Jerome Robbins and Men Who Explain

Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins
by Amanda Vaill

I knew that George Balachine was a genius and that he was the Ballet Master and Maker of the New York City Ballet. I also knew that Jerome Robbins, a Broadway kind of dancer and choreographer, was considered to be the "other" Ballet Master of NYCB. I thought that Mr. Robbins was fortunate to be so well considered, as did he, I found out in this biography. But I did not realize just how talented (I have been cruising PBS and U Tube for videos) Mr. Robbins was, just not on Broadway, but in the ballet.

Mr. Robbins not only choreographed but developed (producing, writing, the music, the book, etc.) so many iconic and classic Broadway musicals of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, with West Side Story, Gypsy, and Fiddler on the Roof as just the most familiar to most musical comedy connoisseurs and high school theater departments.

There was a little too much of the Russian shtetl (the background of Mr. Robbins' parents early in the book and his own discovery of heritage late in life and look, Fiddler on the Roof look!) in some parts of this book. But the American talented boy makes good, very good in America! parts and the Broadway history and the NYCB were the chapters that interested me the most.

Men Explain Things to Me
by Rebecca Solnitz

All about Mansplaining in the Wide World of Boys.

Yeah, I get it. I got it from the Supreme Court just recently. There are things that Women just don't understand and they have to be taught by Wise Old Ugly Men. Ugh!

The Worth of Geraldine Farrar

The history of Silent Film has always interested me. In my readings, I found it ironic that one of the early Silent Film stars was Geraldine Farrar who was a gifted and famous American opera singer of the early twentieth century. In the off-opera season, from 1915 to 1920, Miss Farrar starred in silent film where her vocal talents were unused but she did have "star quality" and she was a very good Operatic Actress and that was all she needed to achieve stardom in the film of that time.

She also had a core fan club of young women who adored her and called themselves "Gerry Flappers". I am sure that they all saw her films at least once if not twenty times.

Miss Farrar was born in Massachusetts and her musical ability was recognized by her mother at an early age (5 years old) and nurtured. Miss Farrar was an only child so her mother's attention upon her was absolute. 

At the age of fourteen, Miss Farrar was giving recitals and those recitals brought her to the notice of The Bonds of Boston who bankrolled Miss Farrar's further education to sing opera. Miss Farrar sought her advanced education in Europe and it was in the turn of the century Germany that she gained notice and earned her reputation as a soprano, much like Maria Callas of the later part of the twentieth century, who sang the emotions of the opera part. She had technique but it was the "acting" of the emotions of the part that was the most important part of the performance for her and her audience.

Miss Farrar made her American Metropolitan debut in 1906 and was the soprano who introduced the iconic and eponymous role of Madama Butterfly to American audiences. She was selected and coached by Puccini himself for the part. Although in her biography, she claims that she was his second choice.

The Autobiography of Geraldine Farrar was written by Miss Farrar in 1938. She has very fond memories of her career and life in Germany before World War I that carries over rather offensively to the 1930s. She finds no offense in Hitler's Germany.

She also divides the book into parts. One part is written by Miss Farrar with flourishes and innuendos and intransitive verbs and lush similes and flushed metaphors that makes the reader sometimes resort to diagramming the sentence to determine what is really being said.

For Example, she describes a tenor named Chaliapin:

"I am sure he was a kind if sometimes forgetful husband, and an affectionate father, in spite of having a brilliant reputation as conquistador in the domain of Amor. This was not difficult, given his tremendous artistic endowment, and the the undeniable attractions of a singularly elemental male."  

In real speak, the man was a Horn Dog and had a Big Dong. And she knows, because she had him. And he and his Dong were Good.

In the other part of the "autobiography", Miss Farrar's mother writes with exactly the same style as Miss Farrar and despite the fact that she, the mother, is dead. I suppose we are to assume that this is some "auto"matic hand writing channeled from the dead mother's spirit. Miss Farrar's mom discreetly covers the heights of Miss Farrar's career and love life that it would be unseemly for Miss Farrar to boast directly about herself.

Miss Farrar had an affair with Crown Prince Wilhem in her Berlin Glory Days, but Miss Farrar's mom writes about what a lovely wife and kiddies that he had, and that she and Geraldine got to see them all the time and practically live with them because they were so close to Mrs. Wilhem. I guess that they had the bedroom on the other side of Prince Wilhem's boudoir. And all those adorable kiddies were Mrs. Wilhem's kiddies, all her own, not one of them was Miss Farrar's.

Miss Farrar's love affairs with Toscanini and Enrico Caruso among others are covered in much the same manner.

Miss Farrar's movie career ended in 1920 when she tore up her contract with Samuel Goldwyn when he told her that her movies didn't make money anymore. Miss Farrar was a New England business woman and she made movies because that was where the money was. Miss Farrar's singing career ended in the late 1920s when she wore out her voice by constant travel in her own private rail car all over the US, because that was where the money was. She did record extensively in the early twentieth century because that was where the money was and you can find some of these recordings on CDs today.

Miss Farrar was a Lady who knew her Worth and got her Worth in every way possible.

Some Odd People

The Guilty One by Lisa Ballantyne

This book is a murder mystery that goes to trial where the truth to be discovered about the trial and whether the accused child murderer did what he is accused of is discernible about half way through the book and the trial.

The real mystery is why the child's attorney, or solicitor (this is a British mystery), is estranged from his adoptive mother and biological mother.

This is good trash reading.


That Furious Lesbian: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta by Robert A. Shanke

Mercedes de Acosta knew every one who was Any One in the early twentieth century. She was a lesbian groupie who slept with all the great lesbians of that age, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Eva le Gallienne, Laurette Taylor, Alice B. Toklas, etc.

Miss de Acosta also wrote plays for the theater of the time and screenplays for Hollywood movies.

This is a good biography. It moves fast and explains the period and its people well to anyone who has not read much about it.

And Cecil Beaton was the one who called her a furious lesbian. Really Mr. Beaton, you are one to talk.

Escape From Affluence and Poverty and Sentiment

Escape From Camp 14 by Blaine Harden is the story of Shin Dong-hyuk who was born and reared in a North Korean Internment Camp. His father and mother were inmates who were favored by the guards and allowed to breed. They produced two sons, Shin and an older brother, in their long and dreary and cruel incarceration. Both sons managed to escape the camp, but in completely different ways.

Shin long blamed his mother and father for making him to be born and live in such hellish conditions. Shin ratted out his mother and older brother to the authorities on their escape plans for extra food and served six months in dark cell isolation and being tortured before being brought out to the daylight to watch the camp authorities hang his mother and shoot his brother before his eyes. Shin and his father got front row seats for that piece of Camp Theater.

After the execution of his mother and brother, Shin was placed in a cell with an older man who told him wondrous stories of the Food outside of the camp. Shin, who was overworked, undereducated, malnourished, and fresh from six months of torture which included beatings and being hung to roast over a fire, and the deaths of this mother and brother which were caused by Shin's informing on them, conceived of escaping from the camp to get him some of that food.

Forget Freedom, Shin just wanted to be able to eat to satiation. By the way, the torture was about the same as living in the camp, beatings and overwork and isolation from the children around him and little or no food.

Later Shin left his cell with his Gourmand Inmate and made the acquaintance of a newly arrived North Korean who made the mistake of going back to North Korea after a few years in the relative benign freedom of China. Shin and the new inmate conceived a plan to escape the camp while cutting wood near the camp's electrical fences. They carried out the plan, but only Shin made it out. He used the body of his escape buddy to neutralize the Electrical Fence and crawled over his dead companion to Food.

Although with his education (they only taught rudimentary reading and writing skills to the children in-between work details and beatings), Shin had no idea where China was or what it was, Shin made it to China and spent three years in the country learning a few things about the world and eating Food. Later South Korea paid him to come to their country and after a de-briefing (tattling is one way to make it in the World), South Korea paid to maintain him there.

But the years of deprivation in Mind and Body, left Shin with long term Mental Illness Issues. He has never really adjusted to life outside the camp. Shin now lives most of the time in California where he lectures on his experiences and life in the North Korean Camp. He travels frequently to South Korea for visits.

During his torture session after ratting out his mother and brother, Shin was shown some papers that he was able to read. He found out that his father was in the camp because two of his brothers escaped to South Korea during the Korean War. The remaining family was sent to North Korean Camps because they were considered contaminated by the two brothers' escape. Somebody has to feed and work for the rest of North Korea and the Kim Jongs.

By the way, Shin didn't even know who the Kim Jongs were until he escaped. Education was very shallow even with propaganda for the Camp Kids.

Shin is one of three people who escaped from North Korean Camps. The interns of the Camps are so cowed and overworked and starved that most of them don't even attempt to run. And most who make the attempt end up like Shin's mother and brother.

Remember, it ain't Freedom that motivates. It is FOOD.



Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead

This book was recommended by Salon.

I got about halfway through it, but I didn't find any of the characters interesting. They were all annoying in their privilege. And there was this Middle Aged Man who was hitting on one of his daughter's Bridesmaids. The Bridesmaid wanted it too. But I didn't want to read about it.

I see the recommendation was by a middle aged man. Well, that explains a lot.


Cascade by Maryanne O'Hara

This book was another recommendation.

It's about a woman artist of the thirties who makes all the wrong decisions (love and art) but comes out right in the end. Her father makes what appear to be the right decisions, but they go haywire.

The best woman artist of the thirties character was in The Big Clock, a classic noir book and film.

I guess that I am just not that sentimental.

City of Nets

by Otto Friedrich

Mr. Friedrich looks at the decade of 1940 for the Hollywood movie business. The consensus is that 1939 was the height of the American movie industry in Hollywood. The movie industry was solid for half a decade after that until the end of WWII and the beginning of television. The movie industry spent several decades after 1950 declining and adjusting to the new culture, technological advances, and economic and political re-adjustments of Post War America. In 1970, the Hollywood movie industry had a re-birth and television production came into its own.

But all this economic and political upheaval and stuff can be fun when it is analysed and illustrated with tales of Hollywood madness, folly, gossip, and envy. Bertrolt Brecht, the German playwright, always struck me as an ass when I had to read him in college. But in this book, he is a fun ass---Mother Courage, but Marx Brothers funny. Mr. Brecht's misadventures in trying to get into the movies and go Hollywood during his exile from Europe in WWII are sour human comedy that he never managed to achieve in his writings.

And Mr. Brecht is not the only European exile lost in the fragrant and fertile Hollywood Hills and landscape; Thomas Mann has a Life in Hollywood and tends his garden in Brentwood, Charles Laughton loses his garden in a Southern California mudslide, and Schonberg argues movie music with Irving Thalberg, the "Boy Genius" of movies before Orson Welles showed up to claim that title (it's all about "control"). And during the making of Fantasia, Disney declaims that he will "make" Beethoven ("Roll over Beethoven and tell Stravinsky that news.")

It is all wild and crazy fun, and travails gone absurdly wrong, in this book. I highly recommend it.

The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years

by David Shipman

The first thing to note, when reading this book, is that it was published in 1970, and the edition that I read, was revised in 1979. That means that this book is not comprehensive, for the last part of the 20th century (it doesn't note or take into account, the re-making of Hollywood movies and their production system of the 1970s that brought American movies back into high repute and opinion).

But Mr. Shipman has either seen every movie before 1970, or he writes as though he has, and as though he knows what he is talking about.

This is a good book to browse or even to read straight through. It gives the reader some ideas of movies and DVDs that she might want to see. I have got to see Limelight, if just for Buster Keaton.

However, every few pages a sentence much like the following will show up:

• "Their personal lives had many similarities, including early deaths, but why should the genuinely attractive Monroe have been constantly compared with Harlow, platinum blonde, cross-legged in her hideous shapeless body-revealing sateen dresses, her smile the genuine tooth past advert?"

Huh? Miss Monroe was naturally pretty and Miss Harlow was manufactured sort of attractive? Is that what I am supposed to infer from this sentence? Don't nobody tell Mr. Shipman that Miss Monroe had a nose job and that a seamstress had to sew her into her body-revealing dresses. And how can a dress be both "body-revealing" and yet "shapeless"? It's called a "bias cut", by the way, and I could make a pun about bias, but never mind.

The book gives a good overview, but Mr. Shipman is no fan of film noir, so note that as you read or skim the book.