The Beatle and the Boss

The Beatles meets the Boss when Paul McCartney joins Bruce Springsteen on stage at a huge concert in the UK in 2012.  First they combine on "I Saw Her Standing There" and then merge the two biggest versions of "Twist and Shout."  Note the extra ecstasy the Boss brings to this performance, as he finds himself being a Beatle--every young dreamer's dream of his generation, and more.  So another shot of joy to start the new year.

R.I.P. 2019

My fix on the contemporary world is slowly slipping.  Merely keeping up with headline stories is not enough--it is insufficient and distorting.  So I confess, for example, that apart from the obviously enormous and growing wealth of the few, I have little purchase on economics.

But I do more or less keep up on the fate of the planet from global heating, species extinction and other tragic destruction of the natural world that sustains all life, including ours.  And there the news in 2019 could hardly be worse.  The insane policies of the current US regime are beginning to take a severe toll on the nation's laws and policies, and perhaps most obviously on the world's will to address the climate emergency, as evidenced by the virtual collapse of the recent UN climate summit.

 Lack of US leadership, or even encouragement in the wrong direction, has emboldened the government of Brazil to allow the cynical burning and cutting down of vast areas of the Amazon rainforest, which is not only causing severe degrading of air quality and other problems in the vicinity, but which adds to the load favoring global doom.  Add this to relentless and expanding effects of melting at both poles, and any chance of saving the future seems more and more remote.

All of this is fueled by global social conflict leading to a growing imbalance in the human response to almost everything. The dark side of human nature is in the ascendancy: greed, hate, systematic and reflexive mendacity, willful ignorance and an almost inexplicable cruelty.

So 2019 was not a good year for the world and many people in it, and a potentially catastrophic year for the future.  Except for important reductions in severe poverty, and what now seems like the distant memory of the Obama years, there's little better to say about the entire decade.

As for those prominent people I knew of but did not necessarily know who died in 2019, when looking at the long list of them, I see my own world slipping away as well.  These were people who populated my life in some way, and as I have waning interest in (or access to) a lot of current culture, they are not being replaced.  This is part of getting old, and realizing it is part of dealing with the change.  But it's also true that the world is changing in ways it hasn't changed in generations--the ways we typically get the news, for example.

When I read some of the names, I recall first my experiences with these individuals, however brief.  James Atlas was a writer, editor and publisher I encountered a few times when we were both young men in Cambridge and Boston in the early 1970s, and had friends in common.  Even then he was working on his biography of the American poet Delmore Schwartz that was nominated for the National Book Award, and complained that Schwartz was invading his dreams.  My most extended memory is of an evening when the two of us detached from a larger group to go bar-hopping, and got gloriously drunk together.

I interviewed architect Cesar Pelli in the 1970s, when he was chiefly a designer of shopping malls (including Greengate Mall in Greensburg.)  He was a key voice in my "Malling of America" article for New Times and subsequent book.  His pronouncement on the mall's effect ("Towns disappear!") was an influential eye-opener at that early stage in my research.  He later became a prominent architect indeed of major urban projects in New York City and around the world. I remember him as gracious and thoughtful. (And in these photos, he looks a lot like James Atlas.)

Wofford accepts the Presidential Citizens Medal from
President Obama in 2013

Harris Wofford was Pennsylvania Secretary of Labor and Industry when I worked on a project highlighting PA Job Centers in the early 1990s.  Our most extended conversation was during a private dinner, when he talked about brokering candidate John Kennedy's call to the jail where Martin Luther King was incarcerated, which may have won him the election, as well as other tales of serving in the JFK administration. He recommended his book on the subject, Of Kennedy and Kings, as now do I.

I also recall that at one of our Job Center inaugural events, Wofford asked everyone not to use the increasingly common jargon of "servicing" people.  We service machines, but we serve people, he said. This respect for language impressed me, as did his urbane and--yes--Kennedyesque manner. Later he was elected to the US Senate as a prohibitive underdog, the first candidate to demonstrate the political potential of running on expanding health care coverage.

Among the musicians of my time who died in 2019 (including Ginger Baker of Cream and Peter Tork of the Monkees) I remember a more obscure one: Leon Redbone.  I saw him perform at a small club in Cambridge, from the front table reserved for music writers. He wore dark glasses and a broad-brimmed hat, and kept his head down so we hardly saw his face, as he played acoustic guitar and sang one old standard after another in his rich baritone. It was the strangest  performance I'd seen to that point.  Still, I got several of his records, and  I always hear "My Blue Heaven" in his voice.

When I met Tom Ellis in the WBZ television newsroom in Boston in the early 70s, a lot of people didn't know what to make of him.  With matinee idol looks and a sometimes uncertain grasp of words, it seems to some he was a model for Mary Tyler Moore's Ted Baxter.  But his newscasts led the ratings by a lot, and he hung in there, learned his craft, and stayed on the air for the next 30 years or so.  For awhile he kept jumping stations for more lucrative contracts, and everywhere he went became the top news station.  He was the only person in Boston ever to anchor number one news broadcasts at all three network affiliates.  After a stint in the Big Town of New York, he returned to Boston to anchor for another 14 years.  I can't say I got much of an impression of him, except that he was not arrogant or manipulative.  He was genial and hugely enjoyed what he was doing.

Speaking of the future, my research for magazine articles in the 70s on the subject brought me in contact with futurists Wendell Bell and Barbara Marx Hubbard.  Hubbard, as heir to the Marx toy fortune, was a kind of godmother to young futurists, kind and careful and probably rightly suspicious, though in a gentle, tentative way.

Others I never met, I remember in their historical moment.  Writer Dan Jenkins and screenwriter Christopher Knopf were making a big noise (as Anthony Hopkins might put it) in the 1970s.  Actors Anna Karina, Peter Fonda, Sue Lyon, Danny Aiello, Valerie Harper, Rip Torn, Peggy Lipton, Carol Channing, Phyllis Newman, Carol Lynley, Michael J. Pollard, Rene Auberjonois, Rutger Hauer, Bruno Ganz and especially--over some 50 years-- actor Albert Finney populated the collective dreams of my era known as movies and television.

 One of my favorite Finney films was Two for the Road with Audrey Hepburn (1967), directed by Stanley Donen, who also died in 2019. Donen had also directed the 1950s classic musicals On the Town and Singin in the Rain (which I've only learned to appreciate years later), the 1957 comedy Kiss Them For Me with Cary Grant (which I discovered on TV); the 1960s caper films Arabesque and Charade, the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore comedy Bedazzled (all of which I saw first run at theatres).  All of them fondly remembered.

The lovely Julie Adams lit up odd movies like Creature From the Black Lagoon and Francis Joins the WACs, but her long career confirms her acting talent and intelligence.  Franco Zeffirelli caught the 1960s youth spirit with his Romeo and Juliet.  Dusan Makavejev made one of the strangest yet most compelling movies of the 1970s with WR: Mysteries of the Organism. 

I had perhaps as many arguments as agreements with Harold Bloom's work, but I honor his reverence for literature.  Ward Just and Larry Heinemann were among the writers first ruminating on the Vietnam War after it was over. Paul Krassner was a provocative and often funny presence in the 1960s.  Ram Dass was his more spiritual counterpart.

Sander Vanocur with RFK

I read Russell Baker's column in the New York Times, and learned the news of the days from television reporters Jack Perkins, Robert Zelnick, Sylvia Chase and Cokie Roberts.  The on-camera reporting of NBC correspondent Sander Vanocur is forever bound with my memories of momentous events in the 60s, especially Robert Kennedy's assassination.  I'll never forget the look on his face during the all night vigil outside the hospital as he reported that the mysterious first name of the accused assassin Sirhan was...Sirhan.  It was a surreal moment that Kurt Vonnegut might have scripted.

And that's the paradox of mourning these deaths: they are so bound to moments of my past, with no likelihood that there would be such presence in my future.  In a sense I lost them long ago.  Their moment is fixed in time forever, yet their definitive passing still seems to depopulate my world.

So I mourn Joe Bellino, possibly the first football star (for Navy) that I recall by name from my youth, and Bob Friend, the oddly colorless ace pitcher for my beloved 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates, whose record for the most innings pitched in a Pirate uniform is unlikely to ever be broken.  (Rex Johnston also died this year--I don't recognize his name, but he has the distinction of having played for both the baseball Pirates and the football Steelers.)

Other once-important names float through my journalism days memories--Harold Prince, Eliot Roberts, Robert Evans, Andre Previn... Their accomplishments are recorded, but some fame is fleeting.  Ross Perot was once one of the most important people in the US--he was the first billionaire who ran for President in 1992 as an independent and might have won if he hadn't dropped out and then reentered the race.  He ran again in 1996, and both times got more votes than nearly any other non-R or D candidate. Though he was a Texan,  my hometown of Greensburg, PA bragged that he'd married a local girl, with the wedding in Greensburg itself.  But his death in 2019 was barely noticed, and his name didn't generally make the "notable deaths" lists.

Lee Radziwill

Time stutters on, following its own strange logic. Princess Lee Radziwill died at the age of 85, twenty-five years after the death of her older sister, Jacqueline Kennedy. And almost exactly 60 years after Buddy Holly was lost in a plane crash, his fellow Cricket Jerry Naylor died in 2019.

May they all rest in peace.  Their work and their memory live on.

So with their passing in 2019, my world inevitably and inexorably got smaller.  These figures in the ground of my life leave me in a world of noisy strangers who can't understand me, or perhaps even see me, the Mad Hatter presiding over a phantom tea party, spouting nonsense.  I am left to live and grow and change--quite happily-- among the fixed stars of the past, and above all in the near and present.

  And what's that up ahead?  The first hour of a new year.

Note: In addition to previous posts here on Ric Ocasek and Jonathan Miller, I've posted on writers who died in 2019 at Books in Heat, and on Star Trek and Doctor Who related deaths at Soul of Star Trek.  

R.I.P. 2019: Jonathan Miller

Of all the people I didn't know who died in 2019, I was most saddened by the death of Jonathan Miller.  He was an important presence at various times in my life.

 When I was in college in the 1960s, one of my teachers (Douglas Wilson) mentioned this comedic satire by four young Englishmen called Beyond the Fringe. I soon acquired the album from their Broadway show, and pretty much memorized many of the bits.  In many ways it was life-changing, and certainly influenced my creative life for a long time.

The four members of Beyond the Fringe--Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Arnold Bennett and Jonathan Miller--were the Beatles of comedy.  Without Beyond the Fringe there would have been no Monty Python or Firesign Theatre, or possibly no Douglas Adams and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. 

 But this foursome was an artifical supergroup of funny guys from Oxford and Cambridge assembled by the official Edinburgh Festival to compete with its unofficial fringe festival comedies. After their Broadway success they disbanded, but while Bennett cultivated a career as a playwright, the other three stayed in the public eye throughout the 60s.  Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were the most visible, on British TV and a few Hollywood films (notably Bedazzled.) Miller was studying medicine, but kept get invitations to direct plays, TV shows and movies.

Meanwhile in my life, after intense periods in Boston and Washington I returned to western Pennsylvania in the late 70s.  I was freelancing for magazines and then working on a book, so my life consisted of short bursts of travel and long periods of relative isolation.  My intellectual stimulation came chiefly from reading, and was mostly embodied by precious moments on film and especially on television.

The Body in Question, Miller's series carried in the US on PBS stations about the history of medicine, was one of the programs of the golden age for such stimulating series that included Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, the James Burke programs, Robert Hughes' Art of the New, Ronald Harwood's theatre history All the World's A Stage, and Carl Sagan's Cosmos.  Probably the last were produced by Bill Moyers into the 1990s.  All of these were as important to my mental nourishment, sense of self, and my sanity.

Though Miller stopped formal performing, he was such an engaging talker that he was often featured on American talk shows, which were far more present and far more likely to hold some intellectual interest in the 60s into the 80s than since. In particular, he was given entire hours by Dick Cavett in the 1980s, often several strung together. His marvellous intelligence was inspiring and encouraging as well as stimulating. Miller's talk was absolute sustenance to me in those years.

 While I was aware of Miller as producer and director of several Shakespeare plays for the BBC project of filming all of them, and I'd heard him talk about at least one of them, it was years later in California when I was writing regularly about theatre that I watched tapes of these productions provided by the Humboldt University library.  It was then that I read with great interest his 1986 book Subsequent Performances, about approaching new productions of classic plays. Even more recently I caught up with his provocative 1960s television adaptation--or reimagining--of Alice in Wonderland on DVD.

directing Alice in Wonderland

In these and other ways, Jonathan Miller was a presence in my life over 5 decades, even though I didn't know him, never met him, and never saw on stage a production he directed.  Now, since his death was announced in November, I've been reading about him (including in a 1992 book, A Profile of Jonathan Miller), re-reading Subsequent Performances and watching what I could find on YouTube. There's actually quite alot: many interviews--including the 80s appearances on Cavett and several with Clive James, who died the same month as Miller--and a couple of television dramas he directed.  I've deepened my knowledge of the man and his achievements.

 He brought a fearless originality to his theatrical productions, while at the same time endearing himself to the people he worked with--particularly actors--with his humor, encouragement and respect for their own creativity.  Though he was the victim of clueless criticism, he got good notices as well.  Many of his theatre productions were hits with audiences, and several of his opera productions ran for decades.  Though I probably would not have agreed with some of his interpretations, they were dazzling in their daring and internal consistency.

directing John Cleese in BBC Taming of the Shrew

Though he brought conceptual frameworks to his productions, and coordinated designs (often selecting painters for his designers to see), he felt his contributions as a director were in details--in small moments and gestures by the actors.  His approach was informed by what his novelist mother told him was a function of fiction: to make the negligible considerable, and the forgettable memorable. The job of directing, he felt, was directing attention.

He used his experience as a doctor observing everything about a patient to collect small human gestures which he suggested to his actors.  To the madness of Lear and other characters, he brought medical knowledge of how disorder or old age are expressed in concrete behavior.

Bob Hoskins and Anthony Hopkins in
Miller's BBC-TV Othello

While his interpretations were sometimes controversial, they were always grounded in history and based on a particular logic, about about how people actually behave rather than some metaphorical conceit.

Some changed how many plays are now approached.  For example, after his working class Iago (Bob Hoskins), no production of Othello can ignore the precedent.  He made the racial components of Othello and The Merchant of Venice more realistic by softening the apparent differences, while revealing and sharpening racial divides in The Tempest--also an interpretation no subsequent production can ignore.


He enlivened classics like Hamlet and Lear and several Chekhov plays partly by emphasizing characters that are usually played as minor, such as Claudius in Hamlet. He approached opera as another kind of play, bringing new interest to audiences.

Those who worked with him often mentioned his humor, and the sense of rehearsal as play.  "For me, what is attractive about the stage is contained in the name of what it is we do," he wrote.  "It is a play and is playful."

In A Profile of Jonathan Miller, a notable number of actors and producers name Tyrone Guthrie as Miller’s closest resemblance in directorial style. In addition to his humor, they also mention his warmth with actors, inventiveness and keen eye for behavior. He began productions with a strong sense of time and place, and with a visual style selected, but collaborated closely with designers and actors to produce effects that worked for them, the audience and the show.

Miller’s work in directing opera transformed opera productions down to the present. Robert Brustein claims that Miller’s direction of Robert Lowell’s Old Glory transformed American theatre. “Alot of stage directors...know only about the theatre and not too much about anything else,” observed opera orchestra conductor Kent Nagano. “Jonathan knows about everything.”

In addition to his knowledge and intelligence, Nagano adds, “That’s what he brings into his productions—a sense of everyday life.”

  Miller directed tragedy, and in every play he looked for the irony.Whether or not it is a tragic irony, in the 1980s Miller helped found the UK's Alzheimer's Society and was an  its president for many years, using his skills and presence to bring attention to the previously obscure disease.  In 2019 he himself succumbed to it.  His mother died relatively young of early onset Alzheimer's, but Jonathan Miller, who once said he would be satisfied with living 80 years, made it to 85.

May he rest in peace.  His work lives on.

Poetry Monday: Prejudice Against the Past

The Prejudice Against the Past

Day is the children's friend.
It is Marianna's Swedish cart.
It is that and a very big hat.

Confined by what they see,
Aquiline pedants treat the cart,
As one of the relics of the heart.

They treat the philosopher's hat,
Left thoughtlessly behind,
As one of the relics of the mind...

Of day, then, children make
What aquiline pedants take
For souvenirs of time, lost time,

Adieux, shapes, images--
No, not of day, but of themselves,
Not of perpetual time.

And therefore, aquiline pedants find
The philosopher's hat to be part of the mind,
The Swedish cart to be part of the heart.

Wallace Stevens