Photo by The Daily Beast
Entertainment
03.22.14
Can Bach Make It on NYC’s Subways?
On
Friday, musicians took to underground train platforms around the world
for the fourth ‘Bach in the Subways’ event, playing the composer’s
music. How charmed were harried New York commuters?
A crowd of around 15 people were gathered to watch a cellist play a suite by Johann Sebastian Bach next to a sign reading: “We do not want money but ask simply that you listen with your heart and soul.” The audience shifted as people caught their trains, the announcement, arrival and departure of which loudly interrupted the music.
Welcome to the fourth ”Bach in the Subways Day.” It’s an annual music event dedicated to showcasing the music of the German baroque composer that occurs on his birthday. (This year Bach would have been 329.) The performer was Dale Henderson, the founder of Bach in the Subways, a Bostonian cellist and music teacher who now lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Henderson, 37, whose feverish facial contortions while playing the cello place him in the visually expressive school of classical musicians, originated the day in 2011 with two other performers. This year there are 75 participants in 13 cities spanning 3 continents. In addition to stations throughout America, Bach was performed last Friday in Canada and Germany by violinists, saxophonists, double-bassists and accordionists for between one and two hours a set. In Taipei, Taiwan, a Bach flash mob consisting of cellists and tuba players took over a train.
At Henderson’s midnight recital, the cluster of people that saw him perform resembled a crowd surrounding a crime scene. One woman, Bo Park, shouted at Henderson, “How long have you been playing? For a few hours?”
“Five minutes,” came the reply.
“I love how he’s playing in the subways,” Park said as she stepped into her subway car. “But why is he playing?”
Why indeed? While Henderson continues playing, Sudeshna Mukerjee, who handles the social media for the initiative, fills me in on the ambitious motive which is a crusade to save classical music from extinction. “Dale’s notion is sowing the seeds of the future generation”, she says. “Classical music is dying out so with this initiative he’s trying to save music and expose people to it by raising awareness.”
When I catch up with Henderson afterwards he is aware of the pitfalls of sounding pretentious (“I try not to be gloom and doom about it because it’s not attractive”) but soon warms to his theme. “I’ve always connected with Bach in a special way,” he says. “Bach in the Subways is a soup kitchen for a world starving for classical music.”“I’ve always connected with Bach in a special way. ‘Bach in the Subways’ is a soup kitchen for a world starving for classical music.”
Not everyone is hungry. During a lunchtime performance by saxophonist Jeremy Danneman at Brooklyn’s Lorimer Street station, I interrupt a couple sharing a tender embrace to tell them about Bach in the Subways. “I would prefer to hear ‘The Entertainer,’” the young lady says (they declined to give their names). Her paramour disagrees: “It’s amazing how the saxophone corresponds with the composer.”
After his two-hour set Danneman, 34, a wiry dead ringer for Sean Penn’s lawyer character David Kleinfeld in the film Carlito’s Way, tells me he shares his birthday with Bach. “The highlight was a school field trip that came specially to see Bach in the Subways who were perfectly behaved,” he says. “I don’t know which school it was but they got here on the G train.”
Danneman is no stranger to public performances--he founded a non-profit music charity Parade of One that performs in Rwanda--but for the Bach gig he modified his location. “I started on the Brooklyn-bound side but got a better reaction on the Manhattan-bound side. More people are going to Manhattan because they’re getting started on some sort of action and on the other side they’re on the way home.”
Bach, who was himself a keen organ player as well as composer, seems well-suited for buskers.
“People don’t expect to hear Bach so that makes it almost a humorous thing,” Danneman says. “There’s a very close relationship between the way Bach composed and the way jazz musicians improvise. Charlie Parker was really influenced by Bach.” Other players felt a kind of cultural civic duty. “I especially love it when parents and their kids stop to talk to me about what it’s like being a musician and where they can go to learn how to play,” says cellist Layne McNeish who played Bach at the 47-50 Rockefeller Center St station during morning rush-hour before going to her job as a Broadway PR.
As Bach on the Subways has grown in size and stature, its audience has expanded beyond surprised strangers. Software programmer and part-time musician David de la Nuez, from Washington Heights, brought along a chair to watch Henderson play at midnight. “I took a two-hour nap before I came here,” he said before adding, “my wife and I will likely fight tomorrow about who gets to stays at home to be with the kids and who sees more Bach in the Subways.”
Such reactions vindicate Henderson’s dream. He’s also grateful to the MTA for being so accommodating to his access requests: “New York is the best place in the world for this. In LA there were problems that were only solved at the last minute. In Berlin they had to call it off because the authorities were so authoritative.”
The consistency of the help provided by New York’s transit authorities is not matched by the reaction from the audience. “One guy got really angry I wouldn’t take a dollar and poked me while I was playing,” Henderson recalled. “And a homeless person writhed in seeming ecstasy while I played. That wasn’t such a bad thing--I’ve had worse reactions!”
Photo by Oleg Klimov/Epsilon/Getty
World News
03.23.14
The Mafia Ruling Ukraine’s Mobs
Organized crime helped Putin grab Crimea, and may open the way for him to take more of Russian-speaking Ukraine.
Before and since Russia’s move to annex the Crimea, many who favor the pro-European government in Kiev have argued that these “bosses” might be provocateurs from Russia’s FSB intelligence service or Spetsnaz special forces infiltrated into Ukraine to orchestrate pro-Russian sentiment. But Berg, an organizer of the pro-Ukrainian rally last week where pro-Russian thugs stabbed a student to death, says there’s a different and in some ways more frightening explanation: the ominous hand of organized crime.
A public prosecutor, who declined to be named in this article for reasons of personal safety, says local hoodlums are operating among the pro-Russian protests in the restive eastern Ukraine, helping to direct them on the instructions of Kremlin-linked organized crime groups. He points the finger specifically at the notorious Seilem mob, which has been closely tied over the years to ousted Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych, a onetime governor of Donetsk, who is now in exile in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.
“We have already seen organized crime working hand-in-hand with the Russians in Crimea,” says the prosecutor. In that breakaway Black Sea peninsula, Moscow helped install former gangland lieutenant Sergei Aksyonov as prime minister, and his background is well known. Aksyonov and his Russian separatist associates share sordid pasts that mix politics, graft and extortion in equal measure and together they helped steer Crimea into the Russian Federation. Police investigations leaked to the Ukrainian press accuse Aksyonov of past involvement in contract killings. Back in January 1996, Aksyonov was himself injured after his car overturned on the Simferopol-Moscow road during a shootout.
“Why should it surprise you,” the prosecutor in Donetsk asks, “if the same dynamic [as in Crimea] is playing out here? … Maybe there are Russian intelligence agents on the ground, but Moscow through crime networks has an army of hoodlums it can use, too.”
The international media were late to pick up on Crimea’s toxic nexus of organized crime, political corruption and politics. But across post-Soviet Ukraine the three have long been regarded as interchangeable and inseparable. And the eastern and southern parts of the country are the worst of all. “Political corruption is ingrained in eastern Ukrainian political culture,” the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, noted in a 2012 study.
The three regions most notorious for the closest relationships between gangsters, oligarchs and politicians—Crimea, Donetsk and Odessa—were the most resistant to the Euro-Maidan revolution that led last month to the ouster of Yanukovych. And now all three regions are at the forefront of the pro-Russian fight-back against the new national leaders in Kiev.
Taras Kuzio, a research associate at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, who wrote the Jamestown report, says the internal political turmoil in Ukraine should be viewed through the lens of the hand-in-glove relationships between politicians, mobsters and the so-called “red directors,” managers-turned-businessmen who are steeped in the ways of Soviet-style public sector corruption and deal-making.
The red directors also have their protégés: men such as billionaire Dmytro Firtash, the gas-trading mogul who was arrested by Austrian police on suspicion of mob activity earlier this month following Yanukovych ‘s ouster. Nor are the ties limited to the Ukraine. Their tentacles embrace Moscow: Firtash has joint business ventures with Russian billionaire Arkady Rotenburg and his brother, Boris, close friends and judo sparring partners of President Vladimir Putin. The Rotenburg brothers, not coincidentally, are prominent on a U.S. sanctions list announced Thursday by President Barack Obama to target Putin cronies.
The symbiosis of politics, organized crime and unscrupulousbiznesmeni developed quickly in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union in much the same way as it did in Russia. The ambitious, the greedy and the powerful lunged for the huge profits that could be made. The state was disintegrating. The big industries – energy, mining and metals – were being privatized, and may the most ruthless man win. “Individuals such as Yanukovych, Aksyonov and their Donetsk and Crimean allies literally fought their way to the top,” says Kuzio. In Donetsk, Yanukovych as governor “integrated former and existing organized criminal leaders into his Party of Regions,” says Kuzio.
In Crimea, “every level of government was criminalized,” according to Viktor Shemchuk, who served for many years as the chief public prosecutor in the region. “It was far from unusual that a parliamentary session in Crimea would start with a minute of silence honoring one of their murdered ‘brothers,’” Shemchuk recalled in a December interview with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a consortium of investigators and journalists tracking developments throughout Eastern Europe.
Donetsk was no different. A March 2006 cable from the US embassy to the National Security Council – one of several on Ukraine released by WikiLeaks—noted that Yukanovych’s Party of Regions was a “haven for Donetsk-based mobsters and oligarchs” and had commenced an “extreme makeover” with the help and advice of U.S. political consultants, including “veteran K Street political tacticians” from Washington D.C. and a onetime Ronald Reagan operative, “hired to do the nipping and tucking.”
According to the cable, Yanukovych was “tapping the deep pockets of Donetsk clan godfather Rinat Akhmetov.” Now supposedly Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarch, Akhmetov has been keeping a low profile in these early post-Yanukovych days, staying out of the limelight and issuing inoffensive statements on how important it is for everybody to get along.
Another US embassy cable from then-Ambassador William Taylor in September 2007 drilled down on how Yanukovych was centralizing Donetsk crime and political and business corruption in his party – something he would go on to do on an even larger national scale when he was subsequently elected as President in 2010. After Yanukovych became president, according to Ukrainian officials, more than $20 billion of gold reserves may have been embezzled and $37 billion in loans disappeared. In the past three years, they claim, more than $70 billion was moved to offshore accounts from Ukraine’s financial system.
The Americans have sent teams of experts to Kiev to help Ukraine’s interim leaders follow the money. “We are very interested in working with the government to support its investigations of those financial crimes,” U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt told reporters last week, “and we have already, on the ground here in Ukraine, experts from the FBI, the Department of Justice and the Department of Treasury who are working with their Ukrainian counterparts to support the Ukrainian investigation.”
Many of the financial crimes are likely to trail back to Moscow. Yanukovych confidant Firtash (the gas mogul picked up in Austria) admitted during a December 2008 meeting with then-US Ambassador Taylor that he had entered the energy business with the assistance of the notorious Russian crime boss Semyon Mogilevich, who, he said, worked with Kremlin leaders.
“Many Westerners do not understand what Ukraine was like after the break up of the Soviet Union,” Firtash told the ambassador. When a government cannot rule effectively, the country is ruled by “the laws of the streets,” he said.
That’s still the rule. The old order has much to fear from reform and change and will do all it can to preserve its wealth and power—and its best bet for that to happen is to look to Russia.
For precisely that reason, rights campaigners and reformers in Ukraine’s interim government are racing against time to uncover as much of the mob story as possible. An anti-corruption panel headed by Tetyana Chornovol, an investigative journalist who was nearly beaten to death in December for her reporting, is starting in earnest to recover billions of dollars of stolen money and piece together the financial crimes of the Yanukovych regime.
The Daily Beast learned something about these operations first hand when a team from the organized crime police raided a discreet boutique hotel in downtown Kiev where this correspondent was staying. According to the police the hotel is owned by Eduard Stavitsky, Ukraine’s former energy minister. He is now believed to be in hiding in Russia. The police searched all the rooms looking for any Stavitsky documents and combing through financial records. As one of the investigating officers told me, “We need to move fast before the cover-ups start.”
Photo by University of Chicago Press
Books
03.23.14
The Stacks: Pete Dexter’s Indelible Portrait of Author Norman Maclean
Norman Maclean didn’t start writing fiction until he was past 70. The man himself turned out to be as remarkable as his fiction.
This piece on Maclean was Dexter’s first profile for a national magazine, and it is reprinted here with the author’s permission. Written with care and precision, it is searching and funny, and a fine tribute to a man Dexter deeply admired.
The Old Man and the River
By Pete Dexter
Early morning, Seeley Lake, Montana. The sun has touched the lake, but the air is dead still and cooler than the water, and the fog comes off the surface in curtains, hiding some of the Swan Range three miles to the east. And in doing that, it frames the rest. It is the design here, I think, that nothing is taken without compensation, except by men and fires. They leave all the holes.
On the lake a cutthroat trout breaks the surface; pieces of it follow him into the air. He breaks it again, falling back. The water mends itself in circles; the circles disappear. You could never say exactly where, but that’s how things mend; it’s how you get old, too. Not that they are necessarily different things. The place is quiet again. The sun has touched the lake, but the lake still belongs to the night. To the night and to the old man.
He is in the main room of the cabin putting wood on the fire. I hear him humming—a long, flat note, more electric than musical. I think it is a sound he makes without hearing it. He moves from the fireplace to the kitchen wearing a fishing hat, runs lake water out of the spigot into a dented two-quart pan, puts that on the stove to heat. He starts a pot of coffee, leaves it on a counter, and pushes out the door to urinate in the yard. He and his father built the cabin in 1922 as a retreat from whatever civilization there was in Missoula, and they didn’t do it to come down off the mountains and have to look at an indoor toilet.
He comes back in, humming, and surveys the kitchen. He scratches his cheek, remembering where he is. He locates the coffeepot, checks to see what is inside. Part of him is somewhere else. Probably not so much of him that he’d piss in the fireplace and throw the wood out the door, but it isn’t impossible.
The guess is that the part of the old man that’s not in the kitchen is someplace tangent to August of 1949, Mann Gulch, Montana, where thirteen of sixteen smoke jumpers were killed in the first hours of a wildfire that got into the crowns of the trees there. He is in the last chapter of that story now—the jumpers have become his jumpers, he looks at tall trees and imagines fire in their tops, sucking the oxygen out of the air, and feels how helpless a man is in its presence—and while it’s still three hours until he sits down and puts himself back in Mann Gulch to confront it, he is headed there already, feeling his way over what has already been done, measuring what is left.
As far as I know, that’s the only pleasure there is in writing—until something’s finished, anyway. And the old man works carefully and is entitled to his time alone with what he’s done. I stay in bed looking out the window, waiting for him to call me for breakfast.
***
The
book was a Christmas present from my brother Tom. I don’t usually read
Christmas books. He brought it with him from Chicago, catching a ride
east through a blizzard with a girlfriend who wasn’t his girlfriend
anymore. I’d met her even when she was his girlfriend, and I owed him
for coming. Christmas Eve, she put him out at Exit 4 of the New Jersey
Turnpike.So I read it, I think in late March 1980. I had just taken the Christmas tree out anyway, and when I came back into the house it was lying there in a forty-dollar pile of pine needles. A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean. It was a thin book, two long stories divided by a shorter story, on the back a picture of an old man who obviously takes no prisoners, looking at you as if you’d just invented rock ‘n’ roll.
That night I called Tom. “Holy shit,” I said. “Who is this guy?”
“I had him for Shakespeare,” he said.
I said, “The fucker is Shakespeare.”
Don’t tell me literary criticism is a dead art. It turned out Maclean wasn’t Shakespeare, but then Shakespeare wasn’t a forest ranger. Or a fisherman or a logger. He may not even have been a literature teacher at the University of Chicago, but they don’t talk about that there.
Maclean was all of those things, and when he retired from the university at seventy, his two children talked him into writing down some of his stories. A River Runs Through It was published in 1976, when he was seventy-three, and the first 104 pages of that book—the title story—filled holes inside me that had been so long in the making that I’d stopped noticing they were there.
It is a story about Maclean and his brother, Paul, who was beaten to death with a gun butt in 1938. It is about not understanding what you love, about not being able to help. It is the truest story I ever read; it might be the best written. And to this day it won’t leave me alone.
I thought for a while it was the writing that kept bringing it around. That’s the way it comes back to me: I hear the sound of the words, then I see them happen. I spent four hours one afternoon picking out three paragraphs to drop into a column I was writing about the book, and in the end they didn’t translate, because except for the first sentence—“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing”—there isn’t anything in it that doesn’t depend on what comes before it for its meaning.
If that sounds more like building a house than like building a story, it’s not an accident. Maclean knows what it is to work with his hands, and for him there is as much art in a cabin as there is in a story, as long as it’s as well done. And there are all kinds of stories and all kinds of houses, but only the ones you have lived in matter.
***
At seven-thirty, Norman Maclean brings in coffee and orange juice.Seeley Lake lies in the valley between two mountain ranges: the Swan to the east, the Mission to the west. The cabin is on the west side of the lake, built of lodgepole pine on land leased from the U.S. Forest Service in one of the best stands of western larch left in the world. Some of the trees are seven hundred years old. A hundred yards south is a public camping area.
On warm weekends during the summer, the camp fills up with “outsiders”—people from places like Helena and Great Falls. Maclean also calls them “the marijuana set.” Sometimes they steal his firewood. “They defile this place. They come in on motorcycles, they yell all weekend, and Sunday night they’ll steal your dog on the way home.”
After August, though, they don’t come back. The ski boats disappear from the lake, the fish come back to the surface in the morning and at dusk. “The bears and I take over after Labor Day,” he says. “Two of them sat right there on the steps last year. I’d come home from fishing or a walk, and they’d be there waiting for me. I’d honk the car horn, wave my hat…” He touches his head, then frowns. “Did you see my hat?”He will not work on the porch; there is too much out there to watch, and he will not indulge himself that there are mornings he can’t write. He doesn’t have the time.
We are standing outside. I don’t see his hat; on the other hand, I don’t see bears. It turns out they are hard cases and won’t move for hats anyway. “It’s no good for anybody when bears lose their natural fear of men,” he says. There is a lot of truth in that—it is two days since a couple of college kids were killed by a bear north of here—but there is a scolding in what he says, and I don’t think he would say it except for the lost hat.
Out on the lake a boat bangs past, then a line, a skier. The skier falls. Maclean watches the small explosion in the water—a leg, a ski, a life jacket. “Sink,” he says.
For six weeks after Labor Day, Norman Maclean has the west side of the lake to himself. It snows for about ten days in early September, then turns warm. Every morning he writes, from nine or nine-thirty to noon. He sits at a small red table in the middle of his living room—the same table where he’s just eaten breakfast—and squeezes out three or four hundred words from Mann Gulch, in longhand. Words that will be rewritten three or four times.
He will not work on the porch; there is too much out there to watch, and he will not indulge himself that there are mornings he can’t write. He doesn’t have the time.
“When it’s good,” he says, “I see my life coming together in paragraphs.”
After the writing he takes a bath in the lake. If it’s snowing, he gets cold. In the afternoon he walks or fishes, visiting the lakes and rivers and mountains of his stories, crossing tracks half a century old.
In October it snows again, this time with nothing behind it but more snow, and the old man closes up the cabin and drives back to Chicago to wait out Montana’s winter.
“Right here, this was the place,” he said. We were standing beneath a pine tree, looking a mile across Holland Lake to the place where runoff from one of the Swan Mountains empties into it. A waterfall. “I used to come here with Jessie, before I married her, and tell her what a hell of a fellow I was going to turn out to be. I don’t know if she believed that bullshit, but she used to get a far-off look in her eyes…
“Her family was Catholic, but they all jumped the fence somewhere along the line. She was from Wolf Creek, population one hundred eleven, and my father married us in Helena. And that woman kept me in place.
“I used to mourn the loss of my youth. I started when I was about twenty, and one day she said, ‘I knew you when you were young, Norman, and you were a goddamn mess.’
“Eighteen years before she died they told her it was hopeless. Emphysema. She wouldn’t leave the cigarettes alone. The last years, she lived with an oxygen tank, but she never whined, I never heard her cry. She died in December 1968, in Chicago, and I thought I died with her.”
***
It
is my second day at Seeley Lake. Norman has shown me the Pyramid
Mountain Lumber Company. Now he wants to show me the nurse. “You’re
going to love her,” he says. “A big, tough talker from Butte. She came
here because we had no doctor—they’re all in the cities doing research,
where the money is. So I went over to see what this nurse was like. She
was in another room with a patient.“I sat down outside and the first thing I heard was, ‘Open your mouth wider, you sonofabitch, so I can see how big a pill to throw down there.’ A great woman. She knows where I fish, what medicine I need; she and Bud know where to find me if I don’t come back. We go off boozing a couple of times a summer, go to some fancy restaurant fifty miles away.“
That sounds like a good nurse, all right, but somehow by the time we pack the car—a Thermos of ice water, field glasses, six shots of Ancient Age bourbon in a mason jar, and “Did you see my hat?”—we decide to visit Bud’s place instead. Bud Moore is his friend who at sixty-three still runs thirty miles of traplines up into the mountains, who walked his wife almost to death taking her into the Idaho wilderness for their honeymoon.
The place is twenty-six miles north on blacktop, another three and a half over gravel. The only way in or out after December is by snowmobile or snowshoes. Maclean uses his little car without lugging the engine; he doesn’t have to stop talking to shift. He understands the car, but then, he understands the canned peaches in his refrigerator. He can tell you where in Oregon they come from, how they’re canned, and maybe what is done with the pits. He knows his furniture, each of his trees, every log in his cabin—faults and graces—all on a personal basis. He knows everything he touches. Knowing what has touched him has been harder.When the book was finished, three New York publishers turned it down as ‘western.’ One of them wrote to point out, ‘These stories have trees in them.’
“When I tell you how to pack a mule,” he says, “goddammit, that’s how you pack a mule.” He is talking here about his stories, but the stories are as much a part of Maclean as he is of them, and a man like this doesn’t start writing at seventy to flirt with the truth, or the language. “I got five hundred letters about the book,” he says, “a lot of them from fishermen. There’s no bastards in the world who like to argue more than fishermen, and not one of them corrected me on anything. That is my idea of a good review.
“I knew when I started that it was too late for me to be a writer, that all I could hope to do was write a few things well.” We are bouncing up Bud Moore’s road now. “I assemble pieces of ordinary speech. Every little thing counts. You take the way it comes to you first, with adjectives and adverbs, and cut out all the crap. You use an adjective, it better be a sixty-four-dollar adjective. Turn off the faucet and let them come out a drop at a time.”
It took more than two years to put together the 217 pages that make up A River Runs Through It. “At the end,” he says, “I was almost afraid to sleep, afraid I’d lose the connections as it came together.”
When the book was finished, three New York publishers turned it down as “western.” One of them wrote to point out, “These stories have trees in them.” Finally it was the University of Chicago Press that took the book, the only work of fiction it has ever published.
In 1977 A River Runs Through It was nominated by the Pulitzer Prize fiction jury, but the advisory board decided not to make the award, calling it “a lean year for fiction.”
I know just enough about the Pulitzer people to guess that what happened was that one of them noticed the trees, too. The movie offers came in anyway.
“Now, there,” he says, “is a bunch that eats what they find run over on the road. One studio sent out some soft-talker first to tell me about art and the integrity of what I’d written. Then they sent me a yellow-dog contract saying they could do what they wanted with my stories, that they could publish a book about the movie—about my stories, my brother, the people I loved and love—and choose anybody they wanted to write it. I told them, ‘When we had bastards like you out West, we shot them for coyote bait.’
“So the studio people turned it over to their New York attorneys—that’s as low as it goes, New York lawyers who can’t make it in New York and go to California—and they studied the situation for a year and discovered the book was autobiographical. I’ve got a cardboard box full of letters, and it was eighteen months before anybody read the sonofabitching book.
“Another year passed, and another soft-talker showed up, saying he cared about art. I told him what had happened with the studio, but he was with an independent producer. He said it would be different, and the next thing that came in the mail was the same goddamn yellow-dog contract that no West Virginia coal miner would sign. They said they had to have artistic control. Not with my family, my stories. Nobody else is going to touch them.”
I ask if he ever thinks about what he might have written if he’d started earlier. He shakes his head. “I try to live without regrets. Besides, I think there are probably patterns and designs to our lives. Mostly, of course, it’s fuck-ups, but there are designs too …”
Norman Maclean didn’t go to school until he was ten. The truant officers got him while he was out hunting. His father was an immigrant Scottish Presbyterian minister and had kept his older son at home and educated him himself.
Paul was three years younger and went to school. Mornings the brothers studied, afternoons they went into the woods or fished the Big Blackfoot, a river the family came to look on as its own. The brothers were fighters and fishermen. Paul was a gambler, a drinker, a genius outdoors. He became a reporter for a small newspaper in Helena, and later, when he was killed, it was probably over gambling debts. The men who beat him to death were never caught. Norman was less of a gambler, less of a drinker, less of a genius outdoors, and he went to Dartmouth, where one of his teachers was Robert Frost.
“I don’t think Frost ever read a paper any of us wrote,” he says. “We’d meet once a week around the fireplace in the basement of the chairman of the English department’s house. Frost would just walk back and forth in front of the fireplace and talk and talk and talk. Dramatic monologues. There was a sense of character in everything he said and everything he wrote. I am directly indebted to him. As a writer of prose, my debts are nearly all to poets.”
Maclean graduated from Dartmouth and taught there two years. He came back to Montana and worked for the U.S. Forest Service for another two years. Then he went to the University of Chicago as a graduate assistant, teaching three sessions of English composition.
“The University of Chicago is a tough place. I had to get drunk Friday night so I could spend all weekend in bed, marking papers.” And summers he would come home to Montana, trying somehow to marry the things he found beautiful—the woods and language—and live with them both. He would do that all his life, but his talent was teaching.
“It’s like shooting a scatter-gun, or fishing, or anything else,” Maclean says. “Take a collie out into the field every day of his life, show him a bird and hold his tail straight, he isn’t going to learn to point. And if you don’t have the genes, you can teach until you die and never be better than a C—or a D +…”
Three times Maclean was given the University of Chicago’s award for excellence in undergraduate teaching—an award that traditionally is given only once. There have been honorary degrees from other universities; the last one, from Montana State University at Bozeman, particularly touched him. He is professor emeritus at Chicago, and there is a scholarship in his name, set up by some of his former students. One of those students is Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who from time to time tells a law-school class that the best way he knows to prepare for the law is to take Shakespeare from Norman Maclean.
“Shakespeare,” Maclean says—“he must have known more about writing than anybody else ever did. Every year I said to myself, ‘You better teach this bastard so you don’t forget what great writing is like.’ I taught him technically, two whole weeks for the first scene from Hamlet. I’d spend the first day on just the line, ‘Who’s there?’”
***
Bud
Moore’s house sits on high ground between two ponds, a two-story log
cabin he built himself. From the corner of the porch you can see the
Swan Mountains; turning your head, you see the Missions. “Look at the
notch work,” Maclean says. “Look at the selection of logs. People think
log cabins are a lost art, but the truth is they’re better now. The old
ones were generally built with the same trees they cleared to build on.
You could stand in the middle of the living room and the wind would blow
your hat off…”While he looks for his hat, I read a note on the front door. Bud is in the Bob Marshall Wilderness on the other side of the Swans. He went in with his dogs and his grandson a day or two ago and is not expected back for a week.
“There is a lake on the other side,” he said. We were a mile from the base of one of the Swan Mountains. “Paul and I would climb over in the morning, catch our limit in George Lake, and climb back at night.”
He studied the mountain. A steep, hard climb. Two thirds of the way up, the trees stop growing. “Goddamn, I wish I were good enough to do that again.” The name of a lady we both know somehow got into it then. “Of course I would follow her up there,” he said. “Who would mind breaking a leg like that?”
Maclean walks over to the tent where Bud Moore lived during the two years he was building the cabin. He shows me where a grizzly was shot trying to get in. “That bear ran half a mile after the bullet passed through his heart,” he says. “After he was dead, that’s how much hate he had, a half mile …You can feel that sometimes in a rainbow [trout] too…”
He heads downhill through some woods, tripping now and then on fallen trees. He doesn’t slow down. “Being old isn’t great,” he says, “but you can’t kick when most of your colleagues are on the other side of the ground.”
On the way down he identifies trees by which needles are best to sleep on: Balsam fir is good. Spruce, you might as well sleep standing up. He points out the different wild flowers. “There’s Indian paintbrush… there’s fireweed… there’s bear shit, over near that aspen tree …”
Bear shit strikes me as a colorful western name for a wild flower: I can picture little bunches of it growing here and there up to a tree with a beehive. But it turns out bear shit is bear shit, even in Montana. I ask, “I don’t suppose you can tell which way the bear was going?” but the old man is already moving ahead, humming. We come to a clearing, the site of a small abandoned sawmill. It is where the grizzly ran out of hate. We stand there a moment admiring the spot.
On the way back we stop at a fork of the Swan River, which is the river he fishes when he isn’t fishing Blackfoot. It is more peaceful than the Blackfoot and runs in sight of the mountain peaks where there is always snow.
The Blackfoot is wider and faster and unforgiving, its view is largely a canyon, and the fish he catches there, sometimes he can feel them hate. The Blackfoot is where he crosses time.
Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.
Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fisherman in western Montana, where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.
—A River Runs Through It
It was the Swan, though, where Bud Moore found him last summer. Lying out on some rocks, not knowing what had happened to him.Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fisherman in western Montana, where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.
—A River Runs Through It
Back at the cabin we sit together on a log near the porch and drink bourbon and ice water out of the Thermos cap. I ask about it. “I don’t know what happened,” he says.
“I was fishing, I must have slipped.” He isn’t asking for help.
I hand him the Thermos lid; we drink liquor and look at Bud Moore’s place. He smiles at the electrical wires leading in. “She’ll have him putting in a toilet next,” he says.
From the log I can see the tops of the Mission Range. The old man has been there and left his tracks in everlasting snow. It is coming together now, mending, he sees it in paragraphs, is almost afraid to sleep for losing the connections.
He asks for no help.
He knows that when the time comes there are friends who will know where to look. “Come back,” he says. “We’ll go fishing.”
When I look over, his eyes are in the branches of Bud Moore’s tallest trees, imagining a fire in the crowns. He begins to hum.
Photo by Brendan O'Sullivan/Photoshot, via Getty
Entertainment
03.22.14
The Week in Death: Clarissa Dickson Wright, One of ‘Two Fat Ladies’
The chequered life of Clarissa Dickson Wright, the larger of the two stars on the eccentric cooking show Two Fat Ladies.
Clarissa Dickson Wright was a recovering alcoholic, running a bookshop for cooks in Edinburgh when the producer Patricia Llewellyn was inspired to pair her with the equally eccentric Jennifer Paterson, then a cook and columnist at The Spectator. The emphasis of the program was to be on “suets and tipsy cake rather than rocket salad and sun-dried tomatoes,” the producer declared. Hence bombastic tributes to such delights as cream cakes and animal fats were mingled with contemptuous references to “manky little vegetarians.”
Not all the reviews were kind. Victor Lewis Smith in the London Evening Standard referred to the ladies’ “uncompromising physical ugliness” and “thoroughly ugly personalities.” Another critic quipped: “Perhaps handguns shouldn’t be banned after all.” Most, though, became instant addicts and predicted future cult status. By 1996 the program was attracting 3.5 million viewers.
The Triumph motorbike and sidecar which sped the two fat ladies around the countryside might have appeared contrived (although Paterson was a keen biker), but their kitchen-sink comedy could never have been scripted. Clarissa Dickson Wright would come up with such lines as “look at those charming looking fellows” when describing scallops, and advise businessmen to come home and cook “to relax after the ghastly things they do in the City.”
Not content to confine themselves to the kitchen, the indomitable pair ventured out into the field, gathering mussels in Cornish drizzle—using their motorcycle helmets as pails—and perilously putting out to sea in a sliver of a boat to catch crabs.
Clarissa Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmeralda Dickson Wright was born on June 24 1947, the youngest of four children. “My parents had great trouble deciding what to call me in the first place,” she explained about her abundant christening, “but then they were so delighted they had finally found a name, they got pissed on the way to the church.” To decide which name should come first, “they blindfolded my mother and turned her loose in the library, where she pulled out a copy of Richardson’s Clarissa.”
Her father, Arthur Dickson Wright, was a brilliant surgeon who was the first to extract a bullet from the spine without leaving the patient paralysed; he also pioneered the operation for stripping varicose veins and his patients included the Queen Mother, Vivien Leigh, and the Sultana of Jahore. He had met Clarissa’s mother, Molly, an Australian heiress, while working in Singapore.
Clarissa’s first memory was of eating a hard-boiled egg and a cold sausage on a picnic at Wisley at the age of three. Her father, though basically miserly, did not stint on household bills. He had pigeons flown in from Cairo and a fridge permanently full of caviar. Clarissa remembered consuming “deeply unhygienic but delicious” things wrapped in banana leaves.
When her parents entertained, Clarissa read recipes to the illiterate cook, Louise, who in turn would squabble with Clarissa’s mother about what they were going to serve. One day, Louise stood at the top of the stairs: “Madam,” she said, “if you make me cook that I’ll jump.” “If you don’t, Louise,” Mrs. Dickson Wright retorted, “you might as well.” (Clarissa also had memories from around this time of Cherie Booth “always doing her homework in school uniform in the middle of louche Hampstead parties—she was a swot.” Later she observed the budding union between Booth (“desperately needy”) and Tony Blair (“a poor sad thing with his guitar”). Later still she observed that the “wet, long-haired student” that she had known had been replaced by a man with “psychopath eyes. You know those dead eyes that look at you and try to work out what you want to hear?”‘I used to say that all I had left in life was my integrity and my cleavage. Now it’s just my integrity.’
Clarissa’s father became a progressively violent alcoholic, so that when he came home “one would take cover.” He broke three of her ribs with an umbrella and on another occasion hit her with a red-hot poker. She later confessed to poring over botanical volumes in search of suitable poisons and scouring the woods for lethal mushrooms.
Boarding school proved a wonderful refuge. She then did a Law degree externally at London (her father refused to pay for her to go to Oxford unless she read Medicine) and was called to the Bar by Gray’s Inn in 1970. It was while she was at home studying for her Bar final that a letter arrived for her mother while the family was at breakfast. It turned out to be from her father, announcing divorce proceedings. After her father left the house Clarissa Dickson Wright never saw him again.
She was by then a regular pipe smoker, consuming two ounces of Gold Block a week. The first woman to practise at the Admiralty Bar, she received excellent notices from, among others, Lord Denning, and was elected to the Bar Council as a representative of young barristers.
Things started to go awry, though, when her parents died in quick succession in the mid-’70s—her mother in 1975, her father several months later. Her father left his entire £2 million fortune to his brother, explaining his decision in a caustic rider to his will. Clarissa’s mother, he wrote “never helped me and sought to alienate my children.” Clarissa’s sisters had married men either too old or too young, and her brother’s fault was to be “seeing Heather (one of Clarissa’s sisters) again.” As to his youngest daughter: “I leave no money to Clarissa, who was an afterthought and has twice caused me grievous bodily harm, and of whom I go in fear of my life.” The family contested the will to no avail.
It was Derby Day when Clarissa came home to find her mother dead. “It was a shock I quite simply couldn’t handle,” she recalled. She went to her boyfriend’s house and surprised everybody by pouring herself a large whisky: “I remember thinking ‘Why have I waited so long? I’ve come home.’ I felt this enormous sense of relief.”
Her “habit” soon consisted of two bottles of gin a day, and a bottle of vodka before she got out of bed. “Suddenly it was as if I’d done it,” she remembered of her consequent loss of ambition. “I could hear the eulogies at my memorial service in my head, so what was the point of actually going through the mechanics of doing it.” In 1980 she was charged with professional incompetence and practising without chambers; she was disbarred three years later.
Financially this presented no immediate hardship since her mother had left her a fortune. Yet by the age of 40, Clarissa Dickson Wright had blown it all on “yachts in the Caribbean, yachts in the Aegean, aeroplanes to the races—and drink.”
“If I’d had another £100,000,” she conceded, “I’d have been dead.”
At rock bottom she went to the DSS to ask for somewhere to live, only to be told: “We’re not here for the likes of you, you know. You’re upper class, you’ve got a Law degree.”
She began to cook in other people’s houses. “Of course it’s only the upper classes who will become domestic servants now,” she reflected. “Other people feel it demeans them.” One day, when preparing to cook for a house party, she was on her knees, cleaning the floor. “I looked up,” she remembered, “and said ‘Dear God, if you are up there, please do something.’” The next day she was arrested for refusing a breathalyser. “I was carted down the long drive just as the house party was coming up it. From then on, I was inexorably swept into recovery.” It took place at Robert Lefever’s Promise Recovery Centre at Nonington, not far from Canterbury. She retained an affection for Kent ever after.
Clarissa Dickson Wright owed her proportions to drinking six pints of tonic a day over 12 years, leading to “sticky blood” (a condition normally associated with people taking quinine tablets over a long period) and a very slow metabolism. Of the ungallant nature of the Two Fat Ladies title, she said, “Well there are two of us. I have a problem with ‘Ladies’ as it sounds like a public convenience. But which bit do you object to? Are you saying I’m thin?” Her size did not deter suitors. “I get more offers now than when I was slender,” she said. “Especially from Australians. They’re crazy about me.”
It could also be a formidable weapon. On Two Fat Ladies she was known as “Krakatoa” for her temper, and once put two would-be muggers in intensive care. “I didn’t go around beating people up,” she said, “but if people were aggressive to me, then I hit them.”
A knowledgeable food historian, she argued that the “use of anti-depressants is directly relatable to the decrease in use of animal fat (a stimulant of serotonin).” She did not own a television, but went across the road to watch the rugby. Her choice for Desert Island Discs ranged from “The Drinking Song” by Verdi to “Ra Ra Rasputin” by Boney M. The desert island of her imagination was “a Caribbean island during the cool season with lots of shellfish… and perhaps the odd hunky native that one could lure to the sound of music.”
Following the success of Two Fat Ladies, Clarissa Dickson Wright was elected a rector of Aberdeen University and opened a restaurant in the grounds of the Duke of Hamilton’s 16th Century Lennoxlove House.
Then, after Jennifer Paterson died in 1999, Clarissa Dickson Wright presented the One Man And His Dog Christmas Special. She later went on to appear (from 2000 to 2003) in the series Clarissa and the Countryman, with Johnny Scott. It was remarkably un-PC, but the real reason for the fact that the BBC dropped her, she claimed, was that she was too pro-hunting.
Her support for the Countryside Alliance did see her plead guilty to attending a hare coursing event in 2007. She had thought it legal as the greyhounds were muzzled and the magistrate gave her an absolute discharge. “I did not get a criminal record for that,” she said. “I was quite looking forward to going to jail in Yorkshire and writing the prison cookbook. It would have been a rest.” In 2012 she again raised eyebrows when she suggested that badgers shot in any cull should be eaten. Badgers, she noted, were once a popular bar snack: “I would have no objection to eating badgers. I have no objection to eating anything very much, really.”
Her autobiography, Spilling the Beans (in which she claimed, among other things, that she once had sex behind the Speaker’s chair in Parliament) was published in 2007. That and other ventures such as the “engaging county-by-county ramble” Clarissa’s England (2012), and a return to the small screen (filming a three-part series for BBC Four on breakfast, lunch, and dinner) saw her finances steadily improve. One supermarket chain offered her an “awful lot of money” to promote it, but she could afford to turn it down. “I don’t regret it. I used to say that all I had left in life was my integrity and my cleavage. Now it’s just my integrity.”
Her faith was less well defined than her views on field sports. “I’m not a very good or compliant Catholic. I reserve my right to disagree. My ancestors fought with Cromwell. Other ancestors went with Guy Fawkes. So we’re bolshie on both sides.” She admitted attending Mass to “give thanks” and enjoyed AA meetings, describing them as “better than television.”
The love of her life was a Lloyd’s underwriter named Clive who died from a virus caught in Madeira. Latterly she said that she had a long-time admirer. “We are very companionable,” she noted. But they did not live together. “Heaven forfend! I don’t mind cooking his meals, but wash his socks? No.”
Reprinted from The Telegraph
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Photo by Paul Drinkwater/NBC, via Getty
Fashion
03.23.14
Miss Piggy Leans In
Miss
Piggy is confidant, driven, and fights for what she wants. She embraces
her "extra fabulous" looks and is unapologetically outspoken. And she
doesn’t care what you think about it.
Since her emergence on the television screen in the mid-seventies, Miss Piggy has been one of Hollywood’s reigning divas, overcoming and surpassing her years as a nameless swine in a male-dominated group. Her roots were humble and tinged with tragedy. “She grew up in a small town in Iowa; her father died when she was young, and her mother wasn't that nice to her,” Frank Oz told The New York Times in 1979. “She had to enter beauty contests to survive, as many single women do. She has a lot of vulnerability which she has to hide, because of her need to be a superstar." But Miss Piggy persevered, transforming her culpabilities into a successful career and becoming an icon to countless generations.
It was her confident and aggressive personality that first earned Miss Piggy a reputation as the Gloria Steinem of the Muppet world. She is the perfect dichotomy of strength and femininity—she doesn’t take any shit from anybody (either physically or mentally), all the while still maintaining an incredibly glamorous persona. She’s a working woman, with a career ranging from acting as the face of a M.A.C. Cosmetics campaign to serving as a bonafide journalist and a fashion magazine editor in The Muppet Movie. In 1981, Miss Piggy penned her own self-help/advice book, Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life, which, naturally, was a New York Times bestseller for 29 weeks. Her words of wisdom are as sharp and to-the-point as she is: on style, “Style comes in all shapes and sizes. Therefore, the bigger you are, the more style you have”; on dating, “There is only one gift you should accept on your first date—diamonds”; and on beauty, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”
It’s Miss Piggy’s advice on weight and dieting, however, that has truly infatuated audiences and solidified her status as a feminist icon. She uses her large stature to her advantage, claiming “too much exercise can damage your health.” In tabloids, Miss Piggy’s looks and size have often been given negative connotations, when celebrities like Adele, Jessica Simpson, and pre-weight loss Christina Aguilera are compared to her. Yet, if you asked Miss Piggy about weight loss or dieting, she’d simply say “never eat more than you can lift.”
In a 2011 interview, funny woman Chelsea Handler asked Miss Piggy about her weight and classification as “plus-size.” "If by plus you mean I have an extra fabulous, gorgeous give me some of that figure, then yes,” Miss Piggy responded. “If you mean fat, then no.” She struts her stuff and knows she is so goddamn beautiful, the same way feminist-favorite Lena Dunham parades around in the nude on her hit-show Girls. They don’t care if their bodies aren’t perfect. And why should they?
While the foundation remains the same, the definition of feminism has changed over the years. It has come to mean more than a simple equality between sexes; it is now a larger cultural examination of how women treat each other and themselves. It celebrates power and strength, self-confidence and satisfaction, but also the prerogative to still care about seemingly-superficial ideals such as sexual relationships or physical appearance.
No one, be it other Muppets, society, the love of her life “Kermee,” or even, yes, Sheryl Sandberg, has the ability to dictate Miss Piggy’s choices. When asked how she felt about the word “bossy” in relation to Sandberg’s latest “Ban Bossy” campaign, Miss Piggy replied, “[Bossy] is not something that I ever have a problem with…I just let people know that I know karate. And then they just do what I want.”
Today, more than ever, Miss Piggy’s ideals regarding style, beauty, relationships, food, confidence, and authenticity display a strong example of feminism. While her relationship with Kermit the Frog may be a subject of scrutiny, since when couldn’t feminists fall in love?
"When you are in love with someone, you want to be near him all the time,” she once said, “except when you are out buying things and charging them to him."
Sure sounds like girl power to me. Preach, Miss Piggy.
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