Save The Marx Brothers Home

179 E. 93rd Street, NYC, where the Marx Brothers spent their formative years, is at risk of being torn down by developers. Please sign the petition to save the building.

For more information, see this article at the New York Times.

More on Dali

While I'm on the subject of Salvador Dali, I've just finished a new post at my Marx Brothers blog, entitled Surrealism or Hello Dali. Feel free to check it out.

Marx Brothers Blog

Today, for no particular reason, I decided to start a new blog dedicated to the Marx Brothers. I have started the new blog with one of the more popular posts at Lugubrious Drollery: "Lydia the Tattooed Lady Revealed."

Chiaroscuro

A couple weeks ago, I attended a lecture at the Snite Museum of Art at The University of Notre Dame. For those readers who missed the gripping account of my little adventure, you will find a link at the end of the current post.

Emerging from the museum onto the hallowed grounds of academe, I decided to play the part of the peripatetic and walk around campus looking for photo opps. Please appreciate that I use peripatetic here in the sense of "a person who walks from place to place," and not the sense of the peripatetic as a follower of Aristotle, who taught his students by walking around and talking at the same time, a technique overused on the TV show, "The West Wing." I mean really, could they possibly have a conversation without everyone involved striding urgently around the White House?

It was a clear, sunny day, and I did manage to get a couple tourist snapshots of campus landmarks.

The Golden Dome

The Basilica of the Sacred Heart

I believe the person on the sidewalk is President Jed Bartlett, a Notre Dame alumnus, looking for someone to talk to as he is walking.

I also stopped by the War Memorial Fountain, which was not running due to the cold weather.

War Memorial Fountain

Inside sits this sphere. After I converted the photo to black and white, I thought this might be an example of chiaroscuro photography. I will leave the final judgment up to those who might actually know something about art and photography.


No one could be more surprised than I that I would come up with the term chiarascuro. I have encountered it a few times in recent reading, but it's not a word that comes up in my daily conversations. I even wrote it down on an index card when I saw the word in Janet Malcolm's book on photography as art, Diana and Nikon. On the same card I wrote ineluctable ("impossible to avoid or evade"), and meretricious ("of or relating to a prostitute; brassy, cheap, flashy, tacky, tawdry," etc.). Unfortunately, I don't remember the context of any of these words, but aren't they cool?

The Marx Family ca. 1913. L to R: Groucho, Gummo, Minnie (mother), Zeppo, Frenchy (father), Chico, Harpo.

So what is chiaroscuro? Let me summarize my intensive education on this topic, acquired at Wikipedia. In Italian, chiaroscuro means, literally, light-dark. The word originally applied to a method of drawing developed during the Renaissance. The artist applied a light material, such as white gouache, to a dark background, reversing the usual process of applying dark strokes to a white background. Consider this work by Zoppo, who was not the sixth Marx Brother (actually, there was a 6th, Manfred, who died in infancy), but an Italian artist.

The Resurrection

Marco Zoppo (Italian, 1432/33?–1478?)
Brush and brown wash, highlighted with white gouache, over black chalk, on blue laid paper washed pale brown; 14 1/2 x 11 1/8 in. (36.8 x 28.1 cm)
Purchase, Rogers and Harry G. Sperling Funds and Florence B. Selden Bequest, 1998 (1998.15)
Courtesy of www.metmuseum.org

The term chiaroscuro is more broadly applied to the effect of light modelling in drawing, painting and printmaking, where highlights and shadows produce the illusion of three dimensions in a 2D work of art. The interested reader can learn more at the Art Studio Chalkboard website of Ralph Larmann, a faculty member at my alma mater, the University of Evansville. A link is supplied at the end of this article.

Chiaroscuro has been adapted to photography and cinematography as well, where it may also be called low-key. Here is an attempt I made at a low-key photo, illuminating a small statue in with a flashlight in a dark room, resulting in strong shadows and highlights.



Link to post about Lola Alvarez Bravo

Link to The Art Studio Chalkboard, Topic: Chiaroscuro

S.J. Perelman

S.J. Perelman at his office in Greenwich Village
Date taken: October 26, 1961
Photographer: Carl Mydans
From the Google Life Magazine Image Archives

This morning I was listening to recent podcasts of Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac on the way to work. February 1 was the birthday of comic genius S.J. Perelman, who, among other things, wrote for the Marx Brothers. The sketch of Perelman which Keillor read on his birthday was so good, I'm quoting it here in its entirety:

It's the birthday of humorist S.J. Perelman, born Sidney Joseph Perelman in Brooklyn, New York (1904). His father was a Russian immigrant who tried to make a living as a poultry farmer. Perelman said his father believed "that if you had a few acres and a chicken farm there was no limit to your possible wealth. I grew up with and have since retained the keenest hatred of chickens."

At this point, alone in my truck, I laughed out loud. Having started life as a third-generation duck farmer, I loved Perelman's statement. Keillor goes on:

He worked as a cartoonist when he was in college, but he switched to writing humorous essays, which he published in The New Yorker. His first collection of essays, Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge, came out in 1929. Groucho Marx wrote him a letter that said: "From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."

Groucho Marx persuaded Perelman to move to Hollywood to write screenplays. He worked on Marx Brothers movies such as Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932), but he hated Hollywood. So he went back to writing essays for The New Yorker. His many essay collections include The Ill-Tempered Clavichord (1952) and Chicken Inspector No. 23 (1966).

One of his essays begins: "I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws."

Groucho Sings "Father's Day"

Thanks to a comment left by kt, here's a link to a studio version of Groucho singing "Father's Day." Till now, I had only heard the live version on the album An Evening With Groucho.

Lydia the Tattooed Lady Revealed

This post, along with many others about the Marx Brothers, also appears in its entirety at my other blog, The Marx Brothers.

Image courtesy of the Yip Harburg Foundation

A lot of landmark events occurred in 1939. The New York World's Fair opened. Hitler invaded Poland. The movie The Wizard of Oz premiered, and the Marx Brothers movie At the Circus was released. Harold Arlen and lyricist E.Y. "Yip" Harburg wrote songs for both the Wizard of Oz and At the Circus. Groucho's performance of "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" is a classic.



As I pointed out in an earlier post about the song Cuban Pete, the internet is littered with inaccuracies. The World Wide Web abounds in multiple copies of a mistaken transcription of Groucho's introduction to "Lydia." What shows up in this transcription is:

My life was wrapped around the circus.
Her name was Lydia.
I met her at the World's Fair in 1900,
marked down from 1940.
Ah, Lydia.
She was the most glorious creature under the sun.
Guiess. Dubarry. Garbo.
Rolled into one.

If you watch the above clip from the movie, you'll see that when Groucho lists the three beauties that were all rolled into Lydia, the first one sounds like it rhymes with "vice". According to Nick Markovich, administrator/archivist of the Yip Harburg foundation, this was Thaïs, an Athenian courtesan who allegedly convinced Alexander the Great to burn the palace of Persepolis. Jules Massanet wrote an opera called Thaïs. The Scottish soprano Mary Garden made her American premiere in the title role. The other two women were Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, and famed actress Greta Garbo. Interestingly, Yip Harburg also wrote lyrics for a song ("Salome") which was sung by Virginia O'Brien in the 1943 movie Du Barry Was a Lady.

Mary Garden as Thaïs

Madame du Barry

Greta Garbo

The joke about the World's Fairs in Groucho's intro refers to the Expositon Universelle in Paris in 1900, and the New York World's Fair, 1939-1940.

Exposition Universelle, Paris 1900

New York World's Fair, 1939

There are many historical and topical references in the song itself:

Battle of Waterloo - Napolean's final defeat by the Duke of Wellington


Wreck of the Hesperus - a poem by Longfellow, based on events that occurred during a blizzard off the east coast of the United States in 1839. In the poem, a sea captain's daughter is tied to the mast of a ship to keep her from being washed overboard during a storm, but both she and her father die.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Kankakee - a town in Illinois


Paree - the one in France. You've heard of it--it's been in all the papers

Lisa Fonssagrives on the Eiffel Tower, Paris 1939.
Photo by Erwin Blumenfeld

Washington Crossing the Delaware - the famous painting by Emanuel Leutze of the beginning of the surprise attack on the Hessians in Trenton, New Jersey, Decemeber 25, 1776


Andrew Jackson - colonel in the Tennessee militia in the War of 1812 and later President of the U.S.


mazurka - a Polish dance


Niagara - the Falls--you know, the big ones between New York and Canada


Alcatraz - the island in San Francisco Bay that used to be a prison


Buffalo Bill - William F. Cody, of Wild West Show fame


Just a little classic by Mendel Picasso - This is the most puzzling phrase in the song, and one for which I can't find an explanation. The abstract artist Picasso's given name was Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruiz y Picasso. That's quite a mouthful, but I don't find anything that looks like Mendel in there.

Captain Spaulding - Groucho's character in Animal Crackers


Godiva - the lady who, according to legend, argued with her husband, Lord Leofric, about the oppressive taxes he levied on the citizens of Coventry in the eleventh century. He challenged her to ride naked through town, and promised to lift the taxes if no one looked at her. She rode, no one looked, the peasants cheered, and the taxes were lifted, or so one version of the legend goes.

Lady Godiva by John Collier

Grover Whalen unveilin' the Trylon - a great turn of phrase. Whalen was President of the World's Fair Corporation, which planned and built the 1939 World's Fair on the site of what was up to that time an ash dump in Flushing Meadow. The symbols of the fair were the Trylon and Perisphere--a big pointy tower next to a big round building.


Treasure Island - another topical reference. Treasure Island is an artificial island in the San Francisco Bay. It is connected by a small isthmus to Yerba Buena Island. It was created out of fill dredged from the bay in 1936 and 1937 for the 1939-1940 Golden Gate International Exposition.


Nijinsky adoin' the rhumba - a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer doing "the dance of Latin romance" (see Cuban Pete).

Vaslav Nijinsky not doing the rhumba

In their book, Who Put the Rainbow in the Wizard of Oz: Yip Harburg, Lyricist, Harold Meyerson and Ernie Harburg point out a couple interesting facts about "Lydia." The song was censored and in order to get it into the movie, Yip Harburg had to add the last stanza:

Oh, Lydia, the champ of them all
She once swept an Admiral clear off his feet
The ships on her hips made his heart skip a beat
And now the old boy's in command of the fleet
For he went and married Lydia

I guess the censors could accept the rest of what they considered a risque song as long as Lydia became an "honest woman" and got married in the end.

Myerson and Harburg also point out that Yip tried his best to make "Lydia" sound like Gilbert and Sullivan, because Groucho was a big fan and would have parties at his house where he would play recordings of Gilbert and Sullivan operas and sing along with them.

As I close this post, I must note a spooky coincidence(?). The Muzak coming out of the speaker in the office at the MRI Center where I am finishing this up is "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" by Arlen and Harburg!

Franklin Pierce the Obscure

It probably has something to do with the fact that I am in my fourteenth hour of reading X-rays, CTs and ultrasounds on call today. I don't know how else to explain this post. I would do almost anything, read almost anything, Google almost anything to get away from the images of the huddled masses in the ERs and ICUs, yearning to have their brain hemorrhages, belly abscesses, and clotted veins diagnosed by yours truly. Actually, the afflicted have no idea who I am, nor will they ever, until they see my name on their bill, for radiologists labor for the most part in obscurity in front of computer monitors. So, for respite between cases, I have been surfing the web for material on the Marx brothers. They are cited as an area of interest in my Blogger profile, but I have not written about them yet. My search took me to David Holzel's zine The Jewish Angle, where he talks about being inspired by Groucho, and his plaster statue of Groucho, like the one I have.
In fact, I have plaster statues of Harpo and Chico as well. Harpo was a wedding present almost thirty-five years ago, and the other brothers were added soon after. From Holzel's site, I linked to The Franklin Pierce Pages, authored by Holzel, Benjamin Bratman, and Todd Leopold. Here, an unusual convergence of items from my recent posts occurred in Bratman's article "Wrested From the Jaws of Triviality." To wit:

Pierce had the peculiar distinction of having as vice president the only nationally elected American official ever to be sworn in on foreign soil. Pierce also had the peculiar distinction of having as vice president a man who never worked one day in the job. William Rufus de Vane King was terminally ill with tuberculosis when he was nominated and subsequently elected as vice president. (This begs the question, why was he selected?). He was sworn in in Cuba where he was seeking medical treatment. Less than a month later, he died, never having assumed his duties.

Ah ha! An example of the modern usage of "begs the question," which I had condemned in recent posts.

Also from Bratman's article:

Pierce’s salad days were clearly in college at Bowdoin College in Maine. There, he was a classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who later became a writer and author of The Scarlet Letter, as well as one of Pierce’s closest friends and advisors.

Wow! Another of my newfound obsessions--Nathaniel Hawthorne! Bratman doesn't mention that Hawthorne wrote a campaign biography of his friend Franklin Pierce, and was rewarded with the American consulship to Liverpool after Pierce was elected. Hawthorne stayed at the post from 1853-57. Also of note, Hawthorne died on a trip to the White Mountains with Pierce in 1864.


Who knows, I may now become obsessed with Franklin Pierce. After all, writing about an obscure president (James Buchanan) paid off for John Updike in his play Buchanan Dying and his novel Memories of the Ford Administration.