A Blog of My Own

In New Orleans, in Faubourg Marigny, is a jazz/funk club called Snug Harbor. We went to hear Charmaine Neville and her band on Monday night. Fun music — they get a groove going. At one point, Charmaine cajoles certain audience members into getting up on stage and handling the auxiliary percussion. I was honored to be selected as cowbellist. My family tells me she gave me a look when I started my pattern that said, “Hey, not bad.”

Here are approximately four seconds of video, thanks to my alert nephew Ari Chalew and the miracle of cellphone video technology:

Photo by Angie Naron.

In Waltham, MA last week, at a cookout at the house my niece is renting with her friends, I experienced newfangled hot dog buns. They appear to the naked eye to resemble simply slices of white bread folded over, but no. Well, yes, but there’s more going on than that. Somehow, in the baking process, they are shaped and crisped into action, ready to perform the bun function, supporting the dog as authoritatively as any bun out there. (No slice of folded-over white bread could do that.) They just taste better than normal buns, that’s all, being nearly crustless. You get delicious bread in every bite, not useless crust, and the bread not only supports the hot dog literally, but taste-wise. Being less intrusive in the total flavor experience than a big ol’ crusty bun, it lets you taste the dog better, while complementing it perfectly with its ever-so-slightly-toasty white bread goodness. Whoever thought of it is a genius.

Well, it turns out the buns aren’t newfangled, and whoever thought of them might be long gone. My research turns up that they are actually called “New England style hot dog buns,” so, just like Thickly Settled road signs, this bun is an indigenous regional treasure. I’m picking up hints that the origin of the bun style may be Portuguese (which makes sense, given the large Massachusetts Portuguese-American population in such towns as New Bedford and Fall River, south of Boston, as well as Boston itself, and in Rhode Island). Internet message boards are full of people who have fallen in love with these New England hot dog buns and are desperately seeking them in areas outside New England without success. According to my niece’s friend Laine (mouth pictured above), the ones at the party were purchased at Costco, but it must be that only New England Costcos have them. Wonder Bread sells a “New England Style” hot dog bun on the web; I can’t tell from the picture on that web page whether the buns inside the bag are really the kind I had, but for $4.75 a dozen, it might just be worth biting.

On a recent stay in Waltham, MA (a town about 15 miles west of Boston), I came across, repeatedly, a traffic sign I’ve never seen anywhere else. Its particular wording is so redolent of colonial times that you just know you never will see it anywhere else. Other locales might urge caution in unusually population-dense areas with a sign like “Watch for Pedestrians,” or “Caution: Congested Area,” or simply “Slow,” but “Thickly Settled” is so clearly a remnant from the Puritan seventeenth and eighteenth century mindset that it has a wonderful indigenous charm. The word “thickly” conjures up some Hawthornian state of nature, as in a forest thick with trees before the arrival of ships from England; the word “settled” harkens back to America’s first immigrants, who arrived on those ships, and what they did. You can’t not see an early colonial village in your mind’s eye when you see that sign. The words are not an ersatz attempt to evoke an earlier time, but rather, it seems clear, have remained in continuous usage such that the residents don’t give a second thought to the matter, even if no one else could fail to catch the phrase’s special flavor.

But the sign is not just a bit of New Englandy charm. A little research reveals it has a specific meaning, and a sanction attached to that meaning. According to the Massachusetts RMV Driving Manual, “a ‘thickly settled’ district is an area where houses or other buildings are located, on average, less than 200 feet apart.” And these areas come with a specific (if unposted) speed limit: Speeds over 30 MPH in such areas are ticketable offenses, because speeds exceeding this in “thickly settled” areas are not considered “reasonable and proper.”

Massachusetts could simply post speed limit signs in population-dense areas, but who would want that? Not I. The “Thickly Settled” sign is a bastion of regional flavor in an increasingly homogenized world.

The occasion of our visit to Waltham, by the way, was the graduation of our niece Hannah Chalew from Brandeis University. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude, with Highest Honors in Studio Art, and was the recipient of the Mitchell Siporin Memorial Prize. (Siporin was a social realist painter who founded the Department of Fine Arts at Brandeis in 1951. His work is contained in the Smithsonian American Art Musuem, among other places.)

A new, major film biography of Frank Sinatra is on the way, to be directed by Martin Scorsese. Accounts vary.

The Hollywood Reporter says this:

The deal comes after years of negotiations with Frank Sinatra Enterprises, a joint venture of the crooner’s estate and Warner Music Group. Internal politics of the estate, where family members had to form a consensus as to how to tell the story and, more importantly, just how much of the story to tell — was a hurdle that had to be overcome.

While Variety says this:

The process of acquiring the late entertainer’s life and particularly music rights was “very complicated, as you can imagine,” Schulman said, because of the multiple parties involved. “The responsibility we are taking on to tell his story — that would cause anyone to be very careful about who they grant these rights to,” she added. “Everyone knows that Marty Scorsese is a final-cut director. So there had to be a lot of trust that he would tell this story in a way that didn’t destroy (Sinatra’s) memory.”

These quotes give two different impressions of how hamstrung Scorsese is going to be. The first quote indicates the family is having a lot of input into the storytelling. The second quote indicates the family is trusting Scorsese to tell the story his way. We shall see.

Family input may be no bad thing. The Sinatra children, Nancy, Frank Jr. and Tina, and their mother Nancy, as well Frank’s last wife Barbara, have insight into the real man that no one else would have. So if their input takes the form of “you really must include this, ” instead of “you can’t show this,” it will make for a greater film. But that quote from The Hollywood Reporter about the family forming consensus on “just how much of the story to tell” doesn’t give one optimism that their input will be more about inclusion than exclusion.

Then again, as a Sinatra idolator, I think a movie that glorifies him may be just what I want to see. I’m really not sure how interested I will be in a “warts and all” portrayal.

A tricky proposition.

A danger in terms of reviewers’ perception of the movie is that all this advance publicity about the family’s involvement will cause reviewers to receive the movie as a whitewash, no matter what the film’s actual qualities.

I have high hopes for the movie, but cautious ones. Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic was a huge lumbering thing that never got off the ground. The young Scorsese could have done an amazing job with Sinatra’s story, but I’m not sure about the old Scorsese. Maybe this is the film that will return him to form. If any subject could, it’s this one, which is right in the wheelhouse of the director who made Mean Streets, Raging Bull and New York, New York as a young man.

I don’t know who should play Sinatra, but I’m not crazy about the strong suggestion in the Variety article that it will be Leonardo DiCaprio. I know the singing in the movie will be Frank’s, but DiCaprio’s speaking voice seems too light to match up with Frank’s when the singing starts.

All caveats to one side, though, this seems like a movie that must be made now. Scorsese (an ideal choice in many ways) won’t be alive forever, the Sinatra family (whose input I hope will improve the film) won’t be alive forever, and we won’t be alive forever.

(Photos courtesy of an invaluable resource — the LIFE photo archive hosted by Google.)

The devolution of the mockumentary in shows like The Office, and now Parks and Recreation, interests me.

The fake-reality comedy form has become, through audience familiarity, simply another film-style choice. The premise that The Office and Parks and Recreation are documentaries — well, that faded long ago into the audience’s unconscious. There are a million things in both P&R and The Office that would never happen in front of a documentary film crew; people would never say or do those things when they knew they were being filmed, and a camera would never be around to capture them in the unlikely event they wanted to. Not to mention that if The Office (now at the end of its fifth year) were the product of a documentary shoot, it would be the longest and most expensive single shoot in the history of film. But that’s OK.

Back in the fifties, George Burns talked to the camera in The Burns and Allen Show. Nobody asked, “Hey, how can he be a character in a situation comedy and still know he’s in a situation comedy?” Today’s mockumentary shows are not different from that — they’ve added a shaky camera, that’s all.

But that’s everything, since the shaky-cam updates the tradition — an ancient one, going back to Shakespeare’s asides; the gloss of modernity may be what we need in order to believe in characters we otherwise, in this cynical time, might not. It breaks through our defenses.

Speaking of character, the complexities of P&R lead character Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler), mid-level Pawnee, IN municipal government bureaucrat, continue to fascinate. Sympathetic figure, or complete buffoon? Both! Her failure to carry out the blackmail of the zoning commissioner last night was sheer, pathetic ineptitude (she ended up with a glass of water thrown in her face, while she poured out a torrent of apologies) — but it was also a sign of innate goodness. When she later says to friend and confederate Ann, as if it were a confirmation of her moral fiber and not merely of her incompetence, “I didn’t have it in me to do that,” she’s actually speaking the truth. She wanted to do it, and that sucks, but it’s also true that her ineptitude in the situation was a direct result of a core decency. She’s not cut out for politics, and part of the reason is that she’s not a horrible enough person to be cut out for politics. So Leslie is a floor wax and a dessert topping — and I find that believable, and unusually layered for a situation comedy. That’s the real reality.

R.I.P., Dom DeLuise.

I have been, and continue to be, an ardent supporter of Al Franken for U.S. Senator from Minnesota. (As well as a financial contributor.) I hope the State Supreme Court of Minnesota will someday confirm him, just as I hope for everlasting peace on earth and the complete elimination of disease.

I have to think Franken is grateful that Tom Davis’ memoir Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss didn’t come out until after the election. In fact, I think he’s more than grateful. I think there was a deal to make sure it happened that way.

While the comedy team of Franken and Davis broke up over Davis’ hard-core drug use, the two are friends. Franken contributes material to Davis’ book, and Davis writes of supporting Franken’s Senate campaign (which had been announced at the time of the book’s writing). The ticklish thing for Franken is that while Davis was certainly the harder-core partier of the two, the book portrays Franken as doing copious amounts of drugs in the seventies himself. And a bunch of other things back then he probably would have had to apologize for now, if Norm Coleman had gotten his hands on the material. It could have been fatal — especially in an election that turned on 300-some votes, as this one did.

So, I think that Al said to Tom, “Tom, go ahead and write your book, but do me one favor. Don’t publish it until after the election.” And Tom, doing what a friend would do, complied.

By the way, the book has received some pans having to do with it containing too much material that has nothing to do with comedy, Franken, or Saturday Night Live. Those pans are wrong. Granted, irrelevant material abounds, about Davis’ world travels and Grateful Dead worship and girlfriends, but there is also plenty of good stuff. More than enough of it to make the book a rewarding read for anyone interested in comedy, Franken, Davis, and their SNL cohorts. It is not particularly well-written, but at least it’s grammatical. And while the book isn’t funny (an air of melancholy and regret suffuses much of it), its reminiscences served to remind me of the unique comic genius that Tom Davis brought to the party. I devoured it, and recommend it.

The Library of Congress has begun to make archival materials available on YouTube. That’s very exciting news for anyone who cares about, you know, history and junk like that. To get you started, here’s a film from 1904 of two hundred women checking in for work at the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co. in East Pittsburgh, PA. The film was made by the American Mutoscope & Biograph Co.

For more YouTubes from the Library of Congress, click here.