Eleanor Powell (1912-1982)

Eleanor Powell, the queen of tap dancing in Broadway and Hollywood musicals during the 1930s and 1940s was born a hundred years ago today (Nov 21. 1912) . This Jukebox number is from Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940), where she's close to outdance Fred Astaire. Or, according to some, she actually does. 

Fred Astaire is said to have felt intimidated only by her. "She put them down like a man. No ricky-ticky-sissy stuff with Ellie. She really knocked out a tap dancer in a class by herself"

Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach

It is the summer of 1962 on Chesil Beach, in the south coast of England. Two young people have just got married and seem to be ready to enjoy their wedding night. They are at a small hotel, just having their special dinner or trying to. Surely it will be a sleepless night. The time of the story, those early 1960s, is a remarkable one in the history of the Western World: The first stage of some most relevant social and cultural changes which would consolidate in the following years and decades and were to define our present age. A "revolution" in human relations. Language itself would acquire new potential, a new capacity for expression: new words will spring, new concepts will find a name. From then on, it will be able to put into words (in a direct and non encapsulated "jamesian" way so to speak) those inner things whose impact in emotions has always been there, but have been kept secret. Or simply they have been hard or embarrassing to express. Sex and its implications in a couple´s life is an immediate example.

1962 is the year chosen by McEwan to represent the turning point in western society as far as intimate relations are concerned.The two protagonists, apparently ready to consummate their marriage in their hotel room are Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting. Edward is a fresh Oxford graduate in history and Florence is a girl of deep artistic and musical sensibility who seems to have an exciting musical career awaiting her. The two young people have different backgrounds: Edward is the son of a schoolmaster and was born in a rural household; Florence comes from a wealthy family, the daughter of a succesful industrialist (her father) and an intellectual Oxford lecturer (her mother), this last one not quite into applauding unreservedly the changing of the times.

Different backgrounds, deeply in love 

They come from different environments, but Edward and Florence seem to fit each other perfectly. They love each other or they are completely convinced that is so. In the years to come, after the conventional "wedding rite", they think, life is going to unfold promisingly to provide them with the most fulfilling experience, with enough intellectual and aesthetic touches, all in a wealthy environment. What is approaching in their horizon seems to be definitely inviting. They are both sensible and educated. Existence for the two seems to be a nice and sophisticated gift, just ready to be unwrapped. After the rite, that is.

The rite. But none of them have any "physical" experience. Well that is not a problem. Or it should not be, at least not for Edward. He has no experience, true, but he really cannot wait to make love to his beloved Florence. Well, the thing is something that every couple has to go through that first night, after all, and they will do fine, won´t they? Aside from the vivid emotions of quality, the sense of sharing and enjoying, that Florence inspires in him, Edward simply desires her. So he is really wishing to carry on with the "rite", and all the rites that delightfully would come after...

Well, 1962 will be about one of the last years in western history in which it was still "advisable", if you wanted to do the right thing, to wait until the wedding night before "consummation", at least among the upper-middle classes. And Edward, even if he would have been delighted to make love to Florence in "advance", he is determined to do the right thing. After the due rites, happiness will undoubtedly follow, so why forcing anything? Yes, let´s do the right thing. 

The trouble with Florence 

But Florence is a completely different case from Edward´s. She really loves him and is confident that they will be happy together, that she is most fortunate having met him, loving him, sharing the project to live together. But there is a problem, and not a minor one: at the same time, even if all that is true, Florence is disgusted by the perspective of that approaching physical act. She is disgusted by sex, but has kept this problem a secret from Edward, who thinks she is just shy or unexperienced. Something, Edward expects, easily to be sorted with patience or skill. But definitely, the thing proves to be more complicated than that.

1962. Sex is not yet the festive exploratory thing that is just about to become in the following years. So far, sex was something whose initiation was better to be left for the wedding night. But in the case of Edward and Florence, leaving the thing for the wedding night will drag them, to their astonishment, into disaster. Exploration and knowledge of some fundamental things about their natures (mainly in the case of Florence), should have been done first, before any attempt to share their lives. They stuck to the rule, and they will both pay for it a sad and definitive prize.

At some point a society goes through a big cultural change which historians do their best to date, to locate in time with as much precision as possible. Transformation of human relations in the 1960s: here is one such dramatic change. Transition from repression to license, to put it simple. The so called sexual revolution. And an author like Ian McEwan (probably the best one writing in Europe today) can help to our understanding of that change, in a sapiential and aesthetic way, like only great writers can do. McEwan puts a magnifying lens on the tragedy of two people, turned into symbols of a larger reality, on the very instant chosen to represent a new world, enlarging it for us to view it, admire it and understand it; framing it like a little piece of art, a beautiful miniature, also full of meaning. The smart and painful testimony of a time about to vanish.

Burton Lane: 100 years

A hundred years ago today, on February 2, 1912, composer Burton Lane was born in New York. He died in the same city nearly 85 years later, on Jan 5, 1997.

He created lots of songs for Broadway musicals and Hollywood movies. A personal favorite of mine is How About You. The song was specifically composed for the Garland-Rooney movie Babes in Broadway (1941), one of the so called backyard musicals of MGM

(Burton Lane is precisely credited with having discovered in 1935 a tiny 13-year old singer, with a voice of unheard-of quality and power. Her name was Frances Ethel Gumm, who in due time would become, yes, Judy Garland).

The How About You lyrics are uncomplicated yet irresistibly cute, beginning:

I like New York in June, how about you?
I like a Gershwin tune, how about you?
I love a fireside when a storm is due

A little later into the song, the ear is caught by this funny patriotic line added by lyricist Ralph Freed, referring to the then US president and Commander in Chief.

I'm mad about good books, can't get my fill 
And Franklin Roosevelt´s looks give me a thrill

It was 1941, and WWII was beginning for the US. Roosevelt was the true star of the day.

Michel Houellebecq: The Map and the Territory

Another extraordinary novel by Michel Houellebecq: The Map and the Territory, which won him the Goncourt Prize in 2010, not an easy award to get, one which involves no less than the recognition by the French literary establishment of the author´s quality. And Houellebecq has not been the least domesticated, no matter what some may say. The Frenchman has not lost a single bit of his irresistible coldness. Reading him continues to be as gloomy as it is exciting and intense.

The novel moves along chronologically throughout the life of the protagonist: the artist and photographer Jed Martin, since the moment of his birth around 1975, until his death by the middle of the next century. (Although the 2010s is the story´s central time). As it progresses, the narration increasingly takes the shape of a kind of biographical essay by some unknown author, writing in a remote future, perhaps a century away. As an “essay”, the text has a very "humanistic" tone, with highly elaborate ideas and arguments about the impact that the main character (Jed Martin) had on the artistic culture of his time, his legacy and influence. And as it often happens in Michel Houellebecq, there is also the presence along the text of the two great forces of human civilization: science and technology. Without which it is impossible to build any serious intellectual discourse.

Life of Jed Martin

Artist Jed Martin, who is destined to become in the future (the "present" in this imaginary essay) a legendary figure in the history of art, shares space and time with some current and recognizable individuals like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or even Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Chelsea. This is something that helps the reader to mentally hold onto his or her time (which is ours) and later experience more effectively its progressive dissolution throughout the novel, as our present is gradually transmuted into a distant past. The map and the territory is, from that point of view, an effective (and momentary) antidote to this almost ludicrous presentism that western civilization has suffered for a century or more.

At a key moment in his career, and having made ​​the transition from an objectual avant-garde photographer into a falsely figurative painter, Jed Martin will "immortalize" two key individuals in the economic and technological development of the 2010s: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and he will capture them with the same psychological intensity as Velázquez. In the painting, which bears the title of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs talking about the future of computer technology or The Palo Alto conversation,  Martin shows the two characters while chatting on the porch of Jobs´ s Californian mansion, relaxing before a chess board. And critics and scholars from the future will proclaim, with their usual symbolic penetration, that this work by Martin contains no less than the history of capitalism. 

And capitalism, indeed, and according to Houellebecq, or his narrator in the book, is in its very final moment: by 2016 another devastating global economic crisis will occur, worse than the 2008 one, which practically leads to the imminent liquidation of our current economic system. Although the author does not give us any idea on what could replace it.

Michel Houellebecq, a character in The Map and the Territory

The futuristic novel or imaginary essay exposes biographical details of Martin, the incidents of his life, vital and sexual experiences, and his intellectual and artistic itinerary, which is going to make of him, a century later, apparently an artist the size of a Picasso, Bacon or Kandinsky. Moreover, the narrative never fails to show who its author is. In its pages, we encounter, for example, the usual houellebecquian sadness before the physical decay of the body or the seeming impossibility of ever leaving our unfortunate condition of elementary particles.

And Michel Houellebecq himself will appear as a character in the novel. And he does so in an extremely talented way, transforming himself into a mysterious and at the same time believable literary creature, a sad and helpless one, but also subtle and poignant. Elements of the Michel Houellebecq media cliché co-exist in the character created with intimate and ironic reflections. And in the final stretch, this Houellebecq character is going to become the tragic core of what will become surprisingly a gripping detective story. In much the same way as The Elementary Particles (1998) became, also in its last section, an amazing science fiction narration.

There is truly stuff in the pages of The Map and the Territory: ideas, events, insights, joys and sorrows. Psychologies displayed. Bleak prospects. Creative inquiries. Reflections on the future of France, the necessity for the preservation of its culture and heritage. The Chinese, destined to become Europe´s new masters, will be a different kind of barbarians from what the Americans used to be: far more enlightened, their money will help to preserve the culture and traditions from the past. The novel also speaks at length with irony about the art market and the network of relations established by the representatives of the high culture world. The French writer Frederic Beigbeder also appears as a character in the book and he is presented as a close friend, or the only one, of that elusive Ireland-based writer whose name is Michel Houellebecq. 

But one main impression that the Map and the Territory leaves in the reader is this dissolution of the present into a distant past, of which only its art, ideas and science will remain, as has happened before with any other bygone era, after disappearing into the great river of Time. Our age, which we find so oppressive and overwhelming, so tangible: it too will be converted into text, history, thought, into some sort of borgesian dream. Achieving this effect means you have previously created a solid fabric: Houellebecq undoubtedly has.