesques. Nearly every character is ugly on some level — most of them physically. They are made-up and photographed so as to magnify the distortions in their features. The external ugliness seems meant to manifest a soul-sickness inside. Everyone is a victim or a predator. Leaders of the community are revealed as pious hypocrites. People behave unconscionably toward one another, or with unpardonable self-absorption. One poor shnook has a medical condition which involves something unspeakable draining out of his neck into a tube at all times, in a manner suggestive of some sort of space-alien fluid. Although there is a worst-nightmare quality to all of it rather than a sense of realism, it is impossible completely to dismiss as fantasy, since it has an uncomfortable truth, as nightmares do. (Otherwise they couldn’t scare us.)

We know that what’s on offer in this movie is not all there is to the real-life Jewish community. The real-life Jewish community contains a rich vein of inner and outer beauty, true (not hypocritical) morality, concern for fellow man (Jew and non-Jew alike), and gratitude for God’s blessings. OK, but all of that acknowledged — would this movie make any sense at all if it had been, instead, about life among the Swedes? I worry that the answer is no.

I felt nervous watching the film. I wished that some sort of Proof of Judaism card had been required for admission, so that we wouldn’t be embarrassed in front of others. I derived comfort from the fact that the movie isn’t a big hit, and not a lot of people may see it. But fat chance of that, now that the movie is being talked about as a serious contender for a Best Picture Oscar.

Of course, the catch 22 with my fear about how these characters are depicted (there’s always a catch 22 with us, isn’t there? — not for nothing was Catch 22 written by Joseph Heller, a Jew) is that the distortions in these characters’ personalities are a product of their fear of the society outside their (invisible) ghetto-suburban walls. The grotesqueries of the community in the film — the things that make the grotesqueries feel so Jewish, and fuel my paranoia about what the film will do to the Jewish reputation — those malformations themselves are stigmata of the characters’ completely-earned, historically-justified anxiety. Give this people a chance not to be persecuted for a century or two, and they might even become normal. I get it; and audiences who think a bit about the film may get it.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t look good.

And that may be the point for Larry David and the Coen Brothers. In being daring enough (in both senses of the word) to show something that doesn’t look good, they may, perversely, be searching for security. In their freedom, a freedom unlike any that Jews have known since Jews began, their (perhaps unconscious) agenda may be to say: “OK, Majority, we’re testing. Testing your tolerance, testing the limits of our freedom to provoke you and still survive. We’re going to give you every excuse to hate us, and if you still don’t — if we can show you this, and you still don’t round us all up and put us into cattle cars — well, then, I guess we Jews really are finally and truly safe.”

From their mouths to God’s ear.

How is January Jones Like Ringo Starr?

People used to say Ringo Starr was a bad drummer. I could never see this. Technically, maybe he didn’t have all the refinement of Buddy Rich, but that simple, foursquare yet swinging beat of his made The Beatles sound the way they did. With any other drummer, they wouldn’t have been The Beatles. And, since the Beatles’ sound was perfect, it follows that Ringo was perfect.

When Mad Men first began, January Jones struck me as an actress of limited technique. I always liked her, but she seemed stiff in a way that I equated with a lack of range or dynamics. But as the show progressed, I began to see that since the show was perfect, January Jones must be playing Betty Draper exactly right. Mad Men would never have been Mad Men with anyone else.

This especially hit home during the big confrontation scene in Sunday night’s episode, in which Betty forces Don to talk to her about his secret past. While watching this, I had the thought, “If January Jones has limited technique, how come this scene is so incredibly powerful?!? What the hell is she doing that is making me buy this scene so completely?” I still don’t know.

My provisional conclusion is that January Jones is a fantastic actress. Just one whose fantasticness doesn’t resemble anything we’ve seen before, so we’re not accustomed to it, and can’t fit it into a mold of what we think “good acting” is supposed to look and sound like.

Harvey Pekar Digs Eydie Gorme.

When comic book writer Harvey Pekar stayed with us for a few days over the summer, we listened to some CDs together, and I decided to lay on him some of my favorite discs by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. This was a risk. Steve and Eydie are widely understood (by those who misunderstand them) to be far from hip, while Harvey’s hipster credentials are impeccable — DownBeat record reviewer in the 1960s, advocate for jazz’s avant-garde in numerous articles and reviews, author of a libretto for a jazz avant-garde opera (Leave Me Alone, premiered at Oberlin College earlier this year) the subject of which was the avant-garde itself. So I was delighted to discover that Harvey is an Eydie Gorme fan, with an appreciation for Lawrence as well.

“She’s got great time, man…Her breath control is really amazing…I’ve always liked her.” I’m paraphrasing a bit, because it’s been about four months since our listening session, but that was the gist of it.

This gratified me immensely. It’s hard to make a case that someone as well-known as Eydie Gorme can be called underrated — it makes no sense, on the face of it — but I think the word applies, because, famous and successful as she is, her name seldom comes up when people make their lists of the great female singers of the American Songbook. Other deserving names always come up: Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan, Barbra Streisand. Never Eydie Gorme. But listen to the body of work which Eydie recorded alone or with Lawrence in the fifties through seventies, and you hear a singer of astonishing gifts. Her intonation, range and control are second to none. She swings. She has humor. Her interpretations can be warm-and-gentle, or broad-and-brassy. (She’s more often remembered for the latter style, since she made something of a shtick of it in the sixties, but there’s plenty of recorded evidence of her lovelier and more restrained singing as well as singing from her that is pure, exhilarating excitement.)

To some extent Steve and Eydie brought their undervalued status upon themselves, by making self-parody and self-deprecation (and deprecation of each other) a part of their act — they actually seem to relish their Vegassy reputation, which does them a partial disservice — but their recorded legacy on ABC-Paramount, United Artists, Columbia and RCA in the fifties, sixties and seventies stands as testament to their true artistic contribution to classic pop. Their singing in those years, together and apart, with the arrangements of giants like Don Costa, Marion Evans and Pat Williams, was simply superb. If Ella and Peggy were jazz, and Sinatra was jazz-pop, Steve and Eydie are pop inflected by jazz with several teaspoons of musical-comedy theatricality thrown in. Which makes their recipe uniquely treasurable. I do feel slightly defensive about my appreciation of them sometimes, because it’s not the most popular opinion or the conventional wisdom even among fanciers of The Great American Songbook — so discovering that I have company in Harvey Pekar made me feel pretty good. I always knew they were hip.

Peggy Lee and Andy Williams – I’ve Got You Under My Skin (1966)

Thanks to Peggy Lee maven Ivan Santiago on the official Peggy Lee Bulletin Board (you can get there by clicking on the Miss Peggy Lee link in my blogroll, on your right), and thanks to Japanese YouTuber “yootami,” here is a musical clip that merits the overused phrase, “it just doesn’t get any better than this.” It also merits the overused “to die for.” The orchestral arrangement in bossa nova style of the Cole Porter standard isn’t credited, but I’ll take an educated guess that it’s by Dave Grusin. (I’ve heard him write for flute and muted trumpets in a way that sounds like what goes on here.)

Yootami has disabled embedding, so clicking on the video image below won’t make it play on my page — but it will direct you, with one more click, to the YouTube page where you can view it. So click on the arrow below. Bonus: You don’t even have to die in order to do it.

Paul Shaffer’s Nutty Koo-Koo New Book.

If you, like me, are a fan of the musical and comedic stylings of Paul Shaffer (golden-age SNL keyboardist, Letterman bandleader, Don Kirshner impersonator), you will enjoy his new autobiography, We’ll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives. It’s no work of literature, but I’m about fifty pages into it, and besides being a fun read, this first part of the book (which deals with his childhood and teen years growing up in Thunder Bay, Ontario) really does give you a sense of how Paul got to be Paul. His personality leaps off the page. I look forward to spending the rest of the book with him.

If Meditation Is Good for Your Health, This Health Care Process Is a Godsend.

It was about seven weeks ago that health care legislation officially passed into “I don’t understand it anymore.” I know some of the proposals, and I know what makes sense to me, but I no longer know what’s in the law making its way through Congress. It’s all too complicated. So the news that something passed yesterday in Max Baucus’ Senate committee leaves me feeling neither elated nor distressed.

The health system we have now is screwed up. Whatever the Congress does is either going to make it less screwed up, more screwed up, or exactly the same screwed up. I have no idea. And if I – a guy who follows these things, and generally stays engaged with policy and politics – have no idea, I’m pretty sure very few other people do.

As I say, though, this doesn’t distress me, or make me anxious. What I’m feeling isn’t boredom, either. Thanks to the impossible-to-follow “debate,” I’ve now attained a state of complete detachment, almost a meditative state, waiting to let Congress do what it will, and to find out later if it made things better or ruined our lives beyond all recognition. It’s actually kind of peaceful.

My knowledge of the new health care law is now on a higher plane, unconcerned with facts about what the new law will do, governed by the certainty that whatever else the law is or will be, it is perfect, because it is part of the universe.