Two Trains, Hitting 70

Oy. Today's Forward is asking us to compare Paul Simon and Bob Dylan.

My cred here: Have followed Paul Simon live and recorded since 1972, jesus, 39 years! (and S&G on LP before that). Straight through Songs from the Capeman, every new Paul Simon album dropped into my world like a letter from an old friend. Me and the girlfriend (the no-longer girlfriend; tale worthy of a Paul Simon song or, knowing Paul Simon, several) saw The Capeman on Broadway twice; we were rewarded with a last-minute invitation to the cast party closing night because Eddie Simon, whom we chatted up in the aisle, was thrilled to be recognized, not mistaken yet again for his big brother.

We also, the girlfriend and me, suffered a night in a crap Freeport, Long Island, motel so we could hear three evenings straight of Paul & Bob/Bob & Paul at Madison Square Garden and Jones Beach. That weekend proved Paul Simon should be honored by the comparison alone. Dylan was different every night: kaleidoscopic, charismatic, alluring and impenetrable. Paul and the hundred-fifty Africo-Brazilians behind him were note for note, gesture for gesture, fabulous, make no mistake. They sure didn't. The act was outrageous, James Brown tight, and identical night after night, like watching a video.

Paul Simon still has the songwriting juice, his last two albums of glib, random ramblings about old age & new babies notwithstanding. But, as he once told The New Yorker's David Remnick, kvetching about the challenge of duets with Bob Dylan, it's "the words, the words." His own words have ever veered from undervalued gems like "You're the One" (available today for 1 cent at Amazon) to flaccid wise-assery like "Pigs, Sheep and Wolves" (on the same 1 cent CD). As tearful as "Sounds of Silence" or "Homeward Bound" may make tri-generational stadium crowds, they forget "We've Got a Groovy Thing Goin' Baby." (Simon, of course, is silently glad of this: It ain't "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall." I, meanwhile, admit I often sing "Groovy Thing" to myself, moving too fast down Morningside Avenue.)

Paul Simon concocts endless, seemingly effortless, wry incidents and accidents, not only in song but, though rarely acknowledged, in screenplay. He's virtuously fearless of self-parody too: "Soft Parachutes" disrespects Simon & Garfunkel as deftly as "A Simple Desultory Philippic" did Bob Dylan. But his incidents rarely come to as sharp a point as, say, Dylan's "Black Diamond Bay." Why do God and son come to Earth in "Love and Hard Times" anyhow, only to split and make simultaneously self-aggrandizing and -effacing room for "an old songwriting cliché"?

Since Rhythm of the Saints, Simon's serious lines have been obscure as Dylan's, if usually to some cringingly obvious end: Consider "The Teacher," "Beautiful," or (department of boundless vocabulary) "So Beautiful or So What." On the other hand, hook-hooky "boy in the bubble and the baby with the baboon heart" wants to say something about modern times but, as the bard himself might moan, "What? What?"

With respect to Simon's self-promoted sincerity (see the recent interview in Rolling Stone), those who accuse Dylan of exploiting 1960s folk music generally ignore the fact that a lyrically sensitive Simon emerged only after Bob built a market for folk-pop. His eye always on "the marketplace, the marketplace" (Simon, again, to Remnick of The New Yorker), mid-60s Paul ("Jerry") shlepped Artie ("Tom") from doowop to full-frontally Queens-Jewish acoustic folk. As Bleecker Street displaced the Brill Building, so Everly ooh-baby danceables gave way to off-the-shelf angstunes like "I Am A Rock." He's nothing if not a professional.

Sigh. I love Paul Simon. I can watch One Trick Pony again and again; I hear "Hearts and Bones" coursing through "Graceland." But while Simon fruitfully, brilliantly borrowed from obscure third-world, Zydeco and gospel artists, Bob Dylan, seeming to pay those musicians no heed, changed their music and their lives. Dylan didn't lift tracks from Nashville; he became Nashville, and gospel, and Aaron Copland and Blind Willie McTell. I cherish my old packets of letters from Paul, and lord knows aspergersy Bob never talked to anyone but himself. Still, you don't need a weatherman to know your windows are shaking, your walls rattling, and the words of the prophet have long faded therefrom. It's sad as a lonely little wrinkled balloon, but Paul Simon--like pop paragons as varied and fine as Harold Arlen, Joni Mitchell and Paul McCartney--may be history. Dylan, incontrovertibly, still makes it.

Christmas in somebody's heart, maybe Bob's

There's this scene of longing in Portnoy's Complaint. I'm not going to fact-check, because the recollection's what counts: Young Alex Portnoy has gone down to the neighborhood park on a snowy day; there he sees a single perfect pardon-the-expression shiksa skating gracefully across a pond, dubs her Thereal McCoy, goes home to make use of her memory.

It's one of those pages where Philip Roth captures the precise in/outness, possession/rejection and, pardon the double meaning, self-love of being a non-Orthodox American Jew/Jewish American. It popped to mind last night within a note or two of my first listen to what I soon knew was the most important American pop album since "The Rising": Bob Dylan's "Christmas in the Heart."

Is this record sincere and in ghastly taste? Might be, but so are its models--the Great American Pop Star Holiday Albums. Is it a spot-on incarnation of a particular, half-century-dead, school of American recorded music? Roger. Is it a, pardon this expression too, post-modern commentary on same? Of course. Is it awesomely (in the pre-21st-century sense) specific in its musicality? Oh yes.

And does "Christmas in the Heart" embody, parody, celebrate, embrace, gaze upon dumbstruck as at a slow-motion pile-up, the gaiety and religiosity to which America pretends each December? Uh, duh. But does it at the same time convey the whole-bodied sense of ownership, the whole-souled sense of not-having-been-invited-to-the-party-and-secretly-glad-of-that, together with the slightly shameful ridiculous feeling when you show up anyhow (singing "Oh Come All Ye Faithful" in the 5th-grade choir) that is the rootless-cosmopolitan secular American Jewish condition at Holiday Time? Mm-hmm. And does it, even so, with wisdom unavailable to the early Roth, capture the complement: our great and good nation's heartfelt, yet suspicious, yet nonetheless dutiful welcome of the Other?

Oh, mama.

But wait, there's more. Listen to Dylan's final "t"'s. Listen to the precision in his phrasings, rhythmic, melodic, and in intonation: Bob Dylan rising to the level of a Sinatra, a Fitzgerald, a Holiday in blazing his own trail through stands of chestnuts, roasting, open-fired, songs we can sing in our sleep, the tunes to which visions of sugarplums dance. Listen to the interplay of classically synthetic pop-choral/orchestral sounds-of-the-season with his own certified-organic vocal instrument. And recall that "Jack Frost," the nominal producer--i.e., the man who made every musical choice you're hearing--is Bob Dylan himself, once famous for his one-take intolerance of the studio.

I used to wonder why Dylan, already pseudonymed, chose that seasonal second-degree nom de travail. "Christmas" may be the answer. It may even be the album he's waited all his life to make, its formalism, its jaunty, maudlin material, and the wintry ravage to his vocal cords achieving the effect "Self Portrait" could not. After 48 years writing killer songs and singing them live every which way, Bob breaks out here at last as master of that peculiarly American art form: studio-recorded performance of standards.

But the brilliance of this record is not merely formal. Dylan knows something is happening, and he knows just what it is. It's Portnoy's pristine skater; it's us, watching from the shore. Every note and every beat of "Christmas in the Heart" prove Thereal McCoy knows what America needs, but Bob Dylan knows what we want.

Memorial Day

A pretty long while ago, I spent too little time working on a screenplay. I was the third writer on the project, not counting my pal T. and his partners, whose idea it had been in the first place and who'd figured why not give the reporter a chance. They were fine with whatever explosions, glass-shattering, air- or waterborne biological agents or massacred troops I might want to adjust, but the name of the picture wasn't changing: Memorial Day.

This was not brought to mind by what you think.  After one last punishing all-nighter Thursday, I'm back on freelance time, which means that today, for me, is a day like all others, apart from the suspension of alternate-side-of-the-street parking which allowed me to wake late, unpack some boxes of books, go back to bed, at last get around to cooking up coffee.  No, what recalled the movie project was a CD I came upon last summer in that cutout place on the stretch between Stockbridge and Lee, playing as the au-lait part of breakfast boiled over: Shirley Temple, Animal Crackers in My Soup, peewee Jolson impressions, multiply anachronistic Otchi-tchornya jokes.

I can't remember:  Was it Sunday afternoons after Hebrew school? Early Saturday mornings? Channel 9? Channel 11? on the huge butterscotch plastic-framed black and white Magnavox, alone on the mustardy couch in the rec room.  I must have been younger than the youngest friend I have today, which makes me wonder whether A. has ever watched Shirley Temple pictures, whether they'd hold any interest for a mind raised on Angelina Ballerina and Arthur.  If anything in the succeeding fifty years filled me with as much dull indelible anxiety as Shirley Temple hearing she'd been orphaned between ads for Sugar Pops, I'm grateful it's slipped out of memory.

Slipped memory.  Friends I didn't call about matters pressing to them while I was foolishly studying all night.  Projects I yet believe I may begin for which I bought boxes of books I've never read, late fees on credit card bills, dishes in sink, this humid afternoon months from the season of repentance.

The Hebrew year starts with that season, the season with a day of remembering.  Our American calendar opens with auld acquaintance forgot, never brought to mind, and when its Memorial Day finally rolls up, life cannonballs giddily into pools, ponds, oceans, orangeade stands.  The only memories the editorialists charge readers with are of dead veterans: memory of nobility. For the rest, notwithstanding tell-all books, chat-show blame or oldies stations, time is short, memories of life more likely to summon regret than satisfaction. No wonder a person'd rather shop and splash it out of mind.  I wish I'd figured out how to deploy those simulated weapons of mass destruction, how those troops could save the day, how our hero could find peace of mind and loving sex before the Oscar-bait end-credit hip-hop song kicked in, but there was something else I had to do back then.  I can't remember what.

Fired up, ready to go

It's a little embarrassing, but it's also one of the two most important causes facing the USA today, so I've written to President Obama again (an undertaking that has become uncannily like writing a letter to God).  Not sparkling prose, so take this message, rewrite it your way and tell your representatives to get on the stick...

Dear President Obama:

Congratulations on all your success so far.

I'm writing with a simple request, and one I'm sure you've already heard: Don't back down on a public option in the health-care plan.  

Not long ago you were a fierce supporter of single-payer health care.  I don't understand why that's off the table, even as a negotiating tool.  But the public option should be absolutely non-negotiable, or else the plan is nothing but a full-employment act for private insurers.  

Opponents of the public option talk out of both sides of their mouth.  They say government can't run an efficient  system, then they say it will be so efficient that private insurers won't be able to compete.  I say: Let private industry prove it can compete against "bloated" government--and give Americans a true choice.  

Finally, please ignore the nonsense about our needing an "American" plan--as if Americans were biologically different from everyone else in every other industrialized nation.

Stand firm, Mr. President.  You can win this one--on principle!

best, Russell Miller

Dream work

I went to a disappointing lecture last night. It was another one of those things I didn't really have time to do; I should have used the hour and a half in Starbucks reading peer-reviewed papers on the value, or not, of reading aloud to young children: pdfs pulled magically into my little white plastic box through the combined juju of the Starbucks-card free WiFi and the electronic subscriptions of the Mina Rees Library of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  But my pal Dixie had posted (on Facebook, a pattern here?) that she was on her way to hear a neuroscientist talk about God, and (further seductions of that telecom sidestreet) my pal Robin, going as well, found me a ticket.

I'd actually heard of the guy. I have this other friend, Ariel. I think he's 21 now, which would be odd because he could buy me a drink and I tend to think of him as two or three days old when I brought him a tiny Big Bird in the hospital. Ariel is one of the three or four brightest frum (look it up) people I know, and at his parents' seder, he was telling me about this professor he'd heard about at Penn who'd found God in the brain. Literally. SPECT scans and the whole nine yards. I went to alibris and bought the fellow's book, cheap, but I haven't read it.

Now I won't. Brought it along to his lecture, but all he really had to say was, you meditate on the oneness of all things and the parts of your brain that take things apart cognitively take themselves a rest, and like Dixie said, duh.

Dixie said she'd hoped to hear something more interesting, like where is the soul with respect to the brain.  She said, he kept saying God, but he didn't talk about God; he talked about thinking about God, not even that, but the idea of God.  She'd wanted the juju.

I'm not a soul type myself, and I can't say what I was hoping for, but what I heard was nothing more than square one of my interest in brains: Everything we experience, we experience thanks to a pile of goop in our skulls. So of course something happens in some lobe when you pray. You're thinking. aren'tcha?

Then three hours reading in Starbucks, then home to bed, and sometime between then and now, another experience, for which only the chemoelectric activity upstairs can take credit. I dreamed of a little girl, the daughter of friends,  8 or 9, and (with her parents' permission, even in the dream) we were hanging out here and there in interesting places in New York. Along the way, she had her first sip of wine and enjoyed it, met a boy a year or two older and snuggled up, first childishly then with a hint of what was to come, then she'd had enough and we two headed home to the familiar, less exciting, but safe. In the dream, I was so happy to watch and talk with her. It wasn't, upon reflection, Freudian pleasure, inherent caveman drive for raw experience. It was simple, suffusive happiness, content, the feeling of being ungodly fortunate to witness and be in some tiny facilitating way a participant in her joy.

When I woke, I thought: Now where is that in the brain? I can easily imagine bits and pieces of memory semirandomly wandering tracts of white matter leaving traces of vague narrative, but that's just narrative. How does some other part of the brain hear the story (feel the story!) and feel plain good about the story, when there's nothing but chemoelectric activity upstairs to take credit?

Unless there is, ut oh, a soul.

What it takes

A few days back, as I have noted, my having no more to do than memorize a list of discredited psychological theories, settle late-payment-charged bills and bone up on media violence, it seemed a good time to upgrade Donkey School's iGoogle. How happy a boy was I (as you can see below) to discover that avoidance shame in the blogosphere is now as easy as placing a text-box gadget anywhere on your home page and letting it sit there, gaping, disappointed in you.

Still, as I say, that was days ago.  Unending access to shame was not enough to make me write.  But advanced telecommunications is a sidestreet whose seductions lie behind every shadow. 

Take Facebook.  I don't think my story is unusual, not for someone who entered this world between the boomers and Generation X and is thereby old enough to remember both clichés.  I mean, it did take a while but I signed up.  I don't think my story's unusual: fun at first until someone shows up, not a person you've disliked, nor anyone you'd fallen out of touch with and regretfully forgotten that you missed: just somebody, and you wonder what on Earth you were thinking when you tossed your name into the index to tickle other people's recollection.

Here's my own recollection:  We were friends (without quotation marks) from Hebrew school, quite literally in short pants, at his 4th or 5th birthday party at the Townhouse on the Green, a restaurant my mother must have let on was pretty slick for a 4th or 5th birthday party, even goyish.  But then my friend's mother was known to buy his underpants at Saks. (Mine came from Mr. Hank's, a nostalgically musty dry goods bin on the gritty end of Speedwell Avenue near the other shul.) How my mother knew where Mrs. A. bought R.'s gottkes is a question whose answer, like so many others, to my own alas un-eternal regret, has gone to the grave.

As, apparently, have Stanley and Pearl Schlossman.

I hadn't thought of R. in thirty years before he decided to renew our friendship through Facebook. It was a small gesture to accept; it would have been petty to decline. And anyway that was that, as Facebook goes so often for so many, 'til just now.

R. wrote on J.'s wall today to ask how well she'd known Stanley and Pearl Schlossman. Facebook's News Feed made me eavesdrop.   And some circuit in my brain reflexively, spontaneously answered, like a sour note in a recent Philip Roth book.

Sour and sweet: Stanley Schlossman, the dentist. Not ours: That was C. Kermit Botkin, of blessed memory too. (What names the Jews had in New Jersey!)

Stanley Schlossman in the basement social hall of Temple B'nai Or (when last I drove by, it was an office building; the Reagan-era crackpot economist Jude Wanniski, a tenant) late one Friday night, the last notes of my father's booming aleinu long faded, Rabbi Levy having long since glad-handed every congregant, young and old.   I mean, late: all the richly sugared lemon tea drained from the paper cup in the little hand the Rabbi so recently, so generously shook. As is my custom, I slip my other little hand into the cup, fish out the lovely browned lemon slice and raise it to my teeth for that last marvelous warm fruity squirt.

They were the only words I ever recall hearing from Stanley Schlossman, the dentist, and I can't say I even recall them, just my surprise (my chagrin, my own parents' irresponsible child-rearing betrayed, the irrefutable fact).  They were something like, "What on Earth are you doing? Do you know what that does to your teeth?"

This is what it takes to return me to blogging.

Experiment

Rip Van Winkle wakes, comes upon iGoogle gadget, yawns loudly. More to come? Only time will tell.