Wherever you are!
Back to the ship of dreams….
Actress Gloria Stuart has died, at the age of 100. She is most famous for her portrayal of Rose Dawson, at the age of 101, in the “present day” scenes of Titanic. Not only was she the oldest actress ever nominated for an Oscar, but Titanic is the only film to ever have two actresses nominated for Oscars for playing the same character. I love this, from the obituary:
Ms. Stuart wrote a memoir, “I Just Kept Hoping” (1999), in which she said of her late-blooming career, “When I graduated from Santa Monica High in 1927, I was voted the girl most likely to succeed. I didn’t realize it would take so long.”
I never saw Stuart in anything else, but her performance in Titanic was just fantastic. She provided the film’s emotional grounding, in the way she tells the story that she’s never told anyone at all, until the moment happens to come that almost requires her to do so. Stuart is what keeps the film from becoming a lot of maudlin, melodramatic schlock. One of my favorite moments comes early on, when she is allowed to look at objects recovered from her very own stateroom, objects she recognizes and remembers but hasn’t seen since the great ship went down. She gazes at her hand mirror in wonder, and then looks into the glass, whereupon she sets it down, simply saying, “The reflection’s changed a bit.”
And now I want to watch Titanic again. I kind of want to watch it with The Daughter, but I just don’t think she’s old enough for it yet. A few more years….
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Mr. Roosa
My first high school band director, Bill Roosa, died over the weekend.
My feelings on Mr. Roosa were always somewhat conflicted. There was a pretty big dispute between him and my parents, regarding my older sister when she was in his band, with the end result being her quitting band in her senior year. I don’t recall the particulars, but my parents felt a certain loathing for Mr. Roosa that I’m not sure ever abated. And I’m not sure those feelings are unjustified.
But then, Mr. Roosa was for the most part completely OK with me. For a time he took a very active interest in my musical education, even taking time to give me individual trumpet lessons when I wasn’t even in his band yet (Mr. Roosa directed the Senior High Band; Jim Beach had the Jr. High group.) I can’t deny that he taught me a great deal; I can’t deny that he loved music; I can’t deny that he had a lot of impact on a lot of music students who came under his baton; and I can’t deny that he could be a first-class son-of-a-bitch. I think he might even be somewhat proud of that last. It wouldn’t surprise me if some people — a smallish number, but real nonetheless — attended his funeral just to make sure he was really dead.
Bill Roosa was a big man with a very deep and raspy voice. He was also loud and liked to command attention. The Senior Band at my high school had a somewhat glowing reputation when I was coming up through the ranks, but the program suffered a bit as I approached it. I never really understood why, but band membership dropped like a rock, and for a time, Mr. Roosa seemed almost apathetic about the whole thing. My guess is that he was a very “old school” kind of teacher at a time when his style of pedagogy was, to put it mildly, falling out of style. He was of the mind that it wasn’t the worst thing in the world if a teacher shoved a student around a bit and maybe even struck him in the course of administering discipline; that kind of thing wouldn’t last more than a day in schools nowadays. I think he felt a growing sense of frustration over his final years of teaching, and I think to a great degree a lot of what he felt was the fun of the job got sucked out of it. (To be clear, this is all guessing on my part.)
When I entered junior high school, the district had for years been run by the same tiny group of crusty white men who all retired right around the same time. I suspect that Mr. Roosa didn’t get along nearly as well with the subsequent administration, in part because he was an old-school type and they were not. (And, I should note, also probably in part because as far as I could tell, the new group of folks running the show were, quite frankly, complete pinheads.) Mr. Roosa’s teaching career came to an abrupt end during my senior year. He had already butted heads a few times with administrators, but a month or two into that year, something transpired that I never found out any details about, but Mr. Roosa started cashing in all of his sick days he’d accrued over the years (this was back when teachers could roll them over, and the more wily and healthy ones would bank them for years, to the point where they could call in sick for two months near the end of their careers), and then he simply stopped showing up for work entirely. The band just kind of twisted in space for most of the remainder of that year, led for a time by a substitute who was not a music teacher at all before finally being taken over in the spring by a twenty-three year old guy who had just graduated college. I’ve always wondered what the final straw was that caused Mr. Roosa to say “The hell with this.” No doubt he felt emboldened by the fact that his family was, at the time, making tons of money off their own small chain of video rental stores.
(The video store thing was kind of interesting — his stores were bought out seven or eight years later by Blockbuster. I asked him about that business once and he bluntly said, “There’s no future in this. Sometime in the next fifteen years they’ll be beaming movies right to your TV and you won’t be renting anything on a tape. But we’ll have made our money by then, so it’s fine.” And, aside from his timeframe being a bit on the short side, he was exactly right, wasn’t he? Now, a bit more than twenty years after I had that conversation with him, you can stream movies over the Interweb via your Wii.)
Mr. Roosa was utterly beloved by nearly every alumnus of his band that I ever met, and I always wondered what it might have been like to play in the band during the years when he wasn’t as disengaged as he was when I was under his baton. He did have his moments during my years, though. In my junior year, membership of the Senior Band had fallen to about thirty kids, which is terribly low — with a really healthy instrumental music program, the band should have had at least fifty kids. Mr. Roosa took what I’ve always thought was a pretty creative approach that year, accommodating the fact that his band was so small: he decided that the year’s focus would be on Civil War band music. Now, the bands of the Civil War era were terribly small, and the music of that era — predating the big marches of John Philip Sousa and Karl King — had a very raw feel to it, with nearly every piece being full of folk tunes and popular songs of the time. It was, to be honest, a terribly fascinating year of band music, deeply steeped in an era of music that to this day very few people know anything about.
The next year was my senior year, when the wheels finally came off. Shortly before that happened, though, I asked Mr. Roosa if we’d be doing Civil War music again, and he said “No, I’m kind of thinking of looking through some of those books of German military music we have laying about.” We had complete sets of German band books there — where they came from, I have no idea — and the idea of exploring another obscure world of esoteric band music was extremely appealing. Alas, that never came to be.
Mr. Roosa’s musical tastes tended to be very heavily skewed toward marches, which it must be said, sometimes got to be a little much. But he also loved the great band transcriptions of orchestral masterpieces that dominated concert band programs during the “glory years” of the American bands, around the turn of the 20th century. It’s because of Mr. Roosa, for example, that I love the light opera overtures of Franz Von Suppe, even though to this day I can’t hear the Jolly Robbers overture without remembering one particular explosive rehearsal when Mr. Roosa lost his temper over our continuing inability to get a particularly technical passage right. (Or the fact that the same overture begins with the trumpets sounding a high F, which is for various reasons pertaining to the physical and acoustic nature of the trumpet a very difficult note to hit dead on.) And it was during my freshman year in Mr. Roosa’s senior band that a piece landed on the program that had a very peculiar title: “March to the Scaffold”. Mr. Roosa introduced me to Hector Berlioz. For that alone he’ll have my eternal gratitude. It now occurs to me that he was already gone from teaching when I discovered my other great musical passion, Sergei Rachmaninov. I have no idea at all if Mr. Roosa liked the Russian Romantics.
Mr. Roosa was, as far as I knew, not terribly interested at all in new music. We played no modern music whatsoever. The music he chose might not have been terribly balanced, but what he chose was invariably good. I don’t recall hating a single piece we ever played. That’s something. His big passion, actually, was circus music, and he was very active in a national group of circus music afficionados called the “Windjammers”. When I was in eighth grade — and thus still in the Junior Band — he somehow arranged for the Senior Band’s spring concert to be nothing but circus music, an entire program of it, complete with introductions by a ringmaster and to be guest-conducted by a man named Merle Evans, who is one of the legendary figures in the music of the three-ring circus. I attended that concert, and I wish to this day that it had happened a year later so I could play in it.
He was also the type of person who liked to test students by, well, being a colossal jerk to them for a time. I myself landed on his shit list one year — I think it was my sophomore year, actually — and I stayed there for a solid month, during which he rode me hard at every opportunity. Every screw-up I made in rehearsal became a moment for him to stop the band and berate me, and I remember one time when I was rubbing my lips during a break in rehearsal (your lips can really start to hurt when you’re a brass player and you’re working hard), he spotted me doing it and launched into a tirade on how no real trumpet player would even admit to pain while playing. Funny thing is, after about a month of this, it stopped almost immediately, and from that moment on, Mr. Roosa never rode me again. He’d point out when I would screw up, obviously, but there was never that sense of maliciousness that had been there during my “Hell Month with Bill Roosa”. I don’t know if there is something I did to earn his respect or if he just got bored and figured it was time to let me out of the doghouse, but we were fine after that, and soon we’d be back to swapping funny stories about great musicians. (He knew a ton of these, and he could crack the best jokes that only musicians would get or find funny. One of them was when he was trying to pick another march for our concert program, and he said, “I’ve got an American march, a British march, a German march, a French march, and a Polish march. I’m not sure which one I should do.” Another kid, who was something of a wise-acre, said, “Hey, have you got any Hungarian marches?” Mr. Roosa didn’t bat an eye as he said, “Yeah, I’ve got a Hungarian march right here. It was written by a Czech.” OK, you had to be there, but to this day, I think that was funny.)
I don’t really know much of anything about what became of Mr. Roosa after he left teaching and after I graduated later that year. I know that his family formed some kind of real estate developing business that was somewhat successful; I also know that his son faced some sort of legal trouble, but what that was about, I have no idea. It’s not really important, anyway.
Finally, I often think of Mr. Roosa whenever the Olympics are taking place. In 1988, when the US Olympic teams performed poorly (especially at the Winter Games in Calgary), Mr. Roosa ranted several times during rehearsals about how discouraging he found the Olympics because they represented to him a fading of a work ethic in American youth. I wonder if he watched subsequent Olympics, when the US teams bounced right back, and ever thought to himself, “Maybe the kids are all right.”
In Mr. Roosa’s memory, here’s the Suppe overture that gave me nightmares in my sophomore year, “Jolly Robbers”. It’s the original orchestral version, but it’s all there. (The part that terrified us all starts at the 5:38 mark.)
And, since Mr. Roosa and I would talk a lot about Wagner, here is Siegried’s Funeral March.
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“Sir Knight!”
Actor Maury Chaykin has died. This is sad. He was only 61, and he was a fantastic character actor — one of the best “Hey it’s that guy” kinds of actors. For me, his most memorable turn was as the Army officer in Dances With Wolves to whom Lt. John J. Dunbar (Kevin Costner) reports, early in the film, for his assignment. Chaykin’s officer turns out to be insane, and as Dunbar is riding away from the base, the sound of Chaykin’s suicidal gunshot rings out across the prairie. It was an odd moment in the film — a “What was that about” kind of thing — but I think it set up quite a lot of the later plot of the film, providing an explanation of just why the tiny camp Dunbar is taking over has been abandoned and why it’s allowed to languish for so long afterwards.
Good character actors are so important, because it’s their professionalism and skill that rounds out the world of a film. Chaykin was a fine one, and he’ll be missed.
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Why can’t the gods ever target, say, Dallas like this?
I’m not sure what Cleveland did recently to so annoy the Gods, but yeesh. Getting shafted on national teevee by Lebron James was bad, but the passing of Harvey Pekar? That’s just mean, Governors of the Universe.
I read Pekar’s graphic novel The Quitter last year and posted about it here. At the moment I actually have Pekar’s graphic adaptation of Studs Terkel’s Working out of the library right now, although I haven’t started it yet. I’m a new admirer of Pekar’s, and I’m saddened to know that he won’t be producing anything more.
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Warren
One of my favorite college professors, Dr. Warren Schmidt, died last week. I’m not really sad about it, because he lived a long, full life that was full of music. He was 89 years old.
I had Dr. Schmidt for music theory and ear training classes. He also taught organ, as well as serving as the college organist for worship services and the like. He was exactly what you would expect an old music professor to be like, in appearance and dress, and while he conducted classes at first in the same way, as you got to know him, he would gradually loosen up until you knew what everyone else who had already had him for class knew: that Dr. Schmidt was a terribly warm and compassionate man with a wickedly sharp sense of humor.
It’s hard to remember too many specific examples of things he said, this long after I studied with him. (I was a freshman twenty years ago, after all!) One time, we were analyzing a chord progression that he had written on the blackboard, when one of my classmates raised her hand and said that the progression employed parallel octaves. “Parallel octaves” are when two voices in a chord progression move in such a way that they stay one octave apart. It’s a “no-no” in music theory and composition circles, although I was never entirely clear on why. The problem with this particular example was that the two voices involved actually stayed on the same notes from one chord to the next. Dr. Schmidt pointed this out, and the girl argued the point, insisting that since it was a new chord and since those two voices had stayed on the same notes one octave apart, we were looking at parallel octaves. Finally Dr. Schmidt grinned and said, “But they don’t move! They stay right there! In the example, nothing is moving! These aren’t parallel octaves, they’re constipated octaves!”
One other time, I was walking past his office when he called me inside. I couldn’t fathom why, but in I went. Dr. Schmidt’s office was the “homiest” of all the offices in the music department, with its carpeted floors and book-lined walls and the fact that he always kept the blinds drawn and the ceiling lights off, preferring instead to light the place with a couple of regular old lamps that looked like they’d come from a living room in the 1950s. Well, anyway, I went in, and he handed me a piece of paper and asks me what I see on the front of it. It was the bulletin from the campus worship service the day before, and on the front was the usual church bulletin stuff, plus a little picture in the middle, which was a stylized picture of the head of Jesus, wearing a crown. I was puzzled, but then Dr. Schmidt said, “Look!” And he covered the face of Crowned Jesus with his finger, so only the outline was visible: an elongated, spikey-headed face. “It’s Bart Simpson! Ay caramba!” I laughed, more out of disbelief than anything else. Dr. Schmidt was up on The Simpsons. And at that time (fall of 1989 or spring of 1990), I wasn’t even up on The Simpsons — they were only just beginning to capture the pop cultural imagination of America, and my freshman year I didn’t have a teevee at school anyway.
Dr. Schmidt’s organ playing was something to behold. He was a big believer in the notion that if you have a big space to fill with sound, well then, you’d best be about the business of filling it. He’d play small and intimate organ works, but that’s not what everyone wanted to hear when he was at the controls. When he would accompany a hymn during a service, he would up the ante with each verse, until at the last, he wouldn’t just pull out all the stops (literally!), it was almost like he installed new stops just so he could pull those.
He was very good at improvising, too, which sometimes led to amusing results when he’d start improvising during the hymns at the services. Dr. Schmidt would cheerfully modulate into any key he wanted to, at any moment. A common question on the lips of Wartburg College music students after one of Dr. Schmidt’s hymns was, “What key was that in?”
When he announced his retirement in 1991, and then gave his final recital in the spring, every single music major was there. It was one of the most emotional musical events I’ve ever experienced, although I couldn’t tell you now what he played that night. He closed it out with one of his typically theatrical tour de force pieces, by which time everyone who knew this was his farewell recital was in tears. He gave a single encore (I think), and then, acknowledging the second ovation with a single nod, left the auditorium and didn’t return.
After his retirement, Dr. Schmidt did some touring and traveling before eventually settling into a retirement facility in Waverly (the town where Wartburg is located). I was, in all honesty, a little surprised that he had still been alive last week. He’d been a regular smoker, and could often be found on the front steps of the music building, indulging himself. Once I asked him why he still smoked, given what we now knew about the habit, and he just shrugged and said, “None of us are getting out of this world alive, right?” I thought his response cynically funny, and preferable to the possibly more appropriate response to the question posed by a know-it-all college student: “Mind your f***ing business, dumb-ass.”
I’ve been remembering other things about Dr. Schmidt: his neat and precise handwriting, which he kept aligned by writing along a straight-edge; this little ditty he would play in ear training classes when someone would fail to identify a perfect fourth (one of the most basic of all musical intervals); the day he suddenly broke off in the middle of a lecture because the musical example in the textbook was from Franck’s Symphony in D minor, which Dr. Schmidt especially loved and proceeded to tell us why; talking about professors with a couple of other music students and having one girl say, “Do you have any idea how good looking he must have been when he was our age?”
Farewell, Dr. Schmidt.
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If only….
Memories that clog the arteries
(EDITED to add a couple of links to photos.)
We’re considering a brief overnight trip next week somewhere, since The Family Unit will all have the same weekend off. One destination we mentioned was Pittsburgh, so I spent some time Googling attractions down there. My family actually originally hails from Pittsburgh; my parents lived there their whole lives except a couple of years in the 1960s (around the time my sister was born), and I was born there. We’ve always had relatives there, although those have dwindled as time has gone on; I’m down to a single aunt living in Pittsburgh now and a couple of cousins. (Five cousins total, but I’m honestly not sure at all where any of them live.)
My sister also went to college in Pittsburgh, so for many years, Pittsburgh was pretty dominant in our lives in many ways. Once my sister graduated college and started attending grad school in Buffalo, our attentions shifted up here for good. When we moved from Portland, OR to Allegany, NY in 1981, we started a period where we would go to Pittsburgh for one reason or another at least a dozen times a year. After sometime around 1988 or 1989, our reasons for going dried up, and since then, I’ve been in Pittsburgh probably half a dozen times, total. The Wife and I did an overnighter of our own there back when she was still The Girlfriend; and when my in-laws lived for about eighteen months in West Virginia, Pittsburgh made a logical halfway-between meeting place for day trips. That’s it, though; we haven’t been there in nearly ten years.
So I was Googling attractions in Pittsburgh — the Carnegie museums, the Macy’s downtown store (formerly Kaufmann’s), that kind of thing — and I remembered a restaurant we used to eat in. Or get food from. Something like that.
It’s a place called Vincent’s Pizza Park, and as I recall, it’s…well, it’s a dive. The place is no-frills to the extreme, crowded, tiny, hot, and the place served some of the best pizza I ever had. It was pretty unique pizza, thick crusted and even more thickly cheesed; partisans of New York style pizza would probably recoil in horror at the sight of a slice of a Vincent’s pizza. It was also the greasiest pizza I’ve ever encountered, the kind of pizza that left behind pools of grease deep enough to drown small animals. Like chihuahuas.
The place was actually run by a guy named Vincent, whom I remember as a tiny Italian guy who sat on a stool making pizza. My memories are probably faulty, but I recall the guy looking ancient the last time we ate there, more than twenty years ago. The joint’s been open for decades, and my father used to tell a funny story from the early days of his marriage to my mother, when she was at home and he was at Vincent’s and he called home to tell her he was going to be a while because some poor slob had managed to get himself locked in Vincent’s bathroom and was screaming his head off because the bathrooms there are legendarily disgusting and Dad wanted to see how it all ended. Funny tales from before the days of routine health inspections, huh?
Anyway, Vincent’s Pizza Park still exists, and apparently it’s still dumpy. Some recent reviews I’ve read suggest that the quality has gone downhill somewhat since Vincent himself retired some years ago. And then I discovered that Vincent actually died earlier this month. Turns out he opened his restaurant in 1950 (when my father was 11 and my mother 9), and he ran it himself until 2005. Fifty-five years of making gooey, heart-stopping slabs of pizza. Not a bad way to spend a life, huh?
Wherever you are, Vincent, I hope the bathrooms are clean!
UPDATE: Well, you should all be able to see what a pizza from Vincent’s looks like, right? Here’s a whole pie in all its glory. Note all the butcher’s paper. One detail I recall, which seems to still be the case, is that Vincent’s doesn’t use pizza boxes. Instead, they put the pizza into a cardboard tray and then wrap the whole thing with butcher’s paper. Here’s a different one, a medium double pepperoni one. I love me some pepperoni, but damn, that’s a lot of it on there. And here’s a Vincent’s pizza with everything on it, after a couple of slices have been consumed. Note the grease. Yowza! How gross! And how I want one!
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Gabrielle
I never knew Gabrielle Bouliane, but a few of my Facebook friends did, and they are mourning her passing this week from cancer. She was a poet, and here is a selection of hers, performed at the Austin Poetry Slam, that I find quite powerful:
Condolences to friends and family. How often do we learn of wonderful people only after their deaths?
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I must return to Ryhope Wood
I’ve seen today, in a number of places, that fantasy author Robert Holdstock has died. He was only 61. Apparently he was hospitalized several days ago with an E. coli infection, and he succumbed today. He was only 61 years old.
Holdstock wrote a number of highly-regarded books, but as of now, the only one I’ve read is Mythago Wood, which a friend of mine who was also a correspondent of Holdstock’s sent me with orders to read it as soon as possible. I did, and I was highly impressed with it (this was seven or eight years ago, and might well have been before I even launched this blog). He also sent me the sequel Lavondyss, which I still have not read — nor anything else by Holdstock, for that matter — but I will. And soon.