Arts

Dance Academy (1)

(part one of two)

Dance, as a performing art, has always been mysterious to me. Of course the rhythmic motion of bodies in space has intrinsic beauty — no mystery there! — but a significant and persistent part of me wants to understand that motion. Why is the dancer’s body moving this way rather than that way? What logic underlies the ordering of individual movements into one sequence rather than another? Can continuous changes in the position of four limbs and a torso be said to have a meaning, and if so, where does that meaning come from?

It wasn’t until relatively late in life that I figured out that I was asking the wrong questions. Dance, I came to realize, is very similar to music — in fact, it might even be considered a physical analogue to music.

When I studied music theory in college, I was taught the rules of counterpoint, which essentially dictate which notes can follow — or coincide with — other notes. The counterpoint exercises that I had to do were frustratingly difficult, because each new note that I placed on the staff severely restricted what notes I could place there afterward. Working through each exercise felt like trying to solve a particularly sadistic puzzle.

The graduate student who graded my assignments was not impressed with my work. “Didn’t you once mention that you write music?” he asked, with a degree of irritation.

“I have lots of songwriting experience,” I said. “Why?”

“Well, the counterpoint exercises you’re turning in aren’t very musical.”

I could have taken that as an insult, but instead I experienced it as a revelation. I had entirely misunderstood what these exercises were for. I’d been treating them like math problems or logic puzzles, when in fact they were about writing music!

That realization allowed me to recognize that I actually knew the rules of counterpoint. I might not know them intellectually, but I had certainly internalized them through years of listening to and making music. The next time I had to do a counterpoint exercise, I didn’t stop to think about it. I simply sang out a musical phrase, and wrote down what I’d sung. Then I sang the harmony line that I imagined would go with it. I had to do a bit of massaging to make sure all of the requirements were met, but most of my work was already done.

The same wisdom comes into play when I listen to music. I’m not analyzing the melodies and harmonies note by note or looking for a meaning. Having some familiarity with music theory helps me make sense of what I’m hearing, but my primary activity in listening to music isn’t analytical. I’m just experiencing the music, as music, without the need to translate it into anything else.

So now I’m learning to relate to dance in the same way I relate to music — to simply experience dance as dance. I don’t have the same foundation in dance theory that I have in music theory, but I do have a lifetime of experience with having a body — a body that moves! — and observing the motions (both choreographed and unchoreographed) of other bodies. Surely I must have internalized some rules during that time, despite not being in touch with them intellectually. And surely those internalized rules give me some context in which to organize the sensory data I take in while watching a dancer in motion.

Therefore, I don’t have to think about why this movement follows that one, just as I don’t have to think about why one note follows another. Those are matters of concern only to the choreographer or the composer. When my brain insists on finding some articulable way to interpret what I’m seeing, I’m increasingly able to tell it to get out of the way. The meaning of the dance is the dance.

Coda: In writing this post, I’ve started to notice how many other elements of my life fall into a similar category. Consider another of my great pleasures: good whiskey. I’m always amused at the serious attention that whiskey drinkers (and wine drinkers, for that matter) pay to tasting notes: “Lemon and orange peel with hints of chocolate…” “A suggestion of lime and a slight woodiness…” “Baked apples, red berries, and sweet honey…” These notes can serve a practical purpose in helping to convince a friend to try a whiskey you like (or in trying to convince a customer to buy one), but they’re merely descriptions of the whiskey — they say nothing about what the whiskey is, or what the distiller’s intention was in making it. The essence of the whiskey lies entirely in drinking the whiskey, at which point none of the words matter.

Posted October 5, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Arts

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Idle Worship

“Last Embrace”: Marcia and me (far right) with our co-stars Roy Scheider and Janet Margolin

In the summer of 1978, the cast and crew of the film “Last Embrace” came to Princeton for a week of shooting on the university campus. I had already graduated, but was still living in town, so I was lucky enough to get cast as an extra (along with my girlfriend Marcia) in one nighttime scene. Marcia and I were directed to walk behind the stars of the movie, Roy Scheider and Janet Margolin, as they strolled along a walkway having a conversation. I don’t remember much about the shoot itself, but I do remember that there was lots of waiting around, that we got surprisingly good food, and that one attractive female student got invited to the afterparty at a nearby hotel while the rest of us didn’t.

Mostly, though, I remember getting my first closeup look at Roy Scheider. It’s not as if I was a particular fan of his; the only reason I was familiar with him was that (like everybody else) I had seen him in “Jaws.” Yet here he was, standing just feet away from me, brushing his hair with a pocket hair brush just like the one I had. He looked exactly like Roy Scheider, except that now he was three-dimensional and breathing the same air I was breathing. The thrill of that moment is firmly etched in my memory.

Why should that be? Why do we always get a thrill when someone we’ve seen on the screen appears before us in person? For me, at least, it doesn’t even have to be someone who’s famous. I’ve been to film screenings where the subject of a documentary takes the stage for a Q & A session afterward, and even that person exudes a special aura.

It’s even stranger when places and things we’ve seen onscreen take on that air of specialness. I’ve never watched “Game of Thrones,” but when our tour bus in Northern Ireland stopped at a key location from the series, passengers went nuts taking photos. I’ve been known to stare reverentially at the Brocklebank Apartments in San Francisco, because that’s where Kim Novak’s character lived in “Vertigo.” Sometimes it gets just plain silly: I was once on a tour of Paramount Studios in Hollywood during the time the series “Monk” was in production, and our tour guide sneaked us onto the set. “Ohmigod,” I remember saying to myself as I walked breathlessly through Adrian Monk’s apartment. “There’s his refrigerator!”

Back when I was a boy in Hebrew school, I remember the teacher having to explain what “graven images” were, since the second commandment admonished us not to “bow down to them nor serve them.” She explained that people used to pray to stone figures as if they were gods. I found it impossible to believe that any sane human being would attribute divinity to a human-made artifact. Yet later on, we learned the story of how the Israelites worshipped a golden calf while Moses was away on Mount Sinai. Was idolatry such an irresistible impulse, I wondered, that even the people who had been freed from Egypt by a series of divine miracles felt driven to do it?

I can’t help thinking that the thrill we get in the presence of people and places we’ve seen on the screen is a modern-day outgrowth of the ancient need to worship something concrete — to treat ordinary entities as having some connection to a realm higher than our own. Rationally, we know that celebrities are just people, and that movie locations are just places, but there’s a strong, irrational part of us that wants to experience them as special.

In my 20s, when I developed close ties with a Quaker community, I was surprised to find out that the Quakers didn’t put much stock in holidays such as Christmas and Easter. Since God made every day, they reasoned, why should we treat any particular day as being more special than another? On Christmas Day, the sun rises and the wind blows just the same as on any other day. Any special attention we pay to a holiday is just us projecting our human egos onto nature, and Quakers don’t think too highly of the human ego.

I’ll grant that it’s possible to observe holidays without thinking of the days themselves as being innately special. They’re a time on the calendar when we can all agree to engage in rituals that we enjoy — rituals that retain their specialness because they only happen once a year. (Even the Quakers hold a special meeting for worship on Christmas Eve, even if it’s no different from their normal Sunday meetings.) Similarly, it makes sense to experience an encounter with a celebrity as having a heightened atmosphere — simply because it’s so rare for something that only existed as a mental image to suddenly become concrete — without necessarily conferring a hallowed status onto celebrities themselves.

Still, there’s something a little crazy about the relationship we have with the movie or TV screen. Whether or not it’s odd that we get a thrill from encountering a person or place that we’d never seen in real life, think about the opposite: when something that’s totally familiar to us suddenly appears on film.

“Oh, wow!” I thought to myself when I finally watched “Last Embrace” in a theater. “That’s the Princeton campus! There’s the East Pyne archway! There’s Holder Courtyard!” Despite the fact that I’d spent nearly every day for four years on that very campus, there was this inexplicable excitement about seeing it on the movie screen. “That’s Ron Grayson!” I said when a familiar classmate was shown running out of a dorm, carrying a trombone. Somehow seeing him on film felt so much more emotionally charged than seeing him in person. So how do you explain that? Why did I run to the theater in 1993 to see a mediocre movie called “Made in America,” simply because parts of it were shot in my neighborhood in Oakland? Why do I feel a tingle whenever my high school friend Rob Bartlett shows up on the TV screen, even though I know perfectly well that he’s played recurring characters on several popular series? Why do I, many years after my graduation, still get excited when I see a film (“A Beautiful Mind,” “I.Q.,” “Across the Universe”) that was partially shot on the Princeton campus? This is behavior that we all take for granted, yet it’s entirely weird when you take a hard look at it.

Posted August 17, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Arts

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TV Guidance

It’s hard to remember that such a time existed, but in the ancient days before Saturday Night Live and David Letterman came along, Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show was the coolest thing on television. Whenever I could, I would stay up late to watch it — or at least the first half hour, when Carson did his monologue and the subsequent comedy bit at his desk. The jokes were rarely funny — in fact, the funniest moments were when a joke failed to land, and Carson would do a little shame-faced soft-shoe dance — but the quality of the humor wasn’t really the point. The show’s tacit premise was that there was a late-night party going on, attended by witty and famous guests, and that we in the audience were somehow allowed to be there. We could be in on the private jokes, watch stars let their guard down and be themselves, and briefly feel like we were members of the in-crowd.

For a celebrity, appearing on the Tonight Show meant that you had really made it. When I was in college, I used to fantasize aloud about a time in the future when my roommates and I would all be booked as guests on the show on the same night — me as a world-famous mime, Krishna as a celebrated author, and Jay as… well, we weren’t sure about that… maybe as the founder of a new religion? In any case, we’d each have our few minutes of interview time and move to the couch, so by the end of the show we’d all be on stage at the same time. At that point, Carson would impishly say, “By the way, I understand that you all attended Princeton University around the same time,” to which one of us would reply, “Actually, Johnny, we were roommates.” And the studio audience would go wild, stunned by the revelation that three people who were prominent in such different fields had so unlikely a connection.

That fantasy failed to materialize, but when I visited Los Angeles for the first time in 1981, the top item on my to-do list was to attend a taping of the Tonight Show. To the bemusement of the friend I was staying with, I got up at 4:00 AM to drive to the NBC studio in Burbank to get a ticket for that night’s taping, then stood in line for hours to make sure I’d get a seat. The show had passed its prime by that time, but that didn’t keep my heart from thumping as I was ushered into the studio that I had visited so many times in my imagination.

I was already prepared for the strangeness of having familiar images take on an unfamiliar cast. Years earlier, when I was five or six years old, my parents had given in to my pleading and arranged for me to be one of the on-camera audience members on the local Bozo the Clown show. It was a horrifying experience. My mother brought me to a strange building in New York City and up in an elevator to the TV studio from which the show originated. The studio was gray and sterile, with painfully bright lights. Bozo himself, who on my home TV was small and black-and-white, was startlingly large and garishly painted, and spoke off-camera in a voice that was not Bozo’s voice at all. I was immediately afraid of him, and equally frightened by the crowd of anonymous children with whom I was seated. Throughout the live broadcast, I sat on my hard wooden bench and sulked. When, afterward, my mother asked me why I hadn’t played along with any of Bozo’s games, the only excuse I could come up with was, “I was tired.”

My attendance at the Tonight Show promised to be much more pleasant. The studio was refreshingly cool, the seat was comfortable, and I had long outgrown my fear of strangers. The only thing that bothered me, at least before the show started, was that I felt so far away from Johnny’s desk. I had a relatively good seat, but between the audience and the set was a swath of studio floor occupied by cameras and crew members. I was clearly going to get a better view by looking at the monitors mounted over our heads than by looking at the stage.

My real disappointment came when the taping began. Carson came out and did his monologue as usual, but something about it felt false. I suddenly realized why: He wasn’t addressing us, the live audience; he was playing directly to the camera. We were there only as a source of sound effects. Our job was to laugh and applaud as if we and Carson were having a fun interaction, whereas in reality there was no interaction at all. The only time I felt connected to what was happening onstage was when I looked at the monitor, where everything looked comfortable and familiar. But that was no different from watching the show on a screen at home.

I wish I could tell you that I remember who the guests were on that night’s show, but I honestly don’t. What I do remember is that Carson and each guest would have a lively and amusing chat. Then, when it was time for a commercial break, the stage lights would dim, and Johnny and the guest would sit silently in the dark to the accompaniment of Doc Severinsen’s band. They looked like animatronic figures who had been powered down for maintenance. When the break was over, the lights would come up, the human figures would come alive, and the conversation would resume as if it had been flowing all along.

By the end of the hour, I was fully awakened to the reality of what I’d seen. This was no party; it was the illusion of a party, tailored for the television screen. I felt angry at myself for having allowed myself to be deceived for so many years.

I’ve since found out that the man in the Bozo costume when I was on the show was named Bill Britten. He was very dedicated to children — not just entertaining them, but educating them. (Before and after his television career, he worked as a schoolteacher.) I sincerely regret that I trusted Johnny Carson, and didn’t trust Bozo.

Posted July 20, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Arts

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Mental Notes

Our household recently had a dinner-table conversation about the so-called Mandela effect, which refers to the sharing of a vivid — but false — memory by a large group of people. It gets its name from the many Baby Boomers who (it is said) have a distinct memory of Nelson Mandela’s dying in prison in the 1980s, when in fact he lived well into the 21^st century. Other frequently cited examples are people’s remembering the children’s-book character Curious George as having a tail, or the “Mr. Moneybags” character in the Monopoly game as sporting a monocle. (As it turns out, neither is true.)

If you read my post “Fair Minded,” you know that I acknowledge the existence of invented memories, having experienced them myself. But when it comes to the Mandela effect, I’m skeptical of the idea that there are false memories that are culturally shared. For one thing, I’d assume that anyone who can recognize Nelson Mandela’s name would have noticed that he served as the first post-apartheid president of South Africa. (In passing, I should add that I’m irritated at how Mandela’s name has been trivialized by being connected to a piece of pop psychology.)

I’d also claim that most of the so-called false memories that are offered as examples aren’t memories at all, but simply mental images that get formed when the topic arises. For example, if you were to ask me, “Does Curious George have a tail?” I would probably think to myself, “Well, he’s a monkey, so I assume he has a tail,” and then I would immediately picture him that way. But that’s different from actually remembering him as having a tail.

That said, I just came across what appeared to be an instance of the Mandela effect. While browsing around YouTube, I discovered some clips from a 1929 Technicolor musical called “Gold Diggers of Broadway.” Most of the film has been lost, but a few fragments survive, one of which features a tenor named Nick Lucas singing the (then-new) song “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” Lucas’s rendition of the song was pretty straightforward, until he got to the bridge — the part that starts with “Knee deep in flowers we’ll stray.” It sounded odd at first, and when he got to the next line, “We’ll keep the showers away,” it just sounded wrong. The rhythm was off. At first I thought that the film editor had accidentally cut in an extra few beats, but no — when the chorus joined in, they sang it the same way. I was perturbed: This is not how the song is supposed to go.

In my memory, the bridge went like this:

But in the film, it went this way:

Notice not only the difference in rhythm, but also how “deep” goes down only a seventh instead of a full octave. I checked the original 1929 sheet music — which, fortunately, is accessible online — and evidently that’s the way the song was written. So why did I remember it differently? And why did all of the cover versions on YouTube sing it my way instead of Nick Lucas’s way?

I was ready to attribute all this to a Mandelaesque mass delusion when I realized that I’d forgotten one important thing: When I and others of my generation learned the song, we didn’t learn it from “Gold Diggers of Broadway” — we learned it from Herbert Khaury, aka Tiny Tim. And as I discovered when I checked his classic 1968 recording, Tiny Tim sang it like this (which, apart from a syncopated flourish at the end, is just the way I remembered it):

Tiny Tim was an avid music historian, and he actually knew Nick Lucas — he insisted that Johnny Carson book Lucas on the infamous show in which he married Miss Vicki — so it’s not clear why he felt the need to alter the bridge from the way the song was originally sung. In any case, it’s clear that the Mandela effect doesn’t apply here. I don’t have a false memory of how the song went in 1929; I have a true memory of how the song has gone since 1968.

Posted July 7, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Arts

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The Wrong Thing

In 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, I wrote a song called “X-Rays Coming Out of My TV.” It was a satirical folk-style song, inspired by Tom Lehrer’s “Pollution,” about how technology was destroying the environment. It was pretty sophisticated for an eighth-grader, but was seriously mediocre on any objective scale. My mother, however, was convinced that it would be my ticket to fame and fortune, and she somehow found a music publisher in New York City who was willing to talk to me. He scheduled an in-person meeting and requested that I bring a demo of the song.

I recorded my guitar and vocal on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and borrowed a second recorder so I could add a vocal harmony track and, for good measure, a tambourine. Realizing that a devious New York publisher might try to take advantage of a naïve boy from the suburbs, I took the precaution of filling out an application and paying a fee (taken out of my allowance) to register a copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office.

The music publisher was surprisingly diplomatic. He listened to the demo tape, told me that it really hadn’t been necessary to add the tambourine, and gave me a couple of albums to listen to — John Prine and Randy Newman — to assist in my development as a songwriter. Then we went home, at which point I assumed that my mother would stop embarrassing me by bragging about my song. But that was not to be. “My son had a song copyrighted!” she told everyone who would listen.

Despite my explaining to her many times that anybody could have anything copyrighted, she talked about my copyright proudly for years. The time I’d put into writing the song didn’t matter; the important thing was a routine transaction that had taken me a few minutes. Since that time, I’ve noticed how often, in the same way, people place value on insignificant things at the expense of significant ones.

Jugglers and acrobats have a variety of tricks in their repertoire. Some are easy but look difficult, and some are very challenging but look easy. According to my college roommate Jay, who has juggled professionally for more than 40 years, an underappreciated item in the juggling repertoire is two people juggling eight clubs. “It takes an incredible amount of practice to get it,” he says, “but once you do, it looks just like juggling seven clubs.” Ideally, the audience would appreciate the skill and discipline required to make such a difficult trick look easy, but instead, they reserve their biggest reactions for the less-subtle tricks. “Juggling an apple and eating it,” Jay says, “is not particularly hard.” But it’s a guaranteed crowd pleaser.

Aerialists — those acrobats who perform high over your head, dangling from ropes or trapezes — take years to learn their craft. Audience members typically remain silent as they watch the performers execute their intricate maneuvers, but one thing every aerialist learns is that if he or she (usually she) simply does a split, the audience responds with instant applause. Aerialists actually have a name for this phenomenon: “claps for splits.”

One thing I’ve always wondered is — to borrow a trope from Jerry Seinfeld — what’s the deal with tap dancers? They can create incredibly rapid, varied, syncopated rhythms throughout a piece of music, but the climactic move is always the one where they lean forward, face the audience, and run in place while swinging their arms. That always seems to bring down the house, despite being the least artistic part of their act. I can only imagine that audiences applaud wildly at that point only because of many years of conditioning.

My experience as an actor in, and writer for, a children’s theater troupe taught me that the one surefire way to get an audience of children to laugh is to have a character fall down. There’s always a moment near the end of a show where the kids get restless and their attention starts to wander. I always made sure to write a pratfall into the script at that point, regardless of whether it was motivated by the story. Nothing else — no matter how clever a joke is, no matter how elaborately a gag is set up — gets the same reaction.

As a community college teacher of digital art courses, I’ve always been surprised at my students’ response when a classmate shows an especially skillful piece of work to the class. Instead of asking what inspired the work or how it was accomplished technically, they tend to ask earnestly, “How long did that take?” Then they marvel at the amount of time the artist devoted to the work rather than at how well done it is.

I suppose that’s not much different from my parents’ attitude toward my own work. No matter what I produced, whether it was for school or for personal expression, they were much more concerned with how it was received — whether it got me a good grade, or whether it won an award, or whether it got me into the local newspaper — than the thing itself. And that extended into my adulthood. Ten years after I wrote “X-Rays Coming Out of My TV,” I wrote a one-act play called “Reel to Reel,” about the troubled owner of a recording studio. By this time, I had graduated from college, was working in publishing, and was living on my own in New Jersey. I decided to enter the play in a local playwriting contest, but first, I again took the precaution of registering it with the Copyright Office.¹

I won the contest, my play was produced, and my parents came to see it on opening night. Despite not having read the play and knowing nothing about it, they presented me with a plaque they’d had made to commemorate the occasion. Engraved in brass affixed to a cherry-wood rectangle, it said, “Congratulations to Mark Alan Schaeffer, author of the prize-winning play ‘Reel to Reel©.’ ” It was a sweet and thoughtful thing for them to do, but the thing my mother most wanted credit for was that she’d made sure the copyright symbol was appended to the title.

Posted May 4, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Arts

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Dance Academy (1)

Idle Worship

TV Guidance

Mental Notes

The Wrong Thing

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