A blog by Jay Livingston -- what I've been thinking, reading, seeing, or doing. Although I am a member of the Montclair State University department of sociology, this blog has no official connection to Montclair State University. “Montclair State University does not endorse the views or opinions expressed therein. The content provided is that of the author and does not express the view of Montclair State University.”
Art Blakey, the great jazz drummer, was born one hundred years ago today in Pittsburgh.
There are only two drummers who I could identify in a blindfold test. Art Blakey is one of them. The other is Max Roach, who said of Blakey:
Art was an original. He’s the only drummer whose time I recognize immediately. And his signature style was amazing; we used to call him ‘Thunder.’ When I first met him on 52d Street in 1944, he already had the polyrhythmic thing down. Art was the perhaps the best at maintaining independence with all four limbs. He was doing it before anybody was. And he was a great man, which influenced everybody around him. [quoted in the Times obituary, October 1990]
He kept the Jazz Messengers going for thirty-five years. He would find talented young players who would, in a couple of years, become famous (well, jazz-famous) and go off on their own (Wynton Marsalis joined the group when he was seventeen). Blakey would then replace them with new talent, and the cycle would repeat.
His best-known album is probably “Moanin’”, released in 1959, an incredibly rich year for jazz. (See the daily entries at The 1959 Project . The video below begins with one of the tunes from that album, not the best-known — that distinction goes to the title tune by pianist Bobby Timmons — but “Along Came Betty” by the sax player Benny Golson, who wrote many other tunes for the Messengers and basically functioned as the group’s musical director. The video is from 1988 with a completely different cast, except for Blakey.
As the tune ends (at about 7:00), Blakey takes a one-minute drum solo followed by “I Get a Kick Out of You” in the rhythmically complicated Clifford Brown - Max Roach arrangement from 1954 with a minute and a half of pure Blakey at the end.
As an undergrad, I took Deviance with Irv Zola, a wonderful man whose main research area was medical sociology. The two topics were related, he said. In his Medical course, he asked the students to keep health journals where they would make note of any health-related matters in their own lives. What he found was that students often framed their health in terms of morality. They got sick because they had done something wrong or had failed to do what was right.
I was reminded of this when I read this passage from Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay “Why I’m Giving Up on Preventative Care” (here).*
Most of my educated, middle-class friends . . . undertook exercise or yoga regimens; they filled their calendars with upcoming medical tests and exams; they boasted about their “good” and “bad” cholesterol counts, their heart rates and blood pressure. Mostly they understood the task of aging to be self-denial, especially in the realm of diet.
In matters of health, and especially food, we are puritanical moralists. If we stick to our vows of health-chastity, if we steadfastly resist temptation, we will be rewarded with eternal life, or at least very long life.
But who is “we”? Ehrenreich seems to think that it’s the people Joseph Henrich in 2009 (here) labeled as WEIRD — Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic.
In the health-conscious mind-set that has prevailed among the world’s affluent people for about four decades now, health is indistinguishable from virtue, tasty foods are “sinfully delicious,” while healthful foods may taste good enough to be advertised as “guilt-free.” Those seeking to compensate for a lapse undertake punitive measures like fasts, purges, or diets composed of different juices carefully sequenced throughout the day.
Even a quick glance around the country will tell you that in wide swaths of the geographical and social territory, this abstemious ethos has not taken root. For decades, some restaurants have advertised All You Can Eat. At Applebee’s (and lots of other places) when it comes to fatty fatty foods, gluttony is a virtue.
In other WEIRD cultures, even the cosmopolitan elite may not conflate pleasure and sin. Foods which in the US are “sinfully delicious” may be merely delicious elsewhere. France for instance. In a 2013 post (here) on “Guilty Pleasures,” I compared the pastry scene in the Judd Apatow film “This is 40” with a similar scene in the the French film “Cousin Cousine.”
In both films, the overload of desserts is a guilty pleasure, but in the French movie the emphasis is almost entirely on the pleasure, while the American film focuses on the guilt. The French lovers slowly feed each other one dessert after another; the scene is almost erotic. But Pete and Debbie [in the American film] seem like children, giggling and trying to eat as much as they can before they get caught. Both scenes mingle sex and pastry, but in the French movie the common theme is sensuality; “This Is 40” plays both for laughs.
Unfortunately, I cannot find even a still shot from “Cousin Cousine,” but here is the scene from “This Is 40.”
The whole film in fact is an exposition of the mindset that Ehrenreich identifies. No sugar, no gluten, a personal trainer, less screen time, salads without dressing, tofu. In scene after scene the film shows how difficult it is to keep to this regime. That’s the basis for most of its humor. But neither the characters nor the film itself can abandon the notion that self-denial is the ideal.
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* Ehrenreich’s essay appeared at Literary Hub in April 2018, but I just found it yesterday, probably via a Twitter link. I cannot remember what the tweet was about, nor do I have any idea why the essay appeared at LitHub, a Website devoted mostly to fiction, poetry, and literary criticism.
MarketWatch is taking some flak on Twitter and elsewhere for this story:
Here’s what should have been the pull-quote:
The thing is, that kind of income, while relatively huge, is barely enough, according to Dogen, for a family to lead a comfortable life in coastal counties — where almost half of the nation’s population calls home.
One reader of this blog reminded me that I’d posted something about this nine years ago, complete with a parody verse based on Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City.” That 2010 post was occasioned by a Chicago law professor’s complaint that he could barely get by on his current income, which was probably a bit more than $350,000. (The original post is here.)
In the previous post, I said that up until the 1950s, it wasn’t uncommon that moviegoers would come into the theater halfway through the film. After The End, they could stay in their seats, wait for the movie to start again — after the previews, newsreel, and cartoon — and, when the film reached the part they’d already seen, leave.
It’s hard to imagine now, when everyone is in their seat by the time the feature starts. (A very few people may be late but only by a couple of minutes.) The only historical evidence I could offer was Roger Angell’s memoir Let Me Finish. As a twelve-year old, Angell would go to the movie theater right after school, and it was rare that the movie showtimes coincided with school dismissal.
There’s also this: Danny Kaye’s big breakthrough came in his first film, “Up in Arms,” in 1944. His tour de force in that movie became known as “The Lobby Number.” Kaye and friends are in the lobby of a large movie theater, and he tries to dissuade them from going in to see the musical they’d come for. These musicals are all alike, he says, and launches a parody of the genre, starting with the credits and the MGM lion’s roar. It’s Kaye at his manic best. After about five minutes, as he is singing an up-tempo song, he stops suddenly and says calmly,
So here we are, back in Fresno, California. And this is where you came in. But do not fret my friend. [singing] This is a picture that ends in the middle For the benefit of the people who came in in the middle. This, this is the end.
You can hear the whole thing. Or just push the slider to 5:10.*
If you can base the final joke on the idea of people walking into the theater when the film is halfway through, it must have been, as we now say, “a thing.”
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*There’s a YouTube clip (here) from the movie itself, and it gives you a better sense of the context for The Lobby Number. Unfortunately, the clip ends before the final line.
