Pintele Update 10: You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet
After boldly declaring last week that Parts One and Two were maybe kind of “finished” in some sense, I haven’t listened to them. I want to get them out of my head a little first. So I’ve been working on Three and Four, and it’s been a productive weekend. Part Three (“A Very Brody Passover”) now exists, from beginning to end, in the rough form that Parts One and Two were in for so many weeks. There are still some editing refinements to come, and I’ll probably rerecord parts of the narration; but it now exists, much more than it did on Friday.
I also rerecorded the narration for Part Four, to accommodate recent revisions and hopefully tame the running time. I think it’s better now, snappier and more focused, thanks mainly to Amanda’s notes from my last attempt to record it, in May.
But I still don’t have a title! As explained previously, I’d been calling Part Four “Pintele Yid,” because it includes a discussion of that phrase, and this is obviously an important moment in the series. But for that very reason, it turns out, “Pintele Yid” is the wrong title for Part Four — other than this discussion of the title phrase, it’s not particularly a key episode. Linking it to the series title would be giving it the wrong setup.
A big chunk of Part Four is about The Jazz Singer, and two of the possible titles on my list are references to it. “Blue Skies” is a nice title, and the Irving Berlin song is both heard and discussed in Part Four. But I’m not sure it’s really a meaningful title for the episode. The other possibility is “You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet,” which nicely fits the theme of the episode on multiple levels. But this phrase is so closely associated with Al Jolson, I worry that it overstates the Jolsonocity of it all.
Jolson is by no means the only twentieth century cultural phenomenon addressed in Part Four. Determined though I’ve been that Pintele is not a Marx Brothers project, they do pop up here, and it’s good to see them as always. (And Groucho pops up again in Part Six.) There’s also more discussion of Fiddler on the Roof (which is also a big part of Part One), as well as Abie’s Irish Rose, Yankev Glatshteyn, and the Yiddish theatre.
But the photo accompanying this post is undeniably Al Jolson, as we see him in his first scene in The Jazz Singer.
Eating ham.
We’ll get into it!
More soon.
