Wednesday, June 17, 2009

John Garfield - Bits and Pieces

Earlier tonight I read a book review of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice and learned that Pynchon's hero-protagonist, PI Larry "Doc" Sportello, is "obsessed with" John Garfield. This reminded me I'd better hurry up and finish this blog entry. I haven't read Vice yet but I've been reading about it courtesy of Dave Monroe's forwards from Pynchon-L for some time now and I added my name to the library's hold list about a week ago.

What prompted this entry which I began about 6 weeks ago was a bit of info I learned in the course of some reading I've been doing. John Garfield lost the lead in Golden Boy to Luther Adler. I've been a fan of Garfield's for decades but lately have been seeing more of Adler in the film noir classic, D.O.A., and in several appearances on the tv series, Naked City. The idea of the first Method actor to become a Hollywood star (and perhaps Hollywood's first real reel rebel) and the scion of the First Family of Yiddish Theater competing for the same part back in the 1930's strikes me as more than a little odd.

According to wikipedia, John Garfield was born Jacob Julius Garfinkle. The son of immigrant parents, David and Hannah Garfinkle, he lived in the Sea Gate section of Brooklyn until his mother's death. Deeply troubled by this loss, young Julie (his lifelong name to family and friends) Garfinkle was sent to P.S. 45 in the Bronx where he came to the attention of the school's principal, noted educator Angelo Patri. Garfield credits Patri with introducing him to theater and the possibility of an acting career.

Although it was taken about a decade later, chances are the school's appearance would not have changed too much so check out http://bronxboard.com/pgal.php?p=20 for a thumbnail image of (a photo of the White Castle hamburger place on Fordham Road at Lorillard Place in 1938 with) a portion of P.S. 45 visible on the right contributed by Charles A. Warren. Click on it for a larger image. Also, in an entry on the Bronx Board site, http://bronxboard.com/diary/diary.php?f=Streams%20of%20Neighborhood%20Memories, Gene Ret describes P.S. 45, Paul Hoffman Junior High School and the Belmont neighborhood. Hopefully some of Mr. Ret's good memories of the neighborhood were shared by John Garfield.

After high school and a brief flirtation with professional theater, John Garfield spent a year and some as a hobo, hitching rides by car and freight train across the country, an experience he shared with writer Dale Wasserman and countless other Americans during the early years of the Great Depression. Garfield's stories of life on the road eventually became part of the inspiration for Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels.

Eventually, Garfield returned to New York and found a home with the Theater Group until that part written for him - Joe Bonaparte in Clifford Odets' Golden Boy - went to Luther Adler instead. Discouraged, Garfield accepted an offer he'd received from the Warner Bros. Studio and moved to Hollywood. Broadway's loss was America's gain as millions got a chance to see Garfield on the silver screen and people like me got to see him on tv a couple of decades later, not to mention on video tapes, dvd's and youtube a few more decades late. In 1960 or thereabout I told my mother all about this great actor I'd just seen in a 1943 movie shown on tv - Destination Tokyo. She laughed and told me she never missed a John Garfield movie when they were released back when she was in school or working in Manhattan. My daughter's a John Garfield fan, too.

Fact-checking some of the info above, I found a website with a detailed biography, filmography, family photos and other nice features: http://www.themave.com/Garfield/index.htm

But who is the actress doing the improv?

Occasionally the reason a person reads a certain book can make for an interesting story and Lessons in Becoming Myself is one of those books for me. I tracked it down at the library hoping it might confirm a possible uncredited appearance by Ellen Burstyn in the Naked City episode "The Fault in Our Stars" which originally aired on Mar. 22, 1961.

There's a young actress who briefly appears doing an improvisation which she describes as "repeated words spoken by a man in a dying delirium." The scene takes place in a Greenwich Village club called Bizarre, in the audience are 3 guest stars - Roddy McDowall (Donnie Benton), Patricia Bosworth (Betty Harkness) and Alvin Epstein (Elliot Kesbeck.) Like many of the bit parts in Naked City, this young woman doing an improv that elicits great approval (by way of snapping one's finger, not clapping) is not identified.

Alas, Ellen Burstyn never mentions appearing in Naked City in her autobiography. It can't be because she's embarassed about the appearance; nor do I think she would have forgotten it. She is very candid about her life and career, telling readers more than some people might want to know about her experiences, aspirations, fears, and achievements.

Coincidentally, she mentions that Patricia Bosworth was among those auditioning for the role in Fair Game which went to Ms. Burtyn, marking her 1957 Broadway debut under the stage name Ellen McRae. By chance I happened to watch a 1961 episode of 77 Sunset Strip titled "The Navy Caper" in which Ellen McRae guest starred as Betty Benson, the Admiral's daughter. At first I thought I was watching Ms. Bosworth, the two young women looked so similar, down to hairstyles and clothing (classic, sleek American sportswear of the early 1960's) their characters wore. Somewhere I read that fans sometimes confuse Louise Fletcher and Ellen Burstyn but in the late 50's/early 60's, the confusion must have been between Patricia Bosworth and Ellen McRae.

Back to Lessons in Becoming Myself - the memoir is closer to "no-holds barred" expose than most. It's a must read if you're interested in learning about the metamorphosis of Edna Rae Gillooly of Detroit, Michigan into Ellen McRae, aspiring stage and tv actress, into major film star, Ellen Burstyn. It also describes a lifelong quest for self-knowledge that begins with the Roman Catholicism of her youth, continues through psychotherapy and early"New Age" healing practices and on to Sufiism.

For me, the mystery of the actress doing the improv continues -- maybe one day I'll have a chance to travel to New York or Boston to consult Patricia Bosworth's papers at NYPL or BU. Alternately, I coud go west and look at Stirling Silliphant's papers at UCLA, or to Madison to look at Howard Rodman's papers at WHS.

Steampunk - a (sub) genre I didn't know had a name

Wow -- this one's been gathering dust in my draft file for so long it's becoming a fading memory but for years I've been reading books by Moorcock, Chabon and Stephenson and very much enjoying the blend of Victoriana and sf . Then I ran across this book searching the library catalog, read it and found a name for these books:

Steampunk / Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, editors ; [Neal Stephenson ... [et al.]].
Publisher San Francisco, CA : Tachyon Publications, 2008.

Michael Chabon / Neal Stephenson / James P. Blaylock / Joe R. Lansdale / Mary Gentle / Ted Chiang / Michael Moorcock / Jay Lake / Molly Brown / Stepan Chapman / Ian R. MacLeod / Rachel Pollack / Paul Di Filippo / Rick Klaw / Jess Nevins / Bill Baker
http://www.tachyonpublications.com/book/Steampunk.html?Session_ID=new

Now I've been introduced to a batch of new authors and gained new insights into Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day which I really ought to reread. Of course, I don't have enough time to read new authors and books on subjects that interest me as it is so that's a wish that'll have to be deferred.

Kudos to the editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer for the fine selection and the history of steampunk, especially its 19th and early 20th century origins in adventure stories published in pulp magazines -- stories featuring steam-powered horses and giant mechanical men taking travellers out to the hinterlands to do great deeds.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

An Intriguing Read "Un-American" Hollywood

Took a bit of effot but I finally finished reading "Un-American" Hollywood : Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era. The reason for the unusual effort was that I borrowed the book from the library along with an armload of other items and neglected to renew it before another borrower put a hold on it so I had to return. It was nearly a month before I got to pick up where I left off.

In case readers are interested (or I need a memory assist), the following are the essays and authors contained in the book:
Are you now or have you ever been a Christian? the strange history of The robe as political allegory (Jeff Smith)
Un-American : Dmytryk, Rossellini, and Christ in concrete (Erica Sheen)
"A living part of the class struggle" : Diego Rivera's The flower carrier and the Hollywood left (Frank Krutnik)
A monarch for the millions : Jewish filmmakers, social commentary, and the postwar cycle of boxing films (Peter Stanfield)
The violent poetry of the times : the politics of history in Daniel Mainwaring and Joseph Losey's The lawless (Doug Dibbern)
Dark passages : jazz and civil liberty in the postwar crime film (Sean McCann)
Documentary realism and the postwar left (Will Straw)
Cloaked in compromise : Jules Dassin's "naked" city (Rebecca Prime)
The progressive producer in the studio system : Adrian Scott at RKO, 1943-1947 (Jennifer Langdon-Teclaw)
The house I live in : Albert Maltz and the fight against anti-Semitism (Art Simon)
Red Hollywood in transition : the case of Robert Rossen (Brian Neve )
Swashbuckling, sapphire, and salt : un-American contributions to TV costume adventure series in the 1950s (Steve Neale)
Hollywood, the new left, and FTA (Mark Shiel)
Red Hollywood (Thom Anderson)
Afterword (Thom Anderson)

If I had to recommend a single essay it would be Red Hollywood both for Thom Anderson's elegant writing and the sheer scope of the piece. A rather different article I enjoyed was Frank Krutnik's "A living part of the class struggle : Diego Rivera's The flower carrier and the Hollywood Left ". Who would have thought that an item of set decoration - a print of a famous painting - would link a group of films. Quite by coincidence, I saw one of these films on tv not too long ago and when I saw the first photo of The Flower Carrier on p. 57 I realized I'd seen it and In a Lonely Place is one of the films discussed.

There's a lot of information in this book as well as analysis and criticism. Steve Neale's research into the authorship of episodes of 4 British tv series which were either shown on US networks or syndicated here is amazing. One can only marvel at the amount of time he must have spent in the archives to compile the lists of credited names and the likely real authors.

Another interesting bit I learned -- one of my favorite actors from the mid 1960's, Robert Vaughn, earned a Ph.D. in communications from the University of Southern California, in 1970. His dissertation was published as a book Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting in 1972. From 1964 to 1968 hVaughn starred as "Napoleon Solo" in the television series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement), with British co-star David McCallum playing his fellow agent Illya Kuryakin. I continue to enjoy seeing both actors on tv.

Makes a person realize that the Blacklist Era wasn't all that long ago.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

What Do You Call Them?

For the last few days publib subscribers have been tossing around the always interesting question about what to call people who register for library cards, or frequent the facility to use the collections and databases. Are they clients, customers, patrons, users, or even as a recent study suggests, MEMBERS??? I was going to post this as a reply there but time got away from me, and my comments got overly lengthy for a listserv reply. So here goes:

Clients hire (sometimes after a negotiation) a professional or professional services firm to carry out a specific task for an agreed upon sum of money; the choices of whom to hire are generally limited. Customers purchase goods or services offered to all for a given price at a point in time; if people do not care for the selection that being offered or find a better price elsewhere, they go there . I cannot see how either term describes the relationship between a library and its public. Users isn't a bad term but it went out the window with the rise in the number of people abusing various substances. Library cardholders or registrants both seem awkward and a lot to keep typing out.

I, for one, have never used the expression joined a library nor do I recall ever hearing anyone else say it. Most people seem say "I have a library card" much as they say "I have an overnight parking permit." Perhaps becoming a member is a regional expression but having lived in New York City, suburban NJ, Denver, CO and in and around the city of Milwaukee I've experienced a pretty good geographic span. Somewhere I should have run across becoming a member of my local library but I haven't before the discussion on publib.

Libraries ask people to become members of their friends group but a membership in the library itself strikes me as competiting with your own friends group since getting a public library card or using library services is free of charge since you are directly or indirectly supporting the library through tax $$$. This doesn't strike me as a good idea.

I used to work for a museum that went from being County department to an NPO managed by a private Board of Directors in 1992. Immediately the nearly 50-year old Friends of the Museum group that had supported the publicly funded museum was dissolved. In place of FOMPM membership everyone became members of the museum. The FOMPM staff were given new titles - Director of Development and Member Services Coordinator (among others) . Perfectly sensible -- a separate Friends group in a private or quasi public institution is redundant, unless that's an additional category of membership.

Of course, more than a decade later, long-time members still refer to themselves as Friends of the Museum; maybe they hadn't adjusted, maybe friends was just a less pretentious word. After all member carries a connotation of a special relationship, often one that is open only to an elite few.

Considering museum members had problems getting around the newly named relationship, I doubt taxpayers and/or community residents generally perceive themselves as members of their libraries. A pair of clever publib subscribers came up with the term custpatronomers and maybe that'll will win the day, cheering all but the spelling challenged. Meantime, I'll stick with users and patrons, depending on the circumstances or context. After all libraries flourish through the patronage of their communities and they demonstrate their value to the community through use.

So I'm trying to figure out how the study came up with members. Were the respondents escapees from a professional association meeting who got confused? Did the researcher time-travel back to the 1st half of the 19th century to conduct the study? Or visit another English-speaking country that lacks our splendid public library heritage? Or mix up coefficients in the statistical analysis of the responses?

Saturday, June 13, 2009

SomeThoughts about the Grand Concourse

The NY Times of Friday, June 5, 2009 has an article about an intriguing new museum - a Museum of Trees - planned for the Bronx's famed Grand Concourse.

Here's a link to the article which includes a multimedia presentation:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/nyregion/07about.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Grand%20Concourse%20Museum%20of%20Trees&st=cseA Museum of Trees That Speak of History

Jim Dwyer's opening paragraph reads:
The notion that the Grand Concourse could be turned into a long boulevard of talking trees — a tree museum, with trees connecting to oral guides of Bronx history — came to Katie Holten one day when she was traipsing along the boulevard near the Cross Bronx Expressway.

I hope people read the entire article but for those pressed for time, the Times has included a pdf of the brochure/prospectus:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/TreeMuseumInfo.pdf

I've been fascinated by the Concourse for as long as I can remember. My college roommate and I bonded in part because her Russian immigrant grandparents and my Irish immigrant grandparents lived not far from each other on either side of the Concourse; hers to east, mine to the west. Years before college, I'd walked along the Concourse with my parents or my grandparents to shop or visit friends and relatives who lived there. During Easter Week vacations in the City, my grandfather and I regularly visited Catholic churches along the Concourse to see how they'd decorated their altars for Easter (I think there was some religious point to this but I forget what it was. For me the appeal was each spectacular display of flowers and altar finery.) I don't think there were too many neighborhoods in the NYC where Pop (a motorman for the IRT and IND lines) couldn't find a favorite saloon or luncheonette, so the church and flower tours included sampling Cokes with maraschino cherries and ham sandwiches along the way.

Lately, I've been watching a classic television show - Naked City - and it's hard to miss how often scenes were filmed along the Concourse and near the Bronx County Courthouse. The show's fictional 65th precinct was located in the theatre district of Midtown Manhattan but the Naked City production headquarters were at the Biograph Studios, (aka Gold Medal Studios) located about a mile east of the Grand Concourse at 807 E. 175th St. It was convenient to shoot in the area and the wide boulevard and tall (but not skyscraper-tall) buildings provided a very attractive cityscape that filmed well in all sorts of weather and at different times of the day.

Wikipedia has a succinct history of the studio, at one time the largest production facility outside the Los Angeles area:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biograph_Studios

For more on the history of the Grand Concourse and pictures of its wonderful architecture, take a look at these two articles from Forgotten New York:
http://www.forgotten-ny.com/STREET%20SCENES/Grand%20Concourse/concourse.html
http://www.forgotten-ny.com/STREET%20SCENES/concourse2/concourse.html

Friday, June 12, 2009

Musings on the Dresden Files in print and on tv

Turn Coat is the latest full-length novel in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series. I just finished reading it a couple of days ago and, once again, I'm impressed. When I started reading the series back in January, it took a bit of effort to read the first few books. I kept going because of an email message on A&A List pointing out that a later novel included an unusual archives (we like to keep track of fictional archives and archivists on the list.)

At that point, I needed the lure of this archives to keep me going while waiting for the arrival of the library dvd of the SciFi Network's Dresden Files. And, I'd found out about the program only because NBC cancelled Lipstick Jungle and I wanted to see more work by Paul Blackthorne, the actor who played Shane Healy , ne'er-do-well husband of movie mogul Wendy Healy (Brooke Shields).

To make a long story short, I'd managed to read most of the books by the time the library finally reached my name. By then I had pictures in my head of what Harry Dresden looked liked, not to mention Murphy, Mister and Mouse, Bob, Harry's office, his apartment, and his favorite bar. I've the added advantage of having visited many of the actual Chicago locations Jim Butcher works into his books so I know what they look like. Needless to say, the tv series disappointed. Paul Blackthorne's a good actor but he was a different Harry. Toronto is a lovely city but it is definitely not Chicago; the lamp posts and street signs are different to begin with. Was a single adversary faced down in a major cultural attraction? And why do a show about a wizard who fights with (or cooperates with) pixies, fairies, vampires, werewolves, etc. without a special effects budget to show the same?

Back to the books, though -- as a longtime reader of mystery and science fiction book series, I know it's very tough to keep developing the characters and inventing fresh plots while still working within the constraints of the series. To borrow a line - -the entries in the Dresden Files just keep getting better all the time. So, thanks to Christine for telling me about Ivy the Archives and thanks to NBC for cancelling another tv program, but most of all, thanks to Jim Butcher for inventing and sharing Harry Dresden and his world.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

The Impossible Musical by Dale Wasserman

This afternoon I caught an episode of Gunsmoke called "Stark" with Richard Kiley as guest star. Seeing Mr. Kiley reminded me that I'd started to write something about a book that discusses his most famous role . Thinking about it, I should have been reminded about the by the Tony Awards this past Sunday but somehow it took seeing Kiley in a most un-Cervantes role to link the synapses.


The Impossible Musical is first and foremost, the biography of a play, Man of La Mancha. It performs double-duty as the Rhinelander, Wisconsin-born Dale Wasserman's memoir of his long and storied career as a playwright and screenwriter.


On November 9, 1959 a teleplay written by Wasserman aired live on CBS' DuPont Show of the Month.
Called I, Don Quixote, the production was widely acclaimed by critics and audience alike and starred Lee J. Cobb, Eli Wallach and Colleen Dewhurst. So many of the productions of the Golden Age of Television exist only as entries in encyclopedias and history and such a fate might have been I, Don Quixote's except that associates convinced Wasserman to turn the television play into a musical. The 1965 production ran for 2,328 performances and won five Tony Awards.


I saw Man of La Mancha when I was in college. It would have been at
the Martin Beck Theatre, the Eden Theatre or the Mark Hellinger Theatre depending on the year. All I'm sure of is that it was not the ANTA Washington Square Theatre, the original home of the production. Since I’ve always been a fan of Northern Exposure, I was delighted to learn from reading the book that the marvelous John Cullum (Holling Vincoeur) was a member of the original cast and filled in on occasion for Richard Kiley in the title role.


Wasserman regales his readers with plenty of Broadway lore, theater stories, Hollywood stories, and the trials and tribulations of a copyright holder dealing with foreign productions of his work. As outspoken in print as he apparently was in person, he settles a few old scores,and takes pains to explain the distinction between Broadway and Off-Broadway play. It is not the theater’s physical location but the type of contract involved. Lavishly illustrated with personal photographs and photos from various productions of Man of La Mancha, The Impossible Musical includes the teleplay I, Don Quixote.






Wednesday, June 10, 2009

More on Seals

This is a followup of sorts to a comment I made in a post on Archives & Archivists List a few days ago. This afternoon I put the tv on while I was eating lunch and caught part of a Season 1 (1951) episode of I Love Lucy -- the episode where Lucy thinks Ricky is trying to murder her. The following is fron a phone conversation between Ricky and his agent, Jerry, who is trying to find a new variety act to include in Ricky's nightclub show.

Jerry: Gotta get over to Jersey to see a talking seal.
Ricky: Does the seal act?
Jerry: Nah, he's the agent, but he's got some great acts.

Darn, if I'd seen this sooner, I'd have called us talking seals, instead of performing seals!

The Natural Order of Things

Love the title, love the book. Sadly, I don't remember who pointed me in the direction of the author, Antonio Lobo Antunes, but thank you. If it were New Year's Day, my resolution would be to read everything the author has written that's been translated into English. Sadly I can't read Portuguese, I'm not even sure how to pronounce the place names or character names so I fall back on my high school Spanish and Latin. Kudos to translator Richard Zenith for his graceful rendering because this book reads as though the author wrote it in English. I think there's an award for translations of novels -- if so I'd nominate this book.

Antonio Lobo Antunes is a lifelong native of Lisbon; he's a psychiatrist which possibly explains The Natural Order of Things' exploration of memory, points of view and mental illness. The River Tagus, the Atlantic Ocean, the weather, the topography of the city, the residents - be they from families that have lived in Lisbon for generations or newcomers from the countryside or North Africa - and, the changes time has wrought in the city and its environs shape this book.

Determining who is speaking and to whom the speaker addresses his or her comments is part of the enjoyment of the book. My favorite books describe their locales - whether real or imaginary - in a sensate fashion; if you also enjoy envisioning cityscapes and landscapes, hearing the sounds and smelling they smells, The Natural Order of Things is well worth the time you'll want to spend reading it.