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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 guaran