Why Writers Write
Oscar Levant
I took yesterday OFF (my favorite mosquito spray) to read; I read at three books, finishing one, Oscar Levant's great little 1940 volume,
A Smattering of Ignorance, published in those days by a publisher called Doubleday Doran (the Doubledays are still around--the publisher became a bookstore (now gone) and the family still owns the New York Mets--but Doran, who the hell knows or cares what happened to them?; I'm sure they came out alright).
Though written in 1940, it's all damn interesting to a person like me or any musician, writer, sociologist, observer, notator (and in that sense historian), filmmaker, or just a gawker at the lives of celebrities, introducing me for the first time to the complexities suffered by famous conductors between their importance and the importance of the philharmonic and symphony orchestras they are hired to conduct and therefore control--first of all most philharmonic players, according to Oscar, are usually antagonistic to the conductor ("100 men and women and a louse" as the old saying goes--though originally there were no women in US symphony orchestras) no matter his stature in the world of conducting--and Levant gives examples of the problems Arturo Toscanini had with the snobby New York Philharmonic (started by the dilettante Damrosch family--it's first conductor Walter Damrosch, who has a park named after him to this day over behind Lincoln Center, though during his reign the orchestra played in Carnegie Hall, it's home for years and years until Lincoln Center was shoddily built in the late 60s and the NY Phil moved into Alice Tully Hall--a hall that had to be redesigned and rebuilt several times before they got the sound right. In Carnegie Hall nobody needed microphones--though they do have a sound system there now--but in Alice Tully Hall the sound was so bad, they had to have microphones everywhere--with sound engineers and shit. I can just see Beethoven and Liszt calling for the sound engineers--"Why the hell is my mic not working? And why can't I hear the cellos, man; I gotta hear the damn cellos, man."
And then Levant in his envious way (Oscar was a great interpreter of Gershwin serious pieces--Oscar was from the Russian school of bombastic pianists but was more noted for his acting and his being sarcastic, put-down asshole--Jack Paar brought him back to prominence in his last years in the early 60s) writes about his relationship with Harpo Marx and the parties and dinners at Harpo's Hollywood house and Harpo and music and playing the harp with it strung backwards because that's how he'd taught himself to play it--backwards; and the great bluesman Sonny Terry played the harmonica backwards, too, as a "by the bye," and also I knew a saxophone player in Santa Fe, a scion of a famous publishing family, whose whole act was playing
The Stars Spangled Banner backwards--always variations of the backwards national anthem (a stupid one to boot, and this was this guy's point--the damn thing is still just as silly backwards or forwards, though this dude wouldn't have been caught dead playing it forwards--nor did he stand for it when it was played monotonously forwards before sporting events and even the Santa Fe Opera one year.
Oscar's best essay in this little book is the one he wrote about his friendship with the Gershwins, George and Ira. Levant lived with George Gershwin for two years almost--was there when Gershwin was writing
Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, the Concerto in F, and
the Preludes for Piano, while he was trying to transcend his role as the leading composer of show tunes, Broadway tunes, and therefore Hollywood film scores and musicals--when Gershwin was trying to compose concert pieces--not symphonies surprisingly enough--but operettas, like his masterpiece
Porgy and Bess--the idea for using an all black cast, by the way, came from the success of Gertrude Stein's and Virgil Thomson's grand little opera
Four Saints in Four Acts, which was conducted by Alexander Smallens the same conductor who would later conduct
Porgy and Bess. Levant's writing is puzzling, witty, deceiving, and I think liquidly refreshing--I love it--though a lot of his best quips are pale compared to what he would have to come up with today--Gore Vidal is as close to Oscar Levant as I can come right now--it's the same sort of deep wit, not really as sarcastic as it is mocking the hypocrisies of life--and how all that glitters isn't ever gold.
Ralph Ellison I've recently been immersed in the life and times of the Prez, Lester Young, the original swinging tenor in the orchestras of what became the jazz bands--Lester arising out of what later became known (thanks to Ralph Ellison's insight) as Southwest jazz, swing, blues--and as Lester said, it's all blues--if you can't play the blues and those blues tonics and those off-minor tangents and shit then you really can't play jazz--to prove this, listen to say Albert Mangelsdorf the German jazz goof a lot of
moderne jazz "students" love and admire, some saying they'd even forsake Charles Parker, Jr.'s, albums in favor of Albert Mangels(jazz)dorf--listen to Albert and then listen to a trombonist you may not have ever heard of, Jimmy Cleveland, who made tons of albums back in the 50s and 60s--a good one under Cecil Payne's leadership. Check out these two dudes playing side by side and tell me which one has you dancin' first or has you finger-popping first, or head shakin' (side to side and not up and down like squares (White people)) first, or toe tapping first, or feelin' like moving horizontally and not vertically like those German-trained musicians go, the ones even Charles Ives knew were ruining classical music way back in the 1880s.
The book is Ralph Ellison's
Shadow and Act , my edition a Book-of-the-Month Club special issue from 1994, the essays in the book a collection of stuff mostly published in magazines from 1953 until 1964.
Ralph was born in Okie City, Oklahoma, his family escaping the white-barbarism of the South out to Indian Territory, finally settling in Oklahoma City, where due to Oklahoma not being a state during the Civil War (and we're still fighting the Civil War, folks, and don't you forget it--Ellison brings this out, too, in his evaluation of the writings of Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway) it therefore never had anything to do with slavery (Native American reservations--though those are OK since the White Man saw right off that these redmen were savages--they had to be penned up and controlled by the Great White Father).
(silver bars)I "grew up" (from 1 to 4 years of age) in Enid, Oklahoma, 100 miles due north (a little to the northwest by a hair) of Oklahoma City; also I was stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, during my stint in the U.S. F-ing Army as an artillery battery officer (a 2nd louie, the first to be killed in a platoon in a war (like Vietnam, where I was headed at the time)--the first to be fragged by his men of that platoon--certainly more 2nd louies (gold bars) get killed in war than do 1st louies or captains (silver bars), so I've always felt a second-home allegiance to Oklahoma in spite of its faults--like legalized cockfighting and 3.2 beer at one time the most disgraceful beer ever invented by the Germans of Milwaukee and Colorado. 3.2 beer was the only beer allowed to be sold in Army PXs (post exchanges) in those dark days-- and one night I drank 15 bottles of Carling's Black Label (a Chicago brew--a prohibition beer label, "Yoohoo, Mabel, Black Label") and was as sober as a judge--though I was drunk, "a 3.2 drunk" as we used to joke about drinking the flat shit--and I grew up drinking 3.2 Walthers, Bergdorf, and original Coors beers all out of Colorado)--and in Oklahoma, all the prostitutes were tested every 6 months for venereal diseases and had to carry a card with them showing they were registered with the State of Oklahoma as clean ho's--I know, I fell madly in love with a prostitute in Lawton, Oklahoma, during my tour of duty at Fort Sill--the most gorgeous creature I'd ever seen until then, a gorgeous black woman, and the first time I saw her I was being escorted back to the base by MPs with a kid from Arkansas because we had caused a ruckus at one of the downtown hotels over a woman and the MPs courteously came and put us under arrest and then drove us back to Fort Sill in a Jeep and set us free--and while we were passing the Starlight Club in that Jeep (now ironically made by Hitler's favorite automobile company, Daimler-Benz (yep, Mercedes were once called Mercedes Benzes (remember Janice Joplin's song)), now Daimler-Chrysler), there she was, standing in front of the club, wearing a tight-tight black dress and looking like the god-damn Queen of Sheba I'd read about in the pornographic
Songs of Solomon, remember him? The man who had 1000 wives? And the Mormons are condemned for wanting at least 6 hot wives--I mean, come on, the Jewish God Jehovah allows a 1000 wives--OK, so Solomon was a privileged human-divinity-king--so he deserves a 1000 babes at least, and, yes, I suppose, an ordinary peasant could only handle six wives at a time--plus, those six wives might produce six beautiful blonde daughters--and under polygamy rules, according to old Brigham "Frig 'em" Young, the daughters go to daddy and daddy's pleasure after they're big enough to be taught the scriptures according to Joe Smith--at least that's what Joe said the Lard told him about it all, though Joe was drunk as a skunk at the time (which was most of the time). Later, I was playing the piano in the smoky Baltimore Club in Lawton and in she walks, wearing a low-cut black gown, with a diamond necklace--god she was beautiful and I was struck down by her beauty and she was with the biggest god-damndest tough-looking black bastard I'd ever seen in my short life and once she came over to the piano and I ask her for her phone number and she said she couldn't talk to me--and then I overheard they were moving to the Starlight--and I got together with my buddy the Congressman from Chicago and we went down to the Starlight and there was a big tableful of our pals--a rowdy bunch of mixed Northern and Southern heavy drinkers--and then I saw her at a table full of expensively dressed and flashy drinking black folks and I went drunkenly over to that table and this woman and I asked her for a dance and this big giant black man said, "Get lost white boy; this ain't you're territory, boy." And I said, "But dammit, I love that woman--I want to dance with her dammit" and then he said, "Soldier boy, you got any money on you?" "I got plenty'a money [read: nothing]." "And you want this woman?" "Yes, I love her." "Then, baby," and he turned to her, "you feel up to taking this dude on tonight?" She nodded her head. "Then, soldier boy, you got the woman you love--just get seven US bucks ready, none of that military script shit, no chits." And I went with her back behind the Starlight to an old army Quonset hut and we went in it and four old black dudes were playing tonk and she went over to one of the tonk players and gave him my seven dollars and then disappeared down the hallway that led to the rooms (the cribs) out of which the girls worked. The old tonk player called me over to a counter and he said, "Boy, you wanna make your seven dollars back?" "Yeah, sure," my naive self answered. "Watch these cards, see one's the Queen of Spades, you just follow my hands with your eyes and tell me where the Queen of Spades ends up. You follow?" He showed me the Queen of Spades, then he put it face down back where it had been and then quickly he shuffled these three cards all around with both his hands and I followed the Queen and said, "That's it right there," and he smiled and said to the other tonk players, "Hey, this white boy just beat my ass for seven dollars." And then back at me, "Wanna go double or nothing, Mr. Soldier Boy?" "Why not?" He went through the routine again and again I knew where the Queen was--it was easy--"It's right there." "Oh, I'm so sorry, white boy, it's not there, it's this one--see? Fourteen bucks, boy." "Fourteen! I've already given you seven." "But you lost, sonny, now you gotta pay." "Where's my original seven dollars then dammit?" "Naw, man, you lost that--you won it back and then we went double'r nuthin' and you lost, so it's fourteen bucks, sweetheart, or you don't get no black pussy tonight--and that's good pussy, too, boy." I ended up giving him twenty-one dollars--it broke me--but it was worth it--this girl, and I still remember her name, became my woman for the next several months I was at Fort Sill--I moved in with her and her little sister; the little sister was in high school and my girl had just graduated high school and was looking forward to moving to Oklahoma City and getting out of the prostitute racket--though when I finally got my marching orders, she was still turning 10 to 12 tricks a day and night, of which she got paid 4 dollars a trick--the pimp taking 3 bucks of her money and then charging sometimes another dollar as room rent. The first time I had sex with her she refused to take off her clothes, just pulled her pants down and encouraged me to hurry. When I tried to kiss her she turned her head hard away from me with her eyes closed. Shit, I pulled out and said, "Baby, we gotta talk. I ain't no jiveass whitey, I'm serious, I like you as a beautiful woman and that's who I want to know--I don't care if we ever fuck--that's not why I want you." Yeah, for the Wolfman; it got me the best loving I'd had until then--the sweetest, smartest, and prettiest woman--and God, so passionate and loving me to read poetry to her and black writers, one of which was Ralph Ellison--and for all I know, she could have been kin to Ralph--she, too, was born and raised in Oklahoma City.
Here's how Ellison wrote about Oklahoma: "Thus it [Oklahoma] had no tradition of slavery, and while itwas segregated, relationships between the races were more fluid and thus more human than in the old slave states. My parents, like most of the other Negroes, had come to the new sae looking for a brader freedom and had never stopped pushing against the barriers. Having arrived at the same time that most of the whites had, they felt that the restriction of Negro freedom was imposed unjustly through the force of numbers and that they had the right and obligation to fight against it. This was all to the good. It made for a tradition of aggressiveness and it gave us a group social goal which was not as limited as that imposed by the old slave states. I recognized limitations, yes; but I thought these limitations were unjust and I felt no innate sense of inferiority which would keep me from getting those things I desired out of life." [page 6,
Shadow and Act, 1964.]
My first experience with a black child was when I was a child in Enid, Oklahoma, and our next door neighbors were a black family, a black preacher and his wife and young daughter my age.
Enid was known as the capital of the Cherokee Strip, the land the whites were given due to the Homestead Act of the late 1800s and the Bureau of Lands set up a contest: the homesteaders were told to bring their wagons, ponies, bicycles, wheelbarrows, whatever to a certain point in North Central Oklahoma that would be the starting line in a race for thousands of acres of rich land. When the starter's gun went off (they waved huge white flags up and down the line)--supposedly anyone getting a false start intentionally was shot on the spot (might be a tall tale), all these wagons and horsemen and such started racing across those fertile grasslands--once the race leaders reached the best lands up for grabs they staked their claims, driving posts in the ground on the plots they intended to homestead with their name and identity number on them--you had to build a house and outbuildings on the land--usually 40 acres--and make a go of it on the land or you lost it--your house could be a tent and your outbuildings could be a corral and a water tank and a windmill, but that was still a part of the free land deal with the government (the Great White Father in Washington, District of Corruption). The sooner you got to the best land the better and that's how White Oklahomans got to be called Sooners--and that's when White Oklahomans hit town and stole all that land from the Native Americans things changed for the worse--I mean stealing from Native Americans who had been forced marched from their native lands on the Southern East Coast and Gulf Coast, Gawjah, the Carolinas, Alabanana, Lawsbanana, and Texas; why even Seminoles from Florida--over that almost-2000-mile Trail of Tears and it ends just over the Arkansas/Missouri borders as you come into the Tulsa--from Joplin over to Miami (yes, a Native American tribal name) (and speaking of the Seminoles, there's a Seminole, Oklahoma, and I used to drink a Seminole Cola that had its origins in that Seminole; there's also a Choctaw, a Cherokee, a Muskogee, an Anadarko, a Shawnee, a Miami, a Ponca City, a Tahlaquah, a Sallisaw, an Okmulgee, a Checotaw--and on and on, just as you cross over the Arkansas border and head in through Central Oklahoma, all named after the tribes who were forced to settle near these towns on reservations, reservations that would soon prove to be filthy rich with oil and all the oil was under Indian Territory, god-dammit, though that would prove not to be a problem for the trickbagging white geologists and land leasers that hit Oklahoma when oil and gas was discovered by Standard Oil scouts).
And soon after the Sooners took over Northern Oklahoma the Rockefeller gang discovered oil up there--soon there were working-'round-the-clock oil derricks pumping crude right on the capitol grounds in Okie City and up around Enid they discovered oil and natural gas and Enid was soon surrounded by both grain elevators (wheat) and oil derricks and gas wells, and the biggest and lustiest field was over around Tulsa and Tulsa soon was bragging it was the Oil Capital of the World--and, hell, it was. [By the bye, the movie
Boomtown was about the Oklahoma-Texas oil boom of the late 19-teens and through the roaring 20s and the cutthroat connivances of oilmen (the kind called "Wildcatters"--also the name of the Tyler, Texas, Texas-Louisiana League baseball team of the 1990s--except the back of my official Tyler Wildcatter jacket spells it "Wild Catters," and when people ask me, like tourists up here in New York City, I tell them its quite a festival down in Texas around Tyler where they drive all the ferrule cats into these huge pens and then go about branding them like cattle--the guy, the Wild Catter, who brands the most cats wins a new car and a chance to play professional baseball for the famous Wild Catters's baseball team and travelling circus. Tourists will believe anything you tell them; especially tourists from Tyler, Texas. "Why I've lived in Tyler all my life and never heard of such a tale." "A cat tale," I added). And
Boomtown, with Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable, was filmed on location (one of the first movies to be filmed on location) in Burkburnett, Texas, on the border with Oklahoma, which at that spot is the Red River, a brownish-red flowing of what was originally melted snow off the peaks of the Colorado Rockies that meanders its way from the Panhandle of Texas all the muddy way down to the Mighty Mississippi in the stomach pits of Louisiana. Burkburnett, Texas, had grown from a village of 300 to a city of 15,000 at the height of the oil boom--the movie actually gives you some live photographs of the way it really was there in those cutthroat days.]
Later, of course, 1921 I think, Tulsa had one of the most heathen race riots ever--white citizens, all good god-fearing Christians (Oral Roberts's brothers got rich in that Tulsa oil boom and I'm sure they put on their sheets and whitecaps at this time), burned down the whole black end of town, then went about randomly shooting blacks, men, women, children, they didn't give a shit--they just let go all their hate for human beings of a different skin tone than them (how stupid are white people; how utterly cornball, cornpone, hillbilly, hickish stupid?).
Ellison writes: "Negro Americans have a highly developed ability to abstract desirable qualities from those around them, even from their enemies, and my sense of reality could reject bias while appreciating the truth revealed by achieved art." [Page xx, Introduction to
Shadow and Act.]
To Be Continued
thegrowlingwolf for
The Daily Growler Don't let the "Title" fool you; it's a test--is the mentioning of a dumbass, stupid, naive, untalented dipstick like Lindsay gonna get us some more readers? Yeah sure! SEX. SEX. And More Sex, and yet, American men aren't very good in bed. Look how frustrated Lindsay and Britney are--I mean, some of the hottest hunks have banged them, even seeded them, and still they go about, like Marilyn Monroe, never experiencing a real orgasm--only the orgasmic acting they were taught in Mickey Mouse School of Sure-Fire Stardom (from where come Ricky "Where's My Little Menudo Boy?" Martin, J Lo, Britney, Christina Aquilera). Poor lost children--soon to be left behind and lost in our short memories.
