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January 31, 2004
TT: This just in
From the Associated Press: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.
Posted January 31, 12:53 PM
TT: When everyone is somebodee
Courtesy of Pejmanesque, this story from the Washington Post: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.
Posted January 31, 12:42 PM
TT: And no commercials, either
This is just to remind you (yet again, and probably not for the last time) that Our Girl and I will be making our joint radio debut this Sunday night, opposite the Super Bowl.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.
Posted January 31, 12:23 PM
TT: One easy lesson
Courtesy of BuzzMachine, this posting from John Robb's Weblog: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.
Posted January 31, 12:21 PM
TT: Get a life
From the Daily Telegraph: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.
Posted January 31, 12:20 PM
TT: A very broad hint
Golden Rule Jones posted (scroll down a bit) some really funny excerpts from Joe Orton's play Loot, which reminded me that it's been a long, long, long time since any of Orton's plays were revived in New York. I sure would like to write about one (ideally What the Butler Saw, though Loot or Entertaining Mr. Sloane would do just fine). And while I'm no kind of Anglophile, I can think of any number of other modern English plays it would be a pleasure to see and review, among them Noël Coward's Present Laughter and Terence Rattigan's French Without Tears.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.
Posted January 31, 12:19 PM
TT: Alas, not by me
From Cup of Chicha: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....
Posted January 31, 12:00 PM
TT and OGIC: New wrinkles
We're gradually trying to make "Sites to See" a useful one-stop navigation tool for anyone interested in arts coverage in major American newspapers. Take a look at the right-hand column and you'll find direct links to arts and book sections and pages in the New York Times, the New York Observer, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, and the Baltimore Sun.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.
Posted January 31, 3:03 AM
TT: Almanac
"Some one was playing the piano--playing Chopin with so much expression that he was scarcely audible."Maurice Baring, C
Posted January 31, 1:18 AM
TT: Homeboy
It suddenly occurs to me that I haven't mentioned for quite some time that "About Last Night" is graciously hosted by artsjournal.com, the Web site that offers a daily digest of news stories and commentaries about the arts gleaned from all across the English-speaking world, not to mention a whole bunch of cool arts blogs.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.
Posted January 31, 1:07 AM
January 30, 2004
TT: Alas, not by me
Courtesy of Mildly Malevolent, here's an interesting observation made by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum in his review of The Fog of War, Errol Morris' new documentary about Robert McNamara: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.
Posted January 30, 12:04 PM
TT: Reading matter
For those of you who read what I wrote yesterday about A.J. Liebling and had your curiosity piqued, here's an excerpt from The Earl of Louisiana, plucked from my electronic commonplace book. It's too long to be an almanac entry, but it deserves to be quoted, as they say, in extenso, so here you are.* * *
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."
Posted January 30, 12:03 PM
TT: Six of one
As you know, I'm all tied up writing an essay about Kandinsky and Schoenberg for Commentary, so in lieu of something brand-new, here's a column I wrote for Fi, the now-defunct audio-and-music magazine, back in 1997. I doubt anybody who reads this blog will remember it--in fact, I doubt any of you read it in the first place! I think it's still relevant, too, though regular readers of "About Last Night" will know that I wouldn't put it quite the same way today....* * *
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.
Posted January 30, 12:02 PM
TT: Almanac
"Renoir asks us to see the variety and muddle of life without settling for one interpretation. He is the greatest of directors; he justifies cinema. But he shrugs off the weight of 'masterpiece' or 'definitive statements.' The impossibility of grasping final solutions or perfect works is his 'rule.'"David Thomson, "Jean Renoir," in A Biographical Dictionary of Film
Posted January 30, 12:00 PM
TT: Three for the price of one
So why do you think OGIC and I are going to the trouble of making a joint radio appearance on Superbowl Sunday? Just to talk about the arts? Nothing doing. Not only is she possibly going to reveal her secret identity, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it emerges that she's someone else, too. (And I don't mean Joe Epstein.)Forget all those other pseudo-confessions. The stuff is here, and it's mellow.
Posted January 30, 9:27 AM
January 29, 2004
TT: Three from the mailbox
A reader writes: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.
Posted January 29, 12:09 PM
TT: Total comfort listening
I'm surprised by the response to my recent list of books I read for relaxation and comfort. I mean, it wasn't even my idea--I was just responding to a curious reader! Nevertheless, fellow bloggers from far and wide (starting, naturally, with Our Girl) have chimed in with comments, demurrers, and lists of their own. You can see some of the latter by going here (scroll down), here (ditto), here, and 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?
Posted January 29, 12:05 PM
TT: Duly noted
From the New York Times: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.
Posted January 29, 12:05 PM
TT: Who was that masked blogger?
Our Girl and I will be on WBEZ-FM, Chicago's public-radio station, this Sunday from eight to nine p.m. EST (opposite the Super Bowl, but who cares about that?). I'll be speaking from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, she from a studio in Chicago. The occasion is the last episode of a week-long series called "Should I Stay or Should I Go?: The Local Artist's Lament." We'll be chatting about the art scene in Chicago and--more generally--the state of the arts outside New York City. I dare say "About Last Night" will be mentioned, too, and there'll also be a call-in segment.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.
Posted January 29, 12:03 PM
TT: Him, too
Apropos of my posting about Bob Brookmeyer, jazz critic Doug Ramsey writes: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.
Posted January 29, 12:01 PM
TT: Almanac
"Everybody who lives in New York believes he's here for some purpose, whether he does anything about it or not."Arlene Croce, Afterimages
Posted January 29, 12:00 PM
TT: Back in the barrel
FYI, I don't expect to be posting much of anything else until Saturday, since I have to spend the rest of today and all of tomorrow writing an essay about Kandinsky and Schoenberg for Commentary.You know where to go. And be sure to tune in Our Girl and me on Sunday night.
Later.
Posted January 29, 10:54 AM
TT: Among those present
Jonathan Yardley, who is writing an occasional series of Washington Post pieces about "notable and/or neglected books from the past" (and what a good idea that is!), has just gotten around to A.J. Liebling's The Earl of Louisiana: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.
Posted January 29, 10:52 AM
January 28, 2004
TT: Elsewhere
In today's New York Observer, Robert Gottlieb holds forth on New York City Ballet's Balanchine-related festivities. It's a must.(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.)
Posted January 28, 12:43 PM
TT: On my walls
I just snagged two inexpensive but deeply satisfying pieces of art via eBay, an undated Arnold Friedman lithograph of a female nude and a 1962 pastel landscape by Jane Wilson. I'm not exactly sure where I'm going to hang them, but I'll figure out something. (The links, by the way, aren't to photos of the actual pieces--they're just to give you a taste of the artists in question.)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.
Posted January 28, 12:05 PM
TT: Ars longa, vita brevis
This just goes to show what happens when you pal around with a problem drinker.Posted January 28, 12:04 PM
TT: Almanac
"The Skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates and researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks he has found."Miguel de Unamuno, Essays and Soliloquies
Posted January 28, 12:03 PM
TT: Sleepless on the Lake Shore Limited
Some of you will recall that I was in Chicago a few weeks ago, visiting the shockingly beautiful Our Girl, admiring her Eames chair, and covering three new plays for The Wall Street Journal. I went there and came back to New York via Amtrak sleeper, and I wrote up the experience in a short essay published on the Arts & Leisure page of this morning's Journal: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.
Posted January 28, 12:02 PM
TT: Accuweather
I got back from the ballet at Lincoln Center about an hour ago. Barely. We're getting a lot of snow in Manhattan, and it doesn't look like it'll be going anywhere any time soon, either.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.
Posted January 28, 12:01 PM
TT: Worthwhile Canadian initiative
I just returned from Good Enough to Eat, my Upper West Side hangout, where I lunched with Sarah Weinman, whose blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, is one of my daily stopovers. Being Canadian, she was unfazed by our 10-inch snowfall (and polite enough not to mention my widely reported infirmity), and we chatted up a storm about life in the blogosphere. She went out drinking with Mr. TMFTML last night, but was largely unaffected by the ordeal, notwithstanding a certain hint of puce around the gills.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.)
Posted January 28, 4:56 AM
TT: Riding the rails
A reader writes, apropos of my piece in this morning's Wall Street Journal: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.
Posted January 28, 4:29 AM
January 27, 2004
TT: About time, too
Good news from The DVD Journal: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.
Posted January 27, 4:56 AM
TT: R.I.P.
First Captain Kangaroo, now Jack Paar. I guess this is what it means to be middle-aged, huh?UPDATE: Tom Shales filed a first-rate appreciation of Paar on deadline for the Washington Post. Read it here.
Posted January 27, 4:56 AM
TT: Incoming
I'm getting swamped with spam and suspicious-looking e-mail today, no doubt because of the virus that's currently going around the Web. So if you should feel like sending me (or OGIC) an e-mail:
(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.
Posted January 27, 1:47 AM
TT: We interrupt this program
No more blogging today, alas. I have two deadlines-for-money, one of them frighteningly pressing, followed by a night at the ballet, and Our Girl is tied up in double knots.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.
Posted January 27, 1:22 AM
TT: Elsewhere
Lileks has a way of tossing off a trenchant little nugget of arts criticism right in the middle of a Bleat about something completely different. Like yesterday: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.
Posted January 27, 1:21 AM
TT: Almanac
"Life grows more equable as one grows older; not less interesting, but I hope a little more impersonal. An old man ought to be sad. I don't know whether I shall be when the wind is west and the sky clear."Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Frederick Pollock, March 22, 1892
Posted January 27, 1:20 AM
TT: Mastery
I just this minute got back from the Village Vanguard, where I heard a special one-night-only old-fashioned "battle of the bands" in which the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra (which plays there every Monday night) squared off against Bob Brookmeyer's Europe-based New Art Orchestra, in town for the annual International Association for Jazz Education conference. Only there wasn't any battle, not really. The Vanguarders were on their mettle tonight, but Bob Brookmeyer is no ordinary bandleader.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.
Posted January 27, 1:15 AM
January 26, 2004
TT: In the belly of the beast
A reader writes, apropos of my posting on crowds at the Art Institute of Chicago's "Manet and the Sea":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.
Posted January 26, 12:05 PM
TT: Semi-pro
A reader writes: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.
Posted January 26, 12:04 PM
TT: Almanac
"Important! Fearful contemporary word, smacking of the textbook, the lecture-hall, the 'balanced appraisal.' So-and-so may be readable, interesting, entertaining, but is he important? Ezra Pound may be pretentious and dull, but you've got to admit that he's ever so important. What? You haven't read Primo Levi (in translation, of course)? But he's important. As the philosopher J. L. Austin remarked in another context, importance isn't important. Good writing is."Kingsley Amis, Memoirs
Posted January 26, 12:02 PM
TT: Sweet smell of obscurity
A reader writes: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."
Posted January 26, 12:01 PM
TT: Missing in action
Says Thomas Friedman: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.
Posted January 26, 12:00 PM
OGIC: Comfort deferred
Dear TT,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
Posted January 26, 3:28 AM
January 25, 2004
TT: Extreme ubiquity
As of this minute (literally), "About Last Night" is being read in fourteen time zones.That is just plain cool. Hello, Greenland! Hello, Brazil! Hello, world!
Posted January 25, 9:29 AM
TT: The continuing saga of Sunday
Now showing on my magic cable box, Garden of Evil (Gary Cooper, Richard Widmark, directed by Henry Hathaway, score by Bernard Herrmann) and Beat the Devil (Bogart, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre, Jennifer Jones, written by Truman Capote, directed by John Huston). I flip from one to the other every three or four minutes, which is easy to do with a digital video recorder. By now, the two movies are pretty thoroughly scrambled up in my head. That's quite a cinematic frittata.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?
Posted January 25, 8:14 AM
TT: But not for thee
Says Nat Hentoff: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.
Posted January 25, 4:39 AM
TT: Things I haven't done today (as of 3 p.m.)
(1) Shave.(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.
Posted January 25, 3:05 AM
TT: Emptying the mailbag
Here are some of the many interesting pieces of e-mail I've received in recent weeks:Steal at will! And thanks to you all for writing.
Posted January 25, 2:38 AM
TT: Still plumb tuckered
I'd planned on writing today, and maybe even going out to see a movie, but the truth is that I'm worn to the nubbin. I wrote too much and did too much this past week, and it's too cold outside this afternoon. I think maybe what I need to do is stay indoors and look at my new Arnold Friedman lithograph and catch up with some of the movies stored on my magic cable box.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.
Posted January 25, 1:56 AM
TT: Almanac
"I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness."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
Posted January 25, 1:55 AM
January 24, 2004
TT: Blogged out
I've written too much this week, here and elsewhere, and I'm not done yet, alas: I'll be going to New York City Ballet this afternoon to see Double Feature, Susan Stroman's new full-evening pop-music ballet, after which I intend to finish another chapter of my Balanchine book, or cry trying. So no more posts until Sunday, if then.Later.
Posted January 24, 12:12 PM
TT: Off duty
A reader writes: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?
Posted January 24, 12:10 PM
TT: Almanac
"Never have men had so many reasons to cease killing one another. Never have they had so many reasons to feel they are joined together in one great enterprise. I do not conclude that the age of universal history will be peaceful. We know that man is a reasonable being. But men?"Raymond Aron, "The Dawn of Universal History"
Posted January 24, 12:07 PM
January 23, 2004
TT: Alas, not by me
If you haven't yet seen Our Girl in Chicago's posting about current goings-on at the New York Times Book Review, click here to skip down and read it. In my humble opinion, she hits nail (A) on head (B).Posted January 23, 1:25 AM
TT: Waltzing in the Windy City
In this morning's Wall Street Journal I write about Chicago Shakespeare Theater's production of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music: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.
Posted January 23, 1:21 AM
TT: Almanac
"Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition."Pascal, Pensées
Posted January 23, 1:13 AM
TT: Centennial
Last night I went to the New York State Theater to watch New York City Ballet dance Apollo, Prodigal Son, and Serenade on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of George Balanchine. It was bitterly cold in Manhattan, but the house was still full of familiar faces: balletomanes and critics, aging ballerinas and budding bunheads, old friends of Balanchine and young choreographers looking for inspiration. Though I'd seen all three ballets danced the week before, I couldn't imagine staying home. I've witnessed most of the great occasions of state since Balanchine's death--the company's 50th-anniversary celebration, Suzanne Farrell's last Vienna Waltzes and Jerome Robbins' last bow, the memorial services for Robbins and Tanaquil Le Clercq, Balanchine's fourth wife--and so I thought it right to be on hand to celebrate the birthday of the man who opened my eyes to ballet 17 years ago.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.
Posted January 23, 1:06 AM
January 22, 2004
TT: That's all, folks (for the m-m-moment)
Absolutely no more stuff from me today. I've got to write, dawn to dusk (a review of Thomas Mallon's Bandbox and another chunk of my George Balanchine book), then it's off to Lincoln Center to watch New York City Ballet dance an all-Balanchine program on the 100th anniversary of the birth of the master.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.
Posted January 22, 12:03 PM
TT: Almanac
"That's all any of us are--amateurs. We don't live long enough to be anything else."Charlie Chaplin, screenplay for Limelight
Posted January 22, 12:02 PM
TT: The butler did it (not)
Says God of the Machine: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.
Posted January 22, 12:01 PM
OGIC: The bad news in brief
Poynter has the scoop on the direction the New York Times Book Review is likely to take under Chip McGrath's yet-to-be-named successor, and it ain't pretty for fiction readers.Posted January 22, 11:31 AM
OGIC: Fortune cookie
"It is still expected, though perhaps people are ashamed to say it, that a production which is after all only a 'make-believe' (for what else is a 'story'?) shall be in some degree apologetic--shall renounce the pretension of attempting really to represent life. This, of course, any sensible, wide-awake story declines to do, for it quickly perceives that the tolerance granted to it on such a condition is only an attempt to stifle it disguised in the form of generosity."Henry James, "The Art of Fiction"
Posted January 22, 8:07 AM
OGIC: Unfit to print
Now that I have a bit of a breather, a few more words on the Poynter piece I linked to in haste this morning. To be truthful, while I didn't like the news that the NYTBR will be moving away from fiction, I couldn't muster a lot of outrage about it either. For a while now, I've found myself more interested in noting which books they assign than in reading the reviews themselves. The reviews are sometimes as dull as reputed (with notable exceptions, of course). In addition to all the usual suspects listed to the right, I've been gravitating toward the Washington Post and Atlantic Monthly for reviews that I actually read. (Check out Michael Dirda's fun, hyper take on the new Elmore Leonard this week.)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 cove