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August 29, 2003
Longer than your average weekend
To those of you joining us for the first time as a result of seeing www.terryteachout.com mentioned in the Wall Street Journal this morning, I say, howdy. You can orient yourself by working your way down the right-hand column, which will tell you all about this site and what's in it. Everybody else knows what's what here at "About Last Night," so I'll proceed directly to today's postings, from narrow to expansive: (1) Middlebrows in love. (2) Visit to a small planet, or, life in the blogosphere. (3) Johnny Mandel, the one that got away. (4) A footnote on Frank Lloyd Wright. (5) O.K., so who the hell is Constant Lambert anyway? (6) The latest almanac entry.So ends my first post-vacation week, and I must say that I seem to have gotten the blog up and running again with a minimum of discomfort. Readers are returning, not in droves but more than gradually. Please encourage them--tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com, starting right this minute.
Incidentally, a colleague asked me at lunch yesterday how to access the "About Last Night" archives. It's simple, or at least I thought it was. Just click on the "ALN Archive" link at the very top of the right-hand column, and you can read everything that's ever appeared on this site. That'll keep you busy all weekend.
I posted an extra-big blog today so that I can take Monday off with a clear conscience (judging by the past week's blog stats, I'm guessing that a lot of you are already on vacation). Nor do I plan to overdo it on Tuesday...but I do promise to have something new and worthwhile for your delectation. Size isn't everything.
Now excuse me while I disappear--I've got to finish up my Prokofiev essay for Commentary, and then there's that stack of as-yet-unanswered mail, yikes-and-a-half. See you around.
P.S. I am pleased to announce a small but welcome technical improvement in "About Last Night": From now on, your browser will automatically open a new window every time you click on a link. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, try it and see--you'll like it.)
Posted August 29, 12:07 PM
What do men want?
I reviewed The Thing About Men, an off-Broadway musical that opened Wednesday at the Promenade Theatre, in this morning's Wall Street Journal. Here's the lead:I didn't go to "The Thing About Men" expecting to have my mind changed about the diminished state of American musical comedy. The posters for the show, which opened off Broadway at the Promenade Theatre on Wednesday, feature a photo of the torso of a half-naked person of indeterminate gender whose necktie dangles from his (or her) open trousers in such a way as to suggest...well, you get the idea. And so, I thought, did I. But "The Thing About Men," much to my surprise, turned out to be something altogether different from the silly sex farce I was prepared to endure. Instead, Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts, the authors of "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change," have now made another honorable and largely successful attempt to breathe new life into the moribund tradition of the middlebrow musical....
To read the whole review, simply go to the nearest newsstand, part with one (1) hard-earned dollar, and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section of this morning's Journal, which is, as ever and always, full of good stuff.
Posted August 29, 12:06 PM
Out here on our own
Courtesy of the ever-interesting 2 Blowhards, some statistics gleaned from the magazine American Demographics:According to a study commissioned by AD with research firm Ipsos-Reid, only 17% of American adults are aware of blogs, and only 5% claim to have read one. The awareness of blogs skews towards men; 21% of male Internet users report they're hip to the blogosphere, while only 13% of women are. Financially, visitors to blogspot.com are either rich or poor; those making under $25,000 or over $100,000 a year are over-represented, while middle-income visitors are under-represented.
These numbers strike me as intuitively right, though I'm a bit surprised at the underrepresentation of middle-income visitors. It's certainly been my experience that most people don't yet know what a blog is. On the other hand, what the numbers don't tell us is exactly who those 15 million American adults are, though I have some guesses. The income spread, for instance, strongly suggests that they are either well-to-do or young (since younger people are both less likely to be making a lot of money and more likely to be comfortable with the Internet).
If you're interested in blogging about the arts, that should make you sit up and take notice. Given the well-established fact that the Internet is an ideal way to reach highly motivated niche audiences, it stands to reason that Web surfers with an interest in the arts are likely to stumble onto an arts blog sooner or later. Bloggers typically link to and write about one another (that's a big part of what blogging is all about, as 2 Blowhards recently and rightly pointed out), and it follows that such interaction is bound to encourage significant growth in the art-related sector of the blogosphere, especially now that younger people are increasingly inclined to look to the Web as a source of news and information.
My own experience may be relevant in this connection. I first heard the word "blog" some three years ago, and like most blogwatchers of that period, it was Andrew Sullivan who first got me in the habit of looking at a blog or two each morning. Not long after I started visiting www.andrewsullivan.com, it occurred to me that it would be possible to launch an arts blog that worked more or less the same way as his political blog. What stopped me in my tracks was that I hadn't the faintest idea of how to start such a site (the user-friendly software employed by most of today's bloggers had yet to be invented). Within a few months, I got sidetracked by the need to finish writing The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, and my still-inchoate plans were filed away, though not forgotten.
The tremendous growth of the blogosphere in the past year revived my interest in www.terryteachout.com, and when I met Megan McArdle, who writes Asymmetrical Information, she persuaded me that it was time to give it a try. (In other words, blame her.) At that exact moment, Doug McLennan of artsjournal.com called me cold and offered to start a site for me. Within a week, "About Last Night" was up and running.
The surprising thing (or maybe not) is that it wasn't until after "About Last Night" went live that I first encountered any of the arts blogs listed in the right-hand column. Think about that. Here I was, a potential blogger with a serious interest in the medium, yet I didn't know of the existence of even one arts blog. It wasn't until I started getting e-mail from fellow arts bloggers and clicking my way through their blogrolls that I finally discovered what was already out there, and how good so much of it was.
All this indicates to me that arts blogging is a phenomenon waiting to happen, in much the same way that political blogging gradually built up to a critical mass, then suddenly mushroomed in the wake of 9/11. The difference, of course, is that arts bloggers can't count on a cataclysmic event to stimulate interest in what we're doing. We'll have to publicize ourselves, not only by linking to one another (though that's important) but also by reaching out to potential readers who don't yet know what a blog is. That's why I always include the www.terryteachout.com URL in the shirttails to the pieces I write for the print media. That's why I remind you each morning to tell someone you know about this site. People who come here will go elsewhere, too.
Am I having fun yet? You bet. But I want lots more people to come into the pool. As I wrote in this space a couple of weeks ago, I believe that serious arts journalism in America is destined to migrate to the Web. If you're reading these words, you're part of that migration. Don't keep it to yourself.
Posted August 29, 12:05 PM
Back on track
A reader writes, apropos of my recent posting on film scores:Add Johnny Mandel to your ALN list. Among his best on CD are I Want to Live (Rykodisc) and The Sandpiper (Verve). And The Verdict (it's almost no writing, but what there is is perfectly placed).
I couldn't agree more, and am chagrined to have momentarily forgotten about Mandel, whose name is universally known and admired throughout the world of jazz. This may explain why I forgot to think of him in connection with film scoring--he simply does too many things well, including songwriting. To have written "The Shadow of Your Smile," the theme from The Sandpiper, is achievement enough for a lifetime. All praise to Johnny Mandel, then, for never having rested on any of his myriad laurels.
Incidentally, my favorite recording of "The Shadow of Your Smile" is by Singers Unlimited. It's only available in a box set at present, but if you're feeling extravagant, I can't think of a better way to spend a hundred bucks.
Posted August 29, 12:04 PM
Footnote to elsewhere
Devoted blogwatchers will be aware that there's a major Frank Lloyd Wright-related wrangle currently taking place all over the blogosphere (go here to start picking up the threads, which lead far and wide). Me, I think Wright was a genius and I'd be perfectly happy to at least try living in one of his houses, even if the roof leaked, but I definitely wouldn't have wanted to pal around with him. Here's my favorite Wright anecdote, from Meryle Secrest's biography:One of Wright's many apprentices to study in that studio recalled that one day when he was buried underneath the Steinway making another of the innumerable attempts to restore its legs, he saw the master saunter into the room. Believing himself alone, Wright arranged three or four objects on the window ledge, then stood back admiringly. He walked over to the piano, still oblivious of the hidden observer, struck a few chords and pirouetted out of the room, singing to himself, "I am the greatest."
(Incidentally, I've seen a kinescope of an appearance Wright made on What's My Line? not long before his death. It's one of the more endearing examples of his rampant egomania.)
Posted August 29, 12:03 PM
Mystery guest
The author of today's almanac entry will be familiar to some of you, but for those who don't recognize the name of the now-obscure Constant Lambert, he was one of the most fascinating figures in 20th-century English cultural life. I suppose he's best known for his invaluable book Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline, though balletomanes with long memories will also know him as the first music director of what later became the Royal Ballet, in which capacity he served as a ballet conductor of genius, collaborated closely with Sir Frederick Ashton, and had a stormy affair with the very young Margot Fonteyn. He also wrote quite a bit of amazingly pungent music criticism, none of which has been collected (Music Ho! will give you a feel for the way he wrote about music), and made quite a few marvelously vital recordings, only a handful of which have been reissued on CD. Lambert even pops up as a major character in Anthony Powell's multi-volume novel A Dance to the Music of Time (he's Hugh Moreland).In the long run, Lambert will be best remembered as a composer, and in recent years there has been a mini-revival of interest in his music, much of which has now been recorded. I once contrived to get Time magazine (which used to be interested in the arts) to list the premiere recording of Tiresias, Lambert's last ballet score, as one of its ten best CDs of the year. It's still in print from Hyperion, fortunately, as is an equally fine album that contains The Rio Grande and Summer's Last Will and Testament, two superlative works for chorus and orchestra that used to be moderately well-known once upon a time, at least in England. All these pieces are at once jazzy and unnervingly melancholic--quite a combination, that.
Every few years I try to stir up interest in Lambert, most recently in a 1999 Sunday New York Times profile called "A British Bad Boy Finds His Way Back Into the Light" (no link, alas--the title refers to the fact that Lambert was a prodigy who died of acute alcoholism in 1951, two days before his 46th birthday). It went for naught, but I'm not done trying. Read today's almanac entry and see if it doesn't make you at least a little bit curious.
Posted August 29, 12:02 PM
Almanac
"After some of the most memorable and breath-taking experiences in my musical life it was indeed shocking to find that the critics next day were damning it with faint pseudo-academic praise, but it was not to me surprising. For the reason that I have, in the past, had to earn my living by that melancholy trade and realise all too well that the average English critic is a don manqué, hopelessly parochial when not exaggeratedly teutonophile, over whose desk must surely hang the motto (presumably in Gothic lettering) ‘Above all no enthusiasm.'"Constant Lambert, quoted in Opera (December 1950)
Posted August 29, 12:01 PM
August 28, 2003
Wielding the shovel
As expected, I had Another One of Those Days yesterday. I got up first thing in the morning to write my review of The Thing About Men, then jumped in a cab and went screaming down to Wall Street for a meeting with my editors at The Wall Street Journal, then jumped in another cab and went screaming back to the Upper West Side and started in on yet another pile of mail, after which I geared up to write a long essay about Prokofiev for Commentary that's due tomorrow (and no, Neal, I haven't written a word of it yet, so don't bug me).I didn't forget about you, though. Here are today's topics, from general to particular: (1) V revisited, plus thoughts about being on the receiving end of a light fisking. (2) My Wednesday-night playlist. (3) Blogs that must be visited (the first in an occasional series). (4) The latest almanac entry.
My site meter is emitting comely numbers again, but not as attractive as before I left for Maine. Help keep me in the pink--tell a friend or two about www.terryteachout.com today. Without you, I'm nothing.
Posted August 28, 12:05 PM
Is feeling all?
Of all the items I've posted on this blog in the past month and a half, the one that's stirred up the most comment is a mini-essay I wrote two weeks ago about the experience of seeing a masterpiece for the first time. If you didn't read it, go here. If you did, you'll recall that I went to Lincoln Center to watch the Mark Morris Dance Group perform V, a dance by Morris set to the Schumann Piano Quintet. I'd seen the New York premiere of V a couple of years ago, and was curious as to the source of the absolute certainty of my reaction to that first viewing: "By now, I know V well enough to be able to talk in a fairly specific way about what makes it so good. But how did I know how good it was the first time I saw it? What made me so sure it was a masterpiece?"It occurred to me that my immediate certainty must have had little to do with any conscious form of analysis, so I decided to take a closer look at what I felt while watching V, and came to the following conclusion:
As A. E. Housman famously said, "Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act." I know what he meant. Instead of analyzing V, I read its quality off myself, the same way you can read the seismographic chart of an earthquake and know how strong it was. Or--to put it more simply--I knew how good V was because of the way it made me feel.
It never occurred to me when writing these words that anyone would give them a second glance, much less find them controversial. Critics are always sounding off about how they do what they do--it's an occupational hazard, if not a professional deformation. (I'm posting an assortment of these reflections all week in the daily almanac. Today's entry is by Kenneth Tynan, the great English drama critic.) But when I published the blog that night, Our Girl in Chicago e-mailed me a few minutes later to say she thought this particular posting would draw a crowd. Boy, did she get that right.
Several readers were unimpressed (to put it mildly) by my attempts to understand exactly what it is that causes us to recognize that we're in the presence of a masterpiece when seeing it for the first time. Among them was one of my favorite bloggers, God of the Machine, who gave me a going-over so thorough as to border on an outright fisking:
Terry Teachout, a distinguished critic who surely knows better, unaccountably sets out to adventure among masterpieces in his review of Mark Morris's ballet V, even quoting Housman with approval. V is a "masterpiece," Terry is sure, for five reasons, none of which has anything to do with what happens on stage. He is "immediately involved," he "realize[s] that the person who made it knew exactly what he was doing," he is not bored, he is "anxious," because "what I was seeing on stage was so beautiful that I was afraid something would go wrong"; and when he finds that this something, whatever it might be, does not go wrong after all, his "eyes filled with tears." This is all so refined that I nearly forgot that I began the piece knowing nothing of ballet and ended it in exactly the same state. Tell you what, Terry: if I give you the great soul, will you promise, next time, to talk about the ballet?
Pow! Thump! Ouch! A number of other bloggers quickly came to my defense, for which much thanks. For my part, I was mostly pleased by the attention, though my snap reaction was to recall what Dawn Powell wrote in her diary upon reading a mixed review by Diana Trilling of one of her books: "Gist of criticisms (Diana Trilling, etc.) of my novel is if they had my automobile they wouldn't visit my folks, they'd visit theirs." I respect God of the Machine greatly, and I take his point--except that I think it's at least a few degrees beside my point. After all, I wasn't writing a review of V. Instead, I was trying to understand how we respond to art at first sight, and I came to the conclusion that in my case, conscious analysis simply doesn't have much of anything to do with it. Art makes us feel. These feelings are anterior to understanding, and after a lifetime of experiencing art I've come to trust them. In a very real sense, they are the whole point of experiencing art. As R. P. Blackmur once said, all knowledge is a descent from the paradise of immediate sensation. (I don't know where he said it, alas--Arlene Croce quoted him years ago in an essay, and I committed the quote to memory the first time I read it.)
Is that criticism? Nope. My job as a critic is to try to understand what it is about a masterpiece that evokes these feelings, and to convert that understanding into intelligible and persuasive prose. Merely to assert is not to criticize, though mere assertion may well be of considerable interest to people who have learned from experience to trust your taste. I mean, I like to think that at least a few of you would rush right out and buy, say, Deidre Rodman's first CD if I told you that it was really, really good--which it is--even if I didn't explain why it was good. (You're curious now, aren't you?) But I wouldn't ever try to tell you that I'd just committed an act of first-degree criticism.
So yes, analysis matters...but it doesn't matter most, and it doesn't come first. If you're sitting in your aisle seat trying to figure out why you're getting goose bumps, you're missing the point of getting them. The point is to be there--to be present and fully receptive to the immediate experience. Otherwise, you're acting just like Tom Townsend in Metropolitan, who preferred reading what Lionel Trilling had to say about Jane Austen to actually reading Mansfield Park. And that's what I was writing about the other day.
I can't say it often enough: I go to the ballet to have a good time, not to give myself something to write about. What's more, I'll bet that God of the Machine does exactly the same thing.
Posted August 28, 12:04 PM
Playlist
As of this evening, I've loaded 2,650 songs onto the iTunes player built into my iBook--a total of eight days, 19 hours and 45 minutes' worth of music. These are the ones to which I listened as I worked on today's blog:(1) Del McCoury, "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" (a wonderfully hardbitten bluegrass-style cover version)
(2) John Scofield with Medeski, Martin, and Wood, "A Go Go" (super-hip jazz à la Booker T. and the MGs)
(3) Benno Moiseiwitsch, Mendelssohn-Rachmaninoff A Midsummer Night's Dream Scherzo (one of the all-time great pieces of virtuoso piano playing, recorded without rehearsal in a single take)
(4) Pat Metheny, "Midwestern Night's Dream"
(5) Rosemary Clooney, "Do You Miss New York?" (my favorite Dave Frishberg song)
(6) R.E.M., "Radio Free Europe" (the Hib-Tone single version--much cooler)
(7) Paul Desmond and Jim Hall, "Any Other Time" (thank you, Marc Myers, for reminding me how good this Desmond tune is)
(8) Joan Baez, "Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word" (and thank you, Bob Nelson, for loaning me this album 35 years ago)
(9) The Band, "The Weight"
(10) Jean-Pierre Rampal, Hindemith Flute Sonata (first movement)
Happy listening!
Posted August 28, 12:03 PM
Elsewhere
I hope some of you have been venturing into the "Sites to See" section of the right-hand column. I pay frequent visits to all the sites for which I've posted links, a few of them every day. I realize, though, that not all of these blogs may be exactly to your taste, so I've decided to make periodic mention of a particular site worthy of your attention, so as to give you a clearer idea of what you're missing.Like me, Maud Newton just got back from a vacation (she went south, I went north), and I'm delighted to see her back at the same old stand. Newton is a New York-based writer (and a good one, too) who doubles as an editor, and her blog, whose subtitle is "Occasional literary links, amusements, politics, and rants," is a well-designed, wide-ranging daily compilation of links to news stories and commentaries about art and culture--mostly literary, though she occasionally ventures onto wilder shores. She has nicely idiosyncratic taste and an eye for interesting stuff, and it's a rare day that I visit her blog without clicking through to at least one of the items she's posted.
Pay her a visit and tell her I sent you.
Posted August 28, 12:02 PM
Almanac
"I see myself predominantly as a lock. If the key, which is the work of art, fits snugly into my mechanism of bias and preference, I click and rejoice; if not, I am helpless, and can only offer the artist the address of a better locksmith. Sometimes, unforeseen, a masterpiece seizes the knocker, batters down the door, and enters unopposed; and when that happens, I am a willing casualty. I cave in con amore. But mostly I am at a loss."Kenneth Tynan, Curtains
Posted August 28, 12:01 PM
August 27, 2003
Under the gun
Yesterday was One of Those Days. I had to write a piece from scratch, do a business lunch, and catch an off-Broadway preview, all in the course of 16 hours (I went to see The Thing About Men, about which more on Friday). That didn't leave much room in the interstices for bloggery. Today and tomorrow will be pretty much the same--I'm still catching up from my week-long absence--so don't expect miracles. Nevertheless, I'll do my best to make sure that "About Last Night" offers something toothsome every day. Today, for instance, I'm holding forth on film music, with an extra-long and super-snarky almanac entry to take up some of the slack.Traffic is still lower than usual, partly because I was gone last week and partly because so many of you are gone this week, but if you're reading this, do please remember to spread the word about www.terryteachout.com. Art knows no holidays!
Posted August 27, 12:03 PM
Backgrounder
I went to see Open Range on Monday, and somewhat to my surprise, I liked it very much. Kevin Costner still isn't much of a director, but the screenplay and cast were so strong that it worked anyway. Robert Duvall can do no wrong, of course, and I was scarcely less struck by Annette Bening, in part because she made no effort whatsoever to pretend that she was anything other than a middle-aged mother. Her beautiful face is now visibly careworn--you can count the lines--and that made it look even more beautiful, at least as far as I was concerned. Bening is an odd duck, a remarkably gifted actress whose career never quite seemed to catch fire, but who doesn't seem to be terribly bothered by that fact. (I guess there's something to be said for being married to Warren Beatty.) At any rate, she now looks as real as Emmylou Harris, and Open Range profits incalculably from her lived-in presence.Michael Kamen, on the other hand, did everything he could to make Open Range trite by smearing his banal music all over the soundtrack. Film scores are far more important than most non-musicians realize, especially when they're no good, and Kamen's mishmash of Aaron Copland and John Williams was notable mainly for its odious ubiquity. He underlined each and every significant glance in the movie, laying on the sentiment with a trowel.
As I say, most people don't think all that much about film scores, which is both normal and proper. The best ones are largely (though not always) unobtrusive, supporting the emotions of a scene in the same subtle manner that a lighting designer helps to control the way you see a play. Generally speaking, a score is something you shouldn't notice until the second time you watch a film. If the score jumps into the foreground on first viewing, it might mean the film isn't good enough to hold your attention.
I love first-class film music, of which there is both not nearly enough (it's surprising how many important films have lousy or unmemorable scores) and much more than you might think (it's just as surprising how many mediocre films have wonderful scores). A number of the best scores have been recorded separately from the films they adorn, and I thought it might be fun to point you in the direction of some albums that can help you hear how much good music adds to the immediate experience of a good film. You can purchase the CDs by clicking on the titles:
Elmer Bernstein, The Magnificent Seven
Leonard Bernstein, On the Waterfront
Aaron Copland, The Heiress
Jerry Goldsmith, Chinatown
Bernard Herrmann, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
Bernard Herrmann, Vertigo
Erich Wolfgang Korngold, The Adventures of Robin Hood
Miklós Rózsa, Double Indemnity
Sir William Walton, Henry V
Franz Waxman, Sunset Boulevard
Posted August 27, 12:02 PM
Almanac
"What advice, then, would I give to someone forced--for no one could be willing--to become a reviewer? Firstly, never praise; praise dates you. In reviewing a book you like, write for the author; in reviewing any other, write for the public. Read the books you review, but you should need only to skim a page to settle if they are worth reviewing. Never touch novels written by your friends. Remember that the object of the critic is to revenge himself on the creator, and his method must depend on whether the book is good or bad, whether he dare condemn it himself or must lie quiet and let it blow over. Every good reviewer has a subject. He specializes in that subject on which he has not been able to write a book, and his aim is to see that no one else does. He stands behind the ticket queue of fame, banging his rivals on the head as they bend low before the guichet. When he has laid out enough he becomes an authority, which is more than they will."Cyril Connolly, The Condemned Playground
Posted August 27, 12:01 PM
August 26, 2003
Period of adjustment
Hi. I'm still chewing through my accumulated mail and trying to catch up with all the other things that go astray when a critic quits the scene for a week. This vacation business is really kind of disorienting, especially when you're completely out of touch for a whole week. I must do it again sometime....But I'm also continuing to apply nose (A) to grindstone (B), the better to keep all of you adequately arted, so prepare for today's topics, from insufficient to supererogatory: (1) A dance that may or may not be about 9/11. (2) "In the Bag," postponed from yesterday because I was so addled from my vacation that I forgot! (3) Your monthly Technicolor fix, with a dollop of Vienna stirred in for good measure. (4) The latest almanac entry.
Needless to say, I've got lost traffic to regain, so do your bit and tell a friend about www.terryteachout.com today. Don't fall down on the job--my site meter is counting on you.
Posted August 26, 12:05 PM
Not necessarily 9/11
Even though I receive complimentary press tickets to most of the shows I want to see, I still get a huge kick out of free performances, especially when they're outside. I love the uncomplicated carnival atmosphere, the feeling that everybody came to play. Of course it helps that in New York, you often get to see fairly famous people for free, meaning that the crowds are staggeringly large--but it's still fun as long as the weather is nice, and sometimes even when it's not.I don't know how hot it was when I went to see the Paul Taylor Dance Company at Lincoln Center's Damrosch Park a couple of days before I left for Maine (I was too scared to check), but it definitely wasn't balmy, and I didn't care, at least not too terribly much, since you can never see the Taylor company often enough, hot or not. I was particularly interested in their appearance at Lincoln Center Out of Doors because they were dancing Promethean Fire, a new work that had its New York premiere in March, and I was curious to see how it would hold up on a third viewing (I also saw an incomplete runthrough last year at Taylor's downtown studio).
As soon as I got home, I looked up what I'd written about Promethean Fire in the Washington Post back in March:
Taylor must have been in one of his apocalyptic moods when he made this jolting piece, set to three of Leopold Stokowski's orchestral transcriptions of Bach organ music. The first one, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, was used in "Fantasia," which Taylor claims was his inspiration. Maybe, but nothing in "Fantasia" is remotely as hair-raising as the final tableau of the first section, in which the dancers pile up in the middle of the stage, looking for all the world like a heap of corpses, out of which Patrick Corbin and Lisa Viola emerge to dance a stunned pas de deux.
At the same time that Taylor claimed Fantasia was his inspiration, he specifically denied having had 9/11 in mind when making Promethean Fire, and I took him at his word. Like George Balanchine, he's very careful about disclosing the "secret meanings" of his dances--he wants you to think about what's happening on stage, not in your head. Nor was I inclined to suspect him of being coy.
Yet as I watched Promethean Fire under the stars at Lincoln Center, with low-flying jets gliding into LaGuardia Airport not so very far above my head, I started to have my doubts. It's true that Taylor has always been drawn to the unspecifically apocalyptic (this, after all, is a man who once made a dance called Last Look). But as I watched the male dancers hoisting women over their heads in positions eerily evocative of flight, after which the whole ensemble crumpled into that terrifying center-stage heap, I found I couldn't simply write off Promethean Fire as a piece of pure abstraction.
Once the applause had died down, I turned to the friend I'd brought with me.
"Paul says this isn't about 9/11," I told her.
"Yeah, right," she replied.
Does it matter? Not a bit. A plotless dance is about what you think it's about while you're watching it. The next time, it might be about something completely different. What Paul Taylor was thinking about when he made Promethean Fire is his business, to be disclosed if and only if he chooses to spill the beans. I admire his refusal to give his viewers an easy escape path to equally easy meanings.
But...is Promethean Fire about 9/11? Your guess is--literally--as good as mine.
Posted August 26, 12:04 PM
In the bag
Time again for "In the Bag," my personal variant of the old desert-island game, featuring a twist of the wrist. In this version, the emphasis is on immediate and arbitrary preference. You can put five works of art into your bag before departing for that good old desert island, but you have to decide right this second. No dithering--the death squad is banging on the front door. No posturing--you have to say the first five things that pop into your head, no matter how dumb they may sound. What do you stuff in the bag?As of this moment, here are my picks. I don't mind admitting (well, maybe a little bit) that one of them is kind of dopey. Nevertheless, I swore I'd tell the whole truth and nothing but, so here goes nothing:
BOOK: Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
CLASSICAL MUSIC: Sir William Walton, First Symphony
PAINTING: John Singer Sargent, A Study from Life (Egyptian Girl)
MOVIE: Michael Caton-Jones, Doc Hollywood
POP ALBUM: The Band, The Band
Your turn.
Posted August 26, 12:03 PM
Words to the wise
Calling all New Yorkers: Film Forum is showing a new, digitally restored print of The Adventures of Robin Hood this Wednesday and Thursday. If you've never seen an old-fashioned Hollywood swashbuckler, here's what it's all about, with Errol Flynn as the man in the green flannel suit, Olivia de Havilland as Maid Marian, and Claude "Shocked! Shocked!" Rains and Basil "Elementary, my dear Watson" Rathbone as the badder-than-bad guys. The real stars of the show, though, are Technicolor (this is one of the handsomest-looking films to come out of Thirties Hollywood) and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who wrote a score so stirring that it'll make you want to sign right up for archery lessons.For tickets and showtimes, go here. I'm tied up tight as a maiden on the railroad tracks both nights, so see it for me, O.K.?
Posted August 26, 12:02 PM
Almanac
"A certain amount of brick-throwing might even be a good thing. There comes a moment in the career of most artists, if they are any good, when attacks on their work take a form almost more acceptable than praise."Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant
Posted August 26, 12:01 PM
August 25, 2003
Tanned, rested, ready
Here I am again, back in New York and not quite up to speed, though August is a good month for a Manhattan-based critic to take a little time off. So far as I know, nothing much happened while I was gone, though I'm pleased (and a little surprised) to see that you kept on visiting www.terryteachout.com in my absence.In case you're wondering, I was visiting Isle au Haut, a Maine island where I spent several days holed up in a lighthouse built in 1907. Well, not quite--I was actually staying in the keeper's house, which has been turned into an inn. No electricity, believe it or not, but the site is eye-bogglingly picturesque and the food is as good as it gets. (To find out more about the Keeper's House Inn, go here.) It's the only lodging available on the island, to which I had traveled in order to see whether I could locate the scene of a 1975 lithograph by Fairfield Porter called "Isle au Haut," a copy of which hangs in my living room. I'll be writing a piece about my adventures for The Wall Street Journal, so I don't want to give too much away, but suffice it to say that no sooner did I discover that I'd have to spend a few hours tramping along a pathway known as the Goat Trail than I started to have second, third, and fourth thoughts....
En route to the Goat Trail, I looked at paintings. The Portland Museum of Art is currently hosting a first-class Fairfield Porter exhibition, and I spent an ecstatic hour looking at the Colby College Museum of Art's John Marin collection, which is nothing short of spectacular. I also tried to visit the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, only to find the place locked up tight (they were hanging a show that opens today). So my vacation was far from unartful, though I made sure to spend plenty of time doing nothing but sitting in an Adirondack chair, watching the lobster boats off the shore of Isle au Haut. (I like to think one of them might have been piloted by Linda Greenlaw.) My goal was to gear down a bit--I haven't taken a bonafide vacation for more than a decade--and I think I succeeded.
For those of you who wrote while I was gone, don't count on hearing from me much before next week--I found 300-odd e-mails in my box upon my return to New York. (We won't even talk about the accumulated snail mail.) But "About Last Night" will be booming and zooming all week long, with plenty of postings about all manner of subjects, and I hope you'll drop in each day to see what's up.
Need I say it? Tell your friends about www.terryteachout.com. I didn't come all the way back from Isle au Haut to spend the week talking to myself!
Posted August 25, 12:04 PM
Reading matter
Not surprisingly, I toted a bag of books to Isle au Haut, two of which were good enough that I read them by candlelight. Both were memoirs, a genre notable in recent years for little more than gross self-indulgence, but these two, I'm pleased to say, turned out to be compelling exceptions to that dismal rule.Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (Free Press) is the story of Carlos Eire, a professor of religion at Yale who was a mere child when Fidel Castro took over Cuba, and who has woven his youthful memories of Havana life into a gorgeously written, unsettlingly passionate account of what it felt like for a little boy to watch his world turned inside out. George Howe Colt's The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home (Scribner) is the story of a Cape Cod house and the family that spent its summers there, fishing and sailing and keeping unexpectedly dark secrets. It's less intense than Waiting for Snow in Havana--Colt, after all, is a bred-in-the-bone WASP--but no less passionate or involving.
If you're looking for a book or two to round out your summer reading, look no further.
Posted August 25, 12:03 PM
Second chance
I've only just started chewing through the mound of press releases that awaited me at vacation's end, but one jumped out and bit me. I Am My Own Wife, Doug Wright's one-man play about an East German transvestite who kept more than a few shocking secrets of his own, is moving to Broadway's Lyceum Theatre after a hugely successful off-Broadway run. I glanced at the press release and saw my own words from The Wall Street Journal at the top of the page: "Jefferson Mays' bull's-eye performance is amazing, bordering on the miraculous." To which I can only add that if you didn't see I Am My Own Wife at Playwrights Horizons earlier this year, now's your chance.Previews begin October 28, with opening night set for November 24. For tickets, call 212-239-6200.
Posted August 25, 12:02 PM
Almanac
One day I was trying to pick out a Mozart sonata on the piano. Like all poor pianists, I unconsciously emphasized the "sentiment" as I played. All at once, my father interrupted me."Whose music is that?"
"Mozart."
"What a relief. I was afraid for a minute it was that imbecile Beethoven." And, as I expressed my surprise at his severity, he went on: "Beethoven is positively indecent, the way he tells about himself. He doesn't spare us either the pain in his heart or in his stomach. I have often wished I could say to him: ‘What's it to me if you are deaf?' It's better for a musician to be deaf, anyway. It's a help, like any obstacle. Degas painted his best things when his sight was failing. Mozart had a far harder time than Beethoven, yet he was modest enough to hide his troubles. He tries to amuse me or to move me with notes which he feels are impersonal. And he is able to tell me much more about himself than Beethoven with his noisy sobbing. I want to put my arm round Mozart and try to console him. After a few minutes of his music I feel that he is my best friend, and our conversation becomes intimate."
Jean Renoir, Renoir, My Father
Posted August 25, 12:01 PM
August 16, 2003
Come back on August 25!
"About Last Night" is taking a well-deserved one-week vacation.While I'm gone, please feel free to read last week's postings, browse the archives, or peruse anything that catches your eye in the right-hand column. (You can also visit artsjournal.com, my host, by clicking on the logo at the top of this page.)
In addition, I'll have a drama column in the August 22 issue of The Wall Street Journal, covering four additional shows from the New York International Fringe Festival.
Enjoy...and don't forget to come back on Monday, August 25.
Posted August 16, 12:01 PM
August 15, 2003
Lights, camera...whoops, no lights!
A funny thing happened on the way to the theater yesterday afternoon. I was sitting at my desk, sending one last e-mail before I departed for a Fringe Festival performance of a musical about Robert Blake, when the lights quivered, dimmed, and died. Figuring the power on my Upper West Side block had gone out, I put my shoes on, walked downstairs in the dark, caught a cab...and realized by the time we'd gone 20 blocks that it wasn't just my neighborhood. Assuming that there wouldn't be any shows to see that day, I told the cabby to turn around.Eighteen hours later, here I am, very sweaty and insufficiently slept but otherwise none the worse for wear. The power's back on in my neighborhood, some of the restaurants are open, and I'm in the process of figuring out what to do next. I was supposed to see Les Ballets Trockaderos de Monte Carlo, the drag ballet troupe, outdoors at Lincoln Center this evening, but I don't know whether that performance will be taking place, or any others. I listened to a wind-up radio last night, so I have some idea of what's been going on, but I only just managed to get back onto the Internet. It's a strange feeling, being out of touch in an age when we make a fetish out of being in touch. If it weren't so damned hot, I'd say I kind of liked it.
In any case, I plan to remain out of touch, but for another reason. I'm leaving tomorrow (I hope!) for a week's vacation, both from New York and from "About Last Night," and I won't be taking my laptop with me, either. I need to rest up before the fall season starts. I'll be back in the driver's seat on Monday, August 25, and this page will remain visible and viewable in my absence, meaning that you can explore the archives and check out all the goodies in the right-hand column.
Don't think I'm leaving you in the lurch. Would I do that? Here's today's list of topics, from penultimate to antepenultimate: (1) Blacked-out bloggers. (2) Dispatches from the Fringe. (3) CinemaScope and its discontents. (4) Whatever happened to Community Concerts? (5) The latest almanac entry.
For those of you who've written in the last couple of days, don't be worried if all you've gotten back in return is an automated do-not-adjust-your-set message. It took a bit longer than any of us expected for artsjournal.com and its associated blogs, including this one, to recover from the chaos-inducing effects of the recent hack attack that left us temporarily paralyzed. (In case you're wondering, that also explains the ratty appearance of "About Last Night" all day yesterday and earlier this morning. Maybe that stupid kid in New Jersey turned off the power before the cops caught him!) Not surprisingly, I haven't been able to answer all my e-mail, and I won't even try to empty the bag until I get back. Like I said, be patient--your time will come.
See you on August 25!
Posted August 15, 11:00 AM
Topic A
Great posts on the blackout from Lileks (of course) and Megan McArdle (who blogs as Jane Galt).More as it unfolds, but now I've got to go write next Friday's drama column for The Wall Street Journal. The fun never stops around here....
Posted August 15, 10:59 AM
Out of the blue
In this morning's Journal, I report on the first weekend of the New York International Fringe Festival, which is presenting 202 shows in 21 off-off-Broadway houses through August 24. (At least I'm supposed to have done that--I haven't yet seen a paper this morning, though I assume it was published normally.) Here's what I wrote about one of the plays I saw:Saturday, 1:45 p.m. Mr. Miyagi's Theatre Company, about which I knew nothing whatsoever prior to laying eyes on its bargain-basement press release two weeks ago, has put together a deliciously knowing revue of sketches about what it's like to take part in a really, really bad audition. "Sides: The Fear Is Real" (the title refers to the script handouts given to performers who try out for a role in a play, film or TV show) includes every imaginable audition-related horror story. Awful actors, puffed-up playwrights, sexually frustrated directors--you name it, "Sides" spoofs it, all in an hour and 15 minutes of high-speed, whip-smart comedy. Cindy Cheung is wildly loony as Cass, the worst casting director in the history of Hollywood, and her five colleagues are fully as sharp. This one's ready for prime time....
To read about other Fringe plays (as well as my report on Melanie Griffith's performance as Roxie Hart in the Broadway revival of Chicago, already covered here on Wednesday by guest blogger Demolition Angel), pick up a copy of today's Journal. The "Weekend Journal" section, where I hang out on Fridays, is full of excellent things.
Next Friday's Journal will contain more Fringe reviews. In the meantime, go here to check curtain times and order tickets.
Posted August 15, 10:58 AM
Scopeless
The Film Society of Lincoln Center is presenting a series called "The Whole Wide World: Fifty Years of Widescreen Moviemaking," starting today (well, maybe not!) and running through Sept. 4 at the Walter Reade Theatre, next door to the Juilliard School. I recently received an e-mail about the series containing this sentence: "The inauguration of CinemaScope 50 years ago changed the way we look at movies." Literally speaking, of course, that's true--movies do look different because of the invention of CinemaScope and the other widescreen processes that followed it--but did that change the way we look at them? And while we're at it, was "Scope" (as film buffs love to refer to CinemaScope in lobby conversations, thus signifying their coolness) really such a great idea?Like most art-related questions, this one isn't as simple as it looks. Pre-Scope directors were mostly dubious about the various widescreen formats, which were introduced after World War II in order to help Hollywood compete with TV, the thought being that bigger pictures would tempt more Americans off their couches and back into their neighborhood movie houses. Older directors feared the loss of intimacy that would come from larger screens, and they were right to do so, as you can see by watching any of a hundred films shot in the Fifties by clueless directors who didn't know what to do with all that extra space. In addition--though the inventors of CinemaScope couldn't possibly have foreseen it--widescreen movies can't be shown in their original form on a TV screen, whose "aspect ratio" closely resembles that of pre-Scope movies. Instead, the studios had to create special "pan-and-scan" prints of widescreen movies to be shown on TV, in which large chunks of the action simply vanished, letterbox viewing not yet having been contemplated. (For a viewer's guide to aspect ratios, go here.)
In time, some older filmmakers got used to wider screens, while younger ones took the additional space for granted--which doesn't necessarily mean they made good use of it. In examining the roster of widescreen films being shown at Walter Reade, I was struck by how few of them I'd go across the street to see. Yes, I'll be glad to catch Nicholas Ray's Bigger than Life, partly because James Mason is so good in it (I love his dark-brown Yorkshire accent) and partly because, like most of Ray's films, it has yet to surface on DVD. But...Two-Lane Blacktop? El Cid? The Girl Can't Help It? Aliens? Whenever I see schedules like this, I think to myself, film buffs are such geeks, by which I that whatever it is about movies that interests them, it isn't their artfulness.
I told a friend of mine at lunch the other day that I thought the day would come when the producers of smart movies aimed at older viewers (i.e., anyone over 21) would bypass theatrical release altogether and market such films in more or less the same way novels are sold in bookstores. If that happens, I'll be sorry to spend less time in theaters. The enveloping experience of watching a good film in a big, dark room--and in the company of a rapt audience--is unique and irreplaceable. Alas, it's already been replaced, at least for most of us who love classic films. How many of the great movies of the past have you seen in a theater? Not many, I suspect, especially if you're under 40 and don't live in a film-friendly city like New York or Chicago
Naturally, watching a movie at home has its own advantages, if you have a good TV and it's the right movie. But there's a catch: in a world where most people watch serious movies at home, the widescreen films of the past are destined to lose much of their impact. It happens that I'd never seen The Bridge on the River Kwai before I rented the DVD last month, and though it made an impression on me, I'm sure that impression was diminished drastically by the fact that I watched it on a letterboxed TV screen, not in a theater.
Is it possible that widescreen filmmaking will be seen in the very long run as an aberration--even a mistake? If so, it wouldn't be the first time a "superior" technology turned out to be an artistic dead end.
Posted August 15, 10:58 AM
Home delivery
A reader sent me this excerpt from Piano Notes, a book by the pianist-author Charles Rosen:Before one played a new piece in London, Berlin, or New York, it used to be possible to try out the program for a small audience. (Composers, of course, prefer that a premiere of their work be held in an important city with proper press coverage.) It is not, as one might think, easier to play in a small town than in a large capital, and the stage-fright that is magnified by playing a new work is more or less the same wherever the recital takes place. But confidence increases naturally with successive performances. The concert series that used to be held in hundreds of small communities is dying out. It is not that the public for them is diminishing, but it has not grown as rapidly as the public for rock concerts, and does not attract investment. Above all, the expenses of travel and publicity have mounted almost catastrophically. Only in large cities is the public concert still a normal constituent of social life.
I know what Rosen is talking about, though more from what an economist might call the demand-side point of view. I grew up in a small Missouri town that had its own Community Concerts series back in the Seventies, and was located just 30 miles from a larger town that had a more ambitious series of the same kind. As a result, I got to hear live performances by artists of quality (including David Bar-Illan, the Beaux Arts Trio, and the St. Louis Symphony) at a relatively early age, and the experience made a deep and lasting impression on me. Such small-town performances, alas, are a thing of the rapidly receding past, as is classical music on commercial TV. It now seems barely believable to me that I first saw Vladimir Horowitz in a Carnegie Hall recital telecast in prime time on CBS.
All of which makes me wonder: would I have become interested in classical music had I not been exposed to it in such a way? I like to think so. I mean, I didn't start looking at paintings until long after I moved to New York. In the church of art, there is always room for late vocations--but earlier is better, and in large parts of America that's no longer an option.
Dark thoughts for the day before a vacation, I supppose. (No pun intended--I wrote that line before the power went out!) But if we don't think them, who will?
Posted August 15, 10:57 AM
Almanac
"It is perfectly correct to disregard all the bad reviews one gets, but only if at the same time, one diregards the good ones as well."André Previn, No Minor Chords: My Days in Hollywood
Posted August 15, 10:57 AM
August 14, 2003
Breaking the sound barrier
Howdy, friends. "About Last Night" here, the arts blog that does the impossible, meaning that I churn it out while simultaneously living the hectic life of a working critic in New York City. This week, for instance, I'm covering the New York International Fringe Festival for The Wall Street Journal, and I went to three plays yesterday. Three plays. Ouch! You'll read about them in next Friday's paper (my first report from the Fringe runs tomorrow). But I didn't forget about you, and thanks in part to one of my invaluable guest bloggers, Our Girl in Chicago, I offer the following list of toothsome topics, from subversive to reactionary: (1) Joan Acocella up, Hilton Als down. (2) Whither AM radio goest, so goeth the common culture. (3) One man's playlist. (4) The latest almanac entry.No, we didn't get hacked again, though the page looked a little peculiar this morning--our server is still cleaning up the mess from earlier in the week. (By the way, do you know who shut us down? A New Jersey teenager. The cops caught him.) All the more reason for you to go right out and tell ten friends about www.terryteachout.com. August is the cruellest month--many of my readers go off on vacation, without benefit of laptops. Now's the time to introduce somebody new to "About Last Night," the 24/7 arts blog. Don't let me be lonely tomorrow.
Posted August 14, 12:05 PM
Goings on about town
Our Girl in Chicago writes:The back of the book in this week's New Yorker is a real roller coaster. It leads off with a typically smart review-essay by Joan Acocella about recent scholarly infighting over the historical origins of childhood. An Acocella byline is always good news. Here, she distills the lumpish books under review into their "good parts," conducting a brisk tour of the most relevant and striking historical ground they cover. She's an even-tempered, fuss-free giant slayer:
A good deal of our intellectual life in the past half century has been ruled by the following pattern: First, a French person, with great brilliance and little regard for standards of evidence, promulgates a theory overturning dearly held beliefs.
As one who exceeded her own recommended lifetime allotment of academic writing some time ago, I say: Joan, you had me at "a French person." Flip a few pages, though, and the unsuspecting reader, knocked off guard by Acocella's wit, seems to have strayed into an upmarket edition of FHM. Richard Avedon's creepy photo of a smirking, haphazardly clothed Chan Marshall, leader of the band Cat Power, stages the accompanying article's tagline in a laughably literal-minded way: "Cat Power demands attention, then resists it."
But at least the Avedon photo, for all its raincoat-flasher aesthetic, has a couple of things going for it. One, lots of fans don't really know what Marshall looks like. (When I saw Cat Power perform in Chicago this past March, it was maddening that the stage was unlit and her hair flopped over her face.) Two, the Hilton Als piece that goes with the picture is worse.
Cat Power's music is ravishingly abstract. Marshall's famous voice is at once disaffected and melodramatic, the instrumentation spare, the effect like strong weather for the psyche. Als' piece seems to aspire to the same enigmatically profound condition. The problem is that Marshall is an artist, while Als is merely a critic--and not a very good one, either. After drawing out Cat Power's classic blues roots in a reasonable enough middle section, he staggers from one undercooked metaphor to another, calling Marshall in the space of one column a cowboy, a preacher, and "a fluid version of Liberty standing guard over the Harbor." To all of which, and much more, I can only say, "Huh?"
Yes, Marshall may be unprofessional and off-putting. She may also may be this generation's incarnation of the untamable spirit of rock and roll. (It'd be pretty surprising, though, if the faux scandal of a naughty glossy photo in The New Yorker did anything but puncture the latter image.) But whatever she is or isn't, her great music deserves better--and smarter.
Posted August 14, 12:04 PM
Something for everyone
I wish I could take it for granted that you read Lileks before breakfast, but since some of you probably don't, allow me to draw the attention of the benighted to yesterday's "Bleat," in which (among various other things) the indispensable James Lileks confesses to having developed a midlife taste for the country music he hated as a boy:On the odd chance I shoot a home video that needs a song about an impotent Vietnam war vet imploring his wife not to go to town and do some hooking, I also ripped "Ruby" by Kenny Rogers. "If I could move I'd get my gun and put her in the ground." Cheery! Socially relevant! Once you realize that they usually followed this song with "Candy Man" by Sammy Davis Jr., you'll know what a strange stew AM radio used to be.
That's so quintessentially Lileksian (an adjective waiting to happen). I love his sharp turns--all of a sudden he swerves from Seventies country to the long-lost world of unformatted AM radio, where you really could hear a little bit of everything in the course of a day's listening, from Paul Harvey to Top Forty to "Desafinado" and "Take Five."
Excuse me for a momentary lapse into being an intellectual, but the drying-up of unformatted radio is yet another sign of the fast-growing fragmentation of American culture. Time was when there were mass-media "meeting places" where you could get a quick taste of life outside your cultural niche, no matter which niche you happened to inhabit. Time and Life used to fulfill that function. So did TV variety programs like The Ed Sulllivan Show. So, to a surprising extent, did commercial radio.
And now? Well, I'm trying to do something similar, in my Web-based, eggheady way, but I suspect that to the marketers, who see the world through category-colored glasses, we "About Last Night" types are our own little niche--the niche of people who like to peer into other people's niches. Call us The Eclectics. The Unpredictables. Slap a label on us and sell us our very own brand of designer beer.
Sigh.
Posted August 14, 12:03 PM
Won't you turn that bebop down?
I usually listen to music while I'm editing--my iBook contains an iTunes player onto which I have loaded 2,646 songs to date--and I thought it might amuse you to know the ones I played as I polished up today's blog:(1) The Beatles, "Lovely Rita" (I love Paul McCartney's swoopy bass line)
(2) Pat Metheny, "A Lot of Livin' to Do"
(3) Earl Hines, "Love Me Tonight"
(4) Buddy Rich, "Love for Sale" (dig that single-stroke roll at the end!)
(5) Dwight Yoakam, "Long White Cadillac"
(6) Woody Herman and His Woodchoppers, "Lost Weekend"
(7) Glenn Miller and His Army Air Force Band, "Flying Home"
(8) Elvis Costello, "Pump It Up"
(9) Bobbie Gentry, "Ode to Billie Joe"
(10) Steely Dan, "Monkey in Your Soul"
Posted August 14, 12:02 PM
Almanac
"The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed."Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Critic
Posted August 14, 12:01 PM
August 13, 2003
None the worse for wear
As those of you who design Web sites could see, "About Last Night" looked the least little bit untidy yesterday afternoon, and you may also have wondered why I didn't post anything new that morning.Here's the scoop. According to artsjournal.com, my host, the company that runs our content management system was on the receiving end of a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDOS). In plain English, this means that sociopathic Webheads were hacking into the system and screwing us up, just for fun. Their hijinks shut me down completely yesterday, and I still have a few minor repairs to make, but at least "About Last Night" is up and running again. Everything should be back to normal fairly shortly (he said, with a sickly smile plastered across his pasty-white face).
All in all, Monday and Tuesday were Two of Those Days. I spent far too much time in taxis, racing from theater to theater and coming home just long enough to change shirts (New York is disgustingly humid this week). But no matter how hectic things got, "About Last Night" was rarely far from my mind. Fortunately, one of my guest bloggers, Demolition Angel, was kind enough to shoulder some of today's load, thereby making it possible for me to get a more or less normal night's sleep. Between us, we cooked up the following list of topics, from causal to coincidental: (1) Melanie Griffith, Broadway star? Puh-leeze. (2) One great composer deserves another. (3) Riffling through the mailbag. (4) The latest almanac entry.
Incidentally, this site racked up well over 1,500 page views on Monday--more even than last Wednesday, when my Wall Street Journal column about Andy Warhol's 75th birthday brought in a sizable spurt of new visitors. Keep that curve sloping upwards by telling a friend about www.terryteachout.com.
Don't do it tomorrow. Don't do it later today. Do it now. The fate of the West is in your hands.
Posted August 13, 12:05 PM
Scared stiff
Demolition Angel writes from New York:The producers of Chicago ought to be ashamed of themselves for hiring Melanie Griffith to step into the role of foxy Roxie Hart. Indeed, Griffith is a triple threat: she can't sing, she can't dance, and she can't act. She's hot, though, and when she first appears on stage, it seems for a fleeting moment as if Roxie had been created just for her. But no sooner does the time come--all too quickly--for her to sing the first note of her first number, performed as she holds onto a ladder, than Griffith proves incapable of hiding her fear of...what? Heights? The audience? The next sound that might come out of her mouth? The fear only gets worse when she has to start dealing with Ann Reinking's Bob Fosse-style choreography, tough stuff even for real dancers.
Is that all there is? By no means. Brent Barrett as Billy Flynn and Camille Saviola as Mama are striking and energetic and--well, talented. The ensemble is still sexy, and "Cell Block Tango" is funnier than ever. Deidre Goodwin is back as Velma Kelly, and though she's not much of an actress and lacks the finesse and nuance supplied in spades by Bebe Neuwirth, her powerful pipes and even more powerful body help her bring off the role. But by the final dance number, trimmed within an inch of its life so that Griffith can stagger through it, our erstwhile blonde bombshell looks like a deer in the headlights, hoping the big oncoming vehicle will swerve around her instead of knocking her flat. No such luck.
Sometimes I like to go country dancing and watch (or be) the tipsy chick trying to follow a line dance for the first time. It's fun, and the effort of doing something new is brave--but watching Melanie Griffith make that same effort isn't worth the price of a Broadway ticket.
Posted August 13, 12:04 PM
Listening room
It's worth noting that in the four weeks since "About Last Night" first went live, I haven't felt the need to recommend a single new classical CD to you. That says something about the increasingly desperate state of the classical recording industry. Still, good things do find their way to my desk from time to time, and "good" isn't nearly strong enough a word to describe the latest release from BBC Records, a 1971 broadcast of the Mozart Requiem conducted by Benjamin Britten.In addition to being one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, Britten was also an extraordinarily gifted pianist and conductor. But even though he made many commercial recordings for Decca/London, they were mostly (though not always) of his own music. Fortunately, the BBC also taped dozens of concerts in which Britten can be heard performing the music of his favorite composers, and this one ranks right up there with his unforgettable BBC broadcasts of the Mahler Fourth and Shostakovich Fourteenth Symphonies. Not that he does anything obviously startling. As always with Britten the performer, the insights are contained within an essentially traditional interpretative framework--but that doesn't mean they aren't there in abundance. His approach to the Mozart Requiem is both weighty and rhythmically forceful, with sonorities built from the bass line upward (an approach typical of many other composer-performers as well). The result is at once fresh and "centric," so to speak.
The recording was made at a 1971 performance by the the Aldeburgh Festival Chorus, English Chamber Orchestra, and four of Britten's favorite solo singers. It's well sung and well played, with slightly congested but otherwise serviceable sound--none of which matters in the least. If you had a chance to hear Felix Mendelssohn conduct Bach's St. Matthew Passion, you wouldn't pass it up because the organ was out of tune, would you?
Should you require additional persuasion (and you shouldn't), the filler is a half-hour interview in which Britten talks about such subjects as the process of composing, opera on TV, and his reluctance to teach. It's worth the price of the album all by itself.
Posted August 13, 12:03 PM
On your mind
Here are some letters I've received in the past couple of weeks:
Your letters make my day. Please keep on writing.
Posted August 13, 12:02 PM
Almanac
"One is justified in leaning towards severity in the laying down of principles, but should nearly always incline to indulgence in the application of them."Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism
Posted August 13, 12:01 PM
August 11, 2003
The joint is jumping
"About Last Night" is one month old today. Champagne will be served tonight at an undisclosed location.Is anybody still in New York? I sure am--I'm covering the New York International Fringe Festival for The Wall Street Journal (about which more below), and I've seen six plays since you last heard from me, so don't be surprised if I sound a little testy from time to time. You'll read about my theatrical adventures throughout the coming week, as well as various other things I've seen, heard, done, and thought. Meanwhile, here are today's topics, from fade-in to blackout: (1) Give your waitress a really big tip today--she's probably an actor. (2) What to do when friends make art. (3) Another round of "In the Bag." (4) The latest almanac entry.
This is to give you fair warning that www.terryteachout.com, meaning me, will be out of town next week, far beyond the reach of e-mail. I'll be posting through Friday, after which the shop shuts down, not to reopen again until the morning of Monday, August 25. (You'll be able to visit the archives and use "Sites to See" to visit other arts blogs during my absence.)
I need the rest--but I'm still having fun.
P.S. If you're an early riser, my apologies for getting today's postings up so late--the server was down.
Posted August 11, 12:05 PM
Hope in a black box
A drama critic who spends most of his evenings covering Broadway and off-Broadway openings tends to forget that most of the plays being staged in New York on any given night are performed in tiny little theaters consisting of a ratty lobby, a smallish rectangular performance space whose ceiling, walls, and floor are painted black (hence the name "black-box theater"), and an even smaller backstage area (often indistinguishable from the hall). Such places are typically situated on blocks so unfashionable that you look twice at your appointment book to be sure you've come to the right place. Then you climb up a flight or three of stairs, settle into a creaky old theater seat, and wait to see what happens next. Often it's painfully earnest. Sometimes it's downright awful. Every once in a while, though, the black box turns into a time machine in which you spend an hour or two exploring a parallel universe of the imagination, and when the lights come up again, you remember why you love theater, and why the waitress who served you brunch in between callbacks loves it, too.The New York International Fringe Festival, which is currently presenting 200-odd plays in 21 off-off-Broadway houses scattered throughout lower Manhattan (it runs through Aug. 24), is dedicated to the proposition that there's more to theater than Beauty and the Beast. More than a few of the plays are stinkers, and my guess is that most are no better than adequate. But some are remarkable, while even the worst ones can be oddly touching, in part because you can smell the hope oozing out of the pores of the actors on stage (if you want to call it that--many black-box theaters are so small that the word "stage" loses its meaning).
I went down to the East Village the other day to see a Fringe play that I more or less picked out of a hat. I didn't know anything about the playwrights or the company, but something about the press release tickled my fancy, and I wanted to see at least one show not on account of The Buzz but simply because it sounded interesting. So I requested a pair of press seats, and when the appointed hour arrived, I boarded the subway and made my way to the theater. I had to change trains twice--not a good sign.
Once I got there, the sidewalk was crowded with chattering playgoers, some coming, others going. The theater itself, somewhat to my surprise, was air-conditioned, but in every other way it conformed to my darkest expectations. The program was a single photocopied sheet, the set a half-dozen folding chairs, and it didn't take much eavesdropping before I figured out that the house was packed with friends and family of the cast members (including small children), all of whom laughed and clapped at every possible opportunity (especially the small children).
Sounds awful, no? Fooled you. Fooled me. I loved the show, and not just because the homely surroundings made me feel sympathetic, either. Just the opposite: I sat in my lumpy seat for five minutes waiting for the lights to go down, muttering to myself, Oh, man, this is going to be crappy. But no more than a minute after the play started, I started saying, Oh, wow, this is really good!
Do I come to a performance with expectations? Of course. How could I not? I've been a critic for a quarter-century, and in that time I've learned not to bet too heavily against the odds. More often than not, you can judge a book by its cover. But I've also learned to leave myself open to the possibility that the odds might be wrong this time around, and when I hear that telltale click in your head and realize that something I expected to be bad is actually good...well, it's just about the best feeling I know.
I went to two other plays that day, one of which was lousy and the other fine. I got rained on all night, spent a couple of hours sweating in a sauna-hot theater, and came home soaked to the skin. It didn't matter. I knew that come week's end, I was going to write a review that would make a gaggle of struggling young actors very, very happy. Rave reviews don't necessarily make much difference in the hard life of a performer. (I once wrote a glowing profile for the Sunday New York Times of a singer who was all set to open in a theater-district cabaret...on September 12, 2001. Needless to say, she didn't get much bounce from that piece.) Still, they don't hurt, especially when they come from out of the blue. Which is one of the reasons--and one of the best ones--why I do what I do.
Posted August 11, 12:04 PM
Beautiful friendships
A reader writes:All of yr. posts where you talk abt. hanging out w/ musicians and painters raise the specter of the critic who's friendly w/ those he writes abt. I imagine I know where you stand on this, that it doesn't change how you write abt. them, but it could make for an interesting discussion.
Sure could. It's a tricky business, being in the world of art but not of it...but wait a minute. I'm not a priest, right? Nope, just a freelance journalist, and one who believes deeply that anyone who tries to write about art without knowing artists is going to make a rotten job of it.
At the same time, I should point out that I'm not at present a regular working performance critic in any field other than theater. Speaking in my official capacity as drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, I can assure you that I know a grand total of two (2) actors, both of whom are among my closest friends and both of whom I knew long before I hooked up with the Journal. I've never mentioned either one in my drama column.
Beyond that, I make no promises, nor should you expect me to. Many of my other friends are artists working in other media. I have occasion to write about some of them from time to time, and the fact that I know them personally does change what I write--for the better. Because I know certain artists well and have talked to them at length about their art, I understand it more fully, and can explain it more intelligently. In the process, I also learn more about the worlds in which they work, and that makes my writing more nuanced and comprehending. (My writing is probably also affected in much the same way by the fact that I myself used to be a professional musician once upon a time.)
I might add that it seems to me perfectly natural for a person who writes about the arts to befriend artists whom he admires, so long as they're nice. Needless to say, this isn't always the case, though it turns out to be true surprisingly often. Three or four of my best friends are artists whom I got to know in the course of writing about them, and they're very nice.
(In case you're wondering, the thought occasionally crosses my mind that this niceness might in certain cases have something to do with the fact that I've written nice things about the artists in question. Yes, it's happened once or twice, and it stings when you realize you've been snookered, but that goes with the territory. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and I've gained a whole lot more than I've lost.)
Does any of this affect my writing for the worse? Maybe. But in the end, you must judge me not by some abstract theory about my work, but by the work itself. Do you tend to agree with what I write? Even if you don't, do you find it illuminating? If so, then it doesn't really matter whether I happen to know the people who made the works of art I recommend, does it? A lot of readers, after all, seem to think I'm a trustworthy critic, and the reason why they do is because their experience has taught them to trust my taste. I've worked hard at building that trust. It's my capital. I wouldn't dream of squandering it by writing a favorable review of a bad work of art by a good friend. I never have, and I never will.
One more thing: I teach a course in criticism at Rutgers/Newark University, in which I spend a few minutes early in the semester talking about conflicts of interest. Rule No. 1 of arts journalism, I tell my students, goes like this: "Never sleep with anybody you write about." That gets their attention--especially since I put it more bluntly than that.
Either way, it's a good rule to live by.
Posted August 11, 12:03 PM
In the bag
Time once again to play "In the Bag," my version of the old desert-island game--with a twist. In this variant, the emphasis is on immediate and arbitrary preference. You can put five works of art into your bag before departing for the proverbial desert island, and you have to decide right now. No dithering--the enemy is at the front door, lasers blazing. No posturing--you have to say the first five things that pop into your head. What do you stuff in the bag?As of this moment, here are my picks:
BOOK: Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies, a Love Story
MUSIC: Maurice Ravel, String Quartet in F Major
PAINTING: Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, Basket of Wild Strawberries
SONG: Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, I Wonder What Became of Me (as sung by Joe Mooney)
FILM: William Wyler, The Heiress
Over to you.
Posted August 11, 12:02 PM
Almanac
"We followed Jo as she marched out of the room with that fanaticism known only to an overachiever, one who lives with the eternal fear that some lurking underachiever will, in a flash of brilliance, achieve more."Samuel Shem, The House of God
Posted August 11, 12:01 PM
August 8, 2003
The feeling of what happens
Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival, which became all but moribund in the Nineties, is now showing fresh signs of life. One is the upcoming production of Mozart's Il re pastore (it'll be seen next Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday) directed by Mark Lamos, in whose work I take wild delight (he's the guy who directed the Met's Wozzeck and New York City Opera's Turn of the Screw). Another is the presence of the Mark Morris Dance Group, which has been performing Gloria and V, two of Morris' most important dances, at the New York State Theater (the last show is tonight at eight).I went on Wednesday, mainly to see V, Morris' staging of the Schumann Piano Quintet. Over the years, I've been lucky enough to catch the premieres of a half-dozen or so works of art that I immediately recognized as great. That's how I felt about V when I saw its New York premiere two years ago at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I've seen it four more times since then, and I haven't changed my mind. By now, I know V well enough to be able to talk in a fairly specific way about what makes it so good. But how did I know how good it was the first time I saw it? What made me so sure it was a masterpiece?
These questions aren't as simple as they sound. I mean, it's not as if I'd been sitting in my aisle seat that night, ticking off boxes on the Masterpiece Checklist. (The 18th-century neoclassicists tried to draw up just such a checklist, which is one reason why their art is so dull.) In fact, I tend not to do much thinking about a great work of art when I'm experiencing it for the first time. Instead, I become swept up in what Robert Warshow called the immediate experience. In the face of mastery, analysis is impossible--it's something you do after the fact.
C. S. Lewis wrote a wonderful little book called An Experiment in Criticism in which he suggested that in order to understand the nature of greatness in literature, we might try approaching it in reverse:
Literary criticism is traditionally employed in judging books. Any judgement it implies about men's reading of books is a corollary from its judgement on the books themselves. Bad taste is, as it were by definition, a taste for bad books. I want to find out what sort of picture we shall get by reversing the process. Let us make our distinction between readers or types of reading the basis, and our distinction between books the corollary. Let us try to discover how far it might be plausible to define a good book as a book which is read in one way, and a bad book as a book which is read in another.
With that in mind, I asked myself these questions on Wednesday: How did I feel as I watched V for the first time? Did I feel the same way as I watched it for the fifth time? And might those feelings tell me something about the nature of a masterpiece?
I was a bit surprised (though perhaps I shouldn't have been) to discover that I still had fairly easy access to the sensations I experienced at the New York premiere of V. What's more, I remembered having had similar sensations on such other occasions as the New York premiere of Paul Taylor's Piazzolla Caldera and my first viewing of Kenneth Lonergan's film You Can Count on Me, both of which I also recognized as masterpieces at first sight.
Here's what I felt:
Immediate involvement. More often than not, it takes a few minutes to become fully engaged by a work of art. You have to shut out the rest of the world, and that isn't always easy, especially in a noisy place like New York. With V, on the other hand, I felt as though the dancers had reached out from the stage and grabbed me as soon as the curtain went up.
The perception of competence. Early on in a masterpiece--often very early indeed--something unexpected happens that makes me shake my head with pleasure and surprise. I realize that the person who made it knew exactly what he was doing, and I say to myself, I'm in good hands.
The opposite of boredom. Harry Cohn, the boor who ran Columbia Pictures in the Forties and Fifties, is supposed to have said that whenever he caught himself squirming in his seat as he watched the rushes of a movie, he knew there was something wrong with it. Herman J. Mankiewicz, the drunken sage of Hollywood (and the author of the screenplay for Citizen Kane), is supposed to have replied, "Imagine--the whole world wired to Harry Cohn's ass!" I don't know anything about Harry Cohn's ass, but a quarter-century on the aisle has taught me that whenever my attention flags midway through a new work, the chances are good that there's something wrong with it. That never happened with V. I was completely involved--"present," as actors say--from start to finish. I didn't squirm once.
Performance anxiety. Roughly halfway into V, I realized that I was nervous. It took a little longer before I realized why: what I was seeing on stage was so beautiful that I was afraid something would go wrong, that Morris would fumble the ball. When I say "afraid," I really mean it. I felt extreme anxiety, not for Morris or me, but for the dance itself, as if it were a living thing for whose health I feared.
Consummation. That anxiety disappeared toward the end of the last movement, at the exact moment when Schumann launches a fugue-like musical episode and the dancers run out from the wings and start to embrace one another. Right then, I knew Morris had "solved" the dance--that he had successfully worked out its internal logic and was demonstrating the solution on stage--and my eyes immediately filled with tears.
All these sensations came back to me as I watched V on Wednesday night. This time around, of course, they were accompanied by a clearer intellectual understanding of the way the dance works, how it grows out of Schumann's music and creates a visual counterpart to the tonal architecture. But I didn't need to understand any of these things to know that V was a masterpiece the first time I saw it. I just knew.
As A. E. Housman famously said, "Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act." I know what he meant. Instead of analyzing V, I read its quality off myself, the same way you can read the seismographic chart of an earthquake and know how strong it was. Or--to put it more simply--I knew how good V was because of the way it made me feel.
P.S. My fellow artsjournal.com blogger Tobi Tobias, who is no dummy, doesn't like V at all. To find out why, go here. I wasn't even slightly convinced, but you should definitely see what she says.
Posted August 08, 12:53 PM
And they never were
Some of my best friends are old crocks. No offense meant--I hope to be an old crock someday. Besides, I tend to think they're right when they grumble about how things ain't what they used to be. But if you're one of those Gershwin-loving Luddites who thinks nobody knows how to write a really smart song lyric anymore, kindly go here.Johnny Mercer it isn't, but I still can't get this song out of my head.
Posted August 08, 12:52 PM
Where's that curve?
Obviously, all of you know what a blog is, but am I right in supposing that some of you hadn't seen one prior to your first visit to "About Last Night"? I didn't invent arts blogging (see the right-hand column for further details), but when I started telling friends, acquaintances, and colleagues in the art world about my plans to launch www.terryteachout.com, I was struck by how many of them had never heard the word "blog," and thus had no idea of what I intended to do. Once they saw the site, they got it, but it was more difficult to explain than I expected.I know my experience is not unique, because I got an e-mail the other day from a writer friend who's been talking me up. "I mentioned ‘About Last Night' on a small AOL board," she told me, "and one woman admitted she had never heard of blogs before now."
My own feeling, for what it's worth, is that as the print media become increasingly obsessed with reaching the mass audiences necessary to keep them profitable, serious arts commentary and news coverage are destined to migrate to the Web, which is the ideal medium for niche marketing and niche journalism (and we arts-crazed folk are definitely a niche, though not the smallest one in the world, either).
That's why I started www.terryteachout.com--I wanted to get there first, or at least not last--and I'm glad you decided to come along for the ride. Stick around. (And while you're at it, see today's BuzzMachine for some provocative thoughts on the future of blogs, occasioned by the second birthday of InstaPundit.)
Posted August 08, 12:51 PM
It's my blog (and I'll post what I want to)
The book of my enemy has been remaindered/And I rejoice....If you've never read Clive James' exquisitely funny ode to professional schadenfreude, go here. It'll brighten your day, if not the whole weekend.
Posted August 08, 12:50 PM
Almanac
"I admit that it would never occur to me to ask a question of an electronic brain, chiefly because I'd be incapable of it. The interrogated electronic brain very quickly generates thousands, if not millions, of responses, and among those thousands of millions of responses, only one is right. Rather than bother with an extremely burdensome apparatus and spend months formulating a question, isn't it quicker to have a stroke of genius and find the right solution right away?"Olivier Messiaen, Olivier Messiaen: Music and Color
Posted August 08, 12:49 PM
The long day closes
"About Last Night" is on the air! What's more, I think I'm starting to figure out how to keep the top spinning without wearing out my wrist--this week was easier than last, and by next Friday I expect to be leaping tall buildings at a single bound. In the meantime, here are today's topics, from subjective to objective: (1) Meeting a masterpiece. (2) After Cole Porter, what? (3) Are you new to the blogosphere? If so, you're not alone. (4) A poem for the grossly impure of heart. (5) The latest almanac entry.Those of you who've been here from the start will remember that in my very first posting, I referred to this blog as an "experiment." So far, the experiment appears to be succeeding, but it still remains to be seen whether I can draw and hold an audience large enough to make a dent in the world of art. To do that, I need your help. Every time you tell a friend or colleague about "About Last Night," you're tossing a pebble into the pool. The Web amplifies the ripples. The next person you introduce to "About Last Night" could tell five more people about it, or 50--or post to a list that might bring in 500 new readers.
The address to remember is www.terryteachout.com. No matter what URL you're currently using, that one will always bring you here.
Spread the word.
Posted August 08, 1:00 AM
August 7, 2003
You can call me Tommy
We're over the hump of the week here at "About Last Night," the 24/7 arts blog, and I have goodies for you. Today's topics, from classic to modern: (1) Ground Zero, silly artists, and the strange case of the vanishing opera house. (2) Daffy Duck is one step closer to a mailbox near you. (3) Paul Taylor, free for the asking. (4) The latest almanac entry.I also have news for you, which is that "About Last Night" racked up more than 1,400 page views yesterday, an all-time record for this three-week-old site, though the numbers have been climbing every day since artsjournal.com installed a site meter. I guess it didn't hurt that Matt Lauer mentioned my Andy Warhol piece on Today, though I'm told he identified me as "Tom Teachout." (A friend writes: "The funny thing was, he made a specific comment that he hoped he was pronouncing your name right!") I also appreciate the many plugs from and links by my fellow bloggers. But of course the credit really belongs to all of you who visited yesterday and came back for more this morning....
You know what I'm going to say now, right? Well, do it. Life has no savor without www.terryteachout.com. How can you bear to see your friends go hungry?
P.S. Arnold who?
Posted August 07, 12:05 PM
What's the worst that could happen?
A reader writes, apropos of various recent postings about the possibility of New York City Opera's moving to a new house at or near Ground Zero:About the opera house on Ground Zero--I admire the idea, and would certainly think it moving. But really, how long would it be before some sort of play or production was put on commiserating with the plight of the poor oppressed hijackers? Or possibly a reading by some famous Jihadist poet? I'd love to see great art at Ground Zero, but the other possibilities make me fear the idea just as much as I love it.
Point taken. I myself have written testily on more than one occasion about what one might euphemistically call the wide-ranging responses of quarter-witted artists here and abroad to 9/11, and I've no doubt that somebody, somewhere, would dearly love to do just what my pessimistic correspondent fears most.
On the other hand, Paul Kellogg, who runs City Opera, is a man of taste, and I've also no doubt that anything he presented in a Ground Zero Memorial Opera House would be worth seeing--which doesn't necessarily mean that I'd like it, of course. But if I required artists to make only works of art with whose underlying premises I agreed, I'd be an unhappy soul indeed. Kellogg, for example, is a fan of Jake Heggie's operatic version of Dead Man Walking, which City Opera performed last season. I disagree, to put it mildly, but I also recognize that it's a serious piece of work (as opposed to, say, the bisected pigs of Damien Hirst), and so I respected his intentions in producing it. If I didn't--if I thought City Opera were in the hands of a cultural politician who didn't give a damn about beauty--I wouldn't be backing the company's plan to move to Ground Zero.
So I guess the smart-ass answer to this perfectly reasonable question would be something like Opera houses don't kill opera, opera directors do. Which is also a perfectly reasonable answer, when you think about it.
Posted August 07, 12:04 PM
Here goes, folks
The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, a four-CD set containing 56 extremely well-chosen Warner Bros. cartoons from the Forties and Fifties (plus a couple of gazillion DVD-type special features), is now available for pre-ordering on amazon.com. Click here to do so. It'll be on the street Oct. 28.The amazon.com page also contains a customer review from an animation fanatic with inside skinny:
It's hard to believe, but Warner Brothers is reportedly not sure that these cartoons can sell. This set is a test to see whether DVD collectors are in the market for Looney Tunes fully restored and presented with in-depth extras. If the set sells well, there will be more big boxes like this one, with still more cartoons (including earlier classics that are still in the process of restoration). If it doesn't sell, all we'll get is bare-bones samplers aimed at kids alone. So don't buy the bare-bones "Premiere Collection," a poorly presented kid-oriented release with no extras and only half of the cartoons on this set....Help make "The Looney Tunes Golden Collection" a best-seller and you'll not only be helping the cause of classic animation on DVD, you'll be getting some of the best comedy films ever produced, animated or live-action. You'll be getting fascinating extras and supplements. You'll be getting hours and hours of great entertainment. What could be better than getting great entertainment in a good cause? Buy this set, and if enough people do, we'll get to see more sets of Bugs, Daffy, and the rest, to enjoy at home as often as we want--and believe me, we'll want to watch it often.
Clearly, the Golden Collection is the set to buy. For a full table of contents that proves the point, go here. (And yes, I've put my money where my blog is.)
Posted August 07, 12:03 PM
Words to the wise
The Paul Taylor Dance Company will be performing for free next Tuesday and Wednesday at Damrosch Park, in between the Metropolitan Opera House and the New York State Theater, as part of the Lincoln Center Out of Doors series. Both performances start at eight p.m. For those of you who know about modern dance, that's all I need to say. (Did I mention the word free?)For everybody else, a word of explanation: Paul Taylor is the world's greatest living artist, irrespective of medium. I don't deny that I've been known on occasion to exaggerate, but I happily stand by every word of that high-octane statement. If you want further details, I wrote the foreword to the 1999 paperback reissue of Private Domain, Taylor's autobiography, in which I summed up my opinion of his work as concisely as possible. (Private Domain is a wonderful book, by the way, by far the best memoir ever written by a choreographer.) His dances are serious and funny, lyrical and frightening, harsh and poignant--sometimes by turns, sometimes all at once. If you've never seen any of them, go and be blessed.
P.S. Not to scare you off, but these are free performances, so try to get to Damrosch Park at least an hour before curtain time if you want to snag a halfway decent seat.
Posted August 07, 12:02 PM
Almanac
"All get what they want; they do not always like it."C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew
Posted August 07, 12:01 PM
August 6, 2003
Come on in, the champagne's fine
You are now entering "About Last Night," the blog where art is long and life is short. Pump up the volume--here come today's topics, from chromatic to diatonic: (1) The guilty pleasures of critical savagery. (2) Mistah Warhol--he dead. (3) Toward less boneheaded Hollywood journalism. (4) Brightness falls, accompanied by extremely cool music. (5) Don't let your mom clean out your closet if you're still in it. (6) More on Finding Nemo and modernism. (7) A complete guide to cartoon censorship. (8) "In the Bag" spreads like a cancer through the blogosphere. (9) Your daily snarkiness supplement. (10) The latest almanac entry.I'm still boggling at the bar graphs my site meter is spitting out. Heavy traffic ahead--especially if you tell a friend or three about www.terryteachout.com. What are you waiting for? Like I said, ars longa, vita brevis!
Posted August 06, 12:05 PM
Let's drop the big one (and see what happens)
A reader writes, apropos of last week's posting on vicious critics, in which I argued that "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." He thinks otherwise:Why not take pleasure in "dropping the big one" on works that are truly hateful? (I'm thinking of stuff like Ancient Evenings, the films of Ken Russell or Peter Greenaway, The Night Porter, Piss Christ.) These works present issues that go way beyond quality of execution. They are fundamentally anti-human, not to mention anti-art. As such, their infliction on the culture should evoke righteous anger and disgust from any critic with blood in his veins. As I see it, identifying the false, the mindless, or the pretentious (which so often are taken for the real thing) is no less important than heralding the beautiful and the wise--and should afford the critic no less satisfaction. Of course, I don't have in mind here works that are bad in a trivial or routine way. I'm speaking of stuff that is importantly or dangerously bad.
I think this is a fair distinction, and I won't deny that I smiled quietly as I piled up dynamite around, say, Franco Zeffirelli's Metropolitan Opera production of Carmen, with which I dealt rather summarily in the New York Daily News a few years ago:
The Met chorus covered itself with glory, but the orchestra was out of sorts, and James Levine conducted as if his mind were elsewhere. I sympathize: Mine was, too. I kept thinking, "Has everybody at the Met forgotten that 'Carmen' is a French opera?" Evidently so: Thursday's performance featured a German Carmen, a Spanish Don José, a Romanian Micaela, a Russian Escamillo and an Italian director. The results were as confused as the casting. Bizet's elegant, deadly opera is a feather-light soufflé with a pinch of cyanide; this production is a Wiener Schnitzel smothered in red sauce. Too bad the Met can't send it back to the kitchen.
That was fairly nasty, and we're not even talking anti-human anti-art, just a piece of gold-plated junk. So sue me. (No, don't.) But I will say this in my own defense: now that I mostly pick and choose my own assignments, I find I want to spend as little time as possible putting myself through hell on the aisle. I've come to feel that as a rule, the thing I do best is point people in the direction of that which and those whom I love. Let somebody else ice Piss Christ--I'd rather spend my remaining hours on earth telling you how beautiful The Open Window is, especially if you've never seen it before. In the long run, silence may be the most powerful form of negative criticism.
Incidentally, please don't bother to remind me of what I just said the next time you catch me beating up on a bad play in The Wall Street Journal. I mean, you don't have to sit through it, right?
P.S. For those youngsters who only know Randy Newman as a composer of sappy movie scores, he's had his moments, as the title of this post recalls.
Posted August 06, 12:04 PM
Birthday boy
Today is Andy Warhol's 75th birthday, and I noted the occasion in this morning's Wall Street Journal:Andy Warhol would have turned 75 today, had he been careless enough to live that long. Fortunately for him, he died in 1987, thus evading the sad fate of those superannuated pop stars who crumple into prune-faced reminders of the distant decade that spawned them. Mick Jagger is a walking joke now, but Warhol is still Warhol, young and decadent and way, way cool. When you think of the '60s, you think of him....
To read the rest of the piece, go here.
And yes, I know, it's really nasty.
Posted August 06, 12:03 PM
Elsewhere
I trolled through the blogosphere, and what did I see?Felix Salmon gently applies a buzzsaw to Newsweek's coverage of the next Harry Potter movie.
God of the Machine has a nice posting about Thomas Nashe's great poem "Summer's Last Will and Testament," source of the oft-quoted line "Brightness falls from the air," whose authenticity GOTM shrewdly questions. (Did you know, by the way, that Constant Lambert, my favorite chronically underrated composer, set this amazing poem to music?)
My Stupid Dog is up and blogging again with a posting about what happens when the very straight parents of a very gay graduate student pay a visit and give his apartment, haircut, eating habits, and bookshelves a makeover. It's called "Straight Eye for the Queer Guy," and it's really, really funny.
Forager 23 has some impressively well-informed reflections on last week's post about Finding Nemo and the problem of realism in animated cartoons.Speaking of which, here's a link to The Censored Cartoons Page, which I knew not. According to the author:
The following is a guide to the cuts and edits which have been rendered to the classic cartoons of Warner Brothers, MGM, Paramount, and other studios when broadcast on television...Gags that are deemed inappropriate for children, racist, violent, etc. are simply edited out of the affected cartoons. Here is a guide to these "lost" moments.
O.K., it's a bit obsessive, but interesting all the same.
Eve Tushnet and Modern Art Notes have taken "In the Bag" and run with it. I've created a monster!
Oh, yes, The Minor Fall, the Major Lift is as snarky as ever. And Maud Newton is as cool.
Posted August 06, 12:02 PM
Almanac
"I detest a man who knows that he knows."Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Holmes-Laski Letters
Posted August 06, 12:01 PM
August 5, 2003
Beat to quarters
Tuesday already? This looks like a job for "About Last Night," so let's cut right to today's topics, from port to starboard: (1) How to start a biography without really thinking. (2) PBS, enemy of high art. (3) A death sentence that didn't kill anybody (except maybe with laughter). (4) Bill Clinton's favorite film, and other exercises in megalomania. (5) The latest almanac entry.Big Brother, my site meter and traffic counter, tells me that you've been very good about introducing your friends to www.terryteachout.com. Keep it up. I know when you've been sleeping, I know when you're awake....
Posted