ART. Anyone who can should see the (New York) Museum of Modern Art’s Matisse exhibition, which runs through October 11, 2010. Twentieth-century art did not get any better: simple forms, bold colors, and an all-but-indefinable emotional resonance that remind you of what painting is all about. If there is a finer example of it anywhere than Interior with Goldfish, from 1914, I’ve never seen it.

BOOKS. I’ve been on a memoir-by-great-writers kick, if two books constitute a kick. Speak, Memory, by Nabokov, is the novelist’s account of his boyhood in an aristocratic family in Russia and his exile following the 1917 revolution. I don’t think I’ve ever read a more exquisite evocation of one’s tender first decade of life, of the kinds of things you notice best when you’re a kid: The door of the [train] compartment was open and I could see the corridor window, where the wires — six thin black wires — were doing their best to slant up, to ascend skywards, despite the lightning blows dealt them by one telegraph pole after another; but just as all six, in a triumphant swoop of pathetic elation, were about to reach the top of the window, a particularly vicious blow would bring them down, as low as they had ever been, and they would have to start all over again. Showing himself to be a lesser craftsman than Nabokov but a thoughtful memoirist just the same, Sartre wrote The Words, in which he explains about his childhood self, I chose as my future the past of a great immortal and I tried to live backwards. I became completely posthumous.

JAZZ. In 1942 Dizzy Gillespie composed “A Night in Tunisia.” That tune’s bridge — the passage after the first statement of the theme but before the body of the piece — calls for an unaccompanied solo. In listening to various jazz greats’ versions of the tune, I’ve come to realize that its bridge is to musicians what major crises are to presidents: it shows what they’re made of. Miles Davis’s bridge to the tune on The Musings of Miles, from 1955, highlights the fundamental characteristics of his playing style: spare, balanced, lovely. Dexter Gordon ’s “Night in Tunisia” from Our Man in Paris (1963) has his trademarks — that unmistakable, hardy tone, conveyed at a not-particularly-fast tempo that nonetheless gets him where he’s going, like those long legs of his. (He seems to be saying, What’s your hurry?) Then there is Charlie Parker. Other musicians walk or run over the Tunisia bridge; on The Complete Dial Masters, Bird, true to his nickname, flies — over, under, alongside it, fueled by a million notes that leave a kind of afterglow.

FILM. Before seeing Inception, I had the impression from reviewers that its cleverness came at the expense of heart or soul. Having seen it, I disagree. Inception uses special effects the way they should be used but rarely are: in the service of really interesting ideas. Beneath all that, though, is the story of a man simply trying to get home to his family — a notion as heartfelt and time-honored as The Odyssey.

What do you think?

Lately, though, I’ve come to feel that summer starts after Independence Day. Between July 5^th and Labor Day is when the thing really happens: that long, hot stretch of business as usual — commuting to and from the office, or going to school or camp, as the days, so slowly as to escape notice, get shorter.

There were a number of songs about summer in my growing-up years. “Summer Breeze (Makes Me Feel Fine),” by Seals and Crofts; “Saturday in the Park,” by Chicago; “Summer,” by War. Then there is “Summertime,” from the George and Ira Gershwin musical Porgy & Bess — based on DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy, about blacks on Catfish Row in New Orleans. “Summertime” is an unusual song, the comfort of its lyrics offset by the haunting nature of the melody, until the lyrics themselves become not entirely comforting: One of these mornings, you’re gonna rise up singing / Then you’ll spread your wings, and take to the sky / But until that morning, there is nothing can harm you . . . (I used to sing the song at night to my kids when they were — perhaps fortunately for them — too young to remember.) I grew up listening to the Sam Cooke version of the song, which is no doubt why it is still my favorite vocal rendition.

There are some fine jazz versions, including Coltrane’s pleasingly dissonant take on the song from his album My Favorite Things. One of MY favorite things, though, is Miles Davis’s version of “Summertime,” from his album Porgy & Bess, one of his great collaborations with the arranger/conductor Gil Evans. Miles plays with a mute, giving his trumpet lines that wiry quality many associate with his sound. He perfectly captures the song’s easy-yet-haunted feel, and late into it, where the words “fish are jumping” would be in the sung version, he performs a kind of magic trick, a four-note innovation that is simply lovely. If you ever give it a listen, maybe you’ll hear what I mean.

Looking at the objects represented, I found that they often fell into two broad categories: those in front of the painter, and those (tree limbs and leaves, clouds) reflected on the surfaces of ponds. So on many of the canvases, there are two realities going on — one fully present, the other seen but existing elsewhere.

And it occurred to me that in this way, Monet’s paintings find either a parallel or an opposite in the modernist novels of Virginia Woolf. Consider these lines from To the Lighthouse (1927), in which a Mrs. Ramsay reads to her young son James. Mrs. Ramsay, we learn, is “reading and thinking, quite easily, both at the same time; for the story of the Fisherman and his Wife was like the bass gently accompanying a tune, which now and then ran up unexpectedly into the melody [italics mine]. . . . Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older! or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters. Nothing made up for the loss. When she read just now to James, ‘and there were numbers of soldiers with kettledrums and trumpets,’ and his eyes darkened, she thought, why should they grow up, and lose all that?”

Monet’s paintings and To the Lighthouse are opposite in this way: in the scenes depicted on the canvases, where clouds seem to be part of the garden but aren’t, we see more than is really there, whereas in the passages from Woolf’s novel, we see less: we witness one reality — a woman reading to her son — through which passes another, in which past experience informs present fears. But of course the two works are also parallel. Are the clouds less real than the lily pads, if both are before our eyes? Are Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts and memories perhaps even more real than the act of reading to her son, since they consume more of her attention and energy?

I feel myself veering close to areas — existential philosophy and all that — I’m not equipped to discuss. Better stop here.

Alfie, which I watched recently, still has a bite, mainly because its hero is the kind of person who is everywhere in real life but lives only in the best movies: one with an exasperating mix of good and bad qualities, one you embrace at your peril but can’t quite dismiss. Alfie disarms you by taking you into his confidence — Caine talks straight to the camera. He is funny, full of life and native wit (of the Cockney variety); he is good-natured and never means anyone harm. His fatal flaws, of course, are that he can’t or won’t see two yards in front of him to the consequences of his (mostly sexual) acts, and that he can’t empathize with the women whose hearts he treats like Kleenex — he fails to understand why they don’t approach life the way he does. (Naturally, he objects when he meets the one woman who does exactly that.) Alfie tells us, at a gut-wrenching moment in the film, that he is like most men, because he doesn’t want to hear about women’s pain. Oh, but it’s there, Alfie, as real as the garment that is visible on the bed across the room even while you’re speaking, its bright red a stand-in for what’s taking place just out of view of the camera. Earlier, Alfie tells an acquaintance that he never means to hurt anyone; the acquaintance replies, saying more than he can possibly know: But you do, Alfie.

A side note: Denholm Elliott, an actor I associate with older, kindly, bumbling characters (see the Indiana Jones films), is here in his younger days, masterfully and memorably playing a creep — the kind of doctor covered by no insurance plan.

And a blue note: It is greatly ironic that Alfie’s theme was composed and played by Sonny Rollins. While Alfie won’t look beyond the surface of anything, Rollins, on the title track of his album Alfie, explores every hidden depth of the catchy, syncopated theme, whose refrain is a mere eight bars in two-four time. Listening to his extended solo on this nine-plus-minute track, you picture him tunneling his way through the earth and coming out the other side. It’s a great performance and a great album. (And nobody sings “What’s It All About?” or anything else — that’s a different record . . .)

And so it is with apprehension — and yet a sense of appropriateness — that I apply the term “jazz-like” to the wonderful, wonderful work of the writer Alfred Appel Jr. (pronounced Ap-PELL), who died last year at age seventy-five.

“Inventiveness based on knowledge” — my words — may be a good phrase to describe what the best jazz musicians do: knowing what underlies a tune’s melody, they can use those building blocks to invent parallel melodies (like, say, Lester Young or Charlie Parker) or play riffs on the harmonies (Coleman Hawkins or John Coltrane). Their inventions may occasionally go to strange places, or they may obey a logic strictly of their own devising, but make no mistake, there is a logic, if you can dig it.

The same can be said for Appel’s works. A professor of literature, an aficionado of jazz and modern art, Appel conveyed his deep love for all three, not infrequently in one sentence. In Jazz Modernism (2002), which I just read, he sets out to make the case for jazz’s place in the canon of modernism; in The Art of Celebration (1992), which I’m reading, he sets out to argue that modern art is celebratory, not “unfathomably abstract and obscure, dispiriting and depressing.” I say “sets out” because, at least in the case of Jazz Modernism, he takes so many detours that it’s arguable that he never arrives. But, as they say, the point is the journey, and to follow Appel down those many side streets is to find treasure. (Among other great features, the books are chock-full of art reproductions and photos.)

Is it possible to have a role model you’ve never heard of? When I wrote “Notes on Notes, or, Plugged in at the Party of Art,” one of the four pieces under “Essays” on this blog (the pieces were originally published elsewhere), I was striving to evoke the love of art’s interconnectivity that is expressed beautifully in Appel’s work, which I had not yet read. When I wrote another, “What Is This Thing Called Love?”, still without having heard of Appel, I was trying to do something he did well — draw parallels between jazz and ordinary life. Man, would I love to write a full-length work that approaches the heights Appel reached. In the meantime, professor, rest in peace.

*          *            *

It is June. Time to pull out the record that evokes this magical month for me: Jaki Byard’s Blues for Smoke. June! Soft clear nights, the promise of summer’s freedom, long walks as the wind gently stirs tree limbs heavy with green leaves — take it away, Jaki . . .

Each installment of the show presented a different bad movie, complete with superfluous but entertaining commentary from the host explaining just what made that week’s choice so god-awful. The selections ran along the lines of the now-classic duds Plan Nine from Outer Space and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Over the years since then, I’ve seen a number of memorably bad movies on my own, and I thought it was time to expand the canon. With no further ado . . .

Caddyshack II. Whatever you may think of the original Caddyshack (I liked it when I was in high school), it looks like A Midsummer Night’s Dream next to the sequel. The filmmakers couldn’t rope Rodney Dangerfield or Bill Murray into coming back, so they brought in Dan Aykroyd and Jackie “Why Did Anyone Ever Think This Guy Was Funny?” Mason for 98 minutes of Is it over yet? Dreadful.

Allan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold. Starring poor Richard Chamberlain and a not-yet-famous Sharon Stone. This was based on H. Rider Haggard’s 19^th-century adventure novels and released in an attempt to ride the coattails of the Indiana Jones series. The movie was so bad, the acting so wooden, the lines so flat, that when I saw it — in the theater, I’m sorry to say — I thought it was supposed to be funny. Silly me! I also paid to see Caddyshack II, and . . .

In the Mood. Here is proof that no story is so inherently interesting that it can’t be screwed up in the telling. This movie is based on the real adventures of Sonny Wisecarver, who in 1944 — at age 15 — had affairs with not one but two adult women before being hauled away by the police. In the Mood seems to have been filmed with the fast-forward button pressed: the scenes go by so quickly that they don’t even make sense, let alone resonate. The movie itself seems to be on the run from the cops — or is it the critics?

Roadhouse. At least this was a rental. I’m repeating myself here, because I wrote about Roadhouse in a post from April 2009 called “More Along the Film Line”; but if I’m making a list of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, there’s no way to leave this off. I wrote earlier: “It is not just implausible, a trait it shares with most bad movies; no, what sets it apart is the one-two combination of pretentiousness (Patrick Swayze has a Ph.D. in philosophy and works as a bouncer — sure!) and mean-spiritedness (’I used to f–k guys like you in prison!’).”

Fresh Horses. Upper-class Andrew McCarthy jilts his fiancée for a girl from the wrong side of the tracks (Molly Ringwald), and we’re supposed to care, even though (1) it’s 1980s America and not, like, Victorian England, and (2) the McCarthy character is an ass. I wonder if Ben Stiller remembers he was in this mess?

Once Upon a Crime. A special category of bad movie, along with lame sequels to box-office hits (see Caddyshack II), is the kind so full of “name” performers that it seems sure-fire — until it starts. This supposed comedy brought together John Candy, James Belushi, Cybill Shepherd, Richard Lewis, George Hamilton, and many others for a thoroughly pointless hour and a half. I paid to see this one, too. (Yet another strike against this movie and Caddyshack II: while you can at least laugh at a movie that’s not supposed to be funny but is, that isn’t true of one that’s supposed to be funny but isn’t.)

Equinox. Okay — this one isn’t so much bad as weird, and was made to seem weirder still by the circumstances under which I saw it. I was 17 and alone in a hotel room when I caught this movie on TV, in the middle.  It’s a very low-budget film about devil worshippers; the parts I saw were so indescribably strange that, because I could never find anyone else who had seen the movie (it didn’t help that I didn’t know the title), I came to suspect that I’d imagined the whole thing. Seventeen years later I was describing what I’d seen to another film buff, who snapped his fingers and said, “Equinox!”

What’s on your list? You know who to tell . . .

For people who are not concerned with the world of books, and for many people who are, there is often no perceived connection between the printed word and the way we live our lives. Books either fulfill their preconceived, very limited functions, or they do not. If a novel is interesting, we finish it and perhaps remember parts of it fondly from time to time; if not, we put it aside after 30 pages and forget about it. The usefulness of a nonfiction book is often measured according to the amount of dinner-party conversation it yields. And this is true even for books by those people we hold to be serious, accomplished writers. So that when we encounter a writer whose work transcends the functions that books normally serve in our lives, we truly have cause to celebrate. That is why I am here this evening — to help pay tribute to a writer whose books have not just entertained me, though they have certainly done that, and have not just given me plenty to talk about, though they have accomplished that, too. I want to say a little about the way in which Albert Murray’s work has influenced my very perception of our society and of my place in it.

First, a little about how I came upon Murray’s work, and met the man himself. Late in 1992, I was reading a book I found provocative — Stanley Crouch’s Notes of a Hanging Judge — when I came across an essay on Mr. Murray. I still remember one line Crouch wrote about Murray: He described Murray as “a writer who knows that to be all-American is to be Indian, African, European, and Asian, if only through cuisine.” In the faction-obsessed 1990s, this idea struck me as being so unusual as to be worth pursuing further. I therefore went to my local bookstore, in Brooklyn, to look for a copy of a book mentioned in Crouch’s essay — The Omni-Americans. Not only did my bookstore not have the book, but their efforts to order it for me were unsuccessful. After striking out at a couple of other stores, I reluctantly gave up the search.

In the meantime, I had joined the staff of Current Biography. Current Biography, or CB, is a reference publication that features profiles of accomplished people in a variety of fields. It was not long after I had become an associate editor of CB, in 1994, that I happened across a copy of The Omni-Americans in Coliseum Books at 57th and Broadway. I immediately bought the book, of course, and I was not very far into it before I knew that Albert Murray was someone I had to profile for CB.  Thus began my attempts to contact Mr. Murray. After going down a couple of blind alleys, I tried one approach so obvious that it seemed destined to fail: I called Directory Assistance. Well, sometimes the obvious works. Before I knew it, I was having a conversation with Albert Murray, and shortly after that I was sitting in his apartment.

I very quickly learned two things about this man. The first is that his initial gruffness — which can be intimidating, especially from someone as accomplished as he is — masks an accessibility, graciousness, and warmth that are missing in many a person far less accomplished.  The second thing I learned, simply put, is that there is very, very little that Albert Lee Murray does not know something about. As I talked to him on the phone, and as I sat in his apartment, among more books than I have seen in many bookstores, I heard Mr. Murray talk about everything and everybody from Joe Louis, to the black musician Will Marion Cook, to the Constitution of the United States, to things I didn’t even know about my alma mater, Oberlin College, to entire subjects I had never heard of before. We all know how tiresome it can be to be in the company of someone who won’t stop talking; but I’m talking about a whole different experience here: the experience of being swept along in a flood of knowledge, one that you don’t want to stop because it’s teaching you so much.

I’ve been asked to speak here about my relationship with Mr. Murray. This is a little difficult, only because I think of a relationship as something existing between equals or near-equals, which Mr. Murray and I certainly are not. We have been in touch from time to time since my Current Biography article on him was published. I have been his guest at Jazz at Lincoln Center, where he is on the board; I have called him periodically to say hello, and I sent along my condolences after the passing of his longtime friend, the great Ralph Ellison; and he called me  to give me his thoughts on a couple of essays I wrote. But I have not been able to repay the benefits I have derived from him and his work. Still, I can say something about his influence on me.

My generation of black Americans is the first not to grow up under the shadow of official segregation. While I am grateful for this fact, it has resulted in some confusion for me and others like me. One of the few benefits of segregation is that one is less often troubled by that quietly spoken but persistent question, Who am I?  In a segregated situation, the answer to the question Who am I? is much the same for you as for those around you, so much so that the question doesn’t often come up. But when you are thrust into a crowd of people who look different from you; when you then get the message from some that you are essentially like those people, and from others that you are fundamentally different — in other words, when you are a black person thrust into a mostly non-black society — the result, if you are at all open-minded, can be paralyzing disorientation. Because, while it is obvious that fact must be separated from myth when it comes to these alleged similarities and differences, while it is obvious that one must figure out the significance of the similarities and differences one decides are real, what is far less obvious is how one does this. How do you decide what, if anything, connects you to those people who live in the same place as you but outnumber you and look nothing like you? How do you decide what in this land and in its history are “yours” and what things are “theirs”? How do you convince yourself that what is yours is worthwhile, when its significance is so often downplayed in “mainstream” culture? How, in short, do you begin to answer the question, Who am I?

Well, one approach, and one that has worked for me, is to read the books, nine and counting, of Albert Murray. The Omni-Americans. Train Whistle Guitar. South to a Very Old Place. Stomping the Blues. The Blue Devils of Nada. Because these works do not shout or plead — they discuss black American culture as if its importance is a given. They do not talk about a black “us” and a white “them” but about an all-inclusive, “omni-American” we. At the same time, Murray’s works define the black contribution to that “we.” As fans of Murray’s need not be told, two large parts of that contribution, two among many, are jazz and the blues. For Murray, these art forms extend beyond mere entertainment; they contain a model for living, for amassing knowledge that one can then use to meet challenging situations — as jazz musicians do. As a member of a people who produced these most American of art forms, what can I myself be but an American? And as such, how can I then doubt my place among other Americans?

With this knowledge to sustain me, secure in my own cultural identity, I am free to go about learning, as Murray has done all his life, and as his alter ego, Scooter, aka Schoolboy, does. I am free to embrace the symbols of American achievement and, by extension, of all great human achievement — while continuing to celebrate, and tell others about, the black American story. As Langston Hughes put it: “My motto, / As I live and learn / Is / Dig and be dug / In return.”

The last year and a half or so has seen a surge of overdue appreciation for Albert Murray. (I am happy to report that my local bookstore now carries The Omni-Americans.) He has won several awards, and this evening, as he receives the Langston Hughes Award, I salute Albert Murray, and I thank him. I thank him for giving me, as he hand-wrote in my copy of Stomping the Blues, “Some riffing field notes from the briar patch for a functional frame of reference for an omni-American identity.” I thank him for clarifying and enriching my experience and that of many other people. Thank you.

My theory of Bellow’s trajectory is that his progeny peaked with Humboldt’s Gift, from 1975 — a long (487-page) novel that overflows with humor, wonder, and zest for life. The Dean’s December, from seven years later, struck me as Humboldt’s smaller, dried-up brother, and by the time of Ravelstein (2000), Bellow’s last novel, his skills as a storyteller seemed to have eroded; having created the interesting title character, Bellow had little for him to do except die, which he does very slowly.

Someone who has read this blog from the beginning might recall from last year that I hadn’t finished The Adventures of Augie March, and I still haven’t. Similarly, I missed the novels between The Dean’s December and Ravelstein. (But hey, Nicholson Baker admitted in his book about Updike — U and I – that he’d read less than half of the man’s stuff.) So, you Bellowphiles out there, what should I pick up? More Die of Heartbreak? The Bellarosa Connection?

Tell Cliff . . .

In the early rerun of The Office I saw recently, the hilariously clueless Michael Scott (Steve Carell) forced the employees under him to embrace diversity by sharing racial/ethnic stereotypes. The episode was one big joke encompassing a lot of little jokes — the big joke being that the least sensitive and racially aware person in the group was teaching the others about awareness and sensitivity. The funniest, and most excruciating, of the little jokes came when Michael did a crude impression of South Asians — while standing face-to-face with a dark-skinned South Asian woman. After she slapped him and stomped away, Michael thought a moment and said, “Now she knows what it’s like to be a minority.”

Obviously the jokes here, big and small, are on Michael. For contrast we now turn to 30 Rock, on which the black comedian Tracy Morgan plays a vain, loud, somewhat-less-than-intellectual cast member of a comedy/variety TV show. The fictional show’s writers play a prank on a white cast member, publishing a fake New York Times interview in which he calls Morgan “clean” and “articulate.” The white cast member, reading the “interview,” complains, “I didn’t call him those things. He’s neither!” To give credit where it’s due, that is a brilliant joke, and it made me laugh, though my discomfort rose as I tried to figure out what — or who — I was laughing at. The joke was like a scene in a movie in which a gun goes off and we don’t know who’s been shot — except that here, at the end, we still don’t know. Is the butt of the joke the stereotyped black man? Or is it our absurd racial situation, in which words become so loaded, their meanings so twisted, that — metaphorically speaking — black becomes white, up is down, a compliment an insult?

Maybe that’s the explanation for one of the 30 Rock’s running gags: that one of the writers of the show-within-a-show is called Toofer, because he’s (1) a Harvard grad and (2) black. Ha ha, the joke’s on us all, except that it’s this poor character — and actor (Keith Powell) — who have to walk around with a nickname based partly on skin color.

What’s going on here?

Maybe the explanation is what sometimes happens to me with pieces of music: I hear it three times without being moved at all, and then the fourth time, kapow, I suddenly get it, or it gets me. Or maybe it’s another case of a revolutionary work that sets a standard subsequently taken for granted, that is made to seem run-of-the-mill by the uncountable imitations, homages, and rip-offs that follow.

Then again, in an era when Hollywood packs movie after movie after fucking movie with shots of cars entering parking lots and other deadly dull filler, the ingenious black-and-white frames of Citizen Kane are anything but run-of-the-mill. And some of the more memorable films made since Kane’s release, in 1941, show visual traces of its influence, ranging from Fellini’s 8½ to Raiders of the Lost Ark. (That last scene in Raiders — of all the wooden crates, one of which contains the Ark of the Covenant – was inspired by the shot of crates containing Charles Foster Kane’s crap at Xanadu.)

My friend enjoyed Kane’s numerous shots of people in shadow but wondered what they signified. I think now that they are visual representations of the unknowability of others — and particularly of the title character. A reporter spends the film trying to understand the meaning of Kane’s last spoken word, hoping thereby to find a key to the man himself. He fails, of course, to find the meaning of “Rosebud,” a name from Kane’s youth, just as Kane fails — just as we all fail — to recapture what is no more.