F. Scott Fitzgerald's Flappers and Philosophers (1920)

The best thing about Fitzgerald's first short-story collection is its title.  Seeing it, and knowing of Fitzgerald's reputation as poet laureate of the Jazz Age, and maybe being familiar with his later knowing, sympathetic portraits of wild women and enchanted men, you're probably going to expect a completely unbridled, unsobered-up collection of hot jazz fantasias.  Specifically the title seems to suggest that the collection will present a contrast between the body-centered concrete liberation represented the flapper and the mind-bound abstract repression represented by the philosopher, and that this contrast will redound (scandalously) to the Flapper's benefit by suggesting that she is the true Philosopher (in the sense of having the most persuasive access to Truth and Understanding).  The title does all this (for me, anyway), and what's even more exciting is that it does it all with such perfect music in the language - the three words of the title.  I mean, think of the orthography and how it relates to the sounds.  In the word "flapper" an "f" sound like an "f" and a "p" sounds like a "p":  straightforward, honest, no nonsense, intuitive.  In "philosopher" a "p" is denatured, abstracted by an "h" until it stands in for a displaced "f":  letters are one or two steps removed from their reflexive, direct sounds.  They're processed through the brain, rather than proceeding naturally from the lips.  The words work, in this instance, like the readings they're meant to evoke.  "Philosopher" is fake nonsense:  "flapper" is real.

I wanted to read that book.  Unfortunately, Fitzgerald's book only has a couple of stories worthy of that title.  "The Offshore Pirate" and "Head and Shoulders."  The latter really does translate the ancient mind/body split into contemporary (Jazz Age) terms, with its pairing of a Broadway ingenue and a Yale prodigy who in the end switch places.  The former presents a really indelible sketch of a flapper, Ardita, "slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick gray eyes full of a radiant curiosity," who is seduced by, or maybe seduces, a modern-day pirate.  Despite the condescending O. Henry twists at the end, these stories display the kind of louche brassiness that one might expect from the title of the book.

But the rest of the stories are not that.  At their best they're deft character studies (like "The Ice Palace" or "Bernice Bobs Her Hair"), and at their worst they're alarmingly conventional ("Benediction," "The Cut-Glass Bowl").  Either way, they're much more mundane than I've come to expect from Fitzgerald.  Middle-brow magazine fodder, which is I guess what they were.

David Fincher's The Social Network (2010)

Just got around to seeing this, right on time.  Don't have much to say except that, despite all the acclaim it got, I guess I was still doubtful that much could be made of the story, and that I was wrong.  It's a serious movie - if only because it lays bare, in an artful way, the obvious metaphors inherent in the whole thing.  I mean, what we all realized, in that three or four year period in which we all joined Facebook, was that the site was not at all redefining the way we interacted, but rather was codifying and making explicit what was already happening in our lives.  The movie brings that out nicely.

It reminded me of one of my college roommates, a history major who used to tutor freshmen.  I'd lie on my bed half-reading and half-listening to him, and one day he told a freshman, what you have to realize is, everybody who ever lived is basically driven by a desire to get laid, and that includes famous historical figures.  It all comes down to sex, and sometimes food.  Later I realized it was hardly an original argument, but it was the first time I'd heard it, and it made a big impact on me.  This movie gets that.

My other reaction to the film was one of total wonder.  I was at Harvard during the years when this all happened, but I was totally oblivious to it.  I was a grad student, and at least in my department that seems to have meant being almost totally estranged from the undergraduates.  I'd teach them, but I never really understood their world.  I have no idea, therefore, if this movie gets that right.  Hell, I didn't even join Facebook until it was opened to everyone, and then only because I heard about it from family members, not fellow Harwardians.

Wong Kar-wai's 2046 (2004)

This is the first Wong Kar-wai joint I've been disappointed by.  Knowing that this was a loose sequel to In The Mood For Love, which I loved, I was expecting great things.  And there are some great things here, but the whole thing isn't a great thing.

Visually it's impeccable - but that kind of goes without saying for Wong and Doyle by now, doesn't it?  They're expanding on their '60s-style-and-texture fetishes of the previous film (there's a shot with a green-tinged Faye Wong in the foreground and a green naugahyde chair in the background shadows that just knocked me out), and adding to them a deliriously mod futurism.  The sci-fi elements in this film, while a disaster for the story, allow them to cut loose with some near-Barbarella level visual play.  Someday I'd like to see them cut loose with a full-on sci-fi flick - I'd expect something along the lines of Fifth Element, style style style.

Unfortunately, the gynoid and Train to the Future bits strike me as silly in unintended ways - Kimura Takuya looks particularly lost in these scenes, and at one point Faye Wong actually starts moving in stop-motion, like every ten-year-old does when imitating a robot...

As for the rest of the film, well, it just didn't do it for me.  Maybe it was unfair to compare it to In The Mood For Love, because in comparison to the clear emotional through-line in that film, in this one the emotional arcs seemed muddled to me.  Maybe it's because Tony Leung's character's motivation was left unclear right up until the end.  As Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki summed it up, it's a movie about a guy who can't get over a past love - but we don't learn that he even had a past love until ten minutes before the movie ends.  Of course if we believe that this is really a continuation of In The Mood, then we already know that - but there are enough shifts to leave us in doubt about that at first, I think.

Maybe I'm just getting impatient with the director's prioritizing of visuals and mood over story;  I know that's his bag, and I expect it.  But in what I consider his best films, the intimations of story that do sneak in support the visuals, and the whole thing comes together.  Not so here.

Groovy Talkin' Verve (or, Talkin' Verve: Groovy!) (1998)

This set tries to answer a serious question in a fundamentally unserious way.  At the same time, only different:  it documents some artists trying to answer a serious question in ways that range from serious to un-.  Viz.

The rise of rock over the course of the '60s seemed to threaten to, and in fact by the end of the decade did, displace the mainstream of American pop.  From the '20s through the '50s, if I have this right, that mainstream had been a course defined, broadly, by jazz.  Pop singers like Sinatra had roots in jazz, and sang in a style that drew its rhythmic pulse and melodic impulse from jazz.  Popular music in America in this period swung, to a greater or lesser degree.  Jazz therefore had a natural "in" with pop, because it shared this basis in swing;  jazz was therefore able to enrich its repertoire with pop music, because the pop music of the period was so influenced by jazz.  The mutually-reinforcing cult of the "standard," right?  Pop music lent legitimacy by its adoption into the jazz world, which also legitimized jazz by situating it in close proximity to "standard" pop songcraft.  Tin Pan Alley and 52nd Street shake hands and both agree that each other was the shiznit. 

In the '60s (started in the '50s, but didn't hit until later), mainstream pop stopped swinging and started rocking.  We're not just talking the British Invasion, either:  Motown's beat wasn't a jazz beat.  Stax's beat wasn't a jazz beat.  And jazz suddenly found itself in danger of becoming superannuated.  Its standards were sounding old-fashioned.

There were lots of ways of phrasing the questions raised by this.  Could jazz appropriate contemporary pop songs like it had "standards"?  Could Lennon/McCartney and Jagger/Richards tunes, or Holland/Dozier/Holland or Hayes/Porter songs, be jazzed up the way Rodgers/Hart or Cole Porter songs could? Could attempts at doing that result in serious music, or only kitsch?  Was jazz as a musical idea separable from the swing beat?  Could jazz continue to evolve?  Was rock intrinsically nothing but greasy kid stuff played by "non-playing motherfuckers" (in Miles Davis's inimitable characterization), or was there something there?

Verve, as we've seen, was already all about what the Village Voice would later (probably more retrospectively than it knew) call "pazz & jop".  So it was natural that the label would at least be willing to experiment with the New Rock, at jazzifying it, or at rockifying jazz - natural that the label would be in the forefront of that effort, which would have been perceived as an imperative by artists for every label.  So the question this set should be asking is, how did Verve do it?  And how well did Verve do it?

The problem is, I don't think the compilers were interested in answering any of those questions seriously, or in examining how the artists they're dealing with tried to answer them.  Because most of what's here is just here for a laugh, and the things that actually work, musically, that inspire grooving rather than goofing, work in ways that go unexplained by this compilation.

The compilation draws from a surprisingly small number of records released between 1965 and 1971 on the Verve, Mercury, MGM, and MPS labels.  Over a third of it is made of Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery selections, which makes sense, given how close those gentlemen stayed to pop in their Verve years, but these selections don't provide any revelations (except possibly for pointing out how bad a singer Smith was - he vocalizes on "Dock Of The Bay," and you wish he hadn't).  Add in a trio of Quincy Jones numbers and a pair of Willie Bobos, and over half of this disc is both literally and conceptually redundant with other items in this series.  Okay, fair enough, they probably didn't expect anybody to be so dumb as to get all the volumes...but some of the other cuts on here are good enough to make you wish the compilers had looked a little harder, thought a little bit more seriously about what they were doing.

The most ear-opening numbers are three tracks from the atrociously-titled Blood, Chet And Tears, a 1970 record that was Chet Baker's only outing for Verve.  We get "Vehicle," "Evil Ways," and "Spinning Wheel."  These work for much the same reason that Astrud Gilberto's take on Chicago's "Beginnings" works:  they draw from the most jazziest strain of contemporary rock, and they take it seriously.  Chet's playing well, the arrangements are forceful (very close to the originals, though), and you don't get the feeling that anybody involved is looking down their nose at the songs.

Which they wouldn't have necessarily had to do...  I'm no expert on any of this stuff, and I haven't yet started to seriously explore fusion (the elephant in this particular room), but it seems to me that a lot of the problem with the way jazz artists dealt with the rock threat stemmed from a general unwillingness.  Like, there were enough kids in rock bands in 1970 who listened to jazz, and who really wanted to expand their own music, that you could have imagined a serious rapprochement.  But instead most artists and producers seem to have taken an attitude of, "Shit, do we have to play this rock shit?  Okay, let's get it over with.  What're the kids listening to?  Beatles?  Rolling Stones?  'Tequila'?"  And then they just dash off whatever Stones title is selling best at that particular moment.  Instead of taking the time to realize that artists like Santana, Chicago, the Allman Brothers, King Crimson, and yes the Grateful Dead were thinking seriously about how to bring elements of a jazz sensibility into a rock context, and meeting them halfway.  (To this day, Santana's early '70s records get treated as "rock," and not jazz.  Why is that?)

Then again, sometimes the least serious intentions can still result in great music.  Oscar Peterson, in a quartet also featuring Ray Brown and Milt Jackson, provides a rendition of the Stones' "Satisfaction" that clearly doesn't take the tune at all seriously, but it's a complete gas.  Everybody solos at breakneck speed and within about thirty seconds you forget what tune you're listening to and just dig the improv.  Which is what tended to happen to standards anyway.  So.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender Is The Night (1934)

Where do you go after Gatsby?  I went where Fitzgerald went, and frankly part of me wishes I hadn't;  Tender is the Night is such a different book, so much sadder.  More than anything it made me want to rush back and read his earlier, lighter things.  Flappers and Philosophers is next.

Other than that, I can't figure out how I feel about it.  Conventionally, probably.  I mean, I expect most everybody feels that the opening chapters, when we see the Gausse's crowd through Rosemary's eyes, gradually leading up to her/our encounters with Dick and Nicole Diver, are the most memorable. And it's no coincidence that those are the most Gatsby-like chapters, full of rich and beautiful people doing things that only rich and beautiful people can.

Once we start to see life from Dick and Nicole's perspective, they lose a lot of their appeal.  Which is, of course, part of Fitzgerald's brilliance in this book:  he's destroying their glamor for us, by showing us the insecurities and instabilities that lie behind it.

But that's not quite right, because if he had effectively destroyed their glamor for me, wouldn't I remember the opening scenes a little less fondly?  And yet a passage like this one floors me still (p. 21 of the Scribner paperback):

Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, supper-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine.  The Divers' day was spaced like the day of the older civilizations to yield the utmost from the materials at hand, and to give all the transitions their full value...

I mean, no matter how much skepticism Fitzgerald turns toward this kind of luxurious living, it's still what he's best at describing.  Maybe he's good at it because he's skeptical of it, but as Greil Marcus once wrote about somebody else in a different context, I think Fitzgerald's attitude toward it is a loud yes and a quiet no, rather than the other way around...

In that passage I love, by the way, how he translates all of the Divers' pleasure-taking into foodie terms.  They consume their days with the discernment and deliberation of a gourmet.

There's another metaphor he uses for it, at least twice, that of curating.  On p. 258, describing the Divers moving back to the Riviera and the obscene number of possessions they take with them, he notes that "Nicole was capable of being curator of it all."  And then he proceeds to list them all.

You see this term popping up these days, too.  I don't know if Fitzgerald invented this usage, but it's a brilliant one in his book, because it perfectly captures the self-absorption of the hedonist who in his/her mind gives his/her material indulgences the dignity of scholarly or aesthetic pursuits.  That is, there are certain objects, and certain collections of objects, and certain settings for those collections, that require and deserve the kind of discernment and care that justify the term "curator" - but your luggage ain't it.  Your iTunes playlist ain't it.  Your spice rack ain't it. 

My blog ain't it.

Dillard & Clark: "Bowed My Head And Cried Holy" (1969)

About ten or twelve years ago I developed a real obsession with Byrds spin-off bands.  It started back in high school, really, with CSN(Y), when like most fans I realized that the quartet's paucity of releases could, and indeed really demanded to, be augmented by solo and spinoff records.  When I realized that CSN(Y) was half Buffalo Springfield anyway, my eyebrows shot up, and when I realized that they also had Byrds DNA, well, my little mind was blown.  It wasn't until much later, though, that I seriously began collecting.

When I did, I started with the Byrds, and like anybody with ears, I fell in love with them for their own sake.  But, like most collectors of this scene do, I soon realized that some of the most interesting work to fall off the whole Byrds/CSNY/Buffalo Springfield family tree came from some of the more obscure acts.  Which brings us to Dillard & Clark.  That's original Byrd Gene Clark, teaming up with Doug Dillard (whose namesake bluegrass act is another minor but rewarding limb on the tree) for two albums of country-rock-pop-soul-Cosmic American Music in 1968 and 1969.

Okay, I've just invoked the spirit of Gram Parsons, and any D&C fan will inevitably claim that they were doing what he did, but with less fanfare and notoriety.  It's not quite true.  Yes, they were wedding country and rock, broadly speaking, just like he was, and they were doing it in 1968 just like he was.  But the important distinction to be made is that they were wedding different kinds of country and rock.  The country that Gram was arguing for was honky-tonk, whose wry drunken outlook matched perfectly with the stoned hippie pop-rock that the McGuinn-led Byrds were doing - so perfectly that it looks obvious in retrospect.

The country that Doug Dillard is bringing is bluegrass:  something a little more back-country, and a little less easy to mingle, than honky-tonk.  And Gene Clark was never much of a rocker - he was a sensitive balladeer.  He took to rock, but through folk:  his talent, probably more than anybody's at the time, was perfectly matched to "folk-rock," however you define it.

What I'm saying is that the things D&C were doing, the ingredients they were playing with, were probably a tougher sell in 1968 than what Gram was doing, and even now what they came up with doesn't sound obvious in any way.  And I say that as a big Gram fan - I don't mean to disparage the Burritos one bit.  But what D&C did was something special, too.

Their first record, 1968's The Fantastic Expedition Of Dillard & Clark, is usually pointed to as the most successful.  Perhaps not coincidentally, it's the one where Gene Clark's influence is most audible.  It's mostly a collection of soft, moody, haunting folk-rock tunes with some unexpected but totally appropriate bluegrass touches.  It really makes for something new, but something as natural and beautiful as the sun burning through the mist in the woods on an autumn morning.

Famously, Gram Parsons kind of lost interest in the Burritos for their second record, leaving second banana Chris Hillman to pick up the slack.  Oddly, the same thing happened to D&C:  the second record (1969's Through The Morning, Through The Night) is much more of a straight bluegrass affair, which suggests that Dillard was the main mover.  But for my money it's just as good.  And if Gene's style was getting submerged in Dillard's, he's just as big a presence in the songwriting.

In fact the most traditional-sounding original on the record, the gospel-bluegrass "I Bowed My Head And Cried Holy," is a Gene Clark original.  You'd never know it.  It's a Jesus-praisin' fast-pickin' raveup that sounds like it roared right out of the Ozarks, and Clark sings it without a lick of his usual self-consciousness. 

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be on youtube in any other version than this cover by an Italian bluegrass band.  But it's well worth seeking out the record.

Ukiyoe at the Portland Art Museum

Huge exhibit of Japanese woodblock prints going on now at the Portland Art Museum.  It's called "The Artist's Touch, the Craftsman's Hand."  They have a magnificent collection - not quite MFA-level, perhaps, but pretty damn good - and they've got a very large selection on display right now.  More than enough to intoxicate you, if you're at all prone to near-drunken ecstasy when looking at these things.  I am.

What's really nice about this show - I mean, beyond the amazing numbers of rare (even unique) and magnificent prints - is how it's arranged.  Rather than a chronological approach, they've laid it out thematically - a few rooms of kabuki-related prints, a few rooms of beauty prints.  And so rich is the collection that this gives them the chance to feature some really unusual stuff.  There's a whole room of prints depicting the 1923 Kantō Earthquake, for example. 

In short, it's extremely educational, as well as being just damn beautiful.  We've only been once, and for not nearly long enough;  we're going to swing an overnight trip sometime soon.  It's a show worth immersing yourself in.