Humanizing The Vacuum

Some fine writing in The Singles Jukebox’s tribute to Whitney Houston. Excerpts:

Frank Kogan on “Saving All My Love For You”: …the clarity of the singing is eerie in that it underlines her lack of illusions, making the contrast extra intense: she’s totally committed to the night, at the expense of knowledge and reason. “‘Cause to-NIGHT, is the NIGHT, for feeling al-RIGHT” (as opposed to all the other moments in her life?). She slams down those words. Tom Ewing, setting the stage for the Freaky Trigger convo, says this makes us feel that she’s not accepting the situation, that something’s got to give (“you can almost hear the cutlery slamming down on the table as she lays it, ready for him to walk in the door”). The flip…is to say that the arrangement suits her perfectly, that she avoids having a relationship that dribbles out and becomes normalized in the day-to-day. She’s saving all her love for the NIGHT, since tonight is the night that outshines her days and outshouts the yesterdays and tomorrows. And this is where Whitney’s clarity and strength and command take over lyrics that could be delivered as sorrow, anger, and devotion but here — delivered with steady diction — are a triumphant, blazing immolation.

Brad Shoup on “I Will Always Love You”: I mean, what else can you do but laugh? When the drumslap rings, when the key change hits, tell me: how should the reaction be? Houston’s effortless mountaintop promise comes on like a new acquaintance trying to shake both your hands at once. Her astounding ability to return to the same ringing, held note is why we still have Green Day, contract extensions for Andy Reid, and Jim Downey writing sketches where the politician addresses the camera. It’s the cult of competence. Whitney was frequently a bishop in this order, at least after a run of airtight dance-pop and ballads that actually feinted toward cohesion.

Katherine St Asaph on “So Emotional”: Let’s start with the production, as ebullient and lush as anything Madonna or Blondie or, yes, Bobby Brown received during the time, its percussion like nails through a wall and its synths like bells ringing through puddles of glitter. The song sounds immaculate. (It’s also what tugs the track off the top tier, but this isn’t the time for that.)

Anyone could get that production, though. Not anybody could be Whitney. Yes, she begins the track with melisma — quite good melisma, the overjoyed sort. Yes, her singing is flawless. But let’s focus on something else: the way she deploys something else at the start: “I don’t know why I like you — I just do,” punctuating it halfway between a giddy exclamation and a period. It’s conversational. It’s spoken. It’s in no way virtuosic; if anything, it’s bemused. Then the track continues like that: “When you talk, I just watch your mouth.” “I remember the way we touched — I wish I didn’t like it so much.” And, of course, “I get so emotional,” the precise phrase you tend not to say when you’re enamored because it’s too real. Of course she doesn’t specify which emotions; there isn’t one subset, and even if there were how would you ever pick them out?

“So Emotional,” then, is the exact opposite of everything people ascribed to Whitney: absolutely listenable on it own, drenched in feeling that’s genuine, not put-upon.

Rich Juzwiak:

Once Whitney hit — and did so with seven straight No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 — the commercial potential for her ornate, melismatic singing style was clear. It was the tone that accompanied the technique that made Houston so special: rich and crisp with several hearts (and octaves) worth of emotional range. The singers Houston inspired to tie their voices into loops could never replicate her exhilarating effortlessness, not even her heir apparent, Mariah Carey.

Houston’s voice was so powerful it lacked vulnerability, but she and her collaborators wrote around that.

From his blog:

To think of anyone’s life as a cautionary tale is condescending (true acceptance includes flaws) and selective. Unless you are model-pretty with the best voice on the planet and have been rewarded for both with international celebrity, Whitney’s complicated story doesn’t apply to you. The best we could ever do was admire it from afar, the worst we could do is reduce it to a one-sentence moral. What can you learn from Whitney’s addiction that Nancy Regan didn’t teach you almost 30 years ago?

I was really looking forward to watching Whitney turn into a crazy old lady. The fun she already was predicted the fun she would have been! I was also looking forward to her comeback, which for the last decade, flirted with the horizon. Selfishly, I feel cheated out of some great chapters, but the early ones are rich enough to provide a lot of solace.

I’ve been pondering the thematic line in Whitney’s “Didn’t We Almost Have It All”: “The ride with you was worth the fall, my friend.” It seems like it should apply here, and it almost does. Jon Caramanica said it really well (with eerie prophecy) days before those pictures of Whitney looking disheveled outside of Kelly Price’s party surfaced: “To be Whitney now, you had to be Whitney then.” A life is over, and Whitney wore it so publicly that we now know exactly what we are missing. Nothing is “worth” someone’s death, but I feel so fortunate to have shared some of Whitney’s life.

Twenty years before listeners praised Adele for being “classy,” for Being Able To Sing, Whitney Houston occupied that space, and she enjoyed every privilege of a musical existence in which chart positions and platinum awards still mattered. Custom-designed by a genuinely awed Clive Davis for global consumption, Houston delivered; the world responded, year after year. Houston was already so big in the late spring of ’86 that my small private elementary school corralled every girl to sing a rendition of “The Greatest Love of All” at the year-end awards night; I can’t remember a time when Houston didn’t generate this kind of attention if not worship. When my family spent its week on Sanibel Island, the video for “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” competed with the Iran-Contra hearings for saturation.

It marked the last time in years that, pinpricks aside (“Love Will Save The Day,” “I’m Your Baby Tonight,” the “I’m Every Woman” cover, updated to take notice of a waning demi-star named Lisa Stansfield), Houston moved me. A wanton expenditure of kinetic energy, irrespective of its target or the means of reaching it, was her metier after 1987. Take the trilogy of #1 Whitney songs: a number called “So Emotional” that wasn’t emotional in the slightest. The title of “Didn’t We Almost Have It All” now looks apt and poignant if imprecise. Forget the “almost” — she did have it all, and settling for less in her productions meant acknowledging limits. Look at those titles again. “All At Once.” “All The Man That I Need.” Excepting the hushed reverie “Exhale (Shoop Shoop),” over and over she confused eros and will. A man wasn’t flesh: he was a peak to climb, an obstacle to triumph over. Remember the moment at the 1:20 mark in the “Run To You” video when she actually chases after Kevin Costner across the clouds dressed like an extra from Clash in the Titans? Sure — run FROM you more like. In a recent Populist entry, Tom Ewing noted how Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” far from being the tragedy realized by Dolly Parton, “is an elemental struggle, each bludgeoning crescendo a deliberate raising of the stakes.” Frank Kogan wrote years ago about her “animal competence”:

…but really there’s no animal in it, it’s more like a jet engine preening and showing its parts. Which can be powerful enough….And from here on she’s just blaring away, trying to power all the windmills in Holland, and the song disappears in the whoosh.

The whoosh could still sound impressive in the late nineties. The Thunderpuss remix of “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay” got more play in gay clubs in 1999 than anything with Madonna’s name on it. The place would go wild when Whitney busted out her still-impressive voice to sustain those high notes.

Although not a fan, I don’t understand the complaints that she “wasted” her talents. A few have even grumbled about why she couldn’t have recorded more performances as delicate as her rendition of Hugh Hopper’s “Memories” for Material in 1982. Try selling that recording in the hundreds of millions; it’s incommensurate with her wish to want it “all.” In a sense, though, she did. For skeptics of eighties and nineties R&B crossover there was “Memories.” For the rest of us, “The Greatest Love of All,” “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” and so forth.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, responding to Glenn Greenwald taking Hitchens to task over his blustery support for the Iraq war:

Virtues don’t excuse sins; they cohabit with them. Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder. Perhaps worse he was a slaveholder who comprehended, more than any other, the moral failing of slavery, and it’s potential to bring the country to war, and yet at the end of his life he argued for slavery’s expansion, and on his death many of his slaves were sent to the auction block.

At his end, Jefferson sided with those who would eventually bring about the deaths of 600,000 Americans. He argued that the antebellum South would have either “justice” versus “self-preservation.” To paraphrase Churchill, it chose the latter and consequently got neither. But Jefferson was a beautiful writer, and a great intellect, whose thinking and prose I consistently find stunning. This admiration does not negate his moral cowardice. Both are true at the same time. (The same point could be made in regards to our conversation over Elizabeth Cady Stanton.)

Or, from one of Coates’ own comments below the post:

But on the broader question, for me, so much of this comes back to writing and race. If I disqualified people for the horrendous ideas they held or advanced, my personal canon would be sliced in half. I don’t think those horrendous ideas should be shooed away. But they aren’t a counter to whatever better ideas the person espoused. You can be a horrendous bigot, and a great father. You can be a raving misogynist and a great novelist. Neither cancels the other out–though I understand people often write as though it should.

To be fair to Greenwald, he doesn’t say so either.

I saw him on the God is Not Great tour in May 2007 at a local synagogue. The set-up reads like a hoary joke: a rabbi, Catholic priest, and iman awaited their rounds with the great boxer, smiling like tetanus victims. As I recall he reduced the venerable Nathan Katz, religious studies professor at FIU, to tight-lipped rage when Hitchens attacked him for endorsing the most reactionary elements of Judaism. “How dare you? How DARE you, sir?” Hitchens thundered, like Orson Welles as Father Mapple in Moby-Dick.

At the post-lecture book signing (for which he absented himself twenty minutes and returned, emitting discreet waves of scotch and Marlboro Reds), he held up the line by talking sweetly and without condescension to old ladies who wanted book recommendations. I hadn’t bought God is Not Great yet, but I brought my copy of Paine’s Age of Reason. His face darkened when he noticed it wasn’t the canary-yellow hardcover. “I’m very sorry, sir, but my publisher [eyes roll] ordered me not to sign any book that’s not my own.” He must have seen my momentary embarrassment because he very quickly added, “But let’s keep this one between ourselves because your taste is extraordinary.” He recommended a couple of chapters for me to emphasize and signed my book “with love” from “Hitch.”

I came to Hitchens late: his name popped up in early 1999 in the waning days of the impeachment proceedings against his nemesis Bill Clinton – as I understood it at the time he and a friend, Clinton flak Sidney Blumenthal, fell out over conversations which may or may not have been on the record. Then came 9/11 and the furor with which Hitchens assailed the left for malfeasances committed by Noah Chomsky and later Gore Vidal, both of whom had been beloved mentors. But I won’t scratch this scab again. I’d wager that we’ll be reading Hitchens on Byron, Powell (about whose A Dance to the Music of Time he could not convince me deserved the considered look), Waugh, Kipling, Wilde, and a forgotten speech about Jewry and Daniel Deronda published in 1993′s For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports that is a masterpiece of probity, especially when one remembers how he discovered his own Jewishness (one of the first and best chapters in his memoir Hitch-22).

I won’t say farewell or “rest in peace” – it’s vulgar, and the man’s dead already. Read his books.

Ten years ago today, I drove as soon as my eight o’clock Literary Analysis course ended to Lion Video. My only other plans that day: buy the new Dylan. The only person in the store, a cashier, stared wordlessly at the TV screen: a replay of the second tower’s implosion and collapse.
“What movie?” I asked.

He looked aghast. “This happened an hour ago! Terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.”

I don’t remember what I checked out. By the time I got to a gas station on Coral Way and Seventy Second Avenue, Mayor Alex Penelas had already given permission for public schools to release children. Mom called — where are you, please come home. On my way, I lied; buying the Dylan album was next on the list. Like the video store Best Buy was deserted, as one would expect on a Tuesday midmorning. Once home Mom confirmed that her uncle was safe; he had never left Jackson Heights, preferring to watch the disaster from his bathroom window, which faced Manhattan. Dad and my sister returned from work shortly after noon. I spent the rest of that day alternating between concentrating on Love and Theft and Peter Jennings. Although FIU didn’t reopen until Friday, I still had to report to work, thankfully, at Books and Books on Wednesday afternoon. We never sold more newspapers. The customers were subdued and polite; a few actually whispered their book requests.

Auden’s “Sept. 1, 1939″ enjoyed renewed appreciation in the coming months. My own mind returned to Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain,” composed in memoriam to those who perished on the Titanic’s maiden voyage. The poem follows the trajectories of the ship and the iceberg, drawn together as if by inexorable need; it releases its masterful tension in the last stanza:

Till the Spinner of the Years
Said ‘Now!’ And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

I also remembered an obscure Robert Frost poem from my childhood called “A Brook in the City,” about an underground tributary whose waters gurgle beneath a metropolis unaware of its existence:

…But I wonder
If from its being kept forever under
These thoughts may not have risen that so keep
This new-built city from both work and sleep.

In 2001 I counted at best a handful of friends who lived in New York City. From my privilege I drew considerable relief, not entirely aware that I wouldn’t be so lucky next time.

Of course he was a slimebag – a prerequisite in Miami politics. Before the staff raises, the BMW’s, the chicanery over the Florida Marlins’ new stadium, the electorate had a chance to get this man out of office in 2008 yet chose to keep him for the usual reasons: apathy and the unspoken dictum which states that one-man rule is preferable to that of an unruly collection of demagogues, would-be crooks, and charlatans called the Miami-Dade County Commission, most of whom have peered at constituents with fish-eyed stares of boredom from the dais since the first Clinton administration. But I got an inkling of what a vile sort of public figure Alvarez would be during the height of the hurricane season in 2005: during a press conference, at which county leaders would explain emergency plans, Alvarez heard a question he didn’t like from a reporter he liked less. Suddenly the hard little eyes crossed in rage. The rented, ghoulish smile disappeared. “I already answered the question!” he snapped. “If you really need me to I’ll repeat my answer.” This wasn’t a mayor – it was the sheriff of a border town, miffed about a farmer’s cattle drinking his water.

Let me repeat: voters knew Carlos Alvarez in 2008. Instead of subjecting a destitute county to a round of special and runoff elections in the next two months at a cost between $15 and $20 million, they could have elected the non-entity who ran against him. To date Alvarez is charged with no crime – nothing requiring the swift removal of an unloved politician whose career would become moribund in less than eighteen months. As one articulate middle-aged voter from El Portal remarked on a local news channel last Sunday: “We voted for him, or we stayed home; now we gotta accept the consequences.”

A few days late, but A.O. Scott’s Leslie Nielsen obituary is worth a read:

But more often, and almost exclusively by the 1990s, Mr. Nielsen showed up in movies, series and commercials, representing in his own archetypal silver-haired persona an ideal of genial, deadpan nonseriousness. His presence was itself the joke. His afterlife is more likely to be on YouTube, where his best bits can be pulled out of context and assembled into a free-form collage of dour silliness.

This is not to understate his talent. On the contrary. Mr. Nielsen’s ability to stay in character, to reel off sublime non sequiturs and koans of cluelessness with a precisely measured balance of dignity and density represents both a rare gift and considerable work. Looking back, it is easy to see that the times required someone like Leslie Nielsen: a handsome silver-haired gentleman of fatherly demeanor willing to commit and submit to any kind of indignity without losing his cool. But only the man himself had exactly the right background.

He was so compulsive a writer that after completing the Roosevelt book, he showed up unannounced at the offices of his publisher with a finished text for Calvin Coolidge, only to be told the president’s life had been assigned to someone else.

Pace the AP’s obituary on Louis Auchincloss, dead at ninety-two. Gore Vidal’s appraisal, written in the mid seventies, piqued my interest a few years ago, sending me towards his Collected Stories, still the best introduction to his work; you’ll know whether to keep going. Complaints about novelists and musicians “repeating themselves” puzzle me. Upon discovering their metier, good writers refine, excise, experiment. Great writers, like Auchincloss’ beloved Edith Wharton (with whom he shared a passion for delineating the exploits of rich, horrible northeasterners), discover new shades, change sympathy, modulate their attitude towards the material. Auchincloss wasn’t a great writer though. The Rector of Julian is justly acclaimed, but the likes of East Side Story and The Education of Oscar Fairfax boast fusty plots, failed attempts at witty dialogue (great writers listen closely to how people of their class talk; good ones too), and misshapen forms. Auchincloss admires brevity; from what I know his oeuvre hides no four hundred-page monsters. But brevity without insight looks an awful lot like languor. Many times he can’t be bothered with fruitfully developing a situation he’s created. I’ll gladly take recommendations from his (vast) catalogue.

But what a life though: he published when he wanted and, apparently, whatever he wanted. Essay collections (consistently elegant and sharply observed), biographies of presidents and writers, including an excellent and very useful one on Wharton, casual observations, history — Auchincloss may have been the last genuine American man of letters. He wrote because he felt like it, and because his class and education imposed a duty, much like other men with his background — the Stimsons, Harrimans, and Bohlens of the world — entered diplomacy.