About Last Night

Christmas was lovely (I'm wearing one of my favorite gifts as I type this, and in fact have barely taken it off for seven days now) but my aesthetic intake was pretty much limited to picking from among the sorry array of holiday wrapping paper on offer this year. Yep, I do consider myself a connoisseur of the stuff. Someday when life is perfect, somebody will pay me money to make up designs for wrapping paper and neckties. In the meantime, my personal cultural drought comes to an end tomorrow, when Terry rolls into town and lets me tag along with him to see a lot of plays and, who knows, maybe some art and cinema into the bargain. However we end up occupying ourselves, it's a good bet you'll read about it here.

I haven't had the stomach to actually count, but the video-ad seems to appear two or three times per episode of L&O, including once at the pivotal moment before the verdict is read. To quote a more quotable show (L&O is many things, but a fount of witty repartée isn't one of them), "It's a nightmare. It's a plague. It's a nightmare about a plague." And it just may be strong enough medicine to cure me and my similarly addicted young professional female friends of a seriously powerful dependency (at least until January 18th, when the movie's 3-night run, and presumably the ad push, end). I don't think any of us believed medicine that strong existed, but this corrosive cocktail of Hootie and Neil Simon appears to be it.

I arrived in Union Station this morning after a deeply satisfying trip on the Lake Shore Limited, spent the day looking at paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago (about which more later), and now am making ready to go eat tapas and see a performance of A Little Night Music, chauffeured and accompanied by OGIC. One or both of us will report later tonight, or maybe tomorrow. In the meantime, it's nice to be in the same room as my superlative co-blogger.

More anon. Hope you're all having a Happy New Year.

More tomorrow....

I'll be boarding a train for New York Sunday night, and the weatherman says I'll be plowing through several inches of snow en route. I'll be home when I'm home. Should I get stuck along the way, Our Girl will tell you all about it. Otherwise, expect extensive postings tomorrow.

Tallying the weekend's attractions, we saw 3 plays, 1 art show, and a few Frank Lloyd Wright houses, doing slow drive-bys in Oak Park (it almost felt like we were stalking the houses, and the unfortunate "No Tourists" signs that abound around the Wright Home and Studio do nothing to dispel that impression). My personal score sheet? A Little Night Music fabulous; Rose Rage riveting (I'm still under its dark spell, and won't shake it soon); Manet and the Sea pleasing overall, with certain highlights that were extraordinary (one Courbet, several Morisots, and a couple of smaller Manets that hailed from private collections). The play at Steppenwolf today, Man from Nebraska? Glossy, polished, and false. But I had to be happy with my batting average, especially considering that Rose Rage amounted to almost three plays. Newest New Year's resolution: see more Chicago theater. And more Terry. Not necessarily in that order.

Happy trails, Terr...and tell us all about it tomorrow.

I just this minute saw Our Girl's report about our hectic but happy weekend doing the art thing in Chicagoland. My own personal opinions of the events in question must remain on ice for a bit longer. You can read about Rose Rage and Man from Nebraska in this Friday's Wall Street Journal, and I'm planning to blog about "Manet and the Sea" as soon as I unpack, take a shower, get some dinner, and answer all my e-mail, which may take several weeks. For the moment, I can say the following:

(1) OGIC is soooooooo cool.

(2) I want her Eames chair.

(3) If I couldn't live in Manhattan, I think Chicago might do quite nicely.

Now, everybody send Our Girl an e-mail ordering her to come to New York as soon as possible. Sweeney Todd opens March 9 at New York City Opera, hint hint hint....

This week ArtsJournal introduces a new feature: rss syndication feeds for all of our ArtsJournal bloggers. If you have a newsfeed reader, you can subscribe to any ArtsJournal blog by clicking on the orange "XML" button now found on each of the blogs.

If you know what the first part of that bulletin means, go thou and do likewise. If you don't know, don't worry about it. Really.

As for us, we sort of understand, kind of, but we don't have newsfeed readers of our own (yet). All we know is that they're supposed to be a good thing, and so we're glad that "About Last Night" is now available via rss syndication feeds. If and when you become a subscriber to "About Last Night," please let us know whether you experience any technical difficulties, and we'll pass your complaint on to the proper authorities.

As for everyone else, ignore that last paragraph. You may continue visiting "About Last Night" the same way you always have, as often as you like. And we still hope you'll tell your friends about us!

W.

(that is short for whatever, in case you didn't know).

I didn't. Now I do. And so do you.

are all reflective of the current cultural Zeitgeist; a legacy of the '60s, and one that has been sounding the death knell for all the high arts, classical music very much included, for almost three decades now. And although a death knell, it's been heard by most who ought to have known better (viz., intelligent, educated, cultured people such as those represented above) not as a death knell, but as a clarion voluntary heralding a new, welcome, and desirable equalitarian embracement of all art -- high and low, great and trashy -- without distinction.

No, I'm not going to embark on a(nother) fulmination against such wrongheaded, woodenheaded, purblind idiocy. I've done my share of that on this weblog; some will say more than my share.

Well, maybe just a teeny bit more than his share. For one of the statements, it seems, comes from "About Last Night":

I'm blogging from the apartment of ________, who is sitting in her Eames chair (yes, she has an Eames chair!), looking shockingly beautiful as Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two twang away on the stereo (didn't I tell you she was cool?).

Needless to say, the lady of the blank was Our Girl in Chicago, who has an Eames chair and listens to Johnny Cash, to whose music I introduced her a number of years ago. Which means, according to Mr. Douglas, that she and I are both part of the horde of woodenheaded, idiotic cultural relativists who are gnawing away at the foundations of Western culture.

Excuse the hell out of me, pal, but you obviously haven't read one-tenth of one percent of what I've been writing for the past quarter-century about cultural relativism and its discontents, and I don't plan to sit still and let you dump all over me like that. Among many, many, many other things, I draw your attention to something I posted in this space a couple of months ago, apropos of the Great King-Hazzard Imbroglio:

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

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

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

I think perhaps Mr. Douglas didn't notice. I think perhaps there's a lot he doesn't notice. And I think perhaps he should do penance by ordering a copy of A Terry Teachout Reader, in which he will find plenty of evidence of just how much he hasn't been noticing.

Enough said. All is forgiven.

UPDATE: Mr. Douglas has responded (the link's the same), or at least thinks he has.

On the streets of Washington and across America, a war is being waged between popular novels and literary fiction. In this increasingly aliterate nation--acrawl with people who can read but don't--the battle for readers is a high-stakes campaign.

Since I (1) write a column for the Post, (2) was interviewed for the story and (3) am quoted extensively therein, I'll refrain from commenting either way on its merits, but I do want to say something about The Elegant Variation's sulfurous response:

Others have already linked to this Washington Post piece about the King/Hazzard contretemps, so I may be beating a dead horse but I have to wonder when this idiotic "literary vs. genre" nonsense will play itself out.

There's not a single message board that I have ever visited -- not one -- that does not include some form of this exhausted debate, usually in terms and tones incendiary and condescending. And after perusing all the miles and KB of threads, I'm forced to ask the question: Who cares? Isn't it enough to say that each side probably envies something the other side has, and to leave it at that? How much more really needs to be said?

Hold on there a minute, hoss. The fact that lots and lots of people (OGIC and myself included) have blogged about this "exhausted debate" is apodictic proof that lots and lots of people care, and at least hints at the further possibility that the debate might be somewhat less than exhausted.

Bookslut, on the other hand, framed the diminishing-returns debate in a slightly different way, suggesting that the Post article "may have seemed more relevant if it had been published soon after the National Book Awards ceremony. I thought this had already been talked out." And so it has--out here in the blogosphere, where lead times are shorter and trigger fingers itchier. But as has been widely observed of late, the whole point of the blogosphere is that it appears to consist, at least at present, of a fairly small universe of early adopters and opinion-shapers whose views are initially disseminated and discussed in cyberspace, only then making their way into the slower-responding world of print media. (Or, to invert the Fox News slogan, we decide--they report.) As a result, that which strikes us as yesterday's news may actually be tomorrow's news, or next month's news, in the "real" world of journalism.

For this reason, instead of grumping about how the Washington Post is beating a dead horse, I wonder if we might possibly do better to say, "Cool--they noticed. And they even remembered to mention that we got there first!" For as Exhalations pointed out,

It was interesting to note that a blog was referenced, Terry Teachout's About Last Night. It was the first time I've seen such a casual reference to a blog without the reporter having to explain the term ‘blog'.

Actually, I'd seen one or two such references prior to this one. It's worth noting, too, that my weekly Wall Street Journal shirttail says simply that I "blog about the arts at www.terryteachout.com," without further explanation. But it's just as worthy of note that the Washington Post is now behaving as though litblogs have become a recognized part of the world of literary journalism. Maybe that's the headline that belongs on this particular story.

I can't remember the last time I encountered a review of new poetry that didn't feel airless, stuffy, and as if it had been written for the initiated few. I think this is less a symptom of arrogance than of laziness, cluelessness, or perhaps disillusionment on the part of reviewers, but the effect is toxic whatever the causes. Last Sunday, however, the Chicago Tribune provided a notable exception to this rule. If new poetry were more often reviewed as dashingly and accessibly as Maureen McLane does here, I submit, more people would read new poetry. (Warning: link will expire Jan. 11.)

Do take a look. Even if "The Garden at Les Lauves" doesn't affect you in quite the same way, I thought you might enjoy this little glimpse into my aesthetic psyche.

I took a cab from Union Station to the Art Institute on Friday, there to be stopped on the steps by a guard who told me that I couldn't check my suitcase--the Art Institute was no longer checking luggage because of the orange alert. Dumbfounded, I asked him, not in a friendly way, what I was supposed to do (I was staying with Our Girl in Chicago, who doesn't live anywhere near the museum). He told me that I could try the front desk of a hotel four blocks away, which was what I ended up doing. Cold, tired, and exasperated, I trudged back to the Art Institute, where I found a line of warmly dressed museumgoers that already stretched halfway around the block. It was, to put it mildly, a bad omen, and sure enough, I didn't get much pleasure out of what followed.

Like most blockbuster museum exhibitions, "Manet and the Sea" requires a separate ticket that permits you to enter the show one time only during a specified half-hour span. I presented myself at the entrance and got in another long line. Once I finally entered, the galleries turned out to be crammed, with huge knots of spectators clustered in front of the wall texts and even larger knots of headphone wearers spread out four and five deep in front of all the paintings discussed in the audio tour. The thick crowds moved sluggishly and randomly, now this way, now that way, making it a struggle to get close enough to any particular painting to examine it in detail.

If all this sounds like standard operating procedure, it is--except that I almost never go to blockbuster shows during regular museum hours. As a working critic, I normally attend "press views," the pre-opening previews which, even when they draw good-sized audiences, are never too crowded. In the past couple of years, I've only had to fight crowds at one mega-blockbuster show, the Museum of Modern Art's "Matisse Picasso" (I reviewed it for The Wall Street Journal, then returned a second time in the company of a friend who had a spare ticket). As a result, I'd forgotten how oppressive it is to try to look at great art in the company of undifferentiated hordes of other viewers, a not-insubstantial percentage of whom are boorishly noisy.

It didn't help that "Manet and the Sea" is an unusually large and complex show, consisting of more than a hundred carefully arranged paintings, watercolors, and prints by Manet, Monet, Courbet, Morisot, Renoir, Whistler, and a goodly number of other lesser lights. That's a lot of art, far too much to take in under the best of circumstances, much less the worst. (The Metropolitan Museum's El Greco show, by contrast, contains only 70 items.) I was already tired by the time I shoved my way into the fourth gallery, and by the end of the show the individual paintings were no longer making much of an impression on me. Sad to say, I was glad to leave.

Our Girl and I returned to the Art Institute two days later, just as a snowstorm was moving into downtown Chicago, and our experience couldn't have been more different: no line in front of the museum, no line at the entrance to the exhibition, no more than a dozen or so people in any gallery at any given moment, not unlike a press view. We spent an hour and a half strolling through the show at our leisure, scrutinizing and discussing each piece, then went back through twice more to pick our half-dozen favorite paintings (about which we were in near-complete accord). Our eyes were still fresh when we were done, and the paintings that made the deepest impressions on us stayed clear in our minds for days afterward.

This isn't going to be the usual Screed Against Blockbusters. I don't feel like rehearsing all the old arguments for and against such shows--they've been done to death, and nothing I say, here or elsewhere, will change the economic realities that drive museums to put together 100-piece extravaganzas of Impressionism's Greatest Hits. Nor do I propose to gripe about wall texts or audio tours. In a perfect world, museumgoers would simply look at paintings, then go home, read about them, and come back to see them again. Alas, the world of art is far from perfect: not only do most museumgoers like to read about the paintings they see while they're seeing them, but more than a few like to hear about them as well. What's more, I don't doubt that at least some of them profit from the experience, and far be it from me to decree that they should be deprived of it.

Having said all this, I do want to make a couple of modest proposals:

(1) Once a year, every working art critic should be required to attend a blockbuster show on a weekend or holiday. He should buy a ticket with his own money, line up with the citizenry, fight his way through the crowds, listen to an audio tour--and pay close attention to what his fellow museumgoers are saying and doing. In short, he should be forced to remind himself on a regular basis of how ordinary people experience art, and marvel at the fact that they keep coming back in spite of everything.

That one's easy. This one's harder:

(2) Every "civilian" who goes to a given museum at least six times a year should be allowed to attend a press or private view of a major exhibition. The experience of seeing a blockbuster show under such conditions is eye-opening in every sense of the word. If more ordinary museumgoers were to have such experiences, it might change their feelings about the ways in which museums present such exhibitions.

Lastly, I'll take a flying leap into the cesspool of arrant idealism:

(3) No museum show should contain more than 75 pieces, and no museum should be allowed to present more than one 75-piece show per year. Tyler Green (whose Modern Art Notes is about to become an artsjournal.com blog, by the way) wrote the other day to tell me that Washington's Phillips Collection, our favorite museum, is putting on a Milton Avery retrospective in February that will contain just 42 pieces. I can't wait to see it, not only because I love Avery but because that is exactly the right size for an exhibit of that kind--big enough to cover all the bases, but not too big to swamp the viewer and dull his responses.

I'll close with a memory. A few years ago, I gave a speech in Kansas City, and as part of my fee I was given a completely private tour of the Nelson-Atkins Museum. I went there after hours and was escorted by one of the curators, who switched on the lights in each gallery as we entered and switched them off as we left. I can't begin to tell you what an astonishing and unforgettable impression that visit made on me. To see masterpieces of Western art in perfect circumstances is to realize for the first time how imperfectly we experience them in our everyday lives. It changes the way you feel about museums--and about art itself. I didn't realize it then, but that private view undoubtedly helped to put me on the road to buying art.

Perhaps one of our great museums might consider raffling off a dozen such tours each year. I'm not one for lotteries, but I'd definitely pony up for a ticket.

In late 2003 we asked a number of our favourite film critics, restorers, authors, curators and scholars for their lists of "most wanted films on DVD". The idea here, six years into the format's life, is to catch a glimpse of what the next six years could hold if these dreams were realised. Here are their responses....

Now, that's my idea of a "list piece." Read, ponder, and note the mysterious absence of anything by Budd Boetticher--though Nicholas Ray does get his due. (Did you know, by the way, that Ninotchka and The Grapes of Wrath aren't available on DVD? Yikes!)

For more information, or to listen on line, go here.

UPDATE: The show ended up being great fun, and I even had an unexpected encounter with an old friend of mine, an early-music soprano who appeared on the first half-hour. Radio is so cool. I used to do it a lot back in the old days of NPR's Performance Today, and I still miss it....

Here's a hint, Alexandre: if you purchase A Terry Teachout Reader, you'll find a cunningly concealed clue to OGIC's identity (in English, of course).

Actually, I'm deadlining today, sort of (I'm finishing the first chapter of my brief life of George Balanchine), so I don't expect to post anything more until well into the evening, if then. Apologies, and further apologies for having ignored the mailbox for the past few days. I know Our Girl is cooking away at her blogpot, though I don't know when the dish will be finished. Here's hoping.

In lieu of a real post, here's the epigraph of the Balanchine book. Ruthanna Boris, a choreographer who danced for Balanchine, said it to Francis Mason in I Remember Balanchine, Francis' priceless collection of oral-history interviews:

After I retired from dancing, I was sitting on the bench with Balanchine at the School of American Ballet while he rehearsed. As they were working, he said to me, "You know, those men in Tibet up in the mountains. They sit nude in the cave and they drink only water through straw and they think very pure thoughts." I said, "Yes, the Tibetan monks. The lamas." He said, "Yes. You know, that is what I should become. I would be with them." And then he looked around and said, "But unfortunately, I like butterflies."

Isn't that nice? I'm having fun with this book.

Now go have a good day. I'll see you Friday.

Steven Soderbergh (on sex, lies, and videotape), quoted in Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures

Rose Rage I liked, with some qualifications:

Of course there's more to "Henry VI" than this--four hours more, to be exact--but Mr. Hall's own ruthless cutting of the original text, combined with the cartoony conceptualism of his production style, stuffs Shakespeare into a straitjacket. At first I found the results tricky and exasperating, but theater is an empirical art whose practitioners make their own rules, and well before the dinner break arrived, I realized that I had gotten completely caught up in the ferocious sweep of "Rose Rage." Mr. Hall may suffer from tunnel vision, but at least his tunnel goes someplace interesting: The comic scenes bristle with vitality, the battles are angry and clamorous, and when the long evening is finally over, you'll find it hard to shake off the dark spell cast by this sometimes over-clever but nonetheless thrilling show....

Man From Nebraska I loathed:

Ken Carpenter (Rick Snyder), a Baptist family man from Lincoln, Neb., awakes one morning to find he has lost his faith. He thereupon embarks on a pilgrimage to London, where he falls in with Tamyra (Karen Aldridge), an arty bartender, and Harry (Michael Shannon), a mediocre sculptor. These enlightened folk introduce the benighted Ken to the Religion of Art, and he returns to Lincoln a fully fledged member of the herd of independent minds, there to renounce fundamentalism, fast food and small-town narrowness. Such smug little exercises in cross-cultural condescension are par for the course in the capital of Blue America, but I wasn't expecting to stumble across one in the City of the Big Shoulders. I guess there's no hate like self-hate: Mr. Letts, a member of the Steppenwolf ensemble, was born and raised in Oklahoma....

No link, hell and death, so to read the whole thing, march to your friendly neighborhood newsstand, lay down one cold hard dollar, buy a Friday Journal, turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, and feast yourself on all sorts of other good stuff (including the book review that supplied me with today's almanac entry).

The newsroom is a nest of believers if we include believers in journalism itself. There is a religion of the press. There is also a priesthood. And there can be a crisis of faith....

The essay was written to herald the launch of The Revealer, a promising-looking on-line magazine about religion and the media. The Revealer is definitely worth a look, but read Rosen's essay first. As BuzzMachine says, "I can't quote it without mangling it so go pour a cup of coffee and have a good read." I agree. It's a must.

Does this trouble me? Not really. I've lived long enough to know that the rhythms of an aesthetic life run in cycles. Sooner or later, probably sooner, I'll hear a piece by a previously underappreciated composer, or a CD by a new singer whose voice tickles me in all the right places, and suddenly music will resume its place in the spotlight, while another art form retires temporarily to the wings. Most likely my love of music is simply lying fallow, regaining its strength. Back in the Seventies and Eighties, I reviewed classical music and jazz for the Kansas City Star. It was great fun, but it was also a burden, not because of the bad concerts but because of the merely adequate ones--of which there were far more than too many. Once I moved on to the next part of my life, I went for two whole years without going to a concert. It was necessary: I had to clear my ears. And when they were back in working order, I resolved never again to let myself get burned out, on music or anything else. Since then, I've made a point of writing about a steadily widening variety of artistic experiences. Whenever my interest in one art form starts to flag, I simply concentrate on another. That's what's happening now.

And yet...I've spent the better part of my life up to my ears (so to speak) in music of all kinds. After literature, music was my first art form, and it remains the one I know most intimately. I "speak" it as naturally as I speak English. I write a lengthy essay about musical matters nearly every month for Commentary. That's why it feels strange to find the spring no longer flowing. It's as if I've become alienated from myself, in much the same way that the victim of a stroke might feel he was no longer himself. I'm not all here.

Ivy Compton-Burnett, the English novelist, told a friend late in life that she could no longer read Jane Austen with pleasure, not because her admiration for Austen had lessened but because she'd read her novels so many times that she had them virtually by heart, and hence could no longer be surprised by them. When I read that, I wondered: is it really possible to exhaust a masterpiece? Much less an entire art form? I can't imagine being unable to hear anything new in Falstaff or the Mozart G Minor Symphony, though I suppose it could happen. And as for a person who came to feel that music or painting or poetry had nothing more to say to him, he'd be in dire straits indeed. Such a terrible prospect puts me in mind of one of Dr. Johnson's most famous utterances: "Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." The arts are like that. To be tired of them is to be tired of life.

Needless to say, I'm not tired of life--far from it--and even though I do seem to be tired of music, I know the time will come when I fall in love with it all over again. Until then, I'll keep in mind Carolyn Leigh's beautiful lyric to one of my favorite songs, "I Walk a Little Faster":

Pretending that we'll meet
Each time I turn a corner,
I walk a little faster.
Pretending life is sweet
‘Cause love's around the corner,
I walk a little faster.

Can't begin to see my future shine as yet,
No sign as yet
You're mine as yet.
Rushing toward a face I can't define as yet,
Keep bumping into walls,
Taking lots of falls.

But even though I meet
At each and every corner
With nothing but disaster,
I set my chin a little higher,
Hope a little longer,
Build a little stronger
Castle in the air,
And thinking you'll be there,
I walk a little faster.

In the process of passing these everyday miracles, I discovered that all the links in "Teachout in Commentary" were busted, on account of a major redesign of the Commentary Web site that went live without anybody bothering to tell me (duh, thanks, Neal!). I'll get 'em fixed as soon as I figure out how.

I won't make you giggle by promising to do all this more often. Either I will or I won't. And hey...maybe I will.

An artsy pal and I played this parlor game: If you were going to be a seven-figure, major donor to one arts institution in the USA, what would you pick?

That is a really good question, and as Jack Benny said to the mugger who asked him for his money or his life, I'm thinking it over. You do the same. I'm painfully aware that the e-mailbox is overflowing and that it will probably be at least another three days before I have a spare half-hour to clear it out, but I'll be strongly inclined to post a whole bunch of your answers one of these days.

Right at this moment, I'm torn between Carolina Ballet and the Phillips Collection. But I could change my mind several dozen more times between now and whenever. Oh, the joys of imaginary philanthropy....

Patrick O'Brian, The Surgeon's Mate

Most serious balletgoers (if not all) have felt for some time now that NYCB was in decline, and tonight's performance did little to prove them wrong. I don't need to go into particulars, since Tobi Tobias nailed all the myriad deficiencies of the current staging of Scotch Symphony in a posting on "Seeing Things," her artsjournal.com blog:

I had been looking forward to my favorite Scotch Symphony moment. Two of the kilts lift the Sylphide high--she seems to be standing on air--and toss her, still vertical, into her ardent suitor's arms. "She sails forward as if the air were her natural home," Walter Terry wrote in 1957, "and [her partner] catches her high on his chest as if she were without weight." I recall the exquisitely gentle Diana Adams in that moment. For two unforgettable seconds, she seemed to be not falling but floating--softly, lazily, serenely, swept crosswise by an idle breeze. It didn't happen last night. They didn't even attempt it. I wonder if whoever is setting the ballet even knows that moment existed. Or cares.

I was one year old in 1957, but anyone who's seen the old Bell Telephone Hour video of Maria Tallchief and André Eglevsky performing the slow movement of Scotch Symphony in 1959 will know at once that Tobi's detailed recollections of how it was danced 40 years ago are more than rosy-eyed nostalgia. This is one Balanchine ballet that definitely doesn't look the way it used to.

On the other hand, it's also worth reporting that my guest was stunned--the only possible word--by her first encounter with Balanchine's choreography. I gave her a discreet glance at the end of Serenade and saw that she was crying softly. That's just as it should be: Balanchine's greatest ballets are sturdy enough to make their effect even in unfocused, infirm performances. I wouldn't have dreamed of telling her that last night's Serenade, for all its virtues, was far removed from the way that immortal masterpiece looks when lovingly set by a first-string repetiteur on a meticulously rehearsed company. For her, the only thing that matters is that she's just discovered a new world of beauty whose existence she never even suspected. I envy her.

In 1987, I went to Lincoln Center to watch New York City Ballet dance Concerto Barocco, set to Bach's Two-Violin Concerto. I knew the music well, having played one of the solo parts in high school, but except for an isolated Nutcracker seen on a college trip to New York, Barocco (as balletomanes call it) was my first Balanchine ballet. Indeed, I hadn't seen very many ballets of any kind, nor was I much impressed with the ones I had seen. So far as I could tell, ballet consisted for the most part of thin women in white skirts pretending to be birds, fluttering through elaborately costumed pantomime shows whose quaint plots were too silly to take seriously. I knew next to nothing about George Balanchine, but I'd just seen a TV documentary about him which led me to believe that his dances were different, so I decided to give Barocco a try, in much the same spirit of adventure that might have led another person to go to the Museum of Modern Art, or to a jazz club.

At four minutes past eight, the house lights dimmed, the curtain flew up, and I saw eight young women standing before a sky-blue blackdrop. The scrappy little band in the pit snapped to attention, the conductor gave the downbeat, and the women started to move, now in time with the driving beat, now cutting sharply against its grain. As the solo violinists made their separate entrances, two more women came running out from the wings and began to dance at center stage. Their steps were crisp, exact, almost jazzy. For a moment I was confused. The stage was completely bare, and the dancers' simple, unadorned costumes offered no clue as to who they were or what they were doing. Had I failed to grasp something crucial? What was the story? Then it hit me: the music was the story. The dancers were mirroring its complex events, not in a sing-songy, naïvely imitative way but with the utmost sophistication and grace. This was no dumb show, no mere pantomime, but sound made visible, written in the air like fireworks glittering in the night sky. When it was all over, 15 breathless minutes later, the audience broke into friendly but routine applause, seemingly unaware that they had just beheld a miracle. Rooted in my seat, eyes wide with astonishment, I asked myself, Why hasn't anybody ever told me about this?

Seventeen years have come and gone, and I can still tell you exactly how I felt on that never-to-be-forgotten January night. Which is why I persist in taking new friends to see their first Balanchine ballets. Things may not be what they used to be at New York City Ballet, but Barocco and Serenade and Apollo can still make a first-timer shiver and weep, even when the steps are fuzzy around the edges and the orchestra sounds like it forgot to tune up (and boy, did it ever sound awful in Scotch Symphony!). Those of us whose business it is to notice and report what goes wrong on the stage of the New York State Theater should always keep that miraculous fact firmly in mind.

Mr. Pekar was inspired in the 1960s by a chance meeting with R. Crumb, the future dean of "underground comics," who was then drawing greeting cards for a living in Cleveland. They met to trade old records, but when Mr. Crumb showed Mr. Pekar the quirky adult comics he was doing on the side, Pekar's imagination caught fire. Crumb's work, he noticed, was intellectual and satirical, but not realistic. Why couldn't you have a "straight" comic book with a tone like Dreiser's, or Celine's, or Balzac's? Thus was born American Splendor. Naturalism was coming to the comics page.

Meanwhile, in case anyone reading this site is for some reason still not regularly reading that site, Michael Blowhard takes l'affaire King-Hazzard in an interesting new direction, comparing how book people and movie people treat the relationship between art and trash. He does not find the book people's way most productive, to put it mildly. Here are some out-takes:

In the world of books trash and art still don't ride in the same section of the bus; the books mindset--at least the respectable-publishing mindset--is still segregationist. If the movie-world view is all about the vital connections between art and trash, and about how each is the lifeblood of the other, the book person's imagination is taken up with the neverending struggle of art, talent and brains to do triumph over the forces of money, hustle and fame.

Also, of course, the simple fact is that, for many people, books equal school, while movies represent weekends, vacation, time off, romance and sex. And so living the books life becomes for many an attempt to continue living life as though in school. Here 's a Robert Birnbaum interview with the Boston Globe book reviewer Gail Caldwell . It's an excellent interview, and Caldwell's an excellent reviewer who does a first-class job. That said, what kind of person does she strike you as? She seems to me to be a born student, ever eager to sink her arms into her next assignment.

I find the gestalt of the book world oppressive; it gives me a pain and it makes me grumpy. I find the movie-person's view of the arts much more congenial, whatever quarrels I may have with it. And I'm often left wondering: how can books people say of themselves that they love books when they look down their noses at 90% of the books that get published? They disdain not just Stephen King but also self-help books, visual books, and trash biographies; they relish little more than an intense discussion about what's a "real book" and what's not. (My staggeringly original response to this tiresome issue: They're all books, for god's sake.) IMHO, what books people love isn't books; what they love is their own standards, and their fantasies about what literature should be.

I think that crime writers are, on the whole, better fiction writers than lit-fiction writers are. For one thing, they've got more respect for their readers' pleasure; for another, they're less bound up in their egos.

As usual at 2 Blowhards, the comments move the discussion forward vigorously. Speaking as a "book person" who has some difficulty observing this particular generic boundary, I find Michael's comments compelling in the extreme.

Finally, Salon picks Brian Hall's I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company as one of its best books of the year:

Hall tells the epic story of the Lewis and Clark expedition from a variety of perspectives, but it's Lewis and Sacagawea who steal the show. This is a historical novel that's unflinchingly honest but doesn't serve a political agenda. It describes the arc of a grand and thrilling journey, but views the progress through the halting, thwarted, damaged psyches of those who make it, one complicated step at a time. Sacagawea is a stifled philosopher, scarred by losses greater than any of her companions can imagine--if they ever bothered to try. Lewis is valiant, depressed, infatuated with the wilderness and his co-captain and tormented by the impossible demands placed on him by his president and, especially, himself. Hall's portraits of these travelers are never less than utterly convincing and his sense of the strangely fruitful intersection of great deeds and human failings is unforgettable.

Somehow this book slipped under my radar, which is surprising because I thought Hall's tour de force The Saskiad was one of the best American novels published in the last ten years.

For a brilliantly informed and non-academic approach to culture, Terry Teachout is the guy. He's the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal and the music critic for Commentary, but no, he is not what you might expect from someone who regularly contributes to both those magazines. He is tremendously well-informed, and tremendously interested in the world. In the course of a week, his subjects will range from recent architecture to obscure plays and ballets to classic cartoons to how high tech changes Middle America's experience of culture, and then on beyond that. In his range of interests and enjoyments, he keeps goading me (in a good-natured way) to broaden my own horizons.

I'm posting that snippet of praise (by blogger Bruce Baugh) because it sums up with enviable precision what I try to do in this space. It's nice to think that I'm hitting the mark, at least some of the time. Thanks much, Mr. Baugh, whoever and wherever you are.

"'Do you know a stronger?'

"'Yes, interest.'"

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

Maybe Binion's will re-open, but it's hard to be optimistic. In retrospect I see that when they removed the million-dollar cash-horseshoe display, it was the beginning of the end.

UPDATE: The second link above, to a Los Angeles Times story, requires registration. This better news story does not.

George Orwell read Richards' book in 1944, and wrote of the experience:

But still, some of the comments recorded by Dr. Richards are startling. They go to show that many people who would describe themselves as lovers of poetry have no more notion of distinguishing between a good poem and a bad one than a dog has of arithmetic.

Flipping back to the present, Haypenny Magazine is working the Richardsian angle with "Actual Comments Overheard in a Poetry Workshop" by Steve Caldes. (Link via Maud, who's back!)

In the meantime, Our Girl's rocking! So back to work for me. Read her instead.

We assume that our readers look to this section as a critical organ rather than a news source--which means that unlike, say, The New York Times Book Review, we don't have to cover the waterfront. For example, we chose not to review Pat Barker's latest, because although she's an important novelist we admire, her most recent book happens to be very far from her best effort. Its review, we reasoned, would be unfavorable but, since it would also point to her obvious talent, would hardly be an evisceration; in other words, it would almost necessarily be equivocal and boring (that good novelists so often produce less than stellar novels largely accounts for the fact that fiction reviews are so often politely qualified and, well, dull).

So true, although somebody has to review such novels (hello, NYTBR), and the Atlantic's rationalization is of little help to those stuck with the task of establishing this presumed critical consesnsus in an interesting and readable way. Still, they're right that some portion of the high number of dull book reviews out there are dull because they are responsible. In an ideal world, even reviews of middling books would be fascinating, but this task takes a special kind of ingenuity from a special kind of critic--a fairly rare commodity that most of us would probably rather see spent on books that are really occasions, or are objects of genuine controversy--and that, frankly, very few reviewers are paid well enough to be able to muster, even if that special kind of critic is lurking somewhere in them.

Moving along:

One aesthetic penchant does militate in favor of British writers specifically: we prefer wit, wryness, and detachment to zeal. Whereas didactic blather and a pedantic spirit still infect too much American fiction, we find that British authors often write with the kind of insouciant precision we prize (as does an American writer such as Lorrie Moore).

Not a characterization of American fiction that I much recognize, but still, it's good to know where the book review editors stand. Better to own the prejudice than to pretend it doesn't exist. And finally:

We run fewer than the predictable number of reviews of books on politics, public policy, and current affairs. This is partly because we assiduously cover these areas in other parts of the magazine, but mostly because a very high proportion of these titles are just godawful.

Not to put too fine a point on it or anything.

On the other hand, you obviously didn't miss me, since Our Girl's postings (plus a couple of fortuitous big-traffic links) racked up some 1,700 page views, a more-than-nice number for Monday. So I'll try to post something on Tuesday, but if I don't, I'm sure you'll be more than adequately taken care of. Sniffle.

As for what jury duty (did I say arrgh?) will do to my schedule for the rest of the week, well, I don't even want to talk about it. Or think about it. I hope they have the good sense to bounce me as quickly as possible. I have a book to write and a blog to...blog? Does one blog a blog? Or keep a blog? Or tend a blog? Beats me.

We won't talk about the backed-up e-mail, either, but I promise you that I'll read and reply to every single piece, eventually, except for the spam from Nigeria. Really. Truly. Madly. Deeply.

Writers who work at home gradually become sealed off from some of the common experiences that unite people with nine-to-five jobs. One of them is getting up in the morning. I'm out most nights attending performances, after which I generally stay up reading or writing until two a.m., my normal lights-out hour. The only time I get up as early as 6:30 is when I have a plane to catch--more often than not, I arise between nine and ten--and I can't remember the last time I rode a subway at rush hour. I did both those things today, and didn't much care for either, though the C train wasn't especially crowded at 7:45, and I was able to sit down all the way to Canal Street.

It was cold in Manhattan today--15 degrees--and the wind pelted me in the face as I made the longish crosstown walk from my subway stop to Centre Street, trudging past dingy storefronts to the edge of Chinatown, where the faces and signs suddenly changed as if somebody had thumbed a button. My destination, 111 Centre Street, was a nondescript medium-rise distinguished only by the homemade 9/11 memorials inside and out. It looks gray and tired. The elevators are slow.

I reached the jury room precisely at 8:30, the time printed on my summons. It's dingy, too, a windowless rectangular box lit with fluorescent fixtures and full of not-quite-comfortable chairs upholstered in institutional blue. In addition to the main waiting room, there are two smaller rooms off to the side, a TV room and a room full of carrels where people with laptops can work while waiting to be called. As I entered, an orientation video was playing on three TV monitors, the same one I saw the last time I served on a jury, Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer mouthing banalities about the justice system with uplifting faux-Copland music blasting away in the background. I got there just in time to see the funny parts, a reenactment of a medieval trial by ordeal in which the officers of the court throw the defendant into a river to see if he floats, followed by a couple of clips from old episodes of Perry Mason intended to illustrate what most trials aren't like. About half the seats in the waiting room were already full, and most of the occupants appeared to be watching the video, or at least facing the monitors. Their faces were closed, non-committal, and sallow. (Nobody looks good under fluorescent light.) I wondered how many of them knew who Perry Mason was. Up until I boarded the subway this morning, my attitude toward the prospect of serving on a jury had been sour and resigned, pretty much what you'd expect of a busy New Yorker with deadlines to hit. During the ride to Canal Street, my civic-duty juices started to flow. By the time the video was over, they'd dried up again, and stayed that way.

A door opened and out stepped a jury clerk, a middle-aged, red-faced gent with a dis-is-a-bad-ideer accent who told us that we were there to hear criminal cases and walked us through the day's routine. His manner was friendly, no-nonsense, cynical but not disagreeable. He explained that we'd be released if we hadn't been empaneled on a jury after three days, adding that things had been so slow during the first part of the week that the jurors were sent home at the end of the second day. He dealt briskly but mercifully with a half-dozen questions, one belligerent and most of the rest inattentive, after which he was joined by a chipper, cheerful woman who helped him collect our summonses.

I took a closer look at my fellow citizens as they lined up at the desk. One woman caught my eye--she had the long neck and slender frame of a dancer--but the rest were mostly nondescript, except for the usual sprinkling of freaks, morons, malcontents, and grotesques likely to be found in any random sample of New Yorkers. One of the latter stumbled back to his chair, opened the bottom button of his shirt, exposing his pale belly, and started snoring at once. I've never doubted that democracy was a good thing, but like so many good things, it often looks better from a distance.

A few self-important folk pulled out cell phones and started placing calls, ignoring the clerk's explicit instruction not to use them in the waiting room. Everybody else produced newspapers or books and began to read. I checked out the magazine rack, passed over a copy of Newsweek with Lance Ito on the cover, then settled down with Patrick O'Brian's The Wine-Dark Sea. For the next two hours, nothing happened. Nobody in the room struck up a conversation with anybody else. A dozen or so people signed out to go get coffee, returning in due course. The rest of us sat in silence, waiting vainly to be called. At 12:15 we were released for lunch, 45 minutes ahead of schedule, but it was too cold to search the neighborhood for interesting places to eat, and most of us had drifted back into the waiting room well before two o'clock.

The afternoon was as uneventful as the morning. At one point I stood to stretch my legs and look at my fellow jurors, and noticed that I was the only person in the room who was standing up. Everyone else was reading or napping. No one was smiling. I've never seen so many people look so bored. This must be what it feels like to be a stand-up comedian in hell, I thought.

The red-faced clerk reappeared at 3:15. "O.K., the fun's over," he said over the microphone. "Everybody go home. Be back here at ten a.m. sharp." The waiting room emptied out within seconds, and 45 minutes later I was home, wondering whether tomorrow would be as stupefyingly dull as today. Would it be worth carrying my laptop all the way to Centre Street? I checked the weather forecast for Thursday morning--four to six inches of snow--and sighed.

If we were more conscientious (read: anal), we'd draw them to your attention on a regular basis. In fact, OGIC and I know we don't do nearly enough link-driven posts, and we plan to do something about it someday, just like I plan to empty the mailbox once I get done with jury duty. (I swear!) For the moment, though, I simply suggest that you make a point of trolling "Sites to See" every week or so. Chances are you'll find something new, or be reminded of something old that slipped your mind.

I've written in the past about the American Film Theatre and its role in my life. The series has been cropping up lately all over the place–at Lincoln Center a year or two ago, through Kino Video's DVD release of the entire series–but now it's coming to a TV set near you as well.

Saturday night at 9:00 pm EST the cable network Trio will begin to run the AFT series in its entirety through the next few months, starting with Tony Richardson's 1973 film of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance. The film stars Katharine Hepburn, Paul Scofield, Joseph Cotten and Lee Remick.

From Chekhov through Genet, Ionesco and John Osbourne, the series provides a refresher course in a huge swathe of twentieth-century European and American theater. Now look, people: I've urged the series on you for weeks now, and here's the opportunity to watch it for free on your TV set. It doesn't get any easier than this. That's the American Film Theatre on Trio starting Saturday night at 9:00 pm. What more can I possibly say?

I couldn't have put it better.

I'm going to the ballet to see Balanchine's Apollo and Concerto Barocco tonight, but I'll try to at least give you a snapshot of my daily service when I get home in the afternoon, assuming I get home in the afternoon. In the meantime, read some of those other cool blogs in the right-hand column. Not only are TMFTML and Old Hag really dirty this week, but Maud is back!

In the summer of 1979 I drove around the South as a representative for the seed dealer Northrup King. I took orders for the next season and gathered the racks from the previous season. Had a yellow Hertz van and a farmer tan. Slept in small motels, drank a lot of Nehi. At night sometimes I'd find myself sitting outside watching traffic and smoking a cigarette – the paperwork was done, the TV showed only snow, and I didn't feel like reading. If it was a small motel it had a chair outside the door - a detail of American roads I expect is nearly gone by now. You had all the necessary sounds for a night in nowhere: the buzzing sign, crickets, carwheels whining on the asphalt. If you were lucky you got train whistle. Nothing quite makes you feel so gawd-awful alone as a train whistle, but you also know that if you weren't alone you wouldn't hear it the same way. When you're alone it goes right down to the bone.

(1) her computer is belching smoke, preventing her from posting, but

(2) she's got some good stuff in the works, and

(3) you'll see it as soon as the glue dries.

Also:

(4) She promises to answer her e-mail soon.

No doubt OGIC will make good on her promise--she's that kind of girl. As for me, well, I'm not any kind of girl.

Perverse as it will seem to you, I have always liked jury duty, as a great escape. My last stint began on 9/11, and we were evacuated just in time for me to see the second tower collapse.

I also found the weather forecast for Thursday, printed in capital letters and sounding very much like a message in a fortune cookie: TRAVEL IS STRONGLY DISCOURAGED THIS MORNING. Opening the blinds, I saw five inches of freshly fallen snow. I bundled up, headed downstairs, and started to make my way from the Upper West Side to the courthouse at 111 Centre Street. It was nine a.m., an hour before I was scheduled to report for my second day of jury duty.

No subway line goes directly from my neighborhood to Centre Street, and I didn't care to walk halfway across town from the Canal Street station to the courthouse in eight-degree weather, so I trudged four blocks north to the nearest bus stop, figuring to take a crosstown bus through Central Park to the Lexington Avenue subway line, board a southbound express train, and change for the local at Fourteenth Street, emerging just two blocks from the courthouse. (If you live anywhere but New York, that itinerary will give you a taste of the travel-related decisions we carless Manhattanites make every day.) On paper, it was a brilliant plan, but it started to break down almost immediately under the pressure of real life, as such plans are wont to do on snowy winter mornings.

The trouble began at the bus stop, where I found a jam-packed crosstown bus that turned away a dozen or so shivering passengers and drove off. It was followed by two empty out-of-service buses, followed in turn by a bus into which the rest of us crammed ourselves. As anyone who has boarded a New York bus at rush hour will know, I use the word "crammed" literally: the last few people who forced themselves through the open door shoved me three-quarters of the way into the lap of a well-dressed woman. The going was slow and got slower, and by the time I reached Lexington Avenue, a half-hour had crawled by, most of which I spent staring at a "Poetry in Motion" placard on which was printed the last stanza of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," surely an odd choice for the purpose of diverting bored commuters. I amused myself by imagining ignorant armies clashing by night on the M86 crosstown bus, though it struck me that a line or two from Joseph Conrad might have been even better suited to the occasion. I couldn't decide whether to opt for "The horror! The horror!" or "Exterminate all the brutes!"

I got off the bus and inched my way down the snow-encrusted stairs to the subway. As I approached the turnstile, I ran into a mob of irate passengers who told me through clenched teeth that the downtown express trains weren't running. I barely caught the next local, which pulled into my station a half-hour later. From there I slithered atop the icy sidewalks to 111 Centre Street, where I lined up to file through the security checkpoint, then waited 10 minutes for an elevator. I finally reached the jury room at 10:20, just as the clerk started calling the roll.

Much to my surprise, the atmosphere in the waiting room was light--almost festive--and several of the people around me were actually chatting. A pleasant–looking woman asked me about the paperback I had pulled out of my shoulder bag, Bernard Taper's biography of George Balanchine, and assured me in return that her book, The Da Vinci Code, was excellent. I scanned the room to see what others were reading, and though most of the books on display were Ken Follett-type thrillers, a few of my fellow citizens were grappling with more ambitious fare. The woman on my right was reading The Piano Tuner, and the man just behind me had his nose in the International Herald Tribune. In the front row, a dignified-looking matron with hair done up in neat cornrows knitted away at an orange afghan, waiting patiently for the clerk's summons.

It never came. For the second day in a row, no judge anywhere in the courthouse called for a fresh panel of jurors. We were sent to lunch 45 minutes ahead of schedule, and I ran for the elevators and slid across the street to a very good Vietnamese restaurant, where I lunched with a friend who works at WNYC, whose studios are a few blocks south of the courthouse. Not long after my return, the waiting-room chatter sputtered, fizzled, and died out, replaced by a thick, resentful silence. I opened up The Wall Street Journal and buried myself in a review of a Hans Hofmann retrospective at the Naples Museum of Art, trying without success to imagine a more complete inversion of my immediate situation than strolling through a Florida museum, looking at brightly colored canvases by one of my favorite painters.

Somehow, another hour passed. Then, without warning, the cheerfully cynical red-faced man who had given us our orientation lecture the previous morning popped out of the clerks' office and announced that we could all pick up our certificates of jury service, after which we would be exempt from further service for four years. I expected at least a few cheers, but nobody made a sound. Instead, we made our way one by one to the desk, picked up our certificates, and left.

I treated myself to a cab--I'd already spent plenty of time on buses and subways--and as the driver pulled onto the West Side Highway, I realized, much to my surprise, that I felt strangely disappointed. It happens that I've never actually served on a jury. (I was empaneled in a civil case a few years ago, but the plaintiffs settled as soon as the attorneys finished their opening statements.) In spite of my exasperation at having made the trek to Centre Street in sub-freezing temperatures, I must have been looking forward, consciously or not, to the prospect of finally sitting in judgment on a defendant. But my short-lived pique was gone by the time the cab pulled up to my building, and a half-minute later I was back in my nice warm apartment, my civic duty done until 2008. The great escape was over.

Where there is sound, there is hope.

P.S. The Elgar was way cool. I believe I'll write a piece about him for Commentary.

My friend was appalled. I was embarrassed.

Musical standards at New York City Ballet have rarely been much better than mediocre at any time since I started looking at the company 17 years ago. A few years ago the orchestra actually dared to go on strike, in the process inspiring a joke that circulated widely among New York musicians and dancegoers: "The worst orchestra in town just went on strike. What do they want? Fewer rehearsals." (That was actually pretty close to the truth.) Fortunately, the strike failed, in the process giving NYCB sufficient leverage to pry a more favorable contract out of the orchestra. The company then hired Andrea Quinn, an excellent conductor, as its new music director, and within months the musical side of its performances had improved noticeably.

I haven't been looking at NYCB as regularly as usual for the past couple of years (I was preoccupied with finishing and promoting my Mencken biography), but now that I'm writing a brief life of Balanchine, I've been making a point of going more often. Last week and this, I noticed that the orchestra had fallen back into its old habits--not consistently, but often enough to be alarming.

Most dance critics don't have musical training. A few, in fact, are downright unmusical--I'll name no names, but New York balletomanes know who they are--while others know when an orchestra sounds bad but are understandably reluctant to say so in print because of their lack of musical knowledge. Hence the work of the New York City Ballet Orchestra and its conducting staff (whose role in the current crisis should not be overlooked) almost always goes unmentioned in reviews. Like George Balanchine, I'm a trained musician, so I considered it my personal responsibility to speak out about NYCB's low orchestral standards when I was covering the company for the New York Daily News. I also talked about the problem with other critics, and encouraged them to do likewise, with some success.

Again, I'm not saying that the orchestra always plays badly. It sounded pretty good last week in Prokofiev's score for The Prodigal Son. On the other hand, the performance of Mendelssohn's Scotch Symphony on the same program fell well below any acceptable standard of musical quality, and what I heard last night was even worse. It grieves me that a company whose founder knew music from the inside out should be forcing its audiences to listen to such unprofessional performances. It also makes me angry.

New York City Ballet is celebrating the centennial of George Balanchine's birth this year. I think that's a highly appropriate occasion for his company to clean its musical house.

The funniest new play to hit New York in months... has taken up residence in the least likely of venues: Oren Safdie's "Private Jokes, Public Places," a comedy about architecture now being performed downtown at (wait for it) the Theater at the Center for Architecture. Implausible as it may sound, Mr. Safdie has done the impossible: He's written an unpretentiously witty play of ideas about some of the most pretentious ideas known to man.

Since 9/11, Americans have been exposed to more up-to-the-second designs for high-profile buildings--most of them bad, some downright hideous--than at any other time in recent memory. What kind of thinking, if any, goes into these white megaelephants? Mr. Safdie, a student of architecture at Columbia University turned struggling playwright (and, not coincidentally, the son of celebrity architect Moshe Safdie), has drawn on personal experience to answer that question....

As for Aunt Dan and Lemon, well, here's the lead:

The word "transgressive" was not yet chic when Wallace Shawn's "Aunt Dan and Lemon" was first produced in 1985, but it could have been coined to describe this vomitous piece of blather, which has been revived by the New Group in a production directed by Scott Elliott and running through Jan. 31 at the Harold Clurman Theater.

Like most works of art (I use the term loosely) that are praised as transgressive by easily impressed critics, "Aunt Dan and Lemon" is actually anything but. To be sure, Mr. Shawn dabbles in theatrical shock tactics, but stripped of its gratuitous nudity and violence, his play is a one-sided piece of sucker bait that will offend only those thin-skinned right-wingers who take unkindly to being portrayed as capital-F fascists by a smug left-winger....

No link, so to read the whole thing (including brief mentions of The Beard of Avon and Anna Bella Eema), pick up a copy of this morning's Journal, turn to the "Weekend Journal" section and keep flipping pages until you find me. I'm there, together with other good things.

Maybe that stuffy lady from the Washington Post was on to something....

LISTENING TO GEORGE JONES, "SHE THINKS I STILL CARE." Somebody make Chan Marshall cover this.

I'd buy it. I must have played that song three times a night for two years back when I was in a country band, and I still love it. (For the original recording, go here.)

If Scrabble can bring out the beast in the most domesticated, pleasure-seeking players, what about those who play for fame and cold cash? They do exist, you know. If you don't, my friends Eric Chaikin and Julian Petrillo want (with a little help from a smart film distributor or cable channel) to show you. I suspect the title of their documentary about the world of knock-out, drag-down Scrabble--Word Wars--will seem intuitively right to anyone who has played much so-called friendly Scrabble at all. The film reaches its first public audience this weekend. Out of 540 films submitted, Word Wars was one of 16 selected to compete in the documentary category at the Sundance Film Festival, which kicked off yesterday.

I saw an early trailer for Word Wars in 2002, and it looked to me like a happy marriage of the respective virtues of Spellbound and Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control--two movies I adored. If you've read Stefan Fatsis's excellent book Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players, you'll understand why I bring up Errol Morris's film. As characters, the perennial championship contenders in Scrabble fall in the general ballpark of those charming yet ever-so-slightly unnerving fellows in Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, who display such feverish involvement in their curious lines of work, and somewhat less interest in other matters.

Word Freak falls into that Subculture-Exposed genre that produces so many middling, midlist, paint-by-numbers books (many of which, I hasten to add, are very good reads). But it rises to the top of its category by virtue of Fatsis's good writing, and two pieces of luck. First, Fatsis turned out to have enough talent for the game to partly break out of his journalist role and compete very seriously. Second, the major players were, to a man, great characters: fascinating meetings of utter brilliance (in the game) and willful social marginality (outside of it). The more you read, the less this seems accidental. Dominating this game takes, aside from labor, a pretty beautiful mind.

Getting back to Word Wars, the documentary originated with Eric, a compulsive and talented anagrammer (throw him "sharecrop" and you get a fast "horsecrap" back) whose path reversed the one Fatsis had followed. Eric first entered this demimonde years ago as a competitor, wandered away from it for a time, and came back later with a camera. (Eric is a minor character in Fatsis's book, where he reveals his favorite anagram, "eleven + two" = "twelve + one." Believe it.)

"I was a wordplay lover in college," Eric says, "but I realized that if you want to be a champion, you have to devote your life to memorizing words. That made me give up, but as I got to know the players I realized I wanted to capture the whole milieu on film. I was around when Stefan was researching Word Freak and I thought, someone should have a camera here."

When Eric decided that the world's best Scrabble players could and should be a cinematic subject, he called Julian, his college pal and a twelve-year veteran of the film industry. Julian's résumé includes work as Assistant Director on Boiler Room, Real Women Have Curves, and Three Seasons. Himself a word games devotee, Julian didn't have to think hard before he signed on.

Even so, the member of the team with almost all of the hands-on filmmaking experience had his doubts. "I read Word Freak as a primer, then met the principals when we started filming," Julian recalls. "My first impressions were that this was a colorful world that would lead to a good character study. At the beginning the characters were all I saw that was going to make the film interesting. As far as the plot, the game itself, I played the skeptic at first. But as we watched the competition unfold, I gradually realized that, if presented in a certain way, it could be more interesting than watching paint dry."

A first challenge was deciding which of the Scrabble circuit's hundred-odd "hardcore regulars" to track on their way to the 2002 National Championship in San Diego, which the filmmakers envisioned as the climactic event of the movie. This turned out to be a process of elimination employing various criteria and a little bit of faith. "It was kind of a horse race," says Eric. "We wanted people who were cinematically interesting. We needed a set of people who would interact with each other a lot, which ruled out anyone from the lower divisions. We definitely wanted people who had a chance to win. And the four people we followed, in fact, turned out to be some of the main characters in Stefan's book."

If you've read Word Freak, you know that the guys (and they are, at the highest level, almost all guys) who excel at this game can be sad or strange figures, or both. So were the kids in Spellbound, some of whom reminded me of whole years of my adolescence that I would have been happy to leave forgotten. But the Spellbound kids (like me) were works in progress, and cute--something not necessarily true of the Scrabble crowd. "Some characters were happy to be on camera," Eric says, "but others could be a little prickly. Theirs are not easeful, comfortable lives, so sometimes things got a little touchy. One player, who did not end up in the movie, we visited in a ward for the criminally insane."

So (moving along), what about Spellbound? I saw the spelling bee sleeper a couple of times last year, and found it pretty extraordinary--especially the vivid, efficient, and above all empathetic sketches of the kids' home lives, which brought forth some unlikely sentimental favorites to follow, fingers crossed, through the bee. Did Eric and Julian think Spellbound's dark-horse success last summer would help their project, or would it crowd them out of the presumably modest-sized niche for word-game documentaries?

Here, on this burning question, endeth this installment of our story. Check in Monday for the second half, which will answer this question and more: What are the prospects for getting more documentaries into general release? Where do tournament Scrabble players cut their teeth? (I'll give you a hint, it ain't your living room with a cocktail.) Short of catching the next plane to Utah, what are the prospects for all of us getting to see Word Wars?

Monday.

Hans Keller, "The Sentimental Violin"

(2) If you have an arts blog, tell your readers.

Enough said?

In fact, I've never been much of a game player of any kind, except for a year or two in high school when I survived a short-lived obsession with chess. Video games don't even interest me: I've never owned one, or run one on any of my computers. On the other hand, I'm a near-perfect speller and always have been, and so I watched Spellbound with rapt attention, having competed in the National Spelling Bee as a boy. I actually got as far as the Missouri semi-finals, where I misspelled "perspicacious" (a word of which I'd never previously heard, and which I've since made a point of never using in print), thereby losing to a young lady named, if memory serves, Sally Shoemaker. I wonder what happened to her.

It's handy to spell well, especially if you're an editor, but I doubt it's evidence of anything more than an oddly turned chromosome. It certainly doesn't prove that you're smart or creative. When I first examined H.L. Mencken's personal library in preparation for writing The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, I looked at the presentation copy of This Side of Paradise inscribed to him by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and my proofreader's eye immediately noticed a misspelled word in the inscription. The resulting feeling of superiority lasted for about a second and a half. Which would you prefer: to be able to spell perfectly, or to be able to write like F. Scott Fitzgerald?

Alas, my spelling abilities mark the outer limit of my gifts in the area of pure wordplay, which doubtless says something about the limitations of my pure brainpower. Not only am I no good at Scrabble, but I've never been able to learn a second language, and I'm only fair at math. My heart sinks whenever I run across math whizzes or natural polyglots, for their very existence is an affront to my pride: they do things I can't even dream of doing, simply by virtue of superior equipment.

Life is unfair, and I know I have gifts that others envy. I had a friend in high school who was completely tone-deaf--he couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, as the saying goes--and who was desperately jealous of my musical talent. I wouldn't trade my musicality for anything (though I'd hate to have to choose between going deaf and going blind). But what would I give to be able to speak and read French fluently? A year off my life? The little finger of my right hand? Probably neither, but certainly something of value, were the Devil to drop by one evening and suggest a little deal. I might, for instance, agree never to read The Great Gatsby again in return for the ability to read Proust in the original. Maybe.

One thing's sure, though: I wouldn't give up anything at all in order to be able to play competition-level Scrabble. Somewhere in Rex Stout's Death of a Dude, Nero Wolfe says that he prefers using words to playing with them. Me, too--but don't ask me to swear that my concurrence isn't faintly tinged with envy. I'm too honest for that.

In 1995, the percentage of women 18 or older who went to the movies at least once a month peaked at 27 percent, according to the National Association of Theater Owners. But in the late 1990's, that percentage declined as Hollywood delivered a string of female-oriented box-office disasters with predictable plots. Studios then began making more action films for teenage boys who see them in groups over and over.

Teenagers remain the largest segment of the audience, primarily because they are repeat customers. But in the past 15 years, the older set has gained ground. Tickets bought by men and women older than 40 grew to 32 percent of overall ticket purchases in 2002, from 20 percent in 1987, according to the National Association of Theater Owners.

By contrast, the percentage of tickets purchased by filmgoers from 12 to 39 years old dropped from 80 percent in 1987 to 67 percent in 2002. Much of that decline, studio executives say, is a result of new distractions, like video games and the Internet.

So could it be that I was wrong to predict, as I did in this space last month, that "the adventurous indie flicks of the not-so-distant future will find their audiences not in theatrical release, but via such new-media distribution routes as direct-to-DVD and on-demand digital cable"? Possibly. Nevertheless, I still think it more likely that we're headed for a two-track system of distribution: dumb movies will be released in theaters, while smart movies will be marketed like books. The only difference is that the preferences of older boomers, who are presumably less open to new media, might well be interacting with the more media-savvy preferences of teenagers and twentysomethings to create a temporary demographic skew. We'll see.

All of which reminds me to plug a new blog I find morbidly fascinating, Boomer Deathwatch (motto: "Because one day, they'll all be dead"), which links to news stories and commentaries about boomer/Gen-X intergenerational strife. Very smart, very funny, very unnerving, at least for those of us born prior to 1960. Yikes!

I've worried, recently, about the front of the book; now I'm worried about the features. The New Yorker under David Remnick is certainly very good at timeliness, and covers foreign affairs magnificently. Newsier subjects in general are excellently done. But the kind of thing the New Yorker is famous for – long articles about people and subjects you didn't know you might ever be interested in – have been very weak for a long while. No one cares about John McPhee's fish, and, as TMFTML so eloquently put it, "enough with the f------ bags already" when it comes to picaresque tales of picking up litter.

Two things:

(1) No, we still don't print That Word here at "About Last Night," though we strongly encourage Mr. TMFTML and Old Hag to continue doing so. (Go ahead, call us a couple of prigs. We double-dog dare you.)

(2) I think Felix is right, but I also know that people have been complaining that The New Yorker isn't what it used to be ever since, oh, 1942 (and no, I didn't pick that number out of a hat). Question: when did the magazine last publish an unusually long piece of reportage that set Absolutely Everybody to talking? I mean something that kicked up at least as much dust as, say, Hiroshima or In Cold Blood. How long has it been? Just wondering.

Speaking of magazines, I can't remember the last time a weekly newsmagazine published an art-related story that was worth reading, but Newsweek just hit the jackpot with an excellent where-are-they-now feature about the makers of The Blair Witch Project. The film, formerly the biggest-grossing indie flick of all time--it has since been surpassed by My Big Fat Greek Wedding--brought in $248.3 million worldwide. The five producing partners of Blair Witch netted $5 million each, the actors $1 million. To you, that's serious money, but in Hollywood, it's chump change. Is that depressing, or what? (Read the whole thing here, if you dare.)

On the other hand, I'm leaving in an hour to go see New York City Ballet dance Balanchine's Midsummer Night's Dream, after which I expect to be sufficiently inspired to come home and write that chapter...unless, of course, I decide instead to write my piece for The Wall Street Journal on Amtrak sleepers. (Benchley's Law: Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.)

Either way, if I blog again today, don't read it. That'll teach me a lesson.

"'He's identified,' said the speaker, 'with the great cause of cheering us all up.'"

Arnold Bennett, The Card

I do have a few small things to add:

No tour of Baltimore is complete without driving past something that used to be there.

For the context of this impeccably quotable remark (plus a nifty photo), go here.

"We heard about Spellbound when we had just finished shooting, in August 2002," says Eric. "First I worried that it would steal our thunder, but soon I realized that the success of the movie could help Word Wars. The issue was whether we would be too close to it, but when I saw it I knew we weren't. Spellbound is about kids. The exploding child syndrome is a very visually compelling act, with the children grimacing and disappearing and so forth." Julian concurs: "Spellbound has a different structure, starting out as a character study and then zeroing in on competition. We wanted to see the characters interact with each other, and as a result our subject matter is more layered and dense, and harder to explain. But it was a fine thing that a word-oriented documentary blazed the trail and proved that it could be done successfully."

One thing Spellbound had going for it was the wide variety of settings in its first movement, from a Texas cowtown to inner-city D.C (it's no picnic not using "hardscrabble" here, but I'm exercising restraint). How bound was Word Wars to the small interior spaces where the game is played? "Intruding with the camera on so many high-strung personalities in such little spaces--hotel rooms and an apartment in Alphabet City, for example--was a particular challenge," Eric concedes. But there are some Scrabble settings that might surprise you, too.

Washington Square Park is the home base for street Scrabble in New York City. "Gutsy, gritty Scrabble gets played everyday in Washington Square," says Eric. "A b-story in the film is about a main character coming back to the Park. I was playing in the Park for a while, and that's where I met some of the most interesting people who inspired me to make a movie. People are familiar with the chess players on the south side of the park, but a smaller, equally ragtag group plays Scrabble on the northwest side, with beaten-up, battered old dictionaries. They know their words as well as the tournament people."

Julian adds, "The park was a vivid setting, visually and aurally, with a protest against the war going on in the background and scraggly codgers playing each other for a dollar a game, penny a point, in the foreground." Two of the Park regulars, who don't appear in the final cut, are "African-American intellectuals from the 1970s who look like they've been wandering around the streets of New York ever since." One of them, friendly with everyone in the neighborhood, once studied comparative linguistics at MIT and knows 13 languages. He's given to tossing off inscrutable pronouncements like "Cornel West took the wrong fork," or "Cornel West is highly medicated" (hmm, pattern?). He has a reputation as the only notable defensive player--he has no offensive game, so his strategy is to jam up the board. He used to be a good player, Eric says, until he got into this defensive, paranoid mode. "That defines his stance toward the world," says Julian, "not just Scrabble."

I asked Eric and Julian about influences, and Errol Morris's name came up early and often. "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control takes its own path, leaving a lot up to the viewer," Eric said. Julian chimed in, "Morris takes subjects that aren't intrinsically visual, and finds visual interest in them." Hoop Dreams and Best in Show were also mentioned. I raised my eyebrows at the latter, which is of course fiction, a mockumentary (n.b., since I first drafted this, Word Wars itself has been described by one lucky soul who has actually seen it as--coming full circle--a nonfictional mockumentary). "We're not out to mock anyone," Eric clarifies, "but we did count on everyone to have a healthy sense of humor about themselves. The obsessiveness with which these guys digest the dictionary is absurd. I spend my share of time looking through the dictionary too, and I try to channel it productively. But it's absurd. There's an absurd, funny, intense camaraderie that I wanted to capture."

So will those of us not imminently jetting off to Utah get to see it? I didn't know it Friday, but the answer seems to be yes. Word Wars distributor Seventh Art Releasing has struck a deal with the Discovery Times channel. As far as I know, there's no air date yet; when there is, you'll hear it here. Seventh Art, meanwhile, is also still looking for a general theatrical distributor. The film's warm reception at Sundance won't hurt. Eric had set this festival as a specific goal for the film, but he admits that the prizes there tend to go to issue-oriented documentaries (this year, though, much attention seems to have gone to a surfing film that became the first documentary to open the festival). "But people may be looking for the next slice-of-life film this year, the next Spellbound." It doesn't hurt their cause that Julian brought to the project his experience of having worked on three films that have won the Sundance Audience Award in the past.

Both Eric and Julian are optimistic about the prospects for more documentaries getting commercially released following a year that saw the mainstream success of not only Spellbound but also Capturing the Friedmans. They have a standard "documentary diatribe," but there have been so many good signs lately that the version I hear is pretty watered down with optimism. "It's still a hard market to break into, financially speaking. Michael Moore's success is unique. This was starting to change when we were filming; every year it seems there's another documentary that breaks into the ranks of general-release films. People's perceptions are changing. Everyone says, ‘I love documentaries.'"

Once again, thanks so much for writing to "About Last Night." Your letters are a significant part of what makes blogging worthwhile. OGIC and I have the smartest readers imaginable, and we love hearing from you, even if it does occasionally take a month for us to reply.

So...if you've been holding back, let the e-mail recommence. I'm ready to rock again!

I'm not sure how much we'll be blogging in the course of the next 24 hours (Our Girl and I are both wrestling with prose-for-money deadlines), but I put up a lot of fresh stuff on Saturday and Sunday that you may not have seen, and I'll also try to post something worth reading between now and the end of the day. In the meantime, thanks for your forbearance.

Donald E. Westlake, Drowned Hopes

Once Cinetrix catches a whiff of her smelling salts, she'll be pleased to hear the latest DVD release info, courtesy of DVD Journal. Out today, as regular readers of this blog already know, is The Rules of the Game, the greatest movie ever made, on DVD at last. I'll be writing about it as soon as my copy arrives.

In the nonce, here's a snippet of news guaranteed to give Our Girl fits de joie:

Finally, the cult favorite TV series Freaks and Geeks is about to go digital, thanks to new DVD vendor Shout! Factory and DreamWorks Television. The six-disc set of the first (and only) season will include all 18 episodes, including three that never aired, and we are assured that some complicated music-licensing issues have been smoothed out (congrats to fans, by the way, who compiled nearly 40,000 online signatures to make this release a reality). Expect a "director's cut" of the pilot episode, deleted scenes, outtakes, and -- get this -- 28 commentary tracks from practically everybody ever associated with the series. Geek out on April 6.

As it happens, I wrote about Freaks and Geeks for the New York Times a few years ago. Here's the piece.

* * *

Old sitcoms never die--they just move to cable, where they surface at odd intervals forevermore. The nice thing about this two-tiered system of programming is that it occasionally allows those of us who don't live on the cutting edge of popular culture to catch up with how the hipper half lives. So I paid attention when my friend Laura, a graduate student who specializes in Victorian literature but also keeps close tabs on the doings of people like P.J. Harvey and Conan O'Brian, called to tell me that the Fox Family Channel was rerunning two episodes of "Freaks and Geeks" back to back every Tuesday night at eight and nine, and that I absolutely had to tune in.

"Freaks and Geeks" is an hour-long comedy about life among the less popular students of a Michigan high school circa 1980. Created by Paul Feig and produced by Judd Apatow, it debuted on NBC in the fall of 1999. The critics loved it, the public ignored it, and the show was scuttled midway through its first season, with three episodes still waiting to be broadcast (they have since aired on Fox, and Feig and Apatow have gone on to create "Undeclared," a new college comedy scheduled to debut on the main Fox network this fall). I never saw it, but Laura assured me that not only was it a great show, it was also eerily true to life. "That was exactly what it was like for me back then," she said.

I tuned in, fell in love, told all my other friends how good it was, and promptly discovered that just about everyone I know who was going to high school in 1980 loved "Freaks and Geeks," too, and that their lives had also been exactly like that. Fortunately, you don't have to be under 40 to appreciate the show's sharp-eyed social humor. Most of the character types will be perfectly recognizable to viewers who, like me, attended high school in the ‘70s. I even had a social-studies teacher who, just like Mr. Rosso, the show's long-haired, herpes-infected guidance counselor, discreetly introduced his students to the Grateful Dead.

At the center of "Freaks and Geeks" is Lindsay Weir, an overachieving 16-year-old (played exquisitely well by Linda Cardellini) who one day crashes into the wall of adolescent alienation, dons her father's old Army jacket, and takes up with Daniel, Kim, Nick, and Ken, a quartet of slightly older underachievers who have banded together to smoke dope and sneer at the popular kids of McKinley High School. Once we get to know the freaks better, we realize that the rejection is mutual: Daniel, their leader, is a working-class troublemaker who gets bad grades not because he doesn't care but because he isn't quite bright enough to do better. Were he a little less daring and a little less cute, he might even find himself consigned to the same circle of high-school hell as Lindsay's younger brother Sam and his geeky friends Neal and Bill, who play "Dungeons and Dragons" and always get picked last in gym class.

The most believable thing about this utterly believable show is that virtually every episode is made to pivot on an experience intrinsic to teenage life: embarrassment. Things rarely go right for Lindsay, Sam, and their friends, at least not for long, and the things that go wrong are often as pathetic as they are amusing. Nick, a hamfisted garage-band drummer who idolizes Led Zeppelin's John Bonham, auditions for a local rock group and proves to be not nearly good enough to pass muster; Neal longs to be a stand-up comedian, but can't make anyone laugh; Bill's mother starts dating the gym teacher who torments him daily. Moreover, the story lines on "Freaks and Geeks" are rarely wrapped up in neat, reassuring packages, and even when everybody manages to get through an episode with a modicum of pride intact, it's a safe bet that further embarrassment is on the way....

"Freaks and Geeks" is agonizingly true to life, far more so than those overcooked programs known in the industry as "reality TV." (Humankind cannot bear very much real reality.) I have no doubt that this is why it failed in its original network run. Most Americans don't watch TV to see life as it is. They get enough of that at home. Nowadays, the most popular shows are about pretty people who have lots of great sex. For these fortunate folk, failure is that which immediately precedes success, a temporary condition existing solely to "humanize" them, thus permitting the rest of us poor slobs to identify more easily with their on-screen adventures. That's why Hollywood stars get paid the big bucks: we can't look like them, but they can act like us.

Ours is a soft-mouthed culture, for which reason we also don't much care for European-style farce, the cruel comedy that arises from the systematic and relentless humiliation of ordinary people. "Fawlty Towers," John Cleese's classic sitcom about the henpecked owner of a rundown English hotel, could never have been shown on American network TV because Basil Fawlty never, ever comes out on top: no matter how outrageously he behaves, his wife and guests invariably contrive to reduce him to cringing servility. (The phrase most frequently uttered by Basil is "Thank you so very much.") The screwball comedies of the ‘30s were farce-like, but contrary to popular belief, they weren't all that commercially successful, nor was the genre long-lived. For Americans, discomfort must have its limits, and today's "gross-out" movies are about as close as our pop culture comes to pure, unadulterated farce, which isn't very close at all. Take away the I-can't-believe-they-did-that slapstick of "There's Something About Mary" and what you're left with is yet another squashy-centered romantic comedy: the obstacle course through which the hapless hero must travel may be longer and more degrading, but Cameron Diaz still waits with open arms at the end.

McKinley High, by contrast, is a place where some problems don't get solved, some parents don't care enough, and some kids are unattractive, unhappy, and likely to remain so. To be sure, Lindsay will probably do all right as an adult--she is, after all, both smart and pretty, in a Janeane Garofalo-ish sort of way--but Daniel and the rest of the freaks probably won't. They know it, and so do we. It is thus wholly admirable, as well as wholly unexpected, that Fox Family Channel, of all places, should be giving a second chance to "Freaks and Geeks," a comedy from which teenagers can learn a valuable lesson about real life: it isn't always funny.

* * *

P.S. My birthday is February 6. Belated gifts are acceptable, though.

Otto Penzler, quoted in today's Wall Street Journal (on the mild-mannered subgenre of murder mysteries known as "cozies")

I want a DVD compilation of 100 opening credits for forgotten 1960s movies. Is that too much to ask? The other night I found something I'd Tivo'd: "After the Fox," a caper comedy with Peter Sellers. The credits were just what you'd expect: Maurice Bender animation, a crafty animal to make you hope this would be as good as the Pink Panther, the pop-stars of the moment (the Hollies) singing a Burt Bacharach song with a hook and instrumentation you could only find in the 60s. I couldn't get the hook out of my mind all day. And it's played on a harpsichord. Someone should do a study of the role the harpsichord played in the 60s – it stood for Sophisticated European Intrigue, Rosemary's Baby-style evil, light physical humor. Your all-purpose instrument. Perhaps in 200 years there will be a sudden & brief spasm of love for the Mellotron, or the Tonette.

I have no interest in seeing the movie, but I love the title sequence. I TiVo lots of 60s movies just for the titles. Nowadays we see the 60s through the prism of the counterculture, and think that helps us understand the era best – well, ahem, the important syllables in "counterculture" are "counter." You can't understand the 60s without spending an equal amount of time in the stuff the counterculture countered. On any given weekend moviegoing Americans went not to a Dead concert but to "After the Fox" or some such trifle. Having the Hollies sing the title tune might have been as close as they got to the scary world of ROCK, with its long hair and folk singers and dope smoking and free love, etc.

Two words: Saul Bass.

Actually, one of the things about Sixties and Seventies films that has dated most completely, at least for me, is the use of jazz in the underscoring--or, rather, the use of Hollywood-style big-band pseudo-jazz, sometimes lightly dusted with rock. It's funny how that should make me wince in an oh-God-how-totally-unhip way, seeing as how I'm a recovering jazz musician myself. Why is it that the use of so rich and evocative a musical idiom should root a film in its time and place to the point of outright paralysis, whereas the best symphonic scores of the Thirties and Forties float free of their periods? I can't explain it, but think about what I just said the next time you see an ur-Sixties film like, say, The Hustler, or almost anything scored by Lalo Schifrin. No matter how involving the film itself may be, it invariably ends up sounding like a TV show.

I started by buying cheap books, like those Wordsworth editions, when I was off on holiday. To tear the pages out as I read them reduced my baggage burden. After all, these books cost £1 - less than a Sunday paper. And you wouldn't take even The Sunday Telegraph all round the Alpujarras and bring it back neatly folded to Luton a fortnight later. Then I weighed a Wordsworth Woman in White against an old World's Classic. The World's Classic won by ounces. It did even better without its cover. And it only cost £2....

Most books are hard to fit in a pocket without making you look like a trainee drug smuggler. But you can easily tear out 64 or even 128 pages and bend them into a back pocket. It makes the hands gloriously free on a walk.

Never in a million years could I do such a thing. Just to read about it makes my skin prickle. I can't even underline or highlight passages in the books I own--even though I approve in theory of underlining, and I love reading other people's marginalia in used books and library copies. Yet I'm not a book collector, nor have I ever been attached to the Book as Object (as readers of this posting will recall).

What, then, stops me from ripping up the paperbacks I own, much less writing in them? In what deeply buried layer of my psyche is this inhibition rooted? And why, given all this, am I a compulsive dogearer? (Sad but true.) Amusing speculations will be published in this space, so long as they stop short of outright obscenity.

His reply:

Now there is a subject worthy of a post. Please do. I guess that periodicals are devoted to what is "new."

So thank god for the blogosphere where someone can "review" a book which was published ten years ago.

Well said, and I do have a feeling that blogs are becoming--slowly but, I hope, surely--an increasingly significant force driving the sale of midlist and backlist books. On the other hand, it's worth remembering that this phenomenon is made possible by two other phenomena. The first is linkage. The reason why people buy books after reading about them on blogs is because they can--i.e., all they have to do is click on the link. And the reason why they can is because of the emergence of on-line bookstores.

Could it be that the interaction of book-oriented blogs and on-line bookstores is starting to have an unforeseen effect on literary criticism? Might the dynamics of what we now think of as "book reviewing" be in the process of evolving away from the books-as-news paradigm that drives the book-review sections of most magazines and newspapers? Ideally, a blog can make an old book news. So can a magazine or newspaper, but do they? Not often. In any case, a blog, at least in theory, is the ideal medium for promoting a book, be it old or new, precisely because linkage facilitates true impulse buying.

Have I mentioned recently, by the way, that you can place an advance order for A Terry Teachout Reader, out in May from Yale University Press, by clicking here? Yes, I just plugged myself--and why not? What's a blog for? I couldn't be happier that Yale is publishing my book, but I don't have any illusions about their ability to promote it. And if by some weird caprice of fate the Teachout Reader had instead been signed by a trade publisher, I wouldn't have any illusions about their willingness to promote it. It's a collection of essays, and (repeat after me) Essay Collections Don't Sell. And while I certainly can't predict the future of book publishing, I'll fall down dead if the total amount of space devoted to book reviews in American magazines and newspapers increases in 2004.

Bottom line: when it comes to serious books, the action is here, not there. So let's make the most of it.

UPDATE: Andy Kessler has a very interesting and relevant piece in this morning's Wall Street Journal about how he self-published a book:

I put together dozens of bound galleys and sent them to reviewers, the usual places--Publishers Weekly, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. I sat back and waited for the glowing reviews to roll in, but was met with the sounds of silence. I checked through back channels and, sure enough, I got stiffed. They just don't review self-published books. I was on my own.

So like Bill Clinton in his '92 campaign, I went around the traditional gatekeepers. I sent out copies to friends and old contacts at newspapers, business magazines and TV, like CNBC. I didn't get any classic book reviews, but probably something better--mentions in articles, short little "hey, I liked this new book" mentions.

I also hit the Web. Nice pieces showed up in a bunch of daily e-mails sent to financial types. Author Michael Lewis said some nice things in a Bloomberg.com column, and the book shot up to No. 26 on Amazon. I did get one real review on Slashdot, whose moniker is "News for Nerds. Stuff That Matters," and that morning my server got flooded with hits.

And a funny thing happened--the book sold well....

Read the whole thing here.

No more from me today: I've got to write my review of Chicago Shakespeare Theater's production of A Little Night Music for Friday's Wall Street Journal. Radio silence officially begins now. Over to you, OGIC.

This offhand comment took me by surprise. Bear in mind that What's My Line? was no ordinary game show: it was so popular that CBS broadcast it in prime time every Sunday night for a quarter-century. This being the case, does it strike you as at all surprising that the president of a publishing house was sufficiently famous in 1961 to have been a regular panelist on a high-rated network series? Or that Arlene Francis took it for granted that the viewers of What's My Line? might be interested in knowing that two major American novelists had just published new books, much less that they'd been favorably reviewed in the New York papers that day?

I hit the pause button and tried without success to envision some latter-day equivalent of this phenomenon. Can you imagine Paul Shaffer casually mentioning to David Letterman that he'd just been reading about Martin Amis's latest novel on Maud Newton's blog? For that matter, can you imagine Letterman or Leno interviewing any novelist at all? (O.K., maybe Stephen King, but that proves my point.) Or mentioning a piece they'd just read in The New Yorker? Or inviting Donna Murphy on the show to sing a song from Wonderful Town?

I could parse this cultural sea change in a dozen different ways, but it's past my bedtime, so I'll simply settle for reporting it.

"'Resent it?'

"'Yes. I suspect it of trying to teach me something--to convert me. And I don't want to be converted. I listen for relaxation, you know. Perhaps I'm not really a musical man. But I don't want struggle or significance or purpose. I want to be pleased.'

"Richard Wakeley, looking about the room, could agree. It was a good deal earlier than the Adams and the architect had known better than to debauch it with a spurious blue. The walls were the palest of apple greens, the pilasters' capitals discreetly gilded. It was a lovely room, calm and assured, a room for leisure and for formal good manners. Outside it men wrestled with eternal problems: evil and beauty, sin and solipsism. Sometimes the greater the problem the smaller the man. Enormous, insoluble problems. And quite possibly meaningless. Yes, in this lovely room almost certainly without meaning."

William Haggard, Venetian Blind

There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff, 45 miles an hour.

How fast was I going, Officer?

I'd say around 90.

Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.

Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.

Suppose it doesn't take.

Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.

Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.

Suppose you try putting it on my husband's shoulder.

Excuse the hell out of me for being a philistine, but I'd rather have written that than anything by Shirley Hazzard. Or Martin Amis, for that matter. Or just about any novel written after approximately 1975, to be perfectly honest (there are exceptions). I guess I've got a film-noir soul, which is pretty funny considering how hopelessly bourgeois I am.

What about you, OGIC? What scene would you pick?

UPDATE: Futurballa didn't recognize the scene. Yikes! Unhelpful hint: the complete script of this film can be found in a Library of America volume, believe it or not....

I would have trampled all over this appalling announcement, but Greg did it for me:

I'm not saying I don't like these pieces. Some of them might be to my taste (or yours), and some might not. It's what they represent as a group that bothers me. They're all examples of a modernist style of composition that hasn't been current for decades. To suddenly jump in a time machine, and present them all as important, presumably cutting-edge contemporary programming -- God, it's so out of date, so retro, so 20th century! By announcing these programs, the BSO turns its back on the current state of new music....

And then there's the problem of accessibility. I'm not -- absolutely not -- saying that orchestras should play only easy pieces. But this modernist style has absolutely no audience. It doesn't appeal to mainstream classical concertgoers. They don't have modernist taste....

And worst of all, this modernist stuff never even appealed to the one audience it conceivably might have had, which is artists in other fields, and intellectuals. If this audience for Carter et al existed, the BSO could proudly say it was doing something for music that, admittedly, few people appreciated -- but those few people were some of the most important artists and thinkers alive. But this isn't the case. In fact, as it happened, when the minimalists came along in the late '60s and early '70s, they had this audience, or anyway a part of it; so did John Cage, in the '50s and '60s. Stockhausen, a modernist who's now out of fashion even among other modernists, and isn't on the BSO's programs, once inspired musicians out on the edges of rock and jazz. But the BSO's modernists never, as far as I know, inspired anyone....

Read the whole thing here. Then scroll upward and read Greg's further postings on this subject. Though I don't share his high opinion of some of the composers he prefers, I endorse virtually everything else he has to say, and I couldn't have put it better. His attack on Levine's ostrichian programming seems to me devastating--and definitive.

Actually, I really did have lunch with Maud today. We met for sandwiches at the Grange Hall. She drank coffee, I iced tea, and I regret to admit that we never got around to discussing our total coolness, nor did we make cruel fun of the proles seated at the inferior tables, gaping and pointing at the Harmonic Convergence of the Titans of the Blogosphere taking place before their astonished eyes. The embarrassing truth is that we talked, among other things, about how friendly and generous-spirited our fellow arts bloggers are. (Well, maybe not Mr. TMFTML, but somebody has to be the heavy, right?) As it happens, Maud is one of the nicest people I know--and not even slightly dull, either. She even used That Word in one of today's postings!

Sorry, Jennifer. We'll try to be snarkier next time.

They have a consistent and bleak preoccupation with life and death, sun and shade, and encompass treachery, cruelty, courage, and bluff with barely a trace of sentimentality or portentousness. The series added the austere image of a veteran Randolph Scott to the essential iconography of the Western and provbed that Boetticher was a masterly observer of primitive man. His style remained without any flourish or easy touch and the series brought him some critical attention. Two films at least--The Tall T and Ride Lonesome--must be in contention for the most impressive and least handicapped B films ever made....Throughout this series, one feels that Scott's middle-aged Westerner is as unsentimental and self-sufficient as the cinema has achieved. The man's integrity never looks less than hard-earned and desperately sustained.

I agree with every word.

The print of Seven Men From Now released by Comet Video is faded and blurry, but it's still a must. Lee Marvin is the villain, and he never played a more flamboyantly vicious one, not even in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat or John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The Tall T, Ride Lonesome, Comanche Station, Decision at Sundown, and Buchanan Rides Alone, on the other hand, are all clean and clear--my guess is that they derive from digital cable telecasts.

Until the Criterion Collection gets around to releasing the Boetticher-Scott Westerns on DVD, these white-label videocassettes will do just fine. If you want to sample before springing for the whole series, start with Ride Lonesome. It's the best, if only by a nose. The Tall T is almost as good, though, and features a wonderfully complex performance by Richard Boone as a not-quite-redeemable villain who has grown to loathe his thuggish companions.

To order, go here.

WYATT EARP: Just to live a normal life.

DOC: There is no normal life, there's just life.

Kevin Jarre, screenplay for Tombstone

As I watched, I thought, I wonder how many people under the age of 45 saw Casablanca for the first time in a theater? I'm 47, and I first saw it in a Kansas City revival house a quarter-century ago, just prior to the introduction of home video recorders. Back then, seeing Casablanca anywhere was still a big deal: it didn't get shown all that often on local TV stations, and there weren't yet any cable networks devoted exclusively to old movies. Come to think of it, there weren't any cable networks, period.

All of which led me to ask myself yet another unnerving question: how many people under the age of 45 have seen Casablanca at all?

When I was in college, Casablanca was one of the few pre-1960 movies of which everyone I knew was at least aware, whether they'd actually seen it or not. Old movies had yet to be made ubiquitous by the invention of the videocassette, making it a lot harder for any film to attain "iconic" status. I worshipped Bogart--everybody did--but I hadn't seen many of his films, and while I still like Casablanca very much, it's no longer the one I'd choose in order to introduce him to a young filmgoer. (Nowadays, I'd opt for In a Lonely Place or To Have and Have Not.) Nor would I be entirely surprised to learn that it no longer holds a privileged place in the hearts of Gen-X film buffs up to their ears in DVDs.

Still, I'd hate to think that my younger friends wouldn't smile in recognition were I to drop a line from Casablanca into a casual conversation. No, it's not a great film, not by a long shot, but it's one of the most purely entertaining movies ever made, and its heart is in the right place. I know, I know, times change and tastes with them, but I'd like to think all my friends had seen Casablanca at least once. It's the romantic in me.

[Isabel] reveals her essential self, and it is less clear-sighted, less natural, less shining a vision than she, or the youthful reader I was, would have wished. But she is all the more human for her failings, just as The Portrait of a Lady is all the more magnificent for its novelistic imperfections. What is true is beautiful, more surely than the inverse; and therein lay my joy in rereading this masterpiece.

The nice thing about this essay is how, aside from offering a clear-eyed appreciation of the novel, it tracks Messud's changing values as a reader. And though she's glad to have moved on to this fuller appreciation, she's not at all dismissive of the easier novel she used to love.

I am now madly in love with Liz Scott. Whatever her thespic limitations, whatever the silly motivations of her character, I don't care. Liz Scott now haunts my dreams and distracts me from my writing. All Liz Scott need do is turn her head and I will happily swoon. If God does not exist, it would be necessary to invent Liz Scott. Liz Scott is still alive. I will happily give blood for her. I will take a bullet for her. It is time for a cold shower. Film noir is dangerous.

I'm with you, buddy. For those who've never seen a Lizabeth Scott movie, take a look at Pitfall and you'll see what we mean. Was there anyone who summed up the film-noir nightmare vision of women-as-predators more completely and alluringly? I mean, I really like women--nearly all my friends are women--but if Liz Scott ever crooked a finger my way, I'd be one dead blogger before the sun came up. (Not that she ever would have, thank God--she worked the other side of the street.)

Don't ask me what that says about my subconscious. I could tell you, but then I'd have to rat you out.

See you tomorrow, unless something staggering happens tonight at the New York State Theatre. You're in good hands with Our Girl.

So it's not as though my reading habits are going to take a big hit even if the NYTBR banishes fiction reviews from their pages altogether. Yet the blinkered reasoning proffered by Bill Keller rankles. First there's his general blithe condescension toward novels, apparently based on an assumption that while nonfiction is serious, fiction is just playing around. Even if Bill Keller really thinks this, it astonishes me that he'd say it, let alone that the Times would base editorial policy on it. Keller may not get it, but a man in his position should be smart enough to at least suspect that his disinterest in a particular form for expressing ideas is a personal blind spot.

Here are the statements that really give Keller away: "The most compelling ideas tend to be in the non-fiction world," and "Because we are a newspaper, we should be more skewed toward non-fiction." If Keller wants to make the Book Review simply an arm of the newsroom, then I suppose that's his perogative. But he doesn't say that. He speaks on two assumptions that are far from universally accepted: 1) that fiction is never a serious representation of the world, and 2) that only "hard" news is news. If all news is hard news, though, why maintain the separate sphere of a book review at all? Or an arts section? If the NYT's television ads are any indication, the paper's "soft" content is integral to attracting its national readership.

It's ironic that these statements would emerge from the paper of record only a few days after Terry made this observation:

I was watching an old episode of What's My Line?, my all-time favorite game show, earlier this evening....This particular program must have originally aired in 1961 or 1962, because in introducing panelist Bennett Cerf, the president of Random House, Arlene Francis mentioned in passing that two of Cerf's authors, William Faulkner and John O'Hara, had gotten good reviews in that morning's papers.

On Tuesday it seemed quaint that a television talk show would acknowledge newspaper reviews of novels. By Friday it starts to seem quaint that newspapers would review them. You are excused for feeling a little bit dizzy.

When Keller assures readers that the Times will still cover major novelists like Updike and Roth, he leaves open the question of who will determine who is major. Of course this will happen elsewhere, and there's a case to be made that it's not happening at the Times now, but for a Times editor to wholly beg off of the mission of even participating in the public discussion that will adjudicate who is considered tomorrow's major talents--well, that's breathtaking.

A couple of weeks ago I discussed a mission statement of sorts that appears in the Atlantic's back of the book this month. This is part of that statement:

Although in some ways constraining, discrimination also liberates us. We assume that our readers look to this section as a critical organ rather than a news source--which means that unlike, say, The New York Times Book Review, we don't have to cover the waterfront.

Suddenly everyone in the print media seems to be running headlong from what you might think would be the enviable task of shaping cultural taste. Lit bloggers, carry on.

UPDATE: Nathalie at Cup of Chicha is excellent on this story:

Good thinking. Also: stop covering narrative films. Only review documentaries. And dance or theatre? Why discuss performances when you could devote more space to politics?

Henry James, "The Art of Fiction"

Nothing is worth seeing or reading that isn't worth seeing or reading twice, and the second time you know how it turns out. Dickens wrote three endings for Great Expectations; Hollywood tests movies with alternate endings all the time. What happens in the last two pages or the last thirty seconds just cannot make that great a difference. The chick in The Crying Game is really a dude, and Kevin Spacey's Keyser Soze, OK? If you're watching a movie or reading a book to find out what's going to happen, I suggest, with all due respect, a more productive use of time, like filing your corns or catching up on the details of Britney's annulment.

Read the whole thing here.

With all due respect to a smart blogger, this is only half right. As I once wrote (in a radically different context) in a New York Times piece about series TV:

The term "classic" is commonly used to describe fondly remembered TV shows of the past. (I searched for the phrase "classic TV" on Google the other day, and came up with 86,300 hits.) To call a work of art "classic," however, implies that it is something to which we return time and again, making new discoveries with each successive encounter. I can't tell you how many times I have looked at George Balanchine's The Four Temperaments, but though I suppose the day may come when it no longer has anything new to say to me, I still find it a source of apparently inexhaustible interest, and try to see it at least once a year. Every art form has produced innumerable masterpieces which, like The Four Temperaments, demand to be experienced repeatedly--every art form, that is, except for series television....

Hill Street Blues was the first TV drama I ever went out of my way to see, and were there world enough and time, I might even consider watching the first few dozen episodes again. But while I still remember how much I liked Hill Street Blues, I can't recall much else about it--only a few isolated moments from two or three episodes--whereas I could easily rattle off fairly complete synopses of, say, Citizen Kane or A Midsummer Night's Dream, or whistle the exposition to the first movement of Mozart's G Minor Symphony. To qualify as a classic, a work of art must first of all be good enough to make you want to get to know it at least that well.

On the other hand, our first experience of a work of art is qualitatively different from all successive experiences, precisely because we don't know what's going to happen. The lure of cumulative revelation is not trivial, but significant: it helps to build the tension that is ultimately discharged in catharsis. Forget the precisely balanced phrases, the delicate half-tones and perfect edits. If you're not watching a movie or reading a book to find out what's going to happen--or listening to a symphony, or watching a ballet--then you're missing the point, at least on the first go-round. Every truly great work of art is coarse at first sight. That's part of its greatness.

As for me, I'd never want to know how a masterpiece ends prior to experiencing it for the first time. To be told what happens is to be cheated of the opportunity to sprint breathlessly from beginning to end, propelled by the overwhelming desire to know--and what happens in the last two pages, or the last thirty seconds, can make all the difference in the world. Think of the finale of The Four Temperaments, with its spectacular, gravity-dissolving lifts that sum up all that has gone before. Or the explosive stutter of the final chords of Sibelius' Fifth Symphony. Or the very last sentence of "The Turn of the Screw," which slams like an oak door in the face of the stunned reader. No one should be deprived of the opportunity to come completely fresh to those climactic moments, any more than a child should be deprived of its childhood. The more refined pleasures that come with repeated exposure can wait--and will.

Charlie Chaplin, screenplay for Limelight

For now, I leave you in the tender hands of Our Girl in Chicago, who may or may not have something on her mind. And even if she doesn't, there's plenty of stuff to read. I'll be back tomorrow with my weekly Wall Street Journal theater teaser, plus whatever else the spirit moves me to post.

On paper, it was just another repertory program, the kind that rarely inspires anything remotely approaching a sense of occasion nowadays, but no sooner did the lights go down than I knew something was different. The orchestra launched into the fanfare-like introduction to Apollo, the curtain flew up to reveal Nikolaj Hübbe standing at center stage in front of a Balanchine-blue cyclorama, and all at once I felt my skin prickle. As Hübbe strummed the fake lyre he held in his hands, I thought of all the times Balanchine told his dancers that he'd been talking to Stravinsky or Tchaikovsky the night before. Such fanciful tales had always made me smile, but for the first time I had an inkling of what he meant. The evening was full of uncanny encounters and events: the unseen message that Calliope scribbles in her hand and shows to Apollo, the ominous flapping of the Dark Angel's wings at the end of Serenade, the terrible moment when a mob of bald-headed goons strips the Prodigal Son naked, their hands skittering over his limp body like the paws of greedy mice. All had sprung from the mind of the genius we were there to honor.

It was one of those nights when past and present are hooked together like the cars of a speeding train. The company Balanchine had founded was performing his three oldest surviving ballets in the house he built. Apollo was danced in the cruelly abridged revised version of 1980, shorn of its prelude, décor, birth scene, and secondary characters, but Prodigal Son looked much the same way it did on the stage of the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt in 1929, right down to Georges Rouault's thickly brushed backdrops. The dancers on stage included Darci Kistler, Balanchine's last protégée, now married to Peter Martins, NYCB's ballet master in chief, and Kyra Nichols, who in the hard years since Balanchine's death has come to embody the poised, transparent purity of which he dreamed his whole life long. An old man sitting next to me reminisced out loud about seeing Edward Villella dance the Prodigal Son, and I in turn remembered my first Serenade, performed by Dance Theatre of Harlem at City Center, where I sat in the cheapest seats in the highest balcony, wondering if there could possibly be anything in the world half so beautiful.

Miniature bottles of Russian vodka were handed out in the second intermission, and after the final bow was taken, Martins and Barbara Horgan, the head of the Balanchine Trust, came on stage to lead us in a birthday toast to the man of the hour. "What he gave us," Martins said, "is all about love. There are young dancers on this stage who were not born when Mr. B died, and they love him." We raised our plastic glasses, the orchestra thundered out a fanfare, and balloons dropped from the fifth ring. As we filed out, the old man who remembered Villella shook a finger in my face. "Your grandchildren will see these ballets," he said.

And will they? If precedent is any indication, the odds are discouraging. Only a handful of pre-modern ballets continue to be danced in their original form, and fewer still can be taken seriously as major works of art. By and large, 19th-century ballet is remembered more for its music than its steps, just as one inevitably wonders about the extent to which choreography per se was responsible for Serge Diaghilev's triumphs. Fokine, Nijinsky, Massine, Nijinska: all made dances for Diaghilev that set the tongues of the world to wagging, most of which are now half remembered or wholly forgotten. We know more about the Ballets Russes' costumes than its choreography.

Why, then, should Balanchine be different? He himself affected to believe that his ballets would not long outlive him, at least not in any recognizable form. "When I die," he told Rudolf Nureyev at the end of his life, "everything should vanish. A new person should come and impose his own things." But he also founded New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet, which exist to preserve authentic versions of his ballets and teach the techniques necessary to dance them idiomatically. And though Balanchine was not the first choreographer to start a company or a school, what sets him apart is the existence of a worldwide network of other institutions and individuals whose purpose is to disseminate his ballets as widely as possible, and to give them a permanent life in repertory. No other choreographer has attracted so many followers, and no other choreographic oeuvre has been the subject of so thoroughgoing and committed an attempt at long-term preservation.

The many "Balanchine companies" led by alumni of New York City Ballet are not the only important dance companies in America, but their common emphasis on Balanchine, and the consistently high quality with which they stage his ballets, is a development of near-unprecedented significance, a sign that the Balanchine style may be evolving into a lingua franca for ballet in the 21st century, just as the Franco-Russian style of classic ballet provided a firm foundation on which the tradition-steeped Balanchine was able to build his neoclassical idiom. It helps, of course, that most of his dances are well suited to the restrictive circumstances under which repertory ballet is presented in this country. A piece like Concerto Barocco, for example, has no set and no costumes--it is danced in simple practice clothes--making it relatively cheap to produce. Nor does the plotless Barocco require elaborate direction to make its effect: it contains no significant glances, no labyrinthine subtexts, just music and steps. And unlike the myriad dialects of modern dance, the steps of classical ballet are for all intents a universal language. Thus Balanchine's ballets, radically innovative though they are, can be executed by any reasonably proficient classical company. "You know, these are my ballets," he told Rosemary Dunleavy, New York City Ballet's ballet mistress. "In the years to come they will be rehearsed by other people. They will be danced by other people. But no matter what, they are still my ballets."

I wish I could speak with absolute certainty about the future of his ballets, but the jury of posterity is still out. That they ought to live and flourish, however, seems to me beyond question. After spending countless hours looking at dozens of them, I have come to believe that George Balanchine was not merely the greatest ballet choreographer of the 20th century, but the only one to have created a body of work that deserves to be remembered in the same way we remember the work of Stravinsky or Matisse. And while I'm sure the balletomanes of 1929 felt the same way about the repertory of the Ballets Russes, Balanchine's lean, stripped-down dances, unlike Diaghilev's evanescent spectacles, were built to last. This is not to say they can thrive in a vacuum, but the world of ballet is full of talented men and women determined to make sure that Apollo, Serenade, and Prodigal Son last at least as long as The Rite of Spring or The Red Studio. Which is why I wouldn't be at all surprised if my grandchildren see them--and their grandchildren, too.

Pascal, Pensées

In Gary Griffin's production, "A Little Night Music" is sung by actors, played on an all-but-bare thrust stage in a smallish house, and accompanied by a 14-piece orchestra. Lush it isn't, but the gain in intimacy almost completely offsets the musical losses. Though some of the cast members have unappealing voices, they can all act, and Kevin Gudahl, who plays Fredrik Egerman (the role created on Broadway by Len Cariou), wears both hats with apparently effortless flair. Jenny Powers is every bit as good as Petra, the sexy maid--I loved the way she sang "The Miller's Son," the best song in the show--and Michael Cerveris struts about quite nicely as Count Carl-Magnus, who expects absolute fidelity from his long-suffering wife Charlotte (Samantha Spiro) despite his absolute unwillingness to reciprocate....

I wrote enthusastically in this space two weeks ago about Chicago Shakespeare's recent production of "Rose Rage," Edward Hall's single-evening version of Shakespeare's "Henry VI." That one company should have been simultaneously presenting so fine a staging of "A Little Night Music" seems to me just about miraculous. I'd always heard that the Windy City was a class-A theater town, but I didn't know it was home to so versatile a resident troupe. I hope Stephen Sondheim makes a point of coming to see this "Night Music," which runs through February 15. I moved to Manhattan a decade after the original Broadway production, but I can't imagine it having been more effective than this one. Like "Rose Rage," it's good enough to play New York without a tweak.

I have equally enthusiastic things to say about the songs and singing of Amanda Green:

Amanda Green has yet to bring a show to Broadway, but it isn't for lack of trying--or talent. She sang a batch of her songs last Friday at the Ars Nova Theater, assisted by a flying squadron of musical-comedy and cabaret colleagues, and I laughed so hard I thought I'd split a rib.

Ms. Green, who wrote the lyrics for "For the Love of Tiffany," one of the high points of last summer's New York International Fringe Festival, specializes in murderously witty songs that crackle with Sondheim-style wordplay, transposed into a postmodern key. (Can you imagine the composer of "Passion" turning out a Bruce Springsteen parody?) Nor is she afraid to stick a red-hot poker into her own heart: "If You Leave Me, Can I Come, Too?" is "funny" like a Dorothy Parker suicide note....

No link, so run--don't walk--to the nearest newsstand, pony up $1 for a copy of this morning's Journal, turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, and read the rest of what I wrote, plus other good things written by my fellow Journal-ists.

Raymond Aron, "The Dawn of Universal History"

You have indicated that you delight in the works of Patrick O'Brian. Are you also a fan of P.G. Wodehouse? E.F. Benson? Saki? R. F. Delderfield?

When the world is getting you down, and you want total comfort reading, who or what do you turn to?

I asked this question at a gathering of friends this weekend and half the people there said "Winnie The Pooh". For me, it's either Arthur Ransome (of "Swallows & Amazons" fame - a must read, must must read! "Grab a chance and you won't be sorry for a might have been!") or children's books I remember fondly.

This is a wonderful question, one nobody has ever asked me, so I'm answering it fresh, straight off the top of my head. I like Saki well enough but have never been able to connect with Benson, and I've never read anything by Delderfield. When I feel the need for "total comfort reading" (a nice phrase), I typically turn to

(1) O'Brian, whose Aubrey/Maturin novels I just finished rereading in their entirety

(2) Wodehouse, usually the Jeeves novels (I don't like the short stories nearly as much)

(3) Anthony Trollope

(4) Raymond Chandler

(5) Rex Stout

(6) Donald E. Westlake's Dortmunder and Parker crime novels (the latter are written under the pseudonym "Richard Stark")

(7) William Haggard's Colonel Russell political thrillers--virtually unknown in this country, alas, but I own them all

(8) Barbara Pym

(9) Jon Hassler

(10) Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time

In addition, I find it relaxing to revisit familiar books about music--preferably biographies. I've no idea why.

This is not to say, by the way, that I necessarily view these writers as somehow unserious. Stout and Westlake, yes--they're pure entertainers, albeit of a high class--but Haggard's cold-eyed view of the world is anything but frivolous, while the others (including Chandler and Wodehouse) can certainly stand up to close critical scrutiny.

What about you, OGIC? Which books reset your overheated brain to a nice mild simmer?

Later.

"There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we'll be no less full of human dignity.

"There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?"

M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me

Last night I watched Kings Row. The movie itself is more or less preposterous, a whole field full of stale corn, but I marveled at the late-romantic beauties of the Erich Wolfgang Korngold score--more Straussian than Strauss--and marveled, too, at how utterly inappropriate it is to the small-town story it purports to illustrate but in fact overwhelms. I was no less surprised to discover that Ronald Reagan was a damned good actor. The only Reagan movie I'd ever seen was Bedtime for Bonzo, not exactly a fair test of his skills, but he was definitely up to the challenge of the demanding part he played in Kings Row. (In case you've forgotten, it's the one where he wakes up, sees that his legs have been amputated, and shrieks "Where's the rest of me?") Just to confirm my first impressions, I looked up Otis Ferguson's 1941 New Republic review of the film, and found that it refers in passing to "Ronald Reagan, who is good and no surprise." Obviously Ferguson, the best American film critic of his generation, took Reagan's gifts for granted--surely the finest kind of tribute.

Today, in an odd parallel, I've been watching Will Penny, a Seventies western with a slightly off-key score by David Raksin (he wrote "Laura"), lovely to hear but not quite right for the Old West in winter, and a first-rate performance by Charlton Heston, another gifted actor whose reputation has gotten lost in the political shuffle. Whatever you happen to think of gun control, he sure could act--in the right roles, anyway--and he's excellent here as an aging cowboy whose best years have slipped away from him. Heston actually made quite a few interesting small-scale films in between Ben-Hur and the big-bucks disaster movies with which he occupied himself in the waning years of his stardom. Will Penny is one of the best of them, not at all the sort of vehicle you'd expect from a name-above-the-title Hollywood star, and decidedly worth seeing on a cold Sunday afternoon.

What do you know? I actually wrote something! But that's enough for now: I've got a lot of work to do this week, and I think it might be smart for me to lay fallow for the rest of the day. I may tinker with the Top Fives, and I might even post a bit of reader mail if I start to feel restless, but otherwise I'll stick to sitting on the couch, chewing through some of the other old movies my digital video recorder has stored up for me. Have a nice day.

(2) Shower.

(3) Open the front door of my apartment.

(4) Say a single word out loud.

(5) Read a newspaper, on or off line.

(6) Listen to any music (other than that heard on the soundtracks of movies).

(7) Write or edit anything for money.

(8) Spend money.

(9) Answer the telephone (it hasn't rung, though).

(10) Answer any e-mail.

A bitter, months-long dispute within the American Library Association -- the largest nation-based organization of librarians in the world -- continues as to whether to demand that Fidel Castro release 10 imprisoned independent librarians found guilty of making available to Cubans copies of George Orwell's 1984 and the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights.

Along with 65 other Cuban dissenters, the ''subversive'' librarians were sentenced to 20 or more years in Castro's gulag. Some urgently need medical attention, which they're not receiving.

At the ALA's annual midwinter meeting this month in San Diego, Karen Schneider, a member of the ALA's governing council, wanted to amend a final report on the meeting to call for their immediate release. In proposing her amendment, Schneider told her colleagues that Castro's police had confiscated and burned books and other materials at the independent libraries.

The amendment was overwhelmingly defeated by the 182-member council. The report was swept through by a raising of hands.

From Sept. 25 to Oct. 2, libraries across this country will invite their communities to the annual Banned Books Week, decrying censorship. I've spoken, by invitation, during those weeks at libraries around the country. Will any library invite me this year to talk about the burning of library books in Cuba?...

If you haven't been following this story, read the whole thing here. It's not pretty.

I still haven't done any of the stuff I hadn't done as of three o'clock this afternoon (see my earlier posting). It is now eight-fifteen. Boy, does it ever feel good to blow a whole day. I feel like I've cheated the world, or at least a bunch of editors.

Do other semi-recovering workaholics take whole days off? Or did I just discover a radical new idea?

That is just plain cool. Hello, Greenland! Hello, Brazil! Hello, world!

You asked here what books I turn to for comfort reading. My list overlaps with yours by one essential item, the Westlake/Stark double threat. Speaking of which, I loved your Dortmundrian almanac entry last week.

John D. Macdonald does very well for me too--although, since I find it hard to stop after just one or two, even getting started can mean courting some really catastrophic distraction from actual life. Series really fit this bill, don't they? Several of your choices are series, strictly or loosely defined. There's serious comfort in knowing that more of the same flavor is available for the asking, and imagining that the comfort zone can be indefinitely extended.

Elaine Dundy's circa-1960 novels The Dud Avocado (based on her involvement with Kenneth Tynan) and The Old Man and Me (alas, almost impossible to find) are major stalwarts for me. I've read them each ten times at least, and have given away half a dozen copies of the former (most recently to cinetrix, so we'll see what she thinks). Nobody I give it to ever likes it as much as I do, by the way--a source of ongoing amazement to me, but no damper on my proselytizing.

Jane Austen does the trick, as does M.F.K. Fisher. On the pricklier side, Mary McCarthy and Lorrie Moore--despite being more like a sharp stick in the eye than a warm blanket, the both of them. That big old David Thomson Biographical Dictionary of Film, of course. Robert Benchley. Joan Didion. Walter Scott. Robert Louis Stevenson.

Just thinking about this question makes me want to take a sick day. Sadly, that's the last thing I can do anytime in the near future, and I won't be blogging much in the next week either. The Friday deadline I'm facing is scary enough that I'm going to have to play the Luddite this week and shun the computer as far as possible. No comfort reading, no newfangled technology. Just me, a fistful of sharpened blue pencils, and a stack of defenseless manuscripts.

That's the goal, anyway. I may weaken and poke my head in and out once or twice. If not, I'll miss you and see you next week. We can talk some more about Freaks and Geeks and scenes from old movies (did I tell you I broke down and joined Netflix? So far, making the queue has been the best part. Well, it's been the only part. But it was pure pleasure.)

XO, OGIC

I was at Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley a few days ago, and they have this really amazing electronic global map that shows, with lights, how many people are using Google to search for knowledge. The region stretching from Morocco to the border of India had almost no lights.

Read the whole thing here.

I've been thinking about your recent posts on the future of adult films and wanteed to ask you a follow-up question. Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse, but as an aspiring screenwriter (yes, I'm a masochist) I have an above-average interest in these topics.

My question is this--when you say (and I agree with you, by the way) that the indie films of today will become the novels of tomorrow, are you really saying that indie films will become even less important to the culture than they are today? Let's face it, the overwhelming majority of novels make zero impact on the culture, and even a mediocre Hollywood film has greater reach than a Nobel-prize-winning novel. And it's not that indies have such an impact today. The intenstity with which indie filmmakers fought against the proposed Oscar screener ban only highlights the sad fact that even critics won't watch the majority of these films unless they get a freebie in the mail.

If you don't mind a followup question, assuming this scenario plays out, what does that mean for mainstream films? It's hard to believe that they'll get any worse (and this is from someone who absolutely loves mainstream films when they work, which they rarely do).

Just curious for your opinion. I may be a masochist, but I don't have to be a fool, and if I'm going into this business I want to know what I'll be facing.

This letter, which I received last month but am only just getting around to answering (sorry!), has acquired a new resonance in light of the recent whirlwind of lit-blog traffic triggered by OGIC's recent posting about the state of the New York Times Book Review. I don't really have good answers to any of my correspondent's questions, either, just a couple of observations.

To begin with, it's true that novels have become increasingly peripheral to the cultural conversation (such as it is). But it also seems to me--as I've said before in this space--that arts blogs might possibly be changing that state of affairs for the better. I don't mean the whole world is suddenly going to start reading literary novels next week, all because of Our Girl and Maud and Bookslut. What I do mean is that the blogosphere makes it easier for people who care about serious fiction to communicate with one another, and that these people appear to be coalescing into a cybercommunity which over time could start to have a significant affect on book sales. Could, I say: the blogosphere is still very young. But it's already stirring up conversation and controversy all out of proportion to its actual size, and that's a good sign, an indication that we're not fad-snuffling eccentrics but "early adopters" who comprise the leading edge of a full-fledged cultural shift.

As for independent film, well, I think my correspondent actually has it backwards. Outside of major cities, most Americans don't have anything remotely approaching easy access to independent films until they finally make their way to DVD (if then). Hence it would be an improvement were such films to be released via Web-based new-media channels. As we city folk have a tendency to forget, America is a big country, and the smart people don't all live in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. In fact, most of them don't. From my art-oriented point of view, the most valuable thing about the new media is their ability to distribute high culture (a phrase I don't define narrowly, by the way) to smart people who don't live in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, I hasten to remind my correspondent that those who want to make serious art must take it for granted that they won't make serious money doing so. If that's what you're in it for, don't even think about writing indie screenplays or literary novels or symphonies--go work for Donald Trump. Making art is its own reward, or ought to be. George Balanchine (about whom you'll be reading a lot more on this blog in the course of the next few weeks) was once asked why the members of New York City Ballet's pit orchestra were paid less than New York City's garbagemen. His answer? "Because garbage stinks."

Kingsley Amis, Memoirs

I've been thinking about how you describe blogging and the Internet as the future of arts journalism. As a neophyte arts journalist who wants to make more money, I'm wondering: if what you say is true, how will arts journalists earn a living?

Short, easy, theoretically funny answer: don't ask.

Serious answer:

(1) Most committed bloggers hope they'll eventually find a way to make money off their blogs, whether by advertising or tip jars or fund-raising drives or premium-content subscription models or...whatever. That's not quite as naïve as it sounds, though so far as I know the only individual bloggers to make any money to date have been the "warbloggers," those politics-oriented bloggers whose sites draw infinitely more daily traffic than us poor artbloggers.

(2) In the meantime, we keep on blogging anyway, just because we love it and find it stimulating.

(3) Moreover, I know a few arts bloggers whose blogs have brought them to the attention of the print media, and who now are starting to get writing assignments that pay actual cash money--not much, but some. It's a start.

(4) In any case, I think the real significance of the blogosphere is that it fosters and fertilizes a true amateur culture--a very old-fashioned notion, rendered freshly viable by a new technology. Lest we forget, you don't have to be a full-time critic in order to have something worthwhile to say about the arts. (My mailbag proves that in spades.) The blogosphere makes it possible for amateur "critics" to say worthwhile things in public. What could be more stimulating, both to them and to their readers? I think that's a hell of a lot more important than whether OGIC and I someday figure out how to make a little money off this blog of ours.

An ex-student of mine is now a senior staffer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I ran into him at the catastrophically crowded Da Vinci drawing show of last spring, having just come from the much better crowd-managed blockbuster at MOMA Queens. I none-too-gently asked him how the Met could have done such a ruinous job of anticipating and managing the Leonardo mania. His theory: Philippe [i.e., Philippe de Montebello, director of the Met] wanted it that way.

According to this gentleman, Philippe thought it looked bad for the museum that the Jackie O fashion display should be the most crowded show of recent times, much more popular than the epic Vermeer show alongside at the same time. It was thus in the Director's interest that an exhibit of "fine" art should also give the Met that appearance of all the world wanting to see what it had to show. Crowds, publicity, buzz, all this for a hundred tiny pieces of paper from a long-dead Italian (when was the last blockbuster drawing show?) - this at least was his theory. Had it been more managed, the appearance of popular frenzy would have been much less dramatic, his thinking went.

Whether true or not, the fact is the Leonardo show was the most egregious example in my experience of body count burying art. The Met made it even worse by encouraging the use of magnifying glasses, thus ensuring even more battles for the one favored viewing position that would end up blocking everyone else. As you know, the Met hasn't ticketed a blockbuster in years, and whatever we might think of the phenomenon itself, a ticketed blockbuster (assuming a reasonable allotment of tickets per hour) sure beats a free-for-all.

That's why I blog. How can I top a letter like this? The Italians have a saying: Si non e vero, e ben trovato (roughly, "If it's not true, it ought to be"). Whether or not de Montebello really had such considerations in mind, consciously or otherwise, who can doubt that the Blockbuster Mentality permeates and contaminates the thinking of all similarly placed museum executives?

Once again, I'm not saying that All Blockbusters Are Bad. I am, however, saying something less clear-cut but more important: Bigger Isn't Better. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, and the difference matters--a lot.

He is--just to start with--the greatest living composer of music for big band. I don't call it "jazz" because Brookmeyer's music, though it's certainly jazz, is in certain important ways something else as well. He is one of the very few jazz composers to have mastered large-scale form, and his pieces have an organic wholeness and flow usually found only in classical music. He is also a superlative valve trombonist whose blunt, burry tone and no-nonsense solos are as recognizable as the face of a friend. He leads the New Art Orchestra with the lucid gestures of a first-class symphony conductor (think Fritz Reiner, not Leonard Bernstein). As for the band itself, I don't know when I've heard better ensemble playing from any group, regardless of idiom. These guys crackle and burn--elegantly.

Brookmeyer and the Vanguard go back a long way. "I've spent more time in this place than in some of my previous marriages," he said wryly at the start of the first set. In fact, he put in a memorable stretch as music director of the Vanguard band starting in 1978, after Thad Jones moved to Europe, and did some of his best composing and arranging for the group (which returned the compliment tonight by playing his celebrated version of Hoagy Carmichael's "Skylark"). But his earlier efforts, impressive though they remain, don't hold a candle to what he's writing now. At 74, Brookmeyer has pared away the thorny dissonances of his middle-period style. His music is simpler, more linear, unequivocally tonal--and full of joy. It's the sort of development one sometimes runs across in the work of major artists as they grow older and strip their art down to the barest of essentials. That's what happened to Matisse and Bartók in their old age, and it's what's happening to Brookmeyer now.

I'll have to put my thoughts in better order tomorrow morning in order to write about the Brookmeyer band for my "Second City" column in this Sunday's Washington Post. I hope that what I write will profit from a good night's sleep and a bit of reflection. But I also wanted to post a few lines tonight, while I'm still bubbling over with the excitement that comes from having heard the kind of performance that reminds us critics of why we do what we do. And no matter how well my column turns out, it won't be any more to the point than the one-line note scribbled on a cocktail napkin that a musician friend passed to me midway through the first set: "Colors are flooding down the walls." That's just what it sounded like.

If you've never heard the New Art Orchestra in person, go here and here to order its two CDs, which contain some of the music performed tonight at the Vanguard. I guess you had to be there, but if you weren't, it's the next best thing.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Frederick Pollock, March 22, 1892

People talk about the golden age of television (grainy, overexposed hard-to-watch kinetescopes of big braying vaudevillians in drag) or the golden age of sitcoms (Mary Tyler Moore, All in the Family) and I suppose that's correct. But TV today is better than TV ever was. There was never a show like "The Wire." There was never anything as brutal and knowing as "The Office." "Curb Your Enthusiasm" would have made no sense in 1967. It makes perfect sense today.

For the most part--with some exceptions--I think he's right. But the exceptions are important, and worth remembering. It's true that the Golden Age of Television was mostly Milton Berle and low-budget westerns and mysteries. But it was also Ernie Kovacs, An Evening With Fred Astaire, Noël Coward and Mary Martin, Your Show of Shows, my beloved What's My Line?, The Sound of Jazz, New York City Ballet's Nutcracker on Playhouse 90, Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, and Toscanini and the NBC Symphony--not every night, but often enough.

We don't have anything like that today, at least not on network TV (nor is there nearly as much of it on cable TV as is commonly thought). What we do have is an unprecedentedly candid style of TV comedy and drama that reflects the brutal knowingness of our postmodern age with startling, even alarming clarity. I like it. I'm not so sure I like what it tells us about ourselves.

Eat what's here. We'll put more in the dish tomorrow.

P.S. All sorts of folks in the right-hand column and elsewhere have been checking in with their own lists of comfort reading (or, in Maud's case, discomfort). We'll post a readers' guide later in the week. Or you could just work your way down "Sites to See," one cool blog at a time, and find out what you've been missing.

(1) Be sure to include a subject header, preferably one obviously relevant to this blog. I am deleting unopened all e-mail with nonexistent or inexplicable subject headers.

(2) No attachments, please, at least not for now.

(3) No, I don't need a penis enlarger.

Thanks.

UPDATE: Tom Shales filed a first-rate appreciation of Paar on deadline for the Washington Post. Read it here.

A hard-to-find MIA title is now on the slate at Image Entertainment -- 1998's Croupier has a March 9 street-date.

I've been waiting for this one. Croupier is the best piece of cinematic neo-noir to be released in ages. (Which reminds me: a composer friend of mine called me a "paleo-modernist" the other day. That's not quite right, but I like it anyway.)

And yes, I made both deadlines. Next stop, Balanchine.

I love the stuff about the trains. I had the good fortune to take a train to New York (not a sleeper, alas, but from Wilmington that would have been just plain silly!) with my mother when I was very, very young. My father usually drove us to New York. I have no idea why we took the train on this one occasion, and without my Dad, but the memory is incredibly vivid for me and fills me with the most incredible nostalgia. I would imagine that traveling by train for the first time would be pretty exciting for a young child even on today's much diminished Amtrak experience. Still, I somehow caught the last gasp of traditional railway service, and it made an impression, even though I could have had no idea that I would never see its like again. I swear the best eggs I ever ate were on that train! Can you imagine getting farm fresh eggs cooked to order on an Amtrak train? The dining car was the most miraculous place. It was like a fancy restaurant that moved! The tables were covered in white table cloths, the cloth napkins were neatly folded next to the silverware, a bud vase graced each table. And the black waiter in his white jacket made a fuss over my brother and me. No doubt we were all dressed up in matching Florence Eisenman outfits. People dressed up to travel in those days, and my mother kept my brother and me looking like we came off a band box (what does that mean, anyway?). I can remember walking from our seat to the dining car and being terribly scared of the connection between the cars. We must have walked through the old Penn Station when we arrived but, unfortunately, I have no memory of the station at all. I must rely on pictures to imagine what it must have been like. Thanks, I think, for reminding me of a time gone by.

Nice. And thanks to you, too.

If you haven't visited Sarah's litblog, do. It's v. smart.

(Incidentally, the streets and sidewalks of Manhattan are almost completely clear of snow this afternoon. That's one reason why I love New York--we gripe about everything, but we don't let it stop us from doing anything.)

I'm supposed to be lunching tomorrow with a blogger in the right-hand column, but at this point I'd say it's no better than even money that she makes it to the Upper West Side. Should she bag me, I plan to stay right here and blog (after sleeping in, of course).

Memo to anybody who wants me to write anything today: no.

I grew up dreaming of long-distance trains. They were in the songs I loved ("I took a trip on a train/And I thought about you") and the movies I watched ("I tipped the steward $5 to seat you here if you should come in"). Their tracks criss-crossed the main street of the small Missouri town where I spent my childhood, and their braying whistles cleaved the night air as they carried sleeping strangers to places I'd never been.

Alas, the highways and airlines were killing off passenger trains long before I figured out exactly what Cary Grant wanted to do to Eva Marie Saint on the Twentieth Century Limited. By the time I was old enough to travel alone, I took it for granted that I'd never spend a night in a sleeper car, watching the world rumble by. So when the Department of Homeland Security raised America's alert status from yellow to orange a few days before I had to fly from New York to Chicago to look at plays, it struck me that this might well be my last chance to satisfy a longtime craving. I tore up my plane ticket, paid a visit to www.amtrak.com, booked a Viewliner Standard Bedroom on the Lake Shore Limited, and prepared to find out what I'd been missing all these years....

No link, blast and damn it, so if you're not covered with 10 inches of snow, do pick up today's Journal and take a gander. I'm kind of pleased with the way this one came out.

Miguel de Unamuno, Essays and Soliloquies

Incidentally, I'd like to put out an all-points bulletin to art-savvy readers of this site: I'm interested in acquiring a pastel still-life by Arnold Friedman, if I can do so without bending my wallet too far out of shape. A beauty was auctioned on line back in December, but I didn't find out about it until the day after the hammer fell (for a price that was well within my means, arrgh). Should any of you know where such a thing might be found, kindly drop me an e.

(My own preliminary thoughts on "Balanchine 100" can be found in my "Second City" column for this Sunday's Washington Post, which will be linked to this page as soon as it goes on line.)

Turn to the opening sentences of A.J. Liebling's "The Earl of Louisiana," and three things happen. You are dazzled by the wit and acuity of Liebling's prose, you want to keep on reading for as long as he keeps on writing, and you are struck by how deeply the character of American politics has changed in the four-plus decades since "The Earl of Louisiana" was first published. To wit:

"Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas -- stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows."

That was 1960, when the first article in Liebling's series about Earl Long, then governor of Louisiana, appeared in the New Yorker. Now, 44 years later, you still can "experience the old-fashioned traditional corn flavor of Golden Bantam," as one seed company puts it, but the old-fashioned traditional corn flavor of Southern politics is as dead as Earl Long himself. Yes, you still can buy a Moon Pie in Ol' Dixie, but the rumpled rustics who inspired Al Capp to create a comic-strip politico called Sen. Jack S. Phogbound long ago vanished, replaced by the blow-dried suburban slicksters who've turned the Solid South into Anyplace, U.S.A....

Read the whole thing here.

I share nearly all of Yardley's admiration for Liebling, whom he rightly compares to H.L. Mencken. I also have strong feelings of nostalgia about him: Liebling was the subject of the first book review I ever wrote for a national magazine, all the way back in 1981. He wasn't that well known then, and he's not now (The Earl of Louisiana, in some ways his best book, was reissued by an academic press), even though he was one of The New Yorker's most admired contributors back in the unimaginably far-removed days of Harold Ross.

I've never quite understood why Liebling isn't better remembered, though I have some suspicions. For one thing, his prose is a rich dish, by no means indigestible but a bit much for many palates. For another, he was a journalist, not a familiar essayist, and most of his pieces, intensely personal though they may be, are about something or somebody other than himself. Nor did it help that his books went out of print early and stayed that way for a very long time. Most of them, including The Earl of Louisiana, are still out of print.

Liebling was no paragon, least of all in his much-admired press criticism, which for me hasn't held up well. It didn't help that his own grasp of "journalistic ethics" (not quite an oxymoron, but close) could be alarmingly shaky. He was, for example, privately advising Alger Hiss' defense team at the same time he was dissecting press coverage of the Hiss-Chambers case in The New Yorker, a feat of ethical elasticity comparable only to the similar services provided by Mencken to the defense team in the Scopes trial. That is a big fat juicy blot on the escutcheon of a writer who deserves to be remembered for many things other than his too-cute "Wayward Press" pieces in The New Yorker. It, too, should be remembered, but in perspective, much like Mencken's anti-Semitism, a dismaying footnote to a career of the highest possible individuality, one to which Yardley's Washington Post piece is a fine and timely introduction.

I'm not quite sure that The Earl of Louisiana is the best place to start with Liebling, though. When I wrote about the Library of America's superlative two-volume set devoted to journalism in World War II, I was struck by how many of the least dated pieces had originally appeared in The New Yorker--one doesn't usually think of The New Yorker as a source of first-rate war coverage--and by how many of the best of those pieces had been written by A.J. Liebling. He originally made his name writing about peculiar New Yorkers, and nobody except Ross expected that so utterly urban a character would have the slightest notion of what to do in a war zone. But time and again, Liebling buried the puck in the net, never deeper than in "Cross-Channel Trip," filed from a landing craft in the English Channel on D-Day:

I looked down at the main deck, and the beach-battalion men were already moving ahead, so I knew that the ramps must be down. I could hear Long shouting, "Move along now! Move along!," as if he were unloading an excursion boat at Coney Island. But the men needed no urging; they were moving without a sign of flinching. You didn't have to look far for tracers now, and Kallam and I flattened our backs against the pilot house and pulled in our stomachs, as if to give a possible bullet an extra couple of inches clearance. Something tickled the back of my neck. I slapped at it and discovered that I had most of the ship's rigging draped around my neck and shoulders, like a character in an old slapstick movie about a spaghetti factory, or like Captain Horatio Hornblower. The rigging had been cut away by bullets....

A sailor came by and Shorty, one of the men in the gun crew, said to him, "Who was it?" The sailor said, "Rocky and Bill. They're all tore up. A shell got the winch and ramps and all." I went forward to the well deck, which was sticky with a mixture of blood and condensed milk. Soldiers had left cases of rations lying all about the ship, and a fragment of the shell that hit the boys had torn into a carton of cans of milk. Rocky and Bill had been moved belowdecks into one of the large forward compartments. Rocky was dead beyond possible doubt, somebody told me, but the pharmacist's mates had given Bill blood plasma and thought he might still be alive. I remembered Bill, a big, baby-faced kid from the District of Columbia, built like a wrestler. He was about twenty, and the other boys used to kid him about a girl he was always writing letters to. A third wounded man, a soldier dressed in khaki, lay on a stretcher on deck breathing hard through his mouth. His long, triangular face looked like a dirty drumhead; his skin was white and drawn tight over his high cheekbones. He wasn't making much noise.

First-person journalism will never get any better than that.

You know where to go. And be sure to tune in Our Girl and me on Sunday night.

Later.

Arlene Croce, Afterimages

I might quibble with you about Brookmeyer being the greatest living jazz composer/arranger, and he might, too. Bill Holman is alive, well, and more brilliant than ever. How nice to have such a close race.

As the saying goes, I'd hate to have to live off the difference. Holman was already damned good in the Fifties (back when he was dedicated to the proposition that even the Stan Kenton band could be made to swing), but he's grown and grown and grown since then, to the point where he ranks with the best of the best. Alas, precious little of his recent music is currently available on CD, but between them, A View from the Side and Brilliant Corners: The Music of Thelonious Monk offer a pretty good snapshot of what he's up to these days.

This, by the way, is Our Girl's first public appearance since taking the veil of anonymity, and while I don't think she'll demand that a voice filter be used, she has no intention of disclosing her secret identity on the air. Guessing is discouraged--we'd prefer not to have you killed, though we'll do whatever's necessary.

To learn more about the series, go here.

To listen to WBEZ on the Web in streaming audio, go here.

To listen on a plain old terrestrial radio, tune to 91.5 FM. (Loser.)

P.S. No, I do not plan to flash the host. This is radio, for God's sake.

President Bush will seek a big increase in the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts, the largest single source of support for the arts in the United States, administration officials said on Wednesday.

The proposal is part of a turnaround for the agency, which was once fighting for its life, attacked by some Republicans as a threat to the nation's moral standards.

Laura Bush plans to announce the request on Thursday, in remarks intended to show the administration's commitment to the arts, aides said.

Administration officials, including White House budget experts, said that Mr. Bush would propose an increase of $15 million to $20 million for the coming fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. That would be the largest rise in two decades and far more than the most recent increases, about $500,000 for 2003 and $5 million for this year.

The agency has a budget of $121 million this year, 31 percent lower than its peak of $176 million in 1992. After Republicans gained control of Congress in 1995, they cut the agency's budget to slightly less than $100 million, and the budget was essentially flat for five years.

In an e-mail message inviting arts advocates to a news briefing with Mrs. Bush, Dana Gioia, the poet who is chairman of the endowment, says, "You will be present for an important day in N.E.A. history."...

Read the whole thing here.

Seeing as how I have the night off and am disinclined to do any gainful work, I thought I'd post a similar list, this one of music to which I turn when my brain and/or heart are stuck on 11 and I feel the urgent need to gear down:

(1) Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K. 488, performed by Alfred Brendel (or better still, if you don't mind the wait, Robert Casadesus)

(2) The Paul Desmond Quartet Live

(3) Schubert's A Major Rondo, D. 951, performed by Artur and Karl Ulrich Schnabel

(4) Copland's Quiet City, performed by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic

(5) Frank Sinatra and the Hollywood String Quartet, Close to You

(6) The Band, The Band

(7) The Very Best of Fats Waller

(8) Chopin's Barcarolle, Op. 60, performed by Dinu Lipatti

(9) Count Basie and the All-American Rhythm Section, The Kid from Red Bank

(10) Getz/Gilberto

How about you, OGIC? And do you remember the first time we listened to Getz/Gilberto together, by the way?

I must thank you for listing Dance in America: Acts of Ardor in your top five. I just finished watching it and was overwhelmed. I really did enjoy it. I am a relative new comer to art appreciation and I have been somewhat skeptical about whether I would enjoy dance. That show definitely changed my mind and to think it was on the same day that I received your book The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken in the mail. I am sure I will enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the Paul Taylor Dance Company.

I sure hope so. The pleasure is all mine. And for those of you who missed Acts of Ardor, some stations are replaying it. (In New York, for example, it'll be shown again next Tuesday at 12:30 a.m. on Channel 13.) Click on the Top Five link for more information.

Another reader writes, apropos of my Wall Street Journal piece about the Lake Shore Limited:

My first experience with trains was last March, when I traveled with a friend from Chicago to Tucson on the Texas Eagle, a three-day trip. The wonderful thing about a train trip is that you can't possibly do anything else except eat, drink, and socialize. We spent afternoons in the lounge car, grumbling that we were behind schedule (as train passengers are obliged to) and exchanging rumors that the conductor had told someone that there would be a smoke break in St. Louis, or that we would make up time after San Antonio. At 4 o'clock, the dining steward walked through to take dinner reservations. My friend and I were always seated with two other people, so as not to waste space at the tables (which, happily, are still appointed with fresh flowers). One evening, we dined with a delightful older lady named Margaret, who, upon hearing that coach passengers were not provided with a shower, invited us to the use the one in her sleeper car--"if the steward tries to stop you, tell him your Aunt Margaret is traveling in the sleeper and said you could use it." In the evenings after dinner, we sat in the lounge until 1 or 2 o'clock drinking bottle after bottle of dreadful Amtrak Cabernet, talking about philosophy and staring out at the Texas night. While I never experienced the grand old days of really first-class train service, I believe it is still the most civilized way to travel. It was nice to read about your experience and your other reader's train memories on the weblog.

I've been getting other nice letters from people who remember their own train rides, past and present, with great fondness. Thanks to you all for writing.

Finally, this wildly amusing speculation:

I have to admit, there was a period of time in which I thought Our Girl was just Joseph Epstein having a little fun pretending to be a woman. All that gushing about Henry James... But your recent statements concerning Our Girl looking ravishing (or something like that) while listening to Johnny Cash (and not Schubert's "Trout") have been poking huge holes in my thesis. Either that, or your blog is no longer grounded in reality. I may tune in to your radio appearance and miss all those cool Super-Bowl commercials just to hear my best guess as to Our Girl's identity smashed once and for all.

Fond as I am of Joe Epstein, he isn't nearly as pretty as OGIC. And she's taller, too.

Forget all those other pseudo-confessions. The stuff is here, and it's mellow.

David Thomson, "Jean Renoir," in A Biographical Dictionary of Film

* * *

Was the invention of the phonograph a good thing for music?

This question will no doubt strike the average audiophile as a bit peculiar, if not actually bizarre: anybody prepared to shell out ten thousand bucks for a pair of speakers is by definition a true believer in the virtues of recorded sound. But as far back as John Philip Sousa, thoughtful musicians were expressing serious reservations about its possible effects on music--with good reason, as it turned out. For the phonograph completely transformed Western musical culture, and the fact that we now take this transformation for granted doesn't lessen its significance in the slightest.

It's no secret, for instance, that the rise of the phonograph basically killed off domestic music-making. My grandfather, who was born a century ago, played banjo, but neither of my parents played any instrument at all, and when I started making music, it was at school, not home; I am the sole member of my extended family who not only learned a musical instrument as a child but also continued to play as an adult. What's more, I majored in music in college, making me even less typical of my fellow baby-boomers: I have just one close friend who plays classical music on a purely amateur basis.

To be sure, I have a lot of other friends who listen to classical music, but I'm struck by how few of them go to concerts at all regularly: their participation in the culture of classical music consists mainly of buying compact discs. Indeed, I know thoroughly civilized people who actively disdain concertgoing, preferring to shovel money into the care and feeding of high-end systems. I don't mean to knock them--they love music as much as I do--but it seems to me that there is something fundamentally parasitical about their love: they reap the benefits of the musical culture without directly supporting it. This is part of what Benjamin Britten was getting at when he called the phonograph "the principal enemy of music," adding that "it is not part of true musical experience." Sitting down in your living room and throwing on a CD is not the same thing as going to a concert, much less playing for your own pleasure: though it can be intensely meaningful, it is nevertheless experience once removed.

Needless to say, this coin has two sides. Leafing through B.H. Haggin's Music in the Nation the other day, I ran across this revealing passage:

Haydn's Symphony No. 104...I heard for the first time a year ago; and several others of the London symphonies I have never heard at all; nor have I ever heard performances of a number of Haydn's clavier sonatas that are superb pieces of music. I began to attend concerts in 1914, but didn't hear Mozart's Piano Concerto K. 467 until 1934, his K. 595 until 1936, his K. 491 and K. 271 until 1937; Webster Aitken's recent performance of K. 450...was the first I had heard since 1922; and I have yet to hear a performance of K. 453.

Haggin wrote those lines fifty-eight years ago. Today they sound--well, quaint. At a time when Le Sacre du Printemps takes up a full column in the Schwann/Opus record catalogue, it's easy to forget how the phonograph made it possible for serious music lovers to do an end run around the entrenched conservatism of symphony orchestras and big-money soloists.

What was true of a lifelong New Yorker in the '30s was triply true of a small-town Missouri boy in the '60s: I lived hundreds of miles away from the nearest concert hall, and it was through the phonograph that I became part of the larger world of music. I fell in love with Stravinsky and Shostakovich because my high-school library had a well-chosen classical record collection; I bought Toscanini reissues at Wal-Mart for $2.98 a pop, not because I knew who Toscanini was but because they were cheap (and because I loved those classy Robert Hupka photos on the jackets). Nor was my youthful musical life entirely passive: I learned the Brahms D Minor Sonata as a teenage violinist solely because the local piano store happened to have a dusty copy of David Oistrakh's Angel recording in its lone classical bin, and I taught myself the rudiments of jazz bass by listening to my father's battered copies of In a Mellotone and Jazz Goes to College, thereby taking my place in a line of descent that started with Bix Beiderbecke, who taught himself cornet by playing along with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's earliest 78s. Without the phonograph, jazz might well have vanished into the humid night air of New Orleans, to be remembered only by those who first played and heard it; instead, it became America's principal contribution to twentieth-century music, known around the world.

It may well be that the most important thing about the phonograph is its unique capacity to reproduce and disseminate those aspects of musical performance which cannot be notated. (If you doubt this, take a moment to reflect on the difference between reading about The Who and listening to Live at Leeds.) This capacity is not without its disadvantages. For one thing, it has caused us to grossly overemphasize the role of execution in musical experience: veteran record collectors habitually spend far too much time talking about whose recording of the Bartók Violin Concerto is best, and not nearly enough talking about the Bartók Violin Concerto itself. But it has also made it possible for us to re-experience great performances of the past--including, among many other things, the world premiere of the Bartók Violin Concerto. I've been listening to old records for well over half my lifetime, and yet it never quite ceases to amaze me that simply by pushing a button, I can hear Joseph Joachim playing Bach, or Louis Armstrong rapping out that golden introduction to "West End Blues."

As this example suggests, collectors of historical recordings are perhaps most vividly aware of the power of the phonograph to take the evanescent and make it permanent. But there is a sense in which all recordings are historical, no matter how recently they were made. I've recently spent several blissful hours listening to Turn Out the Stars, an extraordinary six-CD set of previously unreleased recordings made by Bill Evans at the Village Vanguard in 1980, just three months before he died. These performances may not be "historical" in the same way that, say, Percy Grainger's 1925 recording of the Chopin B Minor Sonata is "historical," but they've certainly changed my understanding of Bill Evans' artistic development--I had no idea how brilliantly he was playing at the very end of his life--and I suspect they will have a powerful effect on the way jazz historians of the future write about Evans. Yet we wouldn't have known the difference had these performances not been recorded (and, just as important, released).

As it happens, I never heard Bill Evans play in person: he died before I moved to Manhattan. Thus, my whole knowledge of his playing derives from his recordings. In fact, I suspect most of the really important musical experiences of my life (not counting the ones in which I was a participant) have come to me not in the flesh but through the medium of recorded sound. Since I moved to New York, I've attended my fair share of live musical performances of all kinds. But even during that time, there has been no shortage of important artists whom I first heard on record. Four who come immediately to mind are Anne Sofie von Otter, Diana Krall, Alison Krauss and Liz Phair, all of whom are now central to my listening life, both on record and in concert; had the phonograph not been invented, I might never have heard any of them.

It is for this reason that I find it difficult to wave the Luddite banner with any real enthusiasm. Of course recorded sound is a mixed blessing: we pay a price for its ubiquity, and that price is getting steeper. But all blessings are mixed, and it is up to us to make the best of them. If I had to choose between the continued survival of the Podunk Philharmonic and the existence of the recordings of Louis Armstrong, I'd probably take a deep breath and vote for Louis--but it's our job as music lovers to make sure that such choices never become necessary. You might think about that the next time you decide to blow ten thousand bucks on a pair of speakers instead of buying a subscription to your local opera company.

* * *

For one thing, the expression of conventional indignation is not so customary in Louisiana as farther north. The Louisianans, like Levantines, think it naive. A pillar of the Baton Rouge economy, whom I shall here call Cousin Horace, had given me an illustration, from his own youth, of why this is so.

"When I was a young man, fresh out of Tulane," he said, "I was full of civic consciousness. I joined with a number of like-minded reformers to raise a fund to bribe the Legislature to impeach Huey [Long]. To insure that the movement had a broad popular base, subscriptions were limited to one thousand dollars. When I went to my father, who was rich as cream, to collect his ante, I couldn't get but five hundred from him--he said he felt kind of skeptical. So I put up a thousand for me and the other five hundred for him. I wouldn't pass up a chance to give the maximum for such a good cause.

"A vote of two-thirds of each house was needed to impeach, and there were then thirty-nine state senators. But before our chairman could see ehough of them, Huey induced fifteen--a third plus two--to sign a round robin stating they would not impeach no matter what the evidence was. Earl says now that he thought of that scheme. We were licked, so I went around to the eminent reform attorney who was treasurer of our enterprise and asked for my money back.

"'Son,'" he said, ‘I am keeping all the subscriptions as my fee.'

"I was mad as hell, and told Dad, and he said, ‘Son, it shows I did right to hold out my other five hundred--I gave it to Huey as part of the contribution he levied on me to pay the fellows on his side.'"

Cousin Horace, who looks like Warren Gamaliel Harding, the handsomest of Presidents, imbibed deeply of a Ramos gin fizz.

"Right then," he said, after the interval, "I made up my mind that it didn't make any difference which side was in in Louisiana, and I have stuck to business ever since."

Then there's a score by Philip Glass (a standby to which Morris has become very accustomed), a metronomic New Age pulse that encourages not thought but the impression that one is thinking. "No one does `existential dread' as well as Philip Glass," Morris has offered by way of explanation. "And this is a movie filled with existential dread." But "doing" existential dread is a far cry from understanding it or, better yet, addressing it.

I used to be a big fan of Glass's music when I heard it performed live, largely because of its meditative qualities. But one might question the use of meditating on Robert McNamara as opposed to thinking analytically and critically about him. If we meditate on charts and figures or feel existential dread about them without even knowing what they say, there's a danger that we'll think we're doing something serious just by gaping at what's in front of us. The same thing applies to gaping at McNamara even when we know what he's saying, in part because of the high gloss of that chugging Glass music. It's almost as if Morris were characterizing McNamara's discourse as "Glassy" (rather than simply gassy), the same way Oliver Stone and Anthony Hopkins tried to make Richard M. Nixon seem Shakespearean.

I've never been a big fan of Philip Glass' music, whether live or on record, but it always used to strike me as rather effective when used as background music to a more interesting event taking place in the foreground--a movie, say, or a ballet. But Rosenbaum has put his finger on something significant about Morris' use of Glass' music that I sensed (I think) but never completely understood.

A very neat piece of criticism.

I visit artsjournal.com every morning, without fail (and I did it before I started "About Last Night," thank you very much). It's the quickest and best way I know to keep abreast of the wide world of art.

To visit the artsjournal.com home page, click on the artsjournal logo at the top of this page.

To check out any of my fellow artsjournal.com artbloggers, go to the OTHER AJ BLOGS module at the bottom of the right-hand column.

And while you're at it:

If you enjoy reading "About Last Night," tell your art-loving friends.

Tell them all.

Tell them often.

Tell them that Our Girl in Chicago is not Joseph Epstein.

Tell them...oh, never mind. It'll take at least a few more weeks before I live that one down.

Maurice Baring, C

Conspicuously missing from this roster, alas, are the Los Angeles Times, which segregates all of its arts and book coverage behind a pay-only firewall, and Terry's own Wall Street Journal, which is very restrictive in the cultural coverage it makes available for free on the Web. We hope these papers change their mind, and if they do, we'll let you know.

We're interested in linking to the Web sites of other newspapers which offer serious arts coverage that might be of interest to readers elsewhere. Keep us posted.

In addition, we've also reorganized "Sites to See" into four separate categories for greater ease of use. From the top down, they are:

(1) Blogs and personal Web sites primarily about the arts (though they may touch on non-art-related subjects from time to time)

(2) Art-related non-blogs and informational sites

(3) Art-related newspaper sections and magazine sites

(4) Interesting blogs and Web sites not primarily about the arts (though they may touch on art-related subjects from time to time)

We hope you find all these changes helpful. If not, say so.

Author photos for literary fiction -- that most introverted of artforms -- try to squeeze intellectual noblesse out of a writer's physiognomy and convince us that "depth" has a surface appearance; thus, in my opinion, author photos are funny. And how funny they are is in direct proportion to how seriously they want to be taken. The more they try to signify "thought," the more their authors look like what they'd hate to write: clichés....

Read the whole thing here.

I'm relieved to say that my author photo for The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (which I think we're reusing on the dust jacket of A Terry Teachout Reader) steers clear of most of the pretentious trickery enumerated later on in this post. However, I did come up with a fresh one of my very own: I'm sitting on the bench of a piano on whose music rack reposes the open score of...an opera.

Yes, I really do play piano, and yes, the opera in question is one that I know well and love with all my heart. Does any of that earn me a pass from the strictures of the alarmingly witty Cup of Chicha? Probably not....

I could use a laugh--preferably an intentional one. I get too many of the other kind in my current capacity as a drama critic.

The head of a once-secret Russian committee that maintains the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin denounced calls to bury him yesterday and vowed to preserve the revolutionary for generations.

Members of the Mausoleum Group still tend to his body 80 years after their predecessors embalmed it.

Valery Bykov, head of the 15-man group, criticised politicians for using this month's anniversary of Lenin's death to reopen a bitter debate over his future. "These people are mostly fools," he said of a broad spectrum of politicians who want Russia to bury Lenin, close his tomb and let his legacy lie. "They have left no mark on history and never will, they are of no interest to us," Prof Bykov said.

Opinion polls suggest growing support for removing Lenin from Red Square. There was constant debate over the issue during Boris Yeltsin's presidency. His successor, President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB spy, has discouraged such talk, although he has restored the Soviet national anthem and encouraged Russians to be proud of their history under communism.

Prof Bykov is the fourth man to lead the Mausoleum Group since scientists were summoned to the Kremlin to freeze the decomposing body of Lenin, who died after a fourth stroke on Jan 21, 1924. They also removed and studied his brain in the search for the source of genius.

Prof Bykov's team checks Lenin's body every week for damage caused by the lighting in his mausoleum or changes in temperature or humidity.

They treat it with a chemical solution developed in secrecy and periodically change his clothes. "Lenin is in a fine state and we will make sure he remains so for our descendants," Prof Bykov said. "We can guarantee preservation of his body indefinitely, certainly for a century and more."

The Mausoleum Group also mummified and helps to maintain the bodies of Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi Minh. It is based at Moscow's Biomedical Technology Centre. Some say the basement holds Lenin lookalikes ready to take his place in Red Square if his corpse crumbles. Prof Bykov denies this.

There are three ways to build a hot weblog.

To be a connection machine (people with huge blogrolls and/or RSS lists that point to other weblogs -- they do add their two cents and sometimes their thinking).

To be a name dropper (people that imply they understand what is really going on -- and you don't -- given their personal connections that they constantly let you know about).

To be an ideologue (people that support a single cause with unquestioned faith).

Here are the ways to build a second tier (but still popular) weblog:

To be a thinker (people that delve into topics with intelligence and/or wit).

To be a topic owner (people that own a topic and report on it with unquestioned knowledge and depth).

To be a voice of outrage/affirmation (people that critique others as often as they can).

To be a cool hunter (people that find the newest of the new, strange and interesting).

Which one are you? Are there more categories? Am I wrong?

I think Mr. Robb forgot this one:

To be really, really funny (especially in your use of That Word).

And judging by the way our Site Meter has been bouncing around for the past few days, I'd also be inclined to add this:

To be publicly accused of hyperendowment by a really, really funny blogger.

Memo to all of you who visited "About Last Night" for the first time this past week in search of whatever it was you were searching for: I'm sorry you didn't find it. But you're welcome to stick around anyway.

For information on how to tune us in, go here.

In other news, I finished my Kandinsky-Schoenberg essay, then took a sixtysomething musician friend to the New York State Theater to see New York City Ballet dance an all-Balanchine program, Donizetti Variations, Apollo, and Serenade. He just discovered dance last month, and these were his very first Balanchine ballets. To say he was blown away would be a considerable understatement. In fact, he was reduced to near-blathering, which is no surprise. I've taken a lot of people to see their first Balanchine ballets, and they tend to blather all over the place afterward, the same way they do the first time they see Paul Taylor's Esplanade or Mark Morris' L'Allegro or Merce Cunningham's Sounddance, three other great dances that have a way of overwhelming the novice viewer.

I particularly liked one thing my friend said about Serenade: "I kept wishing I could stop the action and point at all the beautiful things on stage, so that we could talk about them." I know just how he feels. The first time you see a dance like Serenade, the events fly by so fast that you start to feel swamped by the dizzying onrush of beauty.

The good news is that NYCB dances Serenade a lot, as do most Balanchine companies. Like all the great Balanchine ballets, the more you see it, the more you see.

The school honor roll, a time-honored system for rewarding A students, has become an apparent source of embarrassment for some underachievers.

As a result, all Nashville schools have stopped posting honor rolls, and some are also considering a ban on hanging good work in the hallways -- on the advice of school lawyers.

After a few parents complained that their children might be ridiculed for not making the list, lawyers for the Nashville school system warned that state privacy laws forbid releasing any academic information, good or bad, without permission.

Some schools have since put a stop to academic pep rallies. Others think they may have to cancel spelling bees. And now schools across the state may follow Nashville's lead....

Read the whole thing here. Unless, of course, you live in Nashville, in which case I guess I shouldn't say that, for fear of diminishing the self-esteem of those who can't read, and thus getting hauled into court.

Which reminds me (excuse the enharmonic modulation) that one of the things Sarah Weinman and I talked about at lunch the other day was the potentially fearful prospect of libel suits against outspoken members of the blogosphere. Believe me, it could happen, and then some, and I very much doubt that more than a handful of us bloggers have thought about it.

As you know, I believe in the amateur culture fostered by the blogosphere, and support it enthusiastically. But I did learn two things from my years of 9-to-5 work on a big-city newspaper that are highly relevant out here in the sphere:

(1) How to edit my own copy.

(2) How not to commit libel.

Back when I was on the editorial page of the New York Daily News, we were given regular updates on the evolving state of libel case law. What's more, our copy was scrutinized by editors who knew a thing or two about libel (in some cases because they'd been sued). I'm not saying that made me libelproof, and I hope it didn't make me unreasonably cautious, but it did make me aware of the perils of preemptive litigation in a way I suspect most bloggers are not.

Enough of these grim reflections. I want to go out and play in the cooooooold weather. But I did want to pass them on to any of you who don't have anything better to do than sit at your computer on a Saturday afternoon.

Robert Harth, who became the head of Carnegie Hall days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and led America's premier classical music venue into an adventurous new era, has died. He was 47.

The hall's executive and artistic director was found dead Friday evening at his apartment near Carnegie Hall, said Ann Diebold, a spokeswoman at the hall. She said he suffered a heart attack.

Harth had planned to announce the hall's new season on Tuesday, including the second year of programs at the Judy and Arthur Zankel Hall, the $72 million, 644-seat hall that sealed Harth's reputation as a cutting-edge arts administrator.

Harth spearheaded an eclectic blend of programming at Zankel, from new classical compositions, jazz and rock to avant-garde theater that drew a wider audience than usually attends Carnegie performances.