Hypothesis: the most appropriate narrative format to describe the history of American culture is that of the screwball comedy. The archetypal screwball comedy, a Hollywood creation, flourished for only a short time—the early 30s until the early 40s, roughly—although aspects of it still persist. But it originated out of a time and circumstance marked by, I think, a relatively rich confluence of the sorts of ideas that American culture is consistently obsessed with: the importance of money, the permeability (and fragility) of status.

The screwball comedy has been described by film critic Andrew Sarris as “sex comedy without the sex,” and while I think the format has other, deeper consistent features, Sarris’s epithet does effectively describe the surface of typical representatives of the genre: a romantic comedy that (for the most part) substitutes a certain manic absurdity for sensual eroticism. Here’s some examples, all standards of the style:

• It Happened One Night (dir. Frank Capra, 1934)
• Twentieth Century (dir. Howard Hawks, 1934)
• My Man Godfrey (dir. Gregory La Cava, 1936)
• Nothing Sacred (dir. William Wellman, 1937)
• The Awful Truth (dir. Leo McCarey, 1937)
• Bringing Up Baby (dir. Howard Hawks, 1938)
• His Girl Friday (dir. Howard Hawks, 1940)
• The Philadelphia Story (dir. George Cukor, 1940)
• The Lady Eve (dir. Preston Sturges, 1941)

If this gives some idea of screwball comedy’s rather wide umbrella—it’s a long way from the backstage farce of Twentieth Century to the breezy con of Nothing Sacred to the upper class/lower class anthropology of The Philadelphia Story—there are still common elements that apply equally well to the outlines of American cultural history.

Money is the root of all plot. Though money itself may not figure prominently in many of the stories, almost every screwball comedy is set in motion, directly or indirectly, by money. It’s often overt: Cary Grant meets Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby while in the process of trying to secure a million-dollar donation for the museum he works at; worldly Barbara Stanwyck is after timid ophiologist Henry Fonda’s inheritance in The Lady Eve. In other movies, the financial impetus is in the form of a paycheck: It Happened One Night, His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, and Nothing Sacred, for example, all hinge on reporters trying to land a big story, but getting romantically entangled in the process. Sometimes, it’s the search for a free lunch: the counterpart of Fredric March’s cheerfully cynical reporter in Nothing Sacred is Carole Lombard as a small-town girl feigning a terminal illness to win a free trip to New York.

Likewise, even though not all of American culture is aimed at market or box-office success, the cash nexus (I love that phrase) is at the core of American cultural history; even if a cultural development seems far away from checkbook concerns, it’s a good bet that at least some point of that development’s lineage hinges, crucially, on economics.

What God has put asunder, let men (and women) join again. More than one critic, most importantly the Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell, has pointed out how many screwball comedies hinge on the idea of re-marriage, a separated or divorced couple realizing that they belong together after all. The Awful Truth, featuring a battling Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in the throes of divorce, is the most obvious example; The Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday also hew to the pattern. Perhaps the psychological attraction to this sort of plot is related to the alienation that’s often analyzed to result from the emergence of a consumer-oriented society, in which attempts to construct individual identity are based on what one acquires, instead of what one produces.

American culture is marked by one desired re-marriage after another, usually of genres or styles situated about a perceived highbrow-lowbrow/elitist-populist axis. The elusive “Great American” novel, symphony, opera, what have you, is usually imagined as a work that reconciles a populist sensibility with the intricacy, scale, and allegedly more lofty intent of high art. It might be possible to argue that the propositions of a past confluence of high and low are rendered more plausible by the persistence of the screwball re-marriage trope.

Class conflict goes both ways. Related to the last point is the way screwball comedy seems to be, in part, dedicated to bringing the upper class down a peg. I say seems because, while some examples are explicitly dedicated to diminishing the upper class (the seminal It Happened One Night is perhaps the most populist of the bunch, with reporter Clark Gable de-sheltering by degrees Claudette Colbert’s sheltered heiress), others portray a more complex dance between rich, middle-class, and poor. Jimmy Stewart’s self-consciously down-to-earth writer in The Philadelphia Story thinks he has rich Katherine Hepburn pegged from the beginning, but by the end, he’s not so sure; Hepburn’s high-toned brittleness is something of a façade, her ex-husband Cary Grant shows the sort of cunning that other screwball comedies might have assigned to an average Joe, while her up-by-his-bootstraps fiancé, played by John Howard, proves a rather dull fellow indeed.

Many screwball comedies posit class as a kind of costume. In The Lady Eve, Barbara Stanwyck’s impersonation of a British noblewoman is so transparent as to beggar belief, but she successfully calls the bluff of Henry Fonda and his rich brewer father, whose choice to believe her ruse is as much a reflection of their own class insecurity. The most dazzling aikido of status might be in My Man Godfrey: rich, flighty Carole Lombard brings home hobo William Powell as part of a scavenger hunt, and Powell stays on to become the family butler. But the rich family is secretly broke, while Powell, who is hiding his own upper-class background, draws on that experience to become the perfect servant, romantically pursued by both Lombard and maid Jean Dixon. As Stewart stammers at the climax of The Philadelphia Story, “You’ve got me all confused now.” No kidding. Scratch the surface of the supposed highbrow/lowbrow division of American culture, and the lines begin to blur just as much, and just as fast.

Evolution is chaotic but not random. This is the aspect that I think most ties cultural history to the screwball comedy. As crazy as screwball events may get—Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, in Bringing Up Baby, in the middle of the country, singing to a leopard on a farmhouse roof in an effort to retrieve a dinosaur bone—there is always a clear chain of causality, however unlikely.

The thing is, each link in that chain is, more often than not, forged out of short-term, local concerns that have an at best coincidental relationship to the plot’s overall goal. Culture is the same way: a wayward walk in which each change of direction is determined not by the usually stated end results of artistic activity—say, for instance, emotional resonance or technical mastery—but by chance meetings, vagaries of overhead, practicalities of production, &c. Even the artistic personality is subject to such chaos: at any given time, there are artists who have more of a talent for making a career than making art, or artists who, lacking the knack for public relations and networking, do their exquisite work in inevitable obscurity. Of course, there are those who are equally adept at their craft and their careers, but such and intersection, the discovery (or self-discovery) and cultivation of such a confluence of talents, is—if not quite random—at least the result of a sufficiently idiosyncratic chain of events as to make its exact repetition highly unlikely.

The German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, in his book Zig-Zag: The Politics of Culture and Vice Versa, compared history, and cultural history in particular, to a mathematical concept called the Baker’s tranformation or the Baker’s map. It’s a topological representation of folding dough: you fold a square over, roll it out, fold it over again, and so on. Given a sufficient number of folds, if you trace the path of a specific point on the square, the result is mathematically indistinguishable from a random path. Enzensberger uses the idea to account for the seemingly similarly random appearance of cultural fads, particularly nostalgic ones—retro fashions, neo-this or -that, remakes and reissues; it’s like a raisin embedded in the dough that you lose track of, until it suddenly reappears at the top of the square. I’ve always liked Enzensberger’s analogy because it;s a reminder that a) culture is a never-ending process, and b) cultural history is a construct largely determined by where, when, and why one chooses a given point of culmination. (The fold that brings your chosen point—Romanticism, tonality, atonality, neo-tonality—to the historical surface also brings infinitely many other points to the surface at the same time, each with their own unlikely itinerary.)

Screwball comedies choose rather obvious culminations for their random walks—usually marriage—but the genre acknowledges an Enzensberger-esque view of history and existence more than most histories do. Screwball duets are almost invariably between partners with incomplete information: one knows what they want, but not necessarily how to get it, the other knows where they’re going, but not necessarily what they want. (In Bringing Up Baby, Katherine Hepburn explains the physics of the screwball universe: “I know I want to marry him. He doesn’t know it but I am.”) It’s the sheer implausibility of screwball plots that reveals their unlikely insight. What are the chances of reporter Rosalind Russell, as editor Cary Grant’s ex, dropping by the newsroom to say goodbye on the very day the biggest news story of either of their lives happens to break? About the same chances as any of the events in any of our lives—individual or collective—turning out the way they did. The difference between screwball comedy and life is where you run the credits.

To be continued.

DEAD MUSICIANS

I

From you, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart,
      The substance of my dreams took fire.
You built cathedrals in my heart,
      And lit my pinnacled desire.
You were the ardour and the bright
      Procession of my thoughts toward prayer.
You were the wrath of storm, the light
      On distant citadels aflare.

II

Great names, I cannot find you now
      In these loud years of youth that strives
Through doom toward peace: upon my brow
      I wear a wreath of banished lives.
You have no part with lads who fought
      And laughed and suffered at my side.
Your fugues and symphonies have brought
      No memory of my friends who died.

III

For when my brain is on their track,
In slangy speech I call them back.
With fox-trot tunes their ghosts I charm.
      “Another little drink won’t do us any harm.”
      I think of rag-time; a bit of rag-time;
      And see their faces crowding round
      To the sound of the syncopated beat.
      They’ve got such jolly things to tell,
      Home from hell with a Blighty wound so neat…

      *          *          *          *           *

And so the song breaks off; and I’m alone.
They’re dead… For God’s sake stop that gramophone.

—Siegfried Sassoon, Counter-Attack and Other Poems, 1918

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has announced a voluntary recall of the Casio CTK-710 keyboard. Why? Well, if you burn through that Chopin etude, you might just, um, burn through that Chopin etude:

Hazard: The recalled keyboards can overheat when in use, posing a fire hazard to consumers.

Incidents/Injuries: Casio® has received five reports of keyboards overheating, including two incidents that resulted in fire. There have been two reports of property damage, in addition to the unit itself. No injuries have been reported.

Come on, I’m sure there are bands out there that would consider this a marketing opportunity.

Gerard Schwarz plans an exit; Sue Perkins wins that TV conductor contest in Britain (which may eventually cross the pond); Jed Gaylin plays ringmaster; JoAnn Falletta plays Dr. Doolittle; Yannick Nézet-Séguin has a drink; R.I.P., Patrick Flynn and Vernon Handley.

Official proclamations of the competitive ways of small entrepreneurs now labor under an enormous burden of fact which demonstrates in detail the accuracy of Thorstein Veblen’s analysis. Competition, he held, is by no means dead, but it is chiefly ‘competition between the business concerns that control production, on the one side, and the consuming public on the other side; the chief expedients in this businesslike competition being salesmanship and sabotage.’ Competition has been curtailed by larger corporations; it has also been sabotaged by groups of smaller entrepreneurs acting collectively. Both groups have made clear the locus of the big competition and have revealed the mask-like character of liberalism’s rhetoric of small business and family farm.

—C. Wright Mills, White Collar (1951)

One of the interesting things about the music industry is how the sins and virtues of production in other industries often accrue to distribution when it comes to music. Take the Veblen passage Mills quotes (which is from the book Absentee Ownership) and switch out the terms—

competition between the business concerns that control distribution, on the one side, and the consuming public on the other side

—and you have a pretty succinct description of the recording industry over the past 10-15 years.

Mills, writing just after World War II, is bringing this up as part of his analysis of the alienated position of middle-class white-collar employees. Such employees are disenfranchised on the corporate level—working for somebody else, they make wages, not profits—but also, as Mills is demonstrating, on the political level: political power is still attained by appealing to the ideals of free competition and individual entrepreneurship, both of which have become nostalgic illusions.

It’s tempting to regard the rise of the Internet as somehow rendering Mills’ concerns moot, that the global reach and (in theory) universal access of the Web have resurrected the truly competitive and truly independent entrepreneur. This is an especially appealing idea for musicians, who have come to regard the Internet as direct access to a flexible distribution channel—which would explain the seemingly self-destructive response of the RIAA and its ilk: the whole system is in jeopardy if, to do another terminological switcheroo, the workers control the means of distribution. But then again, we’re all paying for Internet access, either directly (the cable to the house) or indirectly (via higher-ed tuition, taxpayer-financed public Wi-Fi, or a jacked-up price at the coffee shop). We’re, in effect, renting the distribution channel, which, in the long run, is a more stable form of revenue for the collective corporate world than if they had to pay themselves to distribute product that may or may not make back the overhead. Record companies may be losing revenue, but eventually, the capital flows away from physical distribution and towards telecommunicative access.

So I sometimes wonder if descriptions of the revolutionary nature of the Internet, as reasonable as they seem, aren’t just rhetorical cover for another generation of corporate consolidation into a government-enabled collusive cartel (*cough*Net neutrality*cough*). And while arts organizations have traditionally enjoyed a much smaller version of the sorts of government subsidies that have kept small businesses and family farms afloat for decades, it’s entirely plausible that such brave-new-world Internet descriptions could create the perception that the playing field has leveled in favor of musicians, even as increasingly monopolistic gatekeeping makes access to that playing field more and more expensive. Small businesses and family farms have the advantage of conforming to a Jeffersonian image of the American ideal; if musicians are the next ones to get caught in a rhetorical squeeze between corporation and competition, how sentimental do you think government is likely to get?

LITERARY BONUS:

In 1940 [record executive Edward] Wallerstein, who was now at Columbia Records, signed me up again. The first recording I made there was “Clair de Lune,” and it had a special role I never knew about until many years after World War II. Wallerstein, who was with the wartime Office of Strategic Services, told me that “Clair de Lune” disks had been used to send messages to American prisoners of war. The device was simple and played on the fact that the quality of recordings in those days was not all it should have been: a Morse code message would be scratched onto a disk, which would then be sent to a Red Cross station, where it was played on the air. The prisoners would know it contained a coded message and listen for it, but to anyone else it seemed like just another record with bad surface noise.

—Andre Kostelanetz (in collaboration with Gloria Hammond),
Echoes: Memoirs of Andre Kostelanetz, 1981

Random picture:


Random news:

Emily Smith, of The Sun (UK), gets the Non Sequitur of the Day award.

Hurricane Gustav ground to a halt yesterday — as THREE more mega-storms barrelled towards the US.

The hurricane—possibly named after Gustav Holst, the British composer of The Planets—weakened to a depression over Louisiana. (emphasis added)

What basis is there for such a claim? None whatsoever, as far as I know—which doesn’t stop The Sun from including sound clips of The Planets to accompany the article.

Elsewhere in the water, Richard Tognetti, leader of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, is also a surfer, which forms the basis of the documentary Musica Surfica, screening at the end of the month as part of the New York Surf Film Festival. (Tognetti is also fresh off helping to save the Wollongong Town Hall.)

Wolpe! The Musical! No kidding.

The state of Oklahoma has announced the ten finalists for the official State Rock Song.

And New Jersey tenor Philip Alongi, who sang the National Anthem to open yesterday’s session of the Republican National Convention, actually isn’t all that keen on a McCain/Palin ticket, but a gig’s a gig.

If you’re any sort of classical musician, I’ll bet that somewhere, even if you never actually use it, you have at least a small, finely honed sense of disenfranchisement. So if you’ve ever looked at the human penchant for naming geographical features—mountains, rivers, &c.—after other humans, and wondered why they always seem to opt for explorers and politicians and military types rather than, you know, musicians, I have good news and bad news. The good news is, there actually is such a place where creative artists get their eponymous due. The airless, waterless, 400-degrees-Celsius-surface-temperature bad news is that it’s the planet Mercury.


Most things in the solar system borrow their names from Greek and Roman mythology—think of the names of the planets besides Earth. Mercurian geography initially followed suit; the planet’s albedo features—the patterns of light and dark visible through a telescope—were mapped and thus named by the French astronomer Eugène Michel Antoniadi in the 1920s. But in the 1970s, the double whammy of radio telescopy and a Mariner 10 flyby revealed a wealth of details needing names.

Craters on the moon had been primarily named for astronomers and scientists, for example, the prominent southern hemisphere crater Tycho, with its bright ray system, named for the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, or the crater Clavius, named for the German astronomer Christopher Clavius, and made famous as the site of the moon base in 2001. But for Mercury, on grounds of both avoiding repetition and general novelty, the International Astronomical Union decided to go in a different direction.

Mercury is a heavily cratered planet, with perhaps the greatest number of craters of any body in the solar system. After much discussion and no little controversy, the Mercury Task Group decided to name these craters for great human contributors to the arts and humanities, including writers, Composers, painters, sculptors, and architects. This system is consistent with previous decisions made for the Moon, Mars, and Venus, on all of which the craters have human names. In terms of commemoration of human achievement, Mercury will be the complement of the Moon, with the latter honoring scientists and scholars and the former honoring the creative and artistic heroes of mankind. Initially, all craters photographed by Mariner 10 and having diameters of 100km or more will be named, as well as selected prominent or geologically significant craters in the 40 to 100km size range.
…
A number of scholars are assisting the Task Group in selecting these names. The distribution by fields will be approximately 50% for authors, 30% for artists, and 20% for composers. (David Morrison, “IAU Nomenclature for Topographic Features on Mercury,” Icarus 28, 605-606 (1976))

Still bringing up the rear, but better than nothing. The composers selected thus far (you can browse through this list) tend towards the standard European canon, although Charles Ives gets a crater of his own, as do the Indian composers Tansen and Tyāgarāja and the Chinese composer Chiang Ku’i (Jiang Kui) and his legendary countrywoman Ts’ai Wen-Chi (Cai Wenji). Beethoven gets an entire area (the Beethoven Quadrangle, which contains Schoenberg’s crater, as seen above), as does J.S. Bach—the Bach region, near the planet’s south pole, is dominated by large craters named for Johann Sebastian and Richard Wagner. (Mercury’s planetary neighbor Venus, whose craters are named for notable women, actually probably has even more musicians on the list, from Francesca Caccini and Thekla Badarzewska to Kirstin Flagstad, Maria Callas, and Kathleen Ferrier to Patsy Cline and Josephine Baker.)

The most contemporary composer representative on Mercury is Stravinsky. The IAU specifies that geographic features can’t be named for anyone who hasn’t been dead for at least three years, and the last round of Mercurian naming came in 1985, when a lot of possible honorees—Cage, Copland, Bernstein, Feldman, Xenakis, Tippett, not to mention a whole host of jazz and rock composers—were still alive. Their time may be coming, however: amazingly, only half the planet has ever been mapped (Mercury’s revolutions about its axis correspond with its orbital revolutions around the sun, so the same face is always towards the Earth), but that is about to change, now that NASA’s Messenger spacecraft has arrived at Mercury. The craft made its first flyby in January; another will follow in October, and then, in 2011, Messenger will go into orbit around the planet, allowing the first complete map of its surface. Make friends with an astronomer now, and your favorite composer might have his or her own permanent place in the sun.

The news that Governor Oglesby would not commute the sentences of Parsons, Spies, Engel, and Fischer was received by the four men with composure. They had long been prepared for the worst. A deputy sheriff who was with Parsons on the night of November 10 reported that he was in good spirits, indeed “very cheerful and hopeful.” Parsons, in a garrulous mood, talked almost incessantly for several hours. He spoke about socialism and anarchism, about Haymarket, about his wife and children. It was not until he reached the last subject that he manifested any regret, and “the more he talked about it, the more sorrowful he became.” He said that Lucy was “a brave woman, a true wife, and a good mother.”

After the lights had been turned out and the prisoners settled down for the night, the silence of death row was broken by Parson’s voice, reciting Whittier’s poem “The Reformer”:

Whether on the gallows high,
Or in the battle van,
The noblest place for man to die
Is where he dies for man.

Later in the night, Parsons broke the silence once again, this time with the melancholy strains of “Annie Laurie” (“And for bonnie Annie Laurie, I’d lay me doon and dee”). In Parson’s clear tenor voice, verse after verse of the Scottish ballad rang through the gloomy corridor, while other inmates listened “as if to the death-song of a dying hero.” Deputy Hawkins suggested that Parsons ought to get some sleep. “How can a fellow go to sleep with the music made by putting up the gallows?” Parsons joked. The sound of sawing and hammering could be heard late into the night as the scaffold was erected in the north corridor. By two o’clock, however, Parsons was sleeping “as soundly as he ever did in his life.”

—Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy

Happy Labor Day.