SAINT MAZIE

A few weeks ago I wrote a review for Caught By The River of Thomas Kunkel's excellent biography of the great New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell - Man In Profile : Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker - http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2015/05/man-in-profile-joseph-mitchell-new-yorker-andy-childs/. Pleasingly, the book seems to have garnered a great deal of praise and attention and will hopefully have introduced Mitchell's timeless prose to a whole new audience. The wonderful compendium of his best work - Up In The Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) - is still available and hopefully always will be. The second piece in this book is of particular interest at the moment. It's called Mazie and is a short profile of "a bossy, yellow-haired blonde named Mazie P.Gordon....a celebrity on the Bowery....has a wry but genuine fondness for bums....and each day gives them between five and fifteen dollars in small change, which is a lot of money on the Bowery" (a very large amount actually, this being the late 30s). By day Mazie worked, practically lived even, in the ticket cage of the Venice movie theatre which her family owned and from where she presided, like some street-wise, life-hardened matron and angel, over the destitute and the down-on-their-luck inhabitants of the Bowery. 

Joseph Mitchell should always be remembered first and foremost as a great writer and chronicler of New York life, but there are two perhaps more newsworthy elements to his story that will seemingly always resurface in any discussion of his life. The first is the last thirty years of his life working for The New Yorker and never publishing a word, and the second is the revelation, relatively soon after they were published it must be stated, that some of his celebrated profile pieces on various individuals were in fact composite creations. Hugh G.Flood (in Old Mr.Flood), King Cockeye Johnny (in King of The Gypsies) and Mr.Hunter (in Mr.Hunter's Grave) didn't actually exist. In the hands of a lesser writer this underhand blurring of fact and fiction would have devalued the journalistic merit of his work. With his impeccable eye for detail and detached perspective though Mitchell succeeds in creating characters that perfectly represent the essence of the places and the time that he's writing about and they are as real to him as any living person could be. 

In his earlier, shorter pieces like Mazie however there was no room or necessity for any fictional embellishment. Or so Joe Mitchell thought. And so I also thought until I discovered that all of last week and this week BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime is a book called Saint Mazie by Jami Attenberg (Serpent's Tail) which is apparently a novel that imagines the life and times of Mazie and "honours an extraordinary life and heralds a completely original approach to writing historical fiction. Weaving together fictionalised diaries, writings and interviews, Attenberg has constructed an utterly convincing portrait of Mazie Philips, which is also a deeply moving portrait of New York as it passed through the First World War, Prohibition, the boom of the '20s, and then the terrible depression of the '30s."
So it seems that in an audacious manner that Joseph Mitchell would have surely approved of in his courteous Southern-gentlemanly way, Attenberg has taken the essence of Mazie's story (with perhaps only Mitchell's original seventeen-page piece as source material) and brought her to life in a way that feels as credible as it does remarkable. I'm only going on what I've heard on the radio - I have yet to get my hands on a copy of the book - but the voices and narrative sound thoroughly authentic to me. Despite the increasing and bewildering insistence on radio and TV to use English actors for American parts, Samantha Spiro does a very creditable job as Mazie's voice and the supporting voices are equally good. It's riveting radio and I can only assume that the book is even more rewarding.

BRIAN CASE - On The Snap

In the early 70s, when I was editor of Zigzag magazine and based in Soho there was a group of us, some contributors to the magazine and some loosely connected to it, who used to convene on a regular basis to discuss the important records of the day, ridicule anyone in the music business we collectively disliked, extol the virtues of our heroes, and drink. The core of this increasingly-addled coterie consisted of Pete Frame, John Tobler, Tom Sheehan, Paul McNally, Jerry Gilbert, Keith Smith, Rocky Prior, Monty Smith, Will Birch and myself. There were several casual attendees such as Jonathan Morrish and Chalkie Davies and, most often at the behest of Tobler and Sheehan we used to invite the occasional 'guest'. Tobler, who was working as press officer at CBS Records at the time, once brought along a young Rolling Stone journalist who was in town named Cameron Crowe. Very amiable chap, talked to me about Neil Young (who he'd just interviewed) for ages, and was quietly appalled at the amount of alcohol we were able to consume in a lunchtime. And Tom Sheehan, one of the more gregarious members of our tribe, invited several 'personalities' who he thought might amuse us. Danny Baker was one of them I recall (talked so much that none of us could get a word in and consequently drunk even more than usual) and on a couple of occassions he brought along Brian Case, eminent jazz journalist, fine raconteur, proper drinker. All round ace chap. I should add at this point that our particular gathering, enthusiasts of the vituperative arts as we were, didn't suffer fools or other music journalists easily. Sheehan, one of our very greatest music photographers, friend of the stars, and much sought after by the music press, often found himself in the offices of either the NME or MM at lunchtime with a raging thirst and impatient to join us for a restorative 'lotion' (his terminology) he would airily announce that he was “going down the pub”. Being an immensely popular figure and amusing company for witless scribes he would be greeted with a chorus of “which pub are you going to Tom?” Heart sinking at the thought of inflicting these wretched hacks on our esteemed company, Tom would briskly announce :“to the Million Barking Dogs”. Clueless as to where this establishment was located but far too cool to admit it they would all cheerily reply “OK, see you there later”. The Million Barking Dogs of course didn't actually exist. Tom had invented the name to deter any unwelcome intruders with their fatuous opinions who might threaten to lower the tone of our rarified assembly. At various times the Million Barking Dogs was a number of pubs whose names I can't remember, the Princess Louise, the Pillars of Hercules (which became our regular) and a pub near, I think, Windmill Street which is where Brian Case graced our company. I may have got some, if not all, of that wrong but that's how I like to remember it. I'm do know though that Brian, ensconced in a corner with his roll-ups and a selection of beverages, impressed us all with his humour, frightening knowledge about 'difficult jazz' (more inventive terminology from Sheehan), his refreshing and lightly-veiled belligerence towards the many frauds, charlatans and idiots that plagued the music business, and of course his capacity for booze. He must have seen through our tarnished veneer of bohemian pretence immediately and marked us down as imposters because the number of times he illuminated the proceedings were too few. I for one, a mere amateur in comparison at the time, was no match for his level of critical precision, incisive wit and dry humour. I've always loved his writing if not always the subjects he chose to write about, but it is with absolutely no hesitation that I can wholeheartedly recommend On The Snap as a taster of Brian Case's style, humour and ability to paint a vivid portrait in a paragraph. It is, as the title suggests, a series of snapshots of musicians (mostly jazz), actors, film directors, and crime writers who Brian has interviewed over the course of three decades. Most of these subjective profiles are very funny, mercilessly opinionated and infused with respect and admiration for the subject (his encounter with the Sex Pistols is an exception). My favourites are the story about him turning up for an interview with Al Pacino with 100 rounds of ammunition in his trenchcoat pockets, his Chet Baker story, his memories of Ronnie Scott, and the Richard Harris chapter. I will probably read the whole book several more times though (it's 60-odd pages and easily devoured in one sitting) just because it's the sort of great, uninhibited writing about musicians and 'artists' generally that seems to be in short supply these days.

On The Snap : Three Decades of Snapshots from the World of Jazz, Film & Crime Fiction by Brian Case is published by Caught By The River and can be purchased here : https://caughtbytheriver.greedbag.com/buy/on-the-snap-by-brian-case/packshot.html