RUDIMENTS, pt. 888
(the fire had run down)
Elmira played well to my
sensibilities. it was broken,
and humbled. I've already told
the story of Tommy Hilfiger, the
fashion guy, before he was a
big deal. He was just a small
sized young guy, who, after
leaving his job on Water Street
at some old-line, traditional,
men's clothing store, opened
his own little tee-shirt and
fun-clothes place, called
'People's Place.' It really all
began as much of nothing -
LP's blaring rock music of
that day, weird clothing in the
windows, some lights, lots of
cool stuff. Tommy used to run
weekends into the city (NYC,
250 miles off), and come back
with lots of things he bought,
to re-sell. Trendsetting, hip
new styles, in Tommy's opinion
of taste and style. I guess it all
worked. After not too long, a
few years later, he was Tommy
Hilfiger, fashion icon dude
superstar. I wouldn't ever
know what inkling or ideas
he had about the place where
he lived, but I guess it was
never mentioned again.
-
I sometimes think it's already
all there; the idea of place
and totality. You just have
to call it something, giving
it a name which makes it
then real or comfortable to
you, for you, to live in. Pretty
much in the same manner, here,
as Tommy Hilfiger, fashion
superstar on the make, coming
back from his weekends forays
with the Elmira clothing HE
wanted made manifest. As if,
in his (I thought) lousy choice
of title, 'People's Place' really
did mean something, later
abandoned. I think he dealt
his cards low, and, lucky stars,
they all came out high.
-
Which is where the idea of
the creative person gets involved.
Where's that magic come from?
Is it in the air? Local air only?
Mark Twain, as we look back,
sort of 'invented' American and
performance art. Charlie Chaplin,
even Bob Dylan, have all taken
something from him; besides
lying about it all and fabricating
plays and roles for themselves.
Those guys were all derivative,
sourcing from Twain, in their
sneaky ways, from something
that, once, was really authentic.
Twain was our first 'American'
stage raconteur; performer, if
you will. Our own, white,
shooting star of a sort of
minstrelsy that ended up, yes,
defining race, and dealing with
it. The man (late teen) had
been in, for goodness sake,
the Confederate Army, even
if for a short time. Ruffians.
A regiment pf race anarchists.
He grew into, and quickly out
if that role, sensing to see what
it really meant, and then, in
his public like, turned to a rough
form of disdain and sarcasm for
all things - church and state,
without qualms over either. I
think once he left the South
he really did 'leave' the South.
-
I don't think anyone in America
before had ever publicly stood
'outside' of his or her self, in the
mode of performing while imparting
lessons and attitudes and opinions.
Oh, maybe Cotton Mather and
Jonathan Edwards and any of
those early preacher and evangelical
American guys - but that was
pulpit stuff in the spirit of the
Lord and the eyes of an angry God
and any of that Great Awakening
evangelical fervor stuff. Witches
of Salem, notwithstanding, it never
went too far. Twain was different -
which is why I so often returned
to the altar of his secular remains,
this strange tomb, that awkwardly
enlightened hole in the Elmira
ground. No keeping it from me,
this man was touched - and he
went right past the Devil, and
God too, on his way to someplace
else. Fire in the sky; remember
that comet he always talked
about, 'I came in with Haley's
Comet, and I'll go out with
Haley's Comet.' And he did.
-
All around the country, once he
hit the road, taking that touring
relentlessly around, he'd refine,
redo, and re-stage the same old
oddly rhetorical and actually only
occasionally funny, act. And that's
back when cross-country touring
was an ordeal too - sometimes
trains, more often horse wagons,
rutted roads and lanes, problems,
delays, wash-outs, aches and
pains too. Little contact along
the way, for long periods, with
kin. He did it, and the people
came. He'd shuffled onto the
stage, squinting and 'peering,'
as if suddenly surprised, at the
audience he'd not realized was
there. They all laughed. The
ambling, shuffling, gate, the
supposed indecision and
distance. He walked with an
rolling gait, which was easily
mistaken for a drunken stagger.
His voice rolled out, real slow
- in a drawl. 'The syllables
came out about every half
minute,' one observer noted,
that it too could be mistake
for many things it wasn't. (He
recorded it once, his performance,
but the waxes were never saved).
The coy sentimentality behind
it all is the real giveaway. Twain
was his own master of all that,
and those other lapdogs just
sucked it up. For the next
hundred years - there are
still stage acts feeding off this,
and I made mention of but two.
-
Mark Twain said 'History doesn't
repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.'
He also said 'I remember everything,
and what I don't remember I make
up.' That works. He was the first real
'performing' writer we had. Long about,
in Elmira, oh, 1974 or close enough,
maybe, there was a Broadway guy
named Hal Holbrook, with a one-man
'Mark Twain Night' thing - a pretty
good impersonation of the Twain
character; all that sway and ramble,
indiscreet digressions, twisted and
perverse subjects and logics. It
came across well enough I guess
for the Broadway crowd. The
problem was, like all else of this
ilk, it was as inauthentic as could
be, and Holbrook's niceties were
all in a sort of paradoxical yet parallel
netherworld of what Twain's had really
been about. Juxtaposed, and bouncing
right off it. It's funny, but once you
have the 'answer' to a puzzle, there's
not that much fun left in doing the
puzzle. It was like that with the
'future' that Mark Twain inhabited -
when it was still future. It took balls
and some real scurvy-doing to stand
like he did and grab at things when
they were still issues. Everything
rang, hard and harsh as the day it
was in. For Holbrook, if anything
rang, it rang hollow. It no longer
had a dare or a place, the resonance
and the gong was gone. We knew
the endings by then, the fire had
run down. Hell, it was just 'show
biz' by then. It all just became
sweet and cloying. A bunch of
retrospective junk.That crazy
Grandpa again, Grandpa Clemens.
-
Like John Lennon said to the
rich British crowd, 'Applaud.
And those in the really expensive
seats, you can just rattle your
jewelry.' Something like that.
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