December 22, 2010 Notes from a Biographer Dorrie Glenn Woodson By Sam Stephenson Dorrie Glenn Woodson, 1956. Photograph by Harold Feinstein. I was encouraged to reach out to pianist Dorrie Glenn Woodson by her first husband, the photographer Harold Feinstein, and she and I met in person in New York before last Thanksgiving. Dorrie, seventy-six years old, had naturally gray hair that was long and free flowing, parted down the middle, and it framed her glasses in the style of Gloria Steinem. Among jazz musicians, no appearance is unconventional (except a rigid one), so I didn’t think about hers until we talked on the phone a few weeks later: When she described her parents, I couldn’t visualize them in her. She was born Dorothy Meese in 1934 on a small farm in rural Pennsylvania near the Mason-Dixon line; her father farmed fruits and vegetables and peddled them in nearby towns, and her deeply religious mother practiced the dawn-to-dusk farm traditions with dedication and care. The Dorrie I met was a long way from the farm. Young Dorothy displayed a touch and dexterity on piano beyond her years; she won talent shows and admiration. The radio brought Ella Fitzgerald, Nat Cole, Duke Ellington, and other African American musicians into her home, in a nearly all-white region. She was transfixed. Her dreams of being a professional jazz pianist distilled and grew more potent. In 1952, after a talent show in Salisbury, Pennsylvania, eighteen-year-old Dorothy met an African American bassist and singer in the Herb Jeffries vein. He was from Frostburg, Maryland, and twenty years her senior. They began a long-term relationship, in secret due to the scandal of interracial romances at the time. She gained confidence in her ability to make impressions musically and generate opportunities for herself. Things seemed hopeful. But she’d grown up with no sex education—nobody uttered a word about it—and birth control was still illegal and often unreliable. It was double jeopardy. Read More
December 21, 2010 In Memoriam David Randolph By Oliver Sacks As Christmas approaches, the churches and concert halls of New York are filled with various renderings of Handel’s Messiah. But one Messiah, perhaps the most iconic of all, which filled the air last year and each year for the forty-five years before it, has gone. David Randolph conducted his St. Cecilia Chorus’s version of the Messiah at Carnegie Hall every year since 1965. His own birthday was Christmas Eve, and last December 24, as he celebrated his ninety-fifth, he was as full of physical and creative energy as ever. He would bound to the podium with the spring of someone a quarter his age, take a bow, and then turn to the audience, speaking in his deep, melodious baritone, to introduce the singers, players, and their instruments, and the main themes of the Messiah. His passion for the every aspect of the music was evident. He often gave historical glosses on a particular instrument or musical theme, and he never omitted to say that Handel drew much of his most beloved “religious” music from the bawdy Italian love songs of his time. There was no such thing as “religious” music, Randolph felt, any more than there was “military” music or “love” music; there was only music put to different uses, in different contexts. This was a point which he brought out with great eloquence in his beautiful book, This Is Music: A Guide to the Pleasure of Listening, and he would often mention it before a performance of his annual Christmas Oratorio or the great Passions he conducted at Easter. He would mention it, too, when conducting his favorite Requiem Masses by Brahms, Verdi, or Berlioz—all of whom, he would remind the audience, were atheists (as he himself was). The religious imagination, he felt, was a most precious part of the human spirit, but he was convinced that it did not require particular religious beliefs, or indeed any religious belief. (Jonathan Miller, in directing his wonderful Matthew Passion at BAM, often makes the same point.) Read More
December 21, 2010 Arts & Culture Pictorial Grammar By Dawn Chan Co-authored by Gabriel Greenberg. Think of the last time you looked for an apartment: Most likely, a good number of the listings that you encountered came with floor plans. And by looking at these diagrams, you probably had no trouble finding out all sorts of things about the living spaces being advertised: the rough shape of each room; the location of all windows and doors. But how exactly did you reach these conclusions? And how do you immediately understand the route you’re being shown, when a helpful stranger in a foreign country traces a path with their index finger over a subway map? Or how do you look at a courtroom sketch and know that the defendant was wearing suspenders? Whether they’re architectural renderings, Venn diagrams, or even the inkless images created by gestures, pictures can all be thought of as 2-D encodings of our 3-D world. We decipher these images so easily that we never even suspect we’re cracking a code of sorts; we recognize that a certain brushstroke represents an eyebrow, or certain lines forming a Y denote the corner of a cube. But what if someone could write out a codebook (so to speak) precise enough that even a machine, by consulting it, could draw and interpret drawings? Over the past few decades, philosophers, psychologists, and computer scientists have taken on this task, and found it less straightforward than one might think. Read More
December 20, 2010 Notes from a Biographer W. Eugene Smith By Sam Stephenson W. Eugene Smith at a photography workshop in Eugene, Oregon, 1966. Photographs by Don Getsug. Since January 1997, I’ve been studying the life and work of photographer W. Eugene Smith. I was thirty years old when I started, and now I’m forty-four. If this wasn’t my calling, God help me. In 1998, while researching a freelance magazine assignment on Smith’s 1950s Pittsburgh photographs in his archive at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, I stumbled on 1,740 dusty, moldy reels of mysterious tape made in a New York City loft building. What became known as the Jazz Loft Project at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, where I worked, began that day. Smith’s strange, obsessive achievement between 1957 and 1965 in an after-hours jazz haunt in Manhattan’s flower district—forty thousand photos and four thousand hours of audio recordings—spurred me to visit twenty-one states and interview more than four hundred people. I’ve made 115 trips to New York City over a span of time that can be measured by telephones and storefronts: I called Robert Frank from a cold, indestructible pay phone at the end of Bleecker, near CBGB; Roy Haynes on a Motorola StarTAC from a brownstone on 9th Street, a few doors from Balducci’s; and, a few weeks ago, Mary Frank on my iPhone from Spoon in Chelsea. Smith is often portrayed as a classic midcentury male artist-egotist, and not without reason. But there was something selfless about his work in this old Sixth Avenue loft building. The people that passed through that space—some famous, most obscure—have sustained me all these years. Perhaps it’s this perpetually unfolding documentary quality that makes the loft work his greatest. Read More
December 17, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Alcoholics Anonymous, Hollywood Star Whackers By The Paris Review Clancy Martin. Photograph by David Eulitt. The cover story in this month’s issue of Harper’s: “The Drunk’s Club,” by Clancy Martin. An irreverent, harrowing, tough-minded account of Martin’s experience in Alcoholics Anonymous, which he describes (characteristically) as “the cult that saved my life.” —Lorin Stein I’ve begun reading George Gissing’s New Grub Street, a late Victorian novel of the literary demimonde, which one of the characters calls “the valley of the shadow of books.” It’s a grim place: The editors are stupid, the writers are desperate, and everyone seems to live in a garret. A conflict is shaping up between the Pragmatist, who writes for money, and the Idealist, who writes for love. But Gissing was a Realist—which means, I think, there will be no happy ending for Literature. —Robyn Creswell Pick up the January issue of Vanity Fair with Johnny Depp on the cover. Look at all the beautiful people. Then turn to page sixty-four, and read about the delusional world of Randy and Evi Quaid. The two are racked with debt and living out of a Prius in Canada. They are convinced they are being hunted by an anonymous group called “the Hollywood Star Whackers” and that Randy’s royalty checks are being funneled into an account under the name of “Ronda L. Quaid.” Says Randy to the reporter: “I guess I’m worth more to ’em dead than alive.” —Thessaly La Force Read More
December 17, 2010 Video & Multimedia Franzentime, Christmastime By Natalie Jacoby When Jonathan Franzen appeared on Oprah last week, we were inspired to do a video mash-up of her show. After all, we have our own interview with Franzen in the latest issue. Here’s what I put together these last few days. Enjoy, and consider picking up a copy of our winter issue: