"The contradictions of a gay man falling in genuine love with a woman — while retaining his attraction to men — are captured..."

"... in a lovely passage using Bernstein’s score for the ballet 'Fancy Free' (which would morph into the Broadway musical 'On the Town'), turning the dance into a metaphorical pas de deux. (Or is it trois?).... Lenny is the free-spirited, wildly charismatic star of his and Felicia’s lives, but it’s Felicia who grounds him.... When tensions in their relationship reach their apotheosis, [Bradley] Cooper stages the showdown in their bedroom at the Dakota apartment building while the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade tootles by outside. Just as Felicia is hurling the most hurtful, damaging things she can say — warning her husband that if he isn’t careful, he’ll end up 'a lonely old queen' — a giant inflatable Snoopy floats by the window, a sad, whimsically surreal rebuke."

Writes Ann Hornaday in "Bravo, Bradley Cooper: ‘Maestro’ is a grand, messy symphony of moments/The director and star of the Leonard Bernstein biopic tells the conductor’s story, and that of his wife (Carey Mulligan), with electric, sometimes scattershot verve" (WaPo).

Okay. I'm all for such tootling. But is there any of "Radical Chic" in this new movie? (Read Tom Wolfe's great essay here, where it belongs, at New York Magazine.)

Who will play Tony in Steven Spielberg's "West Side Story"?

Ansel Elgort!

There will really be a new movie of "West Side Story"?

Oscar-nominated screenwriter and Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner has written the adaptation of the musical originally penned by Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim with music by Leonard Bernstein. Spielberg has spent the better part of the year looking for stars for his movie, with actors needing to be able to sing, dance, and, of course, act their hearts out for the story that transposes Romeo and Juliet into a 1950s New York setting featuring white and Puerto Rican gangs....

I'll give this my "race and pop culture" tag.  A white gang against a Puerto Rican gang. Let's hope the Tony Kushner rewrite finds a new way of living, a way of forgiving...

Google celebrates the 100th birthday of Leonard Bernstein.

I'm sure there are many articles out there, but I'll just highlight "Life With Leonard Bernstein/The composer's daughter talks frankly about her new memoir" (NPR)(which kind of goes along with our discussion yesterday of the new memoir by Steve Jobs's daughter):

You talk about how it was hard not to buy into the "Bernstein family mythos." But you also say, "I was, above all, obnoxious like my father." How was your father obnoxious?

He was exuberant, and he just sort of took over in spite of himself; he couldn't help himself. Plus, he was a know-it-all and he had answers for everything, and liked talking at great length and was bossy. So he was a big handful, and I think I wound up inheriting a few of those qualities.

Maybe this is a good time to talk about this made-up word — "elf's thread" — that slips through the book, almost like a curse.

My father's great anagram of "self-hatred," a brilliant one. Self-loathing is a feeling that so many of us have a lot of the time, and each person on this planet has their own little recipe for it, I'm sure. But my father suffered from it tremendously. He struggled with elf's thread, as all artists do.

My personal recipe was that I insisted on trying to be a musician; that just made me feel disgusted with myself. It's really the phenomenon of just having the sinking feeling that you're making a complete ass of yourself, and that was a feeling that would come over me repeatedly and it's what has subsided as I got older. Every now and then I can still have that stupid idiot, elf's thread feeling....

ADDED: I made a "Leonard Bernstein" tag and applied it retrospectively to the archive. There were 5 old posts, and 3 of them involved the great Tom Wolfe article, "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s." It begins with a Leonard Bernstein birthday, his 48th:

At 2 or 3 or 4 a.m., somewhere along in there, on August 25, 1966, his 48th birthday, in fact, Leonard Bernstein woke up in the dark in a state of wild alarm. That had happened before. It was one of the forms his insomnia took. So he did the usual. He got up and walked around a bit. He felt groggy. Suddenly he had a vision, an inspiration. He could see himself, Leonard Bernstein, the egregio maestro, walking out on stage in white tie and tails in front of a full orchestra. On one side of the conductor’s podium is a piano. On the other is a chair with a guitar leaning against it. He sits in the chair and picks up the guitar. A guitar! One of those half-witted instruments, like the accordion, that are made for the Learn-To-Play-in-Eight-Days E-Z-Diagram 110-IQ 14-year-olds of Levittown! But there’s a reason. He has an anti-war message to deliver to this great starched white-throated audience in the symphony hall. He announces to them: “I love.” Just that. The effect is mortifying. All at once a Negro rises up from out of the curve of the grand piano and starts saying things like, “The audience is curiously embarrassed.” Lenny tries to start again, plays some quick numbers on the piano, says, “I love. Amo, ergo sum.” The Negro rises again and says, “The audience thinks he ought to get up and walk out. The audience thinks, ‘I am ashamed even to nudge my neighbor.’ ” Finally, Lenny gets off a heartfelt anti-war speech and exits....

"Adolf Hitler adored the Ninth Symphony. Musicians waiting for their deaths in Nazi concentration camps were ordered to play it..."

"... metaphorically twisting its closing call to universal brotherhood and joy into a terrifying, sneering parody of all that strives for light in a human soul. More than four decades later, Leonard Bernstein conducted several performances to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, substituting the word 'freedom' for 'joy' in Friedrich Schiller’s 1785 poem to which Beethoven’s movement was set. And Emmanuel Macron chose this music as the backdrop for his victory speech after winning the French presidential election last year. Western classical music usually thinks of itself as being apolitical. But the Ninth is political. Beethoven saw it as political when he wrote it in the early 1820s. And his fellow Germans, looking for a sense of identity, embraced it with fervour. Beethoven’s Ninth became the musical flag of Germanness at a time when nationalism was a growing force in all of Europe. It also became a Romantic monument to the artist (Beethoven, in this case) as a special creature worthy of special treatment...."

From "'Ode to Joy' has an odious history. Let’s give Beethoven’s most overplayed symphony a rest" by John Terauds in The Star (where it is billed as "the first instalment of The Heretic, a series in which our writers express a wildly unpopular opinion"). I got to that article via a tweet from Terry Teachout, who said, "How utterly tired I am of such art-hating philistinism.."

"The New Yorker was turning 40, occasioning a certain amount of 'greatest magazine that ever was' praise. "

"Despite that, and despite the presence of a few of those New Journalism proto-pioneers, it was going through what was arguably one of the duller stretches in its history. [Tom] Wolfe decided to try... putting into print what most journalists would say only at the bar after hours. The manuscript he produced was so long that it had to run in two parts. 'Tiny Mummies! The True Story of The Ruler of 43d Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!' was the first half, published on April 11, 1965, and it was vicious, hilarious, punishing, gleeful. Its basic stance was, as Wolfe himself said, to paint a portrait of 'a room full of very proper people who had gone to sleep standing up, talking to themselves.' Yes, it was a little bit mean. It was also deadly accurate, and, probably inevitably, became the most-talked-about story in newsrooms across the city.... And if there was a story that coalesced it all, it was Wolfe’s “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” published in June 1970, about a fundraiser at Leonard Bernstein’s apartment for the Black Panthers.... It’ll be taught as long as there are journalism schools. As will 'The Me Decade,' the story that named the 1970s. It’s an extremely unusual piece of magazine writing, going off into thickets about the sociology of Max Weber, but it’s under control all the way, and you will not find a better summary of the baby-boomer solipsism that (one could argue, and Wolfe does indeed suggest) was beginning to eat America alive...."

From "Tom Wolfe, New York and New Journalism Legend, Dies at 88," which I'm reading this morning because it's in New York Magazine, which damned well better have a great article on the occasion for Tom Wolfe's death.

And lets follow those 2 internal links...

From "Radical Chic":

From the beginning it was pointless to argue about the sincerity of Radical Chic. Unquestionably the basic impulse, “red diaper” or otherwise, was sincere. But, as in most human endeavors focused upon an ideal, there seemed to be some double-track thinking going on. On the first track—well, one does have a sincere concern for the poor and the underprivileged and an honest outrage against discrimination. One’s heart does cry out—quite spontaneously!—upon hearing how the police have dealt with the Panthers, dragging an epileptic like Lee Berry out of his hospital bed and throwing him into the Tombs. When one thinks of Mitchell and Agnew and Nixon and all of their Captain Beef-heart Maggie & Jiggs New York Athletic Club troglodyte crypto-Horst Wessel Irish Oyster Bar Construction Worker followers, then one understands why poor blacks like the Panthers might feel driven to drastic solutions, and—well, anyway, one truly feels for them. One really does. On the other hand—on the second track in one’s mind, that is—one also has a sincere concern for maintaining a proper East Side lifestyle in New York Society. And this concern is just as sincere as the first, and just as deep. It really is. It really does become part of one’s psyche. For example, one must have a weekend place, in the country or by the shore, all year round preferably, but certainly from the middle of May to the middle of September. It is hard to get across to outsiders an understanding of how absolute such apparently trivial needs are. One feels them in his solar plexus. When one thinks of being trapped in New York Saturday after Saturday in July or August, doomed to be a part of those fantastically dowdy herds roaming past Bonwit’s and Tiffany’s at dead noon in the sandstone sun-broil, 92 degrees, daddies from Long Island in balloon-seat Bermuda shorts bought at the Times Square Store in Oceanside and fat mommies with white belled pants stretching over their lower bellies and crinkling up in the crotch like some kind of Dacron-polyester labia—well, anyway, then one truly feels the need to obey at least the minimal rules of New York Society. One really does.

From "The Me Decade":

5 videos I watched, none of which seem capable of supporting a free-standing blog post.

1. On Facebook, somebody got me watching this parody video of Hillary Clinton singing "I Will Survive." Amusing enough that I looked up the YouTube page of Maximum Suffrage. Lots of stuff there, as yet unwatched by me.

2. I didn't know "Convos with my..." got a second child (like the first, amusingly played by an adult). I watched "Asking Nicely."

3. Charles Grodin, in 1995, as a talk show host, riffs for 6 minutes surrealistically introducing Jerry Lewis. (I started watching Jerry Lewis interview videos on YouTube a while back, for reasons I don't remember, and YouTube keeps suggesting more Jerry Lewis videos, and this is never going to end, because I keep watching them, and I'm not going to stop, because they are all so weird, including some where Lewis is the host, like here, interviewing Cassius Clay.)

4. The Grateful Dead in a live performance of "It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train To Cry." I got there as a result of a conversation that was mostly about "Ballad of Thin Man," prompted by reading this old 1965 interview in which Nora Ephron tried to get him to identify Mr. Jones and Dylan said: "He's actually a person. Like I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, 'That's Mr. Jones.' Then I asked this cat, 'Doesn't he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?' And he told me, 'He puts his nose on the ground.' It's all there, it's a true story." Meade seemed to believe that Mr. Jones was Leonard Bernstein, but "That Party at Lenny’s" that Tom Wolfe described in "Radical Chic" took place in 1966. The word "camel" does appear in that greatest-of-all-time article, in this sentence: "Forty years ago firms flogging things like Hardman pianos, Ponds cold cream, Simmons metal beds and Camel cigarettes found that matrons in the clans Harriman, Longworth, Belmont, Fish, Lowell, Iselin and Carnegie were only too glad to switch to their products and be photographed with them in their homes, mainly for the sheer social glory of the publicity."

5. "Yeah, I'd like to see a video of a young person singing 'Eve of Destruction,'" I said after commenting in yesterday's post about the death of P.F. Sloan, who wrote the lyrics. The hit single was by Barry McGuire, who was 30ish, and I watched the video of a TV performance I remembered from 1965. I wrote: "Watching it again, I'm struck by the inappropriateness of McGuire's age. The lyrics are ridiculous coming from an adult. They're a perfect expression of teenage confusion about the world. Coming from an adult, it's mental or stupid." I found this, by Bishop Allen. It becomes noticeably "Eve of Destruction" at 3:44, but only the chorus is used, in the changed form: "And I tell you over and over and over again, my friend/That I'm down with you, even on the eve of destruction." I'd like to see a video of a teenager singing the original lyrics earnestly and sincerely.

"When vague desire is the fire in the eyes of chicks whose sickness is the games they play..."

"And when the morning of the warning's passed, the gassed and flaccid kids are flung across the stars."

Along Comes Mary... and then nothing more comes along.

“He used to tell me the music got better the longer he stayed awake,” said Thomas Bernath, a bass player who occasionally rehearsed with Mr. Almer and who is now cataloguing hundreds of tapes found in his apartment. “He didn’t feel like playing until he had been awake for two or three days.”

Mr. Almer often read books on science, and he began attending local meetings of Mensa — the high-IQ organization — in 1977. Several people said he had occasional long-term girlfriends, but he never married.

“He wasn’t shy at all,” Bernath said. “He was, unbelievably, a happy guy. There was never any complaining or gnashing of teeth about money. He was so sensitive — not in the way of having his feelings hurt. But I almost felt he could read my mind. I’ve never been around anybody who was that perceptive.”

Although he briefly drove a taxi and had a job building computer circuit boards, Mr. Almer lived almost entirely on intermittent royalty checks. 

Tandyn Almer died last month at the age of 70. Via Metafilter which also links here, where there are many interesting video clips related to Almer and "Along Comes Mary" and some nice detail about Leonard Bernstein's fascination with the song. ("Along Comes Mary, in the ancient and honorable Dorian mode — the same mode we just heard in Debussy and in the plain-chant. Now who’d have thunk it?")

(You can pre-order "Along Comes Tandyn.")

AND: You can buy a box set of Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts" — 9 DVDs, 1500 minutes, only $84. (This seems to be 25 of the 53 shows he did for TV.)

"'We call them pigs, and rightly so,' says Don Cox, 'because they have the way of making the victim look like the criminal, and the criminal look like the victim."

Wrote Tom Wolfe in "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's" (1970):

"So every Panther must be ready to defend himself. That was handed down by our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton: Everybody who does not have the means to defend himself in his home, or if he does have the means and he does not defend himself—we expel that man... see... As our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton, says, ‘Any unarmed people are slaves, or are slaves in the real meaning of the word’ . . . We recognize that this country is the most oppressive country in the world, maybe in the history of the world. The pigs have the weapons and they are ready to use them on the people, and we recognize this as being very bad. They are ready to commit genocide against those who stand up against them, and we recognize this as being very bad...."

Today's NYT has his obituary:

Donald L. Cox, who was at the center of black radical politics as a member of the Black Panther Party high command and who earned a moment of celebrity in 1970 when he spoke at the Leonard Bernstein fund-raising party in Manhattan made notorious by the writer Tom Wolfe, died on Feb. 19 at his home in Camps-sur-l’Agly, France. He was 74.