LAST STAGE OF A LONG JOURNEY: A Poem After Eberhard Weber

The Last Stage Of A Long Journey is a song by Eberhard Weber which first appeared on his 1980 ECM album Little Movements. You can listen to that version here. It's a slow builder, but I especially like Charlie Mariano's moves from harshness to sweetness, and Rainier Bruninghaus' piano, and the way it seems to swirl around with Weber's bass. The song also appears, and lends the title to, Stages Of A Long Journey, another ECM disc recorded in 2005, for Weber's 65th birthday. This version features Jan Garbarek on sax, Gary Burton on vibes adding extra texture to Bruninghaus' piano, and a full orchestra in the background.
I was listening to that version a couple of years ago, and thinking about the stroke in 2007 which left Weber unable to use one hand, and thus play the bass, when the poem below appeared to me. I haven't made many changes in those two years, and I feel like the texture is somewhere between Weber's song and the rhythms of Woodmont beach, where I grew up.

Weber's since released two albums of bass solos he recorded in live performance over the years with the Garbarek group, with edits and improvisations, including his own one-handed keyboard playing; there has also been another tribute concert in Stuttgart, this one for his 75th birthday, where Garbarek and Burton returned, along with Pat Metheny, Paul McCandless, Danny Gottlieb, and composer/arranger Mike Gibbs. This time he plays one mallet with Burton on the vibes, worth a close listen if you can hear it. I've told the story elsewhere of my one meeting with Weber, he remains an inspiration to me. Here is part of my appreciation.


THE LAST STAGE OF A LONG JOURNEY

(after Eberhard Weber)

Snow falling on the Sound, wind scrapes like a dinghy on shore,

Off the jetties blowing sand across the beach into my face &

Forcing my eyes shut. It's winter

Where I grew up,

Winter in the place I would remember forever

If I could.

                    I turn

My back to the wind & without needing

To open my eyes I walk home, up & down the Central Avenue hill.

The back door is open; my mother & father never

Leave it locked. I float through the kitchen &

Just to the right of the hall is their desk. I open it, take

Some pictures from the middle drawer, to show my son

So he will remember the grandparents he never met

Then

My eyes open & I cannot remember

Who or what or where or when anything was

Or is. I show him the pictures; ask him to try

To remember for me. He is not there. The desperation

In my voice calling for him echoes down that narrow hallway

Full of far-off music I move through
Searching for him.

OLIVIA DE HAVILLAND AT 100: THE ACTRESS BATTLES FOR HERSELF

I wrote this piece at the end of July, but it went unsold and unpublished through August. It probably should have been hooked to her birthday, but I confess to being slow on the uptake. I wanted to focus specifically on DeHavilland's court victory, and the direct artistic impact it had on her career, once removed from the studio system. 

In a more general piece, like this, I would have mentioned how adept she was at comedy, even as a real ingenue; you can see two films released in 1935 for the evidence. Alibi Ike, based on the Ring Lardner story, is still a good baseball movie, with the comedian Joe E Brown (who had played professional baseball). It was her first film released, but her first film role as Hermia in the much-underrated at the time Warner Bros A Midsummer's Night's Dream, directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle, proved she was an actress of real talent. It was released after Alibi Ike. 

I would also have told the story of my friend Steve Springer and his wife Kara, who met on an Errol Flynn chatroom back in the early days of the internet and married very soon after. In London at dinner one night, he told the story and said the reason he'd fallen for her was she was the only person in the chatroom who could name the eight movies DeHavilland and Flynn had made together. I rattled off Captain Blood, Robin Hood, They Died With Their Boots On, Santa Fe Trail, Charge Of The Light Brigade, Elizabeth and Essex, and even Dodge City, but I couldn't recall the title of Four's A Crowd (a screwball-ish comedy that's another of her hidden gems). 'It's lucky,' I told Springer. 'If I'd got all eight you would have had to marry me.'

 
OLIVIA DE HAVILLAND: THE ACTRESS' BATTLE FOR HERSELF

On July 1^st, Olivia de Havilland celebrated her 100^th birthday. DeHavilland is best remembered today for her early work at Warner Bros, particularly the best of her eight roles opposite Errol Flynn, as a radiant Maid Marian in The Adventures of Robin Hood, and for Gone With The Wind where her performance as Melanie is arguably the finest in the film. But there is more to the career of one of Hollywood's best actresses, because in 1943 DeHavilland won a landmark decision in court against Warners, a decision which launched her career on a second act of remarkable quality.

It is not an exaggeration to see DeHavilland vs Warner Bros Pictures as the first of three major blows that brought about the end of the studio system as it had functioned for some four decades. It was followed by the 1948 anti-trust ruling which stopped studios from owning and block booking the theatres which showed their movies, thus separating production and distribution. Then, with the rapid growth of television a few years later, actors and their agents increasingly assumed the producing role studios had kept as a virtual monopoly for themselves.

DeHavilland's case was simple: when her seven year contract with Warners expired, the studio attempted to keep her for another six months, citing accumulated days of suspension which they said she owed them. But California law prohibited personal services contracts of longer than seven calendar years, and the appeal court's confirmation of the verdict in her favour, which became known as the DeHavilland Law, meant DeHavilland herself became a free agent, and the de facto blacklisting by Warners which had stalled her career was finally lifted.

She had received some of those suspensions for her reluctance to accept the parts she was assigned, and her constant battle for better roles. The proffer of such roles was sometimes used as a tactic to draw a refusal and thus suspension, thereby extending the contract. But Jack Warner also saw her as an ingenue, and she was usually cast in roles for ingenues grown up: as the stalwart girlfriend, the loyal wife, or the virtuous foil for the more interesting bad girls of film scripts: not just Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara, but the likes of Rita Hayworth in The Strawberry Blonde or Paulette Goddard in Hold Back The Dawn, just to name two from 1941. After Warners, DeHavilland had to fight to bring people on board to produce and direct her in roles she chose for herself. She worked far less often, but what is fascinating is the way the first four roles she picked all drew explicitly on the frustrations of the characters she had earlier played. She was consciously crossing the artificial boundaries Warners had set for her.

First, she persuaded Mitchell Leisen, who’d directed Hold Back The Dawn, to use his deft touch with actresses on To Each His Own (1946), where her noble character just happened to be an unwed mother, which gave DeHavilland the chance to stretch the boundaries of how audiences defined 'good' women by maintaining the character they were familiar with seeing throughout her moral travails. She won her first Oscar for the role. Hollywood’s appreciation of her fight against Warners may have played a part, but her performance was a complete vindication of her judgement of her own talents.

De Havilland followed up with The Dark Mirror (1946), directed with noirish style by Robert Siodmak, in which she played sisters, one the classic dreamy good girl, the other a deadly femme fatale, in effect her stereotype and its opposite, a lovely piece of commentary on her own career. It was received lukewarmly by the critics, particularly where it bogs down into Freudian murk, which was a hot topic in Hollywood at the time. But it holds up far better than Hitchcock’s Spellbound, released the previous year, in which Gregory Peck impersonates a psychiatrist, with attendant mumbo jumbo and of course an icy blonde shrink played by Ingrid Bergman at her most intelligent yet vulnerable.

After a spell on stage, during which she met her first husband (both her husbands were writers, an interesting coincidence), DeHavilland returned to the screen in The Snake Pit (1948) directed by Anatole Litvak, playing a woman committed by her husband to a state mental institution after suffering a nervous breakdown. There are harrowing scenes of what amounts to torture, and DeHavilland is brilliant in marking her character’s transformation throughout the process. It's worth a comparison to Sam Fuller's more lurid Shock Corridor, some 15 years later. She was nominated for an Oscar, but won awards in Venice and from the New York Film Critics and National Film Board.

She finished the quartet of re-defining films with The Heiress (1949), maybe her finest, most subtle role. She convinced William Wyler to direct after she saw the play, and, drawing on all those nice girl roles, she wrung every possible ounce of emotion out of the plain Catharine Sloper, falling in love with Montgomery Clift, whom her wealthy father, played by Ralph Richardson in rehearsal for films like The Sound Barrier, distrusts. It won her a second Oscar, and remains a melodramatic classic.

From that point, DeHavilland put Hollywood in its place, working on stage (though turning down the role of Blanche DuBois in the Broadway debut of A Street Car Named Desire, for which she would have been perfect) and caring for her family. Her second marriage took her to France and her film career became more intermittent, but it is worth seeking out Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964) directed by Robert Aldrich in his signature mix of Siodmak noir and Sam Fuller tabloid excitement. With Bette Davis and Agnes Moorehead dominating its gothic grand guignol, the formula that had worked so well in Baby Jane, DeHavilland channels every bit of her inner Melanie one more time to steal the film from them.

‘I wanted to play real human beings,’ DeHavilland once told an audience at the NFT in London. She had to win herself the freedom to do that, but what she really wanted was to play larger than life, bigger than real, parts. And she was every bit the actress to conquer such roles.

ROBERT DALEY'S HANDS OF A STRANGER: A Forgotten Friday Entry

Robert Daley in the 1950s was the PR man for the New York football Giants, at the time the NFL was breaking into the national sports consciousness, and the Giants were about to challenge the baseball Yankees as the city’s glamour team. He reported from France for the New York Times, then worked for a year as a deputy commissioner, for public relations, of the New York City police department; his term, in 1971-72 coincided with one of the most turbulent in the NYPD’s history.

This led to his best book, the non-fiction Prince Of The City (1978), which was made into a great film by Sidney Lumet, starring Treat Williams, in 1981. Daley’s fiction has been less acclaimed, but a number of his novels are quite good, and were filmed: the underrated To Kill A Cop (1976) as a decent TV movie, Year Of The Dragon (1981) in an underrated movie by Michael Cimino, and Tainted Evidence (1993) as Night Falls On Manhattan (1993), again by Lumet in 1996. They are big books which read something like sagas; they inevitably present the police force as an extended family, sometimes like a mafia family, and like Joseph Wambaugh’s novels of the LAPD, they deal with the strains the cop’s world places on real family life.

Hands Of A Stranger (1985) is another of those, and it is a deceptive kind of story. It opens with Judith Adler, a rare female Assistant DA, who handles rape cases and aims to be a high flier. She’s brought into an investigation in New Jersey which involves drugs, but also women who appear to have been coerced and raped for a series of videotapes. The drug connection brings her to Joe Hearn, recently promoted to inspector and given command of the drugs squad. Joe is devoted to his wife Mary, but she is beginning to chafe as the pull of Joe’s career relegates to her to second place.

As Joe and Judith are drawn to each other, Mary embarks on a flirtation with her son’s baseball coach, which winds up with her in a sleazy Manhattan hotel room, trying desperately to get out. But before she can, an armed man crashes into the room, and with the coach bound and gagged, rapes Mary.

The set-up plays out as an almost inevitable personal car crash for almost all involved. Mary has to tell Joe she’s been raped, while witholding some details, and Joe, already devoting more time than he should to the videotaping case because he and Judith are starting an affair, begins investigating the rape on his own time, eventually learning the truth and looking for his revenge.

The story works in large part because Daley is so good on the pressures of the police department: the way Joe has to choose between family and job, the way his superiors assume Mary, with a college degree and a talented artist, is what one calls a typical broad, and the way Adler has to fight twice as hard as a woman for her job, and devote even more energy to it.

But it’s also a strange novel, because although it’s set in the Eighties, it seems to be taking place in the Fifties; it could be a novel of the police in the time of Mad Men. It could be largely because the morality of the police is still drawn on the previous era, and the people involved, largely Catholic, have that sort of 50s morality ingrained in their pysches, but there is a definite sort of double standard here, something that makes forbidden fruit seem more exotic than it might be, and something that Daley makes evident when, after the story resolves itself in shooting and near madness, Judith takes a Caribbean holiday and, in the end, is too moral to lose herself to a man she meets, instead returning to her job, a virgin as it were, a bride of the DA’s office. It’s rare to see such morality laid out so plainly, and of course, Adler is not Irish Catholic and not a cop.

It’s not Daley’s best work, but it is well paced and detailed, and fascinating for its odd insight. And it has a feel of reality to it. It too was filmed, as a three-hour two-part TV movie, with great leads: Armand Asante as Joe Hearn, Beverly D’Angelo as his wife (Italians playing Irish) and Blair Brown as the DA, renamed to make her a WASP rather than Jewish. The screenplay is by Arthur Kopit which in itself is interesting, given the issues of morality and the way behaviour is repeated, as a way of coping. I haven’t seen it, but the supporting cast (Michael Lerner, Forest Whitaker, and Arliss Howard) is strong, and includes Ben Affleck as the Hearn’s baseball-playing son. I will be searching it out, not least to see what Larry Elikann, a TV and TV movie director, did with the kind of material Sidney Lumet would crush.

Hands Of A Stranger by Robert Daley

Signet Books, 1986, $4.50 ISBN0451145097

REMEMBERING CHOO CHOO COLEMAN

I noted with some sadness the other day that Choo Choo Coleman had died. Chooch was a catcher on the original New York Mets baseball team which became famous for its ineptitude, a quality magnified by the fact that it was located in America's media hub, and in effect trying to replace the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants in the hearts of New Yorkers.

Living in the New York media diaspora, but not a New York fan, I followed this with all the bemusement a 10 or 11 year old could muster, and the keen eye for baseball that was common place among kids of our day. Plus, for reasons that remain to this day a mystery to me, my best friend Bruce Bonessi became a die-hard Mets' fan, from the start a true believer, with all the attendant delusions such a fate implies.

Chooch was one of the iconic Mets, who came in two varieties. The first was the assortment of well-known stars recycled at Shea Stadium, mostly former  New York faces like Gil Hodges, manager Casey Stengel and Willie Mays, but also the likes of Philly's fvourite Richie Ashburn. They were past their primes, but they made good copy, especially Casey, whose crazy-smart aphorisms and mangled syntax became, with the hapless Mets instead of the dominant Yankees, like something from a Samuel Beckett play. It occurs to me that Beckett might have found the Mets a worthwhile subject.

 The second group were the Mets' original products, cast-offs from other teams whom they chose to fill out the roster, the most notable of whom had the kind of self-defining (if only in an ironic sense) nicknames that make the best athletes memorable. 'Hot' Rod Kanehl. The immortal 'Marvellous' Marv Throneberry. 'The Glider', Ed Charles. And Clarence 'Choo Choo' Coleman.

The most famous Chooch story, repeated in all his obituaries, happened when the Mets' wonderfully tongue-tied announcer, Ralph Kiner, a kind of Beckettian counterpoint to Stengel, was trying to fill time during a rain delay by interviewing Choo Choo. It went pear-shaped when Kiner asked how Chooch got his nickname and Chooch said 'I dunno'. Flailing for a response, Kiner asked 'Well, what's your wife's name, and what's she like?' Chooch replied: 'Her name Mrs. Coleman, and she like me, Bub.'

Many years later, Choo Choo would explain he got his nickname when he was a kid, because he was fast. Indeed, Casey said he'd never seen a catcher so fast 'chasing passed balls'. Roger Angell wrote that Choo Choo 'handled outside curve balls like a man fighting bees'.

But I got another Chooch story from Bob Miller, one of two Bob Millers who pitched without memorable nicknames for the Mets. I met him at some event while I was working for Major League Baseball, and the topic of those Mets and Choo Choo came up; I may have just read that story above in a baseball book. Miller said he could beat it.

He had come in to pitch relief, with a runner on second. Choo Choo called for a curve, which he threw, and the batter was waiting on it and drove it to the wall. The runner scored; the hitter was now on second with a double. Miller calls time and signals for Chooch to approach the mound. 'Chooch, we have to change the signs,' he says,  'they read that one, he knew the curve was coming'. 'OK Bub', Chooch says (he called everyone Bub, which was easier than recalling individual names, though Miller thought he might actually be saying Bob), and holds up 2 fingers. 'We take the second sign now'. He turns to go back to the plate but Miller calls him back. 'What's wrong Bub?' 'Chooch you just told 15,000 people we're taking the second sign.' Chooch 'thinks' about it for moment. 'You're right Bub.' He holds up his glove and whispers behind it, 'OK we take the third sign now'.

If you don't know baseball and can't follow this, the runner on second can see the catcher's signs to the pitcher, and signal the batter what kind of pitch is coming. So by flashing three signs (but only using, in this case, the third one) the catcher and pitcher can disguise what's coming from the opposition.

So Chooch goes back behind the plate and squats. He wants a fastball, so he puts down one finger, the universal fastball sign. Then he puts down one finger again. And then one finger for a third time. Miller said he laughed so hard he fell off the mound. He claimed it was called a balk by the umpire, and the runner advanced to third, but that might be apocryphal. After all, three number ones was good enough. RIP Chooch.

BEHIND THE OLYMPIC CURTAIN

I wrote this essay after the Olympic opening ceremonies in Rio, struck by the way the Olympic experience repeats itself. Sadly, that insight might better have been sold as prediction, rather than analysis, as it proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy in which no one was interested, since they had been seduced and distracted by the games.....

The Olympic Games in Rio are underway, and like a battleship’s slowly turning cannon, the media’s focus has finally been shifted away from crime, or pollution, or shoddy construction, or corruption, or even an unexpected ouster of an elected government, and over to the competitions themselves (and the attendant questions of which athletes and federations are ‘clean’ of performance enhancing products). With swimming one of the early foci of attention, the federation quietly reinstated a twice-banned Russian swimmer, apparently deciding that if the water in the pool did not bubble or steam when she entered the water she must indeed be drug-free.

This is the eleventh Olympics at which I have worked, eight in the summer and three in the winter. The first was in my then-hometown of Montreal in 1976, and it set the pattern for virtually every games that has followed. The month’s run-up to the games produces stories about ineptitude and delays in preparation, about potential accommodation and transport disasters, and in some cases about the government corruption, mis-appropriation of funds, or political unsuitability for staging the world’s biggest sporting event. Then the games begin, and the curtain draws shut around the wonderful wizard of Olympic Oz.

Montreal was a veritable showcase of disaster, putting huge financial burdens on both the city and the province of Quebec which took them decades to crawl out from under. The stadium remained unfinished because of design flaws and a constant stream of strikes by workers who wound up almost-finishing things after enjoying months of golden overtime. I wrote a piece at the time, for a weekly in the States, about how French Canadians were furious when it was learned the royal yacht Britannia deposited its royal wastes untreated into the St Lawrence River; a boat was dispatched each day to collect and deposit them instead into the Montreal sewer system, whence they were returned to the river, untreated, because the money for sewage treatment had been spent instead on a magnificent fountain outside the Olympic stadium.

After the financial disaster of Montreal, no one wanted the Games. Moscow already had 'won' the 1980 Summer Games; the IOC traditionally admires authoritarian governments who can allocate resources without voiced complaints. I was at the Olympic Congress at Baden-Baden in 1981 when Los Angeles were ‘awarded’ the 1984 games; there were no other bidders. Peter Uberroth’s committee went back to America and, citing the potential huge losses, cut deals to get services donated for free, drew on huge numbers of unpaid volunteers, and sought sponsorship for the games. After it was over, far from the expected financial disaster, the Los Angeles Organising committee announced a series of steadily increasing profits, and big bonuses for its bosses. The free-enterprise system perked its ears and the race, as they say, was on.

The IOC moved swiftly to appropriate sponsorship for itself rather than leave it to the organizing committees. Tied to the potential bonanza of advertising revenue from American television, the IOC created a profit centre which benefited from both a worldwide audience and an assembly of competitors who did not require payment. The Olympics became a brand, and cities fought to stage the games on the IOC`s behalf, with the committee`s VIP treatment extracted from those cities. It was a largesse on a grand scale, which only occasionally was revealed to the public when the bribery became too obvious.

Rio de Janeiro is in many ways a poster child for the Olympics. The government was overturned shortly before the games, the kind of timing that is commonplace in Brazil, where bad news is usually run through Parliament just before Carnival begins and thus is ignored for the next weeks and forgotten before the hangover has worn off. The weeks before the games found a steady stream of disaster stories: unfinished or shoddy buildings, including the athletes’ village, the collapsed cycle path, the polluted water, the mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus, and capybaras roaming the new Olympic golf course described as `giant rodents, which is technically true but conjured up visions of huge plague-carrying rats, rather than cuddly pig-sized hamsters.

Then came the opening ceremony: a Tongan disguised as a WWF wrestler entered the arena coated in olive oil and everyone forgot their problems. It was Vendredi Gras, and it reminded me that London 2012 was not that much different. Who in Britain tracked the property deals that saw virtually all spectators at the Olympic Park routed through a shopping mall to arrive at the sports? Who has followed the awarding of the Olympic stadium to West Ham? Who remembers the promises to Britain’s youth as luxury flats go up where once sporting arenas stood in East London? In London’s opening ceremony James Bond, The Queen, Mr Bean, and (blessedly) Ray Davies were presented to the world as the happy face of Britain. The £12 billion that came from nowhere in a country whose budget cannot be stretched to pay doctors or nurses is now forgotten. Curiously, the cost in Brazil has been estimated at $12 billion, in a city whose separation between the rich, who live vertically in gated high rises, and the poor, who live horizontally in favellas, seems like a model for a London of the future.

Yet listening to the speeches, watching the happy athletes of the world, seeing Kip Keino honoured for working with children in Kenya, seemed to make it all worthwhile, even to the most cynical of us. When IOC president Thomas Bach said we were all equal in "Òlympism" (the mind boggles) I almost believed him enough to have my taxi driver try the lane reserved for IOC VIP vehicles next time we got caught in a traffic jam. Then experience, the little Toto of the mind, pulled back the curtain to reveal Frank Morgan pulling levers and playing President of the IOzC. For the people of Brazil, the one-off Carnival has brought Oz to Rio. The circuses eclipse the bread for the next two weeks. Then, like London, the memories will be happy ones and the questions that linger will remain largely unasked, much less answered. Like Dorothy, Brazil will wake up, thinking `there`s no place like home`.

EINOJUHANI RAUTAVAARA: IN MEMORIAM

Cantus Arctics is a remarkable piece of music, integrating the calls of wild birds above the arctic circle into something that both soars in an almost classical romantic Scandinavian sense (think Sibelius) and challenges with its lean modernity. It spins around the listener as birds might, drops hints and moves away, and is totally beguiling.  It was my introduction to Einojuhani Rautavaara, who died last week, and it is a record I have given to many people, not least my late ex-father-in-law, who played horn in the New Zealand national orchestra, and it seems to have captivated them all.

Of course no Finnish composer can avoid comparison to Sibelius, but oddly I see in Rautavaara a strand more like the less romantic challenges in Nielsen, or the much under-appreciated Robert Simpson. Rautavaara studied at Julliard, and while he was there worked with Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland at Tanglewood; you can see a bit of them in his work too, a mixing of romantic and what I saw called post-expressionist. What stands out for me is that he seems to use the different forms as an extension of their content--the ones that seem to fit.

I'd recommend the sweeping brilliance of his 7th Symphony, Angel Of Light, the 3rd Piano Concerto (Gift of Dreams), and if you want to feel his roots, the 3rd Symphony (which he called his Bruckner work). What Rautavaara shows is what I like to think of as the best of post-modernism, a much maligned and much mis-used term, in that his work delves deeply into the possibilities of the tools with which he works, but never loses touch with the impulses that drive us to express our deepest selves in music.  It is both challenging and accessible, appealling to both the mind and the heart. What more can we ask of art?