Sofia the First

Sofia the First is a show on the Disney and Disney Junior channels that my three-year-old (soon to be four) daughter loves.  I think, as Susan and I watch the show with her each time, that the things that are most appealing to her about it are: 1) Sofia was a commoner whose mother married a king (so Sofia has to learn how to behave as a princess behaves) 2)Sofia has a magic amulet that allows her to converse with animals, her favorite being rabbit Clover and 3) Sofia learns on her own, often being wiser than her mother and stepfather. 

My daughter likes to watch the same episodes again and again, her current favorites being "Substitute Cedric" and "The Enchanted Feast."  In the former some pranksters from Hexley Hall, the school for sorcerers, invade Royal Prep while the teachers, good fairies from Sleeping Beauty, are at a fairy convention and Cedric, the Royal Sorcerer, is the substitute teacher.  Cedric is immobilized by the pranksters but teaches the children "the sorcerer's secret" by singing a song about it.  The sorcerer's secret is never to give up and, with this in mind, the students stop the pranksters from filling Royal Prep with bubbles in order to float it away.  In "The Enchanted Feast" the bad fairy Miss Nettle disguises herself as the sorcerer Sasha and immobilizes Cedric and the royal family (King Roland II, Queen Miranda and Sofia's stepbrother and stepsister, James and Amber) and attempts to steal Sofia's magic amulet.  Sofia stops Miss Nettle with the help of Clover and the appearance of Snow White (Disney princesses appear regularly on the show to advise Sofia).

The show is didactic in a low-key way and encourages tolerance and understanding:  Sofia stays friends with commoners Jade and Ruby and brings the trolls out of exile (they were mistakenly banished to their caves by a previous king).  The computer-generated animation is, by my standards, rather primitive (minimal movement and facial expression) but the animation is carried off rather successfully by the voices, particularly Ariel Winter as the eight-year-old Sofia (Winter herself is 17) and the songs, written by John Kavanaugh and Erica Rothschild.  The shows are all directed by Disney TV veteran Jamie Mitchell.

I am particularly impressed by the power to talk to animals that Sofia's magic amulet gives her.  I read Hugh Lofting's Doctor Doolittle books (written in the 1920's) when I was a child and wished that I could talk to animals; I knew they would be more understanding and sympathetic than the adult humans I had to deal with.

The Golden Age of Radio, April 25, 2015

Max Schmid's The Golden Age of Radio, is on WBAI, 99.5, every Sunday night from 7-9 PM.
The show April 25,2015 started with the last episode of The Voyage of the Scarlet Queen and was followed by three shows written by Cathleeen Hite, from Gunsmoke, Escape and Night Beat.

The Voyage of the Scarlet Queen ran on the Mutual network from 1947-1948, was written by Gil Doud and Bob Talman and directed by the versatile Elliot Lewis, who also starred as Master Phillip Carney, captain of the cargo ship on its route through Asia.  The episode Schmid played on April 25 was 'The Winchester Rifle and the Ambitious Groom'", about the murder of the groom at a wedding on Singapore, where one "never goes to bed without them brass knuckles."  At the end, as usual, Carney and his crew are off again to the freedom of the ocean.

Nightbeat ran from 1950-1952 on NBC and the show Schmid played on this date was "The Bug Murders", broadcast on Sept. 25, 1952, directed by Warren Lewis and written by the prolific Cathleen Hite.  Frank Lovejoy plays a Chicago reporter covering the night shift and solves a series of murders that turn out to be perpetrated by the psychologist who had volunteered at the newspaper to help solve them. It is a show full of the sounds of the city and the people of the night.

Escape ran from 1947 to 1954 on CBS and this night's episode came near the end, "The Eye of Evil" from July 17, 1954.  The reliable John Dehner plays a man who goes to Burma to find a friend, the plot being quite similar to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The show was written by Hite and directed by Norman Macdonnel, and effectively captures the disorientation an American would feel in a Burmese jungle.

Gunsmoke ran on radio from 1952-1961, on CBS, and the star, William Conrad, was always bitter that the TV version replaced him with James Arness (some may remember that Conrad was a bit portly).  Gunsmoke was one of the first "adult Westerns," with its gritty realisn, and Schmid played the episode "Nelly Sitden", from May 1,1960, where Sheriff Matt Dillon gets injured by Indians and is taken in by an elderly woman, who had been around for many years and was friends with the Indians.  Cathleen Hite wrote the script and Norman Mcdonnel directed.

Up to this point there has been very little written on the aesthetics and auteurs of radio, a medium that had only begun to reach its artistic peak when it was eclipsed by television, where one did not need one's imagination so much (three of the four shows mentioned above did not take place in contemporary America).  If you are interested in learning more about radio you can listen to Schmid's show every week on WBAI and read John Dunning's excellent On the Air:  The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (Oxford University Press, 1998).  There are many shows that survive and they are readily available on the internet, some of them free and some quite inexpensively on MP3 disks.

A Prairie Home Companion May 10,2015

"That's the news from Lake Woebegone, where all the women are strong,all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average."

 I have enjoyed the radio show A Prairie Home Companion for about 25 years, almost as long as it has been on the air in its present form.  Host Garrison Keillor turns 73 this year and occasionally threatens retirement but so far has been unwilling to go through with it.  The May 10th show was a typical combination of dry humor and American music, including an effective parody of "The Times They Are A' Changing" that emphasized how we are changing: "my daughter doesn't dare leave me alone ..."  There was an episode of Guy Noir, private eye (a tribute to film noir that I'm sure many people don't get) and "commercials" from Bebop-A-Rebop Rhubarb Pie and The Ketchup Advisory Board.  Ricky Skaggs, Sharon White and Kentucky Thunder performed some country rock ("Home is Wherever You Are"), Stuart Duncan performed a bluegrass version of a Waylon Jennings song and Keb'  Mo' played the blues.

The highlights of the show for me were the sketch about Dwayne and his mother, who always tells Dwayne everything is okay when it isn't, and the news from Lake Woebegone, this week about a dog that died, a cafeteria lady at the elementary school who retired, and what happened at Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery, as well as the sermon at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility.  As always, Fred Newman did wonderfully effective sound effects.

I grew up in a small town and I am not one who thinks that Keillor condescends to the people in small towns such as Lake Woebgone; rather, it is an attempt to understand those people and what goes on there, even if one doesn't want to continue living in a town that doesn't have a public library.  And there is no question that Keillor has wide-ranging taste in music, having musical guests in just about every genre, from classical to country, as well as local guests wherever in the country he takes his show.

Mad Men

The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and often incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the direction is unimaginative.
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Mad Men Account, The New York Review of Books, Feb.24, 2011

Mad Men is an unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better.
Mark Grief, London Review of Books, 23 October 2008

I largely agree with these comments (even if they sound like John Simon film reviews) but I still like and enjoy the show.  Mendelsohn thinks that the show may appeal to those too young to have lived through it (it takes place mostly in the sixties) who are interested in what their parents lives were like.  I lived through that period myself and find it quite accurate in its portrayal of the things and attitudes of that period, though I think "realism" is a fallacy when applied to any art.  Certainly the show is not like a nineteenth century novel (though many of the characters are Dickensian in their resistance to change) but it is somewhat like the eighteenth century novels of Smollett and others in its episodic and comic qualities.

My take on the show is that Matthew Weiner, its creator and writer, is not trying to say that today we are superior in so many ways but rather we are very much the same:  some people may smoke and drink less but attitudes toward women, gay men and lesbians, and people of color have not changed as much as we think they have:  there are still many Don Drapers in the world and many women such as Peggy Olson and Joan Harris who are trying to find their way in the business world using whatever combination of sex and accomplishment they can find that works.

The show is something of a soap opera indeed, but so are the films of Vincente Minnelli and Douglas Sirk.  Over a period of seven years Mad Men has consistently delighted and surprised one, as Draper's children have started to grow up and question things, just as their parents did and their parents before them.  The attitudes in Mad Men are centered in the advertising world, where the desire and ability to flimflam the public continues, sometimes more sophisticated than previously, but by no means always.

Secrets and Lies; David Letterman

Making a child die in a picture is a rather ticklish matter; it come close to an abuse of cinematic power.
Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock (Simon and Schuster 1967)

Secrets and Lies had its season finale Sunday with an episode directed by Timothy Busfield and written by Barbie Kligman (who created the show, based on an Australian series) and Judy McCreary  A series about seeking the murderer of a young child makes one a little queasy, though it is becoming more common these days (Gracepoint is another recent example). This series was helped immensely by the presence of  thirtysomething veteran Timothy Busfield, who produced and directed, as well as acting in the series.  I did not find the mystery of who killed the young boy particularly interesting but everyone was a suspect at one time or another and the fragility of neighborhood bonds was convincingly demonstrated.  What I did find also well evoked were the authority issues among the lower-middle class and how little understanding there was between husband and wife and parents and children:  spouses routinely cheated on one another and fought constantly, fueled by alcohol,  and the most important thing for children is to obey their parents and other authority figures.  Violence was never far away and Juliette Lewis, the intimidating lead police investigator on the murder, was everywhere. Lewis was tough and no-nonsense (even sending her own child to jail for drugs), though at the very end she literally let down her hair as a father confessed to a murder his 12-year-old daughter committed.

There's not much to say about David Letterman.  After watching last night's special about his thirty-three years in late-night television it is clearer than ever that, like his idol Johnny Carson, he had little to contribute that will last or be remembered.  The special spent most of its time on the same celebrity guests that visit all these shows, though he did include an occasional hero, such as someone who rescued somebody from the subway tracks.  Letterman's tricks and stunts were all done before, and better, by Steve Allen, the original and best Tonight Show host (1954-57).  Letterman did hire some good writers and  I enjoyed Letterman up to a point when he was on at 12:30 in the 80's, but once he moved to an 11:30 spot (in 1993) he was not much different than Carson and no longer had guests such as Pee Wee Herman telling jokes.

Radio and Me: Part II

Throughout the 70's I listened to WBAI, WNCN and WQXR and also to Jean Shepherd on WOR-AM, who did a 45-minute monologue every night until he left WOR in 1977.  I had discovered Shepherd by reading his short stories in Playboy magazine, one of the very few outlets I had for good writing in the early 60's (it also had Nabokov and P.G. Wodehouse).  Shepherd's modern-day rants do not hold up well today but his stories about his childhood and his days in the army are still incisive and funny stories about growing up in a small town and serving in the armed forces in the days of the draft.  New York has never had a good country radio station but in the 80's and 90's I listened to Honky-Tonkin' and Tennessee Border on WKCR and Laura Cantrell's Radio Thrift Shop on WFMU (another quirky independent station), where most of the country music was classical and played by knowledgeable djs.  The WKCR shows are still on the air, while Laura Cantrell has left to pursue her own country music career (all her radio shows, however, are archived at the WFMU website). 

In the 80's I also discovered Car Talk and Prairie Home Companion on WNYC.  I have never owned a motorcar but I loved the way Click and Clack talked about them, with intelligent good humor. Tom Magliozzi died but his brother Ray survives him and the show is continuing with re-runs.  A Prairie Home Companion is Garrison Keillor's show, which he has been doing in various forms since 1974; he is now 73 years old and has talked about retiring several times.  It is something of a variety show, with music (usually of the folk variety), skits and stories about Lake Wobegone, a fictional town in Minnesota, full of Norwegians.  In the 90's, while listening to WBAI, I discovered Max Schmid's The Golden Age of Radio, where I first heard the great radio dramas that Orson Welles did before he made films, doing brilliant adaptations of books such as The Heart of Darkness using a handful of actors, a sound effects person, and Bernard Hermann's music.  Over the years Schmid has played something of the role with radio shows that Henri Langlois played with films:  presenting everything he can find and being quite careful about giving his own opinions about its quality.  If I hear something I like by a particular writer or director on Schmid's show I will sometimes order additional shows on MP3 discs, which are relatively inexpensive.  People are surprised to hear that many radio shows, most of which they have barely heard of, if at all, still exist and are available for listening.

I do listen to some other shows occasionally.  I like some of what Jonathan Schwartz plays, perhaps about a third, which was the same ratio as with the late Danny Stiles.  And WQXR is still often my default station, as I write this a serenade by Dvorak is playing.   I will be writing more about individual stations and shows.

Radio and Me: a Brief Introduction Part I

We did not have a family radio in my home when I was a child:  neither of my parents cared about music and were content for news from the local newspaper, The Hudson Register-Star.  My parents, particularly my father, did not believe in anything that gave one pleasure, especially if it cost money and didn't make money, though he did buy a TV so my mother could watch soap operas.  Radio drama was coming to an end in the 50's but I still wanted to listen to it --especially the remaining Westerns -- and my brother and I were both baseball fans and wanted to listen to the games on the radio. So we both were able to use birthday money from grandparents to buy inexpensive crystal radio sets (the power comes from the radio waves themselves), put them together (one can still do this) and start listening to the radio, each in the privacy of our own room; we particularly liked the AM baseball broadcasts at night, as the signals bounced to us often from far away and which we listened to with cheap earphones under the covers. Red Barber and Mel Allen were the announcers for the Yankees and Vin Scully, who started in 1950 and is still going strong, was the announcer for the Dodgers.

When I was twelve I had a paper route and was able to use some of the money to buy a portable radio that could also be plugged in and that's when I started to listen to popular music, especially New York station WABC, which had quite a strong signal.  I was fairly indiscriminate in my taste but was particularly fond of The Beach Boys.  In 1962 I went away to school in New Hampshire and listened mostly to Boston Top 40 stations, savoring the British bands of that period; I was especially fond of The Rolling Stones because adults seemed to dislike them almost as much as they disliked Elvis Presley when I was younger.

When I came to New York to attend college in 1965 I still listened mostly to pop music, until I took Music Humanities, a required course at Columbia.  That opened my eyes and ears to classical music and opera, of which there was a great deal in N.Y.  While growing up in Hudson, N.Y. I never heard of classical music and never had attended a concert.  I started going to Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center fairly regularly, as well as the lower-priced and exciting NYC Opera. I also started going to ballet and dance performances, which also helped me appreciate a wider range of music:  seeing the wonderfully musical ballets of Balanchine helped me to appreciate the intricacies of composers as different as Tchaikovsky and Bach.  And I also started listening frequently to classical radio stations WQXR and WNCN (especially the late night show of Bill Watson, who would play Mozart's Requiem twice in a row).

I bought a lot of records and listened to a lot of radio in the 60's and during that period many things happened --the good, the bad, and the ugly -- but among the best were discovering WBAI and discovering country music.  In 1966 I first heard of Bob Fass when he did a "fly-in", something of a "be-in" except that it took place at Kennedy airport.  The press mentioned his show, Radio Unnameable, on WBAI at midnight, Monday to Friday, and I started to listen to its marvelous combination of free-form music and comedy, a very individual style that also influenced WBAI personalities Steve Post (Saturday and Sunday) and Larry Josephson (weekday mornings). Unexpected and interesting things were always happening on Radio Unnameable; for instance, it was where Arlo Guthrie performed "Alice's Restaurant"  for the first time.  And it was around this time that The Byrds, a favorite rock group of mine, did their album "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" and got me interested for the first time in country music.  As popular music had become solipsistic and formulaic I started to discover the populist authenticity of country music. ...to be continued