Song composed by Cole Porter

Is the best art indeterminate? Does it leave itself open to infinite reasonable interpretations? For that matter, is a work of art truly open to multitudinous dissections even when such appears to be the case on the surface? What is the case with abstract art? Is it really open to only one interpretation, that it is a commentary on the concrete? Is it truly possible that the loosest seeming art winds up being the most straightforward? Does structure add complication- something of an unexpected twist when the structure, in the first place, was there to aid understanding?

I know, I know. I started out to write about Cole Porter and my favorite of his songs, a song which defies misunderstanding. The poor woman is unable to appear today due to being lynched. Singers often bring fresh emotions to songs, shining lights on essences which even the songwriter may not have noticed. Many works from the era of great American songwriting hide melancholy and more inside themselves. But this song… from Ethel Waters onwards, is freighted with the same powerful emotions. This is not a complaint. Consider the Beatles’ Yesterday as another song that would seem uninterpretable as anything but reverie and loss.

The apotheosis of abstract in the popular song arena appears to be the myriad psychedelic songs that began pouring into the common consciousness in the Sixties. Humorous nonsense songs have always featured, but these songs looked like they were meant to be taken seriously. They had structure, but they definitely left their meaning open to interpretation.

Kieron Gillen riffs on this question of interpretation in the second volume of his Phonogram series. Nowadays, at a certain age, we become certain that a certain pop song reveals its true meaning just to us as we are the real owners of the work. The artist served merely as conduit as the art passed from the nonexistent to the ultimate recipient. For this reason, we define the real experience of art as perception, not creation.

Is that so far afield? Isn’t that why we like giving gifts- for the experience of seeing the end result in the recipient? Perhaps it is a power thing as when the comedian skillfully controls the waves of laughter passing over an audience. On the other hand, it is unquestionably the artist who is drained and the audience who are reinvigorated.

I haven’t forgotten Cole Porter… his best songs spark off the detonation of wit amid the sadness. He wrote a lot, but that was his job, as the excuse goes, (I blog a lot…) but then he goes and writes this little miracle about abuse, revenge, and more death. It could be an opera (and it has been). Instead, it is this tale of a wronged woman that successfully skirts all sentimentality.

That’s the trick with interpreting Miss Otis Regrets… It demands dignity. You can’t sing it as a wronged woman. All debts have been paid. The wrong is addressed. This is goodbye.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 266 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Comic Strip created by Garry Trudeau

In elementary school or thereabouts, I discovered the paperback racks at the local library. If you dug around long enough, you could find collections of Peanuts strips from the newspaper, an unexpected delight limited only by the librarian’s desire to have the borrower leave something behind for the other patrons.

When I was eleven, my oldest brother received The Doonesbury Chronicles as a Christmas present. Those were the days when opened presents sat under the tree for a few days as everyone contemplated and compared gifts. After all, siblings may have been separated by gulfs in our interests, but we shared a common competitiveness.

I have no recollection of seeing my brother unwrap the gift and, for a couple days, I probably didn’t even notice that it contained comics. Left alone in the living room with the tree one winter afternoon, I nudged the book open and concluded that the artwork looked odd. Also, it had a written introduction that made minimal sense at the time. Most importantly however, the book was huge.

The first few strips, however, were pretty much slapstick about football and roommates. It took a while to ease into the politically charged humor that receives the most attention. I don’t know that I was that much more politically adroit than anyone else my age because we all had parents who watched the evening news on the big networks and read the same local newspaper. We talked about the news of the day in school. We all knew about the Vietnam War and Watergate and a hundred other frightening matters. Even by that age, you knew that you lived in the nuclear age and were well aware that somewhere on the other side of the planet, a warhead was pointed at everything you loved.

Coping came more easily than I’ve drawn it because we were children and current events were still the backdrop to learning math, going swimming, and figuring out a hook shot. But still, the news filtered through and then there was this comic strip. Somehow it managed to treat bigotry and corruption and existential fear with a little humor.

Trudeau de-fanged the terrors by laughing at them. He never suggested the terrors were not real or that you were a fool for worrying about them, only that they fell within the purview of humanity and people are quirky.

Somewhere back in the day, I remember reading that the strip Gasoline Alley was notable for being the first to have its characters age as the years passed. Trudeau has done the same in Doonesbury. I think that has had an interesting effect on the experience of the strip. Because art can go anywhere willed by the creator’s imagination, we have been exposed to the private events and musings of many characters over the years. More than Opus or Charlie Brown, the feeling of an actual relationship accrues. While Doonesbury is primarily humor, the occasional tragedy arises and carries weight because of that long relationship. Humor can be quick, but tragedy takes time.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 267 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Book written by Jim Steinmeyer

For adults, non-fiction has always been the better seller over fiction (juvenile books are another story). Religious non-fiction is the traditional leading category by a wide margin. Humor and computers perform the worst of categories tracked by Publishers Weekly. Books related to the performing arts only [generic throat-clearing sound] perform slightly better. Jim Steinmeyer works within a non-fiction sub-category of the performing arts: magic. It is amazing that he makes a living.

This is all a long way to go to say that we are talking about books that you probably have to possess a subject-matter interest in the first place before you even realize that the things exist. Magic tricks are like dinosaurs- we were supposed to grow out of our interest as adults if we had not managed to turn it into a profession.

Steinmeyer writes books that merit the wider audience than they have acquired. More than that, they deserve an audience larger still, because they are fascinating portraits of America at the start of the twentieth century as experienced by some well-traveled souls. For that matter, any writer who can make the oft-told story of Harry Houdini fresh clearly has some chops.

The baseline requirement in non-fiction would have to be that the author knows what they are talking about, formally trained or otherwise. Steinmeyer has been designing illusions for decades and has studied the work of great magicians of the past, going so far as to present scholarly abstracts on the workings of particularly interesting historical curiosities.

Expertise does not require that the author subsume their personality or their opinion. If so, we would not have humor or political categories. But opinion seeps in everywhere, if only in the decisions about what to leave out or more blatant overt conjectures. In political books, we take offense when conjecture offends our sensibilities. Otherwise, I suspect the only offensive conjectures are those that seem obviously incorrect (to us anyway).

Steinmeyer has written about Harry Houdini, Chung Ling Soo, Charles Fort, Harry Thurston, and many others. In addition to their unusual professional pursuits, they were all idiosyncratic and intensely-focused individuals. Life choices and odd behaviors alone would beg authorial comment. Add to that Steinmeyer’s knowledge of the magical arts and we also benefit from his thoughts on how they did what they did.

All of Steinmeyer’s expertise would come to naught if he could not write and he certainly can. From the opening of his tales through to the end, he not only gets the story across, but also organizes matters in interesting and fruitful ways. Whether or not fiction outsells non-fiction, the best historical authors have learned much from the sweeping epics that dot the imaginary landscape. That cross-pollination takes the illumination of the human condition from fiction and creates a backbone for the historical facts to reach out and touch our current lives in ways only dreamt of by Tacitus.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 268 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.