tellcliff.com

I know black people who read only books by other blacks. In part they want to support the work of black writers — a laudable goal. Partly they enjoy seeing themselves, their experiences and concerns, reflected in what they read. (Who doesn’t?) And the choice is also partly about self-protection. There are enough casual displays of white racism, privilege, and entitlement in the real world, the thinking goes, so why risk encountering them while relaxing with a novel? These readers cast a wary eye on works by contemporary nonblack writers. Books by dead white authors? Forget it.

As a black reader, I understand that attitude. I just don’t share it. This statement will make me sound like — perhaps reveal me to be — the world’s original sap, but I look on books as representatives of the best that the world of human thought has to offer. Greedy fellow that I am, I want unfettered access to that thought. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where I couldn’t read Virginia Woolf or John Cheever, just as I wouldn’t want to live in one that was missing Zora Neale Hurston or Ishmael Reed.

Over the years my openness has been richly rewarded. From time to time, of course, my reward is to read a sentence like this one, from Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh: “With or without her nigger, Mrs Beste-Chewynde was a woman of vital importance.”

What am I supposed to do when I come across a passage like that? Do I rip the book in half at the spine and throw the pieces across the room, feeling that to continue reading would be an act of self-hatred? Do I sigh heavily and plod on, seeing the need to accept the book for what it is — a product of a different time? Do I recognize the separation between author and narrator and give the author the benefit of the (wafer-thin) doubt? Or do I remember my rule about separating any work of art from the artist? I love, for example, the music of Miles Davis, a man not exactly on the cutting edge of feminism. (Of course, his misogyny didn’t come through in his records.)

I’m interested in people’s thoughts on this. Not that I’m likely to change the way I read. I guess I look on the world of books as an adventure; adventure suggests unpredictability – and a certain amount of risk.

When it comes to jazz, I tend to prefer instrumentals to vocals, which is a shame in that it cuts me off from women’s biggest contribution to the genre.

That said, I do have a couple of the greats in my collection. Not long ago I was listening to a Jazz at the Philharmonic record that has Ella Fitzgerald on it. My eleven-year-old daughter heard her singing and said, “Ella’s cool.”

I said, “Have you heard any Billie Holiday?” She shook her head, so I put on one of Holiday’s records next. My daughter listened to the first two songs and said, “I like her voice. She sounds kind of like a woman and a little girl at the same time.” A moment later, she added, “She sounds kind of like she’s singing the words but her mind is on something else.” A future critic, that one.

A short time later I was painting while listening to my new iPod. (See my thoughts on the iPod two posts back.) I had it on Shuffle, and a Billie Holiday song came up. And that’s when I discovered the perfect time to listen to her. If I have on instrumental jazz while painting, I find I’m concentrating too hard on what I’m doing to take in the intricacies of the music, but I can listen to Lady Day and paint at the same time. That is not to put down her artistry; if anything, it is a testament to her forcefulness. That voice of hers, at once tinny and grainy, could bend a note like nobody’s business; and when she is backed up on tenor sax by the gossamer tones of Lester Young (she’s the one who gave him his nickname, The President, or Pres), you’re hearing one of the greatest pairings in all of jazz. Check out the album A Musical Romance.

So: who else should I listen to as I paint? Which jazz/blues divas do YOU like? And which of their records?

While I await your answer, I’ll keep listening to Ms. Holiday.

I won’t, of course, be sending my daughters to her records for guidance on relationships. (If I’m beat up by my poppa / I ain’t gonna call no copper . . . Wooogh.) But man, what her voice could do with lyrics like: Now, love is like a faucet / It turns off and on / I say love is like a faucet / It turns off and on / But when you think it’s on baby / It’s turned off and gone . . .

Who knew Woody Allen and I had so much in common? I will explain in a minute. But first, a story:

About a decade ago I thought very seriously about trying to write a biography of the pioneering tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. What ultimately dissuaded me as much as anything else was reading a piece in the New York Times Book Review about a new biography of Louis Armstrong. The reviewer made mincemeat of the book. Whether it was cowardice or wisdom I don’t know, but I had a vision of myself spending years of my life writing about somebody else’s, only to have one review send up my hard work in a puff of smoke.

This Christmas my sister gave me a copy of Pops, a new biography of Armstrong, written by Terry Teachout . . . the man who wrote that review. Ponder that a moment.

I’m enjoying the book. I just got to the part about “Potato Head Blues,” probably my favorite of Armstrong’s tunes, and was happy to see that Teachout seems to share my opinion.

Which brings me, believe it or not, back to Woody Allen. “Potato Head Blues,” Teachout writes, “was cited by Woody Allen in Manhattan as one of the things that make life ‘worth living,’ along with Marlon Brando, Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, Frank Sinatra, ‘Swedish movies,’ the slow movement of the Jupiter Symphony, Gustave Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale, and Paul Cezanne’s apples and pears.”

A Sentimental Education, that wonderfully vivid, completely unsentimental novel! Brando, of The Godfather and On the Waterfront!Those great reds, yellows and greens of Cezanne’s apples! I leave it to Woody to explain his personal life, and you could count the black actors in his films on the fingers of one thumbless hand, but when it comes to taste in art, the man and I are linked. Now to see Manhattan again . . .

My wife and I gave each other iPods for Christmas. So ended a three-year period when, in terms of how I listened to music, I had one foot in the 21st century and the other back in the 20th: I would download stuff from iTunes, and then . . . burn it to CDs. (My friends laughed at me.)

I have to say, I’m digging this iPod. The most surprising thing about it is the Shuffle feature — not that it exists, but that it actually enhances the experience of hearing some tunes. When you play an album knowing when a particular tune is coming, part of you doesn’t even listen, taking for granted that you know what it sounds like. But hearing music unexpectedly can be like hearing it for the first time.

And then there’s the pleasure of hearing something you haven’t listened to in a while and might not have thought to put on yourself. Something like . . .

Eric Dolphy at the Five Spot, Volumes 1 and 2, from 1961. Man, what great jazz records. You know Dolphy? He played alto sax, bass clarinet, and flute; whatever he played, he was instantly recognizable, his style showing through like the same muscular body under different clothes. His sound had a touch of eccentricity, to my mind prefiguring the last records of Coltrane and the chaos of Albert Ayler. Mostly, though, it was dazzling — quick, wild, exciting. Here, Ed Blackwell’s martial-sounding drums give the tunes shape; Mal Waldron on piano (whom I also have on the great album Teddy Charles Tentet) adds some sweetness; Richard Davis’s bass is in there somewhere; and then . . . there’s Booker Little on trumpet. Little died four months after this performance, at the tender age of 23. (Dolphy died in 1964, at 36.) That is a great shame, because, I want to tell you, Little smokes on these records.

After hearing these, I got a record Little made as a leader, Out Front, which I didn’t like as well. It reminded me of when a funny supporting character on a sitcom gets his own series and falls flat. But that probably means I just need to listen to it some more, look into its mysteries. Maybe it’ll come up on the Shuffle . . .

For the record, I am younger than the three main characters on the TNT comedy-drama Men of a Certain Age – but not by enough to matter. Weeks ago my wife mentioned that she wanted to watch the premiere and asked if I wanted to join her. I declined, having read Alessandra Stanley’s article about the show in the New York Times, in which she referred to the characters as “losers.” Just what I needed: to watch this show, recognize myself in these men of a certain age, and stand condemned — by implication – as a loser in the eys of the obviously all-knowing Times.

Well, so, I wandered into the bedroom while my wife was watching, and I ended up watching. And then we watched the next week, and the week after that. I found myself entertained, even charmed. The three protagonists, friends from college, are decidedly ordinary, decent guys: Ray Romano’s character owns and runs a party-goods store, Andre Braugher’s sells cars, and Scott Bakula’s plays an underemployed actor who supports himself by temping. (I guess what makes them losers is that none of them writes for a major metropolitan newspaper. Get a life, Ms. Stanley.)

To be sure, they have issues. Romano’s character’s gambling has cost him his marriage; Braugher’s has spent his life under the thumb of his blowhard, know-it-all father (who is also his boss); and Bakula’s is a 49-year-old who, in terms of his professional accomplishments and ability to commit to a woman, might as well be 19. But the actors are so good, and their characters played so sympathetically, that rather than looking down on them we pull for them to win out over their difficulties — which, to our delight and the show’s salvation, they occasionally do. Their victories are not major life accomplishments; mostly they amount to breaking even. Romano, who sometimes goes hilariously off the rails when trying to give advice to his children, finds his eloquence when confronting the lovesick teenage boy who won’t leave his daughter alone; Braugher brings his salesmanship to forming a bond with a city bureaucrat, long enough to the power turned back on in his family’s home. When he stands on the city agency’s steps and raises both fists in a parody of the famous scene from Rocky, we laugh with him, not at him.

Some minor quibbles: Braugher’s character, Owen, is 48, but his father doesn’t look older than 62 (the actor who plays him, Richard Gant, is 65); the youngest of Owen’s three children is shown in a high chair. Owen might be 38, but 48? As for Terry, played by Bakula, he is (at least for me) a little harder to root for, maybe because — unlike Joe (Romano) or Owen — he does not have significant others to reveal his various dimensions; his closest relationships seem to be with Joe and Owen, whom he banters with over coffee.

On the up side: is Braugher the odd man out because he plays the only black character? Or is it Romano, because he’s divorced and has an addiction? Or is it Bakula, because he has no kids? The answer, of course, is none of the above. They’re all odd, and they’re all normal, because normal, the show lets us know, is simply what happens in your life.

A few months back, at the Guggenheim, I saw an installation by an artist I won’t name, since the work left me mostly unimpressed. I say “mostly” because on one wall was the cover of a book: Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer. Seeing the cover led me, a bit later, to pick up the book itself. I’m glad I did.

Let’s not blow a fuse trying to sum up Schopenhauer’s contributions to German and Western philosophy. (For one thing, R.J. Hollingdale’s wonderfully illuminating introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Essays and Aphorisms makes anything I would put here superfluous.) I will just let the brief passages below speak for themselves. They do not represent the best or deepest writing in the book — only the most quotable. But they do give a hint of Schopenhauer’s wit and, it must be said, dark outlook — which grew, I think, from a compassion for the human condition:

“Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.”

“Knowledge is power. The devil it is! One man can have a great deal of knowledge without its giving him the least power, while another possesses supreme authority but next to no knowledge.”

“The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting.”

“Newspaper writers are, for the sake of their trade, alarmists: this is their way of making themselves interesting. What they really do, however, is resemble little dogs who, as soon as anything whatever moves, start up a loud barking.”

“The unalterability of our character and the necessary nature of our actions will be brought home with uncommon force to anyone who has on any occasion behaved as he ought not to have behaved, who has been lacking in resolution or constancy or courage or some other quality demanded by the circumstances of the moment. Afterwards he honestly recognizes and regrets his failing, and no doubt thinks: ‘I’ll do better next time.’ Another time comes, the circumstances are repeated, and he does as he did before - -to his great astonishment.”

Read anything good lately? Tell Cliff . . . and happy new year.

In an era of film actors such as Daniel Day-Lewis and Gary Oldman, whose priestlike devotion to their art makes them nearly unrecognizable from one role to the next, it is temping to say about the stars of Holywood’s golden age that they weren’t really actors at all — that they merely played themselves, or, at best, performed variations on a single box-office-driven persona. But before we say that, let’s look at what the following stars did in the following roles, with just their faces:

John Wayne in The Searchers. Say what you will (and there’s a lot to say) about what The Duke stood for as a person and a persona: the man could act. In an early scene in this classic Western, his character goes with others in search of women-folk who have been abducted by “Indians,” and he is separated for a time from the rest of the party. Watch his face when he joins them again; it says everything his character doesn’t want to about what he found.

Lee Marvin in The Professionals. No Hollywood actor had a deeper, stronger, more commanding voice than Lee Marvin’s, a voice that was the same in a score of one-dimensional tough-guy roles. But he was capable of subtlety. In The Professionals, set early in the 20th century, a wealthy white businessman hires four men — led by Marvin — to retrieve his wife, who has supposedly been kidnapped by a Mexican bandit. One of the four is played by the black actor Woody Strode, and the businessman asks Marvin at one point if he minds working with a “Negro.” Marvin’s reaction is worth the price of the rental, and he does it all with his eyes, conveying more in a fraction of a second than a speech on civl rights could have gotten across.

And, because it’s the holidays . . .

Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.  What is there that’s new to say about this movie? Maybe nothing, but possibly this: As poor George Bailey, who is stuck in Bedford Falls while his dreams of seeing the world and building great structures go the way of last year’s snowfall, Stewart goes to the train station to meet his brother, Harry — who he hopes will take over the Building & Loan so George can be free. Trouble is, Harry arrives with his new fiancee, who blurts out that her father has offered Harry a job. What follows is a perfect marriage of cinematography and acting. The camera follows George as he walks alone for about five seconds before joining the others. Check out Stewart’s face in those seconds, as he goes from processing this news, and all it means for him, to showing the requisite happiness for his brother. If there is a better, more succinct wordless portrayal of a decent man wrestling with a lifetime’s frustration, I’ve never seen it.

And with that, I wish you and yours happy holidays.

Pardon this shameless self-promotion — I am my own publicity department . . .

The literary critic Mark Sanders of Emory University  had this to say about my novel, Signifying Nothing:

“[Signifying Nothing] simply nailed black middle-class America of the late ’70s. I knew that family; I went to that same church, heard the same sermons, heard the same old ladies gossiping in the same way. [The novel takes] us through the life of this family in a way that is poignant, insightful and caring. And . . . outright hilarious at times.”

 An interview I gave about the book can be found at:

 http://www.ljndawson.com/authorweb/qa-with-cliff-thompson-author-of-signifying-nothing

And I wrote a guest-post for the blog ringShout.com that tells the story of the book’s publication — a tale of either perseverance or plain old hardheadedness:

 http://ringshout.blogspot.com/2009/05/guest-essay-clifford-thompson-on.html

 And here is . . .
READERS’ PRAISE for Signifying Nothing, available on Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Signifying-Nothing-Clifford-Thompson/dp/1440132690/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240178362&sr=8-3

“I just finished reading Signifying Nothing and I think it is quite an achievement. . . . The characters feel real, the family seems very distinctive but also somehow like other families, and the situation is engrossing — I really had to keep reading to find out what happened to everyone.”

“Cliff: I read your new book and loved it. I am going to buy several more copies to give as gifts. I care so much for all the members of the family in the book, and I laughed and cried as they struggled . . .”

“I just finished reading your amazing novel — i was so moved by the whole family dynamic, sibling to sibling and parents to kids and husband to wife — you wrote such a beautiful book cliff - congratulations.”

“I wanted to tell you that I finished Signifying Nothing, which moved me to tears at times, and am very impressed.”

“I finished reading Signifying Nothing. It is such a wonderful, lyrical book. . . . Truly, every one of the members of the Hobbs family came alive for me as if they were friends of mine.”

“Cliff, I just finished your novel and I liked it VERY much. You made me care deeply about every member of that family, and the last section, where you jump forward twenty years to see what has happened to them, feels just right. Congratulations on a wonderful achievement!!”

Tune in next week, when we will return to our regularly scheduled film/book/jazz/art commentary . . .

             The sitcom M*A*S*H debuted on CBS in the fall of 1972, when I was nine, in the days when TV provided the background noise of my life. On the first floor of our house, if I wasn’t sitting in front of the set, I could hear it as I played on the floor, drew, or did my homework. So when my father began following the antics of M*A*S*H’s Korean War surgeons, who spent their off-hours acting crazy to avoid going insane, I watched and listened, too, even though I didn’t understand everything I was seeing and hearing. For example, when an aging general made a stealth visit to the tent of Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan - the last visit he was ever to make anywhere - my father had to explain to me why a nice romantic evening had killed the man.

            My father himself passed on a couple of years later, and as if I were taking over one of his duties, I began watching M*A*S*H on my own. It soon shot past the likes of The Brady Bunch to become my favorite show. M*A*S*H was first a novel by Richard Hooker and then a film by Robert Altman, but it was with the TV show that the characters got fleshed out best. I loved those characters, and I loved the writing, and if I still didn’t get every rapid-fire line out of Hawkeye Pierce’s mouth, that just made me appreciate the show more: I felt like a junior member of a club for the sophisticated.

Ah, Hawkeye. As played masterfully by Alan Alda, Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce was the center of the action - a brilliant surgeon, a womanizer, a drinker who lived near the border of alcoholism, a man whose practical jokes, wisecracks, and general irreverence could not hide his moral core. Hawkeye was my favorite character on M*A*S*H because, well, he was everybody’s favorite character. The more pressure he was under, the funnier he got; he did the right thing even when it meant defying the “regular army clowns,” as he called the top military brass, and somehow he got away with it. How could you not like him?

            Of course, like many brilliant, morally driven, and very funny people, Hawkeye could sometimes be insensitive, if not downright mean. As I got older, I became more appreciative of how realistically Hawkeye was portrayed - and less fond of Hawkeye himself - when I met some of his real-life counterparts: guys (they were mostly guys) who reacted passionately to injustice elsewhere but didn’t give a hoot about the people in the room with them. Then there were the people who emulated Hawkeye’s irreverence but somehow fell short of his competence and dedication. Surely this is a mark of middle age, but as I’ve developed into the person I will probably more or less remain, I’ve come to have a greater appreciation for another figure on M*A*S*H, the character played by McLean Stevenson - the commanding officer of the 4077^th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake.

            Unlike Hawkeye’s nemesis, the cowardly, self-righteous, idiotic and incompetent Major Frank Burns, Henry was one of the show’s good guys; but like Frank, he was a figure of fun. Henry, in retrospect, was the classic middle manager, which I define (because I’m one, too) as someone with a lot of responsibility but not much power. Henry barely even had power over the people he was nominally in charge of, as Hawkeye and his cohorts - who liked Henry - walked all over him, when they weren’t plotting behind his back. And sometimes Henry was just plain silly, owing largely to his drinking; if Hawkeye lived near alcoholism’s border, Henry had a couple of toes over it.

            But while Henry may not have known half the things his subordinates were up to, he probably wouldn’t have cared if he had. A decent surgeon himself, he was concerned mainly about the smooth functioning of his hospital, where seriously wounded soldiers arrived in droves and gut-wrenching decisions had to be made on a routine basis. (”If I save this leg I’ll lose that life,” is one line I remember from Hawkeye.) Despite his (partly deserved) reputation for indecisiveness, when something had to be done where the hospital was concerned, Henry stepped up to the plate. For example: in one episode, when Hawkeye and Frank - a superior officer - butted heads in the operating room, Henry saw the need to appoint a chief surgeon. Not even the most mature of people like to be passed over for promotion in favor of someone with less seniority, and when you pass over an immature person, you’ve got some unpleasantness on your hands. (I know what I’m talking about.) But sometimes it has to be done, and Henry picked Hawkeye. The actor Larry Linville did a fine job of capturing Frank’s very realistic reaction to the news: a look of pure, childlike hurt followed by outrage. Hawkeye, for his part, responded to Henry’s show of confidence in him by rolling his eyes and saying sarcastically, “Terrific.” Typical thanks for a middle manager.

            A good boss knows when to bend a rule in one area for the benefit of the overall workplace. Once on M*A*S*H, a medic from the front line was caught stealing from the hospital’s supply room and brought before Colonel Blake. Henry could’ve had him put in the stockade - technically, in fact, he was probably obligated to; but he knew that would mean depriving wounded soldiers of immediate attention. “Next time, just ask,” Henry told the grateful medic. “If we’ve got extra, it’s yours.” Like any competent manager, Henry knew when someone on his staff needed a talking-to. In one episode, when Hawkeye was brooding because he hadn’t been able to save a patient, Henry advised him to save that attitude for when he had a medical practice back home and could “pick the kind of patients who won’t go sour on you.”

            Hawkeye was the person many people want to be. Henry was closer to the way many of us are in reality. (One measure of how real he was: at the end of M*A*S*H’s third season, he got his discharge. On the way home to his wife and children, he got killed.) Like me, maybe like you, Henry was not always as sharp, brave, or eloquent as he wanted to be. But he had his moments, times when, away from the limelight, he quietly rose to the occasion.

A few years ago, on the day my older daughter graduated from elementary school, her teacher had a picnic for the students and their families. There were a couple of days of fifth grade left still, but the year’s lessons had clearly come to an end, and during the picnic the teacher asked for suggestions for movies he might watch with the kids the next day. I mentioned Blazing Saddles, and he took me up on it. I don’t know what the other kids thought of that movie, but my daughter became an instant fan; she has seen it several times since.

I still have much affection for Blazing Saddles.  Directed by Mel Brooks, it is frequently, by definition, just plain silly, but for a comedy about race made in the 1970s, it is amazingly hip. (It never hurt to have Richard Pryor work on your screenplay.) Gene Wilder is wonderful, Madeline Kahn has a ball, and there are immortal moments. (Such as: “Are we awake?” “We’re not sure. Are we . . . black?” “Yes, we are.” “Then we’re awake . . . but we’re very puzzled.”)

What I love most about the movie, though, is the presence of the late Cleavon Little. As the “dazzling urbanite” who shows up — for a predictable greeting — as the new sheriff in an all-white town in the Old West, Little gives a very rare type of performance. I’m not sure I have the words to describe what I mean, but I will try. It’s not inacurrate to say that he plays a likeable character you can identify with, but it’s too easy, and it doesn’t do the whole job. Yes, Sheriff Bart’s easygoing manner, gentle humor, and sly way of getting out of trouble he never went looking for are hard to resist, but there’s another element, too. He projects the confidence that you’re with him, that if you were in the movie you would be on his side and react as he does, if only you could. It’s not just that you trust him; he seems to trust you.

A few other people have projected this quality. Bill Cosby did it in The Bill Cosby Show of the late 1960s (not to be confused with The Cosby Show of the 1980s). In his heyday Andy Griffith had a touch of it, as did Alan Arkin, whom I mentioned in another recent post — though the situations Arkin’s characters found themselves in were so outrageous that identifying with him proved only that you were both sane. What Cleavon Little projected was a gentler, warmer thing. I’m sure you know what I mean. I trust you.