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March 31, 2004

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 March 31, 12:01 PM

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 Fauré composed to accompany the death of Mélisande in Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande. 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 March 31, 12:00 PM

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 March 31, 1:20 AM

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 March 31, 1:11 AM

March 30, 2004

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 Furtwängler, BBC interview, November 2, 1948

Posted March 30, 12:02 PM

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 March 30, 12:00 PM

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 March 30, 5:09 AM

March 29, 2004

TT: Almanac

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

Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence

Posted March 29, 12:06 PM

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 March 29, 12:03 PM

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 Carré'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 Carré'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 Carré's literary importance. Definitely worth a look.

Posted March 29, 5:44 AM

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 March 29, 5:34 AM

March 28, 2004

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 March 28, 12:41 PM

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 March 28, 12:03 PM

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 March 28, 12:02 PM

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 March 28, 12:01 PM

March 27, 2004

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 March 27, 8:46 AM

March 26, 2004

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 March 26, 12:30 PM

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 March 26, 12:01 PM

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 March 26, 12:00 PM

March 25, 2004

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 March 25, 12:29 PM

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 March 25, 12:01 PM

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 March 25, 12:00 PM

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 March 25, 1:23 AM

March 24, 2004

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 March 24, 12:00 PM

March 23, 2004

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 March 23, 12:04 PM

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 March 23, 12:02 PM

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 March 23, 4:57 AM

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 Bourrée 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 March 23, 4:48 AM

March 22, 2004

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 March 22, 12:04 PM

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 March 22, 12:02 PM

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 March 22, 12:01 PM

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 March 22, 12:00 PM

March 21, 2004

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 March 21, 12:10 PM

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 March 21, 11:02 AM

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 March 21, 10:46 AM

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 March 21, 10:45 AM

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 March 21, 10:38 AM

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 March 21, 10:31 AM

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 March 21, 10:21 AM

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 March 21, 5:40 AM

March 20, 2004

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 March 20, 1:53 AM

March 19, 2004

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 March 19, 12:00 PM

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 March 19, 12:00 PM

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 clichés, 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 March 19, 2:04 AM

March 18, 2004

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 March 18, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"'That's an old attitude.'"

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

Jon Hassler, Staggerford

Posted March 18, 12:01 PM

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 March 18, 12:00 PM

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 March 18, 1:43 AM

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 March 18, 1:21 AM

March 17, 2004

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 March 17, 12:38 PM

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 March 17, 12:09 PM

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 March 17, 12:04 PM

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 March 17, 12:01 PM

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 March 17, 12:00 PM

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 March 17, 3:33 AM

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 March 17, 1:32 AM

March 16, 2004

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 March 16, 12:48 PM

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 March 16, 12:04 PM

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 March 16, 12:03 PM

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 March 16, 12:03 PM

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 March 16, 12:02 PM

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 March 16, 12:01 PM

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 March 16, 10:45 AM

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 March 16, 9:12 AM

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 March 16, 6:15 AM

TT: Snapshot

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

(Now, what about those other fourteen?)

Posted March 16, 2:16 AM

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 March 16, 1:34 AM

March 15, 2004

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 March 15, 12:03 PM

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 March 15, 12:03 PM

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 March 15, 12:02 PM

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 March 15, 12:02 PM

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 March 15, 12:01 PM

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 argui