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justforbooks · 4 years

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Are you watching Mad Men? You have not been getting a truly balanced view of what it was like to be gay in advertising in that time period.

I was there, as a junior writer, then a senior writer, then a group head through the 1950s, and then a creative director in the 1960s. I went on to become one of the highest-paid creatives in the world through the ‘70s and ‘80s.

I beg to differ on the show’s representation of the single gay character, Salvatore, who was fired by the fictional ad agency for being more open about his sexuality. According to the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, as quoted in The Advocate, “I felt it was an expression of the times that he couldn’t work there anymore. It’s the ultimate case of sexual harassment.”

But there were plenty of gays who, like me, didn’t bother to stay in the closet, succeeded, and thrived in this tough world.

Yes, some agencies were like the one where Don Draper works. But these stuffy, old-line agencies were the big ones — BBDO, J. Walter Thompson, Leo Burnett — not agencies like Draper’s. They were top-heavy with upper-level management from Ivy League schools; they were agencies where women could only be secretaries or work in what was called the “Women’s Division” (food, fashion, and cosmetics). In those kinds of agencies, if you were gay, you were probably closeted, like that poor character on Mad Men. But more likely, if you were gay, you didn’t stay long at such an agency, as many of the smaller agencies were quite different — fun agencies to work for, where being gay was not an issue.

The fact that no one at the Mad Men agency changes jobs is very unreal. In the advertising world I knew, you rarely worked anywhere more than two years, as other agencies wanted you for your knowhow on whatever account you had been working on. And your salary soared. You almost doubled your salary each time you moved. I went from $95 a week when I started at Kenyon and Eckhardt to something over $22,000 a year at Hockaday Associates in four agency moves. In the early 1960s that was good money. I spent two years at BBDO and only about a year at J. Walter Thompson, and voilà! Everybody did it. Why didn’t Salvatore?

After I left BBDO, a friend told me he’d overheard comments about me in the elevator, along the lines of, “So, they were in a lot of trouble here when the queer that was writing all the great stuff left. But then they found another queer who could write just as fancifully.”

When I finally hit Hockaday Associates, a small agency specializing in high-end fashion, furniture, cosmetics, and the like, it was a different world.

All the art directors were gay, and all the account executives were women. The agency president was in fact a Miss Hockaday, and she had her own take on the 1960s. Everyone really dressed to the nines. Everyone was good-looking, and there was wall-to-wall green carpeting in the foyer. A lady with a cart served tea every afternoon at 4 o’clock. Clients came in and were overwhelmed by the chic and wonder of it all. We were famous in the advertising world because Miss Hockaday dropped the Elizabeth Arden account. After Miss Arden kept her waiting for an hour for a meeting, Miss Hockaday swept in and said, “Miss Arden, you are a tyrant. We do not want to have this account,” and swept out.

Can we please have more scenes like this on Mad Men?

The gay men on staff knew everything there was to know at the time about clothes, interior décor, you name it. I learned a lot. This was the early 1960s; being witty was important then. And let’s face it: This was New York, where being gay was hardly a hidden-away phenomenon. In Greenwich Village the gay men were lined up every night along the western side of Washington Square. They sat and lounged against the low pipe railings there, which were called “the Meat Rack.” You could drop in at Mary’s on Eighth Street or go dancing at the Cherry Lane bar (men did the two-step there, clasped in each other’s arms), right next door to the Cherry Lane theater. There was a large sign by the door: “Out of Bounds to Military Personnel.” If you were gay in New York, you didn’t need to run around hiding it.

And there were plenty of places in the advertising world where you could work and it just didn’t matter. What outsiders little realized was the tightrope danger of the advertising industry. There was not a day you went to work that you couldn’t get fired, regardless of whether you were straight or day. If the client vamoosed, the entire group servicing that client was fired. Immediately, to not waste salaries. You deserved “flight pay,” we called it, like the pilots in the Air Force. Employees who could hang onto those slippery, shifting clients were highly valued. I was one of those employees. And I didn’t care who knew I was gay. I was myself. Lots of ladies in the office told me that their closeted gay friends would sigh, “If only I could be as openly gay as Leddick.”

And then I went to Grey Advertising...

I always said that everything I was or ever hoped to be in advertising I owed to Revlon. I was hired as the Worldwide Creative Director of Revlon at Grey Advertising in the mid-1960s. Grey Advertising was huge, the largest agency in the U.S. It was not like stuffy BBDO and other biggies. It was like Hollywood. It had scale, it had dough, and it was heartless. Revlon was the same thing, but only more glamorous, with more money, and heartless in their way, but very loyal to those they valued.

I was never “in” the closet, and actually, I enjoyed making all those white, heterosexual, tough guys face up to the fact they had to have me in that job, because Revlon liked me; they liked a creative director who was taller, blonder, and better-dressed than anyone else in their meetings. When they screamed and cussed and bellowed in their meetings, I would say, “Keep this up and I will lose my enthusiasm.”

And during a tense meeting, when I took out my lip balm, my crew knew the meeting was over.

Every year on Advertising Age‘s “worst clients list,” Revlon was always voted the number-one worst client in the United States. And I didn’t care, because Revlon liked me, and they liked me for what I could do.

In meetings with Revlon, a head honcho would be chewing out the president of Grey Advertising, saying things like, “You guys are useless. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re a waste of time. The only reason you have this account is him!“ And they would point to me. Gee, it felt great. They were loyal to those who truly were on their team.

At one point, my staff went on strike and told management that it was either me or them. They didn’t want to work for me anymore. The head account executive called Revlon while they sat in front of his desk in assembled mutiny. He spoke briefly to the client and hung up. He said, “They like David. You’re all fired.” I only found out about this later.

Revlon spent $34 million a year on advertising. They were a big deal. That’s $246 million in today’s dollars, and the agency got 17 percent. We had enormous budgets and tremendous creative freedom, to an extent that was never seen again. One of my favorite creations was this commercial for Revlon’s Jontue fragrance.

Some people call it “groundbreaking” and “iconic.” I just thought it was a lot of fun.

Their world included major gays like Mr. Kenneth the hairdresser, Bill Blass the designer, and Mr. John the hat designer. And Halston, who went from hats to being a major design name. Believe me, none of those guys did anything but roar around town looking swell. One of my female writers said, “Some people think homosexuality is a crime. And some people seem to think it’s a sin. But you, David, seem to think it’s a luxury.” Well, Mick Jagger wasn’t out there acting very butch, nor was David Bowie and a host of other entertainers. This was the ‘60s, which I have always thought prefigured our 21st century.

And I think the gay advertising world of the ‘60s that serviced the major beauty and fashion clients like Revlon anticipated the gay liberation that is still in full-swing today. These were big people handling money and taking big chances. They didn’t have time to care about what other people did in bed. They only cared about what you did in the office. It was refreshing, liberating, tough, and unprejudiced. They were only prejudiced against the untalented, and a little bit against those who were not good-looking and didn’t know how to dress.

Revlon was the megastar of the cosmetics industry. It was headed by Charles Revson, whose head creative director at Revlon (and my counterpart) was Kay Daly, the highest-paid woman in the U.S. (hint, hint, Mad Men writers). She was paid $100,000 a year back then, a stupefying salary when writers started at perhaps $9,000 a year. My own observation is that as women became more and more liberated, attitudes toward gays became more liberated, too. Women in business simply did not care. The presence of gay men in the office did not make them examine their own inner sexual feelings as it did straight men.

Revlon was exemplary for this — very macho, but not in the Ivy League, Brooks Brothers tradition. Revlon was much more European, and they realized that they were in a woman’s business. Kay Daly led us to create the Revlon woman: single, beautiful, with a good job, and certainly not a virgin. She was welcomed by millions of women. Headlines like “Fire and Ice” and “Jungle Peach” let us all know something sexy was going on.

C’mon, Mad Men, bring us more juicy stuff like this, please!

In many ways it was also very American: If you can do it, you can be it. As a French friend recently said to me while visiting me in Miami Beach, “The great thing here is that you feel anything is possible.” And so it was, back then, in many parts of the Mad, Mad advertising world. But it wasn’t all just Mad men. Much of it looked ahead to the world we are finally beginning to find ourselves in now. We were anticipating the 21st century about half a century before it arrived.

Every year I negotiated a new contract, and toward the end I was only working 32 weeks a year, finally. When the management at Grey asked Revlon if this would be OK, they said, “As long as he’s here when we need him.” I lived in Paris part of the time and would fly into New York on the Concorde for meetings late in the morning and go back the same night on the 7 o’clock Air France flight.

That was glamour. The fact that I was gay meant nothing and never came up.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

#JUST FOR BOOKS

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mrmacdiarmada · 6 years

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intro.

「 Was that JEFFREY DEAN MORGAN walking around the Village? Oh no, it’s GARRETT MACDIARMADA, the FIFTY year old PLAYWRIGHT who resides in one of the WAVERLY PLACE TOWNHOUSES. They define themselves as a BISEXUAL CISMALE and we heard they can be very ENCHANTING and AMIABLE on their good days but on their bad days, they tend to be SELFISH and HAUGHTY. Everyone in the neighborhood knows them as THE VISIONARY. 」

EARLY LIFE IN IRELAND (BIRTH - AGE 31):

- born and raised in a small town on the west region of ireland - actively participated in the one theatre nearby since he was young, playing small background parts for the sake of being around the magic, directing and sharing his ideas whenever possible - moved to galway for university where he met who would become his first wife, ingla, and eventually received his degree in playwrighting - garrett and ingla got married straight away after college and soon after came their first two children, twin boys that equally delighted and overwhelmed the first time parents - worked as a stagehand at town hall theatre in galway while perfecting and pushing his scripts until he eventually got one of his works to be the spring production, he’d never felt more accomplished than in that moment - garret and ingla’s relationship had grown rocky, he was always locked away writing when he wasn’t working and they grew distant. news of a surprise pregnancy brought them back together again for a while as they prepped for the arrival of their baby girl. caireann’s presence healed them for awhile but they began bickering more and more, establishing himself in the theater community was difficult to do as is, but with ingla constantly complaining that he wasn’t around enough he grew tense. - the aunt of their children and ingla’s twin sister, eloisa, began visiting often to help care for their young children when garrett was working. - every night once the twins, caireann, and ingla were in bed -- garrett and eloisa would sit on the porch of their home to share a cigarette and talk, for what typically ended up being hours. sometimes he would share his WIPs with her and she’d give him her critiques and opinions. - eloisa wasn’t jaded by him like ingla was. they had pleasant conversation like he hadn’t had with his wife in a long time. eloisa believed in him, in his dream and his talent and the fact that he could be so much more than he was. garrett’s broadway fantasies were usually just that, fantasies. but eloisa made him believe that it was possible and that he was good enough to make it. - one of those nights on the porch, the two of them confessed they had begun feeling more for each other and shared a kiss that they vowed to pretend never happened. but that one kiss turned into a messy affair and within the span of a few months, ingla found out about them and served him divorce papers.

UPROOTING TO NEW YORK CITY (AGE 31 - 47):

- a combination of his immaturity, selfishness, the impact of losing the life he was comfortable in despite feeling stuck, and eloisa’s encouragement led to him making the impulsive decision that was taking off to new york city as soon as the divorce was finalized. leaving his kids behind broke his heart more than anything, but at this point he believed they were probably better off without him. he was too ashamed to face ingla again and too proud to admit that. - the adrenaline that came from uprooting and chasing his dreams of being a famous playwright with his work on broadway was a heavy distraction from the guilt he buried deep, and in the heat of the passion, he and eloisa made the not so smart decision to marry once they were settled. - without the responsibility of a full family and the need for distraction from feeling any negative emotion, garrett was able to bury himself in work in hopes of making a name for himself in the off-broadway community before taking a step toward the big time. - garrett sent occasional letters and birthday presents to his children in ireland but every single one of them wound up back on his doorstep with a big, fat, RETURN TO SENDER label that made his stomach turn. he received a letter in the mail from ingla a year and a half later with photos and updates, telling him this was the last time he would see his children if he didn’t stop trying to reach them. she would continue sending photos but only in secret, after all, the children were better off without him after suffering the abandonment of their father. he didn’t disagree. - garrett had several of his plays brought to life in theaters all around new york over the next couple of years, and in time with a lot of perseverance, one of his most popular works fell into the lap of a big time producer on broadway and debuted at the helen hayes theater. - this gained his work much more attention, and with more attention came more opportunities and praise, in time -- he became an immensely respected broadway playwright with several shows opening over the years. - garrett’s marriage with eloisa lost a bit of it’s steam overtime because they were both working constantly and barely had time to maintain their relationship. still, it worked for them and they cared deeply for each other. eloisa had made her own way into broadway, acting in various roles, and they made good arm pieces for each other. respected playwright and broadway actress. - when garrett got the call about ingla’s tragic death, it shook him to his core. he couldn’t seem to look at eloisa anymore without a mixture of grief and guilt, wondering if it could’ve gone differently if he hadn’t done what he’d done. - garrett and his ex wife’s fifteen year old daughter, caireann, who he hadn’t seen since she was a toddler was now in his custody and moving from ireland to live with him and his wife, who was also her aunt. trying to build maintain a relationship with your teenage daughter was hard enough as is, but after missing thirteen years of her life and being a monster in her eyes, it was near impossible. she was headstrong, like himself, and didn’t even bother to say a single word to either him or eloisa for months. garrett tried to make it as pleasant as possible for caireann, but he was stupid when it came to showing (or feeling) emotions, so his ‘pretend all was well and dandy between them’ attitude probably didn’t help caireann feel much other than that he was an insensitive jerk. connecting with his sons, while rough, seemed to be much easier than reaching through to caireann but he saw how well his three children took care of each other and decided to put the brakes on trying to form bonds because of his own insecurity. - caireann moved out immediately after high school and the household became cold. his relationship was never the same with eloisa after the death of his first wife and the return of his children into his life. they developed a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and garrett drowned his negative feelings in that freedom. - one night at a jazz bar garrett frequents, a talented young man by the name of eli jackson was playing piano. he was delighted by the music he was making, the melody playing right to his soul. the attention eli gave him in return certainly did not go unnoticed, it fed garrett’s ego for sure and made him all the more interested in the musician. he had the bartender bring him a drink on his behalf, which was successful in bringing him over, and the two of them had a few more while delving into deep conversation for the next couple of hours. this night spun into a year long affair full of passion and excitement, it was heated and captivating, all the way up until garrett realized how real it was becoming for eli. the younger man very much expected garrett to leave his wife, like he told him a number of times, but he just wasn’t ready to give up on his marriage. his relationship with the pianist was not something he saw in the long run and he couldn’t say eli’s vision was the same. - garrett and eloisa ended up having a long discussion about the turn of their personal lives, eventually coming to the decision to work on rebuilding their marriage and rekindling the passion they had at the beginning. he didn’t see eli again.

STARTING ANEW IN THE VILLAGE (AGE 47 - PRESENT):

- garrett and eloisa’s relationship became quite the roller coaster. it was good again for a while but continued to have more lows than highs. they agreed to separate for the time being in order to figure out whether to go their own ways forever or salvage what was left instead of throwing a 19 year long marriage down the drain. - garrett moved out of his and eloisa’s home on the upper east side of manhattan, letting her have the house. - he has officially relocated to greenwich village where he is now renting a townhouse on waverly place, right across the street from washington square park. he is still in the process of moving in. - garrett is now completely comfortable in his career and wants to, for the first time, focus on repairing his personal life. starting with what is the most important and should’ve been all along, his daughter caireann, who resides in the village as well.

i would absolutely love to establish more connections and plots for garrett presently, so please, send over an IM if you are interested in your character meeting him or having a storyline with him. i’m all for characters mingling and developing!

#「about garrett」#// yo this is long as hell if you read it all i love you please plot with me

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justonesongmore · 7 years

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XX. 1920

On Robot Rhythms, Comforting Tapestries, and Black women Saving Us All

1. Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds: “Crazy Blues”

Everything to this moment has been prologue: minstrelsy, marches, ragtime, dance crazes from South America or the Pacific, all has merely made straight the paths. Today the prophecy is fulfilled in your hearing. The record that shook the foundations of the earth, the record that won the first battle in a war most people didn’t yet know was happening, the record in the shadow of which all that has happened since still dwells. “Ain’t had nothing but bad news,” but the joy and energy and racket that propels her is a grand fuck-you to all false merchants of that news.

2. Al Jolson: “Swanee”

Another record important for different, and lesser, reasons. Where “Crazy Blues” is African-American musicians finally presenting their vernacular music unmediated by white caricature, “Swanee” is white (well, Jewish) Americans claiming a new and modern identity directly through the caricature of blacks. It’s a multigenerational caricature, as the 22-year-old composer (meet George Gershwin) quotes the original minstrel songwriter, and the performer, at his reckless height, has abandoned any pretense of imitation: his caricature, though performed in blackface, yowling cretinously for Mammy, is more self-parody than any other. The song’s melodic verve creates the future even as its lyrics plunder the past.

3. Baiano & Izaltina: “Cangerê”

As the Jazz Age begins, so too does the golden age of samba, with this slangy underground duet, the only known composition by Chico de Baiana, or the Bahia woman’s boy. “Cangerê,” said to be derived from an African language, is a specific ritual in the Afro-Brazilian Feitiço religion; the man and woman, arguing as usual in pop duets, threaten each other with the supernatural, while the samba rhythm works its own ineluctable magic on the listener. Two instrumental versions of the song were also cut in 1920, and the rhythmic power of the Banda da Casa Edison’s remains galvanizing.

4. Carlos Gardel: “Milonguita”

We have met many classic tango songs already, and will meet many more; but tango too is kicking into a new gear at the start of a new decade. “Milonguita,” by Argentine composer Enrique Delfino and Uruguayan lyricist Samuel Linnig, is one of the crown jewels of the Golden Age of Tango, never more exquisitely rendered than by Gardel’s burnished pipes. Full of the lunfardo slang that characterized the Buenos Aires underworld, it’s a portrait of a young woman driven to perdition by wine, men, and tango; her very name, “little-milonga,” refers to the dancehalls where the tango corrupted souls.

5. Mistinguett: “Mon homme”

Of the four canonical twentieth-century renditions of this song, the original is the least well-known; but Fanny Brice, Billie Holiday, and Édith Piaf sang other songs. The shining star of the Folies-Bergère between 1900 and 1930, Mistinguett sang many others too, but she may as well not have; this song, whether called “Mon homme” or “My Man,” has far superseded her own limited fame, and dragged her along rather cruelly in its wake. But pay attention to her studied lightness and flippancy, far from Brice’s and Piaf’s tragic posturing or Holiday’s bitter resignation: self-pity would be unfitting of her stardom.

6. Maurice Chevalier: “Oh! Maurice”

Mistinguett had been the toast of Paris since the Belle Époque; meanwhile, her nearest male equivalent, thirteen years her junior, was just rising to fame in 1920. (As though to exemplify the Parisian spirit, they had been lovers since 1911.) His first recorded hit, “Oh! Maurice” is an orgy of ribald egotism, a rhapsody on his masculine charms and the flutters into which he sends the female of the species. It’s tongue-in-cheek, of course, as all music-hall songs (of which it is a cousin) are; but it also owes its insouciant verve to the brio drifting from across the Atlantic.

7. Salvatore Papaccio: “Scettico Blues”

As does this. To be sure, it’s only called a blues because anything with even a slightly downbeat view of life was called a blues in 1920 (the copyright registration books were full to bursting of “blues”), but although structurally it’s what it sounds, a canzone napoletana, it’s also a witty, cynical plaint about the unfairness and falsity of life; and the see-sawing melody, though it doesn’t sound much like the blues strictly defined, owes more to ragtime-inflected American stage music than to traditional Italian bel canto. When pop singer Mina covered it in 1976, nostalgia couldn’t entirely obscure existentialism.

8. Lucille Hegamin & Harris’ Blues and Jazz Seven: “The Jazz Me Blues”

“Crazy Blues” had an immediate, electrifying effect on the recording industry; then as now, the most overwhelming flattery of success was imitation. It would take longer for authentic blues sensations, as measured by live performance in venues whites knew nothing of, to get on record, but refined generalist Black performers like Lucille Hegamin were pressed into immediate service to fill the obvious gap in the market. “Jazz Me Blues” was written by the young Black songwriter Tom Delaney, and its slangy but chaste evocation of the pleasures of the new groove under the sun is spun juicily in her mouth.

9. Bert Williams: “Unlucky Blues”

He was there at the beginning of the century, making outlandish grunts and twisting a love song into travesty; and he remains here at the century’s maturation, in some ways only catching up to where he was then. His voice is weathered with age and experience, the humorous glint in his eye undimmed but his face still poker-straight. Although the blues has now exploded into commercial popularity as feminine tragedy, his throaty plaintiveness looks forward to the masculine rural blues which will overshadow them. The song is Broadway pop, not blues, but his soul has always known the flatted fifth.

10. Nora Bayes: “The Broadway Blues”

It’s not often that I’ll privilege a recording by a white vaudevillian over a more famous one by an epochal Black act, but in this case the Sissle and Blake record is a bit too jaunty and careless, which only makes sense, as they didn’t write it. Bayes, a veteran Jewish coon singer, takes it at a drag, and is no longer burlesquing Blackness with weird hiccoughs, just singing, with the authority of age, a song about the pallor of the limelight. And with hindsight it’s hard to believe the aforementioned Gershwin kid didn’t have an ear on the orchestration.

11. Edith Day: “Alice Blue Gown”

The upheaval among the downmarket forms of musical entertainment, as authentic Black music begins to challenge the galumphing jeers of minstrelsy, did not necessarily have any immediate effect on the upmarket musical theater, which remained prissy, stodgy, and sentimental: but perhaps not quite unrecoverably foreign to us as it may sound today. “Alice Blue Gown” is meant to be wistful: in the show Irene, it is a song by a young woman nostalgic for her childhood dress of the shade named for President Roosevelt’s daughter. Chelsea Clinton would occupy the same cultural space today; and similar nostalgias are at work.

12. Paul Whiteman & His Ambassador Orchestra: “Whispering”

It is perhaps no accident that the “King of Jazz” cut his first record the same year that the real first jazz record was cut, and anyone curious about understanding the currents and cultures at work in the early 1920s would do well to study the sonic, rhythmic, tonal, and (yes) verbal discrepancies between “Crazy Blues” and “Whispering.” The Ambassador Orchestra is crisp, slick, not a hair out of place, not a glimpse of human feeling. Not only easy listening but Kraftwerk is predicted by their well-drilled rhythms; it is perhaps no accident either that Čapek’s robots emerged this year.

13. Ted Lewis Jazz Band: “When My Baby Smiles at Me”

While we’ve met Ted Lewis before, this more conventional dance-band number, with parts portioned out fairly among the band’s instrumentalists and his shabby-genteel crooning avant la lettre, was his first big hit, both on record and (helped by his star appearance at the Greenwich Village Follies of 1920) on sheet music. Compared to “O,” his klezmer-derived clarinet is more integrated into the tune’s jazz gestalt, and the way forward to Benny Goodman is clearly pointed; but there are still elements of ODJB-like novelty, as in the “I cry… I cry” refrain towards the end, squawked in parody by the band.

14. Ben Hokea Players: “Honolulu March”

A star instrumentalist, bandleader, and educator whose first records were also made in 1919, Ben Hokea was a Hawaiʻian-born guitarist who, on coming to the mainland, made his home base in Toronto, and his slack-key technique, more peppy and jazzy than dreamy and wistful, was instrumental in making hula music one of the everyday sounds of the 1920s, not just an exotica fad of the decade prior. The traditional song his band cuts here is taken at such a raggy, stuttering clip that the pedal steel swing of the Nashville-oriented decades to come is conjured by its streamlined, modern drive.

15. María Teresa Vera & Manuel Corona: “El yambú guaguancó”

Although we’ve heard from María Teresa Vera before, it was as a generalist singer covering a popular theater song; with this recording, she and her trova mentor, Manuel Corona, finally introduce the rumba proper (as distinct from the sones marketed as rhumbas in the 1930s) to recorded history. Yambú and guaguancó are both varieties of rumba, and the wordless chorus is characteristic of yambú. Vera’s verses are from the ancient storehouse of Cuban verse and symbol which, like blues verses, were mixed and matched to make up a song; but the insinuating rhythm, with its bell-clear clave, is what moves.

16. Zaki Murad: “Zuruni Kulli Sana Marra”

Because my focus has been (and will remain) primarily on Western music, I have paid scant attention to the deep wonders of Egyptian music, on record since before the century turned. Zaki Murad, of Jewish descent like many early Arabic-language recording stars, had been a successful recording artist since 1910, touring the Arabic-speaking world, and it is unjust that only this magnificent taqtuqa, “Visit Me Every Day,” by the legendary secular composer Sayyid Darwish (often considered the father of Egyptian popular music) represents him here. Do remember Murad’s last name, however; his daughter will join us later in the century.

17. Mishka Ziganoff: “Odessa Bulgar”

The Jewish diaspora, filtered through the sieve of immigration and collected in the tenements of New York, was always many peoples instead of one. Mishka Ziganoff was born in Odessa under the Russian Empire and emigrated to the US around the age of ten; his family settled in Brooklyn, and he became a virtuoso accordionist. His heritage was a jumble: he spoke Yiddish, but considered himself a Gypsy and communed as a Christian. In the ancient tradition of the musician as outsider, he managed to combine multiple interpretations of identity and home into a comforting tapestry, calling everyone to dance.

18. Abe Schwartz & Sylvia Schwartz: “National Hora Pt. 1”

Meanwhile, the most popular Jewish bandleader of the period, while cutting many lively freilach tunes that remain deathless today, paused to record something more quiet and perhaps personal: accompanied only by his daughter on piano, he fiddles a longing, keening improvisation in the “tzigane” (Roma) tradition, and wraps it up in what to Western European ears is an Irish jig. Klezmer scholars have declared this side a one-off, not a rendition of any familiar tune (Pt. 2 is better known as “Der Gasn Nigun”), and it’s impossible for me not to hear it as a thrilling expression of American pluralism.

19. Enrico Caruso: “I’ m’arricordo ’e Napule”

In a year, the Voice will be no more. This isn’t his last recording (that’s a selection from a Mass by Rossini), but it’s his last great canzone napoletana, a brand-new song of nostalgia and reverie about his hometown of Naples. More than anyone, he was the greatest star of the first age of recording, and as he dims, a new generation of stars is beginning to glow. Soon their brightness will eclipse his own; but few of them will retain anything like his name recognition over the years. A century later, and Caruso is still synonymous with beautiful singing.

20. Anita Patti Brown: “Villanelle”

The spectrum of authentic Black femininity which became, for the first time in recorded history, a live issue in 1920 ranged widely even then. The furthest away you could get, anyone would have said, from Mamie Smith’s vaudeville faux-lowdown, was the light classical canon; and here we find another Black woman. Her stage name is a double reference to Sissieretta Jones, her racial forebear in classical singing, nicknamed “the Black Patti” after Italian diva Adelina Patti; Anita Brown was called “the Bronze Tetrazzini” after Caruso’s duet partner. “Villanelle” was composed by Belgian miniaturist Eva Dell’Acqua in 1893, femininity in watercolors.

#1910s

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hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff · 5 years

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Alva Noë is a lifelong Mets fan who grew up in New York City in the 1970s. He is also a Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley who has published influential books on the nature of human action and experience. With his most recent volume, Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark, Noë joins the distinguished line of American philosophers who have embraced the national pastime.

Many of the essays in this diverse collection draw on Noë’s columns from the NPR website, 13.7 Cosmos and Culture, now sadly defunct. A longer opening essay frames recurring themes: baseball as a juridical sport, the questionable urge to reduce it to a game of numbers, and the puzzles raised by performance-enhancing drugs. But the book ranges widely, from joint attention to the magic of the knuckleball, from instant replay to Beep Baseball for the vision impaired

The essays are short, sharp, and attractively written, colloquial but profound. You can read them in the breaks between innings of a baseball game and pretend that you are watching it with Noë. As he writes in a piece about baseball and language, “the thing baseball folks do more than anything else, even during a game, is talk about baseball.”

I talked to Noë before Opening Day.

KIERAN SETIYA: Your parents were not baseball fans. How did you fall in love with the Mets?

ALVA NOË: I grew up in Greenwich Village. My parents were “alternative,” you could say. They were artists and most of the people in our lives were artists — potters, painters, musicians, etc. This wasn’t a sports or fan culture, and professional baseball, professional sports in general, was something sort of beyond the horizon; it showed up mostly by way of transistor radio as a kind of window onto the straight world. My dad was also an immigrant, a Holocaust survivor who’d arrived from Eastern Europe at the war’s end. So I think at least part of baseball’s appeal for me, and for my brother, must have been that it was so very normal, so much a part of a larger culture that felt both strange but also comforting. Safety and comfort were a factor for me — as a child, I would listen to games at night under the covers. I associate that with security and pleasure. At the same time, I guess I’ve also felt that I needed somehow to serve a bit as an ambassador from baseball, or maybe from the wider culture, to my family. Why do I love baseball? What is it I love? How can I make sense of this to people for whom baseball is, well, unimportant? In a way, that’s what this book is about.

As for the Mets, well, it was over-determined that I became a Mets fan back in the early 70s. The Mets were actually the better New York team back then. They’d won the World Series in ‘69. I was too young to be aware of that — but I vividly remember watching Tom Seaver and Tug McGraw lead the Mets to the Pennant in 1973. They weren’t just better than the Yankees, they had the better story, or at least the story that made sense to me. The Mets were pretty good, but they were always the outsiders and the underdogs. They were the team for city kids, for Jews and Puerto Ricans. To me, they represented aspiration rather than entitlement and establishment, as with the Yankees. The Mets were summer barbecues in the park; the Yankees were upstate, White, and Republican. I’m not saying it’s true, but that’s how it felt. I could no more support the Yankees than I could support Richard Nixon. And although my parents were not baseball fans, they were enthusiastic opponents of Nixon. So there is a sense then in which the Mets were the closest I could get to an embrace of a kind of Americana.

Of course, it’s important that I didn’t consciously choose to be a Mets fan. That’s not really the kind of thing you choose. Just as you don’t choose to be born here or there. But there’s not choosing and not choosing. I think there is a way in which you do choose what team to love.

Here’s a comparison: Why does anyone have a New York accent? Why are there even accents? You might say that people simply grow up speaking the language of those around them. This is obviously true to a degree. You don’t grow up in New York speaking Cockney English. And yet, crucially, there is variety to the ways people talk and not everyone ends up talking just like those they grew up learning to talk with. I suspect that finally the only way to explain this is to recognize that there is a sense in which we do choose how we talk. Not quite explicitly, to be sure. But we find ourselves talking, roughly, the way we think ‘people like us’ are supposed to talk. New Yorkers as a group tend to talk the way they think they are supposed to talk. And I suspect this is true for other categories of identity.

In particular, I suspect it is true of being a fan. I didn’t choose to be a Mets fan, nor is it something I inherited like a nationality. But I think at some level I chose to be the kind of New Yorker who would be a Mets fan, and my parents did in some ways raise me to be that kind of person.

That comparison speaks to me! I lived in England until my early 20s and first encountered baseball – at a Mets game – during graduate school. But I love it now in a way I’ve never loved another sport. As it happens, I’ve also acquired what I like to describe as a “trans-Atlantic” accent. I sound dubiously American to British friends.

This leads me to a question about being a fan. At the beginning of your book, you cite a puzzle from one of Plato’s dialogues: are things good because we love them or do we love them because they are good? You argue that we don’t love baseball because it is special; it is special because we love it; and we love it because we grew up with it. It’s an endearingly unsentimental view, especially coming from the author of Infinite Baseball. But it made me wonder what you think of fans like me, who didn’t grow up with the sport. I don’t think baseball is objectively better than other games, but I do think it is objectively special. Am I wrong about that?

You are right. Baseball is objectively special, but not objectively better. For me this is like Tolstoy’s thought about unhappy families, that they’re all unhappy in their own way. Well, baseball is special, but so is American football, and so is soccer. But they’re all special in their own way. The point generalizes. For instance, there is something special about languages. French, German, Yiddish, but also Classical Chinese or Hausa. These are special languages. Not more special. And certainly not better. But special, yes. Objectively so.

There is a joke in Wittgenstein somewhere about a French General who marvels at the fact that in French, alone among all the languages, there is a perfect correspondence between the structure of the sentence and the structure of the underlying thought. The general is the butt of the joke. Wittgenstein’s point is that there is no external standpoint from which we can say that one language rather than another is better at expressing thought. But notice this leaves open that there is an internal standpoint from which it can feel mandatory to say just that. For someone inside a language, language fits meaning like a well-worn glove. If you are French, it seems as if the very way we join words together matches something essential in the way we think. And in a way that’s right, not wrong.

And so with baseball. It is special. But to understand why, you need to take up the standpoint from inside baseball.

I do think the whole question of an immigrant’s love of the game is a fascinating one. Sometimes being an outsider affords the opportunity for a special kind of appreciation. Think Hemingway and the bull fight. Or the British and their passion for American (especially African American) music. And then there’s the fact that it is one of the stories that baseball likes to tell about itself that it has served an important role in the American melting pot. People of different national origins as well as classes come together at the ball park. Children of immigrant fathers and their fathers become American at the ballpark. So your affection for the game taps into important themes.

This connects to another idea in Infinite Baseball. I say that to know baseball’s objective specialness, you need to take up the stance inside baseball. But baseball also reminds us, I think, that the inside stance is also always an outside stance. To play baseball is always at once to think about baseball. Maybe that’s even more pronounced in the experience of a convert such as yourself. You love the game, you take up the stance inside, but you remain, and probably always feel, like an outsider, at least to some extent. That’s true of me, too.

I like the idea that baseball is distinctively reflexive or that it thematizes reflexivity in a distinctive way. In your book, you call it a “forensic sport.” Could you say a bit about what that means?

A curious and unremarked fact about baseball is its preoccupation with questions of agency, credit, blame, liability, and the like. In baseball, it is typically not what happened that matters, but rather who is responsible for — who deserves the credit or blame for — what happened. Actually, it’s more subtle than that. What happened, in baseball, is in good measure determined by facts about liability and responsibility.

To see what I mean, consider the law. A person eats poison and dies. This description of the facts leaves open what actually happened. Was this a suicide, a murder, an accident or a misjudgment? To answer the question what happened? you need to decide, roughly, who’s responsible. That is, you need to ask what I call the forensic question. Did she eat the poison on purpose? Did someone slip it into her sherry? Did she squeeze the dropper too many times when preparing her sleeping draught? One can only know what happens when one makes decisions about what she or other persons did. And this is because what happened is actually made up out of facts about who’s responsible, about whodunnit.

Forensics, as we all know from police shows, is the science of whodunnit. More generally, it is the domain of the law and legal responsibility. And more generally still, “forensic” just means, roughly, having to do with agency, and so with responsibility, that is to say with warranted liability for praise and blame.

Baseball events, like legal ones, are, in this sense, forensic in nature. It isn’t the material facts — hitter swings bat, ball flies to right field and lands uncaught — that fix baseball reality. What we want to know is did the batter get a hit, do we credit him with driving a run home and advancing the runners? If so, then we can blame the pitcher for giving up the run. But if the batter reached on an error — if the fielder bungled the ball — then we don’t credit him with reaching base and driving in a run and we don’t blame the pitcher for letting it happen. In that case, something else happened. Yes, a run scored. But it was unearned.

In baseball, you need constantly to adjudicate questions of this forensic sort. That’s how you understand what’s going on. That’s how you tell the game’s story. Even something as basic as balls and strikes comes down, finally, to a judgment about who’s to be held praiseworthy or blameworthy. If you can’t hit what the pitcher is throwing, but you should be able to, then that’s a mark against you, it’s a strike. But if you couldn’t reasonably be expected to hit a pitch, well then, that’s not your fault, it’s the pitcher’s fault. That’s what a ball is. One of the big mistakes we make about baseball is that we think the strike zone is a physical space. Actually, it’s something more like a zone of responsibility.

Baseball reality, then, depends on our attention to these questions of agency and responsibility. To be a fan, or a player, that is, to care about and know what’s going on, you need to be an adjudicator, which is to say, a thinker. This is what makes baseball such an intellectual game.

There is something deeply right about this. If you compare the MLB rules with those of the NBA and the NFL, “judgment” comes up a whole lot more: 5 times in the NBA rules, 6 times in the NFL’s, 62 times in the official rules of Major League Baseball. It is a matter of judgment whether something is a wild pitch or a passed ball, a stolen base or defensive indifference. The definition of a strike makes this explicit: “A STRIKE is a legal pitch when so called by the umpire, which — (a) Is struck at by the batter and is missed; (b) Is not struck at, if any part of the ball passes through any part of the strike zone; (c) Is fouled by the batter when he has less than two strikes; … etc.”

As a philosopher, I love that peculiar self-reference: “when so called.” At the same time, advocates of baseball analytics are prone to complain about some of the phenomena that implicate human judgment: about the arbitrariness of fielding errors and umpires’ shifting strike zones. What do you make of those complaints?

Great question! I love the job played by judgment in baseball. Its what makes the game so vital. Baseball highlights the fact that you can’t eliminate judgment from sport, or, I think, from life. Sure, you can count up home runs and strikeouts and work out the rates and percentages. You can use analysis to model and compare players’ performances. But you can’t ever eliminate the fact that what you are quantifying, what you are counting, that whose frequency you are measuring, is always the stuff of judgment — outs, hits, strikes, these are always judgment calls.

We as a culture are infatuated with the idea that you can eliminate judgment and let the facts themselves be our guide, whether in sports or in social policy. Baseball reminds us that there are limits. You can’t take the judge out of baseball any more than you can take him or her out of the court room. And that’s not because there aren’t facts of the matter, or because there aren’t precise rules. It’s because no rule is so precise that there are no hard cases. And hard cases demand good judges.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for trying to get it right. If slow-motion replay lets you see what really happened during a close play at home plate, then I’m in favor of it. But the use of instant replay doesn’t eliminate judgment, it only highlights the role it plays. It is umpires at a remote location who make their call on the basis of the videotape. The tape doesn’t read itself and issue a decision.

And if it did — if down the road we replaced the umpire by some kind of AI — that would either spell the end of baseball, or, more likely, it would shift the locus of dispute, adjudication, and judgment. To my mind umpires aren’t measuring devices. They are participants in the game. The idea that you might replace them with machines makes about as much sense as the idea that you might, in the interest of improving the game, get rid of the players themselves.

Maybe underlying all this is the worry that judgment, of its very nature, is subjective and so arbitrary. But a good judge — which means not only someone with good eyes and knowledge of the rules, but an experienced and fair judge who understands what’s going on and who knows where to position him or herself to make the call — is anything but subjective or arbitrary.

I don’t disagree with any of that: as you say in the book, it is a mistake to suppose that “baseball somehow bottoms out in quantitative analysis.” On the other hand, I’m not sure how prevalent this mistake is in baseball analytics, a lot of which aim to improve our judgment or assessments of credit and blame. The problem with errors, for instance, is that fielding percentage is unfair to fielders with greater range. (The strike zone is a more difficult case.) It is easy to abuse numbers in baseball, but some of the prime examples – obsessing about the radar gun or how a batter performs against curveballs on a 2-2 count in the seventh inning – are ones I associate with scouts and TV commentators, not with Fangraphs or Baseball Prospectus. I guess I am hoping for a union of wise judgment with forensic science.

I agree that numbers have been and continue to be a crucially important way to understand what’s going on in baseball, to tell the story, and also yes, in my sense, to assign praise and blame. There is no “in principle” opposition between the judge and the forensic scientist. Indeed, in some ways the history of the game can be tracked as evolving conceptions of how to use numbers to understand the game.

But baseball analytics threaten to change the game in ways that may not be for the good. To give an example I don’t discuss in the book, consider the way pitching has changed in recent decades. When I was a kid, you had starters and relievers. Starters were better pitchers than relievers and the idea was that a reliever was brought on basically only when the starting pitcher got into trouble. (Although there were great relievers, like my beloved Met, Tug McGraw, or Rollie Fingers of the A’s.). Every starter aimed at a complete game. Things have changed so much now. Starters, middle relievers, set-up men, and closers. But the direction we are really headed in — and you are beginning to see this already — is an erosion of the very distinction between starter and reliever. Increasingly what we are moving toward is “pitching by committee.”

Now from a tactical point of view, this makes good sense. Pitchers are always fresh, you can manipulate righty-lefty match-ups to your heart’s content, and you can use each pitcher in a surgical way to perform just the task he’s good at. Some people complain you slow the game down with all the pitching changes, but that doesn’t bother me. I don’t like this development for another reason. The new approach conceptualizes pitchers as if they were, well, a special kind of instrument for delivering the ball. You’ve got different ball-machines — “arms” — for different occasions. But pitchers didn’t used to be just arms; they were team-leaders, generals, and much of the game’s saga had to do with the challenges faced by the pitcher to find ways to enable dominance, not just over an inning or two, but for a whole game.

Remember the case of Matt Harvey and the fifth game of the 2015 World Series. He’d pitched eight scoreless innings against the Royals. Terry Collins, the Mets manager, wanted to pull him for a closer in the 9th inning. But Harvey said he was strong and he wanted it, he needed it — he’d only thrown 101 pitches — so Collins left him in. The rest is history. The Mets went on to lose. The question is: did Collins make a mistake?

If you are an analytics guy, that’s an easy call. Collins listened to his gut not his head. It was time for the 9th-inning specialist.

But if you think of baseball as about the arc of the pitcher’s struggle — or rather, of the arc of the team’s battle as embodied, in part at least, in the overcoming and achieving of its leader, its pitcher — then it’s much harder to say that Collins made a mistake. He took his pitcher’s feelings, his needs, his wants, into account.

And that, finally, is what worries me about the new “moneyball.” It eliminates players as agents, players as human beings who are on a team and working together for an outcome, and views them, instead, as mere assemblages of baseball properties that are summed-up by the numbers.

Is a person an assemblage of statistically describable habits and propensities? Or is there something more to a person than that? In a way, what makes baseball special is that it is a setting in which this very question, a fascinating and important question, can be asked.

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how2to18 · 5 years

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I talked to Noë before Opening Day.

KIERAN SETIYA: Your parents were not baseball fans. How did you fall in love with the Mets?

And so with baseball. It is special. But to understand why, you need to take up the standpoint from inside baseball.

If you are an analytics guy, that’s an easy call. Collins listened to his gut not his head. It was time for the 9th-inning specialist.

The post On Infinite Baseball: An Interview with Alva Noë appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2UnMdI1 via IFTTT

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topmixtrends · 5 years

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I talked to Noë before Opening Day.

KIERAN SETIYA: Your parents were not baseball fans. How did you fall in love with the Mets?

And so with baseball. It is special. But to understand why, you need to take up the standpoint from inside baseball.

If you are an analytics guy, that’s an easy call. Collins listened to his gut not his head. It was time for the 9th-inning specialist.

The post On Infinite Baseball: An Interview with Alva Noë appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2UnMdI1

#Los Angeles Review of Books #topmixtrends

0 notes