The Boomer Hall of Fame

Early Warning

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 12 Feb 2015 07:13:00 +0000

Jeff Masters at Weather Underground unearthed this brief video excerpt from a Bell Laboratory Science series episode in 1958, that includes a mention of the climate crisis consequences of CO2 pollution.

He gave more historical examples to show that global heating has been a topic of concern for longer than generally realized. This included a specific warning in a 1965 message to Congress by President Lyndon Johnson--when the far-seeing Stewart Udall was still Secretary of Interior (he was appointed by JFK), with responsibility for environmental matters before they got their own cabinet secretary in the Nixon administration. Though as a high school student I knew of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (which I saw on the Best Seller List in 1963), it was Udall's 1963 book, The Quiet Crisis, that began my education on environmental matters. (I still have the paperback copy I first read then.)

But this video is fascinating in itself. I remember these programs, as I'm sure lots of Baby Boomers do. If we didn't see them on TV, we saw them run from film projectors in school. There were 8 of these specials made in the decade of 1954-64, each on a specific subject. "The Unchained Goddess" about weather was the one that mentioned global heating, in a characteristically dramatic way.

This was the fourth and last of the specials produced and written by the eminent Hollywood filmmaker Frank Capra (Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Meet John Doe etc.) Disillusioned with Hollywood (and/or vice versa) in the Blacklist era, he used his science schooling and filmmaking chops to create these, which included technical as well as narrative innovations that became standard for both documentaries and feature films. Shot in technicolor, several of the films won Emmys in various categories.

The basic interplay in the film is between a science expert (Dr. Frank C. Baxter, and it's recognizing him that brought these all back to me) and a "fiction writer," played in this episode by actor Richard Carlson, who also directed it. (You'll see just a moment of him in the above one-minute excerpt.)

But Carlson wasn't just any actor, especially to the young Boomer audience. Many adults were familiar with him as the star of the 1953-56 espionage TV series I Led Three Lives. But he was also the star of such Saturday afternoon epics as It Came From Outer Space and Creature From the Black Lagoon.

Moreover, the characters he played were significant. In most Hollywood films (as in most fiction), scientists were either mad and evil, or blandly evil. Though the first scientist as hero was in H.G. Well's The Time Machine (published 120 years ago in 1895) it took a long time for the movies to catch up. Carlson played several of the early examples of scientists as heroes--even action heroes-- in 1950s science fiction and monster movies.

The combination of FBI man on TV and sci-fi scientist gave him a weird sort of credibility with both adults and children. I'm sure we were captivated as well by color if we saw these in school, as well as by the high level of filmmaking skill and familiar stars. For me they came at an age that I wanted to be a scientist, before the realities of math overcame the romance of the scientist who saves the world, and not incidentally rescues the beautiful girl.

Imaginative stories that used scientific what-ifs got two basic responses in the 50s--very negative (from embarrassment to angry scoffing) and very positive, because the ideas as well as the action were stimulating. Today, a lot of deniers count on the angry scoffing of what they would like to believe is the science fiction of the climate crisis.

But we're all facing its reality now. The difference may be that some of us were opened to possibilities of real science speculations in the Bell series and other documentaries by fictional stories in which an international team of scientists convinces leaders of a mortal threat to the planet, and the world unites to overcome the threat. In that regard it turns out they were science fiction, at least so far.

R.I.P. 2014 70s and 80s

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 27 Dec 2014 02:01:00 +0000

Several fond figures from TV some boomers in the 70s grew up on: Ralph Waite, the father in The Waltons, Dave Madden of The Partridge Family, Ann B. Davis of The Brady Bunch, John Henson, puppeteer for The Muppets.

Music of the 70s and 80s lost Tommy Ramone, last surviving member of The Ramones, and Bob Casale, founder of Devo. Also singer-songwriter Jesse Winchester.

Saturday Night Live lost its voice--announcer Don Pardo--as well as 80s star Jan Hooks.

Film lost Harold Ramis (Ghostbusters), cinematographer Gordon Willis (Annie Hall and many others), producer Sal Zaentz (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), director Paul Mazursky (Blume in Love), director Richard Attenburough (Gandhi) and filmmaker Wu Tainming.

Film, television, stage and more--beginning with Mork & Mindy, Robin Williams was everywhere.

In the big world, the editor who helped bring down a corrupt president, Ben Bradlee.

R.I.P. 2014: the 60s

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 27 Dec 2014 02:00:00 +0000

From 60s music: most recently singer Joe Cocker. Earler in the year: Jack Bruce (bassist for Cream), guitarist Johnny Winter, Bobby Keys (sax player for the Rolling Stones and a solo artist), Ian McLager (keyboards, the Faces), Glenn Cornick (bass, Jethro Tull), Paul Revere (lead singer, Paul Revere and the Raiders.) Bobby Womack, Jay Traynor (Jay and the Americans.)

Also lyricist Gerry Goffin (with Carole King) and songwriter Peter Callander.

From the folk world, Pete Seeger, who belongs in every decade from the 30s on, but reemerged with the 60s folk boom, including mentoring Bob Dylan; and (speaking of Dylan) Carla Rotolo, whose enthusiasm got Dylan gigs and a recording contract. And a girlfriend--her younger sister, Suzy.

A major if recently forgotten figure of the 60s counterculture was Steven Gaskin, whose Monday Night Class at the Family Dog in San Francisco was immense and amazing (I was there for several, including the First Annual Holy Man Jam.) He later left the city and established The Farm, an experimental community that still exists. Marking his passing, the Sun Magazine re-published a 1985 interview and an example of a Monday Night Class.

Movies lost director Mike Nichols (The Graduate) and French director Alain Renais, actor Maximillian Schell ( Academy Award for Judgement at Nuremberg.)

Writers crucial to the decade: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Amiri Baraka (then known as Leroi Jones).

R.I.P. 2014: The 50s and Before

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 27 Dec 2014 01:54:00 +0000

From 1950s TV: comic genius Sid Caesar. Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., star of 77 Sunset Strip.

From 1950s music: Phil Everly (left) of the Everly Brothers. Bob Crewe, producer for The Four Seasons and songwriter ("Big Girls Don't Cry.")

Icon from the 50s and before: Shirley Temple, who produced a 1950s TV series of fairy tale adaptations that ranks among her lasting accomplishments.

From the World War II era: Chester Nez, Navajo code talker. Alice Herz, oldest survivor of the Holocaust. Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, last survivor of the Enola Gay crew that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

So Now It's Okay to Like the Bee Gees?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 31 May 2014 06:33:00 +0000

Barry Gibbs, the last living Bee Gee, is playing to large crowds in a solo U.S. tour in 2014. He started in the huge Boston Garden, which is where I once saw the Rolling Stones. It's very big.

Rolling Stone (the magazine) celebrates this with a collection of YouTube versions of "13 Essential Barry Gibb Tracks," most of them from the Bee Gees, beginning in the late 60s. The accompanying paragraphs are laudatory. They suggest that David Bowie essentially copied the Bee Gees in his early albums. So it's okay to like the Bee Gees now? Finally?

When they started, the reigning tastemakers at Rolling Stone considered them Beatles Lite. Their middle period albums were ignored, their hits ridiculed. And that's before they rode the Disco wave with their songs in Saturday Night Fever, which was of course beneath contempt.

Contempt was the attitude we faced when we included their first albums in our 1967-68 continuous play mix back in the Galesburg House for the Bewildered (169 W. First Street, now a national historical monument. Wait--update: they tore it down) where the tunes of that fantastic year were our senior year soundtrack at Knox College. Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, Creem, Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, Buffalo Springfield, even Vanilla Fudge, but...the Bee Gees?

Two of the 13 Essential Tracks are from those first two albums. "New York Mining Disaster 1941" is an acknowledged classic from their first one, and their first radio hit. "To Love Somebody" also from that album (not in this list) was even bigger. "Holiday" was the third hit from the Bee Gees First.

But the critical bloom was off the rose already by their second album Horizontal, so the surprise of the Rolling Stone choices is "World," which led off the album and is immediately picked up thematically and musically in the next track. Their daffy surrealism turned eerie, approaching what French surrealists like Eluard and Apollonaire might have written if they were in a rock band. "Daytime Girl" sets a pattern of dreamy forboding. Still, they could craft a radio hit when they wanted--though "Birdie Told Me" is a classic pop song, the album's hit turned out to be the melodic and yearning "Massachusetts." Though "World" made the Brit charts, it was too weird for the US, or in those days, Rolling Stone. Now apparently it's an essential.

By the time of their double album Odessa (with the red felt cover--I've still got it) the Bee Gees were more often ridiculed than respected. Still, I continued to purchase and listen to every Bee Gees album in the early and mid 70s. Idea played at Iowa, Mr. Natural in PA. My allegiance while I was writing about rock at the Boston Phoenix was considered a puzzling eccentricity. I do remember reading one writer somewhere (it may have even been on an album cover) brave enough to write a positive essay, though a lot of it was about how quixotic he was considered, how defensive he sometimes had to be.

Now Bruce Springsteen is doing a Bee Gees song--and one from the disco era--and Gibb is doing a Springsteen (neither of them terribly good at it.) But that's less of a departure than Rolling Stone's--musicians by and large did not buy into the snobbery. Many recorded Bee Gees songs and copied their riffs. Musicians are like that. (Irony here is that Jon Landau, by now the multimillionaire manager and former producer for the Boss, was the reigning imperial power as the record review editor at Rolling Stone in those years that established the Bee Gees as bad taste.)

So I welcome the conventional wisdom to what I already knew: the Bee Gees were unique, unquestionably strange, but frequently haunting and oddly joyful. I'm glad that at least one of them lived long enough to get some love as well as fame and fortune. Welcome to the fan club.

Icons Connecting the Past and Future

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 05:26:00 +0000

In the 1960s it was becoming clear that pop culture was becoming American culture. By now that seems perfectly normal. The media covers pop music and movie stars as our royalty, television shows and movies like the latest artistic and cultural events. Scholars study Beatles lyrics and Doctor Who scripts. The new myths of gods, goddesses and heroes are the scifi and superhero sagas. But that didn't seriously begin to dominate until the 60s.

Early boomers will remember the roots of this change in the 50s and 60s, especially as icons of those decades and earlier reemerge in the news one last time. The death of Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers reminds us that aspects of pop culture are really refinements of folk culture.

I've just been rereading William Eastlake's early novels and came upon this sentence: "The secret in creating anything new seems to lie in borrowing all you see and hear about you and adding one small touch." That's often true in music particularly. Linda Ronstadt and Paul Simon talked about the Everly Brothers both in terms of the music they transformed and their effect on the music that followed theirs (like Simon & Garfunkel.) (Ronstadt was even better in this Time Magazine piece--the rest of it requires registration but even the intro paragraph adds something.)

Adapting folk culture in a different way is seen in the life of Pete Seeger. He only slightly changed folk songs (though his strengthening of the lyrics of "We Shall Overcome" helped it become immortal) but he applied them to contemporary issues with roots in the past, such as civil rights, an end to war and preserving the natural environment. Here's Josh Marshall's remembrance, and one by Bruce Springsteen.

To put it another way, as Marshall McLuhan did, each new medium (or form) at first adopts a previous medium as its content. So we've seen in our early boomer lifetimes how television took program models from radio and movies, which had earlier adapted them from the stage. As this essay says, the now classic early TV comedians brought sketches and approaches they adapted from the rich stage traditions of vaudeville. This was true of one of the great TV comedians and comic actors of the 1950s who died recently, Sid Caesar. Here's more of what I've written about him on this site, and still more on another.

The death of actor Ralph Waite is an occasion to recall how deeply and for a long time he has been part of establishing a cultural image, first as the young father on The Waltons and most recently as a father and grandfather figure on the TV series NCIS and Bones. I will also remember him for a little known but culturally evocative fantasy film about JFK called Timequest. Here's a biographical obit.

Finally, the little girl who helped a country and a culture through the dark days of the Depression has passed away. One of Shirley Temple's proudest moments was that in one of those movies, she held the hand of the immortal dancer Bill Robinson--perhaps the first time a white female had touched a black male on the silver screen. This reminds us of pop culture's role in change, as all of these examples do in different ways.

R.I.P. 2013: The '70s and '80s

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 28 Dec 2013 06:21:00 +0000

Among those we lost in 2013 that boomers will remember from the 1970s and 80s: Peter O'Toole, seen here in his singular 1972 film The Ruling Class; C. Everett Koop, the 1980s Surgeon General who spoke out on the health dangers of smoking; actress Marcia Wallace of The Bob Newhart show; Roger Ebert, the first film critic to win the Pulitzer for criticism; Phil Ramone, record producer for Billy Joel and other stars; Jean Stapleton, star of All in the Family; Bonnie Franklin of One Day At A Time.

Not pictured: pop psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers, New York mayor Ed Koch, Baltimore Orioles manager Ed Weaver, actress Eileen Brennan, photographer Allen Sekula, All in the Family writer Mickey Rose.

C. Everett Koop

Marcia Wallace

Roger Ebert

Phil Ramone

Jean Stapleton

Bonnie Franklin

R.I.P. 2013: the '60s

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 28 Dec 2013 05:43:00 +0000

Among the many lost in 2013 boomers remember from the 1960s: astronaut Scott Carpenter, comedian Jonathan Winters, actress Karen Black, actor Milo O'Shea (Ulysses); Ray Manzarek, keyboardist for The Doors; Lou Reed, first of the Velvet Underground; Paul Williams, founder and editor of the pioneer rock magazine Crawdaddy; singer Richie Havens; Bobby Rogers of Motown's first big group, The Miracles; David Frost, who first attracted American attention by importing his hit series of topical satire from the UK, That Was the Week That Was.

Not pictured: actor Tom Laughlin (the Billy Jack movie series), Ray Dolby (Dolby sound), musicians J.J. Cale, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Alvin Lee, Mary Love, Rich Huxley (the Dave Clark Five). Liberal Catholic writer Andrew Greeley; perennial White House reporter Helen Thomas, documentary filmmaker Ed Pincus; cinematographer Marcello Gotti (Battle of Algiers), record producer for the Rolling Stones etc. Andy Johns, poet Anselm Hollo, and Syd Bernstein, the promoter who brought the Beatles to America.

Jonathan Winters

Karen Black

Milo O'Shea

Lou Reed

Ray Manzarek of The Doors

Paul Williams, ed. of Crawdaddy

Richie Havens

David Frost (That Was the Week That Was)

Bobby Rogers of The Miracles

R.I.P. 2013: The '50s

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 28 Dec 2013 05:13:00 +0000

Among those we lost in 2013 who boomers remember from the 1950s: Ray Harryhausen, master of stop-motion effects in many 1950s movies, including Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers; Mouseketeers Annette Funicello and Dick Dodd; actress Julie Harris (James Dean's heartthrob in East of Eden); singer Patti Page; baseball great Stan Musial; actor Frank Bank (played Lumpy on Leave It To Beaver); Don Nelson (writer for The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet); Ray Brown (50s car designer, of the Edsel among others); cartoonist Peter Hoffman (Steve Roper) and pianist Van Cliburn, the first American to win a major piano competition in Russia.

Annette

Julie Harris

Patti Page

Stan Musial

Don Nelson--writer for Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet

Frank Bank (Lumpy)

R.I.P. 2013: Stars of Our Fathers

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 28 Dec 2013 04:35:00 +0000

Most of us Boomers had childhoods and adolescences that included old movies on TV, including many from the 1940s. So the stars of our fathers (and mothers) were familiar to us, too, at impressionable ages. Here are some of those stars we lost in 2013. Above: Joan Fontaine.

Esther Williams

Eleanor Powell

Deanna Durbin

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 02:26:00 +0000

Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview
By Jonathan Cott
Yale University Press

Born in 1933, she was an academic and an academic's wife when she heard "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and the Comets on the radio, and changed her life. By the mid 1960s she was the devastatingly beautiful American writer who first brought high culture smarts to popular culture manifestations, and among other things helped give birth to a boomer generation of rock critics like me, and everybody who wrote for Rolling Stone.

So she was a natural for an extensive Rolling Stone interview published in 1979. It's hard to imagine now an analogue to Susan Sontag who would be the subject of such a treatment today. But even with her accomplishments to that date--the groundbreaking collection of essays Against Interpretation, the equally original On Photography and Illness As A Metaphor, with thoughts and a point of view responding to her own confrontations with cancer and the medical system--many important accomplishments were ahead of her, notably her activities in Sarajevo during the Balkan warfare (where she directed a production of Waiting for Godot with a background of gunfire outside the theatre), her book Regarding the Pain of Others and her novel In America which won the National Book Award in 2000. Revelations about her bisexuality--including her own admission-- also emerged some years after this interview.

Jonathan Cott conducted the interview, in which literary allusions are as likely in the questions as in the answers. About a third of it appeared in Rolling Stone, and though there is conversation in the book that is less interesting, having the whole interview published is certainly worthwhile. Sontag (Cott writes) enjoyed the interview process and the best exchanges show how engaged both participants were.

Sontag remained a champion of modernism and of a 1960s sensibility in the best sense. She battled back against the revisionism and reaction already underway just as the counterrevolution of the 80s began. "The idea is that everything that was hoped for and attempted in the sixties basically hasn't worked out and couldn't work out. But who says it won't work? Who says there's something wrong with people dropping out? I think the world should be safe for marginal people. One of the primary things that a good society should be about is to allow people to be marginal."

Cott also contributes a brief introduction which quotes from Sontag's writing, including this startling gem: "There is no possibility of culture without true altruism." That's what we needed and got from Sontag--bold, against the grain, forthright and well-stated. And that's what we miss.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 06:56:00 +0000

And Everything is Going Fine
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Criterion Collection

I last talked with Spalding Gray at Wildberries Marketplace in Arcata, California, on the afternoon of his last Center Arts performance here. I’d had dinner with him in Pittsburgh (along with six or eight others) several years before, where the general conversation was high-spirited—at least until he quietly observed that he couldn’t laugh anymore. He didn’t know why. He just couldn’t.

But when I ran into him at Wildberries he smiled broadly and spoke with enthusiasm about the Humboldt landscape. It was January 2001, just months before he suffered major injuries in a car accident, including brain damage. In this film about his life, Spalding Gray says that the years leading up to the 2001 accident were the happiest of his life. Three years later he was dead, presumably by suicide.

Spalding Gray virtually invented the autobiographical monologue, although he preferred to call what he did “poetic journalism.” Several of his monologues became feature films, including Swimming to Cambodia (directed by Jonathan Demme in 1987) and Gray’s Anatomy (directed by Steven Soderbergh in 1996.) Soderbergh and his team assembled pieces of video—monologues, interviews, reflections—into a kind of posthumous autobiography, with the help of Kathie Russo, Gray’s widow.

There are gaps (notably in the years of his greatest celebrity) and the portrait that emerges may or may not be accurate (there’s emphasis on death and suicide throughout.) But the contours of his life and career are here, from childhood obsessions to the fatherhood that started those happy years. Between them were the yearnings and penchant for seeking extremes, and then the need to construct monologues about the resulting experiences.

In the film he says that at a certain point he got tired of talking about himself, and sought ways to talk about other people. I witnessed him one sunny afternoon in PPG Plaza in Pittsburgh, soliciting stories from an assembled audience. He was a careful, caring listener, and people responded. Later he told some of these stories with as much pith and power as he told his own.

What seemed to brighten his life in the happy years he described was fatherhood. It happened as chaotically and neurotically as all the disasters he describes in his monologues. But this one turned out for the best. He enjoyed being a father, a family man, and apparently was good at it. His son wrote music for this film.

This DVD includes an informative “making of” extra, in which Soderbergh owns up to his cowardice in avoiding Gray after his accident. It also includes Gray’s first monologue, “Sex and Death to Age 14.” Although chaotic, it had his signature emphasis on details as well as the humor and honesty (and the poetic inventions) that he would learn to structure in his later, more mesmerizing works.

The film’s title comes from a monologue in which Gray talks about his father’s attempt to create the perfect suburban home, but even though “everything is going fine,” there was always one more thing to buy or do to create the completely protected life.

Boomer Elder: Steinbeck's 1960 America

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 06:31:00 +0000

John Steinbeck was one of the first authors (as opposed to the first poems or stories) of literary reputation I read independently, and probably the very first. I read some of the volume of his six shorter novels that was on my mother's bookshelves (the same book I now have on mine) and I vividly remember reading his 1961 novel The Winter of Our Discontent in the Readers Digest Condensed Books version. But the first actual book I remember is Travels with Charley: In Search of America (Viking Press.)It was first published in 1962 when I was in high school, and I read a library copy of it then. A few years later I bought the paperback, read that and kept among the books that traveled with me for decades.

Steinbeck set out with his dog Charley, driving a truck topped by a custom-made "little house built like the cabin of a small boat" for his living quarters. He named the vehicle Rocinante. He equipped it with more than it seems it could hold, including guns and fishing gear partly for a cover story. (I recall being particularly impressed by the typewriter and reams of typing paper.) Most of the gear turned out to be superfluous, which he admits with the self-deprecating humor that characterizes the book.

It was a journey of ten thousand miles through 34 states over several months, with a few breaks to visit family and meet up with his wife along the way. He made the now obligatory decision for such books to stay off the interstates. His stated purpose was to become reacquainted with the country he once knew but hadn't seen in decades.

He began after Labor Day in 1960, at the age of 58. He'd been "rather seriously ill" the winter before, he admitted, but even if the trip was taxing beyond his capabilities, he faced that possibility with bravado. "And in my own life I am not willing to trade quality for quantity. If this projected journey should prove too much then it was time to go anyway. I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It's bad theatre as well as bad living." His son later put it in starker terms: Steinbeck knew he was dying, and wanted to see the country one last time.

The year Travels with Charley was published, Steinbeck somewhat unexpectedly won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The award caused controversy, with charges that it was not merited--similar to the furor when Sinclair Lewis became the first American writer to win the prize. Steinbeck mentions Lewis in this book, noting his few meetings with him in Lewis' declining years, when he was still scorned in his hometown. Apparently paraphrasing Lewis, he wrote: "The only good writer was a dead writer. Then he couldn't surprise anyone any more, couldn't hurt anyone anymore."

Steinbeck mentions him as he passes Sauk Center, Minnesota, with its sign, "Birthplace of Sinclair Lewis." "Brings in some tourists," Steinbeck observes."He's a good writer now." Steinbeck died just six years later, at the age of 66, having published little of consequence and no fiction since this book. More than 50 years later, several of his novels remain integral to the mythology of America. He brings in some tourists to Salinas, California. He's a good writer now.

Travels with Charley is a personal account, the tale of a voyage which includes observations of what and who Steinbeck encountered. The traveler's mood, his penchant for getting lost, spates of bad weather and the illness and treatment of his dog, are just about the only dramatic elements. But some of his observations do suggest how America has changed, and how it is the same (or at least on the same track) as in 1960. Steinbeck bemoans the disappearance of local speech, of the local in general, small towns or even the city of Seattle (though he gives more credit than some to corresponding improvements in living standards.) He is emotionally bothered by "the frantic growth, a carcinomatous growth" of Seattle: "Bulldozers rolled up the green forests and heaped the resulting trash for burning...I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction." This was not yet the popular theme that it became, for several decades at least if no longer.

On the other hand, while in our time commentators bristle at ostentatious Texas politicians suggesting that the state might secede from the Union, Steinbeck observes in 1960, "Texas is the only state that came into the Union by treaty. It retains the right to secede at will. We have heard them threaten to secede so often that I formed an enthusiastic organization --The American Friends for Texas Secession. This stops the subject cold. They want to be able to secede but they don't want anyone to want them to."

Steinbeck was traveling during the 1960 presidential campaign between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. This is a pivotal campaign in American history (and very absorbing to me at the time) but Steinbeck (a JFK supporter) found few people who would venture an opinion about it. A certain atomic age foreboding was also present, at least in Steinbeck's mood.

Some of Steinbeck's masculine insistence and style may strike readers today as a little too Hemingwayesque and anachronistic, but his misgivings about the effects of the march of modernity on the country he loved, especially the natural world, still resonate. He notes that cities are already ringed with trash--"In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index." There is some deft description of what various parts of the country were physically like in 1960.

I find that the innocent wonder of my first reading at 15 or so sets unrealistic expectations for the actual book, but there are some fine sentences, and the sense of the man and his times that was worth revisiting, or let's say, visiting by the person and reader I am now, older than he was then.

Perhaps the most poignant passages for me this time were his descriptions of having a couple of curious wolves in his gunsights, knowing that--according to the standards of the time--he should shoot them because they are considered "vermin"--but losing the impulse to kill them, and choosing to spare them. To the extent that he left a couple of cans of dog food behind for them. There is an elegiac quality that emerges now and then, that seems best expressed in this account. There is a sense of approaching the end, when his strongest desire is to leave as much life behind as he can. And I expect there's something of the impulse I feel as the years go by: live and let live, gracefully and with mercy.

In the years since the book came out it has apparently inspired similar journeys (apart from the many taken for literary purposes), and this attempt to retrace the journey exactly by Bill Steigerwald, who claims that Steinbeck fudged or fictionalized various aspects of it. Steigerwald is unduly harsh about it, deriving much of his debunking from a timeline which may well have been different and rearranged in composition. Some rearranging is actually pretty normal. Spalding Gray used to call himself a "poetic journalist," and most autobiographical writing either purposely, necessarily, unconsciously or artfully changes what happened and in what order. The travel and the book are related but separate journeys.

R.I.P. 60s-70s Arts & Entertainment

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 06:41:00 +0000

Among those we lost in 2012 were these important figures in the culture of the 60s and 70s: Don Cornelius, creator and host of TV's Soul Train. Robin Gibb of the BeeGees, a group that expanded the Beatles-style music of the 60s and created a whole new phenomenon in the disco era of the 70s. Ravi Shankar, classical Indian musicians who became known in the U.S. in the 60s and beloved ever since. Dave Brubeck, jazz pianist and composer,pictured here with the quartet that made Time Out, the biggest selling hit jazz album of the 1960s. Davy Jones of the 60s TV and recording group The Monkees. Donna Summer, the female voice of the disco 70s. Levon Helm, drummer and singer for The Band, the group formed in the late 60s that became prominent in the 70s as well. Peter Bergman, member of the unique 1960s comedy quartet, Firesign Theatre, whose first four albums became a surreal soundtrack of the decade.

Not pictured: singer and songwriter Scott ("If You're Going to San Francisco...") MacKenzie, film critics Andrew Sarris (of the auteur theory) and Judith Crist, actors Larry Hagman and Phyllis Diller, writer and director Nora Ephron, art critic Hilton Kramer, British actor Victor Spinetti (Help!),singers Etta James and Andy Williams, artist LeRoi Neiman. May they rest in peace and their work live on.

R.I.P. 1960s-70s The Big Stage

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 06:17:00 +0000

Among those we lost in 2012 who influenced the shape of the 1960s and 1970s: Barry Commoner, whose 1971 best selling The Closing Circle helped make ecology the topic of the decade. Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the moon. Alexander Cockburn, journalist and gadfly beginning in the 60s and 70s. George McGovern, carrying on the Kennedy legacy in the 60s and making a brave and honorable run for the presidency on an anti-war platform in 1972. Gore Vidal, whose voice in books, on TV and elsewhere made him one of the 60s prime public intellectuals. Russell Means, activist at Wounded Knee in 1973, Native American advocate and actor in succeeding decades. Mike Wallace, TV journalist who began to make his mark in the 1960s. Helen Gurley Brown, whose Sex and the Single Girl in 1961 and editorship of Cosmopolitan magazine helped shape the sexual and women's revolutions of the 60s and 70s.

R.I.P. 1950s and Before

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 05:30:00 +0000

Among those we lost in 2012: Dick Clark, who started his career with American Bandstand in the 1950s, and remained ageless for decades. Marc Swayze, artist for the original Captain Marvel comic books who created Mary Marvel. Herb Reed, last surviving original member of The Platters, one of the great groups of the 1950s. Andy Griffith, film actor who scored big in 50s TV. Peggy Ahern, already grown up when the Our Gang comedies became TV staples in the 50s. Lucille Bliss, who voiced the pioneer 1950s TV cartoon hero, Crusader Rabbit. Dorothy McGuire of the McGuire Sisters, stars of records and TV in the 50s. Don Grady, whose best known TV role was in My Three Sons. Gone now, but their work lives on.

George Harrison by Scorsese

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 07:19:00 +0000

Seen last year on pay cable, George Harrison Living in the Material World, a film directed by Martin Scorsese is now widely available on DVD. It’s a two disk set divided into the two parts seen successively on HBO for a total of 229 minutes. There are a few extra scenes and interview snippets as special features, which are nice but not much. I especially felt the absence of some full song performances as were included in the DVD of Scorsese’s film on Bob Dylan. His music grows more impressive with time. [The image above begins and ends this film.]

Some of the footage has been used elsewhere but there’s a lot that comes from Harrison’s “home movies” and photos. There are archival soundbites with Harrison, and new interviews with George’s wife Olivia Harrison (a co-producer) and his son Dhani, and with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, Eric Clapton and other friends, including the race car driver Jackie Stewart.

Scorsese makes some strange cuts and a few significant omissions, but the major biographical elements are there: the Beatles and post-Beatles music, Harrison’s spiritual journey, his invention of the all-star benefit with the Concert for Bangla Desh, and his involvement in film (he mortgaged his house to finance Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.) It’s a rounded if impressionistic portrait. While interviewees speak of the necessarily intense bond among the Beatles, Scorsese shows images of hysterical fans and the rest of the crazed context. Eric Clapton recalls how magical they were as a group, even moving in ways special to themselves.

[Photo above: Olivia Harrison with director Martin Scorsese] On second viewing, some of the rhyming scenes emerge: for instance, early in the film, Dahni relates a recent dream in which he asks his father where’s he’s been and George replies, “I’ve been here all the time.” Much later, Tom Petty describes a phone conversation the day after Roy Orbison’s death (he, Orbison, Harrison plus Bob Dylan and Jeff Lyne were then recording as the Traveling Wilburys) in which Harrison said, “he’s still around."

Death was a focus of Harrison’s spiritual attention, but he did have 58 years of life before cancer took him in 2001 (as opposed to John Lennon, who was shot to death before his 40th birthday.) The last part of his mature life is especially rich territory for Scorcese, highlighted by Olivia Harrison’s wise and beautiful description of the mutual lessons of their marriage. The film gently considers his wilder and darker moments as well as his spirituality and wit. Several interviewees describe Harrison as having two distinct sides: calm and kind, or angry and acerbic. When he was with the Beatles he yearned to be on his own, and later (someone observes) he missed being in a band. He craved solitude and peace, but had several circles of friends and seems to have had a special talent for friendship.

His humor was also an evident trait, one which rates at most memorable to Paul McCartney. Olivia describes in detail the horrific attack that injured both she and George, who was stabbed. But as he was being taken away on a stretcher, he noticed a workman who had just that day joined the crew helping him with landscaping. George said to him, "So how do you like the job so far?"

Two other moments stand out in this companionable film. After John Lennon’s death, a reporter observed to George that Lennon “was no angel.” “No, he wasn’t,” Harrison said, “but he was, as well.” “Was he?” “Yeah.”

Ringo recalls visiting Harrison during his final illness, when he was too weak to get out of bed. Ringo told him he had to leave to visit his daughter in Boston who had a brain tumor. The last words Harrison spoke to him were, “Do you want me to go with you?”

Son Dahni, Olivia and producer George Martin

Olivia, Scorsese and Paul McCartney.

Dhani Harrison.

Remembering the Bee Gees

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 29 May 2012 08:34:00 +0000

Robin Gibb died last week. Partly because of the coincidence of Donna Summer's death a few days earlier, the Bee Gees retrospectives emphasized their disco period. While they sold a lot of records with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and for a few later albums, I was listening to the Bee Gees from their U.S. debut in 1967.

Bee Gees 1st, with its psychedelic cover, was in the pile of rotating albums that fall, along with Buffalo Springfield's first, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Tim Hardin, John Wesley Harding, the Doors, Country Joe and the Fish, Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow, the previous spring's Sergeant Pepper, etc.

Their second album--Horizontal-- came out that winter, along with Magical Mystery Tour, the Stones' Her Satanic Majesty Requests, Disraeli Gears, Strange Days, Vanilla Fudge, more Airplane, Hendrix... Their sound and songs were part of the soundtrack of my senior year of college, and the house at 169 West First Street, otherwise known as the Galesburg Home for the Bewildered.

They had the Beatles patina, but more like the next Beatles thing. Maybe because their first hit was "New York Mining Disaster 1941" they were given to anthemic surrealism, mixed in with rhythm and blues flavored radio songs like their second hit and one of their most enduring songs, "To Love Somebody." The surreal flow of their lyrics grabbed me. Not only pondering poetic possibilities under the influence of this or that, but feeling the emotional undertow, and the feeling expressed in those voices. I mean, who else could get away with a poignant memory song like "Red Chair, Fade Away?" Or the odd U.S. hit "Holiday?"

"Horizontal" went even stronger towards a novelistic surrealism, a poetic freedom that no one else dared. It opened with two slow songs, "World" and "The Sun Will Shine," with lines that barely related and lyrics that wandered, quoted an old ballad, observed, expressing a youthful yearning and yet a larger melancholy of time. Even a lovely song like "Day Time Girl" made more poetic than literal sense. But they still had the ability to construct tight pop tunes for radio hits, like "Birdie Told Me," although the enduring hit from the album, "Massachusetts," also struggles to stay between the lines. Nevertheless, they had the sound.

But among the avid listeners of most of the people and bands I named from 67-68, mine was a minority view. The Bee Gees were mostly dismissed. But I didn't care much. I kept buying and listening to their albums. I played "Idea" in my single long, narrow room tacked onto a real building in Iowa City, as I tried to navigate the Writers Workshop and the draft, as well as, you know, relationships. I was such a Beatles fan that in that room I once fought off depression by going through the paperback novelization of the Beatles' movie "Help!" and correcting the dialogue, because I remembered it all from seeing the movie so many times. But I embraced the Bee Gees, too. I recall reading an interview with Robin Gibb who said he heard music everywhere--the sound of an airplane engine gave him the melody of "I Started a Joke," one of the hits from this album, along with "I've Gotta Get a Message to You." I understood that completely. And I also needed that other message: "Hold on, hold on."

By spring I was pondering their strange double album, "Odessa," with its red felt cover. Again, the tangled history of a disaster in the title song. The antic melodies, the wandering ballads. It was stranger than ever, maybe too ambitious, but something about it held me--some feeling within the excesses, some sense of a meaning just obscured.

The Brothers Gibb broke up, reunited with "Two Years On" and its radio hit, "Lonely Days." What a song! Those harmonies, breaking into painful solos. "Trafalgar" (another historical theme cover and song) starts with "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart," and their sound is starting to change. Though their "Mr. Natural" album was a popular low point, I really liked a song called "Dogs"--nobody but the Bee Gees could have written and sung it. When I first heard "Nights on Broadway" and "Jive Talkin'" on their album "Main Course," I didn't think disco. Everybody was doing that beat, even the Eagles. The song I liked most was "Edge of the Universe."

But then came Saturday Night Fever, and they were officially disco. I bought their "Spirits Having Flown" and "Children of the World" albums, I liked them, I was happy for their success, but when I unloaded almost half of my record collection before heading for the West Coast, those records didn't make the trip.

It is incredible to realize that they made all this music in about 12 years. Only five individuals or groups had sold more records--more than Michael Jackson, not to mention the Stones, the Doors, Dylan, etc. by the time they were inducted in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. They were lucky to have a very persistent and not unhucksterish promotor, Robert Stigwood, right from their late 60s beginning. He packaged and repackaged them endlessly even in the lean years. His judgment wasn't always great--witness their greatest flop, the Sergeant Pepper movie. But he stuck with them.

Robin's twin brother Barry is the last Bee Gee left. The Wikipedia entry mentions a possible movie in development about their lives, produced by Steven Speilberg. For people like me who were there for it all, the Bee Gees were part of the soundtrack that kept us going. A bunch of their songs will haunt me for the rest of my days. Their classic songs that have been recorded by others will stay in the pantheon. And their harmonies will remain unique, lifting up those lonely days.

Boomer Comedy in the Beginning: Sid Caesar

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 09:59:00 +0000

Sid Caesar had a series of television comedy shows in the 1950s and 1960s. He's definitely an early baby boomer hero. He was an amazing comedian, a real connection between the then-fading worlds of vaudeville and stage comedy, and the world of television-dominated comedy he was helping to create.

Sid Caesar was a brilliant comedian in so many ways. He was verbally adept--one of his most famous skills was the ability to "doubletalk" in foreign languages: to make what he said sound like Italian or French and also make it funny. He was a physical comedy genius, who used his whole body, including his eyes and eyebrows. One standard feature of his shows was the pantomime, in which he and a partner (Imogene Coca was the best) would do an entire scene without speaking. But he also used his voice as an aspect of physical comedy. He was musical. He had the timing that could turn parody into pathos and back again.

the famous "From Here to Eternity" parody

I was a child when Sid Caesar was a fixture on television, but I watched him whenever I could. I could stay up later on Saturday nights, but still, it might require me to be very quiet so my parents wouldn’t notice I was still up. I remember Your Show of Shows (1950-54), and the team of Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. I remember that she got her own show for awhile. But I more clearly remember Caesar’s Hour in the mid 50s, including individual sketches.

It's said that his brand of comedy began to fade when television outgrew New York and became national. His comedy was "too urban." But as a child I didn't see it that way. For instance, the foreign movie parodies he did, which Middle America wasn’t supposed to like because they never saw foreign films. We sure didn't have any in my small western Pennsylvania town. I didn’t see a foreign language film until college, but that didn’t stop me from seeing those parodies as funny. They were just funny, partly because they were strange. I’m sure knowing the movies made them funnier, but the level of satire wasn’t always that deep. They were just funny situations, and opportunities for Caesar to do his doubletalk, which doesn’t require knowing the language in question to appreciate it.

But some of what he did was relevant to where I lived--a new neighborhood just outside the small town limits, among other working class becoming middle class families-- and what I was seeing around me.. Caesar’s Hour had a regular segment called "the Commuters." The suburban flight that would transform New York and pretty much end New York theatre (leading to the Broadway for tourists of today) was introducing people to the new culture of suburbia. There were new manners, expected behaviors. These sketches—some lasting almost the entire hour—explored these in the Caesar way. For example, I clearly remember a moment in one from seeing it once as a child. The couples were out together at a restaurant. They were all sitting in a booth and talking. A waiter brought a salad bowl. Carl Reiner told Sid to “toss the salad, Bob.” Sid did one of his series of takes—he didn’t understand what he was supposed to do. Carl kept talking to someone, only to say again, more insistently, “toss the salad!” So Sid tossed it up in the air, lettuce leaves falling on everyone.

Toss the salad” was a new concept to a city guy, probably from a poor immigrant family. It was part of middle class suburban manners. But it also happened to be a new concept to me. I was vaguely aware that the people on television were richer and more sophisticated than anyone I actually knew. So I saw it perhaps as something “ritzy” people said and did. But it also seemed possible that it was something I would need to know, or something I should know—something that adults knew.

When you’re a kid just about everything “adult” is strange-- tossing a salad as much as foreign movies. You spend a lot of time trying to imagine why adults do and say things, and what they mean. Sid Caesar’s humor was often based on exaggeration, and on taking something literally that wasn’t meant to be taken that way. It’s exactly the kind of humor that appeals to children, because we often make those mistakes, and we also often think adults are strange and don’t make much sense. Sid Caesar represented us.

Now the exaggeration in those sketches can also be appreciated for the variations, the lines of logic and the moments in which the logic jumps the tracks (the classic sketch "The Recital" is a good example.) But there’s still something wonderful about their kinship to the imagination of childhood. [continued in following posts]

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 09:58:00 +0000

Writers for Caesar's Hour: (from left, front row) Gary Belkin, Sheldon Keller, Michael Stewart and Mel Brooks; (from left, back) Neil Simon , Mel Tolkin, and Larry Gelbart. (pbs/file 1956)

Sid Caesar didn't do it all alone, of course. There were his brillian costars, such as Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris, Nanette Fabray. And there were the writers--as brilliant a group of writers as ever wrote for one comedian's television shows.

Those writers, many of whom are individually famous (Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart) have also been immortalized on film (in My Favorite Year, which conflates Sid Caesar and Steve Allen) and especially on stage, in Neil Simon's play Laughter on the 23rd Floor.

I recently saw and wrote about a community theatre production, which led to research into the writers and their contribution to Sid Caesar history. The play is about a group of writers for a 1950s comedy-variety television show called the Max Prince Show, but it is based very loosely on the last year or so of Your Show of Shows starring Sid Caesar.

The play is set in the writers’ room of a weekly 90 minute comedy-variety series in 1953. The play’s characters are loosely based on the legendary writers who worked for Sid Caesar, but not all of them in the play worked on Your Show of Shows. Several joined later for its successor, Caesar’s Hour, a one hour show of mostly comedy that debuted in the fall of 1954.

The two characters in the play based most clearly on the real writers were the team that were there at the beginning of YSOS, Mel Tolkin and Lucille Kallen. “They set the tone for the whole show,” Carl Reiner said. They had written Caesar’s previous series, The Admiral Broadway Revue, which first teamed him with the now-legendary comedienne, Imogene Coca.

In the play, the character of Val Slotsky is based on Tolkin. Like Val, Tolkin was a Russian immigrant, by way of Canada. And like Val, he had a dour outlook, conditioned by pogroms in Russia. He trained as an accountant but entered show business through music. His first writing was composing songs and then bits to go with them. Larry Gelbart called him the “founding father” of YSOS, where he was head writer. Despite his years in North America, he had a heavy Eastern European accent, but he was highly literate, with a European sophistication and Old World manner.

The character of Carol Wyman is based slightly on Selma Diamond, who was on the staff of Caesar’s Hour and later became a brassy, gravel-voiced performer. But Carol is mostly based on Lucille Kallen, the only woman on the staff of YSOS. Kallen was famously allergic to the pervasive cigar smoke in the writers room. In the play, Carol complains that she has to keep her dresses in a humidor. Like Carol in the play, Kallen got pregnant during the run of the show, and the play has a kind of in-joke about that. Some reference is made to a writer being hired temporarily to replace Carol. Temporary replacements were in fact hired for Kallen—they happened to be Neil Simon and his older brother Danny Simon. By the time Kallen was ready to return, the show was over. (The play is narrated by “Lucas Brickman,” the Neil Simon stand-in. Brother Danny isn’t mentioned, and he would not follow Neil to Caesar’s Hour.)

Kallen had worked with Tolkin, first at a large Jewish resort in the Pocono Mountains, and then on the Admiral TV show. Kallen wrote especially for Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca as a couple, either in stand-alone sketches or for their regular segment, the Hickenloopers. She was a small woman in a room of large men, and sometimes had to stand on a couch and wave a red sweater to be heard. Reiner remembers her as very pretty, and concerned with preserving her femininity as a professional woman. She later wrote a novel with this theme, before becoming known to a different public as the author of the C.B. Greenfield mystery novels.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 09:57:00 +0000

Mel Brooks, who had also written jokes for the Admiral show, was soon added to the YSOS staff. Like the play’s character Ira Stone, he would often arrive late and complain of some ailment. It later transpired, Reiner said, that he was in fact hypoglycemic, which was a source of some of his woes, perhaps including his insomnia.

The play tends to nail each character with a defining characteristic and elaborates on it, sort of like a comedy sketch. But except for a few scenes it doesn’t really deal with the process of writing this show, nor the characteristic contributions of these writers. So the play doesn’t have much to say about Mel Brooks as a writer.

In an archival interview Larry Gelbart described Brooks’ method as creating whole routines, whereas Gelbart was used to throwing in an appropriate line or joke. With Mel, he said, it wouldn’t be “why does the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.” Instead Mel “would become the chicken, then he’d play both sides of the road, and he’d cross himself, doing 18 choruses of something while he’s crossing it—nobody else does this. He’s the funniest writer—and chicken—in the business.”

One of Brooks’ specialties for Caesar was “the Professor”—an expert on something or other (sleep, archeology, etc.) being interviewed. Carl Reiner was first hired on the show as an actor to be the interviewer. Later the Professor would evolve into the 2000 Year Old Man, which Brooks himself did, with Reiner. It started Brooks’ performing career, which later contributed to the success of his movies.

Carl Reiner became one of the regular sketch actors on YSOS and informally one of the writers, especially for Caesar’s Hour. According to wikipedia, he was the prototype for the Milt Fields character in the play, but I’ve yet to see a reference to Reiner showing up for work in a matador’s cape and a French beret, as Milt does in the play.

As Larry Gelbart explains, comedy writing is based a great deal on improvisation, and Reiner was skilled and imaginative. He was also skilled at “doubletalk--” improvising dialogue in a foreign language with words that don’t necessarily mean anything but sound right, and also funny. Sid Caesar was the acknowledged master, but Reiner held his own in sketches like the satire on the Italian neorealist movie The Bicycle Thief, performed completely in fake Italian.

Reiner was probably with Sid Caesar the longest, and for a long while was identified with him. Though he’s had a career as a performer (most recently in the new Ocean’s Eleven series), he made his enduring mark with the Dick Van Dyke Show. It's remembered for introducing Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie, but Van Dyke as Rob Petrie worked on a comedy show based on the Sid Caesar shows. Rose Marie as Sally Rodgers was again based on Lucille Kallen and Selma Diamond—though this time, more on the harsh voiced, one-of-the-guys Selma. Reiner also wrote and/or directed several of Steve Martin's early films, from the satiric (and Caesar-like) Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid to the classic romantic comedy All of Me.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 09:56:00 +0000

Larry Gelbart himself joined the team in 1955, with Caesar’s Hour. He’s supposedly the model for Kenny Franks in the play. His experience had been as a joke writer, and Caesar’s Hour taught him sketch writing, with basic beginning-middle-end story construction. It was a stage in development that led to his first stage play, collaborating on A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, and later famous plays, movies and the television series M*A*S*H.

The character of Brian Doyle is based on Michael Stewart, who (like Brian) was Irish, and who would go on to write for the theatre. He was a writer for Caesar’s Hour, where he had the role of the one who actually wrote down what the group had come up with—a role previously filled by Lucille Kallen and Joseph Stein on YSOS.

Another character that appears in at least the TV movie version of Laughter on the 23rd Floor is Harry Prince, based on Dave Caesar, Sid’s brother who appeared on Caesar’s Hour. But he’s not in the play, at least the version I saw produced.

At the center of it all was Sid Caesar. However he was much more the Max Prince character during the run of Caesar’s Hour. YSOS was controlled more by its director, Max Liebman, and Caesar wasn’t even the star at first. But by Caesar’s Hour, he ran the show.

As a creative performer, Sid Caesar was a comic genius. That’s only implied in the play, though the Marlon Brando’s Julius Caesar movie excerpt suggests one of his particular kinds of mayhem. He was also mercurial, with a growing dependence on alcohol and pills, as Max Prince. Caesar later conquered these dependencies.

An aside: the production I saw sort of makes fun of Max Prince’s saxophone playing. In reality, Sid Caesar started out professionally as a saxophone player. In the funniest sketch on the Sid Caesar Collection Vol. 1 DVD is Caesar as a progressive jazzman Progress Hornsby being interviewed on "Ominous" (parody of the interview program Omnibus.) At the end of it Caesar actually plays jazz saxophone. (The Progress Hornsby sketch on YouTube is different and not nearly as good.)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 09:54:00 +0000

Neil Simon

All of this adds texture to the differences between the Max Prince Show in Neil Simon's play and Your Show of Shows.

In the play the network wants to cut the Max Prince Show from 90 minutes to an hour, because it’s getting less popular. One reason is discussed: the television audience isn’t just New York anymore. The reach of television is growing—New York was its biggest audience, but new technologies enable broadcasters to reach farther into the Midwest and South. The urban-oriented humor wasn’t translating. There’s reference in the play to more popular shows being Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best.

But the play is set in 1953, and in fact these changes were a little further in the future, and didn't seem to influence the fate of the always popular Your Show of Shows. 39 original shows a year, each one live for 90 minutes, were broadcast from 1950 to the end of the 1954 season, on NBC every Saturday night from 9 p.m. to 10:30. Your Show of Shows ended partly because its stars wanted to do different shows. According to Larry Gelbart and Carl Reiner, Sid Caesar himself wanted to do an hour show that concentrated on comedy, with less “jumping” as he called it, which meant dancing, or musical numbers in general. These were prominent on Your Show of Shows.

Nanette Fabray and Sid

At the same time, Imogene Coca—Caesar’s partner in many comedy pieces—had become a big star, and she was slated to have her own show on NBC. When YSOS ended, she got the 9 p.m. Saturday slot. Sid Caesar got Caesar’s Hour on Monday night. (In the play, the cutting back from 90 minutes meant a writer would have to be fired. But because Caesar's Hour had more comedy, the writing staff actually expanded.) Your Show of Shows ended in June 1954, and both of these shows started with the new TV season in September.

But The Imogene Coca Show never found a stable identity, changing from a sitcom to a comedy sketch show back to a sitcom with an entirely different premise, all in one season. It wasn’t renewed for a second. Caesar’s Hour prospered however, and in 1956 moved back to Saturday night.

It was a hit series for several years, but Caesar reportedly saw the writing on the wall when The Lawrence Welk Show (which started in 1955) started getting higher ratings. Caesar's Hour ended its run in May 1957 (before Leave It To Beaver had begun.)

After Caesar’s Hour went off the air, Sid Caesar had a couple of other shows. Sid Caesar Invites You ran for the first 5 months of 1958, reuniting Caesar and Imogene Coca, with Carl Reiner and several of the writers, including Neil Simon and Mel Brooks. There were three half hour specials in 1962 and 1963 called As Caesar Sees It, leading to The Sid Caesar Show in the 1963 season with a similar sketch comedy format but different regulars. It was for either the specials or the Sid Caesar Show—or probably both—that Woody Allen wrote (uncredited) for Sid Caesar, with (according to Allen) lasting influence on his style.

The Sid Caesar writers' room has become so legendary that the writers and the shows are routinely mismatched and remembered together. The play preserves some aspects, and neglects others. The physical set prescribed for this play is based on Neil Simon’s memory of the actual writers room for one of the Caesar series, which Sid Caesar praised for its accuracy on the original Broadway production’s opening night. The production I saw didn't attempt to mimic one of the actual room’s characteristics: the 39 or so pencils stuck in the acoustical tile ceiling, sent there by frustrated writers.

But the play doesn't fully give the flavor of what the experience might have been like for the writing staff. Just imagine the work week before each show aired on Saturday: Some of the show's regular features could be planned as early as the previous Friday, Lucille Kallen said, with writing started over the weekend. But basically the writing started on Monday, and had to be finished by Wednesday. For Caesar’s Hour, that meant four or five sketches.

Thursday the cast would get the show on its feet, and Friday they would do it for the director. Saturday was intense. The whole show would be done three times before air. The first time for blocking, the second a smooth rehearsal where cuts for time and changes were set, the third was full dress. Then it was done live for broadcast. Eventually it would be done once again, for broadcast to the West Coast. Then Sid Caesar would take everyone out, usually to a place called Danny’s Hideaway, for a Bacchanalian feast. Then they’d have Sunday with their families. But basically, the show was their life.

Carl Reiner based The Dick Van Dyke Show partly
on working for Sid Caesar

The Sid Caesar writing staffs are legendary for a reason. Here is a partial list of titles (plays, movies, TV shows etc.) that entered American life for generations, generated by writers who worked for Sid Caesar: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, The Odd Couple, Blazing Saddles, Fiddler on the Roof, the Dick Van Dyke Show, Annie Hall, Get Smart, Barefoot in the Park, Bye, Bye Birdie, Tootsie, The Producers, The Jerk, All in the Family, City of Angels, Young Frankenstein, M*A*S*H, Enter Laughing, Hello Dolly, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, The Sunshine Boys, Manhattan...and so many more...

R.I.P. Boomer Heroes

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 10:11:00 +0000

Boomer Heroes who died in 2011 included these four exemplars. Two are a little too old to be technically in the boomer generation, but they represent their spirit.

Clarence Clemons was born about four years too soon to boom, but the Big Man was the soul of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band. I saw them early on, when Clemons came out in a Santa suit for the band's version of Santa Claus is Coming to Town.

Kara Kennedy was born in 1960. She is pictured receiving the Medal of Freedom award from President Obama on behalf of her father, Senator Ted Kennedy. Kara herself worked in politics, the media and for causes. She battled lung cancer until her premature death.

Steve Jobs was born in 1955, a middle-boomer visionary of the computer age. His influence on this rapidly changing present and on the future is hard to overestimate.

Wangari Maathai was born in Kenya in 1940. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her environmental justice activism, as the founder of the Green Belt Movement. She also is a link from boomer aspirations to the future. May all their best work live on and grow. And may they rest in peace.

R.I. P. 1950s Pop Culture

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 09:47:00 +0000

Among those we lost in 2011 are these pop culture figures from the 1950s: actor Delores Fuller (Ed Wood films), Elliott Handler (who named the Barbie Doll for Mattel, Joe Morello (drummer for the Dave Brubeck Quartet), actor James Arness (Gunsmoke), actor and icon Elizabeth Taylor, Carl Gardner (lead singer of the Coasters.)