Some Came Running

On "watermelon" (and "fried chicken")

Ivan Julian and Robert Quine at a 1978 recording session, photo by Kate Simon. This piece presented some challenges with respect to illustration, as will be evident. 

After I saw Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave for the first time last fall, I commented to a colleague, “I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to listen to ‘Brown Sugar’ again.” This was both kind of a joke and kind of not. One of the most trenchant aspects of the movie was the relentless but very patient and thorough way it laid out the sadistic psychosexual disease with which the white race poisoned both itself and the race it enslaved; the aforementioned song by the Rolling Stones is both a descriptor and a symptom of that same disease.  Mick Jagger’s rock-and-roll (that is, somewhat elemental) sense of literary irony, combined with his smirk add further dimensions of discomfort to the tune; on the other hand, or maybe on the same hand, it’s got a good beat and you, whether black or white, but probably particularly if you’re white, as it may turn out, can dance to it. Besides, nobody actually still thinks that the Rolling Stones endorse slavery, and if you read Keith Richards’ autobiography you know that the lyrics to their song generally originate as apt-sounding nonsense words: what we hear in the first verse as “scarred old” is actually “skydog,” which Jagger had recently learned was guitarist Duane Allman’s nickname.

A couple of nights ago, the author Daniel Handler, while hosting the National Book Awards ceremony, made a joke predicated on the fact that Jacqueline Woodson, an African-American author who won an award that evening, was/is “allergic to watermelon.” Various rationalizations, condemnations, recriminations, and apologies followed, and as of the Friday morning I’m writing this, the story still has legs, thanks in part to the tendency of outlets like Salon to get Deeply Troubled and stay Deeply Troubled until they’ve got the whole Deeply Troubling Problem worked out.

My own response to the anecdote was befuddlement of a not entirely purely civic-minded sort. It was more like, “Wait, people actually still tell watermelon jokes?” It sounds glib of me, I know—“Your mode of racism is pretty quaint there, fella! Did Straight Outta Compton accomplish nothing?” My perspective derives from a position I’ve held for a long time, and that Handler’s remarks have maybe shocked me out of holding. It’s this, to begin with: I’ve long considered myself a free-speech absolutist. I’m not sure if my primary influence here was Nat Hentoff or selected issues of Forced Exposure, but there you are. I frequently liked to cite Hentoff’s citation of Brandeis about sunlight being the best disinfectant, the best solution to hate speech being more speech, all that. And as a movie lover, I’ve always deplored censorship, particularly a kind of self-censorship. I understood, conceptually, why Disney would cut the “pickanniny” centaurs in the “Pastoral” sequence of Fantasia when re-releasing that film to general audiences and on home video. But I also bristled at the fact that a film scholar such as myself had no access to an unexpurgated version (the cuts in fact are rather clumsy, from a technical standpoint). Every now and then I’d also express dissatisfaction in my inability to view the Looney Tune “Coal Black And De Sebben Dwarfs” in anything besides a kind of samizdat format. Yeah, the 1943 cartoon indulges in every kind of broad outrageous and unfair caricature of African Americans, but Looney Tunes were at the time, I old myself, equal opportunity providers of broad outrageous and unfair, so what’s the fucking harm? Just slap a disclaimer on the opening title of a Warner Archive “Censored Cartoons” collection or something and be done with it.

I now have a fundamental understanding of the fatal flaw of my logic here. Lester Bangs’ 1979 essay “The White Noise Supremacists” has a heckuva lot to answer for (including its effective slander of Miriam Linna—I really think subsequent editions of Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung ought to have an apologetic footnote or something) but it does have very valuable passages, including a long quote from the African-American musician Ivan Julian, who was a bit of an odd man out in the late ‘70s punk scene while playing with Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Rock Against Racism notwithstanding. Talking to Bangs about levels of music industry racism, Julian said, “I’ll tell you one thing: the entrepreneurs, record company people and shit are a hell of a lot worse. People like Richard Gottehrer, who produced the album, and Seymour Stein and a lot of other people up at Sire records. They were totally condescending, they’d talk to you differently, like you were a child or something. I hard a lot of clichés on the level of being invited over to somebody’s house for fried chicken.”

Invited over to somebody’s house for fried chicken. I read that essay for the first time on its initial publication in the Village Voice when I was 20, and I remember my jaw dropping in piss-and-vinegar indignation. Fried chicken jokes were clearly an old man thing, all other social dimensions implied notwithstanding. This cultural upheaval, the one I was living through, the one I was trying to be a part of, we were going to wipe all that shit out.

 That was naïve of me, yes. And as years went by, my opinion mutated, and specifically with respect to the kind of material I describe above. The racist attitudes they embodied, I thought, had by this time been so thoroughly denounced and disproved to be considered completely antiquated, to the point that they could be shrugged off as plainly ridiculous, and hence, the materials containing depictions of those attitudes can be made completely available with no fear of actual harm. And that, I’m afraid, is even more naïve of me—willfully naïve in fact. I’m a straight white male born in 1959 who for some reason honestly thought that watermelon jokes—particularly among literary, or even literate, people—were a thing of the past. Even “meta” watermelon jokes, which I’m not entirely certain Handler’s was. Anyway, for better or worse, Handler, born in 1970, proved me wrong. I can’t really complain if “Coal Black And De Sebben Dwarfs” stays buried. Given the circumstances, it probably ought to. 

"Missing Reels" and "The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing:" Two Very Different Movie-Mad Novels

This month sees the publication of two novels about both movies and movie love—or movie lust, or movie madness, it all depends on how you look at it, I guess. I am very fond of both of these books and believe you ought to buy them. So there.

The first is Missing Reels, by Farran Smith Nehme, published by The Overlook Press. I shall have to disclose my bias here: Farran, who blogs as The Self Styled Siren (you knew that already, did you not?) is one of my dearest friends in the whole wide world. I believe that she too holds me in some esteem (I blush as I write this), and take as evidence the fact that in her novel she gives my surname to a fictional silent-movie leading man. So, those cards are on the table. And it's because I love Farran that I was actually vaguely terrified to read this novel, her first. Although of course I should not have been. She can write, I always knew that.  

The book is both a steady and rollicking New York story of the late 1980s. The heroine is Ceinwen, a feisty, resourceful young woman working at a vintage clothing shop in the East Village, who discovers that her quietly elegant neighbor Miriam, an old woman who guards an air of mystery, may have been a silent movie actress. Ceinwen's not-entirely-inchoate vintage-movie love is hence melded with the curiosity of an amateur detective, and both of these aspects of the character are nurtured and/or thwarted by a motley crew of academics, film preservationists, and some romantic foils, both genuine and potential, associated with those fields. The significant amorous connection in Missing Reels is the dashing, not-that-movie-crazy mathematician Matthew, who’s also got a hot romance going with an Italian colleague, which he insists he’s not about to drop on Ceinwen’s account. And then there’s Fred, the put-upon minion of a mysterious film-preservation organization who introduces Ceinwen to a sort of old-movie utopia when he brings her to a special screening of some Fatty Arbuckle rarities: 

“I think these people are awesome,” whispered Ceinwen.

“They know their stuff, that’s for sure,” muttered Fred.

It became clear, about two minutes into He Did and He Didn’t, that this was the best silent-movie audience she’d ever encountered. No restlessness, unless you counted Fred’s shifts of his legs and arms, and he always did that. No talking. Every laugh was related to something on screen. They picked up every gesture, no matter how small. The first glimpse of Fatty—Roscoe got a round of applause, Mabel Normand’s pretty face got an audible sigh, Buster Keaton got a shout of recognition. Fred wasn’t a lout laugher, bu he was completely caught up in what was happening on screen, leaning forward and occasionally giving her a side glance to see if she got the joke. And Arbuckle was a marvel, holding his own even with Keaton, supple and flexible in the way he moved.

When the applause at the last film died down and the lights came back up, she told him, “I don’t know what you’re complaining about.”

“I’m not complaining about the movies. Arbuckle’s great.”

“I like the audience, too. They’re so into it.”

“I like most of them.” She’d stood up to stretch, but he was still sprawled in his seat, legs straight out and hands in his jacket pockets.

Pretty wide variety of ages here, and some big-time vintage clothing. That was a real 1920s sailor dress on that little brunette. That older had an alligator bag. And some people had gone all the way into actual costume. There was a Louise Brooks, and a Mary Pickford with a tiered lace dress, flat Mary Janes and cascading blonde curls. No Tramps, but that man had on a zoot suit.

What makes Farran’s book particularly bracing is that, as romantic comedies go, it’s as tart as it is sweet, maybe even more so. For all her energy and intelligence, Ceinwen is fully capable of being a bit of a petulant brat. Matthew’s oh-so-European faux-progressive rationales for his have-it-both-ways management of the affair with Ceinwen seemed transparently opportunistic to this straight white male who came of age in the early ‘80s. And while nobody as passionate as movies as Farran is would construct a narrative that argued some films are better off not being found, Missing Reels is pretty blunt in its acknowledgement that many Old Hollywood stories are pretty unpleasant ones, and that the people who lived them maybe have the right not to have those stories exhumed. I'm making the book sound like a Moral Tale or something right about now, so I should hasten to add that what it actually is, its considerable human wisdom aside, is a paragon of wit, a beautifully plotted story, and a romping good read. 

Nicholas Rombes's novel The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing, published later by Two Dollar Radio, is an incredibly gripping but entirely less comic proposition. Rombes was kind enough to send me a galley, along with a note in which he professed to be a longtime admirer of my work (actually, it's about ethics in film blogging, amirite?), and I gave him permission to use as a blurb a note I wrote back to him with my reaction, which is/was: "The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is an uncanny pleasure, a secret history in a series of alchemical celluloid prose poems. I enjoyed the hell out of it even as it began to conspire with my dreams." The story is of a scholar who tracks down and interviews a notorious figure who, somehow, has managed to come into possession of, and then destroy, single-print films of extraordinary provenance. The scholar finds Laing in a seedy motel (one can almost feel the moistness of the carpet under ones feet while reading) and compels him to relate the details of the destroyed films as best he can. In recounting his encounter with Laing, the narrator gives upsetting hints concerning his own tragedy. Here is a particularly striking passage: 

I’m not exactly certain that the person who returned to the motel room with the grocery bag was, in fact, R. Laing. Listen, of course it was him. I don’t mean I doubt it was him literally, in the sense that Christ is “Christ” or Satan is “Satan.” Something had changed, that’s all I’m trying to say. At the time I had no such suspicions that it wasn’t him, or at least not outright suspicions, rather something more like very thin spider-webbed doubts spread so delicately out upon my thoughts that I couldn’t collect it all into a single thought. It was only later, in preparing this manuscript in fact, that these doubts began to take shape into something more fixed and permanent. And even now, like I’ve said, of course I know it was the same Laing as before, just as the resurrected Christ is the same as the pre-crucified Christ, of Satan is the same as the rebellious angel that became Satan. It’s just that when I think about it now, looking back, I have the feeling that it wasn’t him or at least not the same him. But it’s just a feeling and nothing more.

            And yet, his descriptions of the films changed somehow, linguistically, in ways that I’m only now beginning to sort out. For I’ve come to see, in retrospect, that there was a void at the heart of the films that Laing destroyed, and that through his descriptions of these films he was attempting to fill, somehow, that void, as if talking about the films might fill in the meaning that they themselves lacked. I also came to understand that Laing didn’t think of the destroyed films as “lost treasures” as all, but instead as something more dangerous, as expressions of pure nothingness. 

Rombes abjures conventional narrative in favor of stories within stories...or rather stories located at particular nodes and modes of narrative form: oral synopses, transcripts of notes, a “screenplay” “treatment,” and so on. And yet, from the periphery of the map this slim book conjures, a stabbingly vivid account of loss worms its way into the work, suggesting that the sought absolution of the novel’s title is less for Laing than it is for the book’s narrator. A rather remarkable effect. 

Three direct experiences of Jack Bruce

1: First time I saw Jack Bruce play was at the performing arts center at William Paterson College, in 1980, most likely the fall, leading an outfit called Jack Bruce and Friends. I hadn't heard a whole lot of his post-Cream output at the time, and a good deal of what I knew of seemed kind of intimidating to me. But I was also wary of holding him in the reflexive contempt that I still sometimes thought my post-punk aesthetic demanded. Having developed a taste for the astringent progressivism of Henry Cow and Art Bears and such a couple of years earlier, I was definitely an art-rocker in training, and Bruce's presentation hit a relaxed sweet spot with me. He and his band were relaxed, coming off like journeymen virtuosos—Robert Christgau described Bruce's music as "dense and dissonant and throbbing," and it was/is, but the players—Clem Clemson on guitar, David Sancious on keyboards, Bruce of course on bass, and man-mountain Billy Cobham (whose constant grin was the only indication that he wasn't just on the verge of casually destroying his kit) on drums—ere sufficiently relaxed and assured that this might have been the regular Thursday night gig for a bar band that was very attached to its bar. I was impressed, and then when they came back for the encore to repave the campus parking lot with a very heavy rolling rendition of "Politician," kind of awestruck. 

2: In the largely first rate biography of Bruce by Harry Shapiro, Jack Bruce: Composing Himself, the musician recollects his brief tenure with the then-carnivalesque Golden Palominos, beginning in 1986. "That was a completely mad band," Bruce says. "[Founder and drummer] Anton Fier was completely drunk all the time. I remember Anton sitting in the first class lounge in Paris Airport with a bottle of brandy and drinking it in the twenty minutes between flights." 

I do not doubt this. The profile I wrote of Fier and the Palominos, which ran in the February 1987 issue of Spin, is for the most part an account of the writer getting nearly blind drunk on a variety of Chinese wines with Fier and Peter Blegvad. At the time, which seems in my mind to have been by an eternity from the feckless collegiate fall of 1980, feckless freelance rock critic and consumer electronics magazine Associate Editor me had become a potential Boswell to the GoPals, as they were referred to on the scene. I did not really ride to any unprecedented career heights in this endeavor but I heard a lot of great music and got royally fucked up with a bunch of wonderful artists. Singer Syd Straw used to marvel at touring with a bunch of guys who actually played chess in the van, and yeah, eavesdrop on a conversation between Blegvad and Jody Harris and you were likely to hear them comparing notes on Thom Gunn, but good God those guys liked their drink, and when he was touring with them between '86 and '87, so too did Bruce. I remember a show at Webster Hall at which Harris, with both his standard deadpan detachment and a dollop of genuine irritation, told me of a Bostn show the night before at which Jack had gotten so blitzed that he futzed the words to most of the songs he had to sing. "I'm really sorry, I'll never do it again," Jody reported as Jack's apology, and we both smirked. "I'm sure no one who's ever worked with him has ever heard that before, ever," I observed. 

Whatever his damage had been the night prior, he bounced back strongly that evening, and the set was a remarkable pageant of raucous, unself-conscious eclecticism. Slapp Happy and Funkadelic are not two bands one generally thinks of in the space of a single 24-hour or even two-week period, and yet here's a stage featuring founding members of both (Bernie Worrell and, later, Mike Hampton played that night) as well as Jack Bruce, and it all meshes, and rocks, and pushes. I got to go to what is commonly referred to these days as "the after party" (I think back then it was called "a party") and everyone was so wired that it was once more off to the races, and that's when I had my most significant personal interaction with Jack Bruce. I was waiting in a short line to use the facilities, and Bruce scurried over to me, hunched over a bit, and manically requested permission to cut in. "I have to go really bad," he said. Well, who was I to deny Jack Bruce. I said go ahead, and when the bathroom door opened, Bruce scurried in, and held the door open to let in another guy. Feeling slightly burnt, I said, "What he gonna do, hold your dick for you?" Jack Bruce thought this was hilarious. He was still laughing as he closed the door.

The thing was, whatever Bruce was doing at any given time, there was never a trace of genuine-rock-superstar-condescension in the way he carried himself,and there was never a minute of doubt relative to the music to which he chose to commit himself. Coming out of Cream and into Tony Williams' Lifetime, Bruce came off as if it was Williams who was doing him a favor. Listen to him with Carla Bley, with Mike Mantler, with Kip Hanrahan; his discipline, his passion (anyone with doubts of that ought to listen to Cream's "Spoonful" quick fast and in a hurry), his almost offhand sense of adventure all come through  like a-ringing a bell. And in the Golden Palominos, Bruce gave the most convincing reading, pace the wongwriter himself, of Peter Blegvad's dread-laden "Something Else (Is Working Harder)." "People work hard to keep a lid on their anger./To see that justice will prevail,/to no avail, their efforts fail—/something else is working harder." 

3) In June of 2012, I went to B.B. King's Blues Club And Grill to see Spectrum Road, a band—what they used to call a supergroup, maybe—dedicated to the music of the aforementioned Tony Williams. I couldn't swing the Cream reunion, but this I could, and I had been pretty impressed by the attendant album by the group, which seemed a genuine band effort. The other members were guitarist Vernon Reid, who'd flirted with rock superstardom in Living Colour and of late has been, among other things, conducting a productive collaboration with James "Blood" Ulmer; keyboardist John Medeski, whose combo Medeski, Martin, and Wood has made significant inroads with jam-band fans while remaining steadfast to its John-Zorn-affiliated roots; and drummer Cindy Blackman Santana, whose dynamism as a percussionist had not, I think, been so fully represented on any record prior to this one. In any event, throughout the selections, the music flows and pummels beautifully with no sense of it being led in any traditional sense; not to sound trite or anything, but it's one of those tribute records on which is seems that the spirit of the honored musician really is in charge of the whole thing. 

Live, it was like that, and a little more. Almost, or perhaps more than, a century of assured musicianship had come to play, and as Bruce had the main microphone, he was the de facto frontman (although Blackman did vocalize on one tune, and quite well). He had turned 69 in May. In 2003 he had undergone a liver transplant. On stage, he had a not-terribly large bottle of Poland Spring water nearby, and at the stage read there was a standing-stool sort of contraption on which he could rest while playing if need be. 

He didn't use it that often, if at all. First among equals with his bandmates, he commanded the stage for the entirety of a nearly two-hour set, stepping out only during Blackman's drum solo feature. His bass playing was, as ever, astonishing. Jaco Pastorious and Jamaladeen Tacuma get a lot of credit for reinventing electric bass playing from within a certain generic framework, and they were/are great players, to be sure. But there is/was something sui generis about the simultaneous muscularity and delicacy of Bruce's touch. Something working hard, and succeeding. 

At the encore, I thought, "I wonder if they're going to trot out 'Politician.'" They did, either before or after "Sunshine Of Your Love." Why not. They crushed both.