Miscellany #6: Living in the Movies, the Official Preppy Obituary, and the Athleticism of Art

1. Two great movie apartments: Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and Alice (Woody Allen, 1990)

While preparing my upcoming Gentlemen Prefer Brunettes post on Vertigo, I pulled these screenshots of one of my favorite movie apartments, Midge's San Francisco apartment. We see a lot of this apartment, but are never explicitly told if it's a studio (in the bedroom sense - it is an art studio) or a one-bedroom apartment. More to come on Vertigo in my next Gentlemen Prefer Brunettes post. For now, enjoy this incredible apartment in all its glory:

I'm probably not ever going to write a blog post about Woody Allen's 1990 film Alice, which Wikipedia somewhat passive-aggressively notes received "mildly positive reviews" (although it was Keye Luke's final film, and was originally called "The Magical Herbs of Dr. Yang," which makes me feel like there's a lot to unpack), but enjoy this fantastic apartment anyway.

2. Lisa Birnbach on Brooks Brothers's bankruptcy

The Brooks Man.

As Official Preppy Handbook author Lisa Birnbach recently wrote in the New York Times, Brooks Brothers provided "James Madison’s suits, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wardrobe and the Union Army’s uniforms during the Civil War," as well as uniforms for Roosevelt's Rough Riders and coats for presidents including Abraham Lincoln.

I like Brooks Brothers - I own many Brooks Brothers ties, tweeds, suits, and button-down shirts. I am saddened to see news of its bankruptcy because I love the clothes from the company that I own. But I also understand two things: first, Brooks Brothers hasn't made those clothes in a very long time, and second, Brooks Brothers is an increasingly hard sell in a more inclusive world. While I am disappointed that Birnbach's article ignores Brooks's trend towards sweatshop-made mediocrity - when she exhorts her readers to buy Brooks Brothers button-down shirts, suits, and polos, she neglects to mention that after the imminent closing of the company's factories in Haverhill, MA, Queens, and Garland, South Carolina, none of these products will be made in the United States (so much for the Union Army!) - I am more disappointed that her article fails to address what I suspect is a deeper problem with the resuscitation of Brooks than COVID-19.

The problem I'm referring to was summed up beautifully by Daniel Penny when he wrote about his "fear that you can’t uncouple conservative aesthetics from conservative politics, that the man in the Brooks Brothers suit is usually The Man." While it makes sense that Wynton would wear Brooks Brothers, it doesn't help his image among young jazz fans, or an inclusive one for women (Brooks Brothers makes women's clothing, of course, but it is most famous for its clothes for men). And while James Madison, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt are all great examples of Brooks's place in the annals of American history, those examples also perpetuate myths about that history - namely, that it is completely white and completely male.

Contrast Birnbach's article with this op-ed written by Robert Hill for USA Today, where Hill describes his time as one of the very few Black employees. While he wore the Ivy League look - the natural-shouldered, button-down-collared, repp-tied look of which Brooks was the primary creator and exemplar - he ended up embittered by Brooks's discriminatory policies. When Hill writes, "By the time of my sophomore year in high school, I was one of those African American kids who affected the Ivy Jivey persona. But, that wasn't enough — I wanted to sell it," you can hear the disdain for his past self seeping through the type. He wanted to get in the door at Brooks to sell something he loved; when he got there, he ended up selling something he wasn't allowed to fully be a part of. Why doesn't Birnbach mention prominent Black wearers of Brooks Brothers in her pantheon of American history? One reason might be that many of the most famous Black Ivy icons avoided it. Miles Davis, to take just one example, shopped at jazz-lover Charlie Davidson's Andover Shop in the mid-1950s before he, like Hill, moved on from Ivy for bigger and better things. (She doesn't even mention Wynton Marsalis, though Brooks Brothers is the official outfitter of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Marsalis has championed their suits for years.)

"Save Brooks Brothers!" Lisa Birnbach cries. Me? I love my clothes from Brooks Brothers, but I also understand that the Brooks of the past is gone, and that it won't be coming back no matter how they move forward from their bankruptcy. Part of me is sad - I'd love to see repp ties, button-down oxford shirts, and sack suits (made in America!) on the shelves at 346 Madison, and see people flocking in to buy them. But part of me also wishes Brooks would just go down with their mothership and leave some space for new labels to thrive, labels that have a deeper commitment to domestic manufacturing and inclusivity, without the weight of an exclusionary history on their shoulders: labels like Drake's in England, or Rowing Blazers here in America, or even J. Press, the historic Ivy clothier who has weathered several storms by streamlining their operation to focus on their relationships to the history of Ivy League style in general and to American manufacturing, and to bridging the gap between past and present, with a balance of baggy traditional fits and hip newer styles that somehow doesn't make the stick-in-the-muds who wear these clothes too angry.

Even if we save Brooks, we won't be saving the Brooks Birnbach wrote about in her (very white) Preppy Handbook; we won't be saving James Madison's Brooks, or Teddy Roosevelt's, or her own father's or even her own. But if we let it die, we might just be saving something else - the chance for the clothes Brooks ushered into American history to survive; to prove that the man in the navy blazer and repp tie doesn't always have to be The Man.

3. Art as Sports: Wynton Marsalis on Sports Look

In 1986, jazz trumpeter and educator Wynton Marsalis appeared on Sports Look (later renamed Up Close) with Roy Firestone on ESPN to discuss the intersections between jazz and sports. Marsalis was a superstar at this time - he won Grammys for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo in 1983, 1984, and 1985, and for Best jazz Instrumental Album in 1985, 1986, and 1987. 1985 also saw him engaging even more directly with the ways jazz amplifies an underrepresented Black voice with the release of Black Codes (From the Underground). Marsalis had a huge publicity machine, a huge audience, and critical acclaim. He was perfectly positioned to be an authority on jazz, and on its face it's very cool to see him featured on ESPN. Imagine seeing that today!

However, as I wrote about briefly here, Marsalis is a complicated figure. While he raised the profile of jazz hugely in the 1980s and 1990s, one could argue that he did so at the expense of established musicians working with fusion and avant-garde styles, some of whom had been making ends meet in the loft scene for years before Marsalis hit it big. Marsalis has always advanced a conservative view of jazz, prioritizing tradition and history and emphasizing the need for the blues and swing to be the foundation of any meaningful jazz expression. Sometimes, this conservative vision has had problematic real-world consequences beyond simple style disagreements - for example, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra is almost completely male, and has been since its inception.

Sports, of course, has its own troubled history with inclusion and with managing a conservative image as times changed in America, and that history is perhaps no more important to consider than it is right now. So while it's cool to see Marsalis showing up on ESPN, it's also interesting to hear what he has to say because we have an intersection of two traditionally male-dominated modes of expression, and hearing what Marsalis (who, while he has unfairly become a meme of fuddy-duddiness in jazz, is also pretty clearly both a champion of the Jazz Tradition™️ and the most culturally visible jazz educator and standard-bearer in the last 40 years, whose influence, in one way or another, reshaped the jazz landscape in the 1980s and 1990s) has to say about them can perhaps help us understand the challenges jazz is wrestling with as it seeks to shed its overwhelming maleness.

Marsalis appeared on Sports Look in 1986 to discuss the question of "sports as art." Wynton does two noteworthy things early in the interview, as he and Firestone discuss basketball and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. First, he makes a strong argument for intelligence as the root of both jazz and basketball. This is hugely important because jazz and sports are two areas where the intelligence of Black creators has been discounted over and over again. Rhythm and athleticism are often used as racist tropes, with whites dismissing the work that Black artists and athletes put into their craft by claiming that these skills are inherent in Blacks, that they have a genetic predisposition to excel in these areas. This trope not only explains away the humiliation white supremacists feel when, for example, white athletes are bested by Black ones, but it also serves to damn Black artists and athletes with faint praise: if you’re inherently good at sports or music (rather than succeeding due to hard work and intelligence), this racist trope says, then you should stay playing music and sports, not trying to compete with whites intellectually. Wynton pushes back against this trope, emphasizing the intelligence of musicians and athletes. And he does it in a skillful way - while the style of, say, the Harlem Globetrotters might conceivably be open to accusations of minstrelsy, Wynton frames basketball style as specifically rooted in intelligence when he says that “style is an aesthetic proposition” - an intentional artistic statement, in other words - and that Kareem “uses his intelligence to develop the style of the game.”

However, Wynton then pivots to an interesting argument that's worth quoting more at length. Kareem, Wynton says,

reminds me of Monk. You know, you can’t get an angle on Kareem. And then when you think have the angle on him, he’ll do something - Like Monk will play a blues phrase, you know [Wynton sings the opening phrases of “Blues Five Spot”], that’s, like, the same phrase, people been playing that since the 1800s, but he’ll just play it a certain way, or he places it a certain way in the time, and you think, you know, ‘Oh, I know what this is,’ but you really don’t know what it is. That’s like Kareem will throw those, throw a shot on you, you know, it’ll look like the same thing but it won’t be the same thing. 

To me, the interesting part of this analogy is that, while Wynton is making an argument about the aesthetics and intelligence of jazz and basketball, which are directly comparable, there is one major difference between Abdul-Jabbar's playing and Monk's music, one that Wynton's description glosses over: Kareem is trying to win. When Kareem plays a shot that "look[s] like the same thing but it won't be the same thing," he is doing that to trick the opposing player into losing the game. When Monk plays a phrase that seems familiar but is made new and surprising by the way it sits in the time, no one loses, or is supposed to lose.

This brings us to the way that Wynton can frame jazz in an athletic, ultimately masculine and ultimately conservative way. Jazz hasn't been competitive in any meaningful way since the 1930s and 1940s, when "tenor battles" and "drum battles" were staged as publicity stunts. The sweaty histrionics of Buddy Rich were about winning, not about any "aesthetic proposition." Ethan Iverson speaks to this directly in his essay on Whiplash:

Back to the photos of Buddy, Tony, and Elvin at the top. These two photos don’t deserve the weight I’m going to give them now, but I just can’t resist. When I see those impeccably turned out devotional black masters posing with the sweating white athlete, my hackles begin to rise. It’s not just the drumming, it’s the whole relationship they were afforded to their work in the 20th century. Again, this is unfair. I’ve certainly seen Elvin Jones sweaty in a T-shirt with a towel around his neck after a gig! Still, my fear is that Whiplash slouches in as a sweaty white athlete and blocks our view from the devotional black masters.

Buddy Rich as the sweaty white athlete does block our view of the Black masters. However, the sweaty Black masters themselves can easily be twisted into a racist view of art as mere athleticism. A great example of this twisting can be found in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a novel full of problematic depictions of non-white culture:

The tenorman jumped down from the platform and stood in the crowd, blowing around; his hat was over his eyes; somebody pushed it back for him. He just hauled back and stamped his foot and blew down a hoarse, laughing blast, and drew breath, and raised the horn and blew high, wide, and screaming in the air. Dean was directly in front of him with his face lowered to the bell of the horn, clapping his hands, pouring sweat on the man’s keys, and the man noticed and laughed in his horn a long quivering crazy laugh, and everybody else laughed and they rocked and rocked; and finally the tenorman decided to blow his top and crouched down and held a note in high C for a long time as everything else crashed along and the cries increased and I thought the cops would come swarming from the nearest precinct. Dean was in a trance. The tenorman’s eyes were fixed straight on him; he had a madman who not only understood but cared and wanted to understand more and much more than there was, and they began dueling for this; everything came out of the horn, no more phrases, just cries, cries, "Baugh" and down to "Beep!" and up to "EEEEE!" and down to clinkers and over to sideways-echoing horn-sounds. He tried everything, up, down, sideways, upside down, horizontal, thirty degrees, forty degrees, and finally he fell back in somebody’s arms and gave up and everybody pushed around and yelled, "Yes! Yes! He blowed that one!"(1)

This description calls to mind saxophonists like Illinois Jacquet, honking and screaming players who brought down the house with showstopper solos. Kerouac doesn't describe the music as intelligible, just as nonsense sounds employed in a "duel." The real-life Jacquet was an erudite musician who doubled on the bassoon(1), not simply a sweaty tenor machine. Jacquet speaks eloquently about the education of jazz musicians in Dizzy Gillespie's To Be or Not to Bop:

Working in bands, that was your college. If you played music, the big bands were your college.... And most of the people in the bands, the musicians, were college graduates or started out to be doctors and started playing music. But they were all educated musicians, mostly, in their fields. You got in a band, the discipline was there. The band itself was a school.... So when a youngster like me would join a band like Lionel Hampton or Basie, everybody was like professors.

Contrast this view of the jazz musician with Kerouac's! Likewise, the "cutting contest" of the type encouraged by promoters like Norman Granz is undercut by Sonny Rollins, who participated in one of the most famous tenor battles in jazz, Tenor Madness with John Coltrane in 1956. Interviewed earlier this year in the New York Times, Rollins said,

When I played with Coltrane, I had the impression — and back then it was true — that I was much more popular than him. I remember what Kamasi Washington said about “Tenor Madness”: “Sonny, you weren’t even really playing.” I wasn’t really playing. Coltrane was playing. I was only playing halfway, because I thought that I was the guy and that Coltrane was this young whippersnapper. That was my mind-set. It was immature.... I don’t want people to think that I’m saying, “Oh, wow, I could have played much better,” but that’s the story of “Tenor Madness.” My attitude on it wasn’t right.

For Rollins, the "tenor battle" or "cutting contest" mentality is "immature"; for him, competition and jockeying to win between artists is damaging to the art itself. (Tenor Madness was released in 1956. Tenor battles really only came back into vogue with the arrival of saxophonists like Joshua Redman, James Carter, and so on in the wake of Marsalis's fame in the 1990s, when the mid-1950s were back in vogue in the jazz world.)

To return to Marsalis's analysis of Monk and Abdul-Jabbar, then, we can see him working with two ideas that, historically, have been in opposition: first, that jazz and basketball are art forms created by intelligent artists; and second, that the goal of the artists in both forms is to compete and win, either with another artist or with the audience. In both views, the artist is unquestionably male.

For a (often unintentionally) revealing look at Marsalis's male world at its peak, check out Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life, Carl Vigeland's awestruck account of Wynton's septet on tour, largely covering the period between 1989 and 1994, interspersed with passages by Marsalis himself. One passage calls to mind the Robert Glasper interview with Ethan Iverson that caused some controversy a couple of years ago. Speaking about women in the audience, Iverson said, "I guess that's one of the reasons to play, really." Glasper said, "I've seen what that does to the audience, playing that groove. I love making the audience feel that way. Getting back to women: women love that. They don't love a whole lot of soloing. When you hit that one groove and stay there, it's like musical clitoris. You're there, you stay on that groove, and the women's eyes close and they start to sway, going into a trance." Vigeland writes, "[E]verywhere you looked in that crowd there was another beautiful woman." Marsalis then writes:

And I'd be lying if I told you that beautiful women don't make you play better. Or try to play better.... Hell, we're from New Orleans. We understand picnics and parades. And sweet things. And the blues. And making love and the wangdang doodle dandy.... I like the tenderness of an uncertain kiss which innocently begins with a question mark but crescendos to an exclamation point.... Then. I am a man. I love the road. It's not an effort to play for people.... I want to go, every night, want to swing - hard - with the men in the band, with people. Willful participation with style and in the groove - that's swing. And once you feel it you got to get you some more.

I truly don't believe that when he said "I guess that's one of the reasons to play, really," Iverson was being intentionally misogynistic or sexist (Glasper is another matter). Rather, he was simply falling into a decades-old masculine, macho attitude about playing music. After all, the music is played to win - against an opponent, against an audience, against resistance from a woman. That's art as sport.

NOTES

(1) Kerouac describes the "sweaty white athlete," too, in the form of George Shearing:

And Shearing began to rock; a smile broke over his ecstatic face; he began to rock in the piano seat, back and forth, slowly at first, then the beat went up, and he began rocking fast, his left foot jumped up with every beat, his neck began to rock crookedly, he brought his face down to the keys, he pushed his hair back, his combed hair dissolved, he began to sweat. The music I picked up. The bass-player hunched over and socked it in, faster and faster, it seemed faster and faster, that’s all. Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of the piano in great rich showers, you’d think the man wouldn’t have time to line them up. They rolled and rolled like the sea. Folks yelled for him to "Go!" Dean was sweating; the sweat poured down his collar. "There he is! That’s him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes! Yes! Yes!" And Shearing was conscious of the madman behind him, he could hear every one of Dean’s gasps and imprecations, he could sense it though he couldn’t see. "That’s right!" Dean said. "Yes!" Shearing smiled; he rocked. Shearing rose from the piano, dripping with sweat; these were his great 1949 days before he became cool and commercial.