’Tis the Season for Red, Green…and Blue

Maybe it’s the contrarian in me, but seasons of forced jollity tend to evoke the opposite emotions of sadness and loss. I know I’m not alone. Blue Christmas is a universal phenomenon.

My partner and I were reminded by the season that for the past four years we have lost family members during the holidays: a brother each, a mother, and an ex-brother-in-law. More than a decade ago my father died on Christmas Eve. Loss, though purely coincidental with the festive season, is nonetheless more keenly felt when all about you is supposed to be joyful.

Music is the emotional marker, and everyone has a selection of popular sad-song favorites this time of year. I’ll limit myself to three.

The oldest is “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” first recorded by Bing Crosby in 1943. The lyric represents a letter home, written by a serviceman posted overseas during World War II. “I’ll be home for Christmas,” the lyric goes, “if only in my dreams.” Bing’s rendition was a top-ten hit, and the song seems to have been recorded by a new artist or two every year. It probably resonates with me because my father was a serviceman, posted overseas during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Most military families have endured missed Christmases. And because this country is perpetually at war, it seems, there's no end in sight.

“Blue Christmas,” written by Billy Hayes and Jay W. Johnson, was initially recorded by Doyle O’Dell in 1948 but more memorably by Ernest Tubb a little later. Tubb’s rendition occupied the #1 spot on Billboard magazine’s Most-Played Juke Box (Country and Western) Records for the first week of January in 1950. However, the most popular version came nearly a decade and a half later, when Elvis Presley recorded it for the album, Blue Christmas, which was released in November 1964. The album was among a cluster of “comeback” recordings during the years following Elvis’s stint in the military from March 24, 1958, to March 2, 1960, when he was discharged with the rank of sergeant.

Interestingly, Presley was stationed in Friedburg, Germany, beginning October 1 of 1958. Our family was posted to Butzbach, Germany, that year; I was ten years old when Mom, my brother, my sister, and I arrived to join Dad in what was then West Germany on December 14. While Elvis was in Germany, he met fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu, whom he would marry after a seven-and-a-half-year courtship.

The last of my three is “Hard Candy Christmas,” written by Carol Hall for the musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Who’d have thought that a song sung by the evicted prostitutes of a Texas brothel would become a sad Christmas standard? In the movie version Dolly Parton played the madame and released her version of the song in October 1982. It climbed to #8 on the U.S. country singles chart. The film adaptation also featured some songs added by Dolly, including “I Will Always Love You,” which later became a hit for Whitney Houston, although I’ve always favored Dolly’s rendition.

Others can add their sad favorites for this season, and I could mention a few more. But three are sufficient.

Holiday Movie, Anyone?

Everyone has some favorite holiday movies, so why shouldn’t I trot out my Top Five list? The season is made for nostalgia—for good or ill—and so I find that most of my favorites are, as they say, vintage. Here goes:

1. Miracle on 34th Street may be my all-time favorite. I’m talking about the 1947 black-and-white film that stars Edmund Gwen (as Kris Kringle, shown), Maureen O’Hara, John Payne, and a very young Natalie Wood. The remake pales by comparison. The original was one of the first films to be “colorized”—a crime against art if there ever was one.

2. The Lemon Drop Kid, 1951, gets a vote because Bob Hope and Marilyn Maxwell introduced my favorite Christmas carol, “Silver Bells,” in it. Holiday Inn, the 1942 Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire vehicle that introduced “White Christmas,” is a runner-up and better, in my view, than the movie with which it’s often confused, White Christmas, a 1954 film that starred Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera Ellen.

3. Charles Dickens’ novella, A Christmas Carol, has been translated to film repeatedly, apparently so that every generation can have its own. Well, for me, it’s the 1951 version, starring Alistair Sim. Another black-and-white classic.

4. The 1944 Judy Garland film, Meet Me in St. Louis, isn’t a holiday movie per se, but Garland did introduce “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which has become a holiday standard. Another non-holiday film with a favorite Christmas song is Mame, in which Lucille Ball sang “We Need a Little Christmas,” though the film was a less successful vehicle than the original stage musical, which starred Angela Lansbury.

5. Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, 1993, features such haunting music paired with innovative animation that I cannot help but enjoy it time and again. If it were a feature film, I’d also throw in the television favorite, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! This Dr. Seuss book was made into an animated film for TV in 1966, starring Boris Karloff as the narrator and the voice of the Grinch. I watch it every year and it’s always magical.

Granted, I fudged the list to mention more than five films. There are many others that make popular lists that I haven’t included. They simply don’t resonate with me; they may with you. Winter weather makes this time of year perfect to cuddle up with someone you love, share a hot chocolate, and watch a holiday favorite. That’s what I plan to do.

Walking

In his essay, “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau writes:

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day…sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements…. I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon, too…. I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.

Of course, most of us are like those mechanics and shopkeepers. We don’t have the luxury of spending our days walking away our cares in woodland rambles. But Thoreau’s point should not be lost for our lack of time. There is much to be gained from walking—physically, intellectually, and emotionally.

Thoreau walked away from civilization, making much of avoiding towns and settlements. I have spent many pleasant hours walking in woods in all seasons. During twenty years in Wisconsin, the Kettle Moraine State Forest was a frequent destination, particularly in winter when a light snow had salted among the leafless trees and evergreens.

But I would equally advocate walking in more civilized environs. I am a town walker, a city saunterer.

Unlike driving or even bicycling, walking allows the solo pedestrian opportunities to observe his or her fellow inhabitants, both the two-legged and the four-legged varieties. Not long ago, for instance, I rounded a corner in the early-morning semi-darkness only to find that a deer and I were mutually surprised by one another’s presence.

Anyone who enjoys architecture—domestic or commercial—gardens, trees, clouds, indeed whatever the world has to offer can enjoy a walk. And even daily walks in the same general area produce a variety of sights, sounds, and smells. Plus, each day the walker carries different thoughts. Walking is an effective way to stimulate the subconscious to tackle old problems and come up with new ideas.

Having a destination, even if it’s only a coffee shop or the local library, helps motivate my walks. But, in the end, they are as Thoreau describes them: “Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out.”

Street Theater, Now and Then

Public protests are a type of street theater, scripted or impromptu to varying degrees. It’s been interesting to watch the Occupy Wall Street protest “go viral” and spread to other cities and towns. Largely a libertarian, leftist protest, with smatterings of sympathy across the political spectrum, it may or may not effectively awaken the populous to the ever-increasing threat that America, since the late-twentieth-century assault on the middle class began, is becoming a pseudo-democratic corporate oligarchy. From Reagonomics onward, the “99%” have been losing out to the “1%,” and it’s uncertain whether the Occupy movement—or the libertarian, rightwing Tea Party movement, for that matter—will do more than riffle the water in the stream of history.

A recent Indiana University production of the 1968 Rado-Ragni-McDermot antiwar, sexual revolution era, rock musical, Hair, evoked another age of public protest as theater. The students onstage and peppered throughout the audience undoubtedly viewed the show as ancient history. The rock score may have resonated with some, making the production perhaps a little more relevant that other antiwar stage vehicles, such as Bertolt Brecht’s World War II era Mother Courage and Her Children or Aristophenes’ Lysistrata, which played in Athens about 411 BCE. But for those in the audience who, like me, were in college in 1968, Hair brought back memories of public protests far more strident, wide spread, and ultimately effective.

After all, America in the Sixties was embroiled in the Vietnam War, a conflict that many saw as unnecessary (at least in terms of U.S. involvement) and unwinnable—which, in fact, we were not winning. Moreover, America was conscripting thousands of young men to fight in this war, and many of them would be killed doing so. Death tolls were rising, and grizzly scenes of battle played nightly on televisions everywhere. Still, Hair today might seem to be merely a quaint memoir of a bygone era. This is particularly the case, given most American’s blasé response to the more recent Bush era, knee-jerk response to the terrorist attacks of 2001: invading Iraq as part of a so-called War on Terror. No one would argue that the horrific acts of terrorism deserved a response. The war in Iraq simply was the wrong one. But there have been no wide-spread public protests, certainly nothing on the scale of the antiwar protests of the Vietnam era.

Hair is a reminder of the power of public protest—theater of the people with a political purpose. The War on Terror and its domestic counterpart, an economic war on the middle and lower classes, have given us the worst recession since the Great Depression. The Occupy movement may spur a broader awakening to the corporate takeover of American democracy—or not. Time will tell. For the moment, it’s street theater worth watching. If it changes the public conversation about America’s increasing disparity between rich and poor, haves and have nots, then it may one day be worth viewing in retrospect as well.

Architecture as Sculpture

Architecture often has a sculptural quality. Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut Chapel at Ronchamp in eastern France spring to mind as Modernist examples. But in the American Southwest stands an equally impressive, though spatially more modest structure, older than these but still archetypically Modernist in its form and line: the San Francisco de Asis Mission Church in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico.

Built between 1772 and 1816, this adobe church was constructed by Franciscan Fathers, whose patron was St. Francis of Assisi. It is located southwest of Taos, an artists’ colony in the high desert of northern New Mexico, near the Taos Pueblo, the 1,000-year-old settlement of the Taos, or Northern Tiwa, Native American Pueblo people. Nearby the Sangre de Cristo mountains provide a backdrop.

What distinguishes this church sculpturally is not its entrance, which is fairly conventional, but its rear structure. The asymmetry of the exterior of the apse (in conventional terms) and the use of stunted, lump-like buttresses give the building a decidedly Modern sculptural appearance, much as some ancient Chinese ceramics, say, from the Shang Dynasty (1600-1100 BCE), look as though they might have been thrown yesterday.

Declared a National Historic Landmark in 1970, the mission church was recognized much earlier as something special. It has been captured as art by the likes of Ansel Adams and Paul Strand (photography), Georgia O’Keeffe (painting), and Gustav Baumann (color woodcut). O’Keeffe, in fact, called the church “one of the most beautiful buildings left in the United States by the early Spaniards.”

One would be hard-pressed not to be captivated by this early example of adobe architecture. I know I was. So on a recent visit to New Mexico, I also found myself digitally capturing the image of this church, as shown above. The combination of adobe, blue desert sky, and the influences of sculpture, architecture, and religion made the opportunity to record an impression irresistible.

Finding My Father

I find my father in museum exhibits. Dad and I were not especially close. He was, at least for me, easy to admire but hard to love. Maybe that’s why, since his death in 1997, I keep looking for him.

In 1955, while visiting Denver, President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack during his first term in office. He recuperated in Fitzsimons Army Hospital in the suburb of Aurora, and my father was one of his caregivers. Once Ike was well enough, there was a photo shoot on the hospital roof. My father can be seen in many of the photos, standing in the background: hair almost black, hawk-like profile. He was thirty years old, a master sergeant, and already a veteran of two wars as a combat medic.

The photo shoot is how I find my father in museums. In the Smithsonian’s American History Museum I’ve even found a film clip from that day.

Recently I took a long-postponed road trip to Abilene, Kansas, to the Eisenhower Center. There in the museum, sure enough, was a tiny display of the 1955 photo shoot. And there was my father, forever young, the image of him I always carry in my mind from childhood. It’s rare to find my father credited—or any of the other bystanders, for that matter. But I know who they are. (In the photo above, Dad is on the far right, sharing a moment with First Lieutenant Lorraine Knox, one of Ike’s nurses.)

Apart from his military career, I guess I’m less sure who my father really was. There were swaths of time when he was away on duty throughout my childhood and adolescence, and somehow the time never got made up. I sometimes feel as though he was a stranger who just happened to live with us now and again. He wasn’t, of course. But between him and me, there was a disconnect. He even missed the wedding of my wife and me because he was overseas, serving a tour of duty in Vietnam during that war.

A couple of days after Abilene, my road trip took me to Denver. It seemed reasonable to look at where our family lived in the mid-Fifties. The Army post at Fitzsimons has been closed since 1999, and much of the old military facility has been bulldozed. But the soaring old hospital remains, now repurposed as a centerpiece of the sprawling and ever-expanding University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

Originally Army Hospital 21, as it was first called, the building where that long-ago rooftop photo shoot took place was formally dedicated in the autumn of 1918. In July 1920 the facility was renamed the Fitzsimons Army Hospital after Lt. William T. Fitzsimons, the first U.S. casualty in World War I.

Little else of the Army post remains, except for the original gates and the post chapel. Long gone are the housing areas where Army brats like me lived, played, and went to school a half-century ago. Indeed, my sister was born at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital. According to what I’ve read, the Eisenhower Suite, where Ike recovered in 1955, has been restored to that period. I didn’t try to visit it. I wonder if they have any images of the photo shoot. If so, I bet I’d find my father in them.

On the Road Again

As I was contemplating a road trip that would take me through Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas out to Colorado, then down along the Rockies to New Mexio, and back through Texas and Oklahoma, I was struck by a desire to recall some of my favorite road movies. A Google search will yield other folks’ top 15 or 30 road pictures, so why not drive down my own memory lane. I’ll limit myself to five:

The Wizard of Oz (1939). Four unlikely friends come together with the speed of Facebook, joined by a common need to seek the help of a wizard to cure their woes. Who says you can’t dance down the road instead of drive—and in ruby slippers? Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr are the friends: a Kansas girl, a scarecrow, a tin woodman, and a cowardly lion. And a yellow-brick road.

Road to Morocco (1942). This is my all-time favorite among the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby road pictures. Dorothy Lamour co-stars, of course, and Anthony Quinn puts in an appearance. It was topical in 1942 because of the Operation Torch landing of American troops in Morocco. I wasn’t born when this film hit theaters, but I did see Dorothy Lamour in the late 1960s, when she was on the road in the title role of a touring production of Hello Dolly. And who says you have to drive a car when a camel will do?

Paper Moon (1973). Ryan and Tatum O’Neal, father and daughter actors, portray a con man and his, perhaps, daughter, trying to make their way in Great Depression-era Kansas. Moze Pray (Ryan) is Bible seller just one step ahead of the law. Addie (eight-year-old Tatum) is the orphan of a prostitute and so might be Moze’s daughter. Along the road they pick up a stripper (played by Madeline Kahn). Peter Bogdanovich directed, and the film features the song, It’s Only a Paper Moon, by Billy Rose, Yip Harburg, and Harold Arlen. Among the Oscars was one to Tatum O’Neal for Best Supporting Actress, the youngest person to win an Academy Award.

The Adventures of Pricilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). Disco isn’t dead in this celebration of drag in the Australian desert, as an aging transsexual (played by Terrance Stamp) and two drag queen friends drive a broken-down bus across the outback for a gig at a casino and, ultimately, to reunite “Tick” Belrose (Hugo Weaving), a gay father, with his eight-year-old son. The movie was translated into a Broadway musical—a costume and music extravaganza—that I saw in New York City in July this year. Great fun! The film has more substance. And it won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design. Go figure.

Little Miss Sunshine (2006). A dysfunctional family hits the road to a children’s beauty pageant with an odd-ball cast that includes Greg Kinnear, Steve Carrell, Tony Collette, Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin (as the beauty girl), and Alan Arkin (as the grandfather who dies along the way). Disaster and hilarity ensure. The film earned a Best Picture nomination and three others, and won two Oscars. One went to Alan Arkin for Best Supporting Actor. An unheralded star is the Volkswagen minibus in which the family travels. A friend owned one in Germany in the 1980s; that yellow van also figured in a few memorable road trips.

Road movies are invariably tales of quests, some serious, some silly. What are your favorites?

Verging on Darkness

Recently I read a couple of Ariana Franklin’s Mistress of the Art of Death novels, which are set in the late 12th century during the reign of England’s Henry II, who is best, if unfairly, remembered for the martyrdom of Thomas à Becket, his “meddlesome” Archbishop of Canterbury. King Henry is less remembered for his more important accomplishments, including the modernization, for the 1100s, of England’s medieval justice system. For example, he instituted jury trials to replace trial by combat at a time when, on the European continent, trial by inquisition and torture were still the norm.

It should be remembered that the 12th century marked England’s emergence from the darkest of the Dark Ages into what is commonly called the High Middle Ages (11th to 13th centuries) and thus two to three centuries before the Renaissance, the acknowledged rebirth of classical learning and precursor to the modern ascendancy of rationality over superstition leading to the next period, the Enlightenment. In the 1170s, when Franklin set her first novel, the Enlightenment was a long way ahead and even the rudiments of science were at war with medieval superstition and primitive religiosity.

As I read Franklin’s interesting, well-research tales, I was struck by the similarities of that period to our own. American democracy was born in the Enlightenment, also called the Age of Reason, a period that reached its height in the 1700s. America’s founding generation—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe—were all products of the Enlightenment and so infused our fledgling democracy in the 1770s with ideals and principles grounded in humanism and scientific reason.

We should not mistake today’s radical “conservatives” as desiring to conserve this foundation. Indeed, the conservative party in modern American politics has all but disappeared because it has been co-opted in large measure by a radically reactionary faction that seeks not to turn back the clock to America’s democratic roots but, rather, to take this nation back, both figuratively and literally, to the Dark Ages, to superstition and errant, simpleminded religiosity.

Adherents of this reactionary, proto-fascist (to use a term I learned first from Henry Giroux) worldview espouse Christianist ideology to lure the unsuspecting and the uncritical in the same manner that radical Islamists lure the unsuspecting to their reactionary cause. Recall George W. Bush’s application of the laden word crusade to the Iraq War before his handlers and propagandists hushed it up. Neither -ist ideology resembles Christianity nor Islam in any true religious sense; they are political ideologies cloaked in religious garb. Pat Robertson, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Bachmann offer prime examples of this faction’s proponents.

Similarly, political ideologues of this ilk are not trying to restore, but to destroy, American democracy by advocating a return not to the Enlightenment principles of our founding era but to the medievalism that preceded it by several centuries. Rick Perry’s recent statements about the need to rewrite our Constitution are examples of this movement.

Today’s cultural and political struggles between democratic reason and superstitious radicalism in the United States bear uncanny similarity to those that marked 12th century England. If thinking men and women are not informed and proactive on behalf of enlightened American democracy, we will be dragged into an American Dark Ages, a prospect that is not as remote as many might like to believe.

Movies Go Broadway

Used to be, when a Broadway play was a hit, sooner or later someone would make it into a movie: Gypsy, My Fair Lady, Sound of Music, and so on. But somewhere along the way, the trend got flipped. Broadway composers, producers, and their ilk began rummaging in the movie vaults for hits on screen to transform into hits on stage. Some used their own vehicles. For example, Blake Edwards and wife Julie Andrews took their hit movie, Victor, Victoria, and turned it into a stage musical, which I was fortunate to catch in Chicago before it moved to Broadway. Mel Brooks took his movie, The Producers, and made it into a wildly successful stage musical; although when he tried to repeat that success with Young Frankenstein, it was less than stellar.

On a recent trip to New York I was struck by how many of the hit musicals now tapping across the Broadway boards began life as movies—a majority, it seemed, though I may be overestimating. Billy Elliot was a sheer delight on stage. I’ll remember it better than the movie. It’s a great dance show. Pricilla, Queen of the Desert was pure costume fluff, not particularly better than the movie but good for a fun afternoon escape into an air-conditioned theater when the heat wave temperatures soared past the 100-degree mark. Of course, it’s always fun to hear again those great gay disco anthems, such as “It’s Raining Men.”

The flip-flop from Broadway-to-screen to screen-to-Broadway probably has a lot to do with conservative economics, the need to shepherd finances and bet on, presumably, a sure thing: hit movie equals hit stage vehicle. But there are no guarantees. Still, it’s not a bad bet and probably better than risking money on mounting an unknown show that might, or might not, catch the theater-going public’s fancy.

And yet I am troubled by this trend, for its lack of creativity, its lack of leadership in the arts, its pandering to the need to make a buck above all else. Going to a Broadway show today is less about having a new experience and more about seeing merely a new interpretation of a prior experience. That said, isn’t that what we’ve been doing with Shakespeare for the last 400 years or so?

The Problem with Tours

With an informed docent who isn’t on a tight schedule, a tour can be great: full of good information, colorful tidbits, and fascinating insights. Unfortunately, many tours are rushed and cursory, seemingly with the main objective of getting as many tourists through the site as quickly as possible and for the highest admission fee the traffic will bear. I was reminded of this on a recent tour of Neuschwanstein, King Ludwig of Bavaria’s famous fairytale castle in southern Germany.

Granted, I have been to Neuschwanstein in the past, read up on it, and so may be better informed than the average tourist. Still, I was dismayed at how little our group actually saw, how little was explained (and, given that it was an English-language tour, how little English our guide actually spoke), and how quickly it was all over and we were dumped, of course, into one of the souvenir shops ubiquitous at famous sites. When I’ve huffed my way up the mountain, eschewing horse-drawn carriage or bus transportation, frankly, I expect more from a tour of one of the world’s most famous, if rather silly, landmarks. A twenty-minute walk-through just doesn’t cut it.

I well recall a few years ago taking a walking tour of Savannah, Georgia’s well-known residential squares. In this case, the guide was a young man who’d graduated from SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) and so loved his adopted city that he’d stayed on to write a book about its architectural history and to give tours. My partner and I booked the tour online, and the return email designated a square in which to meet the ten-person tour group, ending with the guide’s description that he’d be “the guy with the clipboard.” What a delightful tour—and very informative and interesting.

Savannah’s residential squares probably aren’t as famous as Neuschwanstein. But I would suggest that that’s all the more reason a tour of King Ludwig’s castle ought to be at least as informative and interesting, as colorful and nuanced, as a walk in Savannah.

Replication, Interpretation, and Insight

Replication and interpretation have always been useful learning tools. As an art student, I remember being asked to attempt a copy of a famous painting of my choice. The idea was that I would thereby be forced to look more closely at an artist’s work than I had ever looked before. As parents, we teach our children first to copy us. Later, when they are confident in their learning, they interpret; they make the learning their own.

And so, one recent sleepless night I decided that it would be an interesting exercise to take a popular psalm and, rather than meditate on it, attempt to rewrite it—that is, to render an interpretation in a different form that would convey my own sense of meaning. I chose perhaps the best-known biblical song, the Twenty-Third Psalm. Neither this exercise nor the choice of this verse was novel. This psalm has been recast in many forms over many centuries.

For my purpose, I decided to use another song form, the sonnet, combining a traditional Shakespearean rhyme scheme with a free-meter line cadence. I share the result below, not because it is particularly artistic—indeed, it’s probably no better than the copied painting I produced in student days—but because it illustrates, again, the value of closely examining any artwork, whether the expression is visual, auditory, or literary. I found doing so insightful. Thus, with apologies to William Shakespeare:

Divine Presence is my guide

and so I need nothing more.

My soul is like still water inside

that Presence will restore.

I am led to walk an upright path,

feeling the Divine within me,

and I do not know fear or wrath

even though, at times, I cannot see.

Among worldly shadows of gloom,

Divine Presence wipes away fear.

I feel no foreboding sense of doom.

Presence-filled, I hear, I hear…

O my soul, I know that heart, that hand;

and thus, now and forever, I understand.

Doing this exercise did not induce sleep for me. (It may or may not have a soporific effect on you, Dear Reader.) But I did find that it caused me think more deeply about the meaning I took from the Twenty-Third Psalm than I might have done by simply reading it.

Inspiration and the Iconic

During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, an image of Barack Obama designed by artist Shepard Fairey claimed almost as much attention as the candidate. In the image, a stylized graphic in shades of red, blue, and white, Obama gazes upward. Often, riding just below the knot of his necktie, a word was included: progress, change, hope, etc.

The Obama image became instantly iconic, though it flowed from a long-established Social Realism heritage. After the election the National Portrait Gallery acquired a mixed media stenciled version. Permutations of the image using other prominent figures from the political and entertainment fields proliferated. Some were outright parodies, for example, with Obama’s “hope” replaced with “hype,” or the faces of Obama’s opponents Sarah Palin and John McCain with “nope.”

The image sparked a controversy when the Associated Press claimed that Fairey’s inspiration was taken too literally from a copyrighted photograph snapped in 2006 by freelance photographer Mannie Garcia. Fairey sued for a declaratory judgment that his adaptation of the original image was fair use. The legal issues eventually were settled out of court.

In the political realm the iconic elements continue to be used. Witness most recently the anti-Mubarak poster (at right, posted on Facebook by my friend Alex Goebel, a German public radio correspondent stationed in Morocco), which is being carried during a protest to end the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.

Fairey’s powerful graphic embodies the essence of any icon, a bold simplicity that renders the message instantly comprehensible. And so the form can be transmuted, whether for serious or humorous intent, without diminishing its power to communicate.

Inspiration in terms of political art arises from the artist being particularly attuned, often subconsciously, to signals and currents in the culture that shape and are shaped by a political dynamic. Translation of that inspiration into imagery, in the case of Fairey’s Obama portrait, can produce the iconic, which then takes on a life of its own.

Context Versus Correctness

A wintry day recently gave me time to rummage in my collection of old-time radio shows, and my hand came upon a vintage episode of Amos and Andy. The program, a sitcom set in the black community, has been a source of controversy almost since it was created, written, and voiced by Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, two white men, in 1928. The show was wildly popular on radio in the 1930s and was influential on programs that followed it. It even transitioned to television in the 1950s, although with black actors (who were instructed to sound as much like Gosden and Correll as possible). The last radio episode aired on November 25, 1960.

In the context of an era when racial segregation was the norm, the show was accepted and acclaimed; though even in those days it was not without controversy. A protest was launched in 1930 in an article by the preacher of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, who claimed that the program singled out lower-class characters. This theme was picked up by the Pittsburgh Courier, then the nation’s second largest African American newspaper, but the NAACP declined to join the protest.

Much of the sustained controversy at the root of context versus correctness stems from white actors portraying other races, which was common into the second half of the 20th century. For example, in the popular series of Charlie Chan movies, the Chinese American detective of Earl Derr Biggers’ novels was played primarily by two white actors, Warner Oland and Sidney Toler, in the 1930s and 1940s. Almost to the present day a number of white actors have portrayed Asian characters, including Alec Guiness, Jennifer Jones, Boris Karloff, John Wayne, Mickey Rooney, and David Carradine to name only a few. Linda Hunt won an Oscar for playing Billy Kwan in the 1982 film, The Year of Living Dangerously.

Yellowface, as non-Asians playing Asian was called, survived the political correctness test longer than blackface, although even that persisted until the civil rights era of the 1960s. Witness the 1965 film of Shakespeare’s Othello, which starred Laurence Olivier in blackface in the title role. (On the other hand, Dooley Wilson, who came to prominence as Sam, the piano player in Casablanca, earned his stage name, “Dooley,” playing in whiteface as an Irishman.)

We should not feel behooved to look down on portrayals that fit the context of their time but now, in retrospect, are viewed as politically incorrect. Acting is, after all, an art of artifice, of making things seem other than they are in reality. We do well to remember that in their earliest performances, Shakespeare’s memorable female characters, from Queen Gertrude and Lady Macbeth to Ophelia, Juliet, and Desdemona were all portrayed by males because women were not allowed to perform onstage during the Elizabethan era. Women also were banned from the stage in Japan during the Edo period.

Times simply change—and with them our notions of race, gender, and a lot of other things.

(Photo: Bert Williams, the only black member of the Ziegfeld Follies when he joined them in 1910, is shown here, ironically in blackface. He was the highest-paid African American entertainer of his day.)

Still Sherlock

Graham Moore’s The Sherlockian juxtaposes a modern-day mystery to be solved by an earnest young Sherlockian, Harold White, who has just been inducted into the premier Sherlockian society, the Baker Street Irregulars, and a period mystery in which the sleuth is none other than Arthur Conan Doyle, ably assisted by Bram Stoker, who found fame with Dracula. Holmes himself does not appear in The Sherlockian, but the book is a testament to our enduring, collective romance with the great detective. The existence of Sherlockian societies is a similar testament. Indeed, I briefly belonged to such a group many years ago when I lived in Wisconsin. We met in a cozy tavern appropriately called Sherlock’s Home.

Our long-term fascination with Conan Doyles’ creation puzzled even the author himself, who tried to kill Holmes off at the Reichenbach Falls only to feel compelled to bring him back to life for a further series of adventures after what came to be known as the Great Hiatus. Certainly more than the stories must be credited for such longevity, for there is something utterly captivating in the brilliant, maddeningly eccentric personality of Sherlock Holmes.

Another recent addition to the genre is a new British television series, Sherlock (shown on PBS), in which the dashing, improbably named actor Benedict Cumberbatch portrays a Holmes for the 21st century. Cumberbatch’s detective captures all of the nuanced neuroticism so ably conveyed from 1984 to 1994 by Jeremy Brett. For many, Brett was the definitive Holmes. His interpretation was the most compelling of the second half of the 20th century, and he might have filmed the entire Holmes canon had he lived long enough. In the new Sherlock, Martin Freeman is quite believable as a serious, conflicted Dr. Watson.

Bringing Holmes into a contemporary era is a neat twist but nothing new. Another well-remembered Holmes and Watson duo, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, played not only the period mysteries but in a few set against the backdrop of World War II.

To be sure, Cumberbatch and Freeman are a more interesting pairing than the latest Hollywood big-budget foray into the canon, starring Robert Downey, Jr., and Jude Law as Holmes and Watson respectively. Their 2009 Sherlock Holmes seems more focused on special effects than telling a good story. Nonetheless, a sequel is said to be in the making.

There will be more of the Cumberbatch Holmes stories, too, thankfully. And doubtless someone at this moment is crafting yet another book somehow related to Holmes, this icon of the detection genre. With all of this enduring interest, we should be assured of many fine tales yet to come.

(The Sherlock Holmes illustration is by artist Sidney Paget, drawn in 1904.)

Going Silent

Recently I saw Asta Nielsen, Denmark’s leading silent screen star, in a 1921 version of Hamlet, in which she played the title role as a woman dressed as a man, a fiction created by her mother, the nefarious Queen Gertrude, to ensure the throne and her own position. A brilliant, perfectly apt piano score was created in the moment by Indiana University professor Larry Schanker. It all proved to be a delightful evening at the new IU Cinema.

As in most silent screen dramas, there were moments of unintended hilarity, which served as a reminder that viewers of historical film need what Northrup Frye termed, to enjoy fiction, “a willing suspension of disbelief.” This suspension is necessary to enter into the world of fiction, a world in many cases quite unlike the “real” world in which we live at this moment.

To watch a silent film from the Teens or Twenties—a century ago—we also need a willing suspension of modernity, or modern sensibilities. We must mentally turn back our internal calendars to a time before color and talking motion pictures, before television, before airplanes, before the Internet, and all that.

In short, we must put ourselves, as best we can, into the 1920s, in this case, so that we not only understand but also are immersed in the ethos of that bygone era. Otherwise, our understanding of the film—and our enjoyment of what today seems naiveté—will be utterly diminished.

It also must always be remembered that what seems hackneyed in a silent film often was brand new at the time and now is hackneyed only because it has been used subsequently over and over. To understand and appreciate fully the films of any bygone era requires that we learn anew an old vocabulary, much like learning a language no longer spoken and known only by the cognescenti.

Hamlet, in which she played the title role as a woman dressed as a man, a fiction created by her mother, the nefarious Queen Gertrude, to ensure the throne and her own position. A brilliant, perfectly apt piano score was created in the moment by Indiana University professor Larry Schanker. It all proved to be a delightful evening at the new IU Cinema.

As in most silent screen dramas, there were moments of unintended hilarity, which served as a reminder that viewers of historical film need what Northrup Frye termed, to enjoy fiction, “a willing suspension of disbelief.” This suspension is necessary to enter into the world of fiction, a world in many cases quite unlike the “real” world in which we live at this moment.

To watch a silent film from the Teens or Twenties—a century ago—we also need a willing suspension of modernity, or modern sensibilities. We must mentally turn back our internal calendars to a time before color and talking motion pictures, before television, before airplanes, before the Internet, and all that.

In short, we must put ourselves, as best we can, into the 1920s, in this case, so that we not only understand but also are immersed in the ethos of that bygone era. Otherwise, our understanding of the film—and our enjoyment of what today seems naiveté—will be utterly diminished.

It also must always be remembered that what seems hackneyed in a silent film often was brand new at the time and now is hackneyed only because it has been used subsequently over and over. To understand and appreciate fully the films of any bygone era requires that we learn anew an old vocabulary, much like learning a language no longer spoken and known only by the cognescenti.

Hamlet, in which she played the title role as a woman dressed as a man, a fiction created by her mother, the nefarious Queen Gertrude, to ensure the throne and her own position. A brilliant, perfectly apt piano score was created in the moment by Indiana University professor Larry Schanker. It all proved to be a delightful evening at the new IU Cinema.

As in most silent screen dramas, there were moments of unintended hilarity, which served as a reminder that viewers of historical film need what Northrup Frye termed, to enjoy fiction, “a willing suspension of disbelief.” This suspension is necessary to enter into the world of fiction, a world in many cases quite unlike the “real” world in which we live at this moment.

To watch a silent film from the Teens or Twenties—a century ago—we also need a willing suspension of modernity, or modern sensibilities. We must mentally turn back our internal calendars to a time before color and talking motion pictures, before television, before airplanes, before the Internet, and all that.

In short, we must put ourselves, as best we can, into the 1920s, in this case, so that we not only understand but also are immersed in the ethos of that bygone era. Otherwise, our understanding of the film—and our enjoyment of what today seems naiveté—will be utterly diminished.

It also must always be remembered that what seems hackneyed in a silent film often was brand new at the time and now is hackneyed only because it has been used subsequently over and over. To understand and appreciate fully the films of any bygone era requires that we learn anew an old vocabulary, much like learning a language no longer spoken and known only by the cognescenti.

Hamlet, in which she played the title role as a woman dressed as a man, a fiction created by her mother, the nefarious Queen Gertrude, to ensure the throne and her own position. A brilliant, perfectly apt piano score was created in the moment by Indiana University professor Larry Schanker. It all proved to be a delightful evening at the new IU Cinema.

As in most silent screen dramas, there were moments of unintended hilarity, which served as a reminder that viewers of historical film need what Northrup Frye termed, to enjoy fiction, “a willing suspension of disbelief.” This suspension is necessary to enter into the world of fiction, a world in many cases quite unlike the “real” world in which we live at this moment.

To watch a silent film from the Teens or Twenties—a century ago—we also need a willing suspension of modernity, or modern sensibilities. We must mentally turn back our internal calendars to a time before color and talking motion pictures, before television, before airplanes, before the Internet, and all that.

In short, we must put ourselves, as best we can, into the 1920s, in this case, so that we not only understand but also are immersed in the ethos of that bygone era. Otherwise, our understanding of the film—and our enjoyment of what today seems naiveté—will be utterly diminished.

It also must always be remembered that what seems hackneyed in a silent film often was brand new at the time and now is hackneyed only because it has been used subsequently over and over. To understand and appreciate fully the films of any bygone era requires that we learn anew an old vocabulary, much like learning a language no longer spoken and known only by the cognescenti.

Hamlet, in which she played the title role as a woman dressed as a man, a fiction created by her mother, the nefarious Queen Gertrude, to ensure the throne and her own position. A brilliant, perfectly apt piano score was created in the moment by Indiana University professor Larry Schanker. It all proved to be a delightful evening at the new IU Cinema.

As in most silent screen dramas, there were moments of unintended hilarity, which served as a reminder that viewers of historical film need what Northrup Frye termed, to enjoy fiction, “a willing suspension of disbelief.” This suspension is necessary to enter into the world of fiction, a world in many cases quite unlike the “real” world in which we live at this moment.

To watch a silent film from the Teens or Twenties—a century ago—we also need a willing suspension of modernity, or modern sensibilities. We must mentally turn back our internal calendars to a time before color and talking motion pictures, before television, before airplanes, before the Internet, and all that.

In short, we must put ourselves, as best we can, into the 1920s, in this case, so that we not only understand but also are immersed in the ethos of that bygone era. Otherwise, our understanding of the film—and our enjoyment of what today seems naiveté—will be utterly diminished.

It also must always be remembered that what seems hackneyed in a silent film often was brand new at the time and now is hackneyed only because it has been used subsequently over and over. To understand and appreciate fully the films of any bygone era requires that we learn anew an old vocabulary, much like learning a language no longer spoken and known only by the cognescenti.

Hamlet, in which she played the title role as a woman dressed as a man, a fiction created by her mother, the nefarious Queen Gertrude, to ensure the throne and her own position. A brilliant, perfectly apt piano score was created in the moment by Indiana University professor Larry Schanker. It all proved to be a delightful evening at the new IU Cinema.

As in most silent screen dramas, there were moments of unintended hilarity, which served as a reminder that viewers of historical film need what Northrup Frye termed, to enjoy fiction, “a willing suspension of disbelief.” This suspension is necessary to enter into the world of fiction, a world in many cases quite unlike the “real” world in which we live at this moment.

To watch a silent film from the Teens or Twenties—a century ago—we also need a willing suspension of modernity, or modern sensibilities. We must mentally turn back our internal calendars to a time before color and talking motion pictures, before television, before airplanes, before the Internet, and all that.

In short, we must put ourselves, as best we can, into the 1920s, in this case, so that we not only understand but also are immersed in the ethos of that bygone era. Otherwise, our understanding of the film—and our enjoyment of what today seems naiveté—will be utterly diminished.

It also must always be remembered that what seems hackneyed in a silent film often was brand new at the time and now is hackneyed only because it has been used subsequently over and over. To understand and appreciate fully the films of any bygone era requires that we learn anew an old vocabulary, much like learning a language no longer spoken and known only by the cognescenti.

The Nation's Soul

Religious ceremonies—weddings, funerals, worship services—are forms of theater, whether they are bare-stage productions or lavish with pageantry. This has been understood since ancient days, though the connection perhaps is not as often explored today as in former times. However, there is scholarship in this field, as witnessed by the Journal of Religion and Theatre, published by the Religion and Theatre Focus Group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.

In religious ceremonies, as in theatrical performances, what touches us as witnesses may not be the central action but something incidental to it: a gesture, a word, a verse of song, a melody. They are theater of the soul. This fact was brought home to me on the Saturday preceding the Monday Martin Luther King Day, when I was attending a memorial service for my brother, who had died in December after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

He was a Navy veteran and so military honors were a concluding part of the service. I was sitting near my sister-in-law as the young seaman of the honor guard presented her with the flag, folded in the traditional triangle, “on behalf of the President of the United States….” What moved me at that utterance was not only the honor shown to my brother and the finality of this closing action but also that this honor was rendered on behalf of a President that I like and admire and who is, significantly, nonwhite. Here’s why:

The flag ceremony reminded me of a similar honor accorded to my father, an Army veteran who saw wartime service in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, when he died in 1997. But it recalled an even earlier time, when Dad had been a young serviceman.

For a short time my father had been assigned to work with a black Army officer. They traveled together in the United States at a time before desegregation was widespread, and so part my father’s duties was to go into hotels and restaurants ahead of the military detail and ask whether they would serve this officer. My father, who told me of this episode in his life only in later years, never did so without tears welling in his eyes at the injustice done to this officer—a man who served his country with honor and distinction and yet could not walk into just any establishment and be served a meal or given a room and a bed.

The religious theatricality of celebrations of Martin Luther King Day sometimes obscures the small and large realities that ride just behind the stirring language of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Full civil rights may not yet have been achieved for all individuals. But our country has made progress on this front. When my brother’s widow was presented the flag on behalf of this President, my soul was stirred because so much more lay behind those words for our family.