Poisoned Valentine

Someone there is that doesn’t like Chet Baker. Exactly why did David Thomson, now 80, well-known and respected film critic, go so far out of his way on at least three occasions – in the LA Times, Salon Magazine, and The New Republic – to personally attack jazz trumpet player Chet Baker? 

Thomson has committed plenty of howlers as a so-called critic over the years. In my review of his Biographical Dictionary of Film, first published in Senses of Cinema in 2003, I wrote: “[he is one of] the hangers-on of the medium, who are in it for ephemeral fame or simply the vicarious thrill of rubbing up against, even in effigy, the likes of Jack Nicholson and Nicole Kidman.” Thomson is more of a fan than a real critic. He wrote a whole book – 332 pages long – about Nicole Kidman, for crissake. 

But why did he turn – and return – to an attack on Chet Baker? Baker (1929-1988) was a jazz musician who attained popularity in the early 1950s. He was different, and not just because he was white and had movie star looks (see above). He and his fellow musicians, which included the baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, were practitioners of the "West Coast Cool" bebop sound. Baker had earned chops of his own playing with Charlie Parker in some of Parker's west coast gigs. And Baker could sing, sort of. He landed Downbeat Magazine’s Trumpeter of the Year award in 1953 and ’54. Then, like so many other jazz musicians of the era, he discovered heroin and his addiction destroyed his career. Eventually, if he could've pawned his soul for some heroin, as he often did with his trumpets at his lowest point (he started using in 1957, served time in jail in Europe for drug offenses, and, in 1966, got his teeth knocked out in a drug-related altercation), he would have without a moment's thought. After slowly cleaning himself up and after he got new dentures and regained his embouchure, he got back to performing and recording in the mid-1970s. In 1978 he returned to Europe and he remained there for the rest of his life. He died in a fall from a balcony in Amsterdam in 1988. 

Ten years after his death, in the LA Times, David Thomson began his bizarre crusade against Baker in an article called “Musical Interlude”: 

Chet Baker was a soft white kid who loved black music and wanted to imitate it but who never had the depth or energy to keep up... Baker had a forlorn, uneducated face, insecure, unreliable, indolent and selfindulgent. He had a white-trash Dorian Gray air to him... And Baker’s music, long before heroin or the loss of his teeth, was restricted, plodding, slow and like the last gasp of a consumptive. Still, the playing was dainty, terse and lyrical next to his stunned singing. There, above all, you heard his empty mind. 

It’s worth interjecting that Thomson never actually met Baker. He never wrote about jazz either, but he is clearly anxious to drop as many names of other jazz greats as he can in his article. 

In 2000, another Thomson piece appeared in Salon titled “A Funny Valentine: Chet Baker and Dickie Greenleaf make Tom Ripley fall in love.” It’s an otherwise discursive, pointless meditation on Anthony Minghella's movie The Talented Mr. Ripley. Thomson mentions how 'You hear Baker's muted, exhausted trumpet over a few "happy" scenes,' describes Tom’s (Matt Damon’s) own rendition of the song, and abruptly ends the short piece with the line, “That was the other thing about Chet Baker -- who knew whether he was dead or alive?” 

But in 2002 Thomson reviewed a book about Baker, Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker by James Gavin. Thomson’s review, which he called “My Unfunny Valentine,” is a deeply personal and quite outrageous hatchet job of a defenselessly dead jazz artist. Thomson writes: 

Had the man fallen or jumped, or had someone even pushed him? I am inclined to confess that I think it may have been me - I don't want to be unkind, and in this case it was surely mercy if some angel gave the man's frail back a tender, guiding push. 

Jazz musicians, like blues musicians, often die suddenly or accidentally, and often far too soon. The talent they possess seems to be purchased at the expense of their souls, and a jealous death is always shadowing them, ready to press them for payment. Baker was just 58, but judging from the photograph below, taken two years before his death, he was a great deal older than his years. 

The thesis of Thomson’s review of the Baker biography is that Baker was a bad jazz musician because he was white and because he was strikingly good-looking (which seems to be the only reason why Thomson was attracted by the subject in the first place). He opened his review with the following warning: 

If you treasure Chet Baker, if you have all his recordings of "My Funny Valentine" and "Let's Get Lost," and if you revere the desperate effort to hit flat notes, to stretch more paining pauses, to disappear into the ether, then buy this diligent book, but do not read what I have to say about its subject.

Holding all of his advantages against Baker is as unfair as the system that made him popular. For Thomson, Baker's life story after discovering heroin is so monotonously depressing that he feels sorry for his biographer: 

Baker was out to bring everyone down. It would not surprise me if - just to get through the labor--Gavin needed an hour or so every night listening to something as cleansing, explosive, and hopeful as Louis Armstrong, Lee Morgan, or Clifford Brown, or anyone who knew how to pick up a trumpet and blow, as opposed to using the instrument to enlarge an exquisite, maudlin, and grisly sigh. No, I do not like Chet Baker. 

Ultimately, Thomson claims, “his plaintive look and his whiteness brought him sympathy and praise beyond his due. Truly I think that the Chet Baker story was, from start to finish, based on his appearance. He was pretty, he was handsome, he was cute." It's possible, all these years since, to separate Chet Baker's trumpet playing from his face - especially since, by the time he was 40, he had entirely lost his looks. And it was his later recordings in the 1980s that critics recognize as examples of his best playing, when he looked like death warmed over, as my father used to say. 

I think Thomson’s obsession with Baker was based on jealousy and sexual frustration for a beautiful man who so steadfastly threw away his looks and his talent. He "squandered his talents", as they say. But, as George Orwell wrote about H.G. Wells, "But how much it is, after all, to have any talents to squander." (1) 

Whether or not his death was suicide, whatever was responsible for Chet Baker's success, it's silly to blame him for it. Was John Coltrane responsible for his early death from cancer? If being a gifted jazz musician carried a curse, how was Baker to blame if his curse came ready-made, as it did for anyone who picked up an instrument and made something out of nothing for whomever was lucky enough to be listening? 

“Musical Interlude,” Los Angeles Times, June 14, 1998. “A Funny Valentine: Chet Baker and Dickie Greenleaf make Tom Ripley fall in love,” Salon Magazine, July 20, 2000. "My Unfunny Valentine," The New Republic, June 17, 2002. 

(1) George Orwell, "Wells, Hitler and the World State", Horizon, August 1941.

Pest Control

There is someone in my life whom I strongly dislike, have disliked for 14 years, and there is nothing I can do about it. I wish there was a way I could reason this perennial annoyance away, and writing it all down is the only way I know of doing it. 

The feeling of dislike I have for this person has lasted since I met him when he was just 12 years old. He is the younger son of the woman who lives with me. I can’t get away from him as long as I am involved with his mother. I have tried to make sense of the feeling he inspires in me by explaining it on this blog. In 2011 I wrote: 

He has been living in my house since he was 12. His mother has been my constant companion, translator, and protector since late 2007. And after three years of living under the same roof, the boy and I remain almost total strangers. 

I am willing to take some of the blame for this, but the boy is no day at the beach, either. He was always, I am told, quiet and self-effacing. I would often fail to notice that he was there. Walking around the house on a cool afternoon, I would be convinced I was alone until I saw his feet sticking out from behind a door, sitting there reading his bible. 

When he arrived in my house he was a second grade drop-out. He gave no indications of what he intended to do with the rest of his life until I had had enough of his sullenness, his sneaking comings and goings, and proposed to him that he return to school with an allowance of five hundred pesos (a little more than $10) every month. I only did it to get him out of my house during the day, five days a week. 

This change of outlook apparently had such an incredible impact on his life that he somehow found Jesus - with a vengeance. In fact, he couldn't have devised a better revenge on the man who usurped his good for nothing father. I couldn't have been less pleased if he'd announced he was a Republican. And he couldn't have opted for the gentle Roman Catholic Jesus, whose worship is conducted once a week in church. No, he had to be "born again" - a boisterous, exclamatory worship of Jesus, conducted everywhere: in their hole in the wall church, at the dinner table, before bed, in fact just about every time it occurs to them to emit their passionate cries of devotion to their savior. The boy was made aware of my utter disdain for his new found faith when I told his mother to tell him to shut his trap one night when his bed time prayers were beginning to drown out the comforting drone of my electric fan. 

I am confident enough, and saddened, that he will perhaps never read these words or comprehend how much it pains me to know what a failure I have been as a step-father. If I had more influence over him, I would try to get him away from the people in his church, where he spends so much of his time. I should thank them, perhaps, for giving him the ego-gratification that he found nowhere else. But I have serious misgivings about a religion that makes it impossible for a 14 year old boy to act like any other normal boy, that instructs him to act like a lunatic at every opportunity and that makes living in the same world as everyone else harder than it already is.  

One of the things that aggravated me most about him was his evident refusal to take any part in my household. His little sister called - and still calls - me “daddy." He never does. (He has the effrontery to call me "kuya [brother] Dan.") At night when we said good night to one another in the dark, like they did in the old TV series The Waltons, he remained silent. When I taught the two children a few simple manners  like saying please and thank you and you're welcome and bless you when someone sneezed, his little sister complied but he ignored me. I tried to make sense of this by thinking he was suffering from an Oedipus Complex. He resented me precisely because I had replaced his deadbeat dad. The undeclared and unspoken conflict between us came to a climax in 2014 just after he turned 19. In 2015 I wrote: 

I had been anxious for him to leave my house until last August, when, after pulling the latest in a very long line of stupid stunts (like breaking into my house when I wasn't there), I told him to start looking for another place to live. I expected that it would take him weeks and perhaps months to accomplish the task. Imagine my surprise when he moved out the very next day, pouring forth as he did so what must've been a reservoir of pent-up resentment toward me. The only thing that bothered me about it was that it broke his mother's heart. 

I am poor by any standard you care to apply - including my living for seven years in a backward province of a very poor country and having to support four people on a miniscule pension. When we got here and the four of us settled into a life that has been a constant struggle with severely straightened circumstances - the everyday life of poor Filipinos - what I've witnessed from the boy hasn’t been disappointing – how he went back to school (to the 2nd grade) at the age of 14, twice the age of his classmates who would, out of simple curiosity, ask him why he was there. He told them that he had to get his education, regardless of his age. He swallowed his pride every day that he went to school. By now, he has swallowed enough pride to sink a hundred Titanics. He's a handsome kid. I can take a little credit, I think, for the fact that he has grown up in my house hale and hearty, as has his little sister. I wish I could help the boy, but I am in no position to do so. I wanted to get him out of my house precisely because I couldn't take care of him any more. Despite this, I continue to feed him three times a day. 

He knows how hopeless his life would be if he had no other choice but to stay in the Philippines. The young people here seem to live foreshortened, doomed lives. And they always seem to make the same mistakes. Their fates seem to be aligned for them from birth - the same fate that their parents suffered - to meet a girl, experiment with intimacy (what little intimacy they can find in these overcrowded islands), get her pregnant inadvertently, or as inadvertently as the complete absence of contraceptive choices allows, and be forced to provide for her and her child. By the time they're 21, their lives are as good as over. The boy sees this happening around him, and he knows the finality of such a fate. It happened, after all, to his older brother and sister, who live a few hundred miles from here. Unlike him, neither of them has an education. Their horizons are drawn in on them. Looking to their futures, they know that there isn't much more for them to look forward to. They will look for happiness in small increments, taking each day, each one of them like every other, one at a time. A long time ago I noticed a difference between myself and these poor people: why does it take so little to make them happy and so very much to keep me from being unhappy? 

By now, January 2022, with all of the water under both our bridges, I suppose we’ve arrived at a kind of armistice. We have to deal with each other as long as his mother lives with me. (This is something I am currently taking steps to correct.) He graduated from a local university last fall with a degree in computer science, and intends to use his degree to get a job overseas as – I kid you not – a caregiver. It’s actually a much better idea than staying in the Philippines, where even a 4-year degree won’t get him a well-paying job. Success in this country depends entirely on the family you’re born into. So he’s getting training as a caregiver and talks of possibly landing a job in Canada. 

Meanwhile, he comes to my place at least twice a day to eat and use my WiFi. Since my apartment is small, he does this in my small back yard. He also rewards me by pissing there. It’s a Filipino thing, but since he can piss anywhere, I find his pissing in my yard especially insulting. Every time I see his face as he walks past my door or hear his voice, I wince. It’s a reflex by now. I am certain he is looking forward to seeing the last of me with as much anticipation as I am. Whether he leaves the country before I do, our parting won’t be an occasion for tears.

Brooklyn

Every day she had come back to this small room in this house full of sounds and gone over everything new that had happened. Now, all that seemed like nothing compared to the picture she had of home, of her own room, the house in Friary Street, the food she had eaten there, the clothes she wore, how quiet everything was. 

Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn is a subtle and deeply ironic portrait of Irish emigration – a somewhat inescapable subject for an Irish writer. In the novel, set in the early 1950s, Eilis (pronounced “Eyelish”) is the youngest daughter of Mary Lacey, a widow living in a town in southeast Ireland called Enniscorthy. Eilis's two brothers have jobs in Liverpool. Her sister, Rose, works in an office and, through a priest named Father Flood, arranges for Eilis to go to America to work. Eilis doesn’t want to go to America, but silently complies. Of course, Eilis’s amenability, her willingness to simply go along with other people’s plans, soon emerges as a character flaw in her. 

On board the ship bound for New York, Eilis meets her third class cabin-mate, Georgina, a glamorous-looking woman who puts Eilis in her place – the top bunk. Georgina is returning to America after visiting family in Liverpool. 

“Never again,” Georgina said. “Never again.” 

Eilis could not resist. “Never again such a big trunk or never again going to America?” 

“Never again in third class. Never again the trunk. Never again going home to Liverpool. Just never again. Does that answer your question?” 

Once in Brooklyn, Eilis is boarded in a house owned by a Mrs. Kehoe, along with four other young Irish women. She has a job as a salesgirl on the floor of a department store called Bartocci’s. She settles nicely into her routine until the first letter from Rose arrives and fills her with such overwhelming homesickness that Miss Fortini, Eilis’s store supervisor, calls in Father Flood to help. To occupy her mind, he gets her enrolled in night classes at Brooklyn College. 

On Friday nights, Eilis goes with two of her boarding housemates to a dance organized by Father Flood. It is there that she meets Tony Fiorello, a plumber who lives in Brooklyn with his parents and three brothers. They begin dating, going out to eat, to the movies, to a baseball game, even to Coney Island. Miss Fortini helps Eilis acquire a becoming swimsuit, and takes a few liberties in the changing room that leave Eilis unsettled. 

Then, suddenly, word comes from Ireland of Rose’s sudden death. Eilis decides to go home, but not before Tony gets her to marry him in a civil ceremony. Telling no one of her marriage, Eilis goes home and, despite the absence of Rose, Enniscorthy seems exactly as she left it. She, however, has been transformed into a glamorous figure, with colorful, stylish clothes and makeup. Her friend Nancy is getting married and pushes Eilis at Jim Farrell, whose family runs a local pub. Eilis postpones her return to America, and even takes over Rose’s old office job. She goes to the seaside with Nancy and her fiancé and Jim Farrell. 

Tony has written Eilis several times, but she stops reading his letters. What happened in Brooklyn can stay in Brooklyn. She even thinks about getting a divorce (despite there being no divorce law in Ireland until 1996). All of her deceptions, however, come to an abrupt end when Mrs. Ryan, a terrible snobbish woman in whose store she once worked in Enniscorthy, tells Eilis of a phone call she had with Madge Kehoe, who is her cousin in Brooklyn – the same Mrs. Kehoe who is her landlady. Mrs. Kehoe had been informed of Eilis’s marriage to Tony (possibly by Tony himself) and Eilis realizes instantly that her sojourn in Enniscorthy is over. She arranges a berthing on a ship leaving the following day. She tells her mother she is married and that her husband is nice, and her mother takes the news stoically. In the morning Eilis writes a note to Jim Farrell explaining as much as he deserves to know, and boards the train for Cobh. 

The novelist Colm Tóibín tells the story entirely through the somewhat narrow prism of Eilis. When I read of her return to Enniscorthy and how everyone appeared to have designs on her life, and how willingly she went along with them, I felt as betrayed as Tony might’ve been. But Eilis enjoys her homecoming in ways she never enjoyed her life before she went to Brooklyn. Rose was always the beautiful one, the glamorous one. But at 30, and unmarried, Rose had a secret that she could never tell – that she had a bad heart and that she could die at any moment. She made sure that Eilis was out of the house and in a life of her own before the blow would fall. When Eilis returns to Enniscorthy, she almost takes up where Rose had so suddenly left off. She is now someone in her home town. It’s no wonder that she – momentarily – wanted to forget about Brooklyn and stay home. 

It’s such a beautiful novel that all the film had to do was adopt a different narrative device, shifting from Eilis’s inner world to her outer one. And this is handled brilliantly. The worlds of 1950s Enniscorthy and Brooklyn are so vividly actualized. The film of Brooklyn is one of the most beautiful-looking films I have ever seen. The production design by Canadian François Séguin and the costume design by Odile Dicks-Mireau are so overwhelmingly and acutely palpable that they place the film in another realm entirely. It is all so fetching that they reduce the actors, some of whom are excellent, to shadowy figures in the foreground of a gorgeous tableaux. And Yves Bélanger’s camera is so much in love with it that it dwells on every detail.

There are only a few faces familiar to me in the cast. Apparently Saoirse Ronan* gained a little weight for the role, and it suits her performance. The wonderful Jim Broadbent has only a few scenes, but he is so marvelous to watch. Unfortunately, his is the only male face in the film that held my attention. Emory Cohen looks the role of Tony Fiorello, but he is nothing but his surfaces. Back in Ireland, Domhnall Gleeson, as Jim Farrell, is a negligible presence. These two uninteresting men make one worry about the dearth of Eilis’s chances for happiness, which for her are limited to her choice of a husband. As I mentioned, the novel ends with Eilis on the train to - eventually - the port of Cobh. In the film, a quite unnecessary reunion scene between Eilis and Tony on a Brooklyn street takes us out of the film, trying to convince us, I suppose, that the story ends happily. 

The Irish director, John Crowley, made the remarkable film Boy A in 2007. Here he indulges the same art of close-reef sailing (it is a little film, despite it being a British-Irish-Canadian production) and allows us the space and time to look at his film. There are a few ravishing moments that stand out, but my favorite is when we are shown Rose sitting on a bench by the River Slaney reading one of Eilis’s letters. Why anyone would ever want to leave such a place boggles the mind. 

*Apparently the same practical jokers who transliterate Chinese into the Roman alphabet, wherein Tsingtao Beer is pronounced “Ching-dow,” are also responsible for the spelling of Irish names. Saoirse, for example, is pronounced “Sur-sha.”

A Little More Reading

In March of 2020, when the first pandemic restrictions were imposed everywhere, even here on my island that time forgot, I decided to take advantage of the self-isolation by opening the doors of literature and getting back in the habit of reading every day. With the persistence of the pandemic in 2021, I continued the daily reading routine. Here is what I was reading in 2021. 

January 

Summer Lightning (1929) by P. G. Wodehouse 

The Window Over the Way (1933) by Georges Simenon 

The Widow (1942) by Georges Simenon 

February 

The Stranger by Albert Camus 

Maigret at the Crossroads by Georges Simenon 

Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee 

March 

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh 

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan 

The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy 

April 

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan 

Ironweed by William Kennedy 

An Unsuitable Attachment by Barbara Pym 

May 

Ulysses by James Joyce 

June 

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy 

Nemesis by Philip Roth 

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth 

July 

Dangling Man by Saul Bellow 

The Victim by Saul Bellow 

August 

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow 

Jennie Gerhardt by Theodore Dreiser 

September 

Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow 

October 

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf 

The Unpossessed by Tess Slesinger 

The Train Was On Time by Heinrich Böll 

November 

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth 

The Gospel According To Jesus Christ by José Saramago 

December 

Heavy Weather (1933) by P. G. Wodehouse 

A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul 

Some very satisfying reading, with a few surprises. I’ve written about a few of them already, and of the others... 

I found the early Cormac McCarthy effort to be a little clumsy in places, but with flashes of brilliance. I know that I will have to read Ulysses again some day and that I will get a great deal more out of it. I could see why Virginia Woolf was bothered by it (and not because of its obscenities). Her own use of the “stream of consciousness” approach was best represented, I am told, by To the Lighthouse. It was my fourth Woolf novel, and certainly not my last.

The first half of The Adventures of Augie March I thought was as rich as anything I’ve ever read. Too bad Augie (and Bellow) had to leave Chicago. Nemesis was a beautiful farewell to novel writing for Philip Roth. The two McEwan novels I read were not, I hope, among his best. My very first Simenon novel, The Window Over the Way, was surprisingly fine. It was so evocative of a time and place (a Black Sea outpost of Stalinist Russia) that I think I can still find my way around it. My first Barbara Pym novel happened to be the one her usual publisher (Jonathan Cape) wouldn’t publish. Only when she was “rediscovered” (thankfully in her lifetime) was it posthumously published, two years after her death, to critical acclaim. I enjoyed her concentration on a handful of characters in a regional English town, so much so that I look forward to picking up another of her novels. 

Sandwiched between two Saul Bellow novels is Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt, one of those novels I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. Though it came highly recommended for its “realism,” I was never certain what Dreiser was getting at, but the characters are remarkably real. It reminded me of one of George Eliot’s pièces à thése. What stays with me is how its characters tried to triumph over their misfortunes and how little the misfortunes mattered at the end of their lives. I also learned how Dreiser’s publisher had tampered with his text. 

But it was the two Wodehouse novels, Summer Lightning and Heavy Weather both of them set at Blandings Castle and the second being a sequel to the first, that had the most pleasant effect on me - an effect that is difficult to describe. Wodehouse is the champion of unserious writers who yet managed to write splendidly. Both novels’ endings were positively delicious. Wodehouse created a world that is immensely alluring. And in 2003 two geographers announced that they had solved the mystery of the true identity of Blandings Castle, which Wodehouse never divulged. Apley Hall in Shropshire, “which they reckon a 98% certainty,” is Blandings (see photo below) – although it’s as much a creation of Wodehouse’s inexhaustible whimsy.

Standards

Why do so many jazz musicians play what are known as “standards” – classic songs written for Broadway musicals in the 1920s and ‘30s? Songs like “Body and Soul” by Johnny Green, “Summertime” by George Gershwin, and “My Funny Valentine” by Rodgers and Hart have been performed and recorded by numerous jazz artists over the years since their composition. A great many more songs were written for Hollywood movies, like “The Bad and the Beautiful” by David Raksin, “One for My Baby” by Johnny Mercer, and “The Days of Wine and Roses” by Henry Mancini; and they, too, became standards for jazz artists. 

In an interview with Rick Beato that I watched recently on YouTube, jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton spoke about the state of jazz when he gave his first solo performances in the 1960s and why he wanted to go in a different direction: 

I felt jazz was in a straight jacket. We were all playing the same 150 standards over and over again. Ninety-nine per cent of it was syncopated time and all the harmonies were based on Broadway show tune compositions and it was beginning to feel repetitive to me. 

I am not a musician or a musicologist, but I am a discriminating listener, and I hate to say it, but even coming from a jazz musician as talented as Burton, his statement is more than a little obtuse. In the interview Burton went on to try and justify his adoption of rock chord progressions, even while conceding that rock music consists of only three chords. But as long as it was free from the straight jacket of the 150 standards that all follow a 2-5-1 chord progression, it was “cool.” 

Gary Burton wasn’t the first jazz musician who noticed that the audience for jazz was aging and dwindling in the 1960s. In the ‘70s jazz came perilously close to disappearing. Many musicians, wanting merely to survive, turned to jazz hybrids – the various “fusions” that incorporated funk or some other genre. Some turned to “smooth jazz” – a watered down, tepid hybrid that David Sanborn dubbed “instrumental pop.” This brand of jazz became so popular by the 1990s radio stations devoted exclusively to it sprang up in most of America’s bigger cities. The worst consequence of this awful trend was that many listeners, who had never been exposed to straight ahead jazz believed that it was actually jazz they were listening to. 

I understand Burton’s reasons for wanting to change jazz, for finding new challenges, and for wanting it to appeal to a younger audience. He knew that Be-Bop had changed to Hard Bop and then to Post Bop, and that jazz was, and still is, stuck in Bop. The only satisfying solution to the problem is discovering and nurturing talented musicians, since jazz has always had more to do with musicians than music. As I wrote on this blog in 2010, 'If you were to call in to a late night jazz radio request line and ask them to play "My Funny Valentine," they would ask you, "Whose?" Ben Webster's or Paul Desmond's? Ella Fitzgerald's or Tony Bennett's? Miles Davis's or Chet Baker's? The interpretation of the individual musician is what jazz is about, not whatever song they happen to be playing. In fact, the song is only a pretext for the musician's playing.' 

The reason why jazz musicians play standards is because of the songs’ widespread familiarity, both with musicians and their audiences. From the opening bars, audiences know the song the musician is playing and know where it is going. What they have no way of knowing is how the musician is going to get them there. What happens when a talented jazz musician improvises with a song like “Fascinating Rhythm” is the closest thing to genuine alchemy, the creation of gold from a mysterious combination of baser elements. It isn’t anything like theater, where the actors have to stick to a script. A jazz musician takes the notes of a standard and weaves a tapestry of notes out of thin air. Every great musician is a good listener, paying attention to every note he plays and following his creative instinct to every succeeding note. Elvin Jones, who was John Coltrane’s drummer, had to send him a signal during performances by tapping on the rim of a drum whenever Coltrane’s solo had gone on a little too long. Coltrane would then come back to earth and find his way back to the familiar notes of the standard song he had started with, and together with his bandmates would bring the song to a resolution.

The Show Goes On

‘From a certain point there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.’ Franz Kafka

Retirement to a tropical island paradise is a familiar dream to many Americans, especially retired or separated servicemembers. As a disabled veteran, even with a very small pension, I was able to retire to the Philippines at the tender age of 49. No less familiar to the more faithful readers of this blog are the details of what followed. The terms of my retirement became completely involuntary when a fellow American – a fellow American veteran – stole my passport less than a month after my arrival. 

There is a chilling transition in the Tom Hanks movie called Cast Away in which a man named Tom Noland who survived a plane crash in the ocean has washed ashore on a small island in the South Pacific. After struggling to survive for several days he locates shelter in a cave. Trying to knock out a rotten tooth with an ice skate, he knocks himself unconscious. The screen dissolves from Noland’s fire inside the cave to a rockpool on a sunny day and the words FOUR YEARS LATER appear. A fish swimming in the water is suddenly speared and the camera tilts up to show us Noland, who now looks like Robinson Crusoe, standing several yards away on a rock. 

FOURTEEN YEARS LATER, I am closing out another year in the Philippines. A year ago I planned on not being here. I should have been home by now, but circumstances, once again, got in the way. The circumstances present a somewhat different approach to a country’s deportation of aliens. In the US, which has a sizeable population – in the millions – of the undocumented, deportations, whether voluntary or involuntarily, involve the detainment of aliens and their being boarded on one-way flights back to their country of origin. The length of their stay – or overstay – in the US isn’t an issue. Since they came to the US in a financially disadvantageous position, the paying of fines and/or past visas is overlooked. The only object is their removal from US territory. 

In the Philippines the process is, by comparison, draconian. Aliens are deported from the country, and thenceforth blacklisted by the bureau of immigration, preventing them from ever re-entering the country. But before the deportation takes place, aliens are required to pay penalties for every year of their overstay in the amount of 35,000 pesos per year. Since my overstay, due to the extenuating circumstance of having my passport stolen shortly after my arrival, and of not having a sizeable enough income to acquire a replacement passport, has lasted 14 years, the total amount of my overstay penalties is half a million pesos. 

That may sound like a lot of money, but it’s only $10K. The policy may also sound, to us, like extortion, but it’s worth remembering that this is not a developed country that has much experience with immigration – the incoming kind, that is. The Philippines has a great deal of experience, probably greater than any other nation on earth, with outgoing immigration. Their economy depends on an undisclosed, but probably enormous, influx of cash remittances every month sent by overseas Filipino workers. 

I hired a good lawyer last March, recommended to me by a mutual friend, to negotiate with the Bureau of Immigration on my behalf. He organized an appeal for a waiver of the overstay penalties. Because of pandemic restrictions in Manila, the process didn’t get started until September. And it was only after the appeal was filed in October that the lawyer gave me a ballpark figure of the full amount of my debt. Being a lawyer, alas, he didn’t tell me that my appeal didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Manila. I waited two months for the news, and at the beginning of December I was informed, via a ZOOM call, that the waiver had been denied. (In fact, I wasn’t told it had been denied until I asked.) The reason they gave for denying my appeal was the extended length of my overstay. Never mind the fact that I don’t have ten grand at the moment, but the debt must be paid. 

Once paid, I will have a choice between a voluntary deportation (an involuntary one involves arrest and detainment for an indeterminate period), which will also mean I’ll be blacklisted from ever returning to the Philippines, or extending long enough to acquire an SRRV – a special resident visa that will allow me to come and go as I please. The “special” visa costs another $3K. 

The blacklisting is a curious custom here. The list of people blacklisted by Philippine Immigration includes actors like Michael Caine who devoted a chapter of his autobiography, What’s It All About, to “My Worst Location” – when he acted in a movie called Too Late the Hero that was filmed in Luzon Province. His less than flattering picture of his experience prompted the touchy Philippine government to order Caine blacklisted. 

As for myself, more than one of my friends and family members has asked me why I would ever be interested in returning to a country that extorts visitors who are trapped by misfortune. Another friend who is familiar with the Philippines asked me why I would want to leave and why I would want to return to the States, which he says is a “shit show.” Never mind that paradise by any definition is hell if there is no way out. But so what if my homeland is a shit show – it’s MY shit show. And if, as some people believe, there is going to be a fight, then I want to be in on it. 

But this is my life, not a case study. Ultimately (in about a year), I will pay the penalties that I owe the Bureau of Immigration. By then I will have figured out whether I want to never come back here or get the special visa. Until then I have some advice for anyone thinking about travelling to a tropical paradise: secure your passport and your return ticket in an impregnable safe and never trust an expat.

The Shop Around the Corner

To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year. There was a little device we noticed in one of the sporting-goods stores—a trumpet that hunters hold to their ears so that they can hear the distant music of the hounds. Something of the sort is needed now to hear the incredibly distant sound of Christmas in these times, through the dark, material woods that surround it. E. B. White, “A New Package of Energy”

The 81-year-old movie The Shop Around the Corner* is easily one of the least insufferable of the many that are always screened at Christmas – even though it uses Christmas only as a background to its sweet climactic scenes, giving MGM’s set decorators, under the direction of Cedric Gibbons, another chance to show off their considerable skills with chichi. 

The director was Ernst Lubitsch, who had been the most successful director in Europe before he was coaxed by America’s Sweetheart, Mary Pickford, to come to America in 1922 to make movies with her as the star. By the time he made The Shop in 1939 (he insisted on waiting for Margaret Sullavan until she was available), Lubitsch was Hollywood’s leading confectioner. Of all the many foreign filmmakers who moved to Hollywood, either for money or for refuge from war, Lubitsch was by far the most successful, largely because he made films whose aim was to entertain. Considering the number of films, the vast majority in fact, that fail to accomplish this by no means simple ambition, this is saying a great deal. 

Alfred Kralik and Klara Novak work in a leather goods shop in  Budapest. They tell their co-workers (Kralik tells Pirovitch and Klara confides in Ilona) that they each have a pen friend of the opposite sex who is so much more cultivated and refined than the usual sort of people (like Kralik and Klara). Halfway through the film the pen friends plan to meet in a café, until Kralik is fired and can't go through with the meeting. He stands outside the café with Pirovitch hoping to at least see the girl and he discovers that his pen friend is Klara. This love story exists completely on paper – letters passed between two people – until the very end of the film when Kralik fools Klara into believing her pen friend is a Mr. Popkin, balding, with a pot belly, who stole his best line from Victor Hugo, and it’s what makes the film enchanting.  

James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan had a chemistry between them that made them co-stars in four films, including the nearly forgotten The Mortal Storm, released five months after The Shop. Though they look awfully young in The Shop, during shooting Stewart was 31 and Sullavan 30. The film is quite innocently beautiful and has inspired considerable critical logorrhea. Damning with fulsome praise, David Thompson was so moved by the film that he came up with a metaphor he admitted even he didn’t understand: “The Shop Around the Corner may be as sweet and light as an Esterhazy honey ball – whatever that is.” 

A truly great film always yields something new with every viewing, and when you’ve seen a film as many times as I’ve seen The Shop, you begin to look for things you didn’t notice at first. Underneath all the charm and cheeriness and aromatic nostalgia for an old Budapest is something rather topical for our moment. The nightmare of wage slavery, of tyrannical bosses, of unemployment, of the illusion of job security – all of the objectionable aspects of life under capitalism. 

Alfred Kralik has been working in the shop for 9 years, since he was Pepi the errand boy’s age. Yet he’s still only a clerk. When he considers marriage to his pen friend, and asking Mr. Mataschek for a raise, he consults Pirovitch, an older clerk with a wife and children, if he can manage to support a family on a clerk’s salary. 

Kralik: Pirovitch, do you mind if I ask you a personal question? 

Pirovitch: Go ahead. 

Kralik: It’s very confidential… Supposing a fellow like me wants to get married. How much does it cost you to live, you and Mrs. Pirovitch, leaving out the children. 

Pirovitch: Oh, why fool yourself? (he laughs) 

Kralik: Let’s say temporarily – how much it cost? 

Pirovitch: Well, it can be done. And very nicely. Naturally, you cannot be extravagant. 

Kralik: Well, supposing a fellow gets an apartment of three rooms – dining room, living room, bedroom. 

Pirovitch: What do you need three rooms for? You live in the bedroom.

Kralik: Where do you eat? 

Pirovitch: In the kitchen. Get a nice big kitchen. 

Kralik: Where do you entertain? 

Pirovitch: Entertain? What are you, an ambassador? Who do you want to entertain? Listen, if someone is really your friend, he comes after dinner.

This exchange paints a vivid picture of the pinched lives of newlyweds at the very end of the Great Depression. The only difference today is that both spouses have to work. 

When Matuschek suspects his wife of being unfaithful – and of her being unfaithful with Kralik – he becomes an irascible, tyrannical boss. His employees are defenseless against his temper tantrums, which calls into question the very terms that made them so defenseless and Matuschek’s presumed right to be tyrannical. 

But Lubitsch gives us a rather Dickensian happy ending when the boss is foiled in a suicide attempt and at last learns the value of life and friendship. On Christmas Eve his store makes a lot of money and he gives every one of his employees a bonus. Frank Morgan plays Matuschek in exactly the same tone he used to play the Wizard of Oz, changing from a supernatural monster into a kind old teddy bear. He gives out the bonuses exactly as he gave the Scarecrow a diploma, the Tin Man a heart-shaped clock and the Cowardly Lion a medal. In his shop he delivers a speech to his employees: 

This morning when I received the little Christmas tree that you all sent me, I was deeply moved. I read your little note over and over and it made me very happy that you missed me and hoped that I’d be coming back home soon again. You’re right. This is my home. This is where I spent most of my life.

The speech is meant to be heartwarming, I suppose. But it’s actually sad and quite chilling, especially considering how Mataschek’s wife had to seek attention from another man who didn’t spend as much time in the shop. 

One of the stories coming out of Mayfield, Kentucky in the aftermath of the tornado was how employees at a candle factory making candles for Christmas were told by supervisors when they tried to leave the warehouse as the tornado approached that if they left they would lose their jobs. I was reminded of this report when I watched the scene in which Mr. Mataschek tells his six employees that they have to stay late to decorate the store windows. He loses his temper and berates them – but changes his tone entirely when a customer enters the store, and illustrating everything you need to know about capitalism. The one who has the money makes the rules. 

You could argue that Lubitsch wasn’t interested in changing the world. He wanted simply to observe it and derive from the everyday lives of his characters the lineaments of art. Unedifying entertainment at its richest. At this, Lubitsch was a past master, and The Shop Around the Corner makes the word masterpiece clean again. 

*You’ve Got Mail, the Nora Ephron remake, is one of my late sister’s favorite movies, but it is only mentionable as an illustration of How Have the Mighty Fallen. Whose era would anyone rather live in, when all we can come up with is Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan? Ephron’s version improves on the original in only one respect – it isn’t a Christmas movie.