MARIAN MACPARTLAND R.I.P.

[Mrian MacPartland and I think Mary Lou Williams and Thelonious Monk in a cut out from the famous "A Great Day in Harlem" group shot of many of the living legends of jazz in 1958]

I know some important cultural figures have passed lately, like the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney and the great stage and screen actor Julie Harris (She was sometimes too precious for me, but I saw her do THE BELLE OF AMHERST on the Broadway stage and despite that play's misunderstanding of Emily Dickinson and its interpretation of her personality and character, Harris was still mesmerizing to watch, holding the stage alone and amazing)...

...but the passing of the two of them is getting a lot of attention in the media and among my Facebook friends and such, but I haven't seen anything marking the passing last week of Marian MacPartland who was one of my alltime favorite cultural figures.

The English born piano player was a giant of jazz, and as someone who played jazz piano as a young man and has some experience with the technical challenges I can honestly say she was one of the most talented pianists ever. But even more meaningful to me than her playing was her public radio show where she did duets with brilliant musicians and shared insights into their talent and matched them with her own.

Her show with Ray Charles was one of the most revealing ones I ever heard, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt why Charles was called "The Genius" as he talked about and displayed his vast knowledge of piano technique way more varied than his usual stuff. I looked forward to hearing her show every week for many many years and they were all done when she was already a very old woman!

She lived a long full life and gave the world so much more than most of us will ever be able to, I hope we never forget her legacy and her music and that those shows live on not just in musical history but for anyone who appreciates musical genius to learn from.

[And here's a nice little summary of her career:]


[...and of her talent:}

ANA KARENINA

Missed this last year when it came out. Had a lot of friends, including movie actors you'd know, who thought it should have won a ton of Oscars. I finally caught it on cable tonight and wish I could have seen it on the big screen. It might have been literally too theatrical for some (so much so I thought it must have been made by Baz Lurhman, but it was directed by Joe Wright who did ATONEMENT, another great film I thought, and adapted by Tom Stoppard) but it was brilliantly so.

And it starred Keira Knightley, enough to make me want to see it, and she did not disappoint, as always. A brilliant performance, especially given the challenging balancing act of realism in the context of theatricality. The rest of the cast was terrific too, except, for my taste, Aaron Taylor-Johnson. I liked him in SAVAGES, but it wasn't as demanding a role.

As Vronksy in ANA KARENINA he just wasn't able to match the same power and balancing act as Knightley and Jude Law and others in the cast. And though probably most women would disagree with me, I didn't buy him as someone Knightley's Ana could fall so helplessly and hopelessly in love with. Their love making scenes were subtle though theatrical and Knightley made her part work in ways few movie sex scenes ever capture, but she was doing all the work and Taylor-Johnson seemed out of his comfort zone.

But everything else about the film was refreshingly original—except the story of course—and well worth watching for any movie lover. Including for the surprise of another actor to watch, the Swedish born Alicia Vikander who showed a glimpse of the possibility for the kind of range Knightley has developed. Check it out if you haven't.

THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON/THEN AND NOW

I saw it on TV at a military base in New Jersey I had just been transferred to. I didn't do marches back then. I was engaged to a beautiful woman who for most of our childhood and teen years would have been called "colored." We couldn't marry in most states because it was against the law.

I had been stationed in South Carolina, deliberately sent there because of the woman I was engaged to in an attempt to make me come to my senses. South Carolina was not only one of the states where we couldn't marry, it was so thoroughly segregated at the time that black folks couldn't go to the drive-in movie theater in their own car!

I had been run out of the town where the base was, Greenville S.C., because I refused to obey the stupid racial laws. I didn't realize by not doing it I was putting my black friends there in danger. I was thrown off the first bus I got on because I sat in the last seat so I could check people out as they got on and off but that was against the law.

Most of my friends at the time of the first march fifty years ago today were what we now call African-Americans but back then called Negro or spades on the street. And they didn't march either. They thought, and influenced me to think at the time, that marching was for squares and people who liked to join things. My friends back North preferred to just live their lives the way they felt and not let anyone mess with them even to the point of taking the risk of being beaten or jailed. In my town nobody messed with my black friends.

But we watched Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech and were moved. It felt to me like a vindication of everything I'd been living and feeling my entire life about race relations. Even if circumstances—including racism and personalities and ambitions and differences—ended my engagement not long after that speech, by the time I got to college on the G.I. Bill a few years later I was ready to march and more.

But the main thing about that march and King's speech (which included bits and pieces of many earlier speeches and articles of his, as you can find in A TESTAMENT OF HOPE The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King Jr., edited by James M. Washington that came out in 1986 and was a gift from my oldest son Miles) is that when it occurred I believed that any child of mine and that young woman I was engaged to would be okay, despite even the best intentioned friends' belief that no mixed race child would have a chance in the USA of 1963.

But the main speaker at today's march (well, yesterday by the time I finish typing this) proved who saw the future and who didn't back then. No matter what we might complain about that hasn't improved enough, we can't deny that amazing change.

PRIORITIES

I didn't see the MTV video awards, or whatever it's called, that seems to have a lot of folks in a tizzy over Miley Cyrus's set. I did catch a few clips from it on the web and found it pretty lame. It was an obvious attempt to be outrageous in some sort of sexual way but for my taste it bombed.

So I expected people to criticize the performance. Which some do. But a lot of what I'm seeing on Facebook and elsewhere is outrage at the sexual explicitness of her performance. Some even saying their children were upset by it. But in my memory, there have been a lot of outrageous and kid inappropriate stuff on the MTV awards shows for decades now.

I mean haven't Madonna and Britney Spears and Lady Gaga made their own attempts to be sexually outrageous in performances at these awards over the years, some of which were more scary than sexy (intentionally, whereas Cyrus's seems to have been unintentionally scary while trying to be "sexy")?

And don't many male rappers, let alone bands and etc., have lyrics that are way more offensive than what Cyrus was pretending to be doing on stage. Have these parents and others who seem so upset about the sexual aspect of her performance not noticed their performances (including the guy Cyrus was acting out with on stage in the performance many are upset with her for).

Some have expressed their outrage as concern for another child star losing their way as an adult and ending up like Lindsay Lohan or Amanda Bynes. That certainly may be a legitimate concern, but again it seems to hinge on her attempt to be outrageous in some sexual way.

For my entire life, "American" culture has seemed to accept violence, and its becoming more and more graphic, while often seeming to be upset with any expression of sexuality whether vulgar or romantic, also becoming more and more graphic over my lifetime.

I find most sex scenes in movies and on TV not interesting and often embarrassing, mostly because they don't resemble any sex I've experienced except in some aspects but not the experience. When Forest Whitaker transitions from one emotion to another in THE BUTLER I know what he's feeling, I identify with it, I've felt it and I'm probably feeling it along with him as I watch it. That's great performing.

But very few flicks and TV shows I've seen capture the fun or depth of connection or sense of discovery or deep gratitude etc. I've experienced and suspect most have in sexual encounters. There was a scene in DON'T LOOK NOW, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie I remember identifying with at the time, and a few others over the years, but most of the time: boring.

The same goes for violence. I've experienced some over the years but have only very occasionally seen anything I could identify with my own experience in flicks and TV etc. Especially the more graphic it has become, often to the point of total absurdity. But though I had no interest in watching the MTV awards show that caused all the stir (and we know her manager is happy about it since as I understand it she is now managed by the guy who made Britney Spears' much more limited talent a profit machine by creating controversy etc.) what I have been paying attention to, and I'm sure you too...

...are the terrible photos and video of the children and others convulsing or already passed from chemical weapons in Syria.  It seems absurd for politicians and others to get so upset over the deaths of women and children and other innocent victims of chemical weapons that can be counted in the hundreds when the total death toll is estimated to be over a hundred thousand caused by other weapons.

But there is something especially fear fostering about chemical weapons, an historical psychological trauma consciousness like societal PTSD from what happened in World War One where so many young men died from mustard gas, and from the horror of the gassing of millions in Hitler's death camps. But for whatever reason, it looks like the USA will finally make some military gesture toward Syria in an official and open way (we already have operatives in there according to many sources, but they're the usual secret forces or secretly deployed forces our government has been using for decades now without officially letting us know about it).

There is so much uninformed and ill-informed commentary going on around the web and so-called "social media" about this that it serves as another reminder, as if we needed it, of how dark these ages are despite the access to so much information. People comparing it to Bush Junior's invasion of Iraq, and even some commenting on sites I've seen saying this proves "Bush was right" because these commenters think that Assad got his chemical weapons from Saddam and that these are actually the WMD the Bushies were looking for and couldn't find but now have been, in Syria!

Of course an attack by our missiles or whatever ensues on a few key military and possibly Syrian government targets as a warning, based on the evidence of these chemical attacks is not the same as invading a country on speculation they have chemical weapons and might use them because they did many years before. Hey, I'm anti-war, any war, but as I argued with Howard Zinn one time on a stage we were sharing, I still think sometimes, i.e. Hitler, they're necessary. This may be the case here, no matter our inability to control the outcome unlike WWII in the end.

ANOTHER QUOTE

Many quotes on the Internet aren't sourced except for a name and often are misquotes or outright fabrications (usually obvious, at least to a lot of us). This one doesn't say where this quote occurred, but it sounds like Tutu, and it certainly is true in my book:

THE BUTLER

THE BUTLER (or as the director sees it: LEE DANIELS' THE BUTLER—but I'm getting tired of the whole "auteur" thing unless it's someone like Woody Allen who writers and directs and etc....) is an obvious tour de force. And calculated to be so.

Forest Whitaker deserves an Oscar for the lead role that covers the course of a man's life over several decades, and despite his looking a little old for the earlier years pulling it off physically, emotionally and artistically. I didn't doubt his character for a second.

And Vanessa Redgrave (who for me is the greatest screen actor of all time) does her usual brilliant work, as does Clarence Williams III. But then there's a lot of trick casting, which, once you get past the trick actually in some cases works. Liev Schriber as LBJ for instance. I wouldn't have believed it but he pulls it off. And ditto for John Cusack as Richard Nixon. Not so much in his first scene as Nixon as VP, but as president, especially at the end, he does some beautiful work.

And James Marsden as JFK is totally believable, again once you get over the discrepancy in physical presence and looks. Jane Fonda also, who brings Nancy Reagan to life, despite seeming to get much of what her physical presence was actually like wrong. Fonda still captures the essence of Nancy Reagan's minor key regality.

But Robin Williams as Eisenhower? And Alan Rickman as Reagan? I never thought I'd see him do a bad acting job, but he misses Reagan by miles and miles, as does the script really. Danny Strong's writing is obvious and obviously aiming for symbolic gestures and deep meanings and character types standing in for political and social score keeping. And makes the usual oversimplification mistake when dealing with the complexity of 1960s racial and civil rights politics and realities (why are The Black Panthers always portrayed as cold and bloodthirsty? The ones I knew were the exact opposite! Though it's worth it to see Yaya Alafia in an afro, as well as the rest of her looks in another terrific performance).

And then there's Oprah as Whitaker's butler's wife. Oprah pulls some of her scenes off well, but she's still Oprah, and buying her as someone Terence Howard's roguish character (played brilliantly as usual) would cheat on his wife and Forest Whitaker to get a taste of more than once just didn't fly for me. There's more, like Lenny Kravitz in a very solid portrayal of one of Whitaker's character's fellow butlers and Cuba Gooding Jr's similarly solid portrayal as another of them and Mariah Carey's cameo as the main character's mother (she continually surprises as an actor).

I didn't even get to the actors who play Whitaker's character at younger ages or his sons at different ages, all good, and other actors who play characters' wives or maids who work with the butlers, etc. A lot of great work among them all.

But in the end, despite its obvious flaws and obvious obviousness almost every step of the way, it still pushed my buttons, brought tears to my eyes and led me to applaud along with everyone else when the film was over in the theater where I saw it in up in The Berkshires with my youngest and grandson and his cousin. Because it did tell some truths about our racial history, and it did honor many who suffered long and hard under our racial divisions and policies, and it did offer some solace and consolation for at least some of that suffering that has become in many cases truly history.

But, I'd like to see the movie of Rosa Parks' life, or Bayard Rustin's or the untold number of "Negro" heroes who put their lives on the line to make this country, and the world, a little bit better for their "race" and thereby for all of us.

PS TO LAST POST

Another beautiful day in The Berkshires with the return of Summer Fest to Great Barrington, which meant lots of live music on three different outdoor stages all day as well as sidewalk vendors, including it seemed a lot of variations on the sausage theme.

The best thing though may have been the capper. When I went out to move my car to a space that won't get ticketed for parking overnight, I was greeted with the sound of a drum circle, serious Brazilian drumming from a circle of maybe a dozen drummers echoing down the street.

They had played earlier in the day in front of the town hall to a constantly growing crowd drawn by their spectacular rhythms, and were finishing a gig at The Gypsy Joynt when, according to one of the many family members who run the Joynt, they decided it had become too hot inside so moved outside.

There was a growing crowd of people encircling the drummers and dancing, some with wild abandon, others, like me, slightly more contained but still moving to the beat. The air was cooling down (59 degrees according to my phone) but the drummers and the crowd weren't, at least not music wise.

Nice way to say goodnight to the world at the end of another day to be grateful for.