Жизнь как творчество

И еще один потрясающе интересный фрагмент!

Some of the teachers would keep kids after school as punishment but it always the Jewith kids. Why? Because we’re shifty little usurers and in keeping us after school, we’d be late or couldn’t attend Hebrew school. Now unbeknownst to them, this punishment to me, if I may use a Yiddish word, was a mitzvah. I hated Hebrew school as much as public school and now I’m going to tell you why. First of all, I never bought into the whole religious thing. I thought it was all a big hustle. Didn’t ever think there was a God; didn’t think he’d conveniently favor the Jews if there was one. Loved pork. Hated beards. The Hebrew language was too guttural for my taste. Plus it was written backwards. Who needed that? I had enough trouble in school where things were written left to right. And why should I fast for my sins? What were my sins? Kissing Barbara Westlake when I should’ve been hanging up my coat? Fobbing a plug nickel off on my grandpa? I say live with it, God, there’s much worse. The Nazis are putting us in ovens. First attend to that. But as I said, I didn’t believe in God. And why did the women have to sit upstairs m the synagogue? They were prettier and smarter than the men. Those hirsute zealots who wrapped themselves in prayer shawls on the premier level, nodding up and down like bobbleheads and kissing a string up to some imaginary power who, if he did exist, despite all their begging and flattery, rewarded them with diabetes and acid reflux.

Not worth my time, and my time was the great rub here. I couldn’t wait till the three o’clock bell rang and I was freed from public school so I could hit the streets and the schoolyard and play ball but oh no, to have to pack that in and go sit in a Hebrew class reading words, the meaning of which were never taught to us, and learning how the Jews had made a special covenant with God, but unfortunately failed to get anything in writing. But I went. Parental pressure, my allowance, the threat of no radio, not to mention I’d get hit. My mother hit me every day at least once. Hitting was very de rigueur in those days, though my father only did once, when I told him to tuck off and he made his displeasure known with a genfle tap across my face that gave me an unimpeded view of the Aurora Borealis. But mom whacked me every day and it was the old Sam Levenson joke—»Maybe I don’t know what you did to deserve it, but you do.» And so it came to pass that I was eventually bar mitzvahed and so had to take special bar mitzvah lessons and sing in Hebrew—and let me tell you, as they say in the Old Testament, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

My mother was the observant one. Because of her, we kept a kosher home. She was pretty strict about dietary laws that forbid pork, bacon, ham, lobster, and many delectable treats available to lucky infidels. To keep my mother placated, Dad faked being observant, but he couldn’t hide his addiction to tasty contraband and gobbled pig meat and shellfish like the Assyrians fell upon the fold. Hence, once in a while at a restaurant, I got to knock off a meal Yahweh, as his friends call him, hadn’t signed off on. I remember what a treat it was when at eight, my father first took me to Lundy’s, the legendary seafood restaurant in Brooklyn where I could pig out on clams, oysters, and shellfish, confident God was nowhere near Sheepshead Bay that day. Lundy’s was the first time I was ever given a finger bowl. I’d never heard of anything so astonishing as finger bowls, and it was a thoroughly exhilarating experience using one. Like having your own swimming pool. So impressed was I that two years later, when my aunt took me there for a shore dinner, all I could think of was, this joint has finger bowls. Consequently, when we ordered steamers and the clam broth was served with them, I was convinced this most be the finger bowl. Intensely excited, my certainty overrode Aunt Ann’s muddled skepticism, and the two of us sat there washing our hands in the clam broth. It was not until the actual finger bowls arrived at the end of the meal did my aunt realize she’d been right and struck me affectionately a number of times, perhaps twelve or fourteen, on the head with her purse.

Еще один очень образный и дающий четкое представление о мироощущении Вуди фрагмент:

Just imagine a scorching summer day in Flatbush. The mercury hits ninety-five and the humidity is suffocating. There was no air-conditioning, that is, unless you went inside a movie house. You eat your morning soft-boiled eggs in a coffee cup in a tiny kitchen on a linoleum-covered floor and a table draped with oilcloth. The radio is playing “Milkman Keep Those Bottles Quiet” or “Tess’s Torch Song.” Your parents are in yet another stupid “discussion,” as my mother called them, which stopped just short of exchanging gunfire. Either she spilled sour cream on his new shirt or he embarrassed her by parking his taxicab in front of the house. God forbid the neighbors should discover she married a cabdriver instead of a Supreme Court justice. My father never tired of telling me that he once picked up Babe Ruth. “Gave me a lousy tip,” was all he could remember about the Sultan of Swat. I thought of it years later when I was a comic working at the Blue Angel and Sonny, the doorman, gave me his character rundown of Billy Rose, the wealthy Broadway sport who loved playing big shot. “A quarter man,” Sonny sneered, having learned to categorize all humans by the square footage of their gratuities. I tease my parents in this account of my life, but each imparted knowledge to me that has served me wrell over the decades. From my father: When buying a newspaper from a newsstand, never take the top one. From Mom: The label always goes in the back.

So it’s a hot summer day and you kill the morning returning deposit bottles to the market to earn two cents per bottle so you can ante up at the Midwood or the Vogue or the Elm, our nearest local three movie houses. Three thousand miles away in Europe, Jews are being shot and gassed for no good reason by ordinary Germans who do it with great relish and have no trouble finding coat holders all over the continent. You sweat your way down Coney Island Avenue, an ugly avenue replete with used car lots, funeral homes, hardware stores, till the exciting marquee comes into view. The sun is now high and brutal. The trolley makes noise, cars are honking, two men are locked in the moronic choreography of road rage and are screaming and starting to swing at each other. The shorter, weaker one is running to secure his tire iron. You buy your ticket, walk in, and suddenly the harsh heat and sunlight vanished and you are in a cool, dark, alternate reality. OK, so they’re only images—but what images! The matron, an elderly lady in white, guides you to your seat with her flashlight. You’ve spent your last nickel on some blissful confection fancifully christened Jujubes or Chuckles. And now you look up at the screen and to the music of Cole Porter or Irving Berlin’s unspeakably beautiful melodies, there appears the Manhattan skyline. I’m in good hands. I’m not going to see a story about guys in overalls on a farm who rise early to milk cows and whose goal in life is to win a ribbon at the state fair or train their horse to transcend a series of equine tribulations and place first in the local harness race. And mercifully, no dog will save anyone and no character with a twang will hook his finger into a jug’s ear to suck out the contents, and no string will be attached to any boy’s toe as he dozes at the old fishing hole.

To this day, if the opening shot of a movie is a close-up of a flag being thrown and the flag is on the meter of a yellow cab, I stay. If it’s on a mailbox, I’m out of there. No, my characters will awaken and the curtains to their bedroom will part, revealing New York City with its tall buildings and every bit of its thrilling possibilities out there, and my cast will either dine in bed with a bed tray complete with a holder for the morning paper—or at a table with linen and silver and this guy’s egg will come to the table in an egg cup so he just has to tap the shell to get to the yolk and there will be no news of extermination camps, only maybe a front page showing some beautiful babe with another guy that sets Fred Astaire off since he loves her. Or, if it’s breakfast for a married couple, they actually care about each other after years of being together and she doesn’t dwell on his failures, and he doesn’t call her a douchebag. And when the movie ends, the second feature is a detective thriller where some hard-boiled private eye solves all life’s problems with a sock in the jaw and goes off with a stacked tomato the likes of which did not exist in any of my classes or any of the weddings, funerals, or bar mitzvahs I attended. And by the way, I never attended a funeral: I was ahvays spared reality. The first and only dead body I ever saw was that of Thelonious Monk, when I stopped off en route for dinner at Elaine’s to view him out of respect as he lay in state in a funeral home on Third Avenue. I took Mia Farrow with me; it was very early in our dating, and she was polite but dismayed and should have known then she was beginning a relationship with the wrong dreamer, but that whole mishigas comes later.

So now the double feature is over and I leave the comfortable, dark magic of the movie house and reenter Coney Island Avenue, the sun, the traffic, back to the wretched apartment on Avenue K. Back into the clutches of my archenemy, reality. In my movie «Sleeper», as part of one comic sequence, by some kind of mind- bending process I imagine I’m Blanche Du Bois from Streetcar Named Desire. I speak in a feminine, southern accent trying to make the sequence funny while Diane Keaton does a perfect Brando. Keaton’s the type who complains, “Oh I can’t do this, I can’t imitate Marlon Brando.” Like the girls in class who tell you how lousy they did on the test and the results come back and they’re straight A’s. Naturally, her Brando is better than my Blanche, but my point is, in real life I am Blanche. Blanche says, “I don’t want reality, I want magic.” And I have always despised reality and lusted after magic. I tried to be a magician, but found I could only manipulate cards and coins and not the universe.

And so, because of cousin Rita, I was introduced to movies, movie stars, Hollywood with its patriotic morality and miraculous endings; and while I brushed off everything everyone tried to teach me, from my parents to my Spanish teachers when I’d already had the two years of Spanish, Hollywood took. Modern Screen. Photoplay. Bogart, Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Rita Hayworth—their celluloid world was what I learned. The larger-than-life, the superficial, the falsely glamorous, but I do not regret a frame of it. When asked which character in my films is most like me on the screen, you only have to look at Cecilia in «Purple Rose of Cairo».

Смотрю онлайн-концерт Дэвида Брауна и вдруг понимаю, что был на концерте «Brazzaville» уже десять лет назад… (Почти день в день и в такие же смутные, но не из-за коронавируса времена.)

И не то чтобы за это время мне ни разу не хотелось еще раз побывать на их концерте, но… даже не знаю, в чем дело, хотя географическая отдаленность от мест, где проходят концерты, определенно играет роль. И Дэвид все такой же душка, и кажется, что и не было этих десяти лет, но все же чувствуешь, что…

… вот так и проходит жизнь 🙂

Quarantine Concert #2

И еще один потрясающий и очень важный для понимания характера Вуди фрагмент:

I was the cynosure of my mother’s five sisters, the only male child, the darling of these sweet yentas who fussed over me. I never missed a meal, nor wanted for clothing or shelter, never fell prey to any serious illness like polio, which was rampant. I didn’t have Down syndrome like one kid in my class, nor was I hunchback like little Jenny or afflicted with alopecia like the Schwartz kid. I was healthy, popular, very athletic, always chosen first for teams, a ball player, a runner, and yet somehow I managed to turn out nervous, fearful, an emotional wreck, hanging on by a thread to my composure, misanthropic, claustrophobic, isolated, embittered, impeccably pessimistic. Some people see the glass half empty, some see it half full. I always saw the coffin half full. Of the thousand natural shocks the flesh was heir to, I managed to avoid most except number six eighty-two—no denial mechanism. My mother said she couldn’t figure it out. She always claimed I was a nice, sweet, cheerful boy till around five, and then I changed into a sour, nasty, disgruntled, rotten kid.

And yet there was no trauma in my life, no awful thing that occurred and turned me from a smiling, freckle-faced lad with a fishing pole and pantaloons into a chronically dissatisfied lout. My own speculation centers around the fact that at five or so, I became aware of mortality and figured, uh-oh, this is not what I signed on for. I had never agreed to be finite. If you don’t mind, I’d like my money back. As I got older, not just extinction but the meaninglessness of existence became clearer to me. I ran into the same question that bugged the former prince of Denmark: Why suffer the slings and arrows when I can just wet my nose, insert it into the light socket, and never have to deal with anxiety, heartache, or my mother’s boiled chicken ever again? Hamlet chose not to because he feared what might happen in an afterlife, but I didn’t believe in an afterlife, so given my utterly dismal appraisal of the human condition and its painful absurdity, why go on with it? In the end, I couldn’t come up with a logical reason why and finally came to the conclusion that as humans, we are simply hardwired to resist death. The blood trumps the brain. No logical reason to cling to life, but who cares what the head says— the heart says: Have you seen Lola in a miniskirt? As much as we whine and moan and insist, often quite persuasively, that life is a pointless nightmare of suffering and tears, if a man suddenly entered the room with a knife to kill us, we instantly react. We grab him and fight with every ounce of our energy to disarm him and survive. (Personally, I run.) This, I submit, is a property strictly of our molecules. By now you’ve probably figured out not only I’m no intellectual but also no fun at parties.

Incidentally, it is amazing how often I am described as “an intellectual.” This is a notion as phony as the Loch Ness Monster as I don’t have an intellectual neuron in my head. Illiterate and uninterested in things scholarly, I grew up the prototype of the slug who sits in front of the TV, beer in hand, football game going full blast, Playboy centerfold Scotch-taped to the wall, a barbarian sporting the tweeds and elbow patches of the Oxford don. I have no insights, no lofty thoughts, no understanding of most poems that do not begin, “Roses are red, violets are blue.” What I do have, however, is a pair of black-rimmed glasses, and I propose that it is these specs, combined with a flair for appropriating snippets from erudite sources too deep for me to grasp but which can be utilized in my work to give the deceptive impression of knowing more than I do that keeps this fairy tale afloat.

А Борис Борисович в модной жилетке отправился в лес )) Ролик, в котором прекрасно все!

Подношение Интересному Времени. Песня 12. Черный Брахман.

Антон добрался до Ивана! 🙂 Или наоборот.

В поисках Лапенко. Пролог. Вечерний Ургант. 10.04.2020

Конечно, за двадцать минут мало что можно спросить (хотя Юрий Дудь за это же время, кажется, успевает больше), но все равно довольно милое интервью. А самое невероятное — как Антон меняет голоса! 🙂 Это просто нереально, ю ноу! 🙂

Антон Лапенко.Вечерний Ургант. 10.04.2020

Покончив с автобиографией Элтона Джона, я взялся за автобиографию Вуди Аллена! 🙂

И некоторые фрагменты настолько пронзительны и настолько важны для понимания характера и личности Вуди, что не могу их не процитировать.

О том, с чего все началось:

But now, I’m ready to be born. Finally, I enter the world. A world I will never be comfortable in, never understand, and never approve of or forgive.

О родителях:

Two characters as mismatched as Hannah Arendt and Nathan Detroit, they disagreed on every single issue except Hitler and my report cards. And yet with all the verbal carnage, they stayed married for seventy years — out of spite, I suspect. Still, I’m sure they loved each other in their own way, a way known perhaps only to a few headhunting tribes in Borneo.

Об отношениях в семье с нескрываемым, хотя и грустным сарказмом:

I always took to anything that required solitude, like practicing sleight of hand or playing a horn or writing, as it kept me from having to deal with other humans who, for no explainable reason, I didn’t like nor trust. I say ‘no reason’ because I came from a large, loving, extended family who were all nice to me. It’s like I was a genetically born louse. <…> As it is, having two loving parents, I grew up surprisingly neurotic. Why, I don’t know.

Ну, и для контраста — совсем другой по настроению фрагмент, в котором Вуди рассказывает, как лет в пятнадцать впервые начал читать книги! До этого его интересовали только комиксы 🙂

Anyhow, I didn’t read until I was at the tail end of high school and my hormones had really kicked in and I first noticed those young women with the long, straight hair, who wore no lipstick, little makeup, dressed in black turtlenecks and skirts with black tights, and carried big leather bags holding copies of ‘The Metamorphosis’, which they had annotated themselves in the margins with things like ‘Yes, very true,’ or ‘See Kierkegaard’.

Еще одна песня, во время прослушивания которой явственно открываются порталы в иные измерения…

Подношение Интересному Времени. Песня 9. Синее Небо Белые Облака

Ах, новый «инженер»!!! 🙂

ИНЖЕНЕР «ПРО АВТОМОБИЛЬ»

Чем больше смотришь, тем лучше понимаешь, насколько это глубокий и многогранный персонаж…

Итоги недели: захотелось завести собаку 🙂

Вчера закончил удивительную, потрясающую, фантастическую, невероятно увлекательную (и здесь можно было бы добавить еще десяток эпитетов, и ни один не показался бы лишним!) автобиографию Элтона Джона!!!

При том, что Элтон, безусловно, входит в десятку моих любимых исполнителей, я не ждал от этой книги ничего особенного и даже не был уверен, что смогу дочитать ее до конца 🙂

Но с первых же страниц я окунулся в мир депрессивных послевоенных пятидесятых, овеянных тоской и ощущением всепоглощающей безнадежности (и действительно, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему, но в случае с Элтоном это по-настоящему грустная и щемящая история, которая в той или иной мере, увы, проходит через всю его жизнь).

Безвременье пятидесятых сменяется бурными шестидесятыми с их заветной триадой, в которой Элтон в равной мере уделяет внимание всему, но главным все же остается рок-н-ролл 🙂  Элтон рассказывает об этом так ярко и вдохновенно, что все это великолепие красок, чувств и свежеобретенных смыслов вместе с удивительными героями тех времен, с которыми Элтон был знаком лично, разворачивается буквально перед вашим глазами!

На смену шестидесятым приходят семидесятые, а затем — все новые и новые времена и эпохи, но интерес к книге не ослабевает ни на секунду! Элтон мастерски рассказывает удивительные, фантастические, невероятные, сказочные и при этом уморительно смешные истории 🙂

В одной из глав Элтон рассказывает о том, сколько времени у него уходит на написание песен (после получения свежих текстов от Берни Топина). Как вы думаете, сколько? Может быть, неделя, месяц или пять лет? 🙂 Нет, на самом деле — всего пять-десять минут на каждую! Если за полчаса ничего не вышло, то дальнейшая работа над текстом прекращается 🙂 Так однажды пока остальные музыканты его группы спускались к завтраку, Элтон написал целых три песни за пятнадцать минут! 🙂 И все бы ничего, но в их числе была «Rocket Man»!!!

В другой главе — история и очень веселая, и одновременно — грустная. Контекст: Элтон Джон находится в Лос-Анджелесе, где дает грандиозный стадионный концерт. За несколько лет до этого он еще в Великобритании и практически никому не известен, но после первого же тура в Штатах он становится звездой мирового масштаба. Чтобы насладиться триумфом, Элтон приглашает в свой дом в Лос-Анджелесе свою семью (маму и отчима) и самых близких друзей…

The next day, I invited my family over to lunch at Tower Grove Drive. Like Captain Fantastic, Rock of the Westies went straight into the US album charts at Number One. No one had ever done that before – not Elvis, not The Beatles – and now I’d done it twice, in the space of six months. I was twenty-eight years old and I was, for the moment, the biggest pop star in the world. I was about to play the most prestigious gigs of my career. My family and friends were there, happily sharing in my success. And that was when I decided to try and commit suicide again.

Again, I can’t remember exactly what provoked me to do it, but as my family were eating I got up from the table by the swimming pool, went upstairs and swallowed a load of Valium. Then I came back down in my dressing gown and announced that I’d taken a bunch of tablets and that I was going to die. And then I threw myself in the pool. I can’t remember exactly how many tablets I swallowed, but it was fewer than I’d taken that night at Caribou studios – a sign that, deep down, I had absolutely no intention of actually killing myself. This fact was brought very sharply into focus when I felt the dressing gown start to weigh me down. For someone who was supposed to be in the process of trying to end it all – who was apparently convinced that life had nothing more to offer him and was filled with a longing for death’s merciful release – I suddenly became surprisingly keen not to drown. I started frantically swimming to the side of the pool. Someone helped me get out. The thing I remember most clearly is hearing my grandmother’s voice pipe up. ‘Oh,’ she said. And then, in a noticeably aggrieved tone – unmistakably the voice of an elderly working-class lady from Pinner who’s realized her wonderful holiday in California is suddenly in danger of being cut short – she added: ‘We might as well bleedin’ go home, then.’

…. :))

И из таких невероятных историй в общем и состоит вся книга!

Когда следишь за хитросплетениями этой фантастической биографии, в тщетных попытках хоть как-то ее осмыслить приходишь к двум равнозначным выводам.

Во-первых, при несомненном таланте Элтона в его жизни было очень много фантастических совпадений, потрясающих случайностей, которые имели определяющее значение (сам Элтон в эпилоге называет их «what ifs»).

Во-вторых, просто видишь, как даже с такой удивительной биографией в жизни очень часто происходят не самые приятные вещи — пожалуй, ничуть не реже, чем у нас с вами. И Элтон к его чести пишет о них открыто и без прикрас.

Вообще, удивительное свойство этой книги в том, что характер Элтона ощущается здесь абсолютно в каждой строчке 🙂 И, конечно, с каждой главой его образ раскрывается, обрастает новыми чертами, но при этом понимаешь, что, пожалуй, главное качество его характера, которое подсознательно всегда вызывало симпатию — это его полная искренность и прямота. Элтон рассказывает о таких деталях своей жизни, которые смело мог бы опустить, он с готовностью признает свои недостатки и ошибки — и это стоит дорогого.

Кстати, книга написана на прекрасном и несложном английском, поэтому читать ее в оригинале — редкое удовольствие 🙂 В русском переводе потеряно, конечно, не все, но тонкий британский юмор, легкое и немного отстраненное отношение к происходящему и к самому себе утеряны безвозвратно. А потому читайте в оригинале 🙂

P.S. Буквально пару минут назад, заглянув в Википедию, я узнал, что текст этой книги написал… вовсе не Элтон Джон, а некто Алексис Петридис 🙂 Тем удивительнее, что характер Элтона здесь ощущается в каждой строчке. Каким же мастером слова оказался этот неизвестный джентльмен! Снимаю шляпу.

Ах, какое старенькое )

Подношение Интересному Времени. Песня 7. Песня N2

Мир всеобщей самоизоляции подарил редкую возможность увидеть любимых музыкантов в ютубе. Даже тех, кого уже и не мечтал там увидеть, например, Пола Саймона!

Paul Simon — The Boxer (Acoustic Version March 2020)

Или старину Брайана, который очень трогательно исполняет «You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away» и затем еще несколько минут признается в любви к битлам 🙂

Brian May: Youve Got To Hide Your Love Away — Microconcert #9 — 31 March 2020

Мда..

Посвятим же апрель саморазвитию ) Да так, чтобы в конце себя было не узнать )

Подношение Интересному Времени. Песня 6. С Той Стороны Зеркального Стекла.