The Paris of Appalachia

So for Thanksgiving I had the pleasure of visiting…Pittsburgh! Gateway to the West, the City of Bridges, home of:

• the mighty Steelers,
• Carnegie Mellon University [my actress grandmother’s alma mater],
• a thriving arts scene including the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Pittsburgh Opera,
• and the dearly departed Three Rivers Stadium, named for the Ohio, Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, whose confluence forms the heart of this sturdy, scrappy city. 

Pittsburgh [like New York City] developed as a port city, albeit an inland one, with a thriving business in trade, exploiting its strategic position between the East and the Midwest, amplified by its access to the Great Lakes. In fact one of Pittsburgh’s sobriquets is Gateway to the West. Another one is Iron City—and the city’s other main (historical*) industry is manufacturing. Iron, steel, glass—all drawing from western Pennsylvania's vast natural reserves of coal, lumber, petroleum…

Which perhaps is what drew the attention of the man who created one of the Pittsburgh area’s best-known treasures, the breathtaking Fallingwater, designed by the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

[I have long had a fascination with FLW’s works—my great-aunt and –uncle lived in one of his Usonian houses in Pleasantville, and my mother told me they were always tripping over architecture students crouched in the bushes, scribbling notes. When I read The Fountainhead I suspected Howard Roark was based on FLW and apparently I’m not the only one! Typically perversely, both Rand and Wright denied it but girlfriend, please. Roark even designs a GAS STATION.]

Apparently the original design called for the "udder-like" pumps
to descend from the ceiling "like mother's milk." Gee, that DOES sound exciting! Or something.

ANYWAY. One of Wright’s guiding design principles was integration, and so he conceived Fallingwater’s interiors as well as her structure, using building materials from the same natural reserves from which Pittsburgh** industry drew.  The same lumber sources, the same copper mines and stones...Wright's magnum opus could have been erected nowhere else but in this particular corner of the world, western Pennsylvania.

Notice how the perspective compels you to look
 through the windows, to the outside.

To walk through Fallingwater’s cantilevered terraces and stone-laid floors is to be immersed in the sounds and smells and feel of the Allegheny Mountains, to be a footfall away from the rushing of the Bear Run. A veritable organic cathedral, the perfect marriage of form and function, created by a modern Daedalus!

*The steel industry is but a shadow of what it was--it went belly-up in the '70s and early '80s, hence the term Rust Belt.

**One of the days I will have to write about Chicago—you gotta admire a city so can-do that the city civil engineers actually REVERSED THE FLOW OF THE RIVER.  Now that is some Midwestern pioneer spirit!

1963, 1970, 2011

Remind you of anything?
































What about this?

Or this?

Notice the Guardsman on the right of the picture (circled),
taking dead aim at the photographer, Ruffner--who was in fact a student.

Nothing galvanizes a movement like excessive force.  The children who demonstrated in Birmingham and the children who marched on the hills of Kent State were ultimately victorious--the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed, de jure segregation was overturned, and support for the war had finally eroded, due in large part to those anti-war students, just a few years after the Ohio State Guard wheeled around as one and fired on a bunch of unarmed students.

Just a reminder...

The Lambeth Goosestep

I’ve been busy lately digitizing my (huge) collection of musical theater cassette tapes. One that I came across this week was the mid-‘80s hit Me and My Girl, a fluffy tap-tastic import from across the pond. Me and My Girl has the most perfunctory of plots, about a young Cockney man who suddenly discovers that he is the Long-Lost Heir to the earldom of Hareford--but only if the executors of the will decide he is “suitable.” Gender-reversed My Fair Lady hijinks ensue!

If you can get past the enormous suspension of disbelief required by the audience (such hereditary peerages as dukedoms and earldoms are or at least were, things have changed a bit in the last several generations protected by entailment and certainly not subject to conditional snobbery tests--the barons of Runnymeade would rise up from their graves before they allowed THAT to happen!):

King John: Can I just add a quick rider about how the heir has to speak RP--

Looming Knight: NO. Sign it already, Softsword.

King John: But it would make such a great musical!

...Me and My Girl is a delightful bit of puffery, one long silly music hall number after another, dotted in between with comfortably predictable jokes.


HEATHERSETT: Aperitif, sir?
BILL: No thanks, I got me own.

DOWAGER: Do you know my daughter, May?
BILL: No, but thanks for the tip!

And certainly its most engaging and famous number is the first act finale, “The Lambeth Walk*,” one long rollicking set piece designed to take the piss out of British aristocracy.

We play a different way
Not like you but a bit more gay,
And when we have a bit of fun--oh boy!

Any time you're Lambeth way
Any evening, any day
You'll find us all
Doin' the Lambeth Walk--oi!

Robert Lindsay, Tony Award winner, singing The Lambeth Walk

As silly as it is, the number is truly infectious and was a HUGE hit in pre-War England--obviously a welcome distraction as Europe drew closer and closer to near-annihilation. As the saying went:

While dictators rage and statesmen talk, all Europe dances — to The Lambeth Walk.

Even King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (mother and father of the current Queen) came to see the show in 1939, and sang along with the rest of the audience.** Within a few years, of course, the Kingdom had need of even more distraction--and here their affection for The Lambeth Walk brought its own rewards.

During times of challenge humor is an invaluable coping mechanism--it contextualizes, it cuts down, it reduces, it adds perspective. Monsters have frequently been cut down to size through humor--in fact this is the stratagem behind the riddikukus curse in Harry Potter, that you conquer your boggart by placing it in a silly context. In this age of irony we like to think we invented this technique, that the generations before us were all terribly earnest and brave and stalwart. Brave and stalwart the Greatest Generation certainly was--but no one can cut you down with humor like the Brits! During World War II some filmmaking genius had the clever idea to match an orchestra track of The Lambeth Walk to some footage from Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will--and thus, the mashup was born.

If this is not the funniest thing you've seen all week, there is something wrong with you.

They say that Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, flipped. out. when he saw this footage, throwing chairs across the room. God, I love British humor.

And oh, what a right little island.

A right little, tight little island...

*The actual Lambeth Walk is in the South End of London, off of Lambeth Road. The reference is to the strutting evening promenade popular amongst residents--Noel Gay had the idea to set it to song and thus an iconic song was born.

Notice Mayfair across the river, to the northwest--Mayfair is where the aristocracy, and thus new Earl's "posh" relatives, lived.

**Adorably--and cheekily--Lupino Lane, the star of the show, reported afterward, "They [Their Majesties] said they had been walking the Lambeth Walk the wrong way--the ballroom way--and promised to do it our way in the future."

Give Yourself Over to Absolute Pleasure

Apologies for the too-long absence, I have been hard at work tapping up a storm as Columbia in a production of The Rocky Horror Show.  This is of course the stage version of the '70s movie classic--as a teenager I saw the movie many times at the Key Theater in Georgetown and listened to the soundtrack religiously. I even drew in my diary an approximation of the famously lippy RHPS logo:

Freud would have a field day.  Although he might have a hard time determining whether Frank N. Furter was fixated on the oral or the anal stage.

The meaning behind the tagline never dawned until I was cast in September and then the answer popped into my head.  The movie came out in 1975, and what other "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" film came out that year?  Everyone's favorite updated Moby Dick epic, Jaws.  More on this below.

RHPS somehow manages to simultaneously spoof horror and sci-fi flicks and capture the unabashed hedonism of the '70s, the era of suburban key parties and the gay liberation movement.  Its first song, "Science Fiction Double-Feature," is a roll call of genre classics:

Michael Rennie was ill
The Day the Earth Stood Still
But he told us where we stand
And Flash Gordon was there
In silver underwear
Claude Rains was The Invisible Man
Then something went wrong
For Fay Wray and King Kong
They got caught in a celluloid jam
Then at a deadly pace
It Came From Outer Space
And this is how the message ran...

Fascinatingly, all of the movies listed here are American, and the creator of Rocky Horror, Richard O'Brien, is English.  (Although it should be noted that the Hammer movies, to which RHS also pays homage, were English.) What is it about these British composers who are so well-versed in American pop culture capital?--the song "Tiny Dancer" is so convincingly early '70s Californian in spirit ("blue jean baby, LA lady," "the headlights on the highway," "Jesus freaks, out in the street"), it might have been written by any wistful go-west-young-man free spirit but was instead composed by Bernie Taupin, also English. The American invasion?


And for all of Rocky Horror's celebratory pan-sexualism, it ends on a haunting note--Brad and Janet stumble through the mist in the aftermath, wondering what the hell just happened to them.*

And all I know
Is deep inside I'm
Bleeding...

Perhaps this is the true genius of RHS--embodying the ethos of the '70s, it then anticipates the aftermath, the Big Chill of the '80s.  Gotta pay the piper sometime, sadly...

This poster--and endless riffs thereon--was EVERYWHERE after the movie came out.**

Back to the other set of lips: the movie Jaws is actually quite different from its source book--most people think the movie improves on it, but I have a great fondness for the Benchley novel which is both witty and dark and (like RHPS) very much a product of the '70s (and unlike the Spielberg adaptation which is surprisingly undated, hirsute heroes aside).  The novel is less of a Man vs. Beast thriller and more of an extended metaphor--the shark is not just Brodie's obsession but also a symbol of the forces that threaten to tear apart the town and Brodie's marriage, not the least of which is the sexual revolution which, by 1974 (the year the novel was published) had filtered down to the middle class.  Most memorably, Brodie's wife Ellen has a very brief affair with the ichthyologist Hooper, whose older brother she had dated as a teenager.  Throughout the novel Ellen is a consistently sympathetic character and yet coolly plans and executes extramarital seduction.  What can I say?  It was the '70s--everyone had a lot more sex then.

Key Party







The Ice Storm

Middle class '70s people preparing to have era-appropriate extra-marital sex. You just know Brad and Janet will be hosting the next one.

If you've read the novelization to the Jaws sequel, the first chapter reveals the shark that has come along to terrorize Amity THIS time is pregnant.  Even the shark had sex in Jaws!


*"Super Heroes," and Janet and Brad's bewilderment after their night of debauchery at the castle, always make me think of the last section of Steppenwolf when Harry is wandering through the club.


**Interesting perspective in the poster--in the book the shark is estimated at about 25 feet long but in this picture he sure looks a lot bigger than that!  When Hooper first sees the shark he is euphoric, rhapsodizing "Damn near megalodon!"  C. megalodon was a kind of proto-shark but much bigger and toothier, anywhere from 50 to 100 feet which is frankly terrifying.  

Jaws, the Prequel:
"You're gonna need a bigger--" CHOMP.
The End.