The Cat in the Hat

The Cat in the Hat, by Dr. Seuss (Random House, 1957), which we read to our two-year-old almost every day, is a delight.
1. A wonderful fantasy:  two children are alone on a "cold, cold, wet day" and the Cat in the Hat drops by to do some wonderful, impossible tricks and even cleans up before he leaves and mother comes home. 
2. Psychological complexity.  The Cat obviously represents the id, while the superego is played, in the absence of the mother, by the fish (a natural antagonist of the Cat), who says, "He should not be here when your mother is out."  The Cat brings two companions in anarchy, Thing Two and Thing One, who even fly kites in the house.
3. Delightful characters.  The Cat is obviously in the great American tradition of the charming con man while the fish plays, quite charmingly, the guardian of order.  Sally and her brother stand by, both of them enjoying the chaos until their mother is on her way home, at which time they have to capture Thing One and Thing Two and send the Cat on his way, though he quickly comes back to clean everything up.
4. Complex relationship between text and illustrations. The pictures and the words are in a constantly fluctuating relationship, often combined on the same page, and there is a constant sense of movement conveyed by the way the protagonists are viewed.  There are even somewhat subtle visual touches that indicate this is a fantasy of the children, e.g., Sally's hair ribbon and the Cat's bowtie are a visual match.
When the mother returns things are just as she left them, the children having spent the day at home sharing a fantasy of anarchy.  The book itself is an impressive and playful poem that exists on multiple levels, probably one of the reasons some children never get tired of it.  Even for Dr. Seuss it is unusual in its complex narrative and endlessly playful illustrations.

Jewels

For all of you who have been asking about where the ballet in this blog is I want to mention Jewels, Balanchine's ballet that I saw yesterday at the New York City Ballet (I will also have more to say about baseball when the season starts).

Jewels was originally done for the NYC Ballet in 1967 and is considered the only full-length abstract ballet (that means no plot!).  This is enough to keep many people away but also to attract those of us who love Balanchine's ability to tell a story in a non-literal way.  All three parts indeed have "stories" of a sort, but stories that are subtle and implied and complex.  Diamonds and Rubies are the most popular of the three ballets because they are the most theatrical and the most similar to other Balanchine works.  But Emeralds is the only Balanchine done to Faure music, except the late small-scale Ballade done for Merrill Ashley.  Diamonds is structured like other Tschikovsky/Balanchine ballets, with quite a rousing climax, and Rubies is similar in structure to other Stravinsky ballets, especially Danses Concertantes, with elements of Stravinsky Violin Concerto.  But Emeralds is almost all andante, slow and even meditative.  It seems to take place in a forest glade, with hunters and perhaps fairies and there is an unusual emphasis on port-de-bras; the most beautiful and moving part is the end, a coda (added in 1977) where the four women leave the three men along on the stage, as they slowly kneel and raise their arms.

Baseball Hall of Fame and the Academy Awards.

Now that Glavine, Maddux and Thomas have been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame it is time to ask the question:  what is the point of this particular institution?  It seems to me that its main value is as a modern Valhalla or Pantheon, but is it good to worship baseball players as gods and saints and go to visit their artifacts --gloves, bats, etc.-- as though they were relics of saints or pieces of the true cross?  When I was a kid baseball players were indeed gods and the baseball establishment protected them as such (remember the uproar when Jim Bouton in Ball Four --still one of the best books about baseball --described Mickey Mantle's "beaver-shooting?") but I think it's okay to find out that baseball players, with their extraordinary skills, are still human beings.  The current controversy over who should be in the Hall of Fame and who should be excluded shows the rampant hypocrisy and conflict-of-interest that goes into the whole process.  The rules say that players should be selected on the basis of their "record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character and contributions to the team(s) on which they played."  Now that we know more about drug use, etc. and are going to not elect people because of that, don't we also have to remove some people who are already in there? Also, as Robert Lipsyte as written; "Why are sportswriters giving out awards to people they cover as subjects on behalf of institutions they cover?"

Why do people take the Academy Awards seriously?  Do they have any idea who the 6000 voters are, voting for people and studios to whom they owe their jobs?  There certainly are some good films that have won Academy Awards --Casablanca, Going My Way, How Green Was My Valley--but the awards have gone more often than not to heavily-promoted, bloated epics such as Gone with The Wind.  Take 1956 as a random example:  this was a year that produced such great films as Ford's The Searchers, Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life, Boetticher's Seven Men From Now, Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, et al. and the Oscar goes to: Around the World in 80 Days! At least the Academy has something of a veteran's committee, giving honorary Oscars to those who never won --Chaplin, Hitchcock, Ennio Morricone, etc.

Young Mr. Lincoln

With John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln scheduled for Turner Classic Movies I just wanted to recommend the 1970 Cahiers du Cinema article on the film, a collective text by the editors:
http--isites.harvard.edu-fs-docs-icb.topic235120.files-CdCLincoln.pdf and other sites. 

I suggest that if you have an aversion to the jargon of academic writing you skip part 1 and go directly to part 2, where the analysis begins.  This piece is a complete analysis of the film and its social and political context, emphasizing not only Ford's elegant direction but the role the studio, the producers and others played in the film.  But it also analyzes how we see the film as we watch it, constructing our changing views within the classical narrative. When I was an art history student I shared this article with some of my fellow students and they were amazed how the techniques of close reading could be applied to a film just as effectively as they could be applied to a painting. A great film, like any great work of art, can be enjoyed at a number of different levels.  What particularly impresses me about Young Mr. Lincoln is how effectively Ford can combine romance, comedy, melodrama, suspense and mythology, something he does in all his best films.   

Johnny Carson

I recently read Johnny Carson by his former lawyer, Henry Bushkin (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).  I usually read biographies of people I admire, in the doomed hope that I can learn how people, with all their problems and difficulties, managed to accomplish so much.  In this case I hoped to find out what made Johnny Carson so popular, something that to me was always mysterious.  Carson could not sing, dance or act, as far as one knows and, like many comedians, he was unhappy, nasty and insecure, according to Bushkin.  Apparently he did have the ability to tell a joke, though he had writers to write the jokes and most of them were not so funny.  But also he went out of his way not to offend anyone:  asked why he did not tell political jokes he responded that he did not want to alienate any portion of his audience, a condescending but probably correct perception for much of the audience. In other words, he always played it safe and took no risks and I think that is the reason why much of his audience returned to him night after night and The Tonight Show had plenty of advertisers.  Carson's predecessors, Steve Allen and Jack Paar, often took risks and enjoyed surprising the audience:  Allen was one of the first to have Elvis Presley on his show and Paar once walked out when the network censored one of his jokes. Carson's guests also tended to be bland and inoffensive and if they weren't they were not invited back.  I was in the audience for his show once in California and for the warm up Doc Severinsen came out and humped the piano while Ed McMahon flattered the audience by saying "I can tell this is a drinking crowd!" 

TCM in January

Not a lot to recommend on Turner this month, though I would like to stress that one should always investigate movies with which one is unfamiliar.  One of the reasons we know as much about movies now as we do is because Henri Langlois, when he ran the French Cinematheque. was always non-judgemental:  the scorned movies of yesterday are sometimes the masterpieces of today.

Ford. Hitchcock, Lang and Borzage are well-represented this month; I particularly recommend Borzage's wonderfully romantic History is Made at Night.  I also like Robert Aldrich's Autumn Leaves (with its lovely theme song sung by Nat KingCole) and Otto Preminger's Skidoo (promised this time in wide-screen), bizarre and quirky, with delightful credits, sung at the end by Nilsson.

Orson Welles and Josef von Sternberg

I just finished reading John Baxter's Von Sternberg (The University Press of Kentucky, 2010) and My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles (Metropolitan Books,2013), two stories about Hollywood mavericks.  Josef von Sternberg always insisted on doing things his own way and the results include many beautiful movies, from the silent The Last Command to the sound films with Marlene Dietrich.  But when von Sternberg no longer had Dietrich as a star he fell on hard times and had trouble finding financing for his films. And we all know the story of Welles, doing endless "roasts" and commercials in order to finance his films, many of which remained unfinished at his death.  Baxter's book is an intelligent survey of von Sternberg's career, while in the Jaglom book Welles comes across as a pompous blowhard, always looking for money for movies that never quite comes through.  My suggestion is just to see their movies, many of them glorious.  I am fortunate enough to have seen Welles's Chimes at Midnight (1965) and von Sternberg's Anathan (1952), movies both personal and beautiful, that the directors were able to make at the end of their careers and that sum up their personal visions.