According to the Eddur, the collection of old Norse poems, there was once no heaven above nor earth beneath, but only a bottomless deep. I believe it! If I remember correctly, they also talk about some kind of mist in between and even a warm breeze, but as far as I’m concerned, they got that part of their creation story wrong. There was a howling wind in the beginning and there’ll be a howling wind in the end. If you doubt me, look into the eyes of a cat or a dog on a night like that. They know it, and they don’t like it a bit. We don’t sleep a wink and they don’t either. “Thank God, spring is coming,” we say to each other in the dark. Yeah, sure, the eyes of our animals are telling us, but how are we going to get through this night?
The Buster Keaton Cure
I have a collection of Buster Keaton’s films I bought in the late 1980s when they first became available on video. It’s made up of nineteen half-hour shorts and his nine full-length films, all made between 1920 and 1928. Every few years I take a look at some of them, and recently, being thoroughly depressed by our wars and our politics, I watched a dozen of his shorts to cheer myself up. Almost ninety years old, these shorts are still very funny and visually beautiful. They make the Dada and Surrealist pranks that scandalized everybody in that era seem dated and tame in comparison.
Charlie Chaplin’s bum is at the mercy of a cruel world. Keaton, with his impassive face and a hat flat as a pancake, is a stoic. He confronts one setback after another with a serenity worthy of a Buddhist monk. In one short film, “The Goat” (1921), he’s standing on the sidewalk behind two tailor’s dummies, under the impression that they are at the end of a bread line. When he discovers his mistake, he moves on quietly.
Keaton’s movies were a big success in Europe since his type of comedy doesn’t need a translation. I first saw one of his shorts in occupied Belgrade during World War II. I liked him instantly. His films are full of remarkable acrobatic stunts. Keaton started out in vaudeville when he was four years old working with his parents, whose comedy act included a lot of roughhousing. He was thrown by his father across the stage and sometimes even at the hecklers in the audience.
The plot of a good comedy can be written on a postcard, Keaton said. For instance, in “Cops” (1922) a girl tells the hero, either you become a successful businessman, or I won’t marry you. Everything that happens in this delightful short follows from his effort to fulfill her request.
Keaton claimed that it was much harder to make a short comic film than a full-length one in which the story is uppermost, since a short film is nothing but a series of gags that follow from the original premise. For the gags to work, they have to be timed just right. Even after a film was completed, he reshot some of the gags if he felt they were executed either too quickly or too slowly—and many of them, of course, were extremely difficult to do. In “Neighbors” (1921), when a young woman cries for help from a third-floor apartment across the street, Keaton and two other men each step out of their three respective windows to form a human totem pole and rush to her rescue.
At the same time, he warned against the dangers of rehearsing a comic scene too much. To be successful, a scene had to keep its feel of improvisation. In “One Week” (1920), an uncle gives a pair of newlyweds a build-it-yourself house and a plot of land. A disappointed rival alters the numbers in the boxes containing the house, so that when Keaton begins to assemble it, the result is freakish. A door on the second floor opens to nowhere; the kitchen sink is on the outside wall; the rain pours through an opening in the roof and the house spins in the high wind. An obstinate and ingenious man, he tries to cope with whatever new difficulties present themselves.
In another short, “The Scarecrow” (1920), a couple is eloping on a motorcycle with a side car, pursued by the girl’s father, when in their speed they sweep up a priest who happens to be crossing the street. “Where is the ring?” the priest asks. Using a nut that Keaton has just unscrewed, the priest pronounces them man and wife.
In a world in which everything can go wrong, and usually does, Keaton remains unperturbed. In “The Boat” (1921), after the boat he built in his garage sinks, he and his wife and two kids are set adrift on the sea in a bathtub he brought along to serve as a lifeboat. One of the little ones cries for a drink of water, and Keaton, without any sign of anxiety, pours him a glass from the tap, which the kid drinks as they sink. As the old stoic philosophers said, the sage is immune to misfortune. Since most of us are not sages, we can at least laugh.
On Losing
Now that the World Cup is over, the Spaniards and everyone else who admired their elegant way of playing soccer are happy, and the few nations whose teams either exceeded expectations or did okay in the month-long tournament have returned to their normal lives. But the fans in underachieving countries are still fuming, many of them destined to recall for the rest of their days how their side either disgraced themselves, or were the victims of gross injustice. For those who have been following their national team for years, they’ve most likely already suffered more than any holy martyr in the history of the church, and yet it’s doubtful that even one of them will go to heaven, because they cursed and swore till they were blue in the face each time their team lost.
I speak from experience. The first World Cup I followed closely was held in Brazil in 1950 where Yugoslavia, the country I was rooting for, was eliminated from the cup by the host nation with a score of 2-0 in front of 142,000 spectators in Rio. I still remember that the Brazilian goals were scored by Ademir and Zizinho and that our top player, Rajko Mitić, injured his head before the game as he was exiting the tunnel that led to the field—which, needless to say, was the sole reason we lost. After I listened to the game on the radio, or rather tried to listen to it since the broadcast was live and full of static, I couldn’t fall asleep for hours, hoping vaguely that the next morning, when I bought the newspaper, the score would be different and we the winners.
Although I was only twelve years old, I already had my own view of how we should play the Brazilians and which players should be on our team. I don’t remember the particulars, but I imagine I wanted them to shoot all the time. We played soccer in the street with a ball made of rags, which one really had to kick hard, so dribbling around defenders and shooting is all we knew. (Yugoslavia had a star player, Dragoslav šekularac, who played with me a few times in the street. He was a dribbler in the style of Lionel Messi and they always said it was because he started with a rag ball.) One of my teachers, who ordinarily regarded me as a numskull, once called on me in class before an important game against Russia and said that he heard I knew a lot about soccer and wanted my opinion. I rose in my seat and delivered a lengthy lecture about our chances and had the teacher’s and the class’s undivided attention.
There are kids and grownups like that in every country where soccer is an obsession. Months before the World Cup, they argue with friends over the chances of their national team, alternating between high hopes and premonitions of utter failure, which is what most of them get. (I myself wanted Serbia to win, but I knew their attack was too slow so they wouldn’t go far. Otherwise, being a fanatic Arsenal fan for many years, I have no energy left after the long English season to root for any national team. I just love to see a well-played game.) This, as far as I’m concerned, is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the universe: How is it possible that eleven more-than-competent club players, who stand together before the start of the game with solemn faces and even tears in their eyes as the national anthem is played, turn out to be completely clueless during the next ninety minutes on the field? How could France self-destruct, England play such uninspired soccer, Italy be so predictable, Brazil fall apart after some rough play by the Dutch, Argentina (which until that moment appeared invincible), watch helplessly as the Germans scored four goals?
The obvious explanation, that a better team won that day, is never good enough for the tens of millions of the disappointed. Here, then, are some excuses the fans universally rely on to explain defeat:
1. It
was all the referee’s fault. He was either incompetent, or was pressured not to see what was being done to us, since the FIFA leadership and the big money aligned behind it have their own ideas about who they want to see in the final.
2. Our coach is an idiot. He left our best players at home or on the bench, ordered the team to attack when they ought to have played defense, and made them play cautiously when they ought to have gone for broke.
3. Our players are overpaid prima donnas. They are unable to fully concentrate on the game because they are thinking about their girlfriends, their vacation homes, and the millions in their bank accounts.
4. (For the nationalists) the decline of the nation is the primary cause. Immigrant players of all races have diluted the native stock and turned us into a bunch of sissies. We no longer know how to work and fight together as we once did.
Except for the completely inane reason four, these excuses each contain an element of truth. Thanks to modern technology and the ability of TV broadcasters to show every play from multiple angles, the bad calls of the referees, which are not unusual in soccer, looked in this World Cup even more outrageous and costly than usual—as indeed they often were. Among the coaches, even some of the best, like England’s Fabio Capello and Brazil’s Dunga, failed to read the game in decisive moments and to make the right tactical substitutions. As for the lackadaisical way in which whole teams and many star players performed, what were these men on the sidelines supposed to do?
Maradona, the Argentine coach, hugged and kissed each player like an old friend he hadn’t seen in years after he scored a goal or was substituted, but these public declarations of love did not help his side against the Germans, who always seemed to be exceptionally motivated even though their coach, Joachim Löw, sat through most of the games with no expression on his face. In France, following the team’s early-exit fiasco, the legislature initiated an inquiry and President Sarkozy summoned one of the older players on the team for a tête-à-tête at the Élysée Palace. What a waste of time when every waiter and taxi driver from Paris to Marseille already had the answer: the national coach—who apparently relied on an astrologer to guide his selection and tactics—was a pompous half-wit.
Reminiscing About the Night Before
One of the sorrows of our modern age is that so much of the life one knew in one’s youth has completely disappeared, or is on the verge of disappearing. It wasn’t always like that. For most of human history, one could count on one’s favorite dishes and songs still being around when one became old. Not anymore. One evening recently, thinking about this melancholy subject, I was wondering, for example, what happened to the delicious Manhattan clam chowder that was once on the menu in every restaurant and corner luncheonette in the city, when my mind drifted—first to different neighborhoods in New York where I lived, then to small piano bars, now nearly extinct, where I spent many an evening drinking and listening to music.
Jazz clubs tend to be crowded and noisy, and a small place with a piano player, either solo or accompanied by a bass, makes for the best listening. Large midtown hotels like the Algonquin used to have bars and lounges with pianos, but what I have in mind are neighborhood dives in the Village with no more than a dozen tables where one could drop in late, stay for a set, and go home to bed. Over the years, I heard Mary Lou Williams, Tommy Flanagan, Art Hodes, Ralph Sutton, Dick Wellstood, Junior Mance, Hank Jones, Sammy Price, Dave McKenna, Thelonious Monk, and many other famous piano players, but an even greater number of anonymous ones who most likely never made a record, and who may have had a regular job during the day. I would be returning home, when at the spur of the moment, not quite ready yet to hit the sack, I would go in. On weekends and in the summer these places may have been packed, but on a dark and dreary weekday night, one could get a table right next to the piano.
What made it all possible was the repertory of popular songs and jazz tunes going back to the early years of the twentieth century that most Americans were familiar with and enjoyed hearing. In this setting, they were played in a variety of piano styles, in a more or less predictable fashion—emphasizing the melody, and allowing for passages of jazz improvisation. At times, however, a piano player stood out. His playing was subtle, deeply thought-out, and original enough to chase away most customers and leave a few appreciative ones to linger till closing time.
In my youth, I was usually too shy to tell them how much I liked their playing, or God forbid make a request, since, as a rule, they were wary of customers. The tipsy ones were liable to interrupt their playing and ask them for directions to the bathroom, or, even worse, ask them to play “Melancholy Baby” for the fifth time that evening. I once heard a red-faced drunk, who was sitting with a young woman who appeared to be sobbing quietly, go up to Ray Bryant and shout: “Hey fellow! How about piping down? You are giving me a goddamn headache.” Consequently, if you summoned the courage to make a request, it better have been for some tune that told them that you were not just another know-nothing idiot. Some of them would nod silently, while others pretended they didn’t hear you, and then play your request an hour later. Of course, it was best to ask them to play the blues, any blues, since that’s the mood they were usually in at the end of a long evening with only a few dollars and some small change in the jar reserved for tips that they kept on the piano.
I once asked an old, tired-looking black man to play James P. Johnson’s “Snowy Morning Blues” and he obliged after first turning around to take a better look at me. That tune was written in New York in the 1920s and recorded a couple of times by Johnson himself and a few others. Its name already sets up a scene in one’s imagination: someone has woken late, drawn open the curtains, and found the rooftops and streets covered with snow. It must be a Sunday, because the tune evokes the melancholy and the quiet joy of someone lounging around, reminiscing about the night before. That mixture of emotions is the quality of all the best pop and jazz tunes. If they were only sad, or only happy, they would grow tiresome after a while. Was it Al Capone who expressed the opinion that jazz was better than opera, because it didn’t just go around slobbering?
There are tunes like “Autumn in New York” that obviously evoke the city, but there was also a piano sound, I thought, that one heard only in New York. I don’t mean that the players touched the piano keys any differently than they did in San Francisco. It was the atmosphere of the city with its dark, rain-slicked streets that made it seem so to the listener. These are the hours when one wishes to hear a tune like “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise,” played slowly and soulfully. Both jazz piano and lyric poetry depend on an exquisite sense of timing and phrasing that requires one to omit every unnecessary note and word. But poetry can be read later in a book, whereas sublime moments in a club remain only a memory. The piano player stops playing and gets up. We applaud. He mumbles a thank you and hurries to put on his hat and overcoat and find his umbrella. Everyone is tired after a long day and ready to go home, but there’s always someone who wants to hear one more song. I remember one piano player telling us, after we asked him to play one more: “I’m an old man, folks, and it’s past my bedtime.” Then, of course, he sat back at the piano and played us a slow, heartbreaking old blues.
Confessions of a Poet Laureate Page 2