Archives for October 2017

“All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.”

Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I reflect on The Jazz Singer, which was released ninety years ago tomorrow. Here’s an excerpt.

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Ninety years ago this week, a New York audience saw—and heard—Al Jolson step in front of a camera and say “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” Those 11 words changed the world. Jolson’s signature line, spoken in “The Jazz Singer,” was the first lip-synchronized speech heard in a feature-length film. Before then, feature films were “silent.” When actors moved their lips, their dialogue was printed on title cards flashed on the screen. All you heard was background music played live by a pianist, an organist or a pit orchestra. “The Jazz Singer” changed that forever. Within two years of its release, Hollywood stopped making silent movies. In a single dazzling stroke of innovation, the “talkies,” as sound films were initially known, had made them obsolete….

Writing a few weeks after its release, Robert E. Sherwood, a movie critic who later became one of America’s top playwrights, found it to be “fraught with tremendous significance,” but not for its artistry. “I for one suddenly realized that the end of the silent drama is in sight,” he wrote. Sherwood may have been the first writer to fully grasp the culture-changing power of “The Jazz Singer”: Not only did it introduce a new storytelling medium, but it killed off an old one.

By 1927, silent film had produced a considerable number of works of art that are—or should be—as watchable today as they were then Thanks to TCM, it’s possible for contemporary audiences to view Buster Keaton’s “The General,” Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and F.W. Murnau’s “Sunrise” and see how much a movie without words can say. But the existence of these masterpieces made no difference to ordinary moviegoers, then or now. They preferred the talkies, and the film industry, both here and abroad, unhesitatingly gave them what they wanted….

Is this a bad thing? I suppose so, though I’m more inclined to see it as an example of what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” He believed that capitalism “incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” That’s more or less what happened to silent film: It was destroyed by a technological innovation that was instantaneously embraced by vast numbers of people. As a result, the careers of many gifted artists dried up and blew away—but without it, we’d still be reading sketchy fragments of dialogue off title cards instead of hearing for ourselves the unforgettable sound of Humphrey Bogart growling “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine” in “Casablanca.” So who made out on the deal? We all did.

What I find most interesting about this radical transformation of mass taste, however, is that it is nearly unique in the history of art….

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Read the whole thing here.

Al Jolson’s first dialogue scene in The Jazz Singer:

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Prince of Broadway (musical revue, PG-13, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Mary Jane (drama, PG-13, extended through Oct. 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN PHILADELPHIA:
• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (musical, PG-13, closes Oct. 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:
• A View from the Bridge (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN BOSTON:
• Merrily We Roll Along (Sondheim, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:
• Dancing at Lughnasa (drama, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 15, reviewed here)
• The Madness of George III (drama, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING TOMORROW IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:
• Cyrano de Bergerac (verse drama, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:
• A Flea in Her Ear (farce, PG-13/R, closes Oct. 7, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN LENOX, MASS.:
• God of Carnage (comedy, R, closes Oct. 8, reviewed here)

“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Threatened”

The Julian Bream Consort performs John Dowland’s “The Earl of Essex’s Galliard” in an undated Japanese telecast:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Clocks slay time. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

I never bought an album by Tom Petty. He launched his career at the same moment that I stopped listening to pop music on the radio, and by the time it was in full swing, my artistic interests lay elsewhere. It was only long after the fact that I first heard him, and that was under unusual circumstances: he performed “I Won’t Back Down” on America: A Tribute to Heroes, a prime-time telethon-style benefit concert for the victims of and first responders to the attack on the World Trade Center that aired a couple of weeks after 9/11. The song hit me hard—I don’t see how it could possibly have had any other effect on a New Yorker—but I wasn’t exactly taking in new aesthetic data right then, and it never occurred to me to follow up on the music of the man who sang it that night.

Our Girl in Chicago had long since nudged me into starting to pay closer attention to contemporary pop, but Petty wasn’t on her radar—she’s younger than I am—and I came away with the impression that his music was a bit behind the times. (She’s more the David Bowie type.) So, I gather, it was, which is why it never occurred to me that Petty might in fact be precisely my kind of rocker, a latter-day John Fogerty whose unpretentious, straight-from-the-shoulder songs connected with the feelings of ordinary Americans in a manner similar to that of country music back in the days before it got slick.

The funny thing is that I heard a fair amount of Petty’s music throughout the next decade and a half, more often than not in cabs and rental cars. Once again, though, I didn’t know whose records I was hearing, and for some inexplicable reason, I never sought any of them out.

I thought at once of “I Won’t Back Down” when Petty died yesterday. Within a few hours I learned from the tributes posted on the social media that he’d meant a great deal to a great many people I know who’d never had occasion to mention his name to me. So I followed my nose and started downloading the songs that they singled out for special mention. Mere minutes later I realized that I’d been missing out on something, and someone, very special. Now I’m doing something about it.

One of the pieces about Petty that I’ve liked best, an essay by Mark Hemingway, ends with a passage that echoes what I’ve also been hearing from a number of other people:

America is grieving today for several reasons. And the shooting in Vegas is a tragedy that threatens to divide us along political lines. I’d like to think a huge swath of America, across beliefs, cultures, generations, and races, would want to claim Tom Petty’s music and feel some solidarity in his loss. We need unifying cultural figures and artists now more than ever. We simply can’t afford to lose our Tom Pettys.

That was pretty much how everybody I knew felt after 9/11. We drew together for a brief time, but we didn’t stay together, and I think it even less likely that we’ll do so now. Instead of joining in solidarity, Americans are choosing to hide behind the high walls of tribalism, talking to those who agree with them instead of listening to those who don’t. But if anything will knock a few bricks off the tops of those walls, it’s art.

I’ve had more than one occasion to quote in this space what C.S. Lewis said in the last paragraph of An Experiment in Criticism:

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

I don’t know that it’s so very inappropriate to cite those words again in connection with Tom Petty. His songs speak to an extraordinarily wide range of people, not a few of whom seem to disagree on pretty much everything else. Yet they all love his music, and they miss him now that he’s gone. In that if nothing else, he brings them together and allows them to transcend themselves.

I haven’t any illusions about what lies in store for my beloved country. I expect it to fall apart, sooner rather than later. But I’m touched to the heart by our shared sorrow over a rock musician who wrote songs about emotions and experiences that we all feel and understand. I wish I’d discovered him sooner, but I don’t mind catching up with the rest of the world. You can’t stay on top of everything, and the perennial miracle of art is that it waits for you: if it’s good, it never grows stale. Somehow I doubt that Tom Petty will grow stale any time soon.

UPDATE: Our Girl in Chicago writes:

I’ve always liked Tom Petty! He was definitely part of the general soundtrack of my junior high and high school years, and someone who has been in my iTunes for some years. I don’t think liking him is incompatible with liking Bowie at all.

I happily stand corrected.

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Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers perform “I Won’t Back Down” on America: A Tribute to Heroes, telecast by all four broadcast networks on September 21, 2001:

From 2007:

My mother’s life, in short, is a bridge between two prfoundly, almost unimaginably different worlds. A child of the Great Depression, she was raised on a farm and baptized in a river, and has lived long enough to watch me talk on a computer screen, though she’s never owned a computer of her own. Cake mixes and air conditioning are more her speed. The most recent inventions of any significance that she embraced wholeheartedly were the answering machine, the ATM, and the VCR. (She has a DVD player but never uses it.)
I suppose we all reach a moment in our lives when we lose interest in the new, and I suspect that moment comes sooner for technology than for art….

Read the whole thing here.