What Barack Obama faces from now until November would be unimaginable to the people who made and saw that movie then, including a 23-year-old just back from World War II who had little audacity and even less hope of living in the rich, glossy world it portrayed.

Gregory Peck played a magazine writer who pretends to be Jewish. A decade later, I was an editor on one of those magazines, unknowingly hired by George W. Bush’s grandfather as the first Jew among thousands of employees, working with Laura Z. Hobson, who wrote the novel on which the picture was based.

When it came out, there was an uproar against the director, Elia Kazan, and the producer, Darryl Zanuck, whose names sounded foreign and were presumed to be of Jewish origin. Hobson relished the irony that they weren’t but that she, who was but had married someone with an Anglo-Saxon name, escaped the anger of the offended.

Prejudice is still a nasty, shadowy business that, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, seldom shows its face openly. No one uses phrases like “gentleman’s agreement” or “restricted” these days, but “blue-collar voters” and “Reagan Democrats” serve the same purpose as codes to mask fear and hatred of people who are different.

We haven’t had a Jewish president but, if and when Barack Obama takes the oath of office next January, “Gentleman’s Agreement” will be even more of an anachronism than it is now. But until then, it’s a movie that Hillary Clinton, John McCain and their campaigns might want to think about.

Cross-posted from my blog.

Like the Olympian gods, he is largely forgotten and unloved today. Gary Giddins made a valiant attempt to focus attention on this Mozart of the popular song with his very ample 2001 biography Pocketful of Dreams. And for a brief moment, pop culture glanced at “the first white hip guy born in America” (Artie Shaw). References to him occasionally pop up: two recent are in Ken Levine’s post of Mariah Carey’s topping Elvis for number 1 hits: “If everyone in the United States buys copies of “Rubberneckin’”, “Kiss Me Quick”, and “Old Shep” Elvis Presley can reclaim his rightful crown (of being number three behind the Beatles and Bing Crosby) and order can once again be restored to the universe”; and Kim Morgan did a post on Crosby, citing one of his lesser known films, Sing You Sinners.

But those are the extreme exceptions.

Steed is always teasing that I don’t speak up for Crosby, one of my lifelong passions. And so for his birthday this year, I will.

And I’ll start with the sexy guy, Bing in the 1930s.

This Bing is unrecognizable to those who only know the smiling face in the santa hat on the all-time classic Christmas CD, or worse, the guy in the Minute Maid commercials in the 1970s warbling “there’s nooooo doubt about it.”

But in the beginning, Crosby was young and compelling. He had a distinct, astonishing voice and a way of singing that was unlike any other on the landscape.

He was a heartthrob, best seen in a movie that is almost impossible to get, the original Big Broadcast (1931, but before they started assigning years to them). Crosby plays himself, and the scenes of the women stampeding him are funny but entirely believable. Women fell in love with his voice on the radio, and the early shorts and movies use that as a story line.

Here he is, in The Big Broadcast, singing “Please” accompanied by the legendary Eddie Lang, and a bit of “Dinah,” looking like a male model for Banana Republic. Lang met Crosby when they were both in Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra, and Eddie followed when Bing left the band. They were very close, and Giddins writes how devastated Crosby was when Lang died, hemorrhaging after a tonsillectomy. It was Crosby who had recommended that Lang have his tonsils out to help with chronic laryngitis.

In 1932 Marion Davies insisted on Crosby as her leading man in Going Hollywood, a wild pastiche of a musical. It’s maybe best known for the Grand Central extravaganza number, while the “Make Hay While the Sunshine” is almost too hard to watch.

But there is one scene that deserves a place in film history: a drunk, disheveled Crosby singing “Temptation” intercut with close-ups of the smoldering Fifi D’Orsay. It’s dark and evocative, with other cuts to blurry, tightly-packed bodies, swaying to the pulsating rhythms of the song. The comments on YouTube tell it all: “how young he is” and “how sexy he is” and “Crosby has more talent in his little finger than Sinatra has in his whole body” [okay, that one is just a nice swipe at the other guy].

Yeah. That’s what propelled Crosby into the hearts and imagination of an entire generation, three quarters of a century ago. He does gain new fans amongst the young, but it’s one by one as people stumble upon him.

One more (audio) clip: Crosby in 1931 singing “Star Dust.” It’s nothing like the standard Nat King Cole. He sings it with a wild abandon. Pure passion. Pure despair. Pure, natural talent.

“Modern art is what you can get away with,” Andy Warhol told us, suggesting ‘artistic’ works get approved not just by the few acting out of sometimes perplexing conviction, but by all those who mindlessly tag along. And in this way the limit of the credible often reaches a breaking point. The same may be said of conventional philosophy and religion, man’s most venerated cerebral and spiritual enterprises. Unchallenged by multitudes thirsting for reverent fantasy and meticulous reassurance, their proponents take themselves as abundantly seriously as contemporary art’s high priests do, but does something represent a truth merely because people no longer question it?

Antonin Artaud said it all when he wrote Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu, asking us to stop this nonsense with our imaginary friend. For if man needed to create myths or fairy tales to deal with his own mind and to step out beyond himself so he could look down upon himself and heal himself or give himself that extra bit of courage and strength in the face of mostly cruel and often endless setbacks, then for a time this was fine. But by beginning to believe his own inventions, imposing them as if they were the truth, he created the beginning of his own degradation. Because fable, myth or legend is a series of pretty fibs and an elaborate lie however well meant, however well told, represents the seed of destruction that every grand falsehood carries within itself.

What’s found at the opposite end of the scale is immoderate pride, as for its part formal western thought is built on the completely mistaken contention, its point-de-départ, that if we are not there, seemingly nothing is there. Plus, that while it ought to be philosophy’s function to remove all nonsense from the world, we have never ceased creating it: all that sweet bullshit, those exquisite fictions and tales of ours. And notions like Heidegger’s “sein” or Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, both essentially flawed because when deprived of of our consciousness, our “sein”, we don’t for a moment or necessarily cease to exist. In Descartes’ case the most we could let him get away with: I think, therefore I am what I am (i.e. as opposed to others or animals), and not one hell of a lot more as again even when I’m not sentient, say what you like, but clearly I still am!

When re-reading so many hallowed texts, consider the self-indulgent hokum often meriting some sort of stage direction saying: STOP! Here Mind Disappears Up Rectum! Because, one more time, after close scrutiny nearly all established conventions ultimately point in one single direction—they confirm our pre-eminence and successful continuity in the universe. Man still secretly thinking he’s the measure of all things when nothing is further from the truth. Repeatedly convincing himself there’s some sort of finality to the scheme of things and that finality is him, when most likely there’s not even a scheme. For so called nothingness and the absence of human existence or awareness are not synonymous. Eons simply episodes in which nothingness arising from emptiness is not only a non sequitur but a non plus, though the answer to the question ‘What is is??’ admittedly remains a tempting and elusive one. The body of western thought then having more than anything to do with the mechanics of thinking and formation of action in thought called will. With indexation and the providing of comfort through carefully constructed metaphysical truths no more real than large collections of inane wax figures in a morbid museum staring us in the face. Yet with ultimate intellectual perversion, some brazenly suggesting that we’re not here at all, that everything is an illusion. (Even though, and after the onion soup, a bathroom door regrettably left ajar… would kill this notion pretty swiftly) Anyway, it did and does always come down to the same and unfortunately remains the canard: I know, who else’s, but our take on the world and beyond rules all.

My point then, with ultimate wisdom does there absolutely have to be a ‘take’? For has the foul, this sudden other whiff of reckless certainty and learned self-importance not become… quite unbearable by now?

Contrary to frivolous lore it’s not prostitution, but philosophy that’s our oldest profession, though certainly not as well paid. In classical Greek the word philosophy literally meaning “love of knowledge”, but isn’t it a fact we love knowledge so much that half the time we invented it? Simultaneously mystifying and sanctifying it as time went on? Received wisdom more than anything needing to hang over us because it catered to something deep inside us: our extraordinary vanity, our unquenchable thirst for survival, our need for order, but mostly our dual addiction to certainty and our emotional need to feel wanted? Knowledge manipulated the way a child closes its eyes pretending it’s no longer there, or wants to make believe it lives in a world with which it feels more comfortable?

What mastery! What power, what control, what imagination! King of the hill, top of the heap, are we? Yes Sir! But more perhaps like a fantasizing ostrich sticking its head and neck deep into the sand, proclaiming it’s sovereign of the savannah while forgetting its feathered arse’s sticking out and subject to savage attack. And speaking of darkness, unlike the momentary closed eyes of that child, what if we had all been born moles, burrowing, truly blind, yet with the same ingenuity? How would ‘knowledge’ have evolved? Could we have ‘imagined’ light, days, mountains, oceans, still have invented our gods, our Virgins, God, heaven, the heavens, never even having seen daybreak, seen a bloody thing but darkness. Or no eyes, no skies and so no… pies? And yet still exist!

Yes, to a blind man all the world goes naked. Affirming that human perception and intelligence are wholly circumstantial and by definition conditional. And what about wisdom, knowledge’s incidental step-child, isn’t it also bewilderingly relative, particularly in the additional light of everything written in and around us having been so blatantly self-rigged? Oh dear, does this a sinner make, the refusal to be that submissive, ignorant Agnus Dei? (Thou shalt not eat from the tree of knowledge: Genesis, to which it’s proper to respond Sapere Aude: Dare to Think.) Or a positivist and a radical polemicist? A reductionist? A well-meaning, doubting relativist then? Well, no, no, no and no again because laborers in the sagacity and dignity trade measure learned nonsense against learned nonsense, and what is being attempted here is to remove beautiful irrelevance gently in its entirety from its august but withering plinth, placing it in the playroom, away from our addiction to predictable subjective, absolutist, deterministic thinking— the battle between rationality and desire, between fact and fancy having been uneven far too long.

The time has arrived to cease inventing certainties to cover that arse, hasn’t it? For what say is the place Alzheimer’s or Down Syndrome occupy in philosophy? Does it have any idea what the person sees and feels and which presumably is no less real to him or her? Or is there truth only in quantity, in volume, because fewer here at stake? Yes, what and where is more real, decided upon by whom, especially when the choice is not between onion soup reality or illusion, but between reality that for one reason or another… is multiple? As with sophistry and its many respectable guises, by implication presenting mostly soothing definitions, often suitable nonsense and not much more? Or mysticism, escapism of the highest order, though mystics happily not murdering much? Alchemy and black magic then, treated with contempt these days, but not the rest of the hocus-pocus— collective rationality somehow stopping half way down-road, turning itself inside out, rolling itself into a ball before getting kicked anywhere it wishes to go? Rationality turning surreal, or at least slipping into the skin of completely irrational notions with nobody noticing or volunteering to admit what’s going on? Like what happened in the epoch between Euclid and Copernicus, when we were visited upon by a thousand years of darkness, a time of reason lost, when most of the damage was perpetrated? Isn’t one of the reasons early Greek and Roman thinkers were such astute theorists because they were free-thinkers, unburdened by intellectual straight-jackets, checks and other dogmatic smoked mirrors and traps? No geniuses these chaps, just healthy, free and well-adjusted debaters when after a millennium or more of monotheism all we have to show for are murder, deceit, oppression and threats in massive attempts to corner fluid thought, coming up with proof upon proof that a matter is truth, when there’s no proof the proof is proof. (Bring on the pagan pantheists?) Even now this persisting twilight, these lingering fogs in so many quarters on this planet and recent, truistical so called Intelligent Design nothing more than yet another determinant ‘truth’ job by people who’ll have nothing interfere with their delusions, elimination of which to them akin to some sort of dismemberment, when strictly speaking we can’t ‘know’ anything. A gnosis never to be ours for the simple reason that the real truth is much too elusive, can’t be copied, bought, caught or contained.

Which isn’t to say that centuries of mainly self-stroking musings have been a complete waste, far from it. They were extremely useful in creating a system of ethics and making us understand the structures and mechanics of language and thought, never mind the hundreds of spurious conclusions that were arrived at: it was all part of our moral teething, of our growing up. As with Spinoza’s dozen or so formulae first ‘proving’ there is a single creator and telling us God is everything, then concluding that on the contrary, everything is God but basically only turning his back on constructed religion. Or Kant’s three pure “irrefutable” proofs of God’s existence, bar the obstinate believer, but that now mainly make shoulders shrug. I mean how can one come up with this and still be called one of our first modern rationalists. (Or as his old friend Johann B. growing up across the street in Königsberg already fondly told him: ‘Immanuel, you’re a real Kant!’). Just like Sartre defining freedom for us while being an unapologetic Stalinist, a more recent example of incomplete reasoning. Or de Beauvoir, in 1939 proclaiming that all fear of Hitler was grossly exaggerated, on top of this duplicating her stunning moral and political assessment when it came to Mao twenty years later. Let’s just call a spade a spade and brand some of it pathetic practical intellectual posturing. So with modern language-based deconstruction theories which, pursued to their extreme, lead to a nasty case of… decomposition: intellectual figure skating all of it, with circles beautifully drawn, exquisite axles and soaring triple toe loops, just about choking the bishop in mid-air and much coveted medals in the end, searching, searching maybe, but absolutely no place to go. Beckett stumbling upon it, in Godot, Lucky’s soliloquy to be precise, suggesting that massive words don’t constitute more life, deliver more meaning, deliver anything. On another level also this simple analogy to ponder: recently Swiss aero-dynamic engineers ‘proved’ (that word again) that it’s quite impossible for our dear old bumble-bee… to fly! And what about all those notions of time? Besides the filling in of distance, isn’t time mostly the mental space in which we move? Isn’t our ontological ‘zeit’ immaterial in terms of the universe, given that in all our thinking the fatal inhibitor is our own ephemeral fire-fly status, that old three score and ten business, disqualifying us from dealing with issues of enormity, making much vaunted relativity theories so relative that strictly speaking they become null and void? Lost in the endless waters of space and motion, at least as far as physical man is concerned? And if you don’t agree, Prof Dr Albert Einszwei and Herr Dr Schneeweiss of the Max Planck Institute of Extra-terrestrial Physics have accepted to investigate my point, but indicate they’ll need 1.3 million ‘years’ to prove or disprove it. Yes, I jest, or do they? Because in biological terms aren’t we mere temporary syntheses? In cosmic terms somewhat ingenious, electro-chemical flames? Yes, man the flame, extension of a larger fire until he or it or both burn out? Oh certainly life repeats itself, but never by leaving things exactly the way they were.

So that in the same way that we must deal with inherited credo much more knowingly, we must equally accept that there are limits to our importance and perception. That looking at images of heavenly bodies reaching us but having ceased to exist ten billion ‘years’ ago, is a bit of an impractical, nay, futile enterprise at which point we may best sit down, have a cold beer, relax and enjoy ourselves, pretending that what we saw was a squirt of mayonnaise on Hubble’s mirror telescope. That astonished as we are to find an atom is in fact another pint-sized universe, or at least a solar system with whirling bodies of its own, and earth, for all we know, a proton in an atom in a molecule of some giant leg of lamb, forces us to stand back and reflect at levels we never contemplated before. That a universe inside a universe inside a universe and so on is a distinct possibility and our ‘playing with space’, though all too human, is not uninteresting and representative of our remarkable intellect, but that Big Bang or Unified String theories should not come to obsess in that there could be many bangs and ripples, folds and strands beyond our mental range, imagination or sight. And that while not having to give up all exploration which is in our blood, man has to remain much, much more philosophical in the truest, purest sense of the word: above all no dogma or theory, por favor! For a single universe or megaverse of multiverses shrinking, twisting or expanding with black holes as mere maelstroms in huge rivers of gravity or the detection of the tides of space in general and figuring out what gravity is but not why planets spin (if they stop, will they fall, if so where to?): it’s all very well and entertaining, but what does it really matter when there’s every possibility the human species will have disappeared or been eclipsed in say 20.000, 30.000 years from now in the way insects were found frozen in time and inside droplets of primordial amber? Man the new fossil, our collective umbilical cord already stretched to roughly 200.000 years, isn’t it going to snap at one point? There being only so much genetic mileage to be extracted from the overly complex human mammal, plus given that as organised societies we’ve been around a scant 8000 ‘years’ (with our very limited perspective naively calling the first of these ‘ancient’, though happily one historian, when asked what influence the Roman Empire had exercised on modern western society, retorting that it was much too recent a situation for him to comment on!), yet not organised enough to suspend depletion of our planet when looking at its diseased oceans and forests, our festering coasts?

Of course it can be argued that nothing disappears in thin air, the earth feeding on itself forever in the way that forests live on their own fallen leaves, branches and trunks. Still, it seems we may be way too clever to survive, not a forest humanity, only one among those many branches, one becoming much too heavy for its own good, and ready to break perhaps. Or put differently: humanity one day probably found hanging from its own family tree, done in by natural factors that seemingly include … itself!

And even miraculously starting another cycle on another planet representing only a stay of execution, seeing how we constantly foul our lair, some day probably bequeathing eerie, ghostly piles of vine-covered rubble formerly known as New York, Cairo, Shanghai: Angkor Wat on the Hudson, on the Nile, on the Yangtze. So that you can forget about walking your dog along the Milky Way any weekend soon, today everybody fighting over how it all began, biological evolution or creation, but nobody asking how it’ll all end. Not apocalyptic claptrap this, only that at one point there’ll follow an organic scaling down, a drastic planetary housekeeping of Permian or Cretaceous proportion, and not because anyone says so but because of the way things work, the chemical seasons of all living matter, everything chemical, the irresistible seasons of being. That constant molecular processing and being processed is the only way there can be delicious life. With this I mean let’s move away from sophisticated sentimentalism, and inject some pragmatism and realism. For when galaxies collide, events taking tens of millions of ‘our’ years to culminate, how can Jews, Muslims and other gentlemen for instance really, really believe this is all because of or for them? Beliefs, customs, traditions, institutions Lévi-Strauss tells us, a mere by-product of a world that started without us and one day will end without us. So that for now let’s at least accept that tectonic plates move and are still capable of making mountains come and go. That a small planetary wobble can make all mammals extinct including man, that ice ages covering most of Eurasia and North America with hundreds of meters of unlivable deep frost are not a thing of the past, in short that life has not stopped evolving now that we’re here. Conversely and equally so-called greenhouse periods, or that any other scenario’s a fairy tale because we’re only that flame in the pan, that off-spring of light, that wild short dance in the universe, together with our bosom friends the plants, insects and those sometimes bizarre looking striped, spotted, scaled, horned or feathered cousins of ours. A ball too crazy, too magnificent to end until the fires die, only to spring up elsewhere in that long, long night… probably with entirely new creatures in attendance. We, that third force between volcanic and solar action only until these very fires through exhaustion, eruption or by way of asteroid decide to alter everything and we’ll be quietly asked to dematerialize. Adaptation by disappearance, as it’s called.

Slow, essential change like this making all things tick, is assuming that we’re above it all, not part and parcel of it, not a little silly or worse: the height of egregious, ridiculous arrogance? For what are those 20.000 or 30.000 man years anyway but a quick drop in the ocean of cosmic ‘matter/time/space’, organic or not, in a place where in human terms when all is said and done and except for brief but enormous and violent outbursts, nothing much takes place? Not inherently of course, but again because of our abysmally limited perspective, that severely curtailed and therefore insignificant presence. We, sadly, the universe’s ephemeral and totally immaterial witnesses? Making that even should we be the universe’s prize biological trophy, by implication we also represent its failure, unable as it is to sustain us beyond the fleeting and the contingent or for that matter prevent our very self-destruction? Human minds then, capable of spanning the ages but in an immediate, searing physical sense remaining brutally perishable; brilliant bubbles all too soon and often rather senselessly… made to burst. Poof! Poof! Pity! Next! Suivant!

No, with all due respect, what we as fire-flies ought to be doing is turn A Brief History of Time into A Timely History of Briefs and String Theory into as many G-String Quartets as possible: precisely the down to earth joy that’s missing from most ‘traditional’ thought, except perhaps for Socrates suggesting that a personal life in itself left unexamined to the fullest is not worth living: examined he said, not manufactured, not devised! Because again, besides the real but perhaps impractical, however elegantly dreaming up the rest is not the same. In fact it’s damned dishonest and either way, no longer acceptable. Like making up the news.

The significance then of most pioneering philosophers, those Greeks, then Hume, Hegel, Rousseau, Wittgenstein et al, remaining mostly a historical one and after close reading their thoughts to be affectionately set aside. Especially Wittgenstein’s maintaining there cannot be absolute truth as mathematics are unable to prove this. But it dawning on many that mathematics are imperfect and finite in their capacity to embrace all of reality for the simple reason that not all reality is logical, but random and fluid at best. The Stoics coming closest to understanding what life here really has to offer, but far too self-centred for a world by definition needing to be shared, even though once in a while they could look over their shoulder and conclude that only a good man can be wise. Or Erasmus of Rotterdam, showing us how difficult it is to become and remain a humanist, while exposing many of man’s ugly faces in In Praise of Folly. A work so earnest it must have been close to heresy in its day, a hay-day of artificial truths. He an anti-philosopher really, who to his credit rejected silly, arid, punctilious rationale in favour of passion—a measured dose of sweet madness. Not bad for a fifteenth century chap, traveling on a mule, who didn’t take himself all that seriously but had trouble separating himself from the Church. Then again who hadn’t during the times Rome had a suffocating, totalitarian hold over every aspect of society? And then there was Nietzsche, the first to break the mould, that hold of a priori divine presence over nearly all traditional western thinking, in the end spoiling things with incoherent, syphilitic twaddle or losing the plot after getting hit in Turin by that horse. A superior thinker tragically turned into Stuporman with no consistent line of thought, an extremely loose, hit-and-miss canon with highly interesting but disconcertingly dispersed shots.

So that yes, these men and so many others have made an indisputable but transitory contribution to our development as speaking and reasoning beings, if anything by showing us how no longer to proceed. We, the blessed who through enlightened, break-through scientific investigation (from Galileo and da Vinci through Newton, from Darwin through Planck, quantum physics, paleo-anthropology, the double helix and modern evolutionary molecular/cellular biology at its deepest level, neutrino technology, the isotopes and so on) are now able to assess by new means. Set free of cumbersome, preset pieties and begging to differ by placing mind over myth and matter over mind even when this means cutting our own species down to size. Regaining that natural sense of awe and joy we nearly lost through all that artificiality, all that learnedness, all those utterly contrived formulae and ‘revelations’. As for morals, it is clear by now that tolerance and compassion are entirely linked to developed intelligence, the lack of it, coarse stupidity, producing inequity and social cruelty of the most grievous kind. In addition, the purest and noblest among us those whose generosity comes without held out reward or some ‘divine’ trade-off, the real saints. Secular souls, unheralded, unpaid, remaining completely anonymous while others appropriate religion and go to Calcutta to elevate themselves, as if there can be no goodness without the circus of incense.

Realistic, total re-self-assessment has thus become a distinct possibility as we no longer need to be governed by primitive impulses like the physical one-upmanship, territorialism, awkward philosophical theory and religious doctrine that marked us for a millennium or more. In other words: in an immediate sense we’re free, free at last, but only if we want to be. No more beautiful bullshit that once saw us through, but also kept us down. No more child-like exalted fantasy, no more deliberate mystery and obscuration. No more subjecting, horoscopic, all-fitting texts. For only this last century or so, while in possession of the hard, straightforward facts, the simple truth and a sense of proportion can we ordinary citizens stand back in large numbers and truly contemplate our common, limited yet quite fascinating destiny with unadulterated appreciation.

We’ve been to space and found neither heaven nor hell. Even looking back at Earth seeing absolutely nothing, not even ourselves—only a blessed, precious, blue heavenly body circling an amazing mass of light and warmth! So is this not the moment to accept the magnificence of life on its own unique terms for perhaps only the second time; first then, so innocently, in the very, very beginning, and again only of late? Without the intervening interference of sanctimony, of artificial despair, silly threats of damnation, the torments of a sulfurous hell, the fire, the brimstone of it, places where even seraphs fear to tread? Without the feeble crutch of tailor-made eternity or sainthood and all its supporting ritual and dogma, without feeling that for us, here, there’s no grand role left to play, that we have lost our ‘other’ purpose, as if we ever really had one or for that matter….really need one!? Not as übermensch, superman, but simply as man. Man whose only greatness lies in his capacity to face and manage, if not completely influence, his own destiny. For haven’t we put far too much capital in the search of ‘meaning’ and if there is some other purpose at work, do we think it will reveal itself by our crawling, by our writing sainted comic-strips or our preemptive sucking up? For now, we are our own meaning, isn’t that obvious? Besides what happened to dignity? Do we know? Shouldn’t we?

Still, despite one Spanish thinker whose name escapes me reasoning that since they haven’t contacted us provides definitive proof there’s intelligent life up there, another Spaniard, the mathematician Sampedro, tells us that a powerful metaphor is so much more useful than any mathematical equation, which by itself is so very wise. Nonetheless, dog-fighting over notions like these or not, research rather than repentance (that annoying guilt-tripping) or mere phrase-making, should be our game while remaining practical at all times and not elevating modern science to the status of another religion with all its hierarchy and horrible power-seekers. And always bearing in mind that man can grow but create not one single strawberry.

It should be clear then that true discovery and the inevitable victory of real knowledge over biased pontification should lead to victory over our lingering cowardice, testify to our ultimate maturity and final peace. So that all guiding philosophy, like all guiding religion, should sooner than later be put out to pasture and into the realm of children’s books where surely they belonged all along. Leaving us with only one broad formal philosophical and theological discipline, termed perhaps (studies of) The History of Unfinished Human Thought. Or is it The Redundant Plea Contained In All Past Human Rumination And Reflection?!

Giambattista Vico, a XVIIth century Italian philosopher came close to this position attacking the Church and also the reigning brain of his day, Descartes, who pretended to be a supreme anthropocentric rationalist while thriving on ‘methodical doubt’, but managed to remain a devout Catholic all his life (as Pascal already said of him: talk about triple contradictions, talk about confusion…), the first saying man had successfully faced three ages: the Age of Gods, the Age of Heroes and was now embarking on the Age of Man, with no further need for morale boosters. Vico also talking himself out of a comfortable job at the University of Naples in 1699, selling all his worldly belongings to prove his point and going on to starve to death for lack of income. But this no longer needs to happen to men of utter intellectual integrity.

In addition, here, now, today, and in conclusion there are a handful of myths and faerie or fairy tales from which we needn’t escape, from which we needn’t be set free. We don’t have to deprive ourselves altogether of our fantasies. We only need to carefully remember how perverted political and religious romanticism have accounted for much abject cruelty and suffering, ignominiously producing millions of dead; belief systems and doctrines still thriving in too many places out there. These other fables then the happy exception: bereft of the inherent dishonesty of the all rest. Differing from your run-of-the-mill, multi-striped scribbling and scripture in that they attempt to unmask ostensibly benign falsehoods, near hypnotic to so many, while neither creating nor perpetuating them. Like from the other side of the mirror, Alice in Wonderland coming to mind (contrariwise, continued Tweedleedee, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s the logic.) and also of course The Emperor’s New Clothes. Or what about toothless Tigger in Winnie-the-Pooh, isn’t he absitively, posolutely honester than most of us will ever be? With one superb quote remaining to end this brief exposé and somewhat personal tour d’horizon, not intended to offend but to set free the slaves even though so conditioned to their captivity that distraught, in their bewilderment, and as a primitive response, they’ll probably first want to attack… their liberator.

It’s from another one of these rare works, The Wizard of Oz, the old fool just caught in the act of deception. Dorothy’s exclamation to be precise, on the farm, at end of the tempest, after she awakes:

“Auntie Em, Auntie Em!

There’s no place like home!…

There’s no place like home!”

That’s right, there is absolutely nothing wrong with home: our here and our now. Human existence needn’t be fraught with feelings of fear or a colossal sense of futility once official fairy tales have been exposed for what they are. Simply put, we must cut out the crap. At the risk of sounding like Peter Sellers in Being There, I truly think it’s what Voltaire meant a couple or more centuries ago when he closed Candide with the open-ended Il faut cultiver notre jardin, urging us to value our delicious earthly garden, retrieve lost dignity and move on to living authentically. Never missing a beat, a notion to which before him Plato and Montaigne were no strangers, both moralists of the first order to whom pleasure remained essential. Lusty moralists they, if not moral lustists.

Put differently again this represents the last phase, the First, at the dawn of ‘our’ days, one of light and innocence, the Second, one of fear and survival, the Third, one of fear and sustenance, the Fourth, one of fear, fantasy and order. The Fifth, one of power, fear, fantasy and enslavement, followed by the Sixth, one of self-induced darkness and the beginning of the struggle to free ourselves, then more recently the Seventh, one of drift into despair and a sense of the absurd as reflected in bleak XXth Century theatre and literature, but possibly the time ripe now to do away with all that fear, irrational fear, and more of it: there’s nothing to be afraid of, nothingness as such does not exist, therefore nothing can be ‘absurd’ except perhaps wasting our stay on this magnificent heavenly body. Now if only all would listen, instead of throwing those nasty, archaic bombs. Because really, from any perspective, besides untimely death, man’s only persistent enemy is incomprehension. And he doesn’t improve matters with his lagging awareness, by not ‘farming’ himself more responsibly, by the fear induced abnegating of a good slice of his intellect, by denying himself a real joie de vivre in the face of the miracle of this life, by thinking that dignity’s putting on a uniform or a robe, by favouring myopic arrogance over suitable humility and huge, elaborate lies over simple courageous truth: man the abnegator, the conformist, the great pretender. Don’t let him fabricate, especially purpose, like some existential alibi: living’s not a crime. And while Signore Vico called it the Third Age, why don’t we just call all of this Phase Eight, and see what happens?! If lived and shared equitably, it causes fewer murderous, societal convulsions and may even fight heartburn. Paradise gained at last, paradise for all. The last leaf turned!

*Fairy Tales (Merriam-Webster Dictionary): A story in which improbable events lead to a happy ending. Hence, a narrow escape from ‘improbable events’ or for that matter apocryphal endings and achieving this escape from improbability by inching back to something closer to probability but still rather good, my point. Like Cinderella stepping into our livingroom, wiping her brow, exclaiming, phew, finally got out of that goddamn fairy tale, may I come in?

Nothing you have read here has not been said or written before. This is a summing up by an ordinary XXI Century citizen independently arriving at his perspective, therefore without ‘formal’ indoctrination and pre-acquired certainties of any sort— just common sense, absolutely no despair and a good pinch of ontological courage.

Accompanying prose poem

A FUNERAL FOR IMMORTALITY

(Subtitle: Sodomy and Velvet Hats)

There is no sweeter contingency

Yet consider the promise of endlessness and finding all things good, become all hell

So that the possibility of immortality’s own death sneaking up, to this deception we should not over-react,

cuddled as we were

when still in need

of all her nurturing

Indeed, if immortality were a woman who had a certain way with us, holding herself out, making us go and go on, when otherwise and long ago we would have given up: yes, such is the power of suggestion and the degree to which our fears and at once the self-preservation behind our beliefs, do stimulate

The terrible power of fantasy, it is called

For as it turns out her generosity always exactly mirrors our generosity towards ourselves

Now one day such a lady surely deserves a warm-hearted obituary, seeing how so very suddenly she grew so very old, and cold, before our very eyes. Or was it slowly, but nobody paid attention? The cause of death, since you ask, usually ignored in as formal an outpouring as an obituary, futile bringing the matter up, except perhaps for the benefit of those themselves blindly moribund. And having loads of time coming up with a suitable epitaph, there rarely existing need for impatience or thrusts of other sorts

For it is nearly impossible to write a well-reasoned prose treatise on something that isn’t quite real, something like a real enough obituary for immortality and the reason lady-embodiment serves us well. For in defense of things it must be given a try as life only valued as a constant ‘raging against the dying of the light’ so often leads to the de facto denial of one. Like the stating, as so many do, that wisdom is ‘accepting life’s limitations’ and from there swiftly going on to suggest how terrific and infinite and unlimitated the next one is. Commencing the search for the holy grail of this immortality, even when there is not the faintest hope of finding it, the real, organic universe unable to function in this manner

But let us return to the task of burying a lady: it is not easy celebrating someone who never was and could not be, someone comforting and fanciful, alive superbly in our desires, one we only recently and to our great shock learned no longer lives among us. Gone, defunct, dead and needing to be buried with great pomp, out of respect for what we perceived were her extraordinary accomplishments: dishing out limitless, beguiling reward as recompense for our own perceived victories and qualities. A spell-binding, an overly generous lady, deserving an elaborate grave, a solid grave, for she was uncommonly elusive and thought to be extremely tall, with all of us knowing her but none of us ever really seeing her, even though, incredibly, we would kill for her if we had to, chips down and seemingly in the service of deep need

An obituary then that could say a lot or not so much, because she meant a lot or not so much, depending on to whom one spoke. In fact there could be more than one obituary, the irony that she knew so many and survived a long, long time in so many minds. Longer, and get this, than all her admirers, adherents and good friends put together. With The Daily Telegraph probably celebrating her service to King and Country. The Times her estates. The Guardian her fellow man and Radio Four her forceful voice. And that is because we are all so very much inspired by anything or anyone confirming what we already stand for, making every obituary rich… because, in fact, our own

Though strangely, dead or simply disappeared, she keeps on popping up, sighted by those who can’t give up, wanting to have a fresh go at her. When the only thing the poor dear wanted was to be remembered, not be seduced again or in the other extreme driven to exhaustion. Or ridiculed by some, because that’s the way we are: sometimes good, sometimes nasty, just don’t push and as long as either way we bag some rich reward. But seriously and swiftly removing tongue from cheek, is it not the premise of promise of such another life, the one after the one we know to be so short, precarious and cruel, the sole element of change that possibly makes sense? For what is the point of extending life with one just as fraught with uncertainty? And therefore making the dreaming up of one that is neither, such a perfectly natural endeavour? Putting to good use the one faculty making us differ from all other living creatures: Need something you cannot have, thus badly want? Why, invent it, of course!

Then buy it! And need itself then, so very facultative. And artificiality on the surface so very beneficiary. For it certainly seems to work in other parts of our existence, like matters economic: half the world lives decently by the fabrication of products that are useless or invisible. Goods and services based on fear and contingency. On mere impression and suggestion, with them crazy or smart enough to provide the stuff and us daft enough to buy it. Yes, along broad lines it works, just like the cold war. The economic catalyst without which we would all have been eating dirt and for decades fostering industry upon industry keeping us directly or indirectly in a job. Though nothing ever happened, no shots fired, only those empty, angry menaces and threats. And what did Yves Saint Laurent ever do for Joe Pizza? Sodomy and velvet hats? Just what everyman was pining for? Of course not, but let the poor designer be, you do get the point: he successfully employed thousands of us in hundreds of stores in a dozen countries, or more. But in the end, both Yves and the Cold War tired and went. Yet fatuous immortality, despite all funerals, ever so kept her allures

For on a further level it seems self-evident that there can be no life without death. So why then eliminate death? It is like trying to steal the horizon: it cannot be done and to begin with does not make sense. But by insisting on doing so, by trampling on others in the act, by being blind to every breath-taking landscape on our way, what are we achieving, anyway? To a growing number of us the secret lying in staying away from this sort of thing, by overcoming existential fears and silly ambition. Not craving immortality and reward the answer, ignoring that innate vulnerability to incentives of the kind. For it may be that in this ignoring and the human dignity it engenders lie the only timelessness that matters. Additionally and as a by-product, a delightful element of discovery left to our children, a stretch of road truly their own, nothing handed down or for much longer. The case before. Yes, not having their existence cut and dried after the ignoring… no longer ignored

Is this not the very least we can do, bequeathing them life’s magnificent sense of adventure, the one that we are busy claiming on the late side? Therefore, besides her obituary, the funeral for immortality, our lovely but somewhat sly and once ancient lady, should be an extremely joyous and even repetitive one. Itself an unending New Orleans jazz funeral with laughter and dance flowing through the streets of five continents. Listen! Listen to the sway of that music, slow drums rolling, brash brass and soft reeds blowing, all feet moving, all man’s skins aglow

What a way to live

As live we must,

with this load of time

the party

far from over?

(Conceived just prior to Fairy Tales, the Essay)

The author is probably the first to write of Hollywood’s head censor without condescension or smirking, pointing out that Breen genuinely loved movies and saw his role as more of a script advisor than anything else. Contrary to the picture many people have of classic-era Hollywood censors, the PCA’s chief role was to vet scripts, not scissor prints. Most of Breen’s work consisted of horse-trading with the producers and screenwriters, haggling over word choice and suggesting ways to comply with the Code’s various strictures. Those rules enforced a rigidly Catholic sensibility, one with strict views about sin, repentance and redemption. If other faiths countenanced such things as birth control and divorce, the Catholic Church did not, and so for the duration of Breen’s tenure they were virtually unknown in Hollywood movies as well.

Doherty, while giving full measure to Breen as a particularly rigid example of what he calls “Victorian Irish,” also wants to correct the image of the censor as a dimwitted bluenose. As a movie lover, Breen had taste; his letters to Charlie Chaplin when vetting The Great Dictator practically grovel, as Breen apologizes repeatedly for presuming to scissor genius. (But presume he did, as Breen reminded Chaplin that the word “lousy” was forbidden.) One of the few moments when the Siren felt real warmth toward Breen came when she read the glowing praise he sent to Orson Welles after viewing rushes for The Magnificent Ambersons. And while Breen left himself open to mockery, then and later, with his finger-wagging over things like Nick and Nora’s king-sized bed, his chief desire was what a later generation would call “deniability.” If Ernst Lubitsch’s Angel presented a well-appointed “salon” where ladies offered “an amusing time,” that was fine. The audience could see a brothel if they liked–Breen’s chief concern was whether the up-front appearance was clean. The most talented filmmakers learned to smuggle the smut.

It’s become so common over the last few decades to discover the clay feet of moral arbiters, from Jim Baker to Eliot Spitzer, that it’s pleasant to hear Breen had no such personal failings. He was a faithful husband, good father to six children and restrained in his personal habits, a man who neither overindulged in alcohol nor partied till the wee hours with his fellow Hollywood Irish. Those searching for censorable qualities in the censor will find only a dedicated smoking habit and salty language–that is, aside from the several historians who have alleged something darker.

“These Jews seem to think of nothing but money making and sexual indulgence,” wrote Breen in 1932 to a Jesuit priest, continuing with phrases such as “the scum of the scum of the earth” and “dirty lice.” Doherty says the priest refrained from responding in kind, as did another priest, Martin J. Quigley, when Breen wrote him that same year to say “these damn Jews are a dirty, filthy lot.” Doherty doesn’t try to pretty up the correspondence. He does point out, however, that at this time “blunt slurs were lingua franca at most levels of American society.” Doherty also says that the really intemperate language disappears from Breen’s correspondence after about 1934, about the time that the Hollywood studio heads consented to enforcement of the Code. (There is an excerpt from the book online that discusses this controversy.)

“Rabid antisemitism is a full-time job,” Doherty asserts. “If Breen were a frothing bigot, if his hatred of Jews were passionate and pathological, the fever would infect his entire life and writings, not only a handful of letters written in the early 1930s.” Well, no. Bigotry is nothing like a full-time job. Perhaps the key there is the adjective “rabid,” but the Siren doesn’t think anyone was suggesting Breen’s antisemitism was in line with Nazi eliminationism. Everyday prejudice can be quite passionate, and it is situational, something to be brought forward when you need it and denied when you don’t. If–just as a hypothetical, of course–you are promoting a movie about the last hours of Christ’s life and you want as many tickets sold as possible, why then you have nothing but respect for the Jewish people. Even in solitary moments away from the camera you may convince yourself of your own broadmindedness. When, on the other hand, you are knocking back a few at a bar, get pulled over on the highway and fumble through your alcohol-sodden brain for the reason you are not being treated with the deference you expect, why then it’s time to trot out the Great Global Jewish Conspiracy, natch.

The Siren has some other questions about whether Breen deserves the antisemite tag that has followed him for some time. Most of her queries come from re-reading another book in tandem with Doherty’s. Hollywood Goes to War, by history professors Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, was published in 1987, and because the Siren hasn’t access to the original correspondence from Breen she doesn’t know whether their scholarship has been superseded. But here is an interesting passage:

The conservative head of the Production Code Administration [Breen] was deeply suspicious that Jews in Hollywood, chiefly writers, were trying to use the Nazis’ treatment of Jews to make propaganda pictures. He felt the center of this conspiracy was the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which was, he said, ‘conducted and financed almost entirely by Jews.’ Their response to the Spanish Civil War was to vilify [sic] ‘the communistic loyalists.’ Indeed, Breen feared an attempt to ‘capture the screen of the United States for Communistic propaganda purposes.’ The censor said he had been able to eliminate all attempts at propaganda thus far, but it was increasing at an alarming rate.

Koppes and Black are quoting a private letter from Breen to Jesuit priest Daniel Lord, who wrote the original Code with fellow priest Martin J. Quigley. This letter was written in 1937, five years after Breen’s first burst of slurs and a year after Breen attended a banquet for the anti-Nazi exile and prominent Catholic Prince Hubertus zu Lowenstein. Doherty contends that Breen supported the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which was left as left could be although Breen most assuredly was not. Doherty’s evidence for this is that Breen attended the League’s first-year anniversary celebration, as well as the Lowenstein banquet. Koppes and Black, on the other hand, depict Breen going to Rome, script for Idiot’s Delight in hand, and having the Mussolini government vet it. This trip took place in 1938, after the invasion of Ethiopia and after Rome had passed antisemitic laws based on those of the Nazis.

Doherty tells of Breen writing thoughtful letters of support to Lord and another priest, Joseph N. Moody, after they wrote pamphlets urging Catholics to turn away from antisemitism. At the same time, Koppes and Black have Breen writing in 1938 to Walter Wanger about a screenplay then called “Personal History,” later to become Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent. Breen told Wanger that “in the opinion of the PCA, the script contained ‘pro-Loyalist propaganda…pro-Jewish propaganda, and anti-Nazi propaganda…[which] would inevitably cause enormous difficulty, when you come to release the picture.’”

Doherty doesn’t recount the long journey of Foreign Correspondent to the screen, but he does quote a letter from Breen to Warner Brothers when that studio was about to greenlight Confessions of a Nazi Spy, one of Hollywood’s first openly anti-Nazi films. Breen’s note, which warns that the film will run into trouble in Germany, sounds “pro forma” to Doherty, telling the Warners things they already well knew.

So there is a question of interpretation. Late in the 1930s, was Breen going through the motions as an adviser to the industry, as Doherty says, or actively striving to keep the politics off the screen, as Hollywood Goes to War sees it? It is quite true that the PCA, which saw its job as working in tandem with the studios and not against them, was merely pointing out some economic facts of life to Wanger. It’s also true that Wanger needed no reminding, and that in 1938, well after the Nuremberg laws and mere months before Kristallnacht, it rings an odd note for a supposed Anti-Nazi League supporter to be writing to a producer about “pro-Jewish propaganda.”

We seem to have a mess of contradictions here, but then again, maybe not. The Siren understands Doherty’s desire to balance the picture of Breen–to our eyes, almost seven decades after Auschwitz, antisemitism is the purest kind of evil. As Doherty points out, it is difficult to see how common certain prejudices were and to recognize that not all antisemitism was the direct equivalent of Nazism. But, even if we accept Doherty’s interpretation of Breen’s late-1930s activities, the Siren still doesn’t find Breen’s alleged mellowing at all inconsistent with his earlier proclamations. His later dealings with the Hollywood moguls were more pleasant, so Breen was too. Doherty does acknowledge this: “A cynical reading would conclude that the Irish bigot was smart enough to keep his true feelings to himself and suck up to the men who were buttering his bread. Or one might conclude that, on balance, the venom was a transient spasm, the product of a hot temper and simmering frustration.”

All righty then. Call the Siren a cynic.

Since Doherty’s book is bringing forward an important piece of Hollywood history, the Siren wishes the book spent less time with tales we’ve all heard many times, such as the fusses over Ingrid Bergman’s affair with Rossellini and Jane Russell’s breasts in The Outlaw. Hughes’ battle over the Billy the Kid movie had important implications, it is true, and there’s no way to leave it out, but the movie itself is lousy. The Siren would have trimmed some of the ink devoted to those episodes in favor of discussing, for example, Breen’s permanent scissoring of various pre-Code films and locking up others altogether.

One episode new to the Siren was Breen’s role in how Gone with the Wind expunged Margaret Mitchell’s frequent use of the “n” slur. Doherty contends that the depiction of African Americans actually improved with the institution of the Code. The Siren would love to see this discussed at more length by Doherty, because it’s interesting and new to her. Doherty grants that after the institution of the Code, mainstream Hollywood’s roles for blacks narrowed almost completely to comic relief, until small improvements began in the early 1940s. But he argues that Breen’s office enshrined one uniform stereotype of black Americans, thus ridding the screen of the “slack-jawed simians” that were common to silent film and pre-Code movies. The professor wrote a history of pre-Code Hollywood, next up on the Siren’s nighttable, so he must feel that sympathetic pre-Code movies such as The Emperor Jones and Hallelujah! were vastly outweighed by the loathsome depictions in other films. Certainly Breen seems to have relished playing the broadminded good-cop to some of the South’s more racist censors, including Memphis’s Lloyd T. Binford, who banned the innocent Hal Roach comedy Curley because it showed a class with black and white students.

The notorious “miscegenation clause” was inserted in the third draft of the Code in 1930 by persons in the Hays office whom Doherty does not name. The two priests who wrote the code, Quigley and Lord, were infuriated by its inclusion and said so to Breen. Doherty doesn’t record Breen’s response, but notes that any picture with an interracial angle of any kind would never have played in segregated states. After the war, some loosening of racial attitudes began. Doherty says the federal Office of War Information’s harping on the theme of a united America “opened the eyes of the Breen Office to its racial blind spots.”

To which the Siren responded, “You don’t say.” The “national feelings” clause of the Code said “The history, institutions, prominent people and citizenry of other nations shall be represented fairly.” This worked fine if you were German; the files are full of Breen and OWI admonishing producers not to depict all Germans as Nazis. It worked even better if you were from what Doherty calls “the most-favored nations of Ireland and Italy.” Even the Chinese did all right, if they could tolerate being played by Katharine Hepburn and Walter Huston.

If, however, you were Japanese, you were out of luck, whether or not you were a fascist. And that’s something Doherty discusses not at all.

This isn’t merely the Siren applying latter-day liberalism to another era. As Hollywood Goes to War points out, there were movie fans at the time who found Breen’s standards puzzling, like the woman who wrote him after hearing that the censor planned to delete “hell” from the lines permitted General “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell in Objective Burma. Why, she asked reasonably, was the general’s language being scrubbed when “she heard the Japanese referred to again and again as ‘dirty yellow rats,’ ‘blasted monkeys,’ and the like”? Breen eventually passed on “hell” as an exact quote from Stillwell but drew the line at “by God.”

Another speech, however, passed without a murmur. After Errol Flynn’s character discovers the bodies of his friends, mutilated after hideous tortures by the Japanese, a newspaper correspondent spits out, “They’re degenerate, immoral idiots. Stinking little savages. Wipe them out, I say. Wipe them off the face of the earth.” Flynn says nothing in response.*

This was passed by the Breen Office, without any cavils at needing “good Japanese” or any other balance. All you have to do is spend an afternoon with a few WW II movies set in the Pacific theater to realize that under Breen, the PCA strictures to respect other nations simply did not apply to Japan. It was the studios who churned out the racist films. But Breen, who objected when the first draft for Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt showed all Nazis as “brutal and inhuman people,” self-evidently enforced no such even-handedness for the eastern half of the Axis. If Doherty is going to say, as he does, that Breen “silenced the sounds of racial invective,” then the sounds of scripts calling the Japanese “monkeys who live in trees” (in Guadalcanal Diary) need to be talked about, too.

Overall, while the Siren enjoyed reading the book for Doherty’s deft writing and extensive research, she disagrees with the general premise, summed up in the last chapter, “Final Cut: Joseph I. Breen and the Auteur Theory.” Films of the classic age are cherished, Doherty says, because of a “longing for the certainty of standards and the security of tradition, and an affinity for a mannered time where curse words, nudity and bloodshed are banished, where bedrooms are for sleeping and bathrooms are unmentioned.” This sounds suspiciously like Dume3’s acid comment on a prior Siren post about the Code, that some people like old movies “because they’re clean.” The Siren likes them because they’re good–because the studios, aided by a magic combination of lack of competition, vertical integration and an ability to throw money at some of the world’s most talented people, produced literate, interesting, visually beautiful movies. The Siren is no more going to thank Breen for the vision behind those movies than she’s going to write to the printers at Penguin Classics to thank them for the layout of Great Expectations. He was a technical obstacle, not a creative talent. The moral vision that Breen worked into classic-era movies often feels tacked on, as in John Garfield’s ludicrous explanation of why it’s all right to execute him for the wrong murder in The Postman Always Rings Twice. And the Siren really doesn’t think Lubitsch–or, for that matter, Ben Hecht, Billy Wilder or the Epstein brothers–needed Breen to make them more subtle or delicious.

There’s a cute picture of Breen on the cover of this book, showing Hollywood’s censor yukking it up with some starlets on the set of a Baghdad-and-boobs epic. It’s meant to show that he was no bluenose. In another pronouncement, however, the Siren hears a far more convincing dose of the man’s real personality: “If at any time you are a bit foggy as to what constitutes honor, purity and goodness or where sophistication stops and sin starts, I’ll tell you.”

*Screenwriter Alvah Bessie, of later Hollywood Ten fame, had written a reply for Flynn’s character that said the violence was fascist, not inherently Japanese. But producer Jerry Wald cut it.

Since I’ve been distracted by politics over at my place, and because I didn’t want to inflict a simple review of Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay on you (now, a comprehensive analysis of the Stoner Comedy, maybe… but I haven’t had the time), I’ve been a little out of the loop on the arts beat.

But let me try to get back there, by discussing the sorry state of the Romantic Comedy.

Everybody’s got a theory about what’s wrong with the Rom-Com these days (first idea: calling them Rom-Coms), but it probably comes down to the basics: poor scripts, weak direction, and lack of star power. Though another, probably just as useful theory is economics: given the demands of making big money on pictures that open big, it’s hard to invest the smaller, audience building crowd pleaser.

Myself, while I believe in all those business-based observations, I think it’s also about the films themselves, which have skewed a traditional, winning formula beyond recognition; where these films used to be about couples, and the interplay between two individuals, these days, oversimplification (and some darker social trends) have led to a result that’s killing romance on film: the overarching need to snag a hot guy.

This week, one need not look further than Made of Honor, which drifts into theaters, just as its stars return to their TV day jobs - Patrick Dempsey, resuming hunk status on Grey’s Anatomy (which has been more about Patrick’s anatomy… but never mind), and Michelle Monaghan, pursuing far more daring adventures on Lost than anything here.

There’s a lot of this in romantic comedies these days - not just Dempsey (who also headlined Enchanted this winter), but a string of “TV talent” trying to make the switch to the big time of feature films. Since they tend not to overtax budgets, TV stars make great choices for these things, even though they rarely have the star quality for the big screen (but then, who does, these days). Where the feature film romances used to all star Meg Ryan (or possibly Julia Roberts), now there’s a string of (usually colorless) starlets taking up the slack.

One reason for that may well be the mutating of the genre into “Chick Flicks” a two word term for which I carry unending loathing. Rarely has Hollywood shorthand been more demeaning or, I’d argue, business injuring. By reducing films aimed primarily at female audiences to this charmless sobriquet, everything has been dumbed down… and nothing more so than the role of women within them.

In the past, Women’s Pictures denoted films driven by their female stars. At the height of the Golden Age, female stars served as top draws in pictures at nearly every studio. The studios actively groomed women for these roles, and the stars were, usually, more powerful and bigger draws than the men they worked with (Clark Gable, for one, openly chafed at casting that reduced him to secondary status in these pictures). That reality carried on well after World War II such that even though roles for women became far less interesting, female stars were still expected to serve as the primary draw. It’s worth remembering that, at the time, Doris Day was the #1 Box Office star in America, compared to co-star Rock Hudson, himself something of a male starlet, when they did their string of romantic comedies in the sixties (indeed, one can look at Down With Love and realize the structural problems, when Renee Zellwegger and Ewan MacGregor are essentially equal in star power).

It may be - and I’m really just guessing here - that part of the problem in the past ten years is Ryan: the enormity of Meg Ryan’s success as the top draw in “chick flicks” made it hard, I think, to develop others to follow. One could say the same of Julia Roberts, but I’d argue Roberts was never pegged as quite the Romantic Comedy star Ryan was; Roberts has shown tremendous versatility across a variety of genres, where Ryan has struggled to succeed at almost anything outside of romantic roles. But unlike almost any other genre, the romantic comedy is generally quite age specific - these are tales of young couples, in their mid twenties to early thirties, and Ryan aged out of it in the mid-nineties (to be generous; her last couple of “chick flicks” were, as such things do, stretching things).

What’s followed has not been much to write home about; while there have been some bright spots and a few sleepers, almost no one - except possibly Reese Witherspoon - has shown real strength carrying romantic comedies. And many have tried. There’s also no denying that the wholesale adoption of pushing heightened male beauty has up-ended the traditional calculus: since the eighties, increased sexual objectification of men (a function both of women gaining some measure of sexual freedom, and an increased visibility of gay culture) has takes even Hollywood’s usual emphasis on male attractiveness to new levels.

And it’s bred a new kind of male star, one whose “softer side” (and harder body) becomes central to the new approach to romantic comedy. In one sense this is a progressive step: films have begun to emphasize emotional development in male roles as never before. But much of the progress has come at the expense of balanced scripts with good roles for strong actresses. And, as a result, the “woman’s picture” has become a “chick flick”: where an objectified man’s choice of a suitable woman becomes the most paramount plot development (often told, backwards, as if the girl has a choice, which she rarely does).

Thus we have, Made of Honor: a film where a longtime Lothario (Dempsey), wises up and realizes his closest female friend (Monaghan) is actually the girl he wants to marry, only he’s too late - she’s found love in the arms of a Scottish Duke, and she wants her best friend to be her “Maid of Honor.” Charming, gender role based humor ensues… until the nice girl wises up and realizes that instead of Prince Charming, what she really wants is… Prince Charming.

It’s hard to describe the combination of slapdash scriptwriting that passes for character development (Dempsey’s character gets to show warmth… by petting dogs, basically), along with the morality free evaluation of men’s behavior (you essentially need a charmer like Dempsey in the guy part, because without him the promiscuous emotionless bastard he plays would be… well, a heartless cold bastard only after One Thing). Monaghan and Dempsey have minimal chemistry, but it’s easier to fault Monaghan: her character is tremendously underwritten, and she lacks the presence that’s needed to make the part memorable. But the flick is Dempsey’s anyway, yet another, for him, in a string of aging stud parts that are equal combinations of puppy-like gazes and sexy come-on. If it could work for George Clooney (not to mention Matthew McConaughey), why not Dempsey, too?

It could, but it hasn’t yet; like Enchanted, Dempsey’s films seem to live and die on his appealing charm and wholesome sexiness; it’s nice (no, really, I get it, he’s got star appeal)… but it can’t really carry a picture by itself. And as a result, he still seems more small box TV star on hiatus, than a big screen leading man slumming on TV.

But mostly, I found myself after Made of Honor lamenting the dearth of female roles, and by extension, female stars. And lest we give too much credit to the upcoming big screen transfer of Sex and The City, it too will be all about TV stars (admittedly big time cable stars, but still) playing up to attractive men (Chris Noth, too, surely fits the “aging stud” demo of Clooney, Dempsey, et al). I wish it were more than that. I do. I miss the fun, I miss the romance… I miss the strong women. I bet Prince Charming does, too.

It was quite unexpected when my brother walked into rehearsal one night way back in 1979 and announced that “Steve Miller” had a new record out that blew him away. He told us the name of the song was Is She Really Going Out With Him, and that it rocked hard with great lyrics. Back then we didn’t have much respect for Steve Miller. We didn’t hate him like we hated ELO, but his relentless barrage of inane, repetitive and derivate tripe was a constant reminder that no one was interested in our quirky brand of pop music rife with odd rhythms, non-standard time signatures and inside-joke lyrics. Looking back on those days it’s no wonder. Steve Miller’s music was catchy and very radio friendly and ours wasn’t. It was only a day or two after that we found out that it was of course not Steve Miller, but this new cat named Joe Jackson. I picked up Look Sharp and have been a fan ever since, in spite of more than a couple of subsequent misfires and disappointments.

The oft misused word eclectic is entirely apt in describing Jackson’s catalog. His musical output has run the gamut from pop to swing to reggae to salsa to jazz to modern classical. While his choices were often confounding to his audience and counter-productive to his career as a recording artist, the emphasis was always on artist. Joe Jackson has consistently been true to himself, composing and recording music according to his own tastes, seemingly unconcerned with current trends or commercial appeal.

I’ve been listening to Rain for about 6 weeks or so. If I’m going to give my opinion of an album, I want to live with it for a few weeks and give that opinion the chance to mature. I never could understand how music critics could listen to a record once or twice and then write a review. This works for a movie, but not for a record. Sometimes new music hits me one way on first and second listen and then transforms into something else upon subsequent auditions. I remember being completely taken by The Knack’s My Sharona the first time I heard it but by the 5th or 6th time I couldn’t get to the next station fast enough. Conversely, the first time I heard Steely Dan’s Aja I was somewhat underwhelmed. After living with it for about a week it became and remains to this day one of my favorite albums of all time.

The first couple of times through Rain I noticed that he was going falsetto more often than I would normally expect. He was actually asked about this in an interview contained on the bonus DVD and he said that he had some trouble singing the notes. I’m not sure how much this new information influenced the change in that opinion, but after some time I found the falsetto less annoying and more endearing.

Jackson chose to record this album as a trio, with his most excellent original band members Graham Maby on bass and drummer Dave Houghton. When I first heard about the “stripped down” instrumentation, I was expecting to be disappointed.

I wasn’t.

Invisible Man opens the album, and it’s perhaps one of the most accomplished songs of his career. Musically it’s reminiscent of Katy Lied era Steely Dan. The arrangement, instrumentation and especially the piano playing are all stellar. I’ve found Jackson’s lyrics over the years to be spotty. Some of his songs seemed vague and even ill-conceived lyrically (It’s Different for Girls) while others were concise and compelling (On the Radio.) The lyrics on the opening track are nothing short of inspired. After initial success in his early career followed by some brief almost-comebacks here and there, he seems to be reveling in his relative anonymity, free to be exactly who he wants outside of the bogus scrutiny of MTV and the rest of the crap music culture.

Hey - can you hear me now
As I fade away
And lose my ground
Maybe you’d like to know
What I’d have to say
If I was still around

Can’t touch the Invisible Man Can’t stop the Invisible Man

These are the musings of an artist who is at peace with his circumstances, and indeed happy with them. This was completely evident at the show I attended last Saturday in Atlanta. His set relied heavily on the new record which thrilled our little group, but the people who were there just for the hits weren’t disappointed either. He even covered an obscure song (Inbetweenies) by Ian Dury!

On Rain, the good songs just keep coming. Wasted Time is a ballad of lost love with a haunting, memorable melody. The Uptown Train is a jaunty jazz ditty reminiscent of Night and Day, musically a little lighter and carefree, though the lyric suggests something a little darker. As he informs us in the last verse:

They say -
Take it slow when you’re breaking the mold
Got to pay what you owe or be out in the cold
And they don’t care to know what you know or to go through the pain
To change
To the Uptown Train

There’s a solo piano song, slow and downbeat about persevering through loneliness, aptly titled Solo (So Low) with some pretty depressing lyrics. Here’s the opening:

Solo - It isn’t a dream
So low - It’s just what it seems
An empty thing
Waiting on somebody who never calls
Listening
In the night to something scratching round behind the walls

And the close:

Chances are few
To try to be
Someone new
Though one gets to play
With no referee
Peace at last
Guaranteed

At the concert he said that the song hints at better things to come, but it doesn’t leave me with that feeling. Joe’s sexual preference has always been a matter of speculation, and his lyrics are often I think deliberately ambiguous. As an example, on Too Tough he sings:

I know you think that I protest too much
I’m like a Diva with the tragic touch

but on Rush Across the Road he sings:

Of all the streets in the world
You walk down this one
And I see three hundred girls
But just want to kiss one

Regardless, one can’t help but get the sense that his life has been plagued by failed relationships, and Solo does nothing to dispel that notion. Before you have a chance to feel too badly though the band breaks into the aforementioned Rush Across The Road which will bring a smile back to your face and have you tapping your foot by the first chorus. His piano playing on this track as on others is stunningly gorgeous.

Rain is an instant classic and history will judge it as one of Joe Jackson’s best releases, certainly up there with Night and Day, though it won’t enjoy the same popularity. That’s a pity, because it’s a brilliant record. The songs go down effortlessly upon first listen and continue to improve with age. Every aspect of the album from beginning to end is superb. Joe’s songwriting, arrangements, singing and piano playing all reflect an artist at the top of his game, and not at all the has-been that one might expect from someone whose last hit record was in the early 80’s. If you’ve been craving a new collection of sophisticated pop songs informed by some jazz, latin and a touch of classical music, look no further. This is it

In the second half of the 20th century, he almost single-handedly invented TV drama, then went on to theater and movies, winning three Academy Awards and leaving behind classics like “Network” and “The Hospital” that tell us more about what went wrong with American media and medicine than the history books do.

On our high-school paper, I had taken over a column from Paddy nee Sidney. We were part of a generation coming of age between wars who hoped we could earn our way in the world with our brains rather than backs, as our immigrant parents were doing. We went on to a free college education at City College of New York and then into the Army, where Sidney was rechristened Paddy.

In the 1950s, he mined our lives for “kitchen sink” dramas: “Marty,” “The Bachelor Party,” “Middle of the Night.” From there, he moved on to the confusions of the larger society with savage satires, not only about TV and doctoring but wartime heroism in “The Americanization of Emily.”

But praise was not universal. At one of our occasional lunches, Paddy’s characteristic wry smile was a grimace. His movie, “The Goddess,” based loosely and respectfully on the life of Marilyn Monroe, had just come out to good reviews. The screenplay would soon be nominated for an Academy Award.

“Got a call from Arthur Miller this morning,” he sighed heavily,” and he said ‘I want to tell you that what you’ve done is despicable.’” Years later, I would recall Paddy’s pain as I sat through “After the Fall,” Miller’s nasty portrayal of Marilyn after her death.

Now, Paddy Chayevsky is best remembered for “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more,” the mantra of the crazed anchorman in “Network.”

A few years after the movie came out, I was in the grill of the Four Seasons, a clubby gathering place for media moguls and their hirelings, having lunch with a literary agent as Paddy passed by and said hello on his way to the next table to be introduced to William Paley, founder of CBS, avatar of the TV executives in the movie who exploit a madman for ratings and then, when they fall, have him killed on camera.

“I must admit,” we overheard Paddy telling Paley, “I’m nervous about meeting you.”

The agent leaned toward my ear. “He should be. They showed ‘Network’ on CBS the other night, and it got lousy ratings.”

Now new generations can discover Paddy Chayevsky’s work on videos and Turner Classic Movies. Start with “Emily,” “Network” and “The Hospital,” and work back to “Marty” in the 1950s. The trip is worth taking.

Cross-posted from my blog.

The play begins on the eve of Shakespeare’s death. The Bard explains to the audience the tragic events of some years earlier when the Earl of Essex was convicted of treason, when he became a political threat to his beloved Queen. To ease the grief of putting her lover to death, “Much Ado About Nothing” is performed in her honor. After the performance the players gather in the barn, and Elizabeth pays them an unexpected visit. Shakespeare, Scott David Nogi, narrates details to the audience.

However, the central focus of the play resides on the two protagonists, Queen Elizabeth I and Ned Lowenscroft the male actor who is the “leading lady” of the day, during the Elizabethan period only men were allowed to perform women’s role. Ned contracted a deadly disease from one of his one-time male lovers. The actor, Michael DiGioi provides a robust spirit to his dying character; he gives a beautiful performance.

We learn quickly that Elizabeth I is torn between her royal duties and her passion for a man. At one point, she bellows, “If you will teach me how to be a woman…I will teach you how to be a man.” The main characters exchange heated words about gender and role playing, but we discover there will be no break-through–only payment for their misjudgments, which is death. Stephanie Barton-Farcas lends a fine performance as the Queen; however, her lack of vocal strength was apparent when she engaged in emotionally charged moments. The charming cast provides relief from Elizabeth and Ned’s proverbial daggers. The stage was too small for such a large cast, but the design provided a wonderful visual backdrop to the play.

[From the archives. Originally posted at my place January ‘07.]

Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly is a modern musical masterpiece. It is a quintessential concept album, never wavering from the theme of a teen-aged boy’s (and a maladroit jazz geek at that!) fantasies circa 1960. Part autobiographical, the album captures the essence of the late 50’s early 60’s mixture of cold war paranoia (New Frontier) and the hope for a better future through science (I.G.Y.) Also included is an ironic love story set in the last days of Batista’s Cuba (The Goodbye Look) and a portrait of a lonely and sensitive jazz DJ(The Nightfly) who spends the night shift spinning bop records, smoking Chesterfield Kings and waiting for the phone to ring.

The record is perfect from beginning to end, from lyric to melody, and from meticulous yet soulful musicianship to sonic and tonal quality.

To call Ruby Baby a remake does a disservice to the work: the original is a piece of coal and Fagen’s take is a finely cut diamond. [I count Dion’s version as the original as he had a minor hit with it, but there are some other sides floating around from the era and I don’t know which one came first.] Penned by the seminal songwriting team of Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller , in the hands of Dion it is a forgettable piece of fluff, catchy but unremarkable. Not so under the deft direction of Donald Fagen and producer Gary Katz. Donald heard a sublime jazz arrangement with a score of subtle chord changes hidden between the cracks of this standard 1-4-5 progression, and he made it sound simple and organic. This is one cool record, and I mean cool in the original jazz context. I never tire of hearing it.

It’s usually a risk to see a Broadway show late into its run. For one thing, it’s tired; the performers have been doing 8 shows a week, over and over, and there’s bound to be a certain… lack of freshness. The buzz around even the most amazing show is bound to have slipped as well. And frequently, the show’s original stars - the real “marquee names” who probably justified the multimillion enterprise - have long gone.

In short, there’s a reason I’m not dying to see Hairspray again, now that Harvey Fierstein is two shows away.

I saw Grand Hotel well into its run, when Karen Akers had been replaced by someone who looked and sounded like an uncanny carbon copy, and it had this kind of sluggishness. Everything moved… but just a little slowly. Then again, as Forbidden Broadway nicknamed it, the “Grim Hotel” was never really that much of an “up” show.

By rights, Curtains should suffer just so; it’s not exactly up - though it’s certainly not a down show, by any means. It’s been close to a year, the awards it won in 2007 are largely fodder for poster text, and it is probably soon to close. Yet it was a delight; all of its main stars are still there, still tearing into it with zest, taking it out with a bang, not a whimper. Fred Ebb should be proud.

Ebb, of course, was the lyrics writing half of the legendary team of Kander and Ebb. Along with John Kander, they’ve created some of post Golden Age Broadway’s greatest hits, and helped to define the modern musical. Curtains, the show that was coming together at the time Ebb died, was carried into its final stages with the assistance of Rupert Holmes; but it stands as a final testament to Kander and Ebb’s lifetime of collaboration - a celebration of the theater they loved, and a wicked parody done by truly knowing minds. It’s not perfect, but for what it is, it’s terrific.

One can think of a dozen reasons why Curtains shouldn’t work - it’s a mystery musical, and rarely have two forms been less overtly compatible (musical… death… it’s not easy to see the connections); it’s a satire, which is hard to do well; and it’s a “show within a show” musical, which often creates confusion. Still if anyone could master this, it’s Kander and Ebb, who’ve been writing backstage, or theatrical infused pieces for almost their whole career. Cabaret, Chicago, Kiss of The Spider Woman… all benefit from an ability to celebrate not just the story being told, but the nature of telling it through musical theater. In that sense, Kander and Ebb are the creators who brought the postmodern, the sense of text beside subtext into modern Broadway - in ways, of course, that harked back to some of the oldest notions of telling stories through drama.

Michael Feingold (the brilliant reviewer for The Village Voice) once said “every generation gets the theater it deserves” (in the context of a savage pan), and I think that was very true for Chicago. In 1975, many people didn’t see the idea of accused murderers getting off through seamy lawyering as theater… by the time of OJ… well, we did. Time, I think, has given credence to the dark, grown-up thinking that animates so much of Kander and Ebb’s work.

In Curtains, we get a show in tryouts in Boston, a bad (bad!) musical Western called “Robbin’ Hood” whose closing number opens the show, and whose talentless leading lady promptly expires on her final bow. Turns out she’s been murdered. Also turns out nobody much liked her (well, she was talentless).

David Hyde Pierce plays the detective sent to investigate things, a Brahmin with a taste for the life onstage, and he sequesters the show’s personnel both to ferret out the killer… and help retool the show (he also starts a charming romance with the show’s sweet blonde ingenue). Meanwhile the shows music writers, Georgia (words) and Aaron (music), are battling each other and the show’s score, while the show’s producer (Deborah Monk) keps a jaundiced, non-romantic eye on the proceedings.

Curtains, I think, is something Kander and Ebb may have noodled with for years - there’s a lot of stuff here, a lot of stuff that seems sort of thrown together and shouldn’t, necessarily work. What does make it work is the verve of the performers… and the tings of reality breaking through. The show’s heartbreaking number “I Miss The Music” sung by Aaron, the songwriter, takes lost collaboration as a metaphor for love… it’s not hard to see Kander, telling Ebb, that he misses him.

So what if there are too many characters (there’s at least one male senior speaking role too many, it was confusing) and too many are left with not enough to do - the joys of Curtains come in those parody numbers that cross Annie Get Your Gun with Oklahoma! making fun of every American impulse to overuse our frontier history. Even the choreography takes sly, knowing jabs at Michael Kidd, Agnes deMille and Bob Fosse in sharp, knowing ways.

And that’s before crediting the performers, in a show where there’s room for Karen Ziemba to play Georgia as saucy as Gwen Verdon, yet leave room for Deborah Monk to steal the proceedings as the tough, sarcastic producer. Monk, always brilliant, really shines here. But perhaps most remarkable is David Hyde Pierce, who takes each number as if he just sort of happened upon it, making for a charming, understated commentary on the crazy doings around him. Unlike Hugh Jackman, who was so essential to carrying The Boy From Oz, the necessity of Hyde Pierce to Curtains isn’t necessarily obvious, but it’s still a big explanation to why the show succeeds. It’s hard to imagine who could take the role over successfully.

It’s the affection for the “business of show” that really gives Curtains its zip (not to mention the way it zings, er, critics). They don’t, really make them like this anymore (something I realized listening to Kander’s smart, jazzy overture… who does overtures, these days?), and we probably won’t see the likes of this again. Curtains closes June 29th. Try and see it, if you can.

Crossposted at NYCweboy.

In this week’s next-to-last installment, a sour, surly Adams slips out of a half-finished, half-furnished White House to board a crowded jitney and avoid attending the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson, a former friend he has come to envy and despise.

This is a typical moment in seven hours of relentless “realism” to offset a century of Hollywood biopics that glorified the Founding Fathers beyond human recognition and now attempts to balance the books by presenting them warts and all but ends up with a visually spectacular exhibition of warts.

It was only in middle age that, as a child of immigrants, I fell deeply in love with the makers of the American Revolution while touring the stately homes of England to view huge tapestries celebrating ancestral slaughter that created a ruling aristocracy who passed along generations of splendor to a few who live at the expense of misery for the many.

Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Franklin fought a war to escape all that and, by some miracle, found a way not to replicate it but create something magnificently new in history that endures to this day.

That they were vain, petty, self-seeking–in a word, human–is not surprising, but a televised tapestry of their faults is no more a cause for self-congratulation than the wall hangings in those palaces built on exploitation.

What the peerless Laura Linney as Abigail Adams keeps warning about in pillow talk would have been helpful to the producers of the HBO epic. “Ambition,” she keeps saying sadly. “Vanity.”

Cross-posted from my blog.