The Roots of Tony Bennett

THIS week my Influences column looks at the great crooner Tony Bennett. I figured that his Italian background and Frank Sinatra were important to him, but I was surprised to hear Leonardo da Vinci and Art Tatum, the most ornate and technically accomplished pianists in the history of jazz, as major inspirations. (His Sinatra anecdote, by the way, is one of my favorite things I've heard this year.)

HERE is that piece.

And we didn't have room for his words on painter John Singer Sargent -- here they are.


I have been painting and drawing all my life and studying the great masters but my all time favorite painter is John Singer Sargent. I have always felt that art should be about truth and beauty and for me, Sargent represents the perfect mix of that approach.  His portraits are gorgeous, but he still keeps the humanity of the person he is painting in mind and doesn't over-glorify the subject.   


Bennett will be in Orange County at the Segerstrom Center Saturday night.


Interesting at least to immediate family: My paternal grandfather, Sammy Timberg, who was a vaudevillian and later a Tin Pan Alley songwriter, landed songs with some of the greats, including Sinatra, but always pined to get Bennett to sing one of his, and never did. (I try not to hold that against either of them.)

Playwright Donald Margulies in the Southland

RECENTLY, I had the good fortune to spent part of the day strolling through the Orange County Museum of Art's Richard Diebenkorn exhibit. This enchanting show of the California painter's Ocean Park paintings was even better because I took it in with a trained painter who could point out what I might have overlooked. That this former artist was the New York/New Haven playwright Donald Margulies made the afternoon even more delicious.

Diebenkorn's Ocean Park, No. 129

The playwright was in the OC for a revival of his play Sight Unseen -- which South Coast Repertory developed and premiered 20 seasons ago. David Emmes, company co-founder, directs, this time around, this play about a Brooklyn painter who's visiting England at a moment of both triumph and doubt. My story is here.

Margulies -- whose plays specialize in deeply uncomfortable tales of the creative class -- turned out to be very good company. He talked about giving his students Eric Fischl paintings to spark writing a scene, and asks them to write a monologue from the point of view of a Diane Arbus portrait.

South Coast Rep, Costa Mesa

And I can't say anything more about this publicly, but I'm quite eager to see his work with HBO on an adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides' novel Middlesex bear fruit.

Sonny Rollins, Saxophone Colossus

THE other day I was lucky enough to speak to Sonny Rollins, the tenor saxophone legend who performs at UCLA's Royce Hall tonight, Thursday, and at Segerstrom Hall in Orange County on Sunday.

These days, the once-brash, mohawk-rocking Rollins is 81, and, he's many decades from authoritative, agenda-setting records like Saxophone Colossus and Way Out West.

But the Rollins I spoke to was easy to speak to, boyishly enthusiastic, and sort of innocent in his love of other musicians, like composer Jerome Kern, who he called his favorite, and saxophonist Don Byas, who he called "One of my first idols and I prided myself that I could play a little bit like him." (He spoke specifically about falling for a '40s recording of "How High the Moon" Byas made with Jimmy Jones on piano.)

In thinking about what he and other jazz musicians really do when they are improvising, he came back to another saxophonist's description of telling a story. "I think Lester Young put it succinctly -- it's about logic. You can't just play anything. When I take a solo, the music has to make sense. I just happened to be one of the guys, along with John Coltrane, who stated playing long solos. Back then, everything was geared to shorter records."

And while Rollins' records have not matched his '50s classics, as a live performer he has reached another peak, says jazz critic Gary Giddins. My full interview with Sonny Rollins HERE. See you at Royce Hall.

UPDATE: Here is the set list from last night's very potent show. Especially pleased with guitarist Peter Bernstein, wielding an old-school archtop.

1.       Patan jail 2.       Serenade 3.       Blue Gardenia 4.       Nice Lady 5.       They Say It’s Wonderful 6.       Nishi 7.       Don’t Stop the Carnival

The 5 Browns on the Piano

Photo Andrew Southam

A GROUP of cherubic, Julliard-educated young people came to Irvine this weekend to play 5 pianos in tandem. This could be heaven or it could be hell, but this group of siblings is good.

HERE is my interview with the band in the LA Times. There is more to the story than met the eye when I accepted this piece -- their backstory is a bit complicated. I enjoyed talking to two of the young men in the group a great deal; their sincerity was unfeigned.

Martha Graham vs. Isamu Noguchi

TWO very different artists -- with equally contrasting temperaments -- enjoyed one of the richest collaborations of the 20th century. They were also shaped in some ways by their time in California.

Graham with Bertram Ross

Dance pioneer Martha Graham and sculptor/ designer Isamu Noguchi worked together for more than two decades on about two dozen sets; three of them, including Pulitzer-winning Appalachian Spring, will be staged in Orange County this weekend. HERE is my LA Times piece on these two figures.

These SoCal performances have an additional resonance: Noguchi was born in Los Angeles (and will be the subject of a Laguna Art Museum retrospective opening in June) and Graham spent an important part of her teenage and young adult years in Santa Barbara and L.A. 

Graham talked about the vast expanses of the West as given her ballets a greater sense of space.  And life on the West Coast had a more temperamental effect as well.

A contemplative Noguchi

“My people were strict religionists who felt that dancing was a sin,” she told Dance Magazine. “”They frowned on all worldly pleasures…. But luckily we moved to Santa Barbara, California,” when she was 14. “No child can develop as a real Puritan in a semitropical climate. California swung me in the direction of paganism, though years were to pass before I was fully emancipated.”

And here is a video of Appalachian Spring.

The Return of Franz Liszt

I STILL remember the elementary school assembly in which a local musician in a long white wig came in to play piano and talk to us about classical music and the 19th century craze Liszt-omania.

And while it's true that Franz Liszt inspired all kinds of insane behavior, especially from swooning young women, there's more to the composer than that.

In today's LA Times I speak to Louis Lortie, HERE, a Berlin-based pianist who will perform Liszt's seldom-played Annees de Pelerinage at Orange County's Segerstrom Hall. The work, which translates as "years of pilgrimage" and last almost three hours, tells the story of Liszt's life as well as the evolution of his compositional style.

I also have a sidebar where Lortie talks about why Liszt is both the most intriguing 19the century composer and why he remains underrated.

Tonight, by the way, I will be at Disney Hall seeing a pianist of a very different stripe, jazz giant Brad Mehldau.

The Past Envisions the Future

LOOKING back at mid-century optimism is always both fascinating and depressing. All the labor-saving devices and exotic holidays -- weekends on the moon! -- we were going to get by now.


The science-fiction writer Gregory Benford, who teaches at UC/Irvine, and the editors of Popular Mechanics have put together hundreds of these predictions, from asbestos dresses to personal jetpacks, along with the original art which accompanied them in the magazine. Here is my story from Sunday's LA Times on The Wonderful Future That Never Was.


Benford, who also teaches physics, writes insightful essays that puts the whole future-looking enterprise into context. As any close reader of science fiction knows, we can tell a lot about an era by how it envisions its future.

Benford has also recently co-edited a tribute to science-fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke, whose powers of predictions, especially re satellite communication, he praises. Sentinels: In Honor of Arthur C. Clarke, edited with George Zebrokwski, includes essays on the writer himself as well as stories by Heinlein and Asimov that speak to Clarke's ambitions. (It's published by Hadley Rille Books.)

Philip K. Dick at UC Irvine

ON Friday I braved some of the worst traffic in Southern California for A County Darkly, a panel on Philip K. Dick's years in Orange County.

Overall, the event was lively and fun, even without offering few genuinely new insights. (I wrote about the symposium briefly, here, on the LA Times Jacket Copy blog. And I wrote a lengthy piece on his years in SoCal here.)

UC Riverside scholar Rob Latham read a few passages from the author's OC novels ("Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed..."), and was followed by three of Dick's friends. Generally the most intriguing part of the gathering was getting people who'd really known "Phil" at the same table.

Wily writer/physicist Gregory Benford stressed how funny Dick was a person, describing him as a gifted physical comedian as well as how generous he was, giving much of his Blade Runner money away to charity and poor people he knew. "Even though he lived pretty close to the street himself, he knew what it was like to be down, and tried to help people." Benford also described Dick writing on his old Olympic typewriter on a day Dick was so obsessed with his deadline -- and speed-ed up -- that he had to drag his friend to dinner: "He was hitting the keys so hard and so fast it sounded like a motorcycle." (This took place in the late '60s, a few years before the author moved south from the Bay Area.)

Writer Jim Blaylock emphasized how hard it was to really figure out which of Dick's wild theories the writer himself believed. "He seemed to be evolving in his beliefs so constantly that it became harder to tell from one Tuesday to another," where his thinking was.

Dick told his friends about a thousands-year-old plot involving Jesus Christ and the KBG. "The other night he convinced us that the Soviets had developed a madness ray... which was aimed at Los Angeles... They'd developed the hydrogen bomb as a kind of lark -- what was really going to take us out was the madness ray."

Writer Tim Powers talks about finding Dick's thousands of pages of writing on his visitation by God -- soon to be published as The Exegesis -- while Dick was in the hospital, dying, and stashing it in a large ashtray with "Elvis is King" on it because he didn't want it falling into the wrong hands. "I started to read it, and it sounded really crazy. Out of its proper context it really sounded weird." When he spoke to the authorities after the author's death he told them, "Don't neglect the Elvis ashtray, because that's where all of his theological speculation is."

Powers also mentioned Dick's difficulty with marriage (he was married and divorced five times. "I think he could see, after all of those attempts, that he wasn't very good at marrying people. He wasn't going to do that anymore."

Many intellectual teenagers and young men have an older, eccentric friend who turns them onto weird books and ideas, exposes them to jazz or classical or experimental music, and sometimes buys them beer. (I know I did.) After Friday's session, I sorely regret not having known Philip K. Dick in his prime.

Here is the full announcement and cast of characters:

TITLE: A County Darkly:  Philip K Dick in the OC

TIME:  Friday, May 21, 12-2

PLACE: Humanities Gateway 1030, University of California, Irvine campus

PARTICIPANTS:

Science Fiction Authors:
*Gregory Benford
*Tim Powers
*James Blaylock

Science Fiction Critics
*Rob Latham
*Jeff Hicks

Moderator: Jonathan Alexander

ABOUT: This panel presentation will consider the inter-relationship of
Philip K. Dick's work and his life in Orange County.  Spending the last
ten years of his life in the OC, Dick composed some of his most important
SF works here.  In many ways, the OC is a peculiarly Dickian space, with
managed communities and a veneer of the unreal.  Conversely, Dick's late
novels (A Scanner Darkly, Valis, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer)
seem at least partly inspired by Dick's life in Orange County.  Our
panelists will explore such connections, bringing the work of the
century's most noted SF author to bear on our cultural imagination of
Orange County, while also bringing our imagination of the OC to bear on
possible interpretations of Dick's work.

Death -- and New Life -- for Philip K. Dick

IT seems appropriate for a writer who was fascinated by religion for much of his career that Philip K. Dick's own trajectory tracks that of many a religious messiah: He died in 1982, but in the years after his death he has seemed to rise again.

HERE is the last of six pieces in the Hero Complex blog about the author's decade in Orange County. It looks at his final years, his death, and the movie Blade Runner, which started out as a bomb before becoming one of the (few) great movies of the '80s and perhaps the defining film of contemporary Los Angeles.

This week I will put up a single post that will collect all my recent writing on the author, for Hero Complex and elsewhere.  

Philip K. Dick's Late Work

MY latest piece on Philip K. Dick is the only one built of all-new material: That is, none of this appears in the LA Times story about the writer's Orange County years that ran a couple of Sundays back.

This latest piece, which just went up on the Hero Complex blog, looks at the impact Southern California had on Dick's work. Did it move him toward an interest in consumerism, religion, or change his tone? I spoke to novelist Jonathan Lethem, a local professor, a veteran of SoCal's punk scene and Dick authority David Gill to get at the question of how Orange County led PKD to VALIS, A Scanner Darkly, Timothy Archer and others.

The sixth and final piece should run tomorrow.

Philip K. Dick's Last Decade, Parts 1 and 2

TODAY the second of my six-part series on Philip K. Dick's life in Orange County, Calif., went up on the LATimes' Hero Complex blog.

This second section gets him to OC from his often troubled life in the Bay Area and a really disastrous trip to Vancouver.

Yesterday's installment started out with a 1976 scene in Fullerton in which his marriage unravels and the author tries suicide.

Please stay tuned for the rest of the series: Tomorrow tells of his daily life in Orange County and relationship with his family.

And if you'd like to follow my posts on the site io9, some of which concern science fiction (and some of them actual science), you can check em out here.

Photo credit: Philip K. Dick Trust

Philip K. Dick and the Suburbs

THE science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick was a bearded Berkeley bohemian -- the last guy you'd expect to move to Orange County, Calif., at a time when its John Birch reputation was still well-deserved. But after a disastrous year or so, the author relocated from the Bay Area to SoCal, and wrote some of his most important work.

Dick has also become the first sf writer to land in the Library of America's prestigious series of out nation's foundation texts; the third volume, mostly of work written in OC, came out last summer. To me and many others, PKD was a flawed writer (and flawed man) who also, often in great haste, wrote the work that best anticipates the world we're inhabiting and heading toward.

If all this is old news to you, I recommend you wait until Monday when the director's cut -- six daily installments on Dick's final decade -- unspools on the LATimes' celebrated Hero Complex blog. (That blog,  which looks at sf, fantasy, comics, and other assorted fanboy fare, is run by my tireless and obsessive old colleague Geoff Boucher.)

If you're interested in the more modest Sunday paper version, by all means go here for my new LATimes piece on what might be the most serene and most tumultuous period of this author's life.

Whatever version you prefer, I spoke to a number of figures in Dick's life and afterlife: The sf/fantasy writer Tim Powers, Dick's daughter Isa and his fifth wife Tessa, the mastermind of the exhaustive Total Dick Head website, and the keeper of PKD's flame -- novelist Jonathan Lethem.

I'll be posting each of next week's installments here -- please keep your eyes peeled for more on this complex and contradictory figure!

Photo credits: Tessa Dick and Electric Shepherd

Wu Man and Ancient Chinese Bluegrass

THIS may sound crazy, but this chick kicks ass! if you doubt me, check this out. or consider the fact that avant-jazz madman henry threadgill caught a gig of wu man's back in the early '90s, soon after she'd arrived in the states from china, and asked her to play on his next record.

today i have a piece in the LATimes on wu, who plays the pipa, a two-thousand-year-old string instrument, a sort of mandolin/banjo, with amazingly contrasting styles. that is, it can be the most lyrical as well as the harshest of lutes.

her admirers include yo-yo ma, philip glass and the kronos quartet, with whom she's about to debut a new piece in new york.

wu plays on tuesday as part of an important festival of chinese music put on by both carnegie hall and the philharmonic society of orange county. she's playing not western classical or sacred chinese music, but as part of rustic "family bands" she has brought over from china.

dean corey, the society's southern-bred boss, remembers working in appalachia and seeing wild family groups come out of the woods to make bluegrass. "that's basically what this is," he says.

Photo credit: wumanpipa.org