Walter Winchell Rhumba

A little musical treat for the first Friday of this new venture.  Where else can you find Xavier Cugat's rendition of the Walter Winchell Rhumba?  The bog spews up many an odd item, and perhaps few odder or more delightful than this?  Who's Xavier Cugat, you ask?  Don't ask.  But who's Walter Winchell, you persist?  The knowledgeable among you already know, but for those who don't, here's a fitting anecdote from the end of Winchell's tumultuous life, when he rode uptown to Columbia University during the student demonstrations in 1968 to observe the action firsthand.  Unfortunately an especially nasty cop rudely shoved Winchell (some say he did even worse), and said something to the effect of, "What the hell are you doing here, old timer?"  Winchell's response was characteristic.  "I'm Walter Winchell," he declared stoutly.  The cop was not only unimpressed, but his blank expression indicated he hadn't a clue who Winchell was.  Walter left the scene forlorn, later telling a friend, "What kind of a world is it where someone hasn't heard of Walter Winchell"?

This kind of world, apparently, for even more people now haven't heard of Walter Winchell.  And yet in his heyday -- the 1930s, 40s, and into the 50s -- Winchell was one of the most famous men in America.  Ostensibly he was a gossip columnist, but he was much more than that:  He was the gossip columnist, the man everyone read, the man PR flack went to with a juicy tidbit about some star or would-be star, hoping that Winchell would put it in his column.  Winchell appeared in movies (usually as himself), was the narrator of the 1958 TV series The Untouchables, had a phenomenally successful radio show (anyone of a certain age, and that doesn't include me, will remember his celebrated opening, "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea!  Flash!")  And he had a phenomenally unsuccessful TV show later on, when the famous voice was accompanied by an awkward man who "seemed to be screaming at the camera for no good reason," as one observer noted.  Winchell had thought he was King of All Media before Howard Stern claimed the title for himself, but Marshall McLuhan could have told Winchell (if he'd bothered to listen) that the medium is the message and TV just wasn't Winchell's medium.  ("It's called a medium," quipped Fred Allen, another radio man who was immensely famous in his day and nearly forgotten now, "because it's rarely well-done.)  Never mind.  For a longer time than mere mortals deserve, Winchell was read and listened to by virtually every sentient American, and even a few comatose ones as well.  Winchell had a voice that could easily raise the dead.

He'd been a stalwart supporter of FDR during the Depression and World War II, and America loved his take-no-prisoners approach to hitting the Nazis and fascists with everything he had, which was mainly his voice and his column, with its distinctive, breathless ellipses....between his...startling revelations!  But after the war Winchell turned to the new enemy, the Communist threat, and when he loudly supported Senator Joseph McCarthy (and loudly was the only tone Walter knew), he made some new enemies himself among his former fans.  Winchell red-baited with the best of them, going after reds, pinks, fellow travellers, commie dupes, and people he just didn't like.  Winchell must have known his power was fading when the brilliant 1957 film The Sweet Smell of Success was released with a blistering portrayal of a Walter Winchell-ish columnist and radio commentator named "J. J. Hunsecker," chillingly played to perfection by Burt Lancaster, backed up by one of Tony Curtis as an ambitious small-time press agent ready to lick Lancaster's hand and much worse if it would get one of his clients a mention in J. J.'s column.  Here's an exchange between Curtis's Sidney Falco and Lancaster's Hunsecker:

Sidney Falco: Sure, the columnists can't do without us, except our good and great friend J.J. forgets to mention that. You see, we furnish him with items.

J.J. Hunsecker: What, some cheap, gruesome gags?

Sidney Falco: You print 'em, don't ya?

J.J. Hunsecker: Yes, with your clients' names attached. That's the only reason the poor slobs pay you - to see their names in my column all over the world. Now, I make it out, you're doing me a favor?... The day I can't get along without a press agents' handouts, I'll close up shop and move to Alaska, lock, stock, and barrel.

The two actors were in top form, and the fact that neither they nor screenwriter Ernest (North by Northwest) Lehman from his novella, with an assist from Clifford Odets, felt the slightest fear of reprisal from the real Winchell suggests that Walter's days were numbered.  But newspapers themselves were dying out even back then -- New York City used to have at least nine dailies -- and even Winchell's own flagship paper went under in 1963.  Soon gossip columnists like Liz Smith were learning to make nice about celebrities and not be so darn mean.  The whole story is told in full detail in Neal Gabler's definitive biography, Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity, and in fictional form by Michael (Dispatches) Herr in his small but searing book, Winchell.  And you can even see the great Stanley Tucci portray Winchell in the 1998 TV movie directed by the late Paul Mazursky, titled (what else?), Winchell.  That's enough to keep you busy this weekend.

For a time, Walter Winchell was indeed King....of something.  Remember him kindly, for he fought the good fight as well as the bad one(s).  As for Xavier Cugat, that's another story.  Let's rumba.

An Introduction, an Apologia, and a Hearty Welcome

No, that isn't a typo.  It really says "Robert Nason's Culture Bog."  And considering all the times I (and probably you) have valiantly attempted to type the highly-common word "blog" in an email to a friend, only to have that pesky spell check "correct" it to "bog," why not simply give in to technology (or to serendipity, which may just be a cheery mask for the same thing) and accept "bog" for "blog," though this is indeed a blog (or, How I Learned to Stop Recorrecting and Love the Bog.)  

But where, exactly, does the "Culture Bog" come in?  Well, you've come to just the right place to find out.  The culture bog -- a concept I've adapted from R. Emmett Tyrrell's, earlier, more narrowly political and somewhat Germanic formulation, "kultursmog" -- is the bog we all live in -- an all-encompassing swamp of texts, images, memes, sound bites (or bytes, if you will), classics and commercials (thank you, Edmund Wilson), and conflicting contexts that permeate the air we breathe and the space we inhabit for now and the near future; a cacophony of warring websites and unsocial media that fill our brains from the moment we take our first breath, accompanied by understandable wailing and gnashing of baby teeth, to our last, medically-induced, addled spurts of consciousness of the nursing home TV's current offering of disaster and catastrophe, either fictional, news-informational, or "reality" based -- and who can tell which of the three at that point, or even long before then?  Pixels and propaganda now fill our waking hours while our dreams are increasingly dominated by whiz-kids from Industrial Light & Magic.  We're stuck in the bog, and there's no escape.

But as the late Marshall McLuhan -- one of the unsung heroes of this blog -- famously said, the way out of the whirlpool was discovered by Edgar Allan Poe, a well-sung hero, in his story "A Descent into the Maelstrom": The hero must give in and stop resisting; by riding the whirlpool out to the very end, he can be sucked into the center and find an escape of sorts. But you'll have to read (or reread) that tale for yourself.

To put that into practical terms, it means that I, along with you, derive a great deal of pleasure from savoring the detritus and desire swirling about in our shared bog -- films old and new, novels cheap and novels classic, beloved TV shows from vanished youth, comics (now reborn as Graphic Novels), science fiction, mysteries, comedy, painters and sculptors, poster art and architecture, and the political machinations of scoundrels and statesmen, who surprisingly switch from one to the other given the crisis at hand.  And culture more broadly includes the whole farrago of customs, fads, forgotten trends, romance, disillusion, hope springing eternal, then ending again.  It's all part of the mix. And with luck, perseverance, and Poe's hero in mind, we might rise up from the swirling muck like the fabled Swamp Thing and find ourselves composed of the same stuff we were mired in, the same stuff that stars are made of, ready for action.  In other words, there's fun to be had and adventures to be embraced.  We'll walk that contemporary tightrope between academic naysayers who insist that all culture is mediated by power and privilege and the unwashed masses who simply love the show in all its myriad forms.  The former will grouse that it's just Bread and Circuses; those of us who are not entirely unwashed since we do believe in bathing now and then, will cheer that the human imagination has been so fertile in so many astounding ways.  We'll shoot zingers at both sides and pray they don't let go of the rope.

(A friend has advised me that there is indeed a distinct difference between a bog and a swamp; and in fact, there are many kinds of bogs, from the Valley bog to the Raised bog, the Blanket bog, the Quaking bog, and even, God help us, the Cataract bog.  There is even a sport known as "bog snorkeling" -- don't ask.  But the promising aspect of bogs in general is their "accumulated peat, "a deposit of dead plant material," plus assemblages of plants and animals, leading to a biodiversity from which the living can be reborn from the detritus of the dead -- or, for our purposes, the decayed but still valuable peat of old films, paperbacks, TV shows, comics, and ideas.  And since Stanley Kubrick is one of the resident gods of this blog, it's worth remarking that in the Anthony Burgess novel from which A Clockwork Orange was made, "blog" is the slang word for God.)

Bog is to the early 21st century what Beat was to the mid-20th.  They were beat, we're bogged down.  But to be beat was also to move to the beat, to beat the system, to achieve beatitude.  Our bog god beckons us to move beyond stagnation and overproliferation.  (Call it stagliferation -- not unlike the "stagflation" of America during the Carter years, that lethal combination of stagnation and inflation of the late 1970s).  This blog will, with luck, help encourage the nutrients in the bog to flourish, and provide hints for all of us to develop a more discerning culture-diversity.

In am interview some year ago, culture critic Susan Sontag was asked by Christopher Lydon, "What writers influence you, which ones do you light candles to?"  Sontag protested, "I don't light candles.  I read the writers I admire, and reread them," and went on to say she was interested in many things, and that listing all of them "would be pretentious."  I'm hoping the following list won't be pretentious.  At least I don't light candles to them (though in the case of Grace Kelly I've been tempted to).

Some of the people and subjects that might pop up here (and ultimately I'm the one who does the popping) are:  

Cinema masters Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Preston Sturges, Woody Allen, Luis Bunuel, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Francois Truffaut; screen icons Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and Jack Nicholson, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Groucho Marx, Gene Tierney, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and Natalie Wood; TV legends  Rod Serling,  Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, Mary Tyler Moore, 1950s' Superman's George Reeves, Honey West's Ann Francis, Dick Cavett and Tom Snyder; magisterial film critics Pauline Kael and David Thomson, British giants and eccentrics George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, W. Somerset Maugham, Philip Larkin, Malcolm Muggeridge, Colin Wilson, Winston Churchill, The Beatles, and honorary Brit Arthur Koestler; Irish geniuses Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett; French writers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Boris Vian; American literary virtuosos F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Henry Miller, Raymond Chandler, James Thurber, J. D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, P. J. O'Rourke, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth; literary critics H. L. Mencken, Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, Joseph Epstein, Clive James, and Louis Menand;  playwrights Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Tom Stoppard; speculative fiction wizards Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein; historians Paul Johnson and John Luckacs; artists Salvador Dali, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Edward Hopper, Fairfield Porter, and Charles Addams; plus The New York World's Fairs of 1939 and 1964, Aurora monster model kits from the 1960s, Commentary, MAD, EC comics, Film Comment, Charles Krauthammer, Ben Hecht, jazz, Gustav Mahler, women, Paris, Vienna, kibbutzim, coffee, and the joys of Elmer's Disappearing Glue Stick.  (It sounds like it should be called Elmer's Disappearing Glue Trick, but we'll leave the magic for another time.)  

I should warn you that some of the above eminentoes are people with whom I have strong disagreements, but they nevertheless occupy significant places in my own mental culture bog.  (The links above will take you to some surprising and delightful places.)  I should further warn the faint-hearted among you that some of my views could be categorized as moderately conservative -- a good friend of mine has suggested I'm to the right of Carnegie Hall.  I'd revise that to read I'm slightly to the right of the Carnegie Deli.  That should provide the appropriate flavor to the proceedings to follow.

To conclude:  This is the place to come for the real lowdown on both the High and Low and every hybrid imaginable.  Put your cards on the table, face up -- and remember that the odds always favor the house, but here every man's a king and every woman's a queen, and there are two chickens in every garage and a car in every pot.  But please, no pot in here -- we welcome sober (but not solemn), thoughtful, clear-minded readers eager for a probing analysis of all the news that's not yet fit to print -- though as Ezra Pound noted, literature is news that stays news.  Personally I'll be shocked if any scoops are broken here, but I welcome any you might have to offer.  This blog will sometimes be playful, even silly, but despite Cary Grant's admission to Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, "At my age the last word a man wants to hear is 'serious,'" it won't hesitate to be serious when the seriousness warrants it.  And remember -- sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  So jump right in, the water's brine.  Or at least mine.