Exit: "Last Man Standing"

Digby's appreciation links to this last interview.

"It's 1962; Lenny Bruce and tall guy with posh accent get into a cab, toting a bag of drugs... ." It's an interesting story. Like the other stories, interesting not just for daring or outrageousness, but in hinting at real substance to the man.

The long ago Dick Cavett Show episode I saw must have been this one: from 1972, with Peter O'Toole the sole guest. As I remember it, the actor emerged from the curtains to lurch around and do some jokey mugging. That changed as Cavett said, "I notice you have 'Areopagitca' written on your hand." A reminder to himself, said O'Toole, to raise the subject of censorship. Which he then did, seriously and passionately (if also tipsily).

That show came to mind a few years ago, when I spotted this memoir.

O'Toole tells of his 1930s childhood in northern England, where he grew up in a working poor neighborhood of Leeds. With great zest for it all, young Peter observes the world of his bookie father (and Damon Runyonesque associates), while he and his sister absorb his mother's love of reciting poetry.

As O'Toole opens the book, he's about five years old when he "meets" someone who, if not local, will be more that a secondary character during the years he grows up. Immersed in the pleasure of being taken to the movies by his father, Peter wonders—

...Will Donald Duck be on today? Or a king or a cricketer, or a boxing match or The Three Stooges, or a hurricane or a Zulu? Who's this? A uniformed fat man with a big chin, all wobble and posture and rant. The audience is booing him. It's Mussolini, and he's being booed; cheerfully and vulgarly and ripely booed; but booed in the way you'd boo the Demon King in a pantomime. Comical villainy to be encouraged with a raspberry jeer.

Shortly after, in that cinema, Hitler and I met for the first time. It is impossible to tell you what I felt because, other than being temporarily unhappy, I cannot remember what I felt. When that profoundly strange, mincing little dude from Linz came all unexpectedly onto my screen, not his hideous mouth nor his noise nor his moustache nor his forelock, swastika, salute, eyes or frenzy disturbed my mind; it was the look on his face. He was booed, too. The audience boos, though, were of another colour; a grimmer lowing, an ugly note not for pantomime villains capering about banana skins...

A motif throughout is that of Hitler and top Nazi figures as childhood familiars. While the adult O'Toole's serious study of their history and psychology is much in evidence, the writer often approaches the subject with slangy nicknaming—Hitler as "Alf"; Goering as "Fat Hermann." Unlikely as this may sound, I found O'Toole's writing strong enough that he pulls off this cutting of the bizarre figures to size, while writing an excellent outline of Hitler's rise and fall.

RIP to the last of British "Cinema's Biggest Hellraisers," and an impressively multi-talented one.

Hands-On

Puff piece this may have been, but the subject was one of great interest—

For 160 years, the pianos made by Steinway & Sons have been considered the finest in the world. So when hedge fund billionaire John Paulson recently bought the company, it struck fear in the hearts of musicians: Would the famously handcrafted pianos be changed, for the sake of efficiency? Paulson, who owns several Steinways himself, says nothing will change.

[music]*

Great pianists need great pianos. Vladimir Horowitz, the famous Russian pianist, used to travel with his own personal Steinway when he concertized around the world...

*Seque here was a Horowitz clip: the opening notes of Mozart's C major Sonata (K330). It's music that always takes me back to the first time I heard it: played by the fine pianist who taught my keyboard literature course in college.

Classes were memorable, both musically and in Dr. T's use of sometimes corny jokes as teaching aids. The jokes worked: quite a few years later, I remember them well, as I do the musical points they illustrated.

Memorable, too, was the class trip organized by Dr. T.: a charter bus ride through several states to Astoria, Queens, and a tour of Steinway factory.

Here's a transcript of the NPR piece, describing the many hand crafting processes in use, and quoting veterans of 30, 40, 50 years at the factory. Some workers' families were employed there for generations before them; other workers just happened to grow up in the neighborhood and get interested in the place. Despite use of newer technologies, much of the hand crafting (and the generally good job security) is a throwback to old modes of work. The factory's atmosphere was a focus of the documentary filmed a few years ago, and it's something I remember from touring the place (even if that was... ummm... about 40 years ago).

We visited rooms where small groups worked on different stages of piano making, and they were enthusiastic about showing us what they were doing. People really seemed to enjoy their work and appreciate meeting a class of interested music students. A woman cutting leather (for key action dampening) offered us scraps to take home. We were puzzled, so she tried again—"Do you do crafts?"—until she had a taker. In other areas, other workers looked around their discarded materials for some possible souvenir to share.

In the room where a tester played a finished instrument, he ended the piece, spun his stool around to face us, then said, "Ya like Goishwin?!" Not waiting for a reply, he spun back to the keyboard. We listened to some spirited playing, from someone who was likely a former kid from the neighborhood.

The tour ended at an instrument showroom, where the guide invited our professor to play. He chose the first movement of the Mozart K330, one of the loveliest pieces we had studied. We all were fans of Dr T's playing and approach to teaching music history; our group's applause at the end was very heartfelt.

I'm no musician, but I've never forgotten the keyboard course, the class members, or Dr. T. And I haven't forgotten the high school music ed experiences that later led me to look for more.

The key was my year of singing in the H.S. choir. It was very much a group of average kids who listened to pop music most of the time. But we were the raw material for an ambitious plan of our director's: that we would learn the choral parts of the Bach "Magnificat" and perform them with professional soloists.

At that age (16 or so) I liked some classical music, but thought of Baroque as a repetitious, tinny harpsichord sound. Learning and rehearsing Bach's choral writing opened a new world, though. It was a revelation, just encountering the beauty of individual parts as we learned them. But when the vocal sections later combined to rehearse an entire chorus, the results were new and awe-inspiring.

All these decades later, I remember an afternoon after rehearsal. As the group walked through an empty hallway outside the gym, someone began singing his choral part; soon, everyone else joined in with their respective parts. The acoustics were pretty damn good, and I'll never forget that moment and the rush of feelings it inspired: awe at the music's beauty, as well as the powerful physical sensation of sound reverberating through my body; thrill at the possibilities that seemed ahead of us all; the sheer joy of spontaneously creating this together—and of doing something so out of the ordinary as impromptu mass singing in a school corridor.

It's a scene that always comes to mind in recent years, as arts education has been the first thing cut.

But, my school experience was in another century...

This is the 21st, after all, and art is meant for the elite. If the public deserves a look or a listen, surely a benevolent hedge fund manager will be willing to endow it. Maybe he even won't fire (for now) the craftspeople who contribute to his hobby.

"... a great man because he wasn't a Great Man..."

Charles Pierce, on Nelson Mandela—

He reminded us of that which we need to be reminded, over and over again, about our own best selves. He reminded us because he was the last one of them, the last in the line that began with George Washington, the last one to witness what Lincoln called for 150 years ago. He was there for a new birth of freedom.

Esquire had good pieces by other writers;Evan Fleischer—

There is no such thing as too much media saturation when it comes to Nelson Mandela's life and Nelson Mandela's memory, because there was once a time when his image didn’t exist, was illegal. As the moments pass after his death, we see a raised fist — Mandela's fist — finding the screen and breaking through.

Chris Jones, on South Africa: "Nelson Mandela's Dream Will Prevail."

Stephen Marche: Mandela as "saint," at least in terms of having won by showing the power of compassion. [On a related note, Bag News: "Reading the Tribute Photos: Mandela's Masterful Body Language"].

And this, by the Esquire editors.

This is important, that "Mandela was a great man because he wasn't a Great Man; his politics were aimed at the ability of the people to realize themselves."

On the Majority Report, Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter brought up how predictably the media avoided noting Mandela's greater agenda: of economic justice and peace. And they discussed how the right is perpetually on the wrong side of history—until it's forced to re-write the past, to claim a Dr. King or a Mandela. With Mandela, as with King, anyone standing for radical change has been branded a communist by the right—until decades later, when a whitewash is in order.

The idea that the anti-apartheid divestiture and boycott movement were first marginalized by "the technocratic center" was discussed (which led into the usual depressing but apt analysis of the Obama agenda).

At 1:20 in the audio, talk returned to the right's claiming Mandela's legacy while "tripping over themselves with mendacity or stupidity, or both." It seems Santorum compared Obamacare to apartheid on O'Reilly's show—"O'Reilly bringing the mendacity, and Santorum bringing the stupidity." Sam wanted to know "When's Rick Santorum gonna go into prison for 27 years to fight this?"

Producer Michael Brooks contributed his impression of new conservative icon Nelson Mandela speaking out: against that assault on the conscience of humanity, "an inconvenient website." Which turned into an impassioned speech about comrades "Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and the other heroes of the struggle against the slightly expanded Medicaid"; which turned into conservative talk radio host Mandela hawking gold...

The jokes were not inappropriate, considering the eulogies that remembered Mandela as having had an "impish" sense of humor. Humor would seem necessary to accomplishing what he did: in struggling against the right enemies and being able, as Cliff said, "to come out of the most brutal prison yet swallow the urge for revenge."

Also funny, but it gets just the right tone: Nelson Mandela Becomes First Politician To Be Missed.

More Touching Tales Of The Season

Pre-Thanksgiving, Walmart encourages employees to donate food to "associates in need."

Post Thanksgiving: arrests of strikiing Walmart workers.

Hurrah for good news: "Calm Black Friday: Only 1 Death, 15 Injuries..." Attributed to Big Shopping Day.

Steve M. analyzed publicity around a firearms ad rejected for Super Bowl broadcast—

... in this man's world, there's country (represented by the flag and the military) and there's family, but there's nothing in between. There's no community. His posture is that he's a soft-focus loving dad, but he's also a lone wolf. It's him against the world.

The point of Bowling Alone is that America has become a nation of atomized residents who no longer join bowling leagues and other voluntary associations. I think there's some truth to that -- but this ad reminds me how much right-wing propaganda cultivates that sense of atomization, by portraying American society as debased and not worth participating in.

This guy comes home and regards the society beyond his property line as full of hostile figures who either want to hurt him precious family or deny him the means to defend his loved ones. This strikes me as a specifically right-wing worldview -- I can't think of an analogue for this on the left. If that's how you see society, no wonder you're bowling -- and gunning -- alone.

Well, are they really alone? Like the relatives around the holiday table who, by temperament or by the volume of the propaganda, are lost to wingnuttery, they'll always have their Rush, their Fox Friends, and the gun lobby voices in their heads.

And right on cue: elderly Alzheimer's victim killed by fearful and stupid gun owner.