About Last Night

Please share! Your thoughts on the film version of The Human Stain, that is. It's part of my long-term moviegoing plan, but not particularly high on the list. A good word from you will bump it up a few places, while your disfavor could give me an unimpeachable excuse to give it a miss until video. So I'm eager to hear what you thought.

I also took in a movie among the costumed tonight. The women mostly seemed to subscribe to the Onion school of dressing up: sexy witch, sexy nurse, sexy cat, sexy hobo.... (Alas, I could not find a link to the old Onion list of the top Halloween costumes for women 18-34--but I do have some advice: don't google "sexy hobo.") The clear standout was a guy with an expertly drawn phrenological map on his shaved head. The jury's out on whether it was a sexy phrenologically mapped head.

As for the movie, that was the suitably scary 28 Days Later. Not spooky, mind you, but scary in that special way reserved for rapidly traveling viruses that make the people you love into flesh-eating zombies. Believe it or not, I enjoyed myself, especially during some early scenes that let you feast your eyes on an utterly deserted but mostly intact London, a great unruined ruin. The real saving grace, though, was that this flesh-eating zombie movie had a sense of humor, as did my gallant companion and the audience at large.

So, any zombie action in your movie?

Top Halloween Costumes, Women 18-34

1. Sexy French maid

2. Sexy cat

3. Sexy witch

4. Sexy hobo

5. Sexy ketchup bottle

6. Sexy prostitute

7. Sexy Mother Teresa

8. Sexy bus driver

9. Sexy Teenage Mutant Ninja turtle

What was life like, anyway, before the Onion? Can anyone remember those dark, mirthless days? I don't even want to try.

As you know, I haven't read The Human Stain, nor am I likely to. I'm one of those unfortunate folk who is allergic to most of the Major American Novelists who came of age in the Fifties. Bellow, Mailer, Updike, Roth: they all leave me cold. But my guess is that the makers of the film version have made a good-faith effort to preserve the essence of Philip Roth's novel, and that this is part of the problem with the movie.

None of the characters, after all, are actual human beings--they're all symbols made as flesh, the usual Rothian walking archetypes. And therein lies the chief obstacle to filming The Human Stain, which is that you can't cast it. If you had to pick a movie star to play the part of an aging American classics professor who pretends to be Jewish but is really black, Sir Anthony Hopkins is obviously the last person on earth you'd choose. But...who would you choose? Who could you choose? You can write about a character like Coleman Silk, but you can't put him on screen.

This fundamental implausibility--the inability to believe in the existence of any of the major characters as embodied by the cast--sinks the film before the first reel is over, in spite of the best efforts of a whole bunch of talented actors. They're so good, in fact, that they almost make you believe what you're seeing. The emotions seem real, but the dramatic framework that holds them in place is absurd. (If it were any more plausible, of course, you'd be forced to confront all those awful Portnoy-redux clichés head on. I mean, must we sit through yet another chthonic paean to the redemptive power of sex? Puh-LEEZE.)

As for Nicole Kidman, all I can say is that somebody in the makeup department worked really hard to give her dishpan hands.

Bottom line: go see Lost in Translation again.

Rather than try to describe what a Cornell box looks like, I yield the floor to Fairfield Porter, who did the job once and for all in a 1966 review collected in Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism 1935-1975. Here's an excerpt:

The boxes are 12 by 15 inches more or less...A sheet of glass in front is held in a carefully and imperfectly made frame, whose mitered corners do not fit tightly. The finish looks worn and handled, and a foreign newspaper may be varnished over the surface. The inside is usually white, clean, cracked and peeling. The contents vary greatly. There may be a round column on one side establishing the space of the room, and a horizontal bar from which hangs a piston ring. There are actual objects like wooden parrots on a perch, coarse screening, springs, cork balls like fishing rod floats, wine glasses whole or broken, clay pipes, a bearing plate of a pocket watch, a dried starfish, bits of driftwood whose shape indicates that they were once part of something used, nails, coins; sand colored navy blue, pink, yellow, white....

A list of the contents is misleading, because it does not tell about Cornell's sense of how little is enough, like an actor's sense of timing or the Japanese sensitivity to the value of emptiness and the isolated object. As composer he is director and stage designer both, with the director's feeling for the emotional value of each actor's part, and the most efficient use of the space allotted to him.

I don't much care for surrealism, but I've always loved Cornell's little universes, at once troubled and serene, into which one peers raptly at a parallel world where nothing is as it seems. I've looked at a lot of Cornell boxes over the years, but I don't think I've ever seen so many at one time, and most of these are incredibly choice examples. Go, and go again. Don't be oppressed by the fancy address and locked door--buzz and you'll be admitted, even without a jacket and tie--and don't be fazed by the Monday-Friday hours on the Feigen gallery's Web site. At least for now, the gallery is open on Saturdays, and if you bring along a couple of hundred thousand dollars you can even take a box home with you. (Which reminds me to mention that one of the most intriguing aspects of the show is the price list. Why do some Cornell boxes cost more than others? As far as I can tell, the ones with more stuff in them are the most expensive.)

"Joseph Cornell: The 100th Birthday" coincides with the publication of Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay...Eterniday, a staggeringly well-done coffee-table folio containing an all-about-Cornell DVD-ROM that's worth the price of the book all by itself. I can't even begin to recommend Shadowplay...Eterniday strongly enough.

I also went to a Helen Frankenthaler show, "Prints: A Survey," up at Jim Kempner Fine Art (501 W. 23rd St. at 10th Ave.) through Nov. 29. Frankenthaler is one of the greatest printmakers of the postwar era, and several of her very best efforts are on display, including Broome Street at Night, a deceptively simple, wonderfully involving aquatint from 1987 which I'd happily hang over my fireplace if some well-to-do reader of "About Last Night" would care to buy it for me, or for OGIC. We get along quite nicely and would be glad to consider a joint-custody agreement.

W.H. Auden (on jealousy), in Modern Canterbury Pilgrims

"Shattered Glass" does show that its ambitious villain was less turned on by being a reporter than by being a Somebody worthy of a Pulitzer (though apparently no one told him that Pulitzers are not awarded to magazine writers). But more often the movie doesn't puncture so much as perpetuate the star-worshipping celebrity culture that attracts a Glass. "Shattered Glass" is as pompous about The New Republic as its fictionalized New Republic staffers are, portraying the publication as the biggest thing to be handed down from on high since the Ten Commandments. As one oft-repeated line of dialogue has it, The New Republic is "the in-flight magazine of Air Force One," an inflated claim to glamour that the magazine has never made for itself. The movie even opportunistically wraps itself in the tragic celebrity of the former New Republic editor Michael Kelly, by invoking his death in the war in Iraq in the final credits. Mr. Kelly was covering the war for The Atlantic; in the movie proper, his actual role in the Glass saga, while still at The New Republic in the 1990's, is substantially fictionalized and downsized.

I expect the movie to tank, by the way. Most journalists are dull, even when they're dumb and dishonest. Ordinary moviegoers don't care about their lives, and will rarely go see films about them, nor do they wish to read you-are-there books about their misdeeds--with good reason. Rich is devastatingly right about the chronic narcissism of the reporterati. Screw 'em.

P.S. In case you don't know, I write on occasion for the Times, and have a piece in this morning's paper. But if you think that has anything whatsoever to do with the fact that I'm writing in praise of Frank Rich, you were born late yesterday night. (The frequency with which this blog links to The Minor Fall, the Major Lift should serve to dispel any possible suspicion of favor-currying on my part.)

"We all have our wish lists but we don't go around talking about them. It gets in the way of our getting the work," says Miami art collector Donald Rubell. "We hope that when our friends die, their children won't like their art. Those are our silent wishes."

Jackson Pollock's Lucifer, a prime 1947 drip painting owned by the Anderson Collection in San Francisco, is so coveted it could fetch $50 million or more, sources say, were it ever to come on the market. (Don't hold your breath: entertainment mogul David Geffen, who owns Pollock's coveted Number 5, 1948, offered the Andersons $50 million for Lucifer in the mid-1990s, according to sources, and was rejected.)

Shipping magnate George Embiricos owns Cézanne's The Cardplayers (1892–93), the only work in the series in private hands, which experts say could be worth as much as $100 million. Canadian publisher Kenneth Thomson and his son, David, recently paid $76 million for Rubens's recently discovered The Massacre of the Innocents (ca. 1609–11) at Sotheby's, against competition from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Yet Rembrandt's 1654 portrait Jan Six (owned by the Six family foundation in Amsterdam), says New York dealer Otto Naumann, is possibly the most wanted Old Master painting in private hands. "It is a killer," says Naumann. "It is worth in excess of $150 million easily."

Read the whole thing. Speaking as a guy who just placed his first bid at Sotheby's on Friday--for an infinitely more modest sum, needless to say--these numbers make my hands shake. If I had that much money to spare, would I want to spend it on one painting, no matter how good?

At the same time, owning art (albeit on a very, very minor scale) has caused me to realize what a lovely thing it is to get up each morning, look at something beautiful, and know that you can look at it as often as you want all day long, every day. But...a hundred million dollars? I think not. And stories like this have a way of making you forget that you don't need a hundred million dollars to spare, or even five thousand, in order to own something beautiful. Which is too bad.

Most jazz musicians, black and white alike, come from middle-class backgrounds, while most of those who are born poor strive mightily--and, more often than not, successfully--to join the ranks of the middle class. Anyone who doubts that Armstrong filled the latter bill need only visit his home, located some seven blocks from Shea Stadium in a shabby but respectable part of Queens. It is a modest three-story frame house whose elaborate interior is uncannily reminiscent of Graceland, Elvis Presley's gaudy Memphis mansion. From the Jetsons-style kitchen-of-the-future to the silver wallpaper and golden faucets of the master bathroom, the Armstrong house looks exactly like what it is: the residence of a poor southern boy who grew up and made good.

Unlike Graceland, though, it is neither oppressive nor embarrassing. As one stands in Armstrong's smallish study (whose decorations include, among other things, a portrait of the trumpeter painted by Tony Bennett), it is impossible not to be touched to the heart by the aspiration that is visible wherever you look. This, you sense, was the home of a working man, one bursting with a pride that came not from what he had but from what he did. The American dream has had no more loyal exemplar. "I never want to be anything more than I am, what I don't have I don't need," he wrote. "My home with Lucille [his fourth wife] is good, but you don't see me in no big estates and yachts, that ain't gonna play your horn for you. When the guys come from taking a walk around the estate they ain't got no breath to blow that horn."

You really should go and see for yourself. The Armstrong House isn't the easiest place in the world to reach from midtown Manhattan, but it's perfectly feasible, and absolutely worth a day's pilgrimage. For information about the house, including directions, click here. It's a trip you'll never forget.

While I'm at it, I also want to put in a plug for Michael Cogswell's Louis Armstrong: The Offstage Story of Satchmo, the newly published "official" book of the Armstrong House and Archives (of which Cogswell is the curator). It's a coffee-table tome crammed full of unpublished photos of Armstrong at home, backstage, and on the road, and I highly recommend it as an antidote for the blues. You can't look at Louis--or think about him, or listen to his music--without smiling.

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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. Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

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. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

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

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

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

6. The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue

7. The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

8. The book was thick and black and covered with dust. A.S. Byatt, Possession

9. One never knows when the blow may fall. Graham Greene, The Third Man

10. In Africa, you want more, I think. Norman Rush, Mating

There wasn't exactly a flurry of responses, but I'm guessing that some of you simply opted for the instant gratification that Google could provide. That was a wrinkle I hadn't thought of, which isn't embarrassing at all, since forgetting entirely about the existence of the internet is a well-known occupational hazard of, um, blogging...

Because he's short, chubby, and moon-faced, Beatty never gets to play film leads, and I gather that this production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is his Broadway debut. Not to give the game away, but it's damned well about time.

Where were all the under-70 celebrities? Or do they even come to Broadway shows anymore?

I got home, blogged a little, and decided I wasn't sleepy, so I turned on the TV and started surfing. All of a sudden I found myself watching two familiar-looking ballet dancers cavorting around a studio stage, and quickly realized that I was seeing a performance of George Balanchine's Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux by Jacques d'Amboise and Melissa Hayden. It was, needless to say, Classic Arts Showcase, the foundation-supported "network" that beams high-culture video snippets free of charge, 24/7, to any station in the world that wants to run them. In New York, they're shown at irregular intervals on CUNY-TV, the station of the City University of New York, and I see them on occasion, usually in much the same way I did just now--at random, in other words.

To spend a half-hour or so with Classic Arts Showcase is to empty a wildly mixed bag of cultural bits and pieces. The performance of Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, for instance, was originally telecast in 1962 on Voice of Firestone, a quintessentially middlebrow network TV series of a sort inconceivable today. Forty years ago it aired in prime time, where it might have been seen by an untold number of youngsters who could have said to themselves, "So this is ballet? Hey, that's cool." And so it was.

Next up was an encore, Novacek's Perpetuum mobile, dazzlingly well-played in 1957 by Nathan Milstein, a very great violinist whose centenary is only a month away. (By an improbable coincidence, I'd just been reading From Russia to the West, Milstein's witty, outspoken memoirs, and listening to his incomparably aristocratic 1959 recording of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, which you can purchase for the preposterously low price of $3.98 by clicking here.) This clip came from the BBC, which used to present classical music in the most no-nonsense manner imaginable. No fancy sets, no swoopy camerawork, nothing but Milstein, the pianist Ernest Lush, and a page-turner. When did you last see a page-turner on TV?

Ten minutes' worth of good solid black-and-white high-culture fare--followed by a stiff dose of nonsense. We heard a recording of the first movement of Prokofiev's Classical Symphony and saw a painting by Berthe Morisot, across which the camera panned lovingly, tediously, and pointlessly, Morisot and Prokofiev having, so far as I know, nothing whatsoever in common. I lost patience after a half-minute and changed channels, having just been forcibly reminded that even at the height of the middlebrow moment, TV and high culture coexisted uneasily.

Today, long after the death of American middlebrow culture, they scarcely coexist at all, save on random, context-free occasions in the middle of the night. I wonder how many people in New York City saw that clip of Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux? Fifty? A hundred? Surely not much more than that, and probably less. And how many of them knew who Jacques d'Amboise was? Or George Balanchine? Or Tchaikovsky, for that matter?

And so at last to bed, having come to no conclusions whatsoever about the likely fate of Western culture. Fooled you!

Smith points out that for a long time now in academic literary studies, it has been compulsory to resist loving literature. She learned to do this all too well as a student at Cambridge, and in this essay her triumph is to unlearn that dubious wisdom and to instead resist dismissing Forster as easy and mawkish. How did she unlearn it? By writing novels herself, mostly:

A few years ago, I agreed to take part in a debate on "Modern British Art" at the ICA [Institute of Contemporary Arts]. Two famous young artists rounded on me for what they saw as my "aesthetic fascism" (I'd brought up the topic of value judgments in modern art), arguing that there was no possibility that I could find more value in King Lear than the text printed on the back of a cornflake packet. This is an exceedingly stupid version of a very serious aesthetic and ethical debate that has been raging in the humanities for about 40 years. Once I'd have counted myself on the side of the young artists, and now I don't. They say when you become a practitioner you become a sentimentalist--maybe that's what happened. All I know for sure is that I no longer find it impossible to speak of value (not universal value, or even shared value, but value as it concerns this reader), nor to lend my nervous voice to the philosopher Martha Nussbaum's strong Aristotelian claims, mainly, that literature is one of the places (when we read attentively) that we can have truly altruistic instincts, "genuine acknowledgement of the otherness of the other." Ten years ago, the idea that reading fiction might be a valuable ethical activity in its own right was so out of fashion that it took an author of Nussbaum's hard, philosophical bent to broach it without incurring ridicule. Rather bravely, she climbed the disputed mountain of literary theory and planted her philosophical flag firmly in the dirt. Her flag said: "Great novels show us the worth and richness of plural qualitative thinking and engender in their readers a richly qualitative way of seeing."

My flag is rather weak in comparison. It says: "When we read with fine attention, we find ourselves caring about people who are various, muddled, uncertain and not quite like us (and this is good)."

This is only a small taste of a long, beautifully written essay, full of insights and feeling, that makes strong claims both for Forster's contribution to the possibilities of the novel, and for the pleasure of reading as a good in itself. When she writes that "the heart has its own knowledge in Forster, and Love is never quite a rational choice," Smith is talking equally about love between people and love of literature. Her essay connects these dots admirably and, best of all, humanely.

Due to impending construction on West 43rd Street, "URINETOWN: The Musical," the winner of three 2002 Tony Awards, will have to leave Henry Miller's Theater.  "URINETOWN," which has been playing at the historic Broadway playhouse for over two years will close on Broadway on January 18, 2004 after 25 previews and 965 performances.

Performances are Tuesday at 7:00 PM, Wednesday through Saturday at 8:00 PM, with matinees Wednesday and Saturday at 2:00 PM and Sunday at 3:00 PM. For tickets, call TeleCharge at 212: 239-6200 or visit Henry Miller's Theatre box office (124 West 43rd Street, between Sixth Avenue and Broadway).

If you haven't gone, do it now. I'm no fan of postmodernism (to put it mildly), but the most self-referential musical on Broadway is also one of the few must-see shows in town. "Urinetown" is as cold as an icicle...and as brilliant.

Apart from the music, I found Mystic River most impressive as a portrait of the insular South Boston neighborhood where it is set, but not entirely satisfying as drama--until its surprising last two scenes. Sean Penn's lavishly praised performance as Jimmy struck me as way overbearing; the madder his character gets, the more screen acreage he seems to take up, and the flatter the story becomes. Its panoramic view of a troubled community over two generations telescopes into a narrower and narrower study of a single character with a single, hypertrophied dimension.

Don't get me wrong, the movie did keep me engrossed. But by the time the brutal climax had detonated, I was weary, glad to have it done with, and ready to go home. But it was then that Mystic River unfurled two unforeseeable concluding scenes that changed--not everything, but a great deal. Jimmy's wife (Laura Linney) saunters into the first of these scenes, a serene and satisfied Lady Macbeth, and steals the movie in about five minutes.

Finally dropping her guard, Linney's character delivers a quietly chilling monologue that yanks Jimmy's personal trials back into the context of the neighborhood and its remorseless tribal ethos. Her speech changes some of what we think we know, not about the murder mystery but about the force field in which the murder has been committed and revenged. A previous scene with her father, for instance, takes on new significance; we're forced to reevaluate a couple of minor characters as more than goofball sidekicks; and Jimmy's blazing anger (if not Penn's performance) clicks into place, newly plausible and sympathetic. The scene recasts things in a way that makes the movie, for my money, all of a sudden ten times more interesting.

The last scene continues to track Jimmy's wife. By now the camera can barely take its eye off her. Her silent confrontation with the other major female character (Marcia Gay Harden) is another haunting moment that beats anything in the first 90% of the film for sheer suggestiveness. After all the fixation on male angst, male bonding and male rivalry, the women emerge from the background and make the movie whole. It's not so much that earlier scenes don't deliver any feeling, but that these last scenes don't deliver it in blunt blows. More like electric pinpricks.

I'm of two minds about this turn so late in the story. I thought at first that it seemed tacked on and unprepared for; but Laura Linney's character is conspicuously unreadable in earlier scenes, and the revelation of her character and loyalties enriches the drama to a degree that probably wouldn't be matched if it weren't sprung as a late semi-surprise. But it may be too easily missed in the shadow of all the fireworks leading up to it, since it is so much subtler than any of the movie's other revelations and arrives so late. These last scenes are so subtle, in fact, that even now I worry I'm reading too much into them. But I don't think so--or at the very least I don't want to think so, since they transformed the movie, for me, into something not just well made but haunting and memorable.

Its box office grosses, which set record highs--more than $1.2 million per week--in its first year, have fallen about 20 percent in the last 12 months. It now ranks below newer shows like "Hairspray" and "Mamma Mia!" as well as "The Lion King," the 1997 Disney phenomenon whose success some believed "The Producers" might emulate. Worse, in a supremely status-conscious metropolis, the show is now an easy ticket. "The Producers" has not regularly sold out since the beginning of the year, despite a bout of new television advertising.

I'm not surprised, nor should you be. As I wrote here back in July, Mel Brooks' Borscht-belt style of anything-for-a-laugh humor is the last gasp of a dying comic language:

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

With six months' worth of Wall Street Journal drama columns under my belt, I feel even more confident in saying that we won't be seeing many more shows like The Producers. If you seek the future of musical comedy on Broadway, look to Avenue Q. It's smaller, hipper, faster, snarkier. And--yes--better.

Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music

Ballet Alert has a nice thread on Edward Gorey's legendary obsession with New York City Ballet. The last posting, signed "RG," is by my colleague Robert Greskovic, dance critic of The Wall Street Journal and author of Ballet 101, the best introductory book about ballet ever written. He knew Gorey quite well--insofar as he was knowable.

My Stupid Dog reports on the Kennedy Center premiere of Stephen Sondheim's Bounce. I can't see the show until it opens on Broadway because I have to review it in its final form for the Journal, so I'm green with envy.

CBS will not broadcast THE REAGANS on November 16 and 18. This decision is based solely on our reaction to seeing the final film, not the controversy that erupted around a draft of the script.

Although the mini-series features impressive production values and acting performances, and although the producers have sources to verify each scene in the script, we believe it does not present a balanced portrayal of the Reagans for CBS and its audience. Subsequent edits that we considered did not address those concerns.

A free broadcast network, available to all over the public airwaves, has different standards than media the public must pay to view. We do, however, recognize and respect the filmmakers' right to have their voice heard and their film seen. As such, we have reached an agreement to license the exhibition rights for the film to Showtime, a subscriber-based, pay-cable network. We believe this is a solution that benefits everyone involved.

This was not an easy decision to make. CBS does tackle controversial subjects and provide tough assessments of prominent historical figures and events, as we did with films such as "Jesus," "9-11" and "Hitler." We will continue to do so in the future.

As a Media Person, I see a lot of press releases, and thus have learned to take most of them with a cellar of salt, but this one is striking for its comprehensive lack of candor. If you were born earlier than this morning, you don't need me to tell you that CBS decided to pull The Reagans solely and only because of the "controversy." They didn't give a damn whether it was "balanced." All they cared about was whether enough people would watch the series to make it worth broadcasting--and the firestorm of outrage among conservatives, whom one would assume to make up a large part of the target market for a network miniseries about Ronald and Nancy Reagan, left little doubt that such would not be the case.

I'm sure that everybody and his sister will be blogging about this one, and they'll mostly be right. Of course it's a new-media story, and of course it wouldn't have happened five years ago. I've been following Big Media's coverage of the flap over The Reagans, and just two days ago I noted with interest and amusement a wire story claiming that CBS would be pleased by the controversy, since it would inevitably increase the series' ratings. That is soooooo last year. Those of us who blog, whatever our political persuasions, know better. Boycotts of Big Media have always been feasible in theory. (Newspapers, in case you didn't know, take cancel-my-subscription-you-bastards letters very seriously--if they get enough of them.) In practice, though, they rarely worked, because it was too difficult to mobilize large-scale support quickly enough. No more. Fox News, talk radio, and the conservative-libertarian sector of the blogosphere have combined to create a giant megaphone through which disaffected right-wing consumers who have a bone to pick with Big Media can now make themselves heard.

All that, as I say, is pretty obvious, and need not be belabored further. Besides, this is an art-and-culture blog, not a political blog, so I want to turn to what I regard as the really interesting part of the story, which is that by relegating The Reagans to Showtime, CBS has publicly acknowledged, albeit implicitly, the growing weakness of Big Media. Now that the common culture is a thing of the past, lowest-common-denominator programming is harder and harder to pull off, as is lowest-common-denominator editing. To do it, you have to keep lowering the denominator further and further. When your overhead is as high as it is at CBS, you can't afford to give offense, nor can you afford to be sophisticated. Above all, you don't dare try to lead the culture anywhere it doesn't care to go--not if your job is to keep your numbers in the black.

The new media impact on Big Media in two ways. The first is the megaphone effect I spoke about a moment ago. The second, which is of at least equal importance, is that they compete with Big Media. If you're reading these words, you're not watching CBS, or anybody else, nor are you sitting in a movie theater or reading a print magazine. If you're using iTunes to download two tunes off Radiohead's last CD, you're not buying the CD--though you might do so at some point in the future.

Five years ago, opponents of The Reagans would have failed to sway CBS because of their inability to make enough noise. The network would have taken the "high road" and stared them down, and been praised for its courage by other Big Media outlets. And if it were only a matter of noise, CBS would have done the same thing today...but it isn't. Today, CBS is fighting for its corporate life. So are NBC, ABC, Time, TV Guide, the Reader's Digest, and all the film studios and record labels. They can't afford to ignore the noise anymore, no matter which side of the political fence it comes from. And they won't.

Now that's what I call brave and decisive: having your boots licked by an anonymous source inside your own shop.

I promise. Really. Anything to keep Gnat's dad happy.

P.S. If you're a Lileks reader who is new to this site, click here to find out what we're all about.

Stores will no doubt sell prepackaged music CDs for years to come, but in 2003, the power has shifted....

With at least five major paid sites now offering upward of 300,000 songs, pay-per-song has reached a marketplace mass that will both generate valuable publicity for the owners and create price-cutting competition for consumers.

More big names are poised to join the competition if their marketing surveys pan out: Dell, Microsoft and Amazon have all said they're interested in selling downloadable songs.

Read the whole thing, including a useful box comparing the various features of the five major pay-per-song sites. What it says doesn't surprise me. I've been predicting the demise of the recording industry in its present form for a number of years now, most recently in an essay published in Commentary last year (it'll be reprinted in expanded form in A Terry Teachout Reader under the title "Life Without Records") in which I argued that the rise of CD-ripping, file sharing, and pay-per-song would inevitably lead to the decline of the record album:

In the not-so-long run, the introduction of online delivery systems and the spread of file-sharing will certainly undermine and very likely destroy the fundamental economic basis for the recording industry, at least as we know it today. Nor can there be much doubt that within a few years, the record album will lose its once-privileged place at the heart of Western musical culture....

Prior to the invention of the LP, musicians usually recorded not albums but specific songs or pieces of music which were released on single 78s and meant to be experienced individually. Perhaps, then, there will be no more Only the Lonelys or Kind of Blues, but only "One for My Babys" and "All Blues." Or possibly new modes of presentation will evolve...

To be sure, this prospect is understandably disturbing to many older musicians and music lovers, given the fact that the record album has played so pivotal a role in the culture of postwar music. Nor do I claim that life without records will necessarily be better--or worse. It will merely be different, just as the lives of actors were irrevocably changed by the invention of the motion-picture camera in ways that no one could possibly have foreseen in 1900. But one thing is already clear: unlike art museums and opera houses, records serve a purpose that technology has rendered obsolete. The triumph of the digit, and the demise of the record album as culture-shaping art object, is at hand.

This piece did in fact disturb quite a few older readers, some of them musicians who had not yet envisioned the possibility of life without records. I sympathized, as I always do with those who find cultural change disorienting. What I try to do, though, is remember that different and worse aren't always the same thing. Sometimes different is better, and sometimes, maybe most of the time, it's just different. The thing is to try to understand the nature of the difference--and, insofar as possible, to think of ways in which new culture-shaping technologies can be used in the service of old values. Yes, film has permanently usurped the place of live theater at the center of the cultural conversation. But it didn't kill live theater--and it also gave us new ways to tell old stories, and to tell them to larger audiences than ever before, as Laurence Olivier did in Henry V and Kenneth Branagh in Much Ado About Nothing.

That's how I view life without records: as an opportunity. And I'll feel the same way when the printed book gives way, as in time it surely must, to the hand-held electronic book-reading device. No doubt the day will come when I stop asking the Great Cultural Dealer to deal me new cards, and decide to spend the rest of my life playing with the ones already in my hand. It happens to us all sooner or later. But I'm not ready for that moment, not yet. Yes, I'm old-fashioned--but my attachment is to essences, not embodiments. And while I'm well aware of the law of unintended consequences, I also believe in the power of free men to shape and reshape those consequences.

That's why I'm planning to buy myself an iPod for Christmas. It's time for another card.

Henry James, "The Art of Fiction"

So get with it, O.K.? Don't forget, I'm going to buy Our Girl a Really Good Dinner with the royalties...and we'll even blog about it!

Murray was asked what emanations of popular culture would appear on his own top-twenty list. "The movie 'Groundhog Day,'" he immediately offered. "It is a brilliant moral fable, offering an Aristotelian view of the world." What else? "The genre of the hardboiled detective novel," he said. "I think people may still be reading Sherlock Holmes two hundred years from now." How about television? "I don't go along with the 'I Love Lucy' stuff," he said, as if an "I Love Lucy" lobby were outside, picketing the Hertog home.

It's not outside, it's out here! To Mead, Murray's reference to "I Love Lucy" is just a loopy non sequitur. Committed arts blog readers will have instantly recognized it as one of David Frum's top ten cultural items produced since 1950 that will still matter in 200 years. Cup of Chicha was just one of many such sites to link to Frum's list last week.

By the way, you can read my illustrious cohort's take on Murray's Human Accomplishment over here.

And you can put your hand down now.

Ever since this site began, our traffic has been significantly lower in the Mountain Time Zone than anywhere else in the continental U.S.

Discuss.

As noted by Terry earlier, Amanda at Household Opera is quoting Edward Gorey, which should always be encouraged. Now I know where my next fortune cookie is coming from.

Cinetrix, whom we can't seem to stop linking to, is brave. She's also sick, which will not do. Get on the case, 'Fesser.

Jessica Harbour is full of good advice for participants in National Novel Writing Month, which I kind of wish I were doing, now that it is safely too late to start. NaNoWriMo's FAQs include the following:

Did you know there is a group in Vancouver that writes novels in a weekend?

Yes, and they are fools. Everyone knows that any deep and lasting work of art takes an entire month to make.

How do you pronounce NaNoWriMo?

NAN-no WRY-Mo.

Oh. I've been saying it NAN-no WREE-Mo.

That's ok too.

Can I write one word 50,000 times?

No. Well... No.

Can anyone participate in NaNoWriMo?

No. People who take their writing very seriously should go elsewhere. Everyone else, though, is warmly welcomed.

Oh well, maybe next year.

See Edward Gorey's L'Heure Bleue, possibly his most beautiful book, which includes dialogue such as "I should like a parsley sandwich," "To the best of my knowledge they are no longer in season," and "More is happening out there than we are aware of." "It is possibly due to some unknown direful circumstance."

(Incidentally, why in hell won't somebody reprint The Lavender Leotard, or, Going a Lot to the New York City Ballet?)

Dear Cup of Chicha: OGIC and I really want to see that "little karate-victory-dance" you do when your site turns up on another blogroll. Could you please post a photograph? Or--better yet--a drawing?

Neologisms for old things come and go, but a blog is a new thing, and with new things first out of the gate nearly always wins. In diction wars you have to pick your battles carefully. If you must complain, complain about something that drains meaning from the language. For years I objected to the coalescence of "amazing," "awesome," "remarkable," and "phenomenal," as if English were short on synonyms for "good." This battle was worth fighting because it was over shades of meaning; there is no English word with the precise meaning of "amazing" except "amazing." But popular usage has bulldozed me...

What's wrong with "blog" anyway? It is short. It is more or less Anglo-Saxon. It lends itself easily to back-formations for writing a blog (no ugly "-ize" required) and for the author of one, not to mention felicitious derivatives like "blogrolling" and less felicitious but still useful ones like "blogosphere." The dispute over whether the verb is transitive will sort itself out in time. "Blog" reminds me a great deal of one of the best neologisms of the 20th century, "blurb," coined by Gelett "I never saw a purple cow" Burgess. It rolls off the tongue less easily, and lacks its onomatopoeic qualities, but has all of its other virtues.

Blog it is. Here endeth the lesson.

Dear Reflections in D Minor: Speaking of neologisms, I know just what you mean:

It's funny how sometimes this whole Internet thing seems more like real life than real "real life." And there's another possible topic for a future post. Why do we talk of "real life" as if life online is not just as real? I sometimes use the term "realspace" to refer to that which is not cyberspace and I've seen the word "meatspace" which is more accurate but sort of icky. We need some new words.

OGIC and I are very old friends, but we haven't seen each other in the flesh for a year--yet we "meet" each day in cyberspace. It isn't quite as good as dinner and a movie, but it beats nothing all to hell.

Dear Lileks: We may be semi-highbrows around this shop, but I quite liked what you wrote about Norman Rockwell this morning:

I love Klee, but it's just Klee. I'm not inclined to hang on the wall that SatEvePost cover of the grinning tomboy with the black eye, but if I was asked to write a story about it, I could give you 9000 words. Somehow this makes it bad art.

Go figure.

Dear Eve Tushnet: You must be the first blogger in the known universe to have worked Cat Power and Christ into the same posting. I'm agog.

Dear Asymmetrical Information: Welcome back. About time.

And, finally:

Dear Minor Fall, Major Lift: From now on, we're spelling it "underwhlemed," too. It's better that way.

(1) The Rules of the Game streets Jan. 20 from the Criterion Collection (but Notorious goes out of print Dec. 31, arrgh).

(2) Out this week: High Sierra and To Have and Have Not.

P.S. The wicked smart Cinetrix, who blogs at Pullquote, is a hoot on what it was like to try and buy a copy of To Have and Have Not from a clerk who'd never heard of Humphrey Bogart.

Now the reviews are turning plainly negative. Today everyone will be talking about Michiko Kakutani's takedown of the book in the New York Times. A small taste: "In trying to score a lot of obvious points off a lot of obvious targets, Mr. Pierre may have won the Booker Prize and ratified some ugly stereotypes of Americans, but he hasn't written a terribly convincing or compelling novel." But Kakutani was anticipated in the Philadelphia Inquirer last week, in a review whose lifetime as free web content may be about to expire, so be warned. John Freeman gave the novel's inventiveness its due, but wondered whether it was this quality as much as the scorching of life in these United States that earned it the nod from the Booker judges:

Vernon God Little might be the most vicious satire of American life to come out of Britain since Martin Amis' 1984 Money. Set in a small Texas town at the center of a media circus, the book places an astute, if needling, finger on the scary collusion between entertainment and law enforcement in American culture....

Still, in spite of its linguistic daring-do, Vernon God Little is less a satire than it is a burlesque. It ignores the emotional strafing such high school massacres leave in their wake in order to make a point about the way the media--and Americans' susceptibility to the media--warp the moral contract.

What grates even more about Vernon God Little is that to make these points, it twists itself into a pretzel of unbelievable plotting and gross generalization. None of the characters, including Vernon, earns our sympathy. They are uniformly cruel and crass to one another.

Writers are entitled to their bleakness, and satire demands license. But when books go so far over the top, their insights become easy to dismiss. The acclaim that Vernon Little God received abroad shows us that learned Brits are happy to see America reflected in a funhouse mirror.

And at Amazon, an Australian reader who loves the book groups it with the (by many accounts also fictional) work of Michael Moore, clucking, "This, and Stupid White Men, should be compulsory reading for all Americans."

I've picked up the novel a few times without getting very far, so I can't responsibly comment on its literary merits. One tic I have noticed is the awkward insertion of self-consciously literary language into Vernon's crude vernacular. For example, "My buddy, who once did the best David Letterman impression you ever saw, has been abducted by glandular acids." As far as I can tell, the incongruity of this typical sentence serves to shore up the distance between Pierre and his material, with the narrator stuck uncomfortably in between. In other words, the writing usually seems pretentious. The effect reminds me of American Beauty, a very different work, but one whose writer and director looked down on their poor, soulless suburban subjects from empyrean heights of sophistication and general superiority.

But there I go reviewing a book I haven't read, when I wanted simply to point out the political alertness of this latest wave of reviews. Is it possible that Pierre's critique of Texas and America told the Booker committee what they wanted to hear, and thus helped him win the award? I'd say it's likely. Prize competitions never take place in a vacuum, nor are books written in one. Judges unavoidably will be influenced not only by the intrinsic merits of the books they read, but also by their own world views; some will be better at suppressing this kind of influence than others. It's not exactly scandalous if this year's Booker selection was as much a political statement as a literary one. But it is pretty sad, and will take some of the bang out of the whole shebang next year.

UPDATE: On the other hand, Maud likes the novel. Maud trumps Michiko any day.

The only gas station ever designed and built by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, a 1958 building in Cloquet, Minn., is on the market.

The building's owners, the McKinney family of Cloquet, put the still-operating station up for sale in August. So far, no potential buyers have come forward. The McKinneys are asking $725,000 for the property, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985....

"The building is at risk because no protective easements exist for it," says Ron Scherubel, executive director of the Chicago-based Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, which has listed the structure for sale on its Web site. "Of course, we'd like to see it stay as intact as possible. In the best-case scenario, someone would buy it and keep using it as a gas station. The next-best-case scenario would involve a good adaptive reuse."...

The station has a glass-walled observation lounge, skylights over the service bays, a copper cantilevered canopy that juts out over the front of the building, and a futuristic tower perched on its top. In Wright's original design, the gasoline hoses were designed to come out of the roof, a feature the local fire department subsequently vetoed. The structure cost $75,000 to build--almost three times more than an average late-1950s service station.

Click here for the full story, including a way cool photo.

I can't be so sanguine about the demise of the album as you are. Yes, recordings were originally short one-offs, but the LP represented a real breakthrough in that it organized the individual tracks in a way that allowed them to speak to one another, and thus increase their impact. A bad song, when thoughtfully integrated into a good album, can be marvelous (e.g. "Within You Without You" on Sgt. Pepper). I don't think I'm being purely reactionary about this; there is a real beauty to a well-ordered series of songs that will necessarily fall by the wayside if we lose the album as it is now constructed.

To strike a more reactionary tone, I do worry about the ability of people to maintain interest over time. A couple of years ago, the studio (I don't know which one) sent "Almost Famous" back because it went over their mandatory 2 hour time limit. The resulting cut was a lesser film by any standard (other than brevity), but that didn't seem to matter; the important thing was that the American viewer wouldn't have to sit through an overly-long movie (it ended up clocking in at 2:02, so they fudged a little). Unfortunately, I fear that they know their audience well. Reducing the duration of the units of our music would only exacerbate the attention span problem.

Let me suggest a middle road between albums and pay-per-downloads. Perhaps what we will see is the return of the single as a discreet item (or, in this case, series of ones and zeros), but with the continued existence of the album as well. This way artists wouldn't feel the need to record filler when they only have one good idea, they would simply release the song individually. This could be a good thing. Remember, "Yesterday" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" originally apepared as singles. Then, when a big idea strikes them, they can record a whole album, and even allow fans to only be download it as a whole. It would immediately be pirated on a per-song basis, of course, but it would at least be initially concieved and marketed as an album, thus preserving the integrity of their vision.

I hope I'm right. I would hate to think of future composers being forced to create in snippets.

I actually think something like the two-tier plan my reader envisions is bound to happen. In fact, it's on the verge of happening already, as individual artists start marketing music through their own Web sites (about which more later--I know about some interesting new sites-in-the-making).

But I do want to take gentle issue with my correspondent's use of the word sanguine to describe the way I feel about the prospect of life without records. I'm not saying that the album-as-art-object is a bad thing. On the contrary, I'm passionately attached to more than a few such objects (including the ones I mentioned in my original posting). I simply don't think this kind of mass-produced art object will long survive the transition to a fully digitized, Web-based recorded-music economy.

People often take for granted that I approve of the cultural trends I describe in essays like "Life Without Records." Sometimes I do, sometimes not. Most often I don't know what to think about them--yet. The only thing I'm sure of is that they won't go away, which is why I'm more interested in describing them than judging them. We live in the midst of a blur of onrushing technologies, each pulling its individual train of unintended consequences. I'd much rather try to puzzle out the possible effects of these technologies than complain in advance of having fully experienced them. If anything, I'm temperamentally disposed to be a Luddite, but I absolutely refuse to let myself succumb to that pointless temptation. To be a Luddite, after all, is to renounce all possibility of shaping technology-driven cultural change. I started "About Last Night" for the exact opposite reason: I wanted to try to use a new technology in order to help sustain and enrich the great tradition of Western art.

Early in the life of this blog, I posted an almanac entry by Marshall McLuhan which (allowing for a certain amount of poetic exaggeration) sums up the way I try to look at technological change. It's worth repeating:

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

Neither do I.

P.S. Another reader writes:

I'm enjoying this whole topic of the demise of the record, even as I mourn its passing. While I know the folly of remaining in the ostrich position, I have to side with those who would hate to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Even before I tried my hand at recording, I always loved the concept of an album being a collection of material, like a painting or an opera or a good meal. It's part of the challenge of translating the live performance - making the shape and serving it all up so the listener can enjoy a fuller experience, if that makes sense. kd lang's Drag album, or the pairing of a specific singer with a special musician or group of players, Peggy Lee's Mirrors -- hell, even Dark Side of the Moon and such. I can't imagine Bitches Brew as a single. Maybe it's because I've spent too many hours of pleasure listening to recordings alone in a car. Maybe not - a friend just called me and said that he had spent the evening listening to my last CD and felt like it was like an hour of good conversation. So go figure.

(This e-mail comes from one of my favorite singers, by the way.)

The bottom line is that Tuesday ended up being our biggest day yet--bigger even than the never-to-be-forgotten day that Instapundit linked to one of our postings. We're still kind of dazed, but mostly just delighted.

To repeat what I said yesterday: if this is your first visit to "About Last Night," click here to read a recent posting explaining what we're all about.

If, on the other hand, you're an old-timer, well, come on in, the blogging's fine! I'm going to be tied up for most of today (I've got to finish a piece about The Looney Tunes Golden Collection for The Wall Street Journal, then it's off to see a play), but OGIC tells me she has some stuff up her sleeve. In any case, we won't let you go hungry.

Oh, yes--it's still absolutely O.K. to tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com. Why stop at 2,900? This could be the start of something...well, bigger.

P.S. Andrew Sullivan got into the act shortly after midnight. This joint is going to rock today....

"You know about The Producers?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Could you write something about it?

"Yes."

"For tomorrow?"

"Yes."

So Looney Tunes got put off until next week. Instead, I changed funny hats and wrote about The Producers. Here's the lead:

The big news on Broadway is the announcement that Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, who created the roles of Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom in the musical-comedy version of Mel Brooks' 1968 movie "The Producers," will return to the show for 14 weeks starting Dec. 30. A year ago, that would have been news because "The Producers" was still Broadway's hottest ticket, the musical everyone was talking about. Now, it's news because "The Producers" is sorely in need of artificial respiration. Last week, it played to only 69% capacity.

Some observers blame the show's decline on weak replacements for Messrs. Lane and Broderick, others on the fact that the best seats at the St. James Theatre are reserved for premium buyers willing to shell out a staggering $480 apiece. Both reasons are plausible, but neither quite hits the mark. The real reason why "The Producers" is sagging like a dowager's bosom is that it, too, is out of date--albeit gloriously so....

Believe it or not, this one is available on "Opinion Journal," the free page of the Journal's Web site. To read the whole thing, click here.

I only just got back from tonight's playgoing, and I now have just 11 hours in which to (A) sleep and (B) review Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Violet Hour, and The Long Christmas Ride Home for Friday's Wall Street Journal, so chances are that I won't be posting all that much on Thursday. I haven't heard from OGIC since yesterday afternoon (it is tomorrow, right?), so I can't tell you what she's got planned, but I'm sure she'll keep the home fires burning.

At any rate, it's more than likely that there's something here you haven't seen before, so scroll and browse and check back with us later. We'll try not to keep you waiting.

UPDATE: Site Meter righted itself and spit out a final number for Wednesday of about 2,650 page views. That'll do.

Edward Gorey

My new cable box does all sorts of cool stuff. Among other things, I can pause a TV show while it's being broadcast live, then pick up right where I left off. (Please don't laugh if all this is old hat to you. For me, it's still a novelty.) But the most important part of the box is the DVR. You don't have to read the admirably terse manual to figure out how it works: the menu-driven controls are intuitive to a fault. After fiddling with the remote for about 30 seconds, I was merrily clicking my way through the Turner Classic Movies schedule for the rest of the week.

If you own or have read about TiVo, the stand-alone home DVR system, none of this is news. The only difference is that Time Warner hooks its DVR up for you, and the whole shebang costs (as the old commercials used to say) just pennies a day. For this reason, given the ubiquity of cable TV and the rapid spread of digital systems, I can't imagine that TiVo has much of a future. Everybody to whom I demonstrate my new cable box wants one--right now.

I have no doubt that the introduction of the cable-box DVR will have a massive and immediate effect on TV viewing habits, probably even greater than that brought about by the introduction of the VCR. Not only does the on-screen TV-guide interface make time shifting infinitely more convenient, but it encourages you to view TV programs whenever you please--and to skip the commercials, which is far easier to do on a DVR than a VCR.

I don't care for the word "empowerment," but I can't think of a better way to describe what it feels like to use a DVR for the first time. I wrote the other day about how CBS's decision to scrap The Reagans was really a new-media story that demonstrated the declining ability of Big Media to unilaterally shape the cultural conversation. Digital video recording is not a new medium per se, merely a technology, but it does have a quintessential new-media effect: it gives the viewer greater power to control the way he experiences network TV. In that sense, you might compare it to the way bloggers use links to cherry-pick the contents of Big Media Web sites, reshaping them into new on-line information packages over which the original publishers have no control--save by shifting to subscription-only access models, and thus taking themselves out of the new-media loop altogether. It's an impossible choice: do you surrender control to the consumer, or do you walk away from the possibility of reaching younger viewers who are already deserting Big Media in droves?

The more you think about it, the more clearly you'll see how hard it is to choose between these alternatives, not only in this context but in others as well. One of the Big Media publications for which I write, The Wall Street Journal, charges for on-line access to most of its daily contents. From the paper's point of view, this model "works": the Journal Web site turns a profit. From my point of view, however, it doesn't work. Why? Because no one on the Web can link to my Friday drama columns, meaning that they don't have nearly as significant a presence in the buzz-generating blogosphere as do, say, Ben Brantley's theater reviews for the New York Times. (That's why I post excerpts on this page first thing each Friday morning, even though I'm well aware that it's not nearly as convenient as being able to read the whole column on your computer.)

What's more, this isn't only a problem for me. In my experience, most people out in the larger world of art and culture aren't aware that the Journal runs any pieces about the arts, much less that it covers them regularly and well. For this reason, I've suggested that the paper consider posting all of its fine-arts coverage on its free Opinion Journal Web site, which now carries only one arts-related story each day. So far, the powers-that-be haven't budged, and I understand why, though I'm still trying....

But I've wandered far afield from the tale of my new cable box, on which I have so far recorded five movies and three episodes of What's My Line?, the wonderful old black-and-white game show which the Game Show Network runs in the middle of the night. (The box will store 35 hours' worth of programming.) I've already watched a few shows in my spare time, such as it is. No doubt some will get watched and most of the rest erased, that being the way time shifting works. What I haven't done since the box arrived is watch any TV shows in real time--nor have I seen a single commercial. In effect, I have replaced the existing TV networks with a homemade video-on-demand system on which I can watch what I want, when I want.

I wonder whether the people who run CBS, NBC and ABC realize that by doing so, I and my fellow DVR users have brought an end to the world as they know it? Probably not--but they will.

I'm counting on the healing, or at least distracting, powers of art to snap me out of this funk: in a few hours I'll be attending a preview of 21 Grams, for which I have the highest hopes. I'll let you know how they pan out.

Here are four recent letters to "About Last Night" that caught my eye:

Dear Jolly Days: You are very smart on Pauline Kael (whom I admire greatly, albeit with strong reservations):

She was the safe outlaw - attracted to and provoking the naturally restrained. She liked tweaking the power structure, but was securely part of it and identified with it.

Dear Laura Lippman: RSI or no RSI, God meant for you to be a blogger. Get with the program.

Dear Felix Salmon: You are the first person ever to make me think I might possibly have slightly underrated Marc Chagall.

And, finally:

Dear Old Hag: You rock. Totally.

Ashley Judd. Jason Patric. Ned Beatty. Tennessee Williams. What's wrong with this picture? Plenty, as you'll learn if you visit the new Broadway revival of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," which opened Sunday at the Music Box. But there's nothing even slightly wrong with Mr. Beatty, who breathes fire as Big Daddy. He is as exciting as Ms. Judd and Mr. Patric are dull--and as fresh as Williams' play is stale....

Unlike most camera-pampered Hollywood types, Mr. Beatty knows what to do in front of a live audience. His beautifully placed bass-baritone voice, complete with bottled-in-bond Kentucky accent, bounces effortlessly off the back wall of the Music Box. Though he's the shortest man in the cast, he turns his modest stature into a towering advantage, playing Williams' wealthy plantation owner as a shrewd, scrappy underdog who chewed his way to the top of the heap and now revels in making taller people look small. You'll gasp when he first totters on stage, seemingly wan and yellow from the cancer that is eating Big Daddy alive--and you'll gasp again when he breaks into a maniacal jig to celebrate the news that he isn't dying after all. But his hope is false, and as he faces the inescapable fact of his imminent demise, Mr. Beatty seems to grow a foot or two before your astonished eyes. Such are the mysterious ways of great actors, and this is great acting.

There's much more, including brief but pungent notices of Richard Greenberg's The Violet Hour and Paula Vogel's The Long Christmas Ride Home...but there's no link, for reasons explained at length here.

What to do? Easy:

(1) Extract one dollar from your wallet.

(2) Take it to the nearest newsstand and purchase a copy of this morning's Journal.

(3) Turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, over whose first page I'm plastered.

(4) Read the whole section, not just my review.

(5) Report back at once.

The amazing thing is that even though we couldn't update the site for much of the day, we still pulled in an impressive amount of traffic: just over 2,100 page views, twice our previously normal figure. It begins to look as if at least some of the folks who visited "About Last Night" for the first time as the result of this week's link orgy might just be sticking around. That's very good news indeed.

Fridays can be hectic in both New York and Chicago, but we'll do our damnedest to give you as many piping-hot entries as possible. In the meantime, please tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com, the 24/5-to-7 arts blog. It's been a great week for us. Let's have another.

The remote control caused a populist revolution, I've long said, because once we had choice, we proved that we had taste. (I mark the golden age of TV, the real golden age, not the nostalgic vaudeville age, from the mid-80s, when viewers had choice, watched the good stuff, and let the bad stuff die; the age of the Beverly Hillbillies died; the age of Hill St. Blues emerged thanks to our control.) Seeing that is what made me such a populist; it gave me faith in the taste, judgment, and intelligence of the people....

Go here to read the whole thing.

I confronted him about his use of language, the way the black workmates he wrote about read as ghetto-style and under-educated. White people had goofy accents in his comic, but didn't seem to get that treatment in his book. He took the criticism real well, listening attentively. Finally he interjected.

"Y'got a few minutes?" he asked. "Cuz if ya do, I wanna take ya to my job and introduce ya t' some a' those people. You'll meet 'em and see for yerself -- I ain't givin' them a hard way t'go. I just write 'em as I hear 'em."

Off to his gig we went, and as it turns out, the people he wrote about were exactly as he wrote them, and the writer in me tuned my ears to the music in their voices. I began to hear people in a whole other way -- Pekar was taking risk with the written language I hadn't seen or heard before....

Go here to read the whole thing--which you absolutely must do.

You might be surprised to learn who wrote this (scroll down to find it). Or maybe not:

Several readers have complained about my dissing of 2001. I stand my ground. There's one point a couple readers have made though I will concede. They say if I'd seen it when it first came out I would think differently. That is undoubtedly true. But some movies -- and books and bands and art -- are significant because they break new ground and some are significant because they are timeless....it seems to me that 2001 was pathbreaking but it wasn't timeless. I feel the same way about Citizen Kane, by the way. I watched it in film class in college so I know all about the groundbreaking techniques used in the film. But those techniques have now been absorbed by the trade. What's left is a pioneering movie which is more interesting as a historical document in the history cinema than as a movie. Just as the Model T was a great advance in the history of automotive innovation, but there are plenty of other cars I'd rather drive, there are plenty of "great" movies I wouldn't choose seeing again over the chance to watch Road House one more time. There are plenty of music videos I'd rather watch than Un Chien Andalou, even though Un Chien Andalou is their artistic father.

What I want to know is, which Road House does he have in mind? I have a sinking feeling it's not this one.

I watched What's My Line? as a child, and its return to the small screen inspired me shortly after 9/11 to write a piece for the New York Times of which I'm particularly fond. I didn't include it in A Terry Teachout Reader because it didn't seem to fit, so in the interest of boosting the show's audience, I'd like to make this first-hand reminiscence of the Age of the Middlebrow available to the readers of "About Last Night." Here are some excerpts:

The basic premise of "What's My Line?," which made its debut in 1950, was elegantly simple. The first two guests each week were ordinary people with odd jobs: professional egg-breakers, dynamite manufacturers, makers of square manhole covers. John Charles Daly, the avuncular host, invited them to "sign in, please," whereupon they would scrawl their names on a blackboard, take a seat, and submit to yes-or-no questioning by four panelists who tried to guess what they did for a living, with each "no" answer winning them five dollars. After the middle commercial, the panelists put on blindfolds and sought to identify the Mystery Guest, a celebrity who disguised his voice in an attempt, usually but not always unsuccessful, to fox his inquisitors.

The fun came partly from the contestants, who were chosen whenever possible for their intrinsic incongruity--the dynamite maker, for example, was a distinguished-looking woman of a certain age--but mostly from the droll byplay of the panel and guests. Of the three longest-serving regular panelists, Arlene Francis, a stage actress turned small-screen personality, exuded unfeigned warmth, while Dorothy Kilgallen, a bite-the-jugular newspaper reporter and columnist, and Bennett Cerf, the gentleman president of Random House, played the game to win. The wild-card fourth panelist was sometimes a nimble-witted comedian (Fred Allen and Steve Allen both had long runs on the show), sometimes a celebrity of another sort (Van Cliburn, Moss Hart, John Lindsay, and Gore Vidal were among the more surprising occupants of the fourth chair).

As for the Mystery Guest, "What's My Line?" was so hot in its heyday that it was able to book pretty much anybody it wanted: Frank Sinatra, John Wayne, even Eleanor Roosevelt. Stars with ultra-familiar voices would struggle mightily but vainly to disguise them (Louis Armstrong never had a chance), invariably reducing the studio audience to a puddle of laughter. Trickery was encouraged--Jack Paar lisped his answers through a bullhorn, Paul Muni played his on a violin--and on one never-to-be-forgotten Sunday evening, Bob Hope succeeded in persuading the panel that he was really Bing Crosby....

Much of the charm of "What's My Line?" arises from the fact that it is so palpably of another era. The pace was slowish and agreeable, the repartee good-humored but unabashedly urbane. The host and panel all wore formal evening dress; John Daly addressed his female colleagues as "Miss Arlene" and "Miss Dorothy." The set was penny-plain, the guests signed in on a dimestore blackboard, and Daly kept score by flipping cards. The contestants, who were treated with the utmost courtesy, were clearly content to earn a mere $50 for stumping the panel. Even though all 876 episodes were originally broadcast live, it never occurs to you for a moment that anyone on stage would have dreamed of saying anything naughty.

Perhaps most strikingly, the collegial bonhomie of the participants leaves you with the distinct impression that the show is taking place in a parallel universe of famous people who all know and like one another and probably stroll over to the Algonquin for a drink afterward. Or so, at least, it seemed to myself when young, sitting in front of a black-and-white TV in the living room of a small house in a small town in southeast Missouri....

To read the whole thing, go here.

After this piece ran in the Times, I received a letter from a Hollywood agent who collects old TV shows, and who through means too complicated to recount here acquired a complete set of videocassettes of every surviving kinescope of What's My Line? From time to time he hears from aging former WML guests (or their children), and whenever possible he sends them a copy of the episode on which they appeared. He's also dubbed more than a few WML reels for me. The world is full of lovely people who like nothing better than sharing their pleasures, and this kind gentleman (who now reads "About Last Night" regularly) ranks high among them.

Even during the good years, writing for Time could be exasperating, especially when one of my stories got bumped for lack of space, then killed outright, usually because it had gone "stale" in the preceding week. I still hold it against Bill Clinton that my 50th-birthday profile of Mikhail Baryshnikov ran only in the Latin American edition of the magazine--the U.S. edition required a couple of extra pages that week to cover the first installment of Monicagate. And even though I'm a great fan of Robert Hughes, it irked me no end that his big piece about the opening of the Guggenheim's Bilbao branch squeezed out my own one-pager about the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.

I hung onto that piece, hoping I'd be able to do something with it someday. I just returned from a Sunday matinee at NJPAC, and it struck me on the way home that today might be a good time to revisit what I wrote about the center when it opened its doors in 1997. It appears here for the first time:

On paper, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center looks like a sure thing. The 250,000-square-foot facility, built at a cost of $180 million, contains two handsome theaters--a 2,750-seat multi-purpose auditorium and a 514-seat "performing space"-- and a full-service restaurant....Easily accessible via four major highways, NJPAC has a potential audience of 4.6 million people living within 25 miles of its front door. There's just one catch: It's in Newark.

Thirty years ago this July, two white policemen from Newark's Fourth Precinct arrested a black cabdriver. They said he resisted arrest; he said they beat him up. The people believed the cabby, and took to the streets. Five days later, 26 people were dead, and Newark had acquired a bad name it has yet to lose. White flight was already well under way by 1967, but no sooner had the smoke of the riots cleared than the diaspora to the suburbs became multi-ethnic, and between 1967 and 1994, the city's population shrank by more than a third, from 406,000 to 259,000. You don't need a demographer to know something is still terribly wrong with Newark: All you have to do is take the five-minute walk from the train station to NJPAC, noticing along the way that none of the newer, post-riot buildings has street-level windows. The architecture of Newark is a fever chart of middle-class fear.

Can a stiff dose of the fine arts cure the malaise that has gripped New Jersey's largest city for three decades? To stay in business, NJPAC must coax hundreds of thousands of nervous suburbanites back to downtown Newark, and every aspect of its operation has been planned with that uphill battle in mind. Architect Barton Myers has created a building in which beauty and practicality are shrewdly combined in a style less dazzling than comfortable: The brightly lit brick-and-glass facade is warm and inviting, while the main auditorium, done in cherry wood and copper, is unexpectedly intimate. "It feels like being inside a cello," says NJPAC president Lawrence P. Goldman.

Perfect sight lines (even in the cheap seats) make Prudential Hall a near-ideal venue for ballet and modern dance, and as the cost of performing in New York continues to soar, touring troupes are taking note of the center's close proximity to midtown Manhattan, a 15-minute train ride away....

Unlike more traditionally minded arts centers, NJPAC is making a highly sophisticated effort to attract the widest possible audience, a must in so ethnically diverse a community. "It's not enough just to put artists on the stage," says programming vice-president Stephanie Hughley. "We've got to figure out ways to facilitate conversations between people who think they're different." The center's offerings are as inclusive as a stump speech by Bill Clinton--André Watts, the Israel Philharmonic, the Peking Opera, the Chieftains, even the New York City Gay Men's Chorus. From its "African-American Culture" subscription series (which includes Jessye Norman, black concert pianist Awadagin Pratt, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, and Donald Byrd's "Harlem Nutcracker") to the multicolored mosaics installed in each bathroom (modeled after African kente cloth), NJPAC is seeking to send an unambiguous message of welcome to potential attendees who, as Hughley points out, "are not necessarily familiar with going to performing arts centers."

But none of this will matter if New Jerseyans, whatever their color, prove unwilling to drive into Newark after dark. The fear factor is the great unknown hanging over the center's inaugural season, and it is readily acknowledged at NJPAC, even in the center's newspaper ads, which unashamedly tout its "safe and secure" parking. Similar ventures have revived other near-dead urban areas--most famously New York's Lincoln Center, which turned the Upper West Side from a decaying slum into Seinfeld country--but few have sought to stem so high a tide at so late a date. As a result, far more than $180 million is riding on the outcome of this risky exercise in urban renewal through the arts. In the paranoid age of the gated community, every pane of glass in the glowing facade of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center is an act of faith in the future of America's cities.

If this piece strikes you as tentative, it's partly because I wrote it prior to having seen any performances at NJPAC. Time originally planned to publish it the week before the hall opened, a typical piece of weekly-magazine scheduling that put the cart a couple of miles before the horse.

In addition, I was also skeptical about the power of performing arts centers, however well planned, to serve as engines of urban renewal (the renovation and revival of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, for example, have yet to transform BAM's surrounding community in any substantial way). And I was concerned about the potential confusion of artistic aims that occurs when such a center is viewed as a means, not an end. Few of the performing arts centers of the Sixties have come close to fulfilling their initial artistic promise. Lincoln Center and Kennedy Center are the most glaring examples, partly but by no means entirely because of their notorious architectural inadequacies.

Having spent countless hours attending performances in both centers and others like them, I've come to feel that it's almost always a mistake to try to centralize so many different kinds of urban artistic activity in one overgrown complex. Aside from everything else, it's way too risky to rely on a single architect or architectural concept, especially in the age of what David Sucher of City Comforts calls "starchitecture," in which the function of a building is ruthlessly subordinated to the desire of its designer to make a giant splash in the larger world of art. The catch is that a building isn't a painting or a statue. It's a space in which people of flesh and blood must live and work. Ideally, it should be both beautiful and convenient, but if you should happen to live or work in it, the second of these is by far the greater.

If there's a case to be made for building single-site performing arts centers, though, it might well be in medium-sized cities that have gone dead at the core, and Newark definitely fills the bill. By all accounts, NJPAC has overcome the "fear factor" to which I referred in my Time piece. The Mark Morris Dance Group appeared this weekend in the center's smaller auditorium (Miss Saigon was playing in Prudential Hall), and most of the people who came to see the company today were quite clearly from elsewhere. Too clearly, truth be told: the gray-headed audience was visibly older than the hip-and-happening crowd Morris' company normally draws when it dances in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Nor did these viewers strike me as especially receptive to what Morris had to offer. Yes, I went to a Sunday matinee, but even by the standards one normally applies to matinee audiences, this one seemed unresponsive. I'll write about the program tomorrow. In the meantime, suffice it to say that while the three dances performed by the Morris group were somewhat demanding, they were far from inaccessible.

The theater, like the rest of NJPAC, was as warm and inviting as I remembered from 1997 (though I noticed a number of minor but irritating design problems this time around--the entrances to the smaller auditorium aren't big enough, for instance). I felt six years ago that New York City couldn't claim a single fine-arts performing space as attractive as the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. I felt the same way this afternoon. If NJPAC were in Manhattan, I'd go as often as I could.

Be that as it may, we New Yorkers seem content to stick to our own unsatisfactory halls. Contrary to what I thought possible back in 1997, NJPAC now draws a trivially small percentage of its audience members from Manhattan and its environs. I went this afternoon because the Morris group was giving the first performance in the New York area of "All Fours," an important new dance set to Bartók's Fourth String Quartet. You'd have thought it would attract all the serious dancegoers in the region--and you'd have been wrong. Except for the company manager and the dancers, I didn't see a soul I knew. This was especially puzzling in light of the fact that NJPAC is so easy to reach via public transportation. It takes less time to get there from midtown than it takes to get to the BAM Opera House in Brooklyn, where the Mark Morris Dance Group normally performs when it's appearing in the New York area.

I've no idea why New Yorkers won't go to NJPAC, but I know why I don't especially like to go there. The five-block walk from Penn Station is perfectly safe--and perfectly depressing. I'm told that NJPAC has started to have some visible urban-renewal effects on downtown Newark, but all I saw this afternoon were the same windowless, fortress-like office buildings that lined the streets six years ago. As I walked past them today, I asked myself, as I did in 1997, How can so bleak an urban environment possibly be "renewed" by anything short of sufficient dynamite to blow it up and start all over again? It's one thing to persuade middle-aged suburbanites to drive to NJPAC, dine in the center's excellent restaurant, watch a performance, then drive straight home again. It's another thing altogether to make young suburbanites want to spend part of their spare time in downtown Newark, and so far as I can tell, NJPAC isn't bringing that about.

Of course you can't tell much from a single afternoon-long visit. Maybe it's too soon to expect dramatic changes. But, then, I never did expect them. The most I ever supposed was that the New Jersey Performing Arts Center might become a cultural oasis in the middle of a blasted urban heath. That's what it is, and it's no small thing to be. It's better to have an oasis than no water at all--but it's better still to have a spring that feeds a river that turns an inner city green with new life.

Lincoln Center has its crippling flaws, God knows, but it did succeed in transforming New York's Upper West Side almost beyond recognition. As of today, I'm still skeptical that NJPAC will do much more than make it possible for suburban New Jerseyites to see Miss Saigon without having to drive all the way into Manhattan. Somehow I doubt that's what its founders had in mind.

That movie is a great example of what an artist knows that the rest of us don't.

That's Sunday night's almanac, as far as I'm concerned.

W. Somerset Maugham, Don Fernando

I've never written anything extended on the subject of Stark, but I did review Payback, an awful movie of a few years back in which Mel Gibson played Parker:

"Payback" was adapted from Donald E. Westlake's tough-minded 1962 novel "The Hunter" (published under the pen name "Richard Stark") which was also the source of John Boorman's "Point Blank," one of the most impressive crime films of the '60s. "The Hunter" was the first in a series of novels featuring Parker (he has no first name), a no-nonsense career criminal who specializes in shrewdly planned heists. Largely forgotten save by connoisseurs of crime fiction, these novels are striking for the way in which the reader is made to sympathize with Parker, a thoroughly unappetizing near-psychopath whose only virtue is his professionalism. The plot of "Payback" is drawn directly from the first part of "The Hunter"--the film's advertising slogan is "Get ready to root for the bad guy"--and so it is surprising to see how completely [director Brian] Helgeland has failed to catch the tone of the book. In "The Hunter," Parker is a truly hard man, as amoral as a loaded shotgun; in "Payback," he is a coarsely drawn caricature who has a soft spot for pit bulls and prostitutes but blows away anybody else who crosses his path.

Mel Gibson is a very good actor, but he's all wrong as Parker, and not just because he's too handsome. Lee Marvin, who played the same part in "Point Blank," was anvil-hard, with a bass-baritone voice that sounded like large rocks falling from a great height. Not so Gibson: you keep expecting him to say something amusing. One wonders, then, what could have possessed so talented a performer to waste his time on so witless a project. No doubt money is the answer--as I write these words, "Payback" is the most popular movie in America--but given the fact that Gibson is also said to be both a devoted father and a good Catholic, one further wonders what possessed him to make a film that is morally and aesthetically odious. Money, they say, has no smell, but I can't say the same for "Payback": it stinks of the cheapest kind of cynicism.

(No link--sorry.)

Now over to Forager 23:

Parker is an affectless heavy, who's always a couple of steps ahead of the law and a couple of crosses ahead of his fellow crooks. He's a professional criminal, a mechanic--not a thug, but not Raffles, either. Both my friend and I thought that Mel Gibson, who played Parker in the relatively recent film version of the first novel, Payback, was completely wrong for the part. Gibson is all bug eyes, all acting, and, quite frankly, not very scary....

Lee Marvin is, not surprisingly, just about perfect as Parker. Now here's the problem: actors like Lee Marvin just don't seem to exist anymore. Tough guy stars are a thing of the past: no more John Waynes, Charles Bronsons, or Clint Eastwoods. What happened to the heavy?

1). Audiences today are younger than ever, while guys like Lee Marvin and John Wayne appealed to more mature moviegoers. They often played world-weary characters who resorted to violence only reluctantly. If Rio Bravo were made today, Ricky Nelson would've gotten top billing and John Wayne would've just had a supporting role.

2). Action movies have become more about effects than about action. You only have to go back about ten years to find stuff like Steven Seagal's Hard to Kill and Under Siege, which were genuine action movies, that is, they focused on the actions the main character had to take to get revenge/get justice/save the day, etc. For better or for worse, these movies center on Seagal. Compare this with the Vin Diesel pictures The Fast and the Furious and XXX. Diesel's role in these movies is to act as if he is ironically amused by all the spectacular effects going on around him. I think he does a pretty good job, but I never get a sense of his characters accomplishing anything--doing anything--taking action.

So what does that leave us when we try to cast our hypothetical hard-boiled action flick? Not too much. The straightforward, low-frills action feature--the kind that Don Siegel used to make--is a thing of the past. These movies are still made, but they're either direct-to-video or from Hong Kong. Big screen action movies have been emasculated. Casting Parker has become impossible.

I agree, reluctantly. Read the whole thing here.

If any of this piques your interest, the latest Parker novel is Breakout, published last year. (Go here to check on the current availability of other novels in the series.) The unofficial Parker Web site is here. And Donald Westlake talks about Parker (among other things) here.

It's a puzzlement, by the way, that Westlake, a writer who is now best known for his charming comic crime novels, should also have dreamed up so comprehensively unfunny a character as Parker, which presumably tells us something interesting about human dualism, the subject matter of all film noir and noir fiction. See today's almanac entry for further details....

P.S. Speaking of noir, everyone's favorite hieratical sourpuss has posted a very knowing Raymond Chandler parody. (I'm jealous--I'd kill to be able to write parodies, which I regard as the most subtle form of literary criticism.)

I've walked through downtown Newark countless times now and the more I hear about Newark's Renaissance, the less I believe it's actually happening.

That's not to say Newark is getting worse, but I definitely haven't seen NJPAC have any significant impact on the downtown area. It is bleak. There are a ton of "historic" (really old) buildings that you can tell were once beautiful and now are empty, dilapidated and depressing. No one is buying them or refurbishing them or using them. They just sit there with their broken windows and moldy brick getting more broken and moldier. The businesses that do exist fall into two categories: 1) big business commuter offices (notice I say "commuter" and those buildings really only include Prudential, IDT, Robert Treat Hotel, Hilton, Seton Hall Law, etc) and 2) low-end multi-purpose stores (the likes of Valu-Plus, Lot Less, Pay/Half--and I didn't make up any of those names; hell, our Rite Aid even closes at 6 pm most days).

What's really sad is that, if there were just more investors, downtown could become beautiful and happening. But that takes big money. Newark, the city itself, and its small business owners--concentrated in Portugese district of the Ferry Street area--definitely don't have the capital it will take to help Newark reach its full potential--and there's a lot of potential to be met. But I'm glad Newark has NJPAC. I like going to performances there. Honestly, though, I'm always afraid one of these days the [Newark] Star-Ledger is going to have to report that it's in danger of closing due to lack of patronage if more people don't start going. I think part of it too is advertising. I don't think I've ever seen anything beyond a brochure's calendar of events in little piles around campus. Is there any advertising in New York for NJPAC? Doubtful--once again due to money. Anyway, that's my reaction.

This comes from a smart and observant student at the Newark campus of Rutgers University, by the way.

I'm in the middle of watching the Jessica Lynch movie and let me state the obvious: TV movies are crap. They weren't always, but they are now. They are an utterly discredited form of media. As a form, they are scripted in neon and shot through the wrong end of a periscope. They are insultingly obvious and shallow. They are artistically inept. They are unwatchable and unwatched....

And there's more!

The City Opera has been aggressively lobbying to be named the flagship institution in the new cultural presence at ground zero. To its evident surprise, it has encountered resistance. As of this writing, no decision has been announced, but the downtown powers seem to want a greater diversity of artistic expression....

American culture has changed radically in the last 65 years. It is that change, rather than the virtues or failings of City Opera in its current condition, that is causing it problems downtown....

By now, for all the lip service still paid to high culture and for all the genuine passion and pleasure that millions still derive from it, the revolution is complete. The current issue of Vanity Fair, for instance, has a foldout cover of celebrity photographs by Annie Leibovitz trumpeting "American Music" without one classical musician in the group. American music in the minds of most Americans today is popular music. We're a democracy, and the majority votes for what is most popular. Opera ain't it.

To some extent, opera's current marginality is its own fault, in failing to sustain the blend of creativity and popularity that distinguished the operatic past. And to some extent, one might wish for a little more responsibility on the part of our politicians.

But the fact remains that the new art that excites people these days is likely to come in the form of film or literature or popular music or visual installations, not from an art like opera, whose best days seem well behind it. If an artist today is to celebrate the common man or lament Sept. 11 effectively, it will most likely be – it has already been - Bruce Springsteen or Neil Young. When it comes to art forms based on a blend of song and instrumental accompaniment, Mr. Springsteen's album "The Rising" has touched more people, and is better art besides, than a high-minded classical score like John Adams's "On the Transmigration of Souls."

Maybe City Opera will wind up at ground zero after all, sharing the space with other arts institutions. Perhaps that would be good for all concerned....But no one, least of all those who run City Opera, should be shocked at resistance. We live, for better (say I) or worse, in a multicultural society in which a European-based consensus as to what constitutes "good music" is long gone. Few corporations and politicians feel obligated to improve the populace with high art anymore. The best that beleaguered partisans of opera can hope for is that they won't be ignored altogether.

Read the whole thing here.

Much of what Rockwell says is unexceptionable, at least in the narrow sense that it accurately describes American culture today...but oh, my, those planted axioms! Note, for instance, that his only musical alternatives are Bruce Springsteen or John Adams, as if classical music in the post-postmodern era had nothing better to offer than the sooooo-Eighties banalities of Official Minimalism. Note, too, how embarrassing it is to watch an aging baby boomer try to get down. I mean, really--Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young, exemplars of edgy pop culture? What decade is it, Muffy? It's almost as bad as watching presidential candidates do the yes-I-inhaled pander at a Rock the Vote "debate."

All teasing aside, I think John Rockwell is a smart man. But what I miss in his analysis of the current situation is a more exact sense of the changing role played by Big Media in the erosion of the fine arts in America today. Yes, ours is a popular culture, and always was, even at the height of the middlebrow moment. But the difference between then and now is that the mass media once believed they had the power--and responsibility--to lead our democratic culture. Now they acknowledge no responsibility whatsoever. Instead, they merely seek to shore up their shrinking ratings and market shares by any means necessary, which means slavishly following the cultural election returns. Forget Vanity Fair (which in any case isn't exactly an agenda-setting organ these days, is it?). Consider instead the cultural abdication of PBS and NPR, our allegedly "public" radio and TV networks, which are walking away from the fine arts as briskly as possible, making no bones about it as they head for the exit.

So what do we do now? We blog. For as I've said in this space in contexts too varied and occasions too numerous to link, it's the blogosphere that offers the most potentially powerful alternative to the cultural auto-lobotomizing of Big Media. I no longer feel like bitching about That Which Is. I'm more interested in shaping That Which Will Be--and that means above all helping to create and encourage a richly varied, fully interconnected on-line presence for the arts. As far as I'm concerned, the future of arts journalism is here, and on the other arts blogs listed and linked in "Sites to See." We're not big, but we're growing. We don't convene focus groups in order to decide what to write about. And we're here to stay.

UPDATE: For an interesting response from Tyler Green (who blogs at Modern Art Notes), go here. "Longer, more thoughtful, bigger-picture writing doesn't work so well on the web (unless you're writing about Cecily Brown and sex)," Green argues. "This, presumably, is why Slate focuses on small ideas and why publications such as Harper's, The New Yorker and The Atlantic focus on big ideas." Yes, no, maybe....

21 Grams is the kind of bad movie that gets good reviews. I'm sure it will get more of them when it opens nationally later this month. Why? It is wonderful to look at; its haunting soundtrack is used with dead-on precision; it gets fantastic performances from Benicio del Toro and Naomi Watts (the film's deliberately grainy look heightens the weathered beauty of Watts's features; half its emotional effect comes from just looking at her); and for a good hour or so, it holds your curiosity at highest attention. Also, it has one stock scene--in which bad news is delivered--that is one of the most affecting of its kind I've ever seen. So the people who made this film really know what they're doing. They've got the chops. But they're playing a feeble tune.

At its best, 21 Grams trains a microscope on three characters' interlocking varieties of grief springing from a single tragedy. But it doesn't seem satisfied to evoke and explore these strong feelings. Instead, the script is led astray by a quasi-mystical, dead-end fascination with the way disparate lives can briefly intersect and change forever. The film returns to one such intersection obsessively, scrutinizing the random events that lead there more and more minutely. But despite all this trawling for meaning, it doesn't find anything more than pure accident. Its fruitless fixation comes to reek of melodrama, undercutting the movie's best feature: the astringent realism of its visual style.

That's the hell of it. Visually, the movie is so eloquent, bracing, and always new. Narratively, it can only repeat its threadbare mantra: "look at how this chance event changed the courses of all these lives." After enough of this I couldn't help but feel it mawkish, an effect that no number of ravishing shots could reverse.

If 21 Grams finds nothing meaningful or foreshadowing in the paths that lead to the tragedy, it does even worse with the aftermath. The chain of consequences is hard to buy. The characters' motivations grow increasingly cryptic, like the title. If you've seen the preview you know what "21 grams" signifies. It's suggestive, but in the end just a fancy synonym for death--one more element of this movie that is more bark than bite.

Iñárritu's interest in coincidence, chance, and unforeseen connections reminds me a bit of the late Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, especially his Three Colors Trilogy. But I like the Kieslowski films so much more. They are less naturalistic, staging coincidences that are improbable to the point of fantasy. Yet they seem to me somehow truer, more revealing of the way the world is and the ways we inhabit it.

One more thing: when was the last time Sean Penn played a regular guy? Because it was kind of hilarious watching him try to do it here. The effort of his restraint really shows. He plays a math professor, and the one scene that requires him to talk about math is giggle-inducing. I like Penn, but his hothead performance in Mystic River was too showy for my tastes, and here he is plainly miscast. Maybe he just hasn't found the range yet for this latest stage of his career.

Although I was disappointed by 21 Grams, I'm not sorry I saw it. And I can't deny that it has the aura of something serious and important. Yet I deeply suspect that if you took its narrative liberties away from it (I was going to call them "innovations," but by now this kind of jumping around in time is just one more cinematic convention) and watched the film in chronological order, it would look distinctly pedestrian. Like I suggested above, I'm not convinced that very much more than window dressing distinguishes 21 Grams from the stuff running on Lifetime.

The Block Museum at Northwestern University, which is showing the film, has other good stuff on their schedule too, like Jules and Jim a week from Thursday. One series, "Professor's Pick," consists of films chosen by Northwestern faculty members, who introduce the screenings.

These words of Smart's are scribbled into one of my journals, but I don't know where they come from. My friend Elaine, who was the first to bring it, and Smart (and so much else) to my attention, may know:

What I'm making is a real place for language in my life since I must put up with it anyway. I want to be respected by those who are dead. I want to sing and make my soul occur.

And here's one from By Grand Central Station:

He kissed my forehead driving along the coast in evening, and now, wherever I go, like the sword of Damocles, that greater never-to-be-given kiss hangs above my doomed head. He took my hand between the two shabby front seats of the Ford, and it was dark, and I was looking the other way, but now that hand casts everywhere an octopus shadow from which I can never escape. The tremendous gentleness of that moment smothers me under; all through the night it is centaurs hoofed and galloping over my heart: the poison has got into my blood. I stand on the edge of the cliff, but the future is already done.

And this one, which I like because, in a hothouse of a book, it is so overrun with vegetation. And so lyrical:

I love, love, love--, but he is also all things: the night, the resilient mornings, the tall poinsettias and hydrangeas, the lemon trees, the residential palms, the fruit and vegetables in gorgeous rows, the birds in the pepper-trees, the sun on the swimming pool.

You can still get a used copy of Rosemary Sullivan's fine but now out-of-print biography of Smart. Weep away, kids. And Sarah, thanks for thinking of this.

Bring back music and culture programming. NPR's news reports are thoughtful and compelling. Its talk shows are topical and a nice way to bring listeners into conversations. And "Car Talk" is great entertainment. But occasionally all this talk is wearying. Balance could be provided by music shows and radio documentaries.

What's going on outside the often overwhelmingly adolescent world of popular music? Who are the up-and-comers in jazz and classical music? NPR should take more time and programming space to offer answers. And whether radio documentaries are made in-house or by independent producers, documentaries transport listeners around the country and the world or back into history. And their fascinating use of sound gives the mind's eye creative work to do.

Read the whole thing here. It speaks for itself (albeit stodgily and obviously, as you'd expect from the editorial page of the Globe), but I want to make one additional point. If National Public Radio doesn't seize this opportunity to restore and revive the cultural programming that once made it genuinely "public" in its appeal, it will prove beyond doubt that it's no longer a "public" radio network, but the purely commercial, ratings-driven talk-radio shop that many listeners reasonably suspect it of having become--and I don't see that such an enterprise deserves to be subsidized by public monies. A radio network that does nothing more than follow the ratings should be required to live and die by them.

NJPAC has brought millions of people to the city since it opened, and while it may not have changed the streetscape as much as some would like, it has changed people's perceptions about Newark. And that's no little feat.

The point you made about the small percentage of Manhattanites attending events at NJPAC speaks more to the parochial mindset of Manhattanites than it does to NJPAC's marketing muscle. New Yorkers are lazy cultural snobs--mostly because they can be. They have an abundance of wonderful art down the street or across town...so they don't have to get out and explore. I, on the other hand, regularly drive 75 miles from my Morris County home to see a play in Princeton or a concert or play in New Brunswick, etc. I agree that the Newark renaissance is slow--if it exists at all. That part of town, with the colleges and museums, should be far livelier than it is. But I also know the five-block walk from Penn station to the arts center, while depressing, is no worse than the stretch of 41st street from Port Authority to the NY Public Library.

I think the central theory of arts-going in NY is "If it's not at Carnegie, it can't be good," followed by the corollary: "And if it is good, it will be at Carnegie soon." What can NJPAC or any of the many other arts organizations located in northern Jersey (the city's sixth boro) do about that?

What struck me most forcibly about Ms. McGlone's smart and funny note was her pointed comparison between the walk from Newark Penn Station to NJPAC and the walk from Manhattan's Port Authority Bus Terminal to...any place at all, to tell the truth. That is a grubby part of town--though the difference, of course, is that the Disney-driven rehabilitation of Times Square has been a tremendous success, at least in the limited sense of cleaning up much of the neighborhood surrounding the Port Authority and making it safer and livelier. (And come to think of it, what's so limited about that? I'd rather live in a Disneyfied neighborhood than do daily battle with hookers and pimps, if those are my only alternatives.) Newark, on the other hand, appears as yet to have derived no significant urban-renewal benefits from NJPAC, and since that was one of the major selling points in the drive to get the center built, the failure is all the more relevant.

I speak, by the way, as someone who recently had a modest stake in the future of Newark. I taught arts criticism for two years at the Newark campus of Rutgers University, and enjoyed it enormously. The students, most of whom came from New Jersey, were hard-working, determined, and fun (one of them wrote this), and not a one of them had been fitted out with silver spoon (A) in mouth (B). If they're the future of Newark, there's hope for the city.

As for the unwillingness of Manhattanites to boldly go to NJPAC, I'm not so sure it can be explained by our "parochial mindset" (though I'm not denying that such a thing exists!). We do, after all, go to Brooklyn's BAM Opera House in fairly large numbers. One difference--perhaps the biggest one--is that BAM consciously markets itself as a presenter of "cutting-edge" arts events, whereas NJPAC is targeting a frankly suburban audience, albeit more multicultural than that pale label might suggest. This is why we don't perceive upper New Jersey as the "sixth borough," any more than we seek out cultural experiences in Staten Island. Sure, I've seen some cool things at NJPAC, but it's not on my radar in the way that BAM is, and judging from its 2003-04 offerings, I wonder whether it needs to be.

Besides, most cool things really do make their way to Manhattan sooner or later. That's why we live here (I sure as hell can't think of any other good reasons). Not all, though--our performance spaces are slowly pricing themselves out of the dance market, for example, and I find myself going more and more often to Washington, D.C., to see companies that are bypassing New York because it costs too much to dance here. If NJPAC were to book those companies more than sporadically, I'd go see them regularly, and I wouldn't be alone.

But, then, should NJPAC try to attract Manhattanites? Would it really be worth the trouble? That's a different question, one that goes directly to the heart of the center's mission, and one I can't answer. All I know is that since NJPAC opened, I've seen fewer than half a dozen performances there, and given the incredibly high quality of the facility, that's a puzzlement. I wish I felt the need to go there more often--but I don't.

Terry likes Hope a lot, hockey not so much. Alas.

I think that picture of her is from Next Stop Wonderland, where she gives a delightfully hard performance. Sharp as some very sharp tacks. Those jokers who answer the ad don't even know what hits 'em.

I have a Handspring Treo 90 handheld, and I use it in about equal measure for tweaking manuscripts in progress and for reading books in various electronic formats. With a little memory chip plugged in, it's got 128 Mb of capacity, which holds, well, a LOT of nearly-purely-text books. Literally hundreds of them, particularly since some of the "books" are short stories and essays rather than novels or non-fiction volumes.

This is absolutely wonderful for taking with me when I leave the house. I've got all my lists of, for instance, books and music people like you recommend that I want to look into, and my notes about which volumes I have in series I want to complete, and the clothing sizes and color tastes of people I buy gifts for. And I've got all these great books: lightweight entertainment, scholarly works, references, public-domain classics, a bit of this and that. The handheld goes in a pocket, is rugged, and runs many, many hours on a battery charge. I can pull it out and read a few pages while waiting for the bus, while waiting in checkout lines, while in the bathroom, and so on. On nice spring and autumn days, I sometimes take the handheld and my iPod and go out for a walk to the local park, where I can kick back with good music and good reading and very little to keep track of.

Some e-book formats, like those from iSilo, Palm Digital Media, and MobiPocket, allow for extensive annotation and bookmarking, all done with electronic attachments to the file for a book that leave the original undisturbed. This can be really handy when doing reference-intensive research on volumes that I wouldn't want to mark up physical copies of, and I can compactly save all my notes for later reference without clutter.

I regard this not as competition for my printed books but as an additional alternative. No e-book format I'm aware of could do justice to something like Full Moon, the glorious collection of Apollo mission photographs of the Moon, or a good museum exhibit catalog, or for that matter natural history books like Walking With Dinosaurs and the Time-Life series. Whenever photographs and diagrams matter, print is the way to go. E-books operate effectively only in the realm of text. Nor do e-books offer a replacement for the satisfactions of a well-made old book, or a classy contemporary edition. For that matter, it's hard to autograph an e-book, unless it has Palm Digital Media's provision for that.

So: e-books are handy when I'm concerned only with text, when I want to take a lot of text in a very compact way, and when I want to mark up heavily. The upshot for me of having a growing library of e-books is that I can take better care of my printed volumes and focus a bit more on buying print with an eye toward quality, since I've got this option for uses where aesthetics matter less.

One reader's views, anyway.

This is the most vivid account I've ever seen of the experience of using a hand-held e-book reader. The thing about it that I find most provocative, however, is my correspondent's suggestion that e-books will not replace "the satisfactions of a well-made old book, or a classy contemporary edition."

I've never collected books qua books, precisely because I feared acquiring an expensive addiction, but I do love a handsome volume, and I've always been fussy about the design of my own books. (I'm really excited about A Terry Teachout Reader, by the way--Yale has done a fantastic job on it, inside and out.)

At the same time, I'm not at all sure that I wouldn't be perfectly content to ditch the text-only books in my library and replace them with e-books. Naturally we're not talking about art books, and I imagine I'd also want to hang on to my uniform edition of Henry James...but maybe not. As I said in the posting to which my reader is referring, I'm interested in essences, not their embodiments, and even though I'm a hopeless typeface junkie, there's never been any doubt in my mind that it's the words that matter. (Besides, it's my understanding that you can read an e-book in any typeface you want, so long as it's loaded onto the reader. Think of the unlimited possibilities for aesthetic tinkering!)

Perhaps the bottom line is that I'm open, at least in theory, to the possibility of abandoning the book-as-art-object, just as I've already taken the first step toward abandoning the album-as-art-object. Other people may not be so open to either possibility. I have a number of over-50 friends who say they don't read "About Last Night" because they "can't" read text on a screen--which means, of course, that they find it inconvenient. Not me. I don't read books on my iBook, but I do read virtually all magazine and newspaper articles that way, as well as the blogs that now occupy a fast-growing part of my reading time. It would never occur to me to print out an article (or a blog entry) and read it in the bathtub. Bathtubs are for biographies.

Which reminds me of the informal industry-wide test of the viability of e-book readers: when somebody makes a reader that you can hold in one hand easily and drop in the tub without incident, the major publishers will start getting interested. I think that's just about right--and I think they're bound to get interested sooner or later, probably sooner, the same way the record companies have finally figured out that on-line music is here to stay.

Yes, the printed book is a beautiful object, "elegant" in both the aesthetic and mathematical senses, and its invention was a pivotal moment in the history of Western culture. But it is also a technology--a means, not an end.

Yes, that's a still from Next Stop Wonderland, the film that taught me to love Hope Davis (not that I needed more than about 10 seconds' worth of persuading). As my beloved Brazilian friends have since taught me, she is the very essence of saudade.

(For the musical equivalent of same, click here and purchase the most beautiful CD imaginable. If Hope Davis could sing, this is how she'd sound.)

And what is this...er, horse hockey about my not liking ice hockey? Art it ain't, but way cool all the same. Besides, you promised to take me to a game, remember?

I'd spank you for your impertinence, but I'm too busy laughing at those awful logos. Besides, I just this second woke up, and must now turn instantly to the task of reviewing four different shows for this Friday's Journal. In reverse chronological order of my having seen them, they are: Taboo, the Boy George-Rosie O'Donnell spectacular (which I saw last night), Bright Ideas, Fame on 42nd Street, and the revival of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker. All in one column, yikes. It's like the straight line of a bad Broadway joke: what do Taboo and The Caretaker have in common. I dunno, what do Taboo and The Caretaker have in common? (Insert punch line here.) Rimshot. Isolated titters.

I'll be done circa noon, unless my head explodes, at which time I'll turn to the task of blogging in earnest. See you then.

P.S. No show tonight! I may hang with a musician friend who claims never to have seen High Fidelity or Casablanca. That can be fixed....

I'll hold the fort while OGIC clears her desk, and in the meantime, she sends her love to you all....

"'I daresay not,' said Sybil calmly, 'but that doesn't mean they wouldn't have liked to.'"

Barbara Pym, A Glass of Blessings

Which reminds me: I met a dog named Django the other day. Kinda yappy, but also kinda sweet. He belongs to yet another great jazz guitarist, about whom more next week....

Normally on the eve of the opening of such a movie event, I would be starting to dread the arrival of the reviews. I'm far too much a slave to bad reviews, and I hate it when I let a little faint praise burst my bubble before there's even a chance to go see for myself. I'm sure I've cheated myself out of a lot of enjoyable movies, if not great ones, this way. Also, there is something to be said for being disappointed first-hand. And I always wonder what sort of meaningful relation there is between my experience of a movie in the pursuit of pleasure, and the experience of someone who is at work when they're at the movies. Remember why Pauline Kael retired? She said she just couldn't watch all those movies anymore; she was sick of them, or at least the vast mediocre portion of them. If that's what years of reviewing can do to someone so susceptible to movie love--well, I'm not so sure I should be giving quite so much credence to people undergoing the same week-in, week-out cinematic force feeding that pounded the pleasure out of moviegoing for Kael.

Not to question the whole critical enterprise, or anything. I wouldn't want to talk myself right out of an arts blogging gig! I just hope that in the future (starting tomorrow) I will not let myself be swayed too easily by a cranky critic or two. It's beyond my power to not read the reviews, but I hereby resolve to stand up to them. (It's a bit easier to talk a good game when the trusted Cinetrix has already weighed in positively on the O'Brian. Hooray for sneak previews in Boston that allow her to get the jump on the papers!)

*Our Dad in Detroit
**Our Ex in Texas
***Our Terry and Yours

About Our Girl I have no information as of this moment, though I think she's been preoccupied with life-related activities. For the past few days we've been meeting almost exclusively in cyberspace! Are you there, OGIC? Come in, Chicago....

Bring back music and culture programming. NPR's news reports are thoughtful and compelling. Its talk shows are topical and a nice way to bring listeners into conversations. And "Car Talk" is great entertainment. But occasionally all this talk is wearying. Balance could be provided by music shows and radio documentaries.

Here's what I said in response:

If National Public Radio doesn't seize this opportunity to restore and revive the cultural programming that once made it genuinely "public" in its appeal, it will prove beyond doubt that it's no longer a "public" radio network, but the purely commercial, ratings-driven talk-radio shop that many listeners reasonably suspect it of having become--and I don't see that such an enterprise deserves to be subsidized by public monies. A radio network that does nothing more than follow the ratings should be required to live and die by them.

And here's what Greg said:

But as anyone who's actually studied this subject knows, public radio listeners overwhelmingly don't want music. They want talk. The Globe's editors are free to have their own desires, but it's just silly for them to lecture public radio, as if their own opinion had to be right. At least they should learn why public radio makes the choices that it does.

Greg's a smart guy. Are our views therefore somehow compatible? Not really--but I'm not so sure we're talking about the same thing, either.

Greg is writing about NPR from a cultural populist's point of view. Recognizing that the network's ratings for music programs have become microscopically small in recent years, he thinks NPR should acknowledge and accept that fact and go from there. If NPR's listeners want talk, they should have it, and that's that.

The difference between us--as I understand it, and I may be misinterpreting Greg--is that I don't start from the assumption that National Public Radio has an a priori obligation to exist, and thus should ensure its survival by any means necessary, even if that means scrapping musical and other cultural programming in favor of Car Talk. NPR is not a profit-making corporation. It is, or claims to be, a "public" entity, and it is subsidized in part by public monies and in-kind equivalents. Public entities exist to serve the public--but not in the same way as commercial corporations. The whole point of subsidizing a radio network is to ensure that it will do things that commercial broadcasters won't do. In fact, there's no other point to NPR.

Sir John Reith, the man who for all intents and purposes started the BBC, used to say that its job was to give the public "something a bit better than what it thinks it wants." (I'm quoting from memory, but that's fairly close to what he said.) In the case of the BBC--and, once upon a not-so-distant time, NPR and PBS--that meant a significant presence for the fine arts. Now it doesn't. But in the absence of such programming, how can NPR and PBS justify their public subsidies? I like Car Talk, but in what possible way can it be said to constitute a kind of programming not otherwise available through non-subsidized broadcast outlets?

Here's where I agree with Greg: if NPR's listeners won't listen to the cultural programs it does broadcast, then NPR should change those programs, or create new and better ones. Nor do I think that public radio stations need necessarily broadcast hour upon hour of talk-free music. (I don't listen to classical music on the radio. That's why I have a stereo and a large collection of CDs.) But I take it absolutely for granted that a significant part of NPR's air time--maybe even most of it--should be devoted to cultural programming. Specifically, I think NPR has a far greater responsibility to cover the arts than to cover the news. Other people do that, and do it well. Between them, Big Media and the new media provide 24/7 news coverage in every imaginable flavor. In what way does NPR's news department do something that isn't already being done?

Let me be clear about this. I don't object to the existence of All Things Considered, or even Car Talk, so long as these shows are part of a larger, more varied package of programming that makes a concerted effort to do things the commercial media can't or won't do. If nobody listens to fine-arts programs, then of course there's no point in broadcasting them. But that's a false alternative, a straw man constructed by NPR to justify the gutting of its cultural programming. Do them creatively, do them imaginatively, do them with an ear toward appealing to more than a handful of listeners--but do them. Sure, some of those shows, maybe most of them, will draw far fewer listeners than All Things Considered and Car Talk. Repeat after me: That's the point. Such programming is the only thing that justifies the continued existence of NPR as a subsidized public entity.

UPDATE: Felix Salmon thinks I'm all wet. I think he's being a little bit too cute--way too cute, actually--in claiming that my criticism of NPR has a hidden ideological agenda. Considering that I've done a few gazillion on-air commentaries for NPR's Performance Today (and would be doing another one tomorrow if my schedule permitted), I think perhaps my motives are rather purer than Felix thinks. But he's a smart guy, too, so you ought to go see what he says and make up your own mind....

As a literature teacher in a tech-savvy junior high, I wanted to weigh in on the hand-held electronic book issue.

In my literature classes we often discuss the aesthetics of reading a book. Many of my 14- and 15-year-old students are voracious readers who are willing to tackle classics as well as contemporary and young-adult authors. We've actually discoursed on the implications of reading a book via the web or electronically versus holding the actual book and flipping the page. Many have commented that they enjoy turning the page of a thriller, or that they sometimes linger over a page when something particularly sad or shocking has happened. I must admit that there are times when I will hold that page between two fingers and dread turning it because I know the character I'm so fond of dies there.

That being said, I'm all for a hand-held electronic revolution if it will influence more of my students to actually read. While the introduction of the net, the web, and the dot-com world was originally touted as the demise of reading, it has actually become an impetus for improving reading skills and arousing interest in reading among my students. I can't count the number of times we've read a short story and students have gone home to research, on their own, an issue that was brought up by the study of the story. Imagine a world where all of my students didn't have to carry 10-pound literature anthologies and could whip out their e-book without worrying about fumbling to the right page. As well, the e-books would allow them to take notes as they read and to store them for future reference. Today, we have a "Thou Shalt Not Write in the Book" policy. E-books would end that policy and would allow the students to download their notes and comments later. I think many of my students would read more because they would feel less like they have to "read a book" and more like they're reading a screen. There's a difference, you know.

Another vivid front-line dispatch, worth a close reading if you're wondering what the future holds in store. And once again, I was struck by a small detail--what you might call "nostalgia for the page." I know exactly what my correspondent means when he talks about not wanting to turn a page.

On the other hand, I'm sure that the readers and writers of the future will be conditioned by their experience with computers to respond to the "printed" word in similar ways, only in terms relevant to their new technological environment. No, I don't find type on a screen to be sensuously appealing, and I don't like the visual anonymity of e-mail, which comes in a very narrow range of typefaces--but, then, the same thing was true of typewriters, wasn't it? Nobody in his right mind would type a love letter, but lots of people send love letters via e-mail (usually peppered with emoticons). A couple of years ago, I sent a friend a condolence e-mail, and she was surprised to hear from me via that channel. I doubt she'd be nearly as surprised today.

I don't believe in what intellectual historians call "the idea of progress," but I do accept the inevitability of change. We get used to it, and if we don't, our children will--which doesn't mean it's always good, needless to say. As so often, Dostoevsky spoke the last word on this subject: "Man gets used to everything--the beast!"

UPDATE: Brandywine Books is skeptical about my e-book-related speculations: "The weight of the pages, the smell of glue and paper, the look of the printed text, new or fading, these amount to a book's atmosphere. You can cuddle up with it. You can sink back with it." Not so the e-book, he claims. (Read the whole thing here.)

Not to get too lofty about this, but this argument about physical books vs e-books is sort of a variation on the conflict between Hebrew and Greek notions of body and soul. Is the body an essential aspect of human identity or just a container for a soul? For most purposes, reading things on a screen is fine with me. But then I think of my very favorite novel. I used to read it every nine months. Each time I opened it up again, I expected that it wouldn't have as powerful an effect on me as last time. I was always wrong. I was transported. And when I got to the end, I was always in tears. I would close the paperback and just look at it, in awe that this object in my hand contained these people who were so real to me and whose lives moved me so deeply. It seemed a religious object. Reading that novel on an e-book, I know, would be a very different experience.

That's beautiful, and I hesitate to disagree, however tentatively...but even so, I do wonder whether a person who grew up with e-books might not be capable of broadly similar, comparably intense feelings. Of course they would assume a different aspect, if only by virtue of the fact that (as Bruce so acutely points out) an e-book has no "body." But would they be less powerful as a result?

I don't know, of course. But the thought occurs to me--and I don't know why it took so long--that some of my own feelings about the body/soul problem may well arise from the fact that music was the first art form in which I became deeply involved as an executant. Sheet music, no matter how handsome the paper and typography, is not an art object in and of itself. Rather, it's a set of instructions by which humans of flesh and blood may call into evanescent existence the non-corporeal "art object" that is a "piece" of music. Could it be that my early experience as a musician now conditions the way I think about all art? I'm sure, for example, that it made me more open to abstract art and plotless ballet (for what art is so abstract as music?). Perhaps it has also made it easier for me to accept the idea of the "bodiless" book.

On the other hand, here's a thought experiment: try to imagine a ballet like George Balanchine's The Four Temperaments "performed" on a computer screen by a "company" of articulated stick figures. All the movements, which are the essence of the dance, would be visible--but the viewer would experience them as a three-dimensional geometrical theorem, not an interaction between...well, souls. So long as we are on this earth, there can be no souls without bodies. That's one of the reasons why I love ballet (it's the "word" made as flesh), and why synthesizers will never replace live orchestras.

And will any of this stop the e-book from replacing the printed book? Don't count on it.

Aside from being gorgeous to behold, "Sargent's Women" sheds light on the inner life of an artist who is widely thought not to have had one. Next to nothing is known of Sargent's romantic entanglements (if any), and as a result contemporary opinion seems to be divided between those who think him to have been asexual and those certain that he was homosexual. Be all that as it may, you can't spend ten minutes walking through "Sargent's Women" without feeling the fascination that women exerted on him--not just the darkly exotic ladies of Capri, but his own sisters as well.

For reasons all too obvious, at least to me, Sargent continues to be dismissed by many critics as a lightweight virtuoso who specialized in portraits of the haut monde at the expense of serious work. He was, in fact, an extraordinarily gifted painter who did far more than merely capture the pretty-pretty surfaces of his well-heeled subjects, and even if he hadn't devoted at least as much time and energy to the watercolor landscapes that may well prove in the end to have been his supreme achievement, Sargent's portraits would still require no apologies. Take a look at "Rosina" and "Head of a Venetian Women" (both of which can be seen on the gallery's Web site). The artist who painted those canvases may not have been a ladies' man, but he definitely knew a thing or two about women, and I doubt he learned it just by looking at them.

I want to say a quick word about Adelson Galleries, whose two floors are an eminently civilized place to look at turn-of-the-century American art, about which Warren Adelson knows as much as anybody in the world. He has a knack for putting together museum-quality shows, and "Sargent's Women," like "Maurice Prendergast: Painter of America" before it, definitely qualifies. Between this show and "Joseph Cornell: The 100th Birthday," currently on display at Richard L. Feigen, I'd say it's time you took a trip to the Upper East Side. Why not make it tomorrow afternoon? Or today, for that matter?

Taboo was terrible:

Rumors about the mind-boggling awfulness of "Taboo," which opened last night, have been circulating for weeks. I wish I could say I ignored them, but such whispers often turn out to be all too true, and once again, the whisperers were right on the money. Not since "Urban Cowboy" has Broadway been littered with so much smoldering wreckage. If Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom had produced "Taboo" instead of "Springtime for Hitler," they'd have stayed out of jail....

The Caretaker was really good:

Don't be put off by Mr. Pinter's reputation for inaccessibility (or the whiny anti-Americanism of his post-9/11 public statements). His school-of-Beckett style may have hardened into mannerism long ago, but "The Caretaker" is still fresh and fine, and this production, well acted by all three players and directed with deceptive clarity by David Jones, is a superior piece of work....

No link (gnashing of teeth), so to read the whole thing, including shorter reviews of two new off-Broadway shows, Fame on 42nd Street and Bright Ideas, do the usual. Extract dollar (A) from wallet (B), proceed to the nearest newsstand, buy today's Journal, turn to the "Weekend Journal" section (on whose front page you'll find me), and revel in the rest of our excellent arts coverage. Got that? Good.

In my own case, I'm trying to prepare myself not to get freaked out by the differences between the movie and the books. So far, I've only read one unfavorable review, by Christopher Hitchens, a reflexive contrarian who likes nothing better than to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, even when it's right and he's wrong. Yet it's obvious that Hitchens knows Patrick O'Brian's books extremely well, for he unhesitatingly put his finger on a key aspect of the film about which the trailer left me extremely suspicious: the way it portrays Stephen Maturin.

The summa of O'Brian's genius was the invention of Dr. Stephen Maturin. He is the ship's gifted surgeon, but he is also a scientist, an espionage agent for the Admiralty, a man of part Irish and part Catalan birth--and a revolutionary. He joins the British side, having earlier fought against it, because of his hatred for Bonaparte's betrayal of the principles of 1789--principles that are perfectly obscure to bluff Capt. Jack Aubrey. Any cinematic adaptation of O'Brian must stand or fall by its success in representing this figure.

On this the film doesn't even fall, let alone stand. It skips the whole project. As played by the admittedly handsome and intriguing Paul Bettany, Maturin is no more than a good doctor with finer feelings and a passion for natural history. At one point he is made to say in an English accent that he is Irish--but that's the only hint we get. In the books, for example, he quarrels badly with Aubrey about Lord Nelson's support for slavery. But here a superficial buddy movie is born out of one of the subtlest and richest and most paradoxical male relationships since Holmes and Watson.

I regret to say that all this sounds dangerously plausible to me. I've read the entire Aubrey-Maturin series several times and admire it greatly (if not uncritically), but I also think its virtues, which I tried to describe when I reviewed The Yellow Admiral (one of the later volumes in the series) for the New York Times Book Review, are of a sort not easily transferred to the screen, in part because they are embodied as much in conversation as in action:

Mr. O'Brian's present popularity is to some extent a fad, but it is also justified. To say that his books are a cut above the average historical novel is to miss the point: Aubrey and Maturin are to Capt. Horatio Hornblower what Philip Marlowe is to Perry Mason....In the end, what makes the Aubrey-Maturin novels memorable is their moral gravity: rarely does one encounter in nominally popular fiction so Trollopian an understanding--and acceptance--of the divided nature of men's souls. Mr. O'Brian does not deal in cardboard heroes, which is why the acts of heroism he describes make so powerful an impression. We read him for his plots; we reread him for his philosophy.

I hasten to point out, however, that this is all the more reason to try and forget about the books when watching the film. A faithful film adaptation of a novel of any considerable literary complexity can never be more than a species of illustration--a commentary at best, a comic book at worst. To watch it inevitably becomes a kind of game in which the viewer scores the film according to how many surface details the director gets right. Do the actors look the way they "ought" to? Are the sets convincing? Does the dialogue sound familiar? It's a good game, but it has nothing to do with art.

The smarter approach, of course, is for the director to depart drastically from the source--to subject it to an imaginative transformation that gives the adaptation an independent life as a free-standing art object in its own right. (It's easier to turn a great novel into a great opera than a great film.) But if you do that, you're likely to lose a significant part of the pre-sold audience of loyal fans whose existence is the main reason why popular books get filmed in the first place. As far as they're concerned, the more literal the adaptation, the better--and I, hardened aesthete though I am, can't keep myself from feeling the same way. As Dr. Johnson might have put it, I rejoice to concur with the common reader, even though I know I shouldn't.

Hence I'm of two minds about Master and Commander. I'm well aware that it won't convey more than a fractional part of the subtleties of O'Brian's novels, but I'm going to see it anyway, checklist in hand, hoping against hope that the images on the screen will at least approximate the ones in my head. And that's why I envy OGIC her blissful ignorance. Unlike me, she'll see the film for what it is and nothing more--and if she likes it enough, she might even feel moved to buy a copy of Master and Commander, the first novel in the series, and find out what Patrick O'Brian is really about. (Nudge, nudge.)

Part of blogs' usefulness as a cultural barometer is that they don't automatically buy what the establishment says about Vida or Eggers or any other overhyped phenomenon, literary or otherwise. Bloggers know what they like and what they don't like, and they aren't afraid to tell you why. And they get to use bad words that will never see print inside a family newspaper. But to get to the good stuff, you have to wade through more and more self-congratulation and mutual admiration. Call it blogrolling....

Maybe the back-scratching started as revolutionary solidarity. Now it's a popularity contest in which the value of information is confused with the cool quotient of the person spreading it. Late-night TV has Jay and Dave and Conan; the blogosphere has TMFTML and Old Hag and Choire, only unlike the gods of late night, the gods of the blogosphere really, really like each other--and say so every chance they get.

They're not so nice to the less popular kids, often establishment-media types who get flogged out of all proportion to their op-ed offenses. The last few months, it's been all the rage to paste Laura Miller, a critic with regular gigs for Salon.com and the New York Times. One of the kinder comments, this one from Cup of Chicha: "From the way she writes about contemporary short stories, it feels obvious she doesn't read them." Even if you're not a fan of Miller's, the attacks can get so nasty it starts to feel like bloggers pick on her not because they think she's a lousy critic but because she gets to sound off every other week in the New York Times....

If the ad hominem tactics made for a better read, I might not mind so much. Sure, it can be fun in a sick sort of way, like watching a bar fight while you nurse a beer in the corner. But more and more it gets in the way of what makes blogs useful to someone like me, and that's information. After making my daily e-rounds, I feel more plugged into what's going on--and ever more burned out on cronyism and negativity. Even if you rely on blogs for idiosyncratic takes on the news, even if you enjoy seeing sacred cows slaughtered, even if you believe, as I do, that the world needs the kind of Zorro-like cultural commentary they're so good at, you start to wonder: Is this getting a little too personal?

Maybe that's the point. In the blogosphere, everybody gets to be a critic.

Read the whole thing here.

Actually, Our Girl and I don't do a lot of ad hominem brawling, but we do like to plug what's going on elsewhere in the blogosphere, mainly because it's still a very new invention about which more and more people are learning every day. That's why we mention TMFTML and Maud and Cup of Chicha and Old Hag and Bookslut and all the other interesting blogs that we read regularly--because we think they're worth knowing about. "Coolness" and cronyism have nothing to do with it. We don't party down nightly. I've met one of the aforementioned bloggers, once. Two of them I don't even know by name.

In any case, the great thing about the blogosphere is that it's an unusually pure example of an information market. People read "About Last Night" because they want to read it. If they don't, they won't. The same is true of all the other blogs. The ease with which you can visit a blog is part of what makes the blogosphere so competitive--and it's not a zero-sum game, either. Anyone can play. It's cheap and easy to set up a blog. To be a "popular kid," all you have to do is jump in and be consistently interesting, and you'll get noticed and mentioned and blogrolled very, very quickly. It doesn't matter who you know or where you are. (Look what happened to Cup of Chicha.)

As for Laura Miller, I think maybe Ms. Howard is engaging in a teeny bit of snarkery herself when she suggests that "bloggers pick on her not because they think she's a lousy critic but because she gets to sound off every other week in the New York Times." I don't have an opinion about Laura Miller--I don't read her stuff--but if I felt the need to criticize her, it wouldn't be because I resented the fact that she's an "establishment-media type." After all, so am I. Nor do I blog to be hip or cool or to kick sand in the faces of the "less popular kids," whatever that means. I do it because I think blogging is an exciting and potentially significant development in arts journalism, and I want to be part of it. I'm excited by the immediacy and freshness and personal quality of blogs. I also like the bad words and knife fights, even if we don't do that kind of stuff around here. I don't own a shiv, and Our Girl is too sweet. (I don't even think she knows some of those words TMFTML uses.)

Above all, blogging is fun. And that's one thing I don't get from Jennifer Howard's eat-your-spinach account of life in the blogosphere: a sense of how much fun we're all having out here. "We" meaning TMFTML and Maud and Cup of Chicha and Old Hag and Bookslut and the thousands of nice people who visit us every day. It's not a private party. There's no secret handshake. All you have to do is click on a link. Or not. But we hope you do.

Noël Coward, quoted in Charles Castle, Noël

The first is Cinetrix' 'Fesser:

I confess that I am ambivalent about this $200m gift. It seems to me as if a huge gift to the central NPR will only accelerate the homogenization of public radio. At the left end of the dial, NPR is a behemoth that squeezes out marginally alternative radio, leaving only the raggedy fringe of college stations. The certitude of hearing "Car Talk" and Scott Simon from coast to coast, while pleasant for homesick Bostonians, for a few moments at least, does not really offer a serious alternative to commercial media. NPR, the national organization, may raise the bar, but they lower the ceiling. In essence, the problem in my eyes is the replacement of small p, small r public radio with NPR. The difference is like that between coffeehouses and Starbucks.

Also, the contretemps of a few years ago over Christopher Lydon's "Connection" revealed that the talent at Boston's WBUR was making serious, six-figure money. I am reluctant to brown-bag it for a week so that I can pay for one of Tom and Ray's cufflinks. I support public radio by throwing a few bucks to my favorite music station when I can, and I don't feel too guilty about listening to NPR when I want news. In any event, given the constant sponsor plugs and contests to win Apple iPods, Toyota Prii, or Pat Metheny tickets, the absence of Paul Harvey is the only way to tell you are not listening to AM news radio.

As for the Kroc gift, given the source of the money, it seems as if it would have been more appropriate for her to throw some cash to an organization that is trying to do something about the obesity epidemic in this country.

My second correspondent hails from the suburbs of Philadelphia:

I see you say that you don't listen to classical music on the radio. I would greatly miss it.

In and around Philadelphia and Trenton, Mercer County Community College's WWFM "empire" provides a terrific classical service. It has a network of translators and smaller stations that stretch from north of Easton, Pa. to Cape May. Much of its music is locally programmed and often non-hackneyed (the other day, during the afternoon, I heard David Diamond's Violin Concerto No. 2). From 12-3 pm and midnight-6 a.m. they use Peter van de Graaf from Chicago's marvelous WFMT (the best arts station in the U.S.) and he is a joy. Sure, he plays Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and Ravel's La Valse and other greatest hits, but he also plays French baroque opera, 20th-century Dutch minimalism, Swedish chamber music and all kinds of unusual repertoire and off-the-beaten track tidbits (did you know that Beethoven wrote an Andante and Variations for Mandolin and Harpsichord? I didn't until PvdG played it). Last night at 3 a.m. (I work nights, sleep days) he played an entire one-act Rossini comic opera--what a treat and a real discovery for me! No, I had no idea what was going on; my Italian is a tad rusty. But the joy and effervescent delight that is Rossini came through clearly and really made my night.

I have over 2,000 classical CDs and a fine system to play them on, and I do often play them. But the radio has a spontaneity and excitement that I enjoy and I would miss the discoveries--things I would never hear any other way. I feel sorry that such listening opportunities are not available in so many places--so many potential classical fans may never hear the music.

They certainly won't on NPR, either. In Philadelphia, the NPR outlet loves talk so much it REPEATS shows. They play Fresh Air at 3 and then again at 7. They repeat All Things Considered's first 1/2 hour 2 hours later. There's no room for music, but they can run reruns? NPR and its partner in crime, PBS, should be ashamed for their total retreat from the fine arts. Keep hounding them about it!

These two e-mails are variations on the same theme, and very much to the point of what public radio ought to be about, at least in my opinion. The operative word is "non-commercial," which brings us back to my original posting. Public radio runs on subsidies--some direct, some indirect, some voluntary, some not. But its claim to any kind of subsidy, whatever the source, arises from its non-commercial character. To the extent that NPR allows its programming to be driven by purely commercial considerations, it violates that tacit "agreement" with the public.

Two other points are worth noting. As the 'Fesser notes, non-capitalized "public radio" augments the fast-shrinking diversity of broadcast content in America, while NPR's increasing emphasis on centralized talk-driven programming diminishes it. And my Philadelphia correspondent makes a point that simply hadn't occurred to me, which is that one of the most important reasons to listen to classical music on the radio is the element of surprise. My own life as a working critic provides plenty of that, but those who aren't at concerts and other performances five and six nights a week are in a different boat. Alex Ross said much the same thing in another context a few weeks ago when he wrote to chide me for undervaluing the significance of BAM as "a filter for those who are baffled by the sheer superfluity of choices out there" (and yes, Alex, I know I owe you an e-mail!).

It may be that my correspondents are I are kicking against the pricks--that the centralizing forces to which terrestrial radio is being subjected are irresistible. It may also be that Web-based "radio" is the long-term alternative to the encroaching homogenization of the airwaves. And it's puzzling that none of us has heretofore suggested that possibility. The genius of the Web is that it lowers the overhead for individuality. Hence blogging, which is nothing if not individual. If I weren't having so much fun blogging (and weren't so damn busy writing for profit), I might well be tempted to launch a Web-based radio station of my own...but don't ask me!

THE BLOGOSPHERE IS, LIKE, TOTALLY INBRED: Er, except that I haven't ever heard of most of these blogs, which are nonetheless a big thing in their part of the sphere, I gather.

There are more things in the blogosphere, Jennifer Howard, than are dreamt of in your articles....

Er, you, too, Instapundit. For as this post reminds us, the "warbloggers" (i.e., the political bloggers who mostly sprang to life in the wake of 9/11) and the arts bloggers (i.e., Our Girl and I and all the other folks mentioned in Jennifer Howard's article) don't seem to overlap all that much. To be sure, there's lots and lots more of them than there are of us. "About Last Night"'s traffic has gone through the roof on the infrequent occasions when the warblogging sector of the blogosphere has taken note of our activities. But for the most part we arts bloggers go our own way quite happily, gradually building an audience of interested readers, some of whom also visit the warblogs (as I do) and some of whom don't.

Meaning what? That many more people are interested in politics than art (surprise!). That it's a big pool, with plenty of room for everybody. Above all, that the Web has the power to create and foster far-flung, widely dispersed "communities" of strangers with common interests--and to do it on the cheap.

Jeff Jarvis, who blogs at BuzzMachine, reported yesterday (in near-real time, no less!) on a speech given by Andrew Sullivan, one of the pioneer bloggers, to the Online News Association. Here are his notes:

What sets apart weblogs, [Sullivan] says, is economics: He talks about the economics of thoughtful journalism: The New Republic has never made money and loses more. The Nation doesn't make money.

"And then I experienced blogging as an alternative. It staggers me to realize that last week, AndrewSullivan.com... is now reaching more people online than the magazine I used to edit, which is still losing... hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That's a big deal... We haven't just made the economics of journalism cheaper.... We haven't just lowered the barriers to entry to journalism, we've completely revolutionized it."

"The overhead is minimal and the reach is almost infinite."

The fact that Andrew Sullivan is English may be relevant in this connection. In the U.S., journalism came over the past half-century to be viewed as a "profession"--something you can't do without formal training and, preferably, an academic degree. In Europe, it's something that can be and is done by any literate person for whatever reason--to make money, to help shape the cultural conversation, even just for fun.

I think the second model makes more sense, and also makes for better, livelier journalism. Most newspaper and magazine editors disagree, and prior to the emergence of the blogosphere, they ran things. Now they don't. Which might just be the most important thing about blogs: they have brought about a wholesale revival of "amateur" journalism, in the very best sense of the word.

That's the lead--not that Instapundit hasn't heard of Maud, or that Jennifer Howard thinks TMFTML is too snarky. This is new. And it matters. And you're here.

It'd be easy enough to make the switch, but I'm not going to do it just because one (1) reader thinks it'd be a good idea. What say the rest of you? If you have an opinion, send it to us at "About Last Night" (with the phrase DEFAULT SETTING in the message field). OGIC and I will happily abide by your collective preference on this matter.

I almost forgot to link to last week's Washington Post appreciation of one of my favorite guilty pleasures, John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee crime novels. I discovered McGee some years ago when a friend brought The Long Lavender Look to my sick bed. I was skeptical, but the only alternative was my course reading, which was probably Fredric Jameson or some such thing. And the epigraph caught my eye:

When I play with my cat, who knows but that she regards me more as a plaything than I do her? --Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

The hook had grazed me. Twenty pages into the mystery proper, I was on the line for all twenty books in the series.

I even got Terry to read the McGee novels. He was not very impressed, but even his more discerning critical judgment was not enough to keep him from gobbling them up like so much buttered popcorn. Terry's some fast reader; I think he gave over three or four days of his life to McGee, cursed me heartily, and moved on.

But I'll never be done with McGee, and Jonathan Yardley's piece gives a vivid sense of why this is. While the romanticized, impossible Travis "I bed at least one new girl every book, but I'm a highly principled gentleman" McGee may be a silly character (Parker would eat him for lunch), the plots of the novels give off the authentic whiff of mundane reality. They are Floridian through and through, revolving around prosaic real estate development schemes and small-time swindles. The book Yardley focuses on, The Dreadful Lemon Sky, is a very good choice. But you're going to have to read all of them anyway, so why not take his advice and start at the beginning with The Deep Blue Good-By?

The point is that postings this week may possibly be sporadic and/or erratic. Or not. You never can tell around this joint. At any rate, I posted quite a few items in the past couple of days, including the latest on the Great Blogosphere Contretemps, about which infinitely more below--the air is full of links--so there's no shortage of stuff to read.

Which reminds me: if the Great Blogosphere Contretemps has brought you to "About Last Night" today for the very first time, go here to read an old posting explaining who we are and what we do. Alternatively, you can browse the right-hand column, starting at the top. Either way, all will be made manifest.

Contrary to any impression you may have gotten from the newspapers, we're glad you stopped by. Please come again--and bring a friend.

P.S. To those who inquired, my Wall Street Journal piece about the Looney Tunes Golden Collection is finished but not yet published. I'll let you know when it hits. (And yes, I do have some fresh Top Fives up my sleeve. All I have to do is write them and code them and post them and love them....)

P.P.S. To those of you who've been running into me at parties and asking who Our Girl is, she is beautiful and mysterious and wanted in at least seven countries. That is all you know and all you need to know.

P.P.P.S. Our Girl is finally getting her very own e-mailbox, possibly as soon as this week! Watch this space for details.

I took down Lee Server's Robert Mitchum: "Baby, I Don't Care" from my bookshelf, turned to the chapter about Crossfire, and there it was--a wonderful little "found poem" that Server stumbled across in the screenplay. It's a list of the film's settings, compiled for the use of the production department:

Int. Cheap Rooming House
Ext. Police Station
Int. Hotel Washroom
Ext. Park Bench
Int. Hamburger Joint
Int. Moviehouse Balcony
Int. Bar
Int. Ginny's Bedroom
Int. Street of Cheap Rooming Houses

Has there ever been a pithier summary of what makes film noir noir?

Alice James, diary, May 31, 1889

Constant Lambert (on Emmanuel Chabrier), Music Ho!

I don't mean to sneer. Except for Smiles of a Summer Night, I hadn't seen any of Bergman's early films since my college days--not until last night, when I watched the Criterion Collection CD of Wild Strawberries in the company of a film-loving friend. We'd been planning to get together for weeks to watch it, and a hole opened up simultaneously in our schedules, so we sent out for Vietnamese food, planted ourselves on the couch, and let 'er rip.

Here are some fugitive observations gleaned from our evening:

The Elements String Quartet, a comparatively new ensemble (it was founded in 1999), recently commissioned 16 composers to write short pieces for string quartet inspired by evocative photographs of the composers' own choosing--wedding photos, pictures of their parents, candid snapshots, vacation scenes, whatever. The Elements Quartet has been previewing these pieces throughout 2003, and on Tuesday the group played all 16 at Manhattan's Merkin Concert Hall.

Here are some striking things about "Snapshots," the title given by the quartet to this project, which was underwritten by a foundation called Premiere Commission, Inc.:

More later, probably tomorrow.

Here are the winners of the 2003 National Book Awards, as announced earlier this evening:

In jazz, all fame is strictly relative. Jim Hall, the greatest living jazz guitarist, has been making records for close to a half-century. He's worked with everybody from Sonny Rollins to Pat Metheny and played everywhere from the Village Vanguard to the White House. His colleagues view him with something approaching outright awe. But Mr. Hall, like most jazz musicians, is unknown to the public at large--a fact that doesn't seem to bother him in the least. "It's a privilege to be able to make a living playing jazz," he says firmly. "Not too many people listen to me, but maybe I'd be nervous if I were a million-seller. I'd say, uh-oh, I did something wrong."

Read the whole thing here.

If you've never heard Hall play, click here to purchase Jim Hall Live, the CD mentioned in the piece. Recently reissued by Verve, it's one of his own favorites--and the first Jim Hall album I ever bought, a quarter-century ago. I still love it.

Do you think that personal memoir and narrative nonfiction based on journalistic reconstruction should be in the same category? I suppose that might be like asking whether historical fiction and contempory fiction should be in the same category, yet I can't help but feel that these forms are very different from one another. I guess this begs the question of what, exactly, is it that you judge when viewing art? Is it the impact upon the viewer/listener/reader? And if the content is inherently more emotional in one work than another, does that skew the comparison? I think, too, of actors. The embodiment of a highly charged character seems to have an edge over a masterful embodiment of a more subtle character, even when I suspect the latter requires much more skill.

Right on all counts, say I. All five of the NBA nonfiction judges were troubled by the fact that we had to render a single judgment on so disparate a group of books, and we have made our feelings known to the powers-that-be at the National Book Foundation. On the other hand, I don't think there should be a dozen National Book Awards: if there were, nobody would pay attention to them. (It's hard enough to get the mass media to pay any attention to a literary prize.) Still, disaggregating history from biography, as do the Pulitzer Prizes, seems to me an important step.

On the other hand, to do that would bring us right back to another horn of the dilemma posed by my correspondent. Can you really compare a scholarly biography to a personal memoir? I mean, of course you can, you can compare anything to anything else, but ought they to be considered part of the same category for purposes of prizegiving?

Without telling tales out of school, I can say that my fellow judges and I spent a lot of time talking about precisely these issues. We took them with the highest possible seriousness. But at the end of the day (as they like to say in Washington), we had to perform our assigned task, which wasn't made any easier by the fact that the National Book Foundation instructed us not to split the first prize between two books. We had to pick one, and we chose Waiting for Snow in Havana. As John Wayne is supposed to have said (though I think the quote is as spurious as "Play it again, Sam"), a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Better one prize than none.

This isn't to say that the characters aren't nicely individuated and very believably human. Weir does sketch out the emotional contours of a couple of the shipboard relationships in very broad but deft strokes, and this seems just enough specificity to animate what is essentially a more general evocation of a time and place--and, of course, a great yarn.

The storytelling is terrific, offering up plenty of the sort of well-chosen, toothsome details that make a narrative memorable. There's a model ship that is a small wonder, both as a material object and as a plot pivot. Later in the movie you get a (literally) breathtaking glimpse of a real ship from far enough away that it, too, looks like a toy--and the plot again turns decisively. I loved the benign, wise-looking beasts of the Galápagos Islands, and the depiction of the tools and methods of the Romantic-era naturalist.

If much has been cut loose in the translation of O'Brian from page to screen, it seems to have been for the best. Master and Commander may be cinema first and O'Brian only second, but isn't that as it should be? After all, it hasn't replaced the books; not only are they still out there, but I feel now more than ever that I'd like to read them, and haven't the slightest worry that it will be a redundant experience.

So there you have my uninitiated take on Master and Commander. I'm curious to find out how it stacks up against Terry's view (forthcoming, I presume), but I can report that it is almost identical to that of the ultra-initiated Our Dad in Detroit, who mourned O'Brian's more complex Stephen Maturin a little, but found the spirit of the books intact and, like me, had the time of his life.

I tore myself away from the iBook this afternoon and went to see Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. I'm going to be writing about it next week, so I don't want to give the game completely away, but here's what I thought in a nutshell: it's all wrong...and all right.

No, Master and Commander doesn't reproduce the essence of Patrick O'Brian's books, which is the inner life of Stephen Maturin. (See this recent post for more details.) It's a completely exteriorized view of the Aubrey-Maturin novels. But what a view! I know the novels intimately, and I'm stunned by the evocative precision with which Peter Weir has made them manifest on screen. Sure, he's turned a Trollopian roman fleuve into an action movie, but the action is completely consistent with the tone (and values) of the books. What's more, Russell Crowe is as good an Aubrey as could possibly be imagined. He looks right, sounds right, acts right. From now on, I'll see him in my head when I read the books.

Much more later, but for now I'll add just one thing, which is that I saw Master and Commander in the company of a woman friend whom I thought might not like it, not least because it gets quite bloody from time to time. She was completely enthralled. Me, too. I want to see it again, soon.

1) You don't have to love everything you're told is great, 2) You don't have to claim greatness for everything you love, and 3) You don't have to dispute the greatness of the works and artists you dislike.

This is part of a posting in which Michael Blowhard offers a list of "great art he doesn't get," and invites his co-blogger Friedrich to do the same. (Read the whole thing here.)

Care to play, OGIC? My allergy to Wagner is no secret, to put it mildly, and I've confessed to not getting Dickens in this very space. I'm prepared to make further admissions, but only if you ante up.

The ceremony was held at the Marriott Marquis, one of the super-monster hotels in the theater district of Manhattan, and a good thing, too--some 900 people showed up. The crowd at the reception was so thick that you could barely get a drink, and it was for all intents and purposes impossible to find anyone you knew (I ran into one of my fellow judges, but only by accident). Inside the ballroom, the tables stretched on and on and on, thus making informed table-hopping similarly impossible. Hence the dinner wasn't nearly as social an occasion as I'd expected.

The ballroom was full of security--tough guys in tuxes, wearing Secret Service-style earpieces and talking into their hands. I don't know whether this was standard operating procedure or arose from the fact that Stephen King is in the middle of a much-publicized bout with a stalker, but it seemed clear to me that his presence was part of the reason for their presence. I tried to say hello to him, and a big bruiser shoved himself in front of me and said, "Hey, Mac, you can't talk ta Mr. King." On the other hand, he backed down immediately when I told him I was a judge, and I was permitted to pay my respects to the guest of honor.

Of the 900 other guests, only about 120 were authors. I was the lone writer at my table--everybody else was from the business side of publishing. This, too, was a little disorienting, as I'd expected the mealtime chat to be rather more literary in tone, though I did get into a worthwhile conversation with a fellow from RR Donnelly Publishing (they're the ones who actually manufacture books) about the prospects for e-books (he was skeptical). The food, incidentally, was quite good for a gathering of this sort--I wasn't counting on rack of lamb.

The fiscal orientation of the audience may help to explain why Stephen King received two standing ovations as he was presented with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. As one of the Donnelly execs said to me during Standing Ovation No. 1, "That man has made a lot of money for a lot of people in this room."

King's speech was interesting. He was clearly moved by the honor--he choked up. He was funny and unpretentious when paying tribute to his wife and talking about the "vulnerability" to self-doubt of poor, struggling authors (such as himself when young). I suspect he was the first National Book Award laureate ever to say "Oh, shit!" in his acceptance speech (he was describing the way an honest author might portray a terrified character in extreme circumstances). And he was simultaneously a bit defensive and more than a little bit aggressive when he informed the crowd that they'd be making a mistake if they treated their decision to give him the prize as an act of "tokenism." He said (repeatedly) that he didn't write for money, that genre fiction deserved to be taken seriously, and that the judges of the National Book Awards had an obligation to read the best-selling books that are shaping American popular culture (I'm paraphrasing from memory, but that was the gist of his complaint). "Bridges can be built between the so-called popular fiction and literary fiction," he declared, and to that end he supplied us with a long reading list of popular novelists whom he commended to our attention, among them Elmore Leonard and John Grisham. (He also mentioned Patrick O'Brian.)

The confrontational tone of King's speech startled me--I'd never heard him talk before. Had it been adequately reported this morning, I think it would already be stirring up no small amount of controversy in the literary sector of the blogosphere. The reason why I approached him, by the way, was to ask if he'd made arrangements to publish it. He was polite (just) but brisk when he said that he thought somebody "already had dibs" on it. I hope it gets into print in some form or other, because it deserves to be talked about extensively.

King didn't give the only attention-getting speech of the night. Carlos Eire spoke at unexpected length--eloquently and effectively--upon being given the nonfiction award for Waiting for Snow in Havana. He, too, was moved to the point of tears, but he wasn't so disconcerted as to forget to point out to us that had he published Waiting for Snow in Havana in Cuba rather than America, he wouldn't have been receiving an award in New York--he'd be locked up in one of Fidel Castro's prisons. It was a surprising speech to hear at a gathering of New York literary types, who aren't accustomed to being reminded that to be an honest writer in Cuba is to run the constant risk of being thrown into a jail not fit for animals (Eire's words).

Polly Horvath, who received the prize for Young People's Literature, gave a speech that lasted for about 15 seconds, and her brevity amazed and delighted everyone at my table. C.K. Williams, the poetry winner, read one of his poems in lieu of giving a speech, and it, too, was short. (I very much admired his nerve.)

Then Shirley Hazzard stole the show. Here's how the New York Times described her acceptance speech:

She accepted the award before a crowd of 900 writers, editors and publishers, and urged American writers to remain aware of their immense power in the world and their consequent responsibility not to degrade the language they had been given.

"We're drowning in explanations," she said. "What we need is more questions."

What the story didn't say is that Hazzard was chiding Stephen King--politely, but by name, and she made no bones about it--for telling the NBA judges what they ought to be reading. My guess is that she is more accustomed to weighing her words than speaking off the top of her head, for her remarks, though brief, weren't nearly as pointed as they seemed, and you could tell she was torn between her obligation to be tactful and her desire to tear a piece off King. Nevertheless, it was an unambiguously confrontational moment, and an electric one.

That's about the size of it, though I do want to add a few last words about the experience of being an NBA judge. We considered 436 books (some of them very, very briefly, but they all got talked about at some point in the past few months). We never raised our voices, never argued with one another, never got angry. Our deliberations were civilized, collegial, and great fun. When we met yesterday afternoon to make our final selection, it was the first time all five of us had been in the same room at once--we mostly deliberated via e-mail and in conference calls--and the atmosphere, far from being tense, was positively festive.

Yes, it was hard work, and I really wish the NBA would break up the nonfiction award into at least two parts: it isn't easy or fair to directly compare histories, biographies, and memoirs, as we had to do. But we did it, and though I'm sworn to secrecy as to the particulars of our discussions, I think I can speak for the whole panel when I say that we were collectively pleased and proud to give the prize to Waiting for Snow in Havana. I gather that not all literary prizes are awarded in so companionable an atmosphere, so I hate to disappoint you by not reporting any fist fights, but the sad truth is that I had a wonderful time being a judge for the National Book Awards.

UPDATE: More details of the ceremony are getting into print. For a reliable wire-service account (by way of Maud) with good quotes from the King and Hazzard speeches, go here. Looks like the Times punted on this one....

Either way, we're glad you stopped by. If you had fun, come back tomorrow...and bring a friend. The easy-to-remember alternate URL is www.terryteachout.com, which will bring you here lickety-split (as, of course, will the longer address currently visible in your browser).

Welcome.

Once you've looked at the whole list, which is quite spectacularly impressive, tell me this: whatever your political beliefs or your personal opinion of Bill Clinton, do you really, truly believe these are his 21 favorite books?

I'm not saying they aren't. But having spent a good number of years writing editorials about politics for a New York newspaper--and thus having spent quite a bit of time talking to politicians of all kinds--I'm also not disposed to take such a list at face value, even when it comes from a man who's known to be unusually smart. Politicians, after all, rarely make any public statements not precisely calculated to enhance their popularity in as many quarters as possible.

Don't take my word for it. Take this person's words for it:

A walking, talking person-shaped but otherwise not very human amalgam of "positions," that familiar, tirelessly striving figure interviewed on the evening news who resoundingly tells you what he is thinking--and you keep wondering whether you should believe a word of it. These are people who don't seem to live in the world so much as to inhabit some point on graph paper, whose coordinates are (sideways) the political spectrum and (up and down) the latest overnight poll figures.

That's from Meg Greenfield's Washington, a memoir written in secret by an old Washington hand (she ran the editorial page of the Washington Post for years) who made sure it wouldn't be published until after her death. She mentioned a few exceptions to the rule, but not many, and Clinton wasn't one of them.

I'd very much like to think that Bill Clinton has read and reflected on each and every one of those high-voltage books. I loathe living in a time when most people's snap reaction to such a list is to reflexively assume the converse. I don't like being cynical about politicians. I'd dearly love to suppose that a former President of the United States had read Homage to Catalonia. And perhaps this one has. Here's hoping, anyway.

I'm not sure I totally agree that the books are about Maturin's inner life. I think there is more of that in the later books than the earlier ones, Master and Commander, Mauritius Command, Desolation Island, and a couple of others. Maturin is a complex character, and I believe that O'Brian fell in love with developing his story as the saga went on.

The notion that O'Brian created this character, set him loose in the novels, and proceeded to fall in love with him and let his story take over, makes me want to read those novels even more. The whole idea of literary characters having, or acquiring, a life of their own, apart from the mind of the author, is of course a seductive one. I may have first encountered it in Edward Gorey's first book, The Unstrung Harp, or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel, where the tortured author, uncomfortably mid-book, is confronted by his characters at the top of his staircase in the middle of the night. They hover there, mutely imploring him to do something with them.

But when the character is in a series--i.e., the relationship is long-term--then serious emotional involvement must threaten to supplant mere stalking. So what do you think, TT? Does O'Brian fall for Maturin in media res? And how does Aubrey feel about that?

ODID is absolutely right, and I squirm to admit it. (Nobody's father should be right.) To be sure, Stephen Maturin is a more than sufficiently interesting character in the earliest books, but I do think it took O'Brian a bit of time to start identifying personally with Maturin. Once he did--and in particular when he began writing about Maturin's obsession with Diana, the love of his life--the focus of the series shifted.

Incidentally, here's a story I've always wanted to tell in public. In my New York Times Book Review piece about O'Brien's The Yellow Admiral, I made the following comment:

If Evelyn Waugh or Anthony Powell (or Anthony Trollope, for that matter) had been writing these books, the curve balls would have started flying several volumes back; Diana, for example, might have been killed off, and Stephen's resulting grief used to deepen our understanding of his personality. But Mr. O'Brian coddles and cossets his darlings instead of murdering them, a sure sign of loss of nerve: there are by now at least a dozen untouchable continuing characters in the series, all of whom must be tended, watered and trotted out for their annual star turns.

And do you know what? Somebody really important died in the very next volume, The Hundred Days. (I won't say who, since you're clearly teetering on the verge of Aubrey-Maturin addiction.)

Anthony Trollope wrote in his Autobiography about how he went to his club one day, overheard a pair of clergymen complaining about one of his recurring characters, then went straight home and killed her off in the book he was writing, The Last Chronicle of Barsetshire. Ever since The Hundred Days was published, I've always wondered whether I might have similarly contributed to the demise of...well, never mind.

When coolness is all, nothing is so deadly as to be declared old-fashioned. So please don't get me wrong when I say that Nilo Cruz's "Anna in the Tropics," which opened Sunday at the Royale Theatre, is old-fashioned in the best sense of the word. It's melodramatic, unabashedly poetic and perfectly serious--and it won a Pulitzer Prize from a panel of judges who'd never seen it on stage, a circumstance that left me wondering whether it could possibly be any good, especially in light of the suspiciously convenient fact that Mr. Cruz was (quoth the press release) "the first Latin American to win the coveted prize for drama." Nobody ever went far wrong questioning the motives of Pulitzer judges, but this particular bunch, God knows how, managed to hit the target. "Anna in the Tropics" touched me as much as anything I've seen since I started writing this column....

I also very much liked the new production of Shakespeare's Henry IV that just opened at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, directed by Jack O'Brien and starring Kevin Kline as Sir John Falstaff:

He's properly sly and unctuous, and if his Falstaff is perhaps a bit too much the roguish clown, he nonetheless rises with ease to the terrible moment when Prince Hal (Michael Hayden) betrays him. "I know thee not, old man," declared the newly crowned king, and the audience gasped--I'm not exaggerating--as Mr. Kline reeled at the shock of his public humiliation.

As I say, there's much else to like about this "Henry IV." Mr. O'Brien imposes no high directorial concepts of his own, dressing his players in conventional period garb and letting Shakespeare be Shakespeare....It's Shakespeare for moviegoers, in short, "popular" in the same pleasing way that "Anna in the Tropics" is old-fashioned. It runs through Jan. 11, and you won't be sorry to see it.

No link, so to read the whole thing (including my two cents' worth about Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which closed after one performance, which was one too many), buy today's Journal and look me up in the "Weekend Journal" section, which is worth reading for all sorts of other reasons.

Of all the many reactions I've seen, this one struck me as especially worthy of note:

When is it appropriate to make lists and start lecturing and when is it wiser to keep a steady campaign going, to talk about books one loves, to highlight what makes genre fiction so good and complementary, even, to literary fiction?...

Good writing is the key. It's in places we don't necessarily expect it to be, and comes in many different forms. Let's keep our minds open and welcome all the possibilities. No, literature isn't a "competition," as Hazzard put it, and neither should people feel any sense of guilt that they aren't reading the authors King recommends. These things take time, obviously. But labels are just that, designations often arbitrary. If it's good, then that's all that should matter.

Read the whole thing here. It's by Sarah Weinman, who blogs at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, where she writes regularly (and smartly) about mysteries and other related matters.

What struck me about this posting is its openness to the full range of potential aesthetic experience--an openness that Shirley Hazzard, as fine a writer as she is, appears to lack. Like Hazzard, I've never read any of Stephen King's books (though I mean to), but I do read a moderate amount of genre fiction, and I think some of it deserves to be taken quite seriously. Raymond Chandler and Patrick O'Brian, for instance, both merit that kind of consideration, and so do James M. Cain and Rex Stout, albeit on a lesser level. I haven't read much of Georges Simenon, but what I've read I've found compelling. Among living writers, I enjoy Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake (about whose Parker novels I posted just the other day). And I'm lucky enough to count Laura Lippman, a first-rate mystery writer whose latest book is something more than that, as a friend.

As for Stephen King's speech, I think it was misguided at best. You don't change people's minds by calling them names, which he came perilously close to doing on Wednesday. If King changed any minds at the National Book Awards ceremony, I'm not aware of it. More likely, he hardened still further the resistance of his highbrow listeners to considering the possibility that he might have had a point--which he did.

To my way of thinking, genre fiction is by definition limited in its expressive possibilities, but those limits are a lot less restrictive than many, perhaps most people realize, especially by comparison with much of what is now thought of as "serious" fiction. Back in 1997, I wrote an essay called "Real Cool Killers" about Crime Novels: American Noir, a two-volume set published by the Library of America. (Yes, it'll be in A Terry Teachout Reader.) Here's part of what I said:

The Library of America, a nonprofit publisher whose dust jackets declare it to be "dedicated to preserving America's best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes," has brought out Crime Novels: American Noir, a pair of volumes containing eleven examples of what has lately come to be called "noir fiction," after the cinematic genre of the Forties known as film noir. No such fancy name was applied to these short novels when they first appeared in paperback, bedecked with cheesy cover art and tumescent blurbs promising their semiliterate purchasers the cheapest of thrills. Forty years ago, Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me and Charles Wileford's Pick-Up were smut; now they belong to the ages.

Arrant relativism? Well, yes, and then some. But while the noir novelists scarcely deserve to be ranked among America's best and most significant writers, their harsh tales are infinitely more readable than the chokingly tedious output of a thousand American writers of impeccably correct reputation, and I venture to guess that people will still be turning the pages of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Cornell Woolrich's I Married a Dead Man long after the likes of Toni Morrison and Allan Gurganus are remembered only by aging professors of literary theory who wonder why nobody signs up for their classes any more.

Does that put me in Stephen King's camp? I think not. I don't think The Long Goodbye is as good a book as The Great Gatsby, and I believe the difference between the two books is hugely important. But I also don't think it's absurd to compare them, and I probably re-read one as often as the other.

The point is that I accept the existence of hierarchies of quality without feeling oppressed by them. I have plenty of room in my life for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler, for Aaron Copland and Louis Armstrong, for George Balanchine and Fred Astaire, and I love them all without confusing their relative merits, much less jumping to the conclusion that all merits are relative.

In case you hadn't noticed, that's part of what this blog is all about--a big part.

Come back and see for yourself. A little suspense never hurt anyone. And there's plenty to read either way!

I wanted statuary. A broad wall with the name of the dead. A monument with allegorical figures, thank you. Grief and Pain Comforted by Hope – sure, make it that obvious. As much as I like some of the designs, especially the Garden of Light, they seem too high-maintenance. You can already imagine the sign on the door: The Garden of Light is closed today for repairs. Statues tell the story when the power goes off; statues don't need sheltering from the elements. Statues stand for a hundred years, and I cannot imagine any of these memorials lasting that long. There are memorials in Fargo for the First World War, and if they'd required electricity and gramophone cylinders they long ago would have fallen into disrepair. But the statue of the GAR soldier still stands in Island Park. He's not going anywhere. Don't even try.

Well said.

That's a nice number, but here's a nicer one: OGIC and I racked up just short of 3,000 page views on Friday, an all-time record for this site. And we did it without benefit of any links from non-arts blogs.

The distinction is significant. Our previous sky-high days have been fed by one-time mentions on such heavily trafficked warblogs as Instapundit, Lileks, andrewsullivan.com, and BuzzMachine. Yesterday was different. "About Last Night" posted its best numbers ever solely because of a profusion of links from the arts-related sector of the blogosphere.

This puts legs under my growing conviction that blogging might end up being the most important thing to happen to fine-arts journalism in my lifetime. It's not that, not yet, but when a four-month-old blog has a 3,000-hit day, something's happening out there.

To every arts blogger who mentioned us on Thursday and Friday, Our Girl and I thank you and thank you and thank you. And to every reader who visited us for the first time as a result, thanks for coming...and please come again.

In re books & favorite books, I think in this case everybody is right, or nearly enough right. Greenfield, Clinton, and you. Most politicians would name the Bible and, if pressed, the Gettysburg Address (I know it's not a book, but you get the idea). Their favorite car is any model American, a dwindling option. Their favorite food, hot dogs, fried chicken, or whatever inedible dish renowned in their constituency. Clinton at least came up with enough titles to start a neighborhood library, OK, a small neighborhood library. And I suspect that he has read them all, unlike me. That's not to say that Greenfield's and your skepticism is not well-founded. I spent 20 some years working in the Congress and I can testify that it is. In fact, I wrote a few of those lists.

Like I said, here's hoping.

Of course literature is a competition. Writers compete for prizes and readers and laurels, and anyone who fails to get all three (which is just about everyone) suspects the game is rigged in favor of the other, whoever the other might be.

But the real competition is for longevity, and this contest is the great equalizer. There are NBA winners that will fade into obscurity, just as there are million-book sellers who won't outlast their own lifetimes.

King chose to champion popular bestsellers. (Oh, and primarily men, in genres he likes, as opposed to women writing romance, which outsells everything else.) But what about midlist writers working in genre? What about the one-in-a-million self-pubbed writer who has something to say? I agree with Hazzard on this point: this was not the time or place to give others a reading list.

By the way, I never understood the outraged reaction to King receiving an award that had previously gone to Oprah Winfrey at an event that's been emceed by Steve Martin. I wonder if those who objected so vociferously to King have ever looked at the complete list of NBA winners over the years, which in 1980 recognized mysteries and westerns. John D. MacDonald is an NBA winner. As is Lauren Bacall, for her autobiography.

I'd noticed that Winfrey (not to mention Ray Bradbury) was among the previous winners of the lifetime-achievement award received by King, but I hadn't looked at more than the last couple of years' worth of National Book Awards. Very nice catch.

My correspondent is Laura Lippman, whom I cited the other day as a genre writer whose books I read, enjoy, and admire. If you haven't read any of Laura's Tess Monaghan novels (there are several) and want to try her out, you might consider starting with her latest book, Every Secret Thing, which is her first non-series novel. (Laura might not agree with me about this, but I think the Tess books, like the Aubrey-Maturin novels--or any other roman fleuve, for that matter--profit from being read in sequence. If that piques your curiosity, the first one is Baltimore Blues.)

That's it. Not many memories, and no trauma at all. Which makes sense: I was born in 1956, the exact midway point of the baby boom, making me just too young to have been marked by the JFK assassination or to have served in Vietnam. In both of those respects, we younger baby boomers are more like Gen-Xers than our older brothers and sisters.

I described the difference, as I understand it, in a 1990 essay:

The line of eligibility for military service in Vietnam divides the baby boomers almost exactly in half. The older boomers, the ones who faced the dilemma of whether or not to serve in Vietnam, are the people you usually think about when you hear the term "baby boomers," and Vietnam seems to have broken them. They were the ones who lost their nerve and were never heard from again. Were they victims of the damage the war did to America's national self-image? Or was it that most of the boomers didn't serve in Vietnam, that an entire generation of spoiled middle-class brats never had to undergo any kind of testing experience at all? I can't tell you. But it's clear beyond question that the older boomers, whatever their reasons, simply gave up somewhere down the line.

I didn't include that essay (it's called "A Farewell to Politics") in A Terry Teachout Reader because I don't think it's held up very well. Among other things, I completely failed to predict Bill Clinton, or anyone like him. But I do think I was right to differentiate pre-1956 boomers from post-1956 boomers. The older ones were touched by the Kennedy assassination, while the younger ones merely remember it, and not very well, either.

Today, of course, We Are All Boomers Now, at least in the eyes of the Gen-Xers and their younger brothers and sisters. I have lots of friends in their thirties and several in their twenties, and for them, JFK is...history. Likewise Vietnam and LBJ and Nixon, and even Ronald Reagan. And, of course, the older boomers are history, too. Clinton was their last hurrah, the exemplary figure who summed up in his person and actions the ethos of the pre-1956 boomers. Even before he came along, I didn't partake of that ethos, which may explain why I have so many younger friends.

For me, nostalgia is a powerful emotion (if it can properly be called an emotion), and many of the things for which I feel most intensely nostalgic took place in the Sixties. Yet I feel no nostalgia for The Sixties: The Decade, none whatsoever, no desire to hop in the time machine and check out all the things I was barely too young to have experienced at first hand. I'm much more interested in our current nicknameless decade, this astonishing age of anxiety and possibility, of terrorism and Two Americas and the Web.

As for John F. Kennedy, he doesn't mean a thing to me. As I wrote earlier this year in a review of the latest Kennedy biography:

Once he was a young, glamorous president-martyr whose posthumous reputation was scrupulously tended by the journalists and intellectuals he had so assiduously courted while he was alive. Then a new generation of scholars born too late to be seduced by Kennedy's charm took a closer look at his life and legacy, and discovered that the crown prince of Camelot was a reckless womanizer who installed a secret taping system in the Oval Office, was soft on civil rights and won the Pulitzer Prize for a book he hadn't written.

And, needless to say, the victim of an assassin's bullet, a dark day in American history that I barely remember. It's...history.

As for the interest of the mass media, my guess is that at some point fairly soon they'll wake up and realize that the youthful target market after which they lust so desperately couldn't care less about Michael Jackson. His arrest may be news, but his music is yesterday's news, if not the day before. Big Media is so Eighties.

I don't think younger writers feel that way any more, and one sign of the sea change is the fact that you simply don't see all that many younger syndicated columnists. I started to notice this as early as the Nineties, at a time when I shared the responsibility for editing a major op-ed page, that of the New York Daily News. We were constantly looking for new faces, but the syndicates weren't offering any, and it never occurred to me that the problem might be a lack of interest on the part of younger journalists, much less a lack of interest on the part of young people in journalism.

Now we all know better. Of late, the only significant change in the op-ed scene has been the hiring of David Brooks by the New York Times, and Brooks isn't a new face but a well-established writer of a certain age (mine). What's more, I don't get the impression that his column is causing all that much of a stir outside narrowly politico-journalistic circles. I don't think that's because of the quality of his work, either: I think it's because op-ed pages in general are losing their traction. I may be wrong, but it's not my impression that any newspaper columnist, syndicated or otherwise, is capable of stirring up any vast amount of talk nowadays.

You won't be surprised to see where I'm heading: my guess is that the buzz in opinion journalism has shifted to the blogosphere, partly because it's new and partly because it's so much less rule-bound. You can say anything you want on a blog (though I'm sure the day is not far off when one of the big bloggers will get sued for libel, which will doubtless cool things off considerably). Just as important, you can say it right now, not next Tuesday. Needless to say, none of this is true on an op-ed page, or anywhere else in a newspaper, for that matter.

Sooner or later, existing newspapers will make themselves over in response to the challenge of the Web. Probably later, though, because they're intensely bureaucratic institutions and thus are reflexively resistant to change. The New York Sun is an interesting case in point. It's a daily paper of conservative hue that was started from scratch a couple of years ago in an attempt to provide an opinion-driven alternative to the New York Times. In this respect, it's failed almost completely: the Sun's paid circulation remains trivially small next to that of the Times. Why, then, didn't its founders simply do an end run around the insurmountable difficulties of launching a newspaper in New York and instead conceive of the Sun as the first on-line daily paper? That would have gotten them instant attention, not to mention slashing their overhead to pieces. Yet not only did the Sun stick to the old printed-paper model, but it has lagged consistently behind the Times in establishing a meaningful Web-based presence. (At first, the Sun didn't have any Web site at all.)

The reason, I suspect, is that the Sun was launched by newspapermen who never gave any serious thought to making a complete a break with the traditions in which they were raised. The blogosphere, by contrast, is for the most part the creation of non-journalists and amateurs for whom such time-honored traditions carry no weight. Instead, it has arisen naturally from the organic properties of the Web.

I write for The Wall Street Journal, so you can take what I'm about to say with a stalactite of salt, but I think the Journal's Web site (which turns a profit) is the most potentially significant thing to happen to the newspaper business in decades. Yet the Journal is a quintessential establishment organ, the kind you'd assume would find it impossible to break with the past. That it has done so fascinates me. That no other newspaper has done so doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Which is why I'm betting that the first successful on-line "paperless" daily paper will be started by some 25-year-old hotshot who's never worked on a newspaper, and thus has nothing to unlearn.

As for the coming revolution in opinion journalism, it's already happened. I like David Brooks (he's an old friend), but I think maybe he got on the wrong boat. Not that I blame him in the least: after all, he gets paid for his opinions, which naturally matters to a family man. But for any writer who's more interested in changing minds than making money, the blogosphere is the place to be.

Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections

Rumor has it that OGIC has something up her elegantly tailored sleeve, but I could be wrong. She never tells me anything! So I'll know when you do....

In answer to your challenge issued here, I've sweated a bit, but I'm ready to come clean. And, by the way, Michael Blowhard's original post is an excellent and useful reminder that we don't have to bend our tastes to love everything of value. I'm sure you've noted all the interesting responses he's been getting in his comments section. Some definite patterns have emerged (and things have gotten more than a little heated).

For writers, I'll play my Virginia Woolf and William Blake cards.

Painters? Picasso, Renoir, Gauguin. Several years ago I might have said Monet, but the big show that passed through Chicago a while back reminded me that his paintings are not equivalent to their bland reproductions on a million coffee cups and mouse pads. But I might still cite his series paintings--making an exception for those enormous, very late water lilies.

Among filmmakers, I've seen a lot of Godard movies without chomping at the bit to see any of them again (well, maybe Breathless, but just for its iconicity). Films that fall into this category are harder for me to think of than anything else. It's a seductive medium. And, more so than with other art forms, I tend to believe that if I don't like a film, it's just not that good. Can you make any sense of that?

On Dickens we'll have to agree to disagree. Maybe we're reading different Dickens, but that man makes me laugh out loud. When he is sharp, he is very, very good, but when he's sentimental he's horrid. For me, the former outweighs the latter.

Whack--back into your court!

I'm with you, almost completely. None of the artists you mentioned rings the bell for me, least of all Godard (whom I've always thought to be wildly overrated). As for Picasso, I said my say about him when I reviewed the Museum of Modern Art's "Matisse Picasso" show for The Wall Street Journal:

In the visual arts, the race has always been between Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, and Picasso has always been the front-runner. Certainly Americans, with their puritan distrust of beauty, have typically favored his relentless experimentation to Matisse's less obviously innovative stylistic pilgrimage. Even now, Picasso's paintings look modern to the least tutored eye--you can't help but come away from them secure in the knowledge that you've been challenged with a capital C--whereas it is perfectly possible to skate happily atop Matisse's luscious, angst-free surfaces without feeling the slightest need to come to grips with the existential problem of...well, anything. (That's why Picasso's "Guernica," which wears its antiwar message like a bumper sticker, is far better known than any Matisse painting. It's modern art for modernists who don't like art.)

Rarely has an artist done more harm to his own reputation than Matisse did when he declared that he wanted his work to serve as "a kind of cerebral sedative as relaxing in its ways as a comfortable armchair," a remark as subtle and misleading as T.S. Eliot's observation that Henry James had "a mind so fine no idea could violate it." You have to think hard about it to understand how profound it is, just as you have to look hard at Matisse's paintings to see how radically original they were, and are....

Picasso's painting is the work of a spiritual contortionist who twists the visible world into angry patterns that betray his interior fury; Matisse, the disciplined sybarite, tells us instead of his joy.

My Dickens problem, on the other hand, vexes me. I know I'm missing something good, and can't seem to find a way around it (whereas I'm perfectly happy to be deaf to whatever good there is in the music of Wagner). Maybe you can set me straight.

Obviously I now need to up the ante by making a confession of significantly higher voltage. So, um...well...how about this? I wouldn't lose a bit of sleep if all the German paintings in the world vanished first thing tomorrow morning. Poof.

Top that, you piker.

Thanks, Greg.

I'm skipping town tomorrow, but the aforementioned Doc Films has a full plate of good stuff for the Chicago-bound this turkey week: there's Satyajit Ray's The Branches of the Tree Tuesday, Peckinpah's Wild Bunch Wednesday, a Hitchcock/Buñuel double feature on Thanksgiving, and last summer's sleeper Swimming Pool Friday.

I'd like to be better about keeping on top of all the fabulous cultural events going on around this fair city, but it's going to remain pretty catch-as-catch-can. For literary events, however, Sam at Golden Rule Jones has you covered. His site offers a frequently updated list of readings and talks, and some nice literary coverage to boot. An instant bookmark for Chicago litworm types.

My $85.00 evening at the Ahmanson, Los Angeles, was very enjoyable. I laughed, giggled, and smiled. I am so glad that in my many years of theatregoing I have never read a review prior to seeing the production.

Amen to that! I think reviews should be read after the performance, not before, mine included. And even then, don't let critics tell you what to think. I've known too many critics to take their opinions too seriously. A critic's point of view is just that--a point of view. The theory, of course, is that he knows more than you and thus can enhance your enjoyment of the art object under consideration, but it ain't necessarily so. Here's an almanac encore, from C.S. Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism, a book I passionately commend to your attention: "If we have to choose, it is always better to read Chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him."

Having said that, though, I must add that a goodly number of the people who wrote to me about my comments on The Producers, possibly including my present correspondent, have somehow gotten the mistaken impression that I didn't think the show was funny. When readers misunderstand me, I usually take it for granted that I failed to make myself clear, but in this case I don't think I'm to blame. I said The Producers was out of date, not unfunny, and I described it as "nothing more (or less) than a virtuoso reminiscence of the lapel-grabbing, kill-for-a-laugh shtickery on which so much of the stand-up comedy of my youth was based." Does that really sound like I didn't think it was funny?

I sometimes wonder whether the professional deformation of bloggers is the sort of black-or-white opinionizing that leaves no room for carefully shaded qualifications. Around here, OGIC and I do our best to say exactly what we mean, at least at the moment we're saying it.

Leopold Stokowski, quoted in Oliver Daniel, Stokowski: A Counterpoint of View

I'm a journalist, not a publicist, and I normally wouldn't have thought twice about saying no, but Jane happens to be an old friend of mine (we met before she became successful). Since she spends most of her time on the road, we rarely get to see one another, so I agreed to be the mystery interviewer, and the record company promptly messengered over a top-secret "white-label" advance copy of Jane's new CD, which will be released next spring.

I put the album on, and was staggered. I knew it would be a major stylistic departure for Jane--I'd talked to her longtime producer about it a few months ago--but even so, I wasn't fully prepared for how self-revealing, even confessional, her music had become. As I listened and marveled (for the album is extraordinarily beautiful), I thought to myself, How on earth am I going to talk to Jane about this in front of a TV camera?

The record company sent a big black car to pick me up Sunday morning, and the driver whisked me to the discreet front door of a boutique hotel on a midtown side street. I made my way to a chic sardine can of a room into which had been stuffed an entire video crew. A few minutes later, Jane arrived, trailed by her assistant and her stylist. (Don't laugh--famous women musicians never step in front of cameras without first being fussed over by a stylist.) We hadn't seen one another for two years, but no sooner did she walk through the door than we were hugging and chattering, just as if she were fresh off the bus, hoping to make it in the big city. I told her I'd become a drama critic, and she giggled and said, "Not like Addison DeWitt, I hope!" (Jane has seen All About Eve more times than any straight person I know.) Once her makeup was in place, we sat down in a pair of high chairs, and after what seemed like a half-hour's worth of tinkering with the lights, the cameraman rolled the tape.

Like many performers, Jane is shy, which sometimes causes her to seem standoffish. In addition, she's learned from hard experience to be on her guard when talking to journalists. For her to speak frankly about so personal a work of art would thus have been difficult under the best of circumstances. Yet there we were, brightly lit and surrounded by a tight knot of technicians and handlers, and for a brief moment my heart sank. Then I screwed up my courage and asked a question, and within a matter of minutes we might just as well have been sitting together in an empty room, swapping stories and passing a bottle. We talked about the record, the experiences that inspired her to make it, and everything else that came into our heads. She came close to getting choked up at one point, and my own eyes filled with tears in response.

The cameraman signaled for us to take a break so that he could change reels. "Omigod, was that too much?" Jane asked. "I feel weak in the knees after talking about all that stuff. I've never really talked about it like that. Was I rambling? Did I sound dumb?" She ran to the bathroom to fix her face, and I let out a sigh. As a Kingsley Amis character once put it, I felt as if I'd just sat through a complete performance of La Traviata compressed into one and a half minutes. (It took a little longer than that, but you know what I mean.) Jane returned, the cameraman rolled the tape again, and we wrapped up the interview. More chatter, more hugs, then I descended to my waiting car and we went our separate ways.

As I headed home, I recalled a passage from one of my favorite books, André Previn's No Minor Chords: My Days in Hollywood:

I have never heard of a jazz musician complaining, "You never even called me once," or "Where have you been?"

It's not for lack of caring or that they aren't glad to see you, but chances are they haven't been that easy to find either, so why be accusatory? Only six months ago I went back into a recording studio to make the first jazz album I had made in twenty-five years, and I had taken out fail-safe insurance in the presence of Ray Brown, the indefatigable and brilliant bassist, and Joe Pass, a guitarist whose technique and inventiveness leave his colleagues open-mouthed. I knew them both well, I had worked with both of them a generation earlier, and we had been friends at that time. I walked into the studio, a quarter century of classical concerts later, and was instantly received with the kind of relaxed warmth usually based on twice-weekly dinners. Lots of jokes, some reminiscing, some future planning, and a great deal of music making. I can't remember an easier record to make, and I went home in the early hours of the morning with my nerves quiescent, my blood pressure down, and in a generally euphoric fog.

Most of my friends are musicians of one kind or another, and I used to be one myself, so I know what Previn is talking about. I didn't go home feeling euphoric--the interview had been too intense for that--but once again, I marveled at the mysterious ability of artists to pick up the threads of friendship after a long separation. I marveled, too, at the way in which Jane and I had somehow managed to shut out the world and talk. Perhaps this, too, is a special gift of performers, the gift of emotional concentration, for it is something they must do nearly every night of their lives.

At any rate, it's an amazing album. And yes, I really do have the best job in the world...except for my friend Jane. She's got me beat.

For most of his adult life Carlos Eire had tried to run away from Cuba. The island was his only briefly, for 11 years, before the Cuban revolution ushered in a world of heartache in which he was separated from his parents and spent years of hardship in the United States.

"I still think it's an evil place, and there's nothing I can do to fix it," said Mr. Eire, the new winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction for "Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy" (Free Press/Simon & Schuster). "The best thing I could do was to think that it was an accident I was born there."

Read the whole thing here.

Aaron Haspel over at God of the Machine has a brilliant little piece--provoked by what Terry and I wrote here and here--on why Henry James continues to be so popular in the books-into-movies game:

James only seems literary because, especially in the late novels, he is constantly trying to catch the precise attitudes of his characters toward each other, reflected not just in their conversation but their gestures and thoughts and tiny inflections.

Having given a sample passage from The Awkward Age, he goes on:

The passage is lovely in its way, but James is attempting something to which what James Baldwin called the "disastrously explicit" medium of prose is completely ill-suited. Half of it is stage directions, and it could be done better, and more compactly, with movie actors who can follow such directions-which admittedly is asking a lot. James tried, unsuccessfully, to write plays, but the stage, where the actors have to project to the back row, is still too histrionic for what he has in mind. What he needed was the talkies. If James had been born a century later I'm guessing he would have done most of his writing for film, and maybe tossed off a few novels in his spare time.

This sounds right, and after reading it I was struck with sudden insight into my love of Lost in Translation: Sofia Coppola's movie is a really very Jamesian pleasure. It does in visual language what James, in Aaron's account, bumped up against the limits of prose trying to do in his novels.

Aaron's account of James's modus operandi sheds real light on the success of Lost, which is clinched in the final scene. That scene is just saturated with feeling, and despite all its layers--joy, grief, hope, irony, loss--it manages not to be crushing, but somehow aloft. It is a rich, extraordinary moment. But it is made possible by the accumulated emotional content of many ordinary scenes that preceded it, in which nothing seemed to happen (golfing, flower-arranging, a great deal of staring out of windows).

Doesn't this start to sound like the classic complaint about James? Nothing happens--and it takes pages and pages not to happen. But I think he was up to something very much like Coppola is. He tried to capture in detail the psychic weather in which his characters acted. He did so by making the reader familiar with even their most fleeting, fugitive sensations and associations--to the extreme fatigue of many readers, but not mine. In the later novels, if you pay your dues, and follow the tortured syntax and absorb all of the complex relations, then you stand to be rewarded at the end, when a simple gesture, look, or word--loaded with meaning beforehand--makes everything fall apart or come together. It can blow you right over.

I'm as surprised as anyone to find myself comparing Henry James to Sofia Coppola, but I'm convinced that the movie is Jamesian in both narrative strategy and temperament. Furthermore, I would love to see Coppola try her hand at writing and filming an adaptation of one of the more recalcitrant James works, like What Maisie Knew or "In the Cage" (which has made me cry). Both of these highly interiorized works consist almost entirely of those "gestures and thoughts and tiny inflections" that Aaron pinpointed, and yet both have tremendous dramatic capacity. So how about it, Sofia?

So how rich is Fitzwilliam Darcy, anyway? What does ten thousand (pounds) a year in the aftermath of the Napoleonic War mean, really?

I have two answers, the first of which is $300,000 a year, and the second of which is $6,000,000 a year....

Read the whole thing here.

While I'm at it, kindly allow me to plug one of my favorite Web sites, Inflation Calculator, an on-line form which (in the words of its inventor) "adjusts any given amount of money for inflation, according to the Consumer Price Index, from 1800 to 2002." That may sound dry as dust, but spend just 30 seconds playing with Inflation Calculator and I bet you'll have it bookmarked in 35. I used it frequently in writing The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, and I commend it wholeheartedly to any writer--novelist, journalist, whatever--who ever has occasion to compare what things cost in 1865, or 1925, or five years ago, to what they cost now.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's New York Times obituary, incidentally, ends with the following paragraph:

Nor, surprisingly, did he deplore the decline of print as our main medium. "We forget that most of what people read when everybody read all the time was junk -- competent junk," he told U.S. News & World Report. "Now they get it from television. The casual entertainment people get in the evening from the box was what they used to get from the short fiction in The Saturday Evening Post. That magazine and others like it were the situation comedies and cop shows of their era. It is not a cultural loss that this particular use of literacy has been transferred from one medium to another."

A very smart man.

I mention this because a jazz musician I know has been singing "Black Crow" (from Hejira), and now I can't get its angular tune and strangely off-center harmonies out of my head:

There's a crow flying
Black and ragged
Tree to tree
He's black as the highway that's leading me
Now he's diving down
To pick up on something shiny
I feel like that black crow
Flying
In a blue sky

I took a ferry to the highway
Then I drove to a pontoon plane
I took a plane to a taxi
And a taxi to a train
I've been traveling so long
How'm I ever going to know my home
When I see it again
I'm like a black crow flying
In a blue, blue sky

I love the Great American Songbook with all my heart--and yet there are so many other songs that long to be played and sung. This is one of them.

Either way, we're delighted you stopped by. If you liked what you saw, come back tomorrow...and bring a friend. The easy-to-remember alternate URL is www.terryteachout.com, which will bring you here in a jif (as, of course, will the longer address now visible in your browser).

Welcome.

Ernest Newman, letter to Vera Newman, Apr. 7, 1920

The vivid, seafaring novels of Patrick O'Brian have been getting lots of attention since the release of the big-budget movie "Master and Commander." And they were doing all right without the movie: According to O'Brian's editor at Norton, Starling Lawrence, even before the movie came out O'Brian's books sold 4 million copies. "We're not exactly under a rock," he says.

But as popular as the tales of Lucky Jack Aubrey and his notoriously unseaworthy friend and shipboard physician Stephen Maturin are among readers, they are especially revered by real wind-and-mast sailors. To them, O'Brian speaks the secret code of the sheeted main, the furled jib and the main topgallant staysail.

"I've sailed all my life," says Bay Area venture capitalist Tom Perkins, speaking by phone from his vacation home in England, "and O'Brian never made a mistake about the wind or the sails."

Which is why it was such a surprise that when Perkins took O'Brian on an extended sailing trip, he had a startling revelation. O'Brian didn't have a clue about how a sailboat worked.

"That was the amazing thing," Perkins says today, still a little incredulous. "He didn't know anything about sailing."...

Read the whole thing here.

One day, running his thumb through the pages of Bleak House that remained to be read, Tony said, "We still have a lot to get through. I hope I shall be able to finish it before I go."

"Oh yes," said Mr. Todd. "Do not disturb yourself about that. You will have time to finish it, my friend."

For the first time Tony noticed something slightly menacing in his host's manner. That evening at supper, a brief meal of farine and dried beef, eaten just before sundown, Tony renewed the subject.

"You know, Mr. Todd, the time has come when I must be thinking about getting back to civilization. I have already imposed myself on your hospitality for too long."

Mr. Todd bent over his plate, crunching mouthfuls of farine, but made no reply.

"How soon do you think I shall be able to get a boat?...I said how soon do you think I shall be able to get a boat? I appreciate all your kindness to me more than I can say but..."

"My friend, any kindness I may have shown is amply repaid by your reading of Dickens. Do not let us mention the subject again."

"Well I'm very glad you have enjoyed it. I have, too. But I really must be thinking of getting back..."

"Yes," said Mr. Todd. "The black man was like that. He thought of it all the time. But he died here..."

If you know the book, you know the moral of the story. Terrible things can happen to those who read Dickens! Don't let them happen to you....

"What an ultramaroon." "You're...dethpicable." "Hmm. Pronoun trouble." "Of course you know this means war."

Ring any bells? No? Well, try this one on for size: "Ehh, what's up, doc?"

If that phrase doesn't make you feel like gnawing a carrot, you're probably not a likely buyer of "Looney Tunes Golden Collection," a four-DVD set containing 56 of the finest Warner Bros. cartoons from the golden age of big-studio animation. Otherwise, get ready to laugh yourself silly.

The Warner animated shorts of the '40s and '50s have long been a gaping hole in the fast-growing DVD catalogue. No more. Now you can revel in crisp, clear prints of such classic cartoons as "Rabbit of Seville" and "Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century," plus a full set of the bells and whistles without which no self-respecting DVD set is complete....

The future of animation belongs to the wizards of Pixar, and the day will surely come when they triumph over their computer-enhanced technique instead of being swamped by it. But when the last ink bottle is empty and the last paint brush has been put away for good, Bugs and Daffy will still be with us, one sly, the other spluttering, just as Wile E. Coyote will never stop chasing the Road Runner. They are as obsolete as a silent movie by Buster Keaton--and as imperishable.

There's lots more where that came from. Read the whole thing here.

If for some inexplicable and unacceptable reason you haven't yet purchased Looney Tunes Golden Collection, purge yourself by clicking here.

Don't be an ultramaroon--do it now.

P.S. If that's not enough to hold you for one day, 2 Blowhards has a really smart post on Looney Tunes: Back in Action.

Ned Beatty is a movie star himself, though not the big box-office kind. And he says Broadway has come to rely too heavily on celebrities, thrusting them into challenging roles they do not have the acting chops to handle.

Tucking into a plate of shrimp scampi after a recent matinee -- hold the angel-hair pasta, per the Atkins diet, please -- Mr. Beatty engaged in a candid assessment of his co-stars. He said he very much liked his glamorous colleagues personally: Mr. Patric, best known for the film "After Dark, My Sweet," and Ms. Judd, who starred in "Ruby in Paradise." He simply thinks, he said, that they are ill equipped for their parts: Brick, a brooding, boozing former athlete mourning his friend's death, and Maggie, his long-suffering wife who craves his attention.

Mr. Beatty said of Ms. Judd: "She is a sweetie, and yet she doesn't have a whole lot of tools. But she works very hard."

And of Mr. Patric: "He's gotten better all the time, but his is a different journey."

Read the whole thing here, instantly.

I don't agree completely with your point about reading a critic only after the performance. If you've followed a critic for any substantial length of time, you know with some precision where your tastes and his intersect and where they diverge. You know his enthusiasms, his antipathies, his idiosyncrasies. In short, you can often tell from what he thinks of a work whether or not you're going to like it. In this way, he can be quite useful to you as a consumer guide. And reliable guidance about what is worth seeing or reading is essential, for how is the ordinary guy (who doesn't have the time or resources to make many mistakes) to know which new novelist to pick up or which new cabaret performer to seek out without the help of his favorite critics?...

But of course you should always return to a good critic after experiencing the work. He can illuminate it, enlarge the experience, or put his finger on why you found it unsatisfying. For me, comparing insights and thoughts with my favorite critics is half the fun.

My correspondent has a very good point. I sometimes forget that I don't pay to see Broadway shows (or anything else, except movies). In a perfect world, everybody would experience art without first having it explained: no program notes, no wall labels, no interviews with the author, and--above all--no reviews. You'd go simply because you were interested, because you made a habit of going to see new things. Then, after the immediate experience, you'd seek out further information to help you put that experience in perspective (or, as my correspondent remarks, simply for fun). I think it's hugely important to make a serious and sustained effort to come to new works of art this way. But in order to do so, especially when you're talking about Broadway shows, you've got to have (A) a lot of spare time and (B) a lot of spare money. Otherwise, it's essential to call your shots, if only to avoid bankruptcy, and good reviewers can help.

Can, I said. How often do they help? How often do consumers routinely use reviews in that way--as a "consumer guide"? For me, the problem is less one of money than time. It's my job to attend all Broadway openings, so I don't need a guide to theater, nor do I typically look to reviews to point me in the direction of a new symphony or jazz album or museum exhibit. Movies, yes, in certain circumstances: there are one or two critics whose word is enough to send me to a new film. (I saw Next Stop Wonderland solely because of Stephen Holden's review in the New York Times.) More often, though, it's a profile of an artist that stimulates me to see or hear something I would otherwise have passed up. (That's why I went to see Ghost World--because of a New Yorker profile of Daniel Clowes that appeared prior to the film's release.) Sometimes I go because a description of the plot made me curious (as in the case of Chasing Amy), or because the buzz has become too loud to ignore (as in the case of Lost in Translation). Most often, I go to new things at the urging of friends whose taste I know and trust, Our Girl foremost among them.

So I suppose I was offering a counsel of perfection when I suggested that reviews should be saved for after the fact. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to at least approximate the ideally receptive state that comes from experiencing art objects stripped of the intervening scrim of words. Above all, try to trust yourself, to feel what you feel, not what you think you ought to feel. Granted, if you don't like Bonnard or The Four Temperaments or Falstaff or The Great Gatsby (the book, not the opera) or Charlie Parker's "Embraceable You," you're the problem, not the art--but that's no reason to pretend you feel otherwise, merely to keep trying to see what others see.

I'll close with another almanac encore, this one from Kingsley Amis: "All amateurs must be philistines part of the time. Must be: a greater sin is to be coerced into showing respect when little or none is felt." Yes.

Pauline Kael, When the Lights Go Down

What's more, Our Girl and I expect to rack up our 100,000th hit at some point in the next day or two (that's since we first went live on July 14).

Those numbers are pretty amazing for a new arts blog. Really amazing, in fact. So much so that I don't quite know what to say other than thanks to you all, from the bottom of my heart.

Having said that, I must now add that you probably won't see many new postings here, if any, on Wednesday. OGIC has pet problems, and I'm beset by two very bad deadlines. Still, I'll try to get something up, if only out of gratitude.

And now to bed. Look what time it is! I have pieces to write, and I need to get some sleep. See you later.

If you like "About Last Night," I'd say there's a better-than-even chance that you'll like The Skeptic, and that your friends will, too. Don't take my word for it, though: the reviews were staggeringly enthusiastic, as you can see for yourself by going here.

I blog for free but write for a living. If you'd like to support both causes, think about giving The Skeptic for Christmas, or buying a copy for yourself if you don't already have one.

To purchase the paperback, click here.

To purchase the hardcover edition, click here.

We return you now to our regularly scheduled blog.

With regards to your skeptical blog post about Bill Clinton's favorite books, you might want to take a peek at this old story about a dinner between Bill Clinton and Gabriel García Márquez.

By all accounts, Clinton knew his great books inside and out, and I'd be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one.

Click the link--the piece is definitely worth reading, and even taking seriously, up to a point.

On the other hand, it also leads me to suspect that like most artists, Señor Márquez doesn't know a tongue bath when he's on the receiving end of one. Neither, of course, did the artists whom John Kennedy, by all accounts a first-class philistine, buttered up so assiduously back in the days of Camelot.

Here's a word to the wise. When receiving praise from politicians, sing along with me: it ain't necessarily so....

If you're around on Friday, be sure to buy a Wall Street Journal and look up my review of Wonderful Town, which will run in that day's "Weekend Journal" section. I can't tell you what it says, but I promise it'll be worth reading.

In the meantime, have a happy Thanksgiving. We'll see you next week.

Orson Welles, letter to Peter Bogdanovich, c. 1968-72

In my absence, The Wall Street Journal ran my review of the new Broadway revival of Leonard Bernstein's Wonderful Town, which opened last Sunday. Since there's no link, and I expect most of you were elsewhere on Friday and thus didn't get a chance to see what I wrote, here it is:

Let's cut right to the chase: "Wonderful Town" is now the go-to show on Broadway. Donna Murphy and Jennifer Westfeldt are the best of all possible stars. Kathleen Marshall's dance-filled direction is picture-perfect. As for the songs, they're by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green--need I say more? If a visit to the Al Hirschfeld Theatre doesn't make you feel sunny all over, you need to consider switching to an industrial-strength anti-depressant.

The only thing I can't figure is why it took a half-century for "Wonderful Town," which opened this week, to receive its first full-scale Broadway revival. The legend of New York City, after all, is as potent today as it was in 1953. This is still the place where gifted folk from every small town on earth come to find their futures, and "Wonderful Town" is the quintessential expression of their quest. Based on "My Sister Eileen," the Jerome Chodorov-Joseph Fields play loosely adapted from the autobiographical short stories of Ruth McKenney, "Wonderful Town" tells the tale of Ruth and Eileen Sherwood, two adventurous sisters from Ohio who burn their bridges, find a basement apartment in Greenwich Village and find out that Manhattan really is all it's cracked up to be.

Simplicity is the keynote of this wonderful "Wonderful Town": John Lee Beatty's set is a see-through skein of skyscrapers and fire escapes, with an occasional backdrop flown in to orient the viewer. If you think a Broadway musical absolutely has to be financed by tapping the Federal Reserve, you may find the effect sparse, but for me it was just right. In reviewing the gazillion-dollar "Wicked" (which I liked), I suggested that it was really "a mini-musical à la ‘Godspell' trapped inside the body of a Brobdingnagian Broadway spectacular, signaling wildly to be let out." This is what I had in mind, a spare, uncluttered production that puts the show and its stars in the spotlight.

The plot, to be sure, is paper-thin, and in a less zesty staging, "Wonderful Town," with its period references and fresh-faced optimism, might seem more quaint than anything else. Not to worry: Kathleen Marshall, who did the dances for "Little Shop of Horrors," shows why choreographers make the best musical-comedy directors. Faced with the challenge of cramming the action into a comparatively shallow downstage space (this is a concert-style production in which the orchestra is placed on stage), Ms. Marshall weaves the actors in and out of one another's way with frisky precision. Imagine a frieze-like painting of New York street life, wound up and set in motion, and you'll get the idea.

The playing space may be smaller than usual, but it leaves plenty of room for good acting, and Donna Murphy knows what to do with it. The role of Ruth, the sharp-tongued older sister who's afraid she's too smart to get a man, was created in 1953 by Rosalind Russell, Hollywood's favorite dame-in-a-suit, and Murphy has that precedent clearly in mind. She pops off her wisecracks as if she'd eaten a bag of lemons, peel and all, and growls out her songs with just enough self-lacerating rue to make you want to hug her. I'm not old enough to have seen Russell, but she couldn't have been better than this. No one could.

Ms. Murphy can carry this show all by her leggy self. The good news is that, unlike Hugh Jackman in "The Boy From Oz," she doesn't have to. Instead, she's supported by Jennifer Westfeldt, a Broadway debutante best known as the co-star and co-author of the indie movie "Kissing Jessica Stein." Ms. Westfeldt plays Eileen, the good-hearted, slightly ditsy man magnet of "Wonderful Town," as a Lisa Kudrow-like variant of Jessica Stein--less neurotic, more adorable--and succeeds in the seemingly impossible task of not getting upstaged by Donna Murphy. You won't have the slightest trouble understanding why all the men in the cast follow her around like lovesick cocker spaniels, tongues unrolled.

What else? A discreetly trimmed book by David Ives, who has sharpened the punch lines without adding sore-thumb anachronisms. A 100% live, synthesizer-free 24-piece orchestra led to resplendent effect by Rob Fisher. Which brings us to those good old Bernstein-Comden-Green songs. Interestingly, none has become a standard, though cabaret singers trot out Ruth's "One Hundred Easy Ways (To Lose a Man)" from time to time. The reason is simple: "Wonderful Town" is a book show with musical numbers, not a quasi-opera like "West Side Story," and its best songs are funny, not touching. By the same token, it isn't the subplottish courtship of Ruth and Robert Baker (Gregg Edelman), the magazine editor for whom she flips, that drives the show, but the romance between the Sherwood sisters and the city with which they fall hopelessly in love.

I wondered whether so youthfully idealistic a musical would speak to a new generation of émigré New Yorkers suckled on cynicism, so I brought along a 20-year-old friend who, like Ruth and Eileen, came here full of hope and looking for glory. Guess what? She ate it up--and so will you. At a time when even the most case-hardened of Manhattanites toss and turn at night, "Wonderful Town" is a tonic reminder of why New York remains the capital of the land of dreams.

In other words, go. Soon. Now.

Karl Kraus, Beim Wort genommen

I would soon find that modeling wasn't simply a nude and high-paid sprawl on the chaise lounge (for that you have to turn to its illegal sister profession). It's hard work, akin to being a dancer. Twenty minutes stretch to infinity when you stand still. Add ten more -- and only discipline prevents you from falling like wet laundry from a line. Effortless poses of grace aren't so effortless. While everyone from icy Degas to libidinous Rodin bent necks and crushed spinal disks searching for the perfect position, history doesn't record the groans of their models. Then there's boredom -- to which I credit the glazed look in Mona Lisa's eye. Behind every thoughtful face at the Art Student's League is a woman asking, "When will it be over?"

Read the whole thing here. Please.

December 9: Lee Konitz, alto sax
December 10: John Hollenbeck, percussion
December 11: Jane Ira Bloom, soprano sax
December 12: Joe Lovano, tenor sax
December 13: Kate McGarry, voice
December 14: Kurt Elling, voice

Talk about an embarrassment of riches! I doubt if I can catch more than one or two nights, though I'd much prefer to hear them all. Aside from his astonishing roster of collaborators, Hersch happens to be one of the jazz pianists whose music I love best. Here's part of what I wrote about him a couple of years ago in the New York Times:

Mr. Hersch is frequently compared to Bill Evans--both pianists are greatly admired for their lyricism--but his approach to solo playing is far different. Though Evans made two well-received solo albums, he strongly preferred working with a trio, and his unaccompanied playing tended to be loosely improvisational and sketchy in texture. Mr. Hersch, on the other hand, improvises with the sharp conceptual clarity of a classical composer; instead of merely skimming atop the familiar chord changes of standard songs, he forges them into rigorously structured, wholly personal re-creations. "I like to play orchestrally--juggling several balls, having lots of layers of stuff going on," he says. Yet even at its most complex, his playing never sounds premeditated: it is as though each song is being spontaneously composed, on the spot and in the moment.

To which I need only add that there will be two shows each night, at 7:30 and 9:30, with an additional 11:30 show on Friday (Lovano) and Saturday (McGarry). Call 212-576-2232 for reservations, or to inquire about buying a three-night pass at a special discount.

Be there. I will.