LEHRER WITHAL

This one hurts. The great Tom Lehrer has departed us, at 97. Too soon, as far as I'm concerned.

In the late '60s, we had the album That Was the Year That Was in our house...

It's a live recording, made at the hungry i in San Francisco in 1965, of Lehrer performing topical songs he had written for the NBC comedy series That Was the Week That Was, interspersed with his commentary. At 6 or 7 years old, I of course understood very little of what he was singing about. When he said "dirty books are fun, that's all there is to it," in the intro to his marching anthem "Smut" I can remember wondering why a physically unclean book would be fun, and when, in the song itself, he refers to "...a dirty novel I can't shut," I can remember picturing a book with a broken spine that he literally couldn't close.

So you can imagine how little of the political and social material I grasped. But it didn't matter. I listened to the album endlessly. It's probably my favorite record of all time, to this day. The reason, of course, is the sensibility; the snide, snarky yet genial and affable manner. Tom Lehrer was exactly the smartass I wanted to be when I grew up. And now, at 63, I'm not sure I see much reason to revise or abandon that ambition.

Lehrer was also the first of many lyricists and poets to teach me a love of rhyme I've never gotten over. From "Smut," for instance, comes Lehrer's admirable "As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortense/To be smut it must be ut/Terrly without redeeming social importance..." Or, from his  splendid ballad "Alma" (about Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel): "and that is the story of Alma/Who knew how to recieve and to give/The body that reached her embalm-ah/Was one that had known how to live!"

So was yours, good sir.

Also, in one of the more badass show-business gestures ever, in 2020 Lehrer, a lifelong bachelor with no children, released all of his songs to the public domain.

Back in 2000, one of the few music reviews I ever wrote at New Times (for the great Gilbert Garcia, then Music Editor) was of a Lehrer boxed set containing almost all of his recorded work, including a couple of marvelous tunes he wrote and sang for The Electric Company.

Peace and joy eternal to you great man, and as my friend Owen Kerr would rightly say, Ave, magister.

A NOBEL CAUSE

Since the startling announcement that Bob Dylan was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, there have been a few dissenting arguments, like this one and this one.

As far as I can tell the case against a Nobel for Dylan is twofold—on the one hand, that there are writers who’ve been laboring in obscurity, sometimes in developing countries, that could use the exposure and the money more, and on the other hand that he’s not a writer, he’s a lyricist, and the power of his writing is inseparable from its musical context.

I can sort of see the former argument, I suppose. But I’m still glad Dylan won, because I’m thinking of all the scoffing and eye-rolling I received in my twenties when I gushed about him as one of the great 20^th-Century American poets. For me, it’s not an acknowledged elder statesman of American pop culture being gratuitously honored, it’s the goofy, wise-assed, frizzy-haired kid with the braying-goat voice from half a century ago being vindicated, along with everybody who could hear something dazzling and beautiful in his haywire words and cadences.

As to the second argument, though—lyricists aren’t writers? Really? W.S. Gilbert wasn’t a writer? George M. Cohan wasn’t a writer? Irving Berlin and Cole Porter? Woody Guthrie? Frank Loesser? Sheldon Harnick? Tom Lehrer? Johnny Cash? Jacques Brel? Smokey Robinson? Leonard Cohen? Neil Diamond? Carole King? Merle Haggard? Bill Withers? Judy Collins? Dolly Parton? Stephen Sondheim? Bob Gaudio? Frank Zappa? Billy Joel? Lyle Lovett? Ice-T?

If Dylan, or anyone else on that list, or any of three hundred others that could be named, don't qualify as writers, than I guess I’d rather not be a writer. I’d rather be whatever it is they are.

FIFTY SHADES OF SHADOW

In his proud anthem “Smut,” the great Tom Lehrer celebrates his love of:


“Smut!

Give me smut

And nothing but

A dirty novel I can’t shut

If it’s uncut

And unsubt-

-tle.”

Tom, have I got a book for you. There are many adjectives that might be applied to Steve Shadow’s debut tome Sin-ema, but “subtle” isn’t likely to be one of them.

This book is like a lost work by Henry Miller, if Henry Miller was a grammatically challenged 13-year-old trying to impress his friends at a sleepover. It’s really, really dirty; if the public were to take notice of it, it could set relations between the sexes back 50 years, and American literature back 200 years.

And yet…it’s kind of a good book.

It was given to me by a friend, with a request from the author for a review. I was flattered, because even though I myself, badly in need of money, once wrote a porn novel—it was serialized, under a pseudonym, in Playtime magazine many years ago—I’m no expert on the genre. I’m not a porn consumer, partly because I don’t need help to get distractingly turned on, and partly because…well, because at heart I’m a repressed, uptight Protestant, and porn embarrasses me.

But Shadow’s Sin-ema, though it certainly embarrassed me, also entertained me. It’s written with such adolescent exuberance that I couldn’t keep a smile off my face while reading it, and about once a page it cracked me up.

The story couldn’t be much simpler. The narrator gets a job managing an adult movie theater in Chicago in the early ‘70s. This leads to him having sex with lots of different people, in lots of different combinations. Things get out of hand. The end. Sorry I didn’t give you a spoiler alert.

Sin-ema’s sexual politics are decidedly and unapologetically from another generation, though it should be noted that at times the narrator seems to show at least some, well, personal growth in that regard. The prose style is a train wreck, or rather, a series of train wrecks—each one caused by the runaway locomotive of the author’s headlong narrative gusto.

And Shadow sure does like the word “sure.” Every two or three pages, at most, somebody “sure looked well rehearsed and hot to trot” or “sure had a nice body for an older woman” or “had sure come out her shell.” There’s an absurd boyish charm to this tic. But for pure literary magic, I don’t think that Shadow ever tops a turn of phrase in the very first paragraph, when the narrator describes one of his appendages being “knee-deep in her mouth.”

I found myself wondering by what scale of knee this was being measured—the narrator’s, or the appendage’s, if it had knees? This mental image alone was enough to make me glad I cracked Sin-ema.