Reading: I still want to do a post on Morte D’Urban. I promise. I’ll try. But since that, I’ve read two other novels, neither high literature, both moderately interesting, one more than the other. I’ll talk about the less interesting one first.
The Golden Spur by Dawn Powell. How did this cross my radar? I have no idea. Dawn Powell has been a writer whom I’ve always wanted to like more than I actually do. I think I started The Locuts Have No King four or five times, but have never finished it. But somehow last week, I saw a reference to this book, which , whoever mentioned it said, was not Powell’s best, but provided a fun insight into mid-century New York City via a decent plot hook – a young man from Ohio discovers that his presumed father is not his biological father, and makes the journey to the city, armed with his late mother’s diaries of her time typing manuscripts and hanging out in the Village, of who that might be.
Eh. Yes, we meet artists and writers of varying talents and ego levels, there’s sleeping around and lots of drinking, but there’s also little depth or even much intriguing exploration of the details of that life. I think there just might have been too many characters by half. As often happens with this kind of novel, the strongest passages are those that offer an overview, a reflection of all the author has seen and heard, all she’s filtering through to us:
Before you looked for a job or a home or a girl, Earl instructed Jonathan, you must establish your bar base in a new city, just as you would choose a fraternity on entering a university. Look them all over carefully, he counseled, every bar people mentioned in the Village area–Minetta Tavern, White Horse Inn, San Remo, Leroy, Jumble Shop–all offering their special brands of social security. Compare their advantages and disadvantages. Is this a tourist trap, a “Left Coast” hangout, or is it on the Bird Circuit, a meeting place for queers? Once you’ve made your choice, you conduct your social and business life there, since your home, mate, and job are bound to switch constantly. Make the owner or bartender your friend, use the place as a mailing and phone address, make your appointments there. Note the hours best suited for confidential talks there, the time for crashing a big party, the days when the roast beef is fresh and when it is hash; learn which barflies to duck.
Even if The Golden Spur had not recommended itself to Jonathan because of his mother’s association with it, he would have chosen it. There was, as Earl pointed out, a nice diversity in the patrons. There were the college-faculty types, superior of their kind, for had they been average they would be sucking up to their departmental chiefs over in the Faculty Club or angling for academic advancement and traveling fellowships in stuffier environments. They wouldn’t care to be caught bending elbows with the Spur’s wild artists. The Spur artists were all “modern” in that they were against the previous generation, though generations in art were not much longer than cat generations.
In season, these individuals flooded the bar Monday nights, flushed down in the preview champagne from the Upper East Side gallery openings, and on Friday nights from the show closings. The star of the occasion, at other times perhaps an inarticulate modest painter, then appeared with his brand-new claque, a tangle of patrons, dealers, and a change of blondes, himself now loud with triumph and ready to lick his weight in wildcats, which often turned out to be necessary. It’s a madhouse, everyone cried joyously on these nights, a real madhouse, let’s never go home.
let’s never go home…
..just perfectly captures the emotion of that kind of moment, doesn’t it?
Dark Passage was better, although I did get a little weary of it near the end. It’s a noir novel by David Goodis about whom you can read here. The Library of America has five of his novels collected in a single volume, although not his most well-known book, Shoot the Piano Player.
The plot? A man is convicted of murdering his wife. He’s innocent (there’s no question or mystery on that score). He escapes from San Quentin and ends up back in San Francisco. He connects with various people there, and it gets fairly complicated, but the core twist is that fairly early on, he gets plastic surgery, hoping it will prevent him from being recognized as the escaped convict whose face is all over the papers.
It was made into a movie with Bogart and Bacall very soon after it was published – perhaps even before it came out as a book, but after it had been serialized – with Goodis working on the screenplay. I didn’t watch the movie – I found the trailer painfully overdramatic, despite Bogart and Bacall – but reading the summary online, it does track pretty closely with the novel (not surprisingly – with the author involved) although some elements are softened for the screen – a suicide, for example, becomes an accidental fall. But what the movie is famed for is the fact that before the Bogart character’s surgery, the film’s POV is through his eyes, only shifting away and including his face afterwards.
Anyway, I like to read vintage noir for the same reason I read history – it’s, well – history. It gives me some insight into the past in an unassuming, more direct way. And Goodis writes well within the conventions. In particular, he excels at describing what it feels like to feel and think. He uses concrete imagery much of the time: a snake, a chalkboard, a weight – but he gets right into his character’s head and pulls you in as well, rather effectively:
He didn’t want to start all over again. He wanted to weep. He began to weep and the tears were thick spheres of wet mixing with the wet of increased perspiration. His cramped limbs were giving him pain. He measured the pain and knew that it was bad. And it would get worse, keep getting worse until finally it would blend with the pain in air-starved lungs. Once more he told himself that he was going to die here in the barrel.
Hate walked in and floated at the side of fear. Hate for the bump in the road that had caused the two barrels to slide back. Hate for the two barrels. Hate for the truck. Hate for the prosecuting attorney….
(Long, stream-of-consciousness that essentially summarizes the situation that got him there)
…It was getting awful in the barrel. Parry pushed the hate aside and replaced it with energy.
The scene of Parry’s plastic surgery – done in a back-alley office in the middle of the night – is extremely effective:
“We’re all cowards,” Coley said. “there’s no such thing as courage. There’s only fear. A fear of getting hurt and a fear of dying. That’s why the human race has lasted so long. You won’t have any pain with this. I’m going to freeze your face. Do you want to see yourself now?”
“Yes,” Parry said.
“Sit up and take a look in that mirror.” Coley pointed to a mirror that topped one of the cabinets.
Parry looked at himself.
“It’s a fairly good face,” Coley said. “It’ll be even better when I’m done with it. And it’ll be very different.”
Parry relaxed in the chair. He closed his eyes again. He heard water running. He didn’t open his eyes. He heard the sound of metal getting moved around, the sound of a cabinet drawer opening and shutting, the clink of steel against steel, the water running again. He kept his eyes closed. Then things were happening to his face. Some kind of oil was getting rubbed into his face, rubbed in thoroughly all over his face and then wiped off thoroughly. He smelled alcohol, felt the alcohol being dabbed onto his face. Then water running again. More clinking of steel, more cabinet drawers in action. He tried to make himself comfortable in the chair. He decided it was impossible for Coley to do this job in ninety minutes. He decided it was impossible for Coley to change the face so that people wouldn’t recognize it as belonging to Vincent Parry. He decided there wasn’t any sense to this, and the only thing he would get out of it was something horrible happening to his face and he would be a freak for the rest of his life. He wondered how many faces Coley had ruined. He decided his face was going to look horrible but people would recognize him anyway and he wondered what he was doing up here in this quack set-up in San Francisco when he should be riding far away from San Francisco. He decided his only move was to jump out of the chair and run out of the office and keep on running.
He stayed there in the chair. He felt a needle going into his face. Then it went into his face again in another place. It kept jabbing deep into his face. His face began to feel odd. Metal was coming up against the flesh, pressing into the flesh, cutting into the flesh. There was no pain, there was no sensation except the metal going into his flesh. Different shapes of metal. He couldn’t understand why he preferred to keep his eyes closed while this was going on.
It went on. With every minute that passed something new was happening to his face. Gradually he became accustomed to it—the entrance of steel into his flesh. He had the feeling he had gone through this sort of thing many times before. Now he was beginning to get some comfort out of the chair and there was a somewhat luxurious heaviness in his head and it became heavier and heavier and he knew he was falling asleep. He didn’t mind. The manipulation of steel against his face and into his face took on a rhythm that mixed with the heaviness and formed a big, heavy ball that rolled down and rolled up and took him along with it, first on the top of it, on the outside, then getting him inside, rolling him around as it went up and down on its rolling path. And he was asleep.
Listening: We’ve spent a lot of time listening to Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, in preparation for this past Sunday:
Now that that’s done (for the moment – he’ll play it again in competition in the spring, and it needs to be better and faster by then), we’re back to Beethoven and Liszt and some soon-to-be-determined Handel, as well as a couple of organ pieces and some jazz things and some Metallica.
As well as other things, like this rabbit trail I went down the other night:
I was watching/listening to Spotify, to the “new releases” channel in the Classical section. Album covers come up and you’re not going to be surprised that I was stopped short by this one:
Wut.
So, off I went, and discovered that it’s a collaboration between a pianist and a counter-tenor/dancer. The videos are just ridiculous. Is it awful of me to watch these things and be able to think nothing but, “Yes, these are Europeans doing this crap. Americans are crazy, but not this kind of crazy. This is Euro-crazy.”
Besides, I find counter-tenors creepy.
But I was intrigued by one of the pieces – nonetheless. I just liked it. Turns out it was Rameau – a section of an opera/ballet called Les Indes Galantes (The Amorous Indians) – a reflection of early 18th century fascination with non-European cultures and inspired by a 1725 visit of five Native Americans (from North America) to Paris.
The section that caught my ear was Forêts paisibles, a rondo from Les Sauvages – you can listen to a choral presentation of it with a super-energetic conductor here.
Or this one – also choral, a little more formal, but also with a (different) energetic conductor – must be something about the piece that brings it out of them.
Very catchy.
When you watch videos of modern productions, you wonder…that it’s even…allowed any more. Probably not on this side of the Atlantic, that’s for sure, although it’s a shame – it’s simply a piece of history (and lovely music). It’s not as if Rameau went to Peru and anyone received his work as anthropological reporting.
(Update: it is indeed performed – I did a search of recent reviews, and they do exist. So that’s good.)
Anyway – I dashed off to find a piano transcription, which I’ll be playing around with myself, but before that (we’re not done! One more rabbit trail!), the Rameau led me to a performance by an…intriguing young harpsichordist named Jean Rondeau who, appropriately, is playing Forêts paisibles…barefoot.
Cooking: I made a pork-poblano-chili verde stew, which was good, but I prefer this version, which has sweet potatoes. Also this Italian apple cake, always a hit, and this quick chocolate “wacky” cake (no eggs or milk and leaven is provided by interaction between vinegar and baking soda) – it’s so simple, but it’s the best chocolate cake I make – especially if you use high quality Dutch cocoa powder. I’ve just recently (as in the past year) started using it, and it makes a huge difference.
Watching: The opening montage from Better Call Saul was one of the best – really superb way of showing the devolution of a relationship – with a great, mini-twist of an ending – just when you think Kim is on her way out…back she goes to Office Max, loading up that cart with markers. For some reason.