by Peter Cates

Warren Harding

During this political season, I was re-reading the rambunctious Baltimore Sun correspondent H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) on one of our great former occupants of the White House ­– the, for me, ever-fascinating Warren Gamaliel Harding (1865-1923) whose administration was beset by challenges of a unique nature, in particular the Teapot Dome scandal. Books such as the late Francis Russell’s biography, The Shadow of Blooming Grove, abound in pro and con details, while historian Paul Johnson’s Modern Times makes a convincing case for Harding as an underrated president.

Anyways, Mencken comments that Warren G. “takes first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English I have ever encountered.”

The essayist continues developing his main idea in the next paragraph:

“More scientifically, what is the matter with it? Why does it seem so flabby, so banal, so confused and childish, so stupidly at war with sense? ….That answer is very simple. When Dr. Harding prepares a speech, he does not think of it in terms of an educated reader locked up in jail, but in terms of a great horde of stoneheads gathered around a stand. More, it is a stump speech addressed to the sort of audience that the speaker has been used to all of his life, to wit, an audience of small-town yokels, of low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly unable to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimeters.”

This article can be read in its entirety by googling H.L. Mencken on Warren G. Harding and scrolling down to H.L. Mencken on Balder and Dash.

Mencken did interview Harding and his wife, Florence (1860-1924), who was known as the Duchess; he wrote that Harding exuded charismatic charm and that the Duchess was a very handsome woman.

A worthwhile quote of wisdom from Harding’s inaugural speech – “Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much from the government and at the same time do too little for it.”

A highly recommended viewing experience is the five seasons of HBO’s series The Wire which ran from 2002 to 2008. It takes place in H.L. Mencken’s home town of Baltimore, Maryland, and deals with the tribulations and small victories in the drug war, the city’s shipyard docks, City Hall, the schools and the Baltimore Sun newspaper’s working conditions.

Bill Haley and the Comets

Fractured and Pat-a-Cake
Essex, 327, ten-inch 78, recorded in 1952.

These two early examples of rock music were recorded two years before Bill Haley (1925-1981) hit success with the 1954 Rock Around the Clock and are similarly rocking good examples of rock and roll during the Eisenhower years. Later after Haley moved to Decca records, he unsuccessfully sued Essex for unpaid royalties.

 

 

by Peter Cates

Alfred Kazin

A few years ago, I wrote about the biography of Alfred Kazin (1915-1998), one of the finest writers on literature and any other subject he turned his attention to.

In 1988, Knopf published his huge coffee table volume, A Writer’s America, which is a celebration of his lifelong fascination, come horrible Hell or glorious high water, with the American landscape. Chapter 5, entitled Power Centers, devotes several pages to Washington, D.C.; the following two paragraphs might be of interest to a few readers:

“Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980), Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, spanned the Washington scene from T.R. to Ronald Reagan. Late in life, she described Washington as ‘a small, cozy town, global in scope. It suits me.’ Such superior raillery was unknown to New York, Boston, Chicago. In Los Angeles, it would not have been understood at all. Mrs. Longworth understood (as did Henry Adams [grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams – two former presidents, brilliant historian and notorious misanthrope and gossip, 1838-1918]) that the romance of Washington was the show it put on. In a way totally unlike the development of other American power centers, Washington LOOKED consistent, all of a piece along its white Roman fronts. It was what the founders had hoped for, perhaps the only thing that the wildly heterogeneous America of the late 20th century could look up to – a CENTER.

“Behind the marble columns and the extraordinary museums that late Wash­ington provided on a scale inconceivable even during the New Deal (the rumor then was that the capital had returned from Wall Street to Washington), the business of Washington was compromise, the deal. Everyone in the halls of Congress was involved with everyone else in Washington – lawyers, columnists, bureaucrats. There was not much fine literature about Washington, but there was certainly a lot of information, much in the form of confidential ‘leaks’ from governmental big shots to newspapermen. Washington was the inside story.”

One immediately notices Kazin’s hoarding of enough topics of interest to fill a library – the Roosevelts, dead American presidents after Teddy up to and including Reagan, D.C. as both small town and global center, the raillery of other urbane urban power centers, the Adams family, Greek and Roman architectural styles in the nation’s capital, etc. A number of other American writers have been hoarders, catalogers, collectors of U.S. related items – the irreverent H. L. Mencken of our buffooneries, F. Scott Fitzgerald of lifestyles of the rich, Ernest Hemingway of fishing, hunting, bullfights, wars and other athletic contests.

William Faulkner mined his little piece of Mississippi dirt for every ounce of golden ore in the novels Sanctuary, Light in August, As I Lay Dying and Sound and the Fury. Stephen King used tricks from classic horror story writers to cast our Pine Tree state of Maine in it, Salem’s Lot and Bag of Bones.

P.S. Alice Roosevelt was Teddy’s oldest child, from his first wife who died at 23 very shortly after Alice was born, and, like her father, had a strong mind of her own. When Teddy and her stepmother wanted to send her away to a private girl’s boarding school in New York City, Alice threatened them with outrageous behavior and humiliation; they let her go to a day school.

When her father, as president, was receiving a visitor in the Oval Office, Alice intruded three times until he threatened to throw her out the window. She backed down. He then informed his guest that he couldn’t run his daughter and the nation, too.

by Peter Cates

Road Kill: A Love Story

starring Erika Hoveland, Brandon Culp, Cain Perry etc.; available for free viewing on Amazon Prime; directed by Raphael Maria Buechel; 2014.

The movie Road Kill: A Love Story, was completed by 2014 but took until this year to achieve world wide distribution.

It stars Brandon Culp as the mute Mitch who works in a small town car wash; Erika Hoveland as Taryn who moves into the village to open a taxidermy shop, and has a hunger for true love along with a huge thirst for blood; and Cain Perry as Mitch’s brother, Joe, who’s also the local sheriff, an alcoholic drinking too often on the job parked by the side of the road in a squad car, talks often to Madge the dispatcher (their dialog providing some of the funnier moments in the film) and has a girlfriend who’s a psychiatrist.

Strikingly interesting opening scenes include a man stuck at night on the side of the road with his broken down car, a truck pulling up with a woman driving it and ambiguity as to whether or not help has arrived. Then daylight ensues with Mitch arriving at the car wash and having a practical joke played on him by his co-workers. The fast food joint across the street has three women employees who seem to be goofing off, one of them developing a growing attraction to Mitch while her colleagues urge her to do something about it. Neither establishment is doing much business – just another lazy day in a small town on a hot summer day.

Taryn drives up to the car wash in a pickup truck and recruits Mitch for some heavy lifting back at her address. Needless to say, the film keeps getting more interesting; at this point, I refuse to provide any more spoilers, commend everyone who was involved in the film down to the tiniest detail, and, noting a certain resemblance to the American gothic style of the Coen brothers, applaud its otherwise superlative individuality.

A 5 star viewing experience!

Two more films:

Frozen Ground

starring Nicholas Cage, John Cusack and Vanessa Hudgens; 2013 and available on Netflix.

Frozen Ground is based on the true story of Alaska serial killer Robert Hansen and the joint collaboration of an investigator and one woman who escaped being murdered by him while in captivity. It was a well-done suspense film; two qualities in particular stood out: driving around in a winter blizzard after nightfall, which make winters in Maine seem like a summer picnic, and the woman’s close encounter with a mild-mannered bull moose on a city street.

Seven Deaths of Maria Callas

starring Marina Abramovic and Willem Dafoe; available online for free viewing until October 7.

The Seven Deaths of Maria Callas was seen live earlier this month at the Bavarian State Opera House, in Munich, Germany, and by myself and others around the world on-line after several months of delays, mainly due to the coronavirus pandemic. It was the fruit of a 60-year fascination with operatic soprano Maria Callas (1923-1977) that began when performance artist/actress/director Marina Abramovic first heard the singer on her grandmother’s kitchen radio at her farm in Yugoslavia.

She read, studied, listened to and absorbed every last detail on the singer’s art and life. She identified her own obsessions with those of her idol in which life and art become one and the same and at risk to one’s health and life (the wikipedia pieces on both women are good places to start for more about them.).

The play features Abramovic portraying Callas moving around the stage and on her deathbed, and Willem Dafoe as a stalking lover/adversary. Callas was quite famous for her brilliant singing/acting of death scenes from operas by Bellini, Bizet, Donizetti, Puccini and Verdi and a different soprano and actress performs each one. Abramovic’s voice is heard commenting on life, love, art, death etc. on tape while neither she nor Dafoe are ever seen speaking.

One of the arias, Un Bel Di (One Fine Day) is from Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, which takes place in early 1900’s Nagasaki, Japan. In light of what happened there and at Hiroshima in early August 1945, figures in hazmat suits are moving around while that aria is being sung.

At the conclusion of Seven Deaths, Callas’s own recording of the Bellini aria is heard.

Marko Nikodijevic composed incidental music for the production while Yoel Gamzou conducted the orchestra.

by Peter Cates

Homeland series on the Hulu channel

Originally on Showtime, Homeland ran for eight seasons, was one of the two or three most successful programs in its history and was still attracting new viewers when it came to an end. It starred Claire Danes as C.I.A. agent Carrie Matheson, who is also bipolar while being very good at her work. In addition, Danes was one of the producers.

I have been watching it regularly for the last two weeks, am now on season six, episode 61, and have ignored all other programs. Due to a combination of storyline, plausibility, quality of all production details, relevance to current events etc., it is an addictive viewing experience.

The opening episode begins with the rescue of a Marine sniper, Nicolas Brody, who has been held in captivity for eight years by Al-Qaeda and long thought dead. Carrie comes to believe that the sniper has been programmed by his captors into a terrorist but is unable at first to convince anybody else. The first three seasons revolve around this premise and has cunningly developed plot twists, including a romantic relationship between her and Brody, superbly portrayed by Damian Lewis, who brings out the complexity of his character and his convincing return to being a decent man in the end.

Seasons four and five deal with the invasion of the American embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan; a traitorous C.I.A. station chief in Berlin; a terrorist plot with Sarin nerve gas on a railway line; and the usual political landmines in D.C. Actress Danes’s depiction of Carrie’s bi-polar episodes when she’s off her meds is some of the most convincingly harrowing virtuosity seen in any acting performance. As Carrie warns a later lover at the start of their relationship, “I can get very ugly and violent !”

Other actors warrant attention:

Mandy Pantinkin as Carrie’s agency trainer and mentor, Saul Berenson.

Tracy Letts as the insufferably arrogant Senator Lockhart who leads an investigation into secret agency activities, only to be appointed C.I.A. director himself and who manages to become quite likable before he’s dismissed from his position (Letts is an accomplished playwright and wrote August: Osage County, which became a 2013 film starring Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts.).

F. Murray Abraham as Dar Adal, Saul’s longtime agency colleague and expert in black ops (Abraham won an Oscar for his role as Salieri in the 1985 film Amadeus.).

Miranda Otto as Allison Carr, agency chief of the Berlin station, another protegé of Saul and his lover, and a double agent for the Russians, whose basically evil character has its own complicated dynamic and sympathetic context.

Turkish-born Numan Acar as the Afghan terrorist Haqqani. During season four, Haqqani kidnaps Saul for ransom and the conversation between them conveys a powerful other side of the story in the conflict between Western values and those of Islam, although Haqqani is quite despicable.

Claire Danes was supposedly paid $500,000 for every episode, and the production for each one often ran to $6 million.

Again, the series is very, very highly recommended.

 

 

by Peter Cates

I just began reading a 1980 novel, The Transit of Venus, by the Australian-born Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) and was struck by the descriptive power of one paragraph evoking the atmosphere of the quiet South England countryside just before a violent lightning storm erupts; anyone like myself with finely tuned nerves to these mid-summer meteorological disturbances might appreciate her way with words here:

“That noon a man was walking slowly into a landscape under a branch of lightning. A frame of almost human expectancy defined this scene, which he entered from the left-hand corner. Every nerve – for even barns and wheelbarrows and things without tissue developed nerve in those moments – waited, fatalistic. Only he, kinetic, advanced against circumstances to a single destination.”

For what it’s worth, I got over my 20 years of fear of thunderstorms when I moved to Houston for 16 years.

The Best of Tommy Dorsey

MCA2-4074, 2 LPs, 1975 reissue comprised of early 1930s and 1950s Decca recordings.

The very brilliant arranger, bandleader and trombonist Tommy Dorsey (1905-1956) led one of the most successful orchestras during the Big Band Era from the early ‘30s to circa 1946, when he had to let his players go because of dwindling engagements. However, around 1947, an RCA Victor 78 set of his records scored on the Billboard top ten, where he had already charted 286 times during the previous decade and provided enough money for him to start another band.

The above set covers his years of recording for Decca before he moved to RCA Victor in 1935 and after he returned in 1950, and contains 20 sides, including the well-known Lullaby of Broadway, Ain’t She Sweet, Cheek to Cheek, I’m Gettin’ Sentimental Over You, the classical favorite Ritual Fire Dance from Manuel De Falla’s Love the Magician and the spiritual Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.

The band’s most famous singers and instrumentalists – Frank Sinatra, Jo Stafford, Connie Haines, Buddy Rich, Bunny Berrigan, Glenn Miller – before 1937, older brother Jimmy Dorsey the clarinettist before their rift in 1934 and after their 1947 reconciliation, Gene Krupa, Nelson Riddle, Doc Severinsen etc.

For me, the centerpiece was Tommy’s trombone playing which, for phrasing and breathing, was admired and followed by Sinatra in how to sing beautifully.

Dorsey had a notorious temper and alienated many.

He gave Glenn Miller a very generous cash loan to start his own band in 1937, considering the loan an investment. When Miller’s band achieved success, Miller resisted sharing any profits with Dorsey.

During the mid-’30s, Tommy Dorsey built his own state of the art record playing system for home listening.

In 1956, the Dorsey Brothers hosted Elvis Presley on their TV show.