Southern Bookman

Happy Thanksgiving

It's time to give thanks for our blessings.

This year has dealt me highs and lows. Here are a few snapshots from my 2019 album.

Eight days in the hospital. I'm thankful for the doctors and nurses who helped me feel better again.

A trip to New York City to see Jeff Daniels' masterful performance as Atticus Finch in Aaron Sorkin's theater adaptation of Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird."

The Miro show at the MOMA, before the museum closed to receive a new look. Miro's stance against Fascism in the 1930s gives us courage to resist Trump and the GOP's assaults on truth and human dignity. I was overwhelmed by Picasso's "Guernica" when I first visited MOMA nearly 50 years ago. I'm looking forward to visiting yet another new MOMA.

Trips to Portugal and Amelia Island, Fla., two places where rivers join the Atlantic Ocean. Both are threatened by rising sea levels and the crush of tourism. Like distant cousins, they are battling to preserve their proud cultures.

The Braves' rush to the pennant. Joe Burrow and the Tigers. Anne-Marie and I getting together with our children Sara, Luke and Ruthie in Nashville, Tenn. Learning to play Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" on the piano.

We'll soon turn the calendar to another year, which looms as one of history's crossroads. The personal decisions of millions will determine whether the nation follows the course of freedom or an American totalitarianism.

No matter what happens, truth and beauty eventually will prevail.

 

Farewell, John Simon

For a little while in my younger days, I fell under John Simon's curmudgeonly spell.

The brutal critic's claims to the precise use of English appealed to my language-purist side. For a while, I reveled in his acerbic theater, movie and book reviews in New York magazine and other publications.

Simon, who took a sick pleasure in blasting intellectually fashionable plays, films and books, died at age 94 Monday after suffering a stroke.

After a while, I found that Simon's attacks came more from personal spite than critical acumen. He unfairly disparaged gay, black and women artists. While he claimed total honesty, he violated the critic's duty to respect the theater.

Simon contributed to my intellectual and artistic education. But like the late Hilton Kramer, he was an intellectually dishonest bully who unfairly damaged theatrical, film and literary careers.

 

Emmylou Harris shares love, music with Atlanta fans

Emmylou Harris gave adoring fans a generous helping of beloved songs Sunday night in a performance at Atlanta's Symphony Hall.

Now white-haired like many of those in the audience, the 72-year-old Harris kept the love flowing. Her energy remains high, her voice glorious.

Harris upheld the protest-song tradition with a searing anthem about Emmitt Till's murder in Mississippi, and a number honoring a Nashville program that matches foster children with pet animals.

With her band tautly ranging from rockabilly to bluegrass to old-time mountain laments, Harris thrilled the crowd with favorites like "Together Again," "Green Pastures" and "Pancho and Lefty."

She honored her early muse and partner Gram Parsons with "Las Vegas" and "Wheels," leaving Parsons fans longing for a few more songs from "Grevious Angel," "GP" or "The Gilded Palace of Sin."

Along with a heart-tugging encore of her own "Boulder to Birmingham," Harris presented an anthology of American songwriters, from James Taylor to Don Williams. Her signature performance of Billy Joe Shaver's "Old Five and Dimers" mirrored the life experience of the many aging hipsters present.

She closed the show with a rousing cover of Neil Young's "Long May You Run," raising our hopes of carrying on.

Leonardo Da Vinci exhbit at Louvre reflects unity of his artistic, scientific work

Leonardo da Vinci's astonishing life unified art and science, which later tragically split into separate realms.

A monumental exhibit at the Louvre in Paris that opened Thursday reflects how Leonardo's art and scientific endeavors reflected each other. The exhibit is a major cultural event, with extensive reviews in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and other publications.

Marking the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's death, the exhibit gathers 160 drawings, manuscripts, sculptures and paintings organized to trace Leonardo's development from youth to old age.

Adding to the Louvre's collection, major museums from around the world lent works to the exhibit, the result of intense negotiations, as detailed in a recent Wall Street Journal article.

A last minute court ruling in Italy allowed Leonardo's delicate Vitruvian Man diagram to travel from Venice to Paris. Its artistry and scientific precision is on a spectrum with his great paintings such as John the Baptist, the Madonna of the Rocks and the Virgin and Child With St. Anne.

Leonard's most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, remains on another floor of the Louvre. The enigmatic painting receives a throng of visitors, which would make the exhbit's crowds unmanageable.

A portrait of the elderly Leonardo drawn by one of his assistants comes at the close of the exhibit, a testament to Leonardo's humanity.

The Louvre has gathered a bountiful selection of Leonardo's scattered works into a comprehensive whole. As humanity's worst attributes gain prominence, the Leonardo exhibit shows our highest aspirations.

 

 

 

New MOMA expansion continues museum's real estate maneuvers, as Times critic Michael Kimmelman details

The Museum of Modern Art's relentless expansion since moving to its permanent home on West 53rd Street in 1939 has transformed its Midtown Manhattan neighborhood.

In an early review of the MOMA's latest renovation, opening Oct. 21, ace New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman shows how the museum turned over the years into one of New York City's insatiable real estate brokers.

The $450 million project adds 47,000 feet of exhibition space, allowing MOMA to display more of its permanent collection. It also adds a performance stage, a rooftop restaurant and a dramatic canopy. On the negative side, the MOMA's sculpture garden will be less accessible.

One of MOMA's most touted additions is a gallery for changing exhibits, visible from the street and free to visitors. Alas, MOMA had to tear down the American Museum of Folk Art to build the new space.

The MOMA expansion continues major museums' race to grow bigger and attract more visitors. The MOMA turns ever more corporate as its masterpieces speak against capitalism's ravages. Co-founded by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s wife, the museum has navigated between those poles since its beginning.

Kimmelman's review implies that the project by Diller Scofido +Refro, in collaboration with Gensler, undoes mistakes from Yoshio Taniguchi's widely criticized 2004 expansion. Taniguchi's work led to crowded hallways and escalators as the museum's visitors surpassed 3 million a year, as Kimmelman details. The new MOMA will ease traffic flow. Earlier expansions had been done by Philip Johnson and Cesar Pelli.

When the MOMA moved to West 53rd Street in 1939, the area consisted of low-rise rowhouses, Kimmelman says. The MOMA's six-story home of white marble, clad in a new kind of insulated glass called Thermolux, according to the MOMA's web site, transformed the street like the landing of a spaceship, as Kimmelman said.

Now, skyscrapers in that part of Midtown soar toward the sky, blotting out the sun. Owned by foreign oligarchs, many of the outlandish high-rises remain vacant, killing the area's small businesses.

Conceived as a palace of modern art, the MOMA with its real estate hunger has enervated the area's vitality. Monstrosities rising to an inhuman scale,  empty storefronts and a corporate uniformity have replaced interesting shops and middle-class homes.

Art lovers will flock to the MOMA, which expects an increase to 3.5 million annual visitors. The main interest for many will still be taking selfies before Van Gogh's "Starry Night," as Kimmelman notes.

 

 

 

 

Farewell, Ginger Baker

The rock supergroup Cream's universal popularity is unimaginable today.

Ginger Baker, the group's pyrotechnic drummer, died Sunday at age 80 in London. Baker, bassist Jack Bruce and guitarist Eric Clapton reached a new level of rock success with Cream, drawing huge crowds with their turbocharged music and selling millions of records. Their once innovative power rock today seems as old-fashioned as the big band era did in the 1960s. Fractured audiences and collapsing album sales now thwart widespread appeal.

Baker, who saw himself as a jazz drummer, hated Cream's ear-breaking sound as Clapton and Bruce accumulated more and more amps for stadium performances. While Baker looked down at rock music, he was acclaimed as one of rock's greatest drummers, fusing jazz and blues rhythms.

Cream's luminous career ended quickly, wrecked by animosity between Bruce, who died in 2014, and Baker, as his New York Times obituary recounted. Baker and Clapton joined Steve Winwood to form Blind Faith, which also flashed briefly.

Known for his unpleasant personality, Baker played with several more bands over the years, and reunited with Bruce and Clapton in 2003.

Several rock stars died early. Baker, who battled heroin addiction, survived the rock era's excesses. Two other aging rockers, Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney hailed Baker as a consummate musician. Clapton continues to perform.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Farewell, Leigh Harris, "Li'l Queenie"

Tipitina's opened just before I left Louisiana as a young man.

I saw Gatemouth Brown, Professor Longhair and Asleep at the Wheel at the club at the corner of Napoleon Avenue and Tchoupitoulas Street in New Orleans' warehouse district. No act matched the excitement of Lil' Queenie and the Pecolators.

Leigh Harris, the diminutive woman with a big, raucous, New Orleans voice, died Saturday at age 65 from breast cancer. Performing as Li'l Queenie with her high-octane band, she blasted out soul, funk, rhythm and blues, and jazz, the city's musical gumbo. Dying her hair orange and pink, she created a stage persona as New Orleans-marinated as Dr. John's.

Leaving New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Harris found a serene life in rural North Carolina with her husband, musician Rick Ledbetter. She kept making music, recently releasing the album "Purple Heart." In February, she was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.

Her New Orleans anthem, "My Darling New Orleans," was one of the songs featured on the soundtrack of "Treme," David Simon's HBO show about the corruption and resilience that surrounded the city's recovery from Katrina's devastating flooding.

That recognition was welcome; Li'l Queenie and the Percolators' sound was too New Orleans-flavored to gain widespread national success.

She was magical in her hometown, commanding the stage's light, true New Orleans royalty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Museums, music venues mark the places where Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers stamped country music

A.P., Sara and Maybelle Carter traveled in a primitive automobile over treacherous mountain roads to reach a recording session in Bristol, Tenn., in August 1927.

The group later called "The Carter Family" overcame flat tires and mechanical problems to make it to Bristol from their rural home in southwest Virginia's Appalachian Mountains. The young Maybelle, Sara's cousin and A.P.'s sister-in law, was eight months pregnant. Later, the shy young mountain girl would gain fame as "Mother Maybelle," the queen of country music.

Nowadays, the trip is much easier, as recounted in an article in Sunday's New York Times Travel section. Bristol, and the neighboring  East Tennessee tri-city towns of Johnson City and Kingsport, have built museums, music venues and tourist attractions to mark the 1927 sessions, known as "the big bang of country music," although country hits had been recorded previously in Atlanta and elsewhere.

The birth of country music route extends into Bristol, Va., just across the state line from its Tennessee twin city, and farther into the Virginia Mountains, where the "Carter Fold" presents musical performances at the Carter home.  Now crowds flock to the isolated mountain valleys where the music was born.

RCA Victor scout Ralph Peer, who had captured Fiddlin' John Carson in Atlanta four years before, recorded several mountain artists during the 1927 Bristol sessions. But the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers made the foundational recordings of country music, setting a course for popular song as well.

Rodgers,  formerly a railroad brakeman in Mississsippi, ventured beyond the primitive string-based sound with the bluesy, jazzy "T for Texas," or "Blue Yodel." The record about love gone wrong and rambling across the country reflected an urban sensibility that would make Rodgers the first big crssover country star.

Sometimes discounted as a musician in comparison with black blues pioneers like Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, Rodgers in his brief career cut short by tuberculosis towers over country and popular music.

He's not a guitar virtuoso like Johnson, but his chord progressions influenced later bluegrass and country guitarists. While his yodels now sound old-fashioned, he wrote memorable lyrics that tell stories of cinematic documentary authenticity. He also was a jazz pioneer, recording with Louis Armstrong and other black musicians, and expressing the dislocations of American urbanization in songs like "Miss the Mississippi and You." The theme of country people finding alienation after moving to the city would be common in country music, and American literature.

But to me the Carter Family recordings are truly miraculous, unworldly music that brings something new into the world. AP Carter, who had gatheerd most of the group's songs at rural gatherings, often giving himself songwriting credit, was a conventional singer at best. His braying, nearly off-key voice, overwhelm some of the songs. But his strong voice chimes with Sara's on the memorable "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone."

But his wife, Sara, was a rare, mesmerizing talent. Her mountain pronunciations, otherworldly high notes, and haunting vocal shadings, display the virtuosity of a natural genius. She was a uncommon singer who understood her gift without need of instruction. A groundbreaking artist, she brought to American music a wildness, a sense of adventure, an experimental newness. Like Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, she changed the course of American music.

And she was not the only native genius on the recordings. Maybelle Carter's guitar playing, partially learned from a black man named Lesley Riddle, set the templet for all future guitar gods. Maybelle's combination of rhythm and lead playing still echoes in Nashville recordings. She's up there with Louis Armstrong and Johnson as early 20th century musical innovators.

Peer himself had misgivings when the bedraggled Carters rolled in from the Virginia hollers.

"They wander in," Peer told Lillian Borgeson during a series of interviews in 1959. "He's dressed in overalls and the women are country women from way back there. They looked like hillbillies. But as soon as I heard Sara's voice, that was it. I knew it was going to be wonderful."^[

 

Film Comment magazine a beacon of hope for print

I discovered "Film Comment" magazine the other day.

Much to my surprise, I found that the magazine published by the Film at Lincoln Center series has been coming out since 1962. Since I am a lifetime magazine junkie, I thought I would have discovered "Film Comment" long ago.

The magazine gives hip/academic analysis of films ranging from American blockbusters to obscure foreign productions. Writers such as  The New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis and staffers J. Hoberman, Dave Kerhr, Michael Sragow and Amy Taubin give an auteur's perspective, while remaining grounded.

Also impressive is the magazine's historical outlook. I appreciated a retrospective on the late Doris Day and a feature on United Artists' 100th anniversary.

Another strong piece is Taubin's interview with director Jim Jarmusch about his recent zombie black comedy "The Dead Don't Die." The film received negative reviews, but Jarmusch's thoughts about his scriptwriting made me want to see it.

The film's cast exudes acting brilliance: Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloe Sevigny, Tom Waits, Danny Glover, Steve Buscemi, Tilda Swinton. There's even an appearance by Iggy Pop.

I noticed Film Comment because it had a cover story on Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time....in Hollywood." 

Although I've never liked Tarantino's films all that much, "Once Upon a Time....in Hollywood" has stirred my interest. I suppose it's because I loved the violent TV and movie Westerns the film references, and have long been fascinated by the 1960s conflict between the old and new Hollywood that the film registers. I've also always loved book, movies and TV shows about the glitzy, noirish Los Angeles, whether in the 1930s or 1960s.

Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Rapold gives a good wrap-up of Tarantino's look back at Los Angeles in 1969, but I particularly liked Howard Hampton's sidebar on TV's influence on the production.

As Hampton points out, a group of marginal actors in 1960s Hollywood, including Bruce Dern, Jack Nicholson, James Coburn and Warren Oates, eventually gained fame in the edgy, revolutionary New Hollywood films. Hampton finds an obscure model for Leonardo DiCaprio's Rick Dalton: Ty Hardin, who starred in a TV series called Bronco.

An imaginative magazine produced for a selective audience like Film Comment offer sthe best hope for print's future. While refined general interest magazines like Harper's, the New Yorker, the Atlantic and National Geographic battle on, general interest magazines sink.

Film Comment has a strong Internet presence, but its crisp writing and editing, inviting layouts and vivid photography make a statement for print.

Will Jimmy Buffett demolish Fiddlin' John Carson?

Jimmy Buffett's company wants to build a monstrous Margaritaville development in downtown Atlanta, destroying the building where Fiddlin' John Carson in 1923 recorded the first national country hit.

The Margaritaville plan sounds like the kind of high-concept debacle that has plagued the city for years. Remember Planet Hollywood and the ESPN Zone? These urban pleasure palaces sizzle for a few years, then fizzle out, leaving a hole in the urban fabric.

Buffett's development across the street from Centennial Olympic Park would bring the destruction of a small building at 152 Nassau Street where Carson recorded "That Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane" in 1923, along with "The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster's Going to Crow."

Famed New York talent scout Ralph Peer recorded country singer and fiddler Carson and several local black performers at the building for Okeh Records. Despite Carson's wavering voice and the recording's scratchiness, "The Little Old Log Cabin" caught fire. The song's success led to a flourishing Atlanta recording industry, which eventually faded away as country music found a permanent home in Nashville.

Unless architect and downtown resident Kyle Kessler can succeed with a last-ditch effort to save the 152 Nassau building, the original site of Atlanta's recording industry will disappear, according to an excellent article Tuesday by the AJC's Jeremy Turley. Despite Kessler's online petition that has received 8,000 signatures, the Buffett company is preparing for the imminent demolition of the 152 Nassau building, Turley reported.

A deal with former Mayor Kasim Reed led to the Margaritaville developers receiving building permits for a 21-story Wyndham Hotel and time-share condos above an amusement park, according to the article. The city planning department sought to stop the project, but the developers threatened to sue. Reed then told the company he would support the plan if the luxury hotel were included, the newspaper reported.

Designed to draw aging affluent Parrotheads, the development will be near the giant downtown Ferris wheel, State Farm Arena, Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the College Football Hall of Fame, the World of Coca-Cola and the Civil Rights Museum.

Despite these attractions, someone would have to be pretty wasted in Margaritaville to buy a time-share in downtown Atlanta. The Buffet company's plan contains all the signs of those Atlanta developments that have crashed in the past.

Ace AJC columnist Bill Torpy sounded the alarm in May about the threat to the Nassau Street building. The preservationists don't want to prevent Buffett fans from having their fun. They only ask that the Margaritaville plan incorporate the building in some way.

But the developers say they need to destroy the building to install a garbage facility, or a restaurant "grease trap," according to the AJC.

The preservationists point out the irony of a Buffett enterprise removing a major landmark of Atlanta's music history. Buffett began his career performing in small Atlanta clubs, according to Torpy and others.

The building on Nassau street isn't that distinctive, and has housed many businesses over the years, including a "Gone With the Wind Museum."

The Buffet corporation could easily find a way to preserve the place, perhaps as a museum of Atlanta's musical history, including Buffett's career.

The country pioneer Carson has a darker tie to Atlanta's history. He stirred anti-Semitic fervor by performing on the street during the Leo Frank murder trial in 1913. Frank, whose innocence has been established by historians, was convicted for the slaying of Mary Phagan and subsequently lynched by a mob in Cobb County.

Along with its place in music history, the 152 Nassau Building should be preserved as one of the last downtown sites dating back to that turbulent era of Atlanta's past.