About Author: Hilton Als

Posts by Hilton Als

5

Moon River: The Genius of the Parent

By
Hilton Als
– April 9, 2013

DionneWhen I was a little boy, I loved to sing. I don’t think I associated it with being a performer; singing was an extension of the music I loved, and words, and the singers I loved–Dionne Warwick, that kind of thing. Dionne on Scepter Records, all those 45s stacked up on the record player in my cousin’s bedroom, Dionne didn’t want to be made over. In addition to all that–my first lesson in philosophy–Dionne knew the difference between a house and a home. The Dionne album cover I stared at and stared at in my sister’s collection was 1964’s “Make Way for Dionne Warwick.” I was as fascinated by the sequence of photographs on the cover as I was by the music; each still showed a different Dionne mood; her body was a series of gestures, and sparkles, and legs, and a wig. No living woman had hair like that but Dionne convinced us that that hair was possible–she could convince you of anything–because of her voice, which not only told stories so convincingly, especially the abstract ones–a house was not a home, did I know the way to San Jose?, things long to be close to you when the longing lover perceives it as such–because of her nuance and tone, which was not inseparable from what she said and how she said it. Dionne’s tone was always calm. Her emotional drama on those records was just beneath the surface, though, which made her storytelling all the more real. No one–unless they are crazy or desperate for attention–sounds dramatic all the time; Dionne sounded like the adult women I knew growing up. Their voices said things had been bad but they could be worse–or better. One non-Dionne song I loved growing up was “Moon River.” It said so many things and filled me up in ways I can’t explain even now. (I don’t remember how I first heard the song. Did a teacher choose it for me?) A school recital was to take place, and I was asked or asked to sing “Moon River.” I practiced and practiced and felt no embarrassment as I practiced: “Moon River,” would be me, just as “Make Way for Dionne Warwick,” was Dionne Warwick. On the day of the recital, I stood on that stage, my parents in the audience. I had on a white shirt, and tie. (Ties were mandatory at elementary school back then.) How old was I? Five? Six? I can’t remember, but if I close my eyes now I can feel my little chest and heart beating against that white shirt, and my voice rising up: “Moon river/Wider than a mile/I’m crossing you in style, one day.” Music took a lot. You had to push out to get your voice out, all the while dealing with cadence and that magical element: tone. What was the world feeling as I sang that song? Where was the world? As I sang the world receded, and there was just my voice and my vibrating chest, and my white shirt. After I’d finished: applause. But that meant less to me than the feeling of the song–it had filled me up with its own meaning. (Years after this happened the singer Rickie Lee Jones told me that singers loved to sing sad songs in particular because of the way those songs filled you up.) I left the stage. My mother rushed up to me. “You were wonderful!,” she said, embracing me, while my father stood by, out of reach or out of my reach. “I couldn’t hear you,” he said. Years passed, and, except for a brief stint in a small musical group made up of a number of friends I haven’t seen for years, I never sang again.

Life went on and things happened. Someone I was very close to in college and after college–he died in 1992; AIDS–said once: “You know, you should sing what you write.” And when I protested with, But I don’t know how to sing! He said: “Dylan doesn’t know how to sing!” It’s a conversation that always comes to mind when I get into a cab in New York these days. More often than not the Middle Eastern men, or Latin men, who pick me up in taxis when they pick me up at all, ask, after hearing me speak,  if I’m a singer. I can’t hear my own voice, but I’m always moved when people react to it, and it occurs to me now that my father–who couldn’t bond with either of his sons–knew, in an instinctive way, the intuitive way of the resentful parent, that I had a voice, and if people responded to it, I would exist in ways he did not feel he existed, and  if he shut me up I would be more like him, or no better than him. But my father didn’t count on me becoming a writer, and, in a way, my writing has become a kind of long form singing, particularly when I read aloud. I feel the words filling me up, and isn’t it amazing how children who are given a “You were wonderful!” boost can take another parent’s hatred and make it something else? Another friend told me once: “You were lucky to have your father,” and I didn’t know what he meant for a long time until I thought about it, and realized that what my friend was saying was this: A negative parent can help create a determined child. A parent who is unwilling to praise a child, or look at them with love, may help produce his or her worse nightmare: a child who can sing. Did my father want to sing? No. He wanted to be involved with words, though; he was an obsessive reader of newspapers, of the specious truth. When I was first starting out as a writer, I worked at a newspaper, but I was incapable of making my voice conform to the editorial voice; various editors tried to make me do so, aggressively, resentfully, but, in the end, they would have to take what I said and how I said it, or leave it, even after they tried to marginalize my voice by saying: I can’t hear you. Say it this way. Speak this way. But it was already too late. Dionne Warwick and my father had said otherwise.
2

Toni

By
Hilton Als
– March 23, 2013

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These photographs are by Jill Krementz, and were taken of the author Toni Morrison while she was an editor at Random House, in the nineteen-seventies. On Fridays, the esteemed author taught a class at Yale, in the African-American studies department (at the time it was in a basement somewhere). When I asked her then employer, former Random House director, Jason Epstein, why Morrison taught at the end of her week, he said: Random House paid five cents then. The photographs kill me, being, as they are, a rare glimpse into what a working writer’s life is actually like, free of the usual Jane Addams sentimentality. The pictures say, You do what you need to do to make your life. I am particularly struck by Morrison on the Metro North–picked up in Grand Central–on her way to New Haven. Her briefcase on her lap, she’s making notes–perhaps on a student’s paper, perhaps for her talk, perhaps for one of her books. The light illuminates her as she writes; again, we’re given a real glimpse into the writer living in the every day. At the time these photographs were taken, I was a student at SUNY Purchase; to get home to Brooklyn from Purchase, I took a train that stopped in Grand Central. One day, making my way through the terminal, I saw Morrison’s then just out third novel, “Song of Solomon.” I spent every cent I had on that book, and couldn’t put it down: she had created a world. But what did it take to create a world? I wanted to create a world. That meant not living in the world, right? You sat in a room and shut the world out. How did you do that? Imagine, then, how amazed and gratified I was when I read, in a 1981 Newsweek cover story by Jean Strouse on Morrison, descriptions of Morrison’s daily life in Upper Nyack, her work as an editor, her life as a mother. I recognized her; I had a brother and a single mother, too. Years passed, and I started to teach at Yale, while working for a company that was owned by the man who owned Random House, for a time. In any case, while at that company, I ended up writing a profile about Toni Morrison. Our conversations took place in Morrison’s home, and in a restaurant nearby. As we talked, what struck me most was how much the writer had allowed her life; that is, she had allowed herself the space to create, and to nurture, and to be lauded. I didn’t know many women let alone women or people of color who managed to do that and the question hung in the air: How did you allow yourself to become yourself? One day, as we sat in her studio, she complimented me on a pair of shoes I had on; I told her I’d had them made, and that I’d been encouraged to do so by Jason Epstein, who not only introduced me to the boot maker, but sat with me while I had them designed and fitted. Morrison said: That’s right, my shoes. And it was then that I understood something more about the Krementz pictures (which I didn’t see until last year): portraits are only interesting when the subject can say, simply and complicatedly, but owning it: I.

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“20,000 Years in Sing Sing.” Film Forum. 2.27.13

By
Hilton Als
– February 27, 2013


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The Watts Towers. 1.20.13 Los Angeles.

By
Hilton Als
– January 26, 2013




Yesterday, on my mother’s birthday, I went with two friends to the Watts Towers–one of the more significant spiritual journeys I have ever had in the company of other people, let alone a neighborhood. Poverty in LA (unlike poverty in NYC or the West Indies) always confuses me, since many people who live in houses often have gardens and NYC poverty sends you OUT to gardens–the Botanical Garden, etc. But, if you’re paying close attention in places like Watts, you begin to see deprivation–the outsized desire for “more,” while living with less–i.e. an enormous truck that’s bigger than the structure housing a family; suspicion and dogs. In any case, our tour of the extraordinary towers, which were never defaced or anything by Rodia’s neighbors (he was the only white man in the neighborhood and he was often referred to as Don Rodia), cast a pall of quiet joy in my soul if those words and feelings are possible together. It felt like writing to me–this architecture of invention and all made by hand, scrap after scrap, like words piling up in one’s head, or on the page. The tour was conducted by the handsomest man with the most beautiful voice–sonorous–and when I was a kid and would meet black people from California, I was always struck by the accent–a Western lightness or flatness?–that didn’t sound like “us.” In any case, it was impossible to tell the tour guy’s age (I called him, in my heart, Daddy Watts) and the beautiful play of upper body muscles as he talked and gesticulated and told stories about Rodia did nothing to betray that, either: he was our authority for the day, and also a kid-as-wit. To wit: while telling the story of Rodia, and his obsession with getting his work done, Daddy Watts–who works at the art center attached to the towers; it’s called the Charles Mingus Art Center, I believe–pantomimed Rodia’s first wife giving him the boot because he spent most of his time making his work and drinking than being married and at home. (He eventually stopped drinking.) But Mrs. Rodia how marvelous to be married to such a person, with an evangelical vision, poking around along the railroad tracks, bending metal and so on to make a third dimensional dream even more so. In the little documentary we saw afterwards, we saw Rodia at work, and his little croaky voice–he stood about 4’11–along with his felt hat warding off the sun was so moving to me, especially when he said things like: “I couldn’t hire someone to work with me. No money! I also could not tell them what to do because I do not know what I am doing.” He also said: “I am awake all night!,” as he described trying to understand his work, his life. The language of the artist. Prior to watching the film, as the tour began to wind down, Daddy Watts came up to me, on the side, and said, regarding my shoes: “Brother, where did you get those saddle Oxfords?” And when I told him New York, he said: “Nah, I ain’t going there.”

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The Beauty of Hello, the Gorgeousness of Goodbye

By
Hilton Als
– January 2, 2013

Screen shot 2013-05-17 at 2.47.17 PM2012 becomes 2013 with these words from Maurice Sendak. My mother shared his sentiment: Let me say goodbye first so I will miss none of you in your complications and loveliness.

 

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The Shoes

By
Hilton Als
– January 1, 2013


Moments after the memorial they stepped out into less complicated air. It was warm for an early winter day; the atmosphere was grey and humid and still, despite the traffic sounds, and the people movement beyond. Clutching his friend’s hands, the man said: I’m glad you were there. They looked at one another. One man was chewing gum, and the one who wasn’t longed for some of his own, so, they decided to cross the avenue to get a stick. But before that, the man who wasn’t chewing gum was stopped by another man. He was as tall and brown as the gumless one. He said: Excuse me but are you–. The man without gum nodded. His interlocutor continued: You may not remember me. But I’m –. We met many years ago, through –. And it was maybe twenty years ago and you were wearing the same shoes. I just have to say how much I like them, and what you do. The man without gum, but with the shoes, looked down at them. They were saddle shoes, the first he had ever bought for himself. And he knew the man who complimented him was referring to his previous pair of saddle shoes, a gift from a friend. Looking back as he looked at the man who had admired them–remembered how, after his friend had presented him with the saddle shoes, he sat at another desk at the newspaper they both worked at then, and polished them. Such was the work and emotion of that day. Years later, the backs of those shoes broke down, and, as he crossed 8th Street one day, the always grateful and shy recipient of his friend’s largesse saw a variation of those saddle shoes in a shop window, and put them out of his mind, almost at once: he could not replace the memory of his friend slowly rubbing oil into those first pair of shoes, ever, despite the fact that he hadn’t seen his friend for many years. He went to the organic food shop and thought about the shoes; they would not leave him alone. What was he supposed to do with his memory of love and care, and the necessity of new shoes? Would he buy his own shoes forever? Why did buying new shoes feel as though he was cheating on the old? His friend–the man who bought him his first pair of saddle shoes–was sacred, and yet he needed new shoes, shoes that reminded him of his friend, and yet carried him into the future. He bought the new saddle shoes and as he crossed the avenue in search of his stick of gum, he realized that the person he and his present friend had just memorialized was one of the few people who knew something of his old saddle shoes, and already hope and death stuck to the soles of the new pair, like gum.

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