The Beiderbecke Affair

Three Shots in the Continuing Battle Over Race & Jazz

From “Jazz & The White Critic: 30 Years Later” by Amiri Baraka:

Yet, to be bluntly precise, just as the history of European “Classical” music would not be essentially changed by the exclusion of the many non-European artists who have contributed to it, by the same measure Afro-American music, which is the Soul of what must be regarded as American Classical music, would not be changed if not a single white artist’s contributions were included. And, face it, this analysis is not black chauvinism, but like they say, hard fact!

From “Black and White Blues,” posted yesterday by Nick Dellow on the Bix Beiderbecke web forum:

Jazz is a wonderful music that speaks for itself—close your eyes while you listen and you will see and hear that it is shaded from black to white and all the tones in between. It’s roots are black, of course, and throughout its history black culture has played a fundamental, vital, central role in its development, but to dismiss or at least marginalise the role of other cultures—“white” cultures if you want to be simplistic about it (though one might refine this by saying Italian, Jewish, Spanish, etc.)—is nonsensical and historically inaccurate.

Why do you think jazz started in New Orleans? Obviously (well, obvious to some), because the place was a cultural melting pot, with black and white cultures (Italians in particular) working together to create a new form of popular music. What a shame that some of its latter-day decedents who have been handed down this rich musical heritage have decided to obfuscate its true history in order to create a pastiche that fits modern politically correct sensibilities.

From the forthcoming Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans by Thomas Brothers:

The story of how, out of this [New Orleans] milieu, one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century emerged is uniquely African American and therefore uniquely American. To understand jazz as American in this way is to work with a social conception of the music that is quite different from the familiar story of jazz as an American musical gumbo, a melting pot of many different ethnicities.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG IMAGE: William P. Gottlieb

How Writers Are Like Snipers

From “Under Siege,” a New Yorker essay on Vasily Grossman, the Russian novelist whose journalism & notebooks from the Second World War were recently published by Pantheon as A Writer at War:

In Stalingrad, Grossman spent time with Vasily Zaitsev, the sniper whose duel with a German counterpart was inflated into a multi-day affair by Soviet propaganda (and then inflated once more by Hollywood, which, in Enemy at the Gates, stretched the contest to weeks and added a sex scene with Rachel Weisz), but one of his longest articles was an interview with another sniper, named Chekhov. The name must have appealed to Grossman. To lie in wait, patiently observing, watching, breathing, and then, as soon as the man reveals his position, shooting him in the head: it’s not exactly what a writer does, but it’s not so dissimilar. Stalingrad was about life and death, for Grossman, but it was also, necessarily, about writing. It seems to have altered his idea about truth. “It is only here that people know what a kilometer is,” he declared. “A kilometer is one thousand meters. It is one hundred thousand centimeters.” Maxim Gorky had defined socialist realism as “the ability to see the present in terms of the future.” But what did a centimeter look like from the future?

Tess Gerritsen Gives Birth to a House and Now It's Your Job to Clean It!

The crime-fiction author Tess Gerritsen (pictured) has recently used her blog to engage in snotty exchanges with unpublished writers who apparently expect big shots like herself to read their writing. Her argument is reasonable enough—it’s a lot of work going through manuscripts that, most of the time, aren’t any good. “And if you don’t see my point,” she adds, “think about this. What if someone you barely know says to you: ‘Hey, wouldn’t you love to come over and spend eight hours cleaning my house?’ You’d tell them thanks, but no thanks. Which will then earn you the resentful comment: ‘But you OWE it to me because your house is so clean! Your clean house makes you OBLIGATED to help me!’ If the person asking me to clean their house is my mother or an elderly friend, you betcha I’ll go over and help clean the house. Same with reading manuscripts.”

Deep breath, Tess.

Her metaphor, meanwhile, is strained but still interesting: Books are like houses. They need work. So do your own freaking work!

However, earlier on her blog—last March, actually—books weren’t houses; they were babies.

“Imagine this scenario,” she wrote in that voice of hers that feels like a finger in the chest. “You have just given birth to a brand new baby, and it has been a long, difficult labor. For a year you’ve thought of little else. You’ve lost sleep over it, obsessed over it, tortured yourself over it, and at last you proudly carry your baby out of the hospital. Then a complete stranger comes up to you and says, ‘That’s a really ugly kid.’ Or: ‘It’s deformed!’ Or: ‘People like you shouldn’t even have babies.’”

That would indeed suck. But which is it? Are books houses, in which case it’s jim-dandy to have architecture critics and magazines and opinions, &c.? (I think it’s even okay, in certain situations, to tell someone their house is ugly, but that’s just me.) Or are they babies, in which case we should all be a lot nicer? After all, it’s not her fault . . . exactly.

Anyway, Tess then quotes (proudly, I think) from the most negative of her negative reviews, a kind of anti-blurb hall of shame, and notes that all of them appeared in “legitimate publications” (can you believe it?):

about HARVEST: “Will surprise only readers who move their lips.” (Publishers Weekly)

about BLOODSTREAM: “(Gerritsen's) success is a sorry indicator of how far the book-buying public's standards have sunk.” (Albany Times-Union)

about THE SURGEON: “Abusive garbage . . . The world would be a better place if she had stuck to her medical practice.” (Maine Times)

I actually edited that last one, by the way. I still have mixed feelings about my decision to run it. It’s true that I hate babies, but even so, I probably wouldn’t do it again. Judge for yourself. My decision and the attendant criticism are spelled out here. (Hat tip)

Transmissions from the Bowels of a Fevered Brain or a Kinky Thrill Ride with Teeth?

This weekend Kate & I & some friends saw The President’s Last Bang, a Korean film that expertly combines what so many other films these days expertly combine: action, blood by the barrel, and pitch-black humor. Basically it’s a farce, in the tradition of Kubrick, about the assassination of Korea’s president-slash-dictator, Park Chung-hee, in 1979. His own security chief shot him while they were munching on kimchee in a “safe house.” I like the irony of that. Anyway, after seeing the movie, I went looking for reviews, but what I found was disappointing.

One writer called it a “kinky, historical thrill ride with teeth.” That’s the best mixed metaphor I’ve seen in a long time, at least until I read this, which refers to Park’s assassin, KCIA Director Kim Jae-gyu:

He’s not a very likeable guy to be the hero of a movie, and with his eyes constantly fixed on some kind of tortured Hell Dimension that only he can see, and his mouth continually spewing morbid non-sequitor transmissions from the bowels of his fevered brain, it’s hard to get a handle on him, but if he’s anything he’s deeply watchable, a change agent on crystal constantly throwing a wrench in the works.

The Village Voice, meanwhile, seems to be in La-La Land with their review. (Check out the paragraph that begins “Business as usual” and tell me what that means. I have no idea.) Anyway, a common observation by reviewers was the movie’s refusal to clearly attribute some motive to Director Kim. Why did he do it? “Did Kim shoot Park because of a bad stomach, an imagined slight, a sudden whim?” the Voice asks. He could have had a case of democracy or a case of the shits. The movie isn’t clear.

So I turned to a couple of history books. In The Two Koreas by Don Oberdorfer, Director Kim is an idealist if a bit of a bumbler. According to the American ambassador, he may have “misread” anti-Park signals coming from the Carter administration. “He thought we saw him as kind of a guy in a white hat,” said the ambassador. “In a way we did, but we saw him as the KCIA director, a white hat on a black head. And I think that contributed to this crazy decision.”

That’s the last thing American foreign policy needs to get mixed up in: white hats on black heads.

Meanwhile, Bruce Cumings plays to type in Korea’s Place in the Sun by offering up a good stiff dose of paranoia. Ito Hirobumi, by the way, was the Japanese governor of Korea.

Two years after these events I visited North Korea for the first time. My guides did not know what to do with me in the evening, there being next to no nightlife at that time (a bit has appeared by now). So they showed me movies in a screening room in the hotel. At the end of one of them, a historical docudrama in wide-screen color with the (Korea) soul-soothing title “An Chung-gun Shoots Ito Hirobumi,” the date of the act faded out slowly from the scene of the assassination at Harbin station: October 26, 1909. One of the guides looked at me and said, “When was Park Chung Hee shot?” I answered, “October 26, 1979.” “Seventy years is not such a long time,” he said, and then looked at the other guide with a self-satisfied grin. Later I wondered if this date had played a role in Kim Chae-gyu’s motives, but probably it was just a coincidence.

Who really knows what happened? Suffice to say (and I quote from here again) “This isn’t a sanctimonious, animatronic Hall of Presidents but a orgasmatronic political whorehouse.”

PS—The best review & certainly the most positive comes via Filmbrain.

Jus’ Turn de Tray ’Roun, Or How Mr. William M. Adams Manages to Simultaneously Please the White Man, Subvert His Oppressors, and Tell a Good Story

I wrote last week, not for the first time, about “empathy exercises” and the difficulty of teaching slavery or the Holocaust to students. Phillip Lopate has expressed his contempt over teachers chaining up their students to mimic slave ships. I actually found on the web teachers discussing the upside of holding mock slave auctions. Then there is the museum director in Selma, Alabama, who puts tourists in ratty clothes, calls them names, and sends them off to work building houses for the poor. A Day as a Slave, she calls it. Except that slaves didn’t get to go out for pizza after.

I don’t mean to mock the sincere attempts of teachers and others to educate on the horrors & mysteries of history—although I wonder how much their pedagogy has to do with some presumed imperative to make history entertaining and (whatever this means exactly) interesting. Why, for instance, is it not enough simply to direct students to the Library of Congress’s collection, “Born into Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938”?

Here you’ll find hundreds of short, graphic & memorable interviews with elderly ex-slaves. The website comes equipped with interesting discussions on the potentially racist ramifications of whites transcribing the conversations in the black idiom and on the possibility that much of what the informants informed about was not, in fact, true. Many it seems were storytellers. Which is why they wanted to talk in the first place. One of those folks was Mr. William M. Adams (pictured), aged 93, spiritualist, preacher & healer, who was born into bondage on the James Davis plantation of Jacinto Co., Texas. Here’s the story he told:

Jus’ fore de war, a white preacher he come to us slaves and says: “Do you wan’ to keep you homes whar you git all to eat, and raises your chillen, or do you wan’ to be free to roam roun’ without a home, like de wil’ animals? If you wan’ to keep you homes you better pray for de South to win. All day wan’s to pray for de South to win, raise the hand.” We all raised our hands ’cause we was skeered not to, but we sho’ didn’ wan’ de South to win.

Dat night all de slaves had a meetin’ down in de hollow. Ole Uncle Mack, he gits up and says: “One time over in Virginny dere was two ole niggers, Uncle Bob and Uncle Tom. Dey was mad at one ’nuther and one day dey decided to have a dinner and bury de hatchet. So day sat down, and when Uncle Bob wasn’t lookin’ Uncle Tom put some poison in Uncle Bob’s food, but he saw it and when Uncle Tom wasn’t lookin’, Uncle Bob he turned de tray roun’ on Uncle Tom, and he gits de poison food.” Uncle Mack, he says: “Dat’s what we slaves is gwine do, jus’ turn de tray roun’ and pray for de North to win.”

After de war dere was a lot of excitement ’mong de niggers. Dey was rejoicin’ and singin’. Some of ’em looked puzzled, sorter skeered like. But dey danced and had a big jamboree.

There’s much to be learned from that moment when some “looked puzzled, sorter skeered like.” Such a story may not amount to empathy exactly, but it is literature, and that still counts for something.

Godly Grammar

Here’s a question: “How can Christians take dominion in every aspect of life as we have been commanded . . . family, education, science, law, business, math, language, grammar, literature, civics, and on and on . . . unless we study God’s gift of Words or language?

“The answer is simple . . . we cannot.”

This comes from a home schooling website called Love to Learn Place, which has helpfully provided a guide to teaching godly grammar. “Grammar,” for instance, “Shows Order.” Also: “Grammar Reveals the Precision of God and His Plan.” “Grammar Demonstrates God’s Consistency—We Can Trust Him.”* And “Grammar Allows a Glimpse of God’s Comprehensiveness.”

This last rubric contains the following explanation:

God has created and is sovereign over all things. He not only has a plan for your life, but for the life of your country. His plans are not overturn by any person or thing. Nothing is more powerful than Him. Yet, He created all things totally unique and were created with a purpose that He will cause to bring about. By changing a word suffix, for example, the word can either be a noun, verb, adjective or adverb meeting the need of an author or speaker. The types of sentences—exclamatory, declarative, imperative, and interogatory—also reflect, to a small degree, our Lord’s comprehensiveness at meeting our need to communicate with others.

MS Word’s grammar & spell check had a few minor quibbles (overturned, interrogatory, etc.). Unfortunately, I never had the dominion & salvation check installed.

* No we can’t. Not if you’ve ever actually attempted to teach grammar to a rule-obsessed speaker of Chinese.

IMAGE: Francesca Berrini, Unusual Cards

Notes from a Frontoviki

In A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, the journalist & novelist experiences his first enemy fire shortly after the German invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941. These are just notes of his, of course, but they betray the eye of an artist, the dedication of a journalist, and the nose of a critic.

Gomel welcomes us with an air-raid warning. Locals say that the custom here is to sound the alarm when there are no  German aircraft around and, on the contrary, to sound the all-clear as soon as bombing starts.

Bombing of Gomel. A cow, howling bombs, fire, women . . . The strong smell of perfume—from a pharmacy hit in the bombardment—blocked out the stench of burning, just for a moment.

The picture of burning Gomel in the eyes of a wounded cow.

The colours of smoke. Typesetters had to set their newspaper by the light of burning buildings.

We stay the night with a tyro journalist. His articles aren’t going to join a Golden Treasury of Literature. I’ve seen them in the Front newspaper. They are complete rubbish, with stories such as ‘Ivan Pupkin has killed five Germans with a spoon’.

IMAGE: A Russian artillery unit fires on the advancing German army.

Last of the Penobscot

NPR reported Sunday morning on efforts to save the many dying (or, to be frank, dead) Native American languages. It was a good enough piece, and terribly, terribly sad. How difficult it was to hear tribal members learning sentences by rote based on a recording of their language’s last native speaker. I mean, think about it: What if, say, George W. Bush were the last native speaker of English, and we all had to learn the language from scratch based on his voice, his inflection, his words. In the end, we all might be speaking a new language, but it wouldn’t be English. So who’s to say this woman was any more literate than Bush? Or, to put it more respectfully: I imagine that any one speaker possesses just the tiniest sliver of a language’s possibilities. Is it even possible to resurrect a tongue from just one source?

These are the kinds of questions you ask when you’re not a Native American, when it’s not your culture & history slowly going silent.

Anyway, the report left me feeling like there’s just so much more to be said on the history & politics & anguish & bad feelings wrapped up in language loss. So I dug out a story I wrote back in 2001, when I lived in Maine, a report on the Penobscot Indian Nation and its own struggle to resuscitate a dead language. It was one of the most difficult & most interesting piece I’ve ever worked on: At the center of it are some pretty remarkable characters:

• An often angry tribal chief who was once named one of People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People.

• A fast-talking, dyslexic maple syrup-harvester who is one of the language’s most passionate & controversial advocates.

• A self-trained, probably crazy linguistic genius who at the end of his life knew more about the Penobscot language than anyone before or since. He also seemed to hate just about everybody but especially the Indians he had lived among for so many years.

• A self-deprecating languages prodigy from Harvard who does his best to rise above the shame & resentment and teach the Penobscot their own language.

Here’s their story . . .

UPDATE: Here’s a point-by-point response to the story from Maulian Dana.

IMAGE: “Algonquin Sketch” by Lawren Stewart Harris

Bix Porn (III), Or 'Bix' May Blow But IMDb Sucks

I have reported in the recent past on the strange & unfortunate collisions of things Bix Beiderbecke-related with, well, sex. Here is yet another.

On the Internet Movie Database there used to be a customer review of the English-language, Italian-made biopic Bix: An Interpretation of a Legend (1991, Giuseppe “Pupi” Avati, dir.). It began like this:

This is the Bix Beiderbecke story for gay men. The film appears to have been made by a combination of GQ, the photographers for the Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue, and Bruce Weber. It’s filled with beautiful twenty-something guys (Beiderbecke died at 28), all of them wearing nice clothing—often tuxedoes, posed against vintage 20s automobiles or in art deco theatre lobbies and nightclubs, in prep-school dorms, or on wrap-around porches of large Midwestern homes bathed in a soft golden light. Even when the men are a bit scruffy and in need of a shave, they appear as if in high-fashion photo layouts. This is a film where even the ugly guys are handsome. Watching it is like turning the pages of a deluxe coffee table book about Bix’s life.

I call your attention to this review not because I actually appeared in a couple of the film’s scenes. Instead, I’ve always found the reviewer’s take funny & ironic in the context of the rumors and controversy that have always swirled around Bix’s own sexuality. (Was he gay? Do we care?)

Then, the review up and disappeared. One currently posted comment, left by Michael T. Henderson, even references the missing review—“I would like to thank the guy who said that even the ugly guys were attractive (I played Pee Wee Russel)”—although Henderson also misspells his own character’s name and then goes on to insult the script. (Henderson, by the way, has done some fine work besides Bix, most prominently 1988’s Pledge Night, in which he answers to Chip. The film is notorious for its gratuitous nudity, its unintended homoeroticism, a killer hand coming up out of a toilet, and a cherry bomb up the ass. Music by Anthrax.)

Anyway, this weekend I was able to contact the author of the original IMDb customer review. He was fairly pissed off. In an e-mail, he explained that a single anonymous complaint led the review to be labeled “abusive” and deleted. IMDb officials will tell him nothing, causing him to suspect homophobia. “I made it clear that it was a comment for/about gays,” he told me. “I am gay; I am out. And that's that. If you don’t like it, tough.”

Hey, man. I’m cool. But when you’re dealing with Bix, it’s never that simple.

Odds & Ends (Weekend Vertigo Edition)

• Bernard-Henri Lévy gets his revenge with a letter to The New York Times Book Review Sunday, all but challenging Garrison Keillor to a duel. He writes that he would love to take up the issues in his book “with the herald of Lake Wobegon. At a time and place of his convenience. That is, on the turf and in front of the public of his choosing. But face to face, this time. On equal ground. He may consider this an invitation.”

• At the Language Log, meanwhile, this business of Turin vs. Torino is finally sorted out. Apparently NBC thought Torino just sounded cooler. Duh. The irony is that it’s not actually more authentic just because it’s Italian. Turin “has a longer history than Torino and even has the seal of approval from speakers of Piemontese.”

• A link in LL’s TvT post leads to an archived rant against improper pronunciation of Beijing. It’s not, it turns out, Beizhing, but Beijing. Who would have guessed? I don’t actually speak any foreign languages, but I know enough Korean to have my own list of pet peeves in this department. For instance, Kim Zhong Il? No. It’s Kim Jong Il. Actually, the vowel in his name is somewhere between the o in pot and the u in rug. I have a devil of a time hearing this vowel, and when I confess as much to Koreans, they always cock their heads and look at me like I’m from a foreign country or something. Also, it’s not tie kwon do, but—believe it or not—tae kwon do. Language Log has a great discussion on why we ignore the obvious in these situations. One last one (NPR, I’m talkin’ to you): Not Hun-die, but Hyun-day. OK, that’s enough. I hate people like me.

• Speaking of Dear Leader, there he is in the Washington Post Book World this weekend. Gordon G. Chang, author of Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes on the World, gets spanked for being snarky:

For example, the first chapter is called “Ku Klux Korea,” a clever attempt that falls flat. The same can be said for the book's description of the country's quirky dictator, a man given to “wearing curlers at home and four-inch heels in public,” as “the Wizard of Odd.” China is breathlessly called “the other side's best friend”—hardly a fair overall depiction of Beijing’s sometimes helpful role in the current crisis. Jimmy Carter is described as a “dictator groupie,” Henry A. Kissinger as “Lucifer.” Such throwaway lines, many of them ad hominem, give the book a self-indulgent feel.

I agree wholeheartedly with reviewer Michael O’Hanlon here, but then I look again at names like Kim, Carter, and Kissinger. It’s just so easy to be snarky. All right. That was snarky.

• Finally, Kim Jong Il loves to show up in strange places. This weekend, he snuck into Andrew Sullivan’s blog. Under the rubric “Headline of the Day,” Sully calls attention to CNN, which reported: “Shooting Victim Apologizes to Cheney.” Now for Sully’s own strange bit of snark: “Just substitute Kim Jong Il for Cheney, and it doesn't seem such a weird news story.” Huh?

• Oh, wait. One more. Finally, the Boston Globe gets around to reviewing David Foster Wallace’s not-all-that-new-anymore collection of essays, Consider the Lobster. (The link to my own take on the book is still going strong.) It’s an interesting review as much for what it doesn’t talk about—which is to say anything particularly specific about the actual book.*

* Including, thankfully, its footnotes.