Since reading Susie Boyt’s memoir, I’ve been thinking a lot about Judy Garland and Michael Jackson–as have others–and I found this clip on YouTube. It’s Michael Jackson doing Fred Astaire’s moves while singing “Get Happy,” one of Judy Garland’s signature songs, and it’s totally riveting. The melody is so decidedly hers, but the voice is unmistakably his.
But then those Fred Astaire moves weren’t entirely Fred Astaire’s. They come from Bill Robinson and John William Sublett. And Ruth Etting was the first one to sing the Arlen/Koehler number in 1930, and Arlen and Koehler clearly turned to black gospel music to begin with.
And then, here comes Michael, probably in the 1970s, “heading across the river to wash your sins away in the tide.”
Forty years ago a massively popular performer died from a drug overdose. Judy Garland was 47 at the time. Her fan base was enormous. Some 20,000 people lined up to view her body at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on Madison Avenue.
Susie Boyt, who was born a few months before Garland’s death, has recently written a book about her passion for the star, and my short write-up of My Judy Garland Life is at Newsday. During my reading I thought often of Wayne Koestenbaum’s writing and the way in which one’s passionate fandom doesn’t have to be divorced from criticism but can actually fuel it. (In her bibliography she cites Koestenbaum’s Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon under “Hero worship.”) Boyt’s book, though, is not positioned as criticism. Its subtitle is clear: a memoir. Still, the author is the daughter of Lucien Freud and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, and there’s a strong sense of interrogation, of Boyt turning her adoration over and over as if it were an object that you might see from all angles.
I’ve also been reading Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums that Changed Their Lives, an anthology edited by my friend PeterTerzian. So far I’ve read Stacey D’Erasmo on Kate Bush and Clifford Chase on the B-52s and I’m loving how the memoir genre is refracted through the authors’ meditations on sound, how the essays turn inward toward the writer and at the same time outward to the music itself. From “Beautiful Noise” by Stacey D’Erasmo:
We quilled our hair into stiff spikes and spent our paychecks on leather jackets. We felt like survivors. We knew about the trains, which car to ride in and how; on dark streets, you carried your keys poking between your fingers, weaponlike. We stayed out late in places where punky strippers danced on the bar.
So I thought Kate Bush’s sixth record was naïve. She made so many strange noises: beeping, hooting, ringing, sighing, screeching, impersonating, invoking, murmuring like someone rolling over in bed.
On another note, last week at the book launch for Heavy Rotation, Martha Southgate talked about her girlhood love of the Jackson 5 and passed around her own LPs, artifacts that then took on an eerie significance a few days later with the news of Michael Jackson’s death.
My grandmother was born in 1905 and I don’t remember her having much interest in the popular culture of my childhood. I just don’t think she paid that much attention to a lot of what was on television and the radio in the 70s and 80s. But she always loved to watch Michael Jackson move.
The detective series starring John Cassavetes as a jazz pianist turned private eye lasted one season (1959-60). Jay Maeder in the Daily News writes that Johnny Staccato “was regarded as just too downbeat and strange – too hip for the room, as they say.” But there are twentysome episodes circulating. A commenter on IMDB.com provides sampling:
MURDER FOR CREDIT with Charles McGraw as an egocentric jazz musician; THE NATURE OF THE NIGHT with Dean Stockwell as a psychotic slasher; EVIL with Alexander Scourby as a corrupt religious leader; FLY BABY FLY with Gena Rowlands as the target of a bomb planted on an airplane that Staccato’s also on; TEMPTED with Elizabeth Montgomery as an old flame of Johnny’s; DOUBLE FEATURE with Cassavetes in a dual role; THE LIST OF DEATH with the great Paul Stewart, SOLOMON with Elisha Cook Jr as a megalomaniac attorney and Cloris Leachman as a mysterious vixen; THE MASK OF JASON with a pre- Dick Van Dyke Mary Tyler Moore; A NICE LITTLE TOWN, a Twilight-Zonish episode and THE WILD REED with Harry Guardino as a heroin addicted jazz musician.
Here’s an essay in Senses of Cinema about “The Shop of the Four Winds” episode. And there’s an SCTV parody: Vic Arpeggio.
Last week it was 1965 and John Cassavetes was driving a French journalist through the Hollywood Hills to his home, snapping his fingers along to the Beach Boys, and joking about making a musical of “Crime and Punishment.”
In the clip below nearly twenty years have passed, but this appears to be the same house from before and there’s still a French camera crew on hand. Cassavetes is directing a scene from his penultimate film, Love Streams, which, with its dreamy ballet sequence and Diahnne Abbott singing “Kinky Reggae,” maybe is a musical of sorts. After calling it a day, Cassavetes (“Cassavets” in the French pronunciation) and Gena Rowlands linger at the doorway for a few moments before going inside. The voiceover says it’s 3 am.
There’s also an interview with Peter Falk at the end.
The most compelling blogs seem to manage a perfect balance of immediacy, regularity, and self-exposure. New York Hack and Thirty-Year-Old Secretary, two that I followed closely and are both now on indefinite hiatus, were also highly specialized, which I found appealing. These offered windows onto particular professions, a cab driver and a secretary. The latter was a fictionalized account, but a faithful and emotionally resonant rendering nonetheless. Also, I know both the writers, so I admit to personal attachment. But I don’t know the gentleman who chronicled his cocaine usage on a blog and quite handily fed my own voyeuristic and prurient appetites. I was an avid reader of his exploits until that all came to an abrupt halt when he “went off the air” one day in 2006.
The blogs I mention were also excellent at sustaining the diaristic voice. They were funny, rueful, idiosyncratic, and intimate. My instinct, though, is to rein in the confessional tendency. Of course, there’s some degree of self-protection there, but I think it’s also about trying to conserve that kind of energy for my fiction. It’s possible, though, that’s the wrong impulse. Maybe that voice isn’t a finite resource and maybe more simply is more. (For a discussion of literary style and the internet, see Caleb Crain’s incisive take on the subject. )
But also, I like getting paid for writing. So there’s that. The other night at IFC I saw Isabella Rossellini introduce her new Green Porno Series along with her father’s film, The Flowers of St. Francis (which weirdly made me think of the Teletubbies, but that’s another post). She talked about distributing content online and the dilemma of how to get any money from the whole thing and never has the phrase “business model” been sexier.
But I’m straying here.
Recently I started to wonder if there was a way I could extract some organizing principle from my aimless YouTube surfing and inflict a small bit of order or at least regularity on Kill Fee. Imposing constraints—writing only about your work or only about your drug habit—does promise to yield interesting results, such as behind-the-scenes coverage of the taxi line at JFK and the pros and cons of carrying your coke in a vial vs. in a baggie. But there’s a recession; I can’t afford a ravenous drug habit right now. And writing about my line of work seems like a deadly path as it involves teaching writing, editing writing, or just simply writing. That said, much of what ends up on Kill Fee has been what I think of as the effluvia of my writing, research, and random preoccupations.
I’m intrigued by my friend John’s approach to his blog, the mildly named Help! My Pussy Is Literally on Fire. John has designated several “beats” for himself and they include: Carol Channing, news stories about people in the nude, Patti LuPone, Peaches Geldof, and wearing a wig. (I like to imagine unsuspecting porn seekers innocently plugging some x-rated terms into search engines and ending up with the totally deranged clip of Joe Franklin interviewing “Carol Channing” and her son “Carl.”)
All this is an extremely long way of saying that recently I detected a beat of sorts in my more desultory web browsing: random clips of John Cassavetes. And so without further digression, I present “Fridays with John.”
In today’s installment John endures an interview with a French journalist while driving through the Hollywood Hills and contemplates a musical version of “Crime and Punishment.” I hope you enjoy.
She just finished work on a picture called “Edge of the City”: “It’s so off-beat and real… and not like most pictures.” John Cassavetes plays bongos while Sidney Poitier grooves.
Since reading Deborah Shapiro’s review of Eve’s Hollywood at The Second Pass I’ve been combing the internet for a copy of the “out-of-print 1974 commingling of fiction and memoir that chronicles the adventures of a young woman growing up and living in Los Angeles.” Shapiro’s account of Eve Babitz’s first book, which apparently includes an 8-page dedication, makes for its own tantalizing read and left me imagining the Hollywood novel as told by Bambi Lake.
Halfway through the review, when I was already sucked in by the promise of gossip and decadence, Shapiro cites one of Eve’s visits to The Luau (a “ratty Tahitian place in Beverly Hills with blue lagoons and a gardenia in the drinks”) and things get even more interesting:
It’s worth noting that The Luau and its gardenias – its seedy decadence – coincidentally make an appearance in “The White Album,” Joan Didion’s masterful essay on the excess and incomprehensibility of the late ’60s, particularly in L.A. It’s instructive to read Babitz in relation to Didion because they wrote of the same time and place (recall the dedication, above), yet the contrast between them is stark. Where Didion is clipped and edgy, on the verge of collapse, Babitz is looser, discursive, funny. For Didion, for a time, life became illegible and narratives stopped making sense. Babitz, you suspect, never much relied on narrative sense in the first place.
I particularly appreciated Babitz’s thoughts on getting the story–or whatever it is–to the page:
In her second book, Slow Days, Fast Company, she wrote: “I can’t get a thread to go through to the end and make a straightforward novel. I can’t keep everything in my lap or stop rising flurries of sudden blind meaning. But perhaps if the details are all put together, a certain pulse and sense of place will emerge.”
You can find used and new copies of Slow Days, Fast Company (subtitled The World, the Flesh, and L.A.) here.
