A find

“Georgie and I call this the ultimate family love song”: so said Mel Tormé, introducing “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” (Oscar Hammerstein II–Jerome Kern), on the recording A Vintage Year (Concord, 1988). “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” was a favorite song of my dad’s. We played an older recording of it at his memorial (also by Tormé). But I didn’t know this version, with its spoken introduction, until I put on my dad’s CD this morning.

You can find the song at YouTube.

[“Georgie”: George Shearing.]

Dad, i.m.

My dad, James Leddy, died a year ago today. Last night I dozed while watching the news and dreamed that he was there watching, wearing a plaid short-sleeved shirt. I’ll listen to some of his records today (as I do most days), call my mom (as I do every day), and have a piece of dark chocolate (his favorite). He was a good man, and he’s never out of mind, or heart.

Here is what I wrote about my dad last August.

Pelikan sighting

[Viridiana (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1961). Click either image for a larger view.]

Don Jaime (Fernando Rey) is about to write an important note. His fountain pen’s cap’s distinctively tall captop and two gold bands shout (or whisper) Pelikan . I had to notice these details: I’ve been writing with a Pelikan since 1998.

A related post
Five pens

Separated at birth

 
[The actresses Victoria Zinny and Molly Ringwald. Zinny appears in Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana (1961), recent viewing in our house. Click either image for a larger view.]

Also separated at birth
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti : Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop : John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi : Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt : Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov : Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy : Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Gough : Jacques Derrida, Peter Falk, and William Hopper : Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln : Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls : Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks : Steve Lacy and Myron McCormick : Fredric March and Tobey Maguire : Michael A. Monahan and William H. Macy

Twelve more movies

[Twelve movies, three sentences each, no spoilers.]

Yum, Yum, Yum! A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking (dir. Les Blank, 1990). More Les Blank, more Marc Savoy, more food, more music. I like the repeated scenes of people loading up their plates: a lump of rice, a hunk of something else. Supporting cast: red pepper, black pepper, salt.

*

Gap-Toothed Women (dir. Les Blank, 1987). Minding the gap, from the Wife of Bath to Lauren Hutton and Sandra Day O’Connor. Not the essay in objectification I thought it would be. But neither does it pass the Bechdel test: each gap-toothed woman speaks only to the camera.

*

The Lost Weekend (dir. Billy Wilder, 1945). Ray Milland as Don Birnam, writer and alcoholic, with Jane Wyman as his long-suffering girlfriend, and Phillip Terry as his long-suffering brother. Markedly different from the novel (Don’s sexuality, the ending) but excellent on its own terms. I recommend the novel too, which begins with a sentence from James Joyce’s story “Counterparts”: “The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot.”

*

Fitzcarraldo (dir. Werner Herzog, 1982). “The act of territorial acquisition is done step by step.” Klaus Kinski as Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, known as Fitzcarraldo, a white-suited fanatic attempting to realize his dream of opera in the Amazon. My favorite scene: Caruso v. Jivaro drums.


[Klaus Kinski as Fitzcarraldo broadcasting Caruso. Click for a larger view.]

*

Burden of Dreams (dir. Les Blank, 1982). The making of Fitzcarraldo is a story of determination against all odds. Werner Herzog was his own Fitzcarraldo, mastering an environment, or attempting to. The heart of darkness is here the heart of art.

*

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (dir. Les Blank, 1980). The story goes that Herzog promised to eat his shoe if Errol Morris ever completed his film Gates of Heaven (1978). Morris did, and Herzog did. With help from the chef Alice Waters.

*

Ramona and Beezus (dir. Elizabeth Allen, 2010). In our household Sarah Polley is the one and only Ramona Quimby, but we’ve been reading Beverly Cleary, and when we saw a few minutes of this film by chance, we had to get it. It’s sweet, funny, and good for the whole family. A wonderful touch: not a cellphone or computer in sight.

*

The Grand Budapest Hotel (dir. Wes Anderson, 2014). Perfect for anyone who just happens to be reading Stefan Zweig. A beautiful, deliriously detailed treat, with moment after moment that calls for pausing and zooming. I would say what Umberto Eco said of Casablanca : The Grand Budapest Hotel is “the movies,” with all the delights to be found therein.


[“Who’s got the throat-slitter?” A Courtesan au chocolat from Mendl’s bakery, cut and shared with cellmates. Click for a larger view.]

*

Viridiana (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1961). A novice leaves her convent to visit her uncle. She’s a live ringer for his long-dead wife. Celibacy and lust, purity and degradation, with strong overtones of Vertigo and a Brueghel-like Last Supper.


[Click for a larger view.]

*

Grand Hotel (dir. Edmond Goulding, 1932). Great Garbo, John and Lionel Barrymore, Joan Crawford, and Wallace Beery, all sojourning under various names or guises. This is the film in which Garbo famously said that she wanted to be alone. Is it heresy to think that Crawford steals the show?

*

Joy (dir. David O. Russell, 2015). A plucky mother of two (Jennifer Lawrence) invents a new and better kind of mop and triumphs on QVC. A thoughtful depiction of creativity against the backdrop of a complicated, imperfect, often unsupportive family. But the final thirty minutes feel like a contrived attempt to create further drama when the story has already come to an end.

*

Tickled (dir. David Farrier and Dylan Reeve, 2016). Much of what’s here has been on record for some years. No matter, though: Farrier and Reeve are figuring it out for themselves. What begins as a light look into a quirky online subculture turns into a story of immense cruelty, shame, and sorrow.

What would you recommend?

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)
Fourteen more : Thirteen more : Twelve more : Another thirteen more : Another dozen : Yet another dozen : Another twelve : And another twelve

Art criticism

Caroline Pratt on children criticizing the art their peers have made:

Since we were not interested in turning out young Picassos but only in giving children the freedom of all kinds of materials and media for the expression of their ideas, we had on occasion to discourage these young critics, who were likely to be too forthright for the good of the children whom they criticized. One youngster in the Sevens would not touch paints for a month when the class had laughed at him for painting his locomotive pink! I sometimes feared that if we discovered a genius, his contemporaries would shame him into becoming an academician, such is the conservatism of children.

Caroline Pratt, I Learn from Children: An Adventure in Progressive Education . 1948. (New York: Grove, 2014).

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Caroline Pratt on waste in education

[“The Sevens”: seven-year-olds.]

On Louis Armstrong’s birthday

Louis Armstrong. Photograph by John Leongard. Undated. From the Life Photo Archive.

Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901. “July 4, 1900” began early on, as his draft card shows.

I’ve been listening to Louis Armstrong all week — Hot Fives and Sevens, the 1930s orchestra, the All-Stars, duets with Ella Fitzgerald. I’m no Buddhist, but I think of Armstrong as a bodhisattva showing us all the way to enlightenment. Swing That Music.

Related reading
All OCA Louis Armstrong posts (Pinboard)

Tony Bennett at ninety

In case you missed it:

The video has long since been removed. It was Tony Bennett on The Late Show, singing “This Is All I Ask,” by Gordon Jenkins.

Tony Bennett has often spoken of the advice about practice he received from his vocal coach, Pietro d’Andrea: “The first day you don’t do the scales, you know. The second day, the musicians know. The third day, the audience knows.” Tony Bennett is in practice. Long may he wave.

WSJ vulgarity

The Wall Street Journal now allows the printing of vulgarities. Insert gratuitous vulgar exclamation here .

The New York Times , which has gone so far as to rewrite a Philip Larkin line and sanitize a David Foster Wallace sentence to avoid such words as fuck and fucking , should take heed.

Haiku

A related post
Font haiku

[Context: Elaine, Rachel, and I enjoyed one beer apiece last night — one. (Lagunitas.) As I discovered this morning, Rachel put her empty bottle in the nearest wastebasket. I have posted this haiku with Rachel’s permission. It’s a great joy to have her here for a few days.]