"It would be nice if the wall-to-wall marathon showings of A Christmas Story on TBS and TNT led to a rediscovery of Jean Shepherd's other work..."

"... and even to a revival of the radio arts, but given that people have so many other things to occupy themselves nowadays, that it's unlikely." 

Said Lurker21, in the comments to the Christmas Café.

I've never seen "A Christmas Story," though I am one of Jean Shepherd's biggest fans. For years, in the 1960s, I used to get in bed in time to hear the "Call to Post" — which, today, sounds like something about blogging — on my radio tuned to WOR. And then...

 

Listening to those Jean Shepherd radio shows in the dark, night after night, was the pop culture highlight of lifetime. Of course, I heard him read "A Christmas Story" ever year. That was a tradition. But better than that was any random show on whatever he decided to talk about that night — another story of his childhood (back in Indiana) or some odd trail of musings.

From Wikipedia: 

Shepherd's oral narrative style was a precursor to that used by Spalding Gray and Garrison Keillor. Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media wrote that Shepherd "regards radio as a new medium for a new kind of novel that he writes nightly." In the Seinfeld season-six DVD set, commenting on the episode titled "The Gymnast", Jerry Seinfeld said, "He really formed my entire comedic sensibility—I learned how to do comedy from Jean Shepherd."... 

Shepherd was an influence on Bill Griffith's Zippy comic strip, as Griffith noted in his strip for January 9, 2000. Griffith explained, "The inspiration—just plucking random memories from my childhood, as I'm wont to do in my Sunday strip (also a way to expand beyond Zippy)—and Shep was a big part of them." 

In an interview with New York magazine, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen says that the eponymous figure from his solo album The Nightfly was based on Jean Shepherd. 

Though he primarily spent his radio career playing music, New York Top-40 DJ Dan Ingram has acknowledged Shepherd's style as an influence. An article he wrote for the March–April 1957 issue of MAD, "The Night People vs Creeping Meatballism", described the differences between what he considered to be "day people" (conformists) and "night people" (nonconformists).

A few days ago, in conversation on Facebook, I reconsidered my lifelong policy of averting my eyes from the film version of "A Christmas Story." Just to present my own comments: 

I've never seen "A Christmas Story" because I am too devoted to Jean Shepherd and the original story as told over the radio....

I know [you hear Shepherd's voice-over narration in the film], but I don't want to see the ideal replaced by a literal acting-out of the story by human actors. The adult's voice creates the kid feeling. I don't want to see a real boy acting out the emotions for the camera. It's radio, the ultimate in radio, and not film...

I think I need to change my position. "A Christmas Story" is a deviation from Shepherd's usual show, because he was reading a story — not riffing in real time — that had been published in a book and a magazine (Playboy). So it wasn't the pure radio ideal that I'm so staunch about. It is not one of his stories about his own youth, because he says before reading the story that the boy is *not* him. 

So did I finally watch the movie? No. Not yet, anyway. But I was motivated to listen to a random old show — something about midwestern drug stores. Nothing to do with Christmas, but I was listening on Christmas. 

I don't think of Shepherd as Christmas-y, and it annoys me a bit that so many people do. The radio show should be much more important that that one film version of a story he used to read on the radio. Should be, and perhaps is, as its influence is deeply woven into many things we actively enjoy today. It's baked into this blog.

Factoid: "Shepherd's friend Shel Silverstein likely wrote the Johnny Cash song 'A Boy Named Sue' because of him...."

Here's the podcast where I found my random old show yesterday. Here's a webpage with a lot of the old shows.

The Grammys comedy sketch about trying out as the audiobook reader of "Fire and Fury" (and ending with Hillary Clinton).

"Spoken Word" is a category in the Grammy Awards, and it seems to be almost entirely the audiobook version of published, printed books. I love audiobooks, but I wouldn't call them "spoken word" performances. They keep giving the award to Presidents — Jimmy Carter (more than once! including 2 years ago for "A Full Life: Reflections at 90"), Bill Clinton (beating out David Sedaris!). They gave it to Hillary Clinton in 1997 for "It Takes a Village" (come on! who wants to listen to Hillary Clinton read her book).

My idea of a "spoken word" performance would be something more like what Spalding Gray used to do. Something like this, which he could take on tour and perform on stage, and you'd actually go see in a concert hall. I've done that. I've seen Henry Rollins give a spoken word concert. He once won a Grammy in the spoken word category, but it wasn't for a live, memorized performance like what I saw here in Madison years ago. It was a reading of his book "Get in the Van." And speaking — in written word — of Henry Rollins, I loved his performance on "Portlandia" as a member of the old punk rock band Riot Spray:



But back to last night's Grammys. I can't stand the Grammys, though I did DVR the show and attempt (unsuccessfully) to watch a few things, but I did watch that "Fire and Fury" sketch (just now, on YouTube). It must be hard for the Grammys people to figure out how to do politics, because they are playing to a general audience, and the people of the United States did elect Donald Trump. They can't act like they're talking within a group that all agree they hate Donald Trump. And yet those who like Donald Trump may like him in part because he can take all the heat you want to give him, his whole life has been heat, he likes heat, in a certain way. He wins even when he's attacked, as a certain subgroup of Trump fans understand.

In last night's sketch, we saw Cardi B, John Legend, DJ Khaled, Cher, and Snoop Dogg along with Hillary Clinton, and they were comical in different ways, some of which could be viewed as skeptical of the book or even admiring of Trump. Cardi B stops and says "Why am I even reading this shit? I can't believe this!" DJ Khaled seemed to love embodying Trump to proclaim, "If my shirt is on the floor, it's because I want it on the floor."

And a joke is made at Hillary's expense, with James Corden assuring her that her spoken-word Grammy is "in the bag." She has to say "The Grammy's the bag?" in an excited hopeful voice to set up the comedian James Cordon's line "in the bag," which is said in a way intended to remind us of how Hillary was (it seems) duped by pollsters and advisers assuring her that she'd already won the election.

ADDED: That "Portlandia" clip is even better now that Bruno Mars won all the Grammys.

Oliver Sacks writes about Spalding Gray's brain injury and suicide.

Gray was in a car accident, in 2001, that drove bone fragments into his right frontal lobe and, it seems, changed him profoundly:

It was while he was in the hospital in Ireland following his hip surgery, he told me, that he finalized a deal to sell the old house. He later came to feel that he was “not himself” at the time, that “witches, ghosts, and voodoo” had “commanded” him to do it....

Three years later, he was still obsessing about selling the house. Asked if he had other recurrent thoughts:

He said yes: he often thought about his mother and the first twenty-six years of his life. It was when he was twenty-six that his mother, who had been intermittently psychotic since he was ten, fell into a self-torturing, remorseful state, focussed on the selling of her family house. Unable to endure her torment, she had committed suicide....

"King of America" threatens tubers with a shotgun...

... saying he owns the Pine River.

Tubers... Not the potato kind. The kind Spalding Gray wrote about in "Sex and Death to the Age 14": "The only problem with the river as I saw it was the tubers."

And, no, the King of America was not Spalding Gray. Gray died — in a river — a long time ago.

"I used to think diversity was my best friend marrying a black guy."

"But the guy graduated from rich-kid private schools and has tenure at UCLA and, at this point, I think diversity is not skin color but rather social upbringing."

Writes Penelope Trunk, the Brazen Careerist blogger, who married a farmer. The link post is actually about remodeling the farmhouse, or that's the factual context anyway. It's titled "How to cope with diversity." There's a list of 7 tips for coping with diversity, all explained in remodeling-the-farmhouse stories.

***

Here's a spoken-word performance that I love on the subject of home-remodeling: "Terrors of Pleasure," by Spalding Gray. God, I miss Spalding Gray.

And we missed Penelope Trunk, when she went almost a month without blogging after writing that post.

Alice Walker's daughter writes about her motherhood.

I'd never heard of Rebecca Walker before, but today I see two articles about her in the NYT. The first thing I read -- this piece in the Style section -- is that she's the "estranged" daughter of the radical feminist writer Alice Walker. Then I see there is also this article in the Arts section. So, presumably, you don't get an article -- certainly not two articles -- just for being the estranged offspring of someone famous. There must be a book.

The book is called "Baby Love" -- which must piss off Joyce Maynard (if not Diana Ross) -- and subtitled "Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence."

The Arts section article, by New York Observer editor Alexandra Jacobs, has a deliciously grouchy first paragraph that blames birth control for the genre of "mom-oirs." If it's a choice -- Choosing Motherhood! -- you've got a story to tell, right? Good for you. I support free choice about motherhood, but that doesn't mean I want to hear the details of how you made the very mundane choice. The details of a commonplace story can be worth reading. It might even make the best reading -- if you're the best writer. Just as motherhood is not destiny, however, having a mother who is a writer doesn't automatically make you a writer.

Jacobs clearly detests Walker's book, which she calls "merely a paean to pampering."

A Tibetan doctor, the daughter of one of the Dalai Lama’s private physicians, offers her 'little silk bags of herbs”; hovering in the background, meanwhile, are an osteopath, doula, pedicurist and masseuse....

Not to begrudge the author such luxuries, but there was no need to make the world privy to them.

But that could be good if brilliantly described, self-aware, and hilarious, don't you think? (I'm thinking of this Spalding Gray book.) Maybe Jacobs is jealous. [ADDED: And maybe -- maybe, baby -- the book sucks.]

I'd rather hear Walker tell about that estrangement from the famous writer/mother. That's an inherently more interesting subject, and not just because we love celebrities. The desire for an infant has nothing to do with a particular individual. Even if you honor your unborn child as an individual, that individual is an abstraction. It's when that baby develops a mind of its own that the story gets interesting.

So let's check out the Style piece. It's called "Evolution of a Feminist Daughter," and that title caught my attention. Yet there's nothing in this article that connects the mother's feminism to the daughter's estrangement. The most interesting thing here is that before becoming a mother, Rebecca Walker wrote about how the relationships you make are just as important as blood connections, but in her new memoir she takes it back. Confronted on the contradiction, she says she came upon the first idea to deal with her own problems with her parents, and that having a child changed her mind.

“To grapple with how my parents raised me I had to come up with a philosophy that could sustain me. Having my own child gave me the opportunity to have a completely different experience. So hence a different view.”

This shaping and reshaping of ideas to go along with one's condition in life is thoroughly human, but it unless the writer is sharp and funny and self-aware about it, why would you want to read her?

"You gave me a sense of humor because you are so absurd."

So wrote Spalding Gray, the brilliant monologuist, who (so sadly) killed himself last year:

For 34 years I lived with you and came to love you. I came to you because I loved theater and found theater everywhere I looked. I fled New England and came to Manhattan, that island off the coast of America, where human nature was king and everyone exuded character and had big attitude. You gave me a sense of humor because you are so absurd.

Are you done talking about the New York Times yet? Well, I wanted to talk about the philosophy therapist and Al Franken and Spalding Gray, but I've been sitting in the café too long, the cappucino is severely frazzling my nerves and I'm getting hungry... And yikes, someone just knocked over a chair and I completely overreacted. So it's time for me to go. Let me leave you with a Madison picture, as I disengage from the newspaper from New York and return to my real environs:

Gray's Anatomy. We watched Gray's Anatomy last night. My son had rented it a few days ago, before the news came out that Spalding Gray's body had been identified. His (presumed) suicide changes the way I could see the movie: all the closeups compelled me to try to see into that face to find reasons for what happened. Statements in that film about the terrible effects his mother's suicide had on him cannot be heard the same way any more, because he had children too, though one resists blaming the unfortunate man.

The theater performance of Gray's Anatomy, which I saw at the Union Theater here years ago, was far better than the Steven Soderbergh film that is on the DVD. The Soderbergh film is full of extra scenes, interviews with various people who've had eye injuries. These are actually great interviews, beautifully photographed, and worthy as documentary film, but I want to see Gray's theater performance, which has the static, stark visual of a man at a table with a notebook and a glass of water. When Soderbergh does show Gray in his chair, he propels the chair across the screen in front of various projected images and restlessly moves the camera and changes the lighting.

Though he can claim to be trying to express something about failing vision, Soderbergh's implicit message is that the theater piece is not interesting enough for a film, but in fact it's far more compelling--and much funnier--without all the extra embroidery. I'd like to see a deluxe collection of Gray's work on DVD that would include as many of his performance pieces as exist, including both the official films, like Soderbergh's, and films or tapes that have been made of live theater performances. I'd also like to see--if it exists--a filmed performance of the play Our Town that he talks about in Monster in a Box (with or without projectile vomiting).

A front page obituary for Spalding Gray in today's NYT. He deserves it. (When there's a front page obituary, it makes the inside page obituaries seem hidden away. There's one today on the inside for Paul Winfield, who is fondly remembered, especially for Sounder.)

Here's a quote from the Gray obituary:

In addition to his writing, Gray enjoyed skiing and drinking; he once told an interviewer that a 6 p.m. bloody Mary was a staple of his routine.

That's the second Times obituary in less than a week to mention the decedent's interest in Bloody Marys. The subject of drinking is usually suppressed in obituaries. Perhaps there is an artist exception.

Spalding Gray. I've written about him before--here, here, and here. I can't say how sad I am to know he's dead. What a brilliant man. There are many monologuists, including one I love as much as Spalding Gray, but there is no one else at all like him. I have driven all over the country listening to my tapes of Monster in a Box over and over. Also The Terrors of Pleasure. Everyone should see Swimming to Cambodia. We saw him perform Gray's Anatomy here at the University Theater years ago, with his plain table and chair and notebook and glass of water. From the NYT:

It was a muted end for Mr. Gray, whose singular talent was closely observed autobiography, performed in a style that alternated between conspiratorial whispers and antic screams as he roamed through topics large and small.

Very, very sad. Hearing his monologues, I always found it hard to believe he could have been as sad and he was saying he was, because he was so funny and so deep. I'd like to think he wouldn't have left us if he hadn't also been in physical pain. Love to his wife and children.

“I keep getting these phone calls from fans saying, ‘I’m sure he’s just gathering material.’ I wish that were true.” A New York Magazine cover story on Spalding Gray.

He was spooked by the fact the driver of the minivan in Ireland had the same name as the real-estate broker who had sold them the North Haven house and he started wondering aloud if another broker, who had once approached Gray about selling the Sag Harbor house, had put an evil spell on him.

At first glance, Gray’s assertions seemed alarming. “The problem was, it was a little hard to tell what was ‘delusional’ with Spalding,” says Stein, “because those were also the elements upon which he always built his monologues in the past. I mean, talking onstage about going to the Philippines and having a psychic surgeon pull porcupine needles out of your eyes? It’s not that far-fetched from saying a real-estate agent cast a spell.”

This is an excellent article, worth reading in full. It reveals that Oliver Sacks was one of Gray's doctors, and that Gray had suffered some brain damage in the car accident.

Thinking about Spalding Gray.

I hope for the best for Spalding Gray.

On one of the cable news channels this morning, they went to commercial with a teaser for an update about him, but they printed his name as "Spalding Gary."

Yet you'd think they'd be all over this story. A celebrity is missing. Sometimes just being missing is enough to make you a celebrity. Perhaps it is just too complicated to explain to the audience who Spalding Gray is--complicated compared to showing picture of a smiling young woman like Elizabeth Smart or Laci Peterson, for whom the picture is the explanation.