Recently in Those Conformist Fifties Category
I'd been aware of the name all my life, but that was all; it hovered on the edge of my known world, since the name itself is distinctive. And the name suggested a singer who has some sort of schtick, like HIldegarde's gloves. But that was it, for all my life until now.
And then two people I play music with had a brief conversation, just a couple of sentences, about Blossom Dearie, so I began checking her out. She's often described in very misleading ways, I can tell you. They call her voice "girlish," "wispy," "small" even verging on squeaky, they say. The former New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett once said that "without a microphone it would not reach the second floor of a doll's house"—clever enough, I will admit, but not a statement that tells you what Blossom Dearie would sound like if you were on the first floor, listening to her.
Most damningly, her voice is often called an "acquired taste." Well, I listened to her and acquired the taste instantly, deeply—I fell in love, if you want to know the truth. The clip below is from the early Sixties, by the way, not the Fifties, but it's pretty representative of what she was doing in the early part of her career. Maybe you'll fall in love too:
Well? Was that magical? Are you in love yourself? She was born in the Twenties in a small town in the Catskills, and she said in interviews that she took "Surrey" at a more relaxed pace than was typical because she remembered seeing buggies going by in her youth. Not that rural roots impaired her hipness much: She studied classical piano but was drawn to jazz in her teens, and went to New York, where she made a name for herself playing piano and singing. Then she went to France after the war and made a name for herself there too, then came back and was invited to make albums by Norman Granz, who ran one of the leading jazz labels. She sang the fast songs with a carefree verve that would give Ella a run for her money, and the ballads—well, I've never heard anyone so affecting, so real, so full of feeling. No other singer. Ever. That's just how I feel. And it must also be said that she comps—accompanies herself—brilliantly, and takes a hell of an intelligent, well-crafted solo now and then. And the other thing that comes through is how smart and fun and deeply cool she is. Well—was, actually. She died last year. But she performed to adoring crowds in supper clubs and concerts into 2006, and she did songs on Schoolhouse Rock, and she did a lot of recording all her life. I could have heard her live, if I'd known. I feel bad about that. But I know about her now. My favorite stuff is from the Fifties. Check it out; you may acquire the taste yourself.
He was raised by churchgoing people but his father was a bootlegger. His music came straight from African American gospel roots, and one of his favorite singers was Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a unique performer if there ever was one. He began making "jump blues" records in 1951. He recorded "Tutti Frutti" in 1955, after changing the impromptu lyrics that originally went, "Tutti Frutti, good booty," and it went to the top of the R&B charts. He made sixteen more hit singles in three years, and appeared in three films. He was huge, in a word. People went insane at his concerts, and had to be held back from throwing themselves off balconies. Women threw their underwear at him.
In the Fifties, don't forget.
Personally he had wild parties and bisexual orgies and then gave it up and became a preacher, and he's kind of been shuttling back and forth between God and the devil, or at least the devil's music, ever since. At his height, performers ranging from Elvis Presley to Pat Boone, of all people, covered his tunes—a form of conforming, you might say, but it was the crazy guy that everyone wanted to conform to. Was there anyone who influenced rock music more? Hard to say. But he was huge. Once in the Sixties, he toured England and his opening act was The Beatles. He hired Jimi Hendrix as a guitarist. And I hate to keep harping on this, but he was really one of the biggest names in show business ever. He was so big that it seems inevitable at this late date, and maybe we fail to see how improbable it was that this bundle of seething contradictions from way over on the wrong side of the tracks became a superstar in 1955 and had bisexual orgies and wore eyeliner. Where is music as orgiastic and bacchanalian coming from today, I'd like to know? Now that we're not such conformists any more?
So. Anyway. The Fifties had all kinds of cool stuff going on. Rod Serling had written acclaimed dramas that were done on live TV all during them. Corporate executives did mess with his work, always toning down his more polemical stuff and at one point taking the Chrysler Building out of a script for a show that was sponsored by Ford. (Both of those were car companies, back in the day.) So he decided to do a science fiction and fantasy show, figuring he could put all sorts of barely hidden messages in them about justice and so forth. There were also all kinds of things about the subjective nature of our perceptions and stories told by unreliable narrators and wild plot twists and all kinds of things that directors congratulate themselves for putting in serious films. Serling cranked that kind of thing out every week and he did it during the Fifties, or at least started then, and I just think that between the jazz and art and film and literature and, yes, even some pretty cool stuff happening in TV, I think that the Fifties were a time of great artistic ferment and I wish we had stuff like that going on now. And that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
At any rate, I was watching The Bridge on the River Kwai the other day, and it struck me that we have some more "Conformist Fifties" fodder. It's 1957 and David Lean is making a movie about a British lieutenant colonel, captured with his men in the fall of Singapore, obsessed with keeping their morale up. And he's obsessed with building the Japanese enemy a better bridge than they could have done themselves, to prove the superiority of British methods. This isn't how things really happened in the war—according to Wikipedia, a commander who did this would be quietly killed by his fellow prisoners for aiding the enemy's war efforts. But it's an interesting character study, and I thought so especially at one particular passage.
The night before the bridge is to be formally opened, this Colonel Nicholson takes a slow, contemplative stroll along it. He leans on a railing, his swagger stick in his hand, and gazes about him, seemingly at peace with himself. The prison camp commander, Colonel Saito, walks up toward him, gazes out at the sunset, and says, "Beautiful."
Saito seems to have no particular thought at the moment for the bridge—hardly a surprise, since he was sidelined in its construction. He's a much less focused, effective person than Nicholson—he's the kind of person who simply wants to get through life without getting in trouble with his bosses.
Nicholson, by now unable to clearly distinguish between himself and the building project he pushed forward so obsessively, assumes that Saito is talking about the bridge. Saito politely switches gears and agrees that the bridge is, indeed, a "beautiful creation."
But for all of Nicholson's characteristic focus, tonight he's in a strange mood—where before he was driven, he now seems deeply pensive.
"I've been thinking," he says slowly. "Tomorrow it will be 28 years to the day that I've been in the service. 28 years in peace and war. I don't suppose I've been at home more than 10 months in all that time. Still, it's been a good life. I love India. I wouldn't have had it any other way. But there are times when suddenly you realize you're nearer the end than the beginning, and you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life represents, what difference your being there at any time made to anything—or if it made any difference at all, really, particularly in comparison with other men's careers. I don't know whether that kind of thinking is very healthy, but I must admit I've had some thoughts on those lines from time to time. But tonight—tonight—"
And here, gazing at the horizon and the setting sun, he opens his hands to gesture, as if he can't quite put the feeling into words—satisfaction, contentment, happiness, peace—and the swagger stick falls to the river in a moment and disappears. Nicholson looks at the greenish water in mild dismay.
"Blast," he murmurs.
Then he straightens up, the contemplative moment passed. "I must be off," he says. "The men are preparing some sort of entertainment."
I just couldn't help being very, very struck by this scene. From what I've read, Alec Guinness gave the character more depth than Lean meant to. Yes, he's obsessed, and lost sight of what his real duty was in the larger scheme. But he kept his men's morale up, defying Saito in the beginning with great personal fortitude—he's an embodiment of a person who unswervingly upholds his or her morals and ideals even in circumstances where a bit of swerving might be appropriate.
But he's intelligent and strong enough to question the value of his entire life. And he's sensitive enough to know when he's experiencing a moment that makes all the effort worthwhile and obscures the uncertainty. Faith and doubt, meaning and absurdity, emptiness and fulfillment—for a moment, it all balances on a knife edge—and then the swagger stick splashes into the water. And I think people who believe that entertainment in the 1950s lacked subtlety ought to see this scene. This was no art film—it was meant to entertain, and it was hugely popular. But if you want nuance, ambiguity, questions that aren't resolved and may not be resolvable—it's all there, with a bag of popcorn too. Just sayin' folks.
In 1956, Jules Feiffer started doing a weekly cartoon in the Village Voice titled "Sick, Sick, Sick." Feiffer is still alive today, and so is the work he did back then. The drawing is deceptively casual; he was able to take a type of person and create a highly distilled, vivid caricature with a minimum of ink. And the writing is just as timeless as the art—the subjects may in some cases have changed, and the mores of the culture have changed as well, but the human situation is what Feiffer addresses. The title "Sick, Sick, Sick" was a reference to the culture he found himself in, and he scrutinizes everyone: government officials, business leaders, artists, swingers, parents and children, everyday people. Today, much of what passes for satire is actually just snark: it ridicules other people. Feiffer's work still resonates because it ridicules us; it ridicules the less admirable traits and attitudes in everyone. One cartoon shows a guy angrily despairing over the successful launch into orbit of Russia's Sputnik satellite. "What's the use?" he says. "We have committed the worst of all possible sins—" he says, walking out of the frame, diminishing before our eyes. "We were second," he says in the last frame. It's about Sputnik. But it's also about the tendency in every Olympics, say, for American broadcasters to act as though a failure for some media-darling athlete to get a gold medal is a crushing defeat, as if winning a silver medal in the Olympics is a bad thing, an ignobly diminishing sad event in one's life. We still think that dominating everyone else is the only worthwhile thing. This attitude is, of course, insane—it's sick. And that's why Feiffer is timeless and relevant when people who merely mock others they don't like without seeing the big picture rarely find an audience fifty years after their brief time on the scene.
Feiffer's cartoons from the Fifties aren't just relevant today, they're funny (sometimes grimly so) and aglow with a warming humanity. They're also still available here and here; and check out Feiffer's website. Just one more example of why I do this "Those Conformist Fifties" category: The Fifties were not the boring, bland decade they've been pilloried as, that's just plain wrong, and just plain wrongness is, well, just plain wrong.
One of my pet peeves—and if you don't air a pet peeve now and then, you're not really blogging—is when people say the Fifties were conformist. Just like that, they say it. Everyone conformed and was bored and Ike's face smiled like a full moon over the decade and nothing of interest happened. My guess is that the people who say this derive their knowledge of history and the arts from Nick at Nite. So as a public service, I'm going to start a series of examples of not-entirely-conformism from that much- and wrongly maligned decade. Example the first:
