About Last Night: March 2004 Archives

OGIC: A couple of ways of looking at Stevens

The New Republic has reprinted Delmore Schwartz's colorful and moving remembrance of Wallace Stevens, first published in the magazine in August 1955, a few weeks after Stevens' death.

In 1936 Stevens read his poems for the first time at Harvard--it was probably the first time he had ever read his poetry in public--and the occasion was at once an indescribable ordeal and a precious event: precious because he had been an undergraduate and a poet at Harvard some thirty-seven years before and had not returned since then, in his own person, although he had often gone to the Yale-Harvard games incognito. Before and after reading each poem, Stevens spoke of the nature of poetry, a subject which naturally obsessed him: the least sound counts, he said, the least sound and the least syllable. His illustration of this observation was wholly characteristic: he told of how he had wakened that week after midnight and heard the sounds made by a cat walking delicately and carefully on the crusted snow outside his house. He was listening, as in his lifelong vigil of awareness, for such phrases as this one, describing autumn leaves: "The skreak and skritter of evening gone"; no single one of thousands of such inventions is enough to suggest his genius for experience and language.

After his comment, Stevens returned to his typescript, prepared and bound for the occasion with a fabulous elegance which also was characteristic: but an old Cambrdige lady, holding an ear trumpet aloft, and dressed in a style which must have been chic at Rutherford Hayes' inauguration, shouted out, hoarse and peremptory as crows, that she must ask Mr. Stevens to speak loudly and clearly, loudly and clearly, if you please. She might just as well have been shouting at President Hayes. Stevens continued in a very low voice, reading poems which were written in that bravura style, that extravagant, luxurious, misunderstood rhetoric which is as passionate as the most excited Elizabethan blank verse. And throughout the reading, although Stevens was extremely nervous and constrained, this showed only as a rigid impassivity which, since it might have expressed a very different state of mind, made his feeling invisible; nevertheless, as such readings became more frequent in recent years, it was impossible to persuade Stevens that no one save himself perceived his overwhelming nervousness, just as, when the first reading ended, Stevens said to the teacher who had introduced him: "I wonder what the boys at the office would think of this?" The office was the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., the boys were those who knew him as a vice-president, lawyer, and the most solid of citizens.

No one who thought a poet looked pale, distracted, unkempt and unbarbered was likely to recognize Stevens: he was a physical giant, robust, red-faced, and his large round head suggested not only a banker and judge, but Jupiter. He said then and after that the boys would hardly be more shocked to discover him the secret head of an opium ring--and although I would guess that in this instance he may have mistaken tact for ignorance--the important point is that he felt sure that this was how others regarded a poet. He had written poetry for many years a kind of "secret vice;" and he told many stories about himself of the same kind, resorting to that self-irony which often marks his poetic style.

Where many commentators simply register Stevens' insurance gig as a gross incongruity and leave it at that, Schwartz does a nice job of showing how Stevens' unpoetlike bearing and work life, necessitating his cultivation of a separate solitude for his writing, were actually essential to his greatness as a poet.

If you're interested in more on Stevens, see this excerpt from a Helen Vendler lecture, where she works the Keats-Stevens angle. Vendler shows that Keats is more than just an influence on "Sunday Morning"--his great ode on death, "To Autumn," lives in Stevens' poem in ghostlike form.

Vendler pulls these lines from the last stanza of "Sunday Morning":

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Compare, from Keats:

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Keats wrote his poem after a Sunday morning walk in September 1819.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 1, 2004 5:42 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable. Someone who is translating into English a German novel, the hero of which is named Heinrich, will leave the name as is; he will not Anglicize it into Henry.

"The early epic poets, composing for an audience with the same mythology, heroic legends, topography as themselves, had half their poetic work done for them. Later, when the poet's audience became a cultured elite, their cultural background was still the same as his own: Milton, for example, could assume that any name taken from Greek and Roman mythology or from the Bible would be familiar to his readers. A modern poet, on the other hand, can hardly use a single proper name without wondering whether he ought not to footnote it. In 1933 I wrote a poem in which the name Garbo appeared, assuming, I think rightly, that at that time her name was a household word. When, after the War, Mr. Richard Hoggart included the poem in a selection he had made from my work, he felt it necessary to gloss the name."

W.H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 1, 2004 7:13 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"'He brought it on himself. After all, he's only got what he deserved.'

"'I think on the whole we all get what we deserve,' I said. 'But that doesn't prevent its being rather horrible.'"

W. Somerset Maugham, "The Lotus Eater"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 1, 2004 11:11 AM | Permalink

TT: In lieu of me

- Cinetrix has great links today on movie taglines and The Triplets of Belleville.

- The notorious Jennifer Howard is guest-blogging this week at Bookslut.

- Chicha blogged the Oscars.

- Finally, BuzzMachine has some really interesting new stats on blog use (plus a link to the original Pew Internet study from which they came).

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 1, 2004 11:33 AM | Permalink

TT: Omen

I just got word that A Terry Teachout Reader was reviewed in the current issue of Publishers Weekly.

Here's the money quote:

Woe to be an artist, writer, musician or fellow critic who incurs Teachout's wrath. In this hefty, erudite collection of essays and reviews from the past 15 years, Teachout (The Skeptic) turns his scathing wit on some of high culture's most sacred cows....This book is an impressive testament to Teachout's talents, eloquence and integrity.

How about that? Not bad for a first review.

The book isn't out until May, but you can pre-order it by going here.

Now, back to work! In the immortal words of Crash Davis, the moment's over....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 1, 2004 11:38 AM | Permalink

TT: And I missed it!

Tom Shales on the Oscars:

There was a time, perhaps when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, that actors and other winners at big award shows tried to come up with smart and clever remarks when they made their acceptance speeches. It was almost a competition in itself. The practice has dwindled to almost nothing. Mostly people come out and simply recite long, boring lists of names -- lists and lists of lists -- that ironically or not help make the program listless. There is probably no way the practice can be stopped, and winners will continue to thank their relatives, lawyers, first-grade teachers and anyone else whose name pops into their heads instead of attempting to be witty.

It is about as entertaining as watching Jell-O congeal, and it helps dispel whatever vestige of excitement remains in the doling out of the Oscars. The show was moved up earlier on the calendar this year in part because there are so many other programs handing out showbiz trophies on television. The Oscarcast should probably be put back where it was, because when it's the last or almost last of the award shows, it at least has a sort of climactic sensibility to it, and that helps one tolerate the torture....

Read the whole thing here. And as you do so, recall the prefaces to the last half-dozen non-fiction books you read, and resolve anew not to do likewise when you write the preface to your next book....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 1, 2004 11:58 AM | Permalink

TT: One more time

I'm in this morning's Wall Street Journal with a tribute to my favorite movie, now out on DVD:

"The Rules of the Game" is the greatest movie ever made--but it doesn't act that way. For much of its 106-minute length, Jean Renoir's masterpiece, filmed in France on the eve of World War II, plays like a chic bedroom farce in which a group of well-to-do Parisians spending a weekend in the country seek to sleep with persons not their spouses. Only toward the end does it become fully clear that high comedy is about to precipitate into violent tragedy, and that Renoir's true purpose (as he later acknowledged) was to portray a society he believed to be "rotten to the core." Small wonder that the film's 1939 premiere sparked a near-riot. The audience must have felt as if it had been slapped in the face. "The truth is that they recognized themselves," Renoir explained. "People who commit suicide do not care to do it in front of witnesses."...

One can never see a film like "The Rules of the Game" often enough. Indeed, I have returned to it more than once at times of great personal stress. I watched it, for instance, not long after 9/11, knowing that recent events would have cut yet another facet in its jeweled surface, and as I watched it yet again in the Criterion Collection's DVD version, I realized that I was seeing a requiem not merely for France but for Old Europe, exhausted by modernity and willing to pay any amount of Danegeld in order to be left alone.

No link, so go buy a copy of the Journal and turn to the "Leisure & Arts" page. I never cease to be amazed by the number of people who don't know that The Wall Street Journal has an arts page--and a damned good one, too. Believe it or not, the Journal isn't for rich people only, or even primarily.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 2, 2004 8:19 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

Gore Vidal, "Antipanegyric for Tom Driberg"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 2, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Words to the wise

The Brazilian-American jazz singer Luciana Souza, in whom "About Last Night" has taken a great interest from its first day onward, has a new CD coming out on April 6 called Neruda. It's a song cycle based on the poetry of Pablo Neruda and featuring Edward Simon on piano.

I wrote the liner notes:

If Luciana did nothing more than sing, she'd still be a miracle. But she also writes music, sometimes to her own graceful words, sometimes to those of poets who catch her curious ear. Neruda is an hour-long song cycle based on the poetry of Pablo Neruda and the piano pieces of Federico Mompou, sung in her Brazil-perfumed English (a language she speaks with the freshness and surprise of an explorer charting a new world) and as uncategorizably protean as everything else she does. "House" dances down the street in a sinuous 7/4, spurred on by her own deft percussion playing. "Poetry" has the concentration of an art song by Faur� or Copland. The long melody of "Tonight I Can Write..." unwinds like the slow course of the moon through the night sky....

Neruda will be performed live at Joe's Pub, the cabaret at the Public Theater, on four consecutive Fridays, April 9, 16, 23, and 30. All shows start at 9:30. You can buy tickets here. To make table reservations, call 212-539-8778. Plan ahead--some of these shows will sell out.

For more information about Luciana, go here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 2, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: In lieu of me (plus an invitation)

My editor at Harcourt sent me an e-mail this morning asking (v. politely) when the hell the Balanchine book would be finished. "Soon," I said.

As I continue to work on making that promise come true, amuse yourself here:

- Sarah's back from vacation.

- Franklin has posted some new watercolors. (One of these days I'm going to go to his studio and see his stuff in person, even if it is way the hell down in Maudland.)

- So far, Jennifer has mentioned one (1) blogger by First Name Only. I think she's getting the hang of this....

- Return of the Reluctant is boycotting M&Ms. I don't think I can go there--a life without M&Ms is unimaginable--but I approve.

- Finally, those of you who read artsjournal.com every morning already know about this:

ArtsJournal Live and In Person: Wonder what those ArtsJournal bloggers look like on the other side of that computer screen? Well, we wonder what you look like too. So Wednesday, March 3 at 6:30 pm, AJ editor Doug McLennan and seven of our AJ bloggers are getting together in New York City at the Landmark Tavern (11th and 46th), and you're invited. Greg Sandow, Terry Teachout, Jan Herman, Kyle Gann, Tobi Tobias, James Russell and John Perreault will all be there from about 6:30 on into the evening. Very informal - come talk ideas, arts and culture with us.

And for those of you who don't read artsjournal.com every day:

(1) Why not?

(2) Go here and do so.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 2, 2004 12:06 PM | Permalink

TT: We are the new black

Our new slogan:

"Three percent more evil than Old Hag (but slightly nicer than Cinetrix)."

(Needless to say, it's all Our Girl's fault.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 2, 2004 12:18 PM | Permalink

TT: Just in case you missed it the first time

Paul Taylor and Helen Frankenthaler open tonight in Manhattan (not together, alas). Go here to read last week's posting with details and links.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 2, 2004 12:22 PM | Permalink

TT: Small favors

Check out the right-hand column, where you'll find some new Top Five items and some new blogs listed in "Sites to See." I've also updated the "Teachout in Commentary" module with a new essay called "Kandinsky's Mistake."

I may not be blogging much this week, but I never stop thinking of you.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 3, 2004 1:21 AM | Permalink

TT: Mine aren't nearly that big

The Baltimore Sun's books page recently featured a symposium whose participants were asked what book they wished had never been written. Some of the answers were deadly serious (I picked Das Kapital, while several others opted for Mein Kampf), some funny (one person sent A Year in Provence to oblivion), but Joan Mellen covered herself in honor with this response:

A book that never should have been written is my own Kay Boyle: Author of Herself (1994). At 552 pages in minuscule publisher's revenge type, it is a loose and baggy monster of a biography. Kay Boyle's modest if decisive contribution to the modernist short story and to expatriate Twenties Paris could easily have been covered with force and simplicity in a neat biographical study of two hundred pages in length.

Give that woman a grant!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 3, 2004 1:34 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"It is said that the London police can always distinguish among the corpses fished out of the Thames, between those who have drowned themselves because of unhappy love affairs and those drowned for debt. The fingers of the lovers are almost invariably lacerated by their attempts to save themselves by clinging to the piers of the bridges. In contrast, the debtors apparently go down like slabs of concrete, without struggle and without afterthought."

A. Alvarez, The Savage God

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 3, 2004 3:19 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

Guess who? Don't peek:

"Just as we were all, potentially, in Adam when he fell, so we were all, potentially, in Jerusalem on that first Good Friday before there was an Easter, a Pentecost, a Christian, or a Church. It seems to me worthwhile asking ourselves who we should have been and what we should have been doing. None of us, I'm certain, will imagine himself as one of the Disciples, cowering in agony of spiritual despair and physical terror. Very few of us are big wheels enough to see ourselves as Pilate, or good churchmen enough to see ourselves as a member of the Sanhedrin. In my most optimistic mood I see myself as a Hellenized Jew from Alexandria visiting an intellectual friend. We are walking along, engaged in philosophical argument. Our path takes us past the base of Golgotha. Looking up, we see an all too familiar sight--three crosses surrounded by a jeering crowd. Frowning with prim distaste, I say, 'It's disgusting the way the mob enjoy such things. Why can't the authorities execute criminals humanely and in private by giving them hemlock to drink, as they did with Socrates?' Then, averting my eyes from the disagreeable spectacle, I resume our fascinating discussion about the nature of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful."

W.H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 3, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: In lieu of me

Yep, still writing about Balanchine, though I took time out this afternoon to write my Washington Post Sunday column--watch this space for linkage--and go see Frankenthaler: The Woodcuts, which was even cooler than I expected. I'll tell you all about it the first chance I get.

For now:

- Modern Art Notes skewers a clich�:

This reminded me of a line the WP's Blake Gopnik wrote a while back in a Gerhard Richter review: "Richter has done everything he could to question all the things that paint can do while proving that the ancient medium still has things to say."

As if the medium does the talking. The artist does the talking and makes the work, not the medium.

- Chicha is running dirty pictures of me (scroll down), plus a very naughty blogparody. She's on a roll.

- Reflections in D Minor goes to The Barber of Seville in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and has a revelation:

We had fun. That's the big secret about opera. It's actually fun. In order to enjoy a classical concert, it's probably necessary to feel some reverence for the music but opera is not just great music, it's a show. This is what people did for fun 200 years ago and it's still fun today.

- BuzzMachine on blognumbers:

I have more audience for this humble personal blog than I ever imagined I would have. But I will admit I had to adjust my own old, big media thinking about how big is big in the blog world. I've given this illustration before: Back before I was a hasbeen in a suit, I used to write for TV Guide and People, where -- according to the inflated readership numbers -- I supposedly had an audience of more than 20 million. Granted, there was no way to know how many skipped over, tore out, or spat upon my page but even taking away a large percentage, that's big, measured in millions. Then I started blogging for an audience measured in the low thousands. Felt small. But then one Sunday, I looked out on the congregation in my church and saw about 70 attentive faces looking up at the minister, who had worked darned hard -- much harder than any weblogger -- on his message to them. Is that audience big enough? Ask him and he'll tell that two or more gathering is big enough.

- 2 Blowhards parses the politics of spam:

Does the question of spam highlight the drawbacks of dogmatic libertarianism? I may be going off half-cocked here, but I think it might. In the material world, there's a standard way to deal with much bad behavior. You pass a law against it, you hire people to enforce the law. and you get on with life, provided you can live with complications and imperfect results. In the libertarian paradise that is the electronic world, things go "whoosh" in a way many people seem to think is swell. But the dealing-with-misbehavior thing is a serious, new-style headache. It seems that life online can mean being stuck forever attending to negotiations, to pricing and standards disputes, and to technological arms races. Who exactly is it who finds this desirable, let alone preferable?

- Finally, I'm sooooooo glad to read this:

The Big Mac, epitome of American culture and the junk food revolution, receives an unexpected thumbs up from two leading French nutritionists in a "good food guide" to supermarkets and fast food restaurants published today.

The relative fat-to-protein contents of a Big Mac is considerably healthier than classic French snacks such as quiche lorraine and better than many other sandwiches or fast foods on the market, the authors say....

Let �em eat Whoppers.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 3, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

OGIC: The mouse that roared

Today's Wall Street Journal contains a memorable sketch of the late William Shawn, longtime editor of The New Yorker. In 1966, Lucette Lagnado reports, New York Times reporter Murray Schumach turned out a long profile of Shawn and his magazine:

It was 5,500 words--far longer than the typical newspaper story. It contained some generous praise of Shawn, noting, for instance, the "perfection" of his editing. But there were also pointed criticisms: Some articles were much too long; the Talk of the Town section lacked its old bite; and there was a sense that even the renowned fiction was no longer cutting-edge. It was what a good newspaper piece is supposed to be--neither black nor white, neither a hatchet job nor a puff piece.

But Arthur Gelb, then deputy metropolitan editor of the Times, had, under pressure, agreed to give Shawn right of approval.

Shawn hated it. Though hate doesn't begin to capture the maelstrom of emotions that poured into the 11-page memo he sent to the Times in November 1966 after seeing the draft. He opens by damning the piece with faint praise, calling it "well-intentioned," possessing "merits of its own." He then he proceeds to demolish it--idea by idea, paragraph by paragraph, almost sentence by sentence. The article is "misleading," he declares. It "misses the point." It isn't so much what the reporter has written as what he has "not written." He has "missed the magazine," described "parts of its body (an arm and a leg perhaps)" but "left out the mind and the soul." And that represents only the first few lines of an opening paragraph that runs 2-1/2 pages.

But Shawn was just getting started. He devotes a page to summarizing the contents of his four most recent issues, listing the names of his renowned writers--Hannah Arendt, Janet Flanner, Alistair Cooke, Calvin Trillin. Then, the man described as timid and self-effacing asserts that these four issues surpass what is being done "in any other magazine in the world" and adds, parenthetically, "And they did not come about by accident."

The rest of the memo is a catalog of 37 alleged errors, delicately referred to as "some points of fact." They are more revealing of Mr. Shawn's obsessive, controlling persona than of any significant flaws in the Times piece. The weighty issue of The New Yorker's "philosophy" is at the top of his agenda. Mr. Schumach wrote benignly that the magazine "has a clear idea of its philosophy on editorial matters," and he goes on to quote Shawn's own succinct explanation of its essence: "We do not go beyond consulting our own judgment and tastes and what interests and pleases us," Shawn stated, adding that "The word 'reader' does not come up.

Although negotiations between Gelb and Shawn (nicknamed "The Iron Mouse" by staffers) dragged on for months, the Times was licked before it started. Arguing with Shawn, Gelb recalls, "was like arguing with butter." The story never made it into print. Surrender your dollar and read the whole saga.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 3, 2004 12:20 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"The Lyric Suite was my triumph--Constance's triumph, that is. I had liked Wozzeck at first hearing and Berg's violin concerto at the third or fourth: there was no reason I shouldn't like the Lyric Suite, as Constance said, and she had made up her mind that I was going to. Whenever she had dinner with us, whenever she came by in the evening, she held in her hand a long-playing record of the Lyric Suite, and once each time she played it to us. I would sit and read, sit and talk, sit and dream--at first. I have to admit, I'd sit and suffer; my wife suffered but did not sit--she would say with a vague sidelong smile, 'All that darning...Call me when it's over, Constance.'

"After four or five playings I was getting used to it, my wife did not get up and leave any longer: there were parts we liked very much better than other parts; three or four more times and we liked the other parts--we were, we found, crazy about the Lyric Suite: how could any of it ever have seemed hard to us? Constance was very polite, and didn't once say, 'When I was young I was the same way about it.' So far as the Lyric Suite is concerned, we had been foolish and young and Constance old and clever; and we were grateful to her for that best of gifts, a change in one's own self."

Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 4, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Too pooped to pop

Sorry, but I won't be blogging again until well into Thursday, if then. I wore myself out on Wednesday working on the Balanchine book and writing my Friday drama column for The Wall Street Journal, and instead of staying up late to work on "About Last Night," I've decided to play it smart and crash.

I do, however, want to briefly mention the Wednesday-night artsjournal.com get-together at the Landmark Tavern. Doug McLennan, the mastermind and boss of artsjournal.com, "About Last Night"'s blessed host, was in New York for a couple of days (he runs the site from Seattle), so he took the opportunity to convene all those New York-based AJ bloggers who had a couple of hours free to go drinking, plus any readers who cared to show up. We didn't expect a crowd, but we got one anyway, and I met a lot of very nice people, the same folks who send OGIC and me all that cool e-mail.

As I was getting ready to hit the road, one reader said to me, "You know, artsjournal.com will probably be a Big Institution in a couple of years, and all of us here tonight will probably look back on this get-together and say, 'Ah, yes, those were the days.'" We laughed. But he was right: these are the days, the dawn of a new medium, and all of you reading these words are a part of it. You're the postmodern counterparts of those prescient people who bought their first TV sets in 1948 and watched Toscanini and Milton Berle and Harry Truman and said to themselves, "I wonder what will come of this?"

And now...to bed. I have to finish Chapter Three. I have to get this place straightened up in time for Our Girl's arrival on Friday. I have to call my mother. I have to get some sleep. I have to pick an almanac entry. In lieu of me, go visit all those cool blogs in the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column. Do it yourself.

Later.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 4, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: In lieu of me

As of mid-afternoon Friday, the activities of "About Last Night" will be temporarily centralized. Our Girl in Chicago is en route for a three-day visit to see the Teachout Museum and other cultural goodies. She'll be doing a bit of blogging from here, and--brace yourself--her secret identity will be revealed to Supermaud in a ritual ceremony from which some participants may not return.

Me, I'll be hacking away all weekend at the you-know-what, just like always, though I plan to pry myself away from the iBook long enough to take OGIC to a couple of cool performances. You'll hear about it all in good time.

For now, here are some links to whisk you into the weekend:

- This one's spreading across the Web like kudzu, with (alas) good reason. From L.A. Observed:

Here's why reporters want newspaper corrections to make clear that an editor is at fault for an error introduced to their copy. Last week, the L.A. Times' Mark Swed filed a review of the opera "Die Frau Ohne Schatten" at the Music Center. He wrote that the Richard Strauss epic is "an incomparably glorious and goofy pro-life paean..." But when it ran in the paper, pro-life had been changed to anti-abortion.

Swed was reportedly mortified, since the opera is not remotely about abortion....

There's more--and believe it or not, it gets worse. Read the whole thing here.

In case you were wondering why I blog--and why the blogosphere is rapidly becoming a major center of serious arts writing--there's your answer.

- Says Reflections in D Minor:

I was fascinated with Bolero for a short time when I was just beginning to explore classical music but it quickly became boring and then seriously annoying. Now it is one of the few pieces of classical music that I truly hate....

Actually, Bolero is kind of cool, at least in theory. But I had to play the bass part in a college performance--the same two notes, over and over again, for about six weeks, or maybe ten--and since then I've been unable to listen to it.

- Courtesy of Cinetrix, a chunk of Alistair Macaulay's recent Times Literary Supplement piece about Fred and Ginger:

It's dismaying to see how often, even when a ballet is being broadcast live, camerawork chops up the dancing. Fred and Ginger, by contrast, really do dance several of their duets in a single take, some of them almost three minutes in length. In the annals of cinema, these takes should stand beside the finest feats of D.W. Griffith, Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles....

Is that perhaps coming it a bit high? Um...no.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 5, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Closing the Times was the end of his religious observance for the day. He wished real religion wasn't quite so damn impossible. There was a need for it that the Times didn't really fill."

Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 5, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Among the publicists

Would you go see any of these plays, based on the way they're described in their press releases?

- "A stylized, irreverent romantic comedy about loneliness and isolation � in which six awkward and impulsive innocents search for love with hilarious (and potentially hazardous) results."

- "This world premiere production explores the ways we change, the compromises we make, and the price we pay for our life choices."

- "A poignant and humorous study of three dynamic characters whose lives collide on an abandoned street corner in NYC."

I didn't think so. And I'm not going to. Sure, I may be missing something good, but a whole lot of plays are opening in New York at this time of year, on and off and off-off Broadway, and I can't even begin to see them all. Quite often I don't know anything about them except for what I read in the press release, and when I read drivel like that, MEGO MEGO MEGO. Multiply it by, oh...ten? Twenty? Anyway, multiply it by some figure in the low double digits and you'll start to see why being a drama critic isn't all champagne and roses.

Aside from which, nobody has ever sidled up to me and said in a tremulous baby-girl voice, "Oh, Mr. Teachout, I'd do anything to get a good review. Just...anything!" (Maybe I should put this URL in my Journal bio.)

Did somebody say life was fair?

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 5, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: The kids are all wrong

It's Friday--do you know where I am? In The Wall Street Journal, of course, holding forth on Lincoln Center's new production of King Lear, directed by Jonathan Miller and starring Christopher Plummer, plus an off-Broadway show, Tristine Skyler's highly touted The Moonlight Room.

Lear didn't do much for me:

I confess to not being much of a fan of Jonathan Miller, who has always struck me as rather too smart for his own theatrical good. That's more or less how I'd sum up this well-bred, largely uninvolving "Lear," which runs through April 18 on a limited schedule of performances. Shakespeare was no intellectual, and his plays don't benefit from "thoughtful" stagings. Mr. Miller may think he's given us a Shakespearean-style soap opera, but in his hands "King Lear" comes off more like a slide show on the perils of bad estate planning.

I had sharply mixed feelings about The Moonlight Room, but not about its young star:

As for Laura Breckenridge, she's definitely worth watching. Like Linda Cardellini in "Freaks and Geeks," the TV series that perfectly captured the same youthful anxieties Ms. Skyler has sought to put on stage, Ms. Breckenridge is a dark-eyed, tense-looking young woman whose very pores ooze adolescent angst. If she can play other parts as well as she plays this one, we'll be seeing more of her. Totally.

No link. Buy the damn paper, O.K.?

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 5, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Mute button

These three words, when used in the same paragraph, automatically turn my ears off:

(1) Offended

(2) Demand

(3) Apologize

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 5, 2004 12:40 PM | Permalink

TT: She's here!

Our Girl has landed at LaGuardia and is en route to the home office of "About Last Night" via psychotic cabby. Lunch will follow. Additional blogging will follow that. Paul Taylor will follow that.

In other news, I await the imminent arrival on my doorstep of the first finished copy of A Terry Teachout Reader. I held up the dust jacket at Wednesday's artsjournal.com get-together, and there were cheers. I'm hoping to be able to show off the Thing Itself to OGIC.

Watch this space for bulletins.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 5, 2004 12:41 PM | Permalink

TT: Primus inter pares

My recent Wall Street Journal piece about Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, which I declared to be the greatest movie ever made, has drawn quite a bit of reader mail. One person wrote to say that he preferred Jean Vigo's L'Atalante, and asked what I thought of it. Another wanted to know what my Top Five films were.

As it happens, Our Girl in Chicago gave me a DVD of L'Atalante for Christmas. I had to put it aside--things, as you know, have been a trifle hectic of late--so we decided to watch it together last night after coming home from Paul Taylor. The pairing turned out to be serendipitous, since L'Atalante, though it has dialogue, feels more like a silent film (which isn't necessarily surprising for a movie made in 1934). The words are mere props for the unfolding imagery, and most of them could have been flashed on title cards without impairing the overall effect. It's a perfectly lovely film, sweet and unaffected and very, very French, and it made me think of The Triplets of Belleville, another oh-so-French movie in which the journey matters far more than the arrival.

A keeper, in other words, though it didn't crash my Top Five list. David Thomson, who ranks it in his own Top Ten, catches its essential quality nicely: "It is love without spoken explanation, unaffected by sentimental songs; but love as a mysterious, passionate affinity between inarticulate human animals. A fairy tale about plain, even ugly people, its intensity is always to be found in its images." All true, which probably explains why I still prefer The Rules of the Game to L'Atalante. I'm a writer, after all, and I've never doubted for a moment that the place of words in non-silent film is pivotal, far more so than most film theorists are prepared to admit.

Whit Stillman, who makes wonderfully talky movies, once said to me:

Some visual purists still think film is pictures at an exhibition. They seem to forget that we've been making sound films ever since the Twenties. Talk is incredibly important....Of course you have to be very careful with it, and I understand why all the screenwriting gurus warn against too much dialogue, but I think they're making a mistake. Even action films often have very good dialogue, though there isn't necessarily a lot of it. What's the charm of a buddy comedy? Just to see two guys shooting bullets? It's what the two guys say to each other that matters.

I agree. When I want to immerse myself in wordless narrative, I listen to a symphony or look at a plotless ballet. This isn't to say that wordlessness can't be a tremendously effective device in narrative filmmaking (remember the first scene in Rio Bravo?), but it is a device, an effect, not the normative condition of the medium. Exceptions don't prove or test a rule: they define it. Jerome Robbins once made a terrific ballet without music called Moves--but he only did it once. Similarly, moving pictures cried out for sound, and once it came, the silent movie vanished overnight. I don't think that was a historical accident, much less a mistake.

And what about that Top Five list? Well, I don't know whether I really care to oblige my curious correspondent. In my experience, it's usually not that hard to pick a One Best--absolute excellence is by definition self-evident--but no sooner do you venture below the pinnacle than all sorts of other factors crowd into your viewfinder. When Time asked me to pick the best dance of the 20th century, for instance, I didn't have to think twice before choosing George Balanchine's The Four Temperaments, but I found it much harder to decide on two runners-up, though I finally opted for Paul Taylor's Esplanade and Antony Tudor's Jardin aux Lilas. Up to a point, the problems of choice multiply as the list grows longer, though eventually they subside. I suspect that most serious moviegoers' lists of the 50 greatest films (as opposed to their 50 personal favorites) would overlap substantially, but their Top Ten lists would wander all over the map.

For me, The Rules of the Game is the obvious Greatest Movie Ever Made, and I expect a lot of other critics would agree with me, or at least consider it a completely plausible candidate. Beyond that, I have my doubts. Right at this moment--and no other--I'd be inclined to follow it up with Citizen Kane, Vertigo, The General (a silent film, please note!), and...er, um...I don't know. The Searchers? His Girl Friday? Chinatown? I simply can't tell you. The greatest opera ever written is The Marriage of Figaro, except when it's Falstaff, but what's the fifth greatest? That's a party game, and a good one, and if you're in the right mood it's also a way of clarifying your own feelings about art--but nothing more.

I'll end by quoting myself. This is a snippet from "Living with Art," the essay I wrote for Commentary about my collection of prints:

Living with art teaches you things about the criteria of quality that cannot be learned in any other way, things I am still in the process of learning. If I had to guess--and it is nothing more than that--I would say the finest piece I own is Milton Avery's March at a Table, closely followed by Isle au Haut and Piazza Rotunda. But there are many times when I would rather look at Grey Fireworks, Stuart Davis' jazzy Any as Given, or the gossamer untitled Wolf Kahn monotype that now hangs over my mantelpiece. This never-ending cycle of looking and experiencing is one of the most instructive aspects of living with art. To see a painting or print on a daily basis is to learn from hard experience what makes some works of art durable and others ephemeral. Experienced collectors speak of how certain paintings "go dead on the wall," meaning that their appeal fades over time and with familiarity. So far, all 15 of my pieces are still alive and well, but I never cease to be fascinated by how my preference for one over another shifts from day to day.

So it is with the making of Top Five lists as with the watching of L'Atalante and The Triplets of Belleville: all the fun is getting there.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 6, 2004 1:13 AM | Permalink

TT: Debutante

Supermaud is in tomorrow's Washington Post Book World. Go see.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 6, 2004 1:38 AM | Permalink

TT: The value of everything

I've mentioned it before, but I can't plug the Inflation Calculator often enough. It's a Web site that allows you to adjust for inflation any given amount of money (in American dollars) in any year between 1800 and 2002, in either direction. If that sounds boring, think again. I use the Inflation Calculator at least once a week in my work, and I can't tell you how many times I used it in writing The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken.

Here's an example: I was reading a biography of Benny Goodman this morning, in which it was mentioned in passing that Goodman paid Cootie Williams, one of the top trumpeters of the Swing Era, $200 a week in 1940. O.K., fine--but go to the Inflation Calculator and within seconds you'll know that in today's dollars, Williams made $2,493.29 a week, or $129,651.08 a year. That's pretty serious money now, even more so for a black jazz trumpeter playing with a white dance band in 1940...and you didn't really know how good a salary it was, did you?

That's what makes the Inflation Calculator so useful to anyone writing about the arts. Unless you're an economist, you're likely to have only the haziest notion of what a dollar was worth in 1940, or 1840, or even 1975. (What cost $200 in 1975 cost $701.80 in 2002. Surprised?) Yet that kind of information is indispensable to understanding the implications of, say, a novel about life in 1940, or a biography of a painter that tells how much a particular canvas sold for in 1928. It changes the way you think about the past.

Enough said? Bookmark the Inflation Calculator today. Use it. You can always find it in the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 6, 2004 2:01 AM | Permalink

TT: In lieu of us

Our Girl (who says hi) and I just got back from seeing the Paul Taylor Dance Company perform Taylor's Sunset, Dream Girls, and Promethean Fire at City Center. If you're in New York, go. If not, eat your heart out.

We'll both be blogging about tonight's performance at some point in the next day or two, but not just yet. Aside from having a lot of catching up to do, we're planning to watch L'Atalante before crashing.

In the meantime, here are a few fresh links for you to chew on:

- SlowLearner looks at the high cost of playgoing in New York from the perspective of a budding playwright:

Sometimes reading Time Out New York puts me in despair. One of the reasons I moved to New York was all the theater, right? Just about everything goes up here at some point. I can catch everything, see what everybody is up to - a nonstop showroom of all the latest thoughts and innovations in playwriting, staging, design, and performance.

Of course they all cost about sixty dollars.

Okay, that's not fair. I go to plays all the time that cost fifteen dollars. Showcases, Off-Off-type stuff. Some of which is terrific. But I'm always aware when I'm paying fifteen dollars to get into a play that I'm about to see one of those labors of love that will lose the laborers themselves at least several hundred dollars and probably several thousand.

So I understand why the producers of new plays by Tracy Letts, Doug Wright, Nicky Silver, Alice Tuan, Charles L. Mee, Wallace Shawn, A.R. Gurney, Bryony Lavery, Howard Korder, Craig Lucas, or Paul Rudnick might want to charge a bit more than fifteen dollars admission. They're trying to run a business. (No snickering in the back, please.)

Here's the thing: between the basic expenses of my existence, the non-theater things I do for fun, the occasional steep requirements like air travel, shoes, or dental work, and the various fifteen dollar plays I attend because the people in those plays came and saw my fifteen dollar play, I can really only go to one of these $50-60 deals about once every six weeks....

- Superfluities, another playwright-blogger, has a funny take on my posting from yesterday on bad theatrical press releases:

As a former publicist myself, I see his point about the hopelessly reductive nature of a press release which has the potential of rendering the most sublime into the most banal. Who would see these plays?

* Two homeless men wait for a man who never comes. Then they do it again.

* A family of actors sits around talking for four-and-a-half hours before they're interrupted by their drug-addict mother.

* An architect falls in love with a girl a third his age, then jumps off the roof of a church.

* A Danish prince can't decide who to kill, then kills everybody. (This world premiere production explores the ways we change, the compromises we make, and the price we pay for our life choices.)

O.K., I give up--point taken!

- While we're in a theatrical mood, here's a story from the New York Post that needs no comment from me:

For the glittering first-night audience at "Fiddler on the Roof" last week, the sudden death of Jerome Robbins' sister just before the curtain went up was a terrible tragedy.

But for the show's musicians, it was a chance to grab some overtime.

In what is surely the most ridiculous example of union overreach since the stagehands used to make producers pay for someone to raise the curtain on shows that had no curtain, the musicians at "Fiddler" have put in for overtime for the opening-night performance, which was delayed due to Sonia Cullinen's death in the theater that night.

According to union rules, if a performance runs more than three hours, musicians are entitled to overtime. "Fiddler" was supposed to begin at 6:30 p.m., but it was delayed for almost an hour as paramedics tried to revive Cullinen, 91, who had collapsed in the aisle....

All together now: eeuuww!

See you tomorrow. Jean Vigo awaits.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 6, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Ballet is the one form of theater where nobody speaks a foolish word all evening--nobody on the stage at least. That's why it becomes so popular in any civilized country during a war."

Edwin Denby, Dance Writings

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 6, 2004 12:27 PM | Permalink

TT: Weekend update

Our Girl and I had a quadruple-header yesterday. Not only did we go see "Frankenthaler: The Woodcuts" and Sweeney Todd and have a pre-dinner drink with Beatrice, but we came home so full of energy that we decided to watch a movie, too. She'd never seen The Fabulous Baker Boys, to my astonishment (it's only one of my all-time favorite films), so that was our choice. I'll leave it to her to describe all these events, but later: Supermaud is en route to the Teachout Museum, and we expect to hear her knock on the door at any moment.

In the meantime, please note that the diminutive Ms. Newton isn't the only blogger to be publishing in the Washington Post this morning: this is also the appointed day for "Second City," my monthly Post column about the arts in New York City. You can read it on line by going to the "Second City" module in the right-hand column and clicking on the appropriate link.

Oops, there she is. Time for OGIC to remove her silken mask....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 7, 2004 10:11 AM | Permalink

TT and OGIC: Survey says

We've now looked at all the e-mail sent in response to our recent request that the readers of "About Last Night" write to tell us how often and when they read this blog.

Most of you, it turns out, read us daily, and most of our daily readers visit "About Last Night" more than once a day. No particular time of day stood out in your responses, though our Site Meter says that our peak hours coincide roughly with lunchtime. We can see the wave of fresh hits rolling across the U.S. time zones between noon and three p.m. each weekday.

Most bloggers don't post on weekends, but we started doing it several months ago and have kept it up. Comparatively few of you, however, read us on Saturdays and Sundays, a fact we already knew from the Site Meter. Even so, we still draw roughly 1,500 page views each weekend, which is unexpectedly high. (All told, "About Last Night" received about 44,000 page views in February.)

Though neither one of us uses an RSS feed, we decided to make our postings available via XML syndication, but so far it seems that very few of you read "About Last Night" via RSS, and three or four readers wrote to say that they didn't know what it was. (To find out, go here.)

One of the reasons we asked you to write was to find out whether it makes sense for us to continue posting every day. It isn't easy, but judging by your e-mail, it's definitely worth the trouble. Frankly, we were astonished by the number of daily communicants. So we'll keep our noses to the grindstone (though we might slack off a bit on weekends, if you don't mind).

Finally, we want to share these snippets from the mail you sent us:

- "I'm a regular reader, usually during my lunch hour. Your cultural conversations with the cerebral pin-up OGIC makes each work day go easier."

- "first thing in the west coast morning I check for email, then jump to the browser and read your blog later in the day, sometimes several times, and especially when i'm procrastinating, i check to see if anything new has been posted daily? yes -- even on weekends, and even when you say you won't be posting cuz you're writing for $ or sleeping or..."

- "I think I first found my way there via TMFTML, but as a Chicagoan it may have been through something about Our Girl--I can't quite remember."

(We shudder to think which of Mr. TMFTML's postings brought you from there to here!)

- "Here's my online routine every morning: First, check my e-mail, even though I don't need a penis enlarger, either. Then, look at the day's Dilbert column, see what's being reviewed at Classics Today, scope out the new stuff at ArtsJournal, and from there see what you and Our Girl have posted in the past 24 hours....I scroll through other blogs only very rarely, because I just don't have that kind of time. I do occasionally follow one of your links, but frankly I'd rather settle in for five or six or ten of your solid paragraphs than devote a few precious seconds of my time to the shorter and generally less substantial posts that typify much of what I've seen of blogdom. In other words, what I prefer to read on the screen more closely resembles what I'd find in a magazine or newspaper than a blurb on a book's dust jacket."

- "I try to read artsjournal.com everyday that I'm in my office (three days a week) � but sometimes I forget (I have a small infant � she has rendered my brain into mush). Thanks for requesting this information � it was a kick in the pants to me to drop you a note � I love your blog (and I love artsjournal.com)."

- "Within weeks of having discovered it, I'd read through the entire archive. (Certainly, I'm a natural-born completist, but the stimulating and witty entries kept me clicking happily and recommending the latest entries to my friends.)"

- "I read every day, usually late afternoon to early evening. I was coming only Monday through Friday until I realized that you both were submitting on weekends as well."

- "Last week I was in Japan on business, and the hotel had high speed access. Jet lag being what it is, I found myself reading ALN and other blogs at all different times of the day checking in way too many times. The internet became a touchstone."

- "I read AJ here in Rome, Italy ca. 8:15 A.M. local, daily, for ca. 30 mins. Have gotten hooked; big letdown when there's nothing to read or, alternatively, too much for the half-hour. Also appreciate the links."

- "I read daily M-F, directly, and more or less first thing upon arrival in the office (I check big headline news, read the blog, check one or two other things and then start work - as a lawyer I work when I have to, nights and weekends included, so a few minutes at the start of the day doesn't take time away from a client). If I don't have an early Friday breakfast meeting I read the WSJ Weekend Journal (your reviews included) at home over breakfast and then skim the blog at work. Sometimes I read what I want or all of it immediately, often I'll come back at lunch or during an afternoon break to read something that looked good but too long to read in the am. I have once or twice copied particularly good quotes and put them in my Palm memopad for later laughter or to remind myself that there is more to life than [whatever else I'm doing at the moment]."

- "Daily. In the morning. Before starting the painting for day, while slurping a bowl of cheerios. With an occasional afternoon or evening peek, if I need to get away from the canvas for a bit."

- "Old Manhattanite far from home. Thanks for being there and talking to us out here."

- "This started out so simply: �why sure, i check in every Tuesday and Friday am, scrolling back to check what i've missed' was what i started out to say. Then i started candidly reflecting back on how often i bopped into aboutlastnight two or three times a day -- when a subject seemed of interest and the thread continued on a theme. Or when you've gone back to Missouri, and i've gotten �sucked in' to the narrative that reflected a swath of my east central Ohio rural ambiance, checking daily if not more frequently. So the true answer is: twice a week, except when i don't, and then it's more often."

- "I read you guys's blog every work day (Tuesday thru Saturday), one of nine sites I visit daily. I go through them in a regular order, so yes, I'm reading it the same time every day (10ish, Eastern), and I have been since ALN Day One. Keep up the good work!"

- "Under normal circumstances, I visit your excellent blog every morning. When I am avoiding my own work, I visit it later in the day, as well."

- "First thing each day, usually...Sometimes I check later in the day to see if there's anything new. If I have to go a day or two I get withdrawal symptoms."

- "I tend to log on once a day, directly; generally in the morning, when I've finished gathering and responding to e-mail, but sometimes if I'm checking mail late in the day I'll check ALN too. Just to see if there are any thoughts in the blogosphere that would augment dinner-table conversation.... There almost always are."

- "I read you every morning while slurping coffee at my desk. Not Starbucks, which is scorched and trendy, but home ground good stuff. The closest Starbucks is 35 miles away, which means that we are so far from the caffeine renaissance that we've reached the enlightenment."

- "I read About Last Night whenever I can think of it, which comes close to almost daily. (Yes, we have the RSS-feed technology, but somehow I prefer the serendipity of coming to ALN via a link in another blog, or seeing ALN in a recently updated weblogs list, or just plain surfing.) If I miss a day, all the better...it means a bigger chunk of good stuff to sit down and enjoy."

- "I follow About Last Night through your RSS feed. I find it very annoying, however, that your feed provides only the headline. Since Arts Journal doesn't seem to carry advertising, is there any reason why you can't provide full text, or at least the first paragraph, in your feed as most other sites do?"

(We'll pass this on to the Gearhead-in-Chief at artsjournal.com.)

- "So sad when you guys take a day off...."

- "It is a phenomenon of blogging that you begin to think you are on personal terms with bloggers you read every day. For example, I find myself remarking often to my wife something like, �Terry has the flu so he's in bed watching old movies instead of posting.' I'm wondering if other readers have the same feeling that they know their favorite bloggers. At any rate, I am glad to have you as a daily internet friend."

Needless to say, we feel exactly the same way about all of you.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 7, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Paging George Washington

O.K., who sent me the cherry sapling? I want an answer and I want it now.

'Fess up, please.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 7, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day. We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves."

Orson Welles, This Is Orson Welles

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 7, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Labor-saving device

I wrote enthusiastically a couple of weeks ago in The Wall Street Journal about the new Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof, which I found both convincing and moving. My critical brethren, however, varied widely in their views of the show, and not a few of them found the tone of the production to be insufficiently Jewish. This struck me as wrongheaded--especially since some of the critics in question were about as Jewish as pastrami on white with mayo--and I resolved to write something about it. Then I saw that Blake Eskin of Nextbook, an online magazine about "Jewish literature, culture and ideas," had beaten me to the counterpunch:

Peter Marks of the Washington Post, whose critique of the ensemble's pronunciation of mazel tov places him firmly in the chorus of authenticity-seekers, suggests a deeper reason for their fierce disapproval. "In the secular Jewish home of my childhood, about the closest we ever came to spiritual sustenance was Fiddler on the Roof," he writes. The original cast album was in heavy rotation on the Marks family hi-fi; his father sang "If I Were a Rich Man" in the car; his brother played Tevye at summer camp. "Anyone expecting an experience that reenergizes a connection stretching back four decades will be sorely disappointed," he says.

For Marks, I suspect, and for his contemporaries weaned on Fiddler, the real problem with this production is not its thin Yiddish flavor, but its failure as ritual, its inability to trigger warm memories of childhood. It's as if he's returned to his old bedroom, found a new blanket on the bed, and decided that the mattress isn't as cozy as it once was. The problem is, it will never be as comfortable as the one you remember....

Read the whole thing here, please. I couldn't have put it better. Now I needn't try.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 8, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: She knew she was right

At lunch with Supermaud on Sunday, the talk turned to editors and publishers, and I mentioned a letter Flannery O'Connor sent in 1949 to an editor at Rinehart who wanted her to rewrite Wise Blood. Neither Maud nor Our Girl knew about this letter, so I promised to post it. Here it is:

Thank you for your letter of the 16th. I plan to come down next week and I have asked Elizabeth McKee to make an appointment with you for me on Thursday. I think, however, that before I talk to you my position on the novel and on your criticism in the letter should be made plain.

I can only hope that in the finished novel the direction will be clearer, but I can tell you that I would not like at all to work with you as do other writers on your list. I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I writer will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from. I do not think there is any lack of objectivity in the writing, however, if this is what your criticism implies; and also I do not feel that rewriting has obscured the direction. I feel it has given whatever direction is now present.

In short, I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not be persuaded to do otherwise. The finished book, though I hope less angular, will be just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you have now. The question is: is Rinehart interested in publishing this kind of novel?

Rinehart wasn't, and Wise Blood was published by Harcourt, Brace three years later. Ignored by most critics, it has long since been recognized as a modern American classic, one of the comparatively few American novels of permanent interest to be written in the Fifties...but who knew? Imagine the self-assurance it must have taken for an unknown, unpublished author to have sent a letter like that to an editor at a major house.

Me, I can't imagine it--but, then, I didn't write Wise Blood, either.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 8, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Litmus test

Felix Salmon, writing at MemeFirst, had an interesting reaction to a recent posting in which, among other things, I discussed the difficulties inherent in drawing up Top Five lists:

Terry Teachout, today, says that "it's usually not that hard to pick a One Best--absolute excellence is by definition self-evident". He goes on to give examples: "The greatest opera ever written," he says, "is The Marriage of Figaro". To which my immediate reaction is "That's not the greatest opera ever written � it's not even the greatest opera ever written by Mozart!"

Upon reflection, however, I think that Terry might have stumbled across yet another instance of the age-old Apollonian/Dionysian distinction. Most people think of this as the Beatles vs the Stones, but there are definitely advantages to using a single artist rather than two very different ones in order to force people into one camp rather than the other. Here's my theory, then: if you prefer Figaro to Don Giovanni, you're Apollonian; if you prefer Don Giovanni to Figaro, you're Dionysian.

Well, maybe. In fact, probably--but only up to a point, Lord Copper. Don Giovanni is definitely more Dionysian than Figaro, but surely all of Mozart's music, Don Giovanni included, is Apollonian by comparison with, say, Rigoletto or La Boh�me or Yevgeny Onegin, not to mention the Beatles and the Stones.

Nevertheless, Felix's distinction is a reasonable one. The Marriage of Figaro is a comedy of reconciliation, one in which the natural order of the world is first threatened, then restored. It has the wholeness and perfection of Shakespearean comedy, as does (logically enough) Verdi's Falstaff, which is my other candidate for Best of All Possible Operas. So does George Balanchine's The Four Temperaments. So does all classical art--and comedy and classicism go hand in hand.

Alas, we live in a hopelessly Dionysian age, and thus are inclined to underrate classicism, just as too many of us too often take it for granted that "seriousness" demands unhappy endings, or misunderstand what Matisse meant when he said that he wanted his work to serve as "a kind of cerebral sedative as relaxing in its ways as a comfortable armchair," a remark as subtle and misleading as T.S. Eliot's observation that Henry James had "a mind so fine no idea could violate it." You have to think hard about both remarks to understand how profound they are, just as you have to look hard at Matisse's paintings to see how radically original they are.

As for the Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy, I was writing about it just the other day in the chapter of my Balanchine book that describes (surprise) Apollo, Balanchine's first collaboration with Stravinsky and his first great ballet:

Apollo can also be seen as an "argument" for the superiority of Apollonian neoclassicism over Dionysian expressionism, a prime example of what the art critic Clement Greenberg had in mind when he advocated "the development of a bland, large, balanced, Apollonian art in which passion does not fill in the gaps left by the faulty or omitted application of theory but takes off from where the most advanced theory stops, and in which an intense detachment informs all."

Not surprisingly, I love that quote. But if you don't--if, indeed, it strikes you as an apt summing-up of the kind of modern art you like least--then you're sooooo Dionysian.

(And yes, I prefer the Beatles to the Stones.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 8, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

He who wills great things must gird up his loins;
only in limitation is mastery revealed,
and law alone can give us freedom.

Goethe, "Natur und Kunst" (trans. David Luke)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 8, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Postcard from NY

You'll excuse me, I hope, for not posting extensively, or nearly at all, during my vacation. But I did want to take a few of my last moments here to blow New York kisses to all. What a long, strange trip it's been--except for the long and the strange parts. It's been maddeningly brief, and wonderfully familiar despite the two-and-a-half-year gap since the last time I was in town.

To get here Friday I braved high winds and heavy rain in the fragile carapace of a mini-jet from which four souls had been evicted due to weight concerns. Even more distressing, the book I had intended to read was very, very bad. Excruciating. I can't be more specific just now, as I'm going to be reviewing it. Suffice it to say that after 25 pages I put the offending volume away--oh so far away, into the very depths of my carry-on--and submitted myself with relief to the potent charms of Shirley Hazzard's Transit of Venus, which I've been reading very intermittently for a few months now.

I don't believe it has ever taken me so long to read a book that I find so pleasurable. Weeks may have passed, but every time I pick it up again, everything snaps back into place and I'm instantly absorbed, the picture of a happy reader. In January, when I was on page 75, I suggested to a friend that he pick up a copy and we read it together. He also loved it, but he zipped right through, and six weeks later I'm still in the middle. We had a drink before dinner tonight and talked about how much we both adored it. But the embarrassing fact remains that I can't seem to finish it. (See also Cup of Chicha's inventory of the unfinished books on her floors.) Which leads me to scare up alternatives to the unsettling theory that I am just a hopeless slacker.

Alternative theory #1 cites the quality of Hazzard's prose. You could never call it dense; there's nothing the least bit tangled about it, and the sentences in particular are crystalline things. But every second or third sentence seems to contain some startlingly astringent perception about no less sweeping a subject than human nature, or love, or women, or men. I find myself reading almost every sentence a second time successively. It's the first book I've ever read and reread simultaneously. Is it possible to compare something to quicksand and mean it as praise?

Alternative theory #2 is simply that I don't want to reach the end of the novel.

But I may get a lot closer to that point during the flight home tomorrow (depending, perhaps, on how soon I wrap this up and get to bed). And later this week, beginning late Monday or Tuesday, I'll be posting a series of Transit of Venus fortune cookies. Also more on the delightful events of this weekend.

Till then.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 8, 2004 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: In lieu of me

Our Girl is back in Chicago (sigh) and I'm back at work on the Balanchine book. I'm also plumb tuckered--we had a busy weekend, without a whole lot of down time, in addition to which I've got two pieces and a speech to knock off between now and Friday. For all these reasons, I doubt I'll have much to offer for the rest of the week, though I'll poke my head in whenever possible.

In the meantime, here are some interesting links that merit your attention:

- The New York Sun's Knickerbocker column visited last week's artsjournal.com get-together and filed a report:

At the bar at Landmark Tavern in Midtown, Doug McLennan this week greeted a crowd of about 75 who avidly follow his Web site, Artsjournal.com, a weekday digest of arts and cultural journalism. The Seattle resident was in town with plans to meet some of the Web loggers for his site -- James Russell, Tobi Tobias, Kyle Gann, Jan Herman, Greg Sandow, and Terry Teachout -- and decided to invite general readers as well. An invitation on the home page read,"Wonder what your favorite ArtsJournal blogger looks like on the other side of that computer screen?"

"It's like a blind date," said one attendee who was standing at the mahogany bar, originally built in 1839 and cut from a single tree....

- My December posting about the plight of the Metropolitan Opera's Saturday-afternoon radio broadcasts kicked up a royal fuss. The fuss has died down, but the company is still on the spot, as Robin Pogrebin of the New York Times reports:

The Metropolitan Opera plans to ask the public to help save its venerable Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts after losing the support of its longtime sponsor, ChevronTexaco, and being rebuffed by other corporations that had been asked to pick up the slack.

Beverly Sills, chairwoman of the Met, is going on the air today during the intermission of a broadcast of "La Traviata" to, asking listeners worldwide to help the Met raise $150 million over the next five years....

ChevronTexaco announced in May that it would withdraw its $7 million annual support of the broadcasts after the 2003-4 season, ending the longest continuous commercial sponsorship in broadcast history. The company has been the sole sponsor of the program since 1940, presenting operas without commercials except for references to the company in the commentary. (Chevron bought Texaco for $36 billion in 2000.)

Ms. Sills said she was not optimistic about finding another company to replace ChevronTexaco, which had footed the program's entire bill. "I think in these times it's unrealistic," she said.

Joseph Volpe, general manager of the Met, who recently announced that he would retire in two years, said the search for another corporate sponsor had been difficult. "The corporate community looks at the radio broadcasts and doesn't believe it's a good media buy, that we don't reach enough listeners," Mr. Volpe said yesterday. "They are better off having commercials on big sporting events."...

- Speaking of the Met, Luciano Pavarotti is singing his farewell performances there, and the Times' Anthony Tommasini caught the first one. He minces few words:

Physically he has never seemed heavier. Bad knees and bad hips have made him almost immobile. As he lumbered about the stage, sometimes propped up by his Tosca, the soprano Carol Vaness, you wondered why he was subjecting himself to the ordeal of a staged performance.

When Cavaradossi is shot by a firing squad at the end of the opera, poor Mr. Pavarotti had to sink slowly into a pile of beanbags, bracing his fall with his arms outstretched.

Vocally, once in a while there was a flash of that incomparable Pavarotti sound, a supplely shaped legato phrase, a honeyed pianissimo. He roused himself for a couple of ringing cries of "Vittoria! Vittoria!" in Act II. But after sending the sustained high note into the balconies, his voice essentially gave out for the rest of Cavaradossi's outburst against the villainous Scarpia, the bass Samuel Ramey....

Mr. Pavarotti had already been having vocal troubles when he rallied in 1998 for a gala performance at the Met to celebrate his 30th anniversary. He had lost nearly 70 pounds and had worked hard to get in vocal shape. Though his voice that night was a little underpowered, he essentially sounded great and performed with joy. It would have been an ideal time to take his leave from opera.

No fooling. I spent the last few years of my tenure as the classical music and dance critic of the New York Daily News covering what I thought of as the Pavarotti Deathwatch, attending his increasingly insecure performances just in case something catastrophic went wrong. It didn't--not quite--but once I left the News, I vowed never again to see Pavarotti in person. My memories of his great days had already been blotted beyond repair. Nothing becomes an artist quite like knowing when to quit.

- O.K., Banana Oil, since when is it April 1?

Mostly unkown today, Mortimer Brewster was a widely read drama critic on the New York scene in the 1920s and 1930s, somewhat analogous to Terry Teachout today: smart, sharp-tongued, with a grander vision of what was possible than most of the producers of his day....

My brother doesn't look a bit like Boris Karloff.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 9, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Top 500

A regular reader was stimulated by my recent list of favorite movies to reflect on her own picks:

I think you're absolutely right about top 5 vs. top 50 film lists. It's a funny thing. Over the years I've compiled many a top 10 film list, and over the years the list has changed many times over. "Rules of the Game" is certainly one of the greatest movies ever made, and has been on my top 10 list a lot. There are many films that I need to see again to decide whether they still warrant a spot on the list or even a spot on the top 50. There is only one film; however, that has been on every top 10 list I have ever made. It has never, ever been number 1, but it has always been somewhere on the list. I have seen the film countless times over the years, and I saw it again a couple of summers ago at the Film Forum, and it stays on the list. The film is "The Seven Samurai." I love that movie. It is not the greatest movie ever made, but it is always, always, always on my top 10 list. I love that movie every time I see it.
"Chinatown" often makes the list. "The Searchers" has been on the list. "Vertigo" - as much as I love it - nah! "North by Northwest" - yes. "The General" is one of the greatest films ever made. I only remember to include it after I've seen it, but every time I see it, I rewrite my list! "His Girl Friday" is nearly perfect. It used to make the list a lot. I'm not so sure any more about "Citizen Kane." It's been a very long time since I've seen it. It was on the list for years, but I'm not so sure any more. Like I said, there are a lot of films that I haven't seen in 20 years. I don't know what I'd think of them now.

I watched "Singing in the Rain" at my parents recently and decided it belonged on the list. I don't think I ever thought to put it there before. In college "Dr. Strangelove" or "A Clockwork Orange" always made the list, as did "The Seventh Seal" and "Persona." What would I think of "Persona" now? I suspect it wouldn't get anywhere near the list, but "Fanny and Alexander" might. During acting school, at least one of the following always made the list: "The Awful Truth," "My Favorite Wife," "The Philadelphia Story," and the aforementioned "His Girl Friday." I remember puting Coppola's "The Conversation" on the list, but I haven't seen that film in almost 30 years. Is it as great as I remember it? I loved "8-1/2" and "La Dolce Vita," but would I put any film by Fellini on my list now? I wonder. Same goes for Antonioni.

I probably can't put "The Shawshank Redemption" on a list of top 10 greatest films ever made, but it's one of my favorites. I love Martin Scorcese as a filmmaker, but which of his movies would make my top 10 now - "Taxi Driver"? "Goodfellows"? At one time, I put "New York, New York" on the list. I wonder if I'd still put it there. And then there's David Lean. "Lawrence of Arabia" is an awesome movie. It's been on my list from time to time. But the sentimental favorite is "Bridge on the River Kwai." "Les Enfants du Paradis" is a great film, but it's never made my top 10. "Jules and Jim" used to make the list a lot. I love French film, in general, but how many French movies actually warrant top 10 placement?

I think Robert Altman is a great, great filmmaker. "Nashville" was almost always on the list, but does it hold up? "Three Women" certainly doesn't. I saw that one again recently - boy did it suck! But I saw "M.A.S.H." recently, too, and thought it was hysterical. What about "Ugetsu" by Mitzoguchi? I love that movie. Do you know it? And something by Satyajit Ray should go on the list, but what? Does "Some Like it Hot" or "The Apartment" warrant mention? What about a little known Barbara Stanwyk/Fred MacMurray feature called "Remember the Night"? "Point Blank" is a great movie. John Boorman is a terrific filmmaker. Someone could convince me that "Deliverance" belongs on a top 50 list. And these are just the movies that popped into my head this evening. I've probably forgotten at least 50 of my favorites. Aren't movies amazing?!

They sure are, and the nice thing about this e-mail is the way in which it points out the dynamic quality of taste. Clement Greenberg once observed that all canons of excellence are provisional. That goes double--maybe triple--for lists of personal favorites of art, be they movies or paintings or symphonies or jazz albums.

Which reminds me that I also got an e-mail from somebody else who didn't much care for the first sentence of my original post, "My recent Wall Street Journal piece about Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, which I declared to be the greatest movie ever made, has drawn quite a bit of reader mail." This person said it was "one of the most arrogant" statements he'd ever read. I replied, briefly and perhaps the least little bit testily, "Goodness! Maybe you should get out more." If I may unpack that retort a bit further, I don't see that there's anything remotely arrogant about what I wrote--save to those egalitarians who think it immoral to make value judgments about art. To them I say: this blog is soooo not for you.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 9, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"To them, singing is just something that you buy, for whatever you have to pay, and so is acting, and so is writing, and so is music, and anything else they use. That it might be good for its own sake is something that hasn't occurred to them yet. The only thing they think is good for its own sake is a producer that couldn't tell Brahms from Irving Berlin on a bet, that wouldn't know a singer from a crooner until he heard twenty thousand people yelling for him one night, that can't read a book until the scenario department has had a synopsis made, that can't even speak English, but that is a self-elected expert on music, singing, literature, dialogue, and photography, and generally has a hit because somebody lent him Clark Gable to play in it."

James M. Cain, Serenade

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 9, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Vanishing act

I'm out of here for a couple of days. Aside from All the Usual Crap, I've got to write a speech, then go give it. I have just about enough time (and energy) to do both.

For now, I leave you in the beautiful and capable hands of Our Girl in Chicago. See you Friday.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 10, 2004 1:01 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"Caro, who usually came that way, showed the inscriptions. Here lieth all that could die of Oliver Wade. The earthly enchantments of Tryphena Cope are here subdued. On later stones, merely the name, and the years--of birth and death--connected by a little etched hyphen representing life. Eroded tablets tilted like torn kites. On the oldest the lettering was indecipherable: inaudible last words."

Shirley Hazzard, Transit of Venus

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 10, 2004 1:22 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Changing of the guard

That whoosh you just felt was the collective exhalation of litbloggers everywhere, who will now need some new cause for speculation. By way of Maud, we've learned that Sam Tanenhaus has been named editor of the New York Times Book Review. Here's just one recent testament to his literary bona fides, a sharp review of John Updike. Good luck to Tanenhaus in the most difficult job of its kind.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 10, 2004 2:14 AM | Permalink

TT: Alger Hiss is spinning in his grave

I'm headed out the door to give a speech, but I did want to add my two cents' worth about Sam Tanenhaus, the newly appointed editor of the New York Times Book Review, whom I've known for years (and whose Whittaker Chambers biography I reviewed in an essay reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader). He's absolutely first-rate, smart as a whip and as generous a colleague as you could hope to find. The Times couldn't have made a better or more serious choice.

Said Bill Keller in the official announcement: "To anyone who might have fallen for the notion that we were looking to dumb down this precious franchise: take that!" I think he's earned the right to crow a bit, and maybe even a bit more.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 10, 2004 2:31 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Yet, if we except this serious criticism for the moment, and measure Scott in the light of the full noon of life, we see that he belongs to that very small group of our novelists--Fielding and Jane Austen are the chief of them--who face life squarely. They are grown up. They do not cry for the moon. I do not mean that to be grown up is the first requirement of genius. To be grown up may be fatal to it. But short of the great illuminating madness, there is a power to sustain, assure and enlarge us in those novelists who are not driven back by life, who are not shattered by the discovery that it is a thing bounded by unsought limits, by interests as well as by hopes, and that it ripens under restriction. Such writers accept. They think that acceptance is the duty of a man."

V.S. Pritchett, The Living Novel

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 10, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Unhappy customer

I received this piece of e-mail apropos of my various postings on Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game:

I took your word, paid $30 for the film, and was utterly disgusted. What a boring piece of offal. This is your inspiration? I'll bet you like Last Year At Marienbad.

I've sworn off critics for life.

To which I made the following reply, which I thought worth sharing:

As a matter of fact, I don't like Last Year at Marienbad at all. And I really think you ought to at least consider the possibility that you might be wrong. I can think of a lot of things one might call The Rules of the Game, but "boring piece of offal" is not on my list, or anyone else's save, I suspect, yours.

When I was a college student, I told a teacher that I didn't like the music of Schumann, and he replied, very politely, "That may say more about you than it does about Schumann." Most people who take film seriously consider The Rules of the Game to be a very great work of art. Of course we could all be wrong, but why not give us, and Jean Renoir, a chance? You might just surprise yourself.

As Hans Keller once said in an almanac posting I should probably reprint monthly, "As soon as I detest something I ask myself why I like it."

That's worth pondering.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 10, 2004 12:20 PM | Permalink

TT: The next voice you hear

In lieu of new stuff from me, here's another of the forgotten columns I published in 1998 in Fi, the now-defunct record magazine. It's still relevant--for the most part, anyway--though there isn't much left of the classical recording industry to complain about these days....

* * *

One hundred and twenty-one years ago, Thomas Edison yelled "Mary had a little lamb" into a strange little hand-cranked machine, which promptly yelled his own words back at him. Twelve years later, Johannes Brahms yelled "I am Dr. Brahms, Johannes Brahms" into the tiny horn of a slightly improved version of Edison's little machine, then sat down at a piano and banged out the last part of his G Minor Hungarian Dance. The present whereabouts of the wax cylinder Brahms recorded in 1889 are unknown, but its low-fi contents were subsequently dubbed onto a scratchy acetate disc, and can now be heard on a CD called About a Hundred Years: A History of Sound Recording.

About a Hundred Years contains 38 selections, ranging in time from the Brahms cylinder to a 1943 V-Disc by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony. Unlike most currently available anthologies of early sound recordings, it is fairly evenly divided between classical and popular music--Scott Joplin and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band are heard side by side with Adelina Patti and Jascha Heifetz--and also includes an assortment of spoken-word recordings, including commercially issued 78s that preserve for posterity the speaking voices of Tolstoy, Lenin, Churchill, Gandhi, Sarah Bernhardt, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Anthologies are easy targets for the know-it-all with an axe to grind, and I can think of at least a couple of dozen other items that would have fit quite neatly into this family album of snapshots from the dawn of sound recording. It would have been nice, for example, to hear once again the 1888 cylinder on which Sir Arthur Sullivan can be heard confessing that the invention of the phonograph has left him "terrified at the thought that so much bad music may be put on record forever" (a prescient thought indeed), but no recordings by important composers other than Brahms have been included on About a Hundred Years. Folk music has been similarly ignored--I expect to go to my grave without hearing any of the seven ultra-rare 78 sides recorded for the Gramophone Company in 1908 by Joseph Taylor, the Lincolnshire singer from whom Percy Grainger collected "Brigg Fair"--as have the many distinguished poets who made commercial records.

Scarcely less frustrating is the failure of the producers of About a Hundred Years to draw on the large body of spoken-word recordings made in the United States during the acoustic era. In the days before network radio, many American politicians used the phonograph as a means of "broadcasting" their speeches: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson all made commercial 78s as part of their 1912 presidential campaigns, and William Jennings Bryan recorded in 1923 the famous "Cross of Gold" speech that he originally delivered at the Democratic presidential convention of 1896. (It is one of history's more amusing coincidences that Bryan cut this record in the same Indiana studio where Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke made their first recordings.)

But enough complaining. Though About a Hundred Years may not be perfect, it is still a richly evocative piece of work, and the spoken-word selections are in certain ways the most evocative of all. Especially haunting is the field recording made in France on October 9, 1918, one month before the end of World War I, in which the Royal Garrison Artillery can be heard firing poison gas shells at German troops. This joltingly vivid recording (you can actually hear the shells whizzing off to their targets) was made so that the sounds of war could be heard by generations yet unborn, it then being widely believed that "the Great War" would be the last one ever fought. I wonder how many of those who purchased HMV 09308 were blown up two decades later in the Battle of Britain, or how many of the Bolsheviks who heard Lenin preach the gospel of Soviet power on their hand-cranked phonographs were slaughtered in Stalin's prison camps.

Most of the musical selections included on About a Hundred Years will be familiar to experienced collectors of historical reissues, but no amount of familiarity can breed contempt for them. Here is Francesco Tamagno singing the "Esultate" from Verdi's Otello in 1903, just sixteen years after he created the role on stage at La Scala; here is Joseph Joachim, the man who premiered the Brahms Violin Concerto, scraping soberly away at a movement of Bach's B Minor Partita; here is Sousa's Band playing "The Stars and Stripes Forever" in 1902, just five years after it was composed. To hear these ancient records, flawed though they are, is an intensely moving experience. The battered shellac sputters and crackles angrily, and you wonder for a moment what all the fuss could possibly be about--but then the curtain parts and the nineteenth century comes into view for a minute or two, sometimes through a glass darkly, sometimes with the near-hallucinatory sharpness of a Mathew Brady photograph.

Whenever I listen to performances such as these, I'm struck by the palpable idealism of the men and women who recorded them. Yes, the pioneers of the phonograph were in it for the money, but they never lost sight of the larger goal of bringing great music to the masses, and while one can gnash one's teeth at the mistakes they made, it is surely more useful to reflect on how many things they did right. Though we cannot hear Sergei Rachmaninoff playing Beethoven's "Tempest" Sonata (Charles O'Connell passed up the opportunity to record it, a decision that I like to think he is discussing at this very moment with a committee of devils equipped with sharp pitchforks), we can hear him in the Chopin B-Flat Minor Sonata, Schumann's Carnaval, and dozens of other characteristic performances, thanks solely and only to the money-hungry executives of the Victor Talking Machine Company. Nor is Rachmaninoff's sizable catalogue of 78s unique. Right from the start, the major record labels all made plenty of room for seriousness, which is why we can also hear Grieg, Saint-Sa�ns, Debussy, Strauss, Elgar, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith, Grainger, Bart�k, Falla, Milhaud, Poulenc, Shostakovich, Copland, Walton and Britten performing their own music.

No doubt you see where I'm headed. For it's now official: the classical recording industry as we know it is dead. How do I know? Peter Gelb says so. Gelb, the president of Sony Classical, took part in "Crisis? What Crisis?," a symposium published in the 75th-anniversary issue of Gramophone, the English record-review magazine, in which he made the following remark: "An excellent recording is only excellent if it not only sounds good but has a public as well....I am interested in creating musical projects that will have the largest possible impact." He wasn't kidding, either. Judged by Gelb's yardstick of excellence, Sony Classical's two best releases of the year have been the Titanic soundtrack and Michael Bolton's My Secret Passion: The Arias, both of which are totally unserious from any possible point of view other than that of maximizing Sony's cash flow. Yet My Secret Passion shot straight to the top of the Billboard classical chart, and Titanic, incredibly enough, did the same thing on the pop chart. It seems Abraham Lincoln was wrong: you can fool most of the people all of the time.

Such "successes" as these will not long escape the attention of executives charged with tending to the bottom line. To be sure, Sony Classical continues to put out occasional high-quality CDs: Murray Perahia's new album of Bach English Suites and John Williams' The Black Decameron, a collection of guitar music by Leo Brouwer, could just as easily have been released a quarter-century ago, back when the major labels had yet to lose their self-respect. But how long will such rarefied ventures continue to pass muster at a company whose boss says it isn't good if it doesn't sell?

As long as we're asking hard questions, here's another: what would Walter Legge have said had his superiors at EMI ordered him to record the '50s equivalent of Michael Bolton singing "Che gelida manina," or David Helfgott playing the Rachmaninoff Third? I think it's safe to say that the first part of his reply would have been unprintable (back then, anyway), but that the climax would have been two eminently printable words: I quit. Try and imagine those words being spoken by a present-day recording executive over a matter of taste, and once you stop laughing, you'll be reminded of the vast distance the world has traveled in the 109 years since Johannes Brahms sat down at the piano and sent his message to the future.

* * *

A footnote: the speeches by Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson to which I referred have since been reissued on CD by Marston Records in a two-CD set called In Their Own Voices: The U.S. Presidential Elections of 1908 and 1912.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 10, 2004 12:53 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Professor and the Dunce

In a terrible week for the game, hockey finds a bit of unlikely good press. Well, decent press, anyway. The New Yorker runs three short pieces on the game in Talk of the Town: a loopy one on Rangers icon Mark Messier and the state of the game generally (this one the subject of some mystification at TMFTML yesterday); one on John Kerry's rink days; and my favorite: a look at the movie Miracle from the perspective of a great Russian player who was on the rise in the Soviet system in 1980, but just green enough to have missed being part of the defeated Olympic team. That man is now the oldest player in the NHL and one of my personal all-stars, a crafty strategist with unreal vision and a feather touch.

A few weeks ago, Igor Larionov, the New Jersey Devil and former Soviet star, who has been called the Russian Gretzky, decided that he needed to see the film. He went to a multiplex near his house, in Short Hills, with his wife and his young son, but they wanted to see something else. "So I went by myself," Larionov said the other day, in the Devils' locker room after practice. "I think I was the last guy to come into the theatre. The place was full. It was already dark." Nobody in the theatre seemed to recognize him, in part because he is just a hockey player, and also because he hardly looks like a professional athlete: he is short and compact, with a thoughtful, boyish expression that, along with a proficiency at chess and an occasional quoting of Pushkin and the wire-rimmed glasses that he wears away from the rink, has earned him another nickname--the Professor.

Following the brutality in Vancouver this week, this reminder of some of the game's better elements is a small but welcome palliative.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 10, 2004 12:58 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Worldbeaters

For a while now I've been meaning to post here about whichever too-smart-for-their-own-good schedule makers at Fox and HBO are responsible for placing the two most gleefully misanthropic sitcoms on television directly opposite each other (Sunday nights, 8:30 CST): "Arrested Development" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm." I missed the boat, though, and now that "The Sopranos" has returned in the same slot, my dilemma is intensified, but lacking the neat symmetry of Larry David v. David Cross.

When the Sunday night showdown was "Curb" versus "Arrested," it was closely contested but the latter always won out. Dana Stevens' Slate appreciation nicely invokes the set-up and some of the charm of "Arrested," in case you haven't watched it. The only thing I would add is my impression that, despite their epic character flaws, there is something weirdly lovable about the characters in "Arrested Development," a deer-in-the-headlights helplessness that makes my heart swell even as I snicker and sigh at them. They wear their dysfunctions on their sleeves and have all the vulnerability--not just the brattiness--of children.

Colby Cosh's smart reflections on Larry David this week set me to thinking more about the two shows together. At a glance it would seem that they are perfect negative images of one another. Larry David is an impossible jerk plunked down amid people like you and me to wreak social havoc; Michael Bluth is a person like you or me plunked down amid a bunch of jerks and crazies to try to impose some order. But Colby plays devil's advocate on "Curb":

In the world of Curb Your Enthusiasm you can't shake the suspicion that perhaps Larry David, whatever his self-deprecating protestations, regards "Larry David" as the hero of the show, a quasi-intellectual, creative-professional Christ figure adrift amidst a sea of grasping, pleading, whining nutballs. And, in fact, if you're inclined to view the show that way, the logic holds up remarkably well. Normally "Larry" is either being terrorized quite randomly, thanks to some farcical explosion of circumstances, or is getting into trouble by pursuing some item of his private and arbitrary social credo too far. I don't know if the term "comedy of manners" has ever been applied here, but that's what Curb Your Enthusiasm is; a humorous meditation about the unwritten codes governing the roadway, the dinner party, the driving range, the memorial service. I'd hate to come off as one of those prats who tries to co-opt everything for conservatism, and David's electoral politics seem to lie left of the Clintonian, but the unstated theme of every CYE episode is the longing for a world--by implication, a lost world--of clear social expectations. Perhaps without knowing it, David has crammed some of the concerns of the 19th-century novel into the small screen.

This is compelling, and I wholeheartedly buy the comparison with 19th-century novels, but I still find it hard to squint just the right way so that Larry David appears as the hero of the show. If one could, though, he would look a lot like Michael Bluth, the one normal guy in a family tree of nitwits and screw-ups. Since I find said nitwits and screw-ups so appealing, though, maybe I have been looking at each of the show's heroes precisely wrong, and need to own my sneaking affection for the bad Bluths. Then Michael Bluth would look like the Larry David of "Arrested Development" and Larry David like the Michael Bluth of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Hmm...any other "Arrested" fans out there? Do you love these creeps too, or is it just me?

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 11, 2004 1:34 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Elsewhere

The Forager defines and defends backlash:

When tastemakers grab onto something, it's not enough for them merely to champion it or talk about why they like it or explain why it's worth seeing-reading-listening to-exploring-etc. In order to justify their own existence, tastemakers have to convince an audience that said work is of vital importance to anyone who considers themselves culturally literate.

The Sopranos becomes a legitimate target for backlash not so much because it's overvalued as a TV show (it's not--it remains one of the best TV shows ever), but because tastemakers started talking about the show in terms that made it seem far more important than a TV show could ever be. (Exemplified by the slogan "It's not TV. It's HBO." Actually, it is TV, i.e. just as important and significant as Friends and The Apprentice)...

And Household Opera sketches a rough map of an ideal intellectual community (IIC):

1. The IIC would consist of people who aren't competing with each other for funds, status, recognition, or employment. Intellectual work would not be a zero-sum game to determine who can publish the most, or the fastest, or with the most prestigious publisher.

2. In fact, now that I think about it, publication wouldn't be all-important. Exchange of intellectual work, yes; but that wouldn't be limited to the traditional options of journal article and monograph. Blogging would count. So would conversation over dinner. In point of fact, I've always preferred the less formal ways academics have of sharing their work. At conferences, it's not the panels I really go for, though there's usually a paper or two I'm glad to have heard (sometimes more, depending on the conference); it's the opportunity to meet someone who happens to know a lot about something really interesting, and to end up talking in the hotel bar until after midnight.

3. My IIC, like Susan's, would not be limited to academics. This is probably the corollary to point 1. More specifically: I want to see creative types there as well as the trained literary critics and historians and anthropologists and whatnot. I want to be able to talk to poets and musicians and artists. I want to be able to pick the brains of both musicologists and opera singers. I also want to be able to talk to people who've taken their academic training and put it to interesting uses...

You know what they say: read the whole things.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 11, 2004 5:18 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Snarkwatch redux

Jack Shafer is the Heidi Julavits of blogville:

Several times a day--oh hell, a dozen times a day--I click my way to Gawker and Wonkette for a couple of minutes of reading that usually elicit more guilt than pleasure. If you've yet to visit these blogs, imagine them as the twin offspring of a date-rape incident between Drudge Report and the original Spy magazine. (I'll leave it to your imagination who jumped whom.) Gawker collects links to the day's news and gossip about publishing, New York celebrity culture, advertising, the Paris Hilton video, the art world, public sightings of movie stars and rockers, and adds a signature cutting remark to tie things up. Wonkette performs a similar service for the news and gossip from Washington, although sexing up news from think tanks and politics, and reporting sightings of Mark Shields in blog form is by far the harder assignment.

...But after several weeks of consuming every cartoon obscenity, bludgeoning wisecrack, and meta-knowing, callow riposte served on these two blogs, I've been asking myself: Are these blogs a part of the better world we hope to leave to our sons and daughters?

Well, yes, if we intend for our children to grow strong from sucking bile instead of milk.

Well, no. For one thing, they're a snappier, funnier version of what many of us are dishing around the coffee maker anyway. For another, who's bringing the children into it? Which makes me wonder, is anyone writing blogs for kids yet? It's gotta be in the cards.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 11, 2004 7:54 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Annals of incommensurability

An art historian friend sends ranging reflections on last week's unlikely art appreciation moment on Donald Trump's "The Apprentice" (a show I've never seen, though I will cop to "Average Joe 2." Hey, it can't be all Henry James all the time, people):

Since the ludicrous finale of "Average Joe 2: Hawaii," "The Apprentice" is now the only reality show that has me on the couch at the appointed time. I enjoy seeing all these wooden people turn against each other in the service of completing ridiculous tasks that bring to my mind the humiliation of selling band candy door-to-door when I was in junior high. The episode last week, with the competitors selling art at a gallery, managed to make room in my soul for both despair and a weird sort of elation. Despair first, of course. The assorted MBAs and "project managers" were assigned the project of selecting an artist to represent and then attempting to sell his or her work at a gallery opening. Each team chose one of two artists, and the team that made the most money in the one-night gallery hustle was the winner. Seeing these gladiators using their MBA tools to understand what they were doing was a debilitating experience. They showed up at the studios, they asked questions, they took notes. They stared blankly at the artists explaining their respective works and then came up with such insightful questions as "What would a typical price point for a work like this be?" I don't blame them for this, of course, because it's what they're trained to do, but they were all so utterly adrift in the sea of genuine responsiveness that I feared for the state of cultural production as a whole. Trump put them on the wrong foot at the outset by standing on the steps of the Met telling them, in his introduction to the assignment, that all art was "subjective," a view that they all parroted when it became clear that they were failing. Hatchet-faced Heidi misidentified a work as being constructed from a toilet seat when it was really a fireplace screen. Troy blatantly displayed his lack of knowledge as a sales pitch, as if buying, say, a car from a salesman who didn't know anything about cars would be a good thing. Omarosa laid back and did "what people at galleries do--let the patrons experience the works on their own." That was the smartest approach, even though it has an empirical edge to it that chills me. And she was fired at the end of the show to boot.

In the end, tonight was all sense and zero sensibility. In an era in which the reality dating shows consist of the same cliches--"I've never felt this way before"; "I feel you can really look inside me"; "I'm looking for The One"--I am starting to wonder if what constitutes being human now is just having a ready repertoire of stock phrases trotted out at the appropriate time. For these Apprentices, working out of the box is like speaking a click language, but I guess they don't teach you much about sensibility in Who Moved My Cheese? Trump's declaration of art as "subjective" gave these contestants the license to dismiss what they were selling as bottled water--last week's assignment, by the way--only less comprehensible. So intent on proving their ambition and business-worthiness are these contestants that you wonder if there's a genuine response out there anywhere among those who don't hit the galleries and the museums. Or read novels or whatever. This sounds superior, and I don't mean it to, but in the same week that Barenboim resigned from the CSO because he was tired of his "development" duties, I wonder what capacity our population has for anything that can't be quantified.

The reason I found this cause for despair is also a reason for elation, because the works selected by the producers (or whoever) were actually worthy of a response. The artists were articulate and their works were--I'm going out on a limb here--good. Even the artists I didn't have a particular taste for--the painter who embedded his own DNA in his bright, energetic works in the form of hairs and toenail clippings and god knows what else--had their positive qualities and they all had a thoughtful exuberance that I never thought I'd see on network tv. While one of the gallery owners fronting this scam was exhorting the Apprentices to "communicate" better with the artists, I found myself staring at the works hanging behind her in the background. The artists eventually selected were a woman doing, in a kind of John Currin idiom, a series of technically highly proficient and interesting allegories about womanhood (not usually my gig, but she won me over, and I laughed out loud when one of the Apprentices described her work as "medieval") and a man whose abstract works--abstracted, he said, from landscapes--were gentle and spare and rich; the showcasing of these two articulate painters on primetime NBC made me believe, if only for a moment, that finally the specter of the horrendous "Contemporary Art on 60 Minutes" episode of the 1990s (or was it the 80s? God, I'm getting old) had finally disintegrated, rightfully, into dust.

To their credit, the Apprentices made the right choices for the work they were going to promote. But their utter inability to talk about the work, even if only to sell it, and their bemused indifference ("OK, I'll try to speak a click language for an evening") about what they were doing only consolidated the idea for me that visual art is a flummoxing agent of the highest order. And it deserves better. These works tonight deserved better, and with my enthusiasm for what I was seeing I could have outsold the Apprentices with my mouth taped shut. It wouldn't have been hard, given the quality of the "product." Why is enthusiasm so elusive these days?

Thanks to Our Friend on the Block (who previously opined for About Last Night here) for letting me share.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 11, 2004 10:58 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"In the previous year Christian Thrale, who was then in his twenties, unexpectedly had an evening free from weekend work at a government office. In retrospect it seemed to have been an evening free, also, of himself. He did not often go alone to a concert or anything else of the cultural kind. On your own, you were at the mercy of your responses. Accompanied, on the other hand, you remained in control, made assertive sighs and imposed hypothetical requirements. You could also deliver your opinion, seldom quite favourable, while walking home.

"As to pleasure, he was suspicious of anything that relieved his feelings."

Shirley Hazzard, Transit of Venus

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 11, 2004 11:21 AM | Permalink

TT: Great understatements of our time

From the Los Angeles Times story about Sam Tanenhaus' appointment as editor of the New York Times Book Review:

He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1998 for his biography "Whittaker Chambers" (Random House), about a key figure in the Alger Hiss spy trial.

Um, right. And David was a "key figure" in the later career of Goliath. And Die Frau ohne Schatten is an anti-abortion opera.

Memo to the L.A. Times culture desk: get some culture. Fast.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 12, 2004 1:17 AM | Permalink

TT: Usage du monde

I was just about to praise Household Opera for a major breakthrough in phonetic orthography--Rrrowr!--but then I googled it and came up with 450 hits. Next thing you know, somebody will be writing to tell me it's actually from Finnegans Wake....

While we're on the subject, more or less, I have settled on Eeuuww! as my preferred spelling of that now-essential expletive. Any questions?

(I also prefer Fuhgedaboudit, as rendered by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities, but no standard rendering has yet been universally accepted, alas. These things matter!)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 12, 2004 3:19 AM | Permalink

TT: Additional data points

Publishers Weekly has a story about the Sam Tanenhaus appointment, based on interviews with Bill Keller and Bob Loomis (Tanenhaus' editor at Random House). No link, alas, but here are some quotes:

Tanenhaus, said Keller, displayed particular proficiency at matching reviewer to book--one of the tests apparently had interviewers holding up a work of fiction and asking how the candidate would handle it--and other skills which further "reassured us that this guy was quite impressive and could hold his own against anyone." He added that Tanenhaus "has a tremendous amount of energy, which in a small operation is a lot of the battle. You have to be able to inspire, and he's an inspirational presence."...

Keller also continued to emphasize timeliness and relevance, in both fiction and non-fiction, for TBR. Tanenhaus' background lies in history, biography and, perhaps most critically, current affairs, expertise the Times thinks could apply to unexpected areas. "I think he can bring a bit of a news sensibility to the reviewing of fiction," said Keller. "By that I don't just mean that he'll get excited by a book that is a new discovery but that the Review will write about fiction in a way that ties into the modern world. People who write fiction don't live in seclusion from the world." Tanenhaus himself has a somewhat unexpected background in fiction; in 1984 he wrote Literature Unbound, an incisive survey of Western Lit, despite being just seven years out of college.

Tanenhaus, of course, still has work cut out for him; besides staff, there's the perennial hobgoblin of space and the pressure to keep the section literary while revamping its dusty reputation. Indeed, if the twin, sometimes incompatible, concerns for the Times in the selection were snap and seriousness, the newspaper seems to feel like it has achieved both with its choice, who has literary cred and magazine buzz, Robert Caro by way of Graydon Carter.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 12, 2004 10:27 AM | Permalink

TT: Good news, bad news

I'm back from giving that speech in Michigan, and too tired to do much more than give you the inside skinny on my drama column in Friday's Wall Street Journal, in which I reviewed Craig Lucas' Small Tragedy, a backstage play about a production of Oedipus Rex, and Charles Mee's Wintertime, about which the less said, the better.

I loved the Lucas play, though I didn't expect to:

The good news is that Craig Lucas' characters never act like puppets on a better writer's string, nor is "Small Tragedy" a parasitical "commentary" on Sophocles. It is a play with a life of its own about a group of interestingly complicated people with lives of their own, one in which the process of staging a show is simultaneously satirized and illuminated, an exceedingly neat trick. Mr. Lucas likes to teeter on the edge of political correctness and agonizing predictability--one character is HIV-positive, another is a Good European who spends most of the first act condescending to his na�ve American colleagues--but he invariably pulls the rug out from under your expectations, here and elsewhere. He even contrives to crack an Obligatory Republican Joke that's funny!

Not so Wintertime, which stinks on ice:

The embarrassee-in-chief is Marsha Mason, who for reasons known only to herself and Mr. Mee has been coaxed into playing the part of Marie, a blowsy Italian babe well past her sell-by date who is sleeping with Fran�ois (Michael Cerveris), an overripe hunk of Eurotrash who wants to sleep with Ariel (Brienin Bryant), a starry-eyed little twerp who is sleeping with Jonathan (Christopher Denham), the son of Marie and her husband Frank (Nicholas Hormann). As for Frank, he's sleeping with Edmund (T. Scott Cunningham). I think that covers all the bases, except that the halfwits in question have converged on a summer house in mid-winter. (Did I mention that it's snowing inside the house?)

No link. Repeat, no link. Go buy the paper and make me proud of you. More later. Bed now.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 12, 2004 12:32 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"So far as I know ours is the only language in which it has been found necessary to give a name to the piece of prose which is described as the purple patch; it would not have been necessary to do so unless it were characteristic."

W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 12, 2004 12:35 PM | Permalink

TT: Minority report

"But consider the case of a man sitting down to write something genuinely original--to pump an orderly flow of ideas out of the turbid pool of his impressions, feelings, vague thoughts, dimly sensed instincts. He works in a room alone. Every jangle of the telephone cuts him like a knife; every entrance of a visitor blows him up. Solitary, lonely, tired of himself, wrought up to an abnormal sensitiveness, he wrestles abominably with intolerable complexities--shoadowy notions that refuse to reveal themselves clearly, doubts that torture, hesitations that damn. His every physical sensation is enormously magnified. A cold in the head rides him like a witch. A split fingernail hurts worse than a paparotomy. The smart of a too-close shave burns like a prairie-fire. A typewriter that bucks is worse than a band of music. The far-away wail of a child is the howling of a fiend. A rattling radiator is a battery of artillery.

"Nothing could be worse than this agony. A few hours of it and even the strongest man is thoroughly tired out. Days upon days of it, and he is ready for the doctor. The layman whose writing is confined to a few dozen letters a day can have no conceptions of the hard work done by such a writer. Worse, he must plod his way through many days when writing is impossible altogether--days of doldrums, of dead centers, of utter mental collapse. These days have a happy habit of coming precisely when they are most inconvenient--when a book has been promised and the publisher is snorting for it. They are days of unmitigated horror. The writer labors like a galley-slave, and accomplishes absolutely nothing. A week of such effort and he is a wreck. It is in the last ghastly hours of such weeks that writers throw their children out of sixth-story windows and cut off the heads of their wives."

H.L. Mencken, Minority Report

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 13, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: In lieu of me

- Cinetrix is way wicked about Dave Kehr. I'm, like, ouch.

- No doubt Our Girl probably already blogged this once upon a time, but I only just discovered The Henry James Scholar's Guide to Web Sites. It's exhaustive--in that good way.

- Joseph Epstein waxes grumpy (but interestingly so) on youth culture and its discontents:

If one wants to dress like a kid, spin around the office on a scooter, not make up one's mind about what work one wants to do until one is 40, be noncommittal in one's relationships--what, really, are the consequences? I happen to think that the consequences are genuine, and fairly serious.

"Obviously it is normal to think of oneself as younger than one is," W.H. Auden, a younger son, told Robert Craft, "but fatal to want to be younger." I'm not sure about fatal, but it is at a minimum degrading for a culture at large to want to be younger. The tone of national life is lowered, made less rich. The first thing lowered is expectations, intellectual and otherwise. To begin with education, one wonders if the dumbing down of culture one used to hear so much about and which continues isn't connected to the rise of the perpetual adolescent.

Consider contemporary journalism, which tends to play everything to lower and lower common denominators. Why does the New York Times, with its pretensions to being our national newspaper, choose to put on its front pages stories about Gennifer Flowers's career as a chanteuse in New Orleans, the firing of NFL coaches, the retirement of Yves Saint Laurent, the canceling of the singer Mariah Carey's recording contract? Slow-news days is a charitable guess; a lowered standard of the significant is a more realistic one. Since the advent of its new publisher, a man of the baby boomer generation, an aura of juvenilia clings to the paper. Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, two of the paper's most-read columnists, seem not so much the type of the bright college student but of the sassy high-school student--the clever, provocative editor of the school paper out to shock the principal--even though both are in their early fifties....

- While we're on the subject, here's a new angle on The Passion of the Christ, courtesy of Variety:

Young males who flock to slasher pics seem to be taking an interest in "The Passion," which has been widely characterized as gory by reviewers.

Fangoria editor Anthony Timpone said, "It's sparked an interest in my readership because of the extreme nature of the it as well as the controversy." The magazine hasn't covered "The Passion," but Timpone said horror helmer David Cronenberg recently suggested he should. And at least one horror fan site, E-Splatter.com, has given "The Passion" the thumb's up: "As a horror fan, I was more than satisfied. This is not some kiddie Christ film. This is the real deal."

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 13, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: For biscuit-eaters only

A reader writes:

Discussion has been going in and out on your blog about your or OGIC's or whoever's five favorite things--books, movies, records, etc. I believe you sort of answered the movie question but haven't yet addressed any other categories. Here's another party question that I kind of like: What is your quirkiest favorite? Something you love that (seemingly) no one else gets.

That's a great question, and I wish I had a great answer, but the sad fact is that the rest of the world always seems to catch up with my aesthetic idiosyncrasies sooner or later, usually sooner. I guess I'm just not cool enough, or maybe too centric.

The only thing that comes to mind off the top of my head (something went wrong halfway through that last clause, but you know what I mean) is W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings, a long-forgotten 1975 movie about a small-time country band. The stars are Burt Reynolds, Art Carney, and Ned Beatty. It was written by Tom Rickman, a hack whose other films include Tuesdays with Morrie and The Reagans (as well as one very good Walter Matthau picture, The Laughing Policeman), and directed by John G. Avildsen, a hack whose other films include The Karate Kid and Rocky V. W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings used to turn up on TV every once in a while, but I haven't seen it in years, and it isn't even available on videocassette, much less DVD. I absolutely adore it, at least in retrospect, in part because it reminds me of my own idyllic days as the bass player in a small-time country band. Reynolds is fabulously charming, Carney and Beatty (and everybody else in the cast, for that matter) dead solid perfect. As if all that weren't enough, there's even a scene shot in the back room of Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville, right across the street from the stage door of the Ryman Auditorium, where I sat and watched the Grand Ole Opry on a hot summer night 31 years ago. Et in Arcadia ego!

I suppose I can't recommend W.W. in good faith to cinephiles who haven't eaten a whole lot of truck-stop chicken-fried steak washed down with Dr. Pepper, but any reader of "About Last Night" who can send me a pirated copy will nonetheless earn my undying gratitude.

What about you, OGIC? Got any quirky faves you'd care to acknowledge?

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 13, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

OGIC: People people who died

At Memefirst, Felix Salmon detects a pattern in the all-time best-selling issues of People magazine:

In reverse order, they are: (5) Grace Kelly, dead. (4) John Lennon, dead. (3) John F Kennedy, Jr, dead. (2) Princess Diana, dead. (1) 9/11. Could it be that the best celebrity is a dead celebrity?

Hardly surprising, but still a little bit jarring to see them listed so starkly.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 14, 2004 1:53 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune muffin

"There was a small inner room like a cupboard where, morning and afternoon, these girls took turns to make the tea. A list was tacked to the wall, of all the men and their requirements: Mr. Bostock weak with sugar, Mr. Miles strong and plain. Valda's Leadbetter had an infusion of camomile flowers, which he bought at Jackson's in Piccadilly; these were prepared in a separate pot and required straining. Another notice cautioned against tea-leaves in the sink. The room was close and shabby. There were stains on the lino and a smell of stale biscuits. On one spattered wall the paint was peeling, from exhalations of an electric kettle.

"Sometimes when Valda made tea Caro would set out cups for her on a scratched brown tray.

"It was something to see the queenly and long-limbed Valda measure, with disdainful scruple, the flowers for Mr. Leadbetter's special pot (which carried, tied to its handle, a little tag: 'Let stand five minutes.'). To hear her reel off the directions: 'Mr. Hoskins, saccharin. Mr. Farquhar, squeeze of lemon.' She filled the indeterminate little room with scorn and decision, and caused a thrill of wonderful fear among the other women for the conviction that, had one of these men entered, she would not have faltered a moment in her performance.

"When Valda spoke of men more generally, it was in an assumption of shared and calamitous experience. None of the other women entered on such discussions--which were not only indelicate but would have mocked their deferential dealings with Mr. This or That. Furthermore, they feared that Valda, if encouraged, might say something physical.

"Watching the office women file towards the exit at evening, Valda observed to Caro: 'The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea.'

"There was another male faction in the office, of ageing young men who spoke bitterly of class divisions and of the right, or absence, of opportunity. For these, equally, Valda had no patience. 'They don't quite believe they exist, and are waiting for someone to complete the job, gratis.' She would set down the biscuit tin, switch off the electric kettle. 'Oh Caro, it is true that the common man is everlastingly embattled, but he has a lot of people on his side. It's the uncommon man who gets everyone's goat.'

"Valda would tell Caro, 'You feel downright disloyal to your experience, when you do come across a man you could like. By then you scarcely see how you can decently make terms, it's like going over to the enemy. And then there's the waiting. Women have got to fight their way out of that dumb waiting at the end of the never-ringing telephone. The receiver, as our portion of it is called.' Or, slowly revolving the steeping teapot in her right hand, like an athlete warming up to cast a disc: 'There is the dressing up, the hair, the fingernails. The toes. And, after all that, you are a meal they eat while reading the newspaper. I tell you that ever one of those fingers we paint is another nail in their eventual coffins.'

"All this was indisputable, even brave. But was a map, from which rooms, hours, and human faces did not rise; on which there was no bloom of generosity or discovery. The omissions might constitute life itself; unless the map was intended as a substitute for the journey.

"Those at least were the objections raised by Caroline Bell."

Shirley Hazzard, Transit of Venus

(Note: In my first job out of college, Editorial Assistant at a publishing house, I had to make tea most days for a [female] boss. Sometimes, too, go fetch raspberry muffins at the Mrs. Field's in the subway station. In the latter case, I was always provided money for my own muffin into the bargain, because "I'm affluent and you're not." Which was very, very true.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 14, 2004 2:22 AM | Permalink

TT: Radio silence

As you may have surmised from yesterday's almanac, I'm deep in the throes of composition (though I am taking time today to brunch with Chicha and show her the Teachout Museum).

See you Monday, unless my resolve slackens and I blog inadvertently.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 14, 2004 12:16 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"As for the Quarterly Review, I have not read it, nor shall I, nor ought I--where abuse is intended not for my correction but my pain. I am however very fair game. If the oxen catch a butcher, they have a right to toss and gore him."

Sydney Smith, letter to Francis Jeffrey, c. July 3, 1809

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 14, 2004 12:18 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Steal this title

I was just on Amazon looking up books by the novelist Wayne Johnson. The first listing was his new book, which I'm currently reading (and enjoying), The Devil You Know. The second listing was something called Helicopter Theory. I clicked through, thinking, "ooh, that's a good name for a novel." Not yet, it's not. It was actually a book on, um, helicopter theory, by another Wayne Johnson altogether. Needless to say.

Now the Amazon recommendation mill, which never, ever rests, is just positive I'll find much to divert me in Principles of Helicopter Aerodynamics and Rotary-Wing Aerodynamics, and will doubtless be hawking such wares to me till kingdom come...

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 14, 2004 12:56 PM | Permalink

TT: They knock on your door and say nothing

If you like Unitarian jokes, go here.

(The headline, incidentally, is the punchline of my all-time favorite religious joke, which was told to me by a Lutheran minister who later became a Roman Catholic priest. He told it to me on a plane en route to Chicago, mere minutes after the captain had warned the passengers of a bomb threat. That's savoir-faire.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 15, 2004 1:42 AM | Permalink

TT: At long last

I just opened a FedEx envelope and pulled out a finished copy of A Terry Teachout Reader, the anthology of my essays, articles, and reviews that Yale University Press will be publishing on May 6. I guess I'm biased (to put it mildly), but I've never seen so beautiful a book. It happens that I've been very lucky in my designers--all my books have been handsome--but the Teachout Reader stands out. It's just gorgeous, from the Fairfield Porter lithograph on the jacket to the subtly ribbed green binding to the elegant typography. This is my first book to be composed in Galliard, my favorite typeface. Even if you don't like the way I write, I think you'll like the way it looks. To all the folks at Yale, I offer my heartfelt thanks.

In the unlikely event that you don't know already, you can pre-order a copy from amazon.com by going here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 15, 2004 2:48 AM | Permalink

TT: Numbers, please

I got an e-mail from a reader apropos of my posting on Woody Allen's Annie Hall. He likes Crimes and Misdemeanors, and thinks that this film and a couple of others--I can't remember which ones, alas--justify calling Allen a major filmmaker. I replied:

Very interesting. Do you really think that "two or three movies" are enough to put you on the top of the list? I can see arguing that "Citizen Kane," "Touch of Evil" and "Chimes at Midnight" are three of the greatest movies ever made, but do they add up to a bonafide oeuvre? How many points does it take to make a curve? I don't know--I'm asking.

To which he replied:

I come from mathematics on this issue. There is a saying, which I will quote and then explain: "You judge a mathematician in the L-infinity norm, not the L1 norm".

-- A norm is a measurement of the size of a function, "size" suitably interpreted.

-- L-1 norm of a function is like an average value (many details omitted)

-- L-infinity norm is like the maximum value of the function (many details omitted)

This is funny in a math class, believe me. One thing it means is that in the long run, productivity is not the standard for greatness. An example is Henri Lebesque, who has his definitions and theorems (and his name) in all the standard graduate textbooks for the work he did for his PhD thesis on integration and measure (which is the basis for modern analysis and probability); that's all he is known for, but that's enough. Then there is Randall Jarrell's famous remark: "A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times, a dozen or two dozen times and he is great". This is another way of saying not to look at the "collected works" but at the "selected works".

If we were under the gun to be official we would have to settle on a cut-off count (two? twelve?) for discrete achievements (theorems, poems, movies) in a given field. And for films, I'm saying three, although my reasoning doesn't get much better than saying, well, if it's three then the Woodman makes the cut....

To which I replied:

I'll take your word that it's funny! My answer would be that there's a difference between discovering E=MC2 (or whatever) and writing one or two good books. Ralph Ellison is not a great writer--he just wrote a great book. I do think Jarrell is absolutely right about this, but note that his numbers are a bit higher than yours. It's fun to kick around, isn't it?

Indeed it is, although I don't have any definitive conclusions to share with you, other than this: you don't have to write a whole shelfful of great books to be a great writer...but it doesn't hurt.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 15, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Two fugitive observations

- I was channel-surfing this evening and ran across Unfaithfully Yours, Preston Sturges' 1948 comedy in which Rex Harrison plays the part of a conductor. It's a funny movie, and Harrison obviously went to some trouble to learn how to simulate conducting--but it didn't help. Yes, he knew the beating patterns, but his movements were weirdly rigid, sort of like an excitable robot that hadn't been oiled from the waist up recently.

This reminded me of how impressed I was by Richard Thomas' "conducting" in Terrence McNally's play The Stendhal Syndrome, in which he convincingly "conducts" a complete performance of the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde--facing the audience. Given all the cruel jokes that instrumentalists tell about conductors (Carl Flesch once called conducting "the only musical activity in which a dash of charlatanism is not only harmless, but positively necessary"), you'd think it'd be easier to fake convincingly. In fact, it's just about impossible.

- In the past few days I've seen nine different Paul Taylor dances, several of which begin with a prelude--i.e., the lights go down, the music plays for a minute or two, then the curtain goes up. During each of these preludes, at least a half-dozen people sitting in my immediate vicinity kept on talking, often quite loudly, until the curtain rose. I wanted to tap them on the shoulder, preferably with a hammer, and tell them, "The dance starts when the music starts, dummy. Shut the hell up."

(O.K., I'll be honest. Having recently seen John Malkovich at work in Ripley's Game, what I really wanted to do was drop a garrote over their heads and pull hard, but I didn't think to bring one with me. A critic's work is never done.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 15, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: A spoonful of sugar

A reader writes:

Had a thought this eve while viewing "Cinema Paradiso" for first tiime since theatre run some 14 years ago and with horror of Madrid in mind as I lived there two years some many years ago but thanks to the Web, could find online the two major Madrid dailies: Pais (irony there) and ABC. and have first-hand account from them. And have so strong love for Spanish people and their civilized way of life.

Back to "Cinema Paradiso", in world of film, we often ask of you, the experts, what are your favorite 10 or 50 , "best" or "favorites" but never: "what is the sweetest film in your experience". In this time of Spanish tragedy, I ask you the question of what is your sweetest film--LOL just as if you pose that question on your blog, we could all join in happy shared thoughts in a time of sadness.

I realize that I presume.

Not at all, and I can answer your question right off the top of my head. The sweetest movie I know is Michael Caton-Jones' Doc Hollywood, a lovely little fantasy about life in a small southern town. Michael J. Fox never gave a better performance, and Julie Warner (I wonder what happened to her?), Woody Harrelson, David Ogden Stiers, Frances Sternhagen, George Hamilton, and Bridget Fonda are all just right. No, small towns aren't really like that, but some of them occasionally come close, and Doc Hollywood reminds me quite strongly of the one from which I came. I can't promise that it'll put a smile on your face, but it's never failed to put one on mine.

(Incidentally, it seems that Reflections in D Minor is another fan of W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 15, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become."

W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 15, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: One-tenth of a nation

The New York Times has a story about Hollywood's response to The Passion of the Christ. Some of the quotes are (ahem) revealing, but this sentence was what jumped out and caught my eye:

Last week a Gallup poll found that 11 percent of Americans had seen the movie and that 34 percent more said they planned to see it in theaters.

Is anyone else astonished by those numbers? And can any of you remember similar polling about any other film? I'd love to see comparable numbers for, say, Titanic, or for such middlebrow blockbusters of the past as Ben-Hur or Gone With the Wind.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 15, 2004 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Sunday, Sunday

I went to see Paul Taylor again, wrote two pieces (a book review for the Baltimore Sun and a record review for the Wall Street Journal), and had a Portuguese brunch with Chicha, who is visiting New York this weekend and turns out to be v. cool. I showed her a photo of Our Girl but didn't disclose my shockingly beautiful co-blogger's name, meaning that the Chicha lives to blog another day.

I thought that would do me, but the urge to blog proved irresistible, so here I am. Briefly. Tomorrow I'll be spending the entire day and evening working on You-Know-What.

In the meantime, here are some interesting letters I've been meaning to post:

- "A note on subtitles: I recently purchased the DVD of Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, a beloved favorite film (curious, because I really don't like any of his other films--my other personal favorites--Ikiru, Vertigo, Rules of the Game, Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity--are by directors that have many films to their credit that I like). While viewing the other night, I noticed that there was a new translation in the subtitles. Some dialog and interior monologues, untranslated in the VHS, were now translated. And some translations had been altered--sometimes for the better--sometimes not, I thought. But what really got me was that some lines, including one of the great lines, are now untranslated in the new version. Marian, the trapeze artist, is musing at a rock club and Bruno Ganz, the angel infatuated with her, is nearby. She thinks about how good she feels and speculates that (this is from my rough memory of the VHS) that �heaven must be looking over me.' At this Ganz breaks out in a big grin. But with no translation, the non-German speaking has no idea why he is smiling. I ran out the car trunk and retrieved my old VHS that I was going to churn at the local hipster used book, music, and film store. It seems I need both."

- "A respectful inquiry re helping non-subscribers to the Wall Street Journal. I was totally occupied with my business, and I missed your piece about Amtrak, and also, for several days, your references to it on your blog. I now face having to use some sort of index--I don't find one on the WSJ site, maybe I missed it--or else having to plow through a number of days of dead tree Journals to find the Amtrak piece. Is there a blog-graceful way for you to give us the date and even the page number for such occasional WSJ essays?"

That piece appeared on page D6 of the Journal for Jan. 28, 2004. In light of recent events, it's already acquired a sadly nostalgic feel....

- "Reading a novel, watching a movie or gazing at a painting are all solitary, self-contained experiences. We are one-on-one with the work of art, and our �normal life' is temporarily on hold. The artwork in such moments is both the cause and the recipient of our thoughts and emotions. It demands our undivided attention. Imagine you are engrossed in a novel alone in the house. The phone rings and it's a friend from a distant past. Your mind immediately dis-attaches itself from the text and returns to it only after you had hung up. Your memory of this day will keep the novel and the conversation as separate �stand alone' experiences.

"What makes music different is that it does not require our absolute attention to be enjoyed or remembered. True, not so with a symphony concert, but that may just explain why it is often the lighter musical fare that transports us back in time. Music leaves an imprint on our minds even while it serves as mere background to our day-to-day activities - driving a car, having a conversation in a bar, a get-together in a friend's apartment. Our minds in these situations switch back and forth between the music (of which we are conscious only intermittently), and that which goes on about us. Music is thus woven into our memory much the same way as a movie score is woven into a movie. It is an accompaniment to life in a way that none of the other art forms are."

Nice. Thanks for writing.

And now to bed, and after that...You-Know-What. See you on Tuesday. Wish me a good day's work!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 15, 2004 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Trickle-down theory

It seems that A Terry Teachout Reader has already started to show up in bookstores, at least on the West Coast. I've gotten two e-mails in the past two days from readers who've bought copies over the counter. Considering that I just got my copy yesterday, this is pretty amazing. (The official date of publication is May 6.)

Drop me an e-mail if you should happen to see the Teachout Reader in a bookstore, would you? And if you think of it, let me know where and how it was shelved.

Many thanks.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 16, 2004 1:34 AM | Permalink

TT: Snapshot

As of this moment, we're being read in ten time zones around the world.

(Now, what about those other fourteen?)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 16, 2004 2:16 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Spring, l'enfant terrible

As a first-day-of-spring baby, I can assure everyone that this week's weather is far from exceptional. The day I was born, there was a massive snowstorm, seeming to herald no good. I have vivid memories of sharp disappointment one year when the power got knocked out and we had to cancel my kiddie party, even though this left all the prizes and cake for me (which only seemed just; I always did regard birthdays as one of the great excuses for petty tyranny). When I lived in New York I hosted a joint birthday party with a friend on a night in early spring when you could just about measure the snow in feet and the wind mph in scores. All day long, making hors d'oeuvres and sugar syrup, we listened to the alarmists on the radio urging everyone to STAY IN YOUR HOUSE and tried to think of countermeasures. In the end, twenty hardy or foolhardy souls made their way to the Bowery, and most of them stayed for breakfast.

Aw, this is nothin'.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 16, 2004 6:15 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Sweetness and light

Do check out Marshall Sokoloff's gorgeous photographs of sugar-hauling ships at The Morning News. Jim Coudal comments:

It seems fitting somehow that the hulls of ships carrying raw sugar from the tropics, north through the Atlantic to the Jarvis Quay in Toronto, should be bright and cheerful. That, like those products that will be produced from their cargo, they should be the color of jawbreakers and soda cans, candy wrappers, and the sprinkles that dress the top of cupcakes. It's also appropriate that they show signs of decay.

My favorites are nos. 2 and 4, which look like abstract landscapes. Some others look like the ships they are, some just look abstract. Where they appear, the ships' ropes and markings add an element of collage. I want one.

Recommendation: Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. (Pardon my Cinetrixism.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 16, 2004 9:12 AM | Permalink

TT: Words to the wise

Here's an e-mail I just got from Maria Schneider, the jazz composer and bandleader, about whom I've had much to say on this site:

We are playing the Kaye Playhouse again this Thursday, March 18th at 8:00 p.m.

The Kaye Playhouse is located at 695 Park Ave. (that's actually 68th between Lex and Park on the north side of the street).

If you can't come, or don't live in NY, please forward this to anyone whom you think might like to come.

To order tickets:
Phone 212-772-4448
Fax 212-650-3661

Also, I'd like to mention that we just finished the recording stage of our newest album. I'm so happy with the result.

Please visit mariaschneider.com to find out how you can witness some of the process of making this recording.

Hope to see you this Thursday!

Go thou and do likewise.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 16, 2004 10:45 AM | Permalink

TT: Another hill taken

Sorry to be so slow with this, but Sarah has cracked Washington Post Book World:

In the current climate of book publishing, during which controversies rage over the distinction between literary and commercial fiction, and chaos and uncertainty rule the day, one is grateful for signs of professionalism. That is, an author skilled enough over years of practice in taking the fundamental elements of a good story -- plot, character, pace, setting, historical detail -- and creating a mixture that delivers on nearly all counts. A professional learns from her earlier mistakes and strives to create a better result the next time around; the book may not be transcendent or wholly unique, but a well-crafted work that's enjoyable, entertaining and occasionally educational is more than enough to satisfy most picky readers....

What's more, here's her author bio--or what we in the newspaper business call her "shirttail": Sarah Weinman writes about crime and mystery fiction at sarahweinman.blogspot.com. I guess that's the only credential she needs, so far as Book World is concerned. Good for them, and her. Seems like blogs are here to stay.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 16, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder

A reader was amused by my suppressed longing to strangle a noisy dancegoer:

A critic's work is never done -- without a few weapons in his pocket.

You haven't lived until you've attended theater in Fresno, California, which is certainly the worst place on earth for public events (except, perhaps sporting events where rowdy is expected).

I have -- I am not making this up, as Dave Barry would say -- had a woman sitting next to me singing all of the lyrics loudly. When I politely asked her to refrain, she stood, shrieked at me and everyone in the vicinity that she'd paid for her ticket and she'd damn well sing. It stopped the music. When it started again, she sang.

I have watched standing ovations at intermission for unwatchable performances -- I think they are required for everything here. It won't be long before the audience is staggering to its feet to applaud the curtain opening.

I once had a woman reading her grocery list into her cell phone and explaining what shelf the things would be found on. This was during a very funny and hyperactive performance of Pirates of Penzance, something that should have kept her attention.

But the one bright spot is that most of the offenders are old. Children sit transfixed. Maybe when the geezers die (except me, who will always be too young to be a geezer, of course), we'll get our public space back. We rarely go out any more. I have little doubt that I'd be the one arrested for murder when, obviously, murder is necessary.

All of which reminds me of the last paragraph of one of my Daily News reviews of the New York Philharmonic: "As for the audience, suffice it to say that concertgoers who cough with open mouths should in my opinion have them closed by a passing usher, preferably with a baseball bat."

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 16, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT and OGIC: New around here, stranger?

We're having a major traffic surge as a result of Terry's Wall Street Journal article about Tim Robbins, and our guess is that some of you are visiting for the first time, so welcome to "About Last Night," a 24/7 blog hosted by artsjournal.com on which Terry Teachout writes about the arts in New York City and elsewhere, aided and abetted by the pseudonymous Our Girl in Chicago, who writes from...Chicago.

All our postings of the past seven days are visible in reverse chronological order on this page. Terry's start with "TT," Our Girl's with "OGIC." In addition, the entire contents of this site are archived chronologically and can be accessed by clicking "ALN Archives" at the top of the right-hand column.

You can read more about us, and about "About Last Night," by going to the right-hand column and clicking in the appropriate places. You'll also find various other toothsome features there, including our regularly updated Top Five list of things to see, hear, read and otherwise do, links to Terry's most recent newspaper and magazine articles, and "Sites to See," a list of links to other blogs and Web sites with art-related content. If you're curious about the arty part of the blogosphere, you've come to the right site: "Sites to See" will point you in all sorts of interesting directions, and all roads lead back to "About Last Night."

As if all that weren't enough, you can write to either one of us by clicking the appropriate "Write Us" button. We read our mail, and answer it, too, so long as you're minimally polite. (Be patient, though. We get a lot of it.)

The only other thing you need to know is that "About Last Night" is about all the arts, high, medium, and low: film, drama, painting, dance, fiction, TV, music of all kinds, whatever. Our interests are wide-ranging, and we think there are plenty of other people like us out there in cyberspace, plus still more who long to wander off their beaten paths but aren't sure which way to turn.

If you're one of the above, we're glad you came. Enjoy. Peruse. Come back tomorrow...and bring a friend. The easy-to-remember alternate URL is www.terryteachout.com, which will bring you here lickety-split (as, of course, will the longer address currently visible in your browser).

Welcome.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 16, 2004 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Tim Robbins' ghostwriter

I usually write about theater in Friday's Wall Street Journal, but I made a special guest appearance on this morning's editorial page. The occasion was the opening of Embedded, Tim Robbins' new play about Gulf War II, which he blames on the political philosopher Leo Strauss, quoting chapter and verse to prove his contention that the war was started for nefarious reasons by a cabal of Strauss' neoconservative disciples in the Bush administration (including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz).

There's just one little problem--the quote in question is totally bogus. And that's not even the worst part:

Strauss' complex political views are not easily reduced to speeches in a play, but Mr. Robbins has done his best by making one of his characters, a fellow named Pearly White and thus presumably modeled on Richard Perle (that being Mr. Robbins' idea of cutting wit), spout the following lines: "Moral virtue has no application to the really intelligent man, the philosopher. In the words of Leo Strauss: �Moral virtue only exists in popular opinion where it serves the purpose of controlling the unintelligent majority.'" Hence the Strauss-inspired Gulf War, which was fought not to topple a bloodthirsty monster but to anesthetize the ignorant masses and thereby ensure the re-election of George W. Bush and all those other nasty Republicans. Got it?

Now I'm a drama critic, not a political philosopher, but I do know a thing or two about Strauss, and I was sure he'd never said anything like that, since he wasn't given to self-caricature. So when I came home from "Embedded," I decided to see whether I could track down the source of that suspicious-looking quotation from Chairman Leo. It sounded like something a half-educated movie star might have found on a Web site, so I looked for it on Google, and immediately hit the jackpot.

The source of Mr. Robbins' alleged Strauss "quote," I discovered, was an article called "The Secret Kingdom of Leo Strauss." The author, Tony Papert, turned out to be paraphrasing in his own words the opinions of Thomas Pangle, a student of Strauss, which Mr. Papert had gleaned at second hand from a book by a third party, a Strauss-hating Canadian academic named Shadia Drury. "Pangle had implied," Mr. Papert wrote, "that for Socrates (i.e., for Strauss), moral virtue had no application to the really intelligent man, the philosopher. Moral virtue only existed in popular opinion, where it served the purpose of controlling the unintelligent majority."

Oh, yes, one more thing: Tony Papert's article appeared in the April 18, 2003 issue of Executive Intelligence Review, a magazine published by none other than Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., that well-known millionaire crackpot and purveyor of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Let's review: (1) Leo Strauss never said what Tim Robbins quoted him as having said; (2) Thomas Pangle didn't say it, either; (3) Tony Papert, a LaRouchie, said it; and (4) Mr. Robbins lifted Mr. Papert's quote from a LaRouchie magazine and dropped it into his play, deliberately passing it off as an authentic Straussian utterance.

None of this, of course, has any necessary bearing on the theatrical quality of "Embedded." But it does suggest that Tim Robbins, whatever his other virtues, is not a man to be trusted with facts....

No link, alas, though sometimes the Journal's free Web site, opinionjournal.com, puts up additional links to editorial-page pieces over the weekend. If they do, I'll let you know. Otherwise, you can read the whole thing by going out and buying a copy of the paper (which you should be doing anyway!).

If you want to see Tony Papert's article for yourself, go here. Bring your boots, though: it's in LaRoucheland, where the fever swamps are deep....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 16, 2004 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"She stepped forward, kissed me and laid her head against my shoulder, leaning prudently forward to keep the rest of herself out of contact with the rest of me. Both of us sighed deeply. I felt as if I had just sat through a complete performance of La Traviata compressed into one and a half minutes."

Kingsley Amis, Girl, 20

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 16, 2004 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: Don't rub it in

For those of you who live elsewhere: it's snowing in Manhattan. A lot. Did I mention that I have to go see a play in Brooklyn tonight?

All together now: arrgh.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 16, 2004 12:48 PM | Permalink

TT: The wonders of the Web

A reader who saw last Saturday's posting on W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings wrote with staggering promptitude to tell me that this charming little film can be ordered on videocassette from an on-line store called Hot Rod Memories that sells, among other things, movies suitable for viewing at drive-in theaters. Remember those? I do.

This seemed too good to be true, but the price was right ($19.95 plus shipping), so I paid a visit to www.hotrodmemories.com, placed my order, and the package, glory be, arrived this morning. It's an off-the-air, under-the-counter dub of decent quality: Burt Reynolds' bright red shirt blossoms a bit on the screen, but the picture is otherwise adequate and the sound is good enough.

To do likewise, go here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 17, 2004 1:32 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Save this show

Apologies for my absence from this space today. I'm trying to put out a number of actual and potential small fires before hitting the road after work, destination Hometown. But I did get word of some new developments regarding "Arrested Development," thanks to an alert reader. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Fox is enhancing its efforts to find the audience the struggling show deserves. The most immediate impact of these efforts? "Arrested" will air tonight following "American Idol." That's 9:30 Eastern. Tune in, or set your VCRs and Tivos. Here's some of what Joe Flint at the Journal had to say about the new push from Fox:

The freshest comedy on television this season is Fox's "Arrested Development," which follows the antics of the Bluths, a rich Southern California family. Patriarch George Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor, best known as Hank, the long-suffering sidekick on HBO's "The Larry Sanders Show") is behind bars for raiding the corporate coffers. Jason Bateman plays his second son Michael who is the only one with any sense of decency. When he's not trying to rebuild the family's real estate business he is fending off efforts to undermine him by his jealous older brother GOB (short for George Oscar Bluth), boozy mother Lucille and superficial sister Lindsay. The show is from Ron Howard and Brian Grazer's Imagine Television and the former child star turned movie mogul serves as executive producer as well as narrator of each episode. Mitch Hurwitz, a veteran sitcom producer whose career started as a writer on "The Golden Girls," created "Arrested Development."

Despite all the critical raves (The New York Times called it "sharply satirical," Time said it's the best new sitcom out there and USA Today said the program is "heaven-sent for anyone who has longed for something, anything, outside the comedy norm."), "Arrested Development" is struggling. So far this season, it is averaging only 6.2 million viewers in its Sunday 9:30 p.m. time slot, according to Nielsen Media Research. It usually is dead last in those coveted 18-49 demographics as well.

Fortunately for the hardcore fans of the show, Fox isn't ready to throw in the towel--yet. This week, in an effort to get the show sampled, Fox is putting "Arrested Development" behind its blockbuster "American Idol." "Seinfeld's" Julia Louis-Dreyfus is guest-starring in a two-part story as a blind attorney prosecuting George Bluth Sr. while bedding son Michael. Ms. Louis-Dreyfus joins an already impressive list of guest stars on the show including Heather Graham and Liza Minelli. Since these folks aren't doing the show for ratings, clearly the program is already hitting a high note in the creative community. It was saluted recently by the Museum of TV & Radio's annual festival that salutes the best of television, a rare honor for a freshman program.

The Julia Louis-Dreyfus gig starts tonight. Help rescue a terrific show from the fate of "Freaks and Geeks" and "My So-Called Life."

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 17, 2004 3:33 AM | Permalink

TT: Otherwise engaged

Nothing more forthcoming from me today, alas. I've got to spend the morning writing my Wall Street Journal drama column for Friday, then the afternoon and evening working on That Which Must Not Be Named (arrgh...but it's going well). I might get weird and post something tonight, but more likely you'll be in the hands of Our Girl.

I do want to report an experience from a half-hour ago (I'm writing this just after midnight). I went out to Brooklyn to see Edward Hall's all-male production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and when I emerged from the subway, the trees between Central Park West and my doorway were all sheathed in ice and snow. The air seemed full of cold white light. What a lovely spectacle to behold after spending the evening in an enchanted forest!

And so to bed. See you when I see you.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 17, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: New kid on the block

Today's New York Observer has a profile of Sam Tanenhaus:

"I'm very moderate by nature," Sam Tanenhaus said by telephone from his home in Westchester, two days after The New York Times announced that he would be the next editor of its Book Review. "People with extreme views interest me, dramatically and narratively."

The author of a very well-received 1997 biography of the journalist and eventual anti-communist Whittaker Chambers, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Mr. Tanenhaus has spent the past five years as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, largely chronicling conservatives and neoconservatives in the orbit of the Bush administration. And so liberals seem to think--or, perhaps, to fear--that the man taking over one of the country's premier literary institutions is a conservative, while conservatives find him, as he said, more middle-of-the-road.

Affable, energetic but easygoing, well-respected by a broad swath of the intellectual community, possessing a healthy understanding of the ideological debates of the day but with no apparent dog in the race, Mr. Tanenhaus appears to fit The Times' bill perfectly as a successor to Charles (Chip) McGrath, who has been itching to return to writing after nearly a decade in one of New York's most prestigious--and thankless--jobs. Mr. Tanenhaus also happens to come equipped with an M.A. in English literature from Yale and a background in book publishing....

"Sam is neither conservative nor neoconservative," summed up his friend Terry Teachout, the critic and blogger, who contributes to The Times Book Review. "He is an old-fashioned anti-communist Jewish liberal intellectual who still gets excited about Saul Bellow."

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 17, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"'This cat came out,' said future country singer Bob Luman, still a seventeen-year-old high school student in Kilgore, Texas, 'in red pants and a green coat and a pink shirt and socks, and he had this sneer on his face and he stood behind the mike for five minutes, I'll bet, before he made a move. Then he hit his guitar a lick, and he broke two strings. Hell, I'd been playing ten years, and I hadn't broken a total of two strings. So there he was, these two strings dangling, and he hadn't done anything except break the strings yet, and these high school girls were screaming and fainting and running up to the stage, and then he started to move his hips real slow like he had a thing for his guitar....For the next nine days he played one-nighters around Kilgore, and after school every day me and my girl would get in the car and go wherever he was playing that night. That's the last time I tried to sing like Webb Pierce or Lefty Frizzell.'"

Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 17, 2004 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT and OGIC: A nice round number

Some time this morning, "About Last Night" will rack up its 250,000th page view since opening for business last July.

To all of you from both of us, our heartfelt thanks.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 17, 2004 12:09 PM | Permalink

TT: O.K., one more thing

As of this moment, we're being read in thirteen time zones.

And now I really am going to bed....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 17, 2004 12:38 PM | Permalink

TT: Coming attraction

The Jazz Museum in Harlem is gradually taking shape. Nat Hentoff has a piece about it in this morning's Wall Street Journal:

When Charlie Parker died in 1955, drummer and leader Art Blakey--a persistent proselytizer for jazz--said forlornly, "I doubt if many black kids knew who Charlie Parker was." Soon, there will be a vivid source of immersion in jazz past and future. And since the music has long been an international language, tourists from around the world will be coming to Harlem in ever greater numbers. They won't see a statue of Charlie Parker, but they'll be in his presence, along with that of his progenitors....

Take a look.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 18, 2004 1:21 AM | Permalink

TT: And I thought I was blunt!

Courtesy of Mixolydian Mode, this hair-raising quote from John Tavener, the "holy minimalist" composer:

I have always been drawn more to the archetypal levels of human experience and human types, which is why I think I was drawn to Stravinsky and revolted by Schoenberg. Schoenberg was for me the filthy, rotten 'dirt dump' of the twentieth century. I personally could not stand the angst-ridden sound of decay in his music, the vile post-Freudian world. Basically, I do not respond to the so-called 'Germanic Tradition,' whose by now rotting corpse -- the hideous sound world of its fabricated complexity -- smothers archetypal experience that I have always sought.

For more of the same, go here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 18, 2004 1:43 AM | Permalink

TT: In lieu of me

I'm still tied to the tracks. For now:

- Courtesy of Symphony X, a fascinating samizdata.net posting by Brian Mickelthwait on Dmitri Shostakovich, the greatest Russian composer of the twentieth century:

Shostakovich was almost certainly a better composer after Stalin had given him his philistine going-over following the first performances of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, than he would have been if Stalin had left him alone. Although both are very fine, I prefer Symphony Number 5 ("A Soviet Artist's Reply to Just Criticism") to Symphony Number 4.

Had Shostakovich continued unmolested along the musical path he was travelling before Stalin's denunciation of him, I don't think he would merely have become just another boring sub-Schoenbergian modernist. He was too interesting a composer for that already. But I do not think his subsequent music would have stirred the heart in the way his actual subsequent music actually does stir mine, and I do not think I am the only one who feels this way.

Thanks to Stalin, if that is an excusable phrase, Shostakovich was forced to write what is now called 'crossover' music, that is, music which is just about entitled to remain in the classical racks in the shops, but which also gives the bourgeoisie, such as me, something to sing along to and get excited about. Shostakovich had always written film music as well as the serious stuff. What Stalin and his attack dogs did was force him to combine the two styles. He might well have ended up doing this anyway, but who can be sure?

What Stalin also did for Shostakovich was to make his music matter more. Thanks to Stalin (that phrase again!) every note composed by Shostakovich became a matter of life and death � while it was being composed, and whenever you listen to it. Stalin turned Shostakovich into a kind of musical gladiator, a man who knew that every day might be his last. Not many composers get that kind of intense attention....

I think there's something to this--quite a bit, actually. In my Teachout Reader essay about Aaron Copland, I similarly suggested that the quality of Copland's music was improved by his involvement in the middlebrow cultural activities of the Communist-controlled Popular Front, which inspired him to compose both "popular" ballet scores like Billy the Kid and Rodeo and such abstract yet accessible middle-period masterpieces as the Piano and Violin Sonatas.

Needless to say (I hope!), no artistic masterpiece is worth the loss of even one human life, much less tens of millions of them. But of course there can be no erasing of the Gulag and its murderous activities from the pages of history--and at least we have the music of Shostakovich to console us for the bloody nightmare that was Stalinism.

- Speaking of the Problem of Popularity, I disagree deeply with virtually all of what The Reading Experience has to say in this posting, but it's so provocative and compellingly put that you need to read it anyway:

In Sunday's NY Times Book Review, Brooke Allen reviews a new biography of Somerset Maugham, on behalf of whose faded reputation some critical labor has been expended lately, mostly, in my view, as part of a larger effort to identify certain unthreatening modern writers as possible alternatives to the modernists. (See also this review of the same biography in the February New Criterion.)...

The most interesting part of Allen's review, however, is this bit of quasi-praise: "But Maugham's strengths, it must be remembered, were very considerable. As William Plomer once felt it necessary to remind highbrow readers, 'To be a man of the world, to be acquainted with all sorts of different people, to be tolerant, to be curious, to have a capacity for enjoyment, to be the master of a clear and unaffected prose style--these are advantages.' "

These are perhaps advantages in the attempt to lead a worthwhile life, but they are advantages of no kind in creating works of literature. They are, in fact, except for the imperative "to be curious," wholly irrelevant to the enterprise of writing fiction....

This leaves us with the mastery "of a clear and unaffected prose style." I confess that the demand for this particular quality among certain kinds of readers and critics has always seemed inexplicable to me. For one thing, how many great writers of fiction can actually boast of such a style? Hemingway's style is "clear," but certainly not "unaffected." Dreiser's style is unaffected, but not at all clear. (Personally, I wouldn't want them to be otherwise.) I am hard pressed to think of a great British writer of fiction whose style could be described thus. Maybe Austen. But Dickens? Hardy? Lawrence? Conrad? For another, why would a fiction writer want such a style? It is a great advantage if you're sending a telegram, but why would a writer seeking to use the resources of language to explore human motivation and psychology, our frequently mysterious behavior and actions, be interested in such a style? Does Shakespeare have it?

If Allen's list of Maugham's attributes is the best that can be said of him, then he will assuredly continue to fall into obscurity. For that matter, all such attempts to rescue "clear" and "unaffected" writers (such attempts have been made on behalf of writers like James Gould Cozzens and J. P. Marquand, among others) will always fail. In the long run, their "advantages" are just not the sorts of things readers interested in what can be accomplished in fiction are looking for. Perhaps it would have been interesting to meet the likes of Somerset Maugham (if indeed he was the kind of man Allen describes), but his fiction, in almost all ways unremarkable, is another matter entirely.

One of these days I'll get around to explaining why I think this posting is mostly all wet, but I've got a book to finish....

- I learned about Goodbye, Babylon, a toothsome-sounding mail-order-only six-CD set of old-time gospel music, from this review by Matt Labash:

The going understanding of both Christian and heathen alike has been that when God banished Satan, and carved up their respective fiefdoms, He kept all the key stuff: the clouds, the mansions, the streets paved with gold. But as a sop for assigning Lucifer to an eternity in fiery darkness, he gave him most of the good music. Therefore, Satan got the Rolling Stones and Robert Johnson. God kept Debbie Boone and George Beverly Shea. Most people think that God got screwed.

But the new six-CD boxed set, Goodbye, Babylon, shows God may have been slyer than originally thought--having held in reserve long-forgotten and recently discovered gems that have been dusted off by Lance Ledbetter, a 27-year-old Atlanta software installer and former DJ. Having become obsessed with sacred music from the early part of last century, Ledbetter, over a five-year period, scoured the bins and collections of knowledgeable musicologists, enlisting help from everyone he could lay hands on, including his father, who pulled appropriate Scripture passages as companion notes for songs. He financed this labor of love on his credit cards.

What he came up with is 135 songs and 25 sermons--the largest collection of sacred music ever assembled. Instead of relinquishing control to some major label (which, with Goodbye Babylon's critical success, will hopefully inspire knockoffs), Ledbetter put the whole thing out on his own start-up label, Dust-to-Digital. It's an appropriate name for the time-consuming process of finding, cleaning up, and finally transferring source material from the scratchy, hissing records. As Charles Wolfe, one of the many invaluable liner-note contributors writes, the records, which predated mixing or multiple microphones, often cut in makeshift studios, were carried everywhere from coal camps to railroad yards to juke joints. But for the love of a few obsessive custodians, the music would've been lost forever, as most of the records were "worn out, broken, thrown away, made into ashtrays, used as target practice for local carnival-ball throwing contests, plowed into landfills, or donated to scrap shellac drives during World War II."

What these salvagers have preserved is a gospel hodgepodge, everything from Sacred Harp singing to hillbilly romps to field holler/prison chants to front-porch blues to jubilee quartets to old timey country to Sanctified congregational singing to Pentecostal rave-up's. They all come down in a rain of clamoring tambourines and bottleneck slide guitars, clawhammer banjo-picking, booming jug band-blowing and barrelhouse piano rolls....

To order Goodbye, Babylon, go here. I plan to.

(That one's especially for you, Supermaud.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 18, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"'That's an old attitude.'"

"'It may be old, but I am currently holding it.'"

Jon Hassler, Staggerford

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 18, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Two kinds of people

I'm going to be appearing next month on Studio 360, Kurt Andersen's radio show. To this end, I was chatting with the producer about critics of the past whom I admire, and I mentioned that I thought the film criticism of James Agee to be grossly overrated (though not without merit). That opinion cuts sharply against the grain of received taste, and it's not one I've always held: I used to admire Agee a lot more than I do now.

One thing that caused me to change my mind was Agee's preposterously effusive praise for Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux. Turner Classic Movies has been working its way through the Chaplin oeuvre all month, so I took a look at Monsieur Verdoux the other day, and found it no more amusing on reacquaintance. But, then, I've never liked Chaplin, whom I simply don't find funny at all, whereas I think Buster Keaton is not merely funny but one of the very few silent filmmakers in any genre whose best work remains fully viable today.

I got sick of writing tonight, decided to do a little channel surfing to clear my head, and saw that The Gold Rush, by common consent Chaplin's finest feature-length film, was showing on TCM in the re-edited version Chaplin released in 1942 (he removed the original title cards and substituted his own spoken narration). I thought I ought to give the old boy one more try, so I turned it on...and I just couldn't stick it out to the end. I didn't laugh once.

All this reminded me that not long after 9/11, I went to see Buster Keaton's The General at New York's Film Forum, which isn't all that far from Ground Zero. I wrote about the experience a few days later in my Washington Post column:

To me, it suggests a portfolio of Civil War photographs by Mathew Brady into which a slapstick comedian of genius has somehow inadvertently wandered. The Film Forum showed a handsome-looking print of "The General" two weeks ago as part of its recent Keaton retrospective, and people were lined up halfway down the block to get into the 7:30 showing, which featured live piano accompaniment by Steve Sterner. No doubt the audience was lousy with film-studies majors, but that didn't keep them from laughing themselves silly at Keaton's divine foolery. Where there are laughs, there is hope.

I wonder whether The Gold Rush would have made that emotionally battered audience laugh nearly so hard--if at all.

Maybe it's just me, but it's my impression that Chaplin's films, unlike Keaton's, are now widely thought to have aged poorly. As so often, David Thomson read my mind before the fact:

Intuitively, he sensed how ready the viewers were to have their fantasies indulged. But that instinct usually lacked artistic intelligence, real human sympathy, and even humor. Chaplin's isolation barred him from working with anyone else. He needed to fulfil every creative function on a film, whether it is scripiting, composing, or directing actors. He is isolated, too, in the sense that his later films seem as cut off from any known period or reality as the earlier ones....Chaplin looked like a great instinct narrowed by the absence of the other qualities that would mature an artist.

James Agee, of course, thought otherwise. So much the worse for him, I fear.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 18, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Slight oversight

I got so preoccupied with the latest chapter of my Balanchine book (which is now polished to a fare-thee-well) that I forgot to post the weekly teaser to my Friday Wall Street Journal theater column! Apologies. Today I wrote about Propeller's all-male production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Edward Hall and playing at BAM Harvey through March 28, and Tim Robbins' Embedded, now showing at the Public Theater.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is pure bliss:

Everyone knows that in Elizabethan times, Shakespeare's plays were performed by companies of men and boys, but it's one of those snippets of historical knowledge we tend to file and forget. Not only are Mr. Hall and company well aware of it, but they make the most of it without ever stooping to heavy-handed sexual sermonizing: Hippolyta (Emilio Doorgasingh) is attired in Milton Berle-style drag, while Helena and Hermia (Robert Hands and Jonathan McGuinness) duke it out like a pair of roller-derby queens on the rampage. The cheery atmosphere even extends to the intermission, during which the entire cast strolls out to the lobby and leads the audience in a sing-along (they did the Monkees' "I'm a Believer" on opening night).

Yet the members of Propeller are no less alert to the chiming music of Shakespeare's verse, and no sooner has the wreckage of "Pyramus and Thisby" been carted away than they work one final feat of theatrical prestidigitation and modulate into the sweet solemnity of the last scene, with Puck (Simon Scardifield) speaking the epilogue so simply and benevolently that I forgot to breathe. Suddenly the lights came up and I found myself back in the real world. I hated to go home....

Embedded isn't, and not just because of its fact-twisting, either:

You'd think a satire about Gulf War II would have tried to be laughworthy, and I suppose Mr. Robbins did his best, but in the whole of "Embedded" there are just two clever touches, both involving the American journalists who covered the war. They're put through basic training by Col. Hardchannel (V.J. Foster), a brass-voiced drill instructor who in private life is a musical-comedy buff with a taste for Stephen Sondheim, and the military press conferences they attend are accompanied by canned Muzak, to which they gently sway in unison.

Save for those two tiny oases of wit, "Embedded" is a desert of agitprop clich�s, most of them evidently gleaned from Mr. Robbins's close study of Marc Blitzstein's "The Cradle Will Rock," about which he made a film five years ago. The bad guys all have Herblock-type editorial-cartoon names (Donald Rumsfeld is "Rum-Rum," Condoleezza Rice "Gondola"), while the dialogue is as predictable as a stump speech ("Having neither been to war nor served myself, I know that my dedication to war is a dedication to the safety of our society")....

No link, so go buy this morning's paper and read the whole thing there.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 19, 2004 2:04 AM | Permalink

TT: No show today

In addition to all those postings I didn't really have time to write yesterday, I succeeded in drafting yet another chapter of the Balanchine book. I want to (A) get it polished and locked up this morning and (B) get another chapter started tonight. To these ends, I plan to post no more today. Our Girl isn't in Chicago, so chances are that you won't be seeing anything new until Saturday, unless my resolve slackens. I'm sure you'll forgive us...right?

Anyway, we did manage to put up a lot of stuff on Wednesday and Thursday, and it may be that you haven't read it all, so eat what's here. One or more of us will see you tomorrow.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 19, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Chaplin's a great artist--there can't be any argument about that. It's just that he seldom makes the corners of my mouth move up. I find him easy to admire and hard to laugh at."

Orson Welles, This Is Orson Welles

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 19, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"He had supposed that when you dissolved a joyless marriage, you opened yourself to the return of joy, but he discovered himself open instead to loneliness.

"In matters of loneliness, Chris was a novice. He had never in his life been lonely. Indeed, during the last and most trying years of his marriage, when Karen was in treatment for alcoholism and Kay was in treatment for drugs and Billy's rock group was practicing in the basement, he thought of himself as suffering from the opposite of loneliness--which, he was amazed to discover, didn't have a name. Why, of the 600,000 words in the language, was there no word for the opposite of loneliness?"

Jon Hassler, The Love Hunter

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 20, 2004 1:53 AM | Permalink

TT: Bull's-eye

A reader writes:

You and I disagree as often as we agree, but I read you regularly and enjoy your site very much.

If more people would (or could) say things like that to one another in a wider variety of contexts, both cultural and political, the world would be an infinitely more pleasant place. Instead, we talk past each other--when not shooting at one another. I don't think things were like that when I was young, though perhaps I'm simply remembering the world of my youth through a haze of nostalgia.

At any rate, one of the goals of this site is to be a place where culture and the arts are discussed civilly and amicably. Which isn't to say that OGIC and I don't like a bit of snark from time to time: we do. Nor are we afraid to dust it up. But it seems to me that enough people are kicking up enough dust. All things being equal, I'd rather shed light, and maybe even a little sweetness, too.

I know Our Girl agrees, and I hope you do, too--and I also hope that "About Last Night" gives you pleasure even when you don't.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 21, 2004 5:40 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"There is one very good thing to be said of posterity, and this is that it turns a blind eye on the defects of greatness. Contemporary opinion is more concerned with the faults of a writer than with his excellence, but posterity takes him as a whole and very sensibly accepts the faults as the inevitable price that must be paid for the excellence."

W. Somerset Maugham, Don Fernando

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 21, 2004 10:21 AM | Permalink

TT: All my troubles seemed so far away

I don't know whether this story from the Chicago Tribune says more about the state of cultural literacy in America today or the tendency of middle-aged politicians (and their speechwriters) to live in the dear departed past. Either way, it tickled me:

The bogeymen of the 2004 presidential campaign just aren't what they used to be, a nationwide poll indicated Thursday.

When Republican allies of President Bush try to indict Democratic presidential rival Sen. John Kerry for 34-year-old ties to the anti-Vietnam War activities of Jane Fonda, only 20 percent of Americans have any idea what that's all about.

And when Kerry accuses Bush of being the first president to suffer a net loss of jobs since Herbert Hoover at the outset of the Great Depression, more than half of respondents are left wondering what the Democratic challenger is talking about. Many think Kerry's referring to a former FBI director, a 69-year-old dam on the Colorado River or a vacuum cleaner.

While one-fifth of those polled in a National Annenberg Election Survey know Fonda as a Vietnam War protester, twice as many think of her as an actress, 9 percent tie her to exercise videos, and 2 percent link her to either father Henry Fonda or ex-husband Ted Turner. Another 11 percent give other answers....

When survey respondents were asked, "Just your best guess, what was Herbert Hoover known for?" fewer than 7 percent tied Hoover to the Great Depression or the 1929 stock market crash--the parallel with Bush that Kerry likes to claim.

Thirty-seven percent cited Hoover as president. Twelve percent confused him with the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Another 4 percent correctly tied Hoover to the towering $48.9 million dam on the Colorado River that bears his name....

Twenty-nine percent of those surveyed had no answer at all when asked about Hoover, while 17 percent had no answer when asked about Fonda.

What I wonder is how many respondents could name any movie in which Jane Fonda starred. Or any specific thing Herbert Hoover did. Or any specific thing, period.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 21, 2004 10:31 AM | Permalink

TT: Now we know who to blame

Here's Rachel Toor, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Not so many years ago writing a trade book would bring accusations of popularizing, an academic sin worse than spending a Sunday night watching the Super Bowl. No more. Now university presses are turning away from cranking out piles of narrow monographs too expensive even for libraries and are actively looking for books that have at least an academic/trade market, books that will cross over to scholars in other disciplines or outside a narrow subfield. At the same time, commercial presses are hungry for serious, well-researched books that will appeal to people who want something more substantial than the next John Grisham. Trade publishers are also willing to pay big advances for the prestige of having heavyweight authors on their list. It isn't hard to think of powerhouse intellectual scholars who have become rock stars of the scholarly firmament. Hey, I'd line up to get Simon Schama's autograph.

How do these "popular" academic books happen? Do their authors instinctively know how to write for a broad audience? No stinking way. For the most part, rock-star academics are made, not born. And the people who make them are literary agents....

Read the whole thing here. And before the mud starts to fly, I poached this link--but I don't know where I got it. I bookmarked it a few days ago, then got immersed in writing, and now I can't remember where it came from, arrgh.

You know who you are. You know what to do. But please--I beg of you--don't do it.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 21, 2004 10:38 AM | Permalink

TT: Alas, not by me

Lileks fisked, of all things, Adam Gopnik's New Yorker piece about Times Square:

"It's not filled by media images that supplant the experience of real things."

Neither is my back yard or toilet bowl or left kidney; lots of things are not filled by media images that supplant the experience of real things. Folks, let me tell you: when you reach a certain level in an organization, you can write things like that, and the copy desk shrugs and says "whatever." Because it's Opinion, it's Creative, it's the Star Writer on a tear, and you don't step in to point out the emperor is not only buck-fargin' naked, he's wearing white before Memorial Day....

Bang. Crunch. Thump. Oooh!

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 21, 2004 10:45 AM | Permalink

TT: Don't get any cute ideas

Today's postings are merely an aberration. I wrote until...when? Midnight? Two in the morning? I forget. But I got a whole lot of work done on the Balanchine book yesterday, and I mean to get still more done today. Only I have a guest coming at one o'clock, followed by a matinee at two, and the idea of trying to write between now and then is, shall we say, repellent. Repugnant. Revolting. Maybe even rebarbative. So I decided to post a few quick items instead, knowing that you've all been missing me.

Nothing more will be forthcoming today, except for (I hope) the rest of Chapter Four. And yes, I may post a snippet or two of the book, but not while it's still piping hot. It needs to cool down a bit, and so do I.

(The very next thing I'll be writing, incidentally, is a character sketch of Jerome Robbins. That ought to be fun.)

Anyway, it's time for peanut butter and jelly, after which I'll take a shower and prepare to give my guest a tour of the Teachout Museum. Then we'll go hear Barbara Cook at Lincoln Center. Then it's back to work.

See you Monday.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 21, 2004 10:46 AM | Permalink

TT: Dust-up in the mailbox

I almost forgot to post some of the great mail I've been getting in response to what I wrote the other day about Charlie Chaplin:

- "For the most part, I think your criticism of all kinds is dead-on. In fact, I have once or twice asked myself whether you are me when I grow up. But your recent dismissal of Chaplin made me very sad. I agree that �by common consent' The Gold Rush is considered Chaplin's best movie, but I have never been able to understand why, especially when considering the 1942 rerelease with Chaplin's narration (that narration really saps the humor and spark right out of the movie, in my opinion). And certainly Monsieur Verdoux is not very good (neither is the Great Dictator, really...neither are any of his sound movies). But I suggest that you defer final judgement of Chaplin until you've seen Modern Times and City Lights--especially Modern Times. I think that Modern Times alone will lead you to wrinkle your nose at David Thomson's contention that Chaplin's films are �cut off from any known period or reality.' Both films are very, very funny as well (and I have never laughed during The Gold Rush either, although I have smiled), and both are great venues for his unique physical virtuosity. The ending of City Lights really is one of the best Hollywood Moments ever--it still gets me to reach for the kleenex, and I've seen it maybe a dozen times. Certainly Chaplin has some English dance-hall moments and extended lazzi routines (such as his fondness for strange-noise-making hiccups) that get tedious even in his best films, but Lordy, TT, you're depriving yourself of some really funny, really moving cinema if you give up on him now.

"One parting remark on the Chaplin-versus-Keaton tone of your post. The Chaplin/Keaton dichotomy, in the last twenty years or so, seems to have attained in some critical circles an either/or status. I love Keaton--and yes, there are moments of startling currency in his films, which you won't find in Chaplin. But his greatness does not preclude Chaplin's."

Conversely:

- "I don't know if you've seen Bertolucci's The Dreamers, but there's a fine scene in which the sexy young French guy and the sexy young American guy argue over who is the greater comedian: Chaplin or Keaton. The American picks Keaton; the Frenchman picks Chaplin. When the American protests, the French guy dismisses him, snapping: �You Americans don't even understand the essence of Jerry Lewis!?'

"So there you go."

Thanks, folks. I ain't budgin', though.

(In addition, God of the Machine has waded into the fray, with a little help from Wyndham Lewis. Go look.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 21, 2004 11:02 AM | Permalink

TT: Yo, Brutus, it's our fault

This story from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution almost slipped past me, but the Cranky Professor steered me straight:

"Et tu, Brute?"

Not anymore.

"And you too, Brutus?" is what students read in a new genre of study guides that modernize the Elizabethan English found in "Julius Caesar" and other plays by William Shakespeare.

These guides move beyond the plot summaries found in other study aides by providing line-by-line translations in modern-day English.

Once barred from school, the new translations now are being used in classes across metro Atlanta.

But not everyone thinks they belong there. Some educators say the beauty of Shakespeare rests in the writer's eloquence and poetry -- something missing in the translations.

"Shakespeare without language is like a movie without sound," said Paul Voss, who teaches Shakespeare at Georgia State University.

The translated study guides can be found in a class for struggling readers at one Fayette County high school. Henry County teachers also assigned it to students with lower reading skills. And some DeKalb County high school teachers use it as a supplement.

Shakespeare can intimidate students because of unfamiliar syntax and strange character names. Modernized versions give students the confidence to tackle the work, said Connie Kollias, who had her sophomores at Sandy Creek High in Fayette read a translated "Julius Caesar" aloud in class.

"We're not dumbing down lessons for these students," Kollias said. "We are giving them tools that allow them to do the same work as everyone else."

"Tut, I am in their bosoms, and I know wherefore they do it." -- Act 5, Scene 1.

"I know how they think, and I understand why they're doing this." -- Same scene, "No Fear Shakespeare" translation....

Read the whole thing here.

This isn't an open-and-shut case. As I've told any number of people whom I took to see their very first Shakespeare plays, the Bard is harder to read than he is to watch. (Which is why the teachers quoted in this piece ought to be showing a Shakespeare film or two--or three--to their kids.) I'm not necessarily opposed to the judicious use of "translations" in a classroom setting. It depends on the circumstances.

What made my hair stand on end were these two words: "Some educators..." Are there really English teachers in Atlanta who don't think "the beauty of Shakespeare rests in the writer's eloquence and poetry"? Has it come to this?

Don't answer that. In the immortal words of me, all slopes are slippery.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 21, 2004 12:10 PM | Permalink

TT: On the wagon

Say what you will about me, I've finally learned to keep up with the incoming e-mail! Except that I occasionally move especially interesting letters to a separate mailbox so that I can either respond to them at length or post them, and sometimes...I forget. Which is why some of you haven't heard back from me, for which I apologize most humbly. I'll try to work my way through that box once the book is done.

In the nonce, here are two recent pieces of mail that I especially liked:

- "My Paul Desmond story: although I had been listening to jazz on the radio and to my father's big band 78s since childhood, it was hearing Paul Desmond with Brubeck on the old Steve Allen show one night in 1954 or 55 that told me three things: I would love jazz forever, that the alto saxophone was the most beautiful sounding instrument of all, and that Paul Desmond had a tone worth emulating. My very first experience of jazz in person was seeing the Brubeck Quartet when they played a Sunday evening concert at the Glen Island Casino, about one mile from my home when I was 14. The Casino had fallen on hard times--the big band era was definitely over and Elvis was on the horizon--and was attempting to find new formats to get people to visit. So I got in my Sunday-best suit, and trudged to the show. A very big snowstorm had begun, so I was one of only a handful of people in attendance, so I am sure no one made much money, including my very professional waiter, who served me cokes--15% of the price of a 1955 coke was not much to take home, even with the usual nightclub markup. I was dazzled, enthralled, overwhelmed that men could do this. I had wanted to get everyone's autograph, but was too shy to approach the bandstand. Walking home in the snow past my ankles, I hardly noticed the effort--I was transported. A year later, I committed my first act of semi-adult unfaithfulness--I bought a Shorty Rogers record and transfered my allegiance to Art Pepper. Ah well, they are both up there in the great alto sax section in the sky with Bird, Carter and Hodges."

- "I read your review of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the WSJ, and as a result saw it this afternoon. In the past several years there has been only one other show where, at intermission, I wanted to call all my friends and tell them to see it at once (the other was Wonderful Town, last fall). Of course I couldn't make the calls today because of the intermission concert, which was almost as wonderful as the show. Thank you for telling me about it. I came to your blog in order to thank you, and started reading, and started following links, and now I've ordered Goodbye, Babylon. I hope it's as wonderful as it sounds. I've always enjoyed your WSJ pieces, and now I'll keep in touch with your blog."

Thanks very much to you both. Letters like these are among the very biggest reasons why OGIC and I keep on blogging, come what may.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 22, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"She lived a life of heroism in small things. Maybe stories of heroic goodness without glamor tend to sound sentimental and tawdry, and that is why people don't like to read stories about saints."

Karl Stern, The Pillar of Fire

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 22, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Something is way wrong here

Which classic novel do I belong in?

In my not so humble opinion, you, of course, belong in the Picture of Dorian Gray, and do not try to deny it. You belong in the fashionable circles of Victorian London where exotic tastes, a double life, decadence, wit and a hypocritical belief in moral betterment make you a home. You belong where the witty apothegms of Lords, the silly moralities of matrons, the blinding high of opium, and the beauty of visual arts mingle to form one convoluted world.

But enough about me--what about you? Go here to find out.

(Et tu, OGIC?)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 22, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Man (still) at work

The Great Task continues to go smoothly. Posting will be light this week, but there will be intermittent spells of bloggery, as was the case on Sunday morning (and if you didn't read all those posts, do so now!). OGIC should be back in the saddle shortly, too.

Wish me luck. I'll really be happy to wrap this book up.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 22, 2004 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: Work in progress

Since I'm basically too busy to think about anything else, I thought you might like a taste of the chapter of my Balanchine book that I finished on Monday. It's about Balanchine's fourth wife, Tanaquil Le Clercq.

* * *

It was Balanchine's practice, if not his destiny, to fall in love not with creatures of flesh and blood but with fantasies of his own devising. Like most such romantic idealists, he was aroused by pursuit and disillusioned by capture, and no sooner did he marry his latest muse and capture her essence in a new ballet than he started looking elsewhere for inspiration. With Maria Tallchief, the gap between appearance and reality was especially wide, for she was no evanescent Osage sylph but a hard-working, hard-headed professional who scrubbed her own floors and played poker after hours with the men of the company. "I don't need a housewife," Balanchine complained to a close friend. "I need a nymph who fills the bedroom and floats out." It wasn't long before he found one, right under his nose.

Long-legged and long-necked to the point of gawkiness, with delicately chiseled features and a gamine smile, Tanaquil Le Clercq, known to all as "Tanny," was a Balanchine ballet come to life. "Like a lean Giacometti, she reflected modern art," wrote Allegra Kent, who danced with her in Balanchine's Divertimento No. 15. Born in 1929, she was the first great dancer to have studied exclusively at the School of American Ballet, and by the time she made her professional debut in The Four Temperaments, she was fully formed. Tallchief enviously described her as "a coltish creature who still had to grow into her long, spindly legs. Those legs went on forever--it seemed as if her body could barely sustain them. She had the long, willowy look of a fashion model, dressed stylishly in long skirts and sweaters, and had a lovely presence....Tanny didn't have a formal education, yet she was articulate, witty, and chic." A few of her performances were filmed, and in them one can see "the scissor legs, the vehement energy, the regal spine, the expansive upper body, the wit, the chic, the joy in movement" to which her friend Holly Brubach paid tribute after Le Clercq's death in 2000. Jerome Robbins fell in love with her at first sight, and for a while they were all but inseparable. Balanchine teamed them to memorably comic effect in Bourr�e Fantasque, while Robbins immediately began making dances of his own for her. "All the ballets I ever did for the company," he later confessed, "it was always for Tanny."

But Balanchine's eye had already started to wander--as had Tallchief's. They agreed to separate after the London season (their marriage was subsequently annulled), and no sooner did NYCB return to Manhattan than Balanchine began seeing Le Clercq in public. "I just love you to talk to, to go around with, play games, laugh like hell, etc.," she told Robbins in a letter. "However, I'm in love with George. Maybe it's a case of he got here first." Devastated by what he saw as her betrayal, Robbins made The Cage, a chillingly angry portrait of a tribe of insect-women who kill the men with whom they mate. And though Tallchief remained the prima ballerina of New York City ballet for a few years more, it was Le Clercq for whom Balanchine made La Valse (1951, music by Ravel), a darkly unsettling vignette about a beautiful young girl who encounters a black-clad man at a party. He offers her a pair of black gloves into which the girl heedlessly plunges her hands. Then they waltz together with mad abandon until she collapses and dies.

La Valse ranks among Balanchine's most strikingly personal creations, one with which Le Clercq would forever after be identified. But it was a bizarre present to offer his latest muse, whom he married at the end of 1952: a ballet in which he envisioned her premature death. What happened to her in real life would be immeasurably more shocking....

* * *

How's that for a teaser?

Now I've got to get back to work--it's half past Chapter Five, and Suzanne Farrell is about to make her first appearance. More later.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 23, 2004 4:48 AM | Permalink

TT: Mea maxima culpa, or, tu quoque!

A reader writes:

While I have your attention, I will offer a correction to your Mencken biography. It is minor, but so jarring to this Baltimore resident that I remember it after two years (and suspect, therefore, that some other Baltimore resident has alerted you to it). It is your reference to "riverside renovations" on page 20. Baltimore is not on a river, but on a harbor; I assume that you meant to refer to Harborplace.

I sure did, and I can't tell you how I cringed as I read this e-mail. That's the kind of mistake that gives all biographers nightmares--not quite as horrible as inadvertent plagiarism, but plenty bad enough. Geography has always been one of my weaker suits (I actually made a similarly horrific directional mistake in a book I wrote about my own childhood), but of course that's no excuse.

On the other hand, here's the funny part: until now, nobody else noticed this error, in spite of the fact that The Skeptic sold well and was widely read in Baltimore, where I lectured twice about Mencken in the year and a half following its publication. Not only that, but I ran the manuscript of the passage in question by a close friend of mine who is a Baltimore native and has written with great acuity about the city and its people...and she didn't notice it.

Proving what? I'm not sure, but I thought it'd amuse you. All proposed morals to this story will be read and appreciated.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 23, 2004 4:57 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Granted that in later life a man will have to learn to get along with other people--I learn with horror that the knack is now taught in high school as a 'social study'--that is all the more reason there should be a period in his life when he has to get along with nobody but himself. It will be a sweetness to remember."

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

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 23, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Progress report

Another chapter done and polished, and I'm headed for bed. Yay!

I may try to post something more during the day, but if I don't, it just means I've gotten a good start on Chapter Five.

Keep wishing me luck.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 23, 2004 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"I suppose I'm a believer in Original Sin. People are profoundly bad, but irresistibly funny."

Joe Orton, quoted in the Manchester Guardian (September 19, 1966)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 24, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"Lightning was a mad grin in the room, thunder a shudder over all the earth."

Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 25, 2004 1:23 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Robespierre and Saint-Just were ready to eliminate violently whole social strata that seemed to them to be made up of parasites and conspirators, in order that they might adjust this actual France to the Sparta of their dreams; so that the Terror was far more than is commonly realized a bucolic episode. It lends color to the assertion that has been made that the last stage of sentimentalism is homicidal mania."

Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 25, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Tied to the tracks

I thought you might enjoy knowing what a week in the life of a freelance writer, i.e., me, is like:

(1) My Balanchine book is due April 1. I have a chapter and a half left to write.

(2) Between now and then, I also have to write and file two Wall Street Journal drama reviews, my Washington Post column, and three other pieces.

(3) On April 2, I hop on a plane, ready or not, and fly south to see (what else?) some ballet in Raleigh, N.C.

In short, I hear that train a-comin', it's rollin' round the bend... but all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. I think. I hope. Gulp.

Needless to say, I'm not likely to be posting a whole hell of a lot during the next week and a half, but I do promise to make some sort of daily appearance in this space, however exiguous. A few of my colleagues linked to yesterday's excerpt from the Balanchine book, suggesting approval thereof, so I imagine I'll do the same thing once or twice more. To those of you who want to know what happened to Tanny Le Clercq, the book comes out in November. And to those of you who have already gotten your hands on early copies of A Terry Teachout Reader, I say...tell your friends!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 25, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Half-back

A thousand apologies for the deafening silence from my corner lately. I rolled back into Chicago two days ago, but I'm swamped. Until next week, you'll hear a few peeps out of me but not a whole hell of a lot more, I'm afraid. Thanks to the readers who sent birthday wishes; the day was very nice, and what do you know, spring did arrive more or less on time.

While I scramble to meet more deadlines than I care to count, here are a couple of links:

- Nathalie is great on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I loved the movie too. I don't have much to add to her observations, except to say that while Jim Carrey is a good sad sack, Kate Winslet's performance is the ingredient the movie couldn't have done without. I always liked Being John Malkovich, which is similarly fascinated with the inside of consciousness. But after seeing the sweeter, more loosely conceived Eternal Sunshine, I suspect the earlier movie may now seem almost unwatchably sour, as well as overly invested in the machinery of its fantastical premise.

- Charles Schulz is getting the auteur treatment with Fantagraphics' forthcoming 25-volume Complete Peanuts. I spent some of the weekend going through last year's very cool Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, an ever-so-slightly selfish Christmas gift to my dad. Book designer Chip Kidd (best known for his Jurassic Park cover art) put this volume together. In the Sun article, he compares "Peanuts" to Bauhaus:

"Schulz did for the comic strip what the Bauhaus did for architecture," he says. "I know that sounds really eggheady, but what I mean is this: Visually he pared everything down to its simplest forms. Charlie Brown is a circle with two dots and a squiggle and a line, and all of a sudden it's a person. It's minimal, but Schulz is so in control of the minimalism that the characters almost work like typography-it's like you're reading them. There's your form. And then for your content: He predated Woody Allen's neuroses by a good 20 years. On the comics page!"

Also revealed: Schulz hated the name "Peanuts," but deferred to the wishes of the United Feature Syndicate as one of the terms of his contract.

Back to the salt mines!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 25, 2004 12:29 PM | Permalink

TT: It takes a train to laugh

Book or no book, I remain the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, in which capacity I went to see Twentieth Century, which opened last night, and wrote about it for this morning's paper. It's very uneven, and Alec Baldwin is the opposite of funny, but I did have some good things to report. Here are two:

A passenger train is a perfect setting for a comedy but difficult and expensive to put on stage, so I'll start by assuring you that John Lee Beatty, the designer of this Roundabout Theatre Company production, has done a good job of evoking the streamlined art-deco interior of the old Twentieth Century Limited. Mr. Beatty's set slides from side to side in order to reveal more of the train's interior (as well as suggesting its forward motion), and while it won't make you fall down dead with astonishment, it's quite sufficiently nifty.

Anne Heche, on the other hand, is a whole lot more than nifty--she's dynamite on a stick. Dolled up to the max in William Ivey Long's slinky period costumes, she looks like a blonde clothespin in a black pantsuit, flinging her miraculously flexible arms and legs around the stage as if they were made of some space-age equivalent of rubber and tossing off her lines in the kind of hoity-toity finishing-school accent you learn from a Hollywood diction coach. She's doing Katharine Hepburn, of course, but her Kate the Great is more a manic caricature than a slavish imitation, and so unabashedly gleeful that only a sourpuss would do anything other than giggle. Walter Bobbie, the director, has given her plenty of tricky moves, and she makes the absolute most of them, revealing an unsuspected gift for physical comedy. I won't say Ms. Heche is worth the price of the ticket all by herself, but she sure did make me laugh....

No link, so if you want to read the rest of the story, go buy a Journal. A dollar is a dollar.

In other news, I'm still working on the Balanchine book, it's still due on April 1, it's still going well, and I may post another snippet of it tonight. Watch this space for details.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 26, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Choreography, finally, becomes a profession. In making ballets, you cannot sit and wait for the Muse. Union time hardly allows it, anyhow. You must be able to be inventive at any time. You can't be like the cook who can cook only two dishes: you must be able to cook them all."

George Balanchine, Balanchine's Complete Stories of the Great Ballets

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 26, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Forgotten but not gone

At long last, Verve has reissued Roger Kellaway Cello Quartet, for thirty years one of the most eagerly sought-after recordings on the used-LP market. This is its first appearance on CD, and I'll be reviewing it for the Washington Post next month. Since you probably haven't heard of Kellaway or the Cello Quartet--most people haven't--I thought I'd reprint this profile of Kellaway that I wrote for The Wall Street Journal in 1995. The original title was "Jazz's Most-Admired Unknown."

* * *

Roger Kellaway is the greatest unknown pianist in jazz.

"Unknown" is, of course, a relative concept. Among musicians, Kellaway is not only known but extravagantly admired. "I love Roger Kellaway," says the hard-to-please Oscar Peterson. "He knows the tradition and he's not afraid." And he gets plenty of work for an unknown, not only as a pianist but as a composer and songwriter. He's played with everybody from Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins to Bobby Darin and Joni Mitchell; he's written music for Yo-Yo Ma, New York City Ballet and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; his film-score credits include "Paper Lion" and "A Star Is Born." Chances are that you've heard one of his compositions, the closing theme for the sitcom "All in the Family," several dozen times.

Kellaway is, in short, the quintessential musician's musician, a fact of which he is uncomfortably aware. While he doesn't mind having the respect of his peers, he also wouldn't mind a bit of celebrity to go along with it: "I don't want to be everybody's little secret. There's nobody else in the world who does what I do, or does it the way I do it. I want more people to know that."

Part of Roger Kellaway's problem is that he's a born eclectic. Though he can swing as hard as anyone, he has an unnerving habit of doing it in 7/4 time, or playing in two different keys at once, or throwing in a few top-of-the-keyboard tone clusters just to keep the rhythm section on its toes. These exotic techniques, which somehow sound as familiar as a 12-bar blues when Kellaway employs them, are the natural consequence of his omnivorous musical curiosity. In conversation, he's as likely to bring up Benjamin Britten and Anton Webern ("He's to 20th-century classical music what Thelonious Monk is to jazz") as Duke Ellington and Art Tatum. "The idea that anything can go with anything is very appealing to me," he says, "and classical music has taught me that the options are infinite. If I'm writing a piece and get stuck sonically, I put on a record by Charles Ives or Edgard Varese. These people just blow your head wide open."

For all his determined eclecticism, Kellaway is anything but faceless. Whatever the context, his airy, sparkling playing is instantly recognizable. (If you're listening to an unfamiliar jazz record on which the piano player abruptly drops a bright treble splat into the middle of a solo, it's by Roger Kellaway.) But his refusal to stick with one style sits poorly with the button-down types who run the record business. "The majority of people simply aren't interested in artists who have eclectic tastes," he says with a resigned shrug. "Let's say our lives are a wheel. Well, I've decided to take more spokes of that wheel, that's all. But music-business types are suspicious of musicians like me. I confuse them. They can't pigeonhole me."

Kellaway's closest brush with fame came in 1971 when he put together the Cello Quartet, a drummerless combo consisting solely of "instruments made of wood": piano, cello, marimba and bass. "The cymbals and drums in a regular drum set fill up the air between the other instruments," he explains. "Take them away, clear the air, and you get chamber music." He persuaded Herb Alpert's A&M Records, one of the hottest labels of the '70s, to cut two albums featuring the group, "Cello Quartet" and "Come to the Meadow." The rich, outdoorsy colors of the Cello Quartet set musicians' heads spinning, but the listening public failed to sit up and take notice. Both albums sold modestly, went out of print, became cult classics and now fetch jaw-dropping prices on the used-LP market.

Though Kellaway went on to other things, he never lost his love for the sound of the instrument around which the Cello Quartet was built: "The cello just always killed me. It's so wonderfully expressive, so perfect for playing melodies. I think it resonates with the body to a greater degree than perhaps any other musical instrument." Not surprisingly, the thought of reviving the group remained at the back of his mind. Last year, he found another major label willing to give it a try: Angel Records, which was recently repositioned as the crossover line of EMI Classics. Kellaway added a pair of percussionists to the original lineup ("I wanted to add more ethnicity to the mix") and recorded "Windows," a gorgeous album that sums up his kaleidoscopic style as completely as any one album can.

"Imprisoned in every fat man," Cyril Connolly famously said, "a thin one is wildly signaling to be let out." Corollary: Imprisoned in every musician's musician, a pop icon is dreaming of performing in stadiums packed with screaming fans. "I remember being on stage with Joni Mitchell and playing for 10,000 people," Kellaway says. "I loved it. I remember saying to myself, `I can do this. This is comfortable.' There could be a million people out there and it wouldn't faze me. I don't get frightened, I don't hold back. I'm not afraid to show you who I am."

To this end, Kellaway is putting together still another group, one that may be his least likely musical venture yet: a straight-ahead, no-frills jazz piano trio. "I want to do the trio format," he says, "because it's something I love to do. Except for Monty Alexander, nobody's out there right now just laying it down and making your hair stand on end, and I still know how to do that. So I thought, `Why the hell not?' And as long as we're going to do it, let's do it. Let's play festivals, let's play for big crowds. I want to really try and make some noise." A quizzical look flashes across his lean, bespectacled face. "Maybe I'm not afraid to make a splash anymore."

* * *

Needless to say, he didn't make a splash, and Windows is long out of print, but now you can find out what I was talking about back in 1995 by listening to Roger Kellaway Cello Quartet. So do.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 26, 2004 12:30 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Perhaps you will blame me for having spent so much of my time in Music Halls, so frivolously, when I should have been sticking to my books, burning the midnight oil and compassing the larger latitude. But I am impenitent. I am inclined to think, indeed I have always thought, that a young man who desires to know all that in all ages in all lands has been thought by the best minds, and wishes to make a synthesis of all these thoughts for the future benefit of mankind, is laying up for himself a very miserable old age."

Max Beerbohm, "Music Halls of My Youth"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 27, 2004 8:46 AM | Permalink

TT: The beat goes on

I reviewed Bill Charlap's new CD, Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein, in today's Washington Post:

Not since Ahmad Jamal's legendary trio of the 1950s has there been a jazz combo that blended uptown and downtown so seamlessly as does the Bill Charlap Trio. It's equally at home in smoky nightclubs and I-kiss-your-hand-madam cabarets. You don't have to know anything about jazz to enjoy its polished, elegant renditions of show tunes, but if you do, you'll marvel at the savoir-faire with which the group saunters through Charlap's quietly intricate arrangements.

If any part of that description piques your interest, then by all means give a spin to "Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein." I wouldn't be even slightly surprised if this near-flawless collection of 12 songs written by the man who brought you "West Side Story" turns Bill Charlap into the Diana Krall of jazz instrumentalists, a sophisticated artist whose albums are bought and loved by ordinary folks who don't know the Village Vanguard from the Village People. "Somewhere" is that good -- and that accessible....

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 28, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"One never takes lessons to heart. It's just a thing people talk about--learning by experience and all that."

Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 28, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: The absolute latest

I finished the fifth chapter and the bibliography of the Balanchine book late Saturday night. Come Sunday morning I start on the last one. I hate to tempt fate, but I do believe the end is in sight.

I'll post another excerpt later today. In the meantime, kindly cross your fingers, please.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 28, 2004 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Flashback

A friend of mine went last night to see New York City Opera's revival of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. As soon as she got home, she sent me this e-mail:

Something unexpected hit me close to the end of the second act, about the time all hell was breaking loose and the chorus was running around like mad singing "City on Fire". Up til then, it was a pretty enjoyable show. Then all of a sudden, all the chaos on stage felt too real and I remembered how the Village was the night the World Trade Center was attacked - that horrible metallic burning smell and the air thick with smoke. And the madman onstage waving a razor, seething with vengeance made me uncomfortable. I wasn't planning on that feeling so real.

That's a memory I'm glad not to have.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 28, 2004 12:41 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Spies like us

Over at Slate, one of last night's three notable guest stars, Leon Wieseltier, is dishing but good on the cast members of "The Sopranos":

My fleeting impressions, from a humble place at the table: Michael Imperioli is a talented sweetheart. Lorraine Bracco is a genuinely intelligent woman with the rare gift (these days, the almost unimaginable gift) of holding her eros in reserve. James Gandolfini is a completely authoritative actor whom I would not care to know. Even when he read his lines lightly in the run-through, he gave the lie to the maxim that nobody is indispensable. Peter Bogdanovich is risibly self-important. Steve Buscemi is unexpectedly comfortable in his febrile body and an extremely nice guy. (We went upstairs to wardrobe together, he for his shorts and me for my tux, except that I inadvertently wandered into the wardrobe room of Sex and the City, which made me think affectionately of Robespierre.)

In case you missed it, the other cameo guys included an actor, David Straitharn (as A.J.'s college counselor), and David Lee Roth (at the poker table).

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 29, 2004 5:34 AM | Permalink

OGIC: On the fly

Still crazy-busy over here, but I wanted to throw out this tidbit from James Wood's latest New Republic review, a polite but firm taking-apart of John Le Carr�'s latest--and, somewhat more mildly, of the writer's long-standing reputation as a literary talent who transcends his chosen genre (link via Arts & Letters Daily). Wood identifies Le Carr�'s spies as examples of a recurring literary masculine type that leaves him cold:

This is the tone, and the philosophical posture, inherited from Greene and, further back, from Hemingway, in which what masquerades as thought is actually just the ratification of permissible male reticence. Versions of this male reticence can be found in the work of Robert Stone, and in some of Andre Dubus's stories; it is almost a universal male vernacular. Such characters--"Leamas was not a reflective man"--are, paradoxically, alert but always blocking the ratiocinative consequences of their alertness. Such characters are not minds but just voyeurs of their own obscurities. One thinks of the end of A Farewell to Arms: "He looked very dead. It was raining. I had liked him as well as anyone I ever knew." And that is all we hear on the subject. In such writing, a principled refusal to be sentimental stifles feeling and the description of feeling; and that refusal, in turn, becomes itself somewhat sentimental.

Wood's piece is in part a review of the reviewers who have made claims over the years for Le Carr�'s literary importance. Definitely worth a look.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 29, 2004 5:44 AM | Permalink

TT: Bulletin

I just finished the first draft of the Balanchine book. "First draft" is something of a misnomer, actually, since this draft is substantially polished. I'll need another six or eight hours' worth of close line-editing and sprinkling on a few pinches of magic dust, and then it'll be ready to ship off to the publisher.

More as it happens, but now I need to get some sleep and start writing those other pieces, yikes!

In the meantime...yes, I'm happy. And relieved.

See you later today or, more likely, tomorrow.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 29, 2004 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"'Would you like a sandwich?' she asked, offering a dejected-looking plate."

Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 29, 2004 12:06 PM | Permalink

TT: One good book deserves another

Stunned by overwork, I made the mistake of peeking into my mailbox, where I found a hundred or so accumulated pieces of e-mail. Most of it was spam, of course, but I learned from quite a few of you that amazon.com just started shipping A Terry Teachout Reader, well in advance of the official publication date.

How about that? I'm published!

If you ordered the Teachout Reader in advance, your copy has either just arrived or is on its way to you. If you haven't ordered it yet, go here and do so.

In addition, I got quite a bit of nice mail on various subjects (all of it answered--thanks very much).

I also got a rare piece of hate mail, which tickled me enough to pass on:

The main things that are unpleasant about your WSJ column are that you are relentlessly determined to show us how smart you are (not an elegant trait) and your poor white trash name (definitely not elegant).

In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, "Ah, me public!"

And now...back to overwork. See you tomorrow.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 30, 2004 5:09 AM | Permalink

TT: It is finished

I spent ten hours editing the Balanchine book today, then printed it out. I'm all done. I'll be delivering it to Harcourt on Wednesday. I've never been so tired, and I still have those four pieces left to write (two of them tomorrow), but I'm done.

Thanks again for your forbearance, which I hope will last a little while longer while I finish cleaning my plate. Then I'll start blogging again, and reading other blogs, too, something I've missed terribly in the past couple of weeks.

I look forward to serving you again!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 30, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"It is the line of least resistance, and there is no denying that in daily life it has its advantages. But all the more must we insist that it plays the most deadly role in music, especially in the performance of old and familiar works. In fact, routine with its loveless mediocrity and its treacherous perfection lies like hoarfrost on the performance of the most beautiful and best-known works."

Wilhelm Furtw�ngler, BBC interview, November 2, 1948

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 30, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"For two centuries, Siberia had had a reputation for being the freest place in the Empire, this open-air nuthouse where being a third-generation prisoner made you aristocracy. You could see the difference, the (comparative) fearlessness in people's bearing: Gwen had met the descendant of a Decembrist who was married to the great-great-granddaughter of Poles deported here after the 1848 uprising, and it seemed to her that no beltway politician, no Boston Brahmin could ever match the arrogance of this couple whose families had been on the wrong side of power for a hundred and fifty years. What can you do to us, the joke ran, we're already in Siberia."

Fernanda Eberstadt, The Furies

(Yes, this does mean I finally finished Shirley Hazzard! The Transit of Venus will be the subject of one more gushy post. Any day now.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 31, 2004 1:11 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Borrowed diversions

For the longest time now I've been meaning to add the incomparable Coudal Partners website to our blogroll, and tonight I've finally done so. The site came to my attention back in February, when Nathalie did a stint as a guest editor there, and it has increasingly become my failsafe destination when I simply must find strong distraction from whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing--for those desperate times when hockey box scores just won't cut it. Coudal's Fresh Signals (right-hand column) haven't failed me yet. I read stuff on the web all day, but here you can always find something to look at. Among the freshest at the moment, I particularly recommend 10 worst album covers of all time and the sequel, More album covers. Last one, I swear, as well as The world's flags given letter grades.

Ah hell, now that I've linked to a flag report card I may as well throw in the too-cute Kitty Cat Dance movie I've been sending to everyone I know lately. The title says it all, so you can steer clear if kitty cat dances aren't your cup of tea, and don't say I didn't warn you. I'm afraid they're mine. Thanks to Steve for this one.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 31, 2004 1:20 AM | Permalink

TT: Finishing the book

The last time I finished writing a book (as opposed to editing a collection, which feels much less eventful) was on September 4, 2001. I'd actually typed the final words of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken years earlier--I wrote the prologue and epilogue first--and I'd completed the next-to-last draft of the book in late August, but it was on the afternoon of September 4 that I finished editing the last draft and started printing out the manuscript. I didn't open a bottle of champagne or go out to dinner: instead, I spent the evening alone and went to bed early. I'd been working under extreme pressure all summer, and now, at last, the heat was off. I delivered the manuscript to my agent the next day and caught a plane to Missouri to visit my mother the day after that.

I was expecting to feel a touch of post-partum depression sooner or later, as most writers do when they finish writing a long book. Then, five days later, my mother's phone rang and a caller from the Upper West Side told me to turn on the TV. That was the last time I thought about Mencken, or my book, for the next few weeks.

All these memories came flooding back as I sat at my desk two nights ago and printed out the seven chapters of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine. Unlike The Skeptic, a full-length biography which took me the better part of a decade to research, ponder, and write, All in the Dances is a short biography, about 40,000 words long, and I spent just three months writing it, not counting four or five false starts as I tried unsuccessfully to get the first chapter going. I was still thinking in terms of a full-length book, one that would start with a lengthy set piece describing the making of Serenade, the first ballet Balanchine choreographed after coming to America. That had been my plan more or less from the time I decided to write a book about Balanchine, but it didn't work. Not until I replaced it with a shorter description of the night I saw my first Balanchine ballet (part of which is in this posting) did the logjam break, and after that the rest was easy. If I hadn't had so many other pieces to write in February and March, I probably could have wrapped the whole thing up in a month.

As the subtitle says, All in the Dances is a "brief life," a biography short enough to be read in one or two sittings. I like brief lives (even The Skeptic is a good deal shorter than most full-length biographies), and I'd thought a lot about the form before deciding to write one of my own. A couple of years ago I reviewed Paul Johnson's brief life of Napoleon, a volume in the Penguin Lives series, and made the following observations:

The premise of these tasty little volumes is that it ought to be possible to sum up the life of a famous person in 200 pages or less. Seeing as how Johnson specializes in really, really long books, I wondered at first whether he was the best choice for the job, but within a few pages I knew that Napoleon is a near-perfect model of what a brief life can and should be: crisp, clear, concise and strongly personal.

In order to write a good short biography, you have to start with an unambiguous point of view....

All in the Dances has one: I believe that George Balanchine, in addition to being the greatest choreographer of the twentieth century, was also a key figure in the modern movement in art, directly comparable in significance to Henri Matisse or Igor Stravinsky, even though he isn't widely recognized as such outside the world of dance. This premise flavors the whole of my book in a way that would be inappropriately reductive in, say, an 800-page biography. It also makes possible a kind of overarching unity that isn't easy to create in a longer book. When you're writing 40,000 words about a man who lived to the age of seventy-nine, you have to be selective, and thus interpretative.

It didn't surprise me that I had to leave so many things out. What surprised me was how much I was able to put in, and how many of the techniques I used in writing The Skeptic were equally useful in writing All in the Dances. Both books are built around scenes and portraits, though most of the "scenes" in All in the Dances deal not with events in Balanchine's life but with the premieres of the Balanchine ballets I singled out for description and criticism. Conversely, I used the portraits--of Serge Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, Lincoln Kirstein, Jerome Robbins, Tanaquil Le Clercq, and Suzanne Farrell, the six most important people in Balanchine's life--to keep the narrative moving forward.

If you've read The Skeptic, you'll recall that it's structured in a similar way, but that didn't hit me until I looked over the last draft of All in the Dances. Up to that moment, I'd felt as if I were writing a brief life in the style of a full-length biography. Now I'm more inclined to see The Skeptic as a brief life writ large--an interpretative portrait of Mencken, not a first-he-did-this-then-he-did-that chronicle. The big difference is that it's a lot easier to control the material when you're writing a brief life: you can hold the whole book in your head at once and give it a consistency of tone that's much more difficult to impose on a longer biography. I line-edited the entire manuscript of All in the Dances in a continuous ten-hour session, stopping only to eat two quick meals. You definitely can't do that with a hundred-thousand-word book, though I did my very best to give The Skeptic a similar feeling of unity and sweep.

Another thing that surprised me was that there was room for a certain amount of poetry within the compass of a 40,000-word book. Even though I wrote All in the Dances out of sequence, I saved Balanchine's death for last, just as I had Mencken's, and it wasn't until I actually started writing the death scene that I figured out what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. This is what I wrote, late Sunday afternoon:

His memory had been fading for weeks, and now he was losing the power of speech as well. "I would just sit on the bed," wrote Farrell, "holding his hand while he slept, but as soon as I rose to go, his hand would grip mine more tightly." Karin von Aroldingen saw him most often, but most of the many women he had loved made the pilgrimage to his bedside. Tamara Geva was the last. "One day I found him clutching a small icon in the palm of his hand," she said. "He brought it to my face and repeated several times, �Must believe...must believe...' and closed his eyes. With every hour he seemed to grow farther away into the distance, like a shrinking shadow." All his life he had had the faith of a child. Now it was all he had left.

Balanchine's ballets, early and late, are full of unsettling images of loss. Serenade ends with a processional in which a woman left alone by the hand of fate is carried to her own destiny. In Liebeslieder Walzer, a woman appears to die in the arms of her partner; in La Valse, the partner is death. Even Apollo's triumphant ascent to Olympus was also a farewell to earth. That, too, was part of his vision. He took for granted that earthly love must end in separation. Like the inescapable evanescence of choreography, loss was part of the cycle of life: "Choreography is like cooking or gardening. Not like painting, because painting stays. Dancing disintegrates. Like a garden. Lots of roses come up, and in the evening they're gone. Next day, the sun comes up. It's life. I'm connected to what is part of life." Only a fool, he knew, sought to prevent the inevitable.

In 1976, he added a coda to "Emeralds," a pas de sept in which the principal dancers of the ballet enact the stately sorrow of the incidental music Gabriel Faur� composed to accompany the death of M�lisande in Maurice Maeterlinck's Pell�as et M�lisande. At the very end, the ballerinas slip into the wings, vanishing like mist burned off by the morning sun, while their deserted cavaliers, left alone on the stage, sink down on one knee and gesture skyward in salute to...what? He never said.

* * *

Tamara Geva left him on the afternoon of April 29. He died at four the next morning. After a lifetime of movement, he was still at last.

I didn't expect to write anything quite like that in so compact a book, but I think it works. And now that I've finished writing my first brief life, I'm even more excited by the form than I expected to be. In fact, the last few weeks have actually been kind of wonderful, despite the fact that I had to put the rest of my own life on hold in order to finish on time.

Finishing the hat,
How you have to finish the hat.
How you watch the rest of the world
From a window
While you finish the hat....

That's what Stephen Sondheim wrote in Sunday in the Park with George about what it feels like to paint. That's also what it feels like to sit at your desk for hours on end, immersed in the magical act of "making a hat where there never was a hat." Three months ago, All in the Dances didn't exist. Over the years I'd told dozens of people all about George Balanchine's life and work, but every time I had to start fresh. Now there's an inch-thick pile of paper on my kitchen table with a title page on top, the gateway to a world I made, and even though I'll be reviewing a Broadway play tomorrow morning, then writing my Washington Post column in the afternoon, part of me is still back in that world of shadows.

That's why I wanted to tell you now about how it felt--and how it feels. I want to enjoy it just a little while longer before I return to the world of daylight and deadlines.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 31, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"'We have done our best, and must leave it. No one can do more.'

"'We have done nothing,' said Maria.

"'Well, that is usually people's best,' said her stepson. 'Their worst is something quite different.'"

I. Compton-Burnett, Two Worlds and Their Ways

Posted by Douglas McLennan on March 31, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink