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 perfect 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.

One of the Great Things About Mad Men, Besides January Jones.

Have you noticed how, in shows that are about characters who are writers (as, for instance, 30 Rock is a show about a writer, Liz Lemon, who creates a weekly SNL-type show called TGS), the creative product of the character in the show, if we get to see that creative product at all, is never as good as we’re told it is? We’re asked to accept that Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) is a talented comedy writer, yet the sketch-comedy show she puts on every week starring Tracey Jordan (Tracy Morgan) and Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) looks pretty lame.

From this, one has to conclude that even though Tina Fey writes a hell of a sitcom, it’s harder to write the sketch-comedy show that the sitcom is supposed to be about.

TV shows and movies almost always fail at this “thing within a thing” thing. That’s no doubt because writing the overall show or movie at a high level of excellence requires such expenditure of creative energy, little energy is left to make sure the glimpses of the characters’ work live up to their billing. One exception was the movie this summer called Funny People, a comedy/drama about standup comedians. When it came time for the characters in the film to deliver some standup, they were funny.

Another exception is Mad Men. Judging from other shows about creative types, the hardest thing for the show to get right is the advertising that the characters in it create. But Mad Men succeeds. When the point is that Don Draper and his creative team are coming up short, the ads which we see them present actually are lame; and when we’re asked to believe that they have solved a problem with some ingenuity, the ads we see them present actually are good, and sometimes excellent. We’re not just asked to “take the show’s word for it” that these characters can create good advertising. Hats off to the show’s writers.

Here’s an interview from GQ with one of Mad Men’s stars, January Jones.

Nobel Peace Prize, or Trojan Horse?

Here’s the thing that worries me about the whole Obama-winning-the-Nobel-Peace-Prize megillah. It’s not that he doesn’t deserve it — I’m sure lots of the recipients of this prize didn’t deserve it any more than he does. I also have no doubt that he will accept it with the humility that’s appropriate. (Already, he has indicated the right tone, that it’s a prize he aspires to deserve rather than one merited by accomplishments already achieved.) My worry is that the prize will tie his hands.

Sometimes the way to keep the peace is to commit aggression. A case in point may be Iran. If we don’t want to see the whole Middle East go up in a mushroom cloud, our best option may be to blow Iran’s nuclear facilities to smithereens. I’m glad I don’t have to make that decision, but somebody does. It is sure to be the last thing we’ll ever want to do (and the consequences would be unpredictable), but it has at least to be on the table. Will Obama feel, as the winner now of the Nobel Peace Prize, that he can no longer consider bold military action even if U.S. interests require it? Will the honor hamstring him? Does the Nobel committee, in fact, intend exactly this — was their ulterior motive to constrain Obama’s military options, preferring (over the world we live in now) a world with a United States that has its arms tied behind its back? That’s a scary thought, and one I’m not completely able to dismiss.

Chevy Chase.

One of the nice surprises of the TV season is that Chevy Chase has finally found his funny again. On Community, he plays a business magnate returning to community college to continue his education, and the most recent episode gave him a couple of comedic bits that proved he still “has it.” One was a digression by his character on the different kinds of sneezes and how each can play a role in establishing dominance in a situation, and the other was a bit of physical comedy in the background of a scene as he attempted to get into his mouth a floppy-crusted pizza slice.

For about 28 years, it seemed the comedic genius who was Chevy Chase had drowned in a tsunami of ego. The brilliance he showed in the first season-and-a-half of Saturday Night Live, and which he’d displayed before that in the revolutionary improv-based seventies sketch comedy of the National Lampoon Radio Hour and Groove Tube, seemed to vanish. He hosted an ill-advised late night talk show on Fox in the early nineties that died a merciful early death. His movies were lame and lamer. One kept reading stories of abusive behavior toward colleagues. A turning point for him seems to have been the Comedy Central Roast he endured in 2002. I remember watching it, and thinking that savage as most of these roasts were, this one seemed as if everyone meant it. I assumed nevertheless that he brushed it off — but this Entertainment Weekly article reveals that he didn’t. It was the occasion for some genuine soul-searching.

The problem with genuine soul-searching, though, is that even when it leads an artist to see the error of his ways and to reform his relations with his fellow human beings, it doesn’t always lead to a reignition of the genius that burnt out along the way. More often, what got burnt out stays burnt out. But with Chevy, it looks, from the evidence of Community, that he found his way back to his special place. He’s Chevy Chase and we’re not. It is to be celebrated.