Charles Austin Beard

Posted on 27 Nov 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1874, the great historian Charles Austin Beard was born. I think what matters in historians is if they provide us with new ways of viewing the world. Beard was very much this kind of historian. It’s funny, having been born in 1964, I think I came of age in a great time of American hagiography and apologetics. No one seemed terribly interested in taking a cold, hard look at where this nation had come from and what it had become. And then came the time of Reagan. And now to even mention that the United States isn’t the best country that ever has been and ever could be is an act of heresy by those on the right.

As I discussed last year: Charles Beard was a progressive who saw the history of America through the lens of class conflict. This view has fallen out of favor. But his idea applied to the founding of the country seems correct. He argued that there were two revolutions. First, there was the revolution that we all know and love and that is immortalized with singing and a bit of dance in 1776. But there was a second revolution about who should rule. There were those who wanted at least a proto-democracy, as advocated by people like Paine and Madison. And then there were those who wanted a new aristocratic rule, as advocated by people like Adams and Hamilton. I think we can all agree that the results of that revolution are much more a muddle compared to the whole England business.

Beard argued that the original revolution was really all about economics and not much about the ideology that we now tell ourselves. Gerald Horne has done more recent work updating this concept in, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. The thesis is that a lot of the American owning class was in a big rush to sever ties with England because of the fear that the mother country was going to outlaw the slave trade. There is no question that this is true; the only question is how big a current it was in the revolution. I think it was fairly big.

That’s the great thing about people like Beard: they expand our minds. That is why conservatives hate them. Open minds question the status quo. And that is what all intellectual activity should be about. We want to improve upon the world. Conservatives want to ossify it.

Happy birthday Charles Beard!

Mary Edwards Walker

Posted on 26 Nov 2014 by Frank Moraes

Mary Edwards Walker - Medal of Honor On this day in 1832, the great feminist Mary Edwards Walker was born. It is wrong to call her simply a feminist. She was many things, including a surgeon. She worked for the Union Army during the Civil War. In fact, while treating Confederate soldiers across enemy lines, she was captured by the traitors and accused of spying. She was later released in a prisoner exchange. After the war, she was given the Medal of Honor — the only woman to ever be given one.

There is a strange story about it, though. In 1917, Congress passed a law giving pensions to Medal of Honor recipients. The Army took the opportunity to re-evaluate the recipients (the Navy did not). They decided to knock 911 names off the list — one of which was Walker’s. She still wore the medal for her two remaining years of life. But you just have to wonder what the army thought it was doing removing those names. Regardless, Walker’s medal was restored by President Carter in 1977.

Mary Edwards Walker - Top Hat (1911) Walker was prominent in the women’s suffrage movement. She pushed the idea that woman already had the right to vote and there was no need to alter the Constitution. When this approach did not work, the movement transitioned to calling for a Constitutional amendment. But Walker never changed. This marginalized her in the movement. She was further marginalized by her opinions about dress. She felt that women should be allowed to dress as men if they thought it proper. She normally wore men’s clothing, including a trademark top hat.

Happy birthday Mary Edwards Walker!

Lope de Vega

Posted on 25 Nov 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1562, the greatest playwright of all time, Lope de Vega, was born. Of course, most people wouldn’t think that because Lope didn’t write in English and he was not used as the cultural sword of the expansion of a major empire the way that Shakespeare was. But Lope did not only write great plays, he wrote a lot of plays. As Shakespeare scholar Gary Taylor wrote, “We assume that Shakespeare’s thirty-odd plays contain more of humanity than the five hundred plays of Lope de Vega we have not read.” That’s right: 500 plays. In fact, it might be more than that.

The Shakespeare apologists, of course, will claim that this is why Shakespeare is so great. He took his time. He didn’t write so many plays. But this is always the way it is with Shakespeare. However he did something is the best. For example, scholars have claimed that Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors is better than Plautus’ Menaechmi. Why? Because Shakespeare has two sets of identical twins. Of course, if the situation were reversed, these scholars would argue the opposite: that two sets of twins is needlessly silly. So just the same, if a playwright wrote fewer plays than Shakespeare or more plays, it just goes to show that Shakespeare is the greatest playwright ever. Because everything shows that.

Lope de Vega is the literary equivalent to Mozart. Although born into a working class family (his father was an embroiderer), Lope was writing plays by the time he was 12-years-old. Many people helped him out during his teen years, because his genius was so clear to everyone. But for most of his 20s and early 30s, he was focused on chasing after women. This is an avocation that got him into some trouble: jail, exile, and eventually an assignment with the Spanish Armada, which he was quite lucky to survive.

And then he started to write in earnest. By his count, he had written over 200 plays by the age of 40. By the age of 60, he had written a thousand. There is no doubt that Lope was something of a hack. People wanted a play about X and Lope would spit one back at them in a couple of days. But they weren’t fluff. The average Shakespeare play is about 20,000 words. His comedies are shorter: about 17,000 words. The only play of Lope’s I’ve been able to read, Fuenteovejuna, is roughly 12,000 words. It runs roughly two hours. So it’s shorter, but not terribly so.

In addition to this, Lope wasn’t slavishly committed to holding up the ruling class as the savior of the world. Let me just present three synopses taken from Melveena McKendrick’s excellent Theatre in Spain 1490-1700:

Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña (Peribáñez and the Commander of Ocaña)

[S]et in the fifteenth century, [it] portrays the idyllic marriage and life together of the prosperous and ambitious young peasant Peribáñez and his lovely bride Casilda, and the attempts made by their overlord to seduce her. When Casilda remains impervious to his blandishments, the Commander makes Peribáñez a captain and sends him off to fight the king’s war. He enters his house at night intending to take Casilda by force if necessary, but aware by now of his intentions Peribáñez returns in time to prevent the rape of Casilda and the destruction of their lives by killing his lord. His action is subsequently pardoned though not condoned by the King, he is given a full captaincy and sent off to fight in the Granada campaign…

Fuenteovejuna

Like Peribáñez, Fuenteovejuna also deals with the relationship between honour and noble birth by presenting sexual aggression in the context of class relationships. Here, however, the conflict is not the cat and mouse game played by the Commander in Peribáñez, but open confrontation from the start between a brutally predatory overlord and the entire village of Fuenteovejuna which he tyrannizes in the name of his seigneurial rights; the tension is created not so much by how he will be stopped but by whom. The village’s sense of impotence and fear is encapsulated in its name, Fountain of the sheep: the men are emasculated, almost dehumanized, by their overlord’s grotesque abuse of power and privilege and it is a woman, Laurencia, who eventually shames them into action in the play’s major speech. In the name of their communal self-respect the men and women of Fuenteovejuna kill the Commander and, when tortured for the truth by the King’s men, answer only “Fuenteovejuna did it”…

El Mejor Alcalde, el Rey (No Greater Judge Than the King Himself)

The Galician peasant hero, Sancho, does not take the law into his own hands but invokes the law’s majesty by appealing to the King himself for aid. The noble, for his part, don Tello, not only transgresses against the principles of duty and responsibility on which the social contract is founded but defies the King himself, refusing to accept his monarch as ultimate arbiter of law and justice on earth. The play is set in the twelfth century, when seigneurial rights were only just beginning to yield before monarchical power and this gives credibility to don Tello’s reckless anarchy. The King in the guise of a judge travels to the village and hears for himself don Tello’s defiance. Revealing his identity he marries don Tello to Sancho’s bridge-to-be, whom he has raped, and then executes him so that Elvira, now a rich widow, can marry the man who loves her. Justice is done not by meeting force with force but by recourse to the processes of law. The play, therefore, marks in a sense a more mature and a more serene state in Lope’s exploration of the theme of power and its relationship to justice.

Lope de Vega is a writer that everyone should know a whole lot more about. I think we have all seen enough Shakespeare for the rest of our lives. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of plays of Lope’s that have never even been translated into English. It is a shame.

Happy birthday Lope de Vega!

Marie Bashkirtseff

Posted on 24 Nov 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1858, the great Ukrainian painter Marie Bashkirtseff was born. The reason you have probably never heard of her is that she died of tuberculosis when she was only 25 years old. But she was a master. She was an admirer of Jules Bastien-Lepage, although I think she shows greater technique. What I especially like about her is that depending upon the work, she can use the finest of brush strokes while at other times using very crude strokes as found with the impressionists. Of course, she is of that time and Bastien-Lepage was an influence on the movement.

Bashkirtseff is also known as a diarist and sculptor — probably because we have so little of her work. She died in Paris on Halloween in 1884. Normally, I would provide a bit of her work. But I found this excellent three-minute video that gives a very nice overview of her work — even including one of her sculptures. She was an amazing talent.

Happy birthday Marie Bashkirtseff!

Robert Towne

Posted on 23 Nov 2014 by Frank Moraes

The great screenwriter Robert Towne is 80 years old today. I know, I know: another screenwriter?! But I quite like Towne. Most especially, I like him for Chinatown, which is a great screenplay and a great movie. In Hollywood, he is probably best known as a “script doctor.” He is legend for all the films he has helped fix. I can’t really comment on that. I tend to think that kind of stuff is anti-art. For example, he was brought in to work on Crimson Tide. But really, what major screenwriter in Hollywood was not brought in to work on that film?

The only films that I’m really sure he was the primary writer on were Shampoo and the second Mission: Impossible film. The first Mission: Impossible film is probably more typical of what Towne is paid extremely well to do. After going through a number of screenwriters, the production didn’t have much of a script. Brian De Palma (the guy who made good films at one time) put together a few action sequences in pre-production, so Towne took David Koepp’s basic story line (What?! Team leader double crosses team?) and De Palma’s action sequences and created some kind of a structure. In the end, the film almost seems like it makes sense.

Mission: Impossible II makes a lot more sense. It is riddled with Hollywood movie cliches and its most clever plot twist is so unbelievable that it would make Stan Lee wince. But it is a good vehicle for John Woo and probably as good a thing as he did in America. But it does highlight something unpleasant: being a writer for hire is probably the perfect thing for Robert Towne.

But sometimes a great craftsman gets the perfect project and great art is born. And that is the case with Chinatown. Actually, The Two Jakes is a great script too. It shows that having a great director is also important though. Towne did some directing too. Nothing worth mentioning. Let’s forget all that and just watch a little Chinatown. The following scene brings together three ideas that are very important to me: (1) money is a self-aggrandizing game for the powerful; (2) under the right circumstances, people are capable of anything; and (3) the powerful are far more likely to be evil than the weak.

Happy birthday Robert Towne!

George Eliot

Posted on 22 Nov 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1819, the great writer Mary Ann Evans was born. You probably known her better as George Eliot. It is often hard to fully appreciate older authors. For example, people often miss much of the social commentary in Jane Austen, who is read as little more than a particularly witty Harlequin romance. And don’t even get me started on Shakespeare, who almost no one gets much out of. But Eliot doesn’t so much have this problem because of her deep characterizations.

Another aspect of this is how she approaches people on the margins of society. That’s especially true in her first three books. The crux of Adam Bede is Hetty’s desperate and foolish behavior leading to the death of her baby and the ramifications of that. The Mill on the Floss if mostly about Maggie’s isolation and the results of it. I’ve never understood why Tom and Maggie have to die at the end of the book. I guess it was the style of the time, but the book is hardly a tragedy. And Maggie’s sins are minor — even by the standards of time.

Both of these books seem to me just a lead up to Eliot’s masterpiece, Silas Marner. Okay, I admit it: I’m just a soft touch who is easily charmed by an infant melting the heart of a miser. But there is so much more in that little book. Above all, it is highly positive but still realistic rendering of community. People can be very messed up, but in a situation like this, I think this is how people behave. Of course, it is still 19th century literature, so we have to have villains like Dunstan Cass and low-born opium addicts like Molly Farren.

I guess I have to stop there because I haven’t read anything else by Eliot. She is also known for her German translations and for her work as a left wing journalist. She also led quite a scandalous life. She rejected Christianity. And she lived in sin with philosopher George Henry Lewes for twenty odd years. And then, at the age of 60, she married John Cross who was twenty years younger than she was. On their honeymoon, he apparently tried to kill himself. And then when they returned, she caught some kind of infection and died a couple of months later. But hell, she lived a hell of a lot longer than the much better behaved Jane Austen and all the Brontë sisters.

Happy birthday George Eliot!

René Magritte

Posted on 21 Nov 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1898, the great surrealist painter René Magritte was born. When I was younger, I didn’t much care for his art. There were a good too many apples and bowlers and too little of the overwhelming brilliance of Salvador Dalí. But over time, I came to appreciate Magritte’s art. For one thing, he has much less of a clear style than Dalí. And so the genius behind the paintings is clear.

It’s also the case that Magritte didn’t produce that many works. This may be partly because he wasn’t that successful until quite late into his life. In fact, he had a career arc rather like that of Cervantes: producing work throughout his life, but doing many things to support himself. But it is also the case that he tended to have very distinct thoughts behind his work.

By the late 1920s, he was producing very interesting — clearly surrealistic — work. Some of this, such as The Treachery of Images, is over-intellectual. But other works, such as The Empty Mask, seem to be much deeper than Magritte himself was aware of. I think that is important for an explicitly intellectual artist; the work has to be somewhat out of control or it becomes contrived.

Magritte was always interested in the question of what was behind images. We see that as early as The Empty Mask. It is a profound question to consider coming from an artist who is, after all, only interested in the surfaces of things. But in fact, every image is just covering up another and on and on. In the mid-1930s, he looked at this quite explicitly in his two paintings The Human Condition, where a painting rendered inside the painting covers up exactly the reality it displays.

He did some other interesting work around this time such as Not to be Reproduced and On the Threshold of Liberty. And then his production slowed way down for a decade because of the war. He produced some good work and experimented a lot with color in ways that he didn’t seem to bother with much at other times. And then in the late 1940s, he seemed to arrive at a fairly dependable style that we know him for as in paintings like The Art of Life.

In the early 1950s, he produced a series of paintings, The Empire of Lights. The concept is simple enough. But it is lovely:

Magritte didn’t produce his best known work until shortly before he died, The Son of Man. What Magritte wrote about it could stand as a general description of his entire output:

Well, so you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It’s something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.

Happy birthday René Magritte!

Duane Allman

Posted on 20 Nov 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1946, the great guitarist Duane Allman was born. I can’t think of anyone who plays rock even as good, much less better. Most people think Hendrix was better, but it is hard to see that. I think that is because of what Hendrix did regarding the sound of the guitar. In terms of what he played, it was mostly pretty standard blues. Allman was pushing the envelope of what rock guitar was. It was still mostly blues, but it was a whole lot more. It is sad that we missed out on his evolution. He died in a motorcycle accident when he was only 24 years old.

He worked as a session musician for years, where he had a profound influence — working with people like Boz Scaggs, Wilson Pickett, and Aretha Franklin. He is probably best known for his guitar work on Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla.” He’s the one who created the guitar riff, which is about the only thing people remember on the song. He and Clapton shared guitar on the song with countless overdubs. But all the slide guitar was Allman.

Allman teamed up with his younger brother Gregg and a number of other great musicians to form The Allman Brothers. The three albums they released while Duane was still alive are all classics. They are more standard blues rock, but this isn’t Savoy Brown — as good as they are. And live, they are really something special. I’m having some difficulty finding really good live video, so here is “Whipping Post” from 1970 at Fillmore East (not the concert their third album was drawn from):

Happy birthday Duane Allman!

Charlie Kaufman

Posted on 19 Nov 2014 by Frank Moraes

The great screenwriter Charlie Kaufman is 56 years old today. But is he really “great”?! I’m open to the argument that he isn’t. Maybe he is just good and basically every other screenwriter in Hollywood is a hack. Or maybe it is that he is almost the only screenwriter who is allowed to write anything interesting. Regardless, his work is remarkable.

I don’t want to put this too broadly. There are great screenwriters. Three off the top of my head: Woody Allen, Paul Schrader, and Tony Gilroy. But Kaufman’s work is distinctly expansive of the format in ways that simply aren’t the case with Quentin Tarantino or Robert Towne or Paddy Chayefsky. He has a novelist’s view of the screenplay, but the novelist is more Kafka than Hemingway.

It is hard to appreciate Kaufman in small video clips, but I’m going to try. Let’s start with Being John Malkovich. Here is the introduction to the 7½ floor. It strikes me as quite a lot like Eugène Ionesco, although the film later panders a tad to external reality:

There is much good to say about Human Nature, even if it doesn’t fully work. But I can’t find any clips of it. So we will move on to Adaptation. It is a marvel of meta-art — a vicious attack and loving embrace of genre writing. But it still has this affecting scene in the middle of a totally ridiculous sequence:

Let’s skip by Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which I like quite a lot, because I think it had Kaufman’s soul ripped out of it. So we move to one of my very favorite films, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It really is the cinematic equivalent of Crime and Punishment. And it is the best directing that Kaufman has ever received, which is interesting given that I don’t think much of Michel Gondry as a director. “Meet me in Montauk…”

Then there is Synecdoche, New York — a film so deep it gets lost inside itself. I think of it as “Charlie Kaufman does MC Escher!” It was the first time he directed, and he does have a distinctive style. But it seems very much like a director who has waited fifty years to direct. The density of the film is overpowering. It isn’t at all surprising that the film was a commercial failure. But it is an amazing film. And visually, it reminds me of the photo realist Scott Prior, who I believe was greatly influenced by Edward Hopper. Check out this scene with its world within a world:

And then nothing. Well, apparently he wrote and directed a television pilot, How and Why. But it isn’t going to be picked up. There’s a shock. And maybe this is it. Kaufman is honest enough to admit that his career has largely been a matter of luck. And it is likely the Hollywood was only interested in him because he was “weird” and surprisingly “cool” for a time. But after Synecdoche, New York, it is hard for them to escape the conclusion that he is an artist and that is not a safe conduit to the commodities and profits that they wish to create.

Happy birthday Charlie Kaufman!

The Painting of Wyndham Lewis

Posted on 18 Nov 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1882, the great painter Wyndham Lewis was born. He was also a writer of some repute — probably more famous for that during his lifetime. He wrote about a dozen novels and countless essays, short stories, plays, and even poetry. I’ve never read any of his work, but I probably will now. I am going to focus on his painting here.

He was probably the greatest artist in the Vorticist movement. But he is so much more than that. Partly, this is because the movement didn’t much last. Apparently, everyone was so depressed by World War I that they all slunk off in their own personal ways. As a result, his work is quite eclectic. Actually, I’m not that fond of his — or anyone else’s — Vorticist work.

In the Tate’s discussion of Lewis, it mentions that he “produced a bewildering quantity and range of work.” It is very true. It is hard to get a handle on exactly what he was doing. He was one of those crazy talented people who grab different influences the way we lesser mortals breath air. For example, in his battlefield painting A Battery Shelled, I certainly see Vorticism, but there is much more:

But later, he was doing Tyros as seen above in his self-portrait. And later still, he often did more realism as in the following painting of his wife “Froanna” (Gladys Anne Hoskins):

Most of his work is quite splendid, and I’ll admit that the work I don’t like is probably more a failing of mine than his. It is well worth checking out.

Happy birthday Wyndham Lewis!

Gene Clark

Posted on 17 Nov 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1944, the great singer-songwriter Gene Clark was born. He is best known as a founding member of The Byrds — and by far their best songwriter. There is a reason that the first two Byrds albums are classics and the rest just okay. (I will consider arguments that Younger Than Yesterday is a great album — but you have to explain how it isn’t derivative.) And that reason is Clark who was a prodigious talent.

He only wrote one song on the third album, “Eight Miles High.” It is nominally a collaboration with Roger McGuinn and David Crosby, but the song is clearly so much Clark’s that the other two shouldn’t get writing credit. Its cadences are the same as on other Clark songs like “Here Without You.” Of course, that hasn’t stopped Roger McGuinn for taking credit for the song — but only after Clark died.

I found the following great quote from The Byrds’ bass player (and a fine songwriter himself) Chris Hillman about Clark’s position in the band:

At one time, he was the power in the Byrds, not McGuinn, not Crosby — it was Gene who would burst through the stage curtain banging on a tambourine, coming on like a young Prince Valiant. A hero, our savior. Few in the audience could take their eyes off this presence. He was the songwriter. He had the “gift” that none of the rest of us had developed yet… What deep inner part of his soul conjured up songs like “Set You Free This Time,” “I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better,” “I’m Feelin’ Higher,” “Eight Miles High”? So many great songs! We learned a lot of songwriting from him and in the process learned a little bit about ourselves.

“Set You Free This Time” is from The Byrds second album. It stands out as distinct from his other work from this period. It sounds more like a Bobby Russell song! And on the album it sounds more like a Gene Clark solo song. But here he is years later doing the song with his own band:

Like in most bands, there was a power struggle in The Byrds and McGuinn and Crosby won. Clark left and became a solo artist with the great Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers. The album didn’t do well. You could say that generally of his solo career, including his small group projects with Doug Dillard and ex-Byrds Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman. What’s sad is that the albums are all quite good and some of them are amazing. In particular, No Other has become a classic, even though it was entirely ignored at the time. Here is “Silver Raven” from that album:

Before I knew anything about him, I loved Gene Clark for the songs on those first two Byrds albums. It was always clear to me that he was the great talent. But when I later learned more about him, I appreciated him as a person. He’s such a tragic figure. He suffered greatly from anxiety. He hated touring and was afraid of airplane traveling. To deal with these issues by drinking and drugging them away. And it ended up killing him at 46 from a bleeding ulcer. It’s sad, because I think he might well have become a legend on the order of Neil Young. Certainly, his reputation is better today than it ever has been.

Happy birthday Gene Clark!

Burgess Meredith

Posted on 16 Nov 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1907, the great actor Burgess Meredith was born. Throughout my life, he seemed to be everywhere. When I was a kid, he was the Penguin on Batman. Later I knew him for his great roles on The Twilight Zone. And later still, he was the best thing in Rocky. But like I said, he was everywhere.