A Blog of My Own

Robert Goulet was a good exponent of the booming baritone theatrical style, and not without a sense of humor even in his earliest recorded performances. I have in mind his “C’est Moi” from the Camelot original cast recording. (Click here to hear an excerpt.) The humor in that song requires Lancelot to display an enormous vanity of which he is utterly unselfaware; therefore the actor who portrays and sings him (if he is to give an intelligent performance) has to be very aware of the human tendency toward this foible, yet subtle enough not to telegraph his awareness. (If we sensed the actor was unaware of the irony in the song, we might assume he was as stupid as Lancelot, which would be unfunny and unappealing; and if we sensed him trying too hard to signal that he was in on the joke, that would also destroy the humor. So a very fine line must be trod, which Goulet did well. To do all that, and sing gloriously–well, now you know why the role took him from complete unknown to major star.)

The thing his illness makes me feel right now is that it’s a shame that Goulet couldn’t go on doing what he did well, and instead took on so many parts in the last thirty years in which he denigrated himself and his talents. (Here’s an article from 1996 that gives but one example, but we all remember many of them; Goulet as jerk, self-admitted buffoon, outmoded hack, etc.) In a weird way, it all came out of that very first song, “C’est Moi.” Except now he asked us to believe, for the sake of a laugh, that he was the impossibly vain and stupid Lancelot. If he couldn’t get our respect, he was willing to settle for our derision. Whether the fault was his or the world’s, there should have been a better seat at the round table for him than that.

Don’t tell me the “shuffle play” on my iPod doesn’t know what it’s doing.

My father died from Alzheimer’s last February after a ten-year decline. Two weeks ago I was about to fly back home, as I have been doing about once a month since his death, to look after my Mom. I knew she and I would be visiting his grave. Not a day goes by that my father isn’t with me, but naturally, on the eve of this visit he was even more keenly at the center of my consciousness.

My iPod has over 4000 songs on it. Two of these tracks are different versions of the same piece of music: John Williams’ “Hymn to the Fallen,” his theme for the present-tense scene at the end of Saving Private Ryan in which the now-old Ryan visits the graves of his comrades. One version on my iPod is from the original soundtrack; the other is a re-recording by the City of Prague Philharmonic.

I love this piece, partly because it is gorgeous music, but also because it has associations with my father for me. On a surface level the music honors his World War 2 service just as it does the movie’s characters’. But the deep level on which the music communicates to me has to do with my father’s long fight with Alzheimer’s. I conceived my father as engaged in a war with it, one it was winning and would win for good. At some point, although my father was alive and would remain so for years, my real father, the one inside, became one of “the fallen” that “Hymn to the Fallen” now memorialized for me. The piece–stoical, unsentimental, brave, noble, ineffably sad–was my father’s tragedy in music; it continued to be that, for me, for the rest of his years; and it is that now.

Music can do important things for us. This piece, somehow, helped me make sense of something that seemed to make no sense. Gave meaning, some kind of beginning middle and end coherence, to a story the end of which lacked coherence. Connected me to my father in a way I needed to be connected, when connection through any other means was no longer possible.

Back to the day that preceded my most recent trip back home. I was at the gym, on the elliptical. My iPod’s shuffle-mode decided to play the original soundtrack version of “Hymn to the Fallen.” What are the chances of that? Of having that piece come up, out of 4000-some possibilities, on the eve of my trip, when my father, his Alzheimer’s, the upcoming trip to his grave, were so present in my mind? Ah, you say, coincidences happen. But wait till you hear this. As soon as that track finished, the very next selection that played, out of the other 4000-some possibilities my iPod could have picked, was the other rendition of “Hymn to the Fallen,” from the City of Prague Philharmonic.

(If you wish to hear a short excerpt from the six-minute soundtrack version, you can do so by clicking here.)

Apple has kept it very hush hush, but it’s obvious enough—our iPods know us. When you select shuffle play, what you’re really doing is telling your iPod to play the music it knows you need to hear.

Get this cockatiel make like a regular Tweets Thielemans. Or Beaks Beiderbecke.

Thanks to obroshi for putting it up, and to Larry Kart for linking to it at the Organissimo message boards.

One reason among many to like the final episode of season one of Mad Men was that it showed that, for all the glib cynicism adfolks trade in day after day, the great advertising ideas (like Don’s pitch for the Kodak Wheel, which he renamed, of all things, the Kodak Carousel) — and even some of the just pretty good ones — come from someone’s guts.

Practically nothing. But–

1) Shoe repair shops. If you go in any shoe repair shop, it will look and smell exactly like every shoe repair shop did in 1957. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, all practically lacquered with pigments that have somehow migrated from the shoes; the intoxicating smells of leather and whatever the hell the chemicals are that they’re using in there; the loud machinery that would drive mad any man who had to listen to it all day; the finished shoes waiting in their plain brown paper bags for pickup. Apparently, there is no better way to repair and polish shoes than the way mankind did it fifty years ago.

2) Bakeries. The same cookies, cakes, pies and pastries; the same ladies behind the counter; the same “tak-a-number” tickets; the same intoxicating smells of butter, sugar, and flour. There is no better way for us to obtain our baked goods than existed in 1957.

That’s pretty much it. Everything else has gone to hell.

Added 4/21/08: For a sequel of sorts to this post, click here.

This season, I detect Larry David using Curb Your Enthusiasm to get in some shots at his soon-to-be real-life ex-wife Laurie (An Inconvenient Truth) David, with whom he is going through an inconvenient split.

First this season was the portrayal of the Environment Museum (the NRDC Museum, or whatever it was called) as a platform for phoneys and a-holes. Then came Larry’s resentment at having to use, on TV-Wife Cheryl’s orders, environmentally correct (and scratchy) toilet paper in the house. Then we had the portrayal of surrogate-once-removed Heather Mills McCartney (like Laurie David, a crusader in her own way with her campaign against land mines) as a screaming harpy from hell. Last night, a central plot point involved an ineffectual toaster, the impotence of which was due (one could read between the lines) to its being some kind of solar-powered, carbon-neutral appliance that Cheryl had acquired in another fit of earth-friendliness. Plus we had Larry coming out unequivocally on the side of stomping on spiders, ecology be damned–not to mention implicitly endorsing (or, at least, being willing to embrace for the sake of a good episode-punchline) the species-extinction of minuscule purse dogs that look like rats.

More fossil-fueled power to him.

I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With is a movie of quiet desperation, only because you can’t talk with your mouth full. Written by, directed by, and starring Chicagoan Jeff Garlin (“Jeff Greene” in Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm), the movie gives us James, a fat, lonely actor failing in Chicago. James stuffs his gut because the feelings that might come up from down there are too painful; he puts food into his mouth as a substitute for putting a gun into it.

The movie is funny, with many LOL moments, but the river of pathos that runs through it seems genuinely felt. The packed house at Chicago’s large Music Box Theatre on Friday night (where Garlin did a Q & A after the screening) responded to the funny and the sad.

One of the special things about the movie is that Garlin gives his actors opportunities to do more rounded and nuanced work than we’re used to seeing from them. I have loved Sarah Silverman’s sick sexual ditz for close to a decade now, but in Cheese she fleshes out the schtick so that she begins to resemble an actual person. You see sides to Silverman’s Beth that you’re not used to seeing from Silverman; a capacity in rare moments for narcissism-free joy, and a not-just-kidding-around self-loathing when her neurosis claims yet another victim in James.

I’ll happily continue to enjoy Silverman in her ironically distanced performance art (in her standup and her Comedy Central sitcom), but this was the first glimpse I’ve had that in addition to a talent for that, she is an actress.

Cheese also contains a layered performance from Bonnie Hunt. She plays a schoolteacher who seems together on the surface, and you think “I see where this is going, she’s going to be the strong woman who’ll rescue James”; then she gradually reveals deep insecurities, and you think, “Uh oh, another ditz who’s going to destroy James”; and then you realize that here is a character whose strength lies in her ability not to avoid humiliation or be immune to it, but to endure it. We see in her (and ultimately so does James) that mortification is awful, but not always lethal. She is a beacon for him, but not the way you think at first.

An interesting tension exists between James, whom Garlin has clearly created out of his own interior life, and the successful, happily-married Hollywood macher that the real-life Garlin has become. In the Q & A, Garlin was funny, assertive, in-command, and not at all the poor soul we had just seen portrayed. (The one similarity he confessed is that he does, in real life, compulsively stuff himself with food in order to “stuff his feelings.”) In the dichotomy between himself and James, he had a mirror in his audience. Happy couples; boisterous groups of friends; well-dressed, successful movers and shakers; in appearance, whatever the opposite of lonely is. And yet, in its embrace of the movie, demonstrably an audience who knew what lonely is. I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With is a popcorn movie, one in which you may find yourself gobbling golden popped kernels happily by the handful, but which may cause you to examine why.

That isn’t a clever headline for a post about something else. This is about fish sticks.

We take them for granted, but fish sticks did not always share the planet with us. They were invented in 1953. (And, somehow, “invented” seems like the right word.) I love them! What a tasty way to get your Omega-3’s! Maybe they remind me of being a child again, and since for some reason that feels good to me, I guess I didn’t have such a miserable childhood after all.

For people of a certain age, fish sticks can be like Proust’s madeleine, if one just allows oneself to get over oneself (and one’s inner foodie). The sense memories they evoke bring every other kind of memory swimming back.

At a flea market recently, I discovered this 1956 issue of Consumer Reports, which covers the waterfront (as it were) of the new phenomenon. You might think the fuddy-duddies at CR would be all, “These aren’t nutritious, and if you must have them, you can make your own fish sticks from scratch cheaper at home,” but no. They fall in love with the fish stick just as all America did, though in their own reserved CR way and perhaps a little bit in spite of themselves.

“Frozen fish sticks, neatly oblong in shape and uniform in size,” the article begins, marveling at this culinary advancement, “are almost as much a product of the factory as of the fisherman’s net. But a great many consumers seem to like their fish in sticks without bones, and their appreciation of this rather new form of sea food helped raise the per capita consumption of fish in the United States in 1954 alone from 10.8 to 11.1 pounds per year.” 11.1 pounds per year! Why, that’s 3.41 ounces per American per week! Roughly the equivalent of two whole pieces of sushi!

CR rated the competing fish sticks on three criteria. “APPEARANCE. For a high score, the package must be in very good condition, and the sticks in it must fit snugly…After proper heating, the sticks must be uniformly of good color…and the coating must adhere without blistering, cracking or slipping…CHARACTER…The packaged stick must separate without breakage, and remain whole when…served in a normal manner…FREEDOM FROM DEFECTS…The fish sticks must be free of…skin particles, burned spots, dark carbon specks, and other extraneous material.”

Not surprisingly, the top-rated stick was Mrs. Paul’s, the gold standard of fish sticks for over half a century. Who was Mrs. Paul? Was there a real Mrs. Paul? Aren’t you glad you asked. The answer can be found at The Mrs. Paul’s Website; I’m sure they won’t mind my lifting it in return for the link and the invaluable free publicity.

Seems that “in 1946, power plant worker Edward Piszek started selling deviled crab cakes in a local Philadelphia bar to earn money while the plant was on strike. ‘One Friday, I prepared 172 and we only sold 50,’ he recalled later. ‘There was a freezer in the back of the bar, so we threw ‘em in there. It was either that or the trash can.’ A week later the frozen crab cakes still tasted fine, so Piszek and a friend, John Paul, each chipped in $350 and started a frozen seafood business.

“Piszek’s mother pressured her son to name the company after her…but instead, they named it Mrs. Paul’s Kitchens after John’s mom. Piszek bought out his partner in the 1950s but kept the Mrs. Paul’s name. In 1982, he sold the company to Campbell Soup and in 1996, it was purchased by Pinnacle Foods Corporation.”

“Fish sticks” is a phrase that is both hard and fun to say. The sh and the st are impossible to pronounce in sequence, unless you take a pregnant pause between them, and who wants to do that? The only way to say “fish sticks” is to elide the two words into one, so that you eliminate the s of “sticks,” resulting in fishticks. Have you ever met anyone who doesn’t say fishticks when he means to say “fish sticks”? I haven’t, and frankly don’t want to.