A Blog of My Own

Richard, who has Alzheimer’s, lived for a while next door to us with his daughter. His advancing disease made it necessary for his safety to move him to a Sunrise facility, where he seems to be doing very well. We visited him for the first time there a few days ago.

One thing about our call on Richard was especially poignant to me. We visited for a while in his room (a bright space, attractively furnished), and on the dresser was one of those double-frames for photos with, on the left, a picture of Richard as a young man in the early 1940s, and, on the right, a picture of his wife (now long deceased) from the same time. From our conversation, we knew that Richard still knows that the young man and woman in the pictures are he and his beloved. We sat and talked some more, and Richard put on a CD. Richard loves Sinatra, and so do I, so it was no surprise to me that the disc he played was of the young Frank with the Tommy Dorsey band. I commented, “Ahh, Sinatra” — at which point Richard went over to the dresser, and, pointing alternately to the CD player and the photograph of himself, protested, “That’s me.” It was obvious he had conflated his own identity with the sound of Sinatra’s voice in that period. Then a girl singer took over the vocals on the track we were hearing, and I recognized her as Connie Haines. So I said so, and Richard again disagreed strongly, going back to the double-frame and pointing to his young bride, saying, “That’s her.”

Somehow, he was able to hold two ideas in his head at the same time. He knew the photographs were of him and his wife. But he also “knew,” just as certainly, that the photographs were of the singers on the CD, the singers making the music that meant so much to him. The music which began as a metaphor for himself and his wife when they were young had gone beyond metaphor; now the two of them had become the music, and the music had become them.

When we read a work of fiction, the story can draw us into its world; while we read, we are not here, we are “there,” we become the protagonist in our mind’s eye; his fears are ours, his triumphs are ours. The difference is while this is so, we never quite lose the part of ourselves that says, “I am me, reading this book.” Richard, when he hears the music, seems to lose that.

Maybe it’s because music means a lot to me, too, or maybe it’s because the music of his time meant a lot to my father, whom we lost to Alzheimer’s, but when I realized what was going on with Richard, I started to cry, then held back my tears. At the same time Richard’s confusion is a symptom of his disease, there’s something beautiful in it. Counterintuitively, the disease doesn’t always cloud truth — sometimes it reveals it. And the truth can be a beautiful thing.

Here’s an excerpt from an article about the 10/19 episode of Family Guy:

But I beat them to the punch by a couple weeks.

From the upcoming 11/2 episode of The Simpsons:

The documentary Toots—about the legendary NY restaurateur/barkeep Toots Shor, who owned the place with his name on it at 51 W. 51st St.—had its “U.S. Theatrical Premiere” at Facets Multimedia in Chicago on Friday. I’m not sure exactly what that means, since the film was reviewed in the New York Times on September 14, 2007, with an endline that says “opens today in New York,” but no matter. It is a fun film; a great character study; a vivid portrait of New York in the fifties and sixties; a look at journalism, sports, the mafia, show business and alcohol when there was a point on the map you could locate the nexus of all five; and when it’s done, all you want to do is go to Toots Shor’s.

It’s impossible, of course—one might as well wish to visit Brigadoon, the Scottish village of musical-theater lore which becomes visible to outsiders only once every hundred years. But Toots makes the watering hole Toots Shor’s visible, if not visitable, on demand. More than that, it makes it come alive.

Although the movie is the work of one of Shor’s granddaughters, Kristi Jacobson, Toots is not a vanity project. Jacobson is a documentarian whose films have run on HBO, A&E, ABC, and PBS, and at festivals nationally. The film is well-paced, drawing you into its world from the first sip. A real movie-making intelligence drives it. “Intoxicated” might not be too strong a word to describe the state it puts you in, as the film builds its case for the specialness of a lost world.

Over a period of ten years, Jacobson got revealing on-camera interviews with Mike Wallace, Walter Cronkite, Gay Talese, Sidney Zion, Pete Hamill, Frank Gifford, Whitey Ford, Joe Garagiola, and others who were there. These she has integrated artfully with clips, stills, and other archival materials. Frank Sinatra is seen reminiscing about Shor, in a clip which I believe is taken from Sinatra’s 1985 lecture at Yale, the one organized by Zion. The movie gives us tales about Marilyn, DiMaggio, Mantle, Gleason, Hemingway. Damn. Just writing this, I want to go to Toots Shor’s all over again.

The movie plays at Facets through this Thursday. See if it you can, or if it comes to your city. Failing that, get the DVD, which comes out on December 31.

Louis Armstrong in front of his house.

Me on those self-same steps.

In New York about a week ago, we toured the Borough of Queens (led by our intrepid guides, and friends, Neill and Donna), and a highlight was our visit to Louis Armstrong’s house. A modest single-family home in a neighborhood of such, it has been available to tour since 2003. You’ll find it in the section called Corona (where Dizzy Gillespie, and other jazz musicians, also lived), at 34-56 107th Street. Armstrong lived there with his wife Lucille from 1943 until his death in 1971.

I have toured the homes of the great and the near-great (including the Hyde Park residences of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and, separately, Eleanor Roosevelt), but never before have I been in a house in which one could feel the presence of the former occupant as vividly as one can feel Armstrong’s in this one.

One reason is that Armstrong was fascinated with the tape recorder, and took many opportunities to record mundane and not-so-mundane events in his house. These recordings have been archived, and when you go through the house, you get to hear recordings that were made in the very rooms you’re in. Stand in the dining room, and the young neighborhood lad leading the tour flicks a switch, and you are hearing Louis and Lucille have a dinnertime conversation of no particular consequence. Ah, but stand in Louis’ study, and the flick of the switch plays for you an a cappella vocal recording he made in that very study, singing “Blueberry Hill.” It is a wonderful performance—and one that only those who tour the house will ever get to hear. His having made that private recording in the very room in which you stand makes you feel his spirit.

Why did he make that recording? It certainly wasn’t a rehearsal. He’d had a hit record with the song already. I guess he was just playing with his new toy, the tape recorder. But it is a fine, fully-committed performance of “Blueberry Hill,” maybe the finest you will ever hear, ending with the trademark-Satchmo scatting.

You should hear it.

Correction: Scott Merrell of the Songbirds List points out that the Louis Armstrong House is not the only place to hear the a cappella “Blueberry Hill” recording Louis made on the Tandberg tape recorder built into the wall of his study. (As a tangent, I noticed, for you hi-fi buffs out there, that there are two Tandberg tape decks built into that wall, side by side, but one is a playback-only deck.) The following press release came out this year from Queens College, City University of New York:

CORONA, NY, July 31, 2008—Never-before-released recordings of the renowned Louis Armstrong, including legendary radio broadcasts and excerpts from Armstrong’s home-recorded tapes, are now available on a two-CD set from Jazz Heritage Society.

Disc One features the finest performances from a historic series of radio broadcasts. From April to May 1937, Louis Armstrong was the guest host of Rudy Vallee’s Fleishmann’s Yeast Hour, one of the most popular shows on radio. Armstrong was the first African-American to host a national network variety show—one of his many “firsts.”

In 1987, four years after Lucille Armstrong’s passing, David Gold, Executor of the Armstrong Estate and President of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, selected Queens College to be the repository of Louis and Lucille Armstrong’s vast collection of memorabilia. Discovered in the archives were 18 fragile acetate discs of the legendary 1937 Fleishmann’s Yeast broadcasts. The recordings have now been meticulously remastered by Doug Pomeroy, a notable audio engineer who specializes in historic jazz recordings.

Disc Two provides insight into Louis Armstrong’s private moments. Carefully stored by Lucille Armstrong in Satchmo’s den were 650 reels of home-recorded tape. One of Louis Armstrong’s favorite hobbies was recording into his Tandberg tape deck—he would simply push the “record” button, visiting with fans and friends, at home or backstage, or while practicing his trumpet. Excerpts from Louis Armstrong home-recorded tapes on the CD include Pops singing and playing “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” and “Blueberry Hill” a cappella.

Louis also reminisces about Bix Beiderbecke and Big Sid Catlett. Louis describes in great detail the early decades of his career and—of immense delight for jazz enthusiasts—plays trumpet along with a 78 RPM recording of “Tears” (a disc he made in 1923 with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band).

The two-CD set—conceived of and authorized by the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation—comprises more than one hour of Armstrong’s performance with his big band, more than one hour of excerpts from Armstrong’s home-recorded tapes, illuminating notes by Dan Morgenstern (an NEA Jazz Master who has received seven Grammy Awards for liner notes and two ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for best writing on jazz), and rare photos from the collections of the Louis Armstrong House Museum.

This set, released by Jazz Heritage Society, is currently available on CD exclusively via retail at www.JazzStore.com, and via membership in the Jazz Heritage Society at www.jazzheritage.org . Visitors to the Louis Armstrong House Museum can purchase the CD at the Museum’s shop.

On August 12, this unique recording will be available digitally at iTunes, and on August 19 all digital downloading sites worldwide will be authorized to sell this title. (Note: many international sites will determine their own release date.)

For review copies, please contact Greg Barbero at greg.barbero@musicalheritage.org.

For a preview of this release, visit: www.jazzstore.com/stash/louis-armstrong/index.php

Incidentally, for those who want to reach the Louis Armstrong House by train from Manhattan, satchmo.net provides these directions:

Take the 7 train to 103rd Street-Corona Plaza. Walk north on 103rd Street. After two blocks, turn right onto 37th Avenue. Walk four short blocks, and then turn left onto 107th Street. The Louis Armstrong House is on the left, 1/2 block north of 37th Avenue. The exact address is 34-56 107th Street.

Here’s something you don’t see every day.

(1997, from a show of Vanity Fair photos earlier this year at London’s National Portrait Gallery.)

On Friday, I thought it was finally time I learned about what really happened in 1929, since we seem to be celebrating its anniversary.

What I learned surprised me.

Despite our collective sense of history, the market did not really crash disastrously in 1929. It lost about half its value, but by a year later had regained half that. By 1930 it was down only 25% from its high—quite a bit better than the 40% loss we’ve experienced in the last year.

Ah, if only that were the end of the story. But it wasn’t. In 1931, the market began to slide again. For two years, it declined steadily. There was no crash—but due to consistent losses, the market by the end of 1932 had lost 89% of its value compared to its pre-“crash” high in 1929. That was a disaster.

So, 1) the events of 1929 weren’t cataclysmic, and 2) the actual cataclysmic events, which didn’t happen until 1931-1932, didn’t come as one big “crash” but as a steady, nauseating erosion.

It turns out that our imaginary, collective “Complete Idiot’s Guide to The Stock Market Crash” isn’t right.

None of this means that history is going to repeat itself. Some important things are different now. World governments today seem to understand the necessity of getting ahead of the crisis. We just might end up OK this time around. For us, as ordinary citizens, to be unworried would be delusional, but my gut tells me there’s cause for hope. Call me a cockeyed optimist.

It’s Yom Kippur, the day of atonement (I’m writing this before sundown, by the way, so it’s OK).

Some things I’ll be atoning for:

• Not listening better to my wife.
• Being too quick to anger.
• Not calling my mother often enough.
• Not getting out of the stock market a year ago.

OK, just kidding about that last one, but – say, what did you do in the past year that you should atone for? Post it in the comments section.

I didn’t want to go this far before, because I didn’t think it was necessary, but I do think that if our country sees a Hitler, he’s not going to be a guy with a funny mustache. He just might arrive in a package called Sarah Palin.

She is mesmerizing. Hitler derived his power from his ability to mesmerize. In both cases the power may be primarily sexual. Hitler in his addresses to crowds had the ability, it is well documented, to make German women swoon.

Sarah Palin doesn’t even know that she’s the next Hitler. I’m sure it would come as a surprise to her. That doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen.

I used to think her mesmerizing power was something only the Democrats needed to worry about. But now that she’s making speeches attacking Obama not for what he says but as the dangerous-other, and referring to “those East Coast people” in a thinly-veiled attempt to make middle Americans think “Jew,” her power is something the whole country ought to worry about. I’ve said from the beginning that Sarah Palin was not to be underestimated. Her ability to galvanize an enormous portion of the population who are susceptible to her divisive message is a talent to be dismissed at our peril.

Those who have thought the danger of Sarah Palin is that she is unqualified to be president have had it all backwards. The danger has never been that she’s unqualified, but that she is supremely effective — in the service of some very un-American ideas. The liberal/left bloggers who think she made a poor showing in the debate because she refused to answer questions are missing the point. She spoke exactly as she wanted to. And those who were listening most closely heard exactly what they were waiting to hear.