Santa's Little Yelpers

From the Holly-Bedecked Vault Dept.: Here’s a Metroland piece from 1990, posted on this blog in 2011 (I’ve been at it that long?) and encored here because it’s the season and I can’t think of a more appropriate way of re-celebrating. Besides, it’ll score me points with my wife, which can be helpful if my gift-giving proves to fall short. Yes, those are the pooches that shared my household 34 years ago.

                                                                                   

MY PARENTS FORCED ME into a photo session with Santa when I was four and I have resented them for it ever since. The traditional revenge, of course, is to inflict the punishment on your own children, but I haven't got any. So when the Clifton Country Mall announced its second annual “Pet Day with Santa,” it seemed like a good opportunity to give the brutes a road trip and sooth my damaged sensibilities.

Asta and Bud with Santa
Photo by Meera Shankar

It also would answer an important question: Who in their right minds wants to wrestle a beast into Santa's lap? The cruel truth is that, holiday mangers notwithstanding, animals care nothing for Christmas.

Malls are traditionally petless places and we felt very out of place leading our animals through the corridor. Bud Collyer, my two-year-old black Labrador, has never been taught to walk on a leash and zigzagged in front of me as he chased what must have been some splendid smells. Susan led Asta, an eight-month-old mix of Australian Blue Heeler and neighborhood hound.

This was the dog that barked at the occupants of every passing car, with special eagerness at stop lights. She barked at the people in the mall; she even barked at her own reflection in the shop windows.

Ives Gets You Under His Skin

THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY of the birth of Charles Ives was celebrated in and around Danbury, Connecticut, where he was born and raised and eventually settled. These celebrations took place in 1974. I was a year out of high school, living one town south. My exposure to Ives’s music was probably more robust than that of my coevals, but we had a hip high-school music teacher, Joe Celli, one of whose adventurous programs was a concert that included a multimedia presentation of “The Unanswered Question.” I played amidst a terrified section of fellow violinists, our fingers way the hell up on the E string, offering, as the composer put it, “The Silence of the Druids, Who Know, See, and Hear Nothing.” It’s one of Ives’s most-accessible works, a terrific introduction both to his music and his way of thinking, and two recordings of it are part of the 22-CD RCA and Columbia Album Anthology, focusing on what those labels issued on LP between 1945 and 1976.

Although Ives’s music was known, during his lifetime, to a few fellow-composers like Henry Cowell and performers like pianist John Kirkpatrick, it was otherwise neglected. By the early decades of the last century, the classical-music audience had been conditioned to seek pleasant-sounding works in the European tradition, although even Debussy had a struggle. A concurrent splinter group, primed by Stravinsky, began supporting the outré experiments of Schoenberg and his followers, and this flowed into Academia. Insecure critics (and critics are always nervous) took up the atonal cause and we sailed through the mid-20th century under the misapprehension that Tchaikovsky and his ilk were old hat, while atonal and aleatory music was the stuff that smart people enjoyed. Even Stravinsky wandered into twelve-tone territory.

Passages to Marseilles

A VISIT TO FRANCE is high on my agenda, and it has to include a stop in Marseilles. I’m prepared to be disappointed – I take it for granted – because my expectations have been honed by three movies written by Marcel Pagnol and filmed between 1931 and 1936, which places the first of them right at the advent of sound. And that’s what inspired successful playwright Pagnol to expand into cinema. Like Sacha Guitry, his compatriot, who also was an acclaimed playwright, Pagnol wasn’t interested in the medium until it included his own particular medium: words.

Pierre Fresnay and Orane Demazis

Which led to the accusation, especially after World War Two, that Pagnol’s movies were merely filmed plays, static and therefore uninteresting. The same criticism was lobbed at Guitry; not coincidentally, both Guitry and Pagnol were accused and subsequently cleared of being collaborationists with the occupying army during the war. Passions ran high!

Toward the end of the 1940s, Francois Truffaut spearheaded a critical reassessment of Pagnol’s work, but the effort was dampened by the lousy quality of what prints of those films were still available. Over time, however, a new generation of filmmakers, like Bertrand Tavernier, helped spark a greater resurgence of interest and even, eventually, the restoration of Pagnol’s most-important titles.

Hello, He Must Be Going

IT WAS ONLY AFTER I watched some Marx Brothers imitators at work that I realized there was a quality about the original quartet that’s impossible to reproduce: the sense of family that the brothers shared. They’re in character – they were always in character when in the public eye – they’re in situations that place them at odds with one another, yet you sense a special attachment, an easy familiarity. A bond that was set in place as their ambitious mother sent them, five brothers in various combinations, through the rough-and-tumble world of vaudeville, which would culminate in Broadway and Hollywood. Which makes the Zeppo paradox all the more poignant.

He was the youngest of the five, born Herbert Marx in 1901. Leonard (Chico) was 14 when he was born; Julius (Groucho) and Adolph (Harpo) were two and four years younger than Leonard. Milton (Gummo) was born in 1892. The oldest three were soon enough established as a working unit, but mother Minnie wanted “The Four Marx Brothers” on the bill, so Milton was conscripted into service.

The original foursome acquired their nicknames in 1914 thanks to a fellow-vaudevillian named Art Fisher, who came up with the monikers during a poker game. When queried about their switch to these names, Groucho responded, “We want to be different and attract unusual attention.” Herbert acquired his nickname three years later, and the most plausible story behind it was his resemblance to a sideshow performer known as Zip the Pinhead, Zip, in Herbert’s case, soon morphing into Zeppo. He gave other origin stories through the years, suggesting that he wanted to dissociate himself from the freak-show aspect, yet he (along with all his brothers) never stopped using the memorable name.