December 8, 2005
Gray Area Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:40 PM EST The FX cable channel says that next March it will present a six-part series called Black, White in which a black family and a white family will “trade places,” with the blacks made to appear white and the whites to appear black using makeup. During filming of the series, the two families lived together and were followed by cameras as they tried, as nearly as such artificial conditions would permit, to find out what it’s like to be a member of the other group. The obvious antecedent, of course, is the book Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin, in which the author darkens his skin and records how he is treated in the Deep South in the late 1950s. As an article on our site shows Griffin was a fascinating man in many other ways: “He served in the French Resistance and soldiered in the South Pacific, where he lived for a year as an aborigine islander. He converted to Catholicism, and he thirsted for a life of prayer and chastity even while he wrote a novel banned in Detroit for its sexual explicitness. He lost his sight, lived for ten years as a blind man, and then miraculously recovered his vision. He was a musical scholar, a religious intellectual, a working journalist, a livestock breeder, a professional photographer, a social activist, and a controversial novelist.” Cases of whites pretending to be black, and vice versa, are quite common, in fiction and in real life. One of my favorites came in a column Langston Hughes wrote for the Chicago Defender during World War II. (I could look it up, but since this is a blog I don’t have to, so I’ll just work from memory.) Hughes was sitting in a bar in Harlem when a man he knew walked in wearing an Army uniform. The man, who was light-skinned, explained that not only was he in the Army, but he was serving in a supposedly all-white unit. He had been living in a town upstate, and when he registered for the draft, the clerk glanced at him and checked “White” on the form. At the time, blood banking was just getting started, impelled in large part by military needs. Soldiers were among the most frequent donors. To avoid upsetting racists, blood from black and white donors was kept separate. So Hughes wrote: What if my friend gave blood? It would be marked as white, of course. Now, imagine that someone sets off a small bomb on the floor of the U.S. Senate and some of the senators are injured. And imagine that Senator Bilbo of Mississippi is rushed to the hospital and given a transfusion of my friend’s “white” blood. (Bilbo was a notorious race-baiter and foe of miscegenation.) Remember, Hughes continued, Bilbo himself says that one drop of black blood is enough to make you black. Hughes goes on to have a great time imagining Bilbo rising on the Senate floor and demanding a fair-housing act, an anti-lynching law, and so forth. I doubt we’ll see anything that dramatic in the FX series. More significant, perhaps, will be the ratings. Griffin’s book was a sensation when it came out in 1960; he made the rounds of talk shows, sold the rights to Hollywood, and received thousands of letters. Will Black, White elicit similar levels of interest? I suspect not—and if I’m correct, it will be a sign that, for better or worse, race-related issues are no longer in the forefront of Americans’ minds the way they were half a century ago.
December 7, 2005
A Talk with Bob (“Boze”) Bell, True Westerner Posted by Allen Barra at 12:20 PM EST Immortalized in the title of a Sam Shepard play, True West, the oldest continuing magazine on the legend and lore of the Wild West, has been a part of Americana since its inception in 1952. In 2000, Bob (“Boze”) Bell–failed professional baseball player, radio talk show host, author, artist, and Western historian–bought the magazine with a group of associates, became managing editor, and began the process of revamping its content and image. From the magazine’s offices in Cave Creek, Arizona, Bell found time to field ten questions from AmericanHeritage.com. How did you get the name “Boze”? In 1964, during a high school baseball game with our archrivals, Needles, California, I hit a Texas Leaguer to short right field, rounded first, and realizing I could easily make it to second, I turned and ran the rest of the way backwards, with a slight but mocking chicken strut. The Kingman Bulldogs bench (my team) went nuts, and coach Baca, also my Spanish teacher, called me “Piaso” (Spanish for clown). My teammates picked up on this and began chanting “Bozo! Bozo!” As the season went on and the legend of my antics grew, my teammates began to call me Boze, for short. I guess you could say it has stuck. What other career stops did you have on the way to becoming the managing editor of True West? I was a drummer in a soul band (Faye Shaw and the Generation), I worked hard as an underground cartoonist (the Doper Roper), I was a drummer in a heavy metal band (Central Heating), I was a draftsman, I was a land surveyor, I was a drummer in a country band (Roy Brown and Country Gold), I was a freelance cartoonist (Playboy, National Lampoon), I was an editorial cartoonist (New Times Weekly, Phoenix), I published a humor magazine (The Razz Revue, 1972-1976), I self-published four comic books (Honkytonk Sue, 1978-80), I was a morning drive-radio personality (KSLX 100.7, The Jones & Boze Show, 1986-1994), and to prove I was still crazy after all those failed career moves, me and two friends bought True West magazine in November of 1999.
Hmmm. It would not be incorrect to say you were one of those . . . “underground cartoonists”? Something of, you know, a hippie?
To be honest, I never made it to full-blown hippie. I was at best a weekend hippie. If you don’t mind my saying so, all those jobs makes you sound like somebody who would have ended up working for Rolling Stone or The Village Voice. How in the world did you end up as the editor and co-owner of the most popular magazine on the American West? How far back do you go with True West as a reader and a fan? Although I have freelanced for Playboy and National Lampoon, my heart has always been in the West. I discovered True West magazine in the summer of 1957 at Desert Drugs in downtown Kingman, Arizona. For a 10-year-old kid it was a life-changing moment. My favorite show on television that year was The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, and I often wondered if that show and the many others on TV in those days were true. True West gave me the unvarnished truth. I soon came to love the real characters of the Old West even more than the cleaned-up versions on TV. After seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, my life changed in that direction, and I spent some 20 years chasing rock ’n’ roll dreams, but I never completely lost my love of the West. In 1974, I think it was, the David Wolper TV show Appointment with Destiny tackled the O.K. Corral fight in Tombstone, and I found myself reawakening my Old West interest. I would still see True West on the newsstand from time to time and pick it up and think, “My fave old mag is dying. I think I know what it would take to bring it back.” In 1999 that opportunity presented itself, and with two other crazy True West fans we bought the magazine and moved the headquarters to Cave Creek. It’s been a bumpy ride, but I’ve loved every minute of it. Some people would ask how Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and General Custer are still relevant to modern American society. How would you answer them? The more I learn about these Old West characters the more I understand about our times, our beliefs, our foibles and boondoggles. There’s plenty to learn from Custer’s career that applies directly to Iraq, and there’s just as much insight into the Crips and Bloods to be gleaned from studying Billy the Kid and Jesse James. And I do believe I sense a certain Wyatt Earp stubbornness and focus of vision in our current Commander in Chief. Someone once said the farther back you look the farther ahead you can see. I think that’s not only true but profoundly relevant to all aspects of our world. Other than that, I just think it’s damned fun. True West is an American institution. Did you irk some of the Old Western buffs by dragging the magazine into the new world? And have you succeeded in lowering the magazine’s age demographic? When we bought the magazine, in 1999, it was all but out of business. The previous owners were still printing on pulp paper, and I knew I had to take some drastic measures to get some life back into it. As we updated the paper from pulp to gloss and tweaked the graphics and the writing, it was amazing to me how many of the old-time fans resented the changes. Almost to a man they’d say, “Why change something that was working?” This was understandable to me, since we all had been reading the magazine for decades and loved it. Unfortunately, a reader’s survey in early 2000 showed us that the average age of our reader was 68. We also were receiving a disturbing amount of phone calls from relatives canceling subscriptions because “grandpa bought the farm”—or I guess I should say ranch. Well, I knew if I didn’t act I was about to lose the ranch myself, and I knew I had to act boldly. Finally, after six years, we are steadily gaining younger readers. Our current average reader’s age is 48, and we are working hard on getting history out to a younger audience. Still, we are committed to the same ideals that our founder Joe Small expounded: Tell the truth about our history, warts and all. That has not changed. I am very encouraged and excited about True West magazine leading the charge. We are making history exciting and interesting to a new generation of fans. To me, it doesn’t get any better than that. The new book from True West, True Tales and Amazing Legends of the Old West (published by Crown), reads like a who’s who of the Old West. I see stories on Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Cody, Jesse James, Davy Crockett, et al. Which audience are you trying to reach with the book, the one that grew up on stories of these people or a new generation that you’re trying to bring up to speed. Or are you perhaps after both? Yes, we believe that there is a whole new audience that will be fascinated by Old West icons like Billy the Kid, Wild Bill, and Davy Crockett once they hear their stories. The trick is to expose our new readers to these old stalwarts but still make them fresh for our older readers. This isn’t easy. I’m talking more about the magazine here. One of the common complaints from our longtime readers is that they are tired of the same old names and want new stuff. However, I believe one of the reasons the previous owners were not making it with the magazine is that they went too deep and started talking about very minor characters like Dick Brewer rather than Billy the Kid, or Pony Diehl rather than Wyatt Earp. It’s a tough balance, but we’re getting better at it. Basically, we can’t forget who brought us to the dance. Do you regard the book as a new take on Old West legends? How do the profiles differ from the way they might have been written in the True West of half a century ago? When we bought True West magazine, six years ago, I made a vow to revisit the many gunfights I had read about growing up but to redo them with better graphics, better maps, better photographs, and better scholarship. I hired the best mapmaker in Arizona, Gus Walker, to give us a clear picture of where they stood, where they rode in from, and where they went to. On each gunfight we have gone to the experts. In the case of Wild Bill, that’s Joseph Rosa, a Brit who knows more about Hickok than any living person. In the case of Billy the Kid, we corresponded at length with Fred Nolan (also an England boy), and for Pat Garrett and John Wesley Hardin, we went to Leon Metz. The key is to find the best scholarship. Many of the “facts” printed in the old True Wests from the 1950s have been disproved or are based on the faulty memories of old timers. Also we have had the honor and privilege of utilizing the amazing photo collection of Robert McCubbin. To scan from the original photos is a tremendous advantage for our readers. And to see the actual bloodstains on Ben Thompson’s picture (found in King Fisher’s pocket when the two were gunned down in the Vaudeville Theater in San Antonio) is just the coolest. We pride ourselves on putting you right in the action, with no B.S. or Hollywood goofiness. Just the facts, warts and all. In my artwork I have tried to find the right clothing, weapons, and terrain for each gunfight. No saguaros standing in New Mexico, no 1895 Winchesters in a gunfight that took place in 1876, no 1950s cowboy hats on 1880s cowboys’ heads. I take these things seriously, and I want the look to be right. What are your favorite Westerns? What do you think is the most overrated Western? It depends on the mood I’m in. Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller isn’t a Western in the typical sense, but it’s a great vision of the West and one of the few Westerns that use weather in an important way. I love the way in the big showdown the snow muffles the sound of everything. It’s a strange movie, quite beautiful. I love the ensemble acting and attention to period detail in Tombstone, which has just about the best dialogue of any Western I’ve ever seen. Overrated? I’ve got to say I just don’t get Unforgiven. I find it dreary, depressing, and cynical. Let’s cut to the chase. Billy the Kid and Wild Bill Hickok face off. Who wins? In my opinion, nobody could face down Hickok in his prime. He was the Michael Jordan of gunfighters. On the other hand, Billy the Kid was a wily, slippery little devil and would figure out a way to win, either by distraction (“Hey Wild Bill, nice hairdo!”) or stealth. Virtually all of the Old West gunfighters had an uncanny knack for getting the drop on an opponent. Ironically, both Hickok and the Kid were done in by men who got the drop on them.
December 6, 2005
Whatever Floats Your Boat Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:55 AM EST The other day, while looking through the 1842 edition of John F. Watson’s Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, I came upon the following: “About sixty-five years ago [i.e. around 1777, when you’d think Philadelphians would have had other things to worry about], many hundred persons went out to the Schuylkill to see a man cross that river in a boat carried in his pocket! He went over safe, near High street. B. Chew, Esq., saw it, and told me of it, and my father saw the same at Amboy. It was made of leather—was like parchment—was about five feet long—was upheld by air-vessels, which were inflated, and seemed to occupy the usual place of gunwales. For want of a patent office, the art is probably lost. The fact gives a hint for light portable boats for arctic explorers, and suggests a means of making more buoyant vessels on canals.” I was amazed to read this. Way back in Revolutionary days, long before rubber became a common industrial material, someone had built a working inflatable boat! But in fact the technology is much, much older. According to this article: http://www.allinflatables.com/support/articles/inflatable-kayaks-01.html “the history of the inflatable boat goes back as far as 880 B.C, when the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II ordered troops to cross a river using greased animal skins, which they inflated continuously to keep the vessels afloat. In ancient China, during the Sung and Ming dynasties, inflated, airtight skins were used for crossing rivers.” I’ll bet that even the “airtight” Chinese skins were at least a little leaky, as well as the ones used to cross the Schuylkill. Still, Watson’s suggestions about possible uses for this technology proved quite prescient, as both were patented by other inventors before the end of the decade. On his 1845 Arctic expedition, Sir John Franklin brought along an inflatable boat made of rubberized cloth that had been designed by Lt. Peter Alexander Halkett: http://www.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/conWebDoc.9470 And Watson’s idea about canal boats was turned into an invention by none other than Abraham Lincoln, who received U.S. patent No. 6,469 for a scheme to use inflatable chambers to lift boats over sandbars (which, fortunately for posterity, did not turn out to be practical enough for Lincoln to make a business of it): Click here to see the patent office record.
December 5, 2005
Music and Politics Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:45 PM EST Another piece of music recently premiered at Lincoln Center was Colin Matthews’s Berceuse for Dresden, which was performed over Thanksgiving weekend by the New York Philharmonic. I did not hear the piece, and in fact was unaware of its existence until I saw it mentioned by the music critic and conservative commentator Jay Nordlinger: http://www.nationalreview.com/impromptus/
impromptus200512050824.asp Nordlinger says the title of the composition made him worry that it would be an Allies-bashing piece, but he notes with satisfaction that it is dedicated to Victor Klemperer, a Jew who had recently received a deportation notice but managed to escape Dresden in the aftermath of the bombing. (Nordlinger does worry, though, about the invocation of “They will beat their swords into plowshares” in the program notes, detecting a possible endorsement of pacifism over self-defense.) This search for a meaning in music reminded me of the first time I heard Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. It’s an extremely experimental piece from the late 1950s, filled with unconventional sounds made on string instruments. As I listened, I quite clearly made out, amidst all the aural clutter, the sounds of a massive explosion, followed by screams and cries, sirens, chaos (lots of this), and finally a fade to silence. The cumulative effect was overwhelming; I can’t remember another time when I’ve been so affected by a piece of instrumental music. Imagine my surprise, then, when I read the program notes and learned that Penderecki wrote the piece without any thought of an atomic explosion. It was originally titled 8’37”, for its length, and then Threnody for 52 String Instruments, the title under which it is usually performed today. He meant it as nothing but an exploration of sonic possibilities, but shortly before its first performance, the Polish government ordered him to insert the anti-American reference in its title. It reminds me of one of Leo Rosten’s Hyman Kaplan stories, in which Kaplan gives a moving analysis of a passage from Shakespeare, imagining in great detail Julius Caesar’s thoughts on the eve of battle, only to be told at the end that the passage is actually from Macbeth. I don’t know what all this means, except that it’s easy to see and hear things that aren’t there—and that orchestral music is not a very effective tool for analyzing history.
December 5, 2005
An American Tragedy Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 02:00 PM EST Friday night I went to the Metropolitan Opera to see the world premiere of Tobias Picker’s much anticipated new opera, a work based on a great American novel about a once infamous historical event. Full disclosure: I have known the composer for years and consider him a friend. That said, I am very pleased to be able to report that he and the whole cast and crew have done a thrilling job. They’ve produced something worth going out of your way to see if you possibly can during its short run this month. Theodore Dreiser’s huge 1925 novel An American Tragedy tells the story of a poor boy who tries to climb in the world, gets overwhelmed by the American dream, and is led, ultimately, to murder. It’s a fascinating book not only for the tale it tells but also for its Tom Wolfe-like portrayal of life as it was really lived when the story takes place, with closely observed scenes set everywhere from a Kansas City whorehouse to a soul-deadening factory of a century ago and the grand mansion of the man who owns the factory. The novel is based on the events surrounding a real-life murder that took place in 1906 (the murder led to what was called at the time the trial of the century); the novel has in turn been the basis of two movies, a silent and the 1956 A Place in the Sun, starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters. Picker and his librettist, Gene Scheer, went back to documents about the original murder, including letters written by the victim, a woman made pregnant and then forsaken by the tale’s ever-striving protagonist. They put together a tightly packed three-hour story that refracts many elements of American life both then and today. Clyde Griffiths, the main character, is the son of street preachers, and the tension between faith and irreligious freedom runs through the opera as it does through so much of life now; it dogs Clyde as he keeps seeing success grow both nearer and more costly, and some of the most stirring moments in the score have hymns running through them. Clyde Griffiths is not a bad man; as he pursues a rich, glamorous woman and tries to disentangle himself from his poorer earlier girlfriend, he is, as Dreiser wrote, “really doing the kind of thing which Americans . . . would have said was the wise and moral thing for him to do had he not committed a murder.” The greatness of the novel lies partly in its rich and detailed recreation of particular times and places in America but more in its ability to make us relate to and identify with a man inexorably drawn, by forces we all know, to murder. Clyde Griffiths is every one of us. Picker’s music heightens the power of such identification. The first reviews I’ve seen of the opera tend to praise everything about the production with the exception in at least one case of finding some of the music too accessible, too Broadway-like, as one critic put it. So if you want your music obscure and indigestible, stay away. If you want to see an electrifying story brought to life, go. The case includes several of the best opera singers in America today. Clyde Griffiths is played by Nathan Gunn, a 33-year-old baritone who looks like Montgomery Clift to some people and has gotten a cult following not only for his voice. The woman he makes pregnant is portrayed by the dazzling soprano Patricia Racette; the woman he aspires to, by Susan Graham, a young Texan with one of the richest, most seductive mezzo voices around today. They and the rest of the cast are shown to great advantage by Picker’s wonderfully imaginative vocal writing and deft orchestration. These are singers who look their parts, and who can act too. The sets cleverly combine period stage furniture with large photographic backdrops to both heighten the sense of place onstage and accommodate the mammoth scale of the Met stage without overwhelming the players. An opera based on a novel, like a movie based on a novel, is a distillation. It must replace breadth and detail with intensity and focus. An American Tragedy does so most movingly. I found it an absorbing and truly convincing artistic immersion in a timeless tale of the American dream.
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