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December 31, 2003

TT: Soon to be elsewhere

As you know, I'm headed for Chicago tomorrow via an Amtrak sleeper, there to see plays for The Wall Street Journal and revel in the company of Our Girl in Chicago, whom I've known and adored for years and years, even though she insists on living in another city, damn her. I probably won't be posting again until I get where I'm going. OGIC has been fearfully busy with her day job, which is why you haven't heard from her lately, but I'm hoping that she'll take up some of the slack in my temporary absence. Once I arrive at her place on Friday, I expect we'll have at least a few amusing things to report, but don't be surprised if nothing new turns up in this space for the next couple of days.

To all those who read us regularly, I send our affectionate and appreciative regards. Much to my surprise, "About Last Night" has become one of the most widely read arts blogs in the world. You have made us so. We thank you most humbly, and we promise to do our best to be as readable in 2004 as we were in 2003.

May the New Year bring you joy and love. May it bring us all peace. And should it fail on either count, may you find comfort in the blessed world of art.

Next year in Chicago!

Posted December 31, 1:20 AM

TT: Almanac

"Nobody has suffered more from low spirits than I have done--so I feel for you. 1st. Live as well as you dare. 2nd. Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold, 75 degrees or 80 degrees. 3rd. Amusing books. 4th. Short views of human life--not further than dinner or tea. 5th. Be as busy as you can. 6th. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you. 8. Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely--they are always worse for dignified concealment. 9th. Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you. 10th. Compare your lot with that of other people. 11th. Don't expect too much from human life--a sorry business at the best. 12th. Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion not ending in active benevolence. 13th. Do good, and endeavour to please everybody of every degree. 14th. Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue. 15th. Make the room where you commonly sit, gay and pleasant. 16th. Struggle by little and little against idleness. 17th. Don't be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice. 18th. Keep good blazing fires. 19th. Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion."

Sydney Smith, letter to Lady Georgiana Morpeth (1820)

Posted December 31, 1:18 AM

TT: Birthday card

A reader writes:

A small request, hmmm? Howzabout, on 12/31, you (pretty please with sugar on top) mention Milstein on the blog? Something like: "Today is the 100th birthday of the greatest violinist of the 20th century - Nathan Milstein. So, get out there and buy one of his albums today!" You could also put in a plug for your upcoming article on Milstein and Kaufman (heh, heh).

I'm delighted to oblige. The "Milstein" in question is Nathan Milstein, whose name is now remembered mainly by aging violin connoisseurs--Jascha Heifetz got much better press--but who was, if not the greatest violinist of the 20th century, certainly one of the half-dozen greatest ever to make recordings. He never became as big a celebrity as Heifetz because his playing wasn't as idiosyncratic: his tone was lean and focused, his interpretations poised and patrician, not exactly restrained but not exhibitionistic, either.

Such a musician isn't for everyone, any more than a singer like Nicolai Gedda or a painter like Vuillard suits all tastes. Milstein lacked that slight touch of vulgarity--the common touch, if you like--that so often helps to bridge the emotional gap between artist and audience. Yet those who responded to his playing did so passionately, and there were more than enough of them for Milstein to have a long and satisfying career. He even wrote a wonderful memoir, From Russia to the West, in which he speaks with occasionally hair-raising candor about colleagues and contemporaries (among them his good friend George Balanchine, whose personality Milstein evokes with remarkable vividness).

Milstein made a lot of records, and most of the best of them have been transferred to CD and are fairly easy to find. If you want to jump in head first, The Art of Nathan Milstein, a budget-priced six-disc boxed set, contains a good-sized chunk of his working repertoire. If you'd rather start with a smaller taste, I recommend a CD that couples his early stereo recordings of the Tchaikovsky and Brahms concertos, available from amazon.com for the preposterously low price of $3.98. (Both performances are also included in The Art of Nathan Milstein.) You might also try his superb remake of Bach's six sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin--the best complete set ever recorded, as far as I'm concerned.

As my correspondent notes, I'm planning to publish an essay about Milstein and Louis Kaufman in Commentary some time in 2004. But why wait? At the very least, give that Tchaikovsky-Brahms CD a spin. I don't promise to refund your money, but if you aren't won over by Milstein's soaring performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, I'll be amazed.

Posted December 31, 1:09 AM

December 30, 2003

TT: Almanac

"Everybody who lives in New York believes he's here for some purpose, whether he does anything about it or not."

Arlene Croce, Afterimages

Posted December 30, 9:05 AM

TT: Here today

Regular readers of this blog know that I'm afraid to fly, a mild but nonetheless persistent phobia that came calling from out of nowhere a few years ago and settled in for an extended visit. I'm gradually getting better at it, thanks in large part to the patient counsel of a psychotherapist (she's the one who talked me into riding a roller coaster this past summer), and now I can fly with minimal discomfort so long as the plane doesn't bump around too much.

Last night I flew from St. Louis, the city closest to Smalltown, U.S.A., to LaGuardia Airport. I try not to fly at night, but this time I decided to give it a go, and at the end of 45 anxious minutes spent pushing through a cold front, our smaller-than-usual jet popped out of the clouds and started its descent into the New York area. Suddenly the once-invisible earth below me was lit by a million glittering pinpoints of copper, gold, and chilly blue-white. Not for the first time, I wondered why no painter has ever taken for his subject what one sees from the window of an airplane. Surely Whistler would have known what to do with the lights of a city, just as Constable might have reveled in the spectacle of clouds seen from above. I remembered, too, that as much as I dislike flying, it allows me to gaze as long as I want at a sight that can be seen nowhere else.

The captain told us to look out the right-hand windows, and all at once they were filled with Manhattan. I thought of flying past the southern tip of my adopted island home on the Sunday after 9/11 (I always think of that terrible day whenever I fly back to New York), but the red-and-green Empire State Building swept the unwanted, unforgettable picture out of my head. The plane swooped and dipped, Manhattan vanished from view, and I found myself staring down at Riker's Island, so close I could have tossed a bag of pretzels out the window and hit a guard tower. Then I was on the ground, my fears forgotten, almost home and happy to be.

I've lived in New York for the better part of two decades now, and you'd think I'd have gotten used to it. In a way, I suppose I have, but even now all it takes is a whiff of the unexpected and I catch myself boggling at that which the native New Yorker really does take for granted. As for my visits to Smalltown, U.S.A., they invariably leave me feeling like yesterday's immigrant, marveling at things no small-town boy can ever really dismiss as commonplace, no matter how long he lives in the capital of the world.

My cab swept me across the Triborough Bridge and the Upper East Side, past the Guggenheim Museum and through Central Park, straight to the front door of my building. I trotted up the steps, unlocked the door to my apartment, and turned on all the lights. A quick look at the walls assured me that all my prints were present and accounted for: here an Avery, there a Marin, Frankenthaler over the couch, Wolf Kahn over the mantelpiece. I dropped my bags, locked the door, and sighed deeply. Once again I had made the impossible journey from Smalltown to New York, from home to home.

Posted December 30, 8:27 AM

December 29, 2003

TT: In transit

I'll be spending Monday making my slow way from Smalltown, U.S.A., to the Upper West Side of New York. On Tuesday and Wednesday I'll be back at my desk, writing and blogging and blogging and writing. I have a way cool adventure planned for Thursday: I'm taking an Amtrak sleeper from New York to Chicago, something I've always wanted to do (I love trains). I'll be hanging out with Our Girl in Chicago and seeing plays for The Wall Street Journal all weekend, returning to New York via Amtrak on Monday.

Mail will be answered at some point in the interstices of all this activity.

See you Tuesday.

Posted December 29, 12:59 PM

TT: The reason why

As I start to sift through all those blogs that went unread during my week in Smalltown, U.S.A., I'm digging up all sorts of interesting things. Here, for instance, is a revealing little ripple from Instapundit:

BLOGGERS DON'T NEED EDITORS OR PUBLISHERS: Strangely, this leads Editor and Publisher to dub bloggers "self-important."

Self-important, self-sufficient. Whatever.

UPDATE: Stefan Sharkansky emails: "I'd add 'self-correcting', with the emphasis on 'correcting'. Can you recall the last time any newspaper issued a correction for factual errors on the editorial page? I can't."

Me, neither. And the thing we in the blogosphere have discovered that has yet to penetrate through the thick skulls of editorial-page editors is this: Self-correction is interesting. It's one of the reasons why I like reading blogs, and why I like writing this one.

I know something about editorial pages. I worked on a good one for several years, and also wrote a biography of H.L. Mencken, who spent a sizable chunk of his career doing the same thing. As a result of his experience, Mencken had nothing but contempt but most editorial pages and editorial writers--you can find the details in The Skeptic--but he made a special point of printing any letter to the editor that attacked him personally.

OGIC and I get a lot of e-mail. Not only do we answer all of it, we post some of it, invariably to readable effect, because virtually none of it comes from cranks. It comes from smart people who read what we write and have smart things to say about it--sometimes amplifying what we've written, sometimes challenging it. And because neither one of us makes the mistake of assuming that we're always right, we're happy to keep the ball rolling by letting you show that we're not.

The ease and immediacy with which blogs permit self-correction, public response, and further amplification is central to their appeal. Take another look at that Instapundit item: first he quotes from (and links to) a published article. Then he comments on it. Then, a little later, he receives and posts a comment on his comment. All this happened well within the space of what used to be called a "news cycle." In fact, it probably happened inside of an hour--maybe even less. OGIC and I (usually) aren't that quick on the draw with our e-mail, but the point is that we could be, given sufficient time. And once we do get on the stick and post what you have to say, it frequently results in a whole series of profitable exchanges involving all sorts of other people. What's more, our referral log keeps us up to date about what other bloggers have to say about us, and when appropriate we pass that on, too.

Is this "self-important"? I don't think so. If anything published in this space is important, it's because you make it so, by reading it and responding to it and linking to it--a process that can take place not in a month or a week, but right now. Which is why blogging has caught on so quickly, and is becoming an increasingly significant part of the world of journalism: it's fast, and anyone can do it. You don't need a degree in journalism (nobody needs a degree in journalism), much less a printing press. To re-paraphrase the much-paraphrased words of A.J. Liebling, freedom of the press used to be for those who owned one. Now it's for anyone with a computer, a modem, and something to say.

Take it from one who's spent his entire adult life writing for and editing newspapers and magazines: except for politicians, journalists as a group are the most self-important people in the world. That's why some of them are so horrified by blogging, and go out of their way to knock it. They don't like the idea of a level playing field for opinion. They like it much better when theirs are the only opinions in play. And now they're out of luck. As Rodgers and Hammerstein might have put it, ain't that too damn bad.

Posted December 29, 10:45 AM

December 28, 2003

TT: I guess she told him!

Apropos of my recent exchange with Felix Salmon, my sister-in-law writes from three blocks away in Smalltown, U.S.A.:

You may assure your readers and Mr. Salmon that culture can be found in venues other than a radio broadcast from the Met that the midwestern Smalltown USA did not even know existed. SEMO [southeast Missouri] offers violin, piano, etc lessons to young children, (my nephew, age 4, takes violin lessons) The professor plays some classical music and has the children name the piece. Your own niece enjoys a variety of music without having been exposed to a radio broadcast. We sought out different events for her to see if she enjoyed them. SEMO also offers opportunities to listen to small classical and jazz concerts and see plays (even if they are only performed by students) and also brings various ballets in to perform at the Show Me Center [a local auditorium] from time to time. The Fox Theatre in St. Louis is 2 hours from us and offers a variety of cultural and general entertainment. We have played various radio stations that were never before accessible to us by using our computer. The cost is not as prohibitive as some like to believe - I worked ours into a cable package upgrade. It is only a matter of what it is worth to the individual user. I have even looked into the satellite radio receiver for your brother which would certainly be better quality than our computer speakers, but find that the expense is not worth it to us at this time.

I am sorry this is so long, but it irritates me that someone would imply that you are a snob and feel only that the affluent deserve opera (especially since your brother and I are neither affluent or elite).

My sister didn't mention the St. Louis Symphony, Art Museum, and Opera Theater, which are also two hours away, or Smalltown's own Little Theater, which has been active for something like a half-century--I performed in it when I was a teenager. Otherwise, I'd say she sums up cultural possibilities in Smalltown, U.S.A., pretty thoroughly.

Incidentally, my week with a dial-up connection has convinced me that the future of broadband is now, not because it's anywhere near universal but because so many Web sites (including a number of bloggers in the right-hand column) have lately become all but impossible to use without it. I was a very late adopter--I actually launched "About Last Night" using dial-up, unlikely as it may sound--and it was only through a cable package that I made the big leap. I suspect that's how most as-yet-unbroadbanded people will do the same thing.

Posted December 28, 11:29 AM

December 27, 2003

TT: Almanac

"One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan--or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan."

Norman Podhoretz, Making It

Posted December 27, 12:38 PM

TT: Among the Jello molds

Earlier this evening, three generations of family converged on my mother's house in Smalltown, U.S.A., there to eat dessert and talk. We'd just dined together in the banquet room of the Grecian Steak House--the first time my mother's family has ever eaten its collective Christmas dinner in a restaurant, or at any time other than on the night before Christmas. Things went surprisingly well, too, considering that we'd torn up a half-century's worth of family tradition in one fell swoop. Two dozen of us crammed ourselves into the living room, desserts balanced on knees, and discussed in detail all the things that small-town families like to talk about whenever they get together. (More often than not, illness is the number-one topic, closely followed by restaurants.)

I don't know how typically American my mother's family is nowadays, though there was a time not so long ago when we would have seemed far more typical than we do now. My mother was born and raised in the country, though not on a working farm (her father worked in a shoe factory). Most of her family lives within a two-hour drive of Smalltown and its environs. We all work for a living, pursuing a wide variety of blue- and white-collar jobs. One of us is divorced, two childless, the rest ensconced in more or less conventional nuclear families. Only about half of us have college degrees.

I've always been the odd man out. I'm the only member of the extended family who lives in New York City, the only one who is a member of what Joseph Epstein calls the "verbal class," and the only one to have become seriously interested in the arts (though the wife of one of my cousins is an amateur painter whose favorite artist is John Singer Sargent). Everyone is proud of me for having made my way in the world, but only in the most general of senses, and I suspect that no more than three of my relatives, not counting my mother, read my last book.

None of this bothers me. I'm glad to be a self-made man, and I also find it surprisingly useful to have been born into a small-town family. For one thing, the experience of growing up in southeast Missouri made me a cultural realist. (I learned early on that there's no such thing as a really famous writer.) It has also given me an understanding of Red America not shared by many New Yorkers of my acquaintance. I've changed a lot since I left town in 1974, but part of me remains deeply rooted in the place where I grew up. I'm like a walking, talking focus group: I almost always know what will fly in southeast Missouri, and what will flop.

Given all this, I doubt you'll be surprised to hear that I think The Great Gatsby is the great American novel, but I also have a special place in my heart for a much less well-known novel by John P. Marquand called Point of No Return. Published in 1949, it's the story of an ambitious young boy from a small town in Massachusetts who makes his way to Manhattan, there to become the vice president of a small private bank. Point of No Return is no Horatio Alger tale--Charles Gray, the hero, is deeply alienated and riddled with self-doubt--but neither is Marquand cynical about the complex experience he portrays. He describes with great psychological sensitivity the long journey from Clyde, Massachusetts, to the suburbs of New York City, and though Point of No Return isn't a great novel, I've never read any other book, whether fiction or non-fiction, that did a better job of putting the feelings of a man like Charles Gray on paper. My life wasn't much like his, but some of my feelings were, and I always think of him--and of Clyde--whenever I spend an evening with my mother's family.

Posted December 27, 12:37 PM

TT: Afraid to look

It takes forever for me to access my e-mail via a dial-up connection, so I haven't even looked. No doubt the bag will be overflowing by the time I return to New York on Monday, at which time I'll see what you all wrote this week.

Incidentally, I haven't forgotten that I promised to answer some of last week's accumulated e-mail on the blog during my visit to Smalltown, U.S.A. I still mean to do just that, but once I got here, it struck me (perhaps wrongly!) that at least some of you might be no less interested in what I was up to out here in southeast Missouri. For those who aren't, relief is on the way.

Posted December 27, 10:58 AM

TT: That's Mr. Eroica to you, pal

By way of Reflections in D Minor, an on-line quiz that purports to answer a question of the highest importance to all music-minded folk: What key signature are you?

Here's the answer I got:

E-flat major - you are warm and kind, always there for your friends, who are in turn there for you. You are content with your comfortable life and what you are currently achieving; if you keep in this state you will go far.

Go figure.

Posted December 27, 3:50 AM

December 26, 2003

TT: De profundis

Where are you, OGIC? The world longs to hear your voice!

Speaking of my sister-in-law (see below), I mentioned at the dinner table yesterday that I was going to Chicago next weekend. "So," she replied, "will you be seeing the Girl?" It took me two beats before I realized that she was referring to Our Girl in Chicago.

That's fame.

Posted December 26, 4:36 AM

TT: A matter of perspective

My mother, who like most septuagenarians doesn't quite grasp what a blog is, just poked her head in my bedroom and asked, "Are you actually working on something, or are you just piddling?"

Possible answer: "Why, Mom, I'm busy shaping the cultural conversation."

Probable response: "I'd rather you took out the trash."

Here's a better answer: if all of you out there in the blogosphere will be so kind as to click on this link and place an advance order for A Terry Teachout Reader (out in May from Yale University Press), then I can tell my mother I was working. Otherwise, I was just piddling.

(P.S. Even if you don't want to order the book just yet, click on the link anyway and you can see the dust jacket!)

Posted December 26, 4:31 AM

TT: A Christmas story

In case you're just joining us, I'm blogging this week from Smalltown, U.S.A, the southeast Missouri town where I grew up and where most of my family still lives. My sister-in-law, who lives in Smalltown and reads this blog from time to time, e-mailed yesterday to inform me that she and my brother now have a high-speed modem, thank you very much. (I had previously mentioned in this space that I was having trouble getting used to the dial-up connection at my mother's house.) Of all the new wrinkles that have come to Smalltown, U.S.A., since my last visit home, that one might just be the most significant.

I haven't gotten around to replying to Felix Salmon's recent comment on what I wrote about the Metropolitan Opera's radio broadcasts, but it's relevant here, so I'll mention it now. In case you didn't see my posting, I was writing in response to an article by Tony Tommasini, the chief classical music critic of the New York Times, in which he explained why it was a bad thing that the Met broadcasts, which have lost their corporate funding, might be in danger of cancellation. I begged to differ:

[T]he future of classical radio lies not in what has come to be called "terrestrial radio" (i.e., conventional radio broadcasting) but in satellite and Web-based radio, which make it possible to "narrowcast" a wider variety of programs aimed at smaller audiences. I suspect that's where the Met really belongs--not on terrestrial radio. And if I had to guess, I'd say that the Tony Tommasinis of today would be more likely to listen to the Met on their computers than on high-quality radios bought by their parents.

(In his original piece, Tony had reminisced about how he'd discovered opera by listening to the Met broadcasts as a boy.)

Here's part of Felix's response:

The Met radio broadcasts reach 11 million people – vastly more than will listen to classical music on their computers worldwide over the course of a year. Tommasini makes the point that the broadcasts "have been a cultural lifeline for generations of listeners, both those who live in places far removed from any opera company and those who may live just a subway ride from Lincoln Center but can't afford to attend". Teachout, it would seem, would restrict them to the lucky inhabitants of the affluent side of the digital divide, those with satellite radios and broadband internet connections.

One of Felix's correspondents went even further, calling my post "unseemly and elitist...The idea that only people who have broadband ‘deserve' opera is ludicrous." (Quotation marks notwithstanding, the word "deserve" appears nowhere in my posting.)

I didn't reply at once because what Felix wrote seemed to me so comprehensively wrong-headed that I didn't quite know where to start--and as for what his correspondent said, I thought it was just plain dumb. Now I think my sister-in-law has taken care of it for me. After all, you never could listen to the Met in Smalltown, U.S.A., at least not via terrestrial radio, but you can now have a broadband connection to the Web at an affordable price. If broadband Web access is available in a tiny town located two hours from the nearest medium-large city, it'll soon be available just about anywhere in America--and if ordinary middle-class people like my brother and sister-in-law think it's worth having, the rest of the country will surely follow in short order. So perhaps the time has come to stop talking about high-speed Internet access as a luxury available only to those on "the affluent side of the digital divide" and start thinking of it as the coming norm.

I wouldn't say that everything's up to date in Smalltown, but I can report a few other things that are worthy of note. We have two McDonald's, for instance, and we're on our second Wal-Mart, this one a 24-hour "supercenter" (and yes, it was jammed to the eyeballs today). You can't buy the New York Times in Smalltown, but there are two coin boxes selling The Wall Street Journal, one next to the post office and one in front of the newly remodeled grocery store on the north side of town. Not that it matters, since I read this morning's Times (see below) on line, the same way I read it each morning in Manhattan.

Here's a one-hand-other-hand story about cultural change in southeast Missouri. After we opened our Christmas presents yesterday afternoon, I drove my mother up to Collegetown, U.S.A., to look at the holiday lights. My plan had been to take her to dinner, too, but I'd been away long enough for it to have slipped my mind that folks around here don't eat out on Christmas. Every restaurant in Collegetown, even the ones next to the motels on the highway, was closed up tight as a drum--except for the Chinese places. Now, I don't make a habit of eating Chinese food in southeast Missouri (I get more than enough of it in Manhattan), but desperate times called for desperate measures, so I took my mother to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, fully expecting the worst. I've eaten some pretty horrendous Chinese food in the Midwest--in fact, I'm old enough to remember the days of chow mein and egg foo yung--but this place served perfectly adequate versions of all the usual dishes, and the sesame chicken and hot and sour soup were actually pretty good. We stuffed ourselves and laughed all the way home.

I saw my first episode of The Simple Life the other night, and the thought occurred to me that it might be interesting to spend a year living in and blogging from Smalltown, U.S.A. I'm sure life here is a lot more complicated than it looks, and I'd love to be able to scratch the surface more deeply than usual and find out exactly how people in my home town really feel about such puzzling cultural phenomena as Paris Hilton and Howard Dean. (Which reminds me of a one-liner I saw on the Web last week: did you hear about the town so small that all the Episcopalians were straight?) As it stands now, I never get to do more than sniff the air and do a little light eavesdropping. Maybe Smalltown is actually throbbing with undigested modernity--or maybe not. Either way, it's a nice place to visit, at Christmastime or any other time, and most especially in the middle of an orange alert.

UPDATE: Lileks is rocking this week--now he's got a posting on his father's new satellite radio. Take that, Felix Salmon!

Posted December 26, 4:11 AM

TT: Almanac

"What is the Ninth Symphony compared to a pop tune played by a hurdy-gurdy and a memory!"

Karl Kraus, Beim Wort genommen

Posted December 26, 1:48 AM

TT: Out of many, many

Bruce Weber has an excellent article in today's New York Times about the state of the Broadway musical--excellent because he talked to a lot of people in the business and got candid answers. This is one piece that really needs to be read in its entirety, not quoted piecemeal (you can read the whole thing here), but if there's a money graf, this is it:

"You could spell whither either way," said Jack Viertel, the artistic director of the Encores! series of musicals in concert at City Center. "There's a real reluctance on the part of producers to take on new composers because to some degree no one is sure what a Broadway show is supposed to sound like anymore. Is it supposed to sound like Michael John LaChiusa? Or Alan Menken? If the Broadway sound were the pop music of the day, which it used to be, it would sound like hip-hop, but I don't think anyone feels there's much of a Broadway audience for that at the moment."

What I think Viertel is groping toward--as well as several other people quoted in the piece--is that the success of the "classic" Broadway musical-comedy idiom was in large part a function of the existence of the common culture that began to dissolve in the Sixties, more or less around the time that the Broadway musical began to lose its way.

Here's another relevant excerpt:

In any case, as rock took over the radio airwaves in the 1960's, songwriters began turning from the stage to the recording studio. A few songs from Broadway managed to climb the charts - "The Impossible Dream" from "Man of La Mancha," for example - but the music of Broadway was being overwhelmed by the cultural tidal wave that was transforming the rest of the world.

"I can tell you almost specifically when it changed," said John Kander, Mr. Ebb's partner. "When we did `Cabaret' in 1966, I was unpacking in my hotel room in Boston, even before we went to Broadway, and I turned on the radio and heard five songs from the show. Our next show, in 1968, was a musical called `The Happy Time,' and I think we got maybe one recording. So it was right in there that the changeover happened."

The "untheatricality" of rock music is a complicated subject about which I've never gotten around to writing. It's far too complicated to go into in a short posting, but I can say that to blame the decline of the Broadway musical on rock is to mistake a symptom for the disease. What happened in the Sixties was that the old-fashioned standard-style ballad ceased to be the lingua franca of American popular music--and that nothing replaced it. Instead, our musical tastes shattered into a million pieces. After the Sixties, there was never again one kind of music to which "everyone" listened. In the absence of that kind of broad-based consensus of taste, popular music began to take a back seat in the mass media to other forms of pop culture.

Anyone old enough to remember The Ed Sullivan Show will recall that Sullivan regularly booked musical-comedy stars, and even presented whole scenes from hit shows. (It was Sullivan who turned West Side Story and Camelot into box-office hits.) Nowadays, there aren't any prime-time variety shows, because the culture is so deeply fissured that such shows can't draw a large enough audience to be commercially viable. Similarly, Top 40 has given way to a large number of sharply differentiated formats with minimal overlap. If you ever wondered why David Letterman and Jay Leno almost never bring on their musical guests until the end of the show, that's the reason: no pop musician, however successful, appeals to a sufficiently large slice of the demographic pie. Were Leno to open the show with a musical act, no matter what it was, a significant number of his viewers would promptly switch to Letterman in search of something more to their liking--and vice versa.

All this means that there is no "universal" musical language in which a Broadway musical can be written. That doesn't make it impossible to write good musicals, but it does mean that they will almost certainly appeal to niche audiences, not the masses that once flocked to (and bought original-cast albums of) the great musicals of the pre-rock era. For this reason, my guess is that the really interesting musicals of the coming decade will be small-scale, low-budget shows--and that at least some of them will be written for and premiered by opera companies.

Posted December 26, 1:45 AM

December 25, 2003

TT: And to all a good night

My mother and I just finished watching Holiday Inn and Meet Me in St. Louis on TV. Holiday Inn is a much-loved film whose shining parts are greater than their slightly commonplace sum: Astaire and Crosby, "Say It With Firecrackers," and two terrific Irving Berlin songs, "You're Easy to Dance With" and "Be Careful, It's My Heart," that got lost in the looming shadow of "White Christmas." Meet Me in St. Louis, on the other hand, might just be the most underrated of all the great movie musicals. Sure, it's a bit heavy on the Hollywood nostalgia, but Judy Garland is at her purest and best, Vincente Minnelli's direction is unobtrusively right, and the score--the score! Was there ever a movie that contained three songs as fine as "The Boy Next Door," "The Trolley Song," and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"? (Yes, I know, Top Hat, but that film exists in a realm beyond comparison.) Even the orchestrations, by Conrad Salinger, are exquisite.

I enjoyed tonight's double feature so much that it almost made me forget how irritated I was by a story I read in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal about how red and green are sooooo passé among today's cultural tastemakers. Here's the money quote:

Behind the dimming of the red and green is a culture intent on making over almost everything, from faces to homes to entire lives. Style mavens like Martha Stewart have also trained fans to favor a more neutral palette. "Christmas has got a lot more design-y," says Simon Doonan, creative director at Barneys New York. "People now see their trees as decorative accessories."

Mr. Doonan, who says he eschews all but "ironic" uses of red and green, was asked to do a Christmas tree for this month's issue of Budget Living magazine. Avoiding a color conundrum, he lopped off dozens of Barbie doll heads and strung them to the tree branches....

To which I say...well, maybe I shouldn't be saying that today.

But enough with the gnashing of teeth. Here on Hickory Drive in Smalltown, U.S.A., the decorations are 100% red and green, the mood is quietly festive, and I'm headed for bed. To all of you out there in the blogosphere who've become faithful readers of "About Last Night," OGIC and I wish you the happiest--and safest--of holidays.

See you Friday.

Posted December 25, 12:25 PM

TT: Almanac

"Subtlety is the curse of man. It is not found in the deity."

Flannery O'Connor, letter to an anonymous correspondent (1961)

Posted December 25, 12:24 PM

December 24, 2003

TT: A new Christmas color

I wanted to write something about the orange alert, but Lileks did it for me:

Either we look back at the days of Orange with the same remote interest we have today when we see ration stickers in a Bugs Bunny cartoon – or the idea of gradations of concern will strike us a luxury, a contrivance, a flimsy thing that marked the interregnum between the day the war began and the day it flared hot coast to coast. I'm betting on the former. The worst rarely happens. Something just as bad often comes along, but it's not what we foresaw or worried about. Then we learn that a short period of coping can be preferable to a long period of fearing.

It will end, one way or another. But there won't be any signing of papers on carrier decks; nothing that tidy. No Times Square parties. It began as a long slow subterranean process where the murderers gather and bond, and the end will be slow and constant and maddeningly indistinct. Imagine boxing gloves unraveling the strands of a thick wet rope; that's the next ten years. It won't make sense all the time. The narrative will drift. In 2031 the BBC will put out a 22 hour documentary on the War, and our children will think we all lived in an age of constant peril and heroism.

We will have to remind them that peril and heroism was reserved for those volunteered for a full ration of both. Most of us saw the war on TV. If we felt it at all, it was the pang we got when consulted our 401(k) statements. The stores were full of things; meat and sugar for everyone. The vast majority of Americans hardly felt the war at all – and while that may have been a blessing, it didn't feel altogether right. There was something about Orange that said we should do something, and we had no idea what that might be.

Read the whole thing here.

The only thing I want to add is that everybody in my home town appears to be aware of the alert, though not much more than that. I got my hair cut yesterday, and the barber wanted to know what it was like flying out of LaGuardia on Monday. When you live in a small town far from the coasts, or from anything remotely resembling a military target, you know you'll be watching events from afar, not from across the street.

I happened to be visiting my mother on 9/11, and the feeling of dissociation as I saw the horrors unfold on TV was violent. The place where I lived was under attack, yet here I was, sitting in an easy chair in the living room of the house where I grew up, watching the bloodshed as if it were a war movie. Which isn't to say that people here didn't feel it: they really did, and they do now. But they feel it differently, unless they have a son or daughter in uniform. That changes everything.

Posted December 24, 2:10 AM

TT: Further adventures in Red America

I took my mother to dinner last night at the newest restaurant in town, Ruby Tuesday. It's one of the many franchised "dinner houses" (as they're known in the food business) that dot the American landscape, and its presence in my home town is an anomaly. When I was young, the only restaurants in the area were fried-chicken-and-steak affairs, and there weren't all that many of them. Most families ate at home, and they ate as families, gathering together at the table at a fixed hour to discuss the day's events. Eating out was something you did on Saturday night, usually not all that often.

In time, the major fast-food chains made their way to southeast Missouri, and every new McDonald's and Pizza Hut was a major event. By the time I left home in 1974, there were many such places in town, but nothing much more ambitious. It was the conventional wisdom that "dinner houses" would never take root here, even though they were doing a booming business in the college town 30 miles north of us. Then, last year, an Applebee's opened on the south side of town, and drew customers with a vengeance. It seems that the eating habits of the younger baby boomers and Gen-Xers in town had changed without anybody noticing. They were no longer committed to dinner at the dinner table: wives were working, children busier, and dining out had become, here as elsewhere, less a luxury than a necessity, even in a small town like this.

After Applebee's came Ruby Tuesday, to which I took my mother for the first time on the night before the night before Christmas. It was shiny-new, the waiters were friendly and helpful, and the menu, if not exactly continental, was nonetheless worlds away from what one ate at the Charcoal House circa 1966. I dined on a nicely blackened piece of fish accompanied by rice pilaf and steamed broccoli. As we departed, I noticed that Thomas Dolby's "Blinded by Science," one of the very first rock songs I ever saw featured on MTV, was playing over the restaurant's sound system.

It seemed to me that we both needed a bit of countervailing nostalgia, so we drove around town after dinner and looked at the Christmas lights. They're not as spectacular as they used to be, but I'd still say that one out of three houses in my home town is electrically decorated come late December. Then we came home, watched a Randolph Scott video, and went to bed, there to rest up from the encroaching onslaught of modernity.

(P.S. Speaking of Lileks, he had a nice posting yesterday on holiday lights.)

Posted December 24, 1:44 AM

TT: Almanac

"It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape."

I. Compton-Burnett, letter to Francis King (1969)

Posted December 24, 1:44 AM

December 23, 2003

TT: A visit to Red America

I'm always struck by the small things that distinguish my home town in southeast Missouri from my adopted home, the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I'd never really noticed until today, for instance, but the only houses that are architecturally "modern" in any recognizable sense are a half-dozen Frank Lloyd Wright knockoffs built in the late Fifties. Similarly, you rarely see reproductions of modern art on anybody's walls. It's as though time had stopped in 1900. None of the video stores carries more than a handful of "older" films (i.e., made prior to 1975). I was astonished to find Citizen Kane and Casablanca at the neighborhood video store this afternoon. And while our local cable service offers Turner Classic Movies as part of its regular package, TCM isn't included in the program guide published each day in the local newspaper. To find out what's showing, you've got to buy TV Guide or go on line.

I went Christmas shopping this morning, driving 30 miles to the nearby college town where most of my former neighbors do their "serious" shopping. It has a medium-sized mall and two movie theaters that show about 10 first-run features on any given day--nothing out of the ordinary, though I did see You Can Count on Me at the older theater a couple of years ago. From my point of view, the most important store in the mall is a Barnes & Noble, the only good-sized bookstore in the immediate vicinity. (The sole bookstore in my home town is a small shop that deals in used paperbacks.) I noticed that none of this year's National Book Award nonfiction nominees was in stock, not even Carlos Eire's Waiting for Snow in Havana, the winner. On the other hand, I did find five copies of the trade paperback edition of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, a pleasant surprise.

After I finished shopping, I treated myself to a frappuccino in the Starbucks café attached to the bookstore, and took a closer look at the mural on the wall above the serving counter. It portrays an oddly eclectic, vaguely PC assortment of authors seated in an imaginary coffeehouse: Isaac Bashevis Singer, Franz Kafka, Pablo Neruda, Rabindranath Tagore, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Raymond Chandler, D.H. Lawrence, Carl Sandburg, Edith Wharton, and somebody named Hughes (presumably Richard, the author of A High Wind in Jamaica, though I don't know what he looked like and so can't say for sure). I didn't check, but I doubt if many of them were represented on the shelves of the store.

I'm not being sarcastic or dismissive, by the way. Growing up in a small town gives you a different perspective on chain bookstores, just as it causes you to see the Wal-Mart phenomenon from the point of view of the people for whom such stores are an unimaginable boon. (The first Wal-Mart outside Arkansas was built in my home town.) The Barnes & Noble where I shopped today isn't remotely close in quality to any big-city bookstore, independent or otherwise, but it's still a vast improvement on nothing. When I was a boy, people in southeast Missouri went to the library or did without. Now they can drive 30 miles to the Barnes & Noble, or order from amazon.com. Times are changing, slowly but surely--but slowly.

Posted December 23, 6:55 AM

December 22, 2003

TT: Almanac

"In spite of his quaint Tory prejudices Dr. Johnson is one of the few persons in recent times that one may term wise without serious qualification because he never dodges or equivocates in dealing with the problem of evil; he never fades away from the fact of evil into some theosophic or sentimental dream."

Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

Posted December 22, 3:38 AM

TT: Here I am...

...coming to you live from the dial-up connection of an iBook perched precariously on a 60-year-old card table located in the guest bedroom of my mother's house deep in southeast Missouri, far beyond the reach of any high-culture events not being carried on commercial TV.

Translation: I'm home for Christmas, after a thrilling early-morning battle with a very orange LaGuardia Airport, where lines are long and tempers were already pretty damn short as of six this morning. I shudder to think what it's like by now, which is one reason why it's nice to be in a small town this afternoon. Here's another: it's quiet, and there's no one on the streets. The trees are bare, the sky slate-gray. The nearest mall is 30 miles away. I really do love New York, but it's good to get away (especially after just having seen three plays in three days), and I'm definitely away, and glad to be (except that I'm having a hell of a time getting used to dial-up again).

I should add, however, that I got two hours of sleep last night, and I have a piece to write tonight, so I may not start nibbling at the mail until tomorrow. Nevertheless, my antenna is up, and insofar as this slooooow modem allows me to surf the Web, I'm reconnected to the blogosphere. Like the song says, you're gonna hear from me...later.

In the meantime, hello to Maud, Mr. TMFTML, Old Hag, Cup of Chicha, 2 Blowhards, Sarah Weinman, Cinetrix at Pullquote, Bookslut, Modern Art Notes, Felix Salmon, and all the other cool big-city bloggers whose thoughts you can access by ooching over to the right-hand column and sifting through the blogroll. They'll take up the slack while I readjust to small-town life. And a big old wet kiss to Our Girl in Chicago, who is safely installed among her family in an undisclosed secure location, from which she has promised to post something or other, sooner or later.

Now for a nap.

Posted December 22, 3:25 AM

December 21, 2003

TT: Almanac

"A certain amount of brick-throwing might even be a good thing. There comes a moment in the career of most artists, if they are any good, when attacks on their work take a form almost more acceptable than praise."

Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

Posted December 21, 9:59 AM

TT: Winding down

Judging by the Site Meter, most of you have more important things to do this weekend than read blogs. For those diehards who can't get enough, this is to inform you that I'm out of here very early tomorrow morning, and pretty much every minute between now and then is spoken for. I went to plays on Friday and Saturday, and I've got another one to see today. I'm writing my best-of-2003 "Second City" column for the Washington Post and an unrelated magazine piece. Oh, yes, I mustn't forget to pack.

All of which is to say that I don't think you'll be hearing from me again until I'm safely ensconced in Missouri some time Monday evening. Once I'm there, I'll send up a flare, and I plan to spend the week posting and responding to those items from the "About Last Night" mailbox that I've set aside for precisely that purpose. I don't know what OGIC is planning, but I'm sure it'll be as good, if not better.

See you later.

Posted December 21, 9:52 AM

December 20, 2003

TT: Almanac

"One of the things I learned very early is that students always recognize a good teacher. They may be overimpressed by second-raters who only talk a good game, who are witty and entertaining, or who have reputations as scholars, without being particularly good teachers. But I have not come across a single first-rate teacher who was not recognized as such by the students. The first-rate teacher is often not 'popular'; in fact, popularity has little to do with impact as a teacher. But when students say about a teacher, 'We are learning a great deal,' they can be trusted. They know."

Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander

Posted December 20, 12:02 PM

TT: The last shall be first

I wonder how many classical music lovers under the age of 40 know who Walter Legge was. Not many, I suspect. Older record collectors, of course, know exactly who Legge was: from the end of World War II to 1964, he was one of the half-dozen most powerful people in the classical music business. He founded and ran London's Philharmonia Orchestra, which in the days of Herbert von Karajan and Otto Klemperer was the best orchestra in Great Britain; he was the husband of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, whose career as an opera singer and recitalist he supervised painstakingly and obsessively. Most important of all, he was EMI's chief classical producer, the man to whom we owe, among countless other irreplaceable treasures, such complete opera sets as the Callas-Gobbi-de Sabata Tosca, the Schwarzkopf-Karajan Rosenkavalier, and the Flagstad-Furtwängler Tristan und Isolde. Remove from your shelves every record originally produced by Legge, and you'll have more holes than a film-noir corpse.

Legge was more than just a powerful businessman: he was also a powerful personality, shrewd and witty and arrogant, the last of these virtually without limit. He made enemies easily and happily, and so when he finally needed friends in power, he didn't have any. Legge left EMI in 1964, assuming that every other classical label in the world would bid for his services--but none of them did. He walked away from the Philharmonia that same year, assuming it would fold--but it immediately reorganized and went on without him. He spent the rest of his life in embittered exile from the music business, pouring his thwarted energies into his personal correspondence and his wife's dwindling career, hoping that somebody, anybody, would hire him to run a record company, an opera house, even a music festival--but hoping in vain.

A candid biography of Legge would be a feast of gossip, as well as a matchless cautionary tale. Alas, no such book exists, though Legge drafted a short memoir that saw print in 1982 as part of On and Off the Record: A Memoir of Walter Legge, a book nominally credited to Schwarzkopf but consisting in the main of her husband's own pungent comments on music and musicians; in addition, Legge's own Walter Legge: Words and Music contains a straightforward biographical chapter by Marie Tobin, Legge's younger sister, that tells the story of his life up to the end of World War II. Between them, these two books also reprint most of Legge's published writings about music--including a generous selection of the concert and opera reviews he wrote for the Manchester Guardian between 1934 and 1938--as well as a good-sized chunk of his correspondence.

Needless to say, not all of this material can be taken at face value, for Legge was much given to retrospective self-justification, especially in his later years. But there are also unauthorized versions of various bits and pieces of his story, most notably the second volume of Peter Heyworth's biography of Otto Klemperer, in which the story of Klemperer's uneasy association with Legge is told from the conductor's jaundiced point of view. I hope somebody will eventually finally get around to writing a full-scale biography (though probably not until after Schwarzkopf dies), but these varied sources have already told us quite a bit about the life, work, and character of the greatest record producer of the LP era, much of it in his own vivid words.

One thing that startled me was just how uncautious Legge was. His spectacularly tactless interoffice memos, for instance, were manifestly the work of a bullying egomaniac who thought himself incapable of error and had nothing but contempt for anyone benighted enough to disagree with him. This included musicians as well as fellow employees, for Legge was one of the few record producers who habitually told performers how to do their jobs. Rarely have I read anything so odiously smug as this excerpt from a letter he sent to a friend in Israel: "My wife is going to the U.S.A. on Sunday and I follow 12 days later to try to extract from an American accompanist some of the sensitivity I squeezed out of Gerald Moore and more recently Geoffrey Parsons. Accompanists are made, not born."

Why did musicians swallow this kind of talk? Fear had a lot to do with it, of course, though some of them genuinely believed that Legge's aggressive coaching brought out the best in them. But Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau would have none of it. In Reverberations, his 1987 autobiography, he recalls the first time the two men worked together in the studio: "Walter Legge, as supervisor of the recording, wanted to follow his usual habit of involving himself in shaping my understanding (of some Hugo Wolf lieder and Schubert's 'Schone Müllerin'). Estimating the situation subjectively, I thought I should stick with my own ideas, and he soon fell silent. He never forgave me." And Klemperer's final verdict on Legge, quoted by Peter Heyworth, is franker still: "He likes to think of himself as an incomparable musician...He is a very gifted connoisseur and a very good record producer--c'est tout."

But if that was all, it was also--up to a point--more than enough. For Legge really was a connoisseur of the highest order, consistently capable of spotting and appreciating the very best; the deeply admiring obituaries he wrote for such close colleagues as Dennis Brain, David Oistrakh, and Dinu Lipatti, all reprinted in Words and Music, leave no doubt of that. Moreover, he insisted on the best at his recording sessions, and settled for nothing less. This is part of what he meant when he spoke of himself as "the first of what are called 'producers' of records":

Before I established myself and my ideas, the attitude of recording managers of all companies was, "We are in the studio to record as well as we can on wax what the artists habitually do in the opera house or on the concert platform." My predecessor, Fred Gaisberg, told me: "We are out to make sound photographs of as many sides as we can get during each session." My ideas were different. It was my aim to make records that would set the standards by which public performances and the artists of the future would be judged--to leave behind a large series of examples of the best performances of my epoch.

Implicit in this characteristic statement of purpose was the notion that recordings could be superior to live performances--indeed, that they could exist as wholly independent art objects (a very Glenn Gouldian notion, that). And when Legge joined forces with similarly inclined artists of compatible temperament, the results were often extraordinary. On and Off the Record ends with a 45-page discography of recordings produced by Legge, among which you will find many of the most memorable performances of the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties, a great many of which have since been transferred to CD and continue to set standards to this day.

Legge left another mark on the classical recording business: it was in large part because of his example that the major labels came to concentrate on recording celebrity performances of the standard repertoire. Though he claimed to like the tonal modernists, he had little time for them in the studio (the only two living composers whose music he recorded at all extensively were Walton and Hindemith), preferring to devote his energies to setting down flawless recordings by star performers of popular operas and the safest of Austro-German classics. His concert reviews make it all too clear that he had no feel for the Franco-Russian style, or for modern music in general.

Legge's conservative tastes served his masters well, and continue to do two decades after his death: the records he made are still selling. But his consistent lack of adventurousness, even in the areas of modern music he affected to find interesting, would have dire results in the long run. Of all the major classical labels, EMI has probably had the least success at transforming itself into a repertoire-driven operation, and in recent years it has also had little luck at finding younger artists capable of performing the standard repertoire in a way that captures the attention of younger listeners, save by the worst sort of pandering. How ironic that the label of Walter Legge and Fred Gaisberg has become the home of Thomas Adés and the Eroica Trio.

But, then, maybe it isn't as ironic as all that, for Legge was never a man to take chances. Under John Culshaw, Decca/London poured vast resources into recording the music of Benjamin Britten; Columbia's Goddard Lieberson did the same thing with Stravinsky and Schoenberg, simultaneously letting Leonard Bernstein record a generous helping of then-obscure American music. Not Walter Legge. "I do not believe in spending money to play to empty seats," he wrote. "Ever!" Instead, he preferred to play it safe, and the classical recording industry eventually followed his lead--right over a cliff.

The moral? Never forget to keep one eye on the future. Sooner or later, it turns into the present.

Posted December 20, 12:01 PM

TT: Truth and consequences

Michael Kinsley, who has his moments (but oh, those quarter-hours!), recently put his finger on something that's always irritated me. We all know that politicians never tell the truth, but I don't mind flat-out lies--that goes with the territory. What drives me wild is their inability to say anything without spinning it. Whatever else you may think of him, Howard Dean occasionally does otherwise, as Kinsley points out:

After calling Saddam's capture "a great day" for the military, for Iraqis, and for Americans generally, he added that it was "frankly, a great day for the administration." This is a rare example of a politician saying "frankly" and then saying something actually frank. It comes close to admitting the obvious: that this development helps Bush's chance of winning next year's election and therefore hurts Dean's.

It's a real mystery why politicians find it so hard to admit the obvious about the horse-race aspects of politics. No doubt it requires a dose of blind optimism to be a politician in the first place. Even Dennis Kucinich must think he has a 1-in-10,000 chance of becoming president, when his chance is actually much smaller. But there is also an annoying convention that you must pretend to a confidence you don't feel. Anyone who doesn't realize that this week's news has been a big boost for Bush's re-election is too stupid or blinded to be elected president. Yet the press will punish any candidate who says so, possibly because if the candidates take up stating the obvious, they're stealing our material. The pols need to be coy and evasive so that we can tell it to you straight.

Once again, this is not--repeat, not--a political blog. My reason for drawing your attention to Kinsley's column has to do with the impeccably cultural topic of what used to be called "manners," by which I don't mean choosing the right fork. It is an aspect of American manners that our politicians emulate our advertisers by engaging in the 24-hour robotic spin that determines their every public utterance: "So, Senator, how do you explain the presence of that cheap hooker in your hotel room?" "When I am elected president, the failed economic policies of the current administration will be reversed, thus reducing the burden on the middle class!" (No doubt this phenomenon is in large part a function of the takeover of the political process by lawyers.) In the process, they debase the culture as well, precisely because they're not fooling anybody. When the men and women who lead us, or wish to lead us, engage in such shameless and transparent verbal trickery, they are going far beyond the necessary quotient of euphemism that lubricates everyday human transactions. They are proving themselves consistently untrustworthy in small things. Why, then, should we trust them in large ones?

I doubt I'm the only person in America who's noticed this phenomenon, and who finds it more than merely disagreeable. I've posted this description of contemporary politicians before, but it's worth repeating:

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.

It's from Meg Greenfield's Washington, a book written in secret by the woman who ran the editorial page of the Washington Post for years--and who made sure her truth-telling wouldn't see print until after her death. It's brilliantly put, but what does it say about Washington (or about Greenfield, for that matter) that she considered it too hot to publish while she was still alive?

Back in World War II, shortly before the greasy cloud of spin had seettled on the land, Gen. Joseph Stilwell, whose nickname was "Vinegar Joe," met the press after having been forced to retreat from Burma by the Japanese. He said, "I claim we got a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is as humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back and re-take it."

The day any politician of either party makes so blunt a remark within earshot of microphones--and declines to retract, moderate, or invert it before the day is out--you'll know the barometer of cultural health in America is moving in the right direction. But don't hang by your thumbs waiting for it.

Posted December 20, 11:26 AM

TT: For enlightened readers only

If you own an iPod, or are an Apple fanatic, you'd better read this. Now.

Got that, OGIC?

Posted December 20, 10:47 AM

December 19, 2003

OGIC: It's oh-gic with a guh

Sorry, Terry! But that's not how I say it (see the post directly below). I'm not sure why, but I've always been oh-gic (with a hard "G") to me. I'm just not fond of that chewy "odge" sound, and I definitely prefer the long "O," like the letter. I think this makes my pronunication sound more like the acronym it is, which I like. I've never been known by an acronym before, and I'm finding it rather enchanting. Makes me feel kind of official. So I'm afraid I'm going to have to go over your head here and declare mine the official pronunciation.

Funny, isn't it, that we never discovered we were saying this differently?

And yes, I did make a Liza Minnelli reference up there. Weird, huh?

Posted December 19, 10:40 AM

TT: Gray and grayer

Eric Felten has a very interesting piece in today's Wall Street Journal about advertisers who pitch to the 18-to-34 cohort, and why they're foolish to do so. This paragraph is particularly relevant:

A few years ago the Chicago Symphony commissioned a survey that found the average age of its concert-goers to be 55. But the orchestra's president, Henry Fogel, didn't fall for the actuarial fallacy. Instead he checked similar research done 30 years earlier and found that the average age at that time was also 55. "There is simply a time in one's life when subscribing to a symphony orchestra becomes both desirable and possible," says Mr. Fogel, now president of the American Symphony Orchestra League. Acting on this insight, the Chicago Symphony is wooing boomers who, though they may still enjoy their old Beatles records, long for a new musical experience. The orchestra has targeted new subscribers by advertising on, of all places, a local "classic rock" station.

Read the whole thing here. I think Felton is dead right, but as one who has blogged aggressively about the need for arts organizations to target and capture a younger audience, I should point out that in the context of symphony orchestras and opera companies, "younger" means "younger than 70," not "18 to 34." And when it comes to creating a younger audience, don't forget that arts education in the public schools is in decline. The question everybody is asking, or ought to be asking, is this: how hard is it to persuade people of a certain age (i.e., mine) to make a serious commitment to an art form about which they know little or nothing going in?

I just wrote a piece for Commentary (I'll link to it when it's available on line) about how I became interested in the visual arts. I am an adult convert--I didn't start looking at painting and sculpture until I was 40 years old. So it can happen. But I was an aesthete going in: I was already habituated to the notion of seeking pleasure through high art. If the Chicago Symphony is counting on there being enough people like me in Chicagoland to pay its bills in the coming decade, I have a feeling that they're whistling Schoenberg.

Posted December 19, 10:17 AM

TT: Where his mouth is

I'm reading the revised edition of City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village, a book by David Sucher, who blogs, logically enough, at City Comforts. Sucher has popped up on this site before, usually in connection with modern architecture. He can be quite thought-provokingly testy, in the very best tradition of bloggers. Take a look at his blog--and definitely buy his book. It's a manual of dos and don'ts about urban planning on a human scale, and it is immensely readable (not to mention beautifully designed).

You may not think this topic interests you, but if you live in or near a city, it does whether you know it or not, and Sucher has an uncanny knack for simplifying complicated issues by reducing them to practical essentials. I've never read anything so illuminating about what he calls "the sociable city."

To order the book, go here. I strongly recommend it.

Posted December 19, 9:58 AM

TT: Far removed

Cinetrix writes about obsessive filmgoers:

You've seen them, too. Perhaps even dodged them. Unlike film students, they don't go to the movies because they're supposed to, they go to the movies because they have to. The darkness is asylum and escape from a world that's never just like it is on the silver screen.

(Read the whole thing here.)

No doubt I have these tendencies, too, though I never noticed them until the afternoon a few years ago when I attended a matinee devoted exclusively to Warner Bros. cartoons. Granted, this was in New York, but as I stood in the lobby and looked around me at the visibly peculiar souls drawn by the prospect of spending an hour and a half with Bugs, Daffy, and Wile E. Coyote, I thought to myself, What must I look like to them?

I had this thoroughly unsettling experience in mind when I wrote the first paragraph of "What Randolph Scott Knew," an essay about the Westerns of Budd Boetticher included in A Terry Teachout Reader (preorder your copy today!).

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

It isn't just filmheads, of course. Danceheads and operaheads are the same way, and since I partake of all of the above obsessions, plus a few others, what does that make me? But at least in New York you know you're not alone. I can't think of another city where it's possible to satisfy so many different obsessions so thoroughly, or to be a member of so many different social groups whose membership doesn't overlap at all. I first noticed this at my fortiety birthday party (one of the very few parties, incidentally, that I've ever thrown, or had thrown for me). I didn't know a room could have so many different corners, much less that each could be inhabited with its very own gaggle of recognizably similar people.

Perhaps all my obsessions cancel one another out and leave in their wake the residue of an approximately normal human being. But I wouldn't count on it.

Posted December 19, 9:41 AM

TT: On paper

Erin O'Connor, who blogs at Critical Mass, writes this morning about The Human Stain--the novel, not the movie--from the point of view of "the human cost of the culture of campus speech codes." In light of my unenthusiastic earlier posting on the film, it's hugely interesting to read what she has to say, and even more interesting to read this striking quote from the book:

There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. It's more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because there is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it. Once you're in its grip, it's as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it. Its raw realism is like nothing else.

Read O'Connor's own trenchant posting here. And if you haven't bookmarked Critical Mass, do so. It's indispensable.

Posted December 19, 9:22 AM

TT: Almanac

"I know of nothing more beautiful than the Appassionata, I could hear it every day. It is marvellous, unearthly music. Every time I hear these notes, I think with pride and perhaps childlike naivete, that it is wonderful what man can accomplish. But I cannot listen to music often, it affects my nerves. I want to say amiable stupidities and stroke the heads of the people who can create such beauty in a filthy hell. But today is not the time to stroke people's heads; today hands descend to split skulls open, split them open ruthlessly, although opposition to all violence is our ultimate ideal--it is a hellishly hard task."

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, quoted in Maxim Gorky, Days with Lenin

Posted December 19, 9:08 AM

TT: Funny and otherwise

I reviewed the openings of two off-Broadway shows, Neil Simon's Rose's Dilemma and Bill Irwin's The Regard Evening, in this morning's Wall Street Journal.

About the first I was tepid:

"Rose's Dilemma" is worth seeing, albeit for a sad reason: Mr. Simon is 76 and in fragile health, and my guess is that he intended it as his farewell to the theater. The self-pitying tone of the play, which tells the story of Rose Steiner (Patricia Hodges), an aging, hopelessly blocked playwright who is haunted by the imagined ghost of Walsh McLaren, her old lover (John Cullum), leaves little doubt of that. "You sound like a caricature of yourself that fell off the wall at Sardi's," Rose tells Walsh at one point. I winced, suspecting that Mr. Simon's satirical gun was aimed at his own forehead.

Unlike Rose, Mr. Simon is still in there pitching, but he's lost his curveball. "With Neil Simon," the playwright David Ives once told me, "you can sort of walk out of the theater and hum the jokes, like humming the tunes from a musical." Alas, the jokes in the first act of "Rose's Dilemma" are tuneless, though their metronomic rhythm--setup, payoff, setup, payoff--keeps clacking away relentlessly. That's the problem: The first act feels like a comedy, only it isn't funny....

About the second I wasn't:

[T]his revival of "The Regard of Flight," Mr. Irwin's 1982 spoof of postmodern theater and its malcontents, runs through Jan. 25. That gives you plenty of time to see it at least once, and preferably twice. Not only is it a hoot and a half, but Mr. Irwin has tacked on a brief afterpiece in which the three characters of "The Regard of Flight" grapple ineptly with life in the age of e-mail and cell phones. It's superfluous--the original show is perfect--but it does give you 20 extra minutes in the company of Mr. Irwin and his droll colleagues, and that's good enough for me...

No link, so to read the whole thing, buy this morning's Journal, turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, and regale yourself with a wide variety of arts and culture coverage, all for a dollar. It's the best deal in town.

Posted December 19, 9:06 AM

TT: In case you were wondering

A blogger out there refers to me as "Terry 'Unpronounceable' Teachout." In fact, my last name is pronounced exactly like the two words of which it is constructed: TEACH-out.

OGIC, by the way, is pronounced like "logic" without the "l."

Aren't you glad we cleared that up?

Posted December 19, 2:25 AM

TT: Not quite a torrent, almost a deluge

I've gotten a lot of terrific mail in recent days, and haven't had time to do anything with it. My plan is to devote most of next week's blogging to the best of your letters, with occasional interspersed comments.

If you haven't heard from me, that's why...and watch this space!

Posted December 19, 1:51 AM

December 18, 2003

OGIC: Fortune cooooookie

"The little maid came into the silent room. I looked at her stocky young body, and her butter-colored hair, and noticed her odd pale voluptuous mouth before I said, 'Mademoiselle, I shall drink an apéritif. Have you by any chance--'

'Let me suggest,' she interrupted firmly, 'our special dry sherry. It is chosen in Spain for Monsieur Paul.'

And before I could agree she was gone, discreet and smooth.

She's a funny one, I thought, and waited in a pleasant warm tiredness for the wine.

It was good. I smiled approval at her, and she lowered her eyes, and then looked searchingly at me again. I realized suddenly that in the land of trained nonchalant waiters I was to be served by a small waitress who took her duties seriously. I felt much amused, and matched her solemn searching gaze.

'Today, Madame, you may eat shoulder of lamb in the English style, with baked potatoes, green beans, and a sweet.'

My heart sank. I felt dismal, and hot and weary, and still grateful for the sherry.

But she was almost grinning at me, her lips curved triumphantly, and her eyes less palely blue.

'Oh, in that case a trout, of course--a truite au bleu as only Monsieur Paul can prepare it!'

She glanced hurriedly at my face, and hastened on. 'With the trout, one or two young potatoes--oh, very delicately boiled,' she added before I could protest, 'very light.'

I felt better. I agreed. 'Perhaps a leaf or two of salad after the fish,' I suggested. She almost snapped at me. 'Of course, of course! And naturally our hors d'oeuvres to commence.' She started away.

'No!' I called, feeling that I must assert myself now or be forever lost. 'No!'

She turned back, and spoke to me very gently. 'But Madame has never tasted our hors d'oeuvres. I am sure that Madame will be pleased. They are our specialty, made by Monsieur Paul himself. I am sure,' and she looked reproachfully at me, her mouth tender and sad, 'I am sure that Madame would be very much pleased.'

I smiled weakly at her, and she left. A little cloud of hurt gentleness seemed to hang in the air where she has last stood.

I comforted myself with sherry, feeling increasing irritation with my own feeble self. Hell! I loathed hors d'oeuvres! I conjured disgusting visions of square glass plates of oily fish, of soggy vegetables glued together with cheap mayonnaise, of rank radishes and tasteless butter. No, Monsieur Paul or not, sad young pale-faced waitress or not, I hated hors d'oeuvres.

I glanced victoriously across the room at the cat, whose eyes seemed closed."

From M.F.K. Fisher, "Define This Word" (1936), in The Gastronomical Me

Posted December 18, 11:33 AM

TT: Almanac

"My philosophy of dance? I make it up, and you watch it. End of philosophy."

Mark Morris, quoted in Joan Acocella, Mark Morris

Posted December 18, 10:35 AM

TT: Faster and faster

The tempo of pre-holiday life is accelerating rapidly, leaving OGIC and me with less time for blogging, just as you probably have less time for reading.

We promise something new every day--beyond that, all bets are off. But we won't forget about you!

Posted December 18, 10:34 AM

TT: Back to Zankel

I returned last night to Zankel Hall, the brand-new 650-seat concert hall located underneath Carnegie Hall, to hear a double bill by two of my favorite jazz singers, Luciana Souza and Karrin Allyson. The show was terrific--I would have fallen down dead with surprise had it been anything else. But what about Zankel Hall itself?

If you were reading this blog in September, you'll probably remember my long posting about Zankel's press preview concert. (If you didn't see it, or want to refresh your memory, go here.) I promised to report in due course on the impression the hall made upon closer acquaintance, and this seems like a perfect occasion, so here goes.

Design. Back in September, I called Zankel "attractive enough but somewhat sterile-looking, a typical exercise in safe concert-hall modernism." That's more or less what I thought last night, though I should add that the stage picture is quite handsome, thanks to skillful lighting and three vertical black hangings placed behind the performers for acoustical reasons (about which more later). The ceiling, an exposed black lighting grid which I compared to "a giant assemblage by Louise Nevelson," still looks terrific. What remains oppressive-looking are the slabby walls on either side of the audience, which made me feel as though I were penned in.

Comfort. The lobby seemed more inviting this time, possibly because of better lighting and more elaborate decoration (it had previously struck me as "cramped and claustrophobic"). This time, though, I noticed with displeasure the street-level entrance and vestibule to Zankel Hall, which has no box office of its own (you have to go to the main box office at Carnegie Hall to pick up your tickets). It's functional and ugly, a discouraging-looking transition from Eighth Avenue to the escalator, and does nothing whatsoever to put you in the festive mood appropriate to concertgoing.

Acoustics. Souza, Allyson, and their bands were amplified, so I can't tell you anything new about the hall's natural acoustic. I can say, however, that last night's concert sounded infinitely better than the performance I heard in September by the Kenny Barron Quintet. The on-stage hangings, which I'm told are intended for use at amplified performances, seemed to have improved things, and I also suspect the hall's managers now have a better sense of what works and what doesn't, electronically speaking. Whatever the reason, the drums weren't nearly as boomy last night as they were in September (though I also suspect both drummers were under orders not to play too loudly), and the amplified bass sound was clearer and more concentrated. It still lacked the kind of low-end punch for which I'd hoped: this is definitely a bass-shy hall. Generally speaking, I thought the amplified sound of both bands was a bit tubby--too much midrange, not enough treble and low bass. It's tolerable, and certainly better than what one too often hears in New York nightclubs, but it's not there yet.

The subway. Zankel Hall is only a few feet from a subway tunnel. At the press preview concert, subway noise was audible--and obtrusive. I couldn't hear it at all last night, though the performers could (Allyson mentioned it midway through her set). I can't tell you how much of a problem it will continue to be at classical concerts, but it appears that it won't be a problem at performances that make use of amplified instruments.

Again, these are purely preliminary reactions. Zankel Hall isn't going anywhere, nor am I. We'll have a lot of time to get used to one another. Still, I thought you'd like to know what I thought of the place now that some of the newness has rubbed off, and my feelings, though not uncontrollably enthusiastic, are nonetheless more favorable than they were three months ago. That's good news.

Posted December 18, 10:30 AM

TT: Worm watch

I'm thinking of a famous 20th-century author who used to be immensely popular for his comedies, which made him the most successful commercial playwright of his generation. For a brief time he was even taken seriously by the critics, who saw in his work a reflection of the spirit of the age, and who also thought that at least some of his plays might have a permanent life in revival. Then he hit a bad patch, turning out a string of ineffective scripts at the very moment that a new generation of theatergoers was looking for something new. Tastes changed, and he woke up one day to find himself unfashionable.

If you thought I was talking about Neil Simon, whose Rose's Dilemma opens tonight at the Manhattan Theatre Club (and which I will be reviewing in tomorrow's Wall Street Journal), you were right. But with one small addition, the same things could be said of Noël Coward. The difference is that Coward lived long enough to see the worm turn a second time. Producers and critics sorted through his prolific output and came to the conclusion that five of his plays--Private Lives, Present Laughter, Blithe Spirit, probably Hay Fever, and possibly Design for Living--were classics of their kind. They began to be revived with increasing regularity, and Coward himself contrived to write and star in one last semi-autobiographical play, A Song at Twlight, that solidified his reputation as something more than a mere commercial playwright. Since then, the worm has remained more or less stationary, and Coward continues to be regarded as an important figure in 20th-century theater.

Will anything like that happen to Neil Simon? Certainly a few of his plays, in particular The Odd Couple (which had the advantage of having been made into a very successful movie), are still performed, and it may well be that time will sift through the rest and find another three or four that remain viable. That's all it takes. On the other hand, I recently spoke to a friend of mine who has staged and acted in several Simon plays and who finds them terribly dated. That makes sense to me, for Simon has always struck me as essentially a writer of live-action situation comedy--a genre whose rules he helped to codify back in the Fifties--and outside of The Honeymooners and Cheers, precious few sitcoms have remained watchable over the long haul.

Still, I could be wrong. A lot of smart people, after all, were wrong about Noël Coward. And whatever the reception of Rose's Dilemma, it will be interesting to see what happens to Neil Simon's oeuvre in the course of the next few years. I don't expect him to turn out to be the American Coward--but stranger things have happened in the theater. Did anyone expect Tennessee Williams' work to date as completely and irrevocably as it did?

Moral: if you want to hear God laugh, make a plan. If you want to hear Him howl, try to second-guess posterity.

Posted December 18, 1:21 AM

December 17, 2003

TT: What if?

A reader writes:

Isn't expecting the New York Philharmonic to be adventurous a bit like expecting a major retail chain to begin its life in Manhattan? In other words, the stakes are so high these days in NYC that one can't help but be conservative with one's choices. You go to NYC to announce that you have arrived, not to start your ascent to greatness. For all of its glitter and glitz, NYC isn't terribly interesting from some angles. Its commercial radio is mindnumbingly conformist. Its politics are very narrow. Its major opera companies are fairly staid. Now its flagship orchestra is becoming fusty. No surprise, I guess. Is it a mistake? Sure, but that's not going to change anyone's mind in the near term. If you want innovation you're going to have to hope that the smaller, second-tier orchestras come up with something interesting. The majors can't afford to alienate their core constituency.

Nicely put, and quite possibly right...and it it is, then there are dark days ahead for the New York Philharmonic, and every other big-city performing-arts group of which the same thing can be said.

No names, but I went to a Wednesday matinee of a play last week, and every male head I saw was either gray or bald. I know, I know, Wednesday matinees are highly uncharacteristic, but I just got back from a Tuesday-night performance whose audience looked almost the same. Contrary to the apparent belief of a great many people in the arts world, dead people don't buy tickets.

Posted December 17, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead."

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Posted December 17, 12:00 PM

TT: All filling, no crust

Here's Bob Gottlieb in the New York Observer:

Because it's December, it's also Alvin Ailey time--five weeks at the City Center. What is there left to say? The dancers are fabulous, the repertory isn't. As usual, there are 20-odd performances of Revelations--it's a ritual, the audience lapping it up from first to last. You feel they might not mind if it were done backwards. There was live music at the performance I saw, and it was so over-miked that it coarsened the whole experience.

(Read the whole thing here, including more on Ailey, New York City Ballet's Nutcracker, and Never Gonna Dance.)

Devastating but true, and it goes a long way toward explaining why I'm not doing Ailey this year, and didn't last year, either. I already know what good dancing looks like, and it's not enough to get me into a theater unless it's enlisted in the service of good choreography. Revelations is a good dance, perhaps even a great one, but the Ailey company does it so often that it's lost its effect--I never see anything new in it anymore. Ailey's other dances are terribly inconsistent in quality, and Judith Jamison has so far failed to give the company the kind of wide-ranging, high-quality repertory that would make its programs worth seeing on more than isolated occasions. Every once in a while Jamison manages to come up with something good (the company is doing a new dance by Lynne Taylor-Corbett, for instance, and I have no doubt that it's worth seeing). But her batting average is far too low.

This is a fundamental problem of dance, by the way. How many modern-dance choreographers--or ballet choreographers, for that matter--have created a body of work sufficiently large and varied enough that it constitutes a working repertory all by itself? George Balanchine, Paul Taylor, Mark Morris, and maybe Merce Cunningham (and even Balanchine was smart enough to add Jerome Robbins to the mix, though he didn't really need to). Period. As for all the others, well, you tell me: how many times can you see an all-Ailey, all-Robbins, all-Antony Tudor or all-Martha Graham program without glazing over? And why should you, for that matter? There's no such thing as a symphony orchestra that plays nothing but Beethoven (though God knows there are times when it seems that way), an opera company that performs nothing but Puccini (ditto), or a theater company that produces nothing but Noël Coward. Shakespeare, yes, but are there any choreographers other than Balanchine who can be compared to Shakespeare without causing giggles?

I'll give Judith Jamison this much credit: she apparently realized that Ailey didn't make enough first-rate dances to maintain a sufficiently high level of public interest. By now, though, it's painfully obvious that she doesn't have the taste necessary to build a repertory. (Kevin McKenzie of American Ballet Theatre has exactly the same problem--judging by the company's programs, he doesn't know the difference between a good ballet and a trashy one.) The result is a dance company that has no compelling reason to exist, unless you're the modern-dance equivalent of a "canary fancier," meaning somebody who's more interested in singing than operas.

I hate to say such a thing about "the Ailey," as it's known in the dance world, but Bob Gottlieb said it for me, and in any case it's hardly a secret. If the Paul Taylor Dance Company or the Mark Morris Dance Group were to stop performing, it would be a tragedy, not merely for modern dance but for the world of art as a whole. If the Ailey were to close its doors, a lot of really good dancers would be out of work--and that's pretty much it.

Posted December 17, 3:19 AM

OGIC: Good reads

Ed Page at Danger Blog! has excavated an old New Yorker piece in which James Thurber imagines how Hemingway would rewrite a Chirstmas classic. Here's a small taste:

The children were in their beds. Their beds were in the room next to ours. Mamma and I were in our beds. Mamma wore a kerchief. I had my cap on. I could hear the children moving. We didn't move. We wanted the children to think we were asleep.

"Father," the children said.

There was no answer. He's there, all right, they thought.

"Father," they said, and banged on their beds.

(Via Maud.)

The Wall Street Journal's column 4 has a terrific story today about Brooklyn's last remaining seltzer truck. You know the mantra: no link, but this piece alone is well worth the buck for the paper:

Spritzed by Flatbush Avenue traffic on a wet morning, the last known seltzer truck in New York City was a double-parked apparition, its tiers of lopsided racks holding a cock-eyed pile of siphon bottles in cracked, wooden crates.

Arnold Brenner, a psychoanalyst walking to work, spotted the truck just as Ronny Beberman, the seltzerman, was wheeling a delivery toward an apartment-house door. Dr. Brenner yelled, "How much is a...." But Mr. Beberman was already inside.

Dr. Brenner stood unactualized on the sidewalk. "I was thinking I could get a case," he said. "It's the spritz that does it--that fizz--so soothing, so strong. Reminiscent of something, something romantic."

Ronny Beberman has his own analysis of the spritz mystique: Because nobody wants it anymore, seltzer has become desirable.

"People, they don't know what seltzer is," he says. "They moved from Iowa. They ask me, 'What's in those bottles?' I have people, they chase me in their cars. They're disenchanted. They're drinking out of plastic."

Mr. Beberman emerges from this wonderful piece a genuinely romantic figure, the unbowed last relic of a business you'll be amazed (and grateful) to find has not quite died out yet. Buy the paper, read the whole piece. You'll get a Count Basie review and a profile of a fashion photographer into the bargain.

Posted December 17, 2:25 AM

December 16, 2003

OGIC: Chilling tales

October 1938: Orson Welles strikes fear in the hearts of radio listeners everywhere with his fiendishly lifelike report of highly improbable events.

December 2003: Maud Newton strikes fear in the hearts of blog readers everywhere with her fiendishly lifelike report of highly improbable events.

Posted December 16, 11:42 AM

OGIC: Giving spinach a bad name

Dear Terry,

You and I both are under the gun this week. I just finished writing a review of Doris Lessing's The Grandmothers, due out in January, and it was a book that almost finished me. Going into the assignment, I didn't have anything against Lessing particularly. I duly read The Golden Notebook as a college senior, and if my memories of it are now vague, my fat little Bantam edition bears the cracked spine and dog-ears that are reliable marks of absorption. But this new book was a tremendous slog. Several times I thought I was within an hour or two of finishing it, but an hour to two later found myself maybe 20 pages along.

I found Lessing's writing here very mannered and schematic, and I find myself wondering about her reputation. I can't think of any of my contemporaries who count themselves as her fans, and I know a few who don't like her at all. Talking to the well-read, discriminating OFOB (Our Friend on the Block, from whom we'll be hearing more in the nearish future) about the book earlier today, I said "she's like spinach." OFOB protested: "But I like spinach!" Is Lessing one of those writers who speaks strongly to their own generation but then does a slow fade into obscurity?

In the course of writing the review, I consulted a few references to help me get a fuller sense of Lessing's reception. I looked at my dog-eared old Golden Notebook, the Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors, and a fun, bossy, out-of-print reference book I picked up some years ago used, Martin Seymour-Smith's Who's Who in Twentieth-Century Literature. The Seymour-Smith is very like your and my perennial favorite, David Thomson's New Biographical Dictionary of Film, in approach, if not execution: it's fiercely opinionated, seldom wavers, and is bracingly unapologetic about its judgments. It's fun to disagree with.

None of these sources (of course not the paperback cover) betrays any discontentment with or doubt about Lessing at all. Seymour-Smith and the Salon reviewer, Laura Morgan Green, treat her with a rather grave and unwavering respect. But both they and folks like Irving Howe who give blurbs on the paperback tend to describe the value of her work in terms of truth-telling. Very little is said about how she tells the truth in her fiction: about, say, her style or voice. What matters, according to these accounts, is simply that she is truthful. The conspicuous silence on aesthetic questions makes me a bit suspicious of all this praise, and it definitely resonates with my experience of The Grandmothers, in which the writing was very unbeautiful (I tripped over one sentence that turned out to have eleven commas) and pleasure seemed not only out of the question, but beside the point. If important truths were told in the book, I'm afraid I was too distracted by aesthetic undernourishment to catch them.

Who knows, maybe there are some fervent Lessing fans out there who will rush to her defense, but at the moment I'm having a hard time imagining it. Even the advocates I've cited sound more dutiful than passionate.

Looking ahead, I have two more days in Chicago before heading off to Detroit, from which fair city (don't believe me? see Out of Sight!) blogging will continue. It's the meantime I'm a little worried about, since I really am going to have to move heaven and earth to get everything done that needs doing at my day job. But I'll try to poke my head in now and again, and hope to see yours too.

Posted December 16, 2:51 AM

TT: Sure enough

I stayed up all night writing a piece (to be exact, I went to bed at 5:30 this morning), and I have to go to a play tonight, so you probably won't hear further from me today.

I think OGIC has posting plans. Otherwise, read what's there, and I'll see you tomorrow.

Posted December 16, 1:22 AM

December 15, 2003

TT: Just wondering

Has there ever been a better-cast Hollywood movie than Twilight, Robert Benton's 1998 neo-noir thriller? I'd never even heard of it until OGIC drew it to my attention, but now it's a special favorite that I screen at least once a year, as I did last night. From the top down, here's the star billing: Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, Reese Witherspoon, Stockard Channing, James Garner, Liev Schreiber, Margo Martindale (she's currently doing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway), and M. Emmet Walsh, and every one of them is memorably good, especially Garner and Channing. Yet Twilight wasn't a hit and isn't all that well remembered, presumably because its real subject matter is advancing age, a topic that doesn't make for hits. Likewise Dick Richards' 1975 film version of Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely, in which the nonpareil Robert Mitchum plays Philip Marlowe as much older than did Humphrey Bogart or Dick Powell--and makes you buy it.

Maybe it's just my gray hairs talking, but I think noir and middle age go together like gin and vermouth. Disillusion, diminishing horizons, a shattered sense of the possible: that's noir in a nutshell. Kinda goes well with the holidays, don't you think?

Posted December 15, 12:04 PM

TT: Fair warning

This is a big writing week for me: I have to finish four pieces (and two letters of reference) before I hit the road next Monday. I promise to keep blogging all the while, aided and abetted by OGIC and our wonderful correspondents (see below for yet another case in point), but don't be surprised if the flow of soul around here isn't quite as profuse as usual, O.K.? It's merely a temporary pre-holiday aberration.

Incidentally, there's a chance that Our Girl and I will both be blogging from Chicago for a few days early in January. Should that happen, we'll go out of our way to cook up some exotic stunts for your amusement!

Posted December 15, 12:03 PM

TT: Almanac

"The way to get the best out of instruction is to put oneself entirely in the hands of one's instructor, and try to find out all about his method regardless of one's own personality, keeping of course a secret 'eppur si muove' up one's sleeve. Young students are much too obsessed with the idea of expressing their personalities. In the merest harmony exercises they insist on keeping all their clumsy progressions because that is what they 'felt,' forgetting that the art cannot mature unless the craft matures alongside with it."

Ralph Vaughan Williams, "A Musical Autobiography"

Posted December 15, 12:02 PM

TT: Not forgotten

A reader writes:

I've been mulling over your extensive posts about the cinematic experience. Two things struck me in recent days: your post of someone's memories of the spectacle of live musical performance, and the post of someone's complaints about how Hollywood success is measured, in which he/she comments that "movies are not communal experience."

I've been a bit distressed about your opinions, not because I think you are wrong, but because I think you're forgetting something. Yes, it is wasted energy crying about the shifts in technology and the marketplace. Yes, we should get over our nostalgia. Yes, it is possible to have great home experiences of films.

But #1, the nature of films is changing as they are made for the home market - and this includes the blockbusters. Without captive audiences in a darkened theater, they are paced differently. Without giant screens, overly-filtered light begins to pass for cinematography, subtle camerawork and editing become less apparent and thus less likely to occur. Acting evolves in different directions to take account of the more intimate relationship between screen and audience. The advent of improved video (DVD for the moment) means that increasingly films are preserved digitally for the marketplace, not on film (more expensive). In other words, the character of the films themselves is different on television sets than they are in theaters, and this changes the very nature of how they are produced - which is one reason why you don't remember a lot of tv movies as classics.

#2, going to cinema IS a communal experience. I don't know what is wrong with your other correspondent, but if he/she missed all the people sitting around the theater, I1d assume blindness is the problem. Films made for the movie theater are made for collective audiences. They are screen tested with full audiences to understand how they will be received. Comedies in particular, but tear-jerkers too, have depended for their evolution not just on mass taste, but the presence of multiple tastes during viewing. Watching movies on tv is very different, and the venue absolutely affects the character of the productions, particularly over time. While many more people may watch, there is no sense to the maker of the film that he is creating an overwhelming experience for a discrete group of people.

#3, old movies on tv are reproductions. They were shot on film, not video or digital, and the translation is most often inadequate and always simply different. No flicker, no reflection of pure light into the retina, but an entirely different form of visual experience with completely different physiological and psychological implications. As Norma Desmond, said, the pictures ARE getting smaller. Recordings are not the same as live performance in music, and video copies are not the same thing as original three-strip Technicolor. Period. It does make a difference, or you wouldn't go to museums to see the posters in the shop. The reason why your correspondent who remembered his 3rd-tier orchestra in Belarus had such an extraordinary experience was because it was possible. He was listening to an original.

To sum up, movies are different on tv. Not worse, necessarily, but different. And something is absolutely lost in the transition, and to pretend otherwise is a crime against culture as surely as being a Luddite is. There is something tragic about the slow decline of an extraordinary cultural experience, cinema-going, which resulted (at its best) in art from the dross of commercialism. Would IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and CASABLANCA and CITIZEN KANE be what they are without the filmmakers' sense of the shared aspirations and values of their collective audience? Would Hitchcock's films be as frightening as they are without his careful consideration of how he could drive people crazy with tension in a crowded room, without his certainty that multiple shrieks would amplify fear? For god's sake, what about the feeling you get when an entire room full of people laughs with you at a joke that one and all get?

Cinema is our great accidental art form. It is both private and collective, both interior and public, and yet its contexts have always been driven by the marketplace, wherever we live. We will all have to get used to the changes, yes. But I can't accept that all disappearing sensations, particularly those that come from art, should simply be let go with a brisk wave and tip of the hat.

I don't disagree with a word of this letter--which, perhaps not surprisingly, came from a museum curator. And I'm especially struck by the beauty of the last paragraph, which is very much the sort of thing that would occur to a museum curator. I will miss all those things. I don't want them to go away. I want to be able to see the great movies of the past in theaters, surrounded by enthralled audiences...and I expect the day is coming when I'll have to go to museums to do that. In which case we should all be grateful to museums for preserving the "disappearing sensation" of watching movies in the dark, surrounded by a roomful of people who came to partake of that miraculous communal experience.

What I also appreciate about this letter is that it completely disentangles my expectations from my desires. One of the things I try to do on this blog is predict some of the ways in which art will be affected by technological changes--but those predictions aren't necessarily endorsements. They are attempts at understanding.

I've quoted it before, but I want to mention again a remark made by Marshall McLuhan in 1966: "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." I'm not quite that much of a neophobe, but I think I know how McLuhan felt, and what he meant. Much of the time, I wish the world could be exactly the way it was when I was young. Alas, it can't even be the way it was this morning. I suppose the day will come when I decide to give up on the present and live in the past. Until then, I, too, am determined to understand what's happening--and maybe even try to help shape it.

Posted December 15, 12:01 PM

December 14, 2003

TT: In our hands

This is absolutely, positively not a political blog and never will be, but the most art-relevant story I read this weekend appeared in the Washington Post's "Outlook" section. It's a piece by Everett Ehrlich, Bill Clinton's undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs, on the economic reasons why the Internet is bringing about the decline of the two major political parties:

To an economist, the "trick" of the Internet is that it drives the cost of information down to virtually zero. So...smaller information-gathering costs mean smaller organizations. And that's why the Internet has made it easier for small folks, whether small firms or dark-horse candidates such as Howard Dean, to take on the big ones....

Say you want to buy an appliance, or a vacation. You know there are bargains out there, but it takes time and energy to find them. That's what economists call the "transaction cost" of a purchase. This cost of acquiring information is everywhere: the time it takes to call a friend or to learn something in a newspaper. Or the time and resources it takes a company to find out where to find parts and to make sure they show up at an assembly line on time.

Back when it cost a great deal to learn and know things -- when transaction costs were very high -- big corporations had to solve the problem of coordinating information, such as what customers wanted to buy, what parts were being produced and shipped, how to make sure prices covered costs, and so on. The advent of mass production and similar "process" technologies let firms produce and sell things -- cars, steel, oil, chemicals, food -- on a much larger scale, so there was suddenly much more information to coordinate.

Companies solved this problem by creating massive bureaucratic pyramids... Now, however, with internal communications networks and the speed of the Internet, you don't need a horde of people in a big pyramid to handle all that information. Firms have become "flatter" and "faster," and the "networked" or "virtual" company has come into being -- groups of firms that use shared networks to behave as if they were part of the same company....

Now anyone with a Web site and a server, a satellite transponder and about $100 million can have -- in a matter of months -- much of what the political parties have taken generations to build. Technology, of course, has changed politics before. Television changed the two parties, for example, but it didn't make the parties obsolete. In fact, in the day of Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy, television strengthened the two-party duopoly (the economist's term for a shared monopoly), as only those two parties had the resources to use it competitively.

But the Internet doesn't reinforce the parties -- instead, it questions their very rationale. You don't need a political party to keep the ball rolling -- you can have a virtual party do it just as easily.

Read the whole thing here. Then think about how it applies to the myriad ways in which the Internet has already transformed the world of art, from the decline of the classical recording industry to eBay's inadvertent creation of a worldwide "single market" for art auctions to the inauguration of artsjournal.com and its associated blogs.

I can't say it often enough: The Web changes everything. Any artist who doesn't understand that, and isn't acting on the knowledge, is going to get left behind. Likewise any arts journalist. Even if economicspeak makes your eyes glaze over, read Everett Ehrlich's piece (which is written in plain English, not jargon) and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. Believe me, your time will be well spent.

Posted December 14, 5:59 AM

TT: Sooner or (much) later

Fred Kaplan has a great story in this morning's New York Times on why so many classic films have yet to show up on DVD:

Sometimes films are not on DVD for less Byzantine reasons. Older films especially are often in poor condition. The negative has deteriorated, if not vanished; existing prints are scratched or worse. Repairing the damage, and finding the best film and archival materials for bonus extras take much time and money.

A few years ago, only specialty houses like the boutique Criterion Collection bothered with the effort. Now many big studios are following its example.

In a recent industry survey by the Consumer Electronics Association, asking people what they liked best about DVD's, "picture quality" was the highest-scoring reply, cited by 81 percent of respondents. Studios that may once have rushed a disc to market are now taking greater care, even at some expense. "The marketing people have told us that picture quality is a premium," said MGM's Mr. Grossman.

Paramount knows there's demand for a DVD of "The African Queen," but the studio is in no rush, letting its archivists search for better film materials.

Then again, the ascending power of the marketing departments works both ways. To boost profits, they encourage better-looking DVD's. Yet for the same reason, they prevent many films from becoming DVD's at all.

"A lot of old films, including some well-known old films, don't sell in large volume," Mr. Grossman said. "If you're going to have to spend big money for restoration, and then you've got the costs of packaging and advertising, it's a barely break-even proposition."

Another video-distribution executive agreed: "Unless it's `Casablanca' or `Citizen Kane,' the studios will sell 100 times more copies of a bad action film made three years ago than they'll sell of a great film that they've dug out of the archive."

(Read the whole thing here.)

Sigh. Of course we all knew that, but it's still discouraging to hear, especially given the fact that none of the Budd Boetticher-Randolph Scott Westerns have made it to DVD yet--and only one of them, Comanche Station, was transferred to videocassette. (Copies now sell for $90 and up.) These films are universally admired by critics, yet they never even turn up on TV. Would somebody at the Criterion Collection please get with the program? I guarantee that DVDs of Seven Men From Now, The Tall T, Decision at Sundown, Buchanan Rides Alone, Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station would get plenty of ink, from me and plenty of other cinephiles.

P.S. My essay on the Boetticher-Scott films will appear in A Terry Teachout Reader--yet another reason to order your copy in advance!

Posted December 14, 5:39 AM

TT: Almanac

"A further reason for my hatred of National Socialism and other ideologies is quite a primitive one. I have an aversion to killing people for the fun of it. What the fun is, I did not quite understand at the time, but in the intervening years the ample exploration of revolutionary consciousness has cast some light on this matter. The fun consists in gaining a pseudo-identity through asserting one's power, optimally by killing somebody--a pseudo-identity that serves as a substitute for the human self that has been lost."

Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections

Posted December 14, 4:14 AM

December 13, 2003

TT: Almanac

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

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

Posted December 13, 12:01 PM

TT: Steps in the right direction

A reader writes:

I find the older I get, the less critical I become. As a young man, I held every new work up against the greats and naturally found it wanting. If asked, I would give the thing a thumbs-down. My stance was essentially dishonest, since some of the stuff I blew off gave me pleasure. Today, I'm far more willing to credit even a seriously flawed work for whatever satisfactions it has to offer. Along with that has come a greater willingness to judge a work on its own terms rather than my own. Perhaps my standards have declined. But I prefer to think that I've achieved a mature recognition that a thing doesn't have to be great in order to be good (or at least to give pleasure). That proposition seems perfectly obvious, but it took me a while to apprehend it.

Anyway, I suspect from some of the things you've written that a similar process has been at work in you over the years. (I've definitely noticed it in certain other critics I've followed for a lot longer than you've been on the scene, such as John Simon and Stanley Kauffmann). Am I right? Do you think this critical mellowing comes naturally with age or is there some other explanation? I'd be very interested in your views.

My correspondent is quite right, and it surprises me to admit it--or at least it used to. I was going to hold forth at length on this theme, and then I remembered that I already had. What follows is an essay called "First Time's a Charm" that I wrote for Fi, the now-defunct audio magazine, back in 1999. It wasn't widely read at the time and I forgot to include it in A Terry Teachout Reader, so I'll reprint it here in lieu of a reply....

* * *

"I don't understand acquired tastes," a friend told me the other day. "Why would I want to learn to like something that tastes bad?" Though we were talking about sushi (I love it, she hates it), the conversation soon worked its way around to opera, an art form to which she believes herself hopelessly allergic. Granted, she is only 24 and has heard a grand total of three operas to date -- Macbeth, The Rake's Progress, and Orfeo et Euridice, none of them exactly mainstream -- but she's still certain that opera is not for her, and though I hope she changes her mind someday, I admire her certainty.

My first encounter with the slippery concept of acquired taste came during my undergraduate days, when it was widely taken for granted by the intelligentsia that Elliott Carter was a great composer and Tchaikovsky a lousy one. To be sure, everybody loved Tchaikovsky and nobody loved Carter, but that didn't matter: in fact, it proved that everybody was wrong. The theory was that anything you liked at first hearing was too simple to be good -- or, to put it another way, that there was an inverse relationship between quality and accessibility.

I bought into this theory at first, but then I had a revelation. It was a revelation on the installment plan, actually, for it occurred in stages, the first of which took place when I bought a copy of Peter Pears' recording of Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings. This was in 1975, at which time I hadn't yet heard a note of Britten's music, not even The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. I don't remember what moved me to buy that particular LP, since Britten was still in bad critical odor back then (though the worm was already starting to turn). Whatever the reason, I bought the record, took it back to my dorm room, put it on...and was overwhelmed. Suddenly I realized that I was listening to a masterpiece, and that was that: the intelligentsia didn't matter anymore, at least when it came to Britten.

The second installment came a few years later, when the Juilliard Quartet came to Kansas City and performed the Schoenberg String Trio, which they were about to record for Columbia. By then, I was the program annotator for the concert society that brought the quartet to town, and I knocked myself out over that particular set of notes; I saw it as my mission in life to awaken the benighted music lovers of Kansas City to the delights of late Schoenberg. Though I no longer have a copy of the program, it isn't hard to imagine what I wrote about the String Trio -- it must have sounded exactly like Paul Griffiths raving about Milton Babbitt in the New York Times -- but when I went to the concert, I didn't hear what I expected to hear. Instead of music, I heard...nonsense. Suddenly I realized that I had talked myself into believing that Schoenberg was a great composer, ignoring the evidence of my ears, which had been telling me all along that serialism had as much to do with music as "Jabberwocky" has to with poetry. The spell was broken, and never again did I take serial music seriously.

The third and last installment came when I heard Eugene Ormandy's 1960 recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra of Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances. If Schoenberg was the household god of my undergraduate years, then Sergei Rachmaninoff was the antichrist, a composer played only by those poor grinds who slaved away in the downstairs practice rooms while the rest of us musical eggheads went about our more elevated business. Empty virtuosity! Notes without content! Syrupy sentimentalism! Or so I thought...only this time, I listened with my ears instead of my intellect, and suddenly I realized that this was a real piece of music, tough-minded and sardonic, and I was enthralled.

The lesson I learned from these three experiences was not quite as simple as you may think. Around the same time as my first encounter with the Britten Serenade, I had an instructive conversation with a wise old music critic to whom I blithely announced, apropos of nothing in particular, that I'd never much cared for Schumann. "That says more about you than it does about Schumann," he replied mildly. By the time I'd picked myself up off the floor and pulled the arrow out of my forehead, I'd formulated a credo from which I have never deviated in the past two decades: trust your first impressions -- but don't be afraid to change your mind.

One of the most surprising things that has happened to me in recent years is that I now like far more music, as well as a wider range of interpretative styles, than I did as a young man. This is not at all what I expected to happen as I grew older. "I have devoted myself too much, I think, to Bach, to Mozart and to Liszt," Ferruccio Busoni wrote to a colleague in 1922, when he was 56 years old. "I wish now that I could emancipate myself from them. Schumann is no use to me any more, Beethoven only with an effort and strict selection. Chopin has attracted and repelled me all my life; and I have heard his music too often --prostituted, profaned, vulgarized....I do not know what to choose for a new repertory!" When I first ran across this fascinating letter (Harold C. Schonberg quotes from it in The Great Pianists), I felt as if I were gazing into a crystal ball. I was certain that I, too, would become more and more intensely involved with less and less music, until the day came when I was left with a half-dozen supreme masterpieces to which I would return constantly in search of enlightenment.

Needless to say, it didn't work out that way. Now that I stand on the brink of middle age, I find that I am more open as a listener than ever before, so much so that I even find myself enjoying pieces and performers that don't naturally suit my taste or temperament. I used to dislike Ella Fitzgerald, for instance, but today I listen to her records with great pleasure, even though my reasons for disliking her haven't changed. I still don't think she had any feel for a lyric; I still don't like the sound of her voice, which always struck me as pinched; I still think she skimmed lightly over the emotional content of the songs she sang. Yet none of that matters to me any more. Is she my favorite singer? No, not even close -- but now I can appreciate the virtues of her singing, and that's what matters.

Does this mean that I have somehow "acquired" a taste for Ella Fitzgerald's singing? You could say so, but I prefer to think of it not as a conscious act of will but as a natural process of growth. It isn't as if I sat around my apartment listening to Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie! with furrowed brow, waiting for the sun to rise; it never bothered me that I didn't like Ella, just as it didn't embarrass me when I changed my mind about her. I simply accepted my taste for what it was -- a matter of personal preference -- and when it changed, I accepted that, too.

At the same time, I believe devoutly that criticism is not merely a matter of taste, that it is rooted in objective perceptions of fact; I also think that some critics are more perceptive than others, just as some pieces of music are better than others. I suppose it would be more stylish to put the word "better" in quotes, but the awful truth is that I unhesitatingly accept the existence of a meaningful standard of excellence in the arts. The art critic Clement Greenberg once shrewdly observed that all canons of excellence are provisional -- but in saying so, he never meant to suggest that there is no such thing as excellence. This is part of what that wise old music critic was getting at when he told me in so many words that it didn't much matter what I thought about Schumann: it is the responsibility of the listener to rise to the level of the great masterpieces. If you don't like "Mondnacht," it's your fault, not Schumann's.

How to reconcile these seemingly contradictory points of view? The answer lies in a subtle remark made by Kingsley Amis, who was both a great comic novelist and a passionate music lover: "All amateurs must he philistines part of the time. Must be: a greater sin is to be coerced into showing respect when little or none is felt." I wish those two sentences could be carved in stone and set in the middle of Lincoln Center Plaza. In matters of taste, the most important thing is not to pretend. To go through the motions of "acquiring" a taste is very often to engage in an elaborate and protracted pretense, one that may well be not merely insincere but sometimes just plain wrong. I now know that I was wrong when I pretended to like the Schoenberg String Trio, and even more wrong when I pretended not to like Tchaikovsky.

As for my young friend who thinks she doesn't like opera, that's just fine with me. I plan to keep inviting her to the Met from time to time (La Traviata is next on the list), and I doubt she'll turn me down, so long as I don't insist that she pretend to enjoy herself. But should the day finally come that she decides to give up completely on opera, that'lI be fine, too. For who knows what might happen once she turns 40? She might just hear Der Rosenkavalier on the radio, and suddenly realize what she'd been missing all those years. That's the wonderful thing about taste: it's never too late to change your mind. I might even start liking Schoenberg again--after all, deafness runs in my family.

Posted December 13, 12:00 PM

TT: Discuss

Dear OGIC:

I want to talk about sex scenes again after you've seen The Cooler.

Posted December 13, 12:00 PM

December 12, 2003

TT: Acronymical

Middle age has slowed me down. I only just learned what DTR means--it's Gen-Y-speak for Define The Relationship--and this morning I stumbled across an invaluable addition to my vocabulary: WTF. Thank you, Cup of Chicha.

(For the context of this staggering development, go here. You won't be sorry.)

Posted December 12, 12:54 PM

TT: Opera in the bedroom

As you may have heard, ChevronTexaco, which has been sponsoring the Metropolitan Opera's Saturday-afternoon radio broadcasts for the past 64 years, is pulling the plug at the end of the current season. (They now have other corporate priorities.) The broadcasts cost $7 million a year, and the Met doesn't have that kind of cash to spare.

Tony Tommasini has a story in this morning's New York Times about the situation as of this moment. The broadcasts, he writes,

have been a cultural lifeline for generations of listeners, both those who live in places far removed from any opera company and those who may live just a subway ride from Lincoln Center but can't afford to attend. They are carried by some 365 stations in the United States, as well as in Canada, Mexico, South America, 27 European countries, China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, reaching, according to the opera company's most recent survey, an estimated total of more than 11 million.

The Met has been unable to obtain a new sponsor to pick up the annual $7 million cost of the broadcasts, which covers a range of expenses including compensation to commercial radio stations; extra fees to singers, musicians and technical crews; salaries for the radio production staff, engineers and announcers; transmission fees; royalties; and publicity. Ideally the Met is looking for a single sponsor that will pledge financing for a minimum of five years.

A partial reprieve for next season came recently with the announcement that the Annenberg Foundation had awarded $3.5 million to keep the broadcasts on the air. That still leaves a sizable sum to raise. The only reassurances that the broadcasts will continue have been the personal pledges of Joseph Volpe, the Met's general manager, and Beverly Sills, its chairwoman.

Ms. Sills's determination to find a new sponsor is strongly personal. "Being a child in Brooklyn from a modest home, the opportunities for me to go to the Met were nil," she said in an interview. "The radio broadcasts were an essential part of our lives. My mother cut out that time every week. She arranged for my singing lessons and piano lessons in Manhattan to be on Saturday mornings, so that there was time for me to get back to Brooklyn for sandwiches and the opera."

(Read the whole thing here.)

Susan Graham told Tommasini a similar story. And I sympathize--up to a point. But I'd also like to know how many of the Met's 11 million listeners live in the United States. I'm interested in knowing more about the extent of those "extra fees" to singers and musicians. And I'd especially like to know exactly how much of that $7 million budget goes toward "compensation to commercial radio stations." NPR, as we all know, no longer wants to broadcast live music--its member stations are rushing to adopt the talk-oriented formats that today's listeners seem to prefer. Does this mean that the Met has to pay commercial classical stations to carry its broadcasts?

Regular readers of this blog know that I'm furious with NPR and PBS for abdicating their responsibility to high culture. At the same time, I don't believe in sinking money into obsolete cultural ventures that have largely outlived their utility, and it occurs to me that the Met's radio broadcasts--at least as presently constituted--may well fall into that category.

Another quote from Tommasini:

I, too, was formed musically and even emotionally by the Met broadcasts. Coming from a family on Long Island with no musical background, I discovered these broadcasts on my own. Sometimes I would listen on the crackly radio in the kitchen, where, in something of a role reversal, I tried to engage my mother, who was intrigued but not that interested. Eventually my parents gave me a high-quality radio, and I would listen in my room alone. I remember having only a scant idea of what Verdi's "Aida" was about, yet being enthralled with Leontyne Price's singing.

That's a nice story, just like the others in the piece. On the other hand, I love opera at least as much at Tony, yet I've never listened to the Met's radio broadcasts, not as a kid (we didn't get them in southeast Missouri) and not now. And in any case, all the people he quotes are talking about listening experiences that took place at least a quarter-century ago. I wonder how many budding young singers and critics circa 2003--if any--would paint a picture remotely similar to that of Tony and Beverly Sills.

I've thought for some time that the future of classical radio lies not in what has come to be called "terrestrial radio" (i.e., conventional radio broadcasting) but in satellite and Web-based radio, which make it possible to "narrowcast" a wider variety of programs aimed at smaller audiences. I suspect that's where the Met really belongs--not on terrestrial radio. And if I had to guess, I'd say that the Tony Tommasinis and Susan Grahams of today would be more likely to listen to the Met on their computers than on "high-quality radios" bought by their parents.

As I've said more than once on this blog, I'm as nostalgic as the next guy, but I'm mainly interested in essences, not their embodiments. The real miracle of modern technology is that it offers radically new means of bringing about profoundly traditional ends. You can use your iBook to download Dostoyevsky, or listen to vintage radio shows from the Thirties and Forties--or read a blog like this. The Metropolitan Opera needs to keep that in mind as it figures out how to stay on the air.

Posted December 12, 12:24 PM

TT: Almanac

"The first night we went to hear Parsifal. I still see my paralyzed mother there, looking and listening. In the Prinzregententheater the orchestra pit is invisible, especially designed by Wagner himself. On the stage there moved some high-bosomed women and obese men, enacting some sort of unreal slow-motion tragedy. From the bowels of the theater came the wailing sounds of a music whose humid sensuousness and subjectivism is intended to indicate 'religion,' or something which the artist believed to be religion. It was a strenuous and embarrassing experience. The only bright spot was the interval with sandwich rolls and beer."

Karl Stern, The Pillar of Fire

Posted December 12, 12:03 PM

TT: A really big show

My mailbox continues to silt up with good stuff, which I'll dole out drib by drab. First is a reader's response to my posting on the growing irrelevance of regional orchestras:

To me, the chief benefit of having a third-tier regional orchestra (aside from the employment it provides to classical musicians, which, admittedly, is a poor reason for anything) lies in the children. True, an adult familiar with the classical repertoire would be better off listening to a Beethoven symphony on a CD or DVD rather than spending an evening at some small-town auditorium, but children are a different story.

I spent my first 11 years in a small town in Belarus, and my very first concert was hearing the Soviet equivalent of a third-tier orchestra. I don't remember what was played and I certainly was in no position to gauge the quality of the playing. But the experience was permanently etched in my memory. This was my first introduction not to the music so much, but to the concert experience. It was the grandness, the pomposity of the occasion that I found so fascinating. The music was almost beside the point. It was that evening when my love for concerts (which later evolved into the love of music itself) began.

Later, we moved to New York and I attended various music schools, including the old High School of Performing Arts. Three of my four children now study music at one of the schools I attended. When I though it was time to take my oldest to a symphony concert, it didn't matter to me so much whether it was the Chicago Symphony playing at Carnegie or some Bergen County orchestra playing in Englewood. I wanted him to develop a love for the spectacle of a symphony concert.

My concern is that if regional orchestras disappear, the already shrinking audience base for classical music would, within a generation, disappear with them.

I've gotten a lot of smart letters defending regional orchestras (more of which will turn up here in days to come), but this is the first one that seemed to me to move the argument in a significantly different direction. I really did underestimate the power of sheer spectacle, didn't I?

As I read this letter, I recalled the first time I ever heard a symphony orchestra in person. It was the St. Louis Symphony (a second-tier ensemble of high quality, to be sure), performing Vaughan Williams' Sea Symphony with a local university choir. I can't remember a thing about the music or the way it was performed, but I can still close my eyes and see all those musicians up on stage. Granted, I was already in high school when I saw that concert, by which time I was already well on the way to becoming a performing musician. Looking back, I'd say the most important orchestral "experience" I had during my formative years was watching Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts on TV. Still, I'm inclined to go along with what my correspondent says about how seeing a symphony orchestra in person--be it good or fair or merely adequate--might well help set a young listener on the right path.

Posted December 12, 12:01 PM

TT: Time now for a word from our sponsor

That's me! Please don't forget that my most recent book, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, is now out in trade paperback--and still available in hardcover. If you like "About Last Night," you'll like The Skeptic, and so will your friends. Don't take my word for it, though: instead, take a look at some of the reviews.

I blog for the joy of it but write to pay the rent (as well as to buy the occasional lithograph). You can support both causes by giving The Skeptic for Christmas, or buying a copy for yourself if you don't already own one.

To purchase the paperback, click here.

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Forgive me for being a nuisance, but a boy must peddle his book. We return you now to our regularly scheduled blog.

Posted December 12, 12:00 PM

TT: Black, white--and gray

I reviewed John Kani's Nothing but the Truth and the Builders Association's Alladeen in today's Wall Street Journal. About the first I had mixed feelings:

For playgoers who prefer politics to art, apartheid was a godsend. It inspired countless scripts that were black and white in every sense--you never had to ask who the bad guys were--and whose authors always threw in a last-act sermon to clear up any lingering doubts. Now that the good guys have won, though, it stands to reason that South Africa's playwrights should finally have started working in shades of gray, and Lincoln Center Theater has proved the point by importing the Johannesburg production of John Kani's "Nothing but the Truth," an uneven but interesting new play that runs through Jan. 18 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater....

"Nothing but the Truth" is a kitchen-sink drama (literally--Sarah Roberts made sure to include one in her ultra-naturalistic set) whose characters are all citizens of Clichéland: the blustering father, the half-clinging, half-resentful daughter, the outsider who puts dangerous new ideas in the daughter's head. The ambiguities of life after apartheid that Mr. Kani has faced so squarely deserve a fresher framework.

About Alladeen, on the other hand, I had nothing but praise:

You may not know it, but when you dial an 800 number to order a fruitcake or gripe about your Internet service provider, your call is often answered by an Indian operator who has been given an American-sounding pseudonym, painstakingly (though not always successfully) taught to shed his native accent, and assigned to help you as best he can for the lowest possible per-call price. Half performance art, half documentary, "Alladeen" tells the story of these deracinated residents of Nowhere, U.S.A., who take calls from halfway around the world without ever having seen the distant land they pretend to inhabit.

Such a premise could easily have degenerated into a didacticism as rigid as that of "Nothing but the Truth," and sure enough, Marianne Weems, the director and tutelary spirit of "Alladeen," claims the show is all about "the social imagination in an age of corporate colonialism." Not to worry, though: Ms. Weems and her collaborators have turned this PC-speak high concept into a poetic extravaganza that effortlessly blends words, music, film, video art, and the vivid performances of five versatile onstage actors who waft you into the mysterious world of a Bangalore call center....

No link, so to read the whole thing, head for the nearest newsstand, buy this morning's Journal, and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, where you'll find me on theater, Joe Morgenstern on film, and lots of other interesting stuff.

Posted December 12, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Ignore the man behind the curtain

This week's New York Observer reveals almost more than I wanted to know about Mr. Personality:

We can help ID him only partly: Although Mr. TMFTML was gallant enough to speak to The Observer by phone, he would not disclose his name. This much can be ascertained: His nom de guerre is taken from the Leonard Cohen song "Hallelujah." He is 31. He lives in Manhattan. He is married. His occupation--which he refers to only as "corporate"--remains cloaked in mystery. He was born in New York City, and has lived here ever since. He does not travel in "media circles," a phrase he would no doubt gag over, but he admits to having once met Dale Peck, who "made fun of" his clothing.

Sounds like a lot of disinformation to me. Except for maybe the Dale Peck part.

Posted December 12, 2:26 AM

December 11, 2003

TT: Unhappy camper

It seems that Tony Kushner, whose Caroline, or Change I panned in last Friday's Wall Street Journal, thinks I'm a "right-wing nut." Serves me right for daring to dislike his show. I'm surprised he didn't call me a McCarthyite while he was at it. No doubt it slipped his mind.

P.S. For a gay dissent on Kushner, go here.

Posted December 11, 12:03 PM

TT: Almanac

"Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistant irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food."

Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

Posted December 11, 12:02 PM

TT: The zero option

A reader sent me a link to "Bridging the Gap: Innovations to Save Our Orchestras," a study by the Knight Foundation that preaches the virtues of "nontraditional and enhanced concert experiences" that "seek to reach new and younger audiences by integrating programmatic themes, other art forms and other modes of communication to present classical music in alternative formats." You can--and should--read the whole thing here.

I'm interested in the attempts of various regional orchestras mentioned in the study to find new ways to attract younger listeners--and even more interested in the data showing that these techniques seem to be working. At the same time, I also noted with a different sort of interest these observations:

To date, there is mixed evidence about whether these concerts would lead their ticket buyers to more standard orchestral fare, including classics or pops concerts....The findings are consistent with evidence from the Audience Insight study, which suggest that "increasing attendance--or at least staving off a decline in attendance--may require a loosening of the definitional boundaries around ‘classical music'" and that "some orchestras, especially those in smaller cities, might re-examine how they define their constituencies and how they select, package and deliver their musical products."

Reading that paragraph inspired me to ask a question that nobody in the music business ever asks, at least not out loud: what, if anything, justifies the existence of a regional symphony orchestra? Most readers of this blog, were they to be asked that question, would sputter out some variation of "Well...just because!" And I know what they mean. Even now, it's still widely taken for granted that a symphony orchestra is an indispensable part of that which makes a city civilized. But is that true?

Let's start by considering some superficially similar cases. What justifies the existence of a regional museum? In the case of an institution like, say, Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, whose permanent collection is exceptionally fine, the answer really is self-evident: the quality of the art is its own justification.

What about performing ensembles? Again, let's take a best-case example. Carolina Ballet, based in Raleigh, N.C., operates on a smallish budget and is in constant danger of going under. Yet it still manages to present a repertory ranging from modern classics by Balanchine and Tudor to brand-new works of high quality by such distinguished choreographers as Robert Weiss (the artistic director), Christopher Wheeldon, and Lynne Taylor-Corbett, all of it danced exceptionally well. Once again, the justification for Carolina Ballet's existence is self-evident: all you have to do is take a look.

Is it possible to make a prima facie case of the same kind for regional orchestras? The Knight Foundation studied the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Charlotte Symphony, the Colorado Symphony, the Detroit Symphony, the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, the Kansas City Symphony, the Long Beach Symphony, the Louisiana Philharmonic, the New World Symphony (Michael Tilson Thomas' Miami-based training orchestra), the Oregon Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the St. Louis Symphony, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the San Antonio Symphony, and the Wichita Symphony. One of these orchestras is a world-class ensemble, and three or four others are known and admired outside their regions. The rest are third-tier orchestras--in other words, they don't record or broadcast, and you probably wouldn't know their conductors' names.

As it happens, I haven't heard any of the latter groups in concert, but I have heard quite a few similarly situated orchestras, most of which offer their subscribers an ultra-safe mixture of standard classics and souffle-light pops concerts, performed adequately but not memorably. They rarely play new music, and when they do, it usually isn't very good. None of them is having much luck at attracting younger listeners.

If I lived in a city that was home to such an orchestra, would I subscribe to its concerts? A hundred years ago, I would have said yes, because live performances were the only way to hear music you didn't make yourself. But the invention of sound recording has made it possible to hear great performances of the classics whenever you want. Is there any point in going to hear a merely adequate live performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony? For me, and for a fast-growing number of other Americans, the answer appears to be no. As a result, the only way such orchestras can stay alive, according to the Knight Foundation, is by "loosening the definitional boundaries around ‘classical music'," which I take to be a euphemism for playing fewer classics and more pop-style fare--and I don't want to hear that, either.

This brings us full circle. What justifies the existence of a third-tier regional symphony orchestra, other than the employment it provides to classical musicians? Does civic pride count for anything? Not in our egalitarian age. Today, no community gets points for simply having an orchestra, irrespective of its quality.

I speak as one who believes with all his heart in the power and permanence of Western classical music. Nevertheless, if I were the head of the Podunk Foundation for the Arts and I had to choose between funding the Podunk Philharmonic and a non-musical organization similar in artistic quality to, say, Carolina Ballet or the Nelson-Atkins Museum, I'd dump the orchestra without thinking twice. Why? Because the best regional ballet companies provide a unique aesthetic experience that cannot be duplicated by any other means. Likewise the best regional museums: there is no substitute for actually seeing a great painting. Not so third-tier symphony orchestras. Their primary function, which is to give live performances of great music, has been rendered obsolete by technology. If the only way for them to stay alive is by switching to slickly packaged schlock--and I'm not saying it is--they'd be better off dead.

I repeat: I'm not saying that schlock is the only alternative. Nor am I calling for the defunding of all regional orchestras. This has been a "thought experiment," an attempt to see an old problem in a new light by changing the terms of the discussion. But a growing number of American orchestras are finding themselves in lose-lose situations not dissimilar to the one I've just described. It's their job to come up with a better alternative. If they don't, nobody will mourn their passing.

Posted December 11, 12:02 PM

TT: What's the rush?

A reader writes, apropos of my posting on the box-office "failure" of Master and Commander:

The thing that always occurs to me when I read about the "failure" of some ambitious new film is this - how much of the cycle of fast consumption and a very narrow definition of success sets up failure as an inevitability? I'm not phrasing this correctly. Modern movie "success" is predicated on getting butts in the seats right away - and that's not how adults see movies, for the most part.

Who has time? You've got to work, and clean the house, rake the leaves, fix the toilet, make time for your spouse and children, or friends and family, find a babysitter - or wait for your married friends to find one - go to the gym, feed your mind and spirit in whatever fashion pleases you - arts, news, theater, athletics, cooking, sex, all of the above. Going to the movies is terrific, but not really a communal act and as such falls a little further down in my list of priorities - and I suspect I'm not alone here. Does Hollywood know this?

Maybe it is different in the city, where there is a more logical flow from theater to restaurant to conversation, but out here in the hinterlands, you go, and then you stand in the parking lot dragging out the moment before you go to your separate cars and depart. Maybe you go to dinner after, but by the time you figure out where, get into your separate vehicles and drive there, the immediacy of the experience has changed. Everyone lives 20 or 30 minutes away from each other, so it is not that easy to travel together - and the babysitter dollar factor can not be discounted. I also think there is a 9/11 aspect to movie going, just in terms of where people prioritize their time these days.

When the success or failure of a movie is measured in weeks and instant gratification dollars, most films (adult or otherwise) disappear from the multiplex before I can see them. The perfect exception is My Big Fat Greek Wedding - which, I know, had a tiny budget - a terrific, funny film. Because it was slow building it got to hang around for a while, giving adult people with complex scheduling challenges a chance to find the time to see it, recommend it and sometimes see it again. I probably don't understand the economics of cinemas well enough, but it just seems to me that the "failure" of a film is, in many cases, less about its ultimate audience, its ultimate financial and critical achievements, and more about who's willing to rush out and see it right away. And since that definition of success is skewed towards exploding things and the people who rush out to see them explode, a catch-22 emerges. What's wrong with a slow building success? Is it somehow un-American? Or something to be less proud of? I really don't get it - the elevation of immediacy over the celebration of quality. And the lesson seems to have been lost on the movie business, particularly when it comes to so-called adult oriented movies.

This summer I had hoped to see the documentary Spellbound - it played in the next town over for a week. I barely knew it was there before it was gone - and I just don't understand how that's good marketing, or marketing that has any understanding of the demands of daily life. Movie advertising focuses on the opening week and then peters away to make room for the next thing....Over half the space in the multiplex is devoted to only one or two films, with everything else crammed into the leftover spaces, with more limited show schedules....bragging rights dependent on opening grosses, not total grosses. It encourages the production of shoddy, cheap and exciting movies, endless sequels and safe bets, which will make a lot of money right away and then disappear without leaving any kind of lasting impression and sets up a cycle of expectation where there is no room for any other style or approach.

Gosh, I'm cranky today. Reading about the film industry definition of success always pushes my buttons, particularly after having sat through Matrix Reloaded (I refuse to see Revolutions on the "fool me once" principal). Master & Commander was very expensive, true, but I don't doubt it will make money - ultimately. Foreign rights, DVD, and the audience that will read the reviews, hear their friends say good things and go see it as long as its in the theater. I don't know if that will qualify as success by current standards, but I think its pretty OK. Let's check again in a year.

To all of which I have just two things to say:

(1) This explains why I look forward to the day when (as I argued in my original posting) "the adventurous indie flicks of the not-so-distant future...find their audiences not in theatrical release, but via such new-media distribution routes as direct-to-DVD and on-demand digital cable."

(2) Thanks for writing. I couldn't have put it better if I'd stayed up all night.

Posted December 11, 12:02 PM

TT: Battlefield dispatch

A reader writes:

I thought I might as well add my comments about the opening of minds to symphonic music and your reader's observation about instrumental lessons being a crucial but missing element in American schooling.

As a former full-time piano teacher and a present part-time piano teacher, I can vouch for the fact that many parents provide private piano lessons for their sometimes unwilling children. Most study for a year or two until they nag their parents to let them quit. Sometimes I wonder if they find the lessons uninteresting, not fun, or not informative. A large majority of parents tell me that they have to fight with their children to get them to practice and they soon tire of the frustration.

Who or what is to blame for this sorry state of affairs--teachers, parents, television, computers, technology games, too much homework, too much participation in sports? I certainly do not have the answer for you. But I can tell you that achievement at the keyboard by beginning students varies from dreadful to excellent. If I can produce one proficient student, why can't I reach all of them? Am I competing with too many other distractions for the attention of the very young? Somehow the Twinkle Variations for beginners seem quite quaint in this age of technology. Few are willing to invest time and effort in learning to play the piano, and it grieves me that I may be causing some students to actually "dislike" music by asking them to "think."

This is the piano teacher's dilemma. Should I actually expect my students to advance satisfactorily as in regular school, or do I just let them fool around until they convince their parents to let them quit? I know that the students who get the most out of piano lessons are the ones who stay the course. There are various reasons why parents want their children to study piano--some for the discipline required, some for the therapy music may provide, and some for the joy of being able to play.

I still remember one young student who told his mother that I didn't care whether or not he practiced his assigned pieces or how many mistakes he made. I was shocked to hear this, because nothing could be further from the truth. My hope is that each student will take "something" away from the lessons whatever the length of time studied. Finding a way to reach each child is a spectacular challenge, but I'll never stop trying as long as I am still breathing.

But are these piano lessons actually leading any of my students to become candidates for concert attendance or love of classical music? I don't know the answer to that question either. It seems to me that the students who reach excellence at the keyboard are the ones who were genuinely interested in music and the piano and who had the idea of piano lessons germinate in their consciousness with or without encouragement by their parents. I assume that these students would become lovers of music even if they had never taken piano lessons.

Music does not give up its secrets easily, but that is part of the magic! Those of us who are in love with symphonic and instrumental music will never stop trying to inspire that love in others. But apparently your reader thinks we have already failed.

I, too, wonder whether anyone who is forced to study piano (or any other instrument) gets anything out of it beyond grief and exasperation. I've always wondered whether there's a better way to nudge children in the direction of dabbling in music. My own case is so uncharacteristic as to shed no light on the larger question: I started taking piano lessons in high school, after I'd already spent three or four years studying violin and teaching myself how to play bass and guitar. I did it because I wanted to, not at my parents' behest. The drive came from within.

Presumably I would have developed a serious interest in music even if I hadn't studied it as a boy. Or maybe not. Either way, I have no doubt whatsoever that I owe much of my aesthetic life--first as a performer, now as a writer--to Richard Powell and Gordon Beaver, the men who taught me how to play (respectively) violin and piano. Yes, I found the door, but they held it open it for me, and I bless them for having done so. What's more, I think it's a pretty safe bet that my correspondent has done the same thing for dozens, perhaps hundreds of children. I hope I succeed in doing even one thing in my life that matters half as much.

Posted December 11, 12:00 PM

TT: Eat hearty

We don't usually get e-mail begging to differ with an almanac entry (see below), but a reader writes:

Leaving aside the fact that being likened to the Hezbollah is a formidable strain on one's sense of humor, Mr. Bourdain is incorrect: as a vegetarian, I love food. My meals are tasty, and I can enjoy them without concern that they have caused the demise of some pleasant creature or the injury of my health. So when he says that I am both an enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit and an affront to all he stands for, I'm obliged to conclude that these two things are mutually opposed. I would invite readers of About Last Night to consider that vegetarianism is similar to the restraint of color in the work of Giorgio Morandi: although the extremes of sensation are not indulged, his work is full of feeling, more so than other painters who use every available hue.

Nice try.

Posted December 11, 3:00 AM

OGIC: Elsewhere

Colby has some justifiably grinchy words about Christmas muzak and commerce:

as I am prepared to admit that an unusually good fruitcake might offer some gustatory happiness to a person emerging from a prolonged hunger strike, I am prepared to admit that there may be elements of genuine musical worth concealed in the Yuletide canon.

But what enjoyment remains after you pass these nuggets of quality through some antiquated synthesizer, exsanguinate them of any remaining trace of swing or lively tempo, and broadcast them through a vaporous, trebly PA into a environment clotted with reverb? If you really liked Christmas music passionately, you'd regard malls as churches of Satan. You'd take up arson as a hobby.

Christmas music in stores and malls is clearly not meant to be an active pleasure, consciously savoured by the discriminating shopper. It is one of those cases in which capitalism behaves much as its dumbest critics always argue: as a conspiracy against the public.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted December 11, 2:10 AM

OGIC: Promises, promises

Last weekend I promised to post an interview with a young filmmaker who is on his way to Sundance with his first film. This is still in the works, but will have to wait until next week due to his understandably busy schedule. He and I have an appointment to speak on Saturday.

I'm anxious to find out more about the progress of the documentary, which I saw a few minutes of many months ago. At that time, the film promised to be a mindbending descent into a secret world of--depending on how you look at it--delight or madness. (Two words: competitive Scrabble.) But I'm especially eager to hear about the whole heady experience of being chosen for such a prestigious festival as a relative novice, and excited about the remote possibility that this man may need some arm candy in Park City.

Bear with us--you should find this one worth the wait.

Posted December 11, 2:03 AM

OGIC: Out of sight

Dear Terry,

Your temperature-reading of sex in the movies the other day seems to me right on the money: "I'm not prudish about on-screen sex: I just don't think it tends to be especially memorable or persuasive." This is just what I was trying to say when I wrote here about my problems with the film adaptation of The Wings of the Dove. Here's part of what I wrote about that movie's sex scene (a scene not depicted in the novel, only suggested):

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

In the novel, this off-stage encounter changes something between the characters. The reader can't be sure just how or why it does so, in a typical example of strategic Jamesian ambiguity. But once the filmmaker decides to depict the sex scene, he damn well needs to have an idea about how and why it changes things, and a means of communicating this to the viewer. My distinct impression when I saw Wings (and it has been a while, I'll admit) was that the director was more interested in hottening up Henry James than in linking what happens behind Merton's bedroom door to the film's dénouement. All we learn from the scene as rendered, though, is that he and Kate have sex (and that it is generically steamy). This being the case, one of Renoir's closed doors would have been far more economical, and probably more affecting.

I like your list of movies that do it right (The Big Easy is what I always think of first), though I am woefully underexposed to John Sayles. I would add to the list Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight, where the sex is intercut with clips from the hotel-bar seduction that precedes it. The characters laugh as they undress, and feel a little bit bad in the morning. These details manage to be familiar, yet anything but generic.

And speaking of undressing, did you notice the hit we got yesterday from somebody's Google search for "jennifer+aniston+fully+naked"? I'm shocked, shocked, that we would have come up in such a search: when did either of us ever mention Jennifer Aniston?

Posted December 11, 1:28 AM

December 10, 2003

TT: Possibly not belaboring the obvious

I guess I should have said so earlier, but...the quotations appearing in my "Almanac" posts may or may not reflect the opinions of OGIC and/or myself. Sometimes.

Is that sufficiently unclear?

Posted December 10, 12:03 PM

TT: Home alone

I'm still getting mail about "A Shift in Time," the posting in which I discussed the decline of the movie theater.

Here are three more letters that caught my eye:

"Movies will still be made if the only way to see them is on DVDs, but classical music is different. Chamber music groups (and big symphony orchestras, too) need audiences. Many groups make their living by touring; some record, others don't. Their live repertoire is always greater than their recorded repertoire. Long-lived quartets or trios get their particular sound by playing together again and again, and you wouldn't have that kind of signature sound from ad hoc quartets gathered together just to record the late Beethoven cycle....I think that watching movies alone is a loss, too. I love Netflix and tinker endlessly with my queue, and it's great to snuggle up with your beloved or kids and watch a movie on a rainy night. But I can still remember going to see particular movies at the Orson Welles Theater and the Brattle Street Cinema in Cambridge thirty years ago with a bunch of friends. One doesn't remember viewing DVDs in the same way--one remembers the movie itself and the fact that one has seen it, but not much else about the circumstances. There's a communal aspect to art that you're not accounting for. Reading has always been solitary, and the meditative, lost-in-an-armchair quality is part of the reading life. Blogging and emails and cyperspace are sort of in between--you're both alone and connected though in a phantom way. But music is different. I wouldn't imagine saying this to the author of ‘About Last Night,' but--you need to get out more!"

"Expect cinemas to be around for a few more years. If theater owners catch on to the trend, even longer. How so? By marketing a package. Dinner and a movie. You and your SO [significant other, I assume] have a bite at a favorite eatery, then take the bill to the theater where you get a discount. The restaurant benefits, the cinema benefits, and the two of you have a good time. Depending on your finances it could become a monthly or even a weekly thing."

"I think there's another great shift that's coming about aside from the one you talked about, how now everybody takes movies seriously. That one was brought on by the arrival of the VCR, and the ability of people to watch movies in their own homes. This other one, you could describe as ‘we're all becoming film students.' It was, or is being, brought on by the arrival of the DVD, and all the extra space it provides for things like director and cast and crew and composer and film critic commentaries, featurettes, documentaries, storyboards, scripts, art galleries, text info slides, DVD-ROM extras like script-to-film and storyboard-to-film comparison, and so on. Not everyone will care to explore these extras, of course, but now those who would like to be able to learn more about how films are made have an unparallelled access to everything they need to do just that....In years to come, I suspect we may see a much larger crop of independent filmmakers as folks who learn the craft mostly or entirely from a DVD-based education, grab some cheap digital cameras and start experimenting. It's not going to be as necessary to go to film school or get a massive budget to learn to make movies anymore."

Correspondent No. 1 is a trustee of a chamber-music concert series in a Midwestern city, and I used to feel the way he did. Now I don't. Mind you, I readily admit that the decline of live performance will have dire and unpredictable effects on the culture of classical music and the ability of performers to earn a living--but I don't think the trend can be reversed, at least not very easily, and I'm no longer so sure it should be. This is a complicated problem about which I wrote at length in "Death of the Concert," an essay collected in A Terry Teachout Reader, out in May from Yale University Press (plug, plug). I don't want to reprise the whole thing here, but this paragraph is especially relevant:

To what extent is it reasonable to expect that Alfred Brendel has something so dramatically new to say about the Schubert A Major Sonata, D. 959, that it is worth paying $60 to hear him play it in person? For the veteran concertgoer, the answer is obvious: recordings are at best a pale substitute for the immediate experience of live performance. But for the younger person who can sit in his living room and listen to the same sonata being performed by Maurizio Pollini, Andras Schiff, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Richard Goode, Murray Perahia, or Artur Schnabel--not to mention Brendel himself--this argument is unlikely to withstand close scrutiny.

My point was that a piece of classical music is infinitely more important than any possible interpretation of it, and once a half-dozen first-class versions are available on CD, the marginal utility of hearing an additional one, whether on record or in person, becomes subject to the law of diminishing returns. Therein lies the problem of the classical concert. Believe me, I treasure the "communal aspect" of art, so much so that I go out of my way (and my apartment) to experience it four or five nights a week. I couldn't get out much more than that! But I no longer feel any compelling need to regularly experience it in the form of routine live performances of the standard classical repertoire, any more than I feel the need to own another recording of Beethoven's late quartets, no matter how good it may be.

Is my attitude widely shared? Absolutely. Is it bad for classical music? Probably. Can anything be done about it? Maybe. Go here to read about what might be done to save the classical concert from extinction.

Moving on to Correspondent No. 2, I have some nagging doubts about his suspiciously plausible-sounding plan. It happens that New York once had a perfectly wonderful little combination theater-restaurant called the Screening Room. (That's where I saw Croupier.) You went there to eat a tasty, well-served dinner, then strolled down the hall at the appointed hour to watch a foreign or independent film, all for one reasonable prix fixe. Alas, not enough people appreciated the one-stop convenience, and so the Screening Room was forced to close its doors. My guess is that in our choice-intensive society, fewer and fewer of us care to commit ourselves to package deals of that sort. For much the same reason, it's also becoming difficult to persuade people to subscribe to any kind of advance-purchase ticket series, be it for opera, ballet, concerts, theater, or whatever. Like the song says, we want what we want when we want it--and we don't care whether that makes it impossible for the local ballet company to pay its bills on time, either.

Correspondent No. 3 has answered a question aboout which I'd been wondering. Who watches all those special features? I don't, at least not very often--but I'm not a budding young filmmaker. And I love the idea of young people learning how to make movies "mostly or entirely from a DVD-based education" rather than by going to school. If film-studies majors are anything like creative-writing majors, the result will probably be better independent films. Talk about unforeseen consequences!

Thanks to you all, and to all my readers and writers out there in the blogosphere. Sifting through the mailbox is one of the best parts of blogging.

Posted December 10, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Men who are accustomed over a long series of years to supposing that whatever can somehow be squared with the law is right--or if not right then allowable--are not useful members of society; and when they reach positions of power in the state they are noxious. They are people for whom ethics can be summed up by the collected statutes."

Patrick O'Brian, The Reverse of the Medal

Posted December 10, 12:01 PM

TT: Marching orders

I haven't mentioned this for ages, so I will: please tell your friends about "About Last Night." We don't advertise. We don't send out mass e-mailings. We rely on links, and on you. Each and every time you send our URL to a potential reader, the law of unforeseen consequences has a fresh chance to kick in.

If you read this site, tell somebody about it. If you have a blog of your own, mention us. The easy-to-remember address is www.terryteachout.com. Spread the word...often.

Posted December 10, 12:00 PM

TT: The mixture as before

Take a look at the story in this morning New York Times about who--if anybody--will replace Lorin Maazel as music director of the New York Philharmonic:

When he was selected in 2001, Mr. Maazel was assumed to be a one-term appointment. He was 70, and concerns about an aging audience prompted calls for a less traditional leader. But his appointment also represented the new power of the orchestra's musicians, who had pushed for Mr. Maazel, having played under him as a visiting conductor. Many orchestra members continue to say they are content under his baton.

The quotes are revealing. The orchestra's board invited several Philharmonic players to give their opinions of Maazel. One compared him to Kurt Masur, the orchestra's previous music director:

"He's such a welcome relief after the tremendous abuse we took before," said Eric Bartlett, a cellist. He said Mr. Masur had operated on "the assumption that every musician was trying not to play well and had to be terrorized into doing their best." He added, "That assumption wore everybody down."

Another, concertmaster Glenn Dicterow, said, "If we have no one to replace Maazel, we just can't let him go. I just don't think we're in a rush to replace someone as brilliant as Mr. Maazel....He's respectful and thorough, and he doesn't waste time." And to critics in the media who claim that Maazel's programming is "too conservative," Dicterow replies, "New York audiences like to hear their Beethoven. If we played only contemporary music, we'd only have a quarter of an audience, and pretty soon we wouldn't have an orchestra."

This story virtually speaks for itself, but I should add one footnote for readers with short memories: Kurt Masur took a demoralized, undisciplined orchestra and turned it into the virtuoso ensemble it had been in years past. He didn't do that by being respectful and efficient--he did it by tyrannizing a bunch of temperamental players notorious for their bad behavior. (It's no accident that the Philharmonic long ago acquired the nickname "Murder, Inc." for its treatment of weak and incompetent conductors.)

As for the rest, I'll simply direct you to my earlier post on the future of the classical concert (see below). For my part, I don't think Lorin Maazel is a very interesting or significant conductor, but in a way that's the least important thing about him. What really matters is that the Philharmonic itself clearly believes it can continue to do business as usual, indefinitely. Perhaps it can. The Philharmonic is, after all, America's flagship orchestra, located in a city big and rich enough to keep it afloat no matter what it does or doesn't do. But how many other American orchestras can say the same thing? Damned few--which is why so many are either floundering or folding.

Posted December 10, 11:02 AM

TT: Words to the wise

If The Wall Street Journal posted free links to its arts coverage (hint, hint), I'd tell you to take a look at "Suzanne Farrell Gets Her Revenge," Robert Greskovic's review of Suzanne Farrell Ballet's recent week-long run in Washington. Since it doesn't, I'll tell you instead to go out and buy a copy of this morning's paper. Greskovic's review is the most important piece about ballet you'll read this month, including anything I might happen to write. Here's a brief excerpt:

Since 1999, as part of a project of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Ms. Farrell has been selecting and preparing dancers, and staging ballets, primarily those of Balanchine. The Suzanne Farrell Ballet, a season-to-season group of dancers that currently numbers 34, has just completed an amibitous nine-week U.S. tour with a weeklong, two-program all-Balanchine season at the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Ehater....When the leader starting from scratch is as up to trailblazing as Ms. Farrell has proven herself to be, empires can be built. SFB is on the move, and the Balanchine centenary is happily just the time to keep the momentum building.

Don't miss this one.

Posted December 10, 1:23 AM

December 9, 2003

TT: Almanac

"If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it."

Flannery O'Connor, letter to an unnamed teacher (1961)

Posted December 09, 12:19 PM

TT: 14:59

Here's a sign of the times: JenniCam, the site on which you can view real-time video of life inside Jenni Ringley's bedroom, is shutting down on December 31 after more than seven years "on the air" (or whatever the properly postmodern term for Webcasting is).

I hadn't heard anything about Jenni and her so-called life for ages, but there was a time when her Web site was all the rage, so much so that she attracted quite a few subscribers willing to pay for premium content, not to mention half-witted academic theory-spinners like the professor of psychology who penned the following paragraph, for which he doubtless received tenure:

The JenniCam phenomenon is a unique example of how cyberspace addresses such needs for belonging and the social affirmation of self. There was an overwhelming response to Jennifer Ringley when she set up a live, continuous video broadcast of her dorm room, and then later her apartment. People who idealized, even worshipped, Jenni banded together in groups to talk about her, speculate about her, share screen captured pictures of her. She became the focal point of their camaraderie. Their collective admiration of her--a kind of idealizing transference--served to bolster their sense of self.

Jenni herself was a bit of a theory-spinner, in her fashion. Asked by an interviewer to explain the appeal of her site, she replied:

I think people are getting tired of seeing airbrushed models in magazines and unrealistic actors and actresses living unrealistic lives. The real lives of real people are even more special and interesting and "perfect" than what you find on TV. I try to impress the idea that I do the JenniCam with the belief that EVERYONE is so special, and I hope that's what people come away with.

JenniCam was, of course, nothing more than a hula-hoop-type fad, but seven years ago the Web itself was still something of a giant-sized hula hoop, in much the same way as was television circa 1948. Back then, pretty much anything could draw a crowd--championship wrestling, roller derbies, B-movie matinees--simply because TV itself was so new that people would watch whatever was on, fascinated not by the message but by the medium. The Internet was like that in 1996. Now it's part of the air we breathe, so much so that I rarely stop to reflect on what life was like before e-mail, amazon.com, Google, and blogs.

To be sure, most blogs are the verbal equivalent of JenniCam, but the silly ones neither get nor deserve much attention. Instead, the blog has evolved with astonishing speed into something far removed from mere faddishness. It is now a full-fledged journalistic medium, the first truly new one since the dawn of network TV. JenniCam was a curiosity, but blogs--or something like them--are here to stay.

Nevertheless, Jenni Ringley has earned herself a footnote in the history of the information age: she will be remembered as the Milton Berle of the Web. She was present at the creation of a radically innovative form of interpersonal communication, and used it to show the world her underwear. What's more, the world turned out to be interested in her underwear--briefly. Then something more interesting came along, and Jenni's underwear turned out not to be soooooo special after all.

Posted December 09, 12:01 PM

TT: A code id by dose

In case you're wondering, I'm still sneezing. One of my editors read of my plight on the blog (my voice is out of order, so I'm not returning calls) and e-mailed me the following piece of advice: "Drink heavily. It's your only hope."

I'll try that tomorrow. Tonight, I think I'll stick to TheraFlu. See you Tuesday.

Posted December 09, 12:00 PM

OGIC: The dream that nagged

The King-Hazzard debates that began at the National Book Awards dinner and rippled through blogland a couple of weeks ago are anticipated in this 1999 piece by Ray Sawhill on what publishing professionals wish they had time to read--and what they would like to never have to read again.

It was when I asked my interviewees to specify what they'd be happiest not reading that the surprises began. (The wittiest answers: Publishers Weekly and the New York Times Book Review.) John Grisham, perhaps predictably, topped the list. But after him came writers from among today's most respected literary figures. Salman Rushdie ("boring and pretentious") and Toni Morrison shared top honors. Don DeLillo ("he's homework"), Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, John Updike, Tom Wolfe and Martin Amis trailed close behind. (To be fair, each of these writers also had a fan or two.) In fact, of the dozen publishing people I polled, only three would still be devotees of what passes today for literary writing if it weren't part of their jobs.

The list of living writers my subjects would willingly continue to read was much more varied...

Click through to find out who. Sawhill's essay originally appeared in Salon. His reflections on the results of his informal poll cut to the heart of the discussion about the relative merits of popular and "literary" fiction (a distinction that has proven hard to hold in place) that followed the awards dinner:

What would our reading lives be like if they weren't preoccupied with, or nagged at by, the dream of literature? My poll suggests that in such a world the reader who finds Toni Morrison a hectoring drag and Salman Rushdie a radical-chic blowhard wouldn't hesitate to say so. We would give serious thought to the argument that, for example, Elmore Leonard is more likely to be read 50 years from now than Martin Amis. Preferring Rikki Ducornet and Dennis Cooper would be fine, too. In any case, it turns out that, even if your reading stash looks like a disorderly heap of magazines, mysteries, celebrity bios, a classic or two, fiction by a couple of literary figures you've grown attached to and books about your personal interests--whether it's birdbaths or the nature of consciousness--there's no reason to feel shame or guilt. Nobody can read everything. And, besides, you're already reading like the pros wish they could, if only they had the chance.

Very nicely said.

Posted December 09, 11:09 AM

OGIC: The blog with a mind of its own

Apologies to those of you who may have loaded About Last Night a little earlier and found a rough (very rough!) draft of my post just below (at that time provisionally titled "Hot now"). I was as surprised to see it up here as you were. The post is now in finished form, complete with its right title, and I hope you'll give it a second go.

Posted December 09, 1:51 AM

OGIC: Eating people is passé

As end-of-the-year journalism starts rearing its predictable head, do you ever notice how "what's in, what's out" lists (yes, the fish I am shooting today do inhabit a barrel) tend to mix three elements in roughly equal parts: observable trends; embedded advertising; and attempts to instill good behavior in the gauze-thin guise of arbitrating coolness? I have last Sunday's Chicago Tribune Magazine in front of me, with its six pages of Hots and Nots.

In the first category, the pairings more or less report what's out there: "fitted little jackets" and Jake Gyllenhall are HOT, "oversized boyfriend jackets" and Josh Hartnett are NOT. This boils down to the media reporting on media-generated buzz, but it's the kind of stuff one reads these lists for, and is fair enough.

In the second category, you can pretty much see the fashion industry's lips moving as the features writers pronounce, "HOT: The fitted trench with a twist (like a grape purple Burberry); NOT: Plain beige."

But it's the third category--more Goofus and Gallant than Out and In--that kills me. It's so priggish and Miss Manners, except that Miss Manners is doing her job, while hot lists are pretending to be something quite different. Much as I can't argue with a lot of the implicit social and moral instruction dispensed in this category, it's hard not to snicker at the attempt to soft-sell it as good taste, or all the rage. I have lots of examples from the Tribune, both because they are so plentiful and because they are so risible:

HOT: Making out at the bar
NOT: Going home with someone from the bar

Yep, don't not go home with that stranger because it wouldn't be prudent; don't do it because it wouldn't be hot.

HOT: Introducing friends to one another (www.friendster.com)
NOT: Keeping friends to yourself

Selfishness: so last year!

HOT: Docs who incorporate alternative medicine
NOT: Docs who have no clue

This one doesn't really have the courage of its convictions, since if you're just incorporating your alternative medicine into your conventional medicine, it's not really an alternative, is it? But you have to be impressed by the bold stand against clueless doctors (if less so by the implication that conventional methods make them so). Maybe 2005 will be their year.

But here's my favorite:

HOT: Judging for yourself
NOT: Critics' reviews of films, books

This appears to be the silliest reverberation to date of the manufactured discontentment that is the Believer magazine's police blotter, Snarkwatch, where you can write in to pillory critics you disagree with. What started as a (in my opinion, dubious and thin-skinned) manifesto against dismissively clever book reviewing has now devolved into the soundbite "critics not hot." I think it's safe to say that the hunt for snark has jumped the shark.

Posted December 09, 1:50 AM

TT: Opened and answered

I let the mail pile up while I was sick. I'm still sick, but I decided I ought to empty the bag to enhance my peace of mind, and found therein about a hundred e-mails, all of which are now answered except for the ones I'm going to post on the site in the course of the next few days (of which there are several). Once again, I marvel at the sheer smartness of the readers of this blog....

While I'm at it, a long-overdue announcement: it is the overwhelming desire of the readers of "About Last Night" that we not change our default settings. Now as before, any link on which you click will continue to open in a new window. Nearly everybody seems to find this arrangement more convenient. Needless to say, thanks to all correspondents for expressing an opinion, whether pro or con.

One last thing. I got an e-mail from a fellow who says he finds my postings about the Great Cold of 2003 so amusing that he hopes I hang onto it for a bit longer. To this gentleman I say...uh, er...SNEEZE!!

Posted December 09, 1:05 AM

December 8, 2003

TT: Words to the wise

To jazz buffs outside New York City, Frank Kimbrough is probably best known as the pianist for Maria Schneider's big band. If you live around here, you'll have heard him in any number of other contexts, both on his own and as an indispensable sideman. Either way, he's one of my favorite jazz pianists, but I've never heard him play a solo recital, so it's great news that he's planning to do just that.

The date is this Sunday, Dec. 14. The place is the Blah Blah Lounge in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I've never been there, but Frank, who has high standards when it comes to clubs and their pianos, describes it as "a rarity, an intimate space with a good piano, minimal listening distractions (the bar is in another room), and a friendly staff. CDs will be available if you wish to purchase them. This concert is not widely advertised, so please forward this message to any friends who may be interested. Thanks for supporting the music, and I look forward to seeing you."

For information about and directions to the Blah Blah Lounge (which sounds quite cozy), click here. To learn more about Frank Kimbrough, click here.

Two sets, at 8:30 and 10, with a $7 music charge and a $5 minimum. Tell Frank I sent you.

Posted December 08, 12:50 PM

TT: Go figure

(1) Since I fell ill on Friday night, I haven't listened to a note of music. All I feel like doing is reading, watching TV, and looking at the art on my walls. Would anyone care to speculate on why music hath temporarily lost its charms for this sick blogger?

(2) The incoming mail is going unanswered. Sorry. I'll catch up when I feel a little better.

(3) I managed to rise from my sickbed over the weekend and post a bit, so please take a look.

(4) Have you tried the new search engine yet?

Posted December 08, 12:38 PM

TT: Bookshelf

I'm still sneezing and wheezing. I cancelled all my weekend performances (I can't believe I was too sick to go hear Chanticleer's annual Christmas concert at the Metropolitan Museum!), and I haven't set foot out of the apartment since Friday night other than to buy food and drugs. All I've done is sleep, watch TV, and read.

The last of these has proved to be an unexpected delight, though, for my six-month stint as a judge for the National Book Awards left me next to no time to read purely for my pleasure, and it's been fun to chew through a stack of books simply because they looked good to me.

No pleasure should remain unshared, so here are three books I read this weekend that I strongly recommend:

Notes on Directing, by Frank Hauser and Russell Reich (RCR Creative Press). Exactly what does the director of a play do? This book wasn't written to answer that question, but it does so anyway. Notes on Directing is a 126-page Strunk-and-White-type list of 130 annotated dos and don'ts for theatrical directors, some as bluntly practical as a slap in the face ("1. Read the play"), others subtle and suggestive ("67. Never express actions in terms of feelings"). I've never read anything that taught me more about the theater in so short a space.

Nutcracker Nation: How an Old World Ballet Became a Christmas Tradition in the New World, by Jennifer Fisher (Yale University Press). Just a couple of months ago, a friend asked me if anyone had ever written a book that compared all the different versions of The Nutcracker. Nutcracker Nation isn't quite that, but it's even better: a lucidly written, thoroughly informed cultural history of the reception, spread, and significance of The Nutcracker in the United States. Like Notes on Directing, it's concise (230 pages), full of fascinating things I didn't know, and a perfect stocking-stuffer for the balletomane on your Christmas list.

Aaron Copland: A Reader, Selected Writings 1923-1972, edited by Richard Kostelanetz (Routledge). America's greatest classical composer was also a first-rate critic and essayist. This anthology, the first to be drawn from the complete body of Copland's prose writings, offers a representative cross-section of his views on matters musical, cultural, and autobiographical. Some pieces, like Copland's 1949 address to the Waldorf Peace Conference, have never been collected, and a brief but evocative selection of previously unpublished letters and diary entries serves as a useful reminder that he was also a fine letter-writer whose complete correspondence is sorely in need of publication. Essential reading for anyone who cares about American music.

Oh, yes--while you're at it, don't forget to buy The Skeptic!

Posted December 08, 12:04 PM

TT: Worth getting sick for (not)

Somebody asked me what movies I'd seen since I retreated to my couch to tough out the Great Cold of 2003. I've mentioned a few, but here's a more or less complete list: Yellow Sky, The Cincinnati Kid, Johnny Guitar, The Lady Eve, The Shop Around the Corner, The Gunfighter, Bringing Up Baby, The Tin Star, Passion Fish, and Holiday Affair.

All, incidentally, were plucked from cable TV by my trusty digital video recorder, for which I give much thanks.

Posted December 08, 11:22 AM

TT: Almanac

"There is a passage in the autobiography (more or less true) of Alonso de Contreras, who began life as a scullion and ended it as a Knight of Malta, that has always seemed to me a masterpiece of narrative and an example of perfect style. Having at one period of his picturesque career married the well-to-do widow of a judge his suspicions were aroused that she was deceiving him with his most intimate friend. One morning he discovered them in one another's arms. 'Murieron,' he writes. 'They died.' With that one grim word he dismisses the matter and passes on to other things. That is proper writing."

W. Somerset Maugham, Don Fernando

Posted December 08, 3:28 AM

TT: Things not seen

The Criterion Collection's DVD of Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, all scrubbed up and fitted out with gazillions of special features, is now available for pre-ordering at amazon.com by clicking here. Do so. Even if you don't share my passionate belief that it's the greatest movie ever made, surely you'll agree that it comes damned close--and if you've never seen The Rules of the Game, now's the time. The street date is Jan. 20.

For some reason, mention of The Rules of the Game put me in mind of the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, whose unfortunate winner, Aniruddha Bahal, was announced last week. Or maybe it was vice versa. The Rules of the Game, after all, is a film about sex (among other things) in which you don't see anything but people talking and (occasionally) kissing. Yet there's never any question in your mind about what's going on behind all those closed doors.

I'm not prudish about on-screen sex: I just don't think it tends to be especially memorable or persuasive. More often than not, as in the case of Kissing Jessica Stein, it's far more effective--not to mention sexy--when the details of the act itself are left to the viewer's imagination. But I readily make an exception for those rare sex scenes that are used to deepen our understanding of the characters. John Sayles is particularly good at this, especially in Baby It's You and Lone Star, where the sex scenes tell us important things about the participants. Another film in which an on-screen portrayal of sexual intercourse is used to brilliant (and joltingly unsexy) effect is The Dreamlife of Angels. And I hasten to add that I can also think of a few fairly explicit on-screen sex scenes that are just plain arousing, foremost among them the ones in The Big Easy.

Any thoughts on this topic, OGIC?

Posted December 08, 2:51 AM

December 7, 2003

TT: Almanac

"With her brightest students Miss Batterson was always on terms of uneasy, disappointed admiration; their work never seemed to be helping their development as much as the work of the stupider students was helping theirs. Every year there was a little war--an eighteenth century one, though--about whether the school magazine was printing only the work of a clique. Miss Batterson was perfectly good-hearted in this: if you cannot discriminate between good and bad yourself, it cannot help seeming somewhat poor-spirited and arbitrary of other people to do so. Aesthetic discrimination is no pleasanter, seems no more just and rational to those discriminated against, than racial discrimination; the popular novelist would be satisfied with his income from serials and scenarios and pocket books if people would only see that he is a better writer than Thomas Mann."

Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

Posted December 07, 12:54 PM

TT: I should be so lucky

Joseph Epstein, my favorite essayist, has a witty and thoughtful essay in the current Weekly Standard:

Funny, but I do look Jewish, at least to myself, and more and more so as the years go by. I'm fairly sure I didn't always look Jewish, not when I was a boy, or possibly even when a young man, though I have always carried around my undeniably Jewish name, which was certainly clue enough. But today, gazing at my face in the mirror, I say to myself, yes, no question about it, this is a very Jewish-looking gent....

I have always wondered what it might be like not to be Jewish but to have a Jewish-sounding name--Sarah Jacobson, Norman Davis, Mark Steyn--and often be taken for Jewish. First, there would be the worry that someone might hold your being Jewish (when you're not) against you; and, second, there is the discomfort entailed in getting special treatment from another Jew or philo-Semite because that he or she thinks you are someone you are not. I once saw a man who was a dead ringer for the old actor Cesar Romero wearing a bright red T-shirt with bold white lettering that read "I Am Not Cesar Romero." Perhaps people with Jewish-sounding names ought to wear T-shirts, or at least carry business cards, that read, "I'm Sidney Ross, But Not Really Jewish." Glenn Gould, whose name and face and manner all falsely suggest Jewishness, could have used such a T-shirt.

Read the whole thing here.

So far as I know, I've never been "taken for Jewish," nor do I expect to be. I doubt if anyone in the United States looks more goyische than me, and "Terry Teachout" is roughly as Jewish-sounding as "Thurston Howell III." I do, however, have highly cultivated tastes for lox and bagels, the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Jewish jokes of the way-too-close-to-the-knuckle sort, and it also happens that I'm the music critic for a magazine Jewish enough to have been mentioned by name in Annie Hall. I keep hoping that some raving anti-Semite who only knows me on paper will jump to the wrong conclusion, thus allowing me to reply, "No, but I wish I were." Alas, it hasn't happened yet....

I know a very WASPy-looking WASP musician, by the way, who used to play a lot of recitals at synagogues, where she would invariably be approached at the post-concert reception by at least one old lady who told her, "You don't look Jewish, darling." Eventually she came up with the perfect response: "I know, that's what everybody says!"

UPDATE: Cup of Chicha links to this posting, and (as always) adds some intriguing comments of her own. Take a look.

Posted December 07, 12:51 PM

TT: A new wrinkle

Doug McLennan of artsjournal.com, our prize-winning host site, has installed a search button in the top module of the right-hand column. Click on CLICK HERE TO SEARCH SITE and you will be taken to a Google-driven search engine that allows you to search the "About Last Night" archives at will.

Try it, you'll like it.

Posted December 07, 12:37 PM

TT: Alone in a crowd

A reader writes, apropos of my recent posting on the postmodern decline of the movie theater:

I decided to brave the storm and go to Times Square to see the latest version of Fellowship of the Rings. Made me think of your latest blog about the demise of the movie theatre. Sorry, this may date me, but for me there's nothing that will replace sitting in the dark watching a world unfold before me larger than life. I must get it from my mom, who was a teenager in the forties and like most of her friends lived in the movies. She was not content to keep it to herself either - I first saw 'Gone With the Wind' on the big screen when I was 9. You forget that for the young, going to a movie theatre is a social thing of getting out of the damn house and even if the whole concept of the dinner -n- movie gets tiring after the third decade, it still gives a couple of strangers something to discuss before they really know each other.

Point taken, and it explains why the movie theater remains a popular destination among the young--why, in fact, they are the only demographic group that still matters to Hollywood. For teenagers, theaters are affordable meeting places whose appeal has little or nothing to do with the aesthetic appeal of Film as Art. This suggests that as the median age of Americans continues to soar (driven by the graying of the baby boomers), the trend away from theatergoing will increase.

Needless to say--or perhaps not--I, too, will miss the uniquely enveloping experience my correspondent so beautifully describes. I think that was part and parcel of the original appeal of movies: the fact that we saw them on a large screen, sitting in the dark. And maybe that helps explain why the appeal of theatergoing has diminished for me, since the theaters of my high school and college days were smallish-screen multiplexes. The transition from a small multiplex screen to home viewing is pretty easily made. I've mostly made it, though I feel the tug of the old ways on the rarer-than-rare occasions when I get a chance to see a widescreen Technicolor western in a large theater. Such films were not made to be seen at home--and that's the only place we get to see them nowadays.

I've been watching a lot of movies on TV in the past couple of days, by the way (that's what catching a bad cold does to you), and it's been interesting to see which ones work and which ones don't. Black-and-white films shot in pre-widescreen aspect ratios almost always translate well to the small screen--even William Wellman's Yellow Sky, a Gregory Peck Western whose early scenes are conspicuously landscape-driven. Widescreen color films tend not to work unless their subject matter is intimate, as in the case of The Cincinnati Kid, the Norman Jewison-Steve McQueen film about big-time poker players. And indie-type flicks, significantly but not surprisingly, always work: Amy's Orgasm and Kissing Jessica Stein could have been made for TV.

Which reminds me that I've been meaning to draw your attention to Cinetrix's recent posting about the use of music in Magnolia, and why it's smarter and more essentially cinematic than the fruits of "the so-called renaissance of the movie musical." V. smart, v. much worth reading.

Posted December 07, 12:36 PM

December 6, 2003

TT: More shameless self-promotion

I just received in the mail the Spring 2004 catalogue of Yale University Press. I opened it to page 35, where I found (drumroll) A Terry Teachout Reader, complete with a thumbnail photo of the dust jacket, whose centerpiece is a reproduction of Fairfield Porter's lithograph Broadway.

I can already see one problem with the Reader, which is that Yale has placed it under the category "Music/Essays," which is right and not right at the same time. Yes, music figures prominently in it, but so do lots and lots of other things.

Here's the flap copy, which I didn't write:

Terry Teachout, one of our most acute cultural commentators, here turns his sharp eye to every corner of the arts world--music, dance, literature, theater, film, TV, and the visual arts. This collection gathers the best of Teachout's writings from the past fifteen years. In each essay he offers lucid and balanced judgments that invariably illuminate, sometimes infuriate, and always spark a response--the mark of a critic whose thoughts, however controversial, cannot be ignored.

In a thoughtful introduction to the book, Teachout considers how American culture of the twenty-first century differs from that of the last century and how the information age has altered popular culture. His selected essays chronicle America's cultural journeyover the past decade and a half,a nd they show us what has been lost--and gained--along the way. With highly informed opinions, an inimitable wit and style, and a genuine devotion to all things cultural, Teachout offers his readers much to delight in and much to ponder.

Anyone who comes from a small Midwestern town is genetically programmed to squirm at the prospect of seeing such effusive words emblazoned on his own dust jacket, but publishing is a business, and a boy, as Truman Capote once said, must peddle his book. At any rate, I'm proud of the Teachout Reader, and to see it in the Yale catalogue is a comfort on a cold, snowy day.

The Teachout Reader will be published in May--posthumously, if I become the first author ever to succumb to the common cold. Otherwise, I'll be reminding you of its insidious approach, and as of today, you can pre-order it from amazon.com by clicking here.

Posted December 06, 12:04 PM

TT: Time is short

I rise from my bed of discomfort (my cold is worse, it's snowing again, and I have a preview tonight) to remind you of what you should already know, which is that my most recent book, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, is now out in trade paperback--and still available in hardcover.

If you like this blog, you'll like The Skeptic, and so will your friends. So did the critics: the reviews were spectacularly warm, as you can see for yourself by going here.

I blog for pleasure but write to pay the rent. 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 own one.

To purchase the paperback, click here.

To purchase the hardcover edition, click here.

Now I need to go blow my nose.

Posted December 06, 12:01 PM

OGIC: Sneaky

Here's just a quick Saturday evening post while my weekend guests--you know them as Cinetrix and the 'Fesser--have popped out to see some other friends in the 'hood. I expect them back in a little while with some Ribs 'n' Bibs; a good, greasy time will be had by all.

I know I've been scarce around these parts since before Thanksgiving. This was in large part because I was consumed with worry on behalf of the resident cat, Daffy, who had tentatively been diagnosed with a serious heart problem. She had an ultrasound yesterday, though, that revealed a normal, healthy heart. Relief all around.

Next week should be better. I have plans, including an interview with a young filmmaker (and friend of About Last Night) who just had his first film selected for the Sundance Film Festival, in the documentary category. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, all good wishes to poor Terry with his headcold and blizzard. Terr, we'll call you tomorrow! Hang in there with the Theraflu and DVDs! (Hm, this could be the perfect opportunity for you to watch L'Atalante! I promise you'll adore it!)

Posted December 06, 8:41 AM

TT: Weekend update

New York is covered with fifty feet of snow. (That's what it looks like from my window, anyway.) My throbbing head is full of some unmentionable goo. I'm not going to the press preview I was supposed to cover tonight, for fear of being found in a snowdrift weeks from now. I may never post again.

And how's by you, OGIC?

Posted December 06, 6:24 AM

December 5, 2003

TT: Almanac

"Everywhere in the world literature is in retreat from politics and unless resisted the one will crush the other. You don't crush literature from outside by killing writers or intimidating them or not letting them publish, though as we've all seen you can make a big fuss and have a lot of fun trying. You do better to induce them to destroy it themselves by inducing them to subordinate it to political purposes, as you propose to do."

Kingsley Amis, The Russian Girl

Posted December 05, 12:51 PM

TT: Safety first

I'm in this morning's Wall Street Journal, reporting on this week's major musical openings:

Uptown at the Broadhurst Theatre, "Never Gonna Dance," a fizzy, friendly stage version of the 1936 Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie "Swing Time," is pleasing crowds. Downtown at the Public Theater, Tony Kushner's "Caroline, or Change," a pop opera about race relations in the Sixties, is pleasing critics. You wouldn't think such different shows could have anything at all in common, but they do: They both play it safe....

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about "Never Gonna Dance," because I really did enjoy it. The problem is that I don't enjoy the Astaire-Rogers films--I adore them. Next to that solid-gold emotion, anything else (and anyone else) is bound to come off looking like a pale imitation of the real right thing.

At least "Never Gonna Dance" is entertaining, whereas "Caroline, or Change" is a great big self-righteous bore. Had anyone but Tony Kushner written the libretto, everyone in town would be snorting at this eye-rollingly earnest fable of an angry black Louisiana maid (Tonya Pinkins) and Noah, the shy, effeminate little Jewish boy (Harrison Chad) to whom she teaches a Lesson in Love. Or maybe not, since Mr. Kushner, the Arthur Miller of our time, is not so much a playwright as a cultural politician who has an uncanny knack for telling New York theatergoers exactly what they want to hear--and no more....

Also included are words to the wise about Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife, which transferred to Broadway this week after a successful off-Broadway run at Playwrights Horizons. Here's the money quote: "This show deserves every prize there is."

No link, as usual, so to read the whole thing, extract a dollar from your wallet, take yourself to the nearest newsstand, buy this morning's Journal, turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, and there I am, along with lots of other interesting stuff.

Posted December 05, 12:49 PM

TT: De profundis

I have a COLD, and I feel CRAPPY. And I don't have a play or concert or screening to go to tonight, praise be, since New York is in the process of receiving fifteen inches of snow. Did I say arrgh?

Take it away, OGIC! I'm headed for bed....

Posted December 05, 9:10 AM

TT: A shift in time

I belong to the last generation to have grown up without VCRs. Born in 1956, I was raised in a small town that had one movie theater. The only "arty" films I saw in high school were 2001: A Space Odyssey and Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. The nearest public TV station was in St. Louis, just beyond the range of our rooftop antenna--this was before the invention of cable TV--so it wasn't until I left home to go to college that I saw any old movies other than an occasional Saturday-afternoon John Wayne.

I went to a small school near Kansas City, and lived near there for several years after graduating. As a student, I had a tiny TV set in my room but was too busy to watch it more than occasionally, though I did catch three or four foreign films (among them M and Grand Illusion). My campus had no film series. At that time, Kansas City was home to a grand total of two "art houses," one of which showed first-run foreign films and the other domestic revivals. All told, I probably saw no more than a couple of dozen old movies in Kansas City, including Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind, Duck Soup, and Casablanca, none of them more than once.

If you grew up in New York or Chicago, my experience will doubtless sound alien to you, but I suspect that most Americans of my generation could tell similar stories. For us, seeing a classic film was an occasion--one not likely to be repeated anytime soon--and for that reason, we never quite absorbed the abstract notion of Film as Art. To be sure, I "knew" that film was an art form, but this "knowledge" had little or no basis in experience, and so it had no real meaning.

In 1983, I moved to a big-campus college town, Urbana, Illinois, where I got my first VCR, hooked up to a decent cable system, and started haunting the local art house and the various campus film series. That was when I started taking movies seriously. Prior to that time, they'd been little more than casual entertainment, made to be experienced once and then put aside. Thereafter, I started thinking of great films as art objects that could be revisited and restudied as often as I wanted. They soon became as important to me as books or music, and stayed that way.

Nowadays, of course, pretty much everybody takes movies seriously. It's taken for granted, for instance, that an educated person will have seen Citizen Kane at least once. (If you doubt it, ask yourself this: how many people of your acquaintance would know what you were talking about if you mentioned "Rosebud" in a casual conversation?) Film is now a central part of the middle-class cultural landscape--but that wouldn't have happened without the invention of cable TV and the VCR.

This is why I have no trouble imagining life without movie theaters. Having spent nearly two decades living in New York City, I've had plenty of opportunities to watch classic films in a theater, but there are still any number of important films I've only seen on TV. I know it's not the same thing--I well remember how stunned I was the first time I saw Kane on a large screen--but the fact remains that most people see most movies at home, which is infinitely better than not seeing them at all.

Nor do I expect this situation to change much. For better and worse, film has become a species of home entertainment. Of all the seismic shifts in American art and culture that have taken place since my childhood, that one may ultimately come to be seen as the most fateful of all.

Posted December 05, 1:47 AM

December 4, 2003

TT: Almanac

"Schiller distinguishes the naive--and the sentimentalisch: sentimentalisch doesn't mean sentimental. He distinguished between artists who create naturally, who are not troubled by the burden of the tragic disorder of life, who do not seek salvation in art as some people seek personal salvation in religion or Socialism or nationalism. Verdi in that sense is simply a craftsman of genius with the simple strong moral ideas of his time and place--no tragic self-torment. He was a marvellous composer, a divine genius who created in a natural way as Homer and Shakespeare and perhaps Goethe did."

Sir Isaiah Berlin, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin

Posted December 04, 12:24 PM

OGIC: Real plums, fake cake

What Dale Peck has to say in this interview--which is as engaging and compulsively readable as all of Robert Birnbaum's author chats--reminded me of a book that I have been obsessed with off and on the last ten years, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood: Mary McCarthy's classic, heartbreaking account of her embattled childhood. Peck's latest book, What We Lost, is a memoir of his father's childhood, an essentially uncategorizable work that its publisher calls a work of fiction "based on a true story":

I always got confused in English classes and such where you would be reading Colette and then they would tell you it was based on such-and-such love affair and they would tell you the name of the real person and all this kind of thing. And I'd think, ‘Why did she write the novel and all that?' And at the end of the day I would think that it was not terrifically important to me when you choose not to indulge in or claim that particular weightiness that attaches to the claim of truth. Which is part of the reason I considered publishing this book as a novel. I didn't want to make too great a claim to the truth here. These are things that actually happened to my father. His reaction to them is something I can only base on my own observations of what he said. And to some degree, as in any act of writing like this, part of what I am trying to do is give voice to feelings that I feel like he has never been able to fully express. Or else the story would not be as resonant as it is in our family history.

In its different way, Peck's book (which I own but have not yet read) seems to be as interested as McCarthy's in the borderland between fiction and nonfiction, the pitfalls of memory, and the tricky, haunting work of fitting together and gaining perspective on one's own family's history.

Mary McCarthy's parents died when she was six years old, victims of the terrible flu epidemic of 1918 (as good a reminder as any, Our Dad will say, to get my flu shot) that perversely struck down young, healthy adults like them in huge numbers. She and her brothers were thrown on the questionable mercy of their relations.

Whenever we children came to stay at my grandmother's house, we were put to sleep in the sewing room, a bleak, shabby, utilitarian rectangle, more office than bedroom, more attic than office, that played to the hierarchy of chambers the role of a poor relation....Thin white spreads, of the kind used in hospitals and charity institutions, and naked blinds at the windows reminded us of our orphaned condition and of the ephemeral character of our visit; there was nothing here to encourage us to consider this our home.

Poor Roy's children, as commiseration damply styled us, could not afford illusions, in the family opinion. Our father had put us beyond the pale by dying suddenly of influenza and taking our young mother with him, a defection that was remarked on with horror and grief commingled, as though our mother had been a pretty secretary with whom he had wantonly absconded into the irresponsible paradise of the hereafter. Our reputation was clouded by this misfortune.

McCarthy's book has a curious form and genesis. It began as individual essays about her childhood, many of them first published in The New Yorker. When she collected these together as chapters of her memoir, she discovered errors of memory: memories recorded in the essays that, while vivid to her mind, turned out to be dubious or disprovable.

As much out of fascination with this problem as for conscience's sake, she added short critical interchapters to discuss these inconsistencies, half-truths, and outright fictions. The beauty of this tactic is that it not only preserves the fictions that, for aesthetic or practical or no discernible reasons at all, had insinuated themselves into McCarthy's self-presentation, but recognizes these fictions as a vital part of the truth. Throughout the book, she muses on the distinction:

Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother's unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture. I do not know how my grandmother got the way she was; I assume, from family photographs and from the inflexibility of her habits, that she was always the same, and it seems as idle to inquire into her childhood as to ask what was ailing Iago or look for the error in toilet-training that was responsible for Lady Macbeth.

Some of the most poignant moments of McCarthy's book come when she struggles to know who her lost parents were, having only very limited resources at her disposal: her own shallow well of memories, and the unreliable sources that are the grandparents, uncles and aunts who make her young life such a trial. The book explores the especially close connections between family, myth-making, and misremembering, and persuades you that autobiography is inescapably the most fictional of nonfictional genres.

I won't know until I read Peck's book whether it backs up or bucks against McCarthy's implicit assertion that when it comes to family, what counts is less the historical record than the ways that history is remembered, recounted, and felt. But Peck's project of writing his father's autobiography must be founded on the same kind of search for self-origins, and he appears to share both her healthy skepticism of received family history and her writer's faith in the value of family fiction.

Posted December 04, 12:09 PM

TT: On duty

Another one of those days: I'm writing a piece for money this morning (tomorrow's Wall Street Journal theater column, to be exact), then standing in for Doug McLennan, the genius behind artsjournal.com, at the ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards ceremony here in New York. Doug is getting a special award for having invented artsjournal.com, but he's stuck in Seattle and can't collect it himself, so I'm doing the honors.

Anyway, I won't be posting again until much later in the day, if then, but OGIC promises that she has something in the works. One way or another, we'll be back.

Posted December 04, 9:07 AM

TT: Mailbag

Fellow blogger Felix Salmon writes, apropos of Monday's posting claiming that the failure of Master and Commander to achive full-fledged hit status represents "the sound of doom for big-budget adult movies, which were already sick unto death and have now officially straight-lined":

You say they're officially dead, but I wonder when, exactly, they were alive. I've just been looking down the list of the top-grossing films of all time, after adjusting for inflation, and I really can't find anything you might call a big-budget adult movie from the past 20 years. The Sixth Sense probably comes closest, as you surely don't have stuff like Forrest Gump or Lord of the Rings in mind. Oh, here we go: at the bottom of the list they start appearing. At #92 there's Saving Private Ryan, and at #106 is Dances With Wolves.

I guess my point is that if you're bemoaning the death of adult-oriented movies with nine-figure budgets, I'd simply say that they never existed in the first place. Even Saving Private Ryan cost "only" $70 million: pretty much half of Master & Commander's budget.

In other words, the Hollywood Blockbuster with the nine-figure budget is, and always has been, a mass-market affair. Let's look at Oscar winners: Chicago had a $45m budget, A Beautiful Mind was $60m, American Beauty and Shakespeare in Love were tiny, English Patient was $27m, Braveheart was $72m, and so on.

So what does that leave us with? Titanic, of course, which I'm sure is not what you consider an adult movie, and the one exception -- Gladiator, with a $103m budget, and which was clearly the success that Master & Commander was trying to replicate.

What's expensive is big special effects, bangs and crashes, all the sort of things which you really don't need in an adult film. So do I mind that directors making adult films can't get nine-figure budgets? Not really, since I don't think there's any need for a nine-figure budget when making an adult film. And if we adults want bangs and crashes, we're more than capable of enjoying Pirates of the Caribbean, which is a wonderful movie for people of all ages.

The lesson which I draw from Master & Commander's box-office (which, as you say, is perfectly respectable, and much more in three weeks than, say, Mystic River or Lost In Translation can hope to gross in their entire runs, assuming they don't win Best Picture) is basically that water-based films (Titanic, Waterworld) are always incredibly expensive, and in this case clearly the budget got out of hand. Criticise the producers for spending too much, don't write off ambitious adult films.

Cute, and interesting, too. But while I take Felix's point about actual numbers (facts do have a way of messing up a terrific generalization!), I think maybe it's just to the side of the point. Of the other movies he mentions, The Sixth Sense is an adult film, in the same sense that Alfred Hitchcock's thrillers were at the same time popular and serious. So, in their different ways, were Chicago (which I thought quite good) and American Beauty (about which I had sharply mixed feelings). The others are for the most part pseudo-adult movies, a genre at which Hollywood excels. Conversely, Master and Commander is an adventure film, but its premises and methods seem to me genuinely adult, which is why it isn't working with the mass audience so expensive a film must command in order to succeed.

The real point of my original post, of course, was the claim with which it ended: "Movies as novels, bought on the Web and consumed at home: that's the future of grownup filmmaking in America." About this I feel absolutely certain. What was hitherto missing was the technology necessary to make such a transformation feasible, and now it is rapidly falling into place. I don't say that I necessarily look forward to the contraction of cinematic possibilities that will come from the loss of the theatrical experience (as several other readers wrote to point out, the cinematography of films like Lost in Translation really does benefit from being seen on a large screen), but it will have its reciprocal advantages, too, mostly having to do with convenience. In any case, under-50 filmgoers are universally habituated to the experience of watching movies, even well-known ones, on TV, and in a death match between the enveloping aesthetic experience of a large-screen theatrical film and the comfort and intimacy of home viewing, comfort will win every time.

Posted December 04, 9:00 AM

TT: Bringing home the bacon

I just got back from the 36th annual ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards, presented at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers for excellence in writing about music. No, I didn't win one, but I accepted a citation for special recognition on behalf of Doug McLennan, the creator of artsjournal.com, the invaluable Web site that hosts this blog. Here's what I said:

Sometimes the greatest ideas are simple ideas that no one else has thought of. Doug McLennan had one: start a Web site that carries daily digests of, and links to, news stories and commentaries about the arts, drawn from newspapers and magazines all across the English-speaking world. Not only did he have that idea, he made it happen--and now artsjournal.com is an indispensable part of the morning routine of artists, administrators, and journalists everywhere.

This summer, Doug had another idea: invite arts writers, myself among them, to keep daily Web logs on Artsjournal. And that, too, has been a smashing success. Last week, my Artsjournal blog, "About Last Night," received its one hundred thousandth page view.

I believe the future of arts journalism is on the Web. If I'm right, then Doug McLennan was present at the creation. I'm proud to be a part of his creation, and on his behalf I accept this award with gratitude--and hope.

We were in fast company. Other prizewinners included the authors of several books about which I have written enthusiastically here and elsewhere, among them Alfred Appel, Jr.'s Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce, Charles M. Joseph's Stravinsky and Balanchine: A Journey of Invention, Allen Shawn's Arnold Schoenberg's Journey, and Richard Sudhalter's Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael.

At a time when serious writing about music is getting harder and harder to find in the major media, it's heartening that ASCAP should pay tribute to books and writers like these--and, of course, to artsjournal.com, without which there would be no "About Last Night." Bless them, and Doug, too.

Posted December 04, 7:23 AM

TT: You go, girl!

The Grammy nominations were just announced, and I rejoice to inform you that Luciana Souza, the subject of "About Last Night"'s very first posting, received her second nomination in a row for Best Jazz Vocal Album, this time for North and South.

If you haven't bought North and South, get on the stick!

UPDATE: For a complete list of Grammy nominations, go here.

Posted December 04, 1:55 AM

December 3, 2003

TT: Put out more flags

I spent yesterday afternoon hanging out in a recording studio in midtown Manhattan, watching a friend of mine, a jazz singer from Brazil, record her next album. She was in the vocal booth when I arrived, so I slipped discreetly into the control room and took a seat in front of the board. As soon as she was finished, she burst out of the booth, ran into the control room, gave me a hug and said, "Guess what? I took my citizenship test this morning. I passed!"

A little background: my friend is as Brazilian as it's possible to be, but she's lived here for many years and decided some time ago to become an American citizen. It touched me to the heart when she told me of her plans. Not only do I have a special love for American art (the pieces collected in A Terry Teachout Reader are all about American art and artists, and except for a lone Bonnard, my collection of works on paper is all-American), but jazz has always seemed to me uniquely emblematic of the American national character. Somehow this made my friend's decision all the more moving.

I knew she was taking the test that day, and I had every reason to assume she'd pass it with flying colors, so I was ready for her news. I opened my shoulder bag and took out a neatly wrapped present (neatly wrapped by somebody else, needless to say!). The card was a reproduction of a John Marin watercolor, and the gift was three albums of music by Aaron Copland: Quiet City, the Third Symphony, Old American Songs, Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, and a two-CD set of the complete piano music. I couldn't think of a better way to welcome my beloved friend to my beloved country. Neither could she.

Posted December 03, 12:59 PM

TT: Almanac

"The price of purity is purists."

Calvin Trillin, American Fried: Adventures of a Happy Eater

Posted December 03, 12:58 PM

TT: A confession of utter stupidity

I got up this morning, turned on the computer, tried to check my e-mail, and nothing happened. Neither was I able to get on the Web. I figured it was a transient problem with my high-speed connection, so I spent a pleasant morning not doing e-mail, surfing the Web, or posting to the blog. Come lunchtime, though, I began to suspect a problem. A call to a neighbor established that her high-speed service was just fine, so I called up the cable company, negotiated the thicket of automated possibilities, made contact with a live human being, and told him what was wrong. He suggested I make sure the power cord on the modem was plugged in securely. It wasn't. Apparently I'd knocked it part way out of the wall. And did I feel dumb? You bet.

Anyway, that's why I didn't post anything this morning. (I did, however, enjoy watching some of the hitherto-unviewed TV shows I recorded on my Magic Digital Cable Box in recent days.) And now I have to get ready for a Mencken-related radio phoner to Chicago, so it may be a while before I write anything substantial.

Two things, briefly: (1) Welcome back, OGIC! (2) I just saw a dummy of the dust jacket for A Terry Teachout Reader, complete with Fairfield Porter lithograph. It looks way cool.

Now I'll see if anything else is unplugged, arrgh....

Posted December 03, 12:52 PM

TT and OGIC: Two boxes, no waiting

As of now, Our Girl in Chicago has a separate "About Last Night" mailbox. Look in the top module of the right-hand column under WRITE US and you'll see it.

Click on tteachout@artsjournal.com to write directly to Terry. Click on ogic@artsjournal.com to write directly to Our Girl.

We know we promised this a couple of weeks ago, so thanks for being patient.

Posted December 03, 2:58 AM

TT: Quotes without comment

Here's a trayful of food for thought from the Blogosphere Cafeteria.

From Eve Tushnet:

Anyone who is or feels herself radically opposed to the currents of the day is liable to feel that her own account of her life is "unrealistic." Her perspective is not realist. Her perspective is fantastic, outside, genre.

"Realism" only works for people whose worldviews are already accepted as realistic. The rest of us must make do with genre.

From BuzzMachine:

In this age of transparency -- of constant cable news and C-Span's unblinking eye and instant online wire reports and mobile alerts and full transcripts online and more video here and weblog links to coverage everywhere and automated Google news searches and, in sum, the commoditization of news -- the role of the newsman has utterly changed ... but that news hasn't caught up to the newsmen yet.

It used to be, we depended on them to tell us what is happening (and some prided themselves on doing it better than others). Those days are over. Toast. "What happened" is the commodity; we can find out what happened anywhere anytime....

We can all see all the news and judge for ourselves what's news and what isn't, what's real and what isn't, what's important and what isn't, and often what's true and what isn't.

Do reporters and editors still have a role in the news we can all see (as opposed to the news they dig up)? Don't know yet, do we?

From Household Opera:

I finished grading a round of papers only to discover a documentable plagiarism case. I hate having to deal with that kind of thing. I hate having to give the stern "You're looking at an F on the assignment, a very unpleasant meeting with the dean of students, and academic probation" lecture. Even more than that, I hate it when these cases disrupt my usual working assumption that we're all adults and I don't have to yell at anyone for intellectual dishonesty....

From Mixolydian Mode:

I hate most familiar Christmas music. Some of the carols are very good, but when there's no escape from them they cease to be a pleasure. Other tunes aren't so good; has there ever been a more Orwellian song than "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town"?

God bless us, every one.

Posted December 03, 1:55 AM

TT: Mailbag

Fellow blogger Sarah Weinman writes:

Don't know why it took me so long to read your piece about The Producers, but I agree wholeheartedly, and I enjoyed it immensely when I saw the original cast back in June of 2001, I think, or at least 2 months after opening night, when Lane/Broderick et al were still relatively fresh in the roles.

I love musicals, and have ever since I was a child. I grew up on the stuff. But I'm decidedly uninterested in those made after about, oh, 1970 or so (and that includes most of Sondheim's works), because so much has been sacrificed in the name of glitzy production values, "Broadway voices" that aren't even based on the style of old, and good, solid songwriting instead of this over-the-top stuff that Lloyd Webber and his followers seem to specialize in. And that's not bringing up the Disney adaptations or the rock-opera productions.

So I'm a complete reactionary and I'm proud of it, which was why I enjoyed THE PRODUCERS--it's a throwback to those earlier days, when the jokes were broad, the sensibility all over the place, and the pace absolutely madcap. Would it hold up if it had opened, say, in the 1950s? I doubt it. Compared to the way things are now, it's wonderful. Compared to even some of the failures and flops of decades past, it probably would have been killed by the critics. Context is everything.

I always thought THE PRODUCERS was an anomaly. Was very glad it was a hit, but I didn't see it inspiring a return to old-fashioned type musicals. It's just too expensive to put such things on. So I'll be sorry to see the show go, but I'm glad I saw it near the beginning, when there was much enthusiasm in the air.

Thanks, Sarah. Well said.

Posted December 03, 1:26 AM

December 2, 2003

TT: Oh, all right, one more thing

Here's Cup of Chicha (welcome back to the blogosphere, ma'am) on Sylvia:

Films are very likely to fail if they are about any one of these three subjects: a writer, depression, a real person.

Read the whole thing here. And now I've really got to go write a piece for money....

Posted December 02, 9:04 AM

TT: One of those days

I'm triple-booked today (a deadline, a recording session, a press preview), so this is the last you'll be hearing from me until Wednesday. Our Girl is also enmeshed in life-related activities, though I'm hoping she'll poke her head in at some point in the next couple of days.

Fortunately, I posted a really alarmingly large amount of stuff on Sunday and Monday, in addition to a couple of first-thing-in-the-morning items today, and I suspect in any case that most of you were elsewhere (turkey sandwiches, hangovers) while I was busily blogging away. As I used to say to a now-deceased cat who liked fresh food in the middle of the night, "Eat what's there."

Later.

Posted December 02, 8:49 AM

TT: Almanac

"'Of course,' he said, 'you are at the stage when you think Swinburne is the greatest poet who ever lived. But you won't think that for ever. He is a damned good poet at his best. For the moment at a certain epoch of one's life he's like Wagner's music, he annihilates everything else. Have you ever heard Wagner's music?'

"C. shook his head.

"'Well, you'll have to some day, I suppose. You must get through it like measles. Don't go to it here; they can't do it. It's poisonous, neurotic stuff, and it's all wrong; but you'll have to experience the disease. Don't think I'm saying you're wrong to like what you like. You're young, that's the great thing, and I'm not, and the young are often right in admiring what they do admire. It's a great thing they should admire anything. When people get older they see nothing in Shelley or Swinburne; the colours seem to have faded out of these things, but they haven't really. The colours are there, only they are too dry and too crusted to see them.'"

Maurice Baring, C

Posted December 02, 8:42 AM

TT: Prime directive

A reader writes, apropos of yesterday's exchange about American orchestras:

Regarding your comments (and your correspondent's) about the opening of minds to symphonic music, I think you might have overlooked a crucial element: instrument lessons. Or rather, the lack of them in American schooling. Take a survey of a group of symphony-goers, and you'll find that one had some violin in school. Another still plays amateur piano. Another might have had a clarinet thrust upon her in junior high. While they never became professional musicians themselves, the instruction they received helped them unlock the secrets of music. Knowing something of what it takes to play a viola part, they can appreciate and admire those who do it brilliantly.

It's a sad fact that music appreciation--that very optimistic style of teaching which consists in playing recordings of works and telling students why they're great--doesn't stick. It takes more than one hearing and a definition of sonata form, and even sympathetic and awe-struck description of Beethoven's deafness, to overcome the forbidding nature of a 45-minute work, especially in this era of ambient music and 3-minute songs. A mind can't merely be open to music; it needs to be shaped to the music, through the rigors of practice and performance.

Where has the instrumental instruction gone? It's a victim of budget cuts, at least in the public schools. It's gone from the cultural landscape, too. A piano is no longer an essential item in a cultured household, and the very idea of aspiring to a cultured household is embarrassingly affected to some.

Not every member of a concert audience is an ex-trumpeter or fiddler, to be sure. But a good number are, and they bring their spouses and infect their friends with their enthusiasm.

In short, it's hopeless trying to get people into concert halls by telling them why they need to attend concerts. Love of complex, demanding music has to be engendered from an early age, and that takes the kind of involvement that music lessons entail.

Well...yes and no. Mostly yes, at least up to a point, and I speak as one who actually learned how to play violin in the public schools of a very small Missouri town--but, then, I was the one who wanted to learn. To be sure, the larger culture was encouraging me: I grew up in the middlebrow age of aspiration, at a time when the ideal of the "cultured household" was still taken with the highest possible seriousness. I saw classical music performed on network TV as a boy, which made me want to learn an instrument, and my public school system made that possible. Many of the links have been removed from that cultural chain in the past quarter-century, with dire results. Still, the initial impulse came from within me, in substantial part because of those selfsame music-appreciation classes about whose efficacy my correspondent is so skeptical. Mere exposure rang the bell, and my own budding interest did the rest.

The good news is that people can develop a serious interest in classical music, or any other "complex, demanding" art form, no matter how old they are. I've seen it happen time and again. For this reason, I'm not nearly as pessimistic as my correspondent, who seems to think that if you don't get inoculated with classical music in childhood, you can't learn to love it as an adult. On the other hand, I strongly agree that learning a musical instrument as a child puts you way ahead of the game, and the decline of our public-school music programs has made an uphill battle steeper than ever.

I also agree that "it's hopeless trying to get people into concert halls by telling them why they need to attend concerts." Would that it were more widely understood that high art is good for you--not in the fallacious "Mozart-effect" sense, but in the far more profound sense of soulcraft. Alas, that uplifting notion has largely vanished from American culture. In matters of high art, we must start from zero: we actually have to make the case that listening to operas by Mozart and Verdi and looking at ballets by Balanchine and Tudor are pleasurable experiences.

Fortunately, the strongest card in our hands is that we're telling the truth, an amazing and miraculous fact that it's never too late to discover, even if you've never held a clarinet or stood at a barre or wielded a paintbrush. High art is many things, but above all--before anything else--it's fun. And I think it's possible to make that clear without distorting the experience of art out of all recognition. That's what I try to do in writing about the arts, here and elsewhere: I try to communicate the overflowing enthusiasm and excitement I feel every time I come into the presence of good art. Any arts journalist who doesn't do that is part of the problem.

Posted December 02, 8:41 AM

OGIC: Still life with links

I apologize for my recent absence from this space while I've been on the road, spending time with family, and under the weather, in various combinations. I'm back in Chicago now, easing back into things slowly, and catching up on my reading. To wit:

Is it just me, or does it seem as though you can't blink these days for fear of missing something new and fascinating at 2 Blowhards? Today it is a guest posting by Michael's friend Maureen, who describes her friendship with a blind man who is acutely sensitive to visual beauty of all kinds. Here's a taste:

One of the things that I liked best about our friendship was that it seemed to transcend the superficial. At least, or so it seemed at first, we were free from the appearance game.

Aha! Not quite. I soon began to learn that this accomplished man also had a serious eye, so to speak, for beauty--female pulchritude, to be exact. I learned that Jacek had been making numerous inquiries about my appearance. He wanted to know every detail about me, although he already knew quite a few--body type is easy to determine when you walk with a blind person, and he had gotten to know my personality extremely well. Yet he wanted more. The "aesthetics" of Maureen were important to him. Mind you, this was someone who had never seen a human face.

As they say, read the whole thing.

I've also been having some fun exploring John & Belle Have a Blog. John has been fisking defenders of Bad Academic Writing, talking up the unfairly neglected Robert Louis Stevenson, and examining his affinity for Stephen King:

I have so much affection for Stephen King on account of countless pleasant hours spent reading his first, second, third, fourth and fifth rate fat novels. He's a novelist I feel was my friend in junior high. I feel his influence seep through other writers--Neil Gaiman, for example. Whose first, second, third, fourth and fifth rate products I greatly enjoy. It makes me smile to feel King's influence spread. When I hear he won a prize I feel like I heard a friend won a prize. It hardly occurs to me to ask whether he deserves it.

My own impulse to defend King from the recent attacks directed at him on the occasion of his National Book Award does, I'll admit, stem from the same sort of youthful affection. But it is helped along immeasurably by the smug certainty in some quarters that King's popularity or genre proves his literary unworthiness. And I simply think that he is a good writer (far better, ironically, than any of the other popular novelists he endorsed at the NBA dinner).

Posted December 02, 2:37 AM

December 1, 2003

TT: Almanac

"There are some things too dreadful to be revealed, and it is even more dreadful how, in spite of our better instincts, we long to know about them."

Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

Posted December 01, 12:14 PM

TT: Two kinds of people

Our Girl and I have been batting the great-art-we-don't-get ball back and forth, and in my most recent return service I took a couple of shots that stirred up the natives. In seeking to explain my own lukewarmness about Picasso, I quoted these lines from my Wall Street Journal review of MoMA's "Matisse Picasso" show:

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.

Then I signed off with this bit of wholesale nose-thumbing:

I wouldn't lose a bit of sleep if all the German paintings in the world vanished first thing tomorrow morning. Poof.

Second things first. A persnickety reader writes:

What do you include under the rubric of "German paintings"? Is it too pedantic to remind you that Germany dates from 1871? Do you exempt German engravers who also painted (Dürer, Schongauer, Pencz and many others, down to Kollwitz)? Do you include Giovanni d'Alemagna, Hans von Aachen, Elsheimer and Johann Liss? Adolf Menzel? What about German speakers who were from Switzerland or the Habsburg lands (Josef Heintz, Maulpertsch, Mengs, Klimt, Schiele, Kubin)? Just curious. I respect your opinion and wonder whether this is a considered or a wanton bit of judgment.

Actually, it's both (though perhaps I should have said "German-speaking painting," if I may mix a metaphor). Note, for instance, that I didn't say I wanted all the German paintings in the world to vanish first thing tomorrow morning, much less that I hate all German painting. All I said was that if such a catastrophe were to occur, I myself wouldn't lose any sleep over it, and I'll stand on that. As a general rule, with lots and lots of exceptions, I'm not notably fond of German-speaking art of any kind.

Why not? Well, it so happens that I've been thinking about writing a piece about Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider, up through Feb. 12 at the Jewish Museum in New York, and to that end I recently read Allen Shawn's Arnold Schoenberg's Journey, a superb little book about my least favorite composer. (If only Schoenberg's music were one quarter as good as Shawn makes it sound!) In it, I ran across the following paragraph:

While Schoenberg was trying to continue the Germanic tradition of thematic development, which valued internal qualities of coherence, substance, and human expression over external charm, Stravinsky's work sprang from Russian and French roots, music of a less obviously "emotional" cast in which beauty seemed to issue more directly from sound itself than from the working out of its ideas, the tradition behind impressionism and the world of ballet: a tradition in which the composer was more inspired artisan than musical philosopher or intense visionary, a music in which, ideally, the composer practically disappeared....In this music the strivings and mystical yearnings of the individual creator were subsumed in the object that was the work itself.

I never expected to find in an apologia for Schoenberg so beautiful (and so fair) a summary of the reasons why I prefer Franco-Russian art to Austro-German art--as a general rule, with lots and lots of exceptions. I couldn't have put it any better myself. Thank you, Mr. Shawn, for doing my work for me.

Moving right along to the Matisse-Picasso problem, Tyler Green, who blogs at Modern Art Notes, my favorite visual-arts blog, posted this crisp response:

I don't agree that Picasso was better received here than Matisse. While most of the Euro-moderns received, shall we say, delayed appreciation in the U.S., Matisse caught on first....At the very least, they were received equally in the first half of the century.

(Read the whole thing here.)

In fact, I don't disagree with Tyler in the slightest. What I meant to say, and should have said, was that Picasso is now the front-runner, and has been for a long time, even though the two painters started out more or less even. Furthermore, I believe this is the case for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the relative merits of their work as art qua art. As I suggested in my Journal review, I think Picasso has gone over bigger in this country because he seems more serious than Matisse. Most Americans prefer sermons and spinach-eating to high art with a light touch, and Picasso, unlike Matisse, rarely lets you forget that he means serious business. All of which goes a long way (though not all the way) toward explaining why I prefer Matisse to Picasso--and Stravinsky to Schoenberg.

P.S. Apropos of nothing other than our shared liking for the greatest Italian painter of the 20th century, allow me to mention that Tyler recently posted this link to an online catalogue of a gorgeous Giorgio Morandi show on display through Dec. 20 in San Francisco. The only problem is that it's at a gallery, not a museum. Grumble, grumble, grumble. When will I get to see the comprehensive Morandi museum retrospective for which I long? And when will some rich reader of "About Last Night" get around to buying me a Morandi etching out of gratitude for the sheer brilliance of this site? I'd even let Our Girl borrow it from time to time, maybe....

Posted December 01, 12:01 PM

TT: A visit to Fallingwater

Regular visitors to this site will recall a major dustup in the blogosphere back in September over the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, and in particular over Fallingwater, the 1937 mountain home whose vast terraces are cantilevered over a small waterfall. (Go here to trace the thread.)

Here's part of what I wrote:

Much of the recent wrangling has centered on Fallingwater, the Wright-designed Pennsylvania home... whose unusual design required substantial ex post facto structural work in order to keep it from fallingdown. Of course I don't know what it would feel like to live there, but Fallingwater--as well as many of the other Wright houses I've seen and in some cases toured--seems to me both remarkably and self-evidently beautiful. This says nothing about the no less self-evident structural unsoundness of the house's design and original construction, but I don't really think that's relevant to the issue of its beauty....I dare say my opinion of Fallingwater is far more widely shared than that of Wright's detractors, and not just by art critics, either.

What struck me about this imbroglio was that none of the participants (so far as I can recall) had ever seen Fallingwater, myself included. That's understandable--it's in the middle of nowhere--but the fact remains that we were all holding forth solely on the basis of photographs, of which there are many, Fallingwater being Wright's best-known building after the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Still, the inevitable inadequacies of our discussion were underlined when a reader who had actually spent a week living in a Wright house sent me an e-mail describing the experience (she called the house "exquisite" but "damnably uncomfortable").

As soon as I got her e-mail, I made up my mind to go to Fallingwater and see for myself, a visit from which I returned yesterday. It isn't easy to get there, but it's absolutely worth the trouble, especially if you take the two-hour guided tour of the house, which costs forty well-spent dollars. The guides are comprehensively informed and impressively thorough (thank you, Sue Celaschi!), and the tour is leisurely enough that you get every opportunity to see the house from top to bottom. (Go here for information or to make a reservation, which I strongly recommend.)

I don't want to waste your time telling you what Fallingwater looks like, not only because it's so famous but also because written descriptions can't begin to convey the effect of actually seeing the house, whether in person or in photographs. If you don't know what it looks like, go here for a fine assortment of on-line photos. Beyond that, all I can say is that everything you've read about the house is true. It's a Cubist painting in ochre, sandstone, and Cherokee red, and it seems to melt into the surrounding landscape as if it had somehow grown out of the stream and rocks.

The problem is that when you're looking at Fallingwater in person, it's hard not to be so overwhelmed by its beauty that you forget to reflect on its function. The house was a weekend retreat for E.J. Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department-store magnate, and his wife and son, and the Kaufmanns didn't hang Fallingwater on their wall--they lived in it. So as I walked through the house, I kept asking myself, What must it have felt like to live here?

That may seem like an obvious question, but believe me, it isn't. I just finished reading Franklin Toker's Fallingwater Rising, a formidably smart, engagingly written new book that discusses the house from every conceivable angle, not merely as a piece of architecture but as a cultural event. Yet the one thing the author failed to do was convey a clear sense of the experience of living in Fallingwater. Was it comfortable? Awkward? Awe-inspiring? Frustrating?

Like all geniuses, Frank Lloyd Wright attracts aggressive partisans who refuse to consider the possibility that any of his work might have been less than perfect. I'm no Wright partisan, merely a passionate admirer of his work, and my admiration, while considerable, is not blind. So here are some of the things, good and bad, that occurred to me as I walked through Fallingwater:

Fallingwater still looks modern, though not ostentatiously or forbiddingly so. Perhaps it might be more accurate to say that it looks fresh. Unlike many other "modern" homes of the same period, it looks as if it could have been built yesterday, or 20 years ago, or 20 years from now. It hasn't dated at all.

The complex floor plan, including the labyrinthine staircases that link the different floors of the house, adds a note of mystery and unpredictability to Fallingwater. My guess is that children would love it for that reason--as did I. (Think of all the places to hide!) On the other hand, it would be unmanageably difficult for anyone who had the slightest difficulty climbing steps. It's not a house for old people.

The servants' quarters are as beautiful as the rest of the house--a lovely and generous touch.

Everyone who writes about Fallingwater talks about the noise of the waterfall. Robert Hughes, who considers Fallingwater to be "one of the most astonishing tours de force in all modern architecture," goes on to speak of "the perversity of Wright's idea of building a house over a waterfall that can't be seen from inside it, but only heard: a dull, continuous roar that, in spring-melt time, must have rendered life in Fallingwater nearly insufferable." I can't tell you how loud it is in the spring, but in late November the sound of the waterfall inside the house is nothing more than a soothingly musical background rush of white noise.

Part of what keeps the house manageably quiet is the flagstone floor of the main living area, which extends directly over the water (one of the most striking features of the house is a glass-enclosed staircase that leads straight down to Bear Run). Those big flat stones are great to look at but less pleasant to walk on, and their surface unevenness makes it impossible to put down any kind of rug.

Every guide in every Frank Lloyd Wright house I've visited goes out of his or her way to assure you that Wright's small stature (he lied about his height and wore lifts in his shoes) had no effect on his architecture. Nonsense. The "human scale" to which Wright designed his houses was all too obviously calculated to suit the ego of a self-consciously short man. Sometimes the effect can be wonderfully cozy, as in the low-cost, small-scale "Usonian houses" Wright began to design for middle-class homeowners immediately after finishing Fallingwater (about which more later), but at other times it can be oppressive. I'm five foot eight, Wright's "official" height, and I found the ceilings in many parts of the house--including much of the vast first-floor living area--to be about six inches too low. For the same reason, many other features, including the bathroom fixtures and Wright-designed built-in furniture, looked equally uncomfortable to me.

The defining structural feature of Fallingwater is the huge amount of space allotted to the terraces (they occupy 2,445 square feet, versus a 2,885-square-foot interior). They're as spectacular to stand on as they are to behold. But the fact that they extend outward from the main building with no visible means of support can be disorienting, especially since they now sag vertically by about seven inches, a long-term consequence of Wright's faulty grasp of the load-bearing properties of the cantilever. The sag is evident to the naked eye, no matter where you're standing, and even though the terraces were recently stabilized and are structurally sound, it remains more than a little bit vertigo-inducing. It also detracts from the beauty of the house, much of whose effect arises from the endlessly repeated horizontal lines of the terraces and the sandstone walls.

The giant-sized terrace outside the master bedroom makes no sense whatsoever, especially in a house ostensibly designed on a "human scale." It's big enough to hold a cocktail party or a game of touch football, but accessible only to the occupants of the bedroom. As Franklin Toker readily admits, Wright must have built it that way purely to make a splash. He succeeded--it's the first thing you notice when approaching the house--but I wonder what Mrs. Kaufmann thought of it, or whether she used it more than occasionally.

Like so many of Wright's buildings, including the Guggenheim, Fallingwater is designed in such a way as to make it all but impossible to hang paintings effectively. (This is no accident--Wright was a monster of vanity who disapproved of his clients' displaying art in their homes, believing that his buildings were all the art they needed.) The only things that really look good on the walls are unobtrusive knick-knacks, which can be placed on the built-in horizontal shelves.

Perhaps coincidentally--and perhaps not--Fallingwater also has comparatively few bookshelves, and most of those it does have are awkwardly situated.

All these cavils notwithstanding, I think it would be a profoundly soul-satisfying experience to live in Fallingwater--if you were rich enough to afford a staff of servants and young enough to negotiate the stairs. But two days after visiting Fallingwater, I visited Wright's 1,200-square-foot Pope-Leighey House in Mount Vernon, Va., a prime example of his "Usonian" style, built for a Washington newspaperman who made $50 a week in 1939. It's infinitely more modest than Fallingwater, but no less pleasing to behold, and in many ways a good deal more obviously comfortable. Here, Wright's "human scale" takes a far more intelligible and convincing shape, without any reciprocal sacrifice of exterior beauty. The Pope-Leighey House isn't perfect, either, not by any means, but I don't have any trouble imagining living there, and I suspect it would be at least as soul-satisfying, even without the waterfall. (The best short book about the Usonian houses is Carla Lind's Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian Houses. For an online photo gallery of the Pope-Leighey House, go here. For information about tours, go here.)

Yes, Fallingwater is one of the most extraordinary buildings in the world, fully deserving of its singular reputation. I've never seen a more beautiful house in my life. But I wouldn't be altogether surprised if in the very long run, Wright's Usonian houses prove to have been a more significant contribution to Western culture--which is the surprising conclusion I drew from my visit to Fallingwater.

Posted December 01, 11:45 AM

TT: Book 'em

I see that Master and Commander has tanked. Not in absolute terms: a $67.5 million gross in the first three weeks of release would be perfectly respectable under normal circumstances. Unfortunately, Master and Commander cost $135 million, stars Russell Crowe, and got hysterically enthusiastic reviews. So why isn't it doing better? A whole lot better? The answer is to be found in The Wall Street Journal's post-Thanksgiving report on this year's holiday films, which declared with blunt finality that "the adult-skewing audience it is pitched toward hasn't responded strongly enough."

That rumble you hear in the middle distance is the sound of doom for big-budget adult movies, which were already sick unto death and have now officially straight-lined. If a film with all the advantages of Master and Commander can't do any better than $67.5 million after three weeks, don't expect any remotely similar project to get the green light. Expensive movies, like Trix, are for kids.

Is there still room for smart movies made on the cheap? Absolutely, and plenty of it. But I expect that the adventurous indie flicks of the not-so-distant future will find their audiences not in theatrical release, but via such new-media distribution routes as direct-to-DVD and on-demand digital cable. As I predicted four years ago in "Tolstoy's Contraption," an essay published in the Journal and collected in A Terry Teachout Reader,

it is only a matter of time before [independent] films are routinely released directly to videocassette and marketed like books (or made available in downloadable form over the Internet), thus circumventing the current blockbuster-driven system of film distribution. Once that happens, my guess is that the independent movie will replace the novel as the principal vehicle for serious storytelling in the twenty-first century.

I got the technology wrong, but everything else right. Especially now that large-screen TVs are making it easier to watch films at home under more visually advantageous circumstances, I doubt that over-30 moviegoers will continue to subject themselves to the unpleasantries of trips to the local gigaplex. Intimate films like Lost in Translation and The Station Agent gain little or nothing when you view them in a theater, surrounded by cell-phone addicts and other freaks and morons. (Yes, I recently watched Kissing Jessica Stein for the first time, and have now added that invaluable phrase to my personal repertoire.) I'd just as soon see such films in the comfort of my living room, the same way I'd read a good book.

Movies as novels, bought on the Web and consumed at home: that's the future of grownup filmmaking in America. See if it doesn't happen, soon.

Posted December 01, 5:11 AM

TT: It's dark in here, damn it

A reader writes, apropos of my recent posting about the Elements Quartet's "Snapshots" concert and the persistent inability of American symphony orchestras to attract younger listeners:

If a person's mind is not open, you cannot make him or her like anything. Unfortunately, there is a myth that classical music in general is stuffy, boring, and elitist, and too many people, not just young ones, blindly accept this canard. Many young people just assume that it's "uncool" to like orchestral music, and that only rock music is "relevant." I do not agree with everything in the late Allan Bloom's book "The Closing of the American Mind," but his observations about American popular culture closing young people's minds to the possibility of enjoying classical music are right on target. One thing is certain: it is not that our orchestras have failed to make concertgoing worthwhile. They have never offered more diversified and interesting repertoire. It is minds that need to be opened.

For my part, I don't disagree with all that much of what my correspondent has to say. Alas, it's totally irrelevant to the current crisis.

To begin with, rarely have I heard a question begged so loudly. Of course classical music is not stuffy or boring (though it most certainly is elitist, like all great art, and thank God it is). Of course classical music has an image problem among younger listeners. Of course their minds need to be opened. But note my correspondent's unintentionally revealing use of the passive voice, always a sure sign that something important is being swept under the rug. It is minds that need to be opened. Fine...but by whom? Or--to put it another way--if symphony orchestras aren't responsible for making people want to come hear them, then who is?

I don't mean to be snarky or frivolous. I'm being practical. Like it or not, orchestras must compete for attention in the cultural marketplace. If they don't, they will die. Alas, they can no longer take for granted any institutional encouragement from the larger culture, and there's no button you can push that will change that situation. After all, we no longer have a cultural consensus that classical music is a good thing, much less that it's better than rock or rap. In the absence of such a consensus, you can't reasonably expect the public schools or the mass media to encourage young people (or anyone else) to listen to classical music. Why should they? What's in it for them?

Please don't misunderstand me. I believe devoutly and passionately in the permanent significance of classical music. What's more, I believe truly great music is being written right this minute. But pop culture isn't going away, and that means symphony orchestras have to build their own audiences. If they don't, nobody else will. And if their audiences are shrinking, it means they're doing a bad job--period. It doesn't matter whether they're playing well. It doesn't matter whether they're playing good music. If nobody's listening, something's wrong. You can spend all day assigning blame, or you can try to figure out what to do to change things. There is no third way. Minds won't open themselves.

Posted December 01, 1:30 AM