Drei ostdeutsche Musicals / Three East German musicals

I've recently been using the film streaming site Kanopy to explore the obscure world of East German musicals thanks to a collection of restored vintage titles from the Communist-era German Democratic Republic made by DEFA, the state film bureau. All three are resolutely apolitical and are designed as middle-of-the-road crowd-pleasing entertainment. 

Revue um Mitternacht (Midnight Revue, 1962) is a light farce in which songwriters and filmmakers are kidnapped and locked up in a mysterious mansion so as to produce a hit musical on a tight timeframe, for almost no discernable reason. Some have described Heisser Sommer (Hot Summer, 1968) as East Germany's pre-saging of Grease due to its rivalry between good-looking troupes of young women and men, but it's more accurate to liken it to the wholesome family-friendly 'good clean fun' of Cliff Richard's The Young Ones (1961) or Summer Holiday (1963). And Nicht Schummeln, Liebling (No Cheating, Darling!, 1973) carries on the battle of the sexes motif to a small town in which a clever female doctor takes on the town mayor at his own game when she forms a ladies' football team to teach him a lesson for commandeering all the town's resources to support the men's football team.   

Of the three Revue is most akin to a frothy Jacques Demy musical, and the lavishness of the sets and production numbers shows the East German authorities' desire to provide an impressive film spectacle for East German viewers. There's also a touch of Busby Berkeley's ambition in some of the set pieces, such as the stage set designed to show off a dozen smartly-dressed semaphore girls, deploying their skills in such a coordinated fashion that long-serving Chairman of the East German State Council, Walter Ulbricht, would no doubt have been proud.

Heisser Sommer is an exuberant tale of perky eighteen-year-olds who hitch-hike to the Baltic coast for their summer holidays at the sea-side resort island of Rügen. A rivalry springs up between the troupes of girls and boys, initially because the girls gazump all the hitch-hiking opportunities, and exacerbated when the boys trick the girls into traipsing across a mosquito-infested swamp to get to their destination. (The mosquitos are at least partially repelled when the girls all light up and smoke cigarettes like veritable chimneys). Many of the songs, as in Grease nine years later, revolve around one-upmanship, with the boys proclaiming their prowess at boisterous 'boy things' and the girls either tearing down their arguments or simply dissing their masculinity and maturity at every opportunity.

Nicht Schummeln, Liebling, the slightest of the three films, follows a similar path, with the founding of the girls' football team to take the prideful boys' team down a peg, but adds a layer of local politics in which the town council is manipulated to honour accidental promises to give the girls the same perks as the boys - chiefly a club-house for the purposes of staging slap-up meals, plus the obligatory song and dance numbers. The girls also present the boys' captain with a live piglet, for some reason. 

Frank Schöbel (c) & Chris Doerk (r)

An idiosyncratic if memorable lyrical turn of phrase

Heisser Sommer and Nicht Schummeln, Liebling are also noteworthy for featuring the real-life husband  and wife team of performers Frank Schöbel and Chris Doerk, who were both highly-popular East German pop performers in their heyday. Both deliver almost ridiculous levels of enthusiasm, immaculate hairdos and toothy vigour, even when required to dance joyfully on cobblestones in fake rain or be pushed down a steep street in a go-kart by slightly crazed schoolgirls.

Sooner or later your legs give way, you hit the ground

Thursday music corner: Pete Townshend (b. Chiswick, 1945) joined local skiffle and rock group The Detours in late 1961 at the behest of new member John Entwistle and with the agreement of band leader Roger Daltrey. Learning that an American band had the same name, in 1964 they renamed themselves The Who. The Who have released 12 studio albums between 1965 and 2019, and following the 1978 and 2002 deaths of drummer Keith Moon and bassist John Entwistle, Townshend and Daltrey are the only two surviving members. Townshend has released seven solo studio albums from Who Came First (1972) to Psychoderelict (1993), with the most successful in chart terms being the platinum-selling Empty Glass (1980), which reached number 11 in the UK album charts.

Save It For Later was written by guitarist Dave Wakeling as a teenager and recorded by the UK ska / new wave band The Beat, appearing as the first single release from the band's third studio album Special Beat Service (1982). While it only reached number 47 in the UK charts at the time, it has since grown considerably in popularity, being widely covered and appearing on a range of film soundtracks. Among its many cover versions is the 2006 version by Townshend, which appeared as a bonus track on the re-release of his 1985 album White City: A Novel, and on the subsequent 2006 live album Deep End Live.   

Pete Townshend - Save It For Later (2006)

See also:

Music: The Beat - Save It For Later (live, 1982)

Music: Harvey Danger - Save It For Later (1999)

Music: Eddie Vedder - Save It For Later (2024)

Moby Dick takes Ray Bradbury to the brink

Even after seven months of work, [writer Ray] Bradbury still needed to write the last act of the script. And that’s when it happened. On the morning of April 14, 1954, he woke up, alone in his London hotel room, homesick for Los Angeles, lonely for his wife and children, longing for his old life as an author—autonomous, not answering to anyone, creating his own schedule, writing his own stories. He climbed out of bed, stood before the mirror, looked at himself and declared: “I … am Herman Melville!” He then calmly proceeded to his typewriter.

As with the creation of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury worked best when he wrote quickly, in an onslaught of creativity. “Your subconscious is smarter than you are,” he once told me, “so get out of its way.” He wrote nonstop for eight hours. He produced the final 37 pages of the script in that one sitting. And he knew that, of the 1,500 pages of drafts and outlines he had written in the seven months he had been working with [film director John] Huston, these were his best.

Huston concurred. Bradbury had finished the screenplay. There would be revisions to follow, but the day-to-day work was done. He was free to leave London and travel south to Italy to meet up with his family. He parted on good enough terms with Huston, the two men hugging, Bradbury thanking him for the singular experience. He left London on April 16, 1954, done with the ordeal of working every day with the unpredictable director.

While he was still in Europe, new screenwriting offers poured in. He was offered assignments to adapt the novels Anatomy of a Murder (1958) and The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), among several other projects. The lifelong cinema aficionado was now completely embraced by Hollywood. And Bradbury turned every offer down. He had, after all, harpooned the white whale. And it almost killed him.

- Sam Weller, 'I ... Am Herman Melville!', Los Angeles Review of Books, 6 September 2024

Get yourself together now and give me something tasty

Thursday music corner: Ringo Starr aka Richard Starkey (b. Liverpool, 1940) joined the Beatles in August 1962, replacing Pete Best on the drumkit. Since the Beatles split up in 1970 Starr has appeared in a range of movies, voiced the Thomas the Tank Engine children's TV programme, and released 20 solo studio albums. 

Back Off Boogaloo was a non-album single released in March 1972, which reached number 2 in the UK pop charts; it was his highest-charting UK single until he participated in the BBC Children in Need Medley single in 2009. The title was inspired by Marc Bolan's incessant use of the word 'boogaloo' in social gatherings. George Harrison produced the record, played slide guitar and helping to co-write it, although Starr didn't reveal the co-writing credit until 2017. The music video was filmed in the grounds of John Lennon's Tittenhurst Park estate in Berkshire; Starr and family lived at Tittenhurst after the Lennons, from 1973 to 1988. Back Off Boogaloo's release is sandwiched between Starr's two greatest singles: It Don't Come Easy (1971) and Photograph (1973).

Ringo Starr - Back Off Boogaloo (1972)

See also:

Music: Ringo Starr - Blindman (1972, B-side of Back Off Boogaloo)

Music: Ringo Starr - It Don't Come Easy (1971)

Music: Ringo Starr - Photograph (live at the Concert For George, 2002)

First came a distant hollow sound, swelling at a frightening rate

George Albert Hansard, who kept a journal aboard Her Majesty's steam vessel Acheron during its four-year charting of the New Zealand coastline, recorded the effect on Wellington of the 1848 Marlborough earthquake; the quake is now almost forgotten, particularly overshadowed by the big 1855 quake. It's estimated to have had a magnitude of 7.5. Author Sheila Natusch recounts his reportage:

The earthquake itself, need it be said, afforded Hansard splendid copy. First came a distant hollow sound, swelling at a frightening rate, and next thing a convulsive shock - houses crashed, bricks came tumbling down, women and children rushed to and fro, and even the stoutest-minded felt off colour. There were three shocks. The first, a long deliberate shaking that lasted a couple of minutes ('three', said a Frenchman at Akaroa), was solemnly believed to have stopped the current gale in its tracks. As soon as the shock ended, the gale sprang up again. The shock was felt over a wide area.

The second one next day was ushered in by a bang, followed by a jolt, a loud roar and a tremblement de terre. Waves were seen, a foot high in some places, passing along the ground. Unfortunately, walls and brick buildings were thrown down, killing three people.

The third and most violent grand shock arrived early in the morning two days after the second. It too came roaring into the midst of a howling gale and apparently shocked it out of existence - or at least took people's minds off it - while it knocked down the remaining brickwork. This time, as everyone was still in bed, no harm was done to lith and limb. After that there were no more violent shakes, just a diminishing series of aftershocks, noticeable even on board the Acheron. One of them sounded like barrels rolling along the deck. With two-thirds of its 'chimnies' down, the walls of the Wesleyan Chapel scattered in all directions, the half-ruined Ordnance Store propped up with timbers, and heaps of brick and rafters where there had been houses, Wellington must have looked dishevelled in part; but Lambton Quay, and houses built on higher ground, especially one-storey houses, were not badly damaged. 'All wooden houses, small and great, seem perfectly uninjured, Hansard wrote.

- Sheila Natusch, The Cruise of the Acheron, Christchurch, 1978, p.74.

The commander of the Acheron was Captain John Lort Stokes, who in the 1830s had shared a cabin with naturalist Charles Darwin aboard the Beagle. The same year as the Marlborough earthquake Stokes Inlet and Lort River in Western Australia were named after him. 

"Your story is too good not to have it perfect"

[Katharine S.] White edited according to a set of principles that she never wrote down but that structured her entire career, and the careers of the writers she cultivated. She was lavish with her rejections—both in the sense that she handed them out freely, and that she was generous in always giving a detailed reason for turning down a piece.

She made abundantly clear that she was rejecting a given poem or story, not the writer herself. Though her office was awash in manuscripts from the slush pile, she assiduously followed up on each of “her” authors, writing to them to encourage them to submit if she hadn’t heard from them in a while, even sending them ideas for stories.

But she never suggested other writers to emulate or tried to nudge one writer to be like another. She prided herself on giving unwavering support and encouraging her writers to submit work even as they dealt with divorce, illness, institutionalization. She herself worked from hospital beds through her many surgeries and ailments, so she had no problem sending page proofs to Elizabeth Hardwick in the hospital just days after giving birth to her daughter Harriet.

Katharine advanced her authors money, sent them books, introduced them to each other, introduced them to their future husbands, turned dry spells into rushing rivers, suggested now-classic stories and essays. In one instance, she inquired about getting a divorced poet an annulment so she could marry her Catholic fiancé—the editor as a full-service consultant for all writers’ troubles.

White called out the best from her authors through her relentless attention to them—her criticism was her love language. As she wrote to one potential contributor from whom she asked for major revisions, “your story is too good not to have it perfect.”

- Amy Reading, 'Editing Without Ego: How Katharine S. White Quietly Shaped The New Yorker’s Writers', Literary Hub, 3 September 2024

See also:

Books: Dylan Thomas' Laugharne, 4 February 2022

Books: Mansfield on Joyce, 27 December 2019

Books: The Paris correspondent starts his day, 30 April 2016

He comes up the back stairs every evening at the same time

Thursday music corner: Side Effect were an American disco and jazz-funk band chiefly active from 1972 to 1982, formed in Los Angeles by Augie Johnson. The band released eight albums, including three on major record label Elektra from 1980 to 1982. Five of their albums charted on the US R&B charts, and the band had three US R&B top 40 singles: Keep That Same Old Feeling (1977), It's All In Your Mind (1978) and Make You Mine (1981). 

Midnight Lover was an album track from Portraits, Side Effect's seventh album, released in 1981. The song was written by the band's young singer Miki Howard, who later had seven solo top 10 US R&B charting singles from 1986 to 1992, including two R&B chart-toppers. Portraits reached number 52 in the R&B album charts.

Side Effect - Midnight Lover (1981) 

See also:

Music: Side Effect - Keep That Same Old Feeling (1977)

Music: Side Effect - It's All In Your Mind (1978)

Music: Side Effect - Make You Mine (1981) 

William Gerhardie's definition of humour

Aunt Teresa looked at me uncertainly, not knowing whether I was serious or laughing, and if laughing whether I was laughing at herself. I wonder,' she said, 'whom you could write about?'

'Well, ma tante, you seem to me a fruitful subject.'

'H'm. C'est curieux. But you don't know me. You don't know human nature. What could you write about me?'

'A comedy.'

Under what title?'

'Well, perhaps - A tout venant je crache!" ["I spit on everyone who comes"]

'You want to laugh at me then?'

'No, that is not humour. Humour is when I laugh at you and laugh at myself in the doing (for laughing at you), and laugh at myself for laughing at myself, and thus to the tenth degree. It's unbiased, free like a bird. The inestimable advantage of comedy over any other literary method of depicting life is that here you rise superior, unobtrusively, to every notion, attitude, and situation so depicted. We laugh - we laugh because we cannot be destroyed, because we do not recognise our destiny in any one achievement, because we are immortal, because there is not this or that world; but endless worlds: eternally we pass from one into another. In this lies the hilarity, futility, the insurmountable greatness of all life.' 

I felt jolly, having gained my balance with one coup. And suddenly I thought of Uncle Lucy's death; and I realised it was in line with the general hilarity of things!

- William Gerhardie, The Polyglots, 1925, p.319-320.

Find a two-step partner and a Cajun beat

Thursday music corner: Mary Chapin Carpenter is a Princeton-born American country/folk singer who released her debut album on Columbia Records in 1987, at the age of 29. Her success built until her million-selling, quadruple-platinum fourth album, 1992's Come On Come On, and she won five Grammy awards between 1992 and 1995. Carpenter's most recent album was 2020's The Dirt & the Stars, which reached number 6 on the US Folk charts.

Down at the Twist and Shout was Carpenter's third single from her third album, 1991's Shooting Straight in the Dark. The lyrics celebrate a much-loved Bethesda, Maryland, music venue (which later closed in 1998), and features a collaboration with the Louisiana cajun collective BeauSoleil, who are name-checked in the lyrics. Down at the Twist and Shout won Carpenter her first Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance, and was featured prominently when she performed it at the 31st Superbowl in New Orleans in January 1997.  

The video below is taken from Farm Aid V in Texas in 1992, but features the album version of the track audio.

Mary Chapin Carpenter w/ BeauSoleil - Down at the Twist and Shout (1991)

See also:

Music: Mary Chapin Carpenter - Down at the Twist & Shout (live at Superbowl XXXI, 1997)

Music: Shawn Colvin & Mary Chapin Carpenter - One Cool Remove (live on Later With Jools Holland, 1994)

Music: Mary Chapin Carpenter, Sheryl Crow & Emmylou Harris - Flesh & Blood (Johnny Cash cover, 2002)