About Last Night: September 2003 Archives

Almanac

"The amateur painter is in general a cultivated man who has discovered the pleasures of painting and pursues it as recreation and sport. The approach he adopts may be a form of Impressionism, or even of Abstraction, depending on his age group and education, but it will necessarily be a thoroughly familiar one. He is interested in playing a fascinating game, not in making up new rules. He is visiting a world already explored by other painters rather than creating and imposing a world of his own. His real originality has already found its expression elsewhere. Otherwise he would long ago have quit his own profession for that of painter, as Gauguin gave up a career on the stock exchange in his pursuit of art. The price of originality is undivided love."

Maurice Grosser, Critic's Eye

Posted by diacritical on September 2, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

Happy anniversary

I have now gone an entire calendar year without listening to any minimalist music whatsoever.

Go thou and do likewise.

Posted by diacritical on September 2, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

In the bag

Bloggers all up and down the right-hand column have been playing "In the Bag" lately. Modern Art Notes seems to have been first to take up the cudgel, but after that it spread like kudzu throughout the blogosphere. Since imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, I'm flattered--so here we go again.

First, a quick review of the rules for those of you just joining us. "In the Bag" is my private variation of the old desert-island game. In this version, the emphasis is on immediate and arbitrary preference. You can stuff five works of art into your bag before departing for that good old desert island, but you have to decide right this second. No dithering--the secret police are banging on the front door. No posturing--you have to say the first five things that pop into your head, no matter how dumb they may sound. What do you put in the bag?

As of this moment, here are my picks:

NOVEL: W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

PAINTING: John H. Twachtman, Winter Harmony

PAINTING: Edward Hopper, Sun in an Empty Room

POP SONG: Aimee Mann, Deathly

FILM: Nicholas Ray, On Dangerous Ground

Over to you.

P.S. If you're wondering why I put two paintings in the bag this week, by the way, the answer is, I just felt like it.

Posted by diacritical on September 2, 2003 12:02 PM | Permalink

None dare call it phony

I saw, and loved, American Splendor, not least because of Hope Davis' pitch-perfect performance as Joyce, Harvey Pekar's penny-plain sourpuss of a wife. (It happens that I'd also seen Davis the night before in The Secret Lives of Dentists, and seeing two of her films back to back left me more sure than ever that she is the finest actress to come out of the indie-flick world--better even than Parker Posey, though I hate to admit it.)

What makes American Splendor so good is not its postmodern switching between "Harvey Pekar" the character and Harvey Pekar the bonafide on-screen weirdo himself--that aspect of the film borders on the cutesy--but the clarity and humor with which it portrays the grubby melancholy of lower-middle-class urban life. In that respect, the films it most reminded me of were Ghost World (no big surprise there) and (here comes the curve ball) One Hour Photo, a considerably more thoughtful movie than was generally realized when it came out last year.

At the same time, I think it should be pointed out that the "Harvey Pekar" of American Splendor is a semi-fictional character, and that a movie about the real Harvey Pekar might well have been even more interesting than American Splendor, if less touching. Yes, Harvey the celebrated author of autobiographical comic books and "Harvey" the fictional author of autobiographical comic books both spent a quarter-century working at crappy jobs at the Cleveland VA hospital, survived cancer, razzed David Letterman on camera, found love, and started a family. But the real Harvey Pekar is not simply some hapless record-collecting schlub from Cleveland who decided one day to write comic books about his working-class life. He is also a full-fledged left-wing intellectual--homemade, to be sure, but the shoe still fits--who reviews books for the Village Voice and does regular commentaries on NPR. (Search his name on Google and you'll find, among many other things, his thoughts on Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, which is about as eggheady as it gets.) You'll learn nothing of this from watching American Splendor, or even from reading Pekar's slightly faux-naif blog.

None of which invalidates the movie--it has its own expressive validity independent of the man whose life it purports to portray. Still, it should be kept firmly in mind that in creating "Harvey Pekar," the makers of American Splendor--not to mention Harvey Pekar himself--scissored out inconvenient biographical details whose inclusion in the film would doubtless have caused it to make a radically different impression on many people. "Harvey" is a weird but nonetheless convincingly common man whose plight really does come across as more or less universal. Harvey is...well, something else again. To put it mildly. And then some.

Posted by diacritical on September 2, 2003 12:03 PM | Permalink

Cobwebs in the mailroom

This is the week I answer my post-vacation mail--I promise. Really. Last week I had to write and write and write, but this week I only have to write and write, so be patient and watch your mailbox for further details. In the meantime, welcome back to "About Last Night," the 24/5 arts blog. I took yesterday off and planned not to write a lot today, but as usual the bit got caught between my teeth, so here are today's topics, from peculiar to commonplace: (1) Will the real Harvey Pekar please fess up? (2) Another round of "In the Bag," with a tip of the hat to my fellow baggers. (3) A date which will not live in infamy. (4) The latest almanac entry.

For those of you who were gone last week (and I know some of you were, lucky stiffs), much of what appeared on "About Last Night" during your absence is still visible--just keep scrolling down. If you've been gone longer than that, jump over to the top of the right-hand column and click on the archives link and you can browse and sluice at your leisure.

More tomorrow, as always, but in the meantime, let's get that site meter bouncing, O.K.? Tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com, one at a time or en masse--the choice is yours.

Posted by diacritical on September 2, 2003 12:04 PM | Permalink

Almanac

"Most of the things you read in a newspaper you naturally don't know anything about, except what they tell you. Did you ever happen to read a newspaper account of something you did know something about? It's always more or less wrong, usually more. I'm told it's because most stories are rewritten when they get to the office by somebody else, not the man who covered the story. They have to make them fit between the advertising. I don't think it's done on purpose. I don't think they'd mind if they had it right. There's nothing you can do about it."

James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor

Posted by diacritical on September 3, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

Desperately seeking snarkery

Hosanna in the highest: The Minor Fall, the Major Lift is back from vacation and making mischief. If you don't know why that's good news, click on the link at once. This anonymous New York-based blogger, who may well be the snarkiest person on the eastern seaboard, says things I'd say if only (A) I were clever enough to think of them and (B) I had the nerve to post them.

A warning for prigs: The Minor Fall, the Major Lift is not for the pure of soul or clean of mouth. But it sure is funny.

Posted by diacritical on September 3, 2003 12:02 PM | Permalink

Horizons west

Spencer Warren has written an interesting piece for the Claremont Institute Web site (thank you, My Stupid Dog, for pointing it out) in which, among other things, he names his favorite "classic" Westerns. These are the non-silent entries on his list: The Virginian, Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, Red River, Three Godfathers, High Noon, Shane, The Naked Spur, The Searchers, Seven Men From Now, 3:10 to Yuma, Man of the West, Gunman's Walk, The Hanging Tree, Ride Lonesome, Rio Bravo, Day of the Outlaw, Comanche Station, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and Ride the High Country.

That's a smart list, meaning that it includes quite a few of my own favorites. I mention it because I happened to draw up a similar list when reviewing Open Range for Crisis last week. The piece won't be out until next month, so I'll jump the gun and tell you which films I picked. I tried to limit myself to 10, but ended up with 11 because I couldn't bear not to: Canyon Passage, Ramrod, Blood on the Moon, Four Faces West, Red River, Winchester '73, Hondo, The Searchers, Ride Lonesome, Rio Bravo, and Ride the High Country. If you've never seen a Western--and especially if you think Westerns consist solely of a bunch of weather-whacked guys on horses riding around in circles, shooting at each other, chewing tobacco, and saying "yup" and "nope"--any of these films will set you straight.

I have to tell a tale out of school about one of my guest bloggers, Our Girl in Chicago. The Art Institute of Chicago was showing Rio Bravo when I was visiting her a few years ago (I think it was part of a Howard Hawks retrospective), and I talked her into going to see it with me. I'm sure the only reason she agreed was because we're old friends, but when it was over, I glanced at her and saw that she was positively starry-eyed. She looked back at me and said, "Oh, Terry, you didn't tell me John Wayne was sexy!"

It is, incidentally, a scandal that so few of the films on my list are available on DVD. (I linked the ones that are.)

Posted by diacritical on September 3, 2003 12:03 PM | Permalink

Champagne for one

Join with me in a little celebration, dear readers. The page proofs of A Terry Teachout Reader, the anthology of my selected essays due out next spring from Yale University Press, arrived in the mail yesterday. Yippee!

For those of you who aren't in the lit biz, "proofs" are freshly typeset pages of a book, magazine article, or newspaper piece that the author proofreads and corrects prior to publication. Usually, that's the first time when you get to see more than a few sample pages set up in type, and even if it isn't your first book, it's still thrilling.

I think I've been reasonably good about keeping H. L. Mencken out of your hair, but I do want to share an anecdote from The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken with you. Mencken was 25 years old when his first full-length book, George Bernard Shaw: His Plays, was published in 1905. He was still an up-and-coming young editor at the Baltimore Herald, so he brought the proofs to the office that day to show to Lynn Meekins, his boss. There followed a scene (lovingly described in Newspaper Days, the second volume of Mencken's memoirs) sure to warm the heart of anyone who has ever published a book:

I was so enchanted that I could not resist taking the proofs to the office and showing them to Meekins--on the pretense, as I recall, of consulting him about a doubtful passage. He seemed almost as happy about it as I was. "If you live to be two hundred years old," he said, "you will never forget this day. It is one of the great days of your life, and maybe the greatest. You will write other books, but none of them will ever give you half the thrill of this one. Go to your office, lock the door, and sit down to read your proofs. Nothing going on in the office can be as important. Take the whole day off, and enjoy yourself." I naturally protested, saying that this or that had to be looked to. "Nonsense!" replied Meekins. "Let all those things take care of themselves. I order you to do nothing whatsoever until you have finished with the proofs. If anything pops up I'll have it sent to me." So I locked myself in as he commanded, and had a shining day indeed, and I can still remember its unparalleled glow after all these years.

Me, I'm still feeling a little bit glowy today.

Needless to say, life goes on, proofs or no proofs, and I spent the greater part of yesterday nailed to my desk chair, writing my "Second City" column for this Sunday's Washington Post, after which I scurried down to the Algonquin Hotel to hear Stacey Kent's Oak Room opening, so you'll have to be content with a minimalist blog. Today's topics, from loquacious to concise: (1) The best of all possible Westerns. (2) The snarkiest blog on earth, hands down. (3) The latest almanac entry.

I'll try to do better tomorrow.

Posted by diacritical on September 3, 2003 12:04 PM | Permalink

Almanac

"I found that to really make money, you had to give up music. So I gave up money."

Mel Lewis, quoted in Burt Korall, Drummin' Men: The Bebop Years

Posted by diacritical on September 4, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

Words to the wise

In the general welter of confusion, I almost failed to mention that Bill Charlap, my favorite jazz pianist, is appearing through Sunday at the Jazz Standard, my favorite New York jazz club. For details of the gig, which features the Charlap Trio and a string of guest stars, go here. (Peter Bernstein is on deck tonight, Phil Woods tomorrow.) If you need coaxing, here's a snippet of a profile of Charlap I wrote a couple of years ago for the New York Times:

Mr. Charlap can swing ferociously hard whenever it suits him, but it is his subtly shaded, quietly inward ballad playing that seems to cut closest to the core of his musical identity. "I love really slow tempos," he says. "Shirley Horn-type tempos. I love to move around in that kind of open musical space, and not spell everything out. Like Jimmy Rowles said, �If you have an idea, play half of it.' You want to give the listener a chance to reflect--and sometimes even complete an idea themselves. It can be better to suggest something than to say it straight out. Look at late Matisse. Just a couple of lines, and there it is. And I like songs you can play that slow. Jule Styne told me, �A really good song should be melodically simple and harmonically attractive.' Isn't that beautiful? Attractive--that says it all...."

If you don't live close enough to Manhattan to drop by, go here to order Written in the Stars, one of the most perfect piano-trio CDs ever recorded. If the title track doesn't sell you on Bill Charlap, I don't know what else to do--refer you to an audiologist, I guess.

Posted by diacritical on September 4, 2003 12:02 PM | Permalink

Monday matinee

The Film Forum held over The Adventures of Robin Hood for a few extra days, so I downed tools and went to see it Monday afternoon. I didn't expect much of a crowd, but the theater was full of painfully obvious movie buffs, some of whom brought along their kids. It always amazes me when I run across movie buffs who have kids. As I wrote in the Weekly Standard a couple of years ago apropos of a Budd Boetticher festival at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater:

If you long to meet odd people, it's hard to top Manhattanites who go to movies on weekdays. To be sure, I am among their number, but at least I have an excuse: I write about movies. The viewers I have in mind are the pure-hearted obsessives, overwhelmingly male and uniformly unattractive, who flock to revival houses on sunny spring afternoons to take in the latest week-long tribute to Alexander Dovzhenko, Ida Lupino, or maybe Edgar G. Ulmer--it scarcely matters, since the same folks show up every time, no matter what's showing.

Anyway, Generation Z was out in force and we all had a terrific time, except for a few dried-up spoilsports who kept turning around in their seats and shushing the fathers who were telling their children all about Robin Hood. Sure, I like a quiet theater, but to expect a dead hush at a Labor Day matinee of The Adventures of Robin Hood is just plain silly. Me, I didn't mind the background chatter one little bit. The newly restored Technicolor print was delicious-looking (no red is quite so red as Technicolor red), Erich Wolfgang Korngold's score was more thrilling than ever, and--glory of glories--they even showed a cartoon, Chuck Jones' "Rabbit Hood," a Bugs Bunny in which Errol Flynn makes a cameo appearance. I can't remember the last time I went to a matinee screening of an old-fashioned swashbuckler complete with cartoon. Probably not since I was a kid, and I had at least as much fun last Monday as I used to have watching Saturday-afternoon Audie Murphy double features at the Malone Theater in Sikeston, Missouri. The only thing missing was a newsreel.

Was it art? No. Do I care? No. Man cannot live by art alone. He needs a little popcorn from time to time, and the occasional Bugs Bunny cartoon to go with it. Which is how I spent my Labor Day, thank you very much.

Posted by diacritical on September 4, 2003 12:03 PM | Permalink

Visit to a small island

I wrote a piece for the Leisure & Arts page of today's Wall Street Journal about my recent trip to Maine. Here's the lead:

Six months ago, I bought a Fairfield Porter lithograph. Two weeks ago, I stood at the edge of a rocky cove near the southern tip of a remote island off the coast of Maine, looking at the same scene Porter viewed when he sketched "Isle au Haut." To get there, I hiked for two sweaty hours along a narrow woodland trail, stepping over snakes and trying not to turn an ankle. What possessed a flabby, chair-bound critic like me to make such a journey? It seemed like a good idea as I sat in the air-conditioned comfort of my home office, but I started having second, third and fourth thoughts as I trudged up the Goat Trail of Isle au Haut....

No link, alas, so if you want to read the rest, go buy a Journal. I wish you would--I'm proud of this one.

Posted by diacritical on September 4, 2003 12:04 PM | Permalink

Water? Don't have that, sir

Those of you who admire the one-act plays of David Ives will know exactly what I mean when I tell you I was in a Philadelphia yesterday. (Thank God I didn't go to any restaurants.) For civilians, I'll say only that everything that could go wrong did, here and at The Wall Street Journal, for which I spent the morning writing a piece (see below). I'm still not sure how it got published, much less finished. And did I mention that my computer crashed at 10:45 last night, in the process chewing up the entire rough draft of today's blog? I don't want to discuss it.

Anyway, I didn't slit my wrists, so here are today's topics, from terse to laconic: (1) What I did for my summer vacation. (2) Adventures among the cinephiles and their wee ones. (3) Your weekend entertainment guide, in one easy lesson. (4) The latest almanac entry.

I forgot to remind you yesterday to tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com. Pure chagrin, I guess. I don't feel like doing it today, either. The hell with it. Don't tell anybody about www.terryteachout.com. Consider it an exclusive club--just you, me, and The Minor Fall, the Major Lift, and he'll probably decide I'm not cool enough later this week....

Posted by diacritical on September 4, 2003 12:05 PM | Permalink

Almanac

"The terrible thing about this world is that everybody has his reason."

Jean Renoir, screenplay for The Rules of the Game

Posted by diacritical on September 5, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

Here and there

"The Murder Artist," my latest essay for Commentary, is now posted on the magazine's Web site. It's a review-essay about Frederic Spotts' book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics.

If you didn't read it in the magazine, click on the link in the "Teachout in Commentary" module of the right-hand column. You can't miss it.

Posted by diacritical on September 5, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

Semper fi

My friend Nancy LaMott, who died of cancer in 1995, was the best cabaret singer I ever heard--period--as well as one of the dearest people I ever knew. She recorded five CDs during her lifetime, and a sixth was released after her death. They've been out of print for several years, but are now available again from her old label, Midder Music. To order them, go here.

I wrote a reminiscence of Nancy a few months after she died (it will be included in A Terry Teachout Reader) in which I described her singing as follows:

What I heard...was a warm, husky mezzo-soprano voice that seemed twice as big as the woman in whom it was housed; a vivid yet unaffected way with lyrics; and a quality at once sensuous and achingly idealistic. Later, after I had met Nancy, I would write that her singing sounded "as if the girl next door had snuck out at two a.m. to make a little whoopee with her steady boyfriend," a description that delighted her no end.

All of Nancy's records were good, but if you want to try just one, make it Come Rain or Come Shine: The Songs of Johnny Mercer. I have a sentimental attachment to that particular album--it was my own introduction to Nancy's singing--but I also think it's the best of her six CDs, if not by much. I can't see how anyone could possibly hear her performance of "Moon River," the first track on the album, without falling in love with her singing. I did, and I was also fortunate enough to spend quite a bit of time with her in the year and a half before she died. It's nice to know that people who never heard her live will now be able to buy her records. If you didn't, do.

Posted by diacritical on September 5, 2003 12:02 PM | Permalink

Number one with a bullet

My favorite movie of all time, and I don't mean maybe, is Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, a painfully poignant look at the moral disintegration of France's upper middle class (what Whit Stillman calls the "urban haute bourgeoisie") on the eve of World War II. It's on absolutely every serious movie critic's list of the most important films as yet unavailable on DVD, so I was highly interested in the following item from the Criterion Collection Web site, which I heard about by way of DVD Journal:

Jean Renoir's classic The Rules of the Game had been slated for release at the end of 2003, but that will change thanks to the discovery this week of a film element previously thought to be lost. Criterion's staff had already spent months on the new high-definition master that was to be at the heart of a two-disc special edition when a French lab finally unearthed the fine-grain master of the reconstructed version, one generation closer to the original than anything previously available. A similar discovery delayed the release of another Renoir classic, Grand Illusion, intended to be Criterion's first release. Expect The Rules of the Game in early 2004.

For those of you who aren't cinephiles, this is a BFD (i.e., very big deal). Released in 1939, The Rules of the Game was suppressed after the Nazis moved into France, and had to be reconstructed piecemeal after the war. All existing prints (including the one that made it onto the videocassette linked above) are variously crappy-looking, and the Criterion Collection, whose DVD of Grand Illusion looks almost too good to be true, is famously fussy about picture quality. Hence the delay.

I can't wait, but I don't mind waiting, if you know what I mean. Nor should you.

Posted by diacritical on September 5, 2003 12:03 PM | Permalink

The Red and the blacklist

I reviewed Trumbo, a new play about the life of Dalton Trumbo, in this morning's Wall Street Journal. Here's the lead:

So you've been waiting all summer for yet another play about the Hollywood blacklist? Well, breathe easier. "Trumbo," which opened last night at the Westside Theatre, is a left-wing version of "Love Letters" in which Nathan Lane reads from the correspondence of Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter best remembered as one of the "Unfriendly Ten" witnesses who refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee's 1947 probe of Communist activities in Hollywood and were later jailed for contempt of Congress. Gordon MacDonald plays Christopher Trumbo, Dalton's son and the author of "Trumbo," who in the play doubles as his father's straight man. Both actors use scripts, and Peter Askin's direction consists of having Mr. MacDonald walk from one side of the stage to the other and back again. (Mr. Lane sits at a desk.)

To read the rest of the review--which is considerably less enthusiastic than this paragraph, to put it as mildly as possible--pick up a copy of the Journal and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section. Even if you don't like my review, you'll get your dollar's worth.

Posted by diacritical on September 5, 2003 12:04 PM | Permalink

Fullish house

To those of you joining us for the very first time after having run across the www.terryteachout.com URL in this morning's Wall Street Journal, welcome to "About Last Night," the 24/5 arts blog. You can read all about "About Last Night" in the right-hand column, which contains a diverse assortment of goodies, informative and otherwise (including a mostly new set of Teachout's Top Fives, for those oldsters who didn't notice the change of items earlier in the week).

As you may have gathered, I spent way the hell too much time chasing print-media deadlines this week. Nevertheless, I pulled up my socks and contrived to send you lurching into the weekend with a reasonably full bag of stuff. Today's topics, from transgressive to subversive: (1) New from Christopher Trumbo, "Commie Dearest, or, A Boy's Best Friend Is His Father." (2) Why isn't the greatest movie ever made available on DVD? (3) A singer you shouldn't be living without. (4) Where to read about Hitler. (5) The latest almanac entry.

Hey, everybody, I was not happy with this week's ratings! They weren't bad, but they weren't stupendous, either. I'm doing my job--what about you? Be so kind as to beat the bushes and tell all your art-loving friends about www.terryteachout.com. You'll be glad you did. They'll be glad you did. I'll be glad you did.

Posted by diacritical on September 5, 2003 12:05 PM | Permalink

Guest almanac

Courtesy of The View from the Foothills, for which much thanks:

"For I am convinced that good adverse criticism is the most difficult thing we have to do. I would advise everyone to begin it under the most favourable conditions: this is, where you thoroughly know and heartily like the thing the author is trying to do, and have enjoyed many books where it was done well. Then you will have some chance of really showing that he has failed and perhaps even of showing why. But if our real reaction to a book is �Ugh! I just can't bear this sort of thing,' then I think we shall not be able to diagnose whatever real faults it has. We may labour to conceal our emotion, but we shall end in a welter of emotive, unanalysed vogue-words--�arch', �facetious,' �bogus,' �adolescent', �immature,' and the rest. When we really know what is wrong we need none of these."

C.S. Lewis, On Science Fiction

Posted by diacritical on September 8, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

Words to the wise

I received the following e-mail last week from jazz trumpeter Marvin Stamm:

I just wanted to let you know that my group, the Marvin Stamm Quartet, will be performing for four evenings, Sept. 10-13, at Birdland. The group will include Bill Mays, piano; Rufus Reid, bass; Ed Soph, drums; and special guest John Abercrombie on guitar. Sets will be at 9:00 and 11:00 p.m.

In all my years of playing, this is the most exciting and musical group I have ever been a part of. Though I am always right in the middle of things when we play, the creativity of these gentlemen never fails to astound me. It is really something to hear. While we tour quite a bit, this is the first time we have had the opportunity to appear in a major New York City jazz club as a group. I hope all of you will come hear this group play. I guarantee a great evening of music for us all!

I concur, and then some. Stamm is a musician's musician, one of those brilliant players who are universally admired by their colleagues but unknown to the public at large. I haven't heard his quartet in person, but I did hear a live CD privately recorded at a recent gig, and it blew me out of my shoes. I was so impressed that I wanted to do a print-media profile of Stamm and the group to promote this gig. Alas, it fell through, so the least I can do is let all of you know that starting on Wednesday, Birdland is the place to be.

Posted by diacritical on September 8, 2003 12:02 PM | Permalink

In the bag

Time again for "In the Bag," the game that challenges you to admit what art you really 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 death squad is pounding 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 stuff in the bag?

As of this moment, here are my picks:

PAINTING: Edouard Manet, Roses, Oeillets, Pensees (Flowers in a Crystal Vase)

CD: Bill Evans and Eddie Gomez, Intuition

NOVEL: Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

FILM: John Ford, The Searchers (yes, I'm on a Western kick)

DANCE: Merce Cunningham, Beach Birds

Your turn.

Posted by diacritical on September 8, 2003 12:03 PM | Permalink

Without compensation

As some of you will recall, I'm judging a literary award this year, and as a result, I've had to spend much of my spare time reading books chosen for me by other people (which isn't to say I didn't enjoy them). This weekend, though, I took a busman's holiday and treated myself to a pair of books that I read solely and only because I wanted to read them.

The first, George Jacobs' Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra (HarperCollins), the ghostwritten autobiography of Frank Sinatra's valet, is a piece of lowbrow trash, though I will freely admit that I gulped it down in a single sitting, pausing only to perform necessary bodily functions, and not always even then. I read it partly for the dish value (which is considerable), but mostly because it sheds a strange half-light on Sinatra's artistry. He was and is one of the unsolved mysteries of American culture, a man of limitless vulgarity who made art of the utmost sensitivity, and the more I learn about his life, the more puzzled I am by the fissure in his soul that made it possible for him to record albums like Only the Lonely, then go out and do the things Jacobs describes with seemingly unselfconscious relish in Mr. S.

Because Jacobs had no understanding of Sinatra the artist, his book supplies a shockingly lucid portrait of the dark side of a double man. Perhaps not surprisingly, it barely hints at the existence of the other Sinatra, the self-conscious introvert whose record collection consisted mostly of classical music and who sang the great American popular songs as tenderly as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sang Schubert. I hope somebody will get around to writing a book about that Frank Sinatra, and I'll read it with equal attention, but I'd never make the mistake of supposing that the sensitive Sinatra was the "real" Sinatra. Both Sinatras were real, which is why the man they comprised was so endlessly interesting--and, I suspect, ultimately unknowable.

The second book, John Updike's Just Looking: Essays on Art, is a paperback reissue by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts of a 1986 collection of fugitive essays about the visual arts by a famous novelist for whose books I've never much cared. Still, it's always interesting to see what a distinguished artist (and Updike is nothing if not distinguished) has to say about a medium not his own. I wish more such folk would write this kind of "amateur" criticism, which more often than not turns out to be surprisingly good. Philip Larkin, for example, was both a very great poet and an eccentric but hugely entertaining jazz critic.

While Updike isn't that good, his occasional ventures into art criticism are both readable and not infrequently illuminating. By coincidence, he writes in Just Looking about a painting by Fairfield Porter that I just saw for the first time, Cliffs of Isle au Haut. If you've been keeping up with the blog lately, you'll remember that I went to Maine last month in search of the actual cove portrayed in that painting. (Porter used it as the basis for a 1975 lithograph of which I own a copy.) Here's what Updike had to say about it:

From the Abstract Expressionists Porter learned boldness, the boldness of broad monochrome expanses and of loaded brushstrokes. Often he defines a tree's structure by slashing into its mass with daubs of the background color. Sunlight explodes with terrific violence at the windows of his hushed interiors. In Cliffs of Isle au Haut (a canvas that seems to borrow some of the color-by-number texture of Welliver's landscapes), a spiky blob as opaquely black as anything in Kline or Motherwell overspreads the foreground without "reading" as the natural phenomenon it undoubtedly was. The two children's heads peeping over the lichenous rocks restore us, however, to Porter's domestic world.
Not too shabby for a novelist, I'd say.

Posted by diacritical on September 8, 2003 12:04 PM | Permalink

Time off for good behavior

Get this: I took most of the weekend off! Instead of writing, which is what I usually do all weekend, I slept late, dropped into a half-dozen art galleries, went to hear Bill Charlap at the Jazz Standard, and--yes--got a little work done on Sunday. Nothing too serious, though: I spent the morning and afternoon indexing and proofreading the introduction and first 58 pages of A Terry Teachout Reader. (I'm doing my own index to save money so that I can buy another lithograph.) Did I mention that I didn't write anything?

For those of you wondering when I'm finally going to get around to answering my mail again, here's my reply: I want to thank you all for contributing to my improved mental health by giving me the weekend off. (Pretty clever, huh?) But I didn't forget about you, and here's the proof, from ridiculous to sublime: (1) What I didn't read on my summer vacation. (2) "In the Bag." (3) An insufficiently celebrated jazz trumpeter brings an all-star group to town. (4) The latest almanac entry--with a twist.

"About Last Night" expects that each man will do his duty, and women, too. Tell everyone you know about www.terryteachout.com this week. Fill the air of cyberspace with tidings of aesthetic comfort and joy.

Posted by diacritical on September 8, 2003 12:05 PM | Permalink

Almanac

"Mens sana in corpore sano is a contradiction in terms, the fantasy of a Mr. Have-your-cake-and-eat-it. No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures; no ascetic can be considered reliably sane. Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drink water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted."

A. J. Liebling, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris

Posted by diacritical on September 9, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

Elsewhere

Lileks, the King of Us All, pulls off one of his patented enharmonic modulations, side-slipping from politics to the arts in a half-beat:

It is more likely that a true unalloyed Democrat will be elected than a brass-tacks Republican. Get used to it. The number of people who want a particular Government program exceeds the number who want none. You want the NEA abolished? That will require two nuclear attacks on American soil. After the first the NEA will be more important than ever, as we sort out our feelings about the event through a nationally coordinated series of interpretive dances. After the second, the economy will be so far down the crapper-pipes that someone will point out that we shouldn't fund the Mimes-for-the-Blind symposium when we really need the money for anti-radiation drugs.

As I always say after watching a Fred Astaire dance routine, I wish I could do that.

You've heard about Snarkwatch, right? If not, Colby Cosh explains it all for you:

Have you seen Believer magazine's new weblog Snarkwatch? It's the latest manifestation of Dave Eggers' infuriated conviction that Anglophone literature is being destroyed by critics. The mission statement of Snarkwatch reads thus: "This is a place to record enthusiasms, mystifications, as well as disgruntled reactions to �critical activity.' If you think a book was reviewed unfairly, or if someone missed the point; if you think a reviewer did a splendid job worth praising; if you know of a worthy book receiving no review coverage whatsoever. All categories of response are encouraged, and should be sent to snarkwatch@believermag.com."

All categories of response are encouraged--but, of course, the thing is called Snarkwatch, isn't it. We may infer from this what its content is likely to be: negativity will be brought up short, and the snarky served a dose of their own steaming snark. In truth, this implicit mandate only guarantees that Snarkwatch will be a reliable guide to the most electric, most passionate criticism.

Well said, Mr. Cosh, well said.

Several much-missed bloggers are up and running after late-summer hiatuses, including Moby Lives, the must-read site about the publishing business, and Critical Mass, at which (on which?) Erin O'Connor welcomes herself back with a short, sharp swipe at the dangerous vogue of campus speech codes:

It's the punitive wish of people whose self-righteousness is such that they can never imagine being on the wrong end of such a code themselves, and thus cannot imagine just how damaging--to the private self and to the public sphere--such attempts to regulate expressions of belief inevitably are.

You go, girl.

Banana Oil hadn't posted for so long that I was on the verge of bumping him off "Sites to See" this morning. Then I gave the link one last click and--lo and behold--he turned out to be back in business again, writing about none other than...me. He says I'm "looking for the Grand Muckety-muck title in the CultureBlogosphere" and "swiftly becoming the eight hundred pound gorilla of culture blogging (and hey, any guy who writes a thick juicy bio of H. L. Mencken is okay in my book."

Shucks.

Posted by diacritical on September 9, 2003 12:02 PM | Permalink

Mr. Wright's folly

I weighed in recently on the Great Frank Lloyd Wright Cyberspace Imbroglio, prompting this crisp response from the normally thoughtful City Comforts:

Teachout repeats the conventional thinking that FLW was a "genius" but then gets on to the interesting stuff: anecdotes about FLW's personality....my preference is that we would leave the poor tortured man alone and in peace and simply consider the merits or demerits of his work without the use of conclusory terms such as "genius."

Ah, yes, as opposed to inconclusory terms like "poor tortured man," right? I fear this isn't quite good enough (aside from being the least little bit snippy). For openers, it isn't merely "conventional thinking" that Frank Lloyd Wright was a genius--it is a long-standing and near-universal manifestation of the consensus of taste. And when I call Wright a "genius" in a very short posting, it's a piece of shorthand intended to suggest my own considered view of the merits and demerits of his work.

Much of the recent wrangling has centered on Fallingwater, the Wright-designed Pennsylvania home whose roof leaks and whose unusual design required substantial ex post facto structural work in order to keep it from fallingdown. Of course I don't know what it would feel like to live there, but Fallingwater--as well as many of the other Wright houses I've seen and in some cases toured--seems to me both remarkably and self-evidently beautiful. This says nothing about the no less self-evident structural unsoundness of the house's design and original construction, but I don't really think that's relevant to the issue of its beauty. Is a great painting less great because it makes use of innovative but chemically unstable pigments that change over time?

As for the leaky roof, well, I think I'd be willing to put out the occasional bucket in return for the privilege of spending my days and nights in a house that looked like this. I know, I know, that's a matter of opinion, but I dare say my opinion of Fallingwater is far more widely shared than that of Wright's detractors, and not just by art critics, either.

On the other hand (there's usually another hand, isn't there?), I was sorely disappointed by "From Picasso to Pollock: Classics of Modern Art," the Guggenheim Museum's ongoing exhibit of works from its permanent collection (it's up through Sept. 28), and Frank Lloyd Wright was partly to blame, though not entirely. Let's start with the description of the show posted on the Guggenheim's Web site:

Featuring more than 100 works spanning six decades, this exhibition provides a unique opportunity to view the Guggenheim's exceptional collection in great depth....Wright's visionary building is presented as he intended: as a haven for spiritual and artistic contemplation. Baring the original ivory-colored, curved walls and allowing natural light to stream in from the oculus, the museum is once again, as the architect stated, "a space in which to view the painter's creation truthfully."

The complete version of this statement rates a thorough fisking, but I'll restrict myself to a few words about the Guggenheim's exhibition policy, which has something to do with the fact that "From Picasso to Pollock" provided a "unique" opportunity to view the Guggenheim's permanent collection in "great depth." And why, pray tell, should that opportunity be so unique? Because (1) the Guggenheim now regularly devotes most of its available space to temporary exhibitions of ephemeral interest (Matthew Barney, call your agent) and (2) the Wright-designed main building eats art. The attention-grabbing rotunda and inward-slanting walls pull your eyes away from the paintings on display as effectively as a fireworks display. If Wright really thought he was creating "a space in which to view the painter's creation truthfully," he was as wet as the occupants of Fallingwater on a stormy day.

Me, I think it more likely that he meant to draw attention away from the art. After all, his houses, Fallingwater very much included, tend to do exactly the same thing. To me, that's their one drawback: the visual statements they make are so powerful that they snuff out any possible competition. I can't imagine a serious collector of art wanting to live in Fallingwater--which is perfectly all right, of course, so long as you don't collect art. The Guggenheim is by definition a different story, a museum building so beautiful in its own right as to be paradoxically ill-suited to its intended purpose.

On the other hand (yes, there's a third hand), the Guggenheim happens to be more beautiful than much of the art that it houses. It's an odd collection, at once idiosyncratic and strangely lacking in absolute distinction, not at all like such indisputably first-class one-man shows as the Frick and Phillips Collections. The fact that so little of the permanent collection has been regularly displayed in recent years has tended to obscure that fact. "From Picasso to Pollock," by contrast, rubs your nose in the deficiencies of the Guggenheim's holdings. Once I'd trudged all the way up the spiral, having looked earnestly at everything, I was struck by how few of the paintings I longed to take home with me (as opposed to taking them straight to the nearest dealer). Sure, there were a few treasures, including some luscious Brancusis and one of the Guggenheim's zillion-odd Kandinskys, the show-stopping Black Lines, but after that, the pickings were surprisingly slim.

What kind of architect designs a museum that upstages the paintings it was built to display? A bad one? Or a supremely great one who knew he had to give the patrons something cool to look at? I never enter the Guggenheim without asking myself that question, which is a tribute, albeit something of a backhanded one, to--yes--the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Posted by diacritical on September 9, 2003 12:03 PM | Permalink

Far afield

If it's Tuesday, this must be "About Last Night." I decided to spend Monday afternoon catching up with the recent doings of some of my fellow arts bloggers, and it got out of hand. Hence today's topics, from hither to yon: (1) Fallingwater is not the Guggenheim Museum, and vice versa. (2) There'll always be an NEA. (3) The significance of snarkery (and no, this one isn't about The Minor Fall, the Major Lift). (4) Speech Codes on Campus, or, The Case of the Twice-Gored Ox. (5) Who called me a gorilla? (6) The latest almanac entry.

Heaven only knows what I'll write about tomorrow, but don't you think your best friend will want to know, too? A simple e-mail alerting him/her/it to the existence of www.terryteachout.com will ensure his/her/its happiness forevermore.

"About Last Night" received 17,000 page views during the month of August. Let's not stop there.

Posted by diacritical on September 9, 2003 12:04 PM | Permalink

Almanac

"So, Jeeves!"

"Yes, sir."

"What do you mean, Yes, sir?"

"I was endeavouring to convey my appreciation of the fact that your position is in many respects somewhat difficult, sir. But I wonder if I might call your attention to an observation fo the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. He said: �Does aught befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web'."

I breathed a bit stertorously.

"He said that, did he?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, you can tell him from me he's an ass."

P. G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season

Posted by diacritical on September 10, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

Life's little frustrations

Guess what? I'm starting to open my e-mail again! (Or at least I was.) Here's one I want to share, from a reader who went to see Turner: The Late Seascapes at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., which is a little bit too far off the beaten path for most New York art lovers:

I did do the crazy, quixotic thing Labor Day weekend--went up to W'mstown and back in a single day (Bonanza Bus Co. makes Greyhound look like Concorde, except that they do take a very scenic route through the Berkshires). The Turner show was really marvelous (why is it a truism of art shows that the work you most want on a postcard isn't available? there were two astonishing watercolors, one of which made me feel distinctly larcenous) and the Clark's own collection is surprisingly world class...

Aside from the good report on the show, I was struck by my correspondent's observation about museum postcards, which tallies precisely with my near-universal experience. It isn't true of permanent collections--I've had pretty good luck there--but whenever I go to a touring show, the museum shop never has a postcard of the painting I like best (unless the show is small enough to stack the odds in my favor). The only exception that comes immediately to mind was MoMA's Jackson Pollock retrospective. I was knocked out by an uncharacteristically small 1946 painting (19 by 14 inches) called "Free Form," and sure enough, there was a postcard waiting for me in the gift shop--but the painting belonged to MoMA, so it didn't quite count. (Nor is a link to this lovely painting to be found anywhere on the Web, at least as far as I can see, arrgh.)

Perhaps even more irritating, though, is when you spend an hour or two trolling the permanent collection, retire to the museum shop, and find a half-dozen postcards of the paintings you'd really like to have seen...none of which is currently on display.

Did I say arrgh?

Posted by diacritical on September 10, 2003 12:02 PM | Permalink

It must have been something I ate

The skies over Manhattan were preposterously beautiful last night, full of colors that looked as if Wolf Kahn had squeezed them out of a tube. Too bad I was in no mood to appreciate them, for my personal color was yellowish green. So please forgive this truncated edition of "About Last Night."

I'll be back with something more ambitious tomorrow.

Posted by diacritical on September 10, 2003 12:03 PM | Permalink

Almanac

"How many intellectuals have come to the revolutionary party via the path of moral indignation, only to connive ultimately at terror and autocracy?"

Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals

Posted by diacritical on September 11, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

Elsewhere

You don't have to agree with Hilton Kramer (though I generally do) to appreciate his deadly bluntness, as in this report on his first visit to Dia:Beacon, the new museum/palace/temple of minimalist art:

As for boredom, well, this was one of those attributes of Minimalism that its champions proudly acclaimed from the outset. "Boring the public," wrote Barbara Rose in her "ABC" defense of Minimalism, "is one way of testing its commitment. The new artists seem to be extremely chary: approval, they, know, is easy to come by in this sellers' market for culture, but commitment is nearly impossible to elicit. So they make their art as difficult, remote, aloof and indigestible as possible. One way to achieve this is to make art boring." By this measure--both the boredom quotient itself and the scale of financial commitment to boredom as an artistic principle--Dia:Beacon's achievement is destined to remain unrivaled for the foreseeable future.

Speaking as one who finds most minimalism of all kinds stupefyingly boring, I say, yeah! And then some.

2 Blowhards has launched a contest of sorts:

Choosing solely among the products of HFOP (i.e., High-Falutin' Oil Painting), what would you choose as your favorite female nude?

O.K., I'm game. I stuffed this painting In the Bag a couple of weeks ago, but it's always worth mentioning.

Maud Newton (she's so cool) has posted links to three recent reviews of The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom and Surprising Life of James Thurber (what a lame-o title!), including my own piece for the New York Times Book Review (also accessible in the right-hand column) and the "official" New Yorker review by Robert Gottlieb, who has metamorphosed in recent years into a highly impressive critic. Go here, scroll down to "No one goes there much anymore," and catch up.

Posted by diacritical on September 11, 2003 12:02 PM | Permalink

The future was yesterday

My most recent "Second City" column for the Washington Post (accessible in the right-hand column), a preview of the fall season in New York, started off as follows:

If you're a music lover--and it doesn't much matter what kind of music you love best--the big event will be the opening this month of Zankel Hall, the new 650-seat auditorium that Carnegie Hall has carved out of its basement.

Even before the New York Philharmonic announced its plans to leave Lincoln Center for Carnegie Hall, midtown Manhattan was greatly in need of a medium-size auditorium with good acoustics (Carnegie Hall seats 2,804, Weill Recital Hall 268). Assuming Lincoln Center doesn't try to block the Philharmonic's move, Zankel Hall will become an even more important addition to New York's surprisingly short list of first-class concert venues, since Carnegie Hall will suddenly find itself with an 800-pound gorilla as its principal tenant. An impressive roster of inaugural-season performers is guaranteed to keep the house humming, so all that remains is to find out what it sounds like. I'll be all ears at Wednesday's media preview matinee--watch this space for details.

Sure enough, I was there, but I don't want to jump to any premature conclusions. I'll be seeing a lot of Zankel Hall in the coming weeks and months, and will have plenty of time to get used to its idiosyncrasies. In the meantime, I do have a few preliminary observations:

Design. Zankel Hall is an old-fashioned shoebox (the most acoustically reliable shape for a concert hall) set inside an elliptical shell. The walls and floor are made of blond wood. The ceiling is an exposed lighting grid painted pitch-black--it feels as if you're sitting underneath a giant assemblage by Louise Nevelson. Though the modular stage area and seating allow for multiple floor plans, the basic arrangement is that of a traditional concert hall with a steeply raked parterre (the sight lines are excellent), two shallow rings, and a small balcony. I found the results to be attractive enough but somewhat sterile-looking, a typical exercise in safe concert-hall modernism.

Comfort. Since Zankel Hall is underneath Carnegie Hall, the space available for public areas is necessarily limited. At first glance, the main lobby, which wraps around the elliptical shell, felt cramped and claustrophobic, even maze-like (some of the ceilings seem almost as low as the ones in the first-floor lobby of the Metropolitan Opera House), and it appeared as if the crowd was having a bit of trouble getting in and out of the auditorium, though that may have been due to the unfamiliarity of the floor plan. Again, this is something to which we'll all have to accustom ourselves before drawing any conclusions.

In the seating setup used at the media preview, the parterre level of the auditorium had no center aisle and each row was about 20 seats long, meaning that latecomers will have to stumble over earlycomers, just as they do in the New York State Theatre. I hope the managers of the hall will try out a center aisle at some point.

Acoustics. Multipurpose concert halls are by definition acoustically impossible. Classical music requires long resonant times, pop music short ones. That's why symphony orchestras sound good in Carnegie Hall, whereas amplified jazz groups sound soupy and unclear. Zankel Hall, by contrast, is meant to be used by everybody from Emmylou Harris to the Emerson String Quartet, though it's a safe bet that the acoustics will be more flattering to some kinds of music than others.

The first part of the preview program consisted of six widely varied pieces of classical music: "Shatter Me, Music," an a cappella vocal solo commissioned from John Corigliano for the opening of the hall; two piano-accompanied songs (one loud, one soft) by Richard Strauss; "Pagodes," a piano solo by Debussy; the slow movement of Villa-Lobos' Bachianas Brasilieras No. 5 for soprano and eight cellos; and Concerto in slendro, a vest-pocket concerto by Lou Harrison for violin, two percussionists, and three keyboard players. Having listening to all these pieces, my snap reaction was that the hall seemed bright, clear, a bit dry, and distinctly bass-shy, a combination of qualities that I found to be unflattering to Ren�e Fleming's "heavy" lyric-soprano voice. (I doubt this is going to be a singers' hall.) Emanuel Ax accompanied Fleming in the Strauss songs and played the Debussy, and his piano tone was plummy in the middle range. The sound in the Villa-Lobos was clinically clear. The Harrison, with its pingy, clangy, gamelan-like sonorities, came off best.

Kenny Barron and his marvelous quintet then played Miles Davis' "All Blues" and Wayne Shorter's "Footprints." The band, which was electronically amplified, sounded boomy and tubby, especially the vibes and drums. It's impossible to know whether this was the fault of the hall, the sound system, or the engineer. At the very least, the folks who run Zankel Hall have not yet figured out how to use amplification effectively, which is a surprisingly common problem (I never cease to marvel at how awful the sound is in some of New York's pricier jazz clubs). Assuming the acoustics aren't at fault, there'll be plenty of opportunities to figure out and fix the problem--much of the first-season programming, after all, consists of jazz and pop music. For now, I'd strongly encourage jazz musicians who appear at Zankel Hall to at least try unplugging their amps and playing acoustically, and I don't think it's too early to suggest that drummers shouldn't be miked at all.

The subway. If you've ever been to Carnegie Hall, you know that passing subway trains are clearly audible in the main auditorium (you can hear them on some of Toscanini's recordings with the NBC Symphony). They're much louder in Zankel Hall--in fact, they're almost as noisy there as at the Village Vanguard, which is also located below street level. Though the noise never comes close to drowning out the music, it's definitely obtrusive in quiet passages. As a result, my guess is that the hall will prove to be unusable for recording and tricky for broadcasting (a notch filter might help).

By now I'm sure it's obvious that Zankel Hall didn't make as favorable an impression on me as I'd hoped, but I long ago learned that first impressions of a new auditorium can be deceptive. What seems problematic on first hearing often proves less so later on (and vice versa). The public spaces, for example, may start to seem less cramped and the acoustics more ingratiating, especially once I've attended performances that make use of alternate floor plans. I mean to keep my ears--and eyes--wide open in the coming season, and I'll be sharing my reactions with you.

Posted by diacritical on September 11, 2003 12:03 PM | Permalink

I wonder what became of me

I'm still here, and whatever was wrong with me yesterday isn't today, thus allowing me to present you with a basically normal "About Last Night." All art, all the time, or at least on weekdays when my color is good--you know the drill.

Today's topics, from queasy to comfy: (1) A quick peek into Manhattan's newest concert hall. (2) A museological smackdown. (3) Bare naked ladies on canvas. (4) The Thurber wars. (5) The latest almanac entry.

Tuesday's numbers for this site were the highest since I took a week off to go play on the cliffs of Isle au Haut. I attribute this solely to your industrious plugging (though I have no doubt that the adorable Megan McArdle helped!). Keep it up.

Whither www.terryteachout.com? It all depends on you.

Posted by diacritical on September 11, 2003 12:04 PM | Permalink

Almanac

"It's an odd mindset that sees hubris everywhere, but that cannot recognize evil."

Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, Sept. 11, 2003

Posted by diacritical on September 12, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

Hail and farewell

A memorial service will be held this coming Monday in Manhattan for Benny Carter, the great jazz musician who died July 12 at the age of 95. It'll take place at St. Peter's Church (619 Lexington at 54th St.) starting at 7:30. The service is open to the public, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the joint jumps, albeit decorously--jazz musicians like to send one another off in style.

I have to give a short speech elsewhere in the neighborhood at almost exactly the same time, but I plan to drop by if I possibly can. You come, too.

Posted by diacritical on September 12, 2003 12:02 PM | Permalink

Fog in the channel

A reader writes:

I'm afraid that as blogs proliferate, the medium threatens to become as "oceanic" and inefficent as the myriad other venues on the net--and off. Not enough time is allotted to us in our lifetimes to paddle through this immense and ever-increasing expanse of random opinion. And I fear that the super-high SQ (Snark Quotient) threatens to trivialize the medium, sapping it of real serious intent. I suppose it may be contrary to the essentially free-wheeling nature of the medium, but is there a way to counteract "blog smog"?

I know exactly what my correspondent means, but I also think it's in "the essentially free-wheeling nature of the medium" for arts bloggers (and all other kinds of bloggers, for that matter) to write whatever the hell they want and let their readers sort it out. This is, after all, a market, and a fairly efficient one, too. Given a certain amount of effort, it quickly becomes apparent which arts blogs are worth reading daily, which ones weekly, and which ones not at all.

Even more interesting is the fact that bloggers also tend to link to one another, meaning that we do the sorting, and my guess is that it is in this manner that the Web will gradually become less random and more accessible--through organic evolution rather than central planning, so to speak. It used to be widely said that what the Web lacked were "gatekeepers" who could sort through everything out there and tell the great unwashed public what was worth reading--sort of like, oh, print-media editors. But then the great unwashed public started noticing that more than a few of the existing print-media gatekeepers were doing a rotten job of keeping their gates, and shortly thereafter, the blogosphere started to pick up speed. Coincidence? I suspect not.

As for the snarkiness, well, I kind of like it, at least when it's wicked clever, as Mainers say. "Serious intent," after all, comes under many different covers. I won't blow the cover of my correspondent, but I will tell you that he is the very distinguished classical composer whom I mentioned in this space a few weeks ago--the one who sings Emily Dickinson poems to the tune of the Gilligan's Island theme at drunken parties, and who has also been known to emit the odd snarky remark from time to time.

Lest we forget, blogging is a fairly new phenomenon, one still in the process of finding its footing. Frankly, I think we need more arts blogging, not less. For openers, I know I'd love to read a blog about the daily life of a classical composer. Any takers?

Posted by diacritical on September 12, 2003 12:03 PM | Permalink

Container for the thing contained

As I think about my first visit to Zankel Hall, and what I wrote about it yesterday, I'm struck by something that ought to be more obvious than it is: I took for granted that the architectural design of the hall ought to be of subordinate interest to its function. Beyond a description of the hall's appearance and a succinct expression of my reaction to it ("I found the results to be attractive enough but somewhat sterile-looking, a typical exercise in safe concert-hall modernism"), I devoted myself exclusively to practical matters. How did the hall sound? Were the public areas comfortable? What about subway noise? Short of talking about the bathrooms (which I didn't visit), I couldn't have been much less aesthetic-minded than that.

I know what you're thinking, and quite rightly, too: It's a concert hall, for God's sake. If the acoustics are lousy, who cares how it looks? Of course it isn't quite that simple. The eye can fool the ear into thinking that an ugly hall "sounds" bad (this was part of the problem with Lincoln Center's old Philharmonic Hall). Still, the basic premise holds true under most circumstances. First and foremost, a concert hall must sound good. After that, it must be congenial, meaning that going there should be a pleasant experience rather than an oppressive one. If the seats are uncomfortable, you won't notice the acoustics--you'll be too busy squirming. Once these enabling conditions are met, you start thinking about the visual appeal of the building, if then.

I mention all this because of the recent intramural squabble over the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, which some arts bloggers like and others loathe. Now I'm a dyed-in-the-wool aesthete who would dearly love to live in an exceptionally beautiful house and would willingly put up with a significant amount of nuisance value (i.e., leaky roofs) in order to do so...but not an unlimited amount. To put it as drastically as possible, I wouldn't want to live in Fallingwater if it didn't have indoor plumbing--and I might well think twice about it if there wasn't a good place to hang my John Marin etching, either.

Clement Greenberg, the great art critic whom I not infrequently have occasion to quote, said something highly relevant in this connection:

There are, of course, more important things than art: life itself, what actually happens to you. This may sound silly, but I have to say it, given what I've heard art-silly people say all my life: I say that if you have to choose between life and happiness or art, remember always to choose life and happiness. Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.

I think these words ought to be done in cross-stitch and hung in the homes of artists and art-lovers everywhere, if not necessarily in the living room. Art is not the most important thing in the world. Earthly beauty is not an absolute value. (Among many other things, it isn't worth killing for.) I may disagree with City Comforts or 2 Blowhards about whether or not Frank Lloyd Wright was a genius, but I think we're all basically dealing from the same deck when it comes to this larger question, and I suspect you are, too, whether you've thought about it or not.

If you haven't, try it the very next time you find yourself sitting in a concert hall or theater. Sure, the very best auditoriums are both beautiful and functional. These two qualities need not be incompatible. But if you have to choose, and if the choices are mutually exclusive, there's really no choice, is there? The trick is to keep them from becoming mutually exclusive--which is one of the many reasons why arts bloggers blog.

I close with these thought-provoking words from City Comforts:

The two cultures which concern me are the one of people who carefully observe the built environment and the...what do I call it?....rest of our society. I haven't quite figured out how to term it but I know that there is such a lack of knowldge and sophistication as to be quite remarkable. And mind you, this is amongst otherwise very bright people, all of them alive and living inside the built world. Yet, to my ears, they seem blissfully unaware of it or if somewhat interested, then often somewhat lacking in knowledge, compared to their general knowledge of other aspects of society. At least that's my take. The built world is just a given, part of the background of their lives and over which, perhaps, they have so little control that understanding seems a pointless endeavor. I honestly don't know. But I find it interesting, appalling and a bit confusing....

Are many intellectuals scared of it because it is so vast and complex? Maybe all. And that, if I dare suggest it, is why we have starchitecture running riot: there are far too few intellectual police with the confidence to put such work in its proper place.

We don't agree about everything, but about this we are in perfect sync.

Posted by diacritical on September 12, 2003 12:04 PM | Permalink

Art and about

I'm out of here for a couple of days. Tonight I'll be seeing the premiere of Ken Ludwig's Shakespeare in Hollywood at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. (I'm reviewing it for next Friday's Wall Street Journal), and on Saturday afternoon I'll be giving the annual Mencken Day lecture at Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library. Stop by if you're in town--the Mencken Room, where Mencken's private papers are stored, is open to the public from 10 to 5. I'll be speaking at three o'clock and signing copies of The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken afterward.

Needless to say, none of this will interfere with the clock-like regularity with which "About Last Night" is published--24/5 as per always, unless I'm in Maine or jail. I'll be here on Monday, and I'm here now with today's topics, from functional to frivolous: (1) Of concert halls, museums, and fancy houses. (2) Is blog smog choking the Web? (3) A going-away party for a jazz giant. (4) The latest almanac entry.

Yesterday's posting about Zankel Hall was picked up by my host, artsjournal.com, thus bringing me a heap of new visitors. (Hi, y'all.) Allow me to return the compliment. Click on the artsjournal.com logo at the top of this page and you will be magically transported to one of the best sites on the Web, a daily digest of news stories and commentary on the arts from throughout the English-speaking world (not to mention the host for a half-dozen wide-ranging arts blogs, of which "About Last Night" is but one). I look at artsjournal.com every morning. So should you.

Not to belabor the obvious...so I won't. Have a nice weekend. Come back Monday--and bring a friend. (Whoops, I did it again!)

Posted by diacritical on September 12, 2003 12:05 PM | Permalink

Almanac

"During a technically very complicated recording at Goldwyn Studios, one of the playback machines broke down time and time again, causing endless delays. Finally I succumbed to the luxury of pointless anger. �How long do we all have to sit here waiting?' I shouted loudly. �Why can't this thing be fixed, and fixed now?' I finished this Wagnerian moment and turned rather imperiously. Right next to me, seated at the orchestral piano, was the great jazz pianist Russ Freeman, a good friend. He leaned over so he could whisper to me. �Can I stay and watch you wig out, man?' he asked, a man interested in the answer. I was very grateful. One small put-down, friend to friend, had saved me from acting like a total ass."

Andr� Previn, No Minor Chords: My Days in Hollywood

Posted by diacritical on September 15, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

Two snapshots of the art world

(1) I ordered a copy of this Alex Katz lithograph from a London print dealer three weeks ago. It hadn't reached me as of last Thursday, so I sent the dealer an e-mail asking if anything was wrong. He wrote back to say that he'd been having quite a bit of trouble of late with slow deliveries to the United States, adding that the reason must be that the U.S. Postal Service had been "Bushed."

(2) When I arrived at Washington's Union Station on Friday, I jumped in a cab and asked the driver to take me to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. He looked puzzled, asked me if I knew where it was, scratched his head, then had an epiphany. "Oh, yes," he said, "I believe I do know that one, but nobody ever wants to go there--I take somebody there maybe once a year."

Posted by diacritical on September 15, 2003 12:02 PM | Permalink

In the bag

Time again for "In the Bag," the game that challenges you to put aside pride and admit what art you really like. The rules: you can put any five works of art into your bag before departing for a desert island, but you have to choose right now. No stalling or dithering--the armies of the night are pounding on your front door. No posturing--you have to say the first five things that pop into your head, no matter how uncool they may sound. What do you stuff in the bag?

Here are my picks, as of this second:

PAINTING: Arthur Dove, Rain or Snow (scroll down to see it)

MUSIC: Maurice Ravel, Piano Concerto in G (slow movement, performed by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli)

NOVEL: James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

FILM: Roman Polanski, Chinatown

POP SONG: Lucinda Williams, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

Your turn.

Posted by diacritical on September 15, 2003 12:03 PM | Permalink

On the air

I'll be appearing Tuesday on National Public Radio's Performance Today to talk about the opening of Zankel Hall, as part of a broadcast from the new hall of a concert by Emanuel Ax and the Emerson String Quartet.

Performance Today airs at different times in different cities. To find out more about the show, including where and when to tune in, go here.

Posted by diacritical on September 15, 2003 12:04 PM | Permalink

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 of Glass," and weirdly tilted original compositions with titles like "Silence Is the Question" and "Keep the Bugs Off Your Glass and the Bears Off Your Ass." Their producer is Tchad Blake, whose credits include albums by Elvis Costello, Suzanne Vega and Pearl Jam. And "These Are the Vistas" (Columbia), their major-label debut, isn't just a breath of fresh air--it's a tornado....

The Bad Plus doesn't do cutesy watered-down covers of hit singles. Instead, they deconstruct the songs of Blondie, Nirvana and Aphex Twin with the same rigorous conceptual clarity that goes into their own originals, and their group sound--blunt, clear-cut, full of splintery dissonances and jolting musical jokes--blends jazz, rock and classical music so indissolubly as to make the differences between the three musics seem trivial.

Alto saxophonist Bud Shank is appearing on Wednesday and Thursday at the Jazz Standard. If you don't recognize the name, Shank is one of the indisputable giants of West Coast jazz. Prominently featured on dozens of classic Contemporary and Pacific Jazz albums of the Fifties, he's still alive, well, and by all accounts playing his ass off. As if that alone weren't recommendation enough, he'll be backed by a world-class rhythm section anchored by pianist Bill Mays, who was staggeringly adventurous last week at Marvin Stamm's Birdland gig.

I can't remember the last time Shank played a New York nightclub gig--in fact, I'm embarrassed to admit that I've never heard him live--and I don't plan to pass up this rare opportunity to find out what he's sounding like these days. You come, too.

Posted by diacritical on September 15, 2003 12:05 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 15, 2003 12:06 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 16, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 16, 2003 12:02 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 16, 2003 12:03 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 16, 2003 12:04 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 16, 2003 12:05 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 17, 2003 1:36 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 17, 2003 1:37 AM | Permalink

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 clich�s 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 by diacritical on September 17, 2003 1:38 AM | Permalink

Almanac

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

Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison

Posted by diacritical on September 18, 2003 12:09 PM | Permalink

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 na�ve-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 by diacritical on September 18, 2003 12:09 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 18, 2003 12:18 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 19, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

Today's installment

1.

The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida.

Posted by diacritical on September 19, 2003 12:02 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 19, 2003 12:03 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 19, 2003 12:04 PM | Permalink

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 �migr� 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 by diacritical on September 19, 2003 12:05 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 19, 2003 12:06 PM | Permalink

Almanac

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

Horace, Epistles

Posted by diacritical on September 22, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 22, 2003 12:02 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 22, 2003 12:03 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 22, 2003 12:04 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 22, 2003 12:05 PM | Permalink

Almanac

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

Karl Kraus, Beim Wort genommen

Posted by diacritical on September 23, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

Personal

Dear Stephanie:

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

I await it eagerly.

Posted by diacritical on September 23, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

Today's installment

3.

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

Posted by diacritical on September 23, 2003 12:02 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 23, 2003 12:03 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 23, 2003 12:05 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 23, 2003 12:06 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 23, 2003 12:07 PM | Permalink

Almanac

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

Sam Hamm and Warren Skaasen, Batman

Posted by diacritical on September 24, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 24, 2003 12:02 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 24, 2003 12:03 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 24, 2003 12:04 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 24, 2003 12:04 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 24, 2003 12:06 PM | Permalink

Almanac

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

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Posted by diacritical on September 25, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 25, 2003 12:01 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 25, 2003 12:02 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 25, 2003 12:03 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 25, 2003 12:04 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 25, 2003 12:05 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 26, 2003 1:16 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 26, 2003 1:48 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 26, 2003 1:52 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 26, 2003 1:53 AM | Permalink

Q. What are bunnies run amok?

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

Posted by diacritical on September 26, 2003 1:53 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 26, 2003 1:55 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 26, 2003 1:56 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 26, 2003 1:57 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 26, 2003 1:58 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 26, 2003 1:59 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 27, 2003 11:38 AM | Permalink

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 C�zanne, 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 by diacritical on September 29, 2003 1:06 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 29, 2003 4:55 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 29, 2003 5:47 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 29, 2003 9:51 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 29, 2003 9:57 AM | Permalink

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: No�l Coward, Present Laughter

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

How about you?

Posted by diacritical on September 29, 2003 12:37 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 29, 2003 12:40 PM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 30, 2003 2:40 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 30, 2003 3:53 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 30, 2003 4:08 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 30, 2003 5:12 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 30, 2003 6:15 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 30, 2003 10:16 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 30, 2003 10:49 AM | Permalink

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 by diacritical on September 30, 2003 12:11 PM | Permalink