In August 2005, there was a New York Times report by Robert Simonson called “2 Broadway Composers Do Inharmonious Battle” on a contretemps between composer-lyricists Michael John LaChiusa and Marc Shaiman. (The scrap was also reported in Variety: Robert Hoffler’s “Inside Move: Tunesmiths take tussle to mag, Web.”) LaChiusa, composer of plays such as The Wild Party and The First Lady Suite, had written an essay in Opera News, “The Great Gray Way,” which opened with the statement, “The American Musical is dead,” and called plays like The Producers, Mama Mia!, and Shaiman's own Hairspray "faux-musicals." Shaiman, “hoping to stir up a reaction," responded in a theater chatroom, mostly to defend himself, his collaborators, and their work. I went to the Web and read the two pieces to see whether either guy was actually making any sense, or if either or both were selling sour grapes.
I suppose we ought to be used to hearing about the deaths of this or that institution. History itself was declared at an end as recently as 1992. I guess that was premature. A few years ago, irony was deemed over—but that turned out to be . . . well, ironic. The Republicans, then the Democrats, then the Republicans again have been pronounced deceased for years. (Richard Nixon was taken for burnt toast after losing the governorship of California in 1962, but then . . . . Well, maybe that’s not such a great example.) Detroit’s auto industry was mourned and nearly buried just a few months ago. Broadway itself has been on its deathbed for decades, if you listen to certain critics, journalists, and other croakers who nicknamed it “The Fabulous Invalid” after Kaufman and Hart’s 1938 play about New York theater. In 1953, Oscar Hammerstein II wrote, “The theatre is dying, The theatre is dying, The theatre is practically dead!” (Me and Juliet) and Simon and Garfunkle asked the musical question, “Is the theater really dead?” (“The Dangling Conversation”) in 1966. LaChiusa didn’t actually mean, however, that the musical was totally dead and gone with the wind (as Cole Porter wrote in another context). Dying, maybe; breathing its last. Living on borrowed time. As we can see, five years on, there are still musicals on our stages, both on Broadway and elsewhere. (I saw one just the other night.) It isn’t the production of musicals whose demise LaChiusa had proclaimed anyway. The great oldies were still being revived then (Pacific Overtures, Wonderful Town) just as they are now (South Pacific, West Side Story). It was the art and craft of creating great new musicals whose obit LaChiusa was announcing.
Have a look yourselves, at least at LaChiusa's article (Opera News, August 2005), and see if you agree, but the brouhaha looked more to me like sour grapes than an honest appraisal. Shaiman, dubbing LaChiusa “The Coroner Of Broadway,” was most upset that LaChiusa was criticizing other theater workers as if his offense weren't that he might be wrong about the American Musical but that he was disloyal. "I was surprised,” Shaiman said in the New York Times, “that he would go so on record to badmouth so many of the people working alongside of him, all with the same goals.” The Hairspray composer-lyricist didn’t put up much of a defense for the musical form itself. The Times characterized the contretemps as “a juicy, old-fashioned feud” and Variety proclaimed, “There’s a cat fight in Shubert Alley.” The fight generated more heat than light, to be sure: LaChiusa had a temper tantrum and Shaiman threw a hissy fit!
What LaChiusa said was that the big, popular new musicals on the stages of Broadway and around the country aren’t “real” musicals. He held up The Producers and Hairspray as exemplars of these pale copies of the past greats, saying that such shows “[i]n no way . . .aspire to be the next West Side Story or Sunday in the Park with George.” They are all faux-musicals, which LaChiusa defined as “musicals based on formulae” that don’t “transcend their source material” and therefore end up “facsimiles of the real thing.” He even waxed quite professorial:
A philosopher might consider them simulacra: Plato’s “copy of a copy,” a fake that seems more real than the real thing. . . . No aesthetic is involved in creating the faux-musical, and it’s pointless to disparage the effort or claim that they prove the American Musical is dead. The best of them are exacting copies of copies; they fool the eye and ear to perfection.
But LaChiusa decides which shows are true musicals and which are faux on the basis of whether he likes them or not, it seemed to me. It's very, very subjective. As Shaiman pointed out, though, LaChiusa's assertions were "stated as fact." Shaiman was incensed that LaChiusa “places it down in his article in such a scholarly fashion, to make it seem that this is fact. I'm not sure that he ever says 'In my opinion' or 'Just not my cup of tea.'" LaChiusa listed some criteria, but first, the positive characteristics could all apply to the shows he dismissed (if you let them) and second, the negative ones could also apply to some top-notch shows of the past (which LaChiusa didn't mention, so I wonder how he feels about them)—My Fair Lady, Kismet, Carousel, just for instance. For example, LaChiusa disparaged what he (and many others, too) calls "jukebox musicals" because they string together songs from an outside source and then try to hang a flimsy libretto/plot on them. He went as far back as Mamma Mia! (2001) and Contact (2000) to illustrate his complaint, but I wonder about the work of Robert Wright, who had died the month before LaChiusa’s essay appeared, and George Forrest. They recycled the "songs" of Alexander Borodin and Edvard Grieg for successful musicals Kismet (1953, Best Musical Tony; book by Charles Lederer and Luther Davis; 583 performances) and Song of Norway (1944; book by Milton Lazarus; 860 performances), respectively. By LaChiusa's definition, they're really "jukebox" shows, but how do they measure up in his estimation of the "real" musical? Is it all right to reuse the music of classical composers, but not contemporary or pop writers? It’s true that most jukebox shows have failed both with the reviewers and with audiences; recent examples like Lennon (91 total performances in 2005) and The Times They Are A-Changin’ (Bob Dylan; 63 performances in 2006) went down in flames along with many others. But Movin’ Out (Billy Joel; 1331 performances in 2002-05) and Jersey Boys (Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons; over 2040 performances since 2005, and still going; Best Musical Tony) have caught on with audiences here and around the country (they’re popular touring and rep company productions), and added something either dramatic (a book for Jersey Boys by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice that “catches the very texture, almost the actual smell, of its time”) or theatrical (the rock-ballet story-telling of Twyla Tharp in Movin’ Out that “fits no pigeonhole”) to the canon of American musical theater.
I’m no fan of ABBA or Mamma Mia! and jukebox musicals are, on the whole, not my taste, so I can’t entirely dispute LaChiusa’s estimation of the genre. The fact that most of them sink—even Tharp couldn’t duplicate the success of Movin’ Out with this year’s Come Fly Away, her attempt to make a dance play from the music of Frank Sinatra which, though still running, hasn’t met with general endorsement—suggests that neither the critical community nor the audience pool has embraced the form. But Unchain My Heart, a musical based on the 2004 film Ray using the music of Ray Charles to tell its story (so it’s both a jukebox musical and a “movical”), is coming to New York with a book by Suzan-Lori Parks. Since the Pulitzer Prize-winner for Topdog/Underdog is no slouch when it comes to innovative playwriting, Unchain My Heart, which had a try-out run (as Ray Charles Live!) at the Pasadena Playhouse in 2007, is almost guaranteed to contain some surprises. (The original book is under revision, so the final script isn’t known, but Parks, whose first libretto this is, reportedly played with temporality in the Pasadena version—Charles has returned from the dead to record a last album—and may be applying more of her avant-garde proclivities for Broadway.) LaChiusa rejects the whole genre, which is both reductive and, perhaps, premature. We’ll have to see what Parks comes up with, but even the minimally inventive jukebox form can have its contributions to the American Musical today when put into the right hands.
LaChiusa spent a lot of print denigrating Tharp’s Movin’ Out because “choreography creates the libretto, and not vice versa.” On his continuum of real musical to faux-musical, Movin’ Out is “the real thing,” LaChiusa said, “a real ballet, that is, though it longs to be musical theater.” (He did begrudge that Movin’ Out “is about something: the terrible cost of war.”) LaChiusa also dismissed John Weidman and Susan Stroman’s Contact (though we’ll see shortly that this judgment is suspect for its own reasons), another “dance play.” He bemoaned that Contact won a Best Musical Tony even though there was no live music or singing and the music and lyrics were not original. (LaChiusa did acknowledge that the show’s creators didn’t actually call Contact a musical; “the critics chose to,” LaChiusa charged.) Though he doesn’t cop to it, it seems to me that the composer’s objection to these kinds of shows is not so much that they are made from collections of someone’s pre-existing songs, but that music and lyrics aren’t the drivers of the production—dance is. “I write musicals,” declared LaChiusa early in his essay, but what he really meant is the he writes the songs and book for musicals. Could he be miffed that there are shows, however worthy, that don’t spotlight his work and the work of others like him? We know that that’s not his only complaint because he also insults other composers and librettists—like Shaiman and Mel Brooks—but could he be afraid that another artist might be poised to take a prominent role in making American Musicals of substance and artistry: the choreographer? Dance has long been an important part of the American Musical, beginning with the innovative choreography of Agnes de Mille in Oklahoma! (1943) and arguably reaching a pinnacle in West Side Story (1957). “I’m old-school about what makes a musical a musical,” wrote LaChiusa. “Lyric, music, libretto, choreography—all work in equal parts to spin out the drama.” Sure, but dance has always been subservient to the book and the music, a partner, perhaps, but a junior partner. In fact, a few years earlier, LaChiusa stated flatly that “a musical demands that the music and libretto function as equal partners,” making no mention of dance at all. Choreography didn’t carry the narrative or the production outside of traditional ballet. (“Out of My Dreams” was just a single scene in Oklahoma! that was enacted through dance.) What might happen if dance began to carry the drama itself, the way Tharp used it in Movin’ Out? The late Peter Stone, onetime president of the Dramatists Guild, once observed that “the choreography of musicals is sort of at a dead end” and that Jerome Robbins had tried unsuccessfully to take the step of moving into “ballet in musicals.” But what if the new “dance plays” were the start of that next step—to make musicals where choreography carried the narrative? (The Chinese have a performance form called “dance drama” which is neither ballet nor Beijing opera.) Could LaChiusa be looking into a future in which, not having gotten fully into the room himself, he sees his potential for standing next to the greats of Musical Theater Past diminished?
Since LaChiusa cited The Producers and Hairspray as his prime examples of the faux-musical, let me address them briefly. LaChiusa said that both shows “celebrate” “the premise that musicals are stupid.” I just don’t see that at all. (I checked some of the reviews of both plays, and none of the ones I read thought so either.) Hairspray isn’t even about theater, so if LaChiusa feels it’s making fun of musicals, it’s embedded somewhere in the subtext (though he pretty much denies these plays have anything so profound as a subtext); otherwise, he’s interpolating a context that’s not really there. Hairspray makes fun of a lot of things—racism, “weight-ism,” dishonesty, religious fanaticism, ‘60s fashions, TV—but not theater. There’s a general sense of light-hearted irony, derived as much from John Waters’s original screenplay as from the adaptation, but it’s not mean-spirited and its intent isn’t to shame those who subscribe to a less candy-colored view of the world than the play presents but to remind us that there’s a “right thing to do”—and a little music and dance can’t help but get us there. Okay, the theme is pretty low-intensity, but that’s not a fault. As another light-hearted musical reminds us, “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” In fact, Hairspray is redeemed (if it needs to be) by its placement of the issue of size and our fear of fat people in the same frame as racism. The Producers, which is about theater, is no more poking mean fun at musicals than are Kiss Me Kate or Annie Get Your Gun, both musical comedies that take a wry look at show biz. In fact, I believe Mel Brooks was paying homage to Broadway and the musical. It’s not musicals he says are stupid, it’s investors in musicals. (“There’s a sucker,” sings the title character in Barnum, “born every minute.” Can I get an "Amen"?) If we take that literally—LaChiusa said that musicals “can never be realistic theater”—we have to believe that producers are all dishonest and conniving.
LaChiusa objected to the songs in both plays because, he said, they “seem to endorse the hateful operatic adage: no one listens to lyric.” Really? I haven’t heard The Producers in a while, but I recently listened to the score of Hairspray and I found Shaiman and his collaborator Scott Wittman’s songs witty and funny, perfectly in the vein of the show as a whole. They weren’t writing arias, after all; they were writing songs to evoke the early rock ‘n’ roll of 1962. I lived through that period (and had a damn fine collection of 45’s, too!)—I was the same age as the teens in the play, in fact (15 going on 16, as the song goes)—and I watched American Bandstand, the national counterpart of the Baltimore TV dance show in the play. Even LaChiusa himself stated: “[A] great song is something we think we’ve heard before but haven’t.” Shaiman and Wittman’s songs all sound like what I remember from those pre-Beatles days, from the Philly sound to Motown (even a Sinatra-esque number for the oldsters), except the Hairspray lyrics are more knowing, more pointed. (The Times called them “canny”; I think that’s right on.) I don’t have the musical background to put this in my own terms, so I’ll borrow what Ben Brantley said, because I think he nailed it:
Mr. Shaiman, the show's composer and its co-lyricist with Mr. Wittman, isn't sending up the music of the age of “American Bandstand.” Nor is he simply replicating it. What he's doing instead is taking the infectious hooks and rhythms from period pop and R & B and translating them into the big, bouncy sound that Broadway demands.
If the score was reminiscent of the work of others from 45 years ago, that’s because it’s part of the plot and fits the characters—just how a musical’s score is supposed to work. (The dances, too—despite LaChiusa’s disparaging characterization of that, as well—were spirited evocations of the steps I did in middle and high school.) No, they’re not Sondheim songs. But Hairspray isn’t Sweeney Todd, either; it has it’s own dynamic and character, and the score suits it precisely for me. As for The Producers, its songs are also right for the material. They make reference to other Broadway songs, but shouldn’t they, considering the plot? Because Producers is a farce, the songs are parodies—but they’re not travesties, which is what they’d be if Brooks were saying that musicals are silly. The Producers is silly—farces are—but I don’t think Brooks, who’s professed a love for the Broadway musical, is saying that the form is.
As Shaiman observed, LaChiusa also made a wry face because both Producers and Hairspray, the stage musicals, were being filmed. That's a film from a play from an original movie—which somehow is unworthy in his eyes. Shaiman asked about Mame, which was a book, then a play, then a movie, then a musical, then a movie musical—but I wonder if citing Mame was the best way to make Shaiman's point. I suspect LaChiusa would dismiss Mame in the same way he dismissed Wicked as a “Broadway blockbuster.” But what about MFL? It was a play, then a movie, then a musical play, then a musical movie. (It skipped the book phase, I'll admit—though it was a Greek myth!). Is that an unworthy theater life? Is MFL a faux-musical? I wouldn't say so, but it seems to meet LaChiusa's criteria for one. (Popularity and even critical success aren't aspects of his criteria. In fact, financially successful faux-musicals seem to irk LaChiusa the most—which is where the sour grapes come in. His own shows, which I assume he considers "true" musicals, have been mostly box-office flops—and also had middling critical appeal, as I recall—although LaChiusa was nominated for seven Tonys and has won two Obies. Shaiman, a Tony-winner for Hairspray, really ripped him on this!) There was a time, several decades ago now, when stage musicals were almost always put on film. Since many musical plays were drawn from straight plays, it’s not unlikely there was also a film of the non-musical predecessor, too. I could name many, but I’ll settle for just one: Cabaret, surely a true musical, was a stage musical in 1966, then it was a film musical in 1972. Before all that, it was a drama, I Am a Camera, in 1951 and then a movie in 1955. How does that history diminish any of the four versions of the story, all of which were themselves drawn from a book of tales, Berlin Stories, published by Christopher Isherwood in 1945.
LaChiusa further seems to have a serious problem with “movicals,” shows adapted from movies. But how is adapting a movie really any different from adapting a straight play? I agree with Shaiman here: “I honestly don’t understand why people [keep] harping on this,” he said in a later interview. “A great story is a great story.” (As evidence, I offer Carnival!, based in 1961 on Lili, Sweet Charity from 1966, based on Nights of Cabiria, and even A Little Night Music, Sondheim’s great 1973 musical drawn from Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night.) For decades, from its earliest days, the American Musical was nearly always an adaptation of a straight play. Not until its recent history were musicals written from original material—1776 (1969), I guess is an early example, though Pal Joey (1940) and Guys and Dolls (1950) were taken from non-dramatic sources (short stories and newspaper columns); On the Town (1944) was based on a ballet (Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free). Oklahoma! was Green Grow the Lilacs, Carousel was Liliom, Most Happy Fella was They Knew What They Wanted, West Side Story was, of course, Romeo and Juliet, and so on. (LaChiusa even pointed out that Rent, which he counts as a true—though uncompleted—musical, was adapted from "one of the greatest musical-theater inventions, La Bohème.") Okay, quality certainly depends on the way the adaptation is handled, but LaChiusa didn't say anything about this in his criteria. In fact, he set aside "the quality of creative talent involved" when he made his judgments. It sounded to me like there's a prejudice against movies as a source, as opposed to plays or prose lit. Is it because movies are pop culture and plays are high culture (though not always in either case)? My, my—that's elitist prejudice, isn't it? LaChiusa’s list of faux-musicals includes Lion King, and I would debate him there: Julie Taymor's stage "adaptation" isn't just a straight "simulacrum," as he dubs them, of the film; even the music is different. LaChiusa differentiates between "theater" and "theatricality"—the former is good, the latter bad—and I see Taymor's work in TLK as true, thorough theater, not just theatricality. That's the problem with LaChiusa's points: they're highly subjective and debatable. Why is his judgment in this instance any better than mine? It isn't!
One big problem with LaChiusa’s position is that it isn’t consistent. In the 2005 essay, the composer dismissed Contact as a pastiche like the jukebox musicals and plays based on movies like The Producers and Hairspray, mere “simulacra” of true musicals. But four years earlier, in a panel debate for the Drama Desk, LaChiusa took the positive side of the question “Resolved: The American Musical Has Entered a New Golden Age.” Guess what plays LaChiusa named to demonstrate what the Drama Desk News reported he characterized as the “exciting new musical theater” being staged? The Full Monty, a play taken from a film; Riverdance, an all-dance entertainment with no book or narrative; and, finally, Contact itself, which LaChiusa called “experimental” back in ’01. (Just to make my point all the stronger, the artist who would present himself as a stern purist in ’05, dubbed MTV music videos as “an offshoot of the Broadway musical.” In 2005, he couldn’t tolerate musical plays adapted from Hollywood films, but in 2001, he saw the Broadway musical reflected in the lowly music video!) The musicals of 2001, LaChiusa proclaimed, were “big and splashy, intelligent, experimental, provocative, and controversial” which “tapp[ed] into their culture in bold, sometimes disturbing ways” fusing tech “with artistic wizardry.” I wonder what happened in the four intervening years to cause such a complete flip-flop?
Incidentally, Shaiman noted that LaChiusa himself wrote a musical play based on Medea: Marie Christine. (“How could you! Don't you know it's been filmed??!! How dare you recycle that old story!”) Ripping off Euripides is okay, but ripping off John Waters (even with his connivance) isn't? Marie Christine, as it happens, ran about two months in 1999-2000, including previews. (The Wild Party ran three months in 2000.) Aside from audiences, the critics didn't care much for it, either, as I recall. (But, then, critical and box-office success is not a criterion for "true" musical status. LaChiusa's estimation is. Harrumph!)
LaChiusa's whole attitude reminded me of the column Robert Patrick wrote in the Times in November 1988 trying to argue that Samuel Beckett was a lousy playwright—I think he dared to call him a "hack"—and shouldn't get the critical acclaim and attention he gets, except that critics had all bamboozled us into thinking he was important. (See my counterargument to Patrick in “Is Waiting for Godot Trash?,” ROT, 17 April 2009.) Mike Nichols’s all-star production of Godot (F. Murray Abraham, Bill Irwin, Steve Martin, Robin Williams) was on stage at the time, and I figured Patrick was jealous because he couldn't get arrested, must less produced. (Deservedly so, I suggested in an opinion I wrote a bit earlier for the Rockefeller Foundation.)
Shaiman's response, “Me, Marc Shaiman responds to Michael John La Chiusa,” was an "open" e-mail he posted on All That Chat, the chat room of Talkinbroadway.com, with the intent that LaChiusa would see it. (It had originated as an e-mail he sent to theater friends such as director Joe Mantello, playwright Terrence McNally, producer Margo Lion, and librettist Thomas Meehan because Shaiman didn't know LaChiusa's e-mail address and hoped someone would forward the message to him. His original response was later posted by one of his correspondents and included some funny, and nasty, asides and personal comments that were excised from the public posting. A lot of this was pretty catty, but in one paragraph opening Shaiman cut from the public letter; he wrote: “Good God John . . . er, Michael . . . er, John . . . er, Michael John . . . .” Genius it’s not, but I confess, it handed me a chuckle. The open letter is no longer available, but the unexpurgated version is still at http://www.broadwayworld.com/board/printthread.cfm?thread=862550.) It was pretty much all defensive and self-serving; he mainly addressed the charges LaChiusa leveled at Hairspray. (Shaiman mostly wrote stuff that pretty much means, 'Oh, yeah? Sez you!' though he did make a few points along the way. The Mame point isn't bad; I just think he might have chosen a weak example—or, at least one that was open to challenge by LaChiusa.)
LaChiusa also had some points—certainly it's hard to deny that the musical has slipped since the Golden Age. Many of his general criticisms of the current state of American theater is valid and accurate, but they’re not new—and don’t really bear on the possible death of the American Musical. On the surface, you could disparage some shows as faux—if you could nail down some criteria to define the label. But in the end, LaChiusa's whole screed was just that—a personal diatribe against a lot of successful (and expensive) musicals that he just doesn't like. His criteria for what’s faux is pretty much in Potter Stewart territory: I know it when I see it. As Shaiman justifiably—if vulgarly—wrote of LaChiusa: "I just have to remind myself what the[y] say about opinions and assholes, everyone has one. But who asked to see yours?"
Not that I could hold Shaiman up as an example of a great theater composer; but is he somehow not legitimate because he’s not Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, or Fred Ebb? LaChiusa said of Hairspray and the other plays he disparages that they deliver “what the audience thinks a musical should deliver,” suggesting that we’ve been bamboozled or don’t know any better. Well, if you’ve read “A Broadway Baby” on ROT (22 September), you know that I saw many of those great oldies and hold them in special esteem, so I pretty much do know what a true musical is. Hairspray isn’t great Musical Theater, but it’s good Musical Theater—and it’s as real as, say, The Boy Friend or Girl Crazy. (It even has a little more to say than those fillips.)
By the way, LaChiusa actually concluded that the American Musical wasn't really dead—it was just absent from Broadway. It lives, he asserted, "in the nonprofits, in opera houses, in school cafeterias in Vermont, in basements in Boston, it’s alive and well—far away from the economics of Broadway." I don't know for sure, of course, but that sounds a lot like wishful thinking to me. He made a very valid—but not original—point that the economics of commercial theater—both on and Off Broadway—are helping kill the musical. But that's also helping kill the straight comedy and the serious play, too. And we all already knew that.
Now, I won’t say that the American Musical has entered a new Golden Age. That would be patently untrue. In the actual Golden Age, the ‘30s through the ‘60s, there were always a half dozen or more musicals on Broadway and three or four new ones opened each season. Of those, at least one or two, and often more, became classics. There were composers and librettists who were world-famous on the same level as the greatest playwrights; there were true musical stage stars who spent their whole careers on Broadway and in Broadway musicals. Pop singers covered show songs, right up to the Beatles (1963’s “Till There Was You” from The Music Man); we don’t hear that very much these days. The American Musical was our gift to world culture, next to jazz, and only we could do it. That hasn’t been true for a while now. Our musical stages are filled more with revivals and imports than native creations and of the few new American musicals presented on Broadway or even Off-Broadway, most are wan and lackluster. But the form’s not dead, either. I’ve recently admitted that my first love in theater were musicals, so maybe my prejudice is showing—but I don’t think so, at least not entirely. I feel like composer-lyricist David Yazbek (whose Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is on LaChiusa’s list of faux-musicals) when he likened the situation to the 1941 movie Sullivan’s Travels. A popular director of Hollywood comedies wants to make a serious movie of social significance and Yazbek suggested, "Maybe LaChiusa wants to make 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' and maybe Shaiman wants to do 'Ants in Your Pants of 1938.'" He concluded, "As long as it's good, I'll take either one"; me, too.
First of all, unlike LaChiusa, I applaud a good entertainment. South Pacific was not only a Tony-winning musical but a Pulitzer Prize-winning drama—but not all good theater has to pay off on that exacta. Some high-minded plays don’t work very well as theater, as Shaiman was blunt enough to point out. “Maybe if certain theatrical undertakers stopped trying to be Stephen Sondheim, we could all 'rest in peace,'” Shaiman dryly conjectured in reference to LaChiusa’s remark that contemporary musicals lack aspiration. “If the musical is dead,” Peter Stone, librettist of 1776, Woman of the Year, and Titanic, among others, remarked in the New Yorker, “LaChiusa . . . has put many nails in its coffin. Ersatz seriousness is as deadly as ersatz frivolity. . . . In his earnestness, LaChiusa displays the fallacies of the avant-garde temperament. His own over-serious musicals show how hard joy and frivolity are to make.” Having watched a spectator nod off at LaChiusa’s Marie Christine while a scene played out right in the seats next to him, Shaiman scolded LaChiusa: “[I]t is MY opinion that you made the CARDINAL sin of bad theatre. You BORED the audience.” Now, I can’t confirm Shaiman’s appraisal of Marie Christine because I didn’t see it, but the principal stands. LaChiusa implied that entertaining theater “still should be theater” and I say that good theater must still be entertaining. In 1999, LaChiusa even said that theater “does have the fundamental responsibility to entertain. You can write about the tragic demise of American culture as we know it, but don’t be boring.”
In 1999, LaChiusa also wrote with delight about the “two styles of conventional musicals”: “There are the fun-only shows with skeletal books on which to hang pop tunes, and there are the operettas rooted in European tradition, with sweeping music and story.” The Producers has nothing to be ashamed of, whatever its origins and sources. Good, raucous fun is to be cherished, not denigrated. What Shaiman called “the ‘E’ word” should not be anathema in the American theater. Spamalot, which LaChiusa rejects with twice the opprobrium he heaps on Hairspray and The Producers—he calls it “faux faux, a parody of a parody”—falls into the same category for me: terrific entertainment. Remarking on his own Opera News essay, LaChiusa said in the New York Sun, “There’s nothing wrong with mindless entertainment. Just don’t call it art.” Hardly “mindless,” I say, anything from the Pythons is bound to be more substantive than LaChiusa gives it credit for.
Second, there are exciting ideas being tried and developed, both here in New York City (often Off-Broadway or even Off-Off-Broadway) and in rep companies across the country. Although Steven Suskin, a former Broadway producer and general manager and lately a columnist for Playbill, reviewer for Variety, and author of books on Broadway music and musicals, doesn’t think we’re entering a new Golden Age for the musical, he does believe that emerging writers are working in new directions “and pushing the musical to places it hasn’t gone before.” I’ve mentioned Unchain My Heart with its book by an exciting young playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks, which is coming from California. A few seasons back was Urinetown—with a plot about pay toilets, of all subjects—which began Off-Off-Broadway (as part of the 1999 New York International Fringe Festival) and moved though Off-Broadway (2001; Best Book and Lyrics Obies) to Broadway (2001; Best Book and Score Tonys); and last season’s Tony-winner for Best Original Score (and a Pulitzer Prize-winner as well) is the current Next to Normal, a musical play that was developed at the Second Stage Theatre in New York City and reworked for a second try-out at Arena Stage in Washington, and deals with mental illness. Things no musical play of the Golden Age would ever have touched on are forming the basis of some new plays.
And, third, I’m not ready to dismiss so early the new forms that writers are working with, including the emerging dance play, the jukebox musical, which, if you discount the two oldies I mentioned, is really a phenomenon that only began in the mid-‘80s and deserves time to shake down, and the movical, which, as I’ve said, I don’t really see as much different than musicals based on straight plays. Along with the jukebox shows I’ve already discussed, the movical Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993; multiple Tonys), with book by Tony- and Pulitzer-winning playwright Terrence McNally and music and lyrics by Tony-winners John Kander and Fred Ebb, not only deals with homosexual love in the confines of a men’s prison, a pretty brave topic for a Broadway musical, but does so while “celebrating the theatrical impulse and its ability to remake the world.” That was David Richards in the New York Times, and he went on to say:
"Kiss of the Spider Woman" doesn't just assert their [the show’s creators’] collective belief in the transforming and redemptive properties of theater. It embodies that belief. What the musical does and what it says are one and the same. Work and thesis are indissolubly wedded.
That sure sounds like a work with the standards of an old-fashioned musical drama treating new-fashioned ideas. Okay, granted, these kinds of shows are unhappily rarer today than they were 50 years ago, and that’s to be lamented. The economics of theater and the loss of courageous and adventurous producers like Kermit Bloomgarden, Alexander H. Cohen, and Emanuel Azenberg who were true men of the theater before they were men of business are in great part to blame, undoubtedly. But my point here is that LaChiusa’s ready to put the pennies on the form’s eyes and I say, There’s life in the old gal yet! In a weakened state, perhaps, but dead? Not bloody yet, mate! Like Mark Twain said of himself, the report of the musical’s death is an exaggeration. Whether it will revive, or stay in its invalid state, or get weaker and finally pass away, I don’t have the expertise to gauge. But for now, the American Musical’s still around and making an impact.
[Marc Shaiman is also the composer of the up-coming movical, Catch Me If You Can, which is scheduled to open at the Neil Simon Theatre in April 2011. Michael John LaChiusa has several new openings in the near future: The Public Theater and the Dallas Theater Center have announced a co-production in 2012 of Giant, adapted from Edna Ferber’s novel, which had its world première at the Signature Theater in Arlington, Virginia, in 2009; the Transport Group will stage the première of Queen of the Mist starting in October 2011; the same Off-Broadway company will begin performances in March 2011 for a revival of Hello Again; and in January 2011, a group of young performers will present “The LaChiusa Project,” a cabaret of the composer’s songs, at the West Bank Cafe.]
12 October 2010
07 October 2010
The Beatles and Me
By Kirk Woodward
[Kirk, who’s published many interesting articles on ROT over the past year-and-a-half, is a huge fan of the Beatles. We share that sentiment, but Kirk’s more knowledgeable than I am, both of the history and backgrounds of the Fab Four and of the musicology of their work. Kirk’s a composer and musician, among his other talents, and while I have the albums and try to sing along with the songs on the radio, he knows a thing or two about the musicianship of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. When Kirk sent me this recollection, he told me he was surprised to find that he’d recorded his impressions so soon after the events. “It felt like finding a buried treasure,” he wrote me. I’m mighty glad he did—and that he’s sharing the memories with us. ~Rick]
For those of us who first encountered the Beatles in 1963, when they made their initial impression – to put it mildly – on the United States, the idea that I or anyone I knew would ever have a personal encounter with any them, much less see them perform live, was practically inconceivable. Yet I’ve done both, and the most recent event happened only a short time ago as I write this. I’ll begin at the beginning . . .
The first I remember of the Beatles was a song on the radio – I think it was probably “From Me To You,” and I liked the harmonies, but I only heard it once at that point. (Initially the “single” didn’t sell in the US at all.) The next I recall, following a lot of stories in the newspaper, was watching their first Ed Sullivan appearance in 1964 with the rest of our church youth group. One of the members of the group was in a band, and I remember his saying, “I’ve heard that they aren’t any better than we are.” In a funny sense, that was true – the Beatles weren’t really virtuosos on their instruments (except maybe Paul). On the other hand, the local band wasn’t on Ed Sullivan, either.
I enjoyed the TV appearance, liked it a lot, actually. Such at least is my memory; my diary’s mention of the event, in its entirety, reads, “Also watched the Beatles.” I also wrote about watching them on May 24, with no more detail. Eventually I caught almost all of their US TV appearances, including the thrilling one on Shindig, which can be seen, among other places, on YouTube. Of course I started buying and listening to their albums, and in no time I was a real fan. I find increasingly frequent references to them in my diary for 1964 and thereafter.
Information on bands today is practically real-time, thanks to the Internet. Not so in the sixties, when there could be a lag of months between what the Beatles did in England and what we heard, or heard about, here. Still, information filtered through. At a record store I saw a book about playing rock like the Beatles, which I wish I’d bought – what a treasure that would be to own today. I recall its detailing John’s rhythm guitar style (beat STRUM beat STRUM, STRUM STRUM STRUM STRUM), whether accurately or not I have no idea. I also remember a picture of Paul singing with an earnest expression, and the caption “Paul puts his heart into everything he sings.” That’s fan journalism for you.
Our friends the Paradises saw the Beatles on their first major American tour, and enjoyed them. I remember they recounted how George spat on a countoff (One, two, three, SPIT), which one either finds funny or not. I listened to their reports with deep envy.
My diary contains various inconsequential Beatle references for the following couple of years, but a significant milestone occurred in my freshman year at college, when Rubber Soul came out. It’s difficult to convey today the sensation that each new album, from Rubber Soul on, caused. Each was an artistic earthquake, an event to be discussed, analyzed, and absorbed. We would ordinarily hear the songs on the radio before the album was available. After a night of initial listening to Rubber Soul (the American version, of course – we had no idea that the British album included some different songs), the next morning at breakfast I said to John Burgard, a friend from Louisville who was a fine guitarist, “That’s different, isn’t it?” He confirmed it – yes, he said, it’s not like anything else. I wrote home:
Please latch onto ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’ and ‘It’s Only Love’ in any form as soon as possible, and I’ll repay you; guess they’re not out as singles or albums yet. A boy here who’s a lead guitar player when in Louisville says the Beatles aren’t technically tops in speed or agility at playing but their songs and arrangements are superior and they have great style, and have fun while they’re performing all the time, among the few, he said, that do. Professional opinion.
John Burgard, incidentally, was later to try desperately to learn to play the thirds on the guitar lead in “And Your Bird Can Sing.” He was never able to do it, which makes sense since either Paul or John – accounts differ – played one of the lines along with George – it wasn’t one guitarist. Rubber Soul, in its American format, is heavily folk-oriented, but more than that, it’s musically wonderful, and more than that, you get the feeling, or I did, that the Beatles as people are people you want to know more about.
That’s the key to the Beatles for me, really – not just the music, but the sense it conveys of what George Bernard Shaw calls the greatest achievement in art: belief in the artists’ real selves. That hasn’t changed for me in the years since. I don’t mean that I followed the Beatles’ positions on religion or politics necessarily – I try not to take my guidance from popular songs – but they and I were friends for life.
June 13, 1966 – I checked on the new Beatles album, not in yet. “Want to see why?” the man at One Stop said. He showed me a photo of the cover, with the Beatles amid dismembered toy dolls and thin pieces of raw meat. Bad taste, protest is growing. My faith is a little shaken . . .
August 4, 1966 – John Lennon said that the Beatles were more popular than Christianity, and that Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. The entertainment world, which is made almost entirely out of pretenses aimed at money-making, was horrified and played the situation to the hilt. WAKY had periods of silence (except for violins playing), ended by “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” One interesting thing was how little ministers who were quoted understand things. One said he was glad these people had brought out in the open the immoral content of their songs – about the Beatles! Another, God bless ‘im, said he felt this was the beginning of the end, not just of the Beatles, but of all popular music . . .
August 10, 1966 – new Beatles album, Revolver, staggeringly good. The atonal/electronic things are fascinating. It’s not rock ‘n roll – largely undanceable. The lyric to “Here, There, and Everywhere” is lovely. I hope they don’t split up. How will they be in person, now that they’ve taken this enormous step?
Well, I found out, because when the Beatles came to the US on what turned out to be their last tour, I wrote for tickets to perhaps a dozen cities, got positive replies from several, and chose two. My friend Wally Wobbe and I went to the first concert. I had no idea that the day I first saw the Beatles in concert was also the day John apologized, sort of, at a press conference for his remarks about (or not about) Jesus. Here’s my report of the concert as recorded in my diary:
August 12, 1966 – Wally and I got to the L&N train station at 6:00 and took our seats on the day-coach for Chicago. [NOTE: I have told countless people that the concert was in Detroit. Apparently not.] The trip lasted 8 hours or so. The train was late, so we got off at Englewood station to take a cab to the stadium at which the Beatles were playing.
At the Amphitheatre, the Beatle magic started. Thousands of people moving toward the doors. When a new door would open, a hundred people would immediately line up, followed by more. Mostly girls – mostly cute – many in slacks; maybe 20% boys; few adults. Vendors outside selling “We Still Love the Beatles” pennants, postcards (we bought some), buttons.
Inside we had to check Wally’s camera and tape recorder. The auditorium is a big old barn holding 13,500. It was filled all but about 500 seats. Stage at one end. Before the show some thought they spotted Paul in the press box, and screamed. The show started. The Remains, on that huge amp system, blasted us terribly. [NOTE: By today’s standards there was hardly any sound system at all, but truthfully, at the Chicago concert we could hear everything, including the Beatles, just fine. It was different in Cincinnati, which was outdoors.] The Cyrcle were clean-cut and bland. The “Sonny” man (name escapes me) needed experience. The Ronettes were good though they were better at W&L.
Then an announcer came out and said, “For three years now I’ve been traveling with the Beatles and I’ve never gotten to introduce them. Now, at last, I have the honor. John, George, Paul, and Ringo – THE BEATLES!!!” and everybody screamed and stood. Then a workman told the announcer that they had to clear some equipment off the stage, so the fellow announced a two minute break. Then the lights dimmed again, the announcer introduced again, and the Beatles came on.
It was almost disappointing in a way to see them come on stage. There was so much tension, holding of breaths – I felt it tremendously, waiting for them to appear, especially after the first introduction. Whatever the Beatles did, they couldn’t be as great as the image we had of them at the second before they came on. But almost. Ringo sat, unsmiling, and just drummed. George was facing the back of the stage a lot, apparently working on equipment. McCartney carried the real performing load [NOTE: In Cincinnati it would be different]. Lennon, the coolest man in the world, stood looking like a crocodile staring at its tail waving in front of itself and being fascinated by it. All four were perfectly relaxed and under control. They did:
Rock ‘n’ Roll Music, She’s A Woman, If I Needed Someone, I Wanna Be Your Man, Baby’s In Black, Yesterday, Nowhere Man, I Feel Fine, Day Tripper, Paperback Writer, Long Tall Sally.
On “She’s A Woman,” Paul’s mike went off. “Yesterday” was tremendously received. On “Baby’s in Black,” a wonderful number, they swung their guitars back and forth. On “Nowhere Man,” in which they pulled off the harmony successfully, Paul’s bass went out; they started the next song but it wouldn’t work. Repairmen were behind them; John filled in the time by doing a dance like the one he does in A Hard Day’s Night for about a minute. John plays the guitar introduction on “I Feel Fine.”
Finally, “We’re sorry but this will be our last number,” and Paul sang “Long Tall Sally” in a great performance which really showed why people started to scream in the first place. Tremendous excitement. Then they bowed, waved, and left. In the box next to ours as the lights went up, six girls were weeping unashamedly. It was a great spiritual experience.
I saw the Beatles perform twice on this tour. At the first concert, as I said, you could hear them, and they were in a good mood. The second concert was in Cincinnati, you really couldn’t hear them much at all, and their mood wasn’t all that great either – someone has written that on the way from that concert to the next, they decided not to tour any more, ever. Jay Paradis and I saw them in Cincinnati, and the concert was rained out on Saturday night – the Beatles faced danger of electrocution if they performed – and rescheduled for Sunday afternoon, so we tried to find a motel room (impossible) and ended up sleeping overnight in the car. When we finally saw the concert, Jay was disappointed because Ringo didn’t play a neat drum figure that he plays on the record of “Day Tripper.” I don’t remember a whole lot more than that.
So I saw the Beatles, live in concert. I also saw Elvis once, in Richmond, Virginia. I wonder how many people have seen them both.
As I said, each new Beatles album was a revelation – such an event that occasionally I still dream a new one is out, and I run to the store and listen to it. (It’s always good, but unfortunately I never remember the songs.) Sergeant Pepper couldn’t have been better, and I adopted the White Album as mine – it’s still my favorite. I wrote an article for the college newspaper about it, trying to describe why I thought it was so special; I’m still working on that question, but I think basically it’s because the album is about music, about what it can be and do. I even liked “Revolution No. 9,” which reminded me of the times I would drive late at night and move the radio dial around, trying to find something to listen to.
Abbey Road, including its second side medley, which I consider a great work of art, came out without announcement, and I went over to the school radio station and sat in the hallway to listen to it being broadcast, since I had no idea how to find the station on the radio dial. It was so wonderful to hear how, completely unexpectedly, the Beatles had done something so great. I wrote home, “New Beatles album coming out. I’ve only heard a few tracks – ‘Octopus Garden’ written and sung by Ringo, a maniac vision of happiness, like ‘Yellow Submarine’ only madder, is my favorite so far. . . . Also some astonishingly good singing – chorus work and some gorgeous Harrison guitar.” And after I bought it, “I have now bought the new Beatles album and it’s simply splendid. You know that this is the one they put together this summer when they decided not to release the one they’d spent a year on, and I figured it would be good but not remarkable. Shows how much I know. On the second side is a long medley – really a long song . . . funny and subtle.”
When the Beatles actually did break up, I wasn’t depressed or even particularly surprised; there had been plenty of indications that all wasn’t well. Since then I’ve seen Paul McCartney several times in concert (always excellent), although at least at one point I wasn’t that excited about the music he was producing:
I saw Paul McCartney and Co. on Flip Wilson. He seems determined to be the best composer of wallpaper-music in the world.
I know some people who’ve had encounters with various Beatles. In 1969, I was in a store in London when someone ran in and reported breathlessly, “I just saw Paul McCartney on the street!” I also have a friend who told Paul he couldn’t go to the bathroom. Honest. It was at a production of Brecht’s Arturo Ui by Tony Randall’s National Actors Theatre, with an all-star cast including Al Pacino and John Goodman. Paul went out to the lobby just before the second act started, and my friend had to tell him that if he took too long, he wouldn’t be able to get back in.
And as I hinted at the start of this piece, I’ve had a personal interaction or two with them myself, on a small scale. I saw John Lennon on the street. This took place in Manhattan in the late 1970s, on a cold winter night while I was on my way to Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church to advise a group (not with much result, I guess) on a theatrical venture they were considering. There was a crowd at a window on Fifth Avenue, but I didn’t think much about it. I realize now that the crowd must have gathered around John and Yoko. Then, when I got to the corner, I looked to my right and there was John standing next to me, with Yoko, in a huge fur coat, on the other side of him. I started to say something, and John winked at me! – a wink that said, “You know who I am, and I know who I am, so what do you say we keep it like that.” This thought was perfectly fine with me – I’d had my John Lennon moment – and I walked on down the street, forty feet above the pavement.
I saw Yoko once more on the street, actually, walking just ahead of me after Bob Dylan’s wonderful concert at Madison Square Garden in late 2001.
I spent moments with friends and family of the Beatles at a Beatlefest in the New Jersey Meadowlands. I met the Beatles’ long-time friend Astrid Kirchherr; Louise Harrison (George’s estranged sister); the bass guitarist Klaus Voorman, who played and recorded with three of the group’s members and designed the cover for Revolver; and Bob Gruen, who autographed a copy of his famous photo of John Lennon in the New York City T-shirt for me. The place was filled with Beatle cover bands, none of them outstanding. Years later, though, my wife, Pat, and I saw the best known Beatle cover band, the Fab Faux, and they really are outstanding.
And Ringo sent me an autograph. For my fiftieth birthday Rick Van Horn, then the editor of Modern Drummer magazine, asked his friend Jim Keltner, who’d worked with the Beatles individually and was friends with Ringo, if he’d get me an autograph. Some time later Rick’s secretary came in to say, “Ringo Starr’s on the phone!” This news was naturally an event at Modern Drummer. Rick and Ringo chatted a bit, and then Ringo said, “This friend of yours, that you want an autograph for – is he dying?” Rick said he thought not, and Ringo said, “Good. They’re always asking me to do that. It’s so depressing.”
So I have a copy of Modern Drummer with Ringo on the cover, autographed, “To Kirk – Happy Birthday, Ringo” and a drawing of a star. Astounding.
I’ve seen Ringo and his All Starr Band five times. If you aren’t familiar with Ringo’s routine, he fills the various editions of his All Starr Band with musicians who’ve had a hit or two. Maybe you wouldn’t go to a whole concert by any of them, but put five or six together and it makes for a fine evening. People used to make fun of Ringo for being the least interesting Beatle, for not having much to say, and so on. Not a word of all that is true. When Ringo’s onstage you can see that he’s extremely quick-witted, and he’s the most relaxed performer I’ve ever seen – astonishingly comfortable onstage. Some of my favorite moments with the All Star Band were his work with the sensational drummer Sheila E. How egoless of Ringo to have a drummer in his own band who’s so much showier than he!
Ringo, bless his heart, still tours every year or so. Several years ago, out of a desire to share my heritage with my children, I took the family to see him at Radio City Music Hall. “He’s good,” said my son Craig, maybe twelve years old at the time, “but I’d like to see all the Beatles.” So would I, Craig, so would I.
And in a way, I did. When I read that Ringo’s All Starr Band would be at Radio City this summer, I bought a ticket for the July 7, 2010, concert, not knowing at the time that that date was Ringo’s seventieth birthday. Of course there was a good deal of publicity about it, since he was the first Beatle to reach that age, and a number of papers featured interviews with him.
From the beginning the omens were good for the concert. For one thing, there was great sound balance, which in my experience is rare for Radio City, where the sound tends to boom. The band was great too – four of the members had been in the previous edition of the All Starr Band, which I didn’t like very much, but this time everything worked wonderfully, and the audience was enthusiastic. It was a feeling of great comfort – you just knew the next song would be good too. Ringo was in excellent voice, singing most of his Beatle numbers and two from his new album, which sounded excellent. He also provided fine drumming (along with another excellent drummer, Greg Bissonette), as always.
Ringo has always ended his shows with “A Little Help From My Friends,” sometimes blending into “Give Peace A Chance.” When he reached that point in the show this year, about twenty people came out to sing along. According to published reports the group included Yoko, Jeff Lynne, Ray Davies, Max Weinberg, Steven Van Zandt, Joe Walsh, Nils Lofgren, Procol Harum's Gary Brooker, Cream's Jack Bruce, Billy Squier, Colin Hay of Men At Work, Ringo's son and drummer for the Who and Oasis Zak Starkey, Jim Keltner, Dr. John, and others – truly an all-star crowd. A couple of Ringo’s grandchildren helped push out a little drum set on which the snare drum was a cake, and we all sang “Happy Birthday.” Ringo walked off stage singing “Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me.”
The stage went dark for several minutes. Then the band came back on in the dark, the lights came up, someone brought on a bass guitar, and everybody started to scream – because walking onstage was Paul McCartney, looking terrific in a nice suit. Paul and Ringo, together! Paul sang “Birthday” while Ringo drummed. I believe I can speak for the entire audience when I say that we were all beside ourselves. I suppose I have never been in a room with a happier group of people. It was an absolutely magic moment. At the end of the song Paul hugged Ringo a long time and kissed him twice. Then everybody left the stage, and I flew home.
[Saturday, 9 October, will be John Lennon’s 70th birthday, so this is an auspicious time to publish Kirk’s memoir of the Beatles. A new film, Nowhere Boy, has just been released as well; it tells the story of Lennon’s teen years (from a memoir by his half-sister) and the founding of his first band with Paul McCartney, The Quarrymen. In addition, a new documentary about Lennon’s time off from music to raise his son Sean, LENONYC, is about to air on PBS.
[When the Beatles were first emerging as a new sound in rock ‘n’ roll, I was a high-schooler in Switzerland. I began hearing this new music as soon as the group began being played on European radio; many of my schoolmates were British, and Beatles music began being heard around the dorm before it was heard over here. (I even still have the 45 of the German-language recordings the Beatles made as a tribute to the German audiences who embraced the band before they became popular in England—and then the rest of the world. My first Beatles album is Mit Die Beatles, the German release of With The Beatles.) Unlike stateside listerners, however, I missed their now-famous TV appearances like the Ed Sullivan début on 9 February 1964. But while I knew I was hearing a new sound—and I loved it immediately—Kirk had an understanding of the music that made his appreciation for it much deeper than mine ever was.]
[Kirk, who’s published many interesting articles on ROT over the past year-and-a-half, is a huge fan of the Beatles. We share that sentiment, but Kirk’s more knowledgeable than I am, both of the history and backgrounds of the Fab Four and of the musicology of their work. Kirk’s a composer and musician, among his other talents, and while I have the albums and try to sing along with the songs on the radio, he knows a thing or two about the musicianship of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. When Kirk sent me this recollection, he told me he was surprised to find that he’d recorded his impressions so soon after the events. “It felt like finding a buried treasure,” he wrote me. I’m mighty glad he did—and that he’s sharing the memories with us. ~Rick]
For those of us who first encountered the Beatles in 1963, when they made their initial impression – to put it mildly – on the United States, the idea that I or anyone I knew would ever have a personal encounter with any them, much less see them perform live, was practically inconceivable. Yet I’ve done both, and the most recent event happened only a short time ago as I write this. I’ll begin at the beginning . . .
The first I remember of the Beatles was a song on the radio – I think it was probably “From Me To You,” and I liked the harmonies, but I only heard it once at that point. (Initially the “single” didn’t sell in the US at all.) The next I recall, following a lot of stories in the newspaper, was watching their first Ed Sullivan appearance in 1964 with the rest of our church youth group. One of the members of the group was in a band, and I remember his saying, “I’ve heard that they aren’t any better than we are.” In a funny sense, that was true – the Beatles weren’t really virtuosos on their instruments (except maybe Paul). On the other hand, the local band wasn’t on Ed Sullivan, either.
I enjoyed the TV appearance, liked it a lot, actually. Such at least is my memory; my diary’s mention of the event, in its entirety, reads, “Also watched the Beatles.” I also wrote about watching them on May 24, with no more detail. Eventually I caught almost all of their US TV appearances, including the thrilling one on Shindig, which can be seen, among other places, on YouTube. Of course I started buying and listening to their albums, and in no time I was a real fan. I find increasingly frequent references to them in my diary for 1964 and thereafter.
Information on bands today is practically real-time, thanks to the Internet. Not so in the sixties, when there could be a lag of months between what the Beatles did in England and what we heard, or heard about, here. Still, information filtered through. At a record store I saw a book about playing rock like the Beatles, which I wish I’d bought – what a treasure that would be to own today. I recall its detailing John’s rhythm guitar style (beat STRUM beat STRUM, STRUM STRUM STRUM STRUM), whether accurately or not I have no idea. I also remember a picture of Paul singing with an earnest expression, and the caption “Paul puts his heart into everything he sings.” That’s fan journalism for you.
Our friends the Paradises saw the Beatles on their first major American tour, and enjoyed them. I remember they recounted how George spat on a countoff (One, two, three, SPIT), which one either finds funny or not. I listened to their reports with deep envy.
My diary contains various inconsequential Beatle references for the following couple of years, but a significant milestone occurred in my freshman year at college, when Rubber Soul came out. It’s difficult to convey today the sensation that each new album, from Rubber Soul on, caused. Each was an artistic earthquake, an event to be discussed, analyzed, and absorbed. We would ordinarily hear the songs on the radio before the album was available. After a night of initial listening to Rubber Soul (the American version, of course – we had no idea that the British album included some different songs), the next morning at breakfast I said to John Burgard, a friend from Louisville who was a fine guitarist, “That’s different, isn’t it?” He confirmed it – yes, he said, it’s not like anything else. I wrote home:
Please latch onto ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’ and ‘It’s Only Love’ in any form as soon as possible, and I’ll repay you; guess they’re not out as singles or albums yet. A boy here who’s a lead guitar player when in Louisville says the Beatles aren’t technically tops in speed or agility at playing but their songs and arrangements are superior and they have great style, and have fun while they’re performing all the time, among the few, he said, that do. Professional opinion.
John Burgard, incidentally, was later to try desperately to learn to play the thirds on the guitar lead in “And Your Bird Can Sing.” He was never able to do it, which makes sense since either Paul or John – accounts differ – played one of the lines along with George – it wasn’t one guitarist. Rubber Soul, in its American format, is heavily folk-oriented, but more than that, it’s musically wonderful, and more than that, you get the feeling, or I did, that the Beatles as people are people you want to know more about.
That’s the key to the Beatles for me, really – not just the music, but the sense it conveys of what George Bernard Shaw calls the greatest achievement in art: belief in the artists’ real selves. That hasn’t changed for me in the years since. I don’t mean that I followed the Beatles’ positions on religion or politics necessarily – I try not to take my guidance from popular songs – but they and I were friends for life.
June 13, 1966 – I checked on the new Beatles album, not in yet. “Want to see why?” the man at One Stop said. He showed me a photo of the cover, with the Beatles amid dismembered toy dolls and thin pieces of raw meat. Bad taste, protest is growing. My faith is a little shaken . . .
August 4, 1966 – John Lennon said that the Beatles were more popular than Christianity, and that Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. The entertainment world, which is made almost entirely out of pretenses aimed at money-making, was horrified and played the situation to the hilt. WAKY had periods of silence (except for violins playing), ended by “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” One interesting thing was how little ministers who were quoted understand things. One said he was glad these people had brought out in the open the immoral content of their songs – about the Beatles! Another, God bless ‘im, said he felt this was the beginning of the end, not just of the Beatles, but of all popular music . . .
August 10, 1966 – new Beatles album, Revolver, staggeringly good. The atonal/electronic things are fascinating. It’s not rock ‘n roll – largely undanceable. The lyric to “Here, There, and Everywhere” is lovely. I hope they don’t split up. How will they be in person, now that they’ve taken this enormous step?
Well, I found out, because when the Beatles came to the US on what turned out to be their last tour, I wrote for tickets to perhaps a dozen cities, got positive replies from several, and chose two. My friend Wally Wobbe and I went to the first concert. I had no idea that the day I first saw the Beatles in concert was also the day John apologized, sort of, at a press conference for his remarks about (or not about) Jesus. Here’s my report of the concert as recorded in my diary:
August 12, 1966 – Wally and I got to the L&N train station at 6:00 and took our seats on the day-coach for Chicago. [NOTE: I have told countless people that the concert was in Detroit. Apparently not.] The trip lasted 8 hours or so. The train was late, so we got off at Englewood station to take a cab to the stadium at which the Beatles were playing.
At the Amphitheatre, the Beatle magic started. Thousands of people moving toward the doors. When a new door would open, a hundred people would immediately line up, followed by more. Mostly girls – mostly cute – many in slacks; maybe 20% boys; few adults. Vendors outside selling “We Still Love the Beatles” pennants, postcards (we bought some), buttons.
Inside we had to check Wally’s camera and tape recorder. The auditorium is a big old barn holding 13,500. It was filled all but about 500 seats. Stage at one end. Before the show some thought they spotted Paul in the press box, and screamed. The show started. The Remains, on that huge amp system, blasted us terribly. [NOTE: By today’s standards there was hardly any sound system at all, but truthfully, at the Chicago concert we could hear everything, including the Beatles, just fine. It was different in Cincinnati, which was outdoors.] The Cyrcle were clean-cut and bland. The “Sonny” man (name escapes me) needed experience. The Ronettes were good though they were better at W&L.
Then an announcer came out and said, “For three years now I’ve been traveling with the Beatles and I’ve never gotten to introduce them. Now, at last, I have the honor. John, George, Paul, and Ringo – THE BEATLES!!!” and everybody screamed and stood. Then a workman told the announcer that they had to clear some equipment off the stage, so the fellow announced a two minute break. Then the lights dimmed again, the announcer introduced again, and the Beatles came on.
It was almost disappointing in a way to see them come on stage. There was so much tension, holding of breaths – I felt it tremendously, waiting for them to appear, especially after the first introduction. Whatever the Beatles did, they couldn’t be as great as the image we had of them at the second before they came on. But almost. Ringo sat, unsmiling, and just drummed. George was facing the back of the stage a lot, apparently working on equipment. McCartney carried the real performing load [NOTE: In Cincinnati it would be different]. Lennon, the coolest man in the world, stood looking like a crocodile staring at its tail waving in front of itself and being fascinated by it. All four were perfectly relaxed and under control. They did:
Rock ‘n’ Roll Music, She’s A Woman, If I Needed Someone, I Wanna Be Your Man, Baby’s In Black, Yesterday, Nowhere Man, I Feel Fine, Day Tripper, Paperback Writer, Long Tall Sally.
On “She’s A Woman,” Paul’s mike went off. “Yesterday” was tremendously received. On “Baby’s in Black,” a wonderful number, they swung their guitars back and forth. On “Nowhere Man,” in which they pulled off the harmony successfully, Paul’s bass went out; they started the next song but it wouldn’t work. Repairmen were behind them; John filled in the time by doing a dance like the one he does in A Hard Day’s Night for about a minute. John plays the guitar introduction on “I Feel Fine.”
Finally, “We’re sorry but this will be our last number,” and Paul sang “Long Tall Sally” in a great performance which really showed why people started to scream in the first place. Tremendous excitement. Then they bowed, waved, and left. In the box next to ours as the lights went up, six girls were weeping unashamedly. It was a great spiritual experience.
I saw the Beatles perform twice on this tour. At the first concert, as I said, you could hear them, and they were in a good mood. The second concert was in Cincinnati, you really couldn’t hear them much at all, and their mood wasn’t all that great either – someone has written that on the way from that concert to the next, they decided not to tour any more, ever. Jay Paradis and I saw them in Cincinnati, and the concert was rained out on Saturday night – the Beatles faced danger of electrocution if they performed – and rescheduled for Sunday afternoon, so we tried to find a motel room (impossible) and ended up sleeping overnight in the car. When we finally saw the concert, Jay was disappointed because Ringo didn’t play a neat drum figure that he plays on the record of “Day Tripper.” I don’t remember a whole lot more than that.
So I saw the Beatles, live in concert. I also saw Elvis once, in Richmond, Virginia. I wonder how many people have seen them both.
As I said, each new Beatles album was a revelation – such an event that occasionally I still dream a new one is out, and I run to the store and listen to it. (It’s always good, but unfortunately I never remember the songs.) Sergeant Pepper couldn’t have been better, and I adopted the White Album as mine – it’s still my favorite. I wrote an article for the college newspaper about it, trying to describe why I thought it was so special; I’m still working on that question, but I think basically it’s because the album is about music, about what it can be and do. I even liked “Revolution No. 9,” which reminded me of the times I would drive late at night and move the radio dial around, trying to find something to listen to.
Abbey Road, including its second side medley, which I consider a great work of art, came out without announcement, and I went over to the school radio station and sat in the hallway to listen to it being broadcast, since I had no idea how to find the station on the radio dial. It was so wonderful to hear how, completely unexpectedly, the Beatles had done something so great. I wrote home, “New Beatles album coming out. I’ve only heard a few tracks – ‘Octopus Garden’ written and sung by Ringo, a maniac vision of happiness, like ‘Yellow Submarine’ only madder, is my favorite so far. . . . Also some astonishingly good singing – chorus work and some gorgeous Harrison guitar.” And after I bought it, “I have now bought the new Beatles album and it’s simply splendid. You know that this is the one they put together this summer when they decided not to release the one they’d spent a year on, and I figured it would be good but not remarkable. Shows how much I know. On the second side is a long medley – really a long song . . . funny and subtle.”
When the Beatles actually did break up, I wasn’t depressed or even particularly surprised; there had been plenty of indications that all wasn’t well. Since then I’ve seen Paul McCartney several times in concert (always excellent), although at least at one point I wasn’t that excited about the music he was producing:
I saw Paul McCartney and Co. on Flip Wilson. He seems determined to be the best composer of wallpaper-music in the world.
I know some people who’ve had encounters with various Beatles. In 1969, I was in a store in London when someone ran in and reported breathlessly, “I just saw Paul McCartney on the street!” I also have a friend who told Paul he couldn’t go to the bathroom. Honest. It was at a production of Brecht’s Arturo Ui by Tony Randall’s National Actors Theatre, with an all-star cast including Al Pacino and John Goodman. Paul went out to the lobby just before the second act started, and my friend had to tell him that if he took too long, he wouldn’t be able to get back in.
And as I hinted at the start of this piece, I’ve had a personal interaction or two with them myself, on a small scale. I saw John Lennon on the street. This took place in Manhattan in the late 1970s, on a cold winter night while I was on my way to Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church to advise a group (not with much result, I guess) on a theatrical venture they were considering. There was a crowd at a window on Fifth Avenue, but I didn’t think much about it. I realize now that the crowd must have gathered around John and Yoko. Then, when I got to the corner, I looked to my right and there was John standing next to me, with Yoko, in a huge fur coat, on the other side of him. I started to say something, and John winked at me! – a wink that said, “You know who I am, and I know who I am, so what do you say we keep it like that.” This thought was perfectly fine with me – I’d had my John Lennon moment – and I walked on down the street, forty feet above the pavement.
I saw Yoko once more on the street, actually, walking just ahead of me after Bob Dylan’s wonderful concert at Madison Square Garden in late 2001.
I spent moments with friends and family of the Beatles at a Beatlefest in the New Jersey Meadowlands. I met the Beatles’ long-time friend Astrid Kirchherr; Louise Harrison (George’s estranged sister); the bass guitarist Klaus Voorman, who played and recorded with three of the group’s members and designed the cover for Revolver; and Bob Gruen, who autographed a copy of his famous photo of John Lennon in the New York City T-shirt for me. The place was filled with Beatle cover bands, none of them outstanding. Years later, though, my wife, Pat, and I saw the best known Beatle cover band, the Fab Faux, and they really are outstanding.
And Ringo sent me an autograph. For my fiftieth birthday Rick Van Horn, then the editor of Modern Drummer magazine, asked his friend Jim Keltner, who’d worked with the Beatles individually and was friends with Ringo, if he’d get me an autograph. Some time later Rick’s secretary came in to say, “Ringo Starr’s on the phone!” This news was naturally an event at Modern Drummer. Rick and Ringo chatted a bit, and then Ringo said, “This friend of yours, that you want an autograph for – is he dying?” Rick said he thought not, and Ringo said, “Good. They’re always asking me to do that. It’s so depressing.”
So I have a copy of Modern Drummer with Ringo on the cover, autographed, “To Kirk – Happy Birthday, Ringo” and a drawing of a star. Astounding.
I’ve seen Ringo and his All Starr Band five times. If you aren’t familiar with Ringo’s routine, he fills the various editions of his All Starr Band with musicians who’ve had a hit or two. Maybe you wouldn’t go to a whole concert by any of them, but put five or six together and it makes for a fine evening. People used to make fun of Ringo for being the least interesting Beatle, for not having much to say, and so on. Not a word of all that is true. When Ringo’s onstage you can see that he’s extremely quick-witted, and he’s the most relaxed performer I’ve ever seen – astonishingly comfortable onstage. Some of my favorite moments with the All Star Band were his work with the sensational drummer Sheila E. How egoless of Ringo to have a drummer in his own band who’s so much showier than he!
Ringo, bless his heart, still tours every year or so. Several years ago, out of a desire to share my heritage with my children, I took the family to see him at Radio City Music Hall. “He’s good,” said my son Craig, maybe twelve years old at the time, “but I’d like to see all the Beatles.” So would I, Craig, so would I.
And in a way, I did. When I read that Ringo’s All Starr Band would be at Radio City this summer, I bought a ticket for the July 7, 2010, concert, not knowing at the time that that date was Ringo’s seventieth birthday. Of course there was a good deal of publicity about it, since he was the first Beatle to reach that age, and a number of papers featured interviews with him.
From the beginning the omens were good for the concert. For one thing, there was great sound balance, which in my experience is rare for Radio City, where the sound tends to boom. The band was great too – four of the members had been in the previous edition of the All Starr Band, which I didn’t like very much, but this time everything worked wonderfully, and the audience was enthusiastic. It was a feeling of great comfort – you just knew the next song would be good too. Ringo was in excellent voice, singing most of his Beatle numbers and two from his new album, which sounded excellent. He also provided fine drumming (along with another excellent drummer, Greg Bissonette), as always.
Ringo has always ended his shows with “A Little Help From My Friends,” sometimes blending into “Give Peace A Chance.” When he reached that point in the show this year, about twenty people came out to sing along. According to published reports the group included Yoko, Jeff Lynne, Ray Davies, Max Weinberg, Steven Van Zandt, Joe Walsh, Nils Lofgren, Procol Harum's Gary Brooker, Cream's Jack Bruce, Billy Squier, Colin Hay of Men At Work, Ringo's son and drummer for the Who and Oasis Zak Starkey, Jim Keltner, Dr. John, and others – truly an all-star crowd. A couple of Ringo’s grandchildren helped push out a little drum set on which the snare drum was a cake, and we all sang “Happy Birthday.” Ringo walked off stage singing “Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me.”
The stage went dark for several minutes. Then the band came back on in the dark, the lights came up, someone brought on a bass guitar, and everybody started to scream – because walking onstage was Paul McCartney, looking terrific in a nice suit. Paul and Ringo, together! Paul sang “Birthday” while Ringo drummed. I believe I can speak for the entire audience when I say that we were all beside ourselves. I suppose I have never been in a room with a happier group of people. It was an absolutely magic moment. At the end of the song Paul hugged Ringo a long time and kissed him twice. Then everybody left the stage, and I flew home.
[Saturday, 9 October, will be John Lennon’s 70th birthday, so this is an auspicious time to publish Kirk’s memoir of the Beatles. A new film, Nowhere Boy, has just been released as well; it tells the story of Lennon’s teen years (from a memoir by his half-sister) and the founding of his first band with Paul McCartney, The Quarrymen. In addition, a new documentary about Lennon’s time off from music to raise his son Sean, LENONYC, is about to air on PBS.
[When the Beatles were first emerging as a new sound in rock ‘n’ roll, I was a high-schooler in Switzerland. I began hearing this new music as soon as the group began being played on European radio; many of my schoolmates were British, and Beatles music began being heard around the dorm before it was heard over here. (I even still have the 45 of the German-language recordings the Beatles made as a tribute to the German audiences who embraced the band before they became popular in England—and then the rest of the world. My first Beatles album is Mit Die Beatles, the German release of With The Beatles.) Unlike stateside listerners, however, I missed their now-famous TV appearances like the Ed Sullivan début on 9 February 1964. But while I knew I was hearing a new sound—and I loved it immediately—Kirk had an understanding of the music that made his appreciation for it much deeper than mine ever was.]
02 October 2010
Short Takes: German Humor
After school, Dad would spend the afternoons with his grandmother, who never learned English (she refused, according to family lore), so my father learned to speak German at her knee, so to speak.
[He continued to study German in school, of course, and during the Occupation of defeated Germany after VE day, he was assigned to the Counterintelligence Corps because he spoke the language. When he returned to Germany in the early ‘60s, Dad made use of his German again (and the rest of us began learning it when we got there).
[Among his pleasures, however minor, was collecting humor that was either German or, in some cases, bi-lingual. (Those latter were jokes told by embassy personnel that depended on some knowledge of both English and German. They weren’t all necessary sophisticated jokes, as you’ll see.)
[Some of the jokes I’ve collected below were among my dad’s favorites back then. Vergnügen Sie sich! as we used to say.]
“Herr Wagner, Herr Wagner! Do you spell your name with a Vee?”
“Nein, Double-u.”
“Ha-VAH-ee,” said the second passenger.
“Thank you.”
“You’re velcome.”
“Is he all right? Was there any damage?”
“He’s fine, but his study was completely destroyed.”
“Gott in Himmel!”
“Yes. He’d just finished his 30-volume history of the German people. He saved 29 of the books, but the last volume was lost.”
“How awful!”
“It is. That’s the volume that had all the verbs in it!”
“Good day, Mr. EE-dell. Welcome to town,” said the neighbor, pronouncing the new businessman’s name the way it’s spelled in English.
‘So,’ thought Joseph to himself, ‘that’s how they pronounce my name here. I’ll just change the spelling to match the pronunciation.’ He changed his sign to Joseph Idel, Printer, and set about having his name changed again.
The next day, the druggist down the block called. “Hello, Mr. EYE-dell,” announced the friendly neighbor.
Once again, Joseph thought, ‘So, they pronounce my new name like that, do they. Well, I’ll just spell it to match that, then.’ He wanted to be accommodating to his new neighbors, so again, he changed his sign to say Joseph Aidel, Printer.
Sure enough, the next day, the dress shop owner from across the street came for a visit. “How are you today, Mr. AY-dell?” he asked.
Well, Joseph just threw up his hands in frustration. ‘Now we’re back to the way I spelled my name when I arrived. What can I do but change the sign again?’ And so, the next day the printer hung a newly painted sign that said Joseph Edel, Printer once again. This time, Joseph decided, he’d just leave well enough alone: he’d just become Joseph ‘EE-dell’ in his new hometown.
‘These Americans sure do pronounce things oddly,’ he thought to himself. (You just can’t fight the Great Vowel Shift.)
When is a sausage like a compass?
When you place it on die Mauer (the Berlin Wall). You can tell which way is east by the end that’s been eaten.
As you might imagine, this kind of humor was almost as popular among the Wessis (West Germans) as among the Ossis (East Germans) because it made them more secure about their freedom and economic wellbeing.
A customer stops at his neighborhood East Berlin newsstand for a New Germany. He doesn’t find one and asks the newsvendor.
"All out!"
"So, I’ll take Freedom, says the customer.
"Don’t have that, either!"
"When will there be Freedom again?"
"When there’s a New Germany!
Curiously, this joke seems to blend the Russian joke about Pravda and Izvestia and the one about “Thank Stalin” and “Thank God.”
"Good morning, dear Erich!" replied ol’ Sol.
Honecker got down to business and at noon he went to the window again. "Good afternoon, dear Sun!" he said.
"Good day, dear Erich!" came the reply.
That evening, Honecker quit for the day and stopped by the window on his way out. "Good evening, dear Sun!"
But the sun was silent.
"Good evening, dear Sun!” repeated Honecker. “What's wrong?"
"Kiss my ass,” said the sun. “I'm in the West now!"
What's the difference between Erich Honecker and a wrong number?
None! In both cases, you just hang up (aufhängen) and try again (wiederwählen)!
Two Stasi agents are stuck on a boring surveillance operation. Agent Müller breaks the monotony: "Hansi, what are you thinking about?"
"Nothing much. The same thing you’re thinking," muses Agent Schmidt.
Müller turns suddenly. "In that case, you're under arrest!"
The MAD-Schule was in Bad Ems, only a couple of hours’ drive from Bonn, then the capital of the Federal Republic. The Bundeswehr officers in the class were stationed all over the country, so for some of them, this was the closest they’d been to the capital in a long while. To let them have some time at the Ministry of Defense and to take care of paperwork and a little networking, we took a day off from class and drove up to Bonn in a motor pool bus.
Among the officers were one from the Allgäu (our class leader) and one from Bavaria. While our classmates liked to tease the class leader about his Allgäuer dialect—we two Americans spoke better German than he did, they liked to say—they had a whole different attitude toward our Bavarian classmate (whom I’ll call Wolfgang). To Germans, Bavaria’s a little like Texas is to Americans: almost a separate country.
As we approached Bonn, we passed some of the foreign embassies on our way downtown. “There’s the French Embassy,” someone would call out, or “Look, the British Embassy,” and so on. “Herr Leutnant, there’s your embassy—the Americans.” They knew my dad had served there.
Before we arrived downtown in Bonn, where the main ministries and offices of the Bundesrepublik were located, one of our classmates shouted out, “There’s Wolfi’s embassy!” Everyone laughed, including Wolfgang. Not understanding the joke, since I knew there wasn’t such a thing as a Bavarian embassy, I looked confused at the others on the bus. It was Wolfgang himself who explained: “It’s the Bavarian state tourist agency. My embassy,” he chuckled.
How do you double the value of a Trabant?
Fill the gas tank.
The mechanic looked the car over for a long time, thinking. "Okay, it's a deal!"
Three youngsters are arguing over whose father is the fastest.
Klaus says, "My vati is a race-car driver. He’s the fastest."
Willi counters, "Nein, my father is a fighter pilot in the Luftwaffe. He’s obviously the fastest one."
"That's nothing," insists Hans. "Mein Vater is a Beamte. He’s so fast that when his office closes at 5 o’clock, he's already home by 1 in the afternoon!"
Monday. He has to turn over two calendar pages.
This isn’t a joke but the lyrics to a silly folksong (taught to children for the most part, I believe). I learned it in college and it’s always stuck with me because it’s so silly. I’m providing a free translation here (which doesn’t rhyme or scan, of course), but I think you’ll get the idea. (Because it’s a folksong, the lyrics will vary—and there are many, many verses—but they’re all along the same lines.)
“It’s good you told me,” replied the waiter. “Iced coffee costs 2 Euros more.”
"A half an hour,” replied the other.
“And what’s he speaking about?”
“He hasn’t said yet.”
“A rare one,” said Karl without hesitating.
An American was visiting a German farm. He called out to the farmer: “Hey, mister! Mister!”
The farmer turned to the American angrily. “I’m not the Mister. I’m the milker!”
A tourist was on his way to a long-anticipated concert by the Vienna Philharmonic. Not knowing the way to the concert hall, he stopped a passerby and asked: “Excuse me, but how do I get to the Philharmonic?”
“Practice, practice, practice!”
Little Julia went to Easter Mass for the first time. After the service, her father asked her, “So, what did you like best about the Mass?”
“I liked that everyone sang ‘Hallo Julia’!”
“Long?” asked the clerk.
“I want to buy them,” replied the hiker, “not rent them!”
Two Polish friends meet at their favorite bar. “So, Lech, what are you up to these days?” asks Stanislaw.
“I’m studying Hebrew,” answers Lech. “That way, when I get to Heaven, I’ll understand everything.”
“But what will you do if you go to Hell?” jokes Stanislaw.
“Oh, that’ll be okay. I already speak German.”
The Englishman drinks a whiskey and goes fishing.
The Frenchman has a glass of wine and goes to play boules.
The German takes his cardiac meds and goes to work.
A German exchange student, newly arrived in Britain, had ordered her first full English breakfast. She got hungry waiting for her meal to appear, however. "When do I become a sausage?" she asked impatiently.
The waiter, not understanding the student’s error, simply replied nonplussed, “Why, never, I trust.”
[In German bekommen means ‘to get,’ not ‘to become’ (werden in German). The German student’s mistake was in assuming that the English word has the same meaning as the German verb it looks and sounds like.]
A few of the ones with illogical endings:
What’s green and runs through the garden? A herd of cucumbers.
Two men cross a bridge. One falls in the water. The other one’s name is Hans.
Two guys go through a tunnel. The third guy says to the fourth, “I think there are five of us.” The sixth guy says, “I don’t understand . . . .”
The kind without a punch line:
Knock, knock!
Who's there?
It’s the police. I'm sorry to tell you, there's been an automobile accident. Your husband’s been injured and is in the hospital.
How many plumbers does it take to change a light bulb?
One. His profession is irrelevant.
Two cows are grazing in a meadow. All of a sudden, a rabbit leaps out from behind a hedge and hops off. One cow looks up, chews her cud, and then ambles away.
You’ll have to decide for yourself if you think any of these is funny. I’m just providing the examples.
* * * *
The answer is “Nine W.” What’s the question?“Herr Wagner, Herr Wagner! Do you spell your name with a Vee?”
“Nein, Double-u.”
* * * *
Two men, strangers to each other, were seated next to one another on a plane to Honolulu. The first passenger turned to his seat companion and asked, “You know, I’ve never been sure how they pronounce the name of this state. Do you know—is it Ha-WAH-ee or Ha-VAH-ee?”“Ha-VAH-ee,” said the second passenger.
“Thank you.”
“You’re velcome.”
* * * *
Did you hear? There was a terrible fire in Herr Professor Müller’s apartment last night.”“Is he all right? Was there any damage?”
“He’s fine, but his study was completely destroyed.”
“Gott in Himmel!”
“Yes. He’d just finished his 30-volume history of the German people. He saved 29 of the books, but the last volume was lost.”
“How awful!”
“It is. That’s the volume that had all the verbs in it!”
* * * *
I was meeting a friend in a bar, and as I went in, I noticed two pretty girls looking at me. "Nine," I heard one whisper as I passed. Feeling pleased with myself, I swaggered over to my buddy and told him a girl had just rated me a nine out of ten. "I don’t want to ruin it for you," he said, "but when I walked in, they were speaking German."* * * *
Josef Edelstein emigrated from his native Germany to a town in the United States. To make things simpler, he thought, he changed his name to Joseph Edel. He was a printer in the old country, so he set up a print shop in his new home, too. On the day he opened his business, he hung up a sign over his door which read Joseph Edel, Printer. No sooner had he opened his doors than the man with the shoe store next door paid him a courtesy visit. “Good day, Mr. EE-dell. Welcome to town,” said the neighbor, pronouncing the new businessman’s name the way it’s spelled in English.
‘So,’ thought Joseph to himself, ‘that’s how they pronounce my name here. I’ll just change the spelling to match the pronunciation.’ He changed his sign to Joseph Idel, Printer, and set about having his name changed again.
The next day, the druggist down the block called. “Hello, Mr. EYE-dell,” announced the friendly neighbor.
Once again, Joseph thought, ‘So, they pronounce my new name like that, do they. Well, I’ll just spell it to match that, then.’ He wanted to be accommodating to his new neighbors, so again, he changed his sign to say Joseph Aidel, Printer.
Sure enough, the next day, the dress shop owner from across the street came for a visit. “How are you today, Mr. AY-dell?” he asked.
Well, Joseph just threw up his hands in frustration. ‘Now we’re back to the way I spelled my name when I arrived. What can I do but change the sign again?’ And so, the next day the printer hung a newly painted sign that said Joseph Edel, Printer once again. This time, Joseph decided, he’d just leave well enough alone: he’d just become Joseph ‘EE-dell’ in his new hometown.
‘These Americans sure do pronounce things oddly,’ he thought to himself. (You just can’t fight the Great Vowel Shift.)
* * * *
Just as in the old Soviet Union a lot of the humor was political and tinged with bitterness, so, too, were many of the jokes that came out of East Germany.When is a sausage like a compass?
When you place it on die Mauer (the Berlin Wall). You can tell which way is east by the end that’s been eaten.
As you might imagine, this kind of humor was almost as popular among the Wessis (West Germans) as among the Ossis (East Germans) because it made them more secure about their freedom and economic wellbeing.
* * * *
In my recent collection of Russian jokes (“Short Takes: Russian Jokes,” 28 May 2010), I related one that was based on the names of the two national newspapers of the Soviet days. In the German Democratic Republic, there was a similar joke. The major, party-owned newspapers in the GDR were called Freiheit (‘Freedom’) and Neues Deutschland (‘New Germany’). The joke plays both on the newspapers' names and the constant scarcity of everything in East Germany.A customer stops at his neighborhood East Berlin newsstand for a New Germany. He doesn’t find one and asks the newsvendor.
"All out!"
"So, I’ll take Freedom, says the customer.
"Don’t have that, either!"
"When will there be Freedom again?"
"When there’s a New Germany!
Curiously, this joke seems to blend the Russian joke about Pravda and Izvestia and the one about “Thank Stalin” and “Thank God.”
* * * *
One morning, Erich Honecker, the last Communist boss of the GDR, arrived at his office and opened the window. "Good morning, dear Sun!" he beamed."Good morning, dear Erich!" replied ol’ Sol.
Honecker got down to business and at noon he went to the window again. "Good afternoon, dear Sun!" he said.
"Good day, dear Erich!" came the reply.
That evening, Honecker quit for the day and stopped by the window on his way out. "Good evening, dear Sun!"
But the sun was silent.
"Good evening, dear Sun!” repeated Honecker. “What's wrong?"
"Kiss my ass,” said the sun. “I'm in the West now!"
* * * *
I first heard this joke back at the height of the Cold War from a classmate in the army Russian language program who grew up in a German neighborhood in Chicago. It depends on two German puns so it doesn’t translate very well, but it’s worth recounting anyway. (In German, the word aufhängen means both 'hang up' [as a telephone] and 'hang' [the form of execution], and wiederwählen means both 'redial' and ' vote again' [wählen means ‘to dial,’ ‘to choose,’ and ‘to vote’].) Let’s give it a try.What's the difference between Erich Honecker and a wrong number?
None! In both cases, you just hang up (aufhängen) and try again (wiederwählen)!
* * * *
The East German secret police, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (the Ministry for State Security, universally known as the Stasi), was almost as notorious as the KGB, on which it was modeled. (In fact the names of the German and Russian agencies both translate nearly the same into English.)Two Stasi agents are stuck on a boring surveillance operation. Agent Müller breaks the monotony: "Hansi, what are you thinking about?"
"Nothing much. The same thing you’re thinking," muses Agent Schmidt.
Müller turns suddenly. "In that case, you're under arrest!"
* * * *
This isn’t a joke, really. It’s an actual exchange between one of my classmates at the Bundeswehr intelligence school (MAD-Schule), where I was one of two U.S. guest-officers attending a course, and the other members of the class. The MAD-Schule was in Bad Ems, only a couple of hours’ drive from Bonn, then the capital of the Federal Republic. The Bundeswehr officers in the class were stationed all over the country, so for some of them, this was the closest they’d been to the capital in a long while. To let them have some time at the Ministry of Defense and to take care of paperwork and a little networking, we took a day off from class and drove up to Bonn in a motor pool bus.
Among the officers were one from the Allgäu (our class leader) and one from Bavaria. While our classmates liked to tease the class leader about his Allgäuer dialect—we two Americans spoke better German than he did, they liked to say—they had a whole different attitude toward our Bavarian classmate (whom I’ll call Wolfgang). To Germans, Bavaria’s a little like Texas is to Americans: almost a separate country.
As we approached Bonn, we passed some of the foreign embassies on our way downtown. “There’s the French Embassy,” someone would call out, or “Look, the British Embassy,” and so on. “Herr Leutnant, there’s your embassy—the Americans.” They knew my dad had served there.
Before we arrived downtown in Bonn, where the main ministries and offices of the Bundesrepublik were located, one of our classmates shouted out, “There’s Wolfi’s embassy!” Everyone laughed, including Wolfgang. Not understanding the joke, since I knew there wasn’t such a thing as a Bavarian embassy, I looked confused at the others on the bus. It was Wolfgang himself who explained: “It’s the Bavarian state tourist agency. My embassy,” he chuckled.
* * * *
The GDR actually manufactured an automobile, the Trabant. It was the butt of many jokes because it was not only cheap but poorly made and without a single amenity. How do you double the value of a Trabant?
Fill the gas tank.
* * * *
An Ossi driver pulled into a gas station. "Can I get a wiper blade for this Trabi?" The mechanic looked the car over for a long time, thinking. "Okay, it's a deal!"
* * * *
Like bureaucrats all over the world, German Beamte are the cause of much humor—not often of the complimentary variety!Three youngsters are arguing over whose father is the fastest.
Klaus says, "My vati is a race-car driver. He’s the fastest."
Willi counters, "Nein, my father is a fighter pilot in the Luftwaffe. He’s obviously the fastest one."
"That's nothing," insists Hans. "Mein Vater is a Beamte. He’s so fast that when his office closes at 5 o’clock, he's already home by 1 in the afternoon!"
* * * *
What day is the busiest for a Beamte?Monday. He has to turn over two calendar pages.
* * * *
“(ICH BIN DER) DOKTOR EISENBART”
This isn’t a joke but the lyrics to a silly folksong (taught to children for the most part, I believe). I learned it in college and it’s always stuck with me because it’s so silly. I’m providing a free translation here (which doesn’t rhyme or scan, of course), but I think you’ll get the idea. (Because it’s a folksong, the lyrics will vary—and there are many, many verses—but they’re all along the same lines.)
I’m Doctor Eisenbart,
I cure people in my own way.
Can make the blind walk
And the lame see again.
*
My greatest success
I had once in Osnabrück.
An old fellow had a case of gout;
I cut off both his legs.
*
When a patient puts himself in my hands,
I first have him make out his will.
I send no one from this world
Until he puts his house in order.
*
That's the way I heal,
It’s tried and true, I guarantee it.
That all my methods are effective,
I swear by my doctor's cap.
*
[There’s a refrain after each line, but it’s just nonsense syllables
—and it varies from version to version anyway.]
—
There actually was a Johann Andreas Eisenbarth (1663-1727; spellings of the last name vary), an oculist and barber-surgeon from Bavaria. He didn’t actually have a medical degree, but that was no impediment in the 17th century, and he descended from a family line of similar practitioners. He was apparently a successful and skilled surgeon who was, however, something of a braggart and self-promoter. He had an itinerant practice and traveled with a large entourage of entertainers and musicians. The carnival-like spectacle attracted patients and the noise covered the screams of pain. In 1977, the Federal Republic issued a postage stamp with his image.
* * * *
A customer in a coffee shop calls the waiter over. “My coffee is cold!” he complains.“It’s good you told me,” replied the waiter. “Iced coffee costs 2 Euros more.”
* * * *
Two men are attending a political event where the Chancellor is speaking. One turns to the other and asks, “How long has the Chancellor been speaking?”"A half an hour,” replied the other.
“And what’s he speaking about?”
“He hasn’t said yet.”
* * * *
The German teacher asked Karl: “What case is it when you say, ‘Studying makes me happy?’”“A rare one,” said Karl without hesitating.
* * * *
This joke depends on a German pun, so it won’t translate. I think it’s worth passing on anyway. (Keep in mind that in German, Mist is manure, used widely for fertilizer.)An American was visiting a German farm. He called out to the farmer: “Hey, mister! Mister!”
The farmer turned to the American angrily. “I’m not the Mister. I’m the milker!”
* * * *
We all know this one in a slightly different context:A tourist was on his way to a long-anticipated concert by the Vienna Philharmonic. Not knowing the way to the concert hall, he stopped a passerby and asked: “Excuse me, but how do I get to the Philharmonic?”
“Practice, practice, practice!”
* * * *
This joke, which turns on a German mondegreen, depends on the German pronunciation of a girl’s name. Julia, in German, comes out YOO-lee-ah.Little Julia went to Easter Mass for the first time. After the service, her father asked her, “So, what did you like best about the Mass?”
“I liked that everyone sang ‘Hallo Julia’!”
* * * *
A mountain climber went into a hiking-supply shop. He told the clerk, “ I need some underpants.”“Long?” asked the clerk.
“I want to buy them,” replied the hiker, “not rent them!”
* * * *
Believe it or not, this is a joke Germans tell on themselves:Two Polish friends meet at their favorite bar. “So, Lech, what are you up to these days?” asks Stanislaw.
“I’m studying Hebrew,” answers Lech. “That way, when I get to Heaven, I’ll understand everything.”
“But what will you do if you go to Hell?” jokes Stanislaw.
“Oh, that’ll be okay. I already speak German.”
* * * *
What's the difference between an English, a French, and a German retiree? The Englishman drinks a whiskey and goes fishing.
The Frenchman has a glass of wine and goes to play boules.
The German takes his cardiac meds and goes to work.
* * * *
This isn’t so much a joke as a language lesson. It points out the confusion between English and German, which share many words that seem to be cognates but actually don’t have related meanings. (Mark Twain was delighted, for instance, when he discovered the German word damit—until he learned that the emphasis was on the second syllable, not the first. The word, by the way, means ‘with’ [mit] ‘it’ or ‘them’ [da, a contraction of das, ‘that’]. When I lived in Germany, popular souvenirs among American and British tourists were key chains inscribed with the German expression Gute Fahrt. The phrase is simply the German equivalent of Bon Voyage—despite its appearance.)A German exchange student, newly arrived in Britain, had ordered her first full English breakfast. She got hungry waiting for her meal to appear, however. "When do I become a sausage?" she asked impatiently.
The waiter, not understanding the student’s error, simply replied nonplussed, “Why, never, I trust.”
[In German bekommen means ‘to get,’ not ‘to become’ (werden in German). The German student’s mistake was in assuming that the English word has the same meaning as the German verb it looks and sounds like.]
* * * *
There’s a TV commercial running now on which an American exchange student is in Germany “to get some culture.” What he doesn’t get, he says, is the humor. His German friends are laughing at some video or TV show, but I have a suspicion that some of what the young man doesn’t get is the German fondness for the antiwitz, the anti-joke (or un-joke.) This is a construction that starts out with the familiar structure of a joke but ends illogically or without a punch line. The humor is in the surprise lack of . . . well, humor. In other words, it’s funny because it’s not funny! I thought I’d finish up with a few examples.A few of the ones with illogical endings:
What’s green and runs through the garden? A herd of cucumbers.
Two men cross a bridge. One falls in the water. The other one’s name is Hans.
Two guys go through a tunnel. The third guy says to the fourth, “I think there are five of us.” The sixth guy says, “I don’t understand . . . .”
The kind without a punch line:
Knock, knock!
Who's there?
It’s the police. I'm sorry to tell you, there's been an automobile accident. Your husband’s been injured and is in the hospital.
How many plumbers does it take to change a light bulb?
One. His profession is irrelevant.
Two cows are grazing in a meadow. All of a sudden, a rabbit leaps out from behind a hedge and hops off. One cow looks up, chews her cud, and then ambles away.
You’ll have to decide for yourself if you think any of these is funny. I’m just providing the examples.
27 September 2010
Building Better Lives Through Science
[In a 1992 article called “Science’s Big Shift” in Time magazine, Dick Thompson wrote: " The public hears that we're No. 1 in science, and they want to know why that fact isn't making our lives better. The one thing that works in this country doesn't seem to be paying off." I was teaching a writing course at the time, so I quoted this statement for an essay exam and asked my students to address the idea that we don’t see science making our lives better. I also decided to answer the question myself as a model for an essay-exam response. I’ve based the essay below on that response.]
Science is the most visible indicator of how far humans have come from stone tools and wooden wheels. There’s question, however, whether scientific developments are actually making our lives better. While some perceive no betterment, even evils, from modern science and technology, the indisputable benefits in such fields as medicine, computers and robotics, and energy demonstrate that science makes our lives easier, healthier, safer, and more productive.
Medicine and health are fields plainly affected by new science and technology. Advances in organ transplants, immune-suppressant drugs, diagnostic tools like MRI’s and CAT scans, and new medicines and therapies mean illnesses we might have inevitably died from, like heart disease and cancer, are now routinely curable and others we couldn’t even diagnose until an autopsy, like tumors or weak blood vessels deep in the brain, are treatable. If medical technology has outstripped our ethical and legal capacities, that’s hardly a reason to disparage the usefulness of the scientific advances. It’s a reason to spur society and the law to catch up.
I can personally attest to at least one benefit of medical science and technology in my own life. Like most men my age, I’ve suffered the indignity of prostate examinations and colonoscopies, procedures that have come along only in recent decades to detect cancers that kill millions of men—but killed many more in the past because they weren’t detectable until much later in their progress. Those are common experiences for men (and women, too, in the case of colon exams) of a certain age, as they used to say. But somewhat rarer is the operation I had some years ago now that relieved me of a encumbrance with which I’d been saddled since I was about 12. I’m very astigmatic and I’ve had to wear glasses for over half a century. (I wore contacts for several years in the middle of that period, but they’re still lenses, prostheses.) I hated wearing glasses—not out of vanity (I’m not so good-looking to begin with that lenses were an additional disadvantage), but because as my eyes got worse, the lenses got thicker and heavier, and I couldn’t go anywhere without them. I always had to go about with glasses, and usually a pair of prescription sunglasses, too. If I traveled, I had to take an extra pair. Eventually, I got bifocals, which drove me nuts anyway; I took to carrying reading glasses for work in a library or other environment (because doing a lot of reading with the bifocals gave me headaches) and the bifocals for street use, plus the sunglasses. Three different pairs of glasses. I’d been asking my eye doctor about Lasik surgery, but he kept telling me it hadn’t been perfected enough to correct my vision problems yet. (Ironically, the same situation had occurred when I wanted to replace my glasses with contacts decades before.) Finally the doctor agreed that I was a good candidate and I had the surgery in a procedure that lasted 15 minutes, caused no discomfort, had no side effects, and left me with vision so good that I didn’t need even the drugstore reading glasses the doctor told me I might. It’s been over five years now and I haven’t worn prescription glasses of any kind since the operation (though my eyes have deteriorated in the meantime—the operation can correct the current conditions but it can’t stop your eyes from continuing to age). The operation cost several thousand dollars, which wasn’t covered by any insurance, but it was the best money I ever spent. Just waking up in the morning and not needing glasses to read the clock justifies the decision. For this alone, I can affirm that technology (for the laser device that performed the actual cutting) and science (for developing the technique of applying the laser) has benefited my life unquestionably.
Technological benefits from computers are also indisputable. Factories and offices work more efficiently, products are cheaper, retooling is easier and faster, and dangerous tasks are performed safely by non-human workers. Computer-aided design, for instance, makes possible the development of products with fewer design flaws before a prototype is even manufactured. Computer-generated models are created and tested in computer-generated environments, less costly than test laboratories and tracks, and their potential malfunctions and weaknesses detected long before metal and plastic are molded. The final design is electronically sent to the robot machine that makes the product, saving hours of expensive labor. When the time comes to change the design, the new specifications are sent to the robot, avoiding costly retooling and retraining. Though outsourcing has become an economic drawback (but not a technological one), the lost manufacturing jobs are eventually replaced with high-tech work programming, maintaining, and running the computers, and the computer glitches that occasionally plague our daily lives are becoming less and less frequent as we all become computer-literate.
I’ve written about the application of computer technology to theater and live performance (“Theater and Computers,” 5 December 2009), and that progress continues apace. (Film, which is always in the vanguard of such applications, is beginning to use performance capture—a feature of James Cameron’s Avatar—and the appearance of that tech on the live stage is probably not far away.) But once again, I can testify to the benefit computers have provided my own life. We all use ATM’s for their convenience and many of us use PDA’s and smart phones to access e-mail and the ‘Net when we’re on the move. (On my recent trip to Istanbul, many of my traveling companions were busily texting and e-mailing their friends and families back in the States from their hand-helds.) But my personal boon from computers is probably simpler and more commonplace. I’ve also written about my writing process and how I developed it (“Writing,” 9 April 2010). When I first contemplated that, I’d just started using a wordprocessor and I was very conscious of how that tool was changing how I wrote. I began to write more avidly, and sometimes more words as well, because it was fun. I couldn’t count drafts anymore, because each piece of writing was all one flexible draft that just reformed itself every time I made a change—until I decided it was finished, and sent it to the printer. Since there was no retyping every time I wanted to edit a draft, I began to do far more editing and revising. Where I’d used to give up on a change because it was too tedious to make—say, changing a small word or reversing the order of two sentences—I could push a couple of keys and I’d have exactly what I wanted, instead of what I’d used to settle for. Then conveniences like dictionaries and encyclopedias on CD became available and I had a whole reference and research library at my fingertips, obviating the need for constant trips to a library for small tasks. (I still go when I have major research or have saved up several smaller tasks that can’t be accomplished at home.) This was followed by the Internet and the array of reference and research sites that technology brought right to my screen. (All this eventually led to the launching of ROT, a lagniappe from the computer world that isn’t a benefit to my writing, but has become an outlet for the results. Others will have to determine whether that’s been worthwhile.)
The wordprocessor’s also been a huge asset for my teaching, as has the ‘Net. E-mail’s made communicating with research clients, colleagues, students (I work by e-mail with a woman now whom I tutored for a while and now help as a writing coach and editor), and, of course, friends and family. Business correspondence by e-mail is faster than by letter and more efficient and unambiguous than by telephone. We all know about the inaccuracies and even falsehoods that can be found on the Internet, but judicious use can make it a terrific research resource that saves countless hours in a library or even in my home reference collection. Small details I might have just left out, I can now verify and include because I don’t have to run off and spend an hour or two getting to and from a library and looking for the right reference book. As a result, my writing is both more detailed and specific, and faster. No danger that the Internet poses would make me wish to go back to a typewriter and a legal pad. I may prefer a printed book to an electronic one for reading (“Books in Print,” 9 July 2010), but I see no drawback to writing on a computer; there’s no downside.
A sidelight to computer writing that comes not from my own experience but from a friend’s is on-line publishing. I don’t mean publishing such as a blog or submission to an on-line journal, but publishing a book through an on-line service. Kirk Woodward did that with The Art of Writing Reviews, on which I commented at length on ROT (4, 8, 11, and 14 November 2009). It’s the only way I know of for a little guy like Kirk or me to get a book into print. Furthermore, Kirk can reedit the text instantly to make corrections and additions and potential readers can buy Writing Reviews on line as either a printed book or as a download. I have no idea how well the books published that way do in sales, but it’s still an accomplishment, and computers made it possible.
Communications and media are another field in which scientific and, especially, technological progress have had prominent consequences. Television has improved at both the viewing and the transmission ends with the introduction of digital and high-definition broadcasting, flat screens, green-screen technology, and satellites. (The content, however, may not seem better than 50 years ago! There’s just more of it.) Even old reliable radio has advanced with the birth of satellite transmission. In world events, we’ve seen how the fax machine brought news of the 1989 Tiananmen protest in Beijing out and sent encouragement in and then, two decades later, when Iran erupted after a disputed election, it was digital cameras, cell phone images, and the Internet that kept the story before the world. Perhaps the most salient—and personal—technical change in communications, however, is the cell phone which has gone from a large, clumsy, expensive device that few but the wealthiest enthusiasts owned to the ubiquitous, nearly omnipotent, tiny object that resembles the Star Trek communicator. While we’ve all heard (and experienced) the annoyances that go along with the proliferation of cell phones on our streets (and in our restaurants, stores, theaters, and everywhere else), the convenience and, in an emergency, necessity of a mobile telephone can’t be denied. Readers of ROT may already know the recent urgent situation that prompted my mother and me finally to get our first cells; I described it in “Meeting Mom” (in “Short Takes I,” 30 March 2010). To recap briefly: I was waiting at Penn Station for my mother to arrive on a bus from Washington last Thanksgiving. She was scheduled to get in at 3 p.m. but the bus ended up being 3½ hours late and she couldn’t reach me to tell me what was happening and I couldn’t call her to ask where she was. Long story short: we now each have a cell. No emergency like that has occurred since (yet, halevai!), but the potential exists, hence the necessity of the cell phone in my life.
In the mid-1970’s, the oil-producing nations embargoed the source of most of the world’s energy, teaching us that relying on this imminently exhaustible product is dangerous. Now the spill in the Gulf of Mexico gives us another reason to reconsider fossil fuel, even domestically produced, as our sole energy source. For twenty years, scientists have been looking for new, less vulnerable energy sources. Though no replacement for hydrocarbons has yet emerged, many possibilities have. Nuclear energy, the most common next to oil and coal, has serious drawbacks, but it also has advantages. It’s efficient, cheap, and virtually inexhaustible. The radioactive waste and the danger of a leak or melt-down, as has already happened at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island and the former Soviet Union’s Chernobyl reactors, are very real problems. This doesn’t mean they’re insoluble, and the technology to make reactors and their waste safer is already under development. Meanwhile, scientists are working on producing power from nuclear fusion—much cleaner than the fission used in current reactors—geothermal energy, and electromagnetics. The latter is already used in Japan in trains that float on cushions of air instead of rolling on wheels and track. The reduced friction saves wear and energy, and the high speeds will greatly reduce overland travel time. Even the old stand-by, petroleum, is being cleaned up in experiments with so-called gasahol where alcohol is added to the gasoline to make it burn cleaner and pollute less. Ethanol, too, has been examined as an alternative and though it’s not perfected, the prospect is still encouraging. The resulting more efficient engines and cleaner air are doubtlessly beneficial to all of us, and electric and hybrid engines are gaining popularity as that technology is improved and made less expensive. Busses that run on natural gas are appearing in cities all over the country as well.
Scientific advances can be a double-edged sword, however. In the realm of forensics, we’ve seen how scientific and technological progress has made detection and prevention of crime easier and faster, and solving crime and assigning blame has become more certain because of advances in science. DNA alone must be responsible for the convictions of hundreds of criminals across the country—as well as the exoneration of wrongly convicted defendants from the past. (A friend who’s a criminal defense attorney is very active in the Innocence Project, which has effected the release of hundreds of innocent prisoners.) But the trade-off, as I experienced it in a court, is that we civilians have come to expect a level of certainty that probably can’t be met in real life. I call this the CSI Syndrome because that TV show and its like have popularized the notion that science and scientists can solve any crime. When I was on the jury of an assault trial, we deliberated for several hours and ultimately found the accused, a man charged with the attempted rape of a women who rented a room from him, not guilty. The problem, we determined, was that there wasn’t enough evidence to convince us beyond the mandated reasonable doubt that the man had actually tried to rape the woman. We knew something had happened and that the woman had been a victim, and we suspected that the charge was true, but we couldn’t convict the defendant of such a crime solely on the testimony of the woman (who had credibility problems herself). There wasn’t any forensic evidence of an attempted rape. There was no medical evidence (the woman hadn’t gone to the hospital until after she’d reported the attack, which was some time after it was supposed to have occurred) to confirm a failed sexual assault. (There was also no corroborating testimony from other witnesses.) The accused hadn’t been charged with simple assault, a charge on which we could have convicted without a problem (the prosecutor explained that the DA’s office had decided that an assault charge carried too light a penalty), so we had no alternative but to acquit the man. But, I wondered afterwards, Were we putting too much reliance on criminal science? Has the CSI Syndrome convinced us non-scientists, non-criminalists that there must always be forensic proof, that there always is forensic proof and if there’s not, then conviction is impossible? Have we been taught, apparently falsely, to expect, to trust in, something that’s not really possible?
One question must be asked now, of course: Was my one experience at all typical of other juries of lay people across the country? If it was, then court cases and forensic science may be a metaphor for society’s general attitude toward science and technology: we raise it up on a pedestal, attributing to it capabilities it doesn’t have and when science fails to meet the impossible standards we’ve set, we tear down the pedestal and cast the whole discipline into the trash bin of cultural authority. Meanwhile, of course, real forensic scientists and technicians continue to do their valuable work and to push the envelope of their field to new and useful accomplishments.
Yes, there are disadvantages to scientific developments, and some new technologies may seem frivolous now. The new computer-generated environment called virtual reality is little more than an expensive toy right now, but its potential for real benefits is unmistakable. Television was a rich man’s plaything in the 1940’s and many intellectuals dubbed it a “vast wasteland” poised to rot our brains. Its power as a means of global, even interplanetary communications, however, has been demonstrated time and time again. From the first TV war in Vietnam to the landing on the moon in June 1969, this electronic gadget has proved its value, however badly it’s sometimes used. The same is obviously true of inventions in fields like space (miniaturization), transportation (supersonic jets, bullet trains), the military (nightscopes), and communications and the media (cell and satellite phones). Clearly, science has made our lives better—as long as we know how to use what it gives us. And don’t expect too much from its gifts. Despite the horrors of apocalyptic sci-fi tales, the true dangers of technology and science are on the human side.
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