Miss Graham Regrets She's Unable to Dance Today

Martha Graham portrait by Paul Raphael Meltsner

To John Houseman fell the unenviable task of visiting his old friend Martha Graham to discuss the delicate subject of her continuing to perform her own dances at age 76.

Naturally, they danced around the topic.

“I went to see her one afternoon in her apartment on East 63^rd Street and immediately I had the feeling, as I always did when I was alone with her, of being in the presence of greatness — a greatness frayed, at this moment, by rage and despair. She knew why I was there, and she must have hated the sight of me.

“Yet, for our first hour together, she was her usual seductive, manipulative self. There were occasional interruptions, brief visits to a back room from which she returned each time with brighter eyes and seemingly heightened energy.”

Houseman remembered her saying, “I’m a proud, vain, spoiled woman, John, and have been for 40 years … my analyst tells me I’ll realize one day that I’m not a goddess.”

“(L)ayer by layer, the full depth of her distress was revealed. I couldn’t blame her. For close to 50 years, much of the time by herself, she had fought and struggled to create, with her brain and her muscles, a body of entirely personal and dangerously original work. During that time she had assembled a company of high quality and held it together under terrible conditions of deprivation and public indifference.

“Finally, in middle age, she had achieved a measure of success that she had built gradually into general acceptance and international fame. Now, in her mid-70s, with her spirit undaunted and her creative powers at their peak, she was facing the horror of her own inevitable physical deterioration. Gradually her own dancing — the essential instrument of her creation — was becoming a liability to herself and her company.

“Better than anyone else she was aware that critics and audiences were being tolerant of her failing powers out of respect and admiration for her past achievements; aware, too, (and it hurt and angered her) that there was a growing feeling, among audiences and among her own people, that it was her artistic obligation to herself and to her company to let younger women replace her in the great dancing roles which she had created for herself over the years but which it was still emotionally impossible for her to accept could be danced by anyone else.”

Source: “Final Dress” by John Houseman

 

The Martha Graham dance Company performs her 1948 work "Diversion of Angels."

The Ghosts of Trees

Image: Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967), Tree Ghosts, 1919; watercolor on paper, 16 1/4 x 14 3/4 inches; Image from the Burchfield Penney Archives

American Right Wingers Prefer Abject Ignorance

And no, this isn't about "elitism." This is about intellectual dishonesty.

GOP leaders believe they can eventually con ordinary Americans into living without health care, retirement, veterans' benefits, job security, clean air and food and water or a living wage. Into dying for corporate profit, in other words. And ignorance is their greatest ally. 
American ignorance and stupidity in the 21st century, so carefully cultivated by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, is like quicksand. There's no bottom there.

Captain Commie Resurrected from Ice

Buried under the ice and snow yesterday was a package from Edward R. Hamilton containing Walter Isaacson’s book on Einstein, the Green Hornet Chronicles, the handsome yellow hardcover Stories of Truman Capote and, joy of joys, Avengers Masterworks Vol. 5.

What a pleasure it was to see that great run of issues again, from 41 to 50, including the first annual reuniting all the characters who’d been on the team. In tune with the fans, Roy Thomas, John Buscema and Don Heck created a series of crowd pleasers.

The Red Guardian issue in particular is a series of delightful vignettes, whether I’m 14 or 59 — Quicksilver’s enthusiasm at learning to fly (something I wish they’d kept), Hawkeye in civvies showing the guys in the bar why it’s not wise to mess with a guy trained by Captain America, Cap schooling Hercules, the mysterious Black Widow, and finally the revelation of the Red Guardian himself – a communist Anti-Captain America, a character who fed into comic book fans’ deep, longstanding need for mirror images and polar opposites.

A decade later, my old pal David Anthony Kraft would refine a memorable and sympathetic female Red Guardian during his long stint writing The Defenders. 
And why the rather odd title of Color Him... The Red Guardian? It was a wink at Barbra Streisand’s seventh album Color Me Barbra, as well as the title of her 1966 CBS TV special (her first in color, when that was still a TV novelty). Then, as now, Marvel Comics was all about topical references.

The Rock and the River

Statue by Celeste Roberge

“I was talking with my good friend Argenis a while back about life’s obstacles and how we deal with them,” Jim Hampton wrote. “As he was talking, in my mind flashed an image of a very ugly, craggy rock covered in uneven, sharp edges. This rock sat steadfast in a river with extremely strong and dangerous currents. I asked myself where the image came from and what it could mean. In a flash the image and what my friend was trying to tell me merged into clarity.”

Click here to share Jim’s insight.

The Best Hour of the Day

Art by Tim Nyberg

I generally rise alone at 3:30 a.m. I set up the beagle’s breakfast, put in laundry and make the coffee, then, after doing 18 pushups and some yoga back exercises, meditate for 20 minutes, trying to concentrate on sensations rather than emotions or thoughts. The ding of the coffee pot stops me, and I fill the beautiful raven coffee mug Jim Jenkins gave me and curl up with a biography on the leather sofa. The predawn exercises and the solitude and the intellectual absorption combine to create a languorous sensation in which I drift for 90 minutes or an hour, the best hour of the day. I am centered, and whatever worried me last night or confronts me in the coming day is dispelled like the fog it is by the here and now of focused, unforced attention.

I sometimes treat myself to a late-afternoon echo of that experience by reading with the beagle curled up next to me while I sip Irish Breakfast tea from the cheeky mug Jim Hampton gave me, which boasts a word balloon that declares, “I will never use my powers for evil!”

We're on a Rough Ride Without the Rough Riders

Does this have a familiar ring?

“Notwithstanding the tremendous growth of the industrial age — railroads, telegraph wires, steamships, mines, cities — as Henry George argued in his 1879 ‘Progress and Poverty,’ these vaunted advances made it ‘no easier for the masses of our people to make a living. On the contrary, it is becoming harder.’

“Progress had widened the gap between rich and poor, making the struggle for existence more intense and jeopardizing the stability of a democratic society. ‘To base a state with glaring social inequalities on political institutions where people are supposed to be equal,’ George wrote, ‘is to stand a pyramid on its head. Eventually, it will fall.”

The inverted pyramid of the golden age of American professional journalism was what helped rebalance that dangerously unstable society, as Susan Dunn notes in her article on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “The Bully Pulpit” in the New Yorker Review of Books. The muckraking investigative magazines supplied the necessary “information and exhortation” that spurred corrective political action by President Teddy Roosevelt and others.

And there, unfortunately, ends the parallel between the early 20^th century and the early 21^st century, between the industrial age and the digital age. Because we are now in what can only be described as a dark age of American journalism.