photo courtesy Christopher Macsurak
If ever there was a saying about my life in this stage, such as it is, it is: It’s never too late to embrace all that you don’t know. That and that perhaps it is in the previously unappreciated that we have the most to learn. And, #3, is it not the most wonderful in revelations, that in what unfolds itself from the most serendipitous act, as in flipping through channels after dinner?
These days, mine is a call to ramble, as surely shown in the above, to let out of the bag some of that bubbling and daft verbiage that extemporaneously occurs to me – a rush to expunge and materialize all that has been buried there for some 60 years as if in formation of either an earthquake or a volcano. Long in simmering, perhaps short in real value and yet I am compelled to let it all go. I walk around having words and music floating about nowadays. In my previous life, I would have repressed it all. Now, I just let happen. Before, when I would have redirected myself to “get something done”, now I just let it float.
And so, I end up with self-messaging such as this: Ok, this is good, I have not studied such things, that other people have, I have not considered such things. Add them to the list.
As we all surf through the options these days of what to do with the vast amounts of time gifted to us via COVID lockdowns, of what best fits our time, I, with happenstance came upon the collaboration of Martin Scorsese and Fran Leibovitz on Netflix the other day. Bearing in mind that I have basically nothing in common with the life of Fran in terms of interpretive art and observation, save having grown up in the same school system and basically the same era as she, I was drawn in to listen to what I first thought to be this most uncommon pairing. Really? I said to myself, Martin Scorsese and Fran? What’s this all about? And then I saw. What, nobody ever thought to write “The World According to Fran?” Surely this is more entertaining and potentially more valuable than Garp.
Little can be found of familiarity at first glance but the commonality of sitting in the same exact cafeteria in the same high school. How random is that? After referencing her great love that is Motown music that we share and her priceless reflection that is the instantaneous happiness at hearing it played some 50 years later, I still can see vividly, the Anderson brothers at the jukebox against the wall next to the apple machine (yes, we did indeed have a jukebox and apple-vending machine in our high school cafeteria). And, the idea that there was much more here than I most sillily thought crept in. What Fran did in her few segments was to bring back for me many memories through her most sardonic playing at the fabric of her own life and reflections, her parsing of mindless trend juxtaposed against her clear-eyed wittiness, her flat and statement-oriented frankness.
Aside from needing something quite different to pass my evening hours instead of the news which couldn’t be more demoralizing, I found myself glued to the tv and enjoying my outward loud and substantive chuckling and chortling at Fran’s product of what must have been such careful consideration of so many orbs of her existence. I found myself comparing my own mostly banal existence to her rich and wonderful life – the cello, an early love affair with books, knowing as she fomented her life she had to escape from suburbia, the remembrances of her parents’ unnurturing but unmistakably formative ways.
How did she do it, I wondered? That time, just 4 years ahead of me in school, (she would have been a senior in 1968 I believe) was both a treasured, simpleminded existence and yet, a most visceral springboard. Whomever would have had the nerve to leave high school in their senior year and trek off to New York to roam the streets – in bare feet, no less? I was in awe. I found myself completely enamored with this person who found herself in jobs as a writer when I was still trying to navigate myself through three part-time jobs in pursuit of college, challenged by my own parents’ ambivalence toward it or downright “girls don’t go to college – they stay at home till they get married purview”. That nearly killed me. I could never fathom the absence of wanting something more for one’s children especially from a man of such great natural, yet unrealized intelligence. Chalk it all up to fear, I still guess.
Once I’d gotten past the odd couple relationship of Fran and Martin – I just parked it away on the sideline, I allowed myself to fully want to know exactly what it was that he knew he wanted to get her to put out there in all its glory. Somehow in his immense genius, he saw the scope and relevance and the great sardonic delivery that brought the mixed bag of both her comedy and clear-eyed observedness literally to the table. What Scorcese gives us is a package of vignettes that not only relays to us the perfect encapsuling of the New York City era that is her life, but also the meteoric rise of a talent quite unsuspected yet equally thrilling. I imagine Fran as born with a mission (unlike me) and as undeterred in her assured execution of it as can be. Did she have substantive doubts or was her march-forwardness just the much more powerful instinct?
Anyway, I am glad she has bestowed upon us the philosophy according to Fran. I love that she has deliberately foregone the engrossment in the world of the smartphone so as to allow the full-throttled embrace of the world without it – the actual walking down the streets of the city with eyes on the world in front of you instead of on the tiny screen. Isn’t her world so much the richer for it. That’s a statement not a question. To go inside all those bookstores, to know all of those people of talent that she does, to sit and talk with them, face to face at the parties as she has over the decades, the people she has known and cultivated relationships with, I am in awe. I yearn for the richness of her experiences in jazz clubs, discussing books, paging through dictionaries, cultivating in her head the collection of essays that must materialize naturally in comic strip formation clouds in her imagination. I sure hope she will write them all down for posterity. They are such fertile food for thought, to use a cliché that she would undoubtedly hate.
What appealed to me and what I learned from watching this doc series really surprised me and I love that. While I so doubted the premise of it at the start, wondered aloud to myself what Martin was doing – as compared to all his other work, and with Fran? It sucked me in in curiosity as surely as he must have planned. A regular treasure trove of New York culture – she agreed to just talk and we became the great beneficiaries of all that she has carefully and sarcastically considered, in her own wry and self-confessed jaded yet so real self-examination. I found myself wishing we all were called to such brilliant self analysis.
What have we found? Fran rambles and Martin successfully culls and edits the remarkable formations of a mind of serious proportions. She comments on the social fabric of New York City in such a rich and tumultuous time. While basically contemporaries from the same exact spot on a map, ours couldn’t have been more different and I find myself more than a little envious at her sense of freedom and self determination. What she has done in her decades there seems to me to be a deep and reflective lumbering along the way, combing of the streets of the city, to embrace the actual dirty and grunginess of it while at the same time reveling in the ultimate gift of the height of the culture of it all, the Warhol, the Mingus, the Opera, the books. I left the series wishing for her to catalog it all down on paper for the rest of the world to be able to read in perpetuity. Has anyone else captured the City to this depth, to wax poetic about not feeling guilty about eating two dishes of spaghetti and smoking cigarettes, I wonder?
Fran’s world is one of joy as seen through a remarkably keen eye. Why is it that she “used to be a writer”? Did the coffers fill up so fully and quickly that she couldn’t keep pace with them? Or was she just, in inimitable Fran style way too busy soaking it all up that she chose deliberately not to pause to write it all down any more. As I watch Fran roam the streets in her unique deliberate stroll, a detail I think Scorsese must find as alluring as I do, I wonder at her chosen visual persona. Has she embraced herself so fully as to make a determined statement or has she given over to her own inner voice so completely as to not give a damn? How uniquely freeing, how so liberating she seems to me. In all my suburban comfort cum multi-city yearning I see myself. Fran let go of the former for the scintillating emersion into the latter, finding herself a creature of the city, the streets, the bookstores, the galleries, the clubs, the salons. How rich she is. While she does wax poetic, a term I’d suspect she assuredly hates, about her inability to afford living in New York, she so totally gets it – the letting go of all the holding-back practicality driven into us as kids, of not being able to do something and yet just goes for it all and finds a way to execute. I am enthralled for I am no such risk-taker. And so, I find myself living vicariously, in awe at such a contemporary character as she most assuredly is, in her own story. And, as I listened to the exquisitely choreographed music of the series, I finally did get the genius of Scorsese’s vision, his unmatched listening skill and eye for such mastery. Where else would we find such an unique capture of a caricature of this New York time? Who’d else take the time, devote the resources? I find it so funny that she was juxtaposed against the character she berates in the Wolf of Wall Street. Yet, Fran successfully straddles the whole gambit of New York life – the dark and dirty and the top of the top-crusted salons. Whew. It’s breadth is amazing. I’m sure if I sat around long enough I might find some other examples of those who bloomed in the time – but really, anyone as compellingly fascinating?
How exactly did she come to sit at the desk of Alec Baldwin, David Letterman, and sounds like Nina Totenberg (?) have these embracing chats with Toni Morrison and share her soul and ancestral archive with Scorcese? Don’t you just want to know more? Who will catalog her life more completely? Where else would we get the benefit of her funny yet so incisive depiction of the Wellness fad? Today, Sunday morning, sun just rising in her personal antithesis so startlingly clear as suburb or culturally self-absorbed Silicon Valley and San Francisco as she describes California, I wish to share a spot with her. Or, do I just want to watch it in all its full-throttled life? It’s not lost on me that I’d probably find myself so deferential to her as Mingus did to Duke Ellington.
I found the series so refreshing and nostalgic at the same time. That in and of itself showcases Scorsese’s brilliance. Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts and The Million Dollar Movie. Nomenclatures that virtually no one else thinks about today brought out for all to consider in what we have lost in one generation.
New York – “what’s NOT here?”, she begs. Mostly, I love her philosophy about fun. If it’s not killing or molesting someone, go right ahead, have it. I’m in awe of how much more she knows than I do. I find her as motivating as she is revealing.
I love her freedom to admit her lack of talents, her foibles, and yet her certainty in her powerful self-embracement. The show has been such a good picture for me, even at this stage in my own life, of a great role model.
And so, I humbly have gone full circle from the first wondering about the wisdom of this whole doc series to the profound respect for Scorsese’s knowing, his nose for talent and the story, for his keen insight in revealing it in such precisely powerful vignettes that he has. Call me last to observe the full sense of this point. I’m fine with that.
And now, I am off to listen to the Fresh Air Weekend episode with Teri Gross. I didn’t want to do it before I wrote this so as to not spoil the initial perceptions I’ve had at the series. So, go ahead, listen to Pretend It’s a City again as I have, to soak in, as we do when we watch movies again, the details we missed in the initial partaking. Thanks, Fran and Martin. You are two gems.
Perhaps my favorite preface of hers: “it would have never occurred to me to……..”