The car is loaded with all my worldly possessions (except a George Foreman box full of odds and ends which cost $48 to ship). The house is quiet. I had an amazing 4th of July weekend in Big Sur and San Francisco, a chronicle of which will appear here in the future as "The Final Days of the Hedonistic Seven," and spent the ensuing time saying some emotional farewells. My mind is sharp. My body has never felt better and stronger. Tomorrow I'm leaving Los Angeles in the early afternoon and not looking back until at the least I have my M.A. I am thinking of Johnson, Trollope, how to change the world, how I can thank Kal for packing up my stuff and then sharing a fantastic margarita lunch with me (Gill, you're a damn lucky woman just as he's a lucky man and don't you two ever forget it)...and some recent cultural occurrences from my summer of reading for pleasure which I wanted to share with you.
Novelist and theater historian Ethan Mordden's seven-volume history of the Broadway Musical, 1920-2003, is how non-fiction should be written. Intelligent, informative to the point of exhaustion, and written with passion for the subject and plenty of opinions. (He calls Zorba, Kander and Ebb's follow-up to the brilliant Cabaret, "one of the most evil pieces of shit ever perpetrating itself as musical theater," and that's not even him at his STRONGEST.) Mordden will make you want to go out and listen to every Rodgers and Hammerstein or Gershwin cast recording...heck, every show, PERIOD. His love for the musical (including Andrew Lloyd Webber) knows no limitation. And in what I think is an emotional and intellectual high point, his standing as a chronicler of homosexuals in America lends extra weight to his discussions of the great gay titans: both Lorenz and Moss Hart, the immortals Cole Porter and Noel Coward, and the incomparable Stephen Sondheim. (Follies is his pick as the greatest show of them all...NEED to hear or see it.)
Another way non-fiction should be written is to present it as a research project, with plenty of charts, graphs, and central theses to digest...but also plenty of entertaining anecdotal evidence and case studies to make your point. Jim Collins's trilogy (so far) analyzing what makes a business stand the test of time or fall into Chapter 11 or oblivion--Built to Last, Good to Great, and How the Mighty Fall--is fantastic reading even for those not part of corporate America. The virtues and vices of the company are also the virtues and vices of the human, and for researchers like me, Collins's love for his work and advice are inspirational.
ANOTHER way to write non-fiction is to make it a one-on-one conversation with the reader full of colloquial asides and a friendly, conspiratorial tone to convey all the information. Jeff Pearlman, whose The Bad Guys Won! is one of the most fun baseball books of the decade, is at peak form again with Boys Will Be Boys, though this book-length examination of the glory days and foibles of the 1990's Dallas Cowboys has no real ending...and doesn't hold a candle to "The Wildest Team of Them All," the CHAPTER on the St. Louis Spirits from Terry Pluto's seminal Loose Balls, my benchmark for judging sports books.
And of course, I adore the biography. Tearing Down the Wall of Sound is the life of Phil Spector, the only man who could pull the greatest musicians in the country into one room, make them play the same simplistic patterns over and over again, and not only get away with it but create art in the process. Mick Brown portrays Spector as a true musical genius whose desire to be acknowledged by his peers pushed him over the edge into megalomania. On the one hand, he was a narcissistic bully, and Brown's handling of the Lana Clarkson murder (he interviewed Spector TWO MONTHS before) fills you with empathy for her and rage against him. On the other hand, I can still listen to "To Know Him Is To Love Him," "Da Doo Ron Ron," "Let It Be," All Things Must Pass, "Imagine," and "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" with awe. He did one thing right. (Fun fact! While producing Dion, Leonard Cohen, and the Ramones in the late 70's, Spector would drink an entire case of Manischievietz at every session!)
The supernatural romance is a lovely genre but a hard one to do right without passing over into schmaltz. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death is considered their masterpiece--and one of Scorsese's favorite pictures of all time--because it gets the style RIGHT! At the end of World War II, the record-keepers in the afterlife come up one body short on the ledger, as they overlooked an English fighter pilot who wrongly survived a mortal crash over the Channel. They go to fetch him, but in the ensuing twenty hours since the wreck, he's fallen in love with an American nurse...and uses that to win the right to argue his case before the Almighty Tribunal. It's beautiful to see future Oscar-winners David Niven and Kim Hunter as the star-crossed pair, hilarious to see Niven's defense counsel Roger Livesey--who starred in P&P's awesome and oh-so-veddy-British The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp--and prosecutor Raymond Massey wage legal war (witty, motorcycling neurologist Livesey keeps deflecting the fiery Massey, the first American to die in the Revolution, as the trial becomes a debate on which country is superior and Massey resents a Boston girl falling for a blueblood), and most of all, it's amazing to watch Powell, Pressburger, and Jack Cardiff make a movie which NEVER looks like it was made in 1946. The images are crisp and vivid, the color outstanding, the sounds so well done, the little touches like shooting reality in color and the afterworld in black and white perfect. No wonder Scorsese loved Powell. He was a man ahead of his time, as Peeping Tom would sadly prove.
(BTW, I saw this on my last trip to the New Beverly with Matt, Lisa, and Jesse. The second half was the behind-the-camera trio's 1948 classic The Red Shoes, which as Matt pointed out has no cohesive story and a central figure who seems to create great ballet by yelling at everyone and looking enigmatically at things. Lost a little respect for that film.)
Duncan Jones's Moon is surprising. It's like the long-lost entry from the 1970's MGM sci-fi cycle: serious, perfectly designed in terms of visuals, rather well-acted (Sam Rockwell puts on a great one-man show and Kevin Spacey is better than he's been in a long time voicing the computer), and with an ending I seriously did not expect. Worth a look. Watched A Hard Day's Night for the first time in years on the same day and relished in the music, the madcap laughs, and the lovely, lovely lack of cynicism as the Fab Four treat all the world as a joke except working their magic on the English populace, which IS deathly serious.
I had my greatest game of Rock Band ever, scoring perfect 100% vocals on "Dani California" and "Oh, Pretty Woman," and never earning less than 93 except on "Here It Goes Again." WHY is that one so tricky? Also won last Trivia Night at the Fox & Hounds, Studio City, with Murphy, Callan, and Tocci, the best L.A. team anyone could ask for. Vice-Presidents, sports nicknames, and obscure celebrities. That's how you do it.
Though revealing nothing new for anyone who's read his Boswell, the Samuel Johnson 300th exhibit at the Huntington is the best collection of actual Johnsonian texts I may ever see in one place. And the gardens are lovely as ever. Shame it was 109 degrees that day.
And last night...man...last trip to the Hollywood Bowl, taking the Bogs and Lisa to see an all-Prokofiev show and saying farewell to my great mentor Michael Tabb in the process. Romeo and Juliet brings out the best in composers--Tschaikovsky, Rota, Armstrong--and the man behind the Eisenstein music is no exception, the excerpts hinting at more delights from the full 2 1/2 hours. The second Piano Concerto, which Prokofiev had to rewrite from memory after the Revolution, is FULL-BODIED: the creation of emotional ideas followed by sheerly intellectual arrangements and working out their implications, resulting in something which must be seen and heard--requires a safecracker's fingers. Peter and the Wolf is always a treat, with the Oscar-winning modern-day film being a great pairing with the lively rendition. And for the finale, "The Montagues and Capulets," fireworks with an imagination rarely seen soared from the roof of the Bowl. Tenth concert. Great food (Judy makes a KILLER tuna salad on rye). Wonderful conversation. Lisa with so many terrific things to say and looking adorable in purple while saying them. The Bogs once again being wonderful surrogate parents. Another night to remember.
Right now...reading Kerouac and listening to My Morning Jacket and Grover Washington. Readying journal and Bleak House for the future. Sweating like a hog in Mike's room writing this...until NOW!
See you all in Ohio!
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