Oh, God, I'm Repeating Myself...

Yes, it's travel time again, and once more I will be following in the brave, befuddled shoes of Dr. Howard Bannister and jetting out to San Francisco.

From Now On

I was going to run this on Wednesday morning.

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Drag Rant

What is extravagant in an inconsistent or an unpassionate way is not Camp.

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

A few snippets of Camp at its most classic for this lovely August Saturday...

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Color Me...

Camp taste nourishes itself on the love that has 
gone into certain objects and personal styles.

Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

...exhausted.  Given the past week or so, this clip seemed appropriate.  Barbra, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a regrettable cocktail frock, and an energetic but really pretty terrible pop tune - the camp is in the contrasts, in how it's all thrown together.  And, of course, in the eye makeup.

Birthday Girl: American Beauty Nose

The Greatest Star, en style (faux) Warhol

Half a century on from what is to me still her most beguiling era - when she was the kooky fresh discovery with what seemed like a trick voice - today Miss Barbra Streisand turns a somehow unlikely 71.  She is what she is, much loved and much disliked.  As for me, I think she's swell.  How many people could sing "I'm the Greatest Star," confident in the knowledge you'll believe it?

When Worlds Collide

Yesterday's birthday girl, Miss Marlene Dietrich, gives what is apparently the bemused glance of death to a really rather touchingly terrified young Miss Barbra Streisand, who has clearly only this very moment realized that being Kicky at a Chanel runway show might be classified by some - Miss Dietrich among them - as Trying Too Hard.

All Together, Shout it Now

So here we are, the morning after.  Four more years.  That's terrific, don't get me wrong, but as good as it is, I don't think the re-election of the President is the real game-changer that emerged last night (this morning, actually, out in these parts - it's been a long day).

No - the stunning, astonishing, and unprecedented thing - the thing that to me presages what America's Going to Look Like Next - is that in four separate states, four separate attempts, in different ways, to stop the rise of marriage equality went down in flames.  Not by vast margins, it's true, but decisively enough.  That's simply amazing.  For me, of course, this is a Big Deal issue; for me and Mr. Muscato, the lack of official recognition of our family is what prevents us from living in the U.S.  We love our life, on the whole, as quasi-nomadic expatriates.  In our nine years, we've lived in four countries, dragging our selves and our chattel and our longsuffering animals across two continents.  Even so, maybe it's time to go home, for me, and for Mr. Muscato to come along for the ride.  Last night's wins, I hope, take us that much closer, opening the way for the end of the Defense of Marriage Act and to immigration reform that means I'm no longer an exile.

To celebrate, here's Miss Streisand to sing us in - she's got two numbers, in fact, as I was searching for a killer "Happy Days are Here Again" and ran across this clip, in which she first sings the hell out of "Cry Me a River" (a pleasant  sentiment, I think, to direct at the Republicans and Fundamentalists and general Neanderthals who more or less went down in flames yesterday).  The quality's not great, but we even get a nice little Dinah Shore intro; at least she was wise enough not to sing (only Garland comes off well in a duet with Young Barbra).  I love this phase of Streisand's career, when she's still raw and bizarre and so very, very young. She never seems to be so much performing as just barely containing the voice, never quite sure what's going to come next and just as startled as we at what does.

Speaking of startled - I am, for it seems that this first aired on May 12, 1963.  I was born the next day.  And here we are, all these years later.  Howdy, gay times, indeed.

Movie Night

So, we're back from our little jaunt, and as always after the flash of Dubai, it's nice to be home and lovely to be with the dogs.

A highlight of this trip turned out to be just staying in, as we spent the first part largely in the hotel for the end of Ramadan and then enjoyed that so much (we got upgraded and lolled about in splendor) that aside from a brief mall jaunt we hardly stirred - even passing up a night out dancing with the boys.

The temptations to be even more than usually sedentary were some of the usual suspects - our favorite hotel has a splendid indoor pool, a killer spa, and an open bar from 6 'til 9 - but also one more:  they now get TCM, and we lucked into a fun run of pictures.  It's pretty inexcusable, I know, after what's probably something in the low three figures of viewing, to spend prime vacation time watching The Wizard of Oz, but on a big screen in a decadently comfortable hotel drawing room, why carp?  Besides, Mr. Muscato's only seen it a few times, so we had some reason to be so lazy.  And you know what?  It never fails, in any way, to entertain.

That was good (as was a welcome rescreening of What's Up, Doc?, another never-fail favorite), but in addition we saw two movies in a row that really got me thinking. 

The first, as you might have guessed from the picture above, was Key Largo, which I'd seen before but really enjoyed, as I did on this second viewing.  It's a tense, atmospheric, weird picture, driven by an over-the-top performance by Edward G. Robinson as a high-strung gangster and, at the other extreme, by turns by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall that are so low-pitched that at times they seem to be standing perfectly still while the movie whirls around them.  They are tremendously effective, and I'm baffled by people who say that of their pictures together, this one has the least chemistry between them.  Their connection is the moral foundation of the movie, and while it's less flashy than the incredibly seductive To Have and Have Not, it's rock-solid.  Never in the movies have two so different people been so ineluctably right for each other, and they play the whole movie as if they know that, even when the rest of the world collapses around them.

As it nearly does when the hurricane hits.  Each of the characters suffers a kind of Dark Night during the prolonged storm sequence, but the greatest glory in it goes to the lady above, the incomparable Claire Trevor.  She plays Gaye Dawn, a faded nightclub chantoozie whose name at first seems a cruel joke - until, in the end, it becomes prophetic, for despite her desperate, destructive love for Robinson, her dipsomania, and her essential foolishness (summarized brilliantly by the tacky jewelry she wears like some sort of penance for getting older) she saves the day, and brings a happy morning after the storm.

So that was the good half of our impromptu double feature.  When I saw that the next movie was the 1976 A Star is Born, I was kind of jazzed.  I'd never seen it, believe it or not, as it came out just before I could have been allowed to see what was widely believed to be a racy film, and then its critical drubbing more or less removed it from consideration.

I'd like to report that I found it to be a lost gem, a worthy fellow for the versions by Constance Bennett, Janet Gaynor, and Judy Garland.  It's not.  It's not dreck, exactly, but it's awfully close.  No, I take that back - it is dreck:  endlessly long, excruciatingly paced, laughably staged, portentous and pretentious and utterly humorless.  It's hard to imagine that only four years separate the Barbra who was so effortlessly Judy Maxwell in What's Up, Doc? and the impassive, self-enchanted creature who walks through A Star is Born like it was a series of wardrobe stills for its misbegotten fashions (she spends what seems like hours in a knee-length white cardigan-over-bell-bottoms that made me want to throw things at the screen, while material success is represented by a series of increasingly flashy gypsy-style outfits that Rhoda Morgenstern wouldn't have been caught dead in with her eyes gouged out).  And let's not even start on Kris Kristofferson and how very much he looks like he'd rather be anywhere else, or the pointless series of cartoon bit parts for people like Gary Busey as a manipulative manager or the two unfortunate actresses who play Barbra's first-reel pals, whose roles are so exiguous that they are billed only as One and Two.  They're black, you see; fledgling-star Barbra's in a group with them.  It's called the Oreos.  Get it?  That, in fact, is the high point of funny in A Star is Born.  I rest my case.

What struck me about seeing these two pictures together is how simple Warner Bros. made Key Largo seem, and what obvious, lumbering, all-too-visible and ultimately crushing labor went into A Star is Born.  The former tells its story - nothing less than the rise and fall of its characters' souls - with essentially one set, a few not-terribly-convincing models for the storm sequence, and a short stretch on a boat.  It moves like the wind, without a moment's padding or wasted action.  Even a sequence that another script would have turned into a throwaway number, in which Trevor's Gaye helplessly displays the ruins of her voice by singing "Moanin' Low" in a sad bid for a promised drink, turns out to illuminate the character of every person in the room. 

By contrast, A Star is Born feels like nothing but padding, from the endless helicopter shots meant to awe one at the size of Kristofferson's audience to the whip-round of his Hollywood mansion that felt longer than Jackie Kennedy's tour of the White House.  Even Streisand's songs - theoretically, one would have thought, a prime reason for a Streisand Star is Born to exist - feel bloated and unnecessary.  And that's once you get past the movie's major implausibility:  unlike previous Norman Maines and Esther Blodgetts (the names are changed here, one suspects to protect the innocent, but the characters are more or less the same), the two leads have nothing at all in common including the métiers in which they perform.  Kristofferson's character is meant to be a sort of Jim-Morrison-if-he-had-lived, a full-on rockstar with a kind of grandeur in his desperate excess (that he's played by a singer/actor of middling repute and vestigial screen charisma doesn't help).  Streisand's songbird is a middle-of-the-road pop act at most.  It's as if Jimi Hendrix decided to throw it all away to save the career of Helen Reddy or Rita Coolidge (who actually makes a throwaway cameo as a Grammys presenter).  And it goes on and on, and finally it's over, and you find yourself sitting there in the dark wondering, "What the hell was she thinking with that pantsuit?"

Claire Trevor for the win.

Birthday Girl: She's the Greatest Star

She is by far.  Here, though, not quite yet - and she's not quite 20.  This was the great wide world's introduction to Barbra Joan, on Jack Paar's Tonight Show.  It's 1961.  She appears in her dowdy dress and impossible hair, altogether implausible, and sings Arlen - and Arlen in dialect, from a flop musical, yet.  What?

But time stops.  What must it have been like, night after night, in little clubs up and down the East Coast and elsewhere, to be among the first to experience that voice?  You would, for a few months, have had a wonderful secret, and for years and ever after, a real right to boast - "Oh yes, we heard her at the Bon Soir, you know..."

Today, she's 70.  We take her for granted, or lightly mock her for her undeniable pretensions, her immutable sense of self.  But aren't we lucky to have her?  And who has more of a right to take herself just a shade too seriously?  Who else has sung with Garland, been romanced by Sharif and Redford (not to mention Matthau), held her own against Madeline Kahn in a comedy battle to the death, conquered Broadway and Hollywood, turned herself into a pop star and and a disco diva, turned TV specials into art (or was it vice versa), convinced the world that she was not only supremely talented but supremely beautiful, and never, ever made it look like anything other than what she was born to do?

I think she's swell.  Any time I start to think, oh, dear - the nails, the dreary Donna Karan dresses (perhaps she should always have someone like Cecil Beaton around to dress her?), the solemnity, Yentl... well, I think of the voice, and all is forgiven, now and forever.

Compare and Contrast

Today, let's do a little show-biz exegesis, shall we? Herewith, three versions of one song, spanning, in various ways, three eras of entertainment and of interpretation.

First up, Judy. Her rendition - complete with an almost never-heard intro - is a reminder, among other things, of what a superb band singer she was. She brings all she's got to this number, but never for a moment lets you really think she believes it - a very Vaudeville attitude toward what could be a pretty cynical number.

Barbra's version is, as you'll see at the very end, actually from her appearance on The Judy Garland Show; in fact, it aired the fall before Judy's. Still, it's light years away from her hostess's playful but faithful rendition, poised as it is on the edge of mid-sixties "kookiness", as if just waiting for Laugh-In to happen.

Streisand at this age - just 21 - is amazing to watch; she's not so much performing as possessed by a talent she's still trying to figure out how to handle. That makes the bridge of this arrangement, a mishmash of other love songs, so odd and so oddly effective. How is it possible that this awkward, basically uneducated and unworldly girl can be at succeeding moments the gawkiest thing since My Friend Flicka and a one-woman compendium of twentieth-century show-biz?

Finally, the state of the art, turn of the century edition. Audra McDonald has the most "trained" voice of these three, and she gives a sense of acting the part of a nightclub belter rather than being one. Still, she's got the chops to put this one over, and her manic break midsong is if anything even more fun than Babs's.

What does it all prove? Honestly, I'm not at all sure, although I do know that I adore all three. I've never understood the need to choose one diva and automatically shower filth on any other. I think that maybe the lesson is: talent will out.

Just One Someone, Happy

So, for the first time in a long time, I'm the proud owner of a hot new record. It's kind of fun. I've gotten so used to buying oddities, old favorites, and lounge/chill/Arabesque collections that it's been a while since I've sat down to sit and really listen to something new.

Of course this something, La Barbra's Love is the Answer, is in many ways not entirely new; few voices are more familiar, of course, and the material is drawn from the heart and edges of what people have taken to calling, loosely, the Great American Songbook (which appears to be a flexible enough term to fit Bernstein, Bergman, Kern and even Brel equally comfortably).

So what of it?

As became clear in the New York Times' recent excellent feature on her, much of what Streisand does remains, even after nearly 50 years, both mysterious and counterintuitive: one of the most purely musical singers around not reading music; one of the world's most notorious perfectionists "never" thinking about technique or the physical side of her instrument; and, in the case of this record specifically, a star who for decades has relied on the glossiest of production values and showiest of arrangements going for something, to put it mildly, rather different.

So the first and so far to me biggest shock of the new record is the voice itself: exposed, imperfect, immediate, and, as you might expect, all the better for it. Whatever wizardry actually went into the sessions, the result is something that sounds like a woman, and even a woman of a certain age, sitting with musicians up against a microphone that captures every whisper, rasp, breath. She sings carefully, often staying in the conversational middle-range in which she's obviously most comfortable. When necessary, though, the power and range are still there, and almost invariably they're used to great effect, in the service of the songs. That, and the restraint of the accompaniment, are to me the two most obvious signs of the fine hand of the record's producer, Diana Krall.

One of the touted features of the album, in its "Deluxe" version, is the inclusion of two versions of each song (except for the wistful Bergman/Legrand "You Must Believe in Love"), one orchestral, one with only a backing quartet. I expect future listens will start to sort out which I prefer, but at the moment there are things to find in each. They are not, by the bye, as some reviewers are saying, all drawn from the same vocal takes.

But what of the songs, and what of the singer? These are mostly works which both the audience and the performer are likely to have encountered before. Some, such as "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "Some Other Time," are classics; others - "Where Do You Start?" and "Here's to Life" - are cabaret and lounge-act staples. They are all excellent showcases for a singer like Streisand (is there really such a thing? Okay, they are excellent choices for Streisand). She sings with intelligence and passion, with real attention and warmth; blessedly, there is none of the showboating and mannerisms that were both the worst things about, say, the second Broadway album and the only interesting things about her pop/rock work of the last twenty years.

Still. These are songs that, often, we associate with other veteran performers. What separates Streisand from other, in Mabel Mercer's phrase, saloon singers, is her exalted status: superstar, diva, movie star, pundit, activist, legend. All fine things, but all of which means that she hasn't spent all that much time, comparatively, since her own club days, actually singing. Especially singing things like this. I think that's what adds something of a hothouse air to her versions of, for example, "Here's to Life," a song that for me is inextricably linked to Eartha Kitt, who turned it into an anthem of survival and passion. The song is fine, even brilliant, in Streisand's hands - but she hasn't sung it in a hundred different rooms, to a thousand different sets of listeners. I don't mean, somehow, that she hasn't earned it, in her interpretation - but rather that there remains something, in the voice and the singing, of the prodigy rather than the survivor.

Singers like Kitt - and like Mercer, Barbara Cook, Peggy Lee, Julie Wilson, Karen Akers, Andrea Marcovicci - wield instruments of varying power and elegance, with only Cook's and Lee's on a par with Streisand's in a purely technical sense. But they were or are all working singers, on stage and singing, communicating, interpreting, constantly. Out of that comes a finesse, a directness of impact, and an understanding of how to wring the last bit of meaning out of every phrase and syllable that, I think it could be argued, for all her extraordinary gifts and achievements, Streisand has never reached.

What strikes me in this album's most successful moments is how much they directly recall the strongest moments of her early recordings, which relied on a similar songbook and, to an extent, a comparable production milieu. She is supremely an artist of instinct, most thrilling when she takes an unexpected chance. When she second guesses that, overthinks, overproduces, goes all pop star on us, you get dreck like her 90's Bryan Adams duet "I Finally Found Someone." When she cuts loose and lets that instinct take over, the way that the dreamy young girl up above did, you get her wrenching "Ne me quitte pas," which comes close to reaching Mercerian heights even with its schoolgirl French, or her magisterial "Here's that Rainy Day."

I can't help wondering what wonders she might be creating today if this is what she'd been doing for all the years since Stoney End. In the absence of that, however, Love is the Answer is a very satisfying set, one that we can fervently hope will be followed by more such goes, rather than something on the order of a techno-house duet with Lady Gaga or whatever other nonsense seems (based on history) just a tad too likely...

Record Time

Yes, I admit it. I am a gentleman of artistic tastes of a certain age. And, it seems, of a fairly specific demographic.

I have been reflecting on this while spending far too much time today on iTunes, becoming the proud owner (insofar, in this digital age, that one ever actually owns anything) of - and I suspect this won't exactly comes as a surprise - both the new Barbra and the new Madonna. It's only flaunting my age to note that I don't as yet, plan to get the new Whitney, Mariah, or Britney.

How are we ever going to explain, to a wondering future, the thrill of rushing to a record store to get the latest and greatest? I once spent the better part of a day - and a school day, to boot - waiting at Plastic Fantastic outside Philadelphia to bag a brand new Lene Lovich album. Now you just press a few buttons and it all comes rushing down the 'Tubes, in the Deluxe version.

Fun to have, but, in the words of a song that might as well be on Streisand's new collection of standards, The Thrill is Gone.

File Under "Parade, Rained Upon"

So, you remember that way I've been feeling lately?

At this point, all I can figure is that (and you should pardon the language) the gods must be fucking with me.

Barbra, new album of standards, tiny invitation/lottery-only concert at the Vanguard, right down the street from my old place and exactly but exactly the kind of thing I used to be genius at getting myself into. And here I sit at the edge of the desert, dreading the start of Ramadan.

I know it's not a problem in the scheme of things in the great wide world, but geez...

Trailer Trash: The Meaning of Propriety

There's something about this movie that never fails. If she had never taken herself more seriously than she does here (and if by '75 she wasn't stuck in dreck), La Streisand could have been the greatest of them all, instead of just the greatest pipes of all.

And who knew Bogdanovich was such a flirt? And who remembers that Ryan O'Neal was so very lovely?

But the great mystery of this trailer: where is the person called Eunice?

4 Gals 4

Oh, it's a formidable enough group , but what do you suppose they talked about?

Birthday Boy: Broadway Baby

So this started off as a quick tribute to a great American composer, Burton Lane, who brought us songs like "That Old Devil Moon" and musicals like On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. He was a fixture of American theatre from the early thirties, when he wrote for Earl Carroll's Vanities, through 1979's somewhat less successful Carmelina.

Thanks to Hollywood, he's best remembered today, probably, for Clear Day, which made a rather turgid film if a spectacular showcase for the young Barbra S. (and of course for Café favorite Mabel Albertson). Other than that, he seems to have had a pretty quiet private life.

All of which provides excellent reasons to look at the work more than the man. Here we have a live 1970 performance by the lady herself, in a clip from an awards show:

I like how we get to see La Streisand bifurcated, as it were. In the song itself, recorded in Las Vegas, she's at the very end - and apex - of her High Glamour Bouffant era. Back in New York, accepting her tribute from Mayor Lindsay, she looks poised to break out at any moment into "Stoney End."

All of which is just a way to say: Happy Birthday, Burton Lane!

Her Name is [Not Quite] Barbra

Recognize her?

Yesterday, When We Were Young

Bette Midler, 1972

Barbara Streisand, 1964

Aretha Franklin, 1960

The Primettes, 1959

Cher, 1967

On a Clear Day...

...Rise and look around you - and you'll see who...:

"My name? My name? ... My name is Melinda!"


"...Melinda Winifred Wayne Tentrees..."

Streisand by Beaton. Saw it again last week, and continue to think that it's one of the most compelling not-very-good movies I know of. And of course it has that plum little part for Mabel Albertson.

Picture This: Richard Amsel

I recently discovered that I have to add another entry to the long list of Things I Will Never Do: have my portrait done by Richard Amsel. I remember, as a child, staring at his illustrations - on record covers, magazines (he was a TV Guide stalwart), and movie posters - and thinking he was just... just...

Now I know what I was thinking: camp as a row of tents. But definitely gifted, and, at his best, up there with the best.

He did a lot to set Bette Midler's image in the popular imagination:


He burnished La Streisand's legend as a quirky beauty:

And he made many, many turgid seventies films seem a whole lot more stylish and interesting than actually they were:

I think, if I had been able to be one of his subjects,
it might have turned out something like Miss Lansbury,
seen here waving from the bottom right, opposite Miss Davis.

We lost him, as so many others, in the mid-eighties, and we're the poorer for it.