SAYS IT ALL

SINATRA: ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL

Talk about Jersey boys. Sinatra's voice (he was known as "The Voice" in his first incarnation as the greatest popular vocalist of the 1940s, taking the title from Bing Crosby, which led to confusion for me as a boy, cause Crosby was an Irish-American hero, representing the heights for our community back then, but Sinatra was a home boy, growing up in nearby Hoboken) was the dominant one, and still is, on the soundtrack of my life.

Friends and children and anyone within the sound of my voice has heard me go on endlessly about his amazing artistry. I've always been impressed with humans who can extend the natural talents of our species beyond what anyone previously thought was possible. The great artists and scientists and athletes and thinkers and leaders etc. Sinatra was one of those.

Crosby changed popular signing forever because he happened to come along when the microphone was invented so a singer didn't have to shout a la Sophie Tucker and Ethel Merman and others who broke into the entertainment business when being heard in the last row wasn't enhanced by electricity. Bing made singing intimate and personal, so the females swooned to the intimacy of his tone and the ease of his seemingly effortless control of the melody, influenced by the great African-American musical innovators.

Sinatra was influenced by Bing on every level, from treating his voice like a jazz musician's ax (the slang of his time and mine for a musical instrument) to the casual but perfectly groomed clothes styles of the era. But Sinatra was competitive, disciplined and tenacious in his persistent efforts to improve his technique until he had surpassed Bing, and he did.

The four-hour documentary HBO aired Sunday night and tonight (technically last night now)—SINATRA: All Or Nothing At All—in recognition that Frank would be 100 this year if he were still alive, explains some of the above to some extent, but more importantly it perfectly conveys the reality of Sinatra's importance and iconic stature in "American" (really the world's) culture.

It's directed by Alex Gibney, the guy that also did the recent HBO documentary about Scientology—GOING CLEAR—I commented on a few posts back. The guy can make a documentary film. The ingenious device for SINATRA was to use footage from Frank's 1971 retirement concert which he thought was his last (two years later he returned) so handpicked eleven songs to summarize a career that began in the 1930s. The order of the songs, at least as edited for the film, reflect the chapters in Sinatra's life by expressing the emotions connected to seminal events.

And intertwined with the songs and within them (the vocalizing hushed in the background or faded away) are snippets from various artists and family and friends about those seminal moments in his life, or from brilliantly edited pieces of various interviews Sinatra did for radio or TV or privately for his daughter Tina and others to create a beautifully, almost melodically paced narrative that recreates the impact of Sinatra's creativity and personality on his times (and mine, since his first hit came out the year I was born, 1942, and being a local Jersey boy who everyone was proud of, the sound of his voice was constantly on our radio and Victrola).

If you can get access to the film on demand and watch it from beginning to end (including the end credits please) you'll not only learn a lot about one of music history's most important artists but also about our country's and the world's history during the 20th Century. Informative, entertaining and engaging, is how I'd sum up SINATRA: All Or Nothing At All. Well worth seeing.

JERSEY BOYS

I meant to see JERSEY BOYS on Broadway before it even opened. I've dug Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons from the minute I first heard them. Not only because they're from my part of Jersey so seemed like home boys in my mind and heart, but because they were making their own music before The Beach Boys or The Beatles had their breakthroughs, and they were neighborhood guys. And like those two other groups who all hit the charts around the same time, The Four Seasons were not some corporate creation.

But I missed the chance to get a ticket to the Broadway musical before it became a smash hit and tickets became hard to get. Then I heard the movie was coming out and planned to catch it in the theater, but whatever got in the way I never did. Now it's on cable so I finally watched it, and though it misses some beats—and frankly I think I could have written a better book, as they say, for this show—

still, it's directed by Clint Eastwood, so it's pretty well cast and any miscues in the plot soon pass because the rhythm of Eastwood's direction keeps the story moving, even when it's playing fast and loose with what are, or may really be, the facts. Hey, it worked for me, and I have to say it was worth it just for the ending credits.

BERKSHIRE WEEKEND

My grandson playing drums with the band Highland in the lodge halfway up the ski slope at Butternut outside Great Barrington the day before Easter. Life is good.

A QUOTE FOR POETRY MONTH

"Poetry is shit for your fan."  —Morgan Gibson (I wrote this in a journal in the early 1970s but didn't note what book or magazine it came from)

3 HEARTS (3 COEURS)

Some friends recommended this French film and I'm happy they did. Some really fine acting, directing, editing and soundtrack. As always it's a delight to see the way European movies allow lead actors to look human rather than a fantasy of human perfection. And have grown up stories and actors. Imagine a movie about love and romance starring three middle-aged Hollywood stars (the man might be in his forties or fifties but his leading lady certainly wouldn't be).

Seventy-year-old Catherine Deneuve has a role as the sixty-year-old mother of two daughters close to forty, and she looks in some shots as perfectly beautiful as she did when she was twenty, but she also looks like she's got a pot belly and other signs of normal senior evolution.

And the actresses playing her daughters (Chiara Mastrioinni, Marcello's and Jane Birkin's daughter, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Serge's and Catherine Deneuve's daughter) are both charming, yet each uniquely humanly imperfect. Both a delight to watch. The lead actor (Benoit Poelvoorde) plays a forty-seven-year-old man who is the romantic lead, and yet he more than all of them looks like such a normal middle-aged man he'd never make it to a leading role in most "American" films, though his screen charisma is somehow even more powerful as a result.

I won't give away any of the plot, some of which could only work in a French movie, but work it does. The ending raises questions that I'm sure we'll discuss when I see the friends who recommended it. But in the meantime, the friend I saw it with and I both left the theater feeling elated from having had a very satisfying movie experience. You might too.

A POEM BY ALFRED STARR HAMILTON

Since they officially made April poetry month, and even though poetry keeps me going and has every day of my life, in honor of the officials getting official about poetry, I intend to post poems and quotes and other stuff about poetry as often as I can in April, and I thought to start it off I'd post this poem by the eccentric and reclusive Alfred Starr Hamilton who lived in Montclair, New Jersey, in the last century (he was born in 1914 and I haven't looked up when he passed if the information has even made it to the web). Poet Geoff Hewitt helped get a book of Hamilton's poems published in 1970 by Jargon, one of the best small presses of the 20th century, from which I extract this poem:


A CRUST OF BREAD

why, I often wondered
why I was a poet,
first of all

most of all, I wanted
to have been a bird
if I could have been a bird

but I wanted the starlings
to have been fed,
first of all

—Alfred Starr Hamilton