Erasures

 

1940-2022

Though he did some interesting work in the 1960s, James Caan's real heyday as an actor was the 1970s. First he played the real-life dying NFL player Brian Piccolo in Brian's Song, the first and easily the best of the disease-of-the-week made-for-TV movies that once gave hypochondriacs plenty of reasons to turn off the tube and pick up a book instead. After that success, it was mostly the big screen, baby (I imagine him talking like that.) I don't know if a passing resemblance to a young Marlon Brando is what got him cast as an older Marlon Brando's hotheaded son Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, but he emerged from it a star. Though his character did not survive the Mafia drama, he nevertheless got a flashback cameo at the very end of The Godfather: Part II. Other notable 70's films include Cinderella Liberty, The Gambler, Funny Lady, Rollerball, Freebie and the Bean, and Chapter Two. After 1981's Thief, there were many, many more misses than hits, but the hits are notable. There's the 1988 buddy-cop science-fiction action film Alien Nation, and in 1990s, Caan is Kathy Bate's best-selling author-prisoner in the enormously successful Stephen King thriller Misery. Though he was best known for tough guy dramas, Caan also had a flair for comedy, and can be seen to good effect in '92's Honeymoon in Vegas and the 2003 Christmas classic Elf. In 2016, the actor voted for Donald Trump, a man who often comes across as a Mad magazine parody of Caan.

1923-2022

Comedian and comic actor Larry Storch was never a huge star if you measure that sort of thing by the number of starring roles in comedy movies and long-running comedy TV shows, but he didn't seem to lack for work, a man whom producers and directors could depend on to be funny even when the script fell far short of that. Storch started out in standup, specializing in dialect comedy and imitations of famous people, such as Cary Grant (according to Grant himself, Storch was the first person to utter "Judy, Judy, Judy!") He was successful enough at doing this to be offered a small part in a movie, then another movie, and another, until he racked up at least 25 of them, along with hundreds of TV guest shots. He also did voice-over work in many cartoons, including Drac on The Groovy Ghoulies. However, the role Storch is best known for is that of Corporal Randolph Agarn for two seasons on the 1960s Wild West parody F Troop. That sitcom's portrayal of Native Americans might not pass muster today, but all I can say is as goofy as the Indians behaved, the palefaces on the series were a lot goofier, and no one was a goofier, or more hilarious, paleface than Storch.

 

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CONFIDENTIAL TO BETTE MIDLER:

Cancel The New York Times subscription already.

Awesome Audio (Freedom of the Press Edition)

  

The overturn of Roe vs Wade, and the prospect it raises that all the rest of our constitutionally protected rights and liberties are temporary and can be rescinded at a 6-3 Supreme Court moment's notice, has not left me in a very patriotic mood this Fourth of July weekend. However, seeing as I get tomorrow off, I should at least try to get into the spirit of things. To that end I've turned to the man pictured above for some guidance. First generation American (father born in Spain, mother in Bavaria) John Philip Sousa wrote a number of musical compositions that we've come to regard as patriotic standards--as well as mainstays at high school pep rallies and high school football halftime shows across the land. I've chosen one of those immediately recognizable standards for you all to listen to, but before I do, here's what I found out. This melody originally was meant not to glorify America, secondary education, nor a domestic reboot of rugby, but rather...

   

...a newspaper! In a spirit of journalistic bipartisanship, former Republican Postmaster General Frank Hatton and former Democratic Congressman from Ohio Beriah Wilkins bought the 12-year-old Washington Post in 1889 and needed some way to promote it. So they beseeched Sousa, at the time the conductor of the United States Marine Band (nicknamed "The President's Own") to come up with a march, and he did just that. The composition was immediately popular both here and in Europe, making Sousa a transatlantic celebrity, and earning him the nickname the American March King. Whether all this led to more newspaper subscriptions I can't tell you, except to say there still is a Washington Post, though at this late date you may associate the paper's namesake march more with fireworks and varsity sports than with Woodward and Bernstein. Have a listen: 

Brings you back, huh? All we need now is a cheerleaders' pyramid.

 

Meh. Try again.

 There, girls, that's more like it!

 

It just so happens that today is the late clarinetist Pete Fountain's birthday. And if that wasn't just so happening enough, it also just so happens that he once put out his own New Orleans Dixieland version of Sousa's venerable tune. Put on your Mardi Gras masks and listen: 

 

 

 

 So which version of "The Washington Post March" is better?

You'll have to ask him.

 

Chattel Drive

 

Now that the Supreme Court has done away with a woman's right to an abortion...

...will these be the next to go? 

Barbary Bonhomie

 

Actress Olympia Dukakis was born on this day in 1931 (she died just last year, which I criminally let slide by because I was working on something else at the time.) She deservedly won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as long-suffering Italian-American wife and mother Rose Castorini in 1987's Moonstruck. As good as that movie is--one of the best films of the '80s in my opinion--I'd like to focus on an equally memorable character of hers, middle-aged, free-spirted San Francisco landlady Anna Madrigal, and that beings us to the dude right next to Dukakis, writer Armistead Maupin. Starting in 1974, Maupin took a page out of Charles Dickens and began writing a series of interconnected stories that appeared first in the Marin County-based Pacific Sun, and when that paper folded, the San Francisco Chronicle. Once Maupin had enough material, he did a bit of rewriting, and in 1978 came out with this:

The humorous and sometimes poignant adventures of a collection of straights and gays living in the City by the Bay, it proved to be a best-seller and has been followed by many sequels in the decades since. The television rights to the book was picked up by HBO, with hopes of turning it into a weekly sitcom. But the novel's casual attitude toward casual sex (particularly among gay men) made it seem less like a sure bet as Reaganites took over of the country and the AIDS pandemic began taking its deadly toll. So the rights were dropped, but then quickly picked up by...

...4? The rights were picked up by a number? Actually, it's Channel 4, a British network, and rival of the BBC, that came into existence in 1980. Tales of the City, the miniseries, made its television debut in the United Kingdom in September 1993. Four months later, it crossed the Atlantic, ending up...

...here, a chance if there ever was one for the publicly-funded, nonprofit US network to let its hair down, and get big ratings in the process (though not big enough to calm down outraged conservatives in Congress, who've made sure nothing like that would ever again be shown on a broadcasting system that gets 15% of its operating budget from the federal government, the subsequent reruns and three sequels ending up on cable instead.)

I doubt if too many Americans watching PBS' American Playhouse in 1994 realized they were viewing a British production since the whole thing seemed as American as Ernie and Bert. The following is the trailer for the 20th anniversary DVD box set, but if you were around back in the day, try to imagine seeing it for the first time during the early years of the Clinton administration:

British production notwithstanding, all those American accents would have sounded a bit odd on Masterpiece Theatre, don't you think? Of course, the nudity would have made it odder still.

You saw a few seconds of it during the trailer, but here's the scene in its entirety of the first meeting between Laura Linney's Mary Ann Singleton and Olympus Dukakis' Anna Madrigal:

Mary Ann Singleton is from Cleveland, as am I, and neither one of us can tell you what the hell that...

...Tennyson poem has to do with anything. Maybe if I google it:

How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,

With half-shut eyes ever to seem

Falling asleep in a half-dream!

To dream and dream, like yonder amber light,

Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height;

To hear each other's whisper'd speech;

Eating the Lotos day by day,

To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,

And tender curving lines of creamy spray;

To lend our hearts and spirits wholly

To the influence of mild-minded melancholy;

To muse and brood and live again in memory,

With those old faces of our infancy

Heap'd over with a mound of grass,

Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!

I'm pretty sure lotus is some kind of drug (Anna Madrigal attaches joints to the doors of new tenants as a welcoming gift), but all this stuff about tender curving lines of creamy spray, I just don't get! Maybe if I google some more:

 

Hmm. It sez here it's a poem about "mariners." 

Now I get it.

 

Reflections of the Way Life (or the Undead) Used to Be

 

 

Basil Rathbone examines Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in this publicity still from 1939's The Son of Frankenstein. If that wasn't spooky enough, that very same year Rathbone had to contend with a Baskervilles hound!

Vital Viewing (Lavender Labels Edition)

 

Actor, playwright, and librettist Harvey Fierstein was born on this day in 1952. Should I include female impersonator, or is that considered an actor? It's considered a performer and performing in the guise of a woman is what Harvey did, beginning at the age of 15, at various gay venues in Manhattan. There was acting out of drag as well, and since some of that acting was in improv, he realized so too he could write. After a painful breakup with a lover, Fierstein put his acting, writing, and crossdressing skills into the one-act play International Stud, which premiered off-off-Broadway in 1978. Two one-act sequels, Fugue in a Nursery and Widows and Children First! featuring the autobiographical character he created, Arnold Beckoff, soon followed. Eventually, Fierstein decided all three one-acts could be performed in a single night: 

Running for 1,222 performances, the Tonys took notice. At this point I'd like to hand it over to Wolfgang Amadeus Skywalker:

Close your eyes and you can almost hear Froggy in the later Little Rascals/Our Gang shorts, but that's part of Harvey's charm. In addition to Fierstein winning Best Actor, Torch Song Trilogy won Best Play. One of the show's producers, John Glines, acknowledged in his acceptance speech his coproducer and lover Larry Lane, a first-of-a-kind moment for a televised award show.

In 1988, the four-hour play went on a crash diet and, its overall integrity remaining intact, became a two-hour feature film: 

Ya gotta love advertising. Compare the movie poster above to the Broadway poster farther up. The latter's mascaraed, peekaboo eyes seem to promise thrill-seeking patrons of The Little Theatre a walk on the wild side. Hollywood, though, appears to want to take a different tack. The wry phrasing, the camaraderie that seems to exist among the quartet of people pictured, all of it shouts out FEELGOOD MOVIE! I don't think either poster quite nails it. As provocative as the general public may have found the subject matter back in the day, Torch Song Trilogy takes a matter-of-fact look at drag shows and gay hookups, echoing its characters casual attitude towards both. As to how you should feel while watching it, the story does end on a note of cautious optimism, but that's only after first going to a very dark place. But don't let that turn you off. As a comedy-drama, it has solid laughs throughout. And since everyone loves to laugh, that's very much what's emphasized in this commercial for the stage version:

  That makes it seem like a farce. All that's missing is a door slamming. To be fair, the huge bed plays quite a prominent role in the second act, the funniest of the three, though I would hesitate to call this Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice x 2. The trailer for the film version tries to restore some sense of balance between the comedy and the drama, but not at the expense, as I said before, of feeling good:

It skipped over the murder. Ya gotta love editing.

None of this is meant as a criticism of either the stage or film versions. I'm only pointing out how hard it can be to categorize (and market) the uncategorizable. But then that holds true for the LGBTQ experience in general. 

 

There's an ongoing debate in the LGBTQ community between those who may be called assimilationists and those who may be called subculturalists. At least I'll call them that. The assimilationists believe that outside of whom one chooses to sleep with, there's essentially no difference between gays and straights, and to avoid being marginalized, it behooves gays to be as much like straights as possible, be part of the hetero-hegemonic mainstream, with all the employment opportunities and suitable housing that comes with it. It's why some lesbians wear lipstick, why some gay men look and dress like lumberjacks, and why some gay members of both genders are Log Cabin Republicans. All kidding aside, assimilation was and continues to be one of the main arguments put forth for allowing same-sex marriage (of course, there are other, more constitutional reasons, such as equal treatment under the law, and more heartfelt reasons, such as the simple act of falling in love.) I don't know that gays who raise children do it for any other reason than a strong desire to be parents, but that too puts one on equal footing with straights (though minus the happenstance that works so well for the latter group, meaning a gay either adopts or, as an added option for lesbians, undergo in vitro fertilization.) The subculturalists counter that if it's so morally wrong to bend one's sexual orientation to the will of the majority, why is it so morally right to bend in every other direction that the majority insists, and rather than be part of some Reader's Digest social order, LGBTQ people should have their own bars, their own hangouts, their own shops, their own literature, their own clothing, their own hairstyles, their own slang, their own mannerisms, and everything else that goes into the making of an alternative lifestyle (or stereotype.) Leave the kids to the breeders, and as for holding down a job and having decent housing, hey, Li'l Nas is doing very well for himself these days (just as David Bowie did before he switched over to women.)

Because Arnold Beckoff yearns for a relationship that approximates marriage and has plans on adopting a teenage boy, Torch Song Trilogy has been described as a play and movie that argues in favor of assimilation. But I think it's more complicated than that. Back in the 1980s, and maybe even today, Arnold's flamboyant, effeminate personality and occupational crossdressing would have been a tad too subcultural for the mainstream, even if he showed up at the gate in a Dodge Caravan jam-packed with all the Family Ties, Growing Pains, The Cosby Show, Who's the Boss, Full House, Charles in Charge, Mr. Belvedere, Family Matters, Life Goes On, and Our House kids combined. Arnold wants some of what straights take for granted, but on his own terms, terms that go beyond mere sleeping arrangements. He inhabits that great space in-between assimilation and subculture. Because gays are like everybody else except in those moments, in and out of the bedroom, when they're not like everyone else. Gays are the same but different. In fact, gays are the same but different from each other (as are straights.) It's why an ongoing debate in the LGBTQ community is possible in the first place. The differences and similarities are there to be seen and heard in the stage and movie versions' opening monologue. The following is obviously the result of someone pointing a video camera at a TV screen, and at an odd angle at that. But it's not the full cinematic effect that I'm after--you wouldn't get that on a computer or cell phone anyway--but Harvey Feirstein's acting and writing prowess as he recites the lines that he himself wrote:  

Throughout the course of the film version, Arnold is wooed by both Matthew Broderick and Brian Kerwin, so don't feel too sorry for him.

This Day in History

 

On June 2, 1924, some 125,000 men, women, and children were granted United States citizenship. Why so many all at once? Did a whole fleet of immigrant ships arrive at Ellis Island? No, it turns out these folks were already here, and had been here for a long, long time:

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all non citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States: Provided That the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.

Approved, June 2, 1924. June 2, 1924. [H. R. 6355.] [Public, No. 175.]

SIXTY-EIGHTH CONGRESS. Sess. I. CHS. 233. 1924.

Signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge, who as you can see got a photo op out of the whole thing. So if they weren't citizens the day before June 2, what exactly were they? Uh, foreigners. At least the separate tribes were considered foreign nations, and the members of the tribes considered citizens of those nations. And the foreign soil on which these citizens inhabited? There it gets, and remains, complicated. While according to US law the soil has always been under some sort of US jurisdiction, some sort of US sovereignty, by 1924 such foreigners lived on especially set aside tribal lands, better known as "reservations", the result of bloody wars and treaties signed to end those wars, almost always on terms favorable to the United States government. Incidentally, that 125,000 number wasn't the whole of the indigenous population. At the time there were 300,000 Indians, or if you will, Native Americans, living within the borders of the USA. 275,000 of them were already citizens, having become so by either joining the military to fight in World War I or simply by giving up tribal affiliations, and entering the American mainstream, i.e., forgoing the concept of communal ownership in favor of private property (the pretext for European excursions onto non-European lands that had been going on for centuries.) After June 2, all it took for a Native American to become nationalized was to be born on national soil. The tribal lands were still theirs, too. So, then, does that mean Indians have dual citizenship? Technically no, because they can't have their own military or their own currency. They can make their own laws on their own lands, as long as those laws don't contradict the United States Constitution. Native Americans have been known to chafe under these conditions, but not any more so, in fact maybe even less, than some present-day nonindigenous Republicans.