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JEAN SHEPHERD’S AMERICA & PARTS UNKNOWN
My two concurrent obsessions, Jean Shepherd and Anthony Bourdain just encountered each other in my thinking, and I realized that they have a special attribute in common. It’s their passionate use words and image to give a sense of their fascination with travel.
* * *
Jean Shepherd’s America is a series of nearly two dozen half-hour videos (1971 and 1985), covering a wide variety of American subjects. Shepherd’s love of America and Americana, encompassing all the vast, quirky, lovable aspects of the country, is on full display. I quote from my Excelsior, You Fathead!:
Fred Barzak, the series production director remembers:
He just basically wanted to hit the road….He put out a big map and said, “So where do you want to go, Leigh, where do you want to go, Fred…” That’s how the decisions were made. They were extemporaneous. They were freeform.
Allowing for some ego in the act, Shepherd as Shepherd—on camera (or as narrator in A Christmas Story)—had a knack for creating direct, real connection to the audience….The programs restated many Shepherd themes found in his previous work….
Was Jean Shepherd’s America a bunch of individually self-indulgent, inordinately slow-moving, inchoate, failed graspings for the Great American Novel as Documentary? Or probably was it a few masterpieces of an incomplete, vast mosaic of the country, the very contemplation of which only a master, striving toward encompassing the unattainable vastness, would have had the temerity to attempt? The complete series can only be appreciated if one mentally steps back from the mosaic and visualizes it in its entirety, appreciating the courageous attempt,…
Yes, in a mainly extemporaneous exercise, it displays and brings appreciation to the rich variety of this country’s customs and culture. Also in Excelsior, You Fathead! I quote Shepherd regarding his passion for travel as well as his passion for observing what he called “straws in the wind,” and “cracks in the sidewalk”:
“The real news would be news that described people. I mean—what is happening to people? This would be the real news….But if we could somehow capture the essence of people.”
“As far as I’m concerned, travel—I have found travel to be one of the most—oh—use all these clichés, but it is the one thing that I find really, truly, does give me a kind of final sense of involvement and satisfaction.
“I love the sensation of being completely removed from my known environment, and just looking out—just being able to walk through a street that is—that is completely unknown to me—to look at people who are unknown, to go into a place that is unknown–a restaurant to look at—the sky is unknown….
“I went to the headwaters of the Amazon. I was there. I am a trained reporter. Those of you who listen to me know that. My life has been devoted to absorbing sights and sounds and listening, and I am going to try to give you in the next couple of days—maybe the next week or two—my impressions of what I consider probably the high point of my life so far as adventures and experience is concerned.”
Shepherd lower left (note tape recorder),
in the Amazon.
My Excelsior, You Fathead!’s self-consciously platitudinous title for the section on Shepherd’s travels is “Travel Broadens One.” In my book manuscript posted on www.shepquest.wordpress.com transcribing many of his travel narratives, my introduction comments:
Probably most important is the thrill of all travel, as changes of environment seem to make him feel most intensely alive….
Returning from trips, he gives his observations on the air and sometimes plays parts of the tapes he’d made on-site—a few words, snatches of music, local sounds, the rush of the sea against the hull of a sailing vessel. All evoking some special sense of where he’s been. Dominant among those sounds, of course, is that of the timeless human voice….
He has his very good reasons for traveling. He emphasizes that being in new places promotes new ideas, new ways of understanding our world. All the simple things should be noticed because they are of a different order from the simple things at home….
Shepherd and Bourdain appear to have a related passion for travel,
adventure, and experiencing parts unknown.
* * *
Anthony Bourdain, creator and star of television’s Parts Unknown, an extended series of programs based on the local foods, but encompassing much in the way of the customs, feelings, and basic humanity of scores of places around the world, talking to an audience at a New Yorker event:
“I go to places, I do a bunch of stuff, and I talk about how that felt and how I react to those things as truthfully as I can. By truthfully, I mean I do not owe you journalistic truth as a viewer. I owe you only the truth about how I felt at the time. Did I feel stupid, disoriented, angry, passionate, confused. That’s the only mission I set for myself.”
Just after Bourdain died in June, 2018, CNN, the station that aired Parts Unknown, did a 12-minute tribute, “Remembering Anthony Bourdain,” which included the following Bourdain comments:
You know, food is the entry way. I’m a guy who spent 30 years cooking food professionally. That’s where I come from, that’s how I’m always going to look at the world, but food isn’t everything. And something comes up and I’m happy to get up from the meal and wonder off elsewhere….
We ask very simple questions. What makes you happy? What do you eat? What do you like to cook? And everywhere in the world we go and we ask these very simple questions we tend to get some really astonishing answers….
You know, one of the great things about travel is just when you think “I’ve had enough of this,” something really interesting happens, and interesting things happen to me all the time. All the time. I still feel I have the best job in the world and it’s still fun. More importantly even, I think, it’s still interesting, and it’s still challenging–in a good way.
He had visited scores of countries, and he talks about how important travel is for promoting knowledge, understanding, empathy for the other.
* * *
Amazing the intelligent/sensitive/humane attitude
Bourdain and Shepherd share.
Jean Shepherd’s America in its only 2-dozen parts
is a partial fulfillment—Parts Unknown, in its scores
of episodes comes closer to fulfilling their potential.
Their passion for experiencing and bringing home
other peoples in their own turf and circumstances.
* * *
* * *
P.S. I have requested (and they are winging their way to me),
three presents for Fathers Day:
A small, stuffed, Peppa Pig
New book on the sometimes-advantages of being a generalist
New Anthony Bourdain book
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JEAN SHEPHERD–and KEN NORDINE
Word jazz artist Ken Nordine has died. Because of his work’s relationship to Jean Shepherd’s radio improvisations, lo these many years ago I contacted him and I believe we spoke for a few minutes by phone. Unfortunately, neither my physical archives of papers, tapes, and CDs, nor my crumbling memory can locate a damn thing we said. I vaguely recall (I think) that Nordine was familiar with and appreciative of Shepherd’s work. I encountered his obituary this morning in the New York Times:
Googling reveals lots more. For Shepherd enthusiasts especially, his work is worth pursuing.
By Christopher Borrelli Chicago Tribune
For those unfamiliar with “Word Jazz”: Imagine the silkiest voice delivering light Beat poetry over an aural landscape of piano tinkling and ringing phones and plops and echoes and hums, seeming to meander so far into Nordine’s subconscious that (through the miracle of tape) he has sonorous, trance-inducing discussions with his own thoughts.
* * *
By Rick Kogan Chicago Tribune (TNS) Feb 16, 2019
….What you will discover is the voice of Ken Nordine, one of the few people in the history of radio to use the medium to its fullest potential, rather than as a forum for blather, confrontation, inanities and noisy nonsense. He made a kind of vocal music as the voice of thousands of commercials and as the force behind a new art form he created and called “word jazz.”
* * *
Also part of NYT obit, Nordine is quoted that the goal of his poetry
was to “make people think about their thinking
and feel about their feeling,
but even more important to think about their feeling
and feel about their thinking.”
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JEAN SHEPHERD –and others–true/fiction (4 of several)
Click on images to enlarge
Somewhere in all of the above we can locate where Jean Shepherd’s kid stories and army stories fit. People following my thinking on this matter may remember that my strong belief is that Shepherd was inspired by his extraordinary ability to understand what it’s like to be a kid and a soldier, and this facilitated his related, extraordinary ability to transform such perceptions into mostly fictional material. This despite his confounding us with the use of his own middle name as the family name of his Parker family stories; using the exact street address where he grew up; using the real Warren G. Harding grammar school name (surely that was a witty fiction? No, it was true). One could go on—and on.
One might remember Shepherd’s comment at the opening of his first book of kid stories: “The characters, places, and events described herein are entirely fictional, and any resemblance to individuals living or dead is purely coincidental, accidental, or the result of faulty imagination.” Also of some relevance is the report that when Shepherd encountered that the New York Times had listed the book as non-fiction, he contacted them to insist that it was fiction.
Jean Parker Shepherd–truth-teller/fiction-teller, depending.
*
Along the way in these mental perambulations,
I was made aware of a diagram online that seemed a related fit to
Jean Shepherd’s frequent style of monolog.
It’s by witty chart maker, Dani Donovan (www.danidonovan.com).
I tried making contact, but got no response:
*
Not exactly by accident, I’m reminded of my own manner of
adjusting my depictions of real landscape sites by shifting my head
a bit to alter what I see, while forming a modern-based
cropping and use of the white paper.
(Birch trees sometimes come in handy for this):
Thus endith the improvising/true/fiction/manipulations
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JEAN SHEPHERD –and others–true/fiction (3 of several)
The relationships of truth to fiction in a variety of works–including mine and Shepherd’s.
Click on images to enlarge
I began Rio Amazonas with two epigraphs, and then a salutation:
“The issue is one of metaphor. Beyond that, license. What are we allowed to get away with by calling it literature rather than life.”—Diana Trilling quoted in Mailer: His Life and Times by Peter Manso.
I have always treasured those things that have emotionally affected my life.”—Mario Vargas Llosa [Peruvian author, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature].
SALUTATIONS, DISCLAIMER, ETCETERA
Rio Amazonas is an act of truth, fiction, fantasy, love at first sight, faith, hope, and rape.
Taking advantage of Peru’s beckoning charms once upon a time in the last quarter of the 20th Century (450 years after the original conquest), I traveled south. As exhibit designer and teacher on an expenses paid Fulbright grant, seeking background for a South American Hall design in New York, I contemplated the arts, sites—and sights—of this exotic land of my dreams. I also hoped to discover plot, characters, and meaning, for some contrived, socially, politically, economically relevant Peruvian novel of landless highland peasants, urban coastal decay, and jungle desecration.
As I came upon myself midway through my path in the forest (I was just over 40 at the time), I had an adventure in the Amazon. I found my way.
Now, pen in hand, equipped with poor memory, muted sensory feelings, and serenely modulated emotions, yet exploiting all available resources, I travel back, seeking to repossess the treasure.
Toward that goal, two components shape this book. As far as knowledge, memory, and psyche allow, the true parts are fact. The rest is fiction: within that fiction no character is real, no dialogue or actions ever happened. Fact inspires fiction (I take what I want): fictional exigencies, mutual enhancement, an interactive synthesis which somehow might be truer than matters of fact, I try to effect the most dramatic consequences through the caressing indirection of pen-tip to paper.
Success in this quest depends on acts of daring, skill, luck, self-gratification, conquest, and violation, as it does in all great adventures. The epistle begins.
The novel begins, alternating true parts with the created fiction. At the end, the protagonist (yours truly) eliminates all competitors and flows romantically to safety down the Amazon with his conquest:
She welcomed him into her body. Exploding in a downpour of fiery sensations. A moan of ecstasy slipped through her lips. She was drawn to a height of passion she had never known before. She lay drowned in a floodtide of the liberation of her mind and body. Contentment and peace flowed between them. Her heart swelled with a feeling she had thought long since dead. The admission was dredged from a place beyond logic and reason*
*The foregoing sentences: chosen from The Romance Writers Phrase Book by Jean Kent and Candace Shelton, Perigree Books, copyright 1984. “The essential source book for every romantic novelist, containing over 3,000 descriptive tags arranged for quick, easy reference, guaranteed to stimulate the imagination.”
Much more to come
(including some specifically Shep stuff.)
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JEAN SHEPHERD–At the heights (8)
Ever been to one of those joints where the people walk around tables and they sing to you? It’s a terribly embarrassing thing. I’m in this joint one night with this girl, we’re eating a plate of spaghetti, and there’s this guy who plays cheap guitar. And he comes over and he hangs over the table, see. He has been eating garlic and he’s playing this guitar, and he’s doing “La Paloma”—sort of a South Chicago–type “La Paloma.” And he’s playing the guitar and the spaghetti tasted terrible and the “La Paloma” was awful too—and you’re not again, I can see it—that interested in my—I don’t blame you. But can’t you just see—[Singer on the record interjects, “Oh, but you’re killing me!”]
It’s just the way I am, baby. [Laughs.]
[Singer: “Ohhh!”] Ohhh! You see what I mean? There’s a certain hairy vitality about this that all of us lack today.We’re kind of poured out of a plastic mold. Each of us. Let me say a polyethylene mold—it’s better than just plastic. Or styrene, for the low, lost types. [Someone once commented to me it should be transcribed as “low loss types.”]
Yes sir, that’s my baby. No sir, don’t mean maybe. Yes sir— that’s—my—baby—now. Baby! [Laughs.]
See—it doesn’t work—nothing. You got to wind it up. You got to have the key, you see—stick it in the side where the socket is and wind it just as tightly as you can. Not too tight!— you break the springs—wind it up [Singer gravelly, grating, with that earthy, serious, syncopated beat.] and—wouldn’t it be incredible if this world turned out to be actually only this big ball with a key sticking out the side of it—and they forgot to wind it? For the last ten thousand years, we’re running down?
That’s the last portion of the existing audio.
More stuff to come.
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JEAN SHEPHERD –at the heights (6)
Ever tell you about the time that I wrote the message on the inside of a Baby Ruth candy wrapper? And floated it in a Castoria bottle down the Chicago River? Castoria. [Laughs.] Is there anyone out there who is willing to cry for us now—for it? No, you don’t float anything down the Chicago River—it flows up the Chicago River. They reversed the direction of the Chicago River—they really did—it’s one of the mammoth achievements of mankind. [Music fades to a close.] Ohhh— that’s great! Great! Great! Ohh! [Laughs.] That’s just the way I feel tonight!
Hey—play another cut on that side, will you? And hold it in abeyance. The one—the cut I want you to play is, “Blues I Love to Sing.”* Hold it in abeyance. We use this occasionally when things look the way things look tonight. I have this terrible, terrible, terrible, awful feeling. It’s not really frustration— it’s a kind of borderline—a case of immense disappointment or something. Here it is, June, it’s springtime— it’s almost summer, isn’t it? The sixteenth, isn’t it? Summer will be here in four days—five days. It’s June. All these people—everywhere, are stretched out for millions of miles— one after the other, bumper-to-bumper, sitting there with their radiators overheating.
* “Blues I Love to Sing.” Duke Ellington, Adelaide Hall vocal 1927.
(Can be found on YouTube and on Jim Clavin’s http://www.flicklives.com.)
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JEAN SHEPHERD–more at the heights
[Back in a contemplative mood.] Isn’t it pitiful the way I sit here and spin these poor little glass dreams? [Song ends.] Oh! Play it over again, fellows! Once again! That’s it, play it over. We have nothing but time here. Spinning all those poor little idle dreams. You know? Sort of? It’s sort of like it’s a jigsaw puzzle. They took a couple of the pieces once—you know— and didn’t bring them back.
I have a friend who has—you’re not interested in my friends, are you? ’Course not. That is the secret of it all— you’re not interested and I’m not. I am not interested in my friends, nor are you. Ok? Fine. Now we’re on a good, solid, equitable basis. You don’t like me, and I don’t like you. And it’s just as well that I’m here in studioland, and you’re in radioland. [There is a tinkly piano going under all this.] So let us entertain no further notions. I am no good! The secret is—neither are you.
So let’s not have any of this business here. You know? You keep your opinions to yourself, I’ll keep mine to myself. And we’ll get this thing going here, baby. Heh—don’t you miss magic? Really? Weren’t those the great days when we used to have magic? Am I still insufferable? Huh! You people don’t know the meaning of the word— yet.
Isn’t this great? Listen to this crowd in the back—listen to that! Hear that? You don’t always have to say everything you mean, you know. Listen to this bass man—he’s great! You don’t always have to say everything you mean. That’s where you make your mistake—you always try to say things. Ahaa!—that’s great!—listen to that! [Piano, bass.]
Isn’t that great?—yeah— [Laughs.] Has a certain hairy vitality about this thing that most of us lack today. [Trumpet blows a nitty-gritty riff.] Yes sir, that’s my baby. No sir—no, that’s—sorry, that’s another program. [Hums along.]
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JEAN SHEPHERD at the heights (4)
More transcription from Shep at his best.
You’re out there in radioland, aren’t you? You see, that’s what I mean—all this is unreal—false—sterile! How can I escape—how can I become one of you? Out there? I’ve heard all kinds of stories about what goes on in the outside. All sorts of stories. I don’t believe any of them, though. I can’t. I can’t let myself believe them. If I do, everything I have here will crumble here in studioland. Gotta cling to something. To dreams—belief or two.
Jean Cocteau said, “Destroy the dream, you destroy the man.” So, you know—hang onto a few things. I have to think that nothing happens out there. But I know it does, little boxtop sender-inners. All you people out there in radioland. It’s too bad it’s the way it is. I’m here and you’re there. Ah, gladly would I, indeed—oh, but yes.
[There is a pause, and then Shep, apparently in an act of self-encouragement, continues.] Who’s for beach lotto tonight? [He speaks with mock enthusiasm.] This is a great beach lotto night! Who’s for beach lotto tonight? About four o’clock in the morning. Seven thousand, five hundred and eighty-two people—we might even make the sports pages. [Funky old jazz behind never stops.] Can’t you see yourself in the lineup? The lineup—sixteen columns long. There you are, you see. You scored two goals last night at Jones Beach in beach lotto. Ahooo!
More to come
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JEAN SHEPHERD & BOB DYLAN
I’ve felt so strongly [without anything but circumstantial evidence], that Bob Dylan must have listened to Shepherd in the early 1960s that I once made up a list of questions about it.
↓
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man,
play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning
I’ll come followin’ you.
↑
What questions would I ask?
Bobby, is That You, Woody?
Q: Mr. Dylan, sir, please, if I may, please. When did you start listening to Shep, please? Were you a Shepherd “night person”? Sir, please.
Q: How, please, did you find out about him, please?
Q: What about him got you interested in him, Mr. Dylan, sir?
Q: What were your thoughts about him then, and what do you think about him now?
Q: When did you stop listening to him and why did you stop?
Yes You Can–Love it!
Dylan quoted from a talk he gave in 2015:
“Sam Cooke said this when told he had a beautiful voice: He said, ‘Well that’s very kind of you, but voices ought not to be measured by how pretty they are. Instead they matter only if they convince you that they are telling the truth.’ Think about that the next time you are listening to a singer.”
[I intrude to amplify that by saying that Maria Callas and Frank Sinatra, without beautiful voices, convince me.]
Q: Are there any ways that you feel especially attuned to what Shepherd said and how he said it?
Q: Any specific ways you’ve thought/behaved/ created that you might feel have been influenced by his style?
Q: Any specific aspects of what he said that might have influenced your music/lyrics?
Nice Ta See Ya Smile, Bobby!
Q: He was very negative toward folk and rock–especially regarding you and Joan Baez–were you aware of that–did you care?
The King and the President,
who says he’s a big Dylan fan.
Q: What about your feelings about Shep–then and now?
Q: What do you feel are Jean Shepherd’s best attributes?
Keep on Rockin’
•
•
[Because Jean Shepherd in the 1960s demeaned both Bob Dylan and
Joan Baez, among others, I’ve often felt that not only did he dislike the
political protests they were part of, but that he did not objectively
listen to some of the better rock and other music of the time.
I wish I coulda talked to Shep and gotten him to listen carefully
to some good rock and to some fine Dylan,
and then gotten him to admit what he really felt.
I’d a started with “Mr. Tambourine Man,”
and worked up ta “Like a Rollin’ Stone.”]
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SHEP WORDS TO LIVE BY Part 4
In Hoc
“In hoc Agricola conc” would appear to be a spoken shrug of the shoulders.
•
DOING IT FROM WINDOWS
“Hurling invectives” is a funny/hostile activity Shepherd did from time to time, but hardly any have been described/recorded by his listeners. The best known reference in the media is the one where, in the film “Network,” the TV broadcaster tells his listeners to open their windows and yell, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Also, with a small variation, Ronald Reagan, in a political speech, quoted this phrase from the film.
More importantly, wherever they may have gotten the idea,
Twisted Sister’s most popular song is, “We’re Not Gonna Take it!”
They yell part of “We’re Not Gonna Take it” from windows:
•
“Razzmatazz”
“Razzmatazz” is a less frequent Shepherd saying, but it refers to a very important aspect of his early-career interest in jazz and his continued jazz-related improvisational monologs.
Final set of Shep’s words from my large spreadsheet
just perfect for printing and taping together.
[See previous blog posts for first three parts.]
Other important Shep material forthcoming!
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shepquest 