Sunday Review: How We Got to Now (TV) & 700 Sundays (theatre on HBO)

Strange fruit

By Morris Dean

I don't think I would ever have paired Steven Johnson's How We Got to Now & Billy Crystal's 700 Sundays for a joint review, but for each work's striking invocation of a 1939 song by Billie Holiday, each describing it as perhaps America's first protest song – or racial protest song at any rate. Pairing the two works seemed imperative. Then I realized that the works also have in common that they are theatrical one-man shows, and both are explicitly stories about getting to now.

How We Got to Now, a recent six-part PBS series, is by its title's proclamation a story of getting to now – not for anyone individually, but for all of us who participate in the fruits of civilization and its technological inventions. Written & presented by energetic, personable Steven Johnson, it is "the story behind the remarkable ideas that made modern life possible; the unsung heroes that brought them into the world." [PBS website]
    The theatrical one-man show aspect of the series is Steven Johnson's insertion into dozens of illustrative scenarios, all involving pertinent location, accoutrements, and costume to explain ideas and move the narrative along. Johnson is effective in this role, and he clearly enjoys basking in the limelight, which he seems naturally born to.

    Of course, it isn't and can't literally be a "one-man show." A big point of the series is to herald those often unsung heroes who came up with key inventions, and to explain their legacies – all explored by means of their six respective thematic episodes:
    Clean explores the problem of dirty water, Johnson inaugurating the series by plunging into a sewer to understand what led to the city of Chicago's being lifted, building by building, on jackscrews in order to build America’s first sewer system. He talks about who first added chlorine, considered lethal in 1908, into Jersey City’s water and made it safe to drink....
    Time is the story of getting a grip on the hundreds of local times zones in the U.S. and standardizing them into four zones. This episode talks about clocks and advancements in navigation, and shows how several individuals shaped current technology and the way we work and travel....
    Glass considers the invention of pure, clear glass itself; of lenses and their use in microscopes, telescopes, and spectacles; of the mirror; and of fiberglass, long essential to manufacture and communication....
    Light tells of the people who invented practical lighting, whether from oil found in whales, or from Edison’s light bulbs (which he didn’t actually invent), or from tubes of neon. Lighting altered our sleeping patterns, promoted mass spectator sports, and revolutionized business and society....
    Cold reminds us that only in the last 200 years have we learned how to make things cold, first by methods of transporting ice so it wouldn't melt, then by techniques for making our own ice and cooling machinery and buildings....
    Sound is the episode that mentions Billie Holiday's protest song – in the context of sound recording and the difference radio made in the civil rights movement. Humans may have had a desire to record sound for 30,000 years, if evidence found in the Arcy sur Cure caves in northern France has been interpreted correctly. Johnson explores how big a role sound has played in medicine....
    Another snippet from the PBS website:

Whether Steven is washing windows on the top floor of a skyscraper or drinking beer at 8am in order to better understand the health choices of a 19th century philosopher, he wants to delve into the intense rivalries, terrible failures, and moments of heroic achievement of the men and women who have made the modern world. These are hobbyists and garage inventors, ordinary characters who've done extraordinary things…and yet have remained almost entirely unknown.

    In September, a review of Johnson's book of the same title appeared in The Wall Street Journal. Note its concluding paragraph:

Mr. Johnson's ideas are popular in Silicon Valley, and it is easy to see why. He is an optimist about technology and its possibilities. In his section on "Light," he links the discovery of neon lighting to the growth of Las Vegas and then to the post-modernist movement in American art and architecture. A more raffish mind might have gone from Las Vegas to Siegfried and Roy, Wayne Newton, and the Nevada flesh trade. But Mr. Johnson is too upstanding for that. He believes that the arc of technological history may be long but that it bends toward good.

Billy Crystal's 700 Sundays is avowedly a one-man Broadway show, from its original 2004 stage production – an adaptation of his short autobiography (published in 2005) – to its 54-performance revival in 2013. The HBO special on DVD was filmed in January this year. The title refers to the (approximate) number of Sundays Crystal shared with his father before his father died, when Billy was 15. But that's only an homage – he portrays his life from birth to the 21st century.
    It is, of course, very funny – my wife and I laughed continually, often from the belly. And we were surprised to learn how solidly New Yorker Crystal is, not that we couldn't have known it already.
    At the end of the performance, Crystal quips, "Speaking for the whole cast...," then adds that every time he has performed the show, there have been many other cast members – referring to the family members and friends he has brought to life again for himself through his descriptions and portrayals...and brought to life for the audience, even if just sitting in front of a television screen. As I write this paragraph, it's barely an hour since I turned the TV off, and I'm still tingling from the joy of viewing 700 Sundays.

    It's one film, too, where you don't get more from reading the book. The book is tiny, to begin with, and there's so much, much more in Crystal's performance: his voices, his faces, his pantomimes, his timing, and the images projected on screens that have been set up in his mocked-up family home.

    Crystal ends by ticking off five or six major events that he has recounted and saying, "That's how I got to be here tonight," a personal application of Johnson's title for how we all got here – or for how our technological civilization did. Each of us has his own, personal such story. This review is part of the story of how I came to pair these two otherwise unlikely candidates.

Crystal's mention of Billie Holiday came about because his grandfather had a little record shop on 42nd Street between Lexington & Third Avenue, the Commodore Record Shop. One day in the 30's, Crystal's uncle Milt, who worked in his father's shop and loved jazz, positioned a radio speaker over the transom and blasted passers-by with jazz. It caused a stir and customers and potential customers started asking whether the shop sold jazz records. One thing led to another and the shop eventually became the first independently owned jazz label in the world [p. 34 of Crystal's book]...Well, writes Crystal,

Of all the great people who were recording for my uncle and being produced in concert by my dad, Billie Holiday was by far the greatest. I think there's only two artists, Sinatra and Billie, that when you hear one note, you know you're in the presence of a genius....
    ...She used to call me Mister Billy and I would call her Miss Billie....
    Her most important song was one called "Strange Fruit," which was very controversial because it was about lynching black people down South. Nobody wanted to hear this song...and nobody would record [it]. [pp. 46-47]

But Crystal's Uncle Milt arranged to record it on "the family label." Here's a 1959 performance by Miss Holiday:

    Lyrics:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulgin' eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burnin' flesh

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop

I couldn't find a photo of it, but a couple of days ago I saw a news program about protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and one of the posters referred to what was happening with the police there as "strange fruit." Exactly 75 years later.

Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean