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September 30, 2003

True confessions

(1) It's been an open secret for several months now, but I'm one of the judges for this year's National Book Awards (I'm on the nonfiction panel). Our short list of nominees will be announced on October 7. We think we picked a very nice bunch of books.

(2) No, I didn't have anything to do with Stephen King's lifetime achievement award. I found out about it the same way you did.

(3) No, I don't have an opinion about the award, because I've never read anything by Stephen King (I don't much care for tales of horror). OGIC thinks you ought to have read at least some of his stuff before making up your mind about its quality (see below). I agree.

Fair enough?

Posted September 30, 12:11 PM

Almanac

"If one plays good music people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk."

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Posted September 30, 10:49 AM

Saved by the cavalress

I wrote until 7:44 this morning, then fell into bed for a quick nap before arising to polish the piece I'd written. Suddenly, I remembered the blog. What could I post about save my own exhaustion? But Our Girl in Chicago, God bless her, came riding in to save the day, or at least the morning. Thanks, friend. We'll try to get a mailbox set up for you as soon as possible (but until further notice, do what she says!).

As for the Adventures of Me, well, I wrote 2,500 words last night and early this morning, and now I'm going to polish them, and after that I'm going to write my "Second City" column for this Sunday's Washingon Post, and then I'm going to go see Heather Graham in Recent Tragic Events at Playwrights Horizons, accompanied by a noted blogger, and then...I'm probably going to go to bed and get something like a full night's sleep. Maybe. In between these events I'll pick up my freshly repaired iBook (I hope!), and at some point or two or three I'll post a little something for your delectation. And I might have lunch. And tomorrow I'll do it all over again, except for the part about having written all night.

In the meantime, scroll down if you haven't already and see what OGIC has to say. It's got to be better than anything I have to say right now.

Now excuse me while I go edit some copy.

Posted September 30, 10:16 AM

Age of improvement

In The Guardian, Philip Pullman laments the encroachment of overly mechanistic approaches on the teaching of writing to schoolchildren.

Colby Cosh sympathizes. He is "a bit alarmed, though, that Pullman's memories of outstanding pedagogic moments have no relation to technique--only self-expression," and reminds us that "one never does master the truly imperative matters of technique: the art of the comma, the command of the cornucopial English vocabulary, the dreaded parts of speech." And knowing when the time is ripe to coin a smart new word!

In fact, a quick trip to Webster's reveals the pre-coined "cornucopian," which sounds vaguely, um, zodiacal. And "cornucopious" would be redundant. Scoresheet says: Cosh 1, Webster 0, OGIC 0.

Posted September 30, 6:15 AM

Scratch one nightmare

The techies just called. My iBook is repaired, with all data intact!

Here's how busy I am: I have so many deadlines hitting in the next 48 hours that I probably won't have time to pick it up until tomorrow or the next day. (I have to sit here and write instead of going downtown to the computer hospital.) But at least I know it's fixed, with all data intact. Did I mention that I didn't lose any data?

Please don't expect an instantaneous return to normal around these parts, but between Our Girl and me, we'll do our best to keep you panting for more.

As I explained yesterday, it'll be a few days before I can start to check my blogmail again, but once I do, I'd be interested in knowing whether you prefer the old magazine-style package of early-morning posts or are equally happy with intermittent postings throughout the day, so long as they add up to a daily diet of comparable caloric value. Your thoughts?

Posted September 30, 5:12 AM

Elsewhere

This is the most haunting 9/11-related post I've run across. It's been lodged in my mind ever since I saw it on September 21. I meant to link to it right away, but forgot in the welter of pre-trip and hard-drive confusion. I remembered just now.

I'll be thinking of it when I go to see Recent Tragic Events later tonight. Anyone who dares to make art about 9/11 has to make it at least as eloquent as these few plain-spoken lines.

Posted September 30, 4:08 AM

Oops from OGIC

I was mistaken when I said last week that you could email me at "ourgirlinchicago...." That email address is a mere flimsy fiction.

However, I don't think Terry will mind if you write to me via his Arts Journal address--just make it easy on the poor guy and put "OGIC" in the subject line, would you?

Posted September 30, 3:53 AM

Scaring up a little history

Ever since the National Book Foundation announced that they would bestow their annual achievement award on Stephen King--and especially since Harold Bloom announced his ire about this--I've been plotting a response. Defenses of King have popped up in the meantime, for instance here and here. I couldn't tell whether this was a defense or not (the author plays both sides of the fence). None of them quite captured what is for me the essence of the case against Bloom.

Tonight, however, I found the response that entirely discharges me of the need to write what I think, because it perfectly reflects what I think. Needless to say, it's excellent! At his blog Easily Distracted, Timothy Burke notes the obvious but under-remarked fact that Harold Bloom has read little of King's work, if any:

The most important point is that...qualitative judgements are hard to make, not easy. They're the meat-and-potatoes business of literary criticism. They require a lot of laying of philosophical and intellectual foundations to make in general (which Bloom has done, though in ways I profoundly disagree with) but also a lot of labor in each and every specific case, which Bloom has not done.

And he proceeds to the gist of the matter:

The culture which matters most is not merely the culture that aesthetes praise as worthy, but the culture which indures, inspires, circulates, and is meaningful and memorable for many people, to the widest audiences. Sometimes that involves the adroit manipulation of archetypical themes and deep tropes of the popular culture of a particular time and place, and King does both of those things. I don't know how he'll be read a century from now, but I do know that in this time and place he not only tells a damn fine story (most of the time: even I would regard some of his work as hackwork) but manages to say some important things about consumerism, family, childhood, apocalyptic dread, obsession and many other resonant, powerful themes of his day and age.

This is a vastly greater level of articulation than I had approached in my thinking about this, which had gotten only about as far as invoking two nineteenth-century giants, Scott and Dickens. I once contemplated writing a dissertation about the careers of Sir Walter Scott and Henry James, which pretty quickly proved impracticable though the contemplating was great fun (a sad truism about dissertations). I remember musing that if such a comparative study were to extend into the twentieth century, the most logical place for it to lead would be, full-circle-wise, to King, a hugely popular and prolific storyteller like the Author of Waverley, with frequent recourse to the supernatural and a bead on, as Burke notes above, the "resonant, powerful themes of his day and age."

Scott was not consistently good and certainly is not regarded today with anything like the respect accorded the likes of James or George Eliot. But he thought up, and vividly put down, the stories that most captured the collective nineteenth-century imagination (and not just in England, either). He may be just the figure to shed some literary-historical light on King's achievement, whether you're inclined to understand it as artistic, commercial, or something in between.

Posted September 30, 2:40 AM

September 29, 2003

Not even close to normal

Boy, have things been complicated around here. As Our Girl in Chicago warned you on Friday, my hard drive crashed on Wednesday night, a few hours before I had to catch a plane to Raleigh to spend a long weekend looking at Carolina Ballet (about which much more later). My poor iBook is now in the hands of somebody competent, and I am now back in New York, blogging on a verrrry sloooow borrowed PowerBook and attempting to catch up with several tons of accumulated e-mail.

Given the technical difficulties likely to prevail around here for at least a few more days, not to mention the fact that I have four pieces due between now and Friday, all of which must be written on my verrrry sloooow borrowed PowerBook, there'll be some changes made in "About Last Night." To wit:

For the rest of the week, I'll be posting entries not in my usual exqusitely well-organized magazine-type style (i.e., five or six items posted shortly after midnight), but whenever I can grab a few spare minutes to write and publish something on the fly.

During that time, Our Girl in Chicago, without whom Thursday and Friday simply wouldn't have happened, will chime in whenever the spirit moves her, in addition to doing all of Friday's postings. (She's way cool, isn't she?)

Now for some housekeeping details, aimed mainly but not exclusively at those readers who know me personally:

(1) For the moment, I don't have access to my address files, meaning e-mail and snail mail. If you are someone with whom I communicate regularly via e-mail, please send me a quick note (not through the blog, please) so that I will have your address. (And don't assume that I have your telephone number, either!)

(2) Like I said, this computer is sloooow, so I won't be making any serious attempt to answer my blogmail until next week, if then. Sorry.

Thanks very much for your patience during the continuing crisis. I'll do my best to make sure "About Last Night" remains readable throughout the week. Among other things, I'll be reporting to you on the latest from Carolina Ballet as soon as I get my feet back on the ground, plus a running account of my adventures in playgoing (I've got two shows on tap for this week), a sneak peak at the Metropolitan Museum's El Greco retrospective, and pretty much whatever else I can knock out in between deadlines.

As for the witty and beautiful Our Girl in Chicago, allow me to quote from one of the 200-odd e-mails that awaited me on my return from North Carolina:

great move re chicago girl. doesn't matter who it is. just the notion that some r. crumb-like wonderwoman in a mini is pounding out arts criticism from chi while llistening to san-fran rock is enough to keep 'em coming.

Heh heh heh.

Catch you later today.

P.S. Send me an e-mail ASAP, Our Girl. I don't even have your address!

Posted September 29, 12:40 PM

In the bag (believe it or not!)

Hard drive or no hard drive, it's time again for "In the Bag," the game that challenges you to admit what you like, as opposed to what you'd like other people to think you like.

The rules: you can put any five works of art into your bag before departing for a desert island, but you have to decide right this second. No dithering: the body snatchers are banging on your front door. No posturing: you have to say the first five things that pop into your head, no matter how embarrassing they may sound. What do you stuff in the bag?

Here are my picks, as of this second:

BOOK: David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

SCULPTURE: Constantin Brancusi, Portrait of Nancy Cunard (Sophisticated Young Lady)

POP ALBUM: Liz Phair, Whip-Smart

PLAY: Noël Coward, Present Laughter

STANDARD: Rodgers and Hart, Glad to Be Unhappy (as sung by Wesla Whitfield)

How about you?

Posted September 29, 12:37 PM

Almanac

"Nothing is so poor and melancholy as an art that is interested in itself and not in its subject."

George Santayana, The Life of Reason

Posted September 29, 9:57 AM

Elsewhere

I'm only just starting to catch up with my fellow bloggers. Here are some things that caught my eye.

Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes shares two of my own pet peeves--and tells me something I didn't know:

What is it with galleries and price lists? Why are the prices of work on display a state secret? In New York the law dictates that galleries must have a list of the prices of the work on view available for anyone who comes into the gallery. (Yes, NYC galleries frequently ignore the law. I don't know what the law is in other states.) At one San Francisco gallery last week getting a list of works in the show (which included prices) was something that required a gallery staff meeting. Absurd. Can you imagine the same policy being in effect at Wal-Mart?...

When the Hirshhorn started its "Gyroscope" hanging by just saying no to wall text, nearly every critic who wrote about the show (me included) was thrilled that the art was allowed to talk without curatorial trap-flapping. Sadly wall text has crept into the show: There is now a tedious biographical wall text about Giorgio Morandi in the previously brilliant Morandi gallery. God forbid anyone would just happily look at the paintings and then Google the artist when they get home.

Megan McArdle (who blogs at Asymmetrical Information) wrote a provocative piece for Tech Central Station about what ought to be built--or not--at Ground Zero:

If I were in charge of the site, I would make it a simple sheet of grass, with flat stones set into the earth to mark the outlines of the missing buildings. There would be no other memorial on the site but the shape of what was absent; if you must have a statue or some such, you can put it next to the site of 7 World Trade Center, which is already being rebuilt. But on the site itself, just a grassy space, with enough room for people to reconstruct the site in their imaginations if they wish--and enough room for those who don't so wish to sit on the grass and enjoy life's short moments in the sun....

Are we "letting the Confederacy win" because there are no longer farms at Gettysburg? We don't have to show the South they haven't licked us by painstakingly reconstructing a reasonable facsimile of what was there before; we showed them that by winning the war. It is losers who have to put a good face on things and pretend that nothing has changed, because their puffed-up ego is all they have left. If we smash al-Qaeda, I don't think we need to be afraid to show the world that the loss of more than 3,000 innocent lives has caused us unutterable pain.

And the indispensable Erin O'Connor of Critical Mass tells a few hard truths about her profession:

I have often had occasion to say to students that the things that draw them to advanced literary study--a love of learning, a love of literature, a deep desire to share those loves with students through teaching--are not the things that drive most English professors, and have next to nothing to do with what they would be expected to do in graduate school and beyond. The student who enters grad school intent on becoming a traditional humanist is the student who will be labelled as hopelessly unsophisticated by her peers and her professors. She will also be labelled a conservative by default: she may vote democratic; may be pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, and anti-gun; may possess a palpably bleeding heart; but if she refuses to "politicize" her academic work, if she refuses to embrace the belief that ultimately everything she reads and writes is a political act before it is anything else, if she resists the pressure to throw an earnest belief in an aesthetic tradition and a desire to address the transhistorical "human questions" out the window in favor of partisan theorizing and thesis-driven advocacy work, then she is by default a political undesirable, and will be described by fellow students and faculty as a conservative. She will become untouchable, mockable, and literally unsupportable. She will have a hard time finding people to work with, a harder time getting good letters of recommendation, and may feel that she is being drummed out of the work she is called to do by people who are using that work for profoundly other, self-serving ends.

What would we do without blogs?

Posted September 29, 9:51 AM

Crossed digits

The computer wizards say I should have my iBook back some time tomorrow. Alas, I'm so fraught with urgently pressing deadlines that it may take a full day before I have enough time to make the switch (and I haven't yet heard how much data was lost in the crash). But I'm hopeful.

"About Last Night" will stay on the same as-it-happens posting routine for the remainder of the week. Our Girl in Chicago hasn't had a chance to return to the fray yet, but she should be back some time in the next 24 hours or so. I checked the site meter for last Friday and saw that traffic actually went up during her tenure! (Very slightly, yes, but up is up.) I'm glad you liked her. I sure do.

Posted September 29, 5:47 AM

Look, leap, listen

Apropos of my most recent posting on Zankel Hall and its critics, I got this e-mail last week from Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker. I couldn't post it until now because of the black smoke coming out of the hard drive of my iBook:

A friendly riposte re: Zankel. Is it fair to judge the acoustics on the basis of the preview concert alone? I'd be especially wary of measuring the hall's suitability for amplified music solely on the basis of the Kenny Barron Quintet's brief performance. Yes, their full show that weekend was noisy and unfocused. But Omar Sosa was another matter--cool, crisp sound. Perhaps Mr. Barron simply didn't have an adequate setup.

I've Zankled nine times so far, and my perceptions keep changing. The subway noise, which annoyed me last week, is bothering me less. The acoustics are still weird, but I'm discovering that the aisle seats in the orchestra, where the critics are clumped, are among the worst. Best are the middle seats of the orchestra and the side seats in the balcony. The problem is that the stage lacks a good reflective shell behind it--"revenge of Merkin Hall," I heard one composer say--so the sound seems to gel only in certain places. A couple of butt-ugly buffers on the side might help. However, to judge from comments overheard, casual listeners are totally unperturbed by all these issues. They like the place. So do I.

As for the multi-culti programming, I think you're overlooking the hall's usefulness as a filter for those who are baffled by the sheer superfluity of choices out there. BAM has long functioned in the same way--as a taste agent that people have grown to trust. The opening weekend worked because we trusted John Adams, the man responsible for the programming, and he put on a briliant tour of the musical horizon. The reliance on Nonesuch in the opening season is another canny use of the filter function. The crucial question is whether Zankel can maintain this level of interest, or whether it will devolve toward classical Dullsville.

Looking back over my original postings, I don't think I was quite so categorical in my comments on the acoustics as Alex implies, but beyond that I think he is talking a good deal of sense. I have no doubt that everybody's perceptions of Zankel Hall will change over time and with further exposure--or, to put it another way, we'll all get used to the place, and come to see at least some of its characteristic features not as unpleasant surprises but as...well, characteristic features. This is even true of a phenomenon so seemingly "objective" as acoustics, and it'll be even truer as more artists perform with amplification, thereby creating a sonic track record for the managers to draw on.

For what it's worth (though I can't name names), I recently had a chat with a jazz musician slated to perform in the hall later this season who came away from Brad Mehldau's concert feeling considerable anxiety about the acoustics--especially as they affect drummers. Time will tell, and it will also tell whether Zankel is able to establish itself as a center for consistently imaginative programming or will deteriorate into "classical Dullsville." I like Alex's point about halls serving as filters and trustworthy "taste agents" for the public--though of course that doesn't happen very often.

In retrospect, I fear that I was writing too much as the jaded insider who's Heard It All. It's true that the people who book concert-hall performances in New York rarely surprise me anymore, but then it's my business to know what's going on. In any case, I'm obliged to Alex for reminding me of some things that seem to have slipped my mind in the usual rush to judgment. Blogging has a way of doing that to you, but it also makes it possible for you to think twice, and three and four times, in public. I hope I'll have thought a lot more times than that about Zankel Hall before I'm finally done.

Posted September 29, 4:55 AM

Thomas Crown, call your office

I just got back from the press view of the Metropolitan Museum's El Greco retrospective, which opens next Tuesday and will be up through Jan. 11. It's the first major museum retrospective of El Greco's work in 20 years, and if I may be so bold as to use a word tarnished by excessive handling, it is awesome. At the same time, the scale of the show is unexpectedly reasonable: it contains 70 pieces, a surprisingly modest number for a blockbuster-type show, small enough that you can see the individual paintings rather than being steamrollered by them. The wall labels are informative and (mostly) unobtrusive, and to my amateur's eye the show was quite effectively hung.

The curatorial emphasis is on El Greco's modernity (several of the labels contain miniature reproductions of El Greco-influenced paintings by Cézanne, Picasso, and Jackson Pollack), an approach which is at the same time obvious and appropriate. Even now, you can't help but be struck by the non-realistic distortions of El Greco's late devotional paintings, which all but quiver with a harrowing, desperate intensity that leaps across the intervening centuries to speak directly to those of us born in what W.H. Auden so famously called the Age of Anxiety. (I always think of El Greco in connection with Don Carlo Gesualdo, the Italian composer of Renaissance madrigals whose harmonic extremism similarly breathes the air of modern times.) Yet the show isn't locked into its own preconceptions: in fact, the gallery I liked best was devoted to secular portraits, including an exquisite cardboard miniature on loan from the Hispanic Society of America.

It makes no sense to speak of "highlights." This retrospective is so rich that one comes away feeling as if all the museums of the world had been stripped of their very best El Grecos solely for the delectation of the connoisseurs of New York and London (where "El Greco" will travel next February). Still, I know which painting I would have stuck In the Bag had the guards been looking the other way. Two different versions of "The Adoration of the Name of Jesus" (catalogue nos. 22 and 23) hang side by side in the third gallery, one a medium-large oil on canvas whose festive colors and crowded composition put me in mind of Florine Stettheimer's designs for the first production of the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts. The other is a much smaller version of the same scene which El Greco may have painted in order to hang in his own studio. It's more immediate, more arresting, more concentrated. That one wins the blue ribbon, at least as far as I'm concerned. I mean to go back several times to look at it, though there are several other works with which I want to spend more time, including the three show-stopping icons displayed in vitrines in the first gallery (one of which will only be on display for the first six weeks of the exhibition, all the more reason to go early and often).

What about crowds? Well, the press view was jammed, so I'm assuming that the public will be coming in droves, especially since you don't need a special ticket (your regular Met admission fee lets you in whenever the museum is open). But I wouldn't be altogether surprised if "El Greco" doesn't draw quite so many visitors as, say, the Met's Vermeer-and-friends exhibition of a few years ago, if only because El Greco is not, to put it mildly, an easy artist.

I'll update you on the crowd situation once the show has been open for a few weeks. For the moment, I'd do my best to go on a weekday morning if at all possible. But even if you have to see it on a Sunday afternoon, make "El Greco" your very first priority. You won't find it comfortable, but you'll never forget it.

Posted September 29, 1:06 AM

September 27, 2003

More on Plimpton

I like this remembrance, too.

And a friend emails:

You just know...

George: Ed! Great to see you! Listen, I'm starting a little journal, and I'd love to have something from you for the first issue.

Ed: Uh, George, can I have a week or two to get settled here?

Like I said, unsinkable.

Posted September 27, 11:38 AM

September 26, 2003

Good morning from Chicago...

...and thanks for stopping by in Terry's absence! You did remember that Terry would be absent and OGIC sitting in, didn't you? Of course you did.

Since Terry was kind enough to introduce me yesterday, I'm not going to say too much up here. A newcomer to blogging, I've been discovering that it involves long stretches of not knowing what to write, punctuated by long stretches of not knowing when to shut up. This seems like as good an opportunity as any to rein it in.

But before I quiet down and move along, I do need to cover a few items. First, the unthinkable happened last night and Terry's hard drive crashed! It's getting the best possible attention while he's in North Carolina, and the prognosis is guardedly optimistic. This may result in a few breaks in the About Last Night routine next week, but this blog will be open for business in some form. So please check in Monday for an update.

Second, I'm hoping to update the page throughout today, with fresh links and quick posts every little while, so do check back with me later.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I have so far, and I hope to hear from some of you. I think you can email me at ourgirlinchicago@artsjournal.com. But there's only one way to find out for sure...

Posted September 26, 1:59 AM

Didja hear the one about 9/11?

Terry (remember him?) asked me to let you know that he reviewed Omnium Gatherum and Bill Irwin's The Harlequin Studies in this morning's Wall Street Journal. Here's the first paragraph:

As I watched "Omnium Gatherum," the satirical play about 9/11 that opened last night at the Variety Arts Theatre, a fractured Bible verse ran through my head: It is impossible but that 9/11 plays will come; but woe to them, through whom they come! On the one hand, many American playwrights feel a near-irresistible itch to write about current events, and given the fact that the most significant event of the current century took place four miles south of the theater district, it stood to reason that plays about it would follow as the sparks flew upward. (Another one, "Recent Tragic Events," opens Sunday.) On the other hand, few American playwrights have anything thoughtful to say about current events, so it also stands to reason that most such plays are bound to be pretty awful. "Omnium Gatherum" sure is....

No link, as usual, so go out and buy a copy of the Journal, why dontcha? It only costs a dollar!

Posted September 26, 1:58 AM

Running into a poet

So you're walking along a city street, minding your own business, and you run smack into Robert Hass or Seamus Heaney. Quick, what do you do? Realistically, if you're 99.9% of the population, including me, you look daggers at the guy and go away swearing under your breath.

If you're me and if by some miracle you do recognize one of the best-read poets of our time, you probably--knowing me--help him up, dust him off, and scamper away red-faced.

Not so Sheri Donatti, the artist-girlfriend Anatole Broyard shared an apartment with as recounted in his lean, zippy Greenwich Village memoir Kafka Was the Rage. On West Fourth Street in 1946, Sheri crashed into W.H. Auden:

She fell backward, and as she did, she grabbed Auden around the neck and they went down together, with him on top.... She clung to Auden, who was sprawled in her arms. He tried desperately to rise, scrabbling with his hands and his espadrilles on the floor. He was babbling incoherently, apologizing and expostulating at the same time, while she smiled at me over his shoulder, like a woman dancing.

Besides making me laugh, this passage always strikes me in two sobering ways. First, it takes for granted the celebrity of poets. Second, it seems to presciently emblematize the way poetry readers find themselves, more and more, holding onto the form and its cultural currency for dear life.

Poets, of course, have some control over their own cultural currency. We can argue (and probably will, eventually) about whether Buffy the Vampire Slayer is art, but this poem by Stephen Burt (it's the second of three on the page), inspired by BTVS, certainly is. You should read Burt's fine Randall Jarrell biography, too.

Posted September 26, 1:57 AM

The trouble with readings

I don't have a history of enjoying literary readings. Maybe it's the perfectly excusable deficiency of many writers as performers. Maybe it's my slavery to the modern way of treating reading as a solitary, private activity (preferably conducted under a nice warm comforter, as far as I'm concerned) and a positive respite from other people, rather than a nineteenth-century, communal, gather-round-the-fireplace sort of affair.

Whatever it is, I just don't have fun at these events. A semi-recent exception was a mesmerizing reading by Kathleen Finneran from her exquisite memoir The Tender Land two years ago--great not because she's a master thespian but because her book is so astonishingly powerful and personal, and she was as much under its spell as any of us in the audience.

After that I didn't want to press my luck--until this Wednesday, when I decided to attend a neighborhood reading by a certain torrid young writer whose first book was pretty great and who just published her first novel. Here I relearned my lesson.

Things started 20 minutes late. The mike did not work. We were in the back row and could hear just enough, before we reluctantly bolted, to divine that: 1) the professor who was introducing the author had bought her novel a few days earlier and read half of it; 2) he thought it was o.k. to admit this in front of the author and a few hundred people; and 3) he wasn't going to cede the stage anytime soon. The last straw came when he started reading from the novel, which could tend to, you know, be redundant with the reading itself. It was the sort of thing that could put you off readings for life...

Posted September 26, 1:56 AM

But hope springs eternal

Despite this fresh catastrophe, I may yet turn up to hear Charles Baxter read from his new novel Saul and Patsy next week, and if you're in my neck of the woods you should consider attending too. I met Baxter half a lifetime ago when he graciously came to speak to the staff of my high school's literary magazine. Harmony of the World and Through the Safety Net provided some of the first contemporary short stories that I really loved. The lead story in Harmony of the World has a delicious first paragraph that should give all of Terry's music-loving readers (are you still out there?) a good bracing shudder:

While Kate practiced the piano in the tiny third-floor apartment, Wiley cooked dinner, jogging in place in front of the stove. His feet made the pans clatter, and, after twenty minutes of exercise, he began to hyperventilate. He stopped, took his pulse, then continued, jogging to the spice rack, to the refrigerator's butter shelf, then back to the stove. The air smelled of cumin, chicken stock, and tomatoes--something Mexican. The noise was terrible. He knocked over a spatula. A bottle of soda fell into the catfood dish. Worse yet, he hummed tunes from his high school prom days, melodies like "Call Me Mister Blue" and "Dream Lover," in a nasal, plaintive whine. The noise diverted Kate's attention and broke her Schubert sonatas into small pieces of musical trash.

I'm eager to return to Baxter after a long time away. He is part of the reason I still keep up with short story collections despite a growing preference for novels. I just wait for the paperbacks and hope for something as startling and transcendent as, say, Adam Johnson's Emporium.

Posted September 26, 1:55 AM

Q. What are bunnies run amok?

A. The faunal feature common to Chicago's Grant Park and the airports of Paris, of course.

Posted September 26, 1:53 AM

Carnage in Chicago

In my quest to smuggle sports news into About Last Night disguised as arts news, I get a little help from Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin this week. Living in the vicinity of several Frank Lloyd Wright houses (there's one I pass daily on the way to work), I took interest in the recent discussion about the habitability of his homes, especially this vivid report from the front lines. But Wright and domestic architecture aren't the ones getting buildings on the front page in Chicago these days.

It's the stadium, stupid--and Pulitzer winner Kamin rightly damns the rebuilt Soldier Field, age-old home of Chicago's pro football team, in an aesthetically incensed review, shot through with a healthy dose of populism. Aside from "visual carnage," "a hideous compromise," and "a horrific eyesore," he finds it to be something like the opposite of a Wright house: hell on the outside observer, but comfy-cozy for the lucky few who get to sit inside. You can see it for yourself on the next installment of Monday Night Football, when the Bears will break in their controversial new digs against the Green Bay Packers. It will be interesting to try to determine how tight a muzzle the NFL will have put on the ABC commentators, who might not be able to recognize a blot on the landscape when they see one anyway.

Posted September 26, 1:53 AM

Serve it forth

It's great news that Julie Powell, the woman who cooked everything in Julia Child's legendary tome Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year flat, cursing all the way, now has a book contract. It's even better news that the contract is what she calls an "obscene" one. You can still read "The Julie/Julia Project" on line in the archives of Julie's blog, even though she accomplished her mission earlier this month. I originally went to the site for the cooking but stayed--and stayed and stayed--for the writing. Julie is irreverent, irrepressible, and insightful about much more than just clafoutis and kidneys. Read her before her new publisher makes her pull the archives!

If it comes to that, of course, there's always the unmatchable M.F.K. Fisher to help you bide the time.

Posted September 26, 1:52 AM

The two West Wings?

New York Times writer Bill Carter two days ago on "The West Wing":

Mr. Sorkin had gained a reputation as an idiosyncratic creative mind whose writing--full of intricate, dense dialogue spoken by unusually intelligent and passionate characters--was unique to television.

And, Wall Street Journal critic Dorothy Rabinowitz today, comparing Rob Lowe's new series "The Lion's Den" to his old one, the selfsame "West Wing":

Mr. Lowe should be feeling quite at home with...the familiar beat of sniffy one-liners being batted out among members of the law firm's staff--all much like the verbal potshots pinging and ponging and generally passing as human speech in "The West Wing."

Are these critics watching the same show? Under close reading, actually, their characterizations of the show's dialogue aren't all that far apart--it's just that Carter appears to think that unrealistic dialogue is some kind of achievement.

Posted September 26, 1:48 AM

A literary Lion, literally

George Plimpton seemed as unsinkable as anyone. As shocking as it was to hear this morning of his death, it was almost as surprising to realize that he was 76. I call it surprising not because I expected him to be much younger, but because his protean identity made him someone I never thought of as having a particular age at all.

If the first obituaries are any indication, it will be first and foremost as the author of Paper Lion that Plimpton is remembered. It's no mean distinction, and the book is well worth revisiting. But you could do worse, too, than to visit the Paris Review and remember Plimpton in the round.

UPDATE: Sports blogger extraordinaire Eric McErlain has a nice tribute.

Posted September 26, 1:16 AM

September 25, 2003

Enough about me

As you know, I won't be here tomorrow--I am, in fact, leaving town later today to fly down to Raleigh, N.C., to spend the weekend snarfing down barbecue and looking at Carolina Ballet--and since it happens that I'll also be gone twice more after that, speechifying in Connecticut and St. Louis, I had the bright idea of inviting one of my faithful guest bloggers to run things on Fridays for the next three weeks.

To this end, I have handed the keys to Our Girl in Chicago. Beneath her cloak of pseudonymity, Our Girl (who lives, duh, in Chicago) is a sweet and lovely young thing, wise and good, who...but why listen to me? Here's the Girl herself:

OGIC is a thirty-something dilettante (in the best sense of the word, she hopes) with experience as an editor, critic, graduate student, and teacher. Naturally drawn to the medium-hot centers of this world, she is a fierce advocate of her adopted Second City but still feels at home when she visits her one-time stomping grounds of Manhattan. A serious media addiction helps her keeps close tabs on the red-hot from her comfy but happening city by the lake. She worries she should shoulder more guilt about her guilty pleasures--which include pro hockey, cop and lawyer shows, Las Vegas, and the colorful adventures of Travis McGee--but they're all just so damn pleasurable. More presentably, she's into Romantic poetry, Henry James, landscape painting, modern dance (with and without shoes, if you know what she means), and Edward Gorey. But she's not always sure she doesn't have some of those items in the wrong column.

OGIC's blogging may, how shall we say, somewhat leaven the mix here at "About Last Night" with more pop culture and specifically Buffy references--well, she'll try to keep those under control. Besides the inevitable fluff, OGIC will blog a lot about literary topics: writing, reading, publishing, reviewing, history, reputations. She's especially excited about using ABL as a venue for enthusing out loud about overlooked or forgotten books that she loves. That said, she's certainly not above the occasional snipe (no, she's not using that other s-word) when sniping is called for--and let's face it, sometimes it really is called for.

See what I mean?

The rest of today's posts are mine, but Our Girl in Chicago will be taking charge at 12:01 tonight, and all postings committed on Friday will be entirely her fault. (Aside from being more charmingly written than mine, OGIC's postings will be signed "ourgirlinchicago," just as mine are signed "terryteachout.")

I'll be back on Monday morning, slightly the worse for wear but as aesthetic as ever. In the meantime...you go, Girl!

Now for today's topics, from tremulous to self-confident: (1) Fading photographs. (2) Ronald Reagan, man of letters. (3) Somebody else's bag. (4) The latest almanac entry.

Over to you, OGIC! I'm out of here....

Posted September 25, 12:05 PM

Going, going

Courtesy of artsjournal.com, my invaluable host, a story from The Art Newspaper about a problem rarely considered by anyone other than museum conservators:

All colour photographs fade. According to best estimates, the average colour print has a shelf life of about 200 years. Now, in Basel, Switzerland, the Cesar Foundation, chaired by Claudio Cesar, an American photography collector who runs a company that specialises in coloured glass is trying to reverse this deterioration....

The problem is that the materials of c-print colour photography, chemical reactants which create the image, are complex organic compounds which are unstable and decompose over a long period. Unlike the constituents of black and white photographs or oil paints, the ingredients of c-prints continue to undergo chemical reactions in perpetuity rather than stabilise....

The Cesar Foundation is proposing a two-part solution. First, photographs should be stored in digital form, so that a new copy can be printed when the original fades. Second, the foundation's scientists have invented a software programme and device that scans non-digital, "normal" colour photographs which have aged, and then prints off a version which restores the original colour.

(To read the whole thing, go here.)

I almost hate to bring up Frank Lloyd Wright again, but reading this story made me think of Fallingwater, the Wright house whose conservators have had to work fearfully hard to keep from collapsing. Commenting on this in an earlier post, I asked, "Is a great painting less great because it makes use of innovative but chemically unstable pigments that change over time?" I had at the back of my mind the awkward but undeniable fact--astutely pointed out by the neo-Thomist philosopher Etienne Gilson in his remarkable little book Painting and Reality--that all paintings are evanescent, due in the fullness of time first to fade, then to disintegrate. This basic fact of art is one nobody likes to admit, much less think about. A similar discomfort is now inspiring choreographers and their companies to struggle mightily (and honorably, though not always successfully) to preserve dances far beyond what once would have been their normal life span. It has also led museum conservators to engage in heroic acts of preservation--and, not infrequently, in ill-considered acts of mutilation.

Exactly what are such folk trying to preserve? Sometimes it's all too clear that a collector's interests are fiduciary--that he wants to maintain the value of an object for which he may have paid dearly. More often, though, I think their intentions are reasonably pure. If we think a house or painting or photograph or ballet is beautiful, we want it with us always. But the catch is that the more pieces of the past we succeed in preserving, the less space and time we have in which to display and contemplate the present. Too many lovers of art live exclusively in the past. I understand the temptation--I feel it myself--but it strikes me that we have an obligation to keep one eye fixed in the moment, and that becomes a lot harder to do when you're pulling a long, long train of classics of which the new is merely the caboose. Needless to say, this is a problem without a solution. The only thing you can do is fiddle with the proportions and try to get them right, or at least righter.

For what it's worth, I currently own 13 pieces of visual art, all but two of them works on paper--etchings, lithographs, screenprints. Of these, six are by living artists, two of whom I know. I won't say that's a perfect average, but I do think I've put at least some of my money where my mouth is.

Posted September 25, 12:04 PM

A thousand holographs

I've been looking through Reagan: A Life in Letters, a book whose publication will no doubt startle a lot of people unaware that Ronald Reagan was the most prolific presidential correspondent of modern times. I'm not talking about the kind of "letter" produced in batch lots by a team of secretaries equipped with autopens, either. Of the 1,100 letters in this 934-page book, some 80% were written by hand, another 15% dictated. The editors had "over 5,000 genuine Reagan letters" to choose from, and they estimate that another 5,000 or so have yet to surface.

Put aside for a moment your opinion of Reagan (either way) and think instead about the implications of those numbers. Speaking as a biographer, I can assure you that this is an extraordinarily large number of letters to have been written by any public figure, much less one who wasn't a professional writer--though Reagan, as it happens, spent a number of years writing his own speeches, radio commentaries, and syndicated columns, and would also have been perfectly capable of writing his own memoirs without assistance had he been so inclined. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any other 20th-century president who left behind so large a body of informal writing, and few who wrote as much in any medium. Theodore Roosevelt, probably Nixon, possibly Calvin Coolidge (who was, believe it or not, the best by-his-own-hand presidential prose stylist in modern times), and...who else? Nobody comes to mind.

On paper, Reagan was unselfconscious, fluent, surprisingly candid, and rarely eloquent--most of his best-remembered speeches were written by other people, and I doubt that anything in Reagan: A Life in Letters will make it into the next edition of Bartlett's. Still, I have no doubt whatsoever that his next biographer will quarry this volume assiduously. I'm about to start work on a biography of another non-writer, Louis Armstrong, who left behind a large body of correspondence, and I can tell you that the existence of Armstrong's letters (of which several hundred have been preserved) is one of the main reasons why I decided to write a book about him. It's hard to write about the great jazz musicians of the past precisely because they rarely left behind that kind of material. Unless they happened to be interviewed on tape by intelligent, well-informed journalists (of which there aren't nearly enough) or deposed for oral-history projects, we have few if any reliable documents of the way they expressed themselves off stage. We only know them from their work, and while that's the most important thing, it doesn't tell you everything a biographer wants and needs to know.

Beyond this, of course, the mere fact that Reagan chose to put so much energy, even as president, into corresponding with friends, colleagues, and plain old pen pals is fascinating in and of itself. So is the introduction to Reagan: A Life in Letters, in which the editors describe his letter-writing routine in some detail. As I worked on The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, I never ceased to be astonished by the sheer volume of Mencken's correspondence, and I couldn't help but wonder how he managed to churn out so many letters while simultaneously functioning as a full-time writer. I'm even more mystified that Reagan wrote all those personal letters--most of them by hand--while serving as president.

I also can't help but wonder how the next generation of biographers will approach the next generation of subjects, now that e-mail has essentially replaced snail mail (and now that public officials are routinely warned not to keep diaries for fear that they'll be subpoenaed in court cases). I wonder, too, whether there will ever again be so self-revealing a politician as Ronald Reagan, though that seems an odd word to use about a man whose colleagues all found him difficult to know. Peggy Noonan thought so, too, and offered a plausible explanation of his opaqueness in her deft life of Reagan, When Character Was King:

Ronald Reagan once had deep friendships and close friends. He had men who knew all about him, but by the time he'd reached the presidency they were dead. He'd outlived them.

True enough, I suspect, but not the whole truth. Could it be that Reagan was simply more comfortable writing to people than talking to them? I don't know--I never met him--but henceforth, anyone who tries to make sense of Reagan the man will have to start by explaining the very existence of these letters.

Posted September 25, 12:03 PM

Other people's bags

Not only has the cancer that is "In the Bag" spread to numerous other blogs, but Sean Nelson, one of my faithful readers, has taken to playing solitaire and sending me the results. I particularly liked his latest list:

CLASSICAL CD: Pablo Casals, Bach Cello Suites

POP SONG: Etta James, All I Could Do Was Cry

PAINTING: Paul Klee, Ancient Sound, Abstract on Black

FILM: Baz Luhrmann, Strictly Ballroom

BOOK: Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

Any number can play.

Posted September 25, 12:02 PM

Enough already!

To all of you who wrote identifying "Today's Installment" as Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find, my congratulations. (I even lured a couple of fellow bloggers out of the woodwork!) If I do this again, I'll choose something considerably trickier.

A special prize for sheer unscrupulousness goes to Kevin Joyce, who wrote:

Doesn't everyone know about Google now? I found the author, and story, in ten seconds by typing "orange sports section" and clicking Search. Not to take anything away from Ms. Carew et al., but next time, please keep us honest and find an unGooglable source.

What a scamp.

By the way, nobody wrote to say that they remembered the one-sentence-at-a-time serialization of Ulysses in The New Yorker. I can't even begin to tell you how old that makes me feel.

Posted September 25, 12:01 PM

Almanac

"Admiration, n.: Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves."

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Posted September 25, 12:01 PM

September 24, 2003

Quick, before it melts

Things are silting up here as I prepare for my long weekend in Raleigh (I have two more pieces to write before I can get on the plane and go), so I'll be keeping it fairly short. Today's topics, from testy to zesty: (1) Zankel Hall reviewed--by other people. (2) "Today's Installment" explained, sort of. (3) Today's installment. (4) Last night's playlist. (5) The latest almanac entry.

You know what I want. You know who you are. You know what to do.

Posted September 24, 12:06 PM

Zankel-o-meter

I haven't been back to Zankel Hall since the media preview concert--unlike the music critics, I have other things to do--but I've been keeping a close eye on what's been written about New York City's newest concert hall since it opened a couple of weeks ago. Generally speaking, the reviews accord pretty well with what I said about the hall here and on NPR's Performance Today. In brief, most critics like the design but are variously skeptical about the acoustics. Beyond that, the consensus is all over the place, sort of like a drunken ballerina.

Unlike certain well-known bloggers, I'm disinclined to trash my print-media colleagues (I have to live with them, after all), but I do want to make a few, ahem, general observations about what's been written up to now:

(1) Most critics have discussed the appearance of the hall without attempting to evaluate its functionality. Were the seats comfortable? Are the aisles wide enough? How hard is it to get in and out of the place? Will the interior design wear well--and does it seem to have any effect on the perceived acoustics? These folk are henceforth on Double Secret Probation, and will be watched closely for further signs of shortsightedness.

(2) A few critics had nothing whatsoever to say about the acoustics, or commented on them without drawing any distinction between the differing responses of the hall to amplified and unamplified sound. These clowns get the Lifetime Booby Prize--a dunce hat, nailed on their heads--and are permanently disqualified from any further discussion of Zankel Hall.

(3) Most critics (but not all!) at least mentioned the subway noise that leaks into the hall during performances, and one, Barbara Jepson in yesterday's Wall Street Journal (go here to read her piece), singled it out for extensive and unfavorable comment, suggesting that until the noise can be lessened significantly, the success of the hall must remain in doubt. Good for her. (In fact, I fear the noise problem will become more obtrusive over time, not less.)

I might add that at least one Carnegie Hall head, and probably several, should be gently lowered to the chopping block at the earliest opportunity. Anybody who didn't think noise wouldn't be a huge problem in a hall that is nine feet from the nearest subway tunnel is a quarterwit.

(4) Nearly everybody has praised Zankel Hall's multicultural programming to the skies. In my opinion, it's sucker bait for the print media. I'm not saying the programs aren't good--some are, some aren't--but come on, folks, this is New York City, where every imaginable kind of music can already be heard all over town. Not only are performing arts centers soooooo Seventies, but Manhattan was the biggest and best performing arts center in the world long before Zankel Hall switched on its escalators. In any case, presenting a lot of different kinds of art in one place doesn't make any of them any better. Does Emmylou Harris need a Good Housekeeping seal of approval from Carnegie Hall to be considered the greatest country singer of her generation? Puh-leeze. And just because the (mostly classical) critics who've been writing about Zankel Hall don't get out much doesn't mean the rest of us have to bow and scrape before them.

So one mild cheer to the management of Carnegie Hall for having discovered something the rest of us already knew about, and another when they figure out how to make amplified music sound halfway decent in a hall that so far doesn't appear to be very well suited to it.

Posted September 24, 12:04 PM

Caught in the act

Back when I was a wee thing, one or two light years ago, an extremely smart smartass who edited the "Goings On About Town" section of The New Yorker got tired of writing new capsule summaries of The Fantasticks, which by that time had been running off Broadway since shortly before the birth of Christ. Much the same problem had manifested itself years before: Robert Benchley, who used to be The New Yorker's drama critic, got equally tired of writing capsule summaries of Abie's Irish Rose, the Fantasticks of the Thirties, and started coming up with cute one-liners like "No worse than a bad cold." Forty years later, Mr. Anonymous Smartass approached the problem differently. In place of summaries, he serialized Ulysses...one sentence at a time.

I seem to be the only person alive who remembers reading those snippets from Ulysses in "Goings On About Town" (I couldn't find any reference to them on the Web), so I decided it would be fun to do the same thing in "About Last Night" and see who noticed. Hence "Today's Installment," in which I have been serializing a well-known short story one sentence at a time. One reader, Marla S. Carew, noticed and nailed it on the second installment. Another checked in with the right answer an hour or two after Ms. Carew, while a third correspondent guessed the author--but not the story.

Care to give it a go?

Posted September 24, 12:04 PM

Today's installment

4.

He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal.

Posted September 24, 12:03 PM

Playlist

Here's what I listened to on my iBook while writing yesterday's blog:

(1) Polly Podewell, "After You, Who?"

(2) Larry Goldings Trio, "Asimov" (the hippest organ trio in jazz)

(3) Fred Hersch Trio, "At the Close of the Day" (an exquisite study in pastel harmony--the title is from a poem by Walt Whitman)

(4) Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band, "Lady Chatterley's Mother" (composed by Al Cohn, with an amazing shout chorus at the end)

(5) Stan Kenton, "Young Blood" (composed by Gerry Mulligan, ditto--and dig that Lee Konitz alto solo!)

(6) Mabel Mercer, "The World Today" (in memory of William Roy, the composer, who died a few weeks ago)

(7) Liz Phair, "X-Ray Man"

(8) Jimmy Webb, "Wichita Lineman" (the best record ever made of this perfect little song)

(9) Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, "Where's the Money?"

(10) Peter Warlock, "Sleep" (sung by John Mark Ainsley).

And so to bed....

Posted September 24, 12:02 PM

Almanac

THE JOKER: I'm the world's first homicidal artist. I make art until someone dies.

Sam Hamm and Warren Skaasen, Batman

Posted September 24, 12:01 PM

September 23, 2003

From ocean to ocean, forever

My Site Meter tells me that "About Last Night" was read around the world yesterday, in time zones ranging from here to--I think--Iraq. Quite a few Asian and European readers, somewhat to my surprise (at one point during the day I seemed to have more readers in Central Europe than in the Mountain Standard Time zone of the good old U.S.A.). The kudzu is spreading!

I'm no less pleased, as well as a bit stunned, to announce that my mailbag is now empty. (I cleared out 500-plus e-mails in the last 48 hours.) I also switched off my autoreplier, a token of my determination to answer my mail promptly from now on, or at least while I'm in New York, which I won't be this weekend, so don't get your hopes up.

I found plenty of interesting things in my mailbox, including an e-mail from the long-lost woman who played Flora to my Miles in our small-town high-school production of The Innocents (talk about way weird), a note from someone who thinks I'm a redbaiter for having pointed out that Dalton Trumbo was (gadzooks) a Communist, and a large number of e-mails weighing in on the subject of which work of art Yale University Press should put on the cover of A Terry Teachout Reader. Most of you preferred Fairfield Porter's lithograph Broadway. I reported your choice to my editor at Yale, who wrote back as follows:

That's good news indeed because that's the image that both I & the designer strongly prefer. It's elegant, classy, & a bit nostalgic without the treacle.

How about that? Your vote did count, sort of.

In other news, Maud Newton picked up on my hints about Friday's guest blogger. No announcement yet--you'll have to wait while the suspense continues to build.

Now on to today's topics, from natty to dishevelled: (1) A genuinely fresh contribution (no fooling!) to the Frank Lloyd Wright debate. (2) Four poker faces. (3) Why we blog. (4) Who now reads Pope? Nobody. (5) Today's installment. (6) The latest almanac entry.

I e-mailed my entire mailing list for the first time in several weeks, reminding everyone to come visit www.terryteachout.com, and what do you know? The numbers soared. Why can't you do that, too?

Posted September 23, 12:07 PM

Wronged by Wright

A reader writes:

Regarding living in a work of art, the idea of living in a Frank Lloyd Wright house is indeed attractive, but as one who was recently privileged (and despite my remarks, it was a privilege) to spend a week in one, I have to tell you it was in many ways damnably uncomfortable. It would be nice to put it in a frame and gaze at it in wonder--in fact, standing in the living room and feeling the room around you is one of the great pleasures of the visit, but oh, my back! He may have been a egoist, but he was clearly also a sadist--bolt-upright chairs with short seats, low to the ground with inadequate padding and leg support, insufficient light in the kitchen and insufficient legroom everywhere. My favorite was the leather-covered chaise--whenever I sat on it, the slippery surface of the cushions began a two-way slide, both away from the chair and away from me. Eventually I ended up on the floor. It is the most comfortable chair in the house.

Plus, all the showers were designed for someone about five feet tall.

On the other hand, the place is exquisite, breathes out calm, and seems to swallow large groups of people so that you are never in each other's way. It is not an untouchable kind of art: There is always a corner in the sun, always a place to gather and a place to find solitude, and a stone fireplace big enough for most people to stand in that seems to grow right out of the mountains and provide an anchor that family can build ties around.

Interestingly, the family built an addition, approved by the Wright foundation, that resembles the main house architecturally, but with some things "corrected"--deeper seats, more comfortable proportions, better padding. It's very nice and far more comfortable to live in, but it is indefinably different: a cabin, not a cathedral, and with only a fraction of the peace and presence of the main structure. Mr. Wright definitely knew what he was doing, even if he did say so himself.

After I'd been there for a week, I generally felt that, genius or no genius, he was a malicious man with a detestation of the tall. A week at home on my comfortable chairs, and all I can remember is the feeling of standing in the main room, of being given something important by virtue of being in that space.

I must go and buy my hosts a thank-you gift.

Well, I can't thank my correspondent (who requested anonymity) enough. The ongoing blogosphere debate over Wright has had a certain abstract quality, precisely because none of us has ever lived in a Wright house--which is, after all, the heart of the matter. Right?

Posted September 23, 12:06 PM

Under the radar

If you've already read and enjoyed James McManus' Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker, published earlier this year, pardon me for wasting your time. If not, do. I've never played a hand of poker in my life, but I love reading about high-stakes gambling, and this book, in which a teacher who gambles on the side tells how he went to Las Vegas to cover the World Series of Poker for Harper's Magazine and ended up as one of the finalists, is one of the best books ever written on the subject.

Not the best, you understand. Positively Fifth Street isn't as lucidly elegant as A. Alvarez's The Biggest Game in Town, as desperate as Jesse May's Shut Up and Deal, or as disturbing as Jack Richardson's Memoir of a Gambler. McManus' prose can be ostentatiously eggheady, enough so that I wish the manuscript had been extensively bluepenciled prior to publication. Nevertheless, Positively Fifth Street is still hugely entertaining, especially for those of us railbirds who've never gotten any closer to a high-stakes game than renting The Cincinnati Kid, and I recommend it highly.

It happens that I was rereading McManus' book yesterday, and ran across a passage I hadn't noticed the first time I read it. He comes by his eggheadiness honestly--he teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago--but I was still surprised by this passing observation. Noting that the World Series contestants are diverse by any possible standard, he adds:

Because the evidence before my eyes says the World Series of Poker has evolved from its good-old-boy roots into a stronghold of, yes, functional multiculturalism, proving if nothing else that there is such a thing. Most of the academic versions, of course, have long since degenerated into monocultural zealotry, diverse as to race or gender but in almost no other respects. The term has even taken a pejorative cast of late, correctly associated with tenured politicians swimming in schools of resentment, apparently aiming to prove that ideology is indeed a form of brain damage.

As my younger friends say, woah! Erin O'Connor herself couldn't have put it much better.

Posted September 23, 12:05 PM

Elsewhere

2 Blowhards reflects on why that art-oriented site contains so little criticism or reviewing (in the traditional senses of those words):

I don't know about you, but I find the flexibility and immediacy of blogging a godsend. The publishing process, so to speak, is a snap. The ease (and lack of editing, god knows) allows for whimsy, freewheelingness, carrying-on, ranting and mischief-making, as well as earnestness and sophistication--blogging software is a great tool for an arts-gab hobbyist. It's open-ended and flexible; it'll do pretty much what you want it to do.

A big part of my life, like yours, consists of strolling through the cultural sphere; also I happen to enjoy musing out loud while I do so. That's a lot of what life in the arts-and-culture-and-media world is for me--noticing connections, picking up signals, rhapsodizing, wondering about this 'n' that, giggling, mocking, as well as (occasionally) ranting, or driving home some point or other. I've got no proof for this, but I suspect that this is a decent description of what a life in the arts-culture-media worlds is like for many people, at least on a good day. Plus getting to compare notes--what could be better? So I've chosen to make my blogging an extension of what the arts life already is for me.

My sentiments exactly.

Meanwhile, God of the Machine explains why nobody reads Alexander Pope anymore:

The best poetry is rarely the most quotable; it derives much of its meaning from its context. Pope is highly quotable because he had a superb verbal gift; but the context is foolish. He is like an exceptionally brilliant student who has mastered his exercises and regurgitates them expertly. His poetry is unsatisfactory because the dominant ideas of his time are unsatisfactory. He might have written great poetry had he been born a hundred years earlier or two hundred later. Instead he was bequeathed a cheap and facile philosophy, lacked the intelligence to think his way out of it, and became a poet of brilliant fragments, no more. His vices are those of his age; his virtues are his own.

In the words of the master himself, "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."

Finally, I'm pleased to note the following weekend movie stats, courtesy of DVD Journal:

While Focus Films' Lost in Translation clawed its way into tenth place with $2.8 million, the Sofia Coppola picture starring Bill Murray banked it with less than 200 screens. Unfortunately for Woody Allen, his latest project, Anything Else, starring Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci, took just $1.7 million and did not chart....Lost in Translation has earned near-universal praise and will expand to more screens this weekend.

So go. As a friend of our upcoming Mystery Guest Blogger remarked the other day, "I liked every second of that movie." Me, too.

Posted September 23, 12:03 PM

Today's installment

3.

Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy.

Posted September 23, 12:02 PM

Personal

Dear Stephanie:

If you see this posting, please send me your new e-mail address!

I await it eagerly.

Posted September 23, 12:01 PM

Almanac

"A journalist is stimulated by a deadline. He writes worse when he has time."

Karl Kraus, Beim Wort genommen

Posted September 23, 12:01 PM

September 22, 2003

Fair exchange

Last week, as you may recall, was way too much, so I took Saturday off. I had lunch with one of my former students, after which we strolled across Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I looked at a number of paintings that I'd never seen before (including a half-dozen John Marin watercolors, glory be!). I spent the evening evening reading a pair of books about which I don't plan to write, turned off the light at a reasonable hour, and slept deeply and well. I arose on Sunday and got some work done--but not too much.

I should do this more often, right? Alas, the week to come is crammed with deadlines, and on Thursday I fly down to Raleigh, North Carolina, to spend a long weekend looking at Carolina Ballet, which is presenting two exciting-sounding programs of new and newish dances. That means I won't be around to write Friday's blog (I'm not taking my laptop with me!), so my plan is to borrow a feather from Maud Newton's ever-so-chic cap and invite a guest blogger to sit in.

More about that later in the week, once I succeed in talking that guest blogger into blogging for me (she's way cool). For now, here are today's topics, from restful to hectic: (1) The blessings and curses of technology. (2) "In the Bag." (3) Today's installment. (4) The latest almanac entry.

I haven't hectored you lately about introducing your friends and acquaintances to www.terryteachout.com, mainly because I feel overwhelming guilt for not having answered more than a sliver of my mail. Be that as it may, you know what to do, so do it. You show me yours and I'll show you mine!

P.S. Since writing the above, I had a further attack of guilt and spent an hour and a half working on my accumulated e-mail, as some of you already know. I got rid of about 400 incoming pieces (most of them spam, to be sure) and now have a paltry 117 e-mails left to answer. Sad to say, I inadvertently deleted a message from a correspondent who accused me of suffering from "penis envy." To him, I reply: not of yours, pal. To the rest of you, I say: hold on, I'm on my way!

Posted September 22, 12:05 PM

Coming and going

Two newspaper stories caught my eye last week.

The first one, which attracted quite a bit of attention on the Web, ran in the New York Times. Written by Nicholas Wade, it summarizes the results of recent academic research into the possible biological origins and continuing cultural significance of music. Why is it, Wade asks, that "[a]ll societies have music, all sing lullaby-like songs to their infants, and most produce tonal music, or music composed in subsets of the 12-tone chromatic scale, such as the diatonic or pentatonic scales"? The answer, it appears, is that human beings are naturally predisposed to respond to tonal music:

Dr. Sandra Trehub, of the University of Toronto, has developed methods of testing the musical preferences of infants as young as 2 to 6 months. She finds they prefer consonant sounds, like perfect fifths or perfect fourths, over dissonant ones. A reasonable conclusion is that "the rudiments of music listening are gifts of nature rather than products of culture," she wrote in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience.

But although certain basic features of music, such as the octave, intervals with simple ratios like the perfect fifth, and tonality, seem to be innate, they are probably not genetic adaptations for music, "but rather appear to be side effects of general properties of the auditory system," conclude two Cambridge scientists, Josh McDermott of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dr. Marc Hauser of Harvard, in an unpublished article.

The human auditory system is probably tuned to perceive the most important sounds in a person's surroundings, which are those of the human voice. Three neuroscientists at Duke University, Dr. David A. Schwartz, Dr. Catherine Q. Howe and Dr. Dale Purves, say that on the basis of this cue they may have solved the longstanding mysteries of the structure of the chromatic scale and the reason why some harmonies are more pleasing than others.

Though every human voice, and maybe each utterance, is different, a certain commonality emerges when many different voices are analyzed. The human vocal tract shapes the vibrations of the vocal cords into a set of harmonics that are more intense at some frequencies than others relative to the fundamental note. The principal peaks of intensity occur at the fifth and the octave, with lesser peaks at other intervals that correspond to most of the 12 tones of the chromatic scale, the Duke researchers say in an article published last month in the Journal of Neuroscience. Almost identical spectra were produced by speakers of English, Mandarin, Persian and Tamil.

The second story ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer (not a permalink, alas--the Inquirer clearly doesn't believe in the efficacy of the blogosphere). Written by Markus Verbeet, it described the sad state of Philadelphia's remaining camera stores. Most of the smaller ones have closed, and the survivors are seeing their profit margins slashed by the fast-growing popularity of digital cameras, which are expected to outsell traditional cameras this year for the first time ever:

"From my 15 major competitors in town, there is hardly anybody left," Steve Serota said.

That would normally make him a happy businessman, except that he had to close Camera Care, his Center City store, last month.

After spending almost half his life selling cameras in his Arch Street shop, the 52-year-old merchant was instead stuffing lens filters and other unsold inventory into huge black garbage bags.

"It's a tragedy," he said....

The changes in the photo industry can be seen just a block away from Serota's shuttered store. Quaker Photo is a state-of-the-art lab, but it could serve as a museum at the same time. The five-floor building contains several dozen essentially obsolete darkrooms.

"Back in the late '80s, we used to work here around the clock," Bob Marion, the vice president and general manager, said.

What he called the switch "from a labor-intensive market to a technology intensive market" is immediately visible. Most darkrooms are used for storage or stand empty. Instead of a bustling crowd of up to 120 workers in three shifts, 30 employees are working quietly on desktop computers and digital printers.

What do these two stories have in common? They show us two sharply contrasting sides of the uneasy relationship between technology and tradition.

On the one hand, science has in the long run an uncanny way of validating many of our most deeply-held beliefs about the nature of things. I've never doubted, for instance, that tonality is not merely an arbitrary preference but a natural law, to be disregarded at the price of aesthetic intelligibility, even though a generation of avant-gardists blithely denied what seemed to me so utterly self-evident as to require no further demonstration--and now it appears that I was objectively right and the avant-gardists objectively wrong. Score one for technology (though people with ears to hear needed no further proof).

Yet at the same time, cultural traditions are constantly being undermined by what Joseph Schumpeter called the "creative destruction" of unfettered minds operating under the aspect of freedom, and the price we pay for their creativity is the disruption of the lives of innocents who took it for granted that cameras would always need film.

Mind you, I feel no sentimental attachment to old technologies, merely to the things they did better than the new ones. I miss Technicolor, for instance, but I don't really miss my old manual typewriter, fond though I was of the glorious clatter it made. The dull pid-pid-pid of the plastic keys of the iBook on which I am typing these words is a more than reasonable price to pay for the pleasure and convenience of electronic word processing...but where does that leave the aging typewriter repairman down the street? It's too easy to say that he should go back to school and learn how to fix iBooks. Age brings wisdom and inflexibility in equal measure, and not all of us are up to the challenge ot changing with the times.

This site isn't about politics (and thank God for that). Cultural matters have a way of cutting heedlessly across the cramped pigeonholes of idiotarianism. Very broadly speaking--with plenty of exceptions in either direction--the left has tended to be hostile to the miraculous transforming power of technology, while the right has tended to be indifferent to the plight of those who are incapable of riding its wave. Yet surely we can all agree that both sides must be more responsive if the postmodern world is to remain a fit place for humans. The word "tragedy" has a way of getting misused, but I think Steve Serota got it just about right when he described the closing of his camera store as a tragedy--a minor one, to be sure, but terrible nonetheless. What could be more tragic than a clash of competing goods that leaves most people better off while hurting a few?

Progress is a blunt instrument, equally well suited to driving nails and knocking people over the head. It's the responsibility of those who wield the hammer to try to point it in the right direction--as well as to clean up the messes they make.

Posted September 22, 12:04 PM

In the bag

Time again for "In the Bag," the game that challenges you to tell the truth about your taste. The rules: you can stuff any five works of art into your bag before departing for a desert island, but you have to decide right this second. No dithering--the bad guys are beating on your front door. No posturing--you have to say the first five things that pop into your head, no matter how silly they may sound. What do you put in the bag?

Here are my picks, as of this second:

BOOK (FICTION): John P. Marquand, Point of No Return

BOOK (NONFICTION): Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

PAINTING: Milton Avery, Red Rock Falls

CD: Jim Hall and Ron Carter, Alone Together

FILM: Tom DiCillo, Living in Oblivion

Your turn.

Posted September 22, 12:03 PM

Today's installment

2.

She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind.

Posted September 22, 12:02 PM

Almanac

"You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she will ever hurry back over your foolish contempt."

Horace, Epistles

Posted September 22, 12:01 PM

September 19, 2003

And then some

Too much, too much--and a hurricane to boot. I've had enough for one week. You must content yourself with a varied but essentially miscellaneous set of offerings today. I'll post something more ambitious on Monday. Today's topics, from brisk to torrential: (1) Puck in shades. (2) Dancers without money. (3) The Iran National Museum and its discontents. (4) An opening line I wish I'd written. (5) It must be Jelly, 'cause jam don't swing like that. (6) The debut of "Today's Installment" (part one of an enigmatic new daily feature). (7) The latest almanac entry.

Have a nice weekend. In the immortal words of J.J. Gittes, I plan to do as little as possible.

Posted September 19, 12:06 PM

Stranger than Hollywood

I went to Washington last Friday for the opening of Shakespeare in Hollywood, Ken Ludwig's new play, at the Arena Stage. My review is in this morning's Wall Street Journal. Here's how it starts:

I've been spending so much time in Manhattan aisle seats that I almost forgot there was life beyond the Hudson River. To recapture my sense of perspective, I took a train to Washington, home of the Arena Stage, a well-regarded regional theater-in-the-round that launched its new season last Friday with the world premiere of Ken Ludwig's "Shakespeare in Hollywood," a noisy, funny, thoroughly agreeable play about what happens when two of the Bard's best-known characters take a wrong turn at Albuquerque and find themselves stuck on a soundstage.

"Shakespeare in Hollywood," which runs through Oct. 19, is based on a real-life event that in retrospect seems almost as comically implausible as Mr. Ludwig's script. In 1934, Max Reinhardt brought his lavish staging of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" to the Hollywood Bowl. Jack Warner, of all people, got the idea of hiring the German émigré director to make a big-budget film version for Warner Bros. starring Olivia de Havilland as Hermia, Dick Powell as Lysander, Jimmy Cagney as Bottom and Mickey Rooney as Puck. Released the following year, it took six months to make and cost a whopping $1.5 million ($19.4 million in 2002 dollars).

Mr. Ludwig, the author of "Lend Me a Tenor," has used that fantastic event as the pretext for an even more fantastic backstage comedy in which Oberon (Casey Biggs), Shakespeare's King of the Fairies, and Puck (Emily Donahoe), his jester and general factotum, get their spells crossed and are transported to the set of Reinhardt's film, on which hijinks are already well under way....

To read the rest of the review, pick up a copy of the Journal and turn to the drama page in the "Weekend Journal" section, which contains, as usual, lots of interesting stuff.

Posted September 19, 12:05 PM

Elsewhere

Artsjournal.com, which hosts "About Last Night," linked to a hair-raising story in Backstage about a recent NEA report predicting that "not-for-profit dance companies may see as much as a 30% loss of earned income in the next few years, and even a heavier fall in contributions." I haven't yet seen the whole report (which is coyly titled "Raising the Barre"), but it clearly demands a closer look.

The "Leisure & Arts" page of yesterday's Wall Street Journal carried an abridged version of a detailed briefing given last week by Col. Matthew Bogdanos, the Marine officer in charge of the official investigation of the looting of the Iraq National Museum. No matter what you think you think about this event, you need to go here and read what Col. Bogdanos has to say about it.

In other news, The Minor Fall, the Major Lift, who is both cleverer and funnier than I am (that's not news), actually managed to come up with a clever and funny way to explain why he wouldn't be posting anything yesterday.

Meanwhile, Maud Newton passed along some famous and not-so-famous first sentences from novels (presumably they're favorites of hers, though she didn't say). This happens to be one of my own preferred games, so I am embarrassed to admit that she snagged one from a book I love by an author I love...and I never noticed it until now. Do you recognize it?

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills.

If not, go here and scroll down to behold the source of my shame.

Posted September 19, 12:04 PM

This one's for you, Paul

One of my most loyal readers (who was kind enough to introduce me at the Mencken Lecture in Baltimore last week) has been after me to do this again, so...

Go here and click on "Wolverine Blues," and if you have a RealAudio player you will be rewarded with three minutes of pure pleasure, courtesy of Jelly Roll Morton, Johnny Dodds, Baby Dodds, and the folks at www.redhotjazz.com.

Consider it my present to all of you for toughing out a long week with me.

Posted September 19, 12:03 PM

Today's installment

1.

The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida.

Posted September 19, 12:02 PM

Almanac

"But listen here, there ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. Can you figure out a single thing you really please-God like to do you can do and keep your dignity? The human frame just ain't built that way."

Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

Posted September 19, 12:01 PM

September 18, 2003

In the moment, significantly elevated

A report on current events: I'm still riding the crazy-busy wave, and still staying afloat. I went to bed at three and got up at seven to write my review of Shakespeare in Hollywood for Friday's Wall Street Journal (watch this space for details). Then I hailed a cab that dropped me off in Harlem, where I ate red beans and rice (Louis Armstrong's favorite dish) with Leonard Garment and Loren Schoenberg, masterminds of the Jazz Museum in Harlem, which at present consists mainly of a frugally decorated office and a lot of good ideas. It will be interesting to see where they go from here.

Following up theory with practice, I returned to my own office, signed off on the Journal piece, then went to the Jazz Standard to hear Bud Shank's quartet. As I listened to Shank cleave the air with his flame-thrower tone and remembered that he was born in 1926, I asked myself, How does he do it? Of course it's possible to play alto saxophone like that when you're that old (I heard Benny Carter play as well--though with less stamina--when he was a decade older), but it's a long, long way from possible to probable. And did that faze Shank? Not in the slightest. He stood up in front of a world-class rhythm section that was lobbing musical hand grenades into the crowd and soloed like a man half his age, if that.

After performing Gerry Mulligan's "Idol Gossip," Shank announced a medley dedicated to another "fallen warrior," Bill Evans. That set me to thinking. Yes, the titans of prewar jazz are gone now, and the surviving giants of the Forties and Fifties are dropping like flies, but it's still possible to go to a New York nightclub and hear a man who played alto sax with Stan Kenton in 1950, left an indelible mark on the West Coast jazz scene--and then got even better. Back in the Fifties, Shank's playing was smart, elegant, and sweetly lyrical. Now it's ferocious. Midway through "Idol Gossip," he sauntered away from center stage, planted himself in the bend of Bill Mays' piano, and tore off a half-dozen choruses without benefit of amplification, soaring effortlessly over Joe LaBarbera's drums. Microphones? He don't need no stinking microphones! So forget the good old days--they're right now.

(If I've piqued your curiosity, go here to purchase Silver Storm, a 2000 sextet date also featuring Mays and LaBarbera.)

Anyway, that's what I did yesterday, and now I'm back home again, running on fumes and adrenalin in order to give you something to read today. I have two more items to write, then I'm taking the phone off the hook and going to bed for as long as my brain permits. Tomorrow is--thank God--another day, with no appointments, no deadlines, nothing to contend with but (A) a birthday party in Brooklyn and (B) a hurricane.

Assuming that I haven't been washed into the Hudson River by Friday, I'll be having lunch that day with one of the celebrated bloggers who graces "Sites to See" (guess who?), then going to the press preview of Bill Irwin's Harlequin Studies at the Signature Theatre, about which more on Monday. The fun never stops around here....

Posted September 18, 12:18 PM

Things not seen

While in Washington last Friday, I dropped by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden to see "Gyroscope," a large-scale, long-running exhibition drawn from that museum's permanent collection. I don't plan to write about it in detail, mainly because I don't need to (Tyler Green, who blogs at Modern Art Notes, did it here, better than I possibly could), but I did want to tell you about an educational experience I had while walking through the show.

As those of you who know me personally are all too aware, I have reached that unhappy age when I am sorely in need of bifocals. Alas, I'm too stubborn/vain/lazy to go to the trouble of getting a pair, so I continue to do without. I noticed for the first time at the Hirshhorn on Friday that I can no longer read the wall labels at museums without taking off my glasses. At first I found this to be irritating, but before long I realized that it was liberating.

Confession time: I have another little problem, which is that my eyes reflexively go to the labels in a group show, very often before I've taken in the works of art they identify. I can't help myself--I'm a slave to the printed word. Only I can't do it anymore. To read the labels, I now have to pull off my glasses and move in close, which takes away all the fun. As a result, I looked at "Gyroscope" the right way, meaning what first and who second, and not infrequently, I didn't even bother to find out who. (In addition to a reasonably generous helping of good stuff, "Gyroscope" contains more than its fair share of crappy art.) Dr. Albert Barnes, who deliberately hung the paintings in the Barnes Collection without labels in order to force visitors to think harder about the art they were there to see, would have been proud of me.

Needless to say, I had no trouble identifying many of the artists whose work was on display (no points for spotting a Kenneth Noland at a hundred yards), but even in the galleries where there was no possible doubt about what I was seeing, I learned a lesson from consistently looking at the paintings first. Take the gallery devoted to what I suppose might be called Pop Art and Its Predecessors. The big stuff, the jumbo canvases by Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Indiana, caught my eye first, but as soon as I glanced at the two medium-sized Stuart Davises (one of which was the amazing Rapt at Rappaport's) facing each other on opposite walls, I knew who the real master was.

I've just admitted to a naïve-sounding disability which I'm sure will make some of you smile. I came late to the visual arts, and I still fall on my face with humbling regularity. I'm no connoisseur, just a guy who likes to look at paintings, though I trust my eye and my taste. On the other hand, I don't trust them far enough to be absolutely sure I'm always seeing paintings, not reputations, which is one of the minor reasons why I think I'll put off getting that first pair of bifocals for a little while longer.

Posted September 18, 12:09 PM

Almanac

"The difference between a critic and a reviewer is, I forget."

Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison

Posted September 18, 12:09 PM

September 17, 2003

Immediate experiences

Kindly note the time stamp. Contrary to the suspicions of certain of my loyal readers, I do sleep from time to time, but Tuesday was yet another crazy-busy day, climaxed by a cultural double-header--I went to see Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation in Chelsea and the Bad Plus at the Village Vanguard, with sushi in between--from which I literally just returned. So instead of serving up a made dish, I'll scratch down my first impressions of both events, followed by an item I wrote this morning and the latest almanac entry, in the hopes that the immediacy will excuse the haste.

About Lost in Translation I don't have much to add to what most of the critics have been saying, which is that it is a thoughtful, elegant, amazingly self-assured piece of work. I'm as suspicious of bandwagons as the next guy, but anyone capable of writing and directing a film like this is the real deal, regardless of her last name.

Two observations:

(1) I love the way Coppola catches the strangeness of surfaces in Tokyo--the subtly disorienting quality of a city that looks Western at first glance, but isn't.

(2) Bill Murray really is as good as everybody says, partly because he looks so nakedly middle-aged. The lines in his face are like the rings in a tree stump--you can read his age off them. (In another half-dozen years he'll be a dead ringer for W.H. Auden.) I kept trying to figure out who he reminded me of, and all at once two names popped into my head: Jeff Bridges and Robert Mitchum, both of whom reek of that same barely penetrable disillusion. In fact, Murray's performance is just inches away from film noir--I can almost imagine him playing Philip Marlowe, or Bridges' part in The Fabulous Baker Boys.

As for the Bad Plus, about whom I held forth in this space just the other day, I can only say that there isn't another jazz piano trio in the world that sounds nearly as fresh. Not that their music is "jazz" in any strict sense of the word, since it draws no less deeply from the wells of contemporary pop and 20th-century classical music. Ethan Iverson, in particular, has liberated himself completely from the impressionism-derived harmonies and blues clichés that are the Scylla and Charybdis of post-1960 jazz piano. Yet there's no question that the Bad Plus plays jazz, even when it's merrily deconstructing such unlikely rock tunes as "Every Breath You Take." If you haven't heard These Are the Vistas, their debut CD for Columbia, I can't recommend it strongly enough.

That's a lot of art to digest in one evening, but New York is like that. You can go straight from one memorable event to another without a break, and still get home before sunrise. Nevertheless, this posting is called on account of exhaustion (in addition to which I've got to get up first thing tomorrow morning and crank out a review of Ken Ludwig's Shakespeare in Hollywood for Friday's Wall Street Journal), so let me knock two more runners in and I'll be off to bed.

Posted September 17, 1:38 AM

Your vote counts

My editor and designer at Yale University Press are cooking up a dust jacket for A Terry Teachout Reader, the volume of my selected essays coming out next spring. First, it was going to be an all-typography jacket, which was perfectly fine by me, so of course that wouldn't do. Then they wanted to put my photo on the front cover, which I nixed without hesitation. Then they asked me what I'd like to do. Since all the essays included in the book are about American artists (we actually planned at one point to call it All American: A Terry Teachout Reader), the thought occurred to me that it might be fun to put one of my favorite works of American art on the cover. To this end, I suggested four pieces that seemed to me variously evocative of American art and culture in the modern and post-modern eras.

The first, logically enough, is my celebrated John Marin etching, Downtown. The El, a semi-cubist portrayal of downtown Manhattan circa 1921.

The second, Fairfield Porter's 1971 color lithograph Broadway (not part of my collection, alas), is a more contemporary variation on a similar theme.

Finally, two of Stuart Davis' jazz-flavored paintings struck me as eminently suitable. The Whitney Museum's Owh! in San Pao contains snippets of text that I thought highly suitable to a book about American art. And Ready-to-Wear, which belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago, seemed to me particularly appropriate because of the color scheme, in which red, white, and blue predominate.

I sent all four links off to Yale last week, but haven't heard back yet. What do you think?

Posted September 17, 1:37 AM

Almanac

"If intolerable alternatives are to be avoided, life must achieve various types of often uneasy equilibrium. I believe this deeply: but it is not a doctrine which inspires the young. They seek absolutes; and that usually, sooner or later, ends in blood."

Sir Isaiah Berlin, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin

Posted September 17, 1:36 AM

September 16, 2003

The unintended consequences of gridlock

Apologies--I spent most of yesterday either sitting in cabs (the traffic in New York was insane all day long) or waiting for other people who were sitting in cabs. Hence I spent very little time sitting at my desk, which means that today's edition of "About Last Night" lacks that discursive generosity to which you've become accustomed. Nevertheless, I'm here, and so are you, so let's get going. Today's topics, from crisp to concise: (1) Music from a charnel house. (2) Paul Desmond's ghost. (3) Middle-aisling it with Felix Salmon. (2) Murder at the Corcoran Museum. (4) The latest almanac entry.

Say, where were you yesterday? The ratings were way down. Am I the only person in the blogosphere who didn't take Monday off?

Posted September 16, 12:05 PM

From beyond the grave

Edmund Wilson claimed that one of his greatest pleasures was telling a friend about an especially good book he'd read, so long it was (1) out of print, (2) rare, and (3) written in a language the friend didn't speak.

Aside from being a hopeless monoglot, I'm too kind-hearted a soul to play that mildly sadistic game, but I do want to tell you about a recording I heard the other day that you almost certainly haven't heard, and very possibly will never hear. It's the first recording of Dmitri Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, made by Yevgeny Mravinsky and the Leningrad Philharmonic just four months after they gave the 1937 premiere. So far as I know, this recording has never been issued, much less reissued, in the West. It turned up a few years ago as a bonus CD in an obscure Japanese box set devoted to Mravinsky's early recordings, and a collector I know burned a copy and presented it to me Saturday afternoon at the Mencken Day celebrations in Baltimore.

If you're a Mravinsky buff or a Shostakovich scholar, the inherent interest of this performance will be self-evident. If not...well, give this some thought. Shostakovich wrote the Fifth Symphony not long after Stalin's culture thugs put him in the hot seat by attacking his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in Pravda. All at once, Soviet Russia's most celebrated composer had a bull's-eye hung around his neck, and for the rest of his life he would be haunted by the memory of the fear he first knew on that terrible day. Shostakovich was well aware that the KGB could drag him away in the middle of the night, never to be seen again, just like they'd already disposed of tens of thousands of his fellow Russians. He wrote the Fifth Symphony when that fear was still fresh and raw, and though a Communist "critic" (i.e, hack) dubbed it "a Soviet artist's creative reply to just criticism," everybody with ears to hear knew that it was a lament for Russia.

Years later, Mravinsky was rehearsing the slow movement of the Fifth Symphony with the Leningrad Philharmonic, an occasion about which one of the violinists told the following story:

Mravinsky turned around to the violin sections and said, "You're playing this tremolo with the wrong color, you haven't got the necessary intensity. Have you forgotten what this music is about and when it was born?"

Can you hear any of that in the 1938 recording? I'm not sure. My experience of it is colored too sharply by what I know of the circumstances under which it was made. I have no doubt that beneath the scratch and grind of the old shellac discs, I can hear an orchestra playing with fire and commitment, performing a still-unfamiliar piece on which the ink was still barely dry--and playing it as if they knew it was a masterpiece, which of course it was. But what were they thinking? What was Mravinsky thinking? I cannot imagine my way back to the time and place in which that recording was made, in a country ankle-deep with the blood of innocents, mere weeks after a premiere performance at the end of which the audience cheered for a half-hour.

I dropped my new Alex Katz lithograph off yesterday afternoon at a framing shop in my neighborhood. I do a good bit of business there, and so I struck up a conversation with the fellow who runs the store. He's a refugee from Afghanistan, and we got to talking about how that country has suffered--first at the hands of the Russians, then at the hands of the Taliban. I mentioned that the Taliban had banned all secular music from Afghanistan. He shook his head in disgust. "You cannot live like that," he said. "You cannot. You know I still have family over there? They tell me there is much poverty, many poor people who are lucky if they eat twice a day--but they're happy now, because they don't have to live like that anymore."

I don't know if my framer much cares for Western music, and I know he doesn't care for Russians, but I think he might possibly appreciate my new recording of the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony. Even if he didn't like the music, I think he'd understand what it must have meant for a man to write a piece like that, and for a hundred other men to play it, in the midst of such horror. I know I can't appreciate it, not really--and I hope I never do.

Posted September 16, 12:04 PM

Nothing but the truth

I had dinner on Sunday with a friend of mine who is the daughter of a guitarist who played quite a bit with the late Paul Desmond, the alto saxophonist of the Dave Brubeck Quartet and my favorite jazz musician ever. She'd recently been interviewed by Doug Ramsey, who is at work on a biography of Desmond, so we got to chatting about his life and music. Then we strolled around the corner to a Japanese restaurant, and just as we were sitting down, we noticed that the background music was "Le Souk," the last track on the first side of the Brubeck Quartet's Jazz Goes to College, the very first jazz album I ever heard. (My father owned a battered copy which I found in his record cabinet some 35 years ago, thereby changing my life beyond recognition...but that's another story for another day.)

We both heard it at exactly the same moment. Then my friend looked at me, grinned, and said, "Paul's here."

Posted September 16, 12:03 PM

Elsewhere

Felix Salmon has taken note of my recent postings on Zankel Hall, and begs to differ with my suggestion that the joint needs a center aisle. I'm not sure I'm convinced, but he definitely makes a strong case, not to mention witty and well-informed.

Blake Gopnik, art critic of the Washington Post, recently torched and sewed salt on the ashes of "Beyond the Frame: Impressionism Revisited: The Sculptures of J. Seward Johnson, Jr.," a show of three-dimensional sculptural renderings of impressionist paintings currently on display at Washington's Corcoran Museum of Art. I'll cut right to the rough stuff:

Once upon a time--as recently as the '70s and even later--the Corcoran was a significant force on the national art scene. That reputation has slipped badly over the last few years; when I'm on the road, people often ask me, "What's with the Corcoran these days? Is it still around?"

And now, thanks to the prankster art of J. Seward Johnson, the Corcoran has fallen even further. It has tumbled all the way from nobody to laughingstock.

Go here to read the whole thing. I regret to say that it sounds all too convincing.

Posted September 16, 12:02 PM

Almanac

"In cities men cannot be prevented from concerting together and awakening a mutual excitement that prompts sudden and passionate resolutions."

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Posted September 16, 12:01 PM

September 15, 2003

Back at the helm

The weekend was eventful--Washington and Baltimore in quick succession--but New York beckoned, so I returned. How could I leave you hanging? Here are today's topics, from quick to dirty: (1) How to spend your jazz-related entertainment dollar this week in New York. (2) Turn your radio on and I'll croon for you. (3) "In the Bag." (4) A pair of revealing vignettes. (5) The latest almanac entry.

My ratings fell off a bit last Friday, after a very encouraging week. Did all of you take one last long weekend before the fall season gets going in earnest? If so, did you remember to exhort your friends, colleagues, lovers, and enemies to read www.terryteachout.com regularly--before leaving town? (Long, awkward silence.)

I suspected as much. All is forgiven--but get with the program.

Posted September 15, 12:06 PM

Words to the wise

Two jazz gigs worth hearing:

The Bad Plus is appearing Tuesday through Sunday at the Village Vanguard. Here's what I wrote in the Washington Post earlier this year about their debut CD, These Are the Vistas:

The Bad Plus is a piano trio, one of jazz's most familiar lineups--only Ethan Iverson, Reid Anderson and David King don't sound anything like Ahmad Jamal or Oscar Peterson. Instead of the usual show tunes and jazz standards, they play "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Heart