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.)