SOUNDTRACK: ADAM SCHLESINGER (October 31, 1967 – April 1, 2020).
Adam Schlesinger was best known as the co-founder of Fountains of Wayne. I always appreciated the band because I was familiar withe the store Fountains of Wayne (in Wayne, NJ). But I was never a big fan of the band.
They wrote indie pop songs, which were not really my thing in the late 90s (although I did really enjoy “Radiation Vibe”).
Ironically, Schlesinger was pretty much simultaneously involved with a band that I really did like called Ivy. I liked Ivy a lot primarily for the vocals of Dominique Durand and had no idea that Schlesinger was involved.
Since then I have really come to appreciate Schlesinger’s songwriting (he’s written amazingly catchy songs for just about everyone).
The Coronavirus is devastating the world and Schlesinger’s death from it just amplifies the unfairness of this deadly virus. That a man who made people happy with his melodies should be killed by it while people who are causing direct harm are not even infected by it just seems to show where we are in the world.
[READ: April 1, 2020] “Inside Tove Jansson’s Private Universe”
I’m a fan of the Moomin Universe and I know a bit about Tove Jansson. I also know that her brother Lars (she called him Lasse) took over doing the Moomins at some point because she had burnt out. She died in 2011 at age 86.
This essay is more or less a book review of a new collection of Jansson’s correspondence called Letters from Tove, which I might consider reading.
I did not know that Jansson wrote short stories. Her short story “Messages” is composed of snippets of letters she received: “Last time you didn’t make a happy ending. Why do you do this? We look forward to your valued reply soonest concerning Moomin motifs on toilet paper in pastel shades.”
It’s easy to see how forty years of these letters would be wearying.
Some interesting bibliographic details: at 23 she was accepted to the École de Beaux Arts but found it very disappointing and quit after two weeks. She moved to a smaller atelier run by a radical Swiss artist who agreed with her departure from Beaux Arts. He went “quite pale at the thought of the terrible danger I’d escaped from.”
She found herself struggling with painting and wound up creating the Moomins around this time. But she didn’t see any value in them and put them aside until 1945 during the war, when she released her first Moomin book.
The books were a huge hit and a decade after the first one the London Evening News asked her to turn it into a daily strip. She was proud and relieved to have steady income.
The book is organized not by chronology but by correspondent, with a chapter devoted to each of her most meaningful recipients.
Her most personal letters were sent to Russian Jewish photographer Eva Konikoff. They were friends for twenty years before Konikoff moved to the Unites States and their correspondence began.
Tove had dated a man named Taspa and then wrote to Konikoff that she was suddenly repelled by him “everything that makes me not want to get married came back to me, all the men I’ve seen through and despised….I see what will happen to my painting if I get married.”
In 1946 Lars introduced her to theater director Vivica Bandler. Bandler was married, Jansson had a boyfriend but they began an affair, it was her first time experiencing love with a woman.
Like finding a new and wondrous room in an old house one thought one knew from top to bottom…. it’s bringing me peace and ecstasy at the same time.
She then dated a man Atos, whom she loved and offered to marry. But it never happened.
Later in 1956 she met Tuulikki Pietilä, a graphic designer artist and engraver. They would remain partners for forty-five years. But if you lived with Tove you also lived with her family. Her mother, Ham, stayed with them on and off. Tove felt it was impossible to please them both a the same time.
In 1987 Jansson wrote a short story called “Travelling Light,” which explored the fantasy of being liberated from the endless demands of other people. The narrator tries to get away by gong on a ship, but he winds up lodging with a chatterbox. He finally escapes to the deck of ship only to have an old woman appear with photos of her son.
Tove abandoned the Moomins in 1959 after more than ten-thousand drawings. In the early 1970s she began writing fiction for adults. It included five novels (The True Deceiver is evidently one of her best), a memoir and many short stories.
As a young artist she built narratives around an idealized notion of home. Later she wrote about trying to preserve the delicate balance between the reliable presence of another person and the desire to be in one’s private space.
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