Category: Writing Life

writerly thoughts & activities

Jump From Frying Pan Directly Into Fire…

So I correct one mistake and make two more, kind of like taking a step forward and two backward. Geez.

I was just about to close up shop for the weekend when I heared from Just Muttering. My friend who wrote in correcting me did so with “love and laughter” and not in the spirit of perfectionism, but I agree with JM’s philosophy so I am happy to give her the last word:

Although I am a perfectionist, I am trying to get over it and be able to explore thoughts and expression with greater freedom. In particular, I feel that blogs aren’t published for posterity – although they are, in some sense – and that we should suspend some of our extreme critical criticism therefor (which is one of my favorite not-misspelled words). I guess some people live in grass (yes, I mean grass because they don’t break) houses since they can spell “grievous” wrong (or perhaps even say it wrong – eek) but freak out about “mia”. Maybe Mia Farrow had dome something. Shall readers point out every missing word in everyone’s posts (you “blogged bright early” but probably meant you blogged bright *and* early, and the note was undoubtedly “sent by one of [my/your] best friends”). We are all, sadly, regretably, lamentably, human. When someone can show me that perfectionists are more caring and kind human beings than mistake-makers, I’ll let myself care about these things again. Our lives are too short and kindness all too rare….

Haste Makes Waste, But It Was Mia’s Fault

I was in a hurry yesterday morning — it was 9:13 and my appointment was at 9:20 — so with one foot out the door, I clicked on the Publish button that posted my blog entry for all to see. I had that vague gnawing sense that something was not quite right, but there was no time to think. Off I zoomed while self-administering a quick pat on the back for having blogged bright early. The day was full and fruitful, and I never got a chance to check my email until late evening. Here’s a note sent by one of best friends (and the only message I received on this subject):

Please consider my correction of your blog’s headline as honoring the (holy smokes!) spirit of former Vice President Dan Quayle. Mr. Quayle is appropriately disrespected partly for his inability to speak “Latin” in Latin America.

Those of us who grew up Roman Catholic may have a slight advantage when it comes to recognizing famous Latin phrases…but I think the phrase you were praying for was “mea culpa,” not “Mia culpa.” The salient difference is whether you were claiming that “it’s my fault” or “it’s Mia’s fault.”

I don’t know whether Mia is a regular subscriber to your blog or not, but you have to be careful about throwing around unsubstantiated accusations these days. Well, unless you work for a network news department.

Your replacement headline should be, by all rights, “mea maxima culpa,” I think. Not having a Latin dictionary on your bookshelf is indeed a most grevious [sic] error.

Actually, more grievous is having a dictionary and not using it. Double oops.

I hope that Mia is not feeling litigious. As for the rest of you, I pray that you will forgive me too.

Factually

I have been silent thus far regarding the Frey flap. You know I abhor liars who perpetrate their untruths upon unsuspecting readers. Frey is not alone in his guilt; I rather suspect that the agent and/or publisher may well have been complicit in this little duplicity as well. (“Did Nan Talese Lie to Oprah?” and “Publishers Say Fact-Checking Is Too Costly”) Plain and simple: today, memoirs sell better than novels. And there is always the convenience of blurred or selective memory, alternate realities where no two people see the same thing the same way, yadda yadda yadda. Convenient, of course, because there is some truth to it. In his autobiography, All The Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life, Loren Eiseley wrote:

In all the questioning about what makes a writer, and especially perhaps the personal essayist, I have seen little of reference to this fact; namely, that the brain has become a kind of unseen artist’s loft. There are pictures that hang askew, pictures with outlines barely chalked in, pictures torn, pictures, the artist has striven unsuccessfully to erase, pictures that only emerge and glow in a certain light. They have all been teleported, stolen, as it were, out of time. They represent no longer the sequential flow of ordinary memory. They can be pulled about on easels, examined within the mind itself. The act is not one of total recall like that of the professional mnemonist. Rather it is the use of the things extracted from their context in such a way that they have become the unique possession of a single life. The writer sees back to these transports alone, bare, perhaps few in number, but endowed with a symbolic life. He cannot obliterate them. He can only drag them about, magnify or reduce them as his artistic sense dictates, or juxtapose them in order to enhance a pattern. One thing he cannot do. He cannot destroy what will not be destroyed; he cannot determine in advance what will enter his mind.

Okay, but back to Frey — basic facts that one has not forgotten, like the length of one’s stay in a jail cell, or the method by which someone you know committed suicide (it’s hard to confuse a cutting with a hanging), should remain factual…unless you tell us it’s fiction. And no, you can’t hide under the covers of “creative nonfiction” either. The Writer magazine ran a piece titled “The Ethics of Creative Nonfiction” (December 2005) in which they interviewed ethicist Bruce Weinstein, Ph.D. — here’s a snippet of what he had to say:

The term ‘memoir’ should be applied only to works that reflect the truth as best as the author can find it. This is not to suggest, of course, that it is impermissible to change the names of real people for the sake of protecting their identity; this may not only be ethically permissible but obligatory. What should be out of bounds, however, is intentionally leading the reader to believe that something happened that did not (or its converse).

Pardon me, folks, but isn’t this common sense? Common courtesy? Common decency?

Procrastinations

Those who know me, and some of you just getting acquainted, have figured out that I wear many hats – some might suggest too many. Be that as it may, I had much to accomplish this weekend and I did what most writers do – procrastinate first, write second.

I should write a handbook for procrastinators – all the things you can do before you do what you have to do, eventually. You can pick up lots of such tips at any writers conference. One of my personal favorites used to be alphabetizing the spice rack (those of you who know that I’m not much of a cook are now clutching your splitting sides). These days I try to confine my procrastinations to activities that I can justify as somehow necessary to completing those other tasks – like cleaning my office so that I can find my notes, find my chair… hell, find my desk. Of course, for me, cleaning means completely re-arranging the furniture, and in my office rearranging furniture means disconnecting, moving and re-connecting lots of computer equipment and peripheral devices.

Soooo, “procrastinating” took up the whole day on Saturday. Today was devoted to my role as Minister of Education for the Jazz Journalists Association, preparing a plan of action for what I hope will evolve into tasks that will be accomplished by a real live committee. Now I think I’ll power-down the computer and spend some time with my husband. I’ll probably start drafting my IAJE/NEA report, longhand, before I drift off to sleep, so I should have something new to post by a reasonable hour tomorrow.

IAJE & NEA: Prelude

I don’t know what made me think that I could see everyone and do everything that I wanted to see and do while in New York City – wishful thinking, I guess. I really wanted to meet Just Muttering in person and I also hoped to stop by Local 802 to visit bassist Bill Crow. Both were high on my list of personal priorities, and they are now at the very top of the list for my March trip. I did manage to fit in two personal appointments — lunch alone with my parents, and lunch with my best girlfriend of 45+ years — after that, it was pretty much all business on multiple fronts.

John and I arrived in the Big Apple uneventfully on Sunday, early evening. After unpacking, we set out to find some dinner. On Seventh Avenue, between 54th and 55th Streets, a door or two south of the Carnegie Deli, is China Regency. This inexpensive Chinese restaurant has been there for more years than I can remember, and it was always a favorite of Joe Williams. John and I shared an order of shrimp in lobster sauce with fried rice, and that hit the spot.

My cell phone began ringing at 8 AM on Monday morning – still 5 AM to mind and body. It was Pam Koslow, producer of Jelly’s Last Jam and widow of the show’s Broadway star, Gregory Hines. “I can meet you tomorrow at 10 AM, she said, and so began my rescheduling. The Luther Henderson biography interviews that I had intended to do on Monday and Tuesday, before the convention began, got moved to Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

After meetings with the IAJE (International Association for Jazz Education) and NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) staff people to finalize details of John’s schedule, John and I were off to have tea with George and Ellie Shearing. Over a tasty fruit tart and cups of brewed tea, John and George reminisced. George’s short-term memory is not as vivid as his recollections of the past, but he still takes great delight in re-telling the stories of the original quintet and his escapades with John that began in 1949 and continued for any years. The road stories are always the best, including George, behind the wheel, driving across the desert in Nevada. Ellie told us that she and George attended a concert at the 92nd Street Y the week before, where Dick Hyman, Bill Charlap and others played several of George’s compositions. She also told us that George has been playing duets at home with Michael Feinstein and other musical cohorts who come to visit.

Tuesday morning I met with Pam Koslow who talked me through the trials and tribulations of producing a show for Broadway. The trip from idea inception to stage realization took ten years, but it was worth every nerve-pinching moment, even when she and co-producer Margo Lion had to put their apartments up for loan collateral. After checking in with John, I took off for downtown to have a late lunch with my parents while John prepped for his 4 pm interview with Sara Fishko of WNYC radio. (To listen, click here.)

By 6 pm we were ordering cocktails at Fontana Di Trevi, our favorite mid-town Italian restaurant, with long-time friend Laurie Goldstein who also happens to be the exec in charge of GOPAM, the music publishing company that John set up several decades ago to administer music publishing for his clients. This is one of John’s claims to fame, as it were. He believed that jazz musicians ought not to give away their publishing rights, so he set up individual publishing companies wholly owned by each artist/composer. We lingered over cappuccinos and by the time we returned to the hotel, Clairdee and Ken had just arrived from the airport and were checking in. We ended the night with them at the hotel bar.

At 9 o’clock on Wednesday morning I was knocking on Chico Hamilton’s door. Chico was the drummer with Lena Horne during the days when Luther Henderson was her musical director. For almost two hours Chico told me stories dating back to 1947 when Luther first hired him. He described the rehearsal scene at the house on Nichols Canyon Road where Lena and Lennie Hayton lived – the big gate and Luther, the “sharp dude” who came out in answer to the bell. He talked about rehearsing bar by bar, touring by train (Lena didn’t fly), and earning $125 week out of which he had to pay his own room and board.

As I was leaving Chico’s studio and walking over to Third Avenue, I returned a call to Duane Grant. Duane was not only Luther’s step-son, but also his musical assistant for many years and I wanted very much to spend some quality time talking to him. It was with Duane’s help that Luther was able to complete one of the most important events in Luther’s life, the Classic Ellington project. Luck was with me and we made a date to meet for two hours the next morning. As I headed uptown to the Candle Café to meet my girlfriend for lunch, John was live on WBGO radio with Rhonda Hamilton. (You can hear an excerpt here.)

John and I rendezvoused back at the hotel in time to suit up – both of us in tux – for the Gala kick-off dinner hosted for IAJE by none other than Miss Nancy Wilson.

Biographies

In his autobiography, All The Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life” Loren Eiseley wrote:

“A biography is always constructed from ruins, but, as any archeologist will tell you, there is never the means to unearth all the rooms, or follow the buried roads, or dig into every cistern for treasure. You try to see what the ruin meant to whoever inhabited it and, if you are lucky, you see a little way backward into time.”

I am currently in the process of reconstructing the scaffolding of Luther Henderson’s life, trying to discover which were the turning points and pivotal moments, what were the experiences that shaped him, and which were those by which he left his imprint on history.

Biographical writing can range from the finely crafted literary profiles such as those published in The New Yorker magazine (Whitney Balliett’s being among my favorites), to short books (a fine and highly recommended example being All In The Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine by Terry Teachout), to lengthy books heavy with annotations and citations (Laurence Bergreen’s works come to mind), to multi-volume oeuvres (such as Edmund Morris’s projected three-volume life of Theodore Roosevelt), or even the artful collaboration of biography with photography in a coffee-table sized tome (Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond by Doug Ramsey, also highly recommended, of course – I’m on page 264).

Assuming one is not writing the definitive and most comprehensive account that would necessitate including everything one took, say, ten-plus years to find, one must choose the best approach for the subject and select just the right moments to suit the plan. Take the above-mentioned Balanchine bio, for example. Teachout says up front:

“This is a short book about a great man who lived a long life. It is not a full-scale biography and makes no pretense of thoroughness or originality….”

He goes on to explain who his intended reader is:

“I had in mind a reader who has just seen his first ballet by Balanchine, or is about to do so, and wants to know something about Balanchine’s life and work and how they fit into the larger story of art in the twentieth century.”

He then chose the personal and performance events that best told the story for his audience with his goals in mind. One must take care to include enough so that the portrait is “true” and not lopsided, but I am not prone to embrace the mega biography a là Bergreen who writes long and uses a chronological, annotated format as seen in Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life, As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin, James Agee: A Life, and Capone: The Man and the Era. As I wrote in 1997 for a “Brief” review of the Armstrong bio for The New York Times Book Review section:

The exhaustive research that characterizes Mr. Bergreen’s work does, however, have its occasional downside. The thread of Mr. Armstrong’s story gets lost from time to time amid the lengthy excursions into the history of New Orleans and voodoo beliefs, the geographical evolution of jazz, the Harlem renaissance of the mis-1920s, and the mini profiles of the many people who populated his life. While these portraits are vivid, pages go by in which Mr. Armstrong plays no part whatsoever. Furthermore, readers might wonder whether the fact that Mr. Bergreen is not a member of the musical scene was of help or hindrance in interpreting his findings, and to what extent the biases and experiences of his sources may have colored what he learned.

(Note of Admission: That review was accepted and paid for, but was pulled when my editor discovered that another editor had commissioned a full feature-length review by another writer, one of greater stature to be sure. That writer later become a dear friend….it was none other than Terry Teachout. Anyway, I digress.)

One of the IAJE panels next week is about biographies. Titled “Jazz Lives in Print,” the blurb reads:

The last decade has seen a torrent of new jazz biographies, some comprehensive and thorough, others mere hearsay and hagiography. What makes a good jazz biography? What are readers, fans and musicians looking for in a good bio? Personal anecdotes? Musical analysis? Social Context? A little of all three? Four prominent authors of recent jazz biographies discuss how they did their research and made their decisions about what to include (and not to include). Moderator: Paul de Barros, Seattle Times. Panelists: Gary Giddins, JazzTimes; Ashley Kahn, Wall Street Journal; Peter Levinson, Peter Levinson Communications; Stephanie Stein Crease.

De Barros (Jackson Street After Hours: The Roots of Jazz in Seattle) and Levinson (bios on Tommy Dorsey, Nelson Riddle, and Harry James) are friends of mine, Giddins (Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams) a longtime acquaintance, so I hope to attend. I sure can use their input!

Victor Borge In And On The Air

Around the time that Terry Teachout was watching Victor Borge on an old What’s My Line? episode (read TT’s reminiscence here ), I was perusing Luther Henderson’s papers and came across…Victor Borge.

One Wednesday evening, February 19, 1958 at 9 PM to be exact, CBS-TV broadcast “Victor Borge’s Comedy and Music.” This one-hour show was “Presented by the Big Bold Pontiac and your authorized Pontiac Dealer.” I know this because among Luther’s papers was a program, and I am guessing that there was a live TV audience. (Why else would there be a program for a television show?)

The opening number was described as follows:

Liechtensteiner Polka . . . . . . . VICTOR BORGE and the Orchestra
Mr. Popp’s arrangement of Mr. Borge’s conception of SHAMPOO MUSIC for the 16-piece orchestra under the baton of LUTHER HENDERSON, JR., Conductor and Arranger for the Polly Bergen TV show, Lena Horne, Duke Ellington, Andre Kostelanetz, and other top names in American music.

Pontiac got their monies worth as the program included several “commercial” numbers including:

STILL ANOTHER COMMERCIAL . . . . . starring MILTON CROSS narrator, and VICTOR BORGE
Mr. Borge performs variations on the themes of Pontiac greatness: style, performance and handling…and reaches an impressive conclusion. Narrated by Milton Cross.

There are a number of old television programs I’d like to view as part of my research for “Seeking Harmony: The Life and Music of Luther Henderson.” Thanks to the Museum of Television & Radio , I should be able to see this show, the Polly Bergen show, and a number of other programs for which Luther composed, arranged, and/or conducted music. Bea Arthur tells me that Luther even made an on-camera appearance in an episode of Maude, and I’m really looking forward to seeing that!

TK

TK is a placeholder. It’s the abbreviation meaning “to come.” I (and many) use this when writing a book or article and don’t yet have the exact information but know that’s where it will go in the manuscript — for example, “they moved from their hotel apartment in the [TK] to a doorman building on the Upper West Side [address TK] .” Same goes for quotes often needed for articles and press releases — for example here’s the before and after of one paragraph in a press release I was writing. Before:

Free Association is Hall’s second ArtistShare project available only from jimhallmusic.com. The physical CD is slated to include seven selections: two on-the-spot improvisations (with Hall playing acoustic guitar on one), a beautiful Japanese ballad discovered by Keezer when he was living in Japan, and four Hall originals, one of which he performs solo. Throughout the creative process, from early preparation onward, ArtistShare “participants” repeated logged in to jimhallmusic.com to see what was new. [quote +/or details TK] Upcoming postings at jimhallmusic.com will include downloadable musical sketches tunes, pictures, and interviews, as well as additional recorded selections.

After:

Free Association is Hall’s second ArtistShare project available only from jimhallmusic.com. The physical CD is slated to include seven selections: two on-the-spot improvisations (with Hall playing acoustic guitar on one), a beautiful Japanese ballad discovered by Keezer when he was living in Japan, and four Hall originals, one of which he performs solo. Throughout the creative process, from early preparation onward, ArtistShare “participants” repeated logged in to jimhallmusic.com to see what was new. Not only did they pre-order the new (limited in number) CD, they listened clips from the duo’s Japan tour. “The beauty of these projects is that they never have to end,” explains Camelio. “Participants can sign up long after the recording was completed, and still have access to the process. In fact, most ArtistShare artists continue to add content after the main work is done – it keeps their fans actively involved. Jim is no exception.” Upcoming postings at jimhallmusic.com will include downloadable musical sketches tunes, pictures, and interviews, as well as additional recorded selections.

Sopmeone is bound to ask me why it’s TK and not TC — I don’t know. If you do, please send me an email (there’s an email link in the peach colored box on the left, second from the top).

Anyway, I tell you this just so I can say that I am swamped today with no time for real blogging — and, of course, because it gives me an opportunity to plug dad’s newest recording. I have a list of things about which I’d like to write — Roger Kellaway Trio heard last night, adventures in health insurance, and much more TK. Soon, I promise.