Favorite Things
My Favorite “My Favorite Things”
Sugary, sentimental, and oh so familiar, The Sound of Music is easy to write off as one of those classics you play in the background while the Christmas cookies are baking. You may look up from the gingerbread to see director Robert Wise's use of the Salzburg landscape in the musical set pieces. Or sing along to some of the beloved Rodgers and Hammerstein's songs. Or even manage to hiss appropriately at various Nazi baddies or the calculating baroness.
Julie Andrews and urchins in The Sound of Music.
But watch closely and you'll notice some good old-fashioned star power. In 1964, when she started work on The Sound of Music, Julie Andrews had already made her mark in the theater world. She debuted at age 19 in the Broadway production of The Boyfriend and later conquered London and New York as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. She had a Mary Poppins Oscar on the shelf and had attracted raves in the non-musical film, The Americanization of Emily, a role she accepted to avoid being type-cast as a movie nanny.
Julie Andrews sings “I Have Confidence.”
Her performance as Maria shows signs of her stage experience, but it is so open and natural she claims your screen attention effortlessly. In close up, she is radiant—projecting Maria’s infectious joie de vivre with easy energy. In the musical numbers, with Wise’s camera setting her against spectacular landscapes, she’s turbo-charged and physically assured. We all know the iconic opening number when she embraces an entire mountain range in her arms and present it as a personal gift. But be sure to watch her careen around the Medieval streets of Salzburg in “I Have Confidence.”
Even in “My Favorite Things,” sung in a tiny bedroom crowded with those cute von Trapp urchins, Andrews’s voice and image glow with infectious warmth. Sure, jazz fans will argue that John Coltrane built a jazz classic around the vamp waltz in Richard Rodgers’s tune. But before you roll your hipster eyes at the suggestion that Andrews’s version deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Trane’s, watch it and marvel.
Last Year’s Favorite Thing (Part 1)
My arts and culture life was full of much good stuff in the past year. You maybe read about some of it here. But I don’t think anything was as transporting as the time I spent in the company of Clarissa Dalloway in the delicate but expansive world of Virginia Woolf’s radiant novel.
Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway is without chapters or divisions. It almost seems to unfold in a single breath. Like James Joyce’s Ulysses, the story spans a single day. Mrs. Dalloway is having a party that night. Early in the book, she steps into the London morning to buy flowers and the city comes alive as Big Ben strikes the hour.
There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
Not everything is tea and crumpets in Mrs. Dalloway’s world, as we find out as the book continues through the day. We slip from one life and consciousness to another, each one complex and human. Most are less bedazzled than Clarissa’s—but the prose never loses its music and ecstatic energy.
Next Year’s Favorite Thing
After a short hiatus, I’m back in George Balanchine’s world via Jennifer Homans's brilliant biography, Mr. B. My timing is great. I picked up the story in the 1930s, just as Balanchine was getting ready to set his first dance in America, Serenade. A few weeks after I read Homans's fascinating account of the dance’s genesis, PBS's Great Performances aired a recently recorded staging of it.(Previously, the only video record of the piece was a fuzzy Dance in America episode from 1990.) If you can’t access the Great Performances video, there’s a wonderful history and appreciation of Serenade here, including interviews and video excerpts from several decades of performances.
The opening tableau of George Balanchine’s Serenade.
It is, if not his greatest, certainly Balanchine's signature ballet, and Homans's writing about it is insightful and impeccably researched. She consults several different eyewitness descriptions of Mr. B's process, none exactly the same. The famous opening tableau, the curtain rising on 17 women dancers with their right arms raised, may have been “inspired” by a Nazi salute. At the first meeting in the rehearsal room, he told the dancers of the harrowing years in Russia during World War I and the subsequent outbreak of the revolution: "gunfire in the streets, scavenging for food, killing and eating cats, and freezing in subzero temperatures." And he talked anxiously about Hitler and the Heil salute. Then transformed the gesture into a moment of beautiful introspection. In Homans’s words:
He showed his young American dancers how to stand facing front and to raise their right arms straight up, but then to break this harsh pose by turning their arms and heads softly to the side, gazing up at their hands, which shielded their eyes from the light of the moon.
If you’re in New York City, you have any number of chances to see Serenade live as part of the NYCB’s regular seasons. I’m looking forward to March 22, 2024, when the company will perform it in Chicago as part of their national tour. More information here. .
Least Favorite Things
His naughty-playboy look combines elements of well-off hair-metal rocker in his dotage, white hip-hop impresario, and “Jersey Shore” cast member. “Which hetero guy in the world wouldn’t want to look like this?” his global wholesale director, Fabien Girardi, asked me.
Philipp Plein. The man and his bling.
If you were one of the folks fascinated by Robin Leach and his puffily intoned tributes to the Livestyles of the Rich and Famous, you’ll be glad to hear that sleaze doesn’t sleep. Naomi Fry’s gleeful New Yorker profile of the “maximalist” designer Philipp Plein describes the history and reach of his billion dollar fashion empire, which caters to, as one fashion podcaster puts it, “people who want to make sure everybody can tell that they’ve spent a thousand dollars on a bedazzled T-shirt.”
Fry’s story is a parade of excesses, including a $13,000 shirt made of python hide, a $1500 dog bed—Plein’s first million dollar product idea—and a Mini-Cooper-sized sneaker made of cake. The shoe-cake was displayed at a promotional event at his $250 million Los Angeles home (Snoop Dogg and Tommy Lee were there, of course). After the party, Plein had it towed to Skid Row to feed the homeless. Marie Antoinette would be proud. Let them eat…um…shoe?
My Favorite Things, Critics Edition
I’ve never been too keen on The Holidays. Parties were nice, and I’ve even sung an carol or two. But since my younger days, I’ve associated December with two things: The various year-end academic deadlines I faced as student and teacher. And the thrill of the year’s Top Ten Lists. Forget studying—this was a time to linger around the magazine rack and turn to the back pages of Time, Newsweek, The Village Voice. What did my favorite critics (David Edelstein, Robert Christgau, Roger Ebert, Dave Kehr) pick as the best movies or songs of the year?
It was different in the ‘70s and ‘80s. There was no computerized tally algorithming the personal choices into definitive uber-lists. After perusing the magazines, I couldn't sit down and watch The Elephant Man or The Shining on my phone, or add Prince's Dirty Mind to my Spotify playlist. The corner Blockbuster was still a few years away. LPs cost real money. If you missed anything on the year-end list, you had to pray that the film would be rereleased in theaters when the Oscar nominations were announced. But that was almost unnecessary. If you were serious about film and a new movie by David Lynch or Stanley Kubrick came out, you had already seen it. In a theater.
Today, I still look forward to reading those Top Ten lists. But things are a little more complicated.
Serious criticism in popular press has dwindled, making the way for TikTok influencers ("Hey! This movie/book/show/song/app/game is really cool!") or any schmo who starts a website (ahem). I’m in the nosebleed seats when it comes to pop music, but streaming makes it easy for a dabbler like me to consult some year-end tally and discover a few choice cuts. Building a movie “watch list” is a little more complicated. Film critics’ taste ranges from the esoteric and quirky (The New Yorker’s Richard Brody) to the populist and bland (remember Gene Shalit?), and now, to the ridiculous (like the dozens of Rotten Tomatoes folks who raved about the holiday slasher flick, It’s a Wonderful Knife).
So what’s an enthusiast to do? Find a few trusted writers. Talk to friends. Go with the popular flow. For all the evils of the streaming explosion, it offers a chance to curate your own entertainment world from boundless options. Hallmark Christmas 24/7?—Done! Carols arranged for Balinese Gamelan?—Clang along! Holiday slashers?—Scream and scream again.
Still, the year’s end is the year’s end. So here is my very personal Top Ten list, offered in a time when the “small stuff” is as important as ever. It can perhaps help assuage the swirl of anxiety that is roaring around us all.
Paul’s Favorite Things 2023
Best Drive: The Four-Mile Approach to our cabin Up North.
Best Walk: Up and down the zig-zag walkway to Shorewood's Atwater Beach
Best Noodle: Frozen Udon from Mo's Asian Food Market in Milwaukee.
Best Breakfast: Blueberries, Faye Greek Yogurt (2%), Cascadian Farm Granola.
Real Best Breakfast: Warm cinnamon roll from The City Market.
Best Pen: Zebra F-301 Ballpoint, Black Ink, Fine point (.7mm).
Best App: Alarmed, which has reminded me of hundreds of appointments by playing the first few bars to Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata.
Best Reason to Stay Up Past 10 pm: Steven Colbert's Late Show monolog and "Meanwhile."
Best Reason to Wake Up Before 9 am on Sunday: Fareed Zakharia's opening editorial on CNN's GPS: Global Public Square.
Best Reason to Wake Up Before 5 am: Sunrise over Lake Michigan.
Thanks for reading. May you all have a wonderful holiday and a 2024 blessed with your own favorite things. The Friday Five will return in the New Year on January 5th.