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October 31, 2003

TT: Shrink-wrapped

To those who inquired about my damaged digit, it is improving, slowly but surely. The dressing gets smaller every day, sort of like the bandage on Jack Nicholson's nose in Chinatown. Too bad I don't have Faye Dunaway to kiss it and make it better. (Well, maybe not--she is pretty weird in that movie.)

Posted October 31, 12:37 PM

TT: Off to fetch my paddle

Don't get your hopes up. I just finished writing a book review for the Los Angeles Times, and now I'm about to dress and depart for Sotheby's, where I will be bidding on an etching by an artist-to-be-named-later. After that, I'm going to see The Human Stain with one of my musician friends. After that, I'm coming home and crashing, but good.

Yes, some blogging may take place in the interstices, but not necessarily. I mean, we posted ourselves silly yesterday. What do you want, blood? (You got that earlier this week, anyway.)

P.S. Henceforth Maud (who was really good on the Evelyn Waugh centenary) will be known around these parts as the Pint-Sized Polemicist. Indeed, she is a bonny wee thing, not unlike Kristin Chenoweth, who stole my heart at the Gershwin Theatre the other night. And can she sing? Who cares?

Posted October 31, 12:31 PM

TT: Almanac

"I think ‘deep' is almost always a description chosen by the shallow."

Cup of Chicha, Oct. 31, 2003

Posted October 31, 12:23 PM

OGIC: Elsewhere

Charles Johnson has a cure for what ails our schools' creative writing programs, and it's not for the faint of heart (link via Bookslut). His epigraph from John Gardner gives you an idea of what he's about: "If our furniture was as poorly made as our fiction, we would always be falling onto the floor."

Shirley Hazzard's Great Fire, about which I am officially excited, gets a nuanced review from Judith Shulevitz at Slate: "The Great Fire is a lyrical rather than social novel, its richest writing reserved for landscapes as seen in the fresh, full light of day."

My personal plan to whip through Transit of Venus en route to The Great Fire has been slowed up by the arrival of some books I'm reviewing, as well as my compulsion to read most of Hazzard's wondrous sentences two or three times each. In this regard, and surely no other, she reminds me a little of Barry Hannah. His haywire Southern Gothic plots tend to baffle me, but his sentences are stunning enough to propel me through his novels all by themselves. (I'm at work now, but I'll give you some examples next time I blog from home.)

Posted October 31, 12:16 PM

TT: The girl from Oz

I reviewed Wicked, a new Broadway musical based on Gregory Maguire's postmodern version of the "Wizard of Oz" story, in this morning's Wall Street Journal. Here's the gist:

Broadway's got itself a great big expensive new musical, complete with smoke, mirrors and (no fooling) flying monkeys. Kristin Chenoweth finally has a full-fledged star part that's worthy of her. Stephen Schwartz has written a ballad with legs. And Joel Grey, God bless him, is back on stage. So what's not to like? Not much, really. "Wicked," which opened last night at the Gershwin Theatre, isn't perfect, but it's more than good enough to run for a decade or two. If it doesn't please you, you're too tough to please....

Critics aren't supposed to get crushes, but I've got it bad for Kristin Chenoweth, a teeny blond bombshell who makes perkiness palatable. Ever since she first blew into town with the 1999 revival of "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown," Broadway buffs have been waiting for Ms. Chenoweth to land a bona fide star part in a successful show. Well, this is it. She sings like a cherub on uppers and acts like a damned good actress, and Mr. Schwartz has written her a show-stopping comic turn, "Popular," which will doubtless be heard on the next Tony telecast.

No link (gnashing of teeth), but you can read the whole thing, including my short, scathing remarks on Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, by picking up a copy of Friday's Journal and turning to the "Weekend Journal" section. Do, please--the Journal covers the arts really well.

Posted October 31, 12:04 PM

TT: Melancholic Friday-night playlist

(1) Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Ravel Piano Concerto in G (slow movement)

(2) Frank Sinatra, Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry (1958 version, from Only the Lonely)

(3) Steely Dan, Monkey in Your Soul

(4) Gerry Mulligan, Lonely Town

(5) Stan Getz, Blood Count (dedicated to my damaged digit)

(6) Julian Bream, Britten Nocturnal

And so...good night.

Posted October 31, 11:59 AM

TT: He's a what?

Dear OGIC:

I waded through a sea of very peculiar-looking people this evening (though I quite liked the brunette cat on 70th and Broadway, not to mention my black-clad companion for the evening, who claims to have been disguised as J-Lo) en route to The Human Stain.

I'm full of strong opinions, but seeing as how you've read the book but not yet seen the film, I'm not sure how much I should disclose, given the fact that I'm now in the inverse condition. I'll disgorge my thoughts at your command.

Posted October 31, 11:39 AM

TT: Among the professionals

I just got back from Sotheby's, where I failed to bring home the bacon--an exquisite 1931 etching by Giorgio Morandi on which I bid unsuccessfully this afternoon--but had an exhilarating, educational, and slightly scary time anyway.

Sotheby's New York is near the eastern end of 72nd Street. As soon as I got there, I went straight to the seventh floor, where I registered and was given a numbered paddle, which you need in order to place bids. (No, you can't accidentally buy a million-dollar painting by scratching your nose at the wrong moment, unless you're dumb enough to scratch it with the paddle.) Much to my surprise, all I had to do was show a photo ID. I wasn't asked to furnish proof of solvency. Had I wanted, I could have bankrupted myself several times over, and no one would have been the wiser until it came time to settle the tab.

Paddle in hand, I strolled into the salesroom, a cavernous chamber on two of whose walls hung large lithographs by the likes of Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Chuck Close (this was a print auction, not a big-bucks painting auction). Placed in front of the third wall was what looked like a telethon phone bank, which turned out to be more or less what it was: Sotheby's employees sit there with phones to ears, passing along bids from bidders who couldn't (or wouldn't) show up in person.

The folding chairs filled up, and at two o'clock sharp, a gawky, cheerful-looking WASP in a suit stepped behind the podium, clipped on a lapel microphone, and called the crowd to order. On his right was a ponderous turntable which spun the "lots" into view, one item at a time. On his left was a large video screen on which the items and top bids were flashed, plus a few extra telephone operators and one woman who passed along the on-line bids (Internet bidding is fast becoming a big deal at the lower end of the auction business). The whole thing looked not unlike the set for a low-budget game show.

Once we got started, things moved quickly--really, really quickly. My idea of art auctions had come straight from the scene in North by Northwest in which Cary Grant slips through the fingers of James Mason and Martin Landau by misbehaving in a fancy Chicago auction house and getting himself carted away by the cops. It wasn't like that at all. The auctioneer wasted not a single word describing any of the various prints on sale, much less engaging in small talk. All he did was announce each lot number and (occasionally) the artist, and for the most part he was the only person in the room who said anything at all. Nearly everybody bid in silence, raising their paddles, a finger, or a pen.

The bids came fast and furious, and once the top offer had been made, the auctioneer would say, "Fair warning and down it goes," rap the podium once with his hammer, and move on. It generally took about 30 seconds to dispose of each item, be it a Kandinsky, Feininger, Braque, Matisse, or Miro (of which there were what seemed like at least two dozen for sale). The prices ranged from $1,500 to $30,000, and it was unnerving to watch the numbers soar. The person operating the tote board frequently had trouble keeping up with the bids.

At first I was shocked by the whizzing pace of the bidding, but the etching I wanted was Lot 342, which gave me plenty of time to get used to it, and within half an hour I was swept up in the discreet excitement that rippled through the room. Most of the bidders in the house appeared to be art dealers, but I spotted a few obvious-looking civilians who were clearly delighted to go head to head with the pros, 30 seconds' worth of single combat at a time. It didn't take long for me to figure out that when my time came to bid, I'd need to keep as cool as possible if I didn't want to spend a lot more than I could afford. So I watched in silence, listened, and learned.

Two hours into the auction, Lot 342 finally spun into view. I raised my paddle to place the first bid, and within five seconds I knew the odds were against me. At Sotheby's, the auctioneer places absentee bids on behalf of customers who have authorized him to bid up to a certain amount. Each time I bid, he raised me, at first in hundred-dollar increments, then five hundred at a time. We reached the high end of the pre-auction estimate, then rolled right over it. At that point, a dealer got into the act, and all at once I was bidding above my not-a-dollar-more point--not too far over it, but far enough for me to come to my senses, kick myself, and realize that I was teetering on the verge of doing something extremely stupid. I placed one last ill-advised bid, and the dealer topped it immediately. The auctioneer looked back at me. I shook my head, just like the Sotheby's Web site says to do, and abjectly laid my paddle on the seat next to me. A couple of heartbeats later, the hammer came banging down, and "Vari oggetti su un tavolo" went home with somebody else.

As I left the salesroom, I breathed a deep sigh of relief. I knew it would have been incredibly easy for me to have spent more money than I could afford on that etching (which is, of course, precisely what auction houses count on). But I jammed on the brakes at the next-to-last second--and instead of slinking home with my paddle between my legs, I felt like the king of the cats. As Winston Churchill once said of combat, there is no sensation so exhilarating as being shot at without effect. I'm sure he's right, but there's also something to be said about nearly spending way the hell too much money in public.

The only bad part, of course, is that I came home empty-handed. I'd let myself get my hopes up, and those of you who've been following this blog from the outset will recall how much I love Morandi's work. The thought of owning a piece of it, however small and imperfect (for this particular etching was in less than ideal shape) had filled me with anticipatory joy. On the other hand, I got my first taste of auction-house blood today--and it wasn't my blood, either.

Will I be back? You better believe it.

Posted October 31, 6:06 AM

October 30, 2003

OGIC: I'm twice the boy you are!

Dear Terry:

The Gender Genie is quite insistent: I write like a man. No matter what I feed it. I believe this will surprise you.

As for your critical andogyny, I can only surmise that the theater brings out your feminine side while music cues the testosterone. Nineteenth-century detractors of the novel routinely labeled narrative literature as feminine (and thus decadent) while lauding lyric poetry as a properly manly form. Without endorsing such dusty dichotomies, I wonder whether the Gender Genie--if we even trust it as far as we can throw it--is picking up on some difference in the way you respond to and describe narrative and non-narrative art? This seems like a stretch, but it's all I've got!

Of course, I was disappointed to find that the Genie's methods are not, at a glance, much more sophisticated than counting words. A self-respecting genie should work in more mysterious ways.

Posted October 30, 12:33 PM

TT: Classics and commercials

I've been enjoying OGIC's posts on Henry James. (I wonder if she remembers that we saw The Wings of the Dove together?) And while I have nothing much to add to what she has so beautifully said, I do want to mention another "theatrical" version of James whose Jamesianness seems to me altogether exemplary, Benjamin Britten's opera of The Turn of the Screw. Like all good adaptations, it is fairly free in its approach to the original, and it is precisely because of that freedom that Britten and his librettist, Myfanwy Piper, were able to create a fully independent art object. You don't go see The Turn of the Screw to be reminded of James' story--you see it for its own sake. As far as I'm concerned, that's the only way to successfully translate a classic from one medium to another. Otherwise, why bother?

I mentioned yesterday that I just saw the press preview of Wicked (about which more tomorrow), a new Broadway musical based on the novel of the same name by Gregory Maguire. I brought with me a friend who is a huge Maguire fan, and who bristled visibly at every departure from the original. Not having read the novel, I wasn't bothered by the differences, even after my friend told me how extensively the authors of the show had altered what Maguire wrote. But I knew how she felt. If you're going to make a stage or screen adaptation of a familiar work of art, you really only have two viable alternatives: try to reproduce the original as closely as possible, or go your own way. Anything in between is doomed to failure.

I'll be grappling with the same dilemma when Master and Commander, the new Patrick O'Brian film, is released in a few weeks. I know the O'Brian novels extremely well, and I have my own very strong ideas about what Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin sound and look like. If the film fails to match up with my preconceptions, I'll be jolted. The good news is that I've seen the trailer, and Russell Crowe meshes quite nicely with the Aubrey of my imagination. Still, I'm sure I won't be any easier to please than my friend was by Wicked.

A moment ago I asked: why bother adapting the classics? Of course we all know the real answer. Producers and directors adapt movies from well-known originals in order to piggyback on their success. The Harry Potter movies (which I didn't much like) had a huge pre-sold audience going in. Which reminds me of what Edwin Denby, the greatest dance critic of the 20th century, wrote about Seventh Symphony, a ballet choreographed by Leonide Massine to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, one of several well-known classics that Massine staged, by most accounts unsuccessfully:

[Massine] can get away with murder. If one took him seriously, he would be guilty of murdering the Beethoven Seventh...There is of course no reason for taking Massine seriously; he doesn't mean to be, he doesn't mean to murder. Like a cigarette company, he is using famous names to advertise his wares. But I cannot help resenting it, because they are names of famous things I have loved. It is hardest to bear in the case of his Seventh, where the orchestra is constantly reminding me of the Beethoven original.

Does that perhaps sum up some of your distress with the Wings of the Dove film, dear OGIC?

Posted October 30, 10:12 AM

TT: Not ideas about the thing

I've been reading Virginia Postrel's much-discussed The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, and finding it stimulating, though I'm struck by the failure of most reviewers to see how fundamentally political it is. Postrel, after all, is an ideologue. Specifically, she's a libertarian, one who believes that individual liberty is an absolute value, a universal trump card that tops all other values. This conviction is indissolubly commingled with her belief, stated at the beginning of The Substance of Style, that "aesthetic value is subjective and can be discovered only through experience, not deduced in advance." Me, I'm not a libertarian, and so am able to recognize that the first half of that sentence is untrue, even though I agree completely with the second half.

I'm also struck by the fact that Postrel, for all the delight she takes in the aesthetic appeal of our hyper-designed, choice-driven world, seems oddly, even weirdly indifferent to certain fundamental values of art. Consider the following passage from her book:

A new art market has developed: upscale wall décor. Artists and art collectors have long mocked the idea that someone might purchase a work to go with a couch--an insult to serious art. Perhaps as a result, the wall décor industry has been the home of generic, clichéd prints. But not all visually sophisticated consumers want art to impress their friends, hobnob with the gallery crowd, or make money as an investment. Some just want a more attractive living room. In response, an unsnobbish middle market is offering prints and photographs to go with stylish furniture.

Many of the featured artists are well-known modern or contemporary names. Eyestorm, which started as a specialized Web site and branched out into stores, offers limited-edition prints by Damien Hirst at $3,000 each and a photo of Andy Warhol by Dennis Hopper for $500. Serving the same need, Crate and Barrel sells framed reproductions of Mark Rothko paintings for $499. Sales are growing at double-digit rates. Customers are "buying for aesthetics, not collecting," says an Eyestorm executive. They're treating art not as an investment or a status symbol but simply as a way to create a beautiful home environment.

Excuse me for being cruel, but that passage could only have been written by someone who quite literally doesn't know the first thing about the meaning and function of art. Put aside for a moment Postrel's implicit suggestion that buying "a photo of Andy Warhol by Dennis Hopper" could possibly "serve" any "need" other than the need to be vulgar. Notice instead the planted axiom in the first paragraph, echoed in the last sentence of the second--the assumption that the only reason why anybody would buy "real" art is to make money or impress his friends. Why bother searching, scrimping, and saving for the real thing when you can buy a framed "reproduction" of a Rothko for five hundred bucks? It'll make your living room look just as beautiful, right?

I hardly know where to begin disentangling all the fallacies embedded in those assertions, but perhaps I should start by addressing a half-truth, which is that the point of a Rothko, or any other work of art, is the way it looks, not who made it. Art connoisseurs have a phrase for people who get those two things confused: such benighted folk "buy signatures," which is one baby step up from collecting autographs. And it's quite true that the "visually sophisticated consumer" who likes Rothko's palette and wants to have it in his home can also do so by purchasing a reproduction of a Rothko painting. If the reproduction is well printed, the colors will be similar.

I hasten to point out, though, that Crate and Barrel didn't create that latter possibility out of thin air. All they did was put a dishonest spin on it by marketing "framed reproductions" that purport to look Just Like the Real Thing. As anyone who's ever hung a museum exhibition poster knows, there's a huge difference between a well-printed poster of a painting, which doesn't purport to be anything other than what it is (in fact, it invariably contains text, thus identifying itself for all to see as a non-painting), and a "framed reproduction," which is by definition pretentious, meaning that it pretends to be a real work of art.

I like looking at beautiful colors, which I suppose makes me visually sophisticated, so I used to hang museum-exhibition posters on my walls. In time, though, I found myself longing for something more "real," and I started to buy etchings and limited-edition prints. I didn't buy them for the signatures (though I freely admit to enjoying the frisson of having Helen Frankenthaler's signature hanging on my living-room wall), but because they were more beautiful than posters. The difference between a reproduction of an etching and an actual etching is quite real, and not all that subtle, either. I bought my copy of Milton Avery's March at a Table from a dealer in San Francisco, not having seen anything other than a catalogue photograph, and when I took it out of the package I was stunned (I actually gasped) by how much more intense a visual punch it packed. Even if it hadn't been signed by Avery--and yes, I do own some unsigned prints, which proves my purity of heart--it would have been worth owning for that reason alone. In fact, that's the only good reason to own it.

I wonder if Virginia Postrel understands any of this. I doubt it. She's so excited by the regime of unlimited, mass-produced aesthetic choice that she's lost sight of the value of the handmade object--assuming she ever knew the difference in the first place. Lest we forget, a "framed reproduction" of a Rothko is different from a Rothko. It looks different. And that's the point, at least for people who really love art. We don't buy art to impress our friends--we buy it so that we can see it every day, as often as we want.

All of which leads us to a far more complicated and interesting question: if you could create a Rothko reproduction that was all but indistinguishable from the real thing, would it be a work of art in its own right? And would it be worth having, and hanging? But of course the answers to such complicated questions are only to be found in the realm of true aesthetics, not the watery simulacrum about which Virginia Postrel has written in The Substance of Style.

Posted October 30, 10:11 AM

TT: The lost language of goons

I got a call yesterday from a fact checker at The New Yorker. He was working on a piece that made reference to H.L. Mencken, and very apologetically asked me if I could perhaps help him by answering two questions (one was simple, the other subtle). I told him that Mencken would have approved of his labors, which is true. Mencken did quite a bit of writing for The New Yorker in the Thirties and Forties, and referred admiringly to its fact-checking department as "Ross' goons" (Harold Ross being, of course, the magazine's founding editor and resident tutelary spirit).

That call filled me with nostalgia. As anyone knows who's been in journalism for more than the past 20 minutes or so, fact checking is an increasingly lost art. Time was when many magazines--if not most--rigorously checked every factual assertion made in every story they published. When I was writing profiles for Mirabella nine years ago, the checkers even required me to give them my interview tapes. But by the time I got to Time, the rigor had loosened considerably. My Time stories about the arts were "self-checked," a wonderfully Orwellian euphemism meaning that they weren't checked at all--it was assumed that I knew what I was talking about (though occasionally a copy editor would query me about odd-looking names).

By then, of course, the whole system was unraveling, at Time and everywhere else. I remember the black day when Time actually closed its in-house library, a cost-cutting measure that filled the writers of the magazine with dread. They knew, in the words of "About Last Night"'s favorite novelist, that we should never be again as we were. And we weren't.

All this fond reminiscence will doubtless amuse, if not astound, those readers who grew up under the aspect of the World Wide Web. Nowadays, most of the journalists I know do much of their research on line, and their first stop is Google rather than the nearest library. What's more, I think many of us tend to reflexively take for granted the accuracy of what we see on the Web--and in the blogosphere, that great echo chamber driven by hyperlinks, such an assumption can lead very quickly to inaccuracy, grief, and libel suits.

I am, as I'm sure I don't need to tell you, decidedly pro-blogosphere, for all the reasons that all of us are constantly touting on our blogs. In particular, I love the combination of immediacy and freedom that comes with unedited self-publishing, and I'm also fairly comfortable with it, in part because I've been a newspaper and magazine editor and so have learned over the years how to clean up my own copy. It also helps that the Gene Fairy made me a near-perfect speller (though I am chronically deaf to the more nuanced differences between "which" and "that," a problem about which I make an unnecessary point of warning all editors unlucky enough to have to work on my stuff).

Even so, I'm well aware, at times painfully so, that I'm working without a net. Not always--sometimes I write and publish an item too quickly to think about it--but at some point in the process I generally remind myself that there's nobody to backstop me but you, the readers, and that you aren't necessarily rooting for me. If you've followed the Gregg Easterbrook imbroglio, you know that in the highly politicized and present-oriented world of blogging, one bad mistake can cause the sharks to circle within hours.

All of which went through my mind after I hung up on that nice fellow from The New Yorker, a magazine that (which?) still believes in taking institutional responsibility for the facts it publishes. I know, I know, things ain't what they used to be, and I, too, have found misspelled proper names in its pages of late. I also know that fact-checking is no kind of panacea. As every writer knows, a large pile of scrupulously checked facts can add up to one great big honking lie. And all things being equal, I'd rather bear the responsibility for what I write than cede it to an editor who may or may not be capable of shouldering it.

Nevertheless, I miss old-fashioned editing, just as I miss the common culture that has been largely replaced by the libertarian regime of choice, even though I'm well aware of the defects of the systems with which I grew up. There are no absolute earthly goods, and every virtue has its reciprocal defect. Or, to put it in American, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Me, I choose freedom, and quite happily, too--if not always comfortably.

Posted October 30, 10:09 AM

TT: One wheel, coming up

I finally (no laughter, please) got a cable modem today, and now I know what a good-sized chunk of the rest of the world knows, which is that using the Web feels different when you're always connected. Heretofore, I thought in terms of "going on the Web" as something you had to do. Now, I don't go on the Web, I am on the Web. It's a permanent state of being. The conceptual difference is enormous, and I have no doubt that it will impact greatly on my blogging.

Just thought you'd enjoy listening to me playing catch-up. Which new technology shall I discover next? Answering machines? Typewriters? The printing press? In a way, the really surprising thing is that I managed to start a blog in the first place, thanks solely and only to the adorable Megan McArdle of Asymmetrical Information (who egged me on) and the amazing Doug McLennan of artsjournal.com (who built the damn thing for me). Blame them.

The only thing for which I take credit is the discovery of Our Girl in Chicago. At a cocktail party last night, a distinguished ex-editor sidled up to me and asked, "O.K., how's the finger? And who is this Our Girl? Where did you find her?" Why, under a cabbage leaf, of course....

Posted October 30, 7:47 AM

OGIC: Duh and duh again

A few readers who, unlike some of us, are paying attention have emailed to point out that my First Lines quiz from this morning is easily solved with the help of Google. Duh. I guess I didn't think of this because I had so much fun with the real McCoy that it never occurred to me to cheat.

What makes me feel even sillier is that the Big Story in books this last week has been Amazon's new Search Inside the Book feature (which, by the way, is the subject of several interesting stories and letters at Moby Lives today). Double duh. Verrrry swift, OGIC.

Well, if you still want to write in with your answers, just consider yourself under the honor system. And stay tuned for the perfectly anti-climactic unveiling of the sources on Monday!

Posted October 30, 6:50 AM

TT: Elsewhere

Erin O'Connor, who blogs at Critical Mass, is following the Senate's hearings on academic speech codes, and she has good stuff. Click here and keep scrolling.

Posted October 30, 6:05 AM

TT: Forgotten but not gone

I wrote earlier today, apropos of The Turn of the Screw, that "all good adaptations" of pre-existing works of art are "fairly free." Alas, John Huston's film of The Maltese Falcon momentarily slipped my mind. It's extremely faithful to Dashiell Hammett's novel. In fact, it's said that Huston's secretary prepared the first draft of the script by simply going through the book and retyping it as dialogue. That can't be right, but it's not far wrong. I don't know a more literally adapted film version of a well-known book, or a better one.

Needless to say, the main reason why The Maltese Falcon works so well on screen--though by no means the only one--is Humphrey Bogart. He made the film, just as it made him. It focused his tough-guy persona in a way none of his previous films (except for Raoul Walsh's masterly High Sierra, co-written by Huston) had quite managed to do. Minus Bogart, the movie would still have been good; any movie with Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, and Ward Bond couldn't have been bad. Still, I doubt it'd be half as well remembered today.

Of course somebody added a line to Hammett's original, the best line (and best line reading) in the movie. At the very end, Bond picks up the statuette and asks what it is, to which Bogart rasps in wry reply, "The, uh...stuff that dreams are made of." I gather there's some question about how that Shakespearean snippet got into the script. Did Bogart improvise it, or did Huston write it? Either way, it's a clear improvement on Hammett--though Philip Marlowe would have been more likely to quote from The Tempest than Sam Spade. But I never think about that when I'm watching The Maltese Falcon. In the moment, coming out of Bogart's mouth, it rings true.

Posted October 30, 5:46 AM

TT: You heard it here first

I'm going to Sotheby's Friday afternoon to bid on an etching by an artist whose name has turned up more than once on "About Last Night." It'll be the first time I've ever taken part in an auction of any kind, except when I once raffled off the opportunity to dunk me in a dunking booth as part of a college benefit. (I hope this is more fun.)

Watch this space for details--and in the meantime, cross your fingers. I soooooooo want that etching!

Posted October 30, 5:46 AM

OGIC: Be funny or be quiet

Michael over at 2 Blowhards has stories of disturbing, and possibly disturbed, moviegoers. They range from the merely annoying to the downright hilarious, and include one cautionary tale for New Yorkers.

It's funny he should bring this up today, because there was a general disturbance when I was watching Mystic River in Oak Park the other night (more on the movie later). About halfway through, during a solemn scene involving Tim Robbins' character and his young son, there came a great whooshing from the other side of a door at the front of the theater, as of someone washing a sidewalk with a fire hose. This went on for a while, all of us sitting dumbfounded, looking at the door and missing what may have been a pivotal scene, for all I know. Finally, a brave lady walked over, opened the door, and told the unseen party outside, "we're trying to watch a movie in here!" From outside, we all heard the surprised response: "Uh...you guys can hear this?" Uh, yeah!

Just one more: about ten years ago, a friend went to see an obscure little Russian movie at the selfsame Film Forum that figures in one of Michael's stories. The movie wasn't very good. About half an hour into it, someone at the back stood up, loudly declared, "Janet Maslin sucks!" and walked out. Everyone applauded.

Posted October 30, 3:49 AM

OGIC: News of the bright

Maybe it's just me, but when my next invitation to a Halloween party at a federal building comes rolling in, I'm thinking "gun-toting" anything doesn't get out of the first round of costume ideas.

Posted October 30, 3:45 AM

OGIC: Name that tome

John Dobbins and Mary Ochs's addictive "First Lines" quizzes enlivened and sabotaged my work week (thanks--I think--to Household Opera for the link). They are (yay) many. But (sigh) finite. Helplessly craving another fix, I've raided my own bookshelves for more. I beg forgiveness for the copycatting.

Here are the first lines of 10 works of fiction, arranged by length. The works they come from were published between 1749 and 1991. One is a translation.

1. In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the river Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest, covering the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster.

2. An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money.

3. At the time when this story begins, the Stanhope press and inking-rollers were not yet in use in small provincial printing-offices.

4. On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.

5. You are not going to believe me, nobody in their right minds could possibly believe me, but it's true, really it is!

6. The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis.

7. The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.

8. The book was thick and black and covered with dust.

9. One never knows when the blow may fall.

10. In Africa, you want more, I think.

Answers will appear Monday. In the meantime, if you would like to submit your answers for recognition, email them to the usual address (but please put "OGIC" in the subject line). Top scorers will get... recognition!

Posted October 30, 3:35 AM

OGIC: Cruel to be kind

To snark or not to snark? The conversation continues on two fronts this week. Maud links to a piece bringing a Canadian perspective to bear on the great snark debate (which, if you've been living under a rock, started here). Kate Taylor puts her finger on the most absurd thing, in my eyes, about the anti-snark campaign: purveyors of snark are far, far outnumbered by "mealy-mouthed reviewers tiptoeing around the books they are reviewing, leaving readers to discern their real opinions between the lines." The last thing we need is more reviews of this sort.

At The Morning News, meanwhile, the subject comes up about two-thirds of the way through a long, consistently interesting interview with Julie Orringer, who recently published her debut short story collection, How to Breathe Underwater, to early acclaim. There's something off about Orringer and Robert Birnbaum's discussion of negative reviewing. Their blind spot is most pronounced in remarks like these:

The dismissive review is the one that really disrespects the time and the effort of the writing itself and that's a horrible thing to see done to someone.

...a bad review can be a plea on the part of the reviewer to make the writer see some truth about his work or the world. That's extremely important.

What--or who--goes missing when you start thinking of reviews as "pleas" to authors, or as something "done to" them? Only the reader! In the author-centric universe promoted by the snarkophobes, readers' needs are elbowed out of the way to make room for authors' sensitivities. This is exactly backwards.

Posted October 30, 1:51 AM

October 29, 2003

TT: Uuuuuuuh, gimme a break!

This blog probably belongs to Our Girl for the rest of the day (I've got a review to write and a bunch of appointments on top of that), but I did want to leave you with something to chew on before I vanished up the spout.

It is, incidentally, tough to type when you have a great big bandage on one of your fingers, not to mention a missing "U" key (which I won't have time to get fixed definitively until I hit my last deadline tomorrow afternoon). I don't recommend it. Nevertheless, I'm doing my best, all for you.

Posted October 29, 7:42 AM

TT: Almanac

"Music has an enormous advantage: it can, without mentioning anything, say everything."

Ilya Ehrenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn' (quoted in Solomon Volkov's Shostakovich and Stalin, forthcoming in April from Knopf)

Posted October 29, 7:40 AM

TT: Mailbag (and an aggressive suggestion)

A reader writes:

Thanks for plugging John Marin so aggressively...frankly, from inside the museum world it seems as if his marginalization is a function of his having done his major work on paper. Museum curators are typically departmentalized by media so that American paintings specialists will often deride works on paper (as opposed to larger works or those on canvas) as comparatively minor.

I was fascinated to hear from this correspondent, who is a curator at a well-known Eastern museum. I'd always wondered whether there was a bias in the museum biz against "small" artists, a label that could easily be attached to Marin, who left behind no large-format paintings and (as now seems clear in retrospective) did his major work in watercolor rather than oil. Sure sounds like it.

Another reader writes, apropos of Lileks' recent posting on Fantasia and the rise of digital animation, a theme in which this blog has also taken an interest:

I'm of two minds regarding the changes in animation and animation tools: on one hand, I know the medium in which one works affects the work itself, often in nearly imperceivable ways -- when I hand-write a first draft I produce a slightly different style of prose than when I type straight into the computer -- and on the other hand, I have a gut sense that a tool is just a tool and after many revisions the initial effects of the medium become less important than the core of the content. In the case of animated movies, I believe the quality of the story and the skills of the animators have a greater impact than the means by which the movie was made.

Last Thursday's "Wall Street Journal" included an article ("Disney Decides It Must Draw Artists Into the Computer Age," by Bruce Orwall) about Disney's conversion to computer-generated animation that addresses the issue from the traditional animators point of view. I will not be surprised if the conversion to CG tools is beneficial to Disney in unexpected ways: The studio's problems may have more to do with stagnation, and forcing themselves to learn new tools and develop new processes may shake things up enough to allow creativity to happen. Glen Keane's comment that he feels "like about 30 years ago, when I was first at Disney just learning" seems like as a good sign, don't you think?

Yes, I do, and I'm encouraged by the optimism of this letter, though I'm not quite convinced by the comparison between writing on a computer and animating on one. There's a difference between the former (in which the hand merely transfers pure symbols from the writer's brain to the "support" of a computer screen) and the latter (in which the "symbols" are of interest in their own right rather than because of what they stand for). But I incline to agree that "a tool is just a tool," and I think it's perfectly possible that digital animation can aspire to the warmth and imagination of hand-drawn animation. Maybe. I hope.

Which reminds me to remind you that The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, the new four-DVD set of classic Warner Bros. cartoons--all of them created with nary a computer in sight--is now officially on sale. My copy arrived in the mail yesterday from amazon.com, and I had to pry myself away from it to get to the theater on time for the press preview of Wicked, which opens tomorrow and about which more Friday.

I'll be writing about the Golden Collection in the Wall Street Journal, too, perhaps as early as next week, so I don't want to jump my own gun, but I can tell you this: IT'S FANTASTIC. Go get one.

Posted October 29, 7:38 AM

TT: I'm a boy!

Dear OGIC:

The Gender Genie thinks I'm female when I write for The Wall Street Journal and male when I write for Commentary.

Discuss.

Posted October 29, 5:07 AM

October 28, 2003

TT: It comes at last, the distinguished thing

Courtesy of DVD Journal:

We don't have firm any street dates just yet, but our good friends at Criterion have confirmed that their January slate will include Jean Renoir's 1939 The Rules of the Game, one of the greatest films in history and a long-time MIA title. The digital transfer will be taken from a recently discovered master print with restored audio and new English subtitles, and the feature-set is deep -- on board will be an introduction by Renoir, a commentary written by film scholar Alexander Sesonske (read by Peter Bogdanovich), a second track from Renoir historian Christopher Faulkner, the 1966 French television program "Jean Renoir le Patron: La Régle et L'Exception," a video essay about the film's production, release, and later reconstruction, a discussion of the 1965 restoration by Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand, interviews with assistant cameraman Alain Renoir and set designer Max Douy, and various written tributes in the enclosed booklet.

You know what to do.

Posted October 28, 10:48 AM

TT: Digital update

Don't ask me how (I'm not entirely sure), but I managed to pry a 2,600-word essay on Paul Whiteman out of myself yesterday using only nine fingers. Actually, I can strike keys more or less accurately with my mutilated digit, but not with the Astaire-like precision of my normal typing, so bear that in mind when you stumble across the occasional typo in days to come.

I also went to a play last night, where I saw something astonishing: a playgoer in the front row of the theater had a heart attack in the middle of the next-to-last scene. The ambulance crew was on the scene within minutes, and as they charged down the aisle, I heard a critic sitting behind me mutter, "Well, it wasn't that bad."

Today I write my Washington Post column for Sunday and go to another play tonight, but I did want to poke my head in and check on how you were. I see Our Girl is tempting you with two of her most flagrant enthusiasms, both of which I share. When I visited her in Chicago a couple of years ago, we spent most of my stay watching selected videotaped episodes of Buffy, a marathon that left me persuaded of everything she says below about that excellent show.

As for Jamesian movies, I put my money on The Heiress, which isn't on DVD but can be rented on videocassette at well-stocked stores. Great cast (Olivia de Havilland, Montgomery Clift, Ralph Richardson), great direction (by William Wyler), and an Oscar-winning score by Aaron Copland whose awesome virtues I think I've mentioned before. It's the real reason why The Heiress is so Jamesian. Do seek it out, OGIC.

And now I have to get back to my nine-fingered writing life. Y'all have fun now, you hear?

P.S. Is it just me, or has that Dale Peck interview vanished from Gawker?

Posted October 28, 10:17 AM

OGIC: And it was dead, dead, dead

If you're just tuning in, we've been talking about James on film today (cue the Duran Duran, somebody). Terry's words on behalf of The Heiress this morning (scroll down just a bit) have triggered a small flood of emailed harumphs. Casey Abell writes to steer me toward it and away from The Innocents, which he says "yanks the interpretation toward the governess-is-nuts viewpoint by showing her looking at a picture of Quint before her exact description to Mrs. Grose. This spoils the key ambiguity about whether the ghosts exist outside her active imagination."

Cinetrix also stamps The Heiress with her approval, citing only one caveat: "Montgomery Clift is as dreamy and sleazy/weak-willed as you want, and de Havilland is heartbreaking as Catherine. But Aunt Penniman--oh dear....The movie completely defangs her. She's rendered dithery rather than menacing the way she is in the novel, where her manner of speaking and thinking infects everyone's language."

Casey goes on to ask why all the animus from my corner toward the Wings of the Dove film. It's a good question. A very, very good question. Could it be that I have always felt unreasonably possessive of this novel and jealous of others' appropriations? Am I simply that petty? Yeah, that's part of it. I've been searching my memory, and the only specific criticism I can remember having is of how explicitly and unimaginatively the film represents the bargain struck between Kate Croy and Merton Densher. By showing their liaison in all its immediacy, director Iain Softley theoretically can let the viewer better understand and sympathize with Densher's desire and his choice.

But if the sex scene comes off as just another ho-hum sex scene, despite the transparent and shameless employment of Helena Bonham Carter's naked rear end, as I recall, in the manner of a flashing neon sign advertising "HOT sex"--well, you risk making Densher seem like just some pathetic bounder, altogether unworthy of Milly, and tipping the delicate balance of imperatives that gives James's moral drama its life. And this is what happens. Densher sacrifices Milly for the promise of a night with Kate, that night turns out to consist of bland movie sex, and the whole story becomes hard to take seriously, the dénouement easy to misunderstand. It wasn't just the censors that held James back from depicting the sex in his novel; it was solid professional know-how.

Still, I admit, this is slender evidence on which to hang the whole movie. In the end, I think that the parts of the novel I'm in love with are close to off-limits to Softley or any other filmmaker. Mainly I'm thinking of the big recognition scene, when Milly is snapped out of her dream of being a figure in a Watteau canvas, like the airy people around her in the Matcham gallery, and shown incontestably that she is as different from them as possible--a Bronzino, and doomed. To be honest, I can't even remember whether the movie showed the portrait. But I know it didn't make as big a deal of the scene as I thought it should have.

After thinking this through, I'm deciding that the problem is mine, a symptom of over-attachment. Just as sometimes you can't get there from here, they can't make a movie of this novel that I will like.

Posted October 28, 4:55 AM

OGIC: Fortune cookies

"Your description of the impudent Cambridge winter, however, is vivid--with the earth like a stone and the sky like a feather. Here the earth is like a Persian rug--a hearth-rug, well besprinkled with soot."

Henry James, letter to W. D. Howells (London, December 5, 1880)

"Besides, anything sad that happens to you always seems to me sadder than the same thing happening to anyone else."

Henry James, letter to Grace Norton (February 23, 1884)

Posted October 28, 3:26 AM

OGIC: Grand tour

I love Casey Abell's selection of the best six-step introduction to the work of Henry James (his favorite novelist and mine). His list rang at least five bells for me; it's been long enough since I read Roderick Hudson that I can't say for certain whether it would make my own list. The beauty of Casey's list is that it gives you tastes of all the important phases of James, from the discovery of many of his career's most resonant, abiding themes in Roderick Hudson to the still-Victorian high realism of The Portrait of a Lady, the attempt at a great social novel in The Princess Casamassima, the heady, virtuosic point-of-view innovations (following nearly a decade away from long fiction) of What Maisie Knew, and then full-flowering late James in The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove, novels of the Major Phase that manage to reconcile the psychological embeddedness of Maisie with the keen social observation of Portrait and Princess. This list will get you far.

There's much more on Casey's James page, as you'll see for yourself if you simply scroll down. His commentary on the harder-to-find among James's published letters is both a fun read and a useful resource for anyone doing research on James. It has inspired tonight's double dose of fortune cookies (above).

One little point of dissent: more than most filmed versions of James, I loathed Iain Softley's Wings of the Dove. Casey by no means loves it, but he's kinder about it than I could be. I thought that Agnieszka Holland's Washington Square was worthwhile, with its achingly restrained Jennifer Jason Leigh performance. For some unfathomable reason I haven't seen William Wyler's The Heiress nor The Innocents, the 1961 adaptation of "The Turn of the Screw" that is said to be so chilling.

But the best Jamesian cinematic experience I know is Jacques Rivette's new wave film Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau. David Thomson calls it "the most innovative film since Citizen Kane" (in his New Biographical Dictionary). It's very loosely based on the obscure James novella that was brought back into print a couple of years ago by New York Review Books, The Other House--so loosely that it can't rightly be called an adaptation; rather, call the novella its inspiration. There's a little Jamesian world tucked inside the wider world of the movie, which is as far from Jamesian as possible, and the characters get sucked into it. And into it. And into it. Not unlike your trusty blogger and Mr. Abell.

Posted October 28, 2:05 AM

OGIC: Second things first: for aspiring Slayerites

The great fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will be available soon on DVD. You can make a case for any of the seasons between the second and the fifth being best. Put me on the spot and I'll squirm and equivocate, and in the end take the fifth.

The fifth season begins and ends with two great, jaw-dropping surprises. Although the second surprise is bigger, the first one is gutsier; it's completely disorienting, yet (eventually) satisfyingly accounted for. (It won't be obvious what's so surprising about it unless you've watched the previous seasons.) In between, the Slayer faces her mightiest opponent yet. True, every next Big Bad has to be tougher than the last, but by the fifth season the show had just about topped out in terms of magnitudes of villainy--there wasn't much of anywhere to go after Glory's high-heeled predations. Actually, the sixth season came up with a resourceful and potent solution to this built-in dead end; unfortunately, the individual episodes had become uneven and unreliable by then, lurching from classics like the musical "Once More with Feeling" to terrible clunkers about mystery meat.

If you're like many friends of mine who missed out on Buffy during its run, but want to see what all the fuss was about, I have some advice. Start with the second season. The first season has its charms, but it's different in character from the following seasons and is not the best introduction. Plotwise, there's nothing you can't follow in the second season without having watched the first. If you like the second season, go back and watch the first before you pick up again with the third, and then it's smooth sailing ahead for a good sixty-some episodes before things start falling apart.

About Last Night: you ask, we deliver. Particularly if you ask in verse.

Posted October 28, 1:13 AM

October 27, 2003

TT: Blog-related domestic mishap

I just sliced a chunk out of one of my right-hand fingers on a soup-can lid. It's now wrapped tight and I've mopped up the blood (there was quite a bit of it!). The finger in question, amusingly enough, is the one with which I type "I."

Funny what that does to your blogging. Heeeeelp, OGIC!!

Posted October 27, 11:46 AM

TT: Elsewhere

BuzzMachine is wicked on the Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston Middle East peace initiative, tossing off a pair of sentences I desperately wish I'd written:

That's what the Middle East needs: a laughtrack.

And that's the wonderful thing about stars: They have no idea how stupid they are and they have no one to tell them.

(He really should have spelled Aniston's last name right, though, even though the original story doesn't.)

Lileks, whom I wish would write about cultural stuff more often, knocks it way out of the park with today's fugitive essay on Fantasia:

When I look at the great animation of the past, I have the same reaction I have when I see a skyscraper from the end of the Jazz Age boom. Magnificent, utterly American - and for all the machinery involved, it all comes down to the movement of the human hand.

The hand behind the mouse creates something different than the hand behind the pen. Better and worse and worse and better. Classical animation is dead, I think. Frescos, meet oil.

I know he's right. I wish he weren't.

Finally, don't read this story about "earworms" (the technical term for songs that get stuck in your head) unless you want to have your whole day ruined.

You're tempted now, aren't you?

Posted October 27, 10:30 AM

OGIC: Stop me before I tailgate again

If I've been scarce around here, you can blame my recent initiation into the fine American art of tailgating. The rumors are true; I gave over my entire Sunday to football and associated activities. You have to hand it to the diehard fans out there every Sunday in the parking lots of America with their grills and coolers; they really know how to turn a football game into a mere occasion for more important pursuits. Never let it be said, pace Oscar Wilde, that they don't take meals seriously; in this respect, at least, there is nothing shallow about them. I've only lately recovered from yesterday's demonstrations of their depth.

Like I said, this was a first for me (and, for a while at least, a last). On the strength of my native sympathies with the Detroit Lions, I was invited to the Lions-Bears game here in Chicago. Read: sacrificial lamb. The Bears fans who brought me even provided a honolulu-blue Barry Sanders jersey for me to wear, the better to be picked out by the orange-and-navy-clad multitude as an object of pity and curiosity, if the Bears prevailed, or--well, I didn't find out what my role would entail in the unlikely case of a Lions victory. All for the best, I'm sure.

Left in relative peace thanks to the Lions' harmlessness on the field, I was able to enjoy the $3,000 view from inside the architectural bête noire of the year, the new Soldier Field. ($3K being what my friend paid for the license to the seat I warmed yesterday.) So I can confirm what both the stadium's detractors and the enthusiasts have said about the interior: it rocks. The new design brings the field closer to the fans, giving the proceedings an old-timey, college-bowl feel that contrasts thrillingly with the steel-glass-and-angles modernism of the structure around you. Both the interior and the exterior bring together disparate styles, but the former stages a bold, dynamic clash while the latter makes a hapless muddle (much like the Lions!).

From the outside, the colonnade uncomfortably constricts the bowl, while the bowl bears down on the colonnade; the nostalgic effect of the one, and the futuristic effect of the other, cancel each other out. Inside, the intimate dimensions of the field below and the soaring reach of the steel above make room for each other. They lend each other high definition, with an effect that's additive rather than negating. Inside, you can imagine simultaneously that you have been spirited back to 1955 and that you've been zoomed ahead to 2103. Outside, you're in nowhereland.

This is my third post about a building I'm exposed to a lot, whether driving or biking by it. I've taken the whole thing rather personally. I'm going to stop now and just get used to it.

Posted October 27, 6:33 AM

TT: Further adventures of a dedicated writer

As I was washing the blood off my computer keyboard (now there's a sentence I've never before had occasion to write), I managed to knock the "B" key off. Have you ever tried to reinstall a key on an iBook with nine fingers? Or ten, for that matter. I finally had to give up and seek outside help.

I am not having a good day.

P.S. For those who asked, yes, it's the finger.

Posted October 27, 4:12 AM

October 26, 2003

TT: Latest face

New to "Sites to See" as of today is Cup of Chicha, of which (whom?) Our Girl and I are both fans. Click here or in the right-hand column, as you like it.

We urge you to troll through the roll, by the way. Not all the sites will be equally to your liking, but all are at least worth an irregular peek, and I check out most of them at least once every other day. Right now I am especially fond of Household Opera and Pullquote, and of course life without my daily doses of Maud, Old Hag, and You-Know-Who would scarcely be worth living.

OGIC has her own favorites, which overlap substantially but not completely with mine. I'll let her fill you in.

Did I mention that we are members in good standing of the Cool Lit Club? And that you're not?

Posted October 26, 9:47 AM

TT: Music to answer e-mail by

I don't know about OGIC, but I've answered just about all of my mail. (I understand she's tailgating today. Harrumph! No doubt she'll tell you all about it....)

I'm heading into a four-deadline, two-play week, by the way, so you won't be hearing as much from me as usual, but I promise not to disappear even close to completely, and Our Girl has plenty of stuff on her mind. We'll keep you fed and happy.

In the meantime, here's a playlist. I recovered nearly all my data after that horrendous hard-drive explosion, but one thing I did lose was my mp3 files, every last one of them, arrgh. The good part is that I've been ripping lots and lots of CDs in the course of the past couple of weeks in order to reconstitute my Lost iTunes Jukebox, and my listening has been nicely eclectic as a result. Here's what I played (and ripped) as I answered your mail this evening:

1. Elgar Introduction and Allegro, performed by Benjamin Britten and the English Chamber Orchestra (one of the most underrated of all string-orchestra masterpieces, conducted by a great composer to boot).

2. Coldplay, "Yellow"

3. Django Reinhardt and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, "Swing 42" (I can't hear this record often enough, for some reason)

4. Paul Whiteman, "Dardanella" (arrangement by Bill Challis, solo by Bix Beiderbecke)

5. Gerry Mulligan and Zoot Sims, "Davenport Blues" (in honor of Bix, obviously)

6. Luciana Souza, "Doce de Coco" (from Brazilian Duos, a CD you must own)

7. Fauré "Clair de lune," sung by Gerard Souzay (the 1946 Decca, recorded when his pipes were young and glistening)

8. Nickel Creek, "Seven Wonders" (Sara's singing is so pretty on this one)

Incidentally, has anybody out there heard of a group called the Hot Club of Cowtown? I heard them on NPR the other day, and I'm thinking they might be a good subject for a piece....

Posted October 26, 9:02 AM

TT: For the record

By way of The Corner, this letter to the editor of the Rocky Mountain News:

Recently, a co-worker asked me if I had seen the movie Bowling for Columbine yet, I told her absolutely not! My answer surprised her, given the fact my son, Matthew, was one of the 13 murdered during the deadliest school shooting in our country's history. I explained to her that prior to the public release of the movie the families of the injured and dead were invited by Michael Moore to attend a preview screening. How thoughtful.

Our family and others considered attending because we were genuinely interested in his message to the public regarding gun control and school violence.

However, once we discovered he was going to charge us admission we refrained from doing so.

It's laughable that Moore attempts to portray himself as an anti-establishment liberal who is the voice of the common folk, when in fact he is no better than the greedy capitalists he shuns. Maybe now that he has made millions of dollars off the blood of our children he could toss a DVD or two our way to view.

Ann M. Kechter

Posted October 26, 1:52 AM

TT: Not the place's fault

I just got back from Wesla Whitfield's last set at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel (right in time to reset my clocks), and I simply had to sit down and tell you how wonderful it was. The room was full of singers, among them Julie Wilson and Mary Foster Conklin, and Whitfield was well aware of it, for her singing was everything that cabaret ought to be and sometimes is: sly and playful, daring and free, musically impeccable, devastatingly emotional. (I could--and should--say all the same things about her accompanists, Mike Greensill on piano and Sean Smith on bass, for they, too, were flying.)

The Oak Room and I have a history. I used to go there all the time to see my old friend Nancy LaMott, and when she died, eight Decembers ago (how can so much time have passed?), I found it all but impossible to go back. It took a long time before I started to feel even halfway at ease in the Algonquin, and even then my memories often made me too melancholy to appreciate whatever I happened to be hearing, no matter how good it was.

Of course Nancy was on my mind last night, for Wesla Whitfield was the only cabaret singer she admitted to admiring, and she would have really, really loved the late show from which I just returned. The Oak Room hasn't seen much of Whitfield in recent years, but after an evening like that, I can't imagine they won't bring her back for a nice long run. A one-night stand is about thirty nights too few.

I forgot to mention in my recent posting about Whitfield that she has a new CD out, September Songs. Don't wait for Christmas. Don't even wait for Monday. Click on the link and order it now.

Posted October 26, 1:33 AM

October 25, 2003

TT: What they used to be

I'm reading Wil Haygood's In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr., and finding it engrossing. Perhaps you have to be older than 30--if not 40--to expect to find Davis interesting, but Haygood's anecdotage is quite arrestingly good. Here's an amazing story that comes from Keely Smith:

Sammy and Sinatra and singer Keely Smith were sitting around one evening. Just three singers, awash in the joy they were all having, talking about singing, songs, life. Sammy told Sinatra he'd have to leave early, couldn't hang around. Sinatra couldn't understand what might be more important than hanging around with him. So he wanted to know why Sammy had to leave, and those blue eyes pressed for an answer. It was Kim Novak; they had a date. A little smirk crawled across the Sinatra face. He told Sammy he could get Kim to break the date. Sammy thought Sinatra was kidding, but he wasn't, the blue eyes steady and hard. Keely Smith sat listening, looking between both men. Sammy against Frank. She knew who would win. "I said, ‘Frank, don't do that.' He went into the room, called Kim [said he wanted to see her], and she broke the date with Sammy to go with Frank. It broke Sammy's heart. And Frank never went to meet her."

That's a story any biographer would have killed to unearth, and Haygood's book is full of similar tales.

I have to add, though, that In Black and White is also full of similar journalistic clichés ("A little smirk crawled across the Sinatra face"), and more than a few passages are so throbbingly florid as to read almost like a parody of Tom Wolfe. O.K., it's a celebrity biography, not the life of Samuel Johnson, but In Black and White is also riddled with errors of fact, chronology, and spelling (Jimmie Lunceford's first name is spelled two different ways on the same page) that will be immediately obvious to anybody who knows a reasonable amount about American pop culture in the 20th century. I'm not talking anything so awful as to call into question the fundamental reliability of the book (as a friend of mine cracked, why would you expect an author who can't spell his own first name to be able to spell anything else?), but I just finished proofreading A Terry Teachout Reader, a job I took very seriously, and it's plain to see, at least to me, that nobody went over this book with anything remotely approaching the same kind of care.

Again, I know times have changed...except that In Black and White was published by Alfred A. Knopf, which still has a reputation as a publisher of books that not only look good but read well. There was a not-so-distant time when any Knopf editor who allowed a book as sloppily edited as In Black and White to go into print would have committed ritual suicide in expiation of his sins.

I know this at first hand, incidentally, because Knopf was H.L. Mencken's house, and in 1995 I published a Mencken anthology, A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, that got the full Knopf treatment. It was edited with a kind of care I thought had gone out of style. And so it had at most publishing houses--but not at Knopf, at least not in 1995, and not for at least a few more years after that. But I guess those days are over now, at least when it comes to celebrity biographies.

All of which reminds me of a stanza from my second-favorite song in Chicago (which was inexplicably and inexcusably deleted from the movie, though you'll find it on the DVD):

Whatever happened to old values?
And fine morals?
And good breeding?
Now, no one even says "oops" when they're
Passing their gas
Whatever happened to class?

Posted October 25, 6:21 AM

October 24, 2003

TT: In which I am well pleased

I just received a boxful of author copies of the paperback edition of my latest book, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken. It goes on sale November 4, but you can pre-order a copy or three from amazon.com by clicking on the link.

Depending on the religious inclinations of the potential recipient, The Skeptic might make an excellent stocking stuffer for Christmas--and if you couldn't afford the hardcover version, this one looks almost as nice on the shelf. So buy early and often. I mean, I blog for free, there isn't even a tip jar on this page, so you really ought to do something to keep me solvent, right? If we sell enough copies, I do solemnly swear to give Our Girl in Chicago a stupendous dinner at a restaurant of her choice the next time I'm in the Windy City.

(Incidentally, A Terry Teachout Reader has just been listed on amazon.com for the first time. They seem to think it's coming out in December, which it isn't, but who's complaining?)

Posted October 24, 12:57 PM

TT: Give that woman a Tony

William Nicholson's The Retreat From Moscow, starring Eileen Atkins, John Lithgow, and Ben Chaplin, opened Thursday at the Booth Theatre, and I reviewed it in this morning's Wall Street Journal. Here's the money graf:

Can a great performance save a lousy show? It depends on the show. The post-opening buzz on "The Boy From Oz," for instance, is that Hugh Jackman is worth the price of the ticket, but I'd happily pay good cash money never to see that sugar-coated dud again, with or without the excellent Mr. Jackman. On the other hand, Eileen Atkins has definitely done the silk-purse trick at the Booth Theatre, albeit with a higher-quality sow's ear. William Nicholson's "The Retreat From Moscow," which opened last night, is your standard-issue British domestic drama, all dolled up to look like a serious play, but Ms. Atkins tears into it as if it were Chekhov (which is pretty much what Mr. Nicholson wants you to think it is), and even though I wasn't fooled for a second, it didn't matter....you won't find better acting on Broadway, or anywhere else. She is totally present, totally convincing, totally right.

As usual, no link, so to read the whole thing (which also includes my thoughts on Primary Stages' production of A.R. Gurney's Strictly Academic), buy a copy of this morning's Journal and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, which is full of readable goodies.

Posted October 24, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

Ah! What avails the classic bent,
And what the cultured word,
Against the undoctored incident
That actually occurred?

Rudyard Kipling, "The Benefactors"

Posted October 24, 9:57 AM

TT: Rogue male

OGIC and I tend to like the same movies. I can't remember whether she was the one who first told me about Twilight, or vice versa.

I do feel I should point out, however, that we've been inadvertently drawing attention to the same actor, since Twilight and Support Your Local Sheriff, about which I recently posted, are both graced by the presence of James Garner, who belongs in the category of Famous but Underrated Artists. He's been around forever, and everybody knows who he is from TV--my parents watched him in Maverick, I in The Rockford Files--but for reasons not entirely clear to me, he never quite had the film career he deserved. (One reason was that in Garner's day, it was taken for granted that you couldn't move from small screen to large. In fact, it's usually the other way around.) Yet I can't think of a better romantic comedian, not least because he has the gift of doubleness, the ability to be charming and suspect at the same time.

Cary Grant was like that, too, which reminds me to yield the floor briefly to the ever-relevant David Thomson, who reminds us that Garner was on TV

an hour a week for twenty-six weeks a year for ten years. That is the equivalent of well over one hundred movies--and if any actor could claim one hundred movies made with the wit, narrative speed, and good-natured ease of Maverick and Rockford Files he would be...Cary Grant?

If you don't know what to do with yourself this weekend, you could do a whole lot worse than renting Twilight, Support Your Local Sheriff, and maybe Hour of the Gun (in which Garner plays Wyatt Earp completely straight) or Marlowe (not the best Raymond Chandler movie, but Garner is marvelous as Philip Marlowe) or even the film version of Maverick. You won't be sorry.

Posted October 24, 9:49 AM

TT: Dance, 3; looks, 10

I was going to point out the obvious flaw in amazon.com's new book-searching feature, but Bookslut beat me to it:

Amazon.com has completed its newest sparkly addition. Now when you search for a keyword, it searches the text of 120,000 nonfiction books and offers them in your results. I'm sure this is handy in some way. I bet people all over are rejoicing. But all I know is that when I was searching for "curing pig" in an attempt to find the book "Curing the Pig" by Liza Granville, I got 6,454 results, none of the first page results being the book. When I searched for Liza Granville, I got 202 results, none of the first page results being the book. I had to type in the damn ISBN number to find it. I'm sure this is handy, but you can't turn it off. It just clutters up simple searches, hiding what you're really looking for. Wired, however, calls the move ingenious.

Amazon.com is also having a contest to see how their "Search Inside the Book" feature has changed your life. Do you think if I bitch and complain that the feature is not optional I'll win a Segway?

Granted, it really is fun to search your own name, as BuzzMachine seems to have been the first to point out (and yes, that's the very first thing I did). But it's only fun once. So I really do hope amazon.com figures out quickly that "Search Inside the Book" needs an on-off switch. Like, say, tomorrow.

Posted October 24, 9:30 AM

OGIC: Rank adaptation

If you picked up your copy of The Wall Street Journal today, containing Terry's stage review, then you can also read John Lippmann on the disappointing reception the adaptation of Philip Roth's The Human Stain met with at the Toronto Film Festival last month, and the attendant nervous scurrying of its marketers at Miramax. By "disappointing," I mean "mixed," since Miramax sets the bar high for critical response to its movies--especially the ones it releases in Oscar-bait season.

If you don't have the paper, here's the gist of the piece:

But now, a week before the movie has opened, the buzz has pulled back from a surefire Best Picture Oscar nomination. The film's engine began to sputter at the Toronto Film Festival last month, which has become a major showcase for films with Academy Award aspirations....the word out of Toronto for "Human Stain" was less than unqualified. While it won generally positive reviews from such critics as Roger Ebert, overall reaction fell short of a sure-fire awards contender. "Acting is fine, but never quite gels," concluded trade magazine the Hollywood Reporter. Some reviewers found fault with the unlikely casting of Nicole Kidman as a cleaning woman and even more of the selection of Mr. Hopkins to play Coleman; Variety called the choice of Mr. Hopkins "problematic."

Why do I find this not surprising? First, because there is something depressingly predictable, almost automatic, about the rush to film a high-buzz book like Roth's. It is inconceivable to Hollywood that there might be stories that have already found their most fitting form as books, and can be neither improved upon nor done justice to as movies. (I realize that the very idea that this, rather than profitability, is a guiding interest in Hollywood is absurdly naive.) Second, because I very recently read The Human Stain, guessing that I would probably end up seeing the movie and wishing to have an unadulterated experience of a book that came highly recommended from many quarters.

I finished the novel with mixed feelings, about which more in a later post. For now I'll just say that what strengths it has are not narrative, nor even really descriptive--to name two qualities that can make a novel genuinely ripe for screen adaptation. It is unfailingly smart and has at its core a fascinating and lifelike character study. But for all the extraordinary events in it, the novel struck me as more than a little inert. More than it narrates or describes, The Human Stain expounds and diagnoses; the less charitable verb, and the one that occurred to me repeatedly as I read it, would be "lectures." Not, alas, an eminently filmable mode.

On the other hand, not having cared for the book actually gives me half a hope that I will like the movie. After investing scarce and valuable pleasure-reading time in the venture, I'm almost sure to go see it. It doesn't hurt that the director, Robert Benton, brilliantly wrote and directed one of my favorites, Twilight, a modest little picture with an unbelievable cast. Since it is a trickier thing (though by no means an impossibility) for a movie to lecture than for a book to, it could just be that the process of dramatizing and illustrating this material will have breathed some life into it.

Posted October 24, 5:51 AM

TT: Two heads are better than one

In case you didn't notice, I've performed a bit of subtitle-augmentation surgery on this blog, and also added Our Girl in Chicago's bio to the top module of the right-hand column. All this is nothing more than official acknowledgment of the perfectly obvious fact that "About Last Night" is written by two people. (The headlines of posts written by me start with "TT," while Our Girl's posts start with "OGIC.")

I could tell you some stories about my adorable co-blogger, but I'll refrain, since she prefers to be shrouded in impenetrable mystery. Nevertheless, the fact that she introduced me to Exile in Guyville should speak volumes to the cognoscenti....and she can cook, too!

Anyway, Our Girl is a peach, and way smart. And really good at this. And a welcome addition to "About Last Night."

Posted October 24, 2:05 AM

OGIC: Part of the landscape

Jennifer Howard's Washington Post review of Nell Freudenberger's Lucky Girls is written with more conviction than any reviews I've seen of a very attention-getting book. She's politely underwhelmed by it--I mean, if you consider this polite:

[Freudenberger] excels at evoking the wistfulness that's a poetic version of low-grade depression.

But what's most remarkable about this review is neither Howard's critical acumen nor the persuasive way she pegs the stories as New Yorker Lite. The real news is here:

Some publishing history: The story "Lucky Girls" first appeared in the New Yorker's Summer 2001 "Debut Fiction" issue. This splash earned Freudenberger some nice buzz and the envy of many other twentysomething writers, but that's another story. Check any of your favorite literary blogs for the details.

In the same week that found the New York Times tech section looking down skeptically at the blogosphere from on high, asking "more fizzle than sizzle?" Howard takes blogs' existence, and her readers' familiarity with them, completely for granted. This sounds to me like a new level of absorption into a mainstream cultural discourse whose center is gravitating away from the print media more quickly than many corners of the print media would like to admit.

When I read the above I had two instant reactions: Wow, she and her editors didn't even feel the need to explain that it's short for "web log"; and, more tellingly: Hey, no links? Which goes to show not just what my reading habits have become, but why blogs are gaining ground.

Posted October 24, 1:57 AM

October 23, 2003

TT: Orchids to you

Banana Oil (bless him) reports that the first season of A&E's now-cancelled Nero Wolfe, very closely based on Rex Stout's much-loved detective stories, is now available on DVD. I wrote about the series in National Review shortly before it got the axe:

In addition to co-producing the series and directing several episodes, Timothy Hutton plays Archie Goodwin, and I can't see how anyone could do a better job. Not only does he catch Archie's snap-brim Thirties tone with sharp-eared precision, but he also bears an uncanny physical resemblance to the dapper detective-narrator I've been envisioning all these years. No sooner did Hutton make his first entrance in The Golden Spiders than he melded completely with the Archie of my mind's eye. I can no longer read a Stout novel without seeing him, or hearing his voice.

Still, Archie could have wandered out of any number of screwball comedies, whereas Nero Wolfe is a far more complicated proposition. Weighing in at a seventh of a ton, he is a tireless talker endowed with a touch of Johnsonian genius. (It is no small tribute to Stout's own brainpower that he was capable of making that characterization plausible.) At the same time, he is chronically lazy and neurotic to the highest degree, so much so that he refuses to leave his home on business, preferring to sit at his desk or tend his orchids. Like Sherlock Holmes, the predecessor on whom he was obviously modeled, Wolfe is a misogynist who will have nothing to do with women socially--food, not sex, is his sensual outlet--though every once in a while he gives off a faint but perceptible flicker of interest in one of the pretty ladies who pass through his office.

Maury Chaykin has doubtless immersed himself in the Wolfe novels, for he brings to his interpretation of the part both a detailed knowledge of what Stout wrote and an unexpectedly personal touch of insight. He plays Wolfe as a fearful genius, an aesthete turned hermit who has withdrawn from the world (and from the opposite sex) in order to shield himself against...what? Stout never answers that question, giving Chaykin plenty of room to maneuver, which he uses with enviable skill. His Nero Wolfe is gluttonous, blustery, petulant, even a bit dandyish--but he peers out at his clients through the haunted eyes of a man who knows too much.

You can order it here. And should. And when you do, take a look at Kari Matchett and tell me if she's not the jolie-est jolie laide you ever did see.

Posted October 23, 11:44 AM

TT: Elsewhere

Hilton Kramer has a great piece in the New York Observer about the Romare Bearden retrospective which just opened at Washington's National Gallery, and which I can't wait to see:

What's new to me in this exhibition is some of the early work from the 1940's, executed in the vernacular expressionistic style that was then a common pictorial idiom for painters attempting to align themselves with the politics of social protest. As an African-American, born in North Carolina and raised in Harlem in the Jim Crow era, it was all but inevitable that Bearden would ally himself with that imperative. As early as 1934, in an essay called "The Negro Artist and Modern Art," Bearden affirmed that alliance in declaring that "An intense, eager devotion to present-day life, to study it, to help relieve it, this is the calling of the Negro artist."

Yet even in this early period, Bearden's art never conformed to the simplistic conventions of the 1930's social-realist school. Picasso was a more potent influence on his work than, for instance, the likes of William Gropper, and when Bearden hit his stride in the 1960's, it was in the medium of Cubist collage that he found a style in which he could triumphantly integrate the demands of his modernist aesthetic aspirations with those of his embattled social conscience.

Click here to read the whole thing. Yes, I know, Kramer is the Antichrist of art criticism in certain way-cool circles, but the man knows his stuff--and he writes about what he sees, not what he thinks he should have seen.

Posted October 23, 11:33 AM

TT: R.I.P.

In case you missed the news, one of my favorite character actors, Jack Elam, died the other day. He was 84 years old and hadn't acted since 1995, but it isn't hard to remember him in his prime, for he usually played one of two variations on the same part, that of a cockeyed, slightly screwy Western bum/drunk/loony. Sometimes he played it sinister (at which he was good), more often funny (at which he was even better), but either way he was always a pleasure to behold.

Elam's best comic role was in Burt Kennedy's Support Your Local Sheriff, a Western spoof from 1969 that featured James Garner at his slyest and most charming, plus a half-dozen other ultra-familiar faces (including Walter Brennan, Harry Morgan, and Bruce Dern), all of them obviously having a ball. Blazing Saddles is the comedy Western everybody remembers, but Support Your Local Sheriff was smarter and funnier, and holds up much better after three decades. Rent it, and keep an eye out for the "town character." It's Jack Elam, and you can't miss him.

Posted October 23, 11:25 AM

TT: Almanac

"I never meant to deny the moral impact of art which is certainly inherent in every genuine work of art. What I do deny and am prepared to fight to the last drop of my ink is the deliberate moralizing which to me kills every vestige of art in a work however skillfully written."

Vladimir Nabokov, letter to Prof. George R. Noyes (1945)

Posted October 23, 11:24 AM

TT: Good intentions

I've become an avid fan of the pseudonymous Cinetrix, who blogs at Pullquote, so I was pleased to get the following e-mail from her. It starts with a pullquote from my recent posting on Kind of Blue:

It's the record Clint Eastwood (who knows a lot about jazz) puts on when he comes home from a hard day of assassin-hunting in In the Line of Fire. A whole book has been written about its history and cultural significance. Now it's Muzak--yet it remains as vital and listenable as ever. By what strange alchemy was this transformation effected?

Somebody (me, I guess) ought to write an essay about how jazz has come to be used as a cultural signifier in films, TV shows, and ads, an infallible indicator of upper-middle-class hipness.

Yes, please. You could do worse than use Clint as a jumping-off point. Especially because he (and his son) composed the music for the extra-blue-collar "Mystic River," which some viewers have found distracting. Is his score perhaps supposed to signify (to the members of the Academy?) that this working-class tale is tasteful and well-done and designed to be understood and appreciated by discerning, upper-middle-class hipsters like themselves? The credits cite the BSO and the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra, impeccable cultural signifiers indeed.

Alas, this isn't the essay I sort of promised--I've got to write for money today, so I can't be that discursive--but I, too, was intrigued by the fact that Clint Eastwood scored Mystic River himself. (Lennie Niehaus transcribed the music from Eastwood's piano sketch and did the orchestrations, but the actual music is reportedly all Eastwood, except for a couple of snippets by son Kyle.) This, mind you, in spite of the fact that he didn't do a very good job of it. "Distracting" isn't the word. Whatever made him think those slick, inflated symphonic sounds were even remotely appropriate to a film about working-class life in Boston?

On the other hand, I suspect Eastwood's motives, insofar as he understood them, were pure. His interest in music, after all, is both long-standing and considerable (among many other things, he does his own cocktail piano playing--very competently, too--in In the Line of Fire). What's more, it's clear that he's wanted to score one of his own films for some time now. You may not remember this, but Eastwood composed the main-title themes for several of his earlier films, most notably "Claudia's Theme" from Unforgiven, which is actually quite a nice little tune.

I have no doubt that a lot of other directors would score their own films if they could, and some might even do a good job...if they could. Stanley Kubrick, lest we forget, dumped Alex North's marvelous score for 2001: A Space Odyssey and replaced it with his own "score" made up of pre-existing pieces of classical music, some of which worked extremely well in context. His use of György Ligeti's Atmosphères, for example, was unforgettably apposite. And as more than one bonafide film composer has observed, the rock-and-roll song score for GoodFellas was hugely effective (and hugely influential to boot), even though Martin Scorsese didn't write a note of it himself.

The exasperating paradox of film music is that it doesn't have to be original, or even good music qua music, in order to fulfill its near-indispensible function, which was deftly summed up by the greatest of all film composers, Bernard Herrmann:

I feel that music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety or misery. It can propel narrative swiftly forward, or slow it down. It often lifts mere dialogue into the realm of poetry. Finally, it is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience.

That "single experience," as has often been observed, aspires to the condition of the totally unified Gesamtkunstwerk of which Richard Wagner and Serge Diaghilev dreamed. Yet film is by definition a collaborative medium, an undeniable fact that nonetheless frustrates many filmmakers who would prefer to do the whole thing themselves, or at least control the whole process. Instead, they have to call in experts to do the specialized jobs they can't do, foremost among which is almost always the writing of the score.

For this reason, I don't blame Clint Eastwood a bit for having wanted to be one of the very few directors of importance to have scored one of his own films (has anyone else done it other than Charlie Chaplin?). Even if the results weren't especially impressive, I admire him for trying. And I can't imagine that he purposefully chose the idiom in which he worked--the glossy "symphonic score" beloved of film composers of the Thirties and Forties--in order to make Mystic River seem like an upper-middle-class cultural artifact. My guess is that he scored it that way simply because that's the kind of film music with which he grew up, and with which he's most comfortable.

That the results ended up being wholly inappropriate to the film in question is, of course, another matter, and ultimately a far more important one. I think Mystic River is a flawed but compelling film whose total effect is sharply diminished by an inadequate score. But, then, it wouldn't be the first time a smart director did something dumb to a good movie, would it?

Posted October 23, 10:57 AM

TT: Dude, where's my clavichord?

Dear Our Girl in Chicago:

Pursuant to our deal, according to which I agreed to go see The School of Rock if you went to see Lost in Translation, I finally got around to holding up my end of the bargain last night. What you posted about the film seems to me exactly right--it's "a funny wisp of a premise played out with wit, sweetness, and seeming spontaneity." In fact, The School of Rock charmed my socks off.

Since the critic in me is always on duty, I have to pass along a couple of observations:

(1) It'd be hard to conceive of a more derivative film than The School of Rock. Not only does it make seemingly unironic use of all the stock devices of the You-Can-Do-It inspirational flick, but it's an unabashed ripoff of Revenge of the Nerds (has anybody else noticed this?), only with wonky 10-year-olds who go to a big-ticket prep school instead of wonky 18-year-olds in college. And as you rightly pointed out, Jack Black's performance is essentially a replay of his role in High Fidelity, though I was surprised and pleased to see that he could carry an entire film playing that clever part.

(2) I felt cheated by the film's minimalist use of Joan Cusack, the best of all possible supporting comediennes, who didn't get nearly enough screen time. For one thing, we're prompted to expect a big transformation scene in which she decisively sheds her priggishness...and it never happens. (The little scene in the bar isn't nearly drastic enough.) On top of that, the script also sets us up to expect a romance between her and Jack Black that fails to occur--obvious, I know, but movies like The School of Rock thrive by doing the obvious in unexpected ways.

Enough with the quibbles. The School of Rock is a deliciously sweet nothing, just what I needed and wanted to see after a monstrous day's work (I wrote a Wall Street Journal review from scratch in the morning, then interviewed Regina Carter in the afternoon for a New York Times profile). I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Incidentally, I went to see The School of Rock with one of my cool young musician friends, a singer with fluorescent hair who also took it upon herself to enhance my own coolness quotient by making me listen to selections from Radiohead's Kid A and Coldplay's Parachutes before we went to the theater. I liked them both, a lot. (She also left me a copy of Björk's Vespertine for homework.) I suppose this isn't quite as cataclysmic as that long-ago weekend in Chicago when you introduced me to Exile in Guyville, but I certainly do feel hip and happening this morning.

We return you now to our usual high-culture musings.

Posted October 23, 10:00 AM

TT: Found objects

From artblog.net:

This weekend a friend of mine told me that he was showing his work – prints, mostly – to another artist who said to him, "Yeah, I could do this. It would take longer and it might not come out as good. But my art is about ideas."

And from artnotes, the first installment of a new occasional series called "What Would (Clement) Greenberg Do?"

My two-year-old smeared finger paints on my brand new silk shantung slippers! But when I try to explain to him that this is a no-no, he doesn't understand. What should I do? - Mary H., Minnetonka, Minnesota

Greenberg responds: What it documents is a crisis not of art, but of its criticism: a crisis that is also by way of being a scandal. Scientific method alone asks, or might ask, that a situation be resolved in exactly the same terms as that in which it is presented. ...these mistakes were not so much mistakes as insights, expressed prematurely. There is nothing more to it than that.

We are very definitely amused. (Both of these art-related blogs are worth your time, by the way.)

Posted October 23, 4:49 AM

OGIC: Fork in the road?

If you've wondered how the Atlantic Monthly is recovering, seven months on, from the tragic death of its editor Michael Kelly in Iraq last spring, Dan Kennedy at the Boston Phoenix has a report you will want to read. It's an absorbing look at the magazine's past, present, and especially its future. According to Kennedy, although the Atlantic is now thriving under the interim editorial stewardship of former Managing Editor Cullen Murphy (whose surprising second job is revealed in the story), questions remain about personnel, direction, and even the magazine's continued residence in Boston:

The question now is, where does the Atlantic go from here? Under Kelly and Murphy, the magazine has carved out a handful of areas of expertise--politics, foreign affairs, explanatory journalism, and books. (Literary editor Benjamin Schwartz is highly respected, if intimidating in his judgment--such as his recent pronouncement regarding the King James Bible that "no one who hasn't read it thoroughly should be considered well educated.") Indeed, one of the few differences Murphy admits to having with [former editor William] Whitworth is that he, like Kelly, believes the magazine should be more focused and less eclectic--although a long piece by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last January, arguing that his cousin Michael Skakel is innocent of murder, was as eclectic a piece as one can imagine.

The Atlantic is currently in the midst of an unusual project--downsizing its circulation by charging more and eliminating cut-rate subscriptions, a move that its executives hope will reduce costs and eventually allow the magazine to break even. According to an account in the New York Times, the magazine will guarantee advertisers a paid circulation of 325,000--down from the current guarantee of 450,000, and considerably below the actual circulation of more than 500,000. The magazine has also cut back over the past few years from 12 issues per year to 10.

Kennedy's well reported piece happens to come just when the future of The Paris Review after Plimpton is a front burner subject (link via Maud Newton). If all of the parties interviewed by Kennedy are not on exactly the same page about the magazine's future, they do seem to be well intentioned. Let's hope this is so, and hope these intentions continue to be realized.

Posted October 23, 2:01 AM

October 22, 2003

OGIC: Wallis and her

Once upon a time I read the book proposal for The Last of the Duchess, and felt the frisson generated by Lady Caroline Blackwood's worldly, aggressive wit right down to my parochial midwestern bones. The book tells her story of trying to complete a newspaper assignment to interview the Duchess of Windsor but being blocked at every turn by Simpson's perversely, intrepidly protective 80-something lawyer--sort of à la Michael Moore at General Motors, but with charm.

Blackwoood died a year after this, her last book, was published. Her work will live to see another day, however, as New York Review Books has reissued two of her novels, Corrigan and Great Granny Webster. Gary Indiana casts an appreciative eye over her career this month in Bookforum:

The prose inventions of Caroline Blackwood have the beguiling and ominous quality of fireside tales told at a very louche and drunken summer camp for morticians.

If this doesn't draw you in--but really, what's not to like?--the rest of what he has to say just might. Indiana doesn't dwell on Blackwood's famous husbands and lovers, a group that included Cary Grant, Lucien Freud, and Robert Lowell. Instead he focuses on her writing, and finds her "equally the artist to any of her paramours and husbands." His admiration is infectious.

Posted October 22, 11:47 AM

OGIC: Back in the mix

I love the tech guys. They fixed my iBook with the greatest of ease yesterday (which may just mean I'm a ninny) and sent me home with a lollipop. Okay, not really, but it does strike me that whenever they see me I'm in the state of elevated panic you'd expect from a hypochondriac in a doctor's office. The hushed tones, the urgent appeals, the excessive display of gratitude and relief when they make everything better... did I say "love"? I meant "worship the ground they tread."

I see Terry's been no slouch while I've been gone. In case you missed it and aren't feeling inclined to scroll, this post on the ubiquity of Kind of Blue was a highlight.

Thanks to those who have sent me email. It has been trickling in this week from Terry. I'll answer it over the next few days, whether in email or right here. And now for some blogging.

Posted October 22, 10:20 AM

OGIC: Addendum

Terry posted here yesterday about Kevin Pollak's silent impression of Robert DeNiro. I couldn't let the opportunity pass without mentioning another great wordless impersonation, the comedian-actor Richard Belzer's shambling full-body rendition of Ronald Reagan.

I only wish I had a link; but if you ever catch Belzer on a late-night talk show, he's likely to be pressed by the host into doing it. (His Mick Jagger employs the same m.o., but isn't half as uncanny.)

Posted October 22, 3:05 AM

OGIC: Hit parades

A reader writes with further observations on the Observer 100:

I'm no expert on the contents but I would note the language barrier protecting this list: Of the 100 "greatest novels of all time," I believe that 15 were not written in English. There are but two in Russian--meaning that On the Road, which did make the list, is "greater" than all the other output of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the rest. Note also that there is apparently only one Spanish author as good as Kerouac (Cervantes), and none who's ever written in any Asian language. Point would be not that anyone should attempt a list of "the world's greatest," since that would be nearly impossible for a number of reasons. Rather, couldn't the editors of the Observer have come up with a slightly less grandiose header for their efforts?

Indeed. The Observer has now published reader reaction, including some comments from readers of note. They have also added the 50 books shaken in their faces must huffily by irate readers. This may be more interesting than the original list.

Meanwhile, Roger L. Simon's list of his 20 greatest movies--er, make that 23--is more satisfying. It sure is easy to tell the difference between a list compiled by committee and one put together by a single, discerning organizing intelligence. I also like the way his commenters goaded him into adding Jean Vigo's madly exuberant Zero for Conduct, which in an ideal world would be a hell of a lot easier to see. Maybe one of Chicago's many fine art movie houses could be persuaded to show it sometime soon.

Posted October 22, 3:01 AM

October 21, 2003

TT: R.I.P.

In case you haven't heard, Book Magazine, for which I used to write regularly and with pleasure, is closing down.

Sure, Book had its problems, and its relationship with Barnes & Noble was inevitably tricky, but the bottom line is this: Yet another publication devoted to books and authors has bitten the dust.

All of which strongly suggests (once again, and at least to me) that the future of high-culture journalism is on the Web.

Posted October 21, 11:36 AM

TT: Almanac

"The question of capital punishment arising in connection with In Cold Blood, he says, 'At least in England they don't keep them waiting about for five or ten years.' I point out that in the Christie case they should have and ask whether he thinks the death sentence is ever justifiable. 'Well, there have been people on whom I can picture it being carried out. [Bertolt] Brecht, for one. In fact I can imagine doing it to him myself. It might even have been rather enjoyable, when the time came, to have been able to say to him, "Now let's step outside." I'd have given him a good last meal, of course. Still, you must admire the logic of a man who lives in a Communist country, takes out Austrian citizenship, does his bankin