For #America250, a list I worked on while I was on vacation all of May, essay beneath there explaining what it means.... There's still plenty I missed.
Greatest American Works of All Time:
Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber
Scenes from an Italian Restaurant by Billy Joel
A Required Canon for American Life collated by an intellectual striver. Based on works I've read thirty pages of and places I've never seen. It's not an objective list: it's neither fact nor opinion, it's perception. It's the works that I think invade your pores and make you different than you were before you experienced them, but I can only know that by how they invade mine:
Absolute: means what it says. These are the works that can't get any better: even their weaknesses are their strengths. You don't experience them, they experience you.
The Simpsons (f*** off it's my list...)
Citizen Kane (a lot more entertaining than you remember)
West Side Story
Moby Dick by Herman Melville (took twenty-five years to make me appreciate it)
Our Town by Thornton Wilder (I put it over Death of a Salesman as the Great American Play)
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Alan Lomax Collections (collected recordings of often anonymous folk musicians)
Louis Armstrong Hot Five & Seven (early jazz)
Pinocchio
Bambi
New York City
This World is Not Conclusion by Emily Dickinson (her greatest poem)
Diego Rivera Detroit Murals (does for America what Michelangelo did for the Vatican)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
A Love Supreme by John Coltrane (jazz)
Mad Men (TV)
Do The Right Thing (the ultimate movie about racism)
Gypsy (a musical about the will to succeed)
The Wizard of Oz
Appalachia Region
The Muppets (TV)
My Antonia by Willa Cather (The Great American Novel: a novel of deep connection between immigrants and the native born)
Old Man River (the Great American Song)
Cross Road Blues, Hellhound On My Trail, Love in Vain by Robert Johnson
This Land is Your Land, Pastures of Plenty, 1913 Massacre, by Woodie Guthrie
I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry by Hank Williams
Precious Lord and Come Sunday by Mahalia Jackson
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (short stories about small town life)
Wrigley Field (what sports was meant to do)
Nashville (movie: a cinematic democracy)
Runagate Runagate and Middle Passage by Robert Hayden (poems about slavery)
Radio City Music Hall
Reminiscing in Tempo (jazz-classical suite: Duke Ellington remembers his mother)
The Godfather Saga (TV edition putting both movies in chronological sequence with an hour of restored scenes is the best version)
Move On Up A Little Higher, How I Got Over, Precious Lord Take My Hand, Come Sunday by Mahalia Jackson (Gospel)
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (philosophy/travelogue that predicts the American future)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Unnamable, competes with the best of any time and place:
Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain (travelogue)
The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois (classic of sociology)
Assassins (musical)
Barbecue Cuisine
Godfather I and II (cut separately as they originally were)
Porgy and Bess--classical/jazz opera (deserves special mention)
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (the novel of blackness, vaguely avant-garde)
Twin Peaks (TV mystery series of small town America)
Show Boat by Jerome Kern (our first great musical)
Pet Sounds by Brian Wilson (and no other...)
Beloved by Toni Morrison (the classic historical novel about slavery)
The Grand Canyon
Fences by August Wilson
The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr
Riverside Church
New Orleans
Mother to Son and Harlem by Langston Hughes
Black, Brown and Beige by Duke Ellington (jazz/classical suite)
Charlotte's Web by E.B. White (young adult novel)
The Mississippi Delta
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (apocalyptic novel)
Cathedral of St. John the Divine (still only 2/3rds finished)
Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock and Ernst Lehmann (movie)
Chicago
Vietnam Veterans Memorial
The Great Plains
George Gershwin--all (classical/jazz hybrid)
Scott Joplin--all (ragtime)
Bessie Smith--all (blues)
Jimmie Rodgers--all (country)
Billie Holiday--all (jazz)
Robert Johnson--all (blues)
Woodie Guthrie--all (folk)
Hank Williams--all (country)
Ella Fitzgerald--all (jazz)
Mahalia Jackson--all (gospel)
John Lee Hooker--all (blues)
Take the A-Train by Duke Ellington
Grand Central Terminal in New York
The Lincoln Memorial
The Pacific Ocean
Mood Indigo by Duke Ellington
Harlem Air-Shift by Duke Ellington
The Twilight Zone (sci-fi/horror TV)
Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (novella)
Levi's Blue Jeans
One Night Stand by Louis CK (comedy)
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (avant-garde novel of the South)
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor (Southern Gothic short stories)
I Heard a Fly Buzz --when I died by Emily Dickinson
National Geographic Magazine
Las Vegas by Saul Steinberg (painting)
Camden Yards (! That will always be its name...)
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans (photography book/essays about depression poverty)
The Times They Are a'Changin' by Bob Dylan
It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding by Bob Dylan
Chimes of Freedom by Bob Dylan
The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro (long biography)
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (long novel of America's failures)
Flatbush and Flushing (neighborhoods)
A Hard Rain's-a Gonna Fall by Bob Dylan
The Civil War (documentary by Ken Burns)
The Vietnam War (documentary by Ken Burns)
Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (psychology/philosophy that studies religion like science)
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansburry (the classic play of racial integration)
Ah-Um by Charles Mingus (jazz album)
Bonnie & Clyde (movie)
Joseph Stella (America's greatest abstract artist: I'm the only person who'd say that...)
His Girl Friday (the classic Hollywood screwball comedy of Newspaper journalism)
Kind of Blue by Miles Davis
The Last Picture Show (the classic movie of small town America)
The True Believer by Eric Hoffer (philosophy)
Migrant Mother (photo by Dorothea Lange)
Harlan County, USA (documentary)
Mean Streets by Martin Scorsese
Ebbetts Field (supposedly, demolished...)
-----------------------
Cosmic. Essential for anyone who cares to experience America:
Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill (long play about family and addiction)
Pryor: Live in Concert (comedy album)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Burr by Gore Vidal
San Francisco
The Awakening by Kate Chopin (feminist novella)
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue by Duke Ellington (Newport '56) (jazz)
The Cotton Pickers by Winslow Homer (painting)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Tevye and His Daughters by Sholem Aleichem (Yiddish short stories, the basis for Fiddler on the Roof)
The Redwood Parks
Company (musical)
late George Carlin specials (comedy)
Follies (musical)
Woodstock (live concert recordings and videos)
Boston
The Producers (the great American comedy)
The Education of Henry Adams (autobiography)
Seinfeld (a perfect sitcom, again, it's my list...)
The Public and its Problems by John Dewey (political philosophy)
The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling (literary criticism)
African American Spirituals
Central Park
Waffle House
Blue Velvet (movie)
Creole Cuisine
Neuromancer by William Gibson (sci-fi novel that seems more apropos these days...)
Baseball (documentary)
The Night of the Hunter (movie)
Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen (album)
Dvorak New World Symphony (the music that tells America to look to its own musical traditions)
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (proto-feminist novel about American puritans)
Oklahoma by Rodgers and Hammerstein (classic musical of dreams and endurance
Carousel by Rogers and Hammerstein (classic musical of when dreams and endurance go bad)
Such Sweet Thunder by Duke Ellington
Los Angeles
Robert Frost (poetry - Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, Mending Wall, The Road Less Traveled, After Apple Picking, Death of the Hired Man, Home Burial)
New Orleans Jazz (generally)
Mardi Gras costumes
Rear Window (movie)
These Truths by Jill Lepore (a history of the United States that proposes maybe our country failed)
Baltimore (!)
Watchmen by Alan Moore (the graphic superhero novel)
Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam (sociology about social isolation)
Black Boy by Richard Wright (memoir)
Las Vegas
Call It Sleep by Henry Roth (the classic novel about immigration, trauma and abuse)
The Searchers (classic Western movie about racial hatred)
Blade Runner (under protest)
Peanuts by Charles Schultz (newspaper cartoon about kids)
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Waterson (newspaper cartoon about kid)
All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (classic political novel about demogogy)
Nighthawks by Edward Hopper
James Brown: Live at the Apollo (album)
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (graphic novel about queerness)
Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner (not avant-garde novel)
Thanksgiving Dinner
Sophisticated Lady by Duke Ellington
Civil Rights Movement Songs (generally)
Niagra Falls
Strange Fruit by Billie Holliday (classic song about lynching)
Ko-Ko by Charlie Parker (jazz)
John Lee Hooker (my favorite bluesman)
Desolation Row by Bob Dylan
Yellowstone National Park
Second Line Funerals
Far East Suite by Duke Ellington (jazz/classical hybrid)
How The Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis (photography book about urban poverty)
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (journalism collection about sixties decadence)
Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (political philosophy about what made Stalin and Hitler possible)
The Great Lakes
The Steerage (photo of immigrant ship by Alfred Stieglitz)
Battle Hymn of the Republic (our greatest patriotic song)
How The Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss
Hoop Dreams (documentary about basketball in the projects)
The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives (our greatest piece of classical music)
Pentacostal Services (generally)
The Problem We All Live With (one of Norman Rockwell's few profound paintings)
Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart by Kara Walker (horrific wall cutouts of the slave era)
Apocalypse Now
Duck Soup (the other great American comedy)
Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright (architecture)
Freedom Highway by The Staple Singers (soul music)
The Assistant by Bernard Malamud (novel of immigration)
Spirit In The Dark by Aretha Franklin (soul album)
King Heroin by James Brown (multi-part soul song)
The Atlantic Magazine
Brooklyn Bridge
Catch-22 (the great American war satire)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (the great hope of what aliens might be)
Collected Stories of IB Singer (short stories--Yiddish fiction of Jewish life in the shtetl)
America Today Mural by Thomas Hart Benton (the ultimate art about American progress)
Chinatown (the ultimate movie of corruption)
Midwest County Seat Towns
Tangled Up in Blue by Bob Dylan
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (book of essays about race, religion and family)
The Immortal Otis Redding (album of American promise)
Chrysler Building
Blazing Saddles (the greatest movie ever made about racism...)
Deadwood (classic TV show about the American West)
The Truman Show by Peter Weir (looking mighty good these days)
The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill (play about the ultimate Irish-American institution: bars)
Dreamgirls (musical and movie)
Other Johnnie Cash
Brokeback Mountain by Larry McMurtry, Anne Proulx and Ang Lee (movie about the closet)
Henry Cowell: Piano Music (the most creative classical music ever to come out of this country)
The Manchurian Candidate (classic movie of assassination and conspiracy)
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (classic novel of the endurance of African-American women)
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (nihilistic novel of genocide)
Raging Bull by Martin Scorsese (movie)
Civil War Union Songs
Experience and Nature by John Dewey (philosophy that argues that we are the natural environment too)
The Rust Belt
Contract With God Trilogy by Will Eisner (graphic novel, arguably our greatest art about tenement housing)
Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin (probably the great novel of sharecropper life)
Her (our great film about where AI is going)
The Promise of American Life by Herbert David Crosby (political philosophy that raised progressivism to a national movement)
Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen (solo album of midwestern desolation)
Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss
Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson (essay)
Blue Velvet (movie about what's hidden beneath the suburbs)
Lady Soul by Aretha Franklin (soul album)
Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin (satire of industrial life)
Where The Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein (children's poetry)
MAD Magazine (satire magazine)
The Fog of War by Errol Morris and Robert MacNamera (documentary about an American sinner)
Charles Ives: Symphony no 4 (deeply spiritual avant garde orchestral music)
Rain Dogs by Tom Waits (singer/songwriter album)
King of the Hill (TV Show about small town Texas, fathers and sons)
The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James MacPhereson (history of the Civil War)
Johnny Cash America Albums (the ultimate American albums about death)
Drag (becoming more important these days...)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (classic American movie about how American myths are manufactured)
The Power Broker by Robert Caro (long biography of Robert Moses)
Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya (novel of the Chicano and Native American experience)
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (journalism/history)
County Fairs
the Zoot Suit
The Sopranos (mobster goes to therapy)
Native Son by Richard Wright (classic novel of the American justice system)
There's A Riot Goin' On (album: Sly and the Family Stone)
Roots by Alex Haley (book or TV show)
The Fish Fry
Dispatches by Michael Herr (journalism about the folly of the Vietnam War)
The Crawfish Boil
The Conversation by Francis Ford Coppola (classic movie of tech paranoia and corporate overreach)
Jewish Deli
Appalachian Spring (our greatest ballet)
Angels in America (the gay American experience of AIDS and much more)
The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt (philosophy about how we have to remain civically active)
"Chinese Food"
Ace in the Hole (classic movie of journalistic sensationalism)
Other Poetry by Emily Dickinson (make your own list)
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson (popular history about the Great Migration)
The Southern Breakfast
The Matrix (movie that looks better these days)
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (book and movie adaptation)
Pragmatism by William James (philosophy)
Autobiography of Malcolm X
Work Boots
The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
Sesame Street
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer (classic non-fiction novel of American crime)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (movie about mental health industry)
Coat of Many Colors by Dolly Parton
Woolworth Building
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (gets new relevance after #metoo)
The Social Network (movie, looks pretty f888ing good right now)
Alexander's Ragtime Band by Irving Berlin (a great American song)
Waffle House Breakfast (the great American fat)
The Sweet Smell of Success (great American film of power's corruption)
Touch of Evil (great American film of police racism and corruption)
Pittsburgh, Queensborough Bridge, Hoboken, Blast Furnace, Aeroplane by Elsie Driggs (paintings)
-------------------------------------
Optional to enrich yourself on American life...
Gold: a Transcendent Achievement:
Philadelphia
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennesee Williams (play)
The Italian American Dinner
Mullholland Dr. by David Lynch (movie)
Goodfellas by martin scorsese (movie)
The Stand by Stephen King (I said what I said, nobody writes small town life better than Stephen King, it's a shame he always connects it to stupid monsters)
It by Stephen King (ditto)
Pacific Overtures (classic musical of American imperialism)
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (sci-fi TV series)
The Rockies
Frasier (perfect TV Sitcom)
Memphis
Walden by Henry David Thoreau (philosophy)
Moonlight (movie)
Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown (psychology)
The Clambake
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin (science fiction novel)
New York Pizza
Denim
Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer (non-fiction novel about Vietnam protests)
Jazz (documentary by Ken Burns)
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (apocalyptic sci-fi novel)
Detroit
Alien (movie about an alien)
Work Boots
From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman (journalistic memoir of the Middle East)
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (long novel of American opportunity)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (dream movie of American forgiveness)
The Mojave Desert
Washington DC (it's beautiful, it's also not the real America...)
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (sci-fi short story collection about regular American life that happens to be on Mars)
The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss
Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars (said what I said)
The New Yorker Magazine
Closing Time by Tom Waits (songwriter album)
The Apartment (classic movie about privilege in corporate America)
The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (neoconservative political philosophy--under protest)
American Pastoral by Philip Roth (novel of the sixties)
Taxi (sitcom about New York losers)
Graceland by Paul Simon ('rock' album where Paul Simon promotes musicians who deserved better)
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (avant-garde novel about World War II and erections)
Las Vegas Strip
Platoon (slightly heavy-handed movie about Vietnam)
Born on the Fourth of July (slightly heavy-handed movie about post-Vietnam)
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (novel about a slightly stupid woman)
Soul Food
Bojack Horseman (profound TV cartoon about a talking horse in Hollywood)
Photo of Allie May Burroughs by Walker Evans
New York Bagel
Gumbo
Blue Plate Special
Ubik
County Fairs
Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan
The Brothers Ashkenazi (Yiddish novel of tragic Jewish ambition in the old country)
Soul Food
Creative Orchestra Music 1976 by Anthony Braxton (avant-garde jazz/classical mashup of genius)
Roseanne (Roseanne)
The Leather Jacket
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman (sociology where day to day interactions are questioned)
Love and Will by Rollo May (the psychology of death)
Highway 61 Revisited
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution by Eric Foner (straightforward history)
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (classic novel of war trauma)
The Glass Menagerie (classic play about mothers)
The Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote (racists can be extraordinary writers too, even reliable guides occaionally)
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (formally perfect horror novella)
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (avant-garde novel)
It's a Man's World by James Brown
Woody Guthrie (various)
Zodiac by David Fincher (the great American movie about serial killing)
ET (ET)
Fargo by the Coen Brothers (love letter to the Midwest)
Army Field Jacket
Black Church Hats
Six Feet Under (TV show about a funeral home)
The Larry Sanders Show (TV show about show business)
Chappelle's Show
Bluegrass Jam Sessions (are what they are, anybody can learn how)
American Gothic (painting about people who never had fun)
The Americans (did we have spies like that?)
Cheers (losers hang out in bar)
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Silver: A Great Achievement
The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
Robo-cop (movie)
Herzog by Saul Bellow
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
Gas by Edward Hopper
Corn on the Cobb
Randy Newman (album)
Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
Mary Tyler Moore
Christina's World
Kind of Blue
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
The Philadelphia Story
Hippie Fringe and Denim
Disneyland
Pittsburgh
All in the Family (TV show)
Battlestar Galactica (sci-fi TV shows)
Succession (TV Show)
Cleveland
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
St. Louis
Church Potluck
Guggenheim Museum
Jurassic Park
Denial of Death
King Kong
Nixon (movie)
City Lights
Vertigo
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Ebony
Jet
Washington Square
The Deer Hunter
The Sopranos
Sugar Shack
Rolling Stone Magazine
A Good Man is Hard to Find
Diner Pie
Carol Burnett Show
Born to Run
Network
The Wizard of Oz
Into the Woods
American Graffiti
Red-Headed Stranger
Dazed and Confused
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Sunset Boulevard
Boogie Nights
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Paris, Texas
M*A*S*H (TV)
Tom Waits (various)
Animal House
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood
The Apartment
Rothko Chapel
Star Trek TNG
Piano Music of Henry Cowell
Rodeo & Billy the Kid
Exciteable Boy
The Iceman Cometh
The Crucible
Fences & The Piano Lesson
Glengarry Glen Ross
Stag at Sharkey's
Carousel
Groundhog Day
Close Encounters & ET
Fargo
Toy Story
What's Goin' On
Double Indemnity
All About Eve
Pudd'nhead Wilson
--------------------------------------------
Bronze: A Mostly Great Achievement:
Nighthawks
The Wire Breaking Bad
The Best Years of Our Lives
Black Saint & Sinner Lady
Sula
Kind of Blue
The Color Purple
Ah Um
Erasure
The Hunger Games
The Apartment
Playboy
A Face in the Crowd
Friday Night Lights
Flannel Shirt
The Americans (TV show)
Dog Day Afternoon
Macaroni and Cheese
White T-Shirt
Badlands
Magnolia
Tapestry (album)
Apollo Theater
Habits of the Heart
The Quest for Community
Wise Blood
JFK (movie)
Koyaansqatsi
Deep Dish Pizza
Twin Peaks
South Park
Some Like It Hot
Singin' In the Rain
No Place of Grace
Girls
First Reformed
South Bronx Housing Projects
Stagecoach
Easy Rider
Gone with the Wind
Nebraska
Get Out
Air Jordan Sneakers
The Big Lebowski (pinnacle of Western Civilization)
Casablanca
Days of Heaven
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Doesn't Belong:
Andy Warhol
Jeff Koons
Jackson Pollock
Cindy Sherman
Robert Rauschenberg
Ye
The Eagles
Steely Dan
Nine Inch Nails
Velvet Underground
Lou Reed
Talking Heads
Patti Smith
Metalica
Tool
Eminem
Grateful Dead
John Cage
Damien Chazelle
Scarface
La La Land
2001
Infinite Jest
The Tree of Life
Easy Rider
Superhero Mythology (sorry)
Austin
Silicon Valley
Mount Rushmore
Tom Cruise movies
American Beauty
Joker
Fight Club
La La Land
Friends
Avatar
Nomadland
White Noise
Ready Player One
Tarantino
Dan Harmon
Noah Baumbach
Ayn Rand
Bret Easton Ellis
Michael Bay
Joss Whedon (was not a fan before everybody else wasn't)
Ryan Murphy
David Foster Wallace (as a novelist)
Don DeLillo
Chuck Palahniuk
Seth MacFarlane
Wes Anderson
Lin-Manuel Miranda
Jordan Peterson (Canadian I Know)
Taylor Swift
Lena Dunham (this one honestly also hurts)
How I Met Your Mother (god that aged badly... should have seen that coming)
Chuck Lorre
The End of History
Steven Pinker
Wall Street (movie)
Natural Born Killers
On The Road
The Goldfinch
Visit from the Goon Squad
House of Leaves
Vonnegut
Hunter S. Thompson
The Sun Also Rises
Hemingway novels
Dom DeLillo
Naked Lunch
Pynchon
William Gaddis
Regretfully off the list:
Anthony Jeselnik
Bo Burnham
Frank Zappa
Hunter S. Thompson
Blood Meridian
Sam Harris
David Foster Wallace
Jonathan Franzen
Damien Chazelle
Woody Allen
Belongs under protest:
Stanley Kubrick
Billy Joel (really)
Norman Rockwell
Frank Capra
George Lucas
Cornell West
Oliver Stone
Howard Zinn
Take Them Seriously As Artists:
Charles Schultz
Mister Rogers
George Romero
Bob Ross
Harold Ramis
Brian de Palma
Take Them Seriously as Great Artists:
Steven Spielberg
Jim Henson
Johnny Cash
Tom Waits
Garrison Keillor
John Prine
Dolly Parton
Norm MacDonald (I know he's Canadian)
So I just got back from West Side Story today--a work I've written about endlessly. It was a pretty great performance, 9/10? A little too busy and unsubtle, but all the leads were great bordering on wonderful. Better than I thought I'd ever see it done. At the beginning scenes and the ending I wiped away a lot of tears as my lip quivered, then I looked over and saw my mom doing the same, then I looked in front of me and there was a woman outright sobbing while her husband consoled her, then I looked next to me and there was a couple younger than me and both the man and the woman were wiping tears. The only person near me who didn't like it was the twelve year old texting on his phone the whole time until I asked him to stop nicely at intermission. He apologized very politely, then kept checking the time during the second half.
What is it about this play that speaks to everybody here so deeply? You can't just explain it rationally. Part of why West Side Story is timeless is because we're still living West Side Story's crisis. and it's basically the same show: still gangs, still poverty, still projects, still racist cops, still misspent youth. It could be set in Baltimore today and all you'd need is David Simon to revamp the script, make the Jets African-American and up the racism of the cops, and it's the same show.
But no, you can't explain it like that, that would just make West Side Story a sociology lesson. It has to provoke deep emotional associations, and it can't just be nostalgia.
No, what we're experiencing is something much deeper. Something almost ecstatic. I come out of West Side Story not just moved, but electrified. Simon Schama talks about that effect in the famous documentary: The Power of Art: "
"In the end, there's only one test that matters. You come into the room, you fix it in your sights. Does it, or does it not attack you in the guts, it does. Does your heart jump? Do your eyes widen? Does your pulse race? Do your feet get a bad attack of lead boots you're so struck down by it?"
There's so much about West Side Story that shouldn't work: the antique slang that probably wasn't even real slang in 1957, the ridiculous love story, the ballet sequence that comes out of nowhere and feels like an ego trip from the choreographer... and yet we buy every bit of it. It's one of those works that moves through our heads in a state of grace. Some works just have that irrational impact on us. It's not many, it's never many, but they exist, and if you're open to it, you usually know it when you see it.
You particularly know it because you keep coming back to them. They marinate in your head like an unfinished dinner in the fridge that gets better overnight, and every time you revisit it, it's a completely different experience. A character may resemble your parent, then 20 years later resemble you, then 20 years after that resemble your child; a place may represent the place you live in, then it becomes the place you grew up in, then it becomes the place it used to be but no longer is. Aristotle called it 'mimesis', but what it means is that we just look at the screen or page or stage and say 'that's me.'
It may not exactly be you, but it's something you know, something you remember, something you love or hate or fear, something you're experiencing right now or expect to experience later, and it goes through a journey into your psyche, and by the time it's done you're not the same person anymore.
What's a little unique about West Side Story is that for a country with so many choices for entertainment, how few of them seem to have that ecstatic effect on millions of people. Sure, all kinds of musical groups can get a whole stadium to bob their heads and raise their arms in a kind of trance, but that's not the experience I'm talking about. I'm talking about the solitary experience, the experience that when you leave, you know that your life can never be the same after it happened, and you know that if you come back in 50 years, it will have the same effect. Not just because of its effect on your emotions or nerves, but it's affect on your mind. The kind of piece where your thoughts complicate your emotions, and your emotions complicate your thoughts. And between the two, something deeper emerges even than the heart: a soul. The essential part of who we become, and by the end of that process, we don't just feel delighted or deflated, we understand.
Russia devoted 200 years of literature to that effect, Italy had multiple hundreds of years of that art, but we in America? We don't think much of solitary creation. Of course, even the solitary creators have help, but in so much of even our best art, the vision itself comes from collaboration. Collaboration can do all sorts of wonderful things, but collaboration can also mean committee. And when a committee creates a work of art, the result is not a person's original vision. Committees generally don't look at a work and say 'let's get more daring'. It happens, but not that often, and I think it's a little harder to communicate from one heart to another.
So, individual or collaboration, how do these works have that effect on us? Well, I wonder if there are three ways (and I had a little help from ChatGPT on this...): in the works we see the 'concrete America,' the 'mythic America,' and the 'metaphysical America.' In the concrete America, your mind sees sights and concepts just like the ones we know: open landscapes, tall cities, saturated media, money problems. In the mythic America, it speaks to the dreams we have, both when we sleep and when we wake: the freedom to reinvent ourselves, to meet our destiny, to venture into the frontier. The dream that we'll all be free and equal, and the nightmare that we may get only less as time goes on. Metaphysical America is the America of the spirit, where being American stops being a fact and becomes a way of life. Maybe it's a particular American loneliness where we start questioning what all this freedom and prosperity was for. What happens if, when we reinvent ourselves, we lose ourselves or our souls. We're in a country where we're free to believe anything at all, but what happens if we stop believing in anything?
And when you see these three levels of America reflected back at you, it hits you harder than any rational truth would. It doesn't wrestle with things that are true right now, it wrestles with universal values, fundamental moral laws, universal emotions and experiences and conditions.
I think what makes West Side Story so extraordinary is that there aren't all that many pieces in America that unquestionably do that: We have our share, but we are, supposedly, the freest country there's ever been (that's another story...), and yet we haven't used that freedom to make all that much art that probes questions just that deep, and what we do have, even the best of it, feels just a little bit commercial, just a little bit safe. Not everything's supposed to be a 'really good show,' and even in a show like West Side Story, you can feel the audience concessions. The first half-hour of West Side Story is so beautiful, and then you go into America: America is one of the best songs ever written in this country, but it's placed right after Maria and Tonight, two songs so ecstatic that you want to stay in their spell forever, and it yanks you out of that ecstasy so jarringly that you (I) almost resent it. Then, a half hour later, comes One Hand One Heart, another of the most beautiful songs ever written, and West Side Story's built an entirely new head of steam, and you feel yanked back into love and beauty. Then Act 1 ends with deaths on the stage, and Act 2 opens with I Feel Pretty. We were in the world of the The Wire, and then we're yanked into the world of Rodgers and Hammerstein. It's part of West Side Story's greatness that it can be so many things at once, but it's a little bit exhausting, and in the back of your mind, you wonder if they did it because they worried about the ADD of the audience.
But it's true, sometimes commercial considerations make a work better, sometimes populism makes a work better, sometimes 'simpler' is simply better...
In the vast majority of the best American work, that's what we get. For better or worse, artists here usually have to be entertainers first. The unregulated profundities of Dostoevsky and Wagner don't as often happen here. Does that make the work here worse? Maybe a little bit... but it also means that most of our best art is just that entertaining, and you wouldn't just miss out on something that will change you and give you wisdom and a self-transformation, that seems different every time you experience it, but also, you'd miss having a really good time.
I was going to write about which works are on this list and why, but I don't have that kind of time. Here's another f***ing list...
