Geoffrey Block, Distinguished Professor of Music History at the University of Puget Sound, is the author of Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical From Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber.  The book offers theater lovers an illuminating behind-the-scenes tour of some of America’s best loved, most admired, and most enduring musicals, as well as a riveting history.  In the original post below we learn five new things about West Side Story.

1. Did you know that choreographer Jerome Robbins insisted on making the Jets snap their thumbs against their index fingers instead of their middle fingers? Try it, it’s much harder. That’s the point. Robbins wanted to make the Jets stand out from other finger snapper.

2. Did you know that in Arthur Laurents first two libretto drafts Maria kills herself with dressmaking shears. Starting with the third draft, five more drafts, and the final draft, a mortally wounded Tony finds Maria alive, and the lovers are able to share a few final moments together.

3. Did you know that some of the great tunes in West Side Story contain recognizable connections with famous classical melodies? My favorites are the allusions to Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet and the theme Wagner created to depict the Redemption through Love in his Ring cycle, since in these cases Bernstein’s references are so interesting dramatically as well as musically.

4. Did you know that Sondheim was originally listed as a co-lyricist with Leonard Bernstein? When the early reviews ignored Sondheim’s contribution, Bernstein offered the Broadway newcomer sole lyricist billing and the royalty split that went with it. In an unthinking moment he would always regret Sondheim replied, “Don’t be silly. I don’t care about the money,” and turned down the opportunity to split the 4% lyric royalties. Instead of receiving 2% of the lyric royalties, Sondheim thus retained his original 1%.

5. Did you know that the film soundtrack of West Side Story was the Number 1 best selling album of 1962 from May 5 to June 16 and again for the week of October 6-13?

Richard Barrios has lectured extensively on film, served as a commentator on numerous DVDs, and co-hosted a series on Turner Classic Movies. He currently lives outside Philadelphia. His book, A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film, 2nd edition, illuminates the origins of the movie musical from the smash hits of The Singing Fool and Sunny Side Up to bizarre flops like Golden Dawn and Cecil B. DeMille’s Madam Satan. In the original post below, Barrios looks at the 10 worst musical films ever made.

Musical films, as most of us are aware, are among the greatest mixed blessings in American art. They can be transcendent and glorious at times, and quite often they can be inept, foul, and obnoxious. On a few choice occasions, some individual movie musicals can offer us all these at once. They are part of our lives and our culture and our subconscious, and yet often we are not permitted to adore them unreservedly; they have let us down too often for that.

While I was writing my history of the early movie musical, I was struck again and again by the trial-and-error nature of how the musical was born, and how the mistakes counted for as much as the successes. The two coexist steadily, especially in early musicals, which usually lack the smooth-grained professionalism of later efforts. The filmmakers learned as much from what they got terribly wrong as what they did correctly, and sometimes more so. The resulting films demonstrate this so vividly that, as a historian, I found myself steadily compelled to reflect on both sides of the coin. This naturally sets aside the entire fact that the dogs are often a great deal of fun to write about.

Fourteen years after Oxford first published it, A Song in the Dark now sings anew in an extensively revised and updated second edition. In celebration, I’ve compiled a “Ten Worst” list—technically, it’s “Eleven Worst”—that spans nearly the entire 80-plus year history of musical films, with the genre’s most odious cinematic mistakes and annotations of how and why they got that way. While it may strike some as a somewhat perverse celebration of musicals to offer a list of their worst achievements, I remain gleefully unapologetic. We all learn from our errors, and if they should not be celebrated they must still, ever, be recalled. Naturally it all must remain subjective, much like politics and religion, and I hope that readers will feel free to compose their own lists as well. As a palate-cleanser, I promise a “Ten Best” list in the near future.

The Singing Fool (1928)
A major film, in fact the biggest sensation of its time. Far more important in many ways than The Jazz Singer, beloved by many millions, one of the highest-grossing films made prior to Gone With the Wind. Alas, all this history and triumph don’t count for much when you just try to sit through it today. The annoying technique—back and forth between silent and “talkie”—is the least of it. The most is Al Jolson, who redefines “star ego” for all time. For anyone wondering why The Jazz Singer is shown so frequently and this follow-up so seldom, spend a few minutes communing with Jolson and his excesses, and you’ll know. If you were ever inclined to like the song “Sonny Boy,” seeing it introduced here, and driven into the ground with bathetic repetition, will cure you.

Golden Dawn (1930)
Seldom has terrible ever been this irresistible. A monstrosity of a Broadway operetta—think Emperor Jones meets Rose-Marie—transferred to the screen with all its excesses utterly intact, and for good measure it’s almost as racist a tract as The Birth of a Nation. Stalwart British soldiers try to keep the peace in East Africa, and the native heroine is considered a goddess because she wasn’t born black. There’s lots more, including a fearful idol who resembles a Smurf, a put-upon cast who somehow manages to keep straight faces, and songs such as “My Bwana” and “Africa Smiles No More.” Until you’ve seen and heard a darkly made-up Noah Beery sing “The Whip Song,” you don’t know from bad taste.

Down to their Last Yacht (1934)
Have you ever seen a film destroy itself while it runs through the projector? Behold, then, this ridiculous indigent-millionaires-meet-randy-Pacific-islanders concoction, so incoherent that it appears to be slabs of several unrelated movies glued together. Sidney Blackmer (Ruth Gordon’s husband in Rosemary’s Baby) stars as one of the most ill-at-ease musical heartthrobs in history. There are lots of jokes about cannibals and sex, and if it had been made in recent years there probably would’ve been a song about Viagra. The climactic number, an enormous and incoherent “South Sea Bolero,” seems to have been done by Busby Berkeley while high on drug-spiked papaya juice. Depression audiences weren’t fooled, and Yacht lost so much money that the angry studio fired the producer.

Rosalie (1937)
Overblown, overpriced, overstuffed, overproduced, overlong, overeverything. There’s a teeny princess-meets-commoner story, which is buried under so many tons of rotten MGM meringue that watching it gives you a headache. Eleanor Powell was an incredibly skillful tap dancer, but this thing doesn’t give her enough opportunities to redeem tons of excess and inertia. Nor are Ray Bolger and the beautiful Ilona Massey treated well, while Cole Porter’s songs range from wonderful (“In the Still of the Night”) to stupid (the title song). And chunky, placid Nelson Eddy as a college football star? In what universe?

Panama Hattie (1942)
Ann Sothern, a talented and appealing performer, wasn’t a good fit for Ethel Merman’s stage role. Strike one. Most of Cole Porter’s Broadway songs are cut or mangled, and replaced with lesser work. Strike two. And the strike three nail in the coffin is some interminable and boring slapstick relief involving Red Skelton and a haunted house. Only Lena Horne emerges unscathed, probably because she’s only given two songs and no role in the wretched script. The producers reshot and tinkered with the film, and must have felt redeemed when wartime audiences, eager for escapist relief, made it a hit. Just remember that the public isn’t always right.

Pal Joey (1957) and Can Can (1960)
Sure, Frank Sinatra was a great singer and could be a fine actor, but these two Broadway adaptations were made around the time he decided that he would only need to do one take of any scene. The results of such a blasé lack of commitment? A pair of lavish, worthless dinosaurs. Pal Joey lost all the nasty cynicism, and many of the Rodgers/Hart songs, that made it so striking and innovative onstage, and Can Can—set in 1890s Paris—is about as French as a small order of McDonald’s fries. Some of the other performers do try, but Frank’s phone-it-in Rat-Packy attitude sabotages them. Definition of a dispiriting experience: watching an expensive movie whose center is occupied by a star who doesn’t give a damn. Listen to the soundtracks, and skip the rest.

Paint Your Wagon (1969)
The late 1960s was rife with expensive and bloated musical blockbusters that were totally out-of-step with the time. This was the worst of all of them, and further proof that even an accomplished stage director like Joshua Logan shouldn’t necessarily be allowed near a movie camera. There’s a dumb Gold Rush plot, Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood and poor Jean Seberg form a musical ménage-a-trois, both men do their own vocals (alas!), and the whole thing comes off like a suburban dad trying to pass as a hippie. Lerner and Loew’s Broadway show deserved better, but as Lerner was co-producer he doesn’t rate a pass. With overblown rubbish like this, no wonder audiences turned to films with smaller budgets, bigger brains, and less music.

Lost Horizon (1972)
A debacle that deserves its near-legendary reputation, this abomination spelled finis to the film career of producer Ross Hunter. There had already been a failed attempt at a Broadway musical version of Frank Capra’s classic romance, but this one, with painful songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, was worse. Poor Peter Finch and Liv Ullmann head a worthy, completely misbegotten all-star cast, and the details, script, and musical numbers are all minor classics of wrong-headedness. Choicest detail: the shelves of the Shangri-La library, supposedly a repository for the world’s finest literature, upon which can be clearly seen a number of Readers Digest Condensed Books.

Showgirls (1995)
Perhaps not a musical in the conventional sense of the word, but why pass up any opportunity to call out this classic backstage stinker? Trying oh, so hard to be a scorching erotic exposé, it succeeds in being asinine, juvenile, and very funny. Writer Joe Eszterhas cribbed his plot from All About Eve and his dialogue from old issues of True Confessions and Hustler, forming a worthy setting for Elizabeth Berkeley’s star-breaking acting and hysterical (lap) dancing. Given the appalling musical numbers, it’s somewhat of a surprise to note that Marguerite Derricks is the credited choreographer, not St. Vitus. It’s all cheaper, in every sense of the world, than a trip to Vegas, and if you’re in the right mean mood a whole lot more fun. Viewing note: the hilarity is even greater if you have a pitcher of Cosmopolitans.

Glitter (2001)
Mariah Carey’s high-powered, multi-octave vocalism is not to all tastes, but at least it demands a certain amount of respect. Then there’s her acting… As with Rudy Vallee, Kate Smith, Johnnie Ray, and many other pop singers, she tries to make the leap onto the big screen and fails utterly. A downtrodden-waif-makes-good saga, this is a glaring of example of old, bad wine poured into a new, cheesy bottle. Nobody wins, Mariah can’t read lines and isn’t photogenic, and the single worthy moment is a shot—one of its final screen appearances—of the World Trade Center. It was fortunate that Chicago came along the following year to rescue movie musicals after Glitter nearly killed them.

IGNOMINIOUS MENTION

Mother’s Boy (1929), The Lottery Bride (1930), Take a Chance (1933), George White’s 1935 Scandals, Anything Goes (1956), Song of Norway (1970), Man of La Mancha (1972), Mame (1974), At Long Last Love (1975), A Chorus Line (1985), From Justin to Kelly (2003)

Stephen T. Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, where he holds the title of Distinguished Scholar.  His newest book, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, is a wide-ranging cultural and conceptual history of monsters-how they have evolved over time, what functions they serve, and what shapes they are likely to take in the future.  It is with this monstrous perspective (sorry I know it is an awful pun) that Asma looks at Where the Wild Things Are in honor of its release this weekend.

With hindsight it seems fitting that Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) first appeared in cultural space somewhere between Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Where the Wild Things Are is a rock’n’roll story, about being misunderstood, rebelling against authority, letting your hair down, and generally indulging in the Dionysian rumpus. It’s not surprising, then, that the new film version (Warner Brothers) is brought to us by skateboarding music-video director Spike Jonze and literary mega-hipster Dave Eggers.

As the movie’s trailer reminds us, “Inside all of us is a wild thing.” And in our therapeutic era, we generally accept that it is good and healthy to visit our wild things –to let them off their chains, let them howl at the moon. You can also taste some of this Romanticism in the recent relish of the Woodstock anniversary, with its celebration of noble primitivism. But the hippy view of “the wild” is quite sunny, whereas Sendak (who lost family during the Holocaust) wanted to acknowledge some of the darker aspects of uncivilized life (even, or especially, through the eyes of a child). Despite these darker notes, however, Where the Wild Things Are still affirms the idea that danger, at least in small doses, is good for you. And this latest fascination with beasties, together with the approach of Halloween, reminds us that we have a love/hate relationship with monsters generally. We are simultaneously attracted and repulsed by them.

Sendak’s monsters are just repulsive enough to be alien, foreign, and mysterious, but they’re also vaguely cute and familiar enough for us to identify with them and recognize our emotional selves in them. Sendak claimed in later interviews that the monsters were based loosely on his boyhood perceptions of his frightening aunts and uncles. Like a distant relation, our uncanny monsters are alien aspects of our own identity –they are parts of who we are, unfamiliar aspects of our psyches. This common way to read monsters –as primitive, uncivilized versions of ourselves –is obvious in Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or the forthcoming Universal Pictures remake The Wolfman, starring Anthony Hopkins and Benicio del Toro. Monster stories have a cathartic function, in the sense that they give our tamed, repressed impulses a brief holiday of Bacchanalian revelry. And after these virtual trips to our own hearts of darkness, we can better return to our everyday social world of compromise, accommodation, and compliance. On this account, the monster story is the favorite genre of our reptilian brains (the real home where the wild things are).

However, every era has its own uses and abuses of monsters. The lesson of Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, is often taken as a liberal lesson in tolerance: we as a society must not create outcasts, or persecute those who are different. Or consider that the medieval mind was obsessed with giants and mythical creatures as God’s punishments for the sin of pride. And the medieval period also began the Church’s long fascination with demon possession. For the Greeks and Romans, monsters were prodigies –warnings of impending disaster.

Besides the cuddly monsters of Where the Wild Things Are, our present day fascination seems dominated by zombies, vampires, and serial killers. Why are we so entranced by these specific creatures –why do we love to hate them?

Not only are there more zombies around these days, but they seem to be getting faster and more aggressive. Gone are the slow lumbering goons of the George Romero-era zombies, and in their stead we have lightning fast undead predators. Zombies, just like vampires, serial killers and most other monsters are terrifying because you cannot really reason with them. Unlike your other enemies, you cannot appeal to monsters to recognize that you’re a good hearted person, or you’ve got kids, or you really understand their pain, or you only want to understand them in the name of science. They’ll pummel you and eat you anyway. There’s not much common ground, in terms of rationality or emotional solidarity. One suspects there is a link between a decade of American fear of terrorists, and a rise in zombie monsters that do not respond to negotiation.

But zombies also have unique qualities that trigger the dynamic of love/hate, attraction/repulsion. Everybody wants to live forever. That’s a given. If you can’t remember wanting to live forever, then you’re probably a successful and functional adult. But the inner narcissist –the one that thinks he’s God and wants to live forever –is still in you somewhere, buried deep. The zombie, like the vampire, is a kind of immortal: chop his leg off, he’s still coming; blow a hole in his chest, he’s still coming. His life span is indefinite and he’s indestructible. So the little narcissist inside us really likes the immortal aspect of the zombie and the vampire. We unconsciously crave that kind of staying power and durability, but our narcissistic desire to cheat death is impossible to sustain in the face of mature experience. Reality regularly reminds us, as we are growing up, that we will not cheat death. No one actually cheats death. To carry on in the fantasy world of the narcissistic inner-child is impossible given the brute facts of our animal mortality. So the universal urge to live forever must be repressed, as we grow up. This repression means that the desire must be transformed from positive to negative –from something we like, to something disgusting (just like in potty training).

We love to hate zombies because they simultaneously manifest our craving for immortality, and our more mature realization that the flesh always decays. As “living dead,” all zombies elicit those conflicting impulses in our psyche. The more disgusting they are, the more we are reminded of our inevitable decomposition, but the more they keep getting up and chasing, the more we are delighted by the promise of immortality. The psyche seems to carry out an unconscious vacillation: the zombies live on forever, those lucky sods, but wait…they’re disgusting and repellent and…and…run!

Vampires are a much more glamorized and sexualized version of the attraction/repulsion dynamic. From Polidori’s original Vampyre, to Stoker’s Dracula, to today’s teen vampires of Twilight, the blood drinkers are, generally speaking, totally hot. The play of sexual taboos in vampire stories is well appreciated. But in addition to the always titillating presence of neck-kissing and the exchange of bodily fluids, we have to recognize that vampires are romantic monsters. They are incarnations of the irresistible but damaging femme fatal for boys, and the “bad boy” or cad for girls. A vampire is frequently an archetype of the charismatic, handsome, man, who seduces women by his very indifference toward them. Women find him alluring and seek chase, only to discover too late that they are broken upon his heartless unmovable nature. The vampire holds out the promise of love, but alas lacks even humanity.

Vampires and zombies share another well-spring of horror: you could easily become one. You or your loved one is just a little bite away from contracting the disease. In the age of AIDS, swine flu, SARS, and myriad pandemic anxieties, it’s easy to see why monsters who transmit their monstrosity through bites (both sexual and gustatory) are especially frightening. In the medieval mind, monsters and demons were metaphysically different from you and I, and in the unlikely event that you were transformed into one you could be sure it was the result of serious sin. Nowadays, however, casual, accidental contact can make you “one of them.”

One suspects that losing one’s humanity, or becoming one of them, is also at play in our dread fascination with serial killers –real and imagined monsters. We have extensive media coverage, and corresponding public appetite, for real serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein, as well as the popular fictional characters Norman Bates, Sweeney Todd, Hannibal Lecter, Freddy Krueger, Leatherface, Michael Myers, and so on. Why are so many of us repelled, disgusted, and morally outraged, but also willing to lay out cash to see psychotic murderers hang people on meat hooks, sever limbs, and of course eat their innocent victims?

Before the 1950s, very few people would have suggested that a serial killer was anything like you, or I, or churchgoing folks. And yet, now it is commonplace for people to think of psychopaths as just slight (albeit horrifying) deviations on the otherwise normal brain or psyche. A murdering psychopath is not a demon-possessed creature or an offspring of Cain, but a guy who failed to develop normal levels of human compassion. Most of us believe that the exact causes of monstrous serial killing will be found eventually in brain science or developmental psychology or some combination, but we don’t think that Gacy, Dahmer, Hannibal Lecter, or Leatherface, are metaphysically different from us. We have secularized the evil of such psychopaths only recently, and maybe this is one reason why we love to hate them.

Just as Sendak’s monsters give us a kind of Rousseauian view of going “back to the wild” (wherein the authentic self is discovered, uncorrupted by society), so too Leatherface and similar monsters of “torture porn” give us a kind of Freudian view of going native. We’re attracted to serial killers because they lack conscience, hurt their enemies with impunity, and feel very little. They do the stuff we might do, if we had not been socialized properly. We’re attracted to their animalistic primitive powers. But we’re simultaneously repulsed by them because they lack the precise qualities that make us human.

If Rousseau and the hippies are right, then our inner primitive monsters will be more like Sendak’s beasties; weird, a little dangerous, but ultimately helpful. If, however, Freud is right about the kinds of monsters inside us, then we shouldn’t go too often or too long to where the wild things are.

Like rock’n’roll, the wild primitivism of monsters is tempered by bourgeois (and simply human) needs for security, safety and stability. Howlin’ Wolf is sanitized into Elvis, the “long haired” Beatles have to wear suits, the mud-soaked Woodstock kids are ready to go home after the weekend, and Sendak’s little “Max” misses his mom and leaves his monsters to return to “his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him, and it was still hot.”

Mark Griep is a chemistry professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who is searching for new antibiotics and who recently received a College Distinguished Teaching Award.  Along with Marjorie Mikasen he wrote ReAction!: Chemistry in the Movies, which focuses on chemistry’s role in the narrative of films.  The focus is on contemporary Hollywood feature films, but also include a sampling of documentaries, shorts, silents and international films.  In the original article below, Griep looks at the new film, The Informant!.

The Informant! was directed by Steven Soderbergh, who directed Julia Roberts’ Oscar-winning performance in Erin Brockovich (2000). In this latest movie, Matt Damon plays a corporate executive turned whistleblower with a twist; he proves to be an unreliable witness. Damon is so effective in this role that he has already received Oscar speculation in the September issue of Entertainment Weekly. Since both movies are based on true stories that involve real chemistry, I was curious to know whether Soderbergh got the real chemistry right again.

In Erin Brockovich, Brockovich (Julia Roberts) is an unemployed young mother of three children, perhaps the ultimate underdog. She hustles herself into a legal case against Pacific Gas & Electric. The company allowed hexavalent chromium to leak into a small town’s water supply and then covered it up. Brockovich makes a case that it caused many diseases in the townsfolk and wins the biggest corporate settlement to date. From the movie, the audience learns that hexavalent chromium is toxic but not much else. In our book, we identify the family of compounds meant by “hexavalent chromium”, the reason they were used by PG&E, and the nature of their toxicity.

In The Informant!, Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) has a PhD in Biochemistry, meaning he’s not much of an underdog. Instead, he is an enthusiastic booster of his company’s products. The movie opens with him quizzing his son about the contents of orange juice, maple syrup, and plastic bags. The answer every time is “corn”. Then, as narrator, he introduces himself and says: “most people haven’t heard of us [ADM] but everyone has eaten our products. We turn dextrose into the amino acid lysine. We put corn in one end and profit comes out the other.”

What an excellent introduction to corn syrup. To make it, the kernels are ground into a powder, the water-soluble starch (a large molecule composed of many glucose molecules connected together by chemical bonds) is separated from the other material, and the resulting mush is treated with the enzyme amylase to break the long glucose chain into smaller ones. The shortest is maltose with only two glucose molecules connected together by one strong chemical bond. The final step is to treat this mixture with another enzyme called glucoamylase to break some of it to the desired amount of glucose monomer, a sweet-tasting sugar. Corn syrup is a thickener, a sweetener, and a humectant (water-retainer) all rolled into one. This “corn syrup” is also the raw material used to create high-fructose corn syrup and the four molecules mentioned in the movie: lysine (see structure below), citric acid, gluconate, and threonine.

As journalist Kurt Eichenwald explains in his 2000 book titled The Informant, the real Whitacre was hired in the 1989 to lead Archer Daniels Midland’s new lysine production facility. His facility fermented the corn syrup with a soil bacterium called Corynebacterium glutamicum and it excreted lysine as its waste product. As long as the price of starch is low, lysine produced in this way costs much less than by synthetic chemical methods. After Whitacre discovered the company had set up agreements to control worldwide lysine supply in 1992 (they managed to raise the price by 70% over nine months), his wife prompted him to inform the FBI. He then helped them gather evidence for two and a half years. In the end, three company executives were jailed for the scheme and ADM paid the largest antitrust fine for such a crime. Whitacre was also jailed because he embezzled millions of dollars from ADM during the same period. In the movie, Whitacre’s unreliability increases as the movie progresses to give actor Matt Damon a juicy part to play.

When pigs and poultry are fed soybeans, they grow fast because they obtain a sufficient complement of amino acids from the soybean proteins. When they are fed corn, they don’t. Corn proteins are low in the amino acid lysine and many studies have shown lysine is the most important growth-limiting nutrient for these two animals. As Whitacre explains after only 3 minutes of movie time: “When you feed chicken corn plus lysine, it goes to market in six weeks rather than eight.” As an aside, you may recall the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993) were genetically engineered to require lysine in their diets. If they escaped the island, they would die in seven days because they wouldn’t receive their lysine-supplemented food. The demand for lysine as a feedstock supplement has been growing since the 1960s. Until ADM began fermenting corn syrup into lysine in 1989, the world’s lysine supply was produced by two companies in Japan and one in South Korea. The international lysine price-fixing conspiracy involved all four of these companies.

I would say The Informant! has just as much screen chemistry as Erin Brockovich. Both feature engaging characters fighting the forces of unethical companies with plots involving chemicals. The difference is that The Informant! provides a little bit more information about the chemical and why it is important. While it was amusing to see a dial reading “Lysine Levels Abnormal”, it would have been even better if they had shown the chemical structure of lysine. Now that would have given me a real reaction!

In honor of the new Ken Burns series starting on PBS next Sunday we asked Donald Worster, Hall Distinguished Professor of American History, University of Kansas and the author of A Passion For Nature: The Life of John Muir, to take a look at the series and let us know what he thought. His response is below. Tune in on Sunday and let us know what you think in the comments.

I have been watching the new Ken Burns series for PBS, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” and it is a gorgeous and inspiring achievement. The hero of the series, and of our long history of creating national parks, is John Muir, the subject of my recent biography. Muir had nothing to do with setting aside Yellowstone park in 1872, but he was the main force behind the preservation of Yosemite, and he was the founder of a movement that would go on to add the Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains, Big Bend, Cape Cod, Haleakala, Glacier Bay, and many others. Altogether, Americans would set aside more than two hundred million acres in a vast, diverse system of terrestrial parks and marine preserves spanning the continent and the Pacific Ocean. Muir would have endorsed the claim that those parks are this nation’s best idea ever. But what is the idea behind the parks?

“Recreation” is a commonly expressed purpose of the parks, which usually means outdoor exercise in the form of hiking, camping, fishing, or boating. But one can find mere physical exercise in a gymnasium. Muir understood that recreation should be a “re-creating” of our inner selves through immersion in nature. In his 1901 book Our National Parks he wrote that the parks should offer “wildness” (another word for “nature”) and that “wildness is a necessity.” A nation of “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people” seek in the parks an escape from “the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury.” They go there to reawaken something deep within their souls—a sense of being part of the natural world. Modern society has repressed that feeling of connectedness, of kinship with other forms of life, and has buried people under the burdens of too much work, too much economic insecurity, too much noise and machinery.

Muir thought the parks should be preserved for poor people as well as rich. Americans of all sorts shared the same need for getting back in touch with nature. The rich could buy a private summer retreat in the Adirondacks or a ranch high up in the Santa Barbara mountains, but the poor could not. They could, however, claim a right of access to the “people’s parks,” although it was not clear in 1901 how an impoverished sharecropper or a low-wage factory worker could afford traveling to a park. Muir seems to have assumed that eventually the railroad and the automobile would be cheap enough for almost everybody to use—and in fact that has come true. As well, he supported the creation of urban “natural” areas, like Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and Central Park in New York City. It took art to design them, but they could bring the green world within reach of city dwellers.

Besides restoring Americans’ psychological and physical health, the great parks were supposed to serve a religious purpose. Muir was one of this country’s greatest spiritual prophets, and he envisioned the parks as a kind of church or temple. They should become sacred places, rigorously protected in their pristine beauty from too much profane intrusion. He would never draw a rigid line between what is sacred and what is profane; after all he wanted people to come to those new churches and they would need food, lodging, and transportation while there. It was an old dilemma that has plagued all religions. “Thus long ago,” he noted, “a few enterprising merchants utilized the Jerusalem temple as a place of business instead of a place of prayer, changing money, buying and selling cattle and sheep and doves.” He was under no illusion that the temple of Yosemite or Mount Rainier would be safe from the ancient struggle between what is appropriate and what is not.

For people who do not share Muir’s religious stance toward nature, the whole idea of setting aside and carefully preserving national parks may seem loony. Conservative Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims may find the idea of national parks a dangerous slide toward paganism or pantheism, a threat to their traditions. On the other hand, there are a lot of “nature atheists” who find Muir’s religion misguided, anti-human, or too restrictive. They don’t find nature at all inspiring or holy—it’s just a set of economic resources to be used for the benefit of humankind. Why shouldn’t we let snowmobiles into Yellowstone? Or why shouldn’t we give the parks back to their “rightful owners,” the Indian tribes that once hunted and gathered there and let them use the lands for economic development? That the parks should have a predominately religious purpose is not a universal point of view, and thus they are constantly embroiled in America’s cultural wars.

Yet I am impressed by the extent to which Muir’s way of thinking has spread through American society and the parks have become part of the nation’s religious life. The Ken Burns series promotes this success. It suggests again and again that we should come to these places in a spirit of awe and respect for something grander, more transcendent, more beautiful than we could ever create. Here are places to make us proud but also make us humble. They are the result of immense forces working over immense periods of time, and the outcome is goodness and beauty beyond our capacity to improve. This is a view that has gathered power in our culture. I am convinced that democratic societies are especially open to the religion of nature, for it takes faith out of the hands of priests and gives it back to the people. As long as Americans hunger for religion and as long as they pursue democracy, the national parks will likely be treasured as places where the people can go to worship as they see fit.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Yesterday he puzzled us all with this month’s masterful riddle, below he explains the answer. Were you able to solve it?

Riddle me now, riddle me then,
Can you tell me what again?
Brothers rage against the right,
But this song came before the night.
Not quite crooked, and not perverse;
Replace with “girl,” improve the verse.
Proto-punk, a random slice,
A wild guitar, a roll of the dice.

Forty-five years ago, the summer of 1964 saw the peak of Beatlemania with the release of the film A Hard Day’s Night and its title song. (See last month’s riddle.) Every record producer (called “artist-and-repertoire managers” in the sixties) and would be manager in the United Kingdom scoured the numerous clubs and dance halls looking for the next big act. The previous year had seen bands like Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Searchers rise to prominence along with singers like Billy J Kramer and Dusty Springfield. More acts arrived from the counties almost every week and that summer the Animals from Newcastle (even further north than Liverpool) had a hit with their version of “House of the Rising Sun.”

Nevertheless, everyone had to come to London, the cultural heart of the Isles. To make it, you had to be in the Big Smoke. Not surprisingly, London and vicinity produced its own stars first produced Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, the Dave Clark Five, and eventually the Rolling Stones, the Nashville Teens, and the Zombies. But perhaps the most English of all these groups, with the songwriter who would come to most confidently speak for the working class suburbs emerged onto the scene in the summer of Beatlemania.

Pye Records had already released disks by one local band, but without much success until 4 August 2009 when the Kinks released “You Really Got Me.”

“Brothers rage against the right,
but this song came before the night.”

The radioactive core of the Kinks, Ray Davies, had had a revelation about songwriting, a burst of insight that left football and art as hobbies. The band’s first release of one of his songs (“You Still Want Me”) had failed miserably, which is unsurprising given that Davies seems to have written it as a kind of imitation of the Beatles. “You Really Got Me” materialized in the front room of his parents’ house when he and his brother Dave began jamming on a two-chord riff, Ray pounding on their piano and Dave playing his guitar through an amp with a ruptured speaker. What began as a kind of shuffle soon clotted into a raw ostinato of such powerful simplicity that the brothers knew immediately they had something that could drive the dancers who came to their shows.

The Davies Brothers came from a working-class family in the North London suburb of Muswell Hill where Ray Davies had his artistic conversion. All he needed to do was find his muse. That muse turned out to be London and the suburban community in which he still lives. At one point in the mid sixties, frustrated by the greed and obfuscations of the music and publishing industries, Davies contemplated abandoning music, only to have his father fly into a rage over his perception that his son was letting the upper class (the “right”) destroy him too. Ray Davies channeled this contempt for class privilege into a celebration of British life, in both its tender moments and its vicious competitiveness.

His producer, Shel Talmy, helped Davies to select his best work and to capture the band’s sound and the American (Talmy came from Los Angeles) and he says he knew “You Really Got Me” would be a hit. With the success of “You Really Got Me,” he wanted another song that sustained that mood. Davies had written “Tired of Waiting,” but Talmy wanted to defer releasing it until that had capitalized on their first success. Thus, “You Really Got Me,” came before the follow-up release, “All Day and All of the Night.”

“Not quite crooked, and not perverse;
Replace with “girl,” improve the verse.”

The band’s name came in part from their appearance. They had played under names like “The Ray Davies Quartet” and “The Ravens,” but sometime in late 1963 they adopted the name “The Kinks,” probably as a description of the leather and high heels that some of the members wore. One of their managers, Larry Page, may have made the name change decision looking for a way to capture audience attention better.

In 1964, a promoter who had signed the Kinks for his shows sought to improve their stage presentations by asking entertainment veteran Hal Carter to coach them. The Kinks had been including an early version of the song in their stage repertoire, but Carter, perhaps confused by the band’s long hair, wondered whether Davies was singing to a male or female: “Jane, Carol, Sue, bint, tart—even jus plain ‘Girl.’ Whatever you do, you have to make it personal.” Davies recalls in his semi-fictional autobiography that “‘Girl instead of ‘Yeah’ mean a lot to me…’”

“Proto-punk, a random slice,
A wild guitar, a roll of the dice.”

Part of the distinctive guitar sound on “You Really Got Me” came because of brother Dave’s tiny Elpico amplifier acting as a preamp to his Vox AC 30 amplifier. Of course, he did not think of it as a “preamp”; he just tried to run a lead from the Elpico’s tiny speaker and plug it into his Vox. In combination with another amplifier, he nearly electrocuted himself; but after replacing the fuses in the family home and some rewiring of the wires connecting the amplifiers, he arrived at a nearly marvelous sound: “nearly marvelous” because he was still dissatisfied. He had no doubt heard of how American blues musicians played with ripped speakers and resolved to get the same sound by using a blade to put a “slice” into the Elpico’s cone. He could only guess at where to put the cut in the speaker paper, but the result—the consequence of a slice rather than a rip—gave his guitar a unique sound that Shel Talmy captured for posterity.

Dave Davies’ fingering technique—in contrast to his brother who had been getting second-hand classical guitar lessons—sought out the most simple of solutions and helped to popularize a style of playing that punk music later championed. Compared to other guitarists playing in London (such as Eric Clapton of the Yardbirds or session musician Big Jim Sullivan), Dave Davies’ approach was primitive. When the time came for his solo, he thrashed away of barely a half-dozen notes, but with all the aggression he could muster as his brother yelled encouragement at him. This recording represented their last best chance of holding on to a recording contract. Their first two releases had been flops. If this third release similarly failed, they might easily have been looking for another record contract, if not careers in commercial art. Instead, “You Really Got Me” rose steadily in first Britain’s charts and then, North America. Within weeks of its release, the recording sat at the top of most pop recording lists, forty-five years ago.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Below is a hint to a musical riddle. His introduction is below and be sure to check back tomorrow for the answer and to try his other riddles here. Feel free to guess the answer in the comments.

Sixties British pop created a wealth of musical material that we now describe as classics, not that classicists are likely to embrace them. Not just the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and the Who, but a wealth of musicians of that era competed to produced recordings that would catch the listening public’s attention, draw them to their concerts, and sell disks. This month’s riddle celebrates another anniversary from that milieu.

Riddle me now, riddle me then,
Can you tell me what again?

Brothers rage against the right,
But this song came before the night.

Not quite crooked, and not perverse;
Replace with “girl,” improve the verse.

Proto-punk, a random slice,
A wild guitar, a roll of the dice.

Elliott J. Gorn is author of Dillinger’s Wild Ride: The Year that Made America’s Public Enemy Number One, is Professor of History and American Studies at Brown University.  John Dillinger, celebrity outlaw extraordinaire has been the subject of many films.  In the article below Gorn explores Dillinger’s film history, including the newly released Public Enemies.   Be sure to check out Gorn’s other OUPblog articles here.

In his new film Public Enemies director Michael Mann has Johnny Depp, who plays John Dillinger, smile as he watches Clark Gable go to the electric chair at the end of Manhattan Melodrama. Depp then walks out of Chicago’s Biograph Theater to his death at the hands of federal agents, just as Dillinger did seventy five years ago today. Art recreates life recreating art.

Dillinger was always big box office. After he died, film more than any other medium kept his memory alive.  Dillinger would have loved it.  He went to movies as often as he dared while he was on the lam.  Toward the end, he even thought about making his own film.  Since then, documentaries, made-for-TV pictures, and several movies have featured the Hoosier outlaw.

At first, though, Dillinger couldn’t catch a break.  The Hays Commission, established in the early 30s to police the film industry, stood guard at theater doors, protecting Americans’ morals.  They called out Dillinger by name: His story was too violent, too sexual, too demoralizing.

Still, it was hard to keep the Dillinger story out of the movies. Max Nosseck’s 1945 Dillinger, was a low-budget picture, starring the relatively unknown Lawrence Tierney.  The Hays Commission looked the other way on this one, even though the movie did very well at the box office, because Tierney depicted Dillinger as so ruthless, so craven that there was no chance anyone might identify with him.

Dillinger confirmed the “official” version of the story that J. Edgar Hoover, the Justice Department, and most newspapers had promulgated for a decade.

Director John Milius’s 1973 Dillinger was neither glamorous nor technically polished.  Rather, it had slightly shabby look, matching the era it depicted.  Melvin Purvis, the man who brought the bandit down—played by a big, rough-looking Ben Johnson—narrates the story.  At first, he seems to be the film’s moral center, but before it is over, the feds look more like executioners than law-enforcement officials, and Dillinger (played by Warren Oates with a wonderful combination of self-doubt and bravado) is the one who upholds older American ideals of honor, loyalty, and rural virtue.

Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, released earlier this month, makes Dillinger and Purvis men of action, pure and simple.  We get little sense of their motivations, no character development.  Like an old English ballad the film doesn’t so much tell a story as refer to a known story.  Public Enemies is a great action film, beautifully shot.  But it refuses to take sides, explain what is at stake, or tell us why Dillinger or Purvis are the way they are.  They are simply two men locked in mortal combat.

Mann conceived, wrote and filmed Public Enemies before last fall’s economic meltdown. Financial excess and corporate greed were more on his mind then breadlines and homelessness, which is probably why Public Enemies feels more like a gangster picture than an outlaw film.  The suits, cars, cityscapes, nightclubs, and rich interiors are all gangster movie conventions.  And gangster films are less about renegades pitting their bodies against the system than about outsiders trying to get in.  Like other gangster films, Public Enemies is a parable of corruption, where violence—whether from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, Frank Nitti’s mob, or the Dillinger gang—are the way of the world.  This is allegory—Dillinger, the outsider, the little guy from the provinces—crushed between government and big business.

Which movie gets it right?  The question is a little beside the point.  The Dillinger story has always been about his public persona, and popular media like the movies shaped his legend.  More important than Dillinger’s deeds is how we remember him.

Certainly the 1945 film is the least accurate historically, but Tierney’s ruthlessness echoed J. Edgar Hoover’s conclusion about John Dillinger: “he was just a yellow rat that the country may consider itself fortunate to be rid of.”  Warren Oates’s Dillinger best captured how the outlaw was understood in the 30s.   By keeping the Great Depression in view, the 1973 film gets at the very thing that made Dillinger a hero to so many Americans, his willingness take bold action in fearful times.

Public Enemies certainly recreates the look and feel of 30s America.  But in telling such an unsentimental tale of hunter and hunted, Mann misses something essential.  Americans identified with John Dillinger not just because he was good at crime, but because, in the context of the 30s, being an outlaw was an act of rebellion.  Dillinger’s story was actually very sentimental, highly romantic.  It assumed that bold individual action still mattered.  His brief life on the open road became a fantasy of freedom amidst uncertainty and want.

John Dillinger will never go away.  A generation from now, as the hundredth anniversary of his death approaches, there will be more movies about him. Their creators will try to tell the “real” story, but the real story will reflect the temper of their times.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry.  Yesterday he puzzled us all with a masterful riddle, below he explains the answer.

Riddle me that, riddle me this; can you tell me what it is?
Was not born in Leicester Square; nevertheless, the square was there.
Did not start out as a star; still a nocturnal sun is tougher by far.
Not that parent’s parent, but very mean; Fred came off as very clean.
Did not need to take a tram; a Welsh transplant saw through the glam.

On Monday 6 July 1964, forty-five years ago Monday 6 July 2009, the Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night, premiered for an audience of royalty, dignitaries, record executives, and friends. Of course, the surrounding streets were jammed with fans hoping for a glimpse of the Fab Four as would be Liverpool a few days later for its premier. The film arguably marked the peak of international Beatlemania with record audiences around the globe returning to see the film and memorizing the lines. In theaters almost everywhere, the film’s opening scene of the Beatles racing down Boston Place chased by fans near Marylebone Station elicited screams that suggested the band was about to exit the screen and dive out among the viewers. This riddle plays with some elements of the film

“Was not born in Leicester Square; nevertheless, the square was there.”
A Hard Day’s Night premiered at the London Pavilion in Piccadilly Circus, not Leicester Square where today you can find several film theaters. On the surface, Richard Lester (whose name is not spelled “Leicester” but is pronounced that way) seemed an unlikely candidate to direct the film. Prematurely bald, 32-years-old, and American, he appeared a bit too square to interpret the adolescent world of England’s shaggy-haired heroes. Nevertheless, his work with Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, and Peter Sellers in translating their radio Goon Show for television and, in particular, his work on the eleven-minute short, The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film marked him as a favorite of the Beatles.

“Did not start out as a star; still a nocturnal sun is tougher by far.”
The film’s title notoriously comes from a quirky aside by the Beatles’ drummer. Ringo Starr did not begin life with that name, but rather as Richard Starkey. Like many other teens in postwar Britain, he had a fascination with American westerns and, when he became a professional musician, adopted a stage name that reflected that interest.

The Beatles had become used to a schedule that had them performing at night followed by personal time. Richard Lester introduced them to the life of film crews, which had them up early in the morning. One day during the shoot, Starr emerged from one of the theaters or studios thinking that the sun might still be in the sky. He began to utter the line, “It’s been a hard day’s work,” when he realized the sky was dark. Instead of “work,” he substituted “night,” which apparently delighted John Lennon. Lester preferred this phrase to Beatlemania as the film’s title and Lennon wrote a song to close the deal.

“Not that parent’s parent, but very mean; Fred came off as very clean.”

One of the films conceits introduces a character played by Wilfred Brambell who repeatedly causes trouble for the band and everyone else in the story by inciting arguments and eliciting money. The film introduces us to Brambell through the eyes of the other characters who, when they ask about his identity, are told he’s Paul McCartney’s grandfather. When they respond that they’ve met McCartney’s grandfather and that this isn’t him, the response is that McCartney has two grandfathers and that this is the other one. The running gag—along with the line that describes him as very “clean”—serves the purpose of legitimizing Brambell’s presence among four of the best-known individuals in the world at that time.

“Did not need to take a tram; a Welsh transplant saw through the glam.”

Although the idea behind the film was to capture the lives of the Beatles in a kind of cinéma vérité black-and-white style, Lester wanted a script. He turned to a promising young screenplay writer, Alun Owen, because the Welsman had been so successful at capturing a working-class image of Liverpool in his No Trams to Lime Street. Owen, who had spent his adolescent years in Liverpool, had an ear for dialect and an eye for detail. After briefly traveling with the Beatles, he came to see how their fame had trapped them in hotel rooms, dressing rooms, and train compartments and he brought this image to the film. He also listened to their stories of the kinds of things that happened to them, such as the scene where a suited middle-aged businessman reminds them that he had fought a war for them. In general, although the film had the Beatles playing a band called the Beatles, McCartney thinks that Owen accurately distilled their world.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Below is a hint to a musical riddle.  His introduction is below and be sure to check back tomorrow for the answer.  Feel free to guess the answer in the comments.

Day One: The Riddle

British pop music resounded around the globe in the sixties, expanding American consciousness of the musical world outside of its borders and providing adolescents with a vehicle by which they could define an identity unique from their parents. For this month’s riddle, I’ll give you the additional clue that, as with my earlier blog entries, this riddle celebrates an anniversary.
Here are your riddle clues…

Riddle me that, riddle me this; can you tell me what it is?
Was not born in Leicester Square; nevertheless, the square was there.
Did not start out as a star; still a nocturnal sun is tougher by far.
Not that parent’s parent, but very mean; Fred came off as very clean.
Did not need to take a tram; a Welsh transplant saw through the glam.