Please, Dean, no!

Every morning, once I have set the soy milk steaming in the kitchen, I will open Pandora, an online streaming music site, on my Mac. I can wander out, as I did today, and paint a cabinet and an hour later come back to hear a song and artist that reflects the genre, the style or the generation of the artist I had selected as a "seed" station. The seed is analyzed, and it qualities plotted. Pandora chooses the songlist based on similarities. I find it, then, somewhat peculiar that every song, artist or style I have selected inevitably leads to the same fucking song: Dean Martin singing "On the Street Where You Live". This is a song originally from the musical "My Fair Lady". It was covered widely, but seldom to odder effect. For Martin it was given a slow, swinging Big Band arrangement. It seldom matters who I have selected to listen to- after an hour, it has lead to Dean Martin singing "On the Street Where You Live". Blondie to Grace Jones to Sylvester to "I have often walked, down this street before". Prokofiev to Stravinski to Rimsky-Korsakov to "I have often walked, down this street before".  Dinah Washington to Carmen MacRae to Nancy Wilson to "I have often walked....? Copland? Daft Punk? "I have often walked...." Dean Martin has become my online stalker.

It could be worse. I have nothing against Dino, as he was called. He was not the classic songbook type of artist, more of a movie-star personality than a vocalist. For some unrecoverable reason, I loved Matt Helm movies, though Dean seemed the least physically apt hand-to-hand combatant on film. It was, luckily, the era of the glancing karate chop to the neck. Though Martin lacked physical authority, he epitomized a sort of easy-going, boozy, hip, masculinity. Like Sinatra, he turned a lack of athleticism into a sort of non-threatening but unsurpassed virility. They never seemed to take a woman by force. They sort of melted underneath her. They were straight bottoms.

To my unending mortification, the only time anyone ever caught me in the act of um... self-gratification, I was a teen in my darkened bedroom at home watching "Bells Are Ringing" with Dean and Judy Holiday on a black and white portable. Of course at that age, I could have jacked off to a Porky Pig cartoon. 

I remember from a bio of Martin, but only hazily, Dean's inability to stomach the bathos of Jerry Lewis- the false pathos, the disproportionate straining of sentiment to portray great sadness, which he then contrived to bracket by desperate farce- the mannerisms of a clown, without context or reference. Dean Martin's decision to walk away from Martin and Lewis is one of the great artistic abnegations of the 20th c.- like Rothko slitting his wrists, or dating Yoko, or David Foster Wallace hanging himself, although that's a little less Martin and a little more Lewis.