Did Miles Davis wear his underwear backwards?

[KenP]

In the December issue of Atlantic Monthly, there’s an article, “Our Genius Problem,” by Marjorie Garber. On page 69, she discusses the eccentricity that sometimes accompanies genius, and mentions that, for example, “Miles Davis wore his underpants backwards.” Can anyone confirm this, or elaborate? Thanks.

[x-ray_vision]

Nope, no one can.

[samclem]

Wow! Even a guy with x-ray vision can’t confirm it. We’re lost.

[Walloon]

Actress Cicely Tyson was married to Miles Davis for seven years. Maybe she could tell us.

[Larry_Mudd]

You know, I like Marjorie Garber. But I read her the same way I read Antonin Artaud. A typical passage, from Symptoms of Culture:

Like Benny Kubelsky, koshered by General Foods into Jack Benny, with a seemly nose and an appetite for Jell-O plum pudding, Jell-O itself both marked and crossed the borderline between Jewish and Christian, American and foreign, kosher and traif. As such, and embodied in the split or bifurcated box, it was the perfect sign for the politics of the Rosenberg case.

I return then to my epigraph, spoken of course by Iago, the master-plotter and master opportunist, the man who seized upon another overdetermined domestic object, a woman’s handkerchief, and made it the sign of calumny. “This may help to thicken other proofs/ That do demonstrate thinly.” The Jell-O box is not a random signifier, however it made its way into the evidence submitted in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Overdetermined by both its relationship to the Jewish community and its much more highly visible status as the quintessentially American, middle-class, and patriotic food, America’s just dessert, the Jell-O box was already a culturally loaded term, “the necessary link,” when Roy Cohn or one of his colleagues cut a facsimile into pieces and displayed it to the court.

She’s a genius. A poetic genius. Don’t take her too literally, dude. She’s playful, and her sense of humour is Joycean.

[samclem]

Larry Thanks for that passage. Hard to argue against her abilities as a writer. Your description of her seems accurate.

Would someone quote the passage about Miles Davis in a little more detail? Don’t quote so much that we get The Reader in trouble, but is there more to it than a simple declarative statement about his underwear?

[samclem]

When all else fails, you write to the source. So, last night I emailed Prof. Garber as to where the quote came from. Just got a nice reply today.

The source for Professor Garber’s reference to Miles Davis’ underwear was the special “Genius” edition of Esquire magazine.

Amazing how many times I"ve gotten a reply to an emailed question.

[KneadToKnow]

Esquire had a “Genius” edition?

That’s gonna take a little while to process.

[bayonet1976]

I heard and saw Miles Davis play at the Jacksonville Jazz Festival in 1990(?). It was October, pouring rain, cold, and there were less than a dozen people there so I was up against the stage, and Miles played the entire concert a few feet away from me, next to one of the speakers. Not that I was looking or anything, but it looked to me that he either wore no underwear or had very loose fitting boxers.