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July 31, 2003

Denials and salutations

Welcome to the world of art, or mir iskusstva, as they say in Russian. It's "About Last Night," the blog that brings you all art, all the time.

I begin by reporting a flat, unequivocal, and unconvincing denial. Remember last week's posting about the party of drunken classical composers who were sitting around singing Emily Dickinson poems to the tune of the Gilligan's Island theme? Well, the wife of one of the composers in question (herself a superlatively good opera singer) writes to assure me that "he was NOT drunk! He cannot speak for the others!"

Right.

I also want to pass along a piece of e-mail from one of my favorite jazz pianists in New York, whose message follows in its entirety:

Dude--you are SO bookmarked!

Go thou and do likewise.

Now on to today's topics, from inverse to obverse: (1) The problem of the vicious critic. (2) A totally irrelevant but amusing exercise in anagramming. (3) Writers' envy, as described by the envious one. (4) Get jiggy with Rapmaster Sylvia P. (5) How to speak fluent PoMo without really trying. (6) Art Tatum, on the cheap. (7) The latest almanac entry.

Tell a friend about www.terryteachout.com. It'll add years to your life.

Posted July 31, 12:06 PM

We who cannot do

A reader writes:

Obviously, a critic should be rigorous, honest, and forthright, but how far is not too far? When the critic likes the work, there's not much problem, but what if the work is deemed flawed or worse (an all too common situation in my experience)? Living artists, even those without significant talent, are still human and apt to be hurt. Furthermore, it's always possible for a critic to be wrong, however honestly. It's been said that Art is ruthless and only cares for its own goodness or quality. Should a critic simply serve Art, and artists be damned?

Whenever I think about that question--and any critic who doesn't lose sleep over it from time to time is a boor and a cad--I think of this couplet by Alexander Pope: "Yes, I am proud! I must be proud to see/Men, not afraid of God, afraid of me."

Terrible words, aren't they? They say a great deal about Pope, and what they say, I don't like. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that they have the rank smell of pathology--that they speak of a man whose ego was badly twisted, and who took it out on the people about whom he wrote. But I'm not going to try to tell you that they don't hit the target: I know a lot of critics, and some of them are just like that. I also know a lot of critics who are incompetent, by which I mean they don't know enough about their chosen art form to responsibly pass judgment on the things they review. Such critics make artists miserable, confuse audiences, and generally add to the sum total of unhappiness on this earth.

It's not a popular view among my colleagues, but I think most of the best critics--not all, but most--have had at least some professional experience in at least one of the arts about which they write. I know I try to write not as a lofty figure from on high, smashing stone tablets over the heads of ballerinas and prima donnas, but as someone who has spent his entire adult life immersed in the world of art, both as a critic and as a practitioner. I was also fortunate to have served my apprenticeship as a critic in a middle-sized city, because it taught me that criticism is not written in a vacuum. It touches real people, people of flesh and blood, and sometimes it hurts them. If you don't know that--and I mean really know it--you shouldn't be a critic. And you're more likely to know it when you've lived and worked in a city small enough that there's a better-than-even chance of your meeting the people you write about at intermission.

Writing for the Kansas City Star taught me that lesson, and it also taught me that critical standards have to be appropriate. You don't review a college opera production the same way you review the Met. That's another reason why critics should ideally have hands-on experience in the areas about which they write: It teaches them proper respect for what Wilfrid Sheed calls "the simple miracle of getting the curtain up every night." It's hard to sing Tatyana in Yevgeny Onegin, or to dance in Concerto Barocco. It's scary to go out in front of a thousand people in a dumb-looking costume and put your heart and soul on the line. Unless you have some personal experience of what that feels like--of the problems, both psychological and practical, that stand in the way of getting the curtain up--then you may err on the side of an unrealistic perfectionism, and your reviews will be sterile and uncomprehending as a result.

None of this is to say that criticism should be bland and toothless. Sometimes it's your duty--your responsibility--to drop the big one. But you shouldn't enjoy it, not ever. And you should always make an effort to be modest when writing about people who can do something you can't, even when you don't think they do it very well.

You will find a contrary view in today's almanac entry, written by Ernest Newman, one of the most distinguished music critics of the 20th century. I take his point--which doesn't mean I agree with it.

Posted July 31, 12:05 PM

Party time

Sooner or later, everybody with a computer discovers the Internet Anagram Server, a Web site that generates anagrams of any phrase you plug into it. What you mostly get are reams of garbage, but sift through it long enough and you can usually find some gems.

I got tired of writing the other day and decided to run my name through the Internet Anagram Server, and was surprised to receive in return a fairly large number of anagrams that could be related to my career as a drama critic: "Reroute thy act," "Teary tech tour," "Outcry at three" (how's that for a play about a matinee murder?), and my favorite, "Hey, actor, utter!" I also got some vaguely naughty responses, such as "Etch your tater," and a few sinister ones, including "Treachery tout" and "Cutthroat eyer."

But all these are merest fluff compared to my Top Five Personal Anagrams. In ascending order of coolness, they are:5. That cuter yore

4. Ratty, cute hero

3. Arty, cute other

2. Retract ye thou!

1. The Tory Curate

O.K, back to art. But I bet you can't wait to check out that Web site, can you?

Posted July 31, 12:04 PM

Elsewhere

If you still haven't gotten around to reading the essay absolutely every author I know is buzzing about, Kathryn Chetkovich' "Envy," go here. (For those totally out of the loop, Chetkovich is the girlfriend of Jonathan "The Corrections" Franzen.)

I'm not the envious type (at least I don't think I am), so for me it was the approximate equivalent of reading a brilliantly written piece of pornography describing a taste I don't share. But if the green monster has ever come calling on you, my guess is that you'll hear an echo deep within your psyche:

When the subject of his success came up, often enough a friend would say, "The great thing is he really deserves it." Were they kidding? This was precisely what made it so hard. For once, the gods hadn't made the stupid mistake of smiling on another no-talent, well-connected charlatan.

Which somehow reminds me of the title of the first song in Avenue Q, opening tonight on Broadway: "It Sucks to Be Me."

For those of you who read Demolition Angel's review of Edge, the one-woman play about Sylvia Plath, I am pleased to direct you (courtesy of the very amusing Maud Newton, of whose blog I am a daily communicant) to a very naughty parody called Sylvia Plath's Gangsta Rap Legacy.

O.K., I am soooooo Nineties, but I only just found out about the Postmodern Generator (thank you, Artnotes!), an amazing piece of software that creates totally meaningless essays written in PoMo jargon. To try it out, go here. Don't do it while you're eating, though, or you'll make a mess....

Posted July 31, 12:03 PM

Words to the wise

Proper Records has just released a four-CD box set of recordings made between 1932 and 1951 by Art Tatum, the blind megavirtuoso who was the greatest of all jazz pianists (that's a fact, not an opinion). It includes most of his important studio sides, plus a sprinkling of how'd-he-do-that live performances. Go here and you can buy it for twenty-five bucks, which is absolutely preposterous.

Well? What are you waiting for?

Posted July 31, 12:02 PM

Almanac

"In art the ideal critical ethic is ruthlessness. There the race is only to the fleet and the battle to the strong. There should be no thought of helping lame dogs--and still less sick or deformed dogs--over the stile; if the dog is going to be as helpless the other side of the stile as he is on this side, then let him stay on this side till he is strong enough to get over by himself. He is no worse off, while you have saved yourself a good deal of trouble (perhaps a biting also), and may have spared the people on the other side the infliction of a nuisance on them."

Ernest Newman, Essays from the World of Music

Posted July 31, 12:01 PM

July 30, 2003

Cusp of the week

Aggressive deadline-related activity continues to take place in my shop, but there'll always be an "About Last Night." Today's topics, from possibly to probably: (1) A painter you don't know--yet. (2) In praise of Joel McCrea. (3) How's Robert Lowell doing on the Great Poetic Scoreboard? (4) Why dancers dance. (5) Your daily dose of snarkiness. (6) About Bob Hope. (7) The latest almanac entry.

Thanks for all your letters, many of which will be finding their way onto this page in due course. All the more reason to tell your friends about www.terryteachout.com. One fine morning they'll click that bookmark--and there you'll be!

Posted July 30, 12:06 PM

Interrogating reality

A friend asked me the other night, "Do you think there are any really important artists who get completely overlooked? And do you think blogging might change that?"

This is an interesting question--more interesting than many critics might be willing to admit. In the long run, I think the answer is no, or at least probably not. Canons of excellence tend to sort themselves out over time (with a little nudging from critics), and I think it's fairly safe to say that there are no truly great contemporaries of Shakespeare or Mozart about whom we have yet to hear.

In the short run, though, all bets are off. "Every morning a stock-market report on reputations comes out in New York," Norman Podhoretz wrote in Making It. "It is invisible, but those who have eyes to see can read it." It also has an arts section, equally invisible but equally readable, and the numbers are quite volatile indeed. Most journalists are day traders--all they care about are today's winners. Me, I try to buy low and hold. I'm old enough to trust my taste, and I don't much care what anybody else thinks, though it's always nice when smart people agree with you. I think, for example, that I'll live long enough to see Fairfield Porter generally regarded as a major American painter and critic (his stock registered a healthy upward spike when Justin Spring's excellent Porter biography was published three years ago), and I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happens to Arnold Friedman one of these days, though that's a longer shot.

I mention all this because I just paid a visit to the studio of a painter whom I believe to be absolutely first-class, even though it's a safe bet that you've never heard of him. Albert Kresch has been around forever (he was born in 1922, back when Warren Harding was in the White House), and every once in a while he gets a bit of ink, but for some reason his work never seems to ring the bell of fame. Part of the reason--the biggest part, I suspect--is that he's never been fashionable, not even for an afternoon. A pupil of Hans Hofmann, the great Abstract Expressionist teacher (and painter), Kresch embraced representation back in the Forties, at the exact moment when all the hip New York painters were going abstract with a vengeance. Yet he never completely abandoned abstraction, either, which made him even harder to pigeonhole. Instead, like Porter, Nell Blaine, and a number of other greatly gifted American painters, he bent it to his own subtle purposes.

Here's how Kresch explains the seeming paradox:

We were using the abstract as an armature or a structure onto which to build a painting, and [the Abstract Expressionists] were using it as the be-all and end-all of the painting. And in a way, we felt that what we were doing was more difficult, because we were trying to interrogate reality, and what we saw, and the visual. They were in the first ecstasies of success and triumph and we just didn't agree.

That's what I call a recipe for unfashionability. But fashion be damned, for Kresch is still alive, well, and painting as wonderfully as ever. As a matter of fact, I wrote about a show of his last year in my Washington Post column:

His paintings are full of sweeping horizontal movement and hot, high-keyed color contrasts. Kresch's work is rarely shown in New York, but I was dazzled by a solo exhibit last year at the Center for Figurative Painting, so I went straight to the opening of his current show, a roomful of small but compelling landscapes at Salander-O'Reilly Galleries. For me, the pick of the litter was "Yellow Landscape," scarcely bigger than a postcard but breathtaking in its focused intensity.

To look at some of the paintings from that show (including "Yellow Landscape"), and to read an equally enthusiastic New York Times review by Michael Kimmelman, go here.

I wish I could send you to an exhibit of Kresch's work right now, but I can't, because there isn't one up at the moment. All I can do is tell you that I spent a couple of hours in his Brooklyn studio last Thursday looking at his latest paintings, after which we retired to a neighborhood café, where he told me amazing stories about hanging out with Charlie Parker in the Village a half-century ago. (He's a jazz fan, too--one of his best paintings is of Lester Young, the great tenor saxophonist.) Then I rode the subway back to Manhattan, thinking for maybe the thousandth time this year that when you live in New York, there's no place like home.

I promise to let you know the next time any of Albert Kresch's paintings are on display in the New York area. And to the friend whose original question inspired this lengthy reply, here's my short answer: That's one of the reasons why I started this blog.

Posted July 30, 12:05 PM

Screening room

I love Westerns, a taste not widely shared within my sphere of acquaintance. Even the cinephiles with whom I hang are disinclined to saddle up. So I mention the release on DVD of Four Faces West knowing that it'll be a tough sell. Too bad. It's a lovely little movie, and if you've never seen a Western before, you could do a lot worse than to start here.

Joel McCrea, the star, is now best known for having shared a swimming pool with Veronica Lake in Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, but what he really liked was making Westerns, and in the second half of his career he didn't do anything else. He always played good guys in white hats, and he had the face and voice for it. I won't say McCrea never made a better Western than Four Faces West--he's just about perfect in Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country, a film sorely in need of transfer to DVD--but this one ranks right up there with his best work. Traditional Westerns are all about the myth of the frontier, and Four Faces West, released in 1948, takes that myth at face value. A bit romantic and more than a bit sentimental, it was written and shot with a sharp eye for authentic period detail. The result is a 90-minute-long holiday from cynicism.

Incidentally, Four Faces West isn't your usual shoot-‘em-up. In fact, it's the only Hollywood Western ever made in which no guns are fired. (Really.) But I bet you wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't told you.

Posted July 30, 12:04 PM

Elsewhere

J. Bottum's astute revaluation of the poetry of Robert Lowell is in the current issue of the Weekly Standard:

The general reader of literature can now walk many of the poetic battlefields of the twentieth century with little more emotion than the tourist's usual wonder at how much blood was spilt to gain so little ground....William Carlos Williams has won, and Stephen Vincent Benét has lost. Hart Crane has surprisingly faded, and Wallace Stevens has unsurprisingly shone. Delmore Schwartz has been washed under by the great wave of the world, while Sylvia Plath has made it safe to shore. Amy Lowell is out, and Robert Lowell is...well, what is he these days? Time will revisit some of these judgments. Time ought to revisit some of these judgments. But what will time make of Lowell?

To find out, go here.

My fellow artsjournal.com blogger Tobi Tobias, who writes about dance, recently invited her readers to respond to this question: "Some would say that dancing is the cruelest profession, all but guaranteeing grueling work, physical pain, poverty, and heartbreak. Yet the field has always been rich in aspirants willing to dedicate their lives to the art. Why?" To read the answers she received--some of which are quite strikingly beautiful--go here.

And for sheer smart snarkiness, make The Minor Fall, the Major Lift a daily part of your blogdiet. I am now officially addicted.

Posted July 30, 12:03 PM

Obit

I can't imagine that the death of Bob Hope meant anything whatsoever to anyone under the age of 30, and for those much under the age of 50 it can only serve as a vague reminder of Seventies TV at its cheesiest (unless you happen to have served in the military, in which case your memories of him may be very different). Hope, after all, never quite succeeded in making the transition to the small screen. Though he made some pretty good movies, he was essentially a creature of network radio, and who remembers that? It was a wonderful medium, a generation of gifted artists poured their souls into it, and now their work is almost completely forgotten.

This, I suspect, is why some of us who aren't quite old enough to remember Hope when he was funny (which he was, believe it or not) still felt queasy at the news of his passing. The world spins immeasurably faster today than it did when I was a boy, and the fixed stars I remember are mostly fallen now. Meanwhile, here I sit, writing about a hundred-year-old comedian for a journalistic medium that didn't even exist five years ago. What will I be doing in another five years? In the words of my favorite refrigerator magnet, "Time passes quickly, whether you're having fun or not." (I wonder what that sounds like in Latin.)

That's what makes you cling to the landmarks of your youth, cherished or not. The older you get, the more you cherish everything that used to be, not so very long ago.

Posted July 30, 12:02 PM

Almanac

"He was never in a hurry, never anxious to make an effect or sensation. He sat still and men came to him."

Winston Churchill, My Early Life

Posted July 30, 12:01 PM

July 29, 2003

Onward and upward

Greetings, salutations, all that stuff. I think today's topics are nicely varied, if I do say so myself: (1) Reflections on a pair of bloody corpses. (2) Should conductors talk to their audiences--even if they don't know how? Ask Alfred Hitchcock. (3) Another installment of "How to Buy Good Art Without Going Broke." (4) A review of a recent gig by one of New York's most adventurous jazz singers, featuring the debut of our newest guest blogger, Hang Glider. (5) The latest almanac entry.

Incidentally, "About Last Night" is popping up all across the Web, for which much thanks to dozens of linkers. Once again, I'm equally eager to link to other blogs that regularly post commentary about the fine and medium-fine arts--please e-mail me if you know of a good one that isn't already listed in the right-hand column.

Does your mother know about www.terryteachout.com? What about your best friend? Brighten their lives today!

Off we go.

Posted July 29, 12:06 PM

Unreal life

If you wanted to, you've seen the pictures of the corpses of Saddam Hussein's sons by now. They were broadcast on TV and scattered throughout cyberspace last week, usually labeled "warning--graphic photos," or words to that effect. And they were graphic, I guess...but I can't say they shocked me. I've seen a lot worse (I used to work for the New York Daily News, after all). More to the point, the photos released by the Defense Department were tame compared to what you can see any day of the week by renting any reasonably violent Hollywood film released in the last 30 years or so, going all the way back to 1969 and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. For that matter, you can even view the "sealed" autopsy photos of John F. Kennedy at your leisure, 24/7--they're scattered throughout cyberspace, too, easily accessible to anyone with a computer and a taste for the macabre, along with all sorts of other nightmare-inducing death-scene photos posted by peculiar folk. (And no, I'm not posting any links.)

It may also be relevant that I once witnessed a shootout in a big-city bank. Granted, I didn't actually see guns blazing--I was around the corner, a few feet away--but I did stand over the robber seconds after he was shot dead by a security guard. Forgive the cliché, but the whole thing seemed less like real life than a scene from a movie. The sound of the guns going off was far more frightening than the sight of the corpse.

Is my experience commonplace? Have most of us become blind to the pathos of cooling corpses? Did Hollywood do that to us--or was it modernity? I can't tell you. All I know is that I looked at the pictures of the Hussein boys and didn't flinch, though I wish I had.

Posted July 29, 12:05 PM

When conductors talk, audiences listen

A reader writes:

You recently mentioned "snobbery" in your blog:

I can't think of many things I loathe more than the hyper-aggressive snobbery whose effect--perhaps even its purpose--is to frighten away well-meaning people who want to dip their toe into the pool of beauty for the first time.

Question: Do you believe in pre-concert audience talks? I'm not talking about those pre-concert lectures which some concerts and operas offer (like my Houston Grand Opera), which take some time before the show, in a special room, to discuss the piece in detail. They might be great, but my wife and I are too busy grabbing a bite before the show.

I'm talking about when the conductor comes to the podium, turns to the audience, and says a few words about the piece just before playing it. Do you think this would be a good or bad thing to do?

My personal opinion is that it would double orchestra attendance overnight.

I couldn't agree more--if the conductor in question can talk. Some can, some can't. One who can is Michael Tilson Thomas of the San Francisco Symphony, who has an uncanny knack for getting his audiences on the side of difficult new music by chatting about it in a direct and engaging way from the podium. Needless to say, it helps that Thomas is also a great conductor who has turned the San Francisco Symphony into one of America's top orchestras. And all things being equal, I'd rather hear a good performance by a mute conductor than a fair performance by a talkative conductor. But all things aren't equal anymore, and it seems to me that conductors who can't talk as well as Thomas would do well to learn how--or hire speechwriters. Sure, it'd be nice if they wrote their own speeches, but talent is not apportioned equally or logically, and the ability to write a good pre-concert talk probably isn't found on the same chromosome as the ability to conduct Beethoven.

I just finished reading the galleys of a new biography of Alfred Hitchcock. If you're of a certain age, you'll remember his TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, whose episodes he used to introduce in the driest, drollest manner imaginable. Well, Hitchcock didn't write those introductions. They were written for him by a witty playwright named James Allardice, the same fellow who knocked out his after-dinner speeches. Hitchcock just read them--brilliantly--and they helped make him a star in his own right.

Me, I think all musicians, classical and non-classical alike, should talk to their audiences. If I ran a conservatory, I'd require every student to take a class in public speaking. Failing that, though, I think a little discreet ghostwriting might prove to be a shrewd investment in the future of classical music in America.

By the way, my fellow artsjournal.com blogger Greg Sandow has some thoughts on the same subject. Go see.

Posted July 29, 12:04 PM

Affordable art

If you long to purchase real art that won't require you to take out a second mortgage, Lincoln Center's List Art Poster & Print Program is worth a visit. Each year, the program commissions signed limited-edition screenprints from well-known artists, subsequently turning them into high-quality posters advertising a Lincoln Center constituent. Prints are limited to 108 copies, posters to 500. The batting average, artistically speaking, is impressively high, and several List screenprints, like Helen Frankenthaler's Grey Fireworks, have sold out quickly and appreciated considerably in value since their publication. I own a List print, and look at it lovingly several dozen times each day. (I paid for it, too--this is not a commercial!)

"Celebrating 40 Years of List Posters," an exhibition drawn from the 160-plus prints commissioned to date, goes up August 11 at the Lincoln Center Gallery (across the hall from the downstairs entrance to the Metropolitan Opera House) and will remain on view through September 6. Artists in the show include Frankenthaler, Jennifer Bartlett, Wolf Kahn, Robert Motherwell, Jules Olitski, Gerhard Richter, and Jamie Wyeth. All works on display will also be available for sale. In addition, you can purchase List prints and posters on line any time by going here.

Posted July 29, 12:03 PM

Daredevil

Hang Glider writes from New York:

Most people who know me wouldn't call me a risk-taker, yet I'm intensely drawn to taking chances in my on-stage life as a jazz musician. That's why I tend to become restless during performances that mainly consist of things like safe melodies, predictable harmony, meters you can count without really trying, and The Blues. On the other hand, too much complexity--a solid hour of free improvisation by an avant-garde jazz quartet, say--can bore me to tears just as quickly. So I was delighted to run across something at the Cornelia Street Café that struck a 10 on my interest meter. That something was Kate McGarry.

If I had to compare McGarry to a snack-food item, she'd be a handful of chocolate-covered mini-pretzels--a perfect blend of cool, salty style with a decadently rich, sweet sound, satisfying your initial craving while leaving you hungry for more. Her material is just as flavorful, ranging from hard-swinging jazz standards to sensual bossa novas in 7/8 time, from a sexy, modern arrangement of a tune by the Kinks to a gorgeously pure Irish folksong. (You can hear some of these songs on her newly reissued debut CD, Show Me.) Best of all, she has the rare ability to improvise with a sophisticated ear, spinning out attractive, tastefully phrased melodic lines that snake effortlessly (and accurately) through every chord change.

McGarry's biggest leap of faith may have been her quasi-apologetic announcement to the audience that most of what we'd be hearing was unrehearsed. (She got tied up in a traffic blockade resulting from last week's shooting at City Hall, and missed her own dress rehearsal.) I almost wished she'd kept this fact a secret, though it did add to the thrill of watching the music spontaneously unravel and resolve. After hearing one exciting performance after another, a wise audience member leaned over to me and whispered, "This is why she shouldn't make disclaimers like that!" But it also suggested that while she can sing from the heart with reckless abandon, she also cares deeply about the art she's making. Maybe that's what it means to be a true daredevil.

Posted July 29, 12:02 PM

Almanac

"Interesting is easy, beautiful is difficult."

Gustav Mahler, quoted in Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler

Posted July 29, 12:01 PM

July 28, 2003

Alert, awake, aware

Happy Monday! Here we are again, ready to do art. I have three deadlines looming, so don't expect miracles, but I promise a varied menu all week long (including the debut of a new guest blogger) or your money back.

Today's topics, from now to never: (1) Why the estate of an oil heiress is suing the Metropolitan Opera. (2) A culture-related blunder at Ground Zero. (3) Nostalgia in Times Square, courtesy of a theatrical press agent. (4) Comics, cartoons, high art, and the theory of relativity. (5) Where to read about ballet and modern dance. (6) Another point of view on Adam Guettel. (7) The latest almanac entry.

Incidentally, I posted an obit yesterday morning, which you will find immediately following today's almanac. It's the first time I've done a weekend posting, and though I don't plan to make a habit of it, there's no telling what I might do next.

Are you awake yet? Have you told 10 friends about www.terryteachout.com? If you do, good fortune will be yours.

P.S. Mick Jagger turned 60 this weekend. Remember Mick Jagger? O.K., how about the Rolling Stones? Is anybody out there?

Posted July 28, 12:06 PM

The queen's coin

The New York Times ran a story last week about a now-deceased Texas oil heiress whose estate is suing the Metropolitan Opera. During her lifetime, Sybil Harrington, the lady in question, gave the Met $27 million, with the explicit (and obviously well-lawyered) proviso that the money be used in support of "at least one new production each Metropolitan Opera season by composers such as Verdi, Puccini, Bizet, Wagner, Strauss and others whose works have been the core of the repertory of the Metropolitan Opera during its first century, with each such new production to be staged and performed in a traditional manner that is generally faithful to the intentions of the composer and the librettist." The Met obliged, going so far as to name its auditorium after her.

After Harrington died in 1998, her estate gave the company another $5 million to televise its productions, with a similar stipulation that the gift be used "exclusively for the televising of traditional/grand opera productions of the Metropolitan Opera...set in a place and time and staged as the composer placed it." The estate charges, among other complicated things, that the Met spent some of that money on a telecast of a non-traditional production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, and wants her money returned.

Joe Volpe, who runs the Met, isn't talking, except to say he's "confident that, at the end of this affair, the name of the Metropolitan Opera will remain unsullied." Right. In fact, the Times story seems to leave little doubt that the Met did what the Harrington estate says it did, though if you've followed the eternalitigation in which Philadelphia's Barnes Collection is entangled, you know nothing is simple when cultural institutions find themselves in legal hot water.

What interests me, though, is less the suit than the terms of the original gift. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Met agreed to let a Texas oil heiress dictate a good-sized chunk of its artistic policy, which strikes me as...well, where shall I begin? Provincial? Irresponsible? How about downright boneheaded? On the other hand, the whole thing starts to sound less surprising when you consider the past decade or so of new Met productions. Yes, I've seen some theatrically breathtaking things there (Mark Lamos' Wozzeck comes immediately to mind), but in recent years, with only a few exceptions, the company's productions have typically oscillated between rigidly hyper-traditional stagings of standard operas like Madama Butterfly and Eurotrashy anything-for-an-effect stagings of non-standard operas like A Midsummer Night's Dream. All of which makes me wonder: To what extent were Sybil Harrington and her oil money responsible for the fact that the Met has become so tired and unadventurous, theatrically speaking?

Granted, it isn't easy for the Met to put on a theatrically serious show--the house is too large. Nor do I believe that neo-traditional stagings of standard operas are necessarily a bad thing (though I can't remember the last time I saw a good one). In any case, I'm well aware that older operagoers as a group tend to hate adventurous operatic productions. They want trees with leaves. So maybe Harrington simply made it possible for the Met to do what it would have done anyway, only with more leaves.

All I'm saying is that when I go to the opera, I want to see something that's worth seeing, not just hearing. Which may be why I now go to New York City Opera far more often than the Met. But that's another posting.

(Incidentally, the Times is also reporting that the powers-that-be have decided against including a new downtown house for New York City Opera in their Ground Zero redevelopment plans--a huge disappointment for those, myself included, who thought it a terrific idea. I suspect it won't be the last such disappointment as the plans start to take clearer shape.)

Posted July 28, 12:05 PM

Sidney Falco, e-mail your office

From time to time, one of New York's theatrical publicists sends out an e-mail called "Who Was Seen at the Theatre Last Week?" Here are excerpts from the most recent edition (all spelling and punctuation guaranteed unaltered).

Last weekend in London Arnold Schwarzenegger, in town to promote with opening of Terminator 3 in Europe, was spotted at the West End production of MAMMA MIA! along with wife Maria Shriver and their children.

Toni Braxton, dressed in an exquisite gown designed by special guest and dear friend, Marc Bouwer, was feted at Laura Belle last Thursday (July 17) by family, friends and Broadway luminaries celebrating the 6-time Grammy-winner's return to the Great White Way in AIDA.

"Friends" star David Schwimmer caught up with Broadway's long running URINETOWN at the Henry Miller.

The sensational Broadway show NINE was visited this week by a variety of sensational Broadway stars: Jon Secada, Rebecca Luker and Lou Diamond Phillips. Also seen was Broadway newcomer, and Antonio's wife, Melanie Griffith.

I never fail to be amused by this charming little relic of the stone age of press agentry, redolent as it is of the dear departed days when Walter Winchell ruled the earth. I mean, does anybody, anywhere, care how Lou Diamond Phillips spends his spare time? Then again, maybe it's just me. Obviously somebody, somewhere, is paying attention, otherwise the publicist in question wouldn't bother, right? Or is "Who Was Seen at the Theatre Last Week?" actually being knocked out on an Underwood manual (that's a typewriter, Gen-Xers) by an 85-year-old guy who wears a fedora at his desk and doesn't know that the only kind of gossip people want to hear these days involves the sex lives of the rich and famous? As Captain Renault might have said, that's what I like to think--it's the romantic in me.

Posted July 28, 12:04 PM

Zowie! Splat!

A reader writes, apropos of my recent claim that younger New Yorkers don't seem to be collecting affordable serious art:

When I go to people's houses, I routinely have to drool at the art on the walls, and if there's not real art, there's really nice posters and reproductions. See, baby boomers and Gen-Xers who are science fiction/fantasy or comics fans routinely have inexpensive high-quality art on their walls, as well as sketches by the famous tucked away in various places. I'm not an especially huge art collector and I'm not making much, but I have the following in my collection: (1) A painted cover layout by Jack Gaughan. (2) Two sketches by Hannes Bok (I paid too much for these, frankly). (3) Six pages of sketches by Phil Foglio. (He gives out his old scratch paper for free at conventions. We like.) (4) A quick-sketched portrait by Mark Wallace ("William Blackfox"). (5) A drawing by Matt Roach. I've also got five paintings by lesser-known folks and a ton of laser prints. Oh, and I've been known to buy animation cels and artwork as gifts for others.

I could easily pick up a really good cover painting for 500-1000 dollars if I attended the right science fiction conventions, but frankly, I don't have enough space on my wall and my apartment has this little thing called rent. But lots of fans make lots more money than I do, and they buy. A lot. Most fans have more art stuck away somewhere in the house than on the walls, and there's plenty on the walls. But every convention features an art show, with work by the most revered professionals cheek-by-jowl with rank beginners. A lot of stuff is clumsy, and some of the stuff with good technique is too pretty-pretty or too dark or too interested in showing large expanses of female flesh. But there's a lot of good and interesting stuff out there.

Shh! Don't tell anybody!

Pop quiz: What do you think my reaction to this letter was?

If your answer was (A) amused snobbery, you are sooooo wrong. One of my most prized pieces of art is an original cel setup (animation cel plus background painting) from The Cat Concerto, an Oscar-winning Tom & Jerry cartoon. It shows Jerry Mouse scampering up a piano keyboard, a vexed expression on his face. I love animated cartoons, and I think they're art, too, the same way I think All About Eve is art--that much, and no more. That's the reason why my Tom & Jerry cel setup is hung in my office, but my John Marin etching is hung in my living room.

To quote from the preface to A Terry Teachout Reader, out next spring from Yale University Press: "Just as city dwellers can't understand what it meant for the residents of a rural town to wake up one day and find themselves within driving distance of a Wal-Mart, so are they incapable of properly appreciating the true significance of middlebrow culture. For all its flaws, it nurtured at least two generations' worth of Americans who, like me, went on to become full-fledged highbrows--but highbrows who, while accepting the existence of a hierarchy of values in art, never lost sight of the value of popular culture."

The point being that it's absolutely O.K. to like both John Marin and Tom & Jerry, so long as you know that there's a big difference between them, and that one is better than the other. Which ought to be needless to say...but we all know it isn't anymore, don't we?

Posted July 28, 12:03 PM

Elsewhere

This link will take you to Robert Gottlieb's dance reviews in the New York Observer, which in my opinion rank among the very best things currently being written about dance in New York, or anywhere else. Last week he wrote about Dance Theatre of Harlem and Pilobolus, and in both cases he was right on the money. Gottlieb came to criticism late, after editing books (which he still does) and The New Yorker, but he's taken it up with a vengeance, and he's a natural. It figures--he's probably been to more New York City Ballet performances than anybody other than George Balanchine and Edward Gorey, and they're both dead.

Click the link, then bookmark it. You won't be sorry.

Greg Sandow (who blogs about classical music elsewhere on artsjournal.com) responds to my recent posting on Adam Guettel, the off-Broadway composer of musicals whom I think is writing operas and doesn't know it, or maybe won't admit it. Here's an excerpt:

Opera singers are good at operatic singing, and if that's what I want--along with the grand surge of an operatic orchestra--I'd better get my work produced in an opera house. But if what I want is good theater, maybe I'd be better off elsewhere. I used to write a lot of incidental music for plays and was delighted with how quickly actors got to the heart of any music they were involved in. They went straight for what the music meant, something that, in my experience, happens much more slowly in opera, and sometimes might not happen at all.

Read the whole thing.

Posted July 28, 12:02 PM

Almanac

"The Thomas Crown Affair is pretty good trash, but we shouldn't convert what we enjoy it for into false terms derived from our study of the other arts. That's being false to what we enjoy. If it was priggish for an older generation of reviewers to be ashamed of what they enjoyed and to feel they had to be contemptuous of popular entertainment, it's even more priggish for a new movie generation to be so proud of what they enjoy that they use their education to try to place trash within the acceptable academic tradition."

Pauline Kael, Going Steady

Posted July 28, 12:01 PM

July 27, 2003

Obit

I wonder how many readers of the New York Times remember Harold C. Schonberg, who died Saturday at the age of 87. He was the Times' chief music critic from 1960 to 1980, during which time he published two very popular books about classical music, The Great Pianists (1963) and The Lives of the Great Composers (1970), and won a Pulitzer prize for criticism, the first ever awarded to a music critic. Yet he was regarded as increasingly irrelevant even during his tenure at the Times, and though his old paper gave him a proper sendoff, by now I suspect he is best remembered (if at all) for having taken memorably worded but ultimately philistine potshots at Leonard Bernstein and Glenn Gould, neither of which was quoted in his Times obituary. (It was Schonberg who wrote of an especially flamboyant Bernstein performance that "he rose vertically into the air, a la Nijinsky, and hovered there a good 15 seconds by the clock.")

A no-nonsense journalist who understood in his bones that a performance is also news--something many working critics never figure out--Schonberg was conservative to the point of reaction in his musical values, and this, I suspect, is what has caused his memory to fade. It wasn't just that he rejected the avant-garde: The Lives of the Great Composers, otherwise a rather good book, is surprisingly unreceptive to 20th-century classical music in general. But he got one thing on the nose, as he recalled in his farewell column, from which the Times did quote:

I thought the serial-dominated music after the war was a hideously misbegotten creature sired by Caliban out of Hecate, and I had no hesitation in saying so. Nor has it been proved that I was all wrong. Certain it is that the decades of serialism did nothing but alienate the public, creating a chasm between composer and audience.

Schonberg lived long enough to see time prove him dead right about the music of Schoenberg, Webern, and their progeny--although a good many of his fellow critics have yet to figure out what he sensed at once. And as unfashionable as his rejection of 12-tone music was in the Sixties and Seventies, he never hesitated, then or at any other time, to say exactly what he thought.

Not the worst possible epitaph for a critic.

Posted July 27, 11:42 AM

July 25, 2003

Alive and well

Hello, there. As I mentioned yesterday, I'm distracted by pressing deadlines, but I hope "About Last Night" is as scintillating and pungent as ever, if necessarily a bit more concise than usual.

Today's topics, from in to out: (1) Deaf West Theatre's production of Big River comes to Broadway. (2) At last, the truth about British artists! (3) Classical composers party down. (4) A Gen-Xer succumbs to Bossmania, featuring the debut of our latest guest blogger, Omahattanite. (5) Behind the scenes at a play reading. (6) The poet laureate blurbs a bad movie. (7) Impressionism and its malcontents. (8) The latest almanac entry.

Now, back to the grindstone. Don't let a day go by without whispering www.terryteachout.com to your nearest and dearest. See you Monday.

Posted July 25, 12:07 PM

Considerable joy

Deaf West Theatre's revival of Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn opened last night on Broadway. Here's the first paragraph of my review in this morning's Wall Street Journal:

Why on earth--and how on earth--would a deaf theater company bring a musical to Broadway? Neither part of this question can be briefly answered, but in the case of Deaf West Theatre's magical production of "Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," which opened last night at the American Airlines Theatre, the results need no explaining. This stage version of Mark Twain's novel, first seen on Broadway in 1985, is now being revived by a mixed cast of deaf and hearing actors who not only speak and sing their lines out loud but simultaneously "say" them in American Sign Language. Laborious as the process may sound, Jeff Calhoun, the director and choreographer, has shaped it into a miraculously fluid theatrical spectacle....

To read the rest of the review (plus my thoughts on Angelica Torn's performance in Edge, reviewed here on Wednesday by guest blogger Demolition Angel), you'll have to fork out a dollar for the Journal, whose "Weekend Journal" section is worth at least that much in gold.

Posted July 25, 12:06 PM

Figures

Speaking of the Wall Street Journal, I read a front-page story there yesterday (no link, sorry) about how the U.S. and its allies sent artists to Iraq to paint pictures of the war. Here's the fourth graf:

The U.S. Air Force sent eight civilian illustrators. The Navy sent two of its own. The Army's lone staff artist has just made it to Baghdad. Britain will send an avant-garde artist known for his "film installations."

That odd sound you hear is me, suppressing a very loud titter.

Posted July 25, 12:05 PM

Not as you or I

I had lunch the other day with a classical composer I know. He told me, perfectly seriously, "I just had the worst nightmare--I dreamed I was trapped inside an E minor chord."

He also told me about attending a drunken dinner party of fellow composers, who clustered around the piano after dessert to sing funny songs. Did you know that every poem Emily Dickinson ever wrote can be sung to the tune of the Gilligan's Island theme? "Beeeeee-cause I could not stop for death/He kind-ly stop-ped for me...." Or that all limericks can be sung to the tune of "It Ain't Necessarily So"?

Think about this the next time you see a composer take a bow at a new-music concert. Don't let appearances fool you--these people are kinky.

P.S. A reader writes:

I've only very recently overcome the unfortunate habit of singing Emily Dickinson's poems. "Yellow Rose of Texas," "Ghost Riders in the Sky," "The Marine Corps Hymn," and, perhaps worst of all, "Deep in the Heart of Texas" also work.  But I warn you: That way madness lies.

Posted July 25, 12:04 PM

The Boss' butt

Omahattanite writes from New York:

From Montclair to Cherry Hill, "the city" means only one thing, and it's not Trenton. Culturally, Manhattan wields it over New Jersey, a fact that even Kevin Smith would reluctantly admit. New Jerseyites flock here for museums, shopping, theater, restaurants, and all the rest. But when it comes to down-home rock and roll, the Apple has nothing on the Meadowlands right this moment. Bruce Springsteen is midway through a week's worth of sold-out shows at Giants Stadium--the first time in Ticketmaster history that a performer has sold out tickets for seven consecutive stadium dates in a single day. Sitting in a huge football stadium in East Rutherford, watching one of its local heroes do good, all I could think was, thank God for Jersey.

Even the threat of rain (and an eventual downpour) couldn't dampen the spirits of fans at last Friday's show. Tailgaters turned the parking lot at Giants Stadium into a huge concrete party, complete with barbeques, chairs, tables, and thousands of stereos all blasting the same thing--the Boss, of course. The talk centered on set-list possibilities. Would he play "Rosalita"? (Yes.) What bonus songs might he do? ("Who'll Stop the Rain" opened this waterlogged show, and the first encore was a Detroit medley featuring special guest Garland Jeffreys.) Did he still have the cutest butt in the music business? (O.K., maybe that was confined to the ladies in my group--but he does.)

Until you've seen 50,000 fans screaming "Bruuuuuuuuuuce" as one, you haven't seen loyalty. As a naïve college freshman, I turned to my then-boyfriend and asked "Why are they booing him?" "They aren't saying boooooooooo," he responded kindly. "They're saying Bruuuuuuuuuuce." Now it's 10 years later, and I have fully succumbed to Bossmania. And I'm not the only one--the stadium was full of those in my generation, as well as many a decade younger, or two (or three) decades older. I always seem to be behind the times musically--I never did get Nirvana's appeal, and currently I'm not a huge fan of Coldplay--but on Friday night in Giants Stadium, that didn't matter one bit.

Posted July 25, 12:03 PM

Elsewhere

It takes a lot to get a curtain up, most of which is invisible to the audience. Richard Brookhiser, a writer not normally known for his theater criticism, got a peek way behind the scenes one evening and came away with this lovely, precisely evocative piece about a part of the process that civilians never get to see:

The theaters of Broadway, given over to spectacle-hungry suburbanites and gay aficionados of musicals, are several blocks, and quantum levels of success, away. We are in the shadow of the Port Authority bus terminal, among the small venues sustained by public subsidy and cheap production values, where dreams and talents are tried out: Broadway's back offices, television's sweatshops, the Bangalore outsourcing of Hollywood. Tonight's performance is a reading of a new play....

For the rest, go here.

A Fool in the Forest has noticed that some very strange names are popping up in the ad campaign for the movie Masked and Anonymous--including Andrew Motion, England's poet laureate. Say what?

Modern Art Notes has absolutely had it with impressionism.

Posted July 25, 12:02 PM

Almanac

"Boredom is one of the flattest, most self-evident, most self-justifying of all esthetic judgments. There is no appeal from boredom. Even when you tell yourself you like boredom, there the verdict is."

Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics

Posted July 25, 12:01 PM

July 24, 2003

Gather ye rosebuds

Welcome to "About Last Night," the blog that brings you all the arts, all the time--or at least whichever ones I happened to be thinking about yesterday. Today I will be scrambling to meet a deadline (you know, for a piece I'm getting paid to write) and visiting an artist's studio in Brooklyn, so tomorrow's blog may be a trifle skimpier than usual, though not without its delights. Just wanted to warn you.

Anyway, here are today's topics, from inside to out: (1) Aging performers who don't know when to quit--and the hangers-on who aid and abet them. (2) Humphrey Bogart meets the Suicide Blonde. (3) Two very hip saxophonists. (4) Other bloggers weigh in on Ground Zero architecture, Morandi, and Woody Allen. (5) The latest almanac entry.

You were expecting maybe hang gliding?

Posted July 24, 12:07 PM

Screening room

Film noir is the porn of pessimists, who like nothing more than to watch stylishly photographed movies in which the Robert Mitchums of the world make the mistake of going to bed with the Jane Greers of the world, for which they pay with their lives. In LaBrava, Elmore Leonard dreamed up the perfect title for a nonexistent film noir: "Obituary." That's a movie somebody needs to make.

Alas, I'm just as hopeless a case--I'm one of those pathetic cinephiles who can't settle on the best place to hang his framed On Dangerous Ground lobby card--and in the interests of spreading my addiction more widely, I want to pass the word that Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place is now available on DVD. In a Lonely Place is well known to serious film buffs and Humphrey Bogart fanatics, but if you don't fall into either of those two categories, you probably haven't seen it. Do so. Bogart plays Dixon Steele, an almost-washed-up screenwriter who gets tagged with a brutal murder at the precise moment that he falls hard for Laurel Gray, a blonde with a past-and-a-half. Gloria Grahame, the ultimate film-noir babe, is eerily perfect as Laurel, and as all cinephiles know, she was simultaneously (1) married to Nicholas Ray and (2) having an affair with Ray's teenage son while the movie was in production. Yikes!

As for Bogart, he never made a better movie, and I do mean Casablanca. David Thomson nails it: "This last [film] penetrates the toughness that Bogart so often assumed and reaches an intractable malevolence that is more frightening than any of his gangsters."

This, by the way, is the film in which Bogart rasps out the line of a lifetime: "I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me." If that doesn't make you go ooooh, film noir is not for you.

Posted July 24, 12:04 PM

Listening room

Four years ago, I wrote a piece for the New York Times about great jazz LPs that hadn't yet been tranferred to CD. Rarely have I managed to combine altruism and selfishness so indissolubly. I wrote the piece because I wanted those albums on CD, but I also wanted to share the wealth. Since then, several of the records in question (Jim Hall Live!, Pee Wee Russell's New Groove) have crossed the great divide, but others remain in limbo, most notably Ahmad Jamal's Chamber Music of the New Jazz. Arrgh!

Anyway, I'm still keeping score, and it is with altruistically selfish delight that I inform you that the good guys just knocked another runner in. Gerry Mulligan Meets Johnny Hodges, originallly released on Verve in 1959, is an uncomplicatedly wonderful album featuring Mulligan, the master of cool jazz, and Hodges, the premier soloist of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, accompanied by what in 1959 was just about the best of all possible West Coast rhythm sections, Claude Williamson on piano, Buddy Clark on bass, and Mel Lewis on drums. Nothing tricky or fussy, just a bunch of riff tunes by the two saxophonists, but the results are bluesy and super-sly, and you can hear on every track that Mulligan was having the time of his life.

Moral: Good things come to those who wait--but not in silence.

Posted July 24, 12:03 PM

Elsewhere

Just in case you don't see the Wall Street Journal's Leisure & Arts page, Ada Louise Huxtable, the noted architecture critic, wrote there this morning about development at Ground Zero. Here's the lead:

The announcement of the collaboration between Daniel Libeskind, the architect of the winning design for the World Trade Center site, and David Childs, the architect working for Larry Silverstein, the developer who acquired the leases of the Twin Towers six weeks before their destruction on 9/11, is something that would be normal under any normal circumstances. This is common practice when more than one interested party is involved in the development of a site; properly pursued, the procedure usually works out to everyone's advantage. But nothing is normal about this site. It was created by extraordinary circumstances requiring an extraordinary solution; the enormity of the disaster and the cataclysmic nature of the destruction turned a real estate operation into a mandate for a rebuilding plan in the city's greater public interest. Mr. Silverstein does not recognize that mandate....

To read the rest of the piece, go here.

Artblog.net has weighed in on the Great Morandi Debate, and very thoughtfully, too.

Meanwhile, the amazing James Lileks swerves off the road at the end of a blog about the Hussein boys to run over my least favorite filmmaker:

I have to quit, hit the main computer upstairs, upload this, download the column I have to tweak for tomorrow, and commence tweaking. This will leave me with 20 minutes for TV entertainment, and that will consist of a grim slice of "Hollywood Ending," part of my Woody Allen Punishment week. In "Curse of the Jade Scorpion," 65-year-old Woody had a 30+ girlfriend; in "Ending" his girlfriend is about 23. At this rate he will make a movie in 2009 in which he sleeps with a zygote; by 2012 he will make a movie in which he has sex with the actual DNA strands of a female embryo.

Question: Why is this man not famous? Answer: In cyberspace, he is.

Posted July 24, 12:02 PM

Almanac

"If we have to choose, it is always better to read Chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him."

C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

Posted July 24, 12:01 PM

July 23, 2003

Notes of a dragon slayer

Good morning, and welcome to How to Ride a Roller Coaster Without Really Trying. No, just kidding. I did ride the damn thing, though, and I'm proud of it, and we'll let it go at that. We return you now to your regularly scheduled blog, which features the debut of our latest guest blogger, Demolition Angel.

Today's topics, from here to eternity: (1) A new play about Sylvia Plath. (2) Stokowski's Wagner. (3) Snappy answers to not-so-stupid questions about art. (4) How Washington's Hirshhorn Museum is making its permanent collection look like an expensive blockbuster exhibition. (5) A word to the wise about the Guggenheim Museum's attempt to do the same. (6) Today's almanac entry.

That's about the size of it. Have you told a friend about "About Last Night"? If not, how can you bear to show your face around here?

Enough already. I have to go see a man about a parachute.

Posted July 23, 12:06 PM

Baggage handler

Demolition Angel writes from Queens:

Let's face it: if someone asked to spend a whole evening with Sylvia Plath, you might think to pop your Prozac early. Eloquent poet that she may have been, Plath was also just a more verbose version of your friend with too much baggage who won't shut up about it. So why pay to suffer through all that talk when they don't allow alcohol in the theater? Or so I first thought when invited to see Paul Alexander's Edge, the one-woman play about Plath which opened Monday at the DR2 Theatre for a limited off-Broadway run.

The reason, it turns out, is Angelica Torn. She tears through the script like a woman on a mission, which indeed she is: this is the last day of Sylvia Plath's life, and she has a few things to get off her chest. Out of a very literal and linear script, this remarkable actress wrings all the bitterness and pain one might expect from Plath after having read her poetry--plus vivacity, sardonic humor and, every so often, a glimpse at the vulnerable young girl inside who could never please her father. No actress in New York should miss this performance. It's an invaluable lesson in nuance, spontaneity, availability. The play itself is loooong for a one-woman show (two hours plus intermission), and the second act isn't as well-written as the first, but the universal frustration of feelings of inadequacy and agony of betrayal keep us rooting for this woman whom we know will make her fourth and final suicide attempt in a matter of minutes.

I felt an odd mixture of hurt and relief as I filed out of the theater, then plain awe at what Angelica Torn had exposed for us. The follow-up question is inevitable: Do you have to be in that much pain to create such great art? But that's a discussion for another day.

Posted July 23, 12:05 PM

If Wagner we must

I started writing about music a quarter-century ago, and one thing I've learned since then (the only thing, some of you may already be muttering) is that the quickest way to start a fight is to say something nasty about the operas of Richard Wagner. Most of his admirers are reasonable, but some are fanatical, and the fanatics are all compulsive correspondents. Since I find Wagner a near-unendurable bore...O.K., O.K., enough already. Let's just say that staged performances of Wagner's operas usually fill me with unenthusiastic respect, and drop it. Or, as H. L. Mencken put it in his inimitable manner:

In the concert-hall Wagner's music is still immensely effective; none other, new or old, can match its brilliance at its high points, which may be isolated there very conveniently and effectively. But in the opera-house it has to carry a heavy burden of puerile folk-lore, brummagem patriotism, and bilge-water Christianity, and another and even heavier burden of choppy and gargling singing. No wonder it begins to stagger.

For some (though not all) of these reasons, I occasionally enjoy listening to excerpts from Wagner's operas in the privacy of my own home, and I definitely have a depraved taste for the super-sensuous Wagner performances of Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Stokowski may have been a bit of a fraud, with that phony Slavic accent and those pretty-pretty hands, but he knew how to make an orchestra play its heart out, and his Wagner recordings, which I once described as being as hot as an atomic pile, are the antithesis of dull.

Hence it was with unexpected delight that I learned that Andante has released a five-CD set of the complete Wagner recordings made by Stokowski and the Philadelphians between 1926 and 1940, exquisitely remastered from the original 78s by Ward Marston. I shelled out good cash money for this set, and considering the way I feel about Wagner, I'd say that's a pretty strong recommendation. Maybe Stokowski's Wagner is for people who don't really like Wagner, but I have a feeling it's for everybody, especially his 35-minute-long "symphonic synthesis" of Tristan und Isolde, which consists of all the good parts lined up in single file with nothing in between.

One last slapshot at the Bryan of Bayreuth. This is what I wrote in the New York Daily News a few years ago about Robert Wilson's Metropolitan Opera staging of Lohengrin:

"Though Wagnerites are a famously conservative lot, I confess to being puzzled by the displeasure of the opening-night crowd. Wilson was born to stage Wagner, and his ‘Lohengrin'--epic in scale and often deeply poetic in effect, but also inhumanely symbolic and portentous to the point of self-parody--is as precise a translation into contemporary terms of Wagner's windy German romanticism as could possibly be imagined."

Heh, heh, heh.

Posted July 23, 12:05 PM

Posts from the host

Here are a couple of stories that caught my eye when I saw them linked on my host site, artsjournal.com (which you can visit by clicking on the logo at the top of this page).

(1) The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is inviting its readers to send in any questions they may have about the arts, no matter how seemingly naïve. (Some sample questions offered by the paper: How do those actors fight on stage without getting hurt? Who writes the supertitles for the opera? Does a dancer ever drop his partner?) This is a perfectly wonderful idea. As far as I'm concerned, there are no dumb questions about the arts. Everybody has to start somewhere. Short of mass murder, I can't think of many things I loathe more than the hyper-aggressive snobbery whose effect--perhaps even its purpose--is to frighten away well-meaning people who want to dip their toe into the pool of beauty for the first time.

(2) Blake Gopnik wrote an interesting piece for the Washington Post about "Gyroscope," currently on display at Washington's Hirshhorn Museum. It's a blockbuster-style show, only drawn from the museum's permanent collection, and Gopnik suggests--I think rightly--that other museums ought to pay similar attention to finding interesting and provocative ways to display the art they already own.

Posted July 23, 12:03 PM

Words to the wise

Speaking of which, the Guggenheim Museum is currently presenting "From Picasso to Pollock: Classics of Modern Art" (through Sept. 28), a 100-piece overview of the museum's permanent collection, which I look forward to seeing at the earliest opportunity.

Amazing how much good art you can hang once you send Matthew Barney packing....

Posted July 23, 12:02 PM

Almanac

"The mentality of conductors is a dark, abysmal chapter that still awaits a historian. Conducting tends to spoil the character. When all is said and done, it is the only musical activity in which a dash of charlatanism is not only harmless, but positively necessary."

Carl Flesch, Memoirs

Posted July 23, 12:01 PM

July 22, 2003

We get letters, too

I'm getting great mail (and answering it in a reasonably timely fashion, at least for the moment). I'll be posting the occasional letter from time to time, together with what I hope are helpful, appropriate, or at the very least amusing comments. I think your e-mail is going to be at least half the fun of this blog.

Today's topics, from top to bottom: (1) Adam Guettel and the state of post-Sondheim musical comedy. (2) A new novel about teenage cruelty (reviewed by my latest guest blogger, Our Girl in Chicago). (3) A British musicologist sings the blues, sort of. (4) Cash-and-carry dust-jacket blurbs. (5) A word to the wise about the National Academy of Design. (6) Today's almanac entry.

And now, as some of you may have heard, I'm off to ride a roller coaster for the first time since I was eight years old. Would that I were doing it for fun! I have a fear-of-flying problem, and my therapist has "recommended" that I ride a roller coaster as part of my treatment, so I'm headed for the nearest one (unless I get rained out). Should I fail in my mission, "About Last Night" will disavow any knowledge of my actions.

Otherwise, come back and see me sometime. Like, say, tomorrow morning. I'll tell you all about it.

Posted July 22, 12:07 PM

It's pretty, but is it Art?

Jesse Green recently wrote a smart piece in the New York Times Magazine about Adam Guettel, the composer of the off-Broadway musical Floyd Collins (it's about the guy who got stuck in the cave) and the pop-song cycle Myths and Hymns. I've been interested in Guettel for some time now--I think he's the most gifted and significant of the post-Sondheim musical-theater composers--and I'm very much looking forward to seeing his latest show, The Light in the Piazza, once it finally makes its way to New York. (It just had its premiere at Seattle's Intiman Theatre.)

Having said all this, I'm puzzled by one thing. Green, who obviously admires Guettel as much as I do, described The Light in the Piazza as a "serious chamber musical" and emphasizes its musical complexity:

Anyone can whistle a happy tune. But take a look at the score of ''Piazza.'' To create its highly chromatic, yearning atmosphere (Guettel calls it faux-Lisztian), the harpist is kept so busy changing pedals that she's basically doing a clog dance. The other instruments--piano, violin, cello, bass--aren't spared, either. The vocal lines are compulsively notated down to the last crotchet, specifying the kinds of inflections and back-phrasings that other composers would leave to the singers' sense of style. It's not pedantry; it's how Guettel hears, and in some sense tries to stabilize, his damaged world. Is ''Love to Me''--the romantic climax of the score--less heart-melting because it is set mostly in the compound time signature of 5/8 + 4/8? No, it is more so, thanks to that strangely limping extra eighth-note, which seems to argue that imperfection can be another kind of beauty. But just try learning it without Guettel's longtime music director, Ted Sperling, hammering out the beats.

What few can learn, few can love. ''I can't help that,'' Guettel says. ''We can finally admit, confidentially, that being a prominent theater composer is like being a prominent manuscript illuminator. So let's not ask people to think more of this art form than they want to.'' Which seems a shame because, with enough tinkering, ''Piazza'' could be a classic....

Well, duh, it sounds to me like it wouldn't take any tinkering whatsoever for Piazza to be...an opera. So why not call it that, and invite an opera company to produce it? I am fascinated by, and have written more than once about, the continuing resistance of "new music theater" composers like Guettel to thinking of their work in operatic terms. Stephen Sondheim is the same way. It's as though "opera" were the dirtiest world in the language.

Does it matter whether you call a show like The Light in the Piazza or Sweeney Todd a musical or an opera? I think so. As I wrote in the Times a couple of years ago apropos the failed Broadway run of Marie Christine, whose composer, Michael John LaChiusa, similarly insisted on calling it a musical:

"The key word here is ‘elitist.' Mr. LaChiusa, who admits to having had to pawn his piano after writing ‘Marie Christine,' clearly longs to be popular. Alas, he longs in vain. Broadway today is about ‘Beauty and the Beast' and ‘Footloose,' not complex scores that demand your full attention at all times. To call ‘Marie Christine' a musical is implicitly to claim that it has more in common with these simple-minded shows than ‘Carmen.' Not only is this untrue, it's bad marketing, the equivalent of a bait-and-switch scam. Labels are unfashionable these days, even politically incorrect, but sometimes they still matter. Had ‘Marie Christine' been billed as ‘a new opera' and produced by, say, Glimmerglass Opera, it would have drawn a different, more adventurous kind of audience, one better prepared to grapple with its challenging blend of pop-flavored rhythms and prickly harmonies."

Judging by Jesse Green's piece, I'd say Adam Guettel, for whatever reason, is making the same mistake--and I don't think it will serve him well in the long run.

But don't get me wrong--I love Broadway....

Posted July 22, 12:06 PM

Hell is other teenagers

Our Girl in Chicago writes:

Is there a woman out there who doesn't carry around the invisible scars of her teenage social life? If so, I don't know her. For everyone else, though, I recommend Special, Bella Bathurst's psychologically acute, emotionally charged first novel. Why it hasn't been more widely reviewed is a mystery to me. The perfect title captures one aspect of the angst that makes girls of 13 treat each other so cruelly, even at the height of their own psychic tenderness. How do you square the idea, carried over from childhood, of your own inalienable specialness with the beginning of an adult social life and the regard for others it entails? How can everyone be special? In the adolescent social algebra that Bathurst renders with heartbreaking verisimilitude, to remain special implacably requires that someone else be chaff--to put it politely.

Bathurst tells the story of a school trip that brings eight girls to a shopworn English countryside. Removed from their usual setting, the girls quickly shake off the flickering authority of their two chaperones and hammer out their own pitiless social contract. Early on, one character looks out over the Severn River: "Something about the water seemed misleading to Hen. Over there in the distance the river looked harmless. Only when she looked down through the railings of the bridge could she see how fast it was going. You'd never know until you were dead that it might kill you, she thought." It's a powerful metaphor, both for the feelings churning inside the girls and for their shifting alliances with one another. Throw in boys and sex, distracted absent parents, and everyday insecurities, and you have plenty of lit matches to go with this powderkeg.

No doubt you've thought by now of Lord of the Flies, a point of reference duly noted in the book's jacket copy. But it isn't power that's at issue here so much as the struggle to shape an acceptable self to present to the world. When the audience is narrowed to seven others involved in the same endeavor, beset by the same vulnerabilities, things get dangerous--like the Severn. The girls' little world smolders, rather than explodes, but the conclusion is every bit as devastating.

This book dredged up uncomfortable memories of junior high school, but gave me new sympathy with my tormentors of old--something I wouldn't have thought possible. Maybe it's because I'm a woman that I find Bathurst's girls even more fascinating than William Golding's boys, and her novel at least as penetrating as his. But I think it's because Special is simply that good.

Posted July 22, 12:05 PM

Summarizing the blues

I've been reading Edward Brooks' The Young Louis Armstrong on Records: A Critical Survey of the Early Recordings, 1923-1928, a record-by-record study of Armstrong's early work written by a Brit with a Ph.D. in musicology. Most of what he says is astute and well-informed, but I have to confess that I get the giggles whenever he writes about one of the many recordings in which Armstrong can be heard backing up such classic blues singers as Bessie Smith. Each of these latter entries begins with a wonderfully starchy summary of the lyrics of the song in question. To wit:

"The words describe a life of emotional imprudence, but without chronological plot; they are more a series of sorrowful, impressionistic comments about a wasted life caused by a wild temperament." (Reckless Blues)

"A melancholy but resigned complaint about an uncaring, ill-treating, improvident, impecunious man, sung by a voice well acquainted with grief; it ends with a resolve to find another." (Cold in Hand Blues)

"A demand for emotional status, the words contain a grain or two of oblique humor." (I Ain't Goin' to Play No Second Fiddle)

I suspect--I hope--that Brooks is pulling our legs, but either way, his decorous little summaries somehow remind me of George Bernard Shaw's parody of over-technical classical-music program notes:

I will now, ladies and gentlemen, give you my celebrated "analysis" of Hamlet's soliloquy on suicide, in the same scientific style. "Shakespear, dispensing with the customary exordium, announces his subject at once in the infinitive, in which mood it is presently repeated after a short connecting passage in which, brief as it is, we recognize the alternative and negative forms on which so much of the significance of repetition depends. Here we reach a colon; and a pointed pository phrase, in which the accent falls decisively on the relative pronoun, brings us to the first full stop.

I'm not exactly a Shaw fan, to put it mildly, but I forgive him a lot for having written that.

Posted July 22, 12:04 PM

Elsewhere

Amazing news, courtesy of BookSlut: British book publishers are now paying for blurbs!

In the immortal words of the Unknown Musician, where do I go to sell out?

(In fact, the Unknown Musician in question was Paul Desmond, my favorite jazzman ever. So, at any rate, I am assured by Doug Ramsey, who is hard at work on a Desmond biography, about which more as it happens. I want the first copy!)

Posted July 22, 12:03 PM

Words to the wise

The National Academy of Design recently opened two exhibits that sound equally promising. "Visages and Visions: American Art of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries" (up through Sept. 7) is a 50-piece overview of the Academy's huge collection of 19th- and 20th-century American art. As for "Challenging Tradition: Women of the Academy, 1826-2003" (up through Jan. 4), I'm not usually a fan of women-only shows, which seem to me to diminish the significance of individual female artists for whom no apologies need be made, but when the artists in question include the likes of Louise Bourgeois, Isabel Bishop, Mary Cassatt, and Helen Frankenthaler, I say shut up and deal.

More about both shows once I've seen them, but I've gotten tremendous pleasure out of most of the Academy's recent exhibitions, and I'll be surprised if these two don't measure up.

Posted July 22, 12:02 PM

Almanac

"As soon as I detest something I ask myself why I like it."

Hans Keller, Essays on Music

Posted July 22, 12:01 PM

Stop hanging by your thumbs

I just got back from riding the Dragon Coaster at Rye Playland. No broken bones, no obvious signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. You may all start breathing again.

Now I'm off to hear Karrin Allyson at the Blue Note. See you tomorrow, unless I decide to give up blogging and become a full-time thrill-seeker.

Posted July 22, 5:10 AM

July 21, 2003

Possible signs of excess

Welcome to Week Two of "About Last Night." I'll begin by reporting two unintended and unexpected consequences of a week's worth of intensive blogging:

(1) I no longer have to tell my friends what I've been up to--they already know. (This can be conversationally inhibiting.)

(2) I took a nap the other day and dreamed about posting links to other sites.

Someone suggested over the weekend that I start off each day's postings with a list of topics. O.K., here goes: The Producers and Jewish assimilation, the plight of the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, an exchange with a reader about Morandi and modern art in general, best-seller lists, a word to the wise about Karrin Allyson, and today's almanac entry.

You'll also find new stuff in the right-hand column, including some fresh Top Fives and additional links to other arts-related blogs.

Oh, yes, I wanted to pass on this e-mail from Maria Schneider, who just wrapped up a three-night stand at the Jazz Standard: "A couple of people came up to me and told me they read about my gig in your blog and that's what made them check it out. I am sure there were more who didn't make a point of telling me that."

Sounds like we're off and running. Please help spread the word about "About Last Night," open 24/7 at www.terryteachout.com. And thanks for stopping by.

Posted July 21, 12:07 PM

Not that there's anything wrong with it

I went to The Producers last Friday to see the new leads, Lewis J. Stadlen and Don Stephenson. I'll leave their performances for my drama column in this Friday's Wall Street Journal, but what struck me most forcibly about the show is how old-fashioned, even quaint it seemed, from the slam-bam-zowie overture to the billion-decibel acting to--above all--the corny rim-shot jokes.

It stands to reason that The Producers should be old-fashioned, Mel Brooks having been born in 1926, but it occurred to me that what I was seeing on stage at the St. James Theatre was not so much a hit musical as the last gasp of a dying comic language. Strip away the four-letter words and self-consciously outrageous production numbers and The Producers is nothing more (or less) than a virtuoso homage to the lapel-grabbing, absolutely-anything-for-a-laugh schtickery on which so much of the stand-up comedy of my childhood was based. That kind of comedy was for the most part explicitly Jewish, as is The Producers itself, in which Yiddish slang is forever popping up, even in Brooks' lyrics (which, if I heard right, go so far as to rhyme "caressing you" with "fressing you," a couplet that would have made Lenny Bruce giggle).

It is this aspect of The Producers that I found...well, poignant. Back when I was a small-town Missouri boy, Jewish humor still had the crisp tang of the unfamiliar, which was part of why it was so funny. But Jewish comics assimilated a long time ago, as was proved beyond doubt by the colossal success of Seinfeld, that least overtly Jewish of Jewish sitcoms. Jerry and his friends shed their parents' accents and became cool and ironic and put the past behind them--and now it's gone, never to return.

To see The Producers is to be immersed one final time in that older style of pressure-cooker comedy, and for those of us who were born before 1960 or so, the experience is as sweetly nostalgic as a trip to the state fair, which I rather doubt is what Mel Brooks had in mind. My guess is that he still thinks it's titillating, even shocking, to put swishy Nazis on stage. It's no accident that he hasn't made a movie for years and years: Broadway is the last place in America where he could possibly draw a crowd with that kind of humor, and it's not an especially young crowd, either.

"It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes," says a character in Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana. It can also be sad--and even touching.

Posted July 21, 12:06 PM

Philadelphia story

Speaking of the Wall Street Journal, Eric Gibson, who edits the Leisure & Arts section of that paper (and is himself a noted art critic), reviewed John Anderson's Art Held Hostage: The Story of the Barnes Collection for "Weekend Journal" the other day. The Barnes is, of course, the renowned private museum created by a Philadelphia millionaire to house his huge collection of Renoirs, Matisses, and Cezannes, which can only be viewed by appointment. It's in dire financial straits, and Anderson's book tells how it got that way. Here's the money graf from the review:

For almost eight decades, the Barnes Foundation, outside Philadelphia, has housed the superb collection of Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951). Art lovers have long visited the suburb of Merion to see, among much else, his Renoirs, Matisses and Cezannes--arranged crowdedly on the walls of the small, stripped-down classical building designed by Paul Cret. But in recent years, the Barnes collection has been in trouble, its fate uncertain, its coffers drained by legal battles and mismanagement. Mr. Anderson's book, a chronicle of chaos, contains one mind-boggling revelation after another.

To read the full review (and you should), go here.

Posted July 21, 12:05 PM

Pistols for two, coffee for one

A reader writes, apropos of last week's postings about Giorgio Morandi:

Morandi looks a bit like our local Sacramento Wayne Thiebaud--rather creamy unfocused objects.

Ask yourself--is this really beautiful? Exquisite? As good as Leo Da Vinci's Madonna of the Rocks (London version)?

I submit it is not. If it is not as beautiful, why should I care about it? Why is it worth my time or eyesight?

I only care about the Good, the True, the Beautiful. Not the sort of good etc. So why should anyone care about the sort of?

I never know quite what to say to people like this, other than what Stephen Maturin says in Treason's Harbour to a slickster who tries to sell him on the idea that Napoleon was actually a great guy: "Sure, it is a point of view." But I'll give it another try.

To begin with, I don't think Morandi is "sort of" good. I think he's great, as do many other people who take art seriously and know far more about it than I, among them Karen Wilkin, the author of the eloquent monograph about Morandi I cited in my original posting. Yes, we could all be wrong, just like those 50 million Frenchmen, but as a college teacher of mine once gently informed me in response to my declaration that I didn't think much of the music of Robert Schumann, "That may say more about you than it does about Schumann."

I like "Leo Da Vinci," too, but I also like lots of other painters, many of whom were alive in the 20th century and some of whom are at work right now, whereas there are more than a few people out there--including, I fear, my correspondent--who don't like any modern art, and are proud not to. Such a lack of receptivity makes no sense to me, if only because there is a vast amount of modern art which is both deeply rooted in tradition and completely accessible to the open-minded traditionalist. Nobody's asking you to fall in love with green women with two noses, or listen to symphonies with no tunes. If you like (say) Chardin, Brahms, Trollope, and Swan Lake, I can't think of any earthly reason why you shouldn't like (say) Morandi, Vaughan Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Balanchine.

And if you don't? Well, you don't. De gustibus and all that. But what sort of person doesn't even want to try to engage with the art of his own day, much less the comparatively recent past? That's like a six-year-old who refuses to taste anything he doesn't already like. I spend a lot of time--most of my time, really--engaging with art of all kinds, and I'm here to tell you that there are people out there right now who are busy creating "really beautiful" works of art that will make sense to even the most conservative viewer, reader, or listener, so long as he has sufficient curiosity to give them a try. Once again, I'm not talking about bisected pigs and dried bull dung--I mean this. Or this. Or even this.

If none of these things strikes you as "really beautiful," all I can say is that you may have come to the wrong blog. Fair enough?

Posted July 21, 12:04 PM

Elsewhere

2 Blowhards has an interesting post-plus-comment on how best-seller lists work--and why they may soon become obsolete.

Also mentioned on that site is something I knew but had forgotten, which is that Paul Johnson's Art: A New History will be out in October. Like it or loathe it (or a little of both), I have no doubt that it will be maximally readable from cover to cover.

Posted July 21, 12:03 PM

Words to the wise

Starting Tuesday, Karrin Allyson (pronounced KAH-rin, if you please) is doing a week at the Blue Note, sharing the bandstand with Anita O'Day (Tuesday-Wednesday) and Jon Hendricks (Thursday-Sunday). I don't often write liner notes, but I was delighted to supply a set for Daydream, one of Allyson's many superb albums for Concord Jazz. Among other things, I said that she "sings well-chosen, smartly arranged songs in a slender, sunny voice that makes you feel warm inside." Another CD of hers that I find similarly addictive is From Paris to Rio, which contains a deliciously offhand version of "Samba Saravah" that I play--repeatedly, if necessary--whenever I get the blues.

Two shows each night, at eight and 10:30.

Posted July 21, 12:02 PM

Almanac

"I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what's happening, because I don't choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me."

Marshall McLuhan, "This Hour Has Seven Days"

Posted July 21, 12:01 PM

July 18, 2003

And on the fifth day

I can't quite believe that "About Last Night" has come to the end of its first week (yes, I'm taking the weekend off--I need some sleep!). Your response has been phenomenal and gratifying. I didn't realize there would be so many people out there who were looking for a site like this. As you can see, your mail is becoming an ever-expanding feature of my postings. I love hearing from you.

What's up next week? Beats me, though I can promise that you'll be seeing some new Top Fives in the right-hand column. Probably I'll post a bit less--I have a couple of bad deadlines just over the horizon--but there will always be fresh content every weekday, plus all the surprises I can think of.

Please make "About Last Night" a regular part of your morning Web routine--and, as always, tell your friends to pay a visit to www.terryteachout.com. If you have an arts blog to which you make regular postings, link to me and let me know.

I'm definitely having fun yet.

P.S. Do you find the typography of this blog difficult to read? If so, please send me an e-mail telling me what parts are too small or too dim, and please also tell me what browser/system you're using. I'm not sure how much we can do to help you, but we'll sure try.

Posted July 18, 12:07 PM

Yonda lies da castle of my fadda

I reviewed the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park production of Henry V, directed by Mark Wing-Davey and starring Liev Schreiber (who is really, really good), in this morning's Wall Street Journal. Here's the money graf:

"Up until the war scenes proper, all the energy of this production is comic, with Mr. Schreiber the only straight face on stage. Everybody else is trying to get laughs by any means necessary. Even the low comedians are painted with a too-wide brush: Bronson Pinchot's Pistol is a pompadoured idiot with a Tony Curtis-type Lawng Oyland accent whom we find amusing himself in a latrine, a girlie magazine in his free hand. The fact that so much of the slapstick is clever (though not that particular bit) only makes matters worse. By the time intermission rolled around, I felt as if I'd been watching an old friend skinned alive by a stand-up comedian who told really funny jokes as he wielded the knife."

No link, alas, but the "Weekend Journal" section of the Friday Journal is definitely worth a buck, with or without me.

Posted July 18, 12:06 PM

Pode ser a brasileira, please

I've been mentioning Brazil a lot this week. Small wonder--I've been up to my ears in Brazilian music for the past few months, and loving it. As I recently confessed in the Washington Post, "If the Great God of Art told me I could only listen to one kind of popular music for the rest of my life, and that it couldn't be jazz, I'd take a deep breath--a very deep breath--and say, ‘O.K., make it Brazilian.'" (This piece was picked up by a Brazilian newspaper, which translated it, logically enough, into Portuguese: "Se o Grande Deus da Arte me dissesse que eu poderia ouvir apenas um tipo de música popular para o resto da minha vida, com exceção do jazz, eu respiraria fundo bem fundo e diria: ‘Tudo bem, pode ser a brasileira.'" It's much prettier that way, don't you think?)

On Wednesday, I went to the Jazz Standard to hear Trio da Paz, a Brazilian jazz trio you probably haven't heard of--yet--unless you happen to share my obsession (though you may possibly know about guitarist Romero Lubambo, who plays on Brazilian Duos, the gorgeous CD that turned me on to Luciana Souza). They've been slowly but steadily building up a following in New York, and this well-attended gig undoubtedly brought them a bunch of new fans. Me, I find them utterly entrancing, and go to hear them whenever they perform in New York. Though Trio da Paz never plays straight-ahead four-four swing, preferring the sinuous lope of the samba, there's something about their spare, airy sound that reminds me of the deep-dish groove of Count Basie's rhythm section. If I may lapse into jazz for a moment, these guys don't just have great time--they've got time-and-a-half.

While I'm at it, I want to say a word about the Jazz Standard. Talk to musicians about jazz clubs and you'll hear...well, a whole lot of bitching. (Among musicians, unsatisfactory clubs are known as "toilets.") But there is a very short list of New York night spots that treat both patrons and artists in a civilized fashion, and the Standard is on it. Every time I go there, I feel as though I were visiting a place whose owners like jazz, which is a lot rarer than you might suppose. It helps that the Standard shares a kitchen with Blue Smoke, the high-end barbecue palace upstairs, meaning that you can eat dinner there without running the risk of an untimely hospitalization.

As you will recall from yesterday's "Words to the Wise," the Maria Schneider Orchestra opens tonight at the Standard for a three-day run. If you have something better to do, kindly send me an express e-mail and tell me what it is.

Posted July 18, 12:05 PM

Forgive me for preening

This exchange with Paul Johnson, author of Modern Times, was posted yesterday on National Review Online's The Corner. (Several writers, myself included, were recently invited to supply questions for Johnson to be asked on a PBS show called Uncommon Knowledge. This is from the transcript--the show hasn't aired yet.)

Q. Terry Teachout asks--

A. I know Terry Teachout. He's a wonderful writer, especially on music.

Q. Terry would like to know if Paul Johnson has a favorite painting by Norman Rockwell.

A (after a long silence while he thinks): The one of the barbershop. All of his paintings are interesting and good and a lot of them are funny. But that is one which clearly has the right to be called a considerable work of work. The actual structure of the painting is marvelous.

The painting in question, by the way, is Shuffleton's Barber Shop, and I agree.

Posted July 18, 12:04 PM

Beyond velvet

A reader writes:

How does one go about discovering gems like your new Marin etching? I am just starting out and would like to replace my college-era posters with something more enduring, but I have absolutely no clue how or where to look for such things. I have contemplated purchasing several pieces in the past, but I find art galleries imposing and a little bit scary. How does one learn how to buy art? And how does one know if the prices are inflated? Sorry to burden you with such an odd request, but I can't be the only one who is afraid to embark on this enterprise.

Nothing odd about it. I felt the same way when I first started going to galleries, though I think in my case it arose from a fear of looking dumb, coupled with the reflexive embarrassment that Midwestern WASPs feel at the thought of discussing money with strangers. But as Anthony Powell wrote in A Question of Upbringing, "Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one's dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction." The first step in the process of smashing through that barrier is screwing up your courage and saying to the ominous-looking person in charge, "Uh, what does that pretty purple-and-blue one cost?" Once you do this, you will have lost your virginity and can proceed at will. It only hurts the first time. Very often--though not always--you will quickly discover that the folks who run galleries are nice, helpful human beings who wouldn't dream of embarrassing a potential customer. (Many galleries, by the way, have printed price lists of the works on display at the front desk. Ask.)

Are the prices inflated? Sometimes. How do you know? You don't. That's why God made computers. The Internet is without question the most valuable educational tool available to budding young art buyers, especially if you're looking (as you should be) for "multiples," meaning works of art which exist in multiple copies, i.e., etchings, woodcuts, or signed limited-edition lithographs and screenprints. Galleries dealing in multiples can be found in most major cities, and many of them also have Web sites. A good Web site features thumbnail images of the pieces in a gallery's inventory (which can usually be enlarged). Most of the time it also includes prices, and if it doesn't, all you have to do is send the gallery an e-mail asking for the price of a specific piece, which is less anxiety-inducing than asking in person. Once you've spent a few Web-browsing sessions engaged in competitive shopping, you'll start to get a feel for whose prices are inflated and whose aren't. Generally speaking, the Web has helped to bring on-line prices into broad accord, but I was looking for a particular Helen Frankenthaler screenprint last month and discovered that there was a $3,000 difference in price between the least and most expensive copies. (Guess which one I bought?)

Don't buy art until you've looked at quite a bit of it, both off and on line, and know which artists speak to you most persuasively. The trick is to reconcile your tastes with your budget. I'm interested in American art, not only because I like it but because much of it is still affordable (also, there are a whole lot of phony European art prints out there). Many fine 19th- and 20th-century American artists have made prints of various kinds. Start looking, and see what you like best. Read art books. Use Google, searching for both the artist and the medium that interests you. I found my Marin etching by searching for "John Marin" and "etching." Another useful code phrase is "fine prints," which often (but not always) appears on the Web sites of galleries. Remember that inventories turn over, so don't assume that just because you can't find what you're looking for this week, you'll never be able to find it. Be patient.

What about eBay, you ask? Well, I've bought a couple of lovely pieces there, but I can't recommend it to the novice buyer, simply because you don't yet know enough to know whether you're getting (A) an amazing bargain or (B) screwed. I came away clean both times, but I already knew a lot about the artists in question (Nell Blaine and Neil Welliver). Much better to stick to galleries until you find your footing.

Buying art on line isn't nearly as risky as it sounds. Reputable dealers typically belong to the International Fine Print Dealers Association (whose Web site is a good place to start learning about prints) and advertise that fact on their sites. The more extensive and well-designed the site, the more likely the dealer in question has been around for a while. If you really want to play it safe, which is perfectly all right, the Metropolitan Museum of Art publishes and sells signed limited-edition prints on its Web site. I bought my first piece from them. You should also look at Crown Point Press, a much-admired publisher of prints by a wide assortment of American artists. Both of these sites are completely up front about pricing. Visit them and you'll start to learn what things cost. In recent months, I've also bought from Jane Allinson, Rona Schneider, Flanders Contemporary Art , and K Kimpton , all of whom have good Web sites and are a pleasure to deal with. Tell them I sent you.

Posted July 18, 12:04 PM

Elsewhere

If you didn't read yesterday's posting about Harold Bloom on Critical Mass, Erin O'Connor's must-read blog on the academy, take a look at it now.

This is what the blogosphere is all about.

Very interesting debate on John Cage going on over at Forager 23. I actually do like the Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, of which I just burned a copy for a friend (they make great ballet music), but as for the later music, I'm with Stravinsky. When he first heard about 4' 33", Cage's "composition" consisting of four minutes and 33 seconds' worth of silence, he allegedly said that he looked forward to similar compositions of greater length from Cage.

On the other hand, there is one quote from Cage in my Almanac file, which I will jump the gun and share with you now: "Forced, nervous laughter takes place when someone is trying to impress somebody for purposes of getting somewhere." I wish I'd said that.

Posted July 18, 12:03 PM

Words to the wise

Tyler Green (who blogs at Modern Art Notes) writes:

There is a whole room of Morandi up at Washington's Hirshhorn Museum right now as part of their permanent collection show, "Gyroscope." It's a large, cavernous, dark room with no natural light. Each wall is about 20-25 feet long...and has just one tiny, precious, divine Morandi on it. It's a heckuva installation.

I'm there, baby. What time does the next Metroliner leave?

P.S. Jazz singer Kendra Shank writes to say that she liked Karen Wilkin's quote about Morandi: "For anyone who pays attention, the microcosm of Morandi's tabletop world becomes vast, the space between objects immense, pregnant, and expressive." She adds that "the same could be said about Shirley Horn's singing." Could it ever....

Posted July 18, 12:02 PM

Almanac

"Art, and the summer lightning of individual happiness: these are the only real goods we have."

Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts

Posted July 18, 12:02 PM

July 17, 2003

Wielding the shovel

I'm pleased (and not a little surprised) to announce that I answered most of my e-mail last night. Mind you, certain replies were a bit concise, but they were all heartfelt. As you can see below, I will be answering some of your letters in public.

Note also that we have our first guest blogger today, East of Ouest, who writes from New York. Other guests are waiting in the wings. Yes, I like the sound of my own voice, but I always wanted to sing with a backup group, and my plan is for "About Last Night" to feature guest bloggers from several cities.

Still more new features will be rolled out over the next few days, including a couple of additional boxes in the right-hand column. We aim to please!

Pardon my redundancy, but if you like "About Last Night," please tell all your art-loving friends to visit www.terryteachout.com. This could be the start of something biggish. Conversely, I'm interested in hearing from you about high-quality arts blogs not already linked in the right-hand column (they don't have to be 100% arty, but the content should be reasonably art-'n'-culture-oriented). I'd like to spread the word about them, too.

And now, on with the show.

Posted July 17, 12:16 PM

Maximal minimalist

A couple of months ago, I hung a poster over my front door, a reproduction of a still life consisting of three boxes, a cup, and a jug, all floating in a neutral-colored void. The painter's name appears nowhere on the poster, which came from a still-life show at Washington's Phillips Collection, my favorite museum. Ever since I put it up, at least one visitor per week has asked me who did the painting. You wouldn't think so plain an image would attract so much attention--I have far more eye-catching items on my walls--but there's something about it that speaks to a certain kind of person.

Not to keep you in suspense, but the painting in question is a 1953 oil by Giorgio Morandi called, simply, "Still Life." Most of Morandi's paintings are called "Still Life," and most of them look a lot like this. (This isn't my poster--it's another of my favorite Morandis, painted in 1946 and now hanging in London's Tate Modern.) Morandi was born in Bologna, Italy, in 1890, and died there in 1964, and he spent most of his seemingly uneventful life arranging and rearranging a dozen or so boxes, cups, jugs, bottles, and pitchers on a tabletop, and painting them over and over again. Sometimes he made etchings of his carefully arranged objects, and from time to time he painted a landscape. That's about all there is to say about him, really, except that he was a very great artist, which is more than enough to say about anybody.

What makes Giorgio Morandi's paintings so special? To begin with, most people don't seem to find them so. Though Morandi is renowned in his native Italy, he is unknown in this country save to critics, collectors, and connoisseurs. It's easy to see why. His art is too quiet and unshowy, too determinedly unfashionable, to draw crowds. It creates its own silence. "Curiously, these deceptively modest paintings, drawings, and prints seem to elicit only two responses: extreme enthusiasm or near-indifference. And yet, this is not surprising, since Morandi's art makes no effort to be ingratiating or to put itself forward in any way....For anyone who pays attention, the microcosm of Morandi's tabletop world becomes vast, the space between objects immense, pregnant, and expressive."

That quote is from Karen Wilkin's Giorgio Morandi. Wilkin is one of America's finest art critics (as well as a damned good freelance curator), and her profusely illustrated monograph makes the case for Morandi far better than I could ever hope to do. What I wish I could do is tell you to go right out today and look at a dozen Morandis, but you can't, unless you happen to live in Bologna, in which case you can go to the Museo Morandi and look at them to your heart's content. Most major American museums in America own a Morandi or two, and sometimes they even hang them. The Phillips often has one of its two oils on display, and in recent months I've seen Morandis in Princeton and St. Louis. But I've never seen one in New York, except for the reproduction in my living room. Somebody in this country is collecting them--Morandi's etchings are way out of my modest price range--but it clearly isn't MoMA or the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Barring a quick side trip to Bologna or Washington, your best bet is to purchase a copy of Giorgio Morandi. I've given away several copies as presents. Only last week, I gave one to a friend who noticed my Morandi poster and asked about it. Should that ring the bell, you can buy a poster of your own by going here. You will then be officially enrolled in the International Society of Morandi Fanatics. We don't have meetings--we just trade occasional e-mails about what's hanging where. Feel free to advise me about domestic Morandi sightings. And if any of my wealthy readers are feeling moderately generous, a gift of a Morandi still-life etching would not go unappreciated.

Posted July 17, 12:15 PM

Go thou and do likewise (not)

A reader invited me to post "some words on your working life as a critic." To this end, he submitted the following questionnaire:

Does having to write about something ever diminish the pleasure you take from it? No, but knowing I have to write about it first thing tomorrow morning sometimes does. Taking notes at a performance takes away part of the fun, so I try to do it as infrequently as possible.

Do you read, listen to music, sitting, lying down? I read lying down and listen sitting up.

Do you write in the morning, evening? Full, empty stomach? Take coffee? I usually start writing shortly before the deadline. Prior to Monday, I generally managed not to write at night (at least not very often), but that went out the window as soon as this blog went live. Stomach contents don't seem to matter. Except for the odd mocha frappuccino, I rarely drink coffee other than to be sociable.

Do you ever work in an, ahem, merry state? Surely you jest, sir!

Do you worry, prolific as you are, that you won't get all around your subject? Jeepers, why worry? Nobody ever gets all around his subject, least of all me.

Do you, did you ever consciously imitate any style? Oh, Lord, yes. In fact, I once wrote an essay about this very subject, which will be reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader, out next spring from Yale University Press.

Who are your critical influences? Originally Edmund Wilson, more recently Edwin Denby, Joseph Epstein, Clement Greenberg, and Fairfield Porter. I would be happy to be a tenth as good as any of them.

What do you try to do in a review? Not to be cute, but I try to write pieces that are (A) cleanly written enough not to give my editors any unnecessary trouble and (B) personal enough that they sound like me talking. Beyond that, I leave it to the muse.

Do you have an idea of what you're going to write before you do it? Usually, but rarely more than the title and the first few sentences. On occasion, though, I just sit down and wing it. (So far as I know, by the way, there's no correlation between the length of time I spend writing a piece and its quality.)

How many words a day? It depends on what's due. If absolutely necessary, I can manage 2,500 polished words between sunrise and bedtime. In the immortal words of James Burnham, "If there's no alternative, there's no problem." But I try not to write that much in a single day. It's not exactly compatible with having a life.

Do you revise? Endlessly--but I hope it doesn't show.

Posted July 17, 12:14 PM

Abnotfab

East of Ouest writes from New York:

Cross a sadistic act with a fetching young victim and you may end up with great art. (Think Tosca. Madama Butterfly. Otello.) Take the possibility of a sadistic act, introduce your fetching young victim, and you frequently end up with great reality TV. It's the sadism that we can't get enough of. Both a college-aged friend and my 82-year-old father tune into Trading Spaces not to revel in renovations completed for lunch money, but in hopes that Hildi will lose control again and glue hay on the walls. Someone could cry. That's the point.

The basic premise of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, snooty Bravo's maiden voyage into the gritty world of reality TV, brims with cruel potential. The five gay gentlemen of the panel (one each in charge of grooming, food and wine, culture, interior design, and fashion) pounce upon one hapless straight fellow each week, determined to make him...well, possible, if not downright fabulous.

The results? Mean-spirited, entirely bitchy bantering, tempered by a constant undercurrent of genuine sweetness. Will and Grace, unscripted, and every bit as addictive. (Although I think my dad may give this one a miss.) If you're willing to buy into the notion that gay men are simply superior beings, you'll be hard pressed to resist such tidbits as "He has a kosher kitchen. I wonder if he has a kosher closet--like it's all Isaac Mizrahi?" But Queer Eye is a poseur as far as reality TV goes. From its engaging we're-secret-agents comic-book opening credits to the closing "Queer Eye Hip Tip for the Day," it's nothing more (or less) than feel-good TV.

Next up in Bravo's attempt to corner the gay reality-TV market: Boy Meets Boy, whose producers' premise is that some of the 15 single guys their bachelor will meet are really straight. It sounds awful. It sounds wonderful. It sounds like a hit.

Posted July 17, 12:13 PM

Words to the wise

The Maria Schneider Orchestra is coming to the Jazz Standard this weekend for its first Manhattan club date in far too long. Schneider, who studied with Gil Evans and Bob Brookmeyer, which is sort of like having studied with Picasso and Matisse, is the most gifted jazz composer of her generation, and her band cooks in a very big way. The personnel will fluctuate slightly from evening to evening, but that's all right, since it allows for surprises. Here's one: Clarence Penn, whom I recently decided is my favorite jazz drummer, will be playing with the band for the first time ever on Saturday. (A Brazilian friend of mine recently described Penn as "the most Brazilian drummer born in the U.S.") There will be others.

Three sets on Friday and Saturday, two on Sunday. The music starts at 7:30 each night. You might be able to get in without a reservation, but don't count on it.

Posted July 17, 12:13 PM

Almanac

"I never saw a good ballet that made me think."

Arlene Croce, Afterimages

Posted July 17, 12:12 PM

July 16, 2003

Stay out of sausage factories

A friend writes:

Difficult, is it not, to know the effect of one's literary efforts. My sense is that H. L. Mencken's literary reputation is much lowered after the printed discussion of your Mencken biography--and yet I believe that you have great admiration for Mencken and showed it in your book. Does Mencken's reputation deserve to be lowered? I rather doubt that it does. My sense is that you were trying to straighten some things out--Mencken's anti-Semitism, among others--and a coarse public (intellectuals among that public) coarsely took the information you provided to disqualify Mencken. Not sure I have any interesting explanation for all this, but I wonder if some of the problem doesn't inhere in biography itself.

I've been thinking about the same thing, and coming to roughly the same conclusion. I don't think it's a biographer's job to be an excuse-maker, much less a hagiographer. I thought Mencken was big enough to be written about honestly, flaws and all, and I certainly didn't write The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, my most recent book, in order to take him down a peg or two. I admired him when I started writing it, and I still do, with strong reservations but nonetheless wholeheartedly. Many reviewers agreed with me, and nearly all of those who didn't thought I treated him fairly and left room for the reader to make up his own mind--which was exactly what I had tried to do. So far as I know, the only people who slammed The Skeptic in a snarky way were a handful of extreme Mencken buffs certain their idol could do no wrong (several of whom made a point of posting their opinions on amazon.com, for which I was somewhat less than grateful).

All this notwithstanding, I fear my friend is right. At least in the short run, Mencken's literary standing does seem to have been diminished by the publication of a balanced biography that pays proportionate attention to his dark side. Meaning...what? The easiest answer, of course, is that Mencken did deserve to be taken down a peg or two, and I accomplished the feat in spite of myself (which doesn't reflect very well on me, does it?). Or perhaps, as my friend suggests, there is indeed something in the nature of biography that necessarily diminishes its subjects (not exactly a comforting thought, since I'm about to start writing another one).

More likely, the problem is that most people simply find it hard to take men as they are--to live with the uncomfortable but undeniable fact that we are all indissoluble mixtures of good and bad, wise and foolish, generous and selfish. "I do not believe," Somerset Maugham wrote in Don Fernando, "that there is any man, who if the whole truth were known of him, would not seem a monster of depravity; and also I believe that there are very few who have not at the same time virtue, goodness and beauty." (That might make a good warning sticker for the cover of the paperback of The Skeptic.) You'd think we'd have figured that out by now, but when it comes to the people we admire most, I'm not sure anybody really knows it, not in his secret heart.

Posted July 16, 12:10 PM

Negative capability

I know, I know, hybridization is the hallmark of post-postmodern art, but lots of people still stubbornly insist on disliking works of art they find difficult to pigeonhole. I suspect that's why Hollywood Homicide slipped through the cracks so quickly, and I know it's why Mary Foster Conklin isn't nearly as popular as she ought to be--she's not quite jazz, not quite cabaret, and not even slightly worried about it. She sings what she wants the way she wants, and if you don't get it, somebody else will. Me, I think she's the best cabaret singer on the East Coast (Wesla Whitfield being the best cabaret singer on the West Coast--they don't sing a whole lot of cabaret in between coasts), so I made sure I was at Danny's Skylight Room last week for the opening of "Caught in the Trance: The Songs of Matt Dennis," Conklin's first single-composer show ever.

You know Matt Dennis, even though you don't think you do. He wrote the music for "Angel Eyes," "Everything Happens to Me," "Let's Get Away From It All," "The Night We Called It a Day," and a half-dozen other blue-chip standards that get sung all the time. Conklin sang them at Danny's, but she also left plenty of room for such lesser-known gems as "That Tired Routine Called Love," "Where Am I to Go?," "Compared to You," and "Blues for Breakfast" ("No coffee, please"). In between tunes, she talked about Dennis and his lyricists, wittily and charmingly and never excessively. She brought along an amazingly hot band led by pianist-arranger John di Martino, whose dapper, Shearingesque arrangements were unfailingly appropriate. I don't think I've ever heard tastier drumming on a cabaret gig than that supplied by Ron Vincent. There was even a printed program!

As for Conklin herself, I can't do any better than quote from what I wrote about her in "Second City" a couple of years ago: "Mary Foster Conklin...started out as an actress, and her style is precisely balanced between jazz and cabaret. Scratch her witty tough-girl-from-Jersey patter and you'll find a sensitive artist (but not frail!) with a wide-ranging, boldly colored voice and an open ear for offbeat material."

Conklin and her band will be returning to Danny's July 23 and 24 for two more performances of "Caught in the Trance." Both shows start at 9:15.

Posted July 16, 12:08 PM

Duck Amuck, anyone?

From DVD Journal:

"All right, Looney Tunes fans, you've finally got what you've been waiting for--the folks at Warner are getting ready to put out their first DVD releases from their substantial animated holdings, starting with The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, a four-disc box featuring 56 all-time classics, and we can expect commentaries, archive materials, and lots more. Also on the 'toon slate is the two-disc The Looney Tunes Premiere Collection, which will offer 28 shorts with the debuts of Warner's major animated characters."

I kind of hate to admit how thrilled I was to see this posting. (Well, no, I don't.)

Both sets hit the street Oct. 28. Have I said yippee yet?

Posted July 16, 12:06 PM

Words to the wise

Film Forum is showing MGM musicals this week and next, and Singin' in the Rain is playing Thursday through Saturday. (Betty Comden, who co-wrote the screenplay with Adolph Green, will be on hand to answer questions following the 7:30 show on Thursday.) Believe it or not, it was pouring down rain the last time I saw it at Film Forum, and my companion and I were both soaked to the skin by the time we finally got seated. Did we care? Not after the first five minutes or so.

If you've never gotten to see Gene Kelly dance on a big screen--well, a reasonably big screen--now's your chance. Astaire he wasn't, but he did just fine the way he was.

Posted July 16, 12:04 PM

Almanac

"Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally, unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it. We can welcome experience as it comes, and give it what it demands, in exchange for something which it is idle to pause to call much or little so long as it contributes to swell the volume of consciousness. In this there is mingled pain and delight, but over the mysterious mixture there hovers a visible rule, that bids us learn to will and seek to understand."

Henry James, "Ivan Turgenieff"

Posted July 16, 12:03 PM

Alias terryteachout.com

Greetings. As Mr. Sondheim says, I'm still here, though slightly underslept. In the words of one of the gazillion e-mails I've received since opening for business on Monday, "Do you realize that once you start blogging, you cease to have a life?" That's what a new blogger likes to hear at 1:18 in the morning as he wonders whether he remembered to put in all the serial commas.

Many interesting and useful comments have materialized in my mailbox, and I am taking them all seriously. Please don't hesitate to tell me what you think, what you'd like to see more of (or less of), what I did wrong (or right), etc.

Finally, an announcement. As promised on Monday, you can now reach "About Last Night" by going to www.terryteachout.com. No, you don't have to change your bookmark, the original URL is still valid and will remain so, but the new and improved address is a lot easier to remember, as well as to share with your friends. Think what they're missing!

If this is your first visit, thanks for coming. If you've been here before, thanks for staying. And now, if you'll pardon me, I have new links to test....

Posted July 16, 1:18 AM

July 15, 2003

A nice problem to have

Thanks for the mail! Please don't stop writing, but give me a day or two to open all of it. I wasn't expecting to hear from so many readers, and while I couldn't be happier, I do have to write a new bunch of postings for tomorrow.

I promise to get back to each and every one of you, sooner or later or somewhere in between. You're the best.

Oh, yes, one more thing...tell your friends about "About Last Night." The more, the merrier.

Posted July 15, 12:15 PM

Whatever

I've seen a whole lot of Pilobolus Dance Theatre over the years, but familiarity has yet to breed contempt, which is why I was sitting on the aisle at the Joyce Theater last night, watching with delight as they performed two new works, "Star-Cross'd" and "Wedlock," and two old standbys, "Walklyndon" and "Day Two."

As always, I was happy (but no longer surprised) to see that much of the crowd consisted of New Yorkers who don't make a habit of going to dance concerts. Pilobolus' light-hearted style, an unabashedly sexy combination of dance, gymnastics, and performance art, appeals not just to dance buffs but to audiences of all kinds. You don't have to know anything about dance to revel in a piece like "Day Two," in which the dancers take their curtain calls while spinning and sliding crazily across a water-covered stage. The setting is pure Pilobolus, a hot, steamy jungle of the mind inhabited by six all-but-naked people who enact a series of mysterious rituals apparently intended to propitiate the god of fertility. At the end, the stage floor seems to buckle and the dancers suddenly rip through it, an effect as exhilarating as the launch of a rocket.

But is it really dance? Even Arlene Croce, a longtime admirer of the troupe, insisted on calling Pilobolus "a company of acrobatic mimes rather than dancers," and the distinction is more than mere hair-splitting. What Pilobolus does is not ballet (though its members frequently fly through the air) and not quite modern dance (though they usually perform barefoot). The group's movement vocabulary is designed not to show off the body in motion but to exploit its sculptural properties in order to create theatrical illusion--hence the trompe l'oeil effects that are Pilobolus' trademark.

Arguments about the definition of dance are about as productive as arguments about the meaning of life. Yet this ambiguity is part of what makes Pilobolus' work so interesting. The elusive beauty of the company's sleight-of-torso tricks, combined with a consistently imaginative use of music (much of it popular) and a generous touch of slapstick (if cream pies were cheaper, Pilobolus would throw them), also has much to do with its accessibility. When the curtain goes up and a half-dozen handsome dancers come running on stage and start tying themselves into exotic knots and strange, almost-familiar shapes, only a hopeless prig would worry about whether the results are really, truly dance.

Alison Chase's "Star-Cross'd," announced as a "premiere-in-progress," turned out to be a lovely exercise in seemingly plotless lyricism with a show-stopping opening tableau: the lights come up on five dancers who appear to be floating high above the stage, upside down. (Presumably the Shakespearean angle will become clearer as the piece continues to take shape.) First viewings of unfinished works tend to be deceptive, but "Star-Cross'd" already looks like a keeper to me. Jonathan Wolken's "Wedlock," by contrast, is a suite of eight short vignettes about relationships, some jokey and others serious, fun to watch but not nearly as compelling as "Star-Cross'd." As for the classics, "Walklyndon," a zany bit of Ernie Kovacs-like pantomime danced (so to speak) in silence, is as infallibly funny as ever, while "Day Two," the company's signature piece de facto, continues to cast its inscrutable spell. Renee Jaworski, the company's resident blonde, was slightly injured, so Rebecca Jung, my all-time favorite Pilobolus alumna, came back to dance her old part in "Day Two." It was pure pleasure to see her striking face and strong, shapely legs and feet again after an absence of several years.

This is the last week of Pilobolus' annual month-long run at the Joyce, and all three programs will be seen at least once more between now and Saturday night. (For a schedule, go here.) I'll be back on Saturday afternoon. When it comes to Pilobolus, once is never enough for me.

Posted July 15, 12:14 PM

Good for the Jews

In between essays, articles, and reviews, Joseph Epstein writes short stories, 18 of which have been collected in Fabulous Small Jews (Houghton Mifflin). It's an odd book--odd, that is, if your idea of what a short story should sound like is based solely on the output of those dewy-eyed authors who learned their craft in expensive creative-writing programs.

Epstein, by contrast, is homemade and middle-aged, and for all his undeniable highness of brow, he has taken as his subject matter the lives and loves of a class of people who rarely figure in contemporary American fiction. His stories are set in Chicago and inhabited almost exclusively by Jews--but not just any Jews. As one of his characters explains, "In our neighborhood, politics, modern art, and psychotherapy played no role whatsoever. Fathers were too busy with their work as salesmen, owners of small businesses, or one-man law practices. Their horizons ended with making a good living and being excellent providers. As for their sons, most of the boys I knew in grade school and high school went on to the University of Illinois, where they majored in business; the rest, a small minority, aimed at dental or medical school." Such are the folk of whom he writes.

If you're bored already, Fabulous Small Jews might not be for you, but I think you'll be surprised by how quickly Epstein's divorce lawyers, upper-middle-class businessmen, and high-school teachers cast their spell. A few bad eggs notwithstanding, most of them are basically decent men whose lives are much more than half over, playing against the clock and trying to make the best of their variously bad situations. Being Jewish, they view the world with a briny blend of humor and disillusion, and he sums them up skillfully and with unsentimental affection.

These tales are the opposite of trendy. Instead, they partake of what might be called the journalistic virtues. Epstein knows how to get a story moving right from the opening bell: "'Apart from your brother,' my father used to say, ‘money is your best friend.' He said it to me early, and he said it more than once." (Did you notice that the second sentence scans?) His eye for detail is just about infallible: "At the Wasserburgs' house on the lake, on the North Shore in Glencoe, amid the Matisse, the Motherwells, the Fairfield Porter, and the large Frankenthaler, he approached her."

Most of all, Joseph Epstein knows the territory, and the people who work it. If you don't, now's your chance to pay them a visit. Should you find yourself on or near the Upper West Side of New York tonight, you can do it in person: Epstein will be answering questions and reading from Fabulous Small Jews at 7:30 at the Barnes & Noble at 82nd and Broadway. You buy it, he'll sign it.

In case you're wondering, the title comes from "Hospital," a poem by the acutely underrated Karl Shapiro: "This is the Oxford of all sicknesses./Kings have lain here and fabulous small Jews/And actresses whose legs were always news." (To read what Epstein wrote about Karl Shapiro, go here.)

Posted July 15, 12:13 PM

Ahead of the times

Am I the only person to have spotted the social significance of Roz Chast's Cremaster-bashing back-page cartoon in the June 9 issue of the New Yorker? (It's not on line, alas, but it's definitely worth looking up.) Back in the days of Harold Ross, the New Yorker wasn't above publishing cartoons that made fun of abstract expressionism, but ever since Jackson Pollock became God, they've been careful not to make that kind of mistake again--until now. Chast chronicled a visit to the Guggenheim Museum by a frazzled-looking lady who made no bones about being utterly befuddled by Matthew Barney's much-ballyhooed Cremaster Cycle: "I do not understand this at all...I must be a complete idiot...I'll reread the brochure...No help there...I'll just stare at the art until something comes through."

To her infinite credit, Chast didn't play both sides of the street, which would have been all too easy to do. Instead, she suggested what I take to be her own jaundiced opinion of the fawning critical reaction to the Cremaster Cycle, for the funniest panel in the cartoon showed our frazzled lady gazing at a jumbo wall label whose text reads as follows: "Matthew Barney blah blah blah blah blah Cremaster blah blah blah blah blah blah referencing blah blah metaphor blah blah narrator blah blah blah differentiate blah." (Over her head floated a puzzled thought balloon: "Maybe I should reread this explanation.")

I loathe the modish usage of the word "subversive," which more often than not is code for "PC," but I do think there is something quite genuinely subversive about the fact that Roz Chast, of all people, felt free to make fun of Matthew Barney in the New Yorker, of all places. Or could it be that I didn't get it? Maybe I should reread this cartoon....

Posted July 15, 12:12 PM

Words to the wise

Jazz vocalist Julia Dollison is appearing tonight at Chez Suzette, a theater-district bistro that regularly books good singers. I've called Dollison "the real right thing, a deeply musical virtuoso with an airy, luminous voice, an astonishingly wide vocal range, and a bracing taste for challenging material." (To read the rest of what I wrote about her in the Washington Post, go here.) She'll be doing duets with Ben Monder, Maria Schneider's wildly original guitarist. The first set starts at 8:30.

P.S. The food is good, too.

Posted July 15, 12:11 PM

Words to the wise

The run of Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons has just been extended one last time, to August 3.

Here's what I wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal: "I don't begrudge Vanessa Redgrave her well-deserved Tony for Long Day's Journey Into Night, but simple justice compels me to add that the best actress currently appearing in New York is neither on Broadway nor a woman. It's Jefferson Mays, the star of Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife, off-Broadway's latest dispatch from the wilder shores of gender identity, in which Mr. Mays plays Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, an East German transvestite with more than one secret under her skirt. Mr. Mays' bull's-eye performance as the mousy, fussy Charlotte is amazing enough, but when you consider that he is also playing 40-odd other roles--for I Am My Own Wife is a one-man show--it borders on the miraculous. Not since Ruth Draper has a lone actor portrayed a stageful of characters with such elegantly exact delineation and control."

In other words, go.

Posted July 15, 12:11 PM

Almanac

"Al Shriver was one of those many people who have no distinguishing talents or abilities. They are faces in group shots of Times Square at midnight on New Year's Eve. In trying to climb above the others, they go from little self-inflicted irregularities to the extreme of placing bombs in public places."

Ernie Kovacs, Zoomar

Posted July 15, 12:10 PM

July 14, 2003

Are you having fun yet?

Here I am, finally. I've been talking about starting an arts blog for the past couple of years, but I never got up the nerve to do the dirty work (i.e., the computer-geek stuff). So when artsjournal.com kindly offered to do it for me, it took me about three seconds to say yes.

If you already know my stuff, "About Last Night" will be familiar to you. It's a daily offshoot of "Second City," the monthly column I write for the Washington Post about the arts in New York City. (To read my last Post column, go here.) I'll report on out-of-town events from time to time--I see a lot of things in Washington--but I plan to concentrate on New York City, the place where I live and where I spend most of my spare time going to theaters, concert halls, art galleries, and nightclubs. I can't think of a better place in the world from which to write a blog like this, though I do get arted out every once in a while. (You'll hear about that, too.)

"Second City" deals only with the performing and visual arts, whereas "About Last Night" will also cover books, film, and television, as well as offering commentary on what other people write about the arts. But the premise is still pretty much the same: this is the diary of a working critic who happens to cover all the arts, not just one or two.

Why a blog? I take intense pleasure from every kind of art there is--music, dance, literature, theater, paintings and sculpture, movies and TV. So can you. That's why I'm writing "About Last Night." I want to encourage you to follow your curiosity wherever it leads you, the same way I do. I believe deeply that all art is one, and that all the arts are accessible to everyone. I hope you'll treat this blog as a daily opportunity to widen your horizons.

If you don't know my stuff, you can read about me by clicking on the appropriate link in the top box of the right-hand column, where you can also read about the various books I've written and edited, and buy copies if the spirit moves you. Whenever possible, I will be posting links to the essays, articles, and reviews I write about the arts for magazines and newspapers. (Look in the right-hand column under "Teachout Elsewhere" for a sampling of my recent pieces.) You can use the other links in my daily postings to buy and/or find out more about the things I see, hear and read.

You can access this blog two ways, by going directly to my URL or visiting my host, artsjournal.com. If you came here the first way, click on the artsjournal logo at the top of the page and look at the rest of the site--I read it every morning, and so should you.

In addition to the URL that brought you here, you will be able within a day or two to access this blog by going to www.terryteachout.com. (I'd hoped to have that easier-to-remember URL operational today, but it's not quite ready yet. Apologies. I'll let you know as soon as it's available.)

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Welcome aboard.

Posted July 14, 12:07 PM

In a red dress

I hear there are places to live that are almost as much fun as New York City, but I wouldn't know--I live here, and I'm not going anywhere.

One reason why I'm sticking is that last Thursday, Luciana Souza sang with the New York Philharmonic on the Great Lawn of Central Park, just a five-minute walk from my front door, before a crowd of...oh, I don't know, maybe two or three million. It sure looked that big from where I was sitting, anyway. (Allan Kozinn guessed 50,000 in the New York Times, but who's counting?) In any case, Souza ought to be singing in front of multitudes, because she's the most exciting jazz singer I've run across in ages. The catch, if you want to call it that, is that she isn't really a jazz singer, or at least not quite exactly one. Souza, who now lives in New York, comes from Sao Paulo, Brazil, and her style is a rich, volatile brew of Brazilian pop and American jazz, impossible to categorize and irresistible to hear.

So what in the world was she singing with the New York Philharmonic? Why, Manuel de Falla's El amor brujo, of course, a wonderfully subtle exercise in Spanish local color with a part for a mezzo-soprano with peasant blood in her veins. Most classically trained mezzos make it sound too formal, or--worse yet--like a caricature of flamenco. Not Souza. Her singing, at once coolly poised and earthy, with a chesty vibrato that grabs you by the heart and squeezes, is the voice Falla must have heard in his dreams. Yes, she uses a microphone, meaning that prissy purists will want nothing to do with her (though she couldn't very well have sung in Central Park without one), but I'm the furthest thing from a purist, and I doubt there's been a performance quite like this one since Argentinita recorded the piece with Antal Dorati and the Ballet Theatre Orchestra for Decca back in the Forties (and why, pray tell, has that performance never been reissued on CD?). Souza performed El amor brujo earlier this year with Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony, and if somebody doesn't haul the lot of them into a studio right away, somebody is dumb.

Should Falla strike you as excessively fancy fare for an outdoor pops concert, I can only say that the New York Philharmonic has been known to pull some fast ones in Central Park. A couple of years ago, for example, Audra McDonald sang the Brecht-Weill Seven Deadly Sins outdoors with the Philharmonic (in the W.H. Auden-Chester Kallman English-language version, thank you very much). I was there, agog and then some, which gives me an excuse to mention McDonald and Souza in the same breath. Even though they don't sound a bit alike, they still have a lot in common, for neither one of them loses any sleep worrying about labels--instead, they sing whatever they want and make you like it. To call them "crossover" artists is to trivialize their boundless curiosity and resourcefulness. I think of them as citizens of the musical world, at home wherever they go, be it concert hall or cabaret or the great outdoors.

I had my fingers crossed all afternoon, checking the weather every couple of hours and wondering when the skies would fall. Instead, the temperature fell, and by the time I got to my seat it was preposterously balmy. The gnats were out in force, flying in funnel-cloud formation with orders to kill, but they picked a new target at intermission and left the rest of us to enjoy the sunset. Stretched out at the rear of the Great Lawn was the midtown skyline, bouncing light off the low-lying clouds, with the Chrysler Building peeping between the high-rises on Central Park South like a six-year-old boy trying to push his way through a crowd of six-foot-tall grownups in order to see the passing parade a little better. The surrounding sky was grayish-purple, and the effect was so exquisite that I would have been perfectly happy to turn my folding chair around and face the wrong way all night long, except that I wouldn't have been able to see Souza's spectacular rust-red-to-die-for dress.

Did I mention that the Gruccis were kind enough to set off fireworks as an encore, accompanied by a parkful of oohs and aahs? I felt as if I were looking at the biggest painting in the universe. (This one, to be exact.) And all for free!

Yes, it was disgustingly humid all week long, the orchestra needed another rehearsal, and I won't be surprised if I have a nightmare or two about those gnats...and none of it mattered one tiny bit. Nights like this are why you live in a preshrunk apartment and pay outrageous rent and grope around to make sure your wallet's still there every time you get off a crowded subway car. Feel free to remind me the next time you catch me griping about New York.

Posted July 14, 12:06 PM

M-m-m-mama!

Gerald Nachman's Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (Pantheon) is a narrative history of the post-Catskills standup comedians of the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras, starting with Mort Sahl and ending with Bill Cosby. It's a surprisingly thick book, and surprisingly serious, too, though I'm surprised that Bob Gottlieb, the normally sharp-eyed editor, didn't give it a few more nips and tucks. The chapters on Sahl, Tom Lehrer, Shelley Berman (I'd wondered what happened to him), Woody Allen, and Mike Nichols and Elaine May are especially good. No footnotes, and Nachman sometimes lapses into uncritical enthusiasm, but it's still a solid read, good enough to make you curious about ex-headliners you've never heard of, or can just barely recall from childhood memories of The Ed Sullivan Show.

I smiled to see so many of these Formerly Hip Comics complaining about the frequency with which young comedians make use of what now appears to be the most popular 12-letter word in the English language. (They don't seem to think much of David Letterman, either.) I look forward to seeing what tasteless outrages Chris Rock is bitching about when he's 64.

Posted July 14, 12:05 PM

Better late

I have a friend whose messages on my answering machine invariably begin, "I guess you're out at some nightclub." Contrary to widespread opinion, I don't see everything the same night it opens. In fact, I didn't get to Playwrights Horizons' production of Theresa Rebeck's Bad Dates until yesterday afternoon--the very last performance. It took me long enough, but I'm glad I finally made it.

The play itself is no great shakes, a sort of monositcom about a no-longer-young single mom who plunges back into the dating scene after long absence. What made it special was Julie White's performance as Haley, the ditsy, doe-eyed jolie laide of a certain age whose tales of woe occupy an unchallenging but agreeable hour and a half. That's a long time to hold an audience, especially without an intermission, but White pulled it off with breathtaking ease. In an odd sort of way, the very slightness of the material made it easier to concentrate on her acting, which was so natural and transparent that you just know she sweat blood over it. She was alive from top to toe--I could write a hundred words about the way she used her feet. Too bad you can't go see her (though maybe you already did, and I'm the last person in town to catch up with her), but I'm sure she'll be back on stage any minute now, and next time around I'll catch her first night instead of her last afternoon.

Posted July 14, 12:04 PM

On my wall

I just bought a copy of John Marin's 1921 etching Downtown. The El, and it's a beauty--a nervous cubist spiderweb that captures some of the sheer excitement of this crazy city in which I insist on living. It's already taught me a lesson, which is that the ultimate test of the quality of a work of art is whether you can look at it every day without getting bored or irritated. So far, so good.

I never thought I'd be able to afford a Marin, but this one is a fluke, reprinted in 1924 in a special edition of 500 copies as a premium for New Republic subscribers, meaning that surviving impressions are comparatively easy to find and thus a hell of a lot less expensive. I've been trying to imagine a modern-day counterpart of such an offer, without much success. (Perhaps O could offer its subscribers tubes of Vaseline signed by Matthew Barney?)

When I first moved to Manhattan, nearly two decades ago, I'd see etchings and small lithographs by well-known artists hanging on the walls of the apartments of older middle-class New Yorkers, and say to myself, "Gee, that is so cool." I innocently supposed such things were simply part of the New York package, something you did when you got old enough, like drinking coffee or getting married. I'm old enough now (to put it mildly), but I notice that New Yorkers of my generation are no more likely to own inexpensive high-quality art than they are to go to the ballet. If you're rich, you buy rich people's art, which too often means expensive signatures; if you're not, you don't buy anything at all. I wonder what happened to us. Could it be it that baby boomers and Gen-Xers are less interested in art? Or do we not know that you don't need a lot of money to own something beautiful, so long as you don't care whether it's trendy?

Whatever the reason, Downtown. The El now hangs on the south wall of my living room, and I look at it lovingly every time I pass by, marveling at the chain of coincidence that brought this exquisite little specimen of prewar American modernism into my home. I'm lucky to have it--and lucky to have wanted it. I hope somebody else will want it just as much, someday.

Not just yet, though.

Posted July 14, 12:03 PM

Obit

Benny Carter was one of the last living links to the golden age of jazz. Born in 1907, he made his first records in 1928, remaining active as a performer well into the Nineties, when I heard him at Iridium in what I gather was his last nightclub gig in Manhattan. (Amazingly enough, he was still playing quite well.) Though he's best remembered as the suavest of alto saxophonists, Carter was no less distinctive as a composer and arranger. I also loved his tasty trumpet playing, a hobby he occasionally indulged in public, if never often enough. His lucid, balanced style and self-contained personality lacked the overt charisma that brings popularity to great artists--he was too much the gentleman to impose himself on his listeners--but connoisseurs and colleagues knew him for what he was, and rejoiced in his gifts.

If Carter made a bad record, I haven't heard it, but Further Definitions, the 1961 album that teamed him with Coleman Hawkins and Jo Jones, two of his peerless contemporaries, captures him at close to his absolute best. I listened to "The Midnight Sun Will Never Set" when I got the news of his death in Los Angeles last Saturday. It seemed a proper way to say goodbye.

Posted July 14, 12:02 PM

Almanac

"We must find out what we can about this place we're living in--this place in time--but we've got to be awfully careful, it seems to me, never to make ourselves too perfectly a part of it. Modishness is the sure sign of the second-rate. We're finally to be judged not by the degree of our involvement in the mainstream, but by our individual response to it."

Orson Welles, This Is Orson Welles

Posted July 14, 12:01 PM