The
Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia
By
Michael Booth
2014
Picador
New
York
Now
I know why we left the old country.
Michael
Booth’s new survey of the Nordic lands is a feisty, funny, trip that enlightens
as it entertains.
The
English travel and food writer has a long-standing connection to Denmark
through his wife, and the book originated in his chagrin at Denmark’s
consistent rating as the world’s happiest, most progressive society. “They don’t
look that happy to me,” he thought, and what results is Booth’s frank and
acerbic levering up of the great assumptions about these cultures’ superiority
to take a peek at what squirms about in the shadows beneath them.
As
he travels through Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden, Booth does an
admirable job of blending reportage, anecdote, and historical contextualization
to present a balanced sketch of each society. This is a tricky business – Booth
plumbs the national stereotypes for validity, and confronts his own ingrained
generalizations, revealing a much bumpier, more complex reality.
Not
that this is an expose or stab job. Booth is keen to remind the reader that in
a world where poverty, conflict, disease, and injustice are par for the course,
the problems of the highly developed, affluent North are relatively minor.
Additionally, he espouses the virtues that makes these societies work – “trustworthiness,
accountability, openness, a strong civil society, long-termism, individual
self-control.” However, those of Scandinavian heritage raised with an
intimidating sense of where they came from will find this study a big fat
relief -- as some of these stereotypes are all too grounded in fact.
For
instance, it seems that Danes are not the most happy, they are simply the best
at pretending that everything is just fine. The Norwegians come off as not-too-bright,
right-wing tribalists rendered effete by their vast oil revenues. Iceland?
Vikings led astray into modern financial incoherence by their piratical
tendencies. Finland is portrayed as composed of tough, taciturn binge-drinkers.
And Sweden, the economic leader of them all, is a stultifyingly conformist
culture, the ultimate nanny state, with an enormous immigrant problem.
In
fact, the problems of multiculturalism crop up again and again in “Almost.” These
host cultures are incredibly homogenous, not just culturally but genetically. The
need for workers willing to do the mundane tasks that keep things running falls
more and more to refugees, and inclusive philosophies are being tested now up
North, with intermittent success. Enforcing tolerance and avoiding racial
stratification is the new challenge.
The
overall sense that Booth leaves the reader with is that, like a typical American
suburb, Scandinavia is a nice place to be from. The traits I thought were my
family’s alone are more broadly based. The aversion to conflict, the lack of emotionality, the stiff
politesse, the smugness, the non-specific gloominess, the nagging sense of personal unimportance, the shyness,
the yearning for universal approval, and wielding relentless, lethal niceness as a weapon all are found among the people Booth meets on his way.
Booth
quotes journalist Niels Lillelund --“In Denmark we do not raise the inventive,
the hardworking, the ones with initiative, the successful or the outstanding,
we create hopelessness, helplessness and the sacred, ordinary mediocrity,” and The Economist – “Scandinavia is a great
place in which to be born . . . but only if you are average. . . . if you are
extraordinary, if you have big dreams, great visions, or are just a bit
different, you will be crushed, if you do not emigrate first.” Why leave heaven? Well, if for you it's hell.
The
idea that these “perfect” societies tend to iron out or exclude the unique,
eccentric, and enterprising individual makes me understand why my dissatisfied,
grumpy, free-thinking ancestors got the hell out of there. Hans Christian
Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling” has more than a dollop of truth in it. Of course, Booth's observations have stirred debate, as they should. "Almost" is great look below the surface.
“ . . . the house had been hit in a
raid, and among the losses was my record collection, all save one, which I
still have . . . I daren’t play it much; it creates such vivid memories. I have
to go for a walk; even then it’s about three hours before I can settle down
again.” Spike Milligan, Adolf Hitler: My
Part in His Downfall
Sitting
in my head for decades is a root musical memory of the vinyl disc RCA Victor
LM-1837. It’s got the ungainly title of “Mario Lanza sings the hit songs from The
Student Prince and other musical comedies.” On the album’s cover there floats
Mario’s big, ripe, grinning head, cut out and set against a blood-red
background. Inside, a flood tide of rich phrasing and incredible vocal
pyrotechnics. My father, an operetta aficionado, played it all the time. My
mother, normally allergic to this kind of thing, shared an affection for it
with him. They had been carting it around all their married life. By the time
we kids got to it the vinyl was scratched and pitted with affectionate use.
Why was
Lanza so important to both of them? What did he mean to them?
Between
1945 and 1955, you couldn’t buy a beat in pop music. Somewhere between swing
music and rock and roll, a great wave of sentimental balladry took hold in
America. As soldiers came home from World War II and inaugurated the Baby
Boomer generation, big bands faded and singing stars – Perry Como, Vaughn
Monroe, Vic Damone, Frankie Laine, Dinah Shore, Doris Day, Patti Page, Nat
“King” Cole, Pat Boone, Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Eddie Fisher, Jo
Stafford, Andy Williams, the Chordettes, the Ames Brothers, the McGuire Sisters
– took over the airwaves and jukeboxes. The county was awash in violins and
vibrato.
Now, in
1940, big bands were riding high. The Swing Era was inaugurated by Benny
Goodman’s breakthrough concert in Los Angeles’s Palomar Ballroom in 1935. Ten
years later, it was over. Many factors contributed – the drafting of many
musicians in World War II, the crippling ASCAP strike of 1942-1944, and most importantly
the phenomenal explosion of interest in Frank Sinatra, who went from being one
of Tommy Dorsey’s juvenile singers to a number-one sensation. Suddenly, instead
of a vocalist serving as one component in the ensemble, he or she was pushed
into the spotlight. Song choices and musical arrangements were now shaped
around a vocalist’s range and persona.
Into this
setting stepped the ambitious 26-year-old Lanza. His slowly developing career
took off after his performance at the Hollywood Bowl on August 28, 1947. The
4,000 in attendance included many people from the film industry, including MGM
mogul Louis B. Mayer. Mayer quickly signed Lanza to a contract. Three films
later – “That Midnight Kiss,” “The Toast of New Orleans,” and “The Great
Caruso” – he was the first to sell a million copies of an operatic recording,
1951’s “Great Caruso” soundtrack, one that has never gone out of print.
Then he
eased out of the onerous pressures of Hollywood, trained himself to an
exemplary degree, and became a long-lived and beloved opera star, the greatest
tenor of the 20thcentury.
Of
course, this did not happen. In fact, this is precisely the opposite of what
happened, and that flicked the switch on the tragic nimbus that still hovers
behind Lanza’s memory. The singer, the only child of a passive, shell-shocked
WWI veteran and a domineering, frustrated-musician mother, was spoiled as a
child. His lack of discipline and impulse control as an adult, mated to
childish willfulness, led to a lifetime of self-destructive behavior.
Lanza
seemed bipolar, swinging abruptly between extravagant spending, womanizing, and
boasts that he was greater than Caruso, and long periods of crippling stage
fright, depression, isolation, paranoia, and compulsive bouts of eating and
drinking. (He repeatedly went on sometimes-successful crash diets to reduce his
weight for filming – yo-yoing between 180 and nearly 300 pounds.) He would
sabotage his voice by singing loudly all night before a concert – then cancel
the concert due to a sore throat. (Like Pavarotti, he was famously called out for
lip-synching in public; his sloppy erotic divertissements with Judy Garland and
others are on record.) In the end, he stormed and strutted like the stereotype
of the preening Italian tenor.
MGM
announced that Mario Lanza would play the lead in Sigmund Romberg’s “The
Student Prince” in 1951. However, this marked the point at which Lanza’s
diva-esque behavior would drive the studio to suspend him, cancel the film, and
sue him for damages. After pre-recording his songs for the film shortly before
his conflicts with the studio became unworkable, Lanza found himself frozen out
of the production. Finally, Lanza submitted to the ultimate insult – his vocal
tracks would be lip-synched by a slimmer and more cooperative actor, Edward
Purdom. The authorities finally divorced Lanza's wonderful voice from his troublesome self.
The movie
was released two years after Lanza’s recording sessions. By that time, he had
made one more film in the U.S., “Serenade,” and would be off to Italy, from
where he would not return alive.
Lanza was
possessed of the finest natural tenor voice many have ever heard. It is full,
ringing, clear and expressive. When Lanza was focused and disciplined, his
breath control, diction, tone, interpretive skill, and sense of dynamics was
unsurpassed. However, when in distress or out of shape, these abilities would
lapse and audiences would hear some of the qualities complained about by many
critics – a forced, metallic quality, pushing for effect, poor breath support,
and an impulse to constantly go for “toppers” – stunning bursts of volume
and flashy high notes, whether the material warranted it or not.
Being an
overnight sensation meant that Lanza was pushed into recording lots of
forgettable pop. However, while his health permitted his versatility and
sensitivity to the material meant that he recorded many fine interpretations of
ballads. Too, his renditions of many romantic and lyricalcanzone Napoletana(Neapolitan songs) are considered
definitive.
Lanza’s
voice is so compelling and penetrating, he sings with such commitment and
intensity, that it is difficult to be unmoved. Tied in with the conventions of
the day – heavily orchestrated accompaniment, echo, stereo reprocessing – the
result is super-extravagant schmaltz of the highest pitch. It’s a collision of
the high-art operatic and the lowbrow, sentimental mush of the time.
Success
destroyed Lanza. The money, fame, and adulation sudden film stardom brought
were just as addictive as the women he chased and the booze he poured into
himself. To his handlers, Lanza was a machine that printed money. Very few of
the people who did business with or for him had any regard for his sanity or
long-term career. Studio heads, music producers, managers, agents, lawyers – he
quickly grew a protective carapace around himself -- one that required massive
amounts of income to sustain. It was in no one’s interest to say no to him.
So, if
Lanza’s life was a tragedy, whose fault was it? It depends on which biographer
you read. Six different biographies range in their depictions of Lanza from a
suffering saint to a contemptible cur. Some are clearly written for gain,
retailing Lanza’s flaws to sell books. These include books in which the authors
felt no compunction about making up reams of imaginary dialogue, as well as the
inner thoughts of its subject and everyone around him.
Another
pushes the myth that the Mafia killed Lanza. In fact, Lanza’s self-indulgent
lifestyle weakened his heart considerably and contributed to the phlebitis that
killed when a blood clot left his leg and migrated to his heart, causing a
fatal heart attack.
One
reliable source is Armando Cesari’s “Mario Lanza: An American Tragedy,” which
includes a painstaking list of his recordings, films, concert, and radio appearances
as well as a Cesari-curated CD of rare live and home-recorded tracks that
bolster his extensive, solid analyses of the singer’s changing voice.
Roland L.
Bessette’s “Mario Lanza: Tenor in Exile” is its equal. Bessette is painfully
honest about many embarrassing incidents in Lanza’s life, but balances them
with equally affecting stories of his kindness and his bouts of
professionalism. At book’s end, Bessette speculates that Lanza’s inherent
character flaws would have prevented him from having other than the life he
did. “He had . . . the best career he could have had.” All who examine his life
declare his voice a natural talent so immense that it crushed the man who had
to bear it.
This is
where my parents come in. My father, raised in a comfortable middle-class household,
was heir to a taste for light classical music and operetta, from Gilbert and
Sullivan through Herbert, Friml, Lehar, and the rest of those composers of
tuneful pleasantry from the turn of last century. My mother, out on the farm,
had no such musical pretensions, and grew up on country music and white (aka
unswinging) gospel. But she was quite imaginative, well-read and had a flair
for the dramatic – thanks to her, we had a well-stocked assortment of musical
comedy soundtracks.
Somehow,
Lanza hit the sweet spot for both of them. It served as a sort of soundtrack to
their courtship. Later, it became a humorous and affectionate reference for
them. Much later, it became something no one wanted to hear around the house.
It had become an unbearable reminder of a romance that played out into a
marriage overwhelmed by alienation and despair.
“The
Student Prince” is powered by a classic romance plot: he’s a student prince,
she’s a barmaid . . . complications ensue.
We kids
played Side One over and over, crooning and swooping about the house, making
melodramatic gestures of cross-eyed devotion in jerry-built costumes we thought
mimicked the elegant finery of the principals. There was nothing more exhilarating
than to imagine that I might one day be as captivating as Mario, with a
magnetic voice that no one woman could resist!
“Overhead,
the moon is beaming
White as
blossoms on the bough
Nothing
is heard but the song of a bird
Filling
all the air with dreaming
Could
this beauty last forever?
I would
ask for nothing more, believe me
Let this
night but live forever, forever and ever more!”
Lanza’s
sound penetrates the thick, warm orchestrations, creating a kind of
gem-scattered brilliance on a velvety background. It’s not hard to see how Lanza and his music
became a metaphor for the world of unattainable, disturbing fantasy the protagonists
of Peter Jackson’s film “Heavenly Creatures” seek. For a while, it was our
fantasy world as well.
Likewise,
after years of contemplating my parents’ emotional dynamic, and sometimes
overcoming its shadow on my own relationships, I have to come to a conclusion
parallel to Bessette’s concerning Lanza – they had the best marriage they could have
had.
As for
me, to the extent that I grew up thinking that love was supposed to be one long
operatic epiphany . . . well, life took care of that. I spent many years
chasing that addictive love high. Complications ensued. Now on much more solid
ground, I can finally detach myself from all the regretful associations and
really hear that voice for what it is.
And
there, distilled in those romantic melodies, is still a kernel of what drew my
parents together. Whether it was illusory, or never meant to last, those songs
embody a majestic passion that must have consumed them, once. It’s comforting
to know that.
Two groupies admiring that consumate vocalist, Carl 'Alfalfa' Switzer.
By BRAD WEISMANN
"Success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit . . . They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud." Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
"It's better to have done something bad than to have done nothing." --Preston Sturges
Hey, how’s it going? Mind if I ask you something? What if
you’re a hack? An artistic fraud? A waste of time and money?
Guess what – it doesn’t matter.
For years, I strove (strived? stroved?) to make it. Too arrogant
and idiosyncratic to follow any normal course of employment, I went from acting
to comedy to radio to journalism to social media to, hopefully finally, writing
and editing. I wasted a lot of time trying to achieve that supposed moment when
popular acceptance would be mine and I would be another cultural icon, embedded
in beneficence and solvency in the firmament of collective consciousness.
It didn’t really work out. And now, it doesn’t have to.
It’s important that every person of artistic bent collide
with the real world, at least initially. The first thing you learn is that
everyone is talented, and that talent doesn’t have much to do with success. Starting
out at the bottom, working crap jobs to stay alive, learning how to be a
functioning part of a larger whole, all important skills. Learning that truisms
such as showing up on time and ready, with an open mind, put you miles ahead of
others, or that you have to know how to take orders before you can give them,
or that the worth of your commodifiable skills are not identical with your
inherent worth as a person.
It’s instructional to see business deals blow up, projects
collapse under you, bosses make choices that doom you and others to
unemployment – to see how many ways thing scan go south. Your work can be scorned,
ignored, or simply not show up on society’s radar. However, at some point, if
you are still capable of producing creative content, you can stop standing in
your own way, cease worrying and just get the work done. Your standards are too
high.
Have you ever tried to write something popular? Has it ever
worked? (I’m not talking to you, Nicholas Sparks.) No one knows what will be a
hit – either now or in the scope of human history . . . hey, might as well aim
high. Critic Anthony Lane memorably read and reviewed the literary top 10 of 1945
in 1995; the results were ghastly and involved books no one now remembers. OK –
my grandpa had a copy of “Forever Amber” stashed on a high bookshelf – I heard
there was sex in it and dashed eagerly through its pages, unsatisfied.)
You can never tell. It is a truth in standup comedy that
generally, the jokes you’ve written that you really love don’t get a great
response but that the ones you aren’t so crazy often click with the crowd. If
you have a bone of self-preservation in your body, you keep the jokes that work
and toss or rework the ones that won’t. But how many of your darlings do you
have to kill to make it? I try to balance my desire to write about whatever the
hell I want with the need to craft something interesting and readable to
humanity at large. I am still often wrong. Oddly enough, when I stopped
worrying, I started selling more stories. My voice got stronger. I could hear
myself instead of my anxieties. You need to express yourself, whether there’s a
check at the end of the trail or not. It’s a crap shoot.
And even when you get to that point, there is still the
concern about if the work will speak to the masses, if it will “endure.” Come
on. Really? When I was younger, I and the rest of my fellow struggling, resentful,
well-drink-slurping comics in the back of the club hated the comedy hacks that
always got time in the clubs, even though they did the same banal crap over and
over. I used to scorn TV shows and TV writers, the whole shoddy
lowest-common-denominator bunch.
Now, I find that many of my friends write for and produce these
TV shows. They do it well. They have houses, spouses, kids to put though
school, and they earn every penny of their salaries. They are highly
intelligent, talented, and tough people -- who sometimes have created forgettable
entertainment. So what? Once I learned about these people’s work weeks, my
respect for them went stratospheric.
If you have been alive for any length of time in this world,
you need a little mindless distraction. Crap in our entertainment diet is good
for you, roughage for your aesthetic digestive tract. For all that I grew up on
high-falutin’ films like “Children of Paradise,” I needed “Abbott and Costello
Meet the Mummy,” too. I needed Miro and Matisse, AND Famous Monsters of
Filmland and Tales from the Crypt. As Patton Oswalt put it in “Silver Screen
Fiend,” “If people need bread and circuses, better it be bread from the finest
flour and springwater, and circuses under the cleanest canvas with the
healthiest animals.”
And besides, what harm does bad art cause? Someone I can’t
call to mind at present insisted that artists’ errors are unimportant as,
unlike doctors, chefs, or politicians, when an artist screws up, no one dies.
In fact, horrible artistic efforts have spurred even greater ones – think of
Mark Twain being inspired to write merely by reading James Fennimore Cooper
until he couldn’t take it anymore? And in fact, Cooper began writing in
reaction to the even worse popular literature of HIS day.
And is it every really definitively crap? The 12-cent superhero
comic books we treasured bloomed into a mythos that has sold billions of
dollars in movie tickets. Jerry Springer became the subject of an avant-garde
opera. John Kennedy Toole wrote “A Confederacy of Dunces,” killed himself in
1969, won the Pulitzer for it in 1981. Stick with it – you never know.
You have very little, if any, control over how your work
will be taken, or utilized. Sometimes, like a favorite character actor, you may
find yourself as that familiar ace in the corner of a movie screen whose name
can never be summoned. Even Boris Karloff, typed if ever an actor was, said
this:
“One always hears of actors complaining
of being typed – if he’s young, he’s typed as a juvenile; if he’s handsome, he’s
typed as a leading man. I was lucky. Whereas bootmakers have to spend millions
to establish a trademark, I was handed a trademark free of charge. When an
actor gets into a position to select his own roles, he’s in big trouble, for he
never knows what he can do best. I’m sure I would be damn good as Little Lord Fauntleroy,
who would pay ten cents to see it?”
Within the confines of what we are capable of and what
people can absorb from our work, we can make magical things happen. It just
never goes quite the way they told you.
And hey, what about having a life? That’s all the stuff that
happens every day while you are waiting for the universe to tell you that you
are loved. That is important. When I get published, I get a spectacular rush –
for about 10 minutes. Then I got back to whatever else it is that’s on my desk
to be done. But my wife and kids and family and friends and pets and nature and
God and music and baseball and good Mexican food and IBC root beer . . . these
things stay with you far longer. Pay attention to them.
If things go as they have been, I need never worry about the
pitfalls of popularity. Here’s how it works: I write first, I sell it after. (The
few major-media gatekeepers left standing aren’t guarding much of anything; and
their choices are as always dictated by budgets, not an altruistic desire to
exhibit your genius to all and sundry.) Nothing gets wasted; I can always
rework something that doesn’t move commercially and post it myself. Maybe I’m
an arteeste, but the only thing that gets me through a work day is craftsmanship,
discipline, and a good will to forge ahead. Writing a story can be as complex,
tedious, and ultimately rewarding as building a cabinet.
You never know where your obsessions will take you. After
years of just keeping my head down and writing no matter what, I found that a
lot of work that I thought was random coalesced into themed groups – and that I
had pretty much written the sample chapters for four books, which I am now
peddling. Will they sell? I don’t know. But they are there, and they weren’t
before.
And what are awards and pans but ways of categorizing and
controlling creatives? You have no control over that, either. What if your work
doesn’t get read? What if someone, just one person, finds it hundreds of years
later and gets something out of it? In my researched pieces, I find this all
the time – as if someone long dead was thinking of me and left some
information, some guidance I needed. Love is as strong as death, but writing is
stronger.
And what if your masterpieces aren’t just scorned or ignored
but lost? Destroyed? Your laptop’s hit by lightning, the studio burns down, the
recordings get thrown out. Once during a period of volunteering at the local
Goodwill store I had the extremely sad experience of seeing a cache of 19th-centry
family photos, and 78-rpm records, smashed and thrown into the trash because no
one could conceive that they might have some value, or were worth preserving.
Who knows what works of genius, of irreplaceable memories, have gone out with
the trash?
I believe that the effort to create, even if unrewarded, works
on some spiritual level as a counteractive to the more selfish and hateful
impulses that drive this world. To glean meaning from a seemingly random and
unfair world is an assertion of worth and significance.
In the end, you’ll be dead. It won’t matter if you will end
up rivaling Shakespeare or you wind up the poet laureate of East Jesus, Nebraska,
if even that. Do not waste your time wondering where all this is getting you,
and don’t listen to those who wonder it out loud for your supposed benefit. It works
for me.
So get up on your mountaintop of genius, or your molehill of
mediocrity, and trumpet, strut, and bellow. We each have one song to sing in
life, so get up there and sing it, dammit. Only God or fate determines what of
us persists, of what we did that is deemed worthy. Sing, bird, sing.
Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the
World’s Rarest 78 rpm Records
Amanda Petrusich
2014
Scribner
New York
Balance is the key here, in the best non-fiction I’ve read
this year.
“Do Not Sell at Any Price” is an exemplary work that demonstrates
that a non-fiction narrative can be just as compelling as any fictional one. By
virtue of solid research and investigation, coupled with good writing, author
Amanda Petrusich creates, rather than glib feature writing, authentic insights
into far more than the specific topic at hand.
“Do Not Sell” delves into the cloistered and idiosyncratic
world of music collectors – seekers of vintage music on 78 rpm records. Between
1925 and 1948, these brittle shellac discs were the way music was recorded,
vended, and preserved, produced by a profusion of companies large and small. In
those days of cultural and communication isolation, vast amounts of marginal,
eccentric, and original performers were captured. The savants that collect
these sonic rarities are obsessed figures, some possessed with a quasi-messianic
sense of mission to rescue these lost voices from oblivion.
Petrusich brings the scene to life with an impeccably
balanced approach equal parts research, interviews, profiles, and critical
analysis, ensconced in a first-person framework as she goes along on the quest
with some of her subjects, sometimes hilariously. She goes so far as to learn
how to scuba-dive so that she can search the muddy bottom of the Milwaukee
River for some of the fabled lost Paramount recordings. (Save the receipts; I
believe those lessons ae tax-deductible.)
Most important of all, Petrusich is wise to herself. She
states early on, “I wanted collectors to reveal their desires and methodologies
so I could dissect their work and devise grand statements about our cultural
moment. In response, collectors sneered, chortled, or told me to fuck off.”
From the get-go, Petrusich simultaneously acknowledges and lets go of her
preconceptions – then gets on the ground and saturates herself in the details.
Petrusich’s voice is here, but it’s not cloying or cute,
pompous or sententious. As one should, she asks good questions, listens well,
and pulls her conclusions from the evidence and her experience. She brings to
life the characters that inhabit this alternate universe and gives them space
to express themselves – and they are quite eloquent.
Remember, these fanatics aren’t academics but hobbyists – living
outside the mainstream of cultural dialogue, creating their own canons and
alternative histories, sometimes sharing their thoughts with others, sometimes
remaining clapt in near-complete isolation, inhabiting what seems to be a
self-constructed dream world, addicted to control over their basement-level
kingdoms. “. . . collecting had clearly become . . . a functional way of
rebelling against mainstream culture. . . . rejecting a society that felt
homogenized and unforgiving,” Petrusich writes.
Says collector Ian Nagoski of his ilk, “’ ‘Zwigoff and Crumb
and innumerable others, these guys are definitely discontents in a Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents kind of
way. They’re looking at the world and seeing it as untenable. The world is
sick. And yet here is this thing that affirms that there’s something about it
that’s beautiful. But it’s forgotten, or lost, or separate from day-to-day
reality. But if you could just put it back together, then you could reconstruct
this gone world, this kind of life that was once worth living, and make that
into your own life, and then it would be okay or tolerable for you.’”
One of the most interesting considerations Petrusich brings out
is the concept that the historical narrative is always in flux, subjective,
squishy – determined by accidents, destruction, bias, prejudice, and the sheer
inability to deal. Cultural worth fluctuates like stock prices. The vital
expression of the culture lies first here, and then there, and over there where
you never expected it to manifest (that my childhood comic-book heroes are now
seen as the foundation of a world-beloved secular mythology seems to me ridiculous
and awesome, simultaneously).
She quotes another collector, Nathan Salsburg, “’Another
danger of the canon being having been engineered – accidentally or on purpose –
by collectors is that scads of things were excluded, either because they didn’t
conform to a collector’s taste of because there just wasn’t enough time or
space for anyone to properly process them.’”
The paradigm of the
curator-as-impositioner-of-significance-meaning-and-context is, of course,
Harry Everett Smith, the legendary compiler of The Anthology of American Folk Music, quite accurately described by
Greil Marcus as “an occult document disguised as an academic treatise on
stylistic shifts within an archaic musicology.” This 1952 creation helped spark
the folk revival and blues renaissance, both of which folded into rock – and still
surfaces in genres as diverse as grunge and Americana. Smith’s achievement was
to select and assemble an intuitive masterpiece – a narrative of outcast voices
summoning raw feeling and captivating sounds. Since then, supplemental and
alternative compilations have emerged. Companies such as Revenant,
Dust-to-Disc, and Yazoo and individual efforts such as Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard: Good Time, and End Time Music and People Take Warning! Murder Ballads &
Disaster Songs make the case that there is much material to be processed
yet.
Petrusich is not an ironic observer. She can hear what the
enthusiasts share with her, describing the raw, unmediated sound of the turn of
last century, before media surrounded us. “And I understood, for a moment, what
collectors meant when they moaned about what was lacking in contemporary music:
that pure communion, that unself-consciousness, that sense that art could still
save us, absolve us of our sins. We know better than to expect that now.”
There is something to be said about the parallel I pick up here
between collecting and the act of creating itself – another lonely occupation populated
by shall-we-say-unique-types who dredge for signs of significance, and reveal
their insights . . . or don’t. The nature of obsession drives most creative
types inward, and the shelter of eccentricity often protects the fragile. What
is an artist but one who, unsatisfied with things as they are, crafts their own
worlds? What do you call someone who discovers a new set of meanings – a visionary
or a nutjob?
But I digress. “Do Not Sell” does more – it makes the reader
come to terms with his or her own acquisitive tendencies (confession: I have
stacks of 78s, and 45s, and LPs, and cassettes . . . it was difficult for me to
throw out my 8-track tapes). Most importantly, it inspires us to seek out the
sounds that are the basis of all this fuss. Few of us have the wherewithal to
match Petrusich’s subjects, but the digital revolution means that nearly all
the musics of the world can be enjoyed, absorbed, passed on. This book ties it
all together.
He spent 21 years running the eatery in the Aspen Place
shopette at 2095 30th St. in Boulder. For a full 40 years it
occupied the space, under three owners before Dennis as well. (The site is
being bulldozed to create new Google office space.) When he closed on November
21, most of his many faithful customers came by to get one more magnificent
lunch from him.
His menu was simple – soups and sandwiches. Yet I and other
regulars could go day after day, gulping down his signature borscht, or his vegetarian
chili, or his clam chowder. His sandwiches had the same ingredients as those at
any chain sandwich place. Yet they were a thousand times more delicious than
the usual fare, more filling, more satisfying somehow. And I would crawl over
broken glass to get one of his famous German crusty rolls – sometimes we’d just
buy a bag of them to munch on. How did he do it?
I think it was a function of Dennis’ unique character. He
was completely honest, for one thing. If he thought you looked terrible, he
said so. If he disagreed with your order, he’d try to get you to change it. He
made you bus your table. And, if he was feeling lighthearted, you could joke
and laugh with him, get into a delightful conversation that made you wish you
didn’t have to sit down and eat.
Dennis was for real. He cared about what he was doing. He never
took a day off. He came in, he set up, he served along with an ever-changing
roster of assistants, he cleaned up, he went home. Day after day, in serene consistency,
he fulfilled himself by making good food for people in his own modest establishment.
The reason why he never got any press? He didn’t advertise.
This drove every single ad rep in town crazy, and they all eventually stopped
coming by and trying to sell him and became regulars as well. Dennis had all
the business he needed, and didn’t see any reason to bring in more. He was
immune to every sales pitch, technique, contract, and offer. He wouldn’t even
try some advertising for free, on spec, something a media company just doesn’t do
until it has tried everything else.
Well, the system does not know
what to do with people who won’t advertise. This is the life blood of any media
enterprise, so inextricably bound up with the business of news that the
mechanism hardly recognizes a story that doesn’t have some kind of profit
motive behind it.
What motivation is there to cover
the activities of any business save to promote it? What leverage does any story’s
subject have if he or she is not, in the end, selling something? Given the
state of things here in the post-journalistic age, reporters are mostly just
content creators for the bar down the street, the favored cause, the politician
in sync with the publishers’ agendas, the institutions they’re indebted to for
information.
The late Bill Vielehr was
little-known, too. He sculpted for decades in his little rattrap studio at the
end of Pearl Street in Boulder, getting a commission here and there, gradually
increasing his popularity He kept his head down, scraped along, kept making
work. He kept all his rejection letters in a drawer in his office. It contained
more than 1,400 separate expressions of disinterest. 1,400. He was still going
strong when he died suddenly on October 11.
What Dennis and Bill had in
common was the knowledge of what they were good at, a dedication to doing the
best work they could, day and day out; and a sense of proportion – being content
with working to the limits of their capabilities, but no further. Who can say
what worth it is to craft huge, shiny, serrated sculptures? What’s the value of
a quiet little lunch spot? Who’s to tell these guys that they didn’t dream big
enough, or were on the wrong track? And who cares if neither of them got a
write-up until their work was done? They fed us.
Bill Vielehr at the Boulder International Film Festival, 2014.
At our best we measure ourselves
against the template of our ambitions on a daily basis. Motivated properly, we
work as hard as we can to fulfill our lives, to fill them with meaning. Hacking
away at stories here at my desk, dropping them into the media stream, hoping
they reach those who need them, I feel like I have some sense of what these
guys went through. Dennis and Bill toiled away in obscurity, and affected far
more people than you might think. I still love to watch the kids playing among
Bill’s sculptures in the park here. I will always be able to taste that crusty
roll.
Baking bread honestly
Shatters the light
By strength of grace
So that it must creep
Tenderly along the walls
Of the morning kitchen
Brown and gold caressing
All reflecting the oh brave
Scent of fullness.
Pregnant, eternal moment
Grants quick to firm
Makes even stone
Slip like water
Under the throb and breath
Of light discordant, glorious.
#####
Summit
There is nothing at the top
but light out cold screaming
and wind torrential, the rock
that suffers nothing and avoids nothing.
We cling, conquerors!
Only the snow moves, weaving
into an abyss.
What challenge is this?
#####
The city uncorks its pigeons
Tattooing silhouette,
Impertinent and soaring
The blazing, glittering banners
Weaving improvisation
Above bones of steel.
#####
decay and criticize
the phantoms who flicker
and return to wombs of ash.
laugh and lop
at unhurried warm life
chastise the flesh
threaten the sky
make death from baby's breath
shake disaster out of ingenuity
Daily mortify. innocence
with blind whips
is handled cruelly. it's suicide
and screams look like laughs
unheard.
#####
Dream #4
The moon probes with fierce light
the childlesss woman, bare and lost
who speaks with lucid hatred,
donates chrysanthemums, and sense-
les, grins more frightfully.
Ronald Coleman and Madeline Carroll in "The Prisoner of Zenda" -- the romantic paradigm.
Love, o love is sweetly flowing
On its banks are lilies growing
And the waters all bestowing
Love, love, beautiful love.
Come ye children, sweetly gather
Learn to bless and love each other
It will bind your hearts together in
Love, love, beautiful love.
Shaker song
First of all, this not about filial or fraternal love. This
is about the love you sign up for.
I had planned this to be to be a rollicking survey of my romantic
relationships. After a short time, it became clear that would be
sad, painful, and embarrassing. I have been a romantic fool.
In fact, if I look at it from a crazy, non-constructive way,
my every romantic relationship up to the present one has been a failure. Which
is how I looked at it. And, what’s even less helpful, the details of these
failures are mostly locked away inside me. I learned little over a remarkably
long period of time with a number of different beloveds.
I know nothing about women. Ask around. Particularly women. My
conceptions of love were formed by poets and paper-heart makers, Hollywood and
Tin Pan Alley. As far as I can tell, my ancestors felt brief urges of passion,
mated, and then settled down into monochrome normality. (After they died, I
found out about their deeply repressed, tragic emotional lives. Still waters,
etc.) The particular example my parents set was not particularly comforting or
helpful. As a kid, when I thought at all about girls I cued on love songs,
romance films, and storybook endings. The peculiar cultural window I looked
through made me model myself much more on Ronald Coleman than Peter Fonda. You
can guess the results.
When I began grappling with the opposite sex (fortunately,
at 15 I was 6’3” and weighed 150 lbs., which made it easy to fight off my advances), bliss
and disaster alternated. My first love played the alto sax, which probably says a lot about my devotion to Art Pepper. She loved marshmallow crème, laughed at my
jokes, and was a great kisser.
But I began a long tradition of finding someone who could
bear the extravagant weight of my urgent, undeveloped, and unmitigated emotional demands. I
was scrawny and needy, and socially retarded. No one could more theatrically
misinterpret reality than I could, and still can. I could perform love, I
could act the swain. I wrote poems, sang songs, acted like a clown, ached,
fought, made love, burned with despair. But I still hadn’t a clue.
In addition, be narcissistic and bipolar impairs
selection skills. For years I found myself involved with women who were
dangerously unstable, coldly remote, or simply baffled and increasingly enraged
by the gap between my occasionally charming initial self-presentation and the
swamp of dysfunction I would unleash as soon as she relaxed. After which I would stagger away
from the burning crash site, wondering what went wrong.
Wanting is a kind of thirst that is satisfied only shortly.
In my case, it has been largely poisonous. Desire is theft. Love is music. And
I can barely tell them apart. What’s love, then? Would true love prevail?
Approaching the 20-year mark of my (so far) successful
second marriage – successful denoting purely that it is still in effect – I can
say that I am just grateful I haven’t been beaten to death in my sleep yet. (A
displaced paramour once pulled a gun on me, a unique and refreshing experience
I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.)
After many years, it finally is what it is. Little is like
we thought it might be, and we are very different than we imagined we might be.
Life has ground away at us, revealing ourselves to each other as completely as
two people can. We have seen the best and the worst of each other, and I think
that if you can do that and not flinch, and keep looking into the other’s eyes,
you have something.
Real love is forged by the demands of necessity. Real love
mysteriously accrues as the years are lived together. It’s no musical, no
slow-motion gambol at waves' edge. You have to be damn stubborn and endure.
At the same time, I am learning to let go of how I think
things should be between us, of creating some kind of static template of
relationship satisfaction. Developing, despite myself, some compassion.
And humility. Another annoying problem is that someone that close
to you can call you on your shit. Every time. There’s no place to hide. And so, by dint of the constant erosion caused by being wrong, only over the course
of the last decade have I learned that I may actually BE wrong at times and,
even worse, that my wife is right. And of course, once one person might be
right . . . you can probably see how trying this has all been for her, she’s
explained it to me a thousand times.
Love is a verb that must be incessantly acted upon, never
shifting from present to past tense. Infatuations just happen. Love is a job, and its own reward. The tiny pleasures and hard-won
satisfactions of each day are the rewards of working together to create a life
and a home together.
When I keep my head down and keep pushing through, somehow
it works. It’s a closeness and peace that flares up protectingly when times are
tough. It can’t be erased or taken from. It’s knowing who I can count on, and
finally accepting that I can be counted on, too. Maybe that’s what love really
is for me – knowing that I am capable of transcending my own selfishness and
stupidity, at least with my single someone, at least some of the time.
Love isn’t a condition. It’s an action. It’s maddening, it’s
complex, it’s contradictory, it’s earned.
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