Old Stanley Cup prefers warm sunny South

Who can blame it? Born in 1883 as a trinket of Queen Victoria's Canadian plenipotentiary, it has the scars and hard living that 130 years have given it. The NHL playoffs begin this week and the purists will tell you that the Cup belongs in Canada or Chicago or Detroit. But after last year's upset by the LA Kings you have to believe it's happy elsewhere. There was a snarky diatribe in the NY Times this weekend that the NHL Southeast division had the worst winning percentage in the four major North American pro sports leagues. But in this 6 column diatribe there is a single sentence that says, 'the Southeast did win two Stanley Cups—Tampa Bay in 2004 and Carolina in 2006. And how many do the Canucks have, Buffalo, Winnipeg, St. Louis, Minnesota, anyone? Anyone? I think I've made my point. As for the NY Rangers what do they have...one Cup in 74 years...the Islanders won 4 in a row but that was decades ago. Meanwhile you have Anaheim, Dallas, LA, Tampa and Carolina hoisting the Cup. By the way my wife's name is engraved on it from 2006 (you can look it up) P.LaViolette (Peggy LaViolette using her maiden name). The Cup is a hefty 35 lbs. It stays in shape by removing the oldest band of the barrel and attaching the latest. You won't see the Seattle Metropolitans, the first US team to win it or the Victoria Cougars or the Vancouver Millionaires (although the Canucks did wear the Millionaires uniform this year to see if some luck would rub off.) Sipping champagne from the Cup is an annual tradition for the winners. But of late there have been Margaritas to imbibe and heaven forbid, even Mint Juleps!

You can't repeat the past

“Of course you can Old Sport.” Yes, that's Jay Gatsby, the elegant roughneck, inveterate dreamer and immensely wealthy young man answering his neighbor (and our narrator) Nick Carraway. A new film version opens next month (May) directed by Baz Luhrman with his usual panache. It will be a big improvement on the stilted black and white film starring Alan Ladd and most certainly bigger and gaudier than the one with Robert Redford. The casting will be a concern since a mere movie star can only hope to encompass the yearning and mystery of Gatsby, content simply to portray the glamour. The lovely and feckless Daisy seems to come off better in the movies. She is just an illusion after all even though Gatsby loves her and will eventually die for her. The new film will have a lavish sound track but the music I find most evocative of the era is in the four impressionistic piano solos written and played by Bix Beiderbecke, especially “In a mist”. How does it end—like so many American stories, he is shot and killed by a minor character, the same type of nonentity that kills Presidents, mayors, litte school children and thousands of others every year in our gun-loving republic. As for Daisy and her husband Tom, they will just disappear back into their money and continue to bicker like a loveless couple in a Strindberg play. Fitzgerald said that the greatest thing life can give you is youth. That is, if you can dodge the assault rifles and bombs long enough to enjoy it.

Mad Men and me

The sixth and final season of “Mad Men” starts tomorrow (April 7) on AMC. It's my favorite show for many reasons because it depicts the golden age of advertising when legends like David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach and Mary Welles were turning out iconic campaigns; when Bert Stern and Irving Penn were shooting memorable pictures including my favorite model, the beautiful Suzy Parker. And yes, I was part of it as an agency creative director like Don Draper. The only difference was that I was in London and he was in New York. Yes. I drank and smoked the way he did, I had my suits made on Savile Row, but I didn't have a couch in my office so I didn't have all of his adventures. I still get the Eric Idle “nudge-nudge wink-wink” but I was happily married to Peggy (Don & Peggy!!!) and living quietly in St. John's Wood with our two children. The show has elements of a soap opera that's definitely one for grownups but the advertising plots are 100% accurate. In fact I find myself yelling at the screen when I see the thing that got me fired and the double cross that led me to quit. Rolling Stone calls it, “The greatest TV drama of all time”. And I call it “my greatest job of all time”.

Lawrence of Arabia--the new Broadway musical

The opening line of one of Joe Queenan's culture commentaries is, “CATS is very, very, very, very, very bad.” And he's being generous. I saw Les Miserables in London and it was very, very miserable. I know better than to see Phantom of the Opera, Aspects of Love, Stardust Express and CATS no matter how much money they make for Andrew Paine Webber, I mean Andrew Lloyd Webber, I was thinking of his bank account. Phantom has done $5.6 billion, with a B. I can't object to Sir Andrew's golden touch, I just think the source of these musicals is wrong. They are built on a financial model. There are no “stars”, no memorable score, just high-priced tickets and buses unloading the middle-aged groups from the burbs. They're beautiful and dead, certainly joyless.These sort of pretentious productions were spoofed wonderfully by Mel Smith in his film “The Tall Guy” where, if you can believe it, they put on a musical of the poor crippled Elephant Man. Someone asked Stephen Sondheim if he didn't approve of these more operatic musicals and he said, “no, I don't, all that recitative with a song stitched in every now and then isn't the kind of musical I like...a song has to appear at precisely the right time with memorable music and lyrics.” By the way, it was Sir Andrew who called “My Fair Lady” the perfect musical. Now we have a London production of Lawrence of Arabia*. It's about an American girl, Sarah Lawrence who ventures into the desert to find her long lost lover Sandy Hill. It has a love song “Dancing Sheik to Sheik”; a light number “Put on a happy fez”and a rousing show stopper: “The camels are coming, hooray, hooray”. How stuff like Billy Elliott made lt in America I'll never know. It's about a foul-mouthed brat who wants to show off in dancing shoes. Nothing from over there can match the witty lyrics of Larry Hart or Ira Gershwin or the brilliant score of “West Side Story” or the score and lyrics of Frank Loesser.. While I'm at it I'll relate an incident from a toney Manhattan salon recital. I volunteered a story about Irving Berlin sending a note to Cole Porter on the opening of “Kiss Me Kate”. Turning one of his hit songs from “Annie Get Your Gun” inside out he wrote “Anything I can do you can do better”. The lady across the table from me smiled and said, “yes, daddy used to tell us about that”. It was one of Berlin's daughters echoing the immortal voice of the true Broadway. *At least in my mind.

You can't be a Catholic and a grownup

That's one of Orwell's “hard truths”. It's in the same vein as Marx's “religion is the opium of the people” and Freud's assertion that religious believers display a “persistent neurosis”. But hey, we must always look on the bright side as the Monty Python group sang. Woody Allen, a latter day philosopher said once, “traffic in midtown Manhattan is very congested today, is the Pope or some other show business personality in town?” So now we have the first Francis but it could have been otherwise. We could have had Francis Albert Sinatra. Don Rickles says that he and Dean and Sammy worked tirelessly to get Frank made Pope. “That way,” he said, “we'd only have to kiss his ring.”

You become what you behold

That ominous insight is from cultural guru Marshall McLuhan, and if true we are in big trouble. Our television and movie fare is red in tooth and claw now. Time magazine says that TV dramas have become addicted to blood. It is drowning in dumb, mindless violence. Cinemax's “Strike Force” has already stacked up 208 corpses in one season. Time also diagnoses the creative ways of the grim reaper: impaling, knifing, poisoning, stabbing and in “Game of Thrones” strapping buckets of rats to prisoner's chests, stolen from Orwell's torture scene in “1984”. The NY Times says that gore flows freely in both broadcast and cable. It also points out that it is absurd to pretend that a gun culture is unrelated to popular culture. Is this how we escape from boredom? The late Neil Postman said we were “amusing ourselves to death”. We're not amused. This is our living rooms we're talking about and I, for one, have disinvited these monsters into our home. The Times says that Americans love to watch death, even when it's real. “Some can gaze and not be sick, But I could never learn the trick. There's this to be said for blood and breath, They give a man a taste for death.” A.E Housman

A nicer sort of murder

In Orwell's essay “Decline of the English murder” he details how murder seemed to be changing and becoming an “ordinary” event. Murders had moved from poisoning, mainly by the middle class (see Agatha Christie) to murders done with the utmost callousness and brutality. No more deeds done for insurance money or marital affairs or just good old fashioned envy. In another essay “Raffles and Miss Blandish” he chronicles the descent from Raffles, the charming jewel thief, to poor Miss Blandish who is raped and killed in a cold-blooded way. He attributes this to modern events such as mass killing of innocent civilians, hostages, torture, flogging and treachery as normal and morally neutral events. Today these events are seen as admirable when done by the CIA. We now live in a country that worships guns, especially the weapons of mass destruction used in places like Newtown. They're consecrated in the Constitution, the same document that offers the pursuit of happiness. If you watch television today you are treated to a visit to the morgue or a ghastly autopsy with your dinner or late night snack. Too many corpses; too many sex crimes, too much Freud and Krafft-Ebbing without the redeeming things Orwell said these plots should be about such as real social wrongs, economic injustice and plain decency and justice. On the nightly news 6 year olds are gunned down and a pimp firing shots on the Vegas Strip kills 3 innocent people. I have found an escape from this dreadful drivel to a foreign language channel called MHZ. It features a cop named Brunetti in Venice, Maigret in Paris and DeLuca, a tenacious policeman who has to do his job in WWII Italy. There's even a detective priest named Don Matteo whose only weapons are compassion and human insight. The writing is better because the stories are from literature and always have a moral point of view, not the stuff the overhyped TV hacks serve up today. And the narrative is not constantly interrupted by commercials. These men have to walk down the same mean streets as Phillip Marlowe and Harry Bosch but the boulevards and canals are a lot less mean. These men have charm, intelligence and dedication to justice and they very rarely carry firearms. It's just a safer, saner place over there. So, if you hear an Englishman say, “I could murder some Chinese”, don't take alarm, it only means that he'd like to attack a plate of Moo Goo Gai Pan.