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April 30, 2004

TT: A real fortune cookie

For those of you familiar with my all-or-nothing work habits, the fortune I extracted from last night's pre-ballet cookie will likely make you smile:

Don't just work hard, work smart.

I'm trying! I'm trying!

Posted April 30, 12:07 PM

TT: Jump first, ask questions later

Today's Wall Street Journal drama column is a triple-header. First up, Jumpers, about which I had nothing but great things to say:

Most playwrights of ideas are content to play with the ideas of others. Tom Stoppard has his own, and in "Jumpers" he serves them up with plenty of hot pepper on the side. Imagine a Broadway show in which a beleaguered professor of moral philosophy agonizes over the existence of God. Then stir in a pin-striped totalitarian sharpie, a half-witted police inspector, a half-crazy musical-comedy star (that's the professor's wife), a mute secretary, a jazz trio, eight acrobats and--oh, yes--two murders. That's "Jumpers," the frightening farce currently being performed by the National Theatre of Great Britain at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in a revival directed with coruscating flair by David Leveaux....

Next is Raisin in the Sun, a generally outstanding revival that has, alas, a gaping hole smack dab in the middle:

Not to keep you in suspense, but Sean Combs, the Rapper Formerly Known as P. Diddy, can't act, though he does what I suspect is his best in the revival of Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun" playing through July 11 at the Royale Theatre. Not only does he remember all his lines, but he even manages to insert a touch of emotion here and there. Alas, Mr. Combs hasn't the foggiest idea of how a thirtysomething father from the Chicago ghetto circa 1950 might have looked and sounded. Instead, he portrays Walter Lee Younger as a proto-rapper--blustery, adolescent and phony to the core. That he should have the gall to make his Broadway debut alongside Phylicia Rashad and Audra McDonald suggests that his capacity for embarrassment is insufficiently developed....

Last and most definitely least, Bombay Dreams:

It won't be enough if "Bombay Dreams" flops--I'd like to see it removed from the Broadway Theatre with bulldozers at high noon. Not since "Urban Cowboy" have I endured a show so irredeemably stupid as this backhanded "tribute" to the musicals churned out in boxcar lots by "Bollywood," the Bombay-based Indian film industry. Their simple-minded scripts and drop-of-a-turban production numbers are said to be charming, but you couldn't prove it by "Bombay Dreams," a mishmash of tuneless tunes, vapid lyrics, dull choreography, and pointlessly expensive sets (including a sunken on-stage fountain) that put me in mind of an Elvis Presley movie with a billion-dollar budget....

No link. Go buy Friday's Journal. (And yes, Aaron, it only costs a dollar, nyaah nyaah nyaah!)

Posted April 30, 12:03 PM

TT: Almanac

"I move my head imperceptibly, because of his moustache which brushes against my nostrils with a scent of vanilla and honeyed tobacco. Oh!...suddenly my mouth, in spite of itself, lets itself be opened, opens of itself as irresistibly as a ripe plum splits in the sun. And once again there is born that exacting pain that spreads from my lips, all down my flanks as far as my knees, that swelling as of a wound that wants to open once more and overflow--the voluptuous pleasure that I had forgotten."

Colette, La Vagabonde

Posted April 30, 12:01 PM

TT: Consumables

Thursday wasn't nearly so busy as Wednesday: I wrote a speech in the morning, met Maud for lunch, then came back home and blogged a bit. (My scheduled nap slipped through the cracks.)

- As for the evening, I just got back from seeing New York City Ballet dance George Balanchine's Liebeslieder Walzer. It was the first time I'd seen NYCB since writing All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, and the first time the company has danced Liebeslieder Walzer in several seasons. Here's what I said about it in the book:

New York City Ballet toured the Soviet Union in 1962, the first time Balanchine had been there since his defection thirty-eight years before. "Welcome to Russia, home of the classical ballet," a Soviet official told him as he stepped off the plane in Moscow. "Thank you," he replied without missing a beat, "but America is now home of the classical ballet. Russia is home of the old romantic ballet." But that didn't mean he had turned his back on the romanticism of his youth. Liebeslieder Walzer (1960, music by Brahms) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1962, music by Mendelssohn), for example, were both profoundly romantic in every sense of the word--as well as formally innovative.

Liebeslieder Walzer is set not in a sky-blue void but a candle-lit ballroom where four aristocratic-looking young couples in evening dress spend an hour waltzing together, accompanied by the four singers and two pianists with whom they share the stage. The couples are entangled in subtly differing ways (one of the women, for example, appears to be older than her partner-lover), though there is no plot or Tudor-style "acting" to give away their intimate secrets. Romantic ends are achieved by modern means: all you see are the setting and the steps, with everything else left to the imagination. The dancers drift outdoors into a moonlit garden and the curtain falls for a breathless moment. When it rises again, the ballroom itself is flooded with moonlight, the women are wearing tutus and toe shoes, and the decorous ballroom dancing of the first act is replaced by the heightened gestures of ballet. At the end, the women reappear in their party gowns, and the couples listen in stillness to the last waltz, whose words, sung in German, are by Goethe:

Now, Muses, enough!
You strive in vain to show
How joy and sorrow alternate in loving hearts.
You cannot heal the wounds inflicted by love;
But assuagement comes from you alone.

"The words ought to be listened to in silence," Balanchine wrote, surely thinking of the joys and sorrows of his own complicated life.

The costume change midway through Liebeslieder Walzer is a stroke of fantasy as stunning in its quieter way as the climactic flying lifts of The Four Temperaments. Balanchine revealed its meaning to Bernard Taper: "In the first act, it's the real people that are dancing. In the second act, it's their souls." But more than a few members of the ballet's earliest audiences, bored by its unending succession of "love-song waltzes," would slip out of the theater during the pause between acts. In an oft-told anecdote that may or may not be true, Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein were watching a performance together. "Look how many people are leaving, George," Kirstein moaned, to which Balanchine replied, "Ah, but look how many are staying!" Today, though New York City Ballet now performs Liebeslieder Walzer only infrequently, it is loved by connoisseurs for what Arlene Croce has called its "persistent note of melancholy and tragic remorse," and there are those, myself included, who regard it as their favorite Balanchine ballet of all.

That isn't a bad description of Liebeslieder Walzer, but reading it immediately after having seen the ballet is somewhat disheartening. To capture the smallest part of its mystery and complexity would have taken me at least a chapter, which I didn't have to spare. In any case, few things are more futile than trying to describe a Balanchine ballet in words, least of all this profound meditation on romantic love. All I really hoped to do was make the reader want to go see it, which you can do on Saturday and next Tuesday at the New York State Theater. (Go here for details.)

The program also included Symphony in C, about which I last had occasion to write in a piece about a performance by American Ballet Theatre that I saw only a few short weeks after 9/11:

Then, too, there was George Balanchine's Symphony in C, which received its long-overdue ABT debut. Few other modern artists working in any medium have had Balanchine's uncanny ability to transport the attentive viewer into a better-ordered universe of romance and grace--and humor. So it was with Symphony in C. As the curtain rose for the ten thousandth time on that familiar stageful of women in white tutus poised before a blue backdrop, one felt the world snap back to normal again--just what all the pundits had been assuring us would never happen. It put me in mind of a poem by Edwin Muir, "Reading in Wartime," that makes the case for sonnets about skylarks: "Boswell's turbulent friend/And his deafening verbal strife,/Ivan Ilyich's death/Tell me more about life,/The meaning and the end/Of our familiar breath,/Both being personal,/Than all the carnage can,/Retrieve the shape of man,/Lost and anonymous."

I guess that isn't dance criticism, but I like it anyway, if only because it brings to mind an evening that meant a great deal to me at the time.

- Now playing on iTunes: Ernie Wilkins' "The Jazz Connoisseur," recorded in 1961 by Harry James and most recently available as part of Jazz Masters: Harry James, a Verve anthology of James' MGM recordings. I was introduced to this up-tempo swinger by a musician friend who several years ago underwent a life-threatening operation that left him partly paralyzed. He later told me that listening to "The Jazz Connoisseur" as he lay in his hospital bed helped give him the courage to carry on. I can't claim to know exactly what he meant--I've never been that sick--but I do know a wonderful big-band performance when I hear one, and this definitely fills the bill.

Posted April 30, 12:00 PM

TT: A word from our sponsor

It's been a while since I mentioned that "About Last Night" is made possible by our host, artsjournal.com, the award-winning daily digest of arts journalism here and abroad.

Each day, artsjournal.com posts links to and abstracts of important English-language news stories and commentaries about all the arts, gleaned from magazines and newspapers throughout the world. And in addition to "About Last Night," artsjournal.com also hosts other 24/7 blogs whose authors cover specific art forms: dance, architecture, music, the visual arts, and more.

Long before Doug McLennan, the founder and mastermind of artsjournal.com, invited me to launch "About Last Night," I'd become a daily visitor to his site. It's indispensable reading for anyone who wants to keep up with the arts in America and elsewhere. Doug doesn't stick to the obvious sources (although he has those covered, too). In addition, he posts a dazzlingly eclectic mix of other links, not a few of them from publications you've probably never heard of, or at the very least see only sporadically.

If you read "About Last Night," you'll want to make artsjournal.com a regular part of your daily Web troll. To go there, click on the artsjournal.com logo in the upper left-hand corner of this page. To visit artsjournal.com's other blogs, scroll down to the "Other AJ Blogs" module in the right-hand column (it's just below our blogroll, "Sites to See") and click on whatever catches your eye. You'll be glad you did.

Posted April 30, 9:31 AM

April 29, 2004

TT: Almanac

Here malice, rapine, accident conspire,
And now a rabble rages, now a fire;
Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay,
And here the fell attorney prowls for prey;
Here falling houses thunder on your head,
And here a female atheist talks you dead.

Samuel Johnson, "London"

Posted April 29, 12:44 PM

TT: We are amused

From God of the Machine:

As of this moment, God of the Machine is being read in twenty-five time zones. Hello Madagascar! (In what Guinness has certified as a new world record, it is being misunderstood in twenty-four of them.) We celebrated our 1,500,000th unique visitor and 10,000,000th page view, and that's just this afternoon. (How do I know this? I counted, every one of them.) I'd love to write more, but my wine column's due for The Spectator, Car and Driver is simply insisting that I take this damn Lamborghini out for a test drive, my agent needs to discuss the movie rights to my New York Review of Books piece on Proust's influence on Balanchine, I'm already running late for my date with Uma Thurman, and Gisele Bundchen's holding on the other line. Gisele so hates to be kept waiting.

V. funny. In fact, that's the best "About Last Night" parody I've seen since Mr. TMFTML gave us the blunt end of the stick last September. Alas, Uma hasn't called back yet, but Maud awaits. See you by the swimming pool....

UPDATE: A reader writes: "Please remind God of the Machine not to forget the bespeckled bare-breasted groupies in cheerleader skirts camped outside on your block reading Samuel Johnson, just waiting for a glimpse of you taking out the garbage every morning."

That'll be the day.

Posted April 29, 10:57 AM

TT: This, that, the other thing

First of all, it's nice to have Our Girl back!

Secondly, the spam count in the "About Last Night" mailbox is octupling, so let me remind you:

(1) I never open e-mail with a blank subject header.

(2) If I'm chewing through a lot of spam, I don't always open e-mail whose subject headers are so oblique or obscure as to make no obvious sense to me.

Help me out here--be clear.

Finally, don't be surprised if I fail to post anything tomorrow beyond an almanac entry and my regular Friday Wall Street Journal theater teaser. I'm feeling signs of incipient burnout, compounded by acute schedule overload. (The speech got written, though.)

Whenever. And thanks for stopping by. See you soon.

Posted April 29, 10:31 AM

TT: As others skewer us

Apropos of God of the Machine's wicked parody of one of my more breathless contributions to "About Last Night" (scroll down), is there anything more frustrating than ransacking your failing memory for the source of a half-recalled quote? That's what I've been doing ever since I got back from lunch with Supermaud (who says hi). At last, the coin dropped, and I went to my shelf of art books, took down N. John Hall's Max Beerbohm Caricatures, turned to page 15, and hit the jackpot:

As Edmund Gosse told a fellow writer whom Max had just caricatured: "I feel it my duty to tell you that something has happened to you that sooner or later happens to us almost all. Max has got you. We don't like it and you won't like it, but you must pretend you do. You can console yourself at any rate with the thought that it will give uncommon pleasure to your friends."

What threw me off the track was that I wrongly remembered this letter as having been sent by Gosse to Henry James apropos of "The Mote in the Middle Distance," the James parody in Beerbohm's A Christmas Garland ("It was with the sense of a, for him, very memorable something that he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively, left it"), which also contains eerily exact parodies of G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells. I chased that hare in vain for a good ten minutes, though I did find this highly relevant footnote in Simon Nowell-Smith's The Legend of the Master: Henry James as Others Saw Him:

Gosse told Siegfried Sassoon that James had roamed round the room discussing, "with extraordinary vivacity and appreciation, not only the superlative intelligence of the book as a whole but 'The Mote in the Middle Distance' itself, which he had read in a self-scrutinizing bewilderment of wonder and admiration."

As you may have gathered, I love parody and caricature, and it's one of my medium-sized regrets that I have no gift for either (though I can do adequate impersonations of a few of my friends). Alas, I find it impossible to get inside another person's prose style. I once tried to write a parody of a Jeeves novel in the style of Bright Lights, Big City. That was actually a pretty good idea, conceptually speaking, but I stalled out halfway through the fourth sentence, so it went unwritten, and the only thing I can remember about it now is that the very first word was, of course, "you."

This incapacity is all the more vexing because I believe parody to be one of the most powerful and illuminating forms of criticism. Some of Kenneth Tynan's most brilliant drama reviews were parodies, including his double-edged skewering of William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun, which he rewrote in the style of Our Town:

Well, folks, reckon that's about it. End of another day in the city of Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Nothin' much happened. Couple of people got raped, couple more got their teeth kicked in, but way up there those faraway old stars are still doing their old cosmic criss-cross, and there ain't a thing we can do about it. It's pretty quiet now. Folk hereabouts get to bed early, those that can still walk....

I wouldn't kill to be able to do that, but I might be willing to maim.

Posted April 29, 3:59 AM

TT: Consumables

Wednesday was a very, very long day. I wouldn't have skipped a moment of it, not for anything in the world.

- I woke up at five-thirty to find my as-yet-unwritten Wall Street Journal review of Jumpers, A Raisin in the Sun, and Bombay Dreams rattling around in my head. It seemed pointless to try and go back to sleep, so I climbed down from the loft, booted up my iBook, and started writing. The piece was slow going--Jumpers isn't easy to sum up in four paragraphs, which was all I could spare--but I finally got it written.

- Midway through the first draft, I took a break and picked up my copy of Fairfield Porter's Broadway from my framer. It turned out that the upper right edge of the print had been slightly damaged in transit, which saddened me. But once I carted it home and hung it over the mantelpiece, I found that the flaw didn't bother me all that much, especially since the frame is so handsome--the photo the dealer sent didn't do it justice. Every time I walk into the living room, it's as if I see A Terry Teachout Reader writ large on the wall. I wonder how long it'll take before the association fades and I start to see Broadway solely as a work of art in its own right rather than a beautiful symbol of the pride I feel in my new book. Maybe never--and that'll be all right, too. In any case, I'm hopelessly in love with the latest addition to the Teachout Museum. For the moment, my other prints have receded into the background, and I now find myself staring at Broadway for minutes at a time, drinking it in.

- With Broadway safely hung, I sent off my Journal review, read and corrected the proofs of my Commentary essay, and checked in with the editor of my Washington Post column, which runs in Sunday's paper. (He had a few last-minute suggestions, all of which I gladly took.) Then I ran downstairs, hailed a cab, and hurtled across Central Park to watch Maria Schneider and Bob Brookmeyer rehearse tonight's concert at the Kaye Playhouse (go here for details). I can't be there--Thursday is the only night I can see New York City Ballet dance George Balanchine's Liebeslieder Walzer this season, and it could easily be several years before they do it again--so I talked my way into the sound check instead. I'd never before had the privilege of watching Brookmeyer rehearse his music with a big band, and it was fascinating to watch him put Schneider's players through their paces on Celebration, the four-movement suite they'll be performing tonight.

- Back home again to return phone calls, check my accumulated e-mail, and read another half-chapter of W. Jackson Bate's Samuel Johnson. (Incidentally, Erin O'Connor linked to what I wrote yesterday about the experience of revisiting one of my favorite biographies. Take a look--I like what she had to say.)

- Dinner with an out-of-town friend, then down to the Village Vanguard to hear Jim Hall's eleven o'clock set. Hall is my favorite living jazz musician, and I've never heard him play guitar other than wonderfully well, but this performance was memorable even by his own rarefied standards. Maybe it was because he'll be recording live on Friday and Saturday, or because Lewis Nash, the drummer, was in awesome form--I would have sworn he was channeling Shelly Manne. Whatever the reason, I've never heard Hall, Nash, or Scott Colley play better. "That's exactly how I'd want to play all those instruments, if I could play any of them," a singer friend told me afterward. What she said.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the set was that nobody played above a mezzo-forte all evening long. Even under the best of circumstances, the Vanguard can be an exasperatingly noisy place, but I didn't hear a single stray peep out of the enthralled crowd. It was a night of whispered confidences and sweet surprises. I'm going back on Saturday, and I'll be taking Sarah, who's in town for the week. She's in for a treat--to put it mildly.

Now that I'm home at last, I'm starting to feel the cumulative effects of the long day. I wish I could sleep in, but I have to haul myself out of bed in the morning and finish writing a speech before I head downtown to lunch with Supermaud. I suppose this whole week has been too much of a great many good things--but is that really possible? I'm not so sure.

I can't remember the last time it occurred to me to quote William Saroyan (he isn't exactly a favorite of mine), but a half-remembered line of his popped into my mind as I climbed the stairs of the Vanguard an hour or so ago: "In the time of your life, live--so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it." And that's what I did on Wednesday: I lived.

UPDATE: This inverted axiom just occurred to me: The unlived life is not worth examining.

Posted April 29, 1:29 AM

April 28, 2004

TT: Almanac

"When Goldsmith said, 'We have a claim upon you,' Johnson replied, 'I am not obliged to do any more. No man is obliged to do as much as he can do. A man is to have part of his life to himself.' Though he is quite justified, he is plainly uneasy in his own conscience as he continues to rationalize; and when Boswell, instead of dropping the matter, says, 'I wonder, Sir, you have not more pleasure in writing,' there is the testy response: 'Sir, you may wonder.'"

W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson

Posted April 28, 12:01 PM

TT: Consumables (and the consumed consumer)

Tuesday was the second busiest day of a rocky week: I wrote two pieces, went to an appointment in between, then headed south for a Broadway preview from which I only just returned. Today will be even busier: I have to write my Wall Street Journal column and a speech, go to an afternoon rehearsal, meet an out-of-town visitor for dinner, then take a cab to the Village Vanguard to hear Jim Hall (you come, too). Things will ease off a bit after that, but I'm still double-booked through next Monday, my day off. That's my life, and though I'm not really complaining--it's nice to be wanted--anybody who tries to get me to do anything on Monday is looking for t-r-o-u-b-l-e.

Enough said. Here's what's been happening on the art front:

- I saw a press preview of Bombay Dreams, which opens Thursday at the Broadway Theatre. I'll be reviewing it in Friday's Journal.

- I watched the first part of The Letter, William Wyler's 1940 film version of Somerset Maugham's short story. It's not bad, and Bette Davis (of whom I'm not usually a fan) was quite good, but I'd rather read Maugham than watch him, so I switched off after Davis spilled the beans to her stiff-uppah-lip lawyer.

- As I mentioned the other day, I'm currently rereading W. Jackson Bate's Samuel Johnson, something I do every year or two. For me, Johnson is the most sympathetic figure in all of English literature, and the courage with which he climbed out of the abyss of failure and depression has helped nudge me through more than one dark patch of my own life. Not only is Bate better than Boswell when it comes to this particular aspect of Johnson's psychology, but his biography is a masterly piece of writing for which no stylistic apologies of any kind need be made. Would that all academics wrote so lucidly. A friend of mine who studied under Bate at Harvard assures me that his Johnson class was better than the book, but I wouldn't know--I didn't go to Harvard, or even Yale! All I can tell you is that I've read Samuel Johnson at least ten times since it was published in 1977, and profited from it every time, this one included.

- My copy of Fairfield Porter's Broadway, the color lithograph reproduced on the cover of A Terry Teachout Reader, was delivered today. It proved to be even more beautiful than I expected (and my expectations were high). Alas, the print came loose from its mounting tape in transit, but a quick trip to my framer should set things right, and then I'll hang it over my mantelpiece. If I wasn't so busy, I'd invite a few select friends over for a hanging ceremony! I'm having lunch with Supermaud on Thursday, so maybe I can lure her uptown to take a peek.

- Now playing on iTunes: "Rapunzel," a sinuously hip bebop line by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen (that's Steely Dan to you) performed by nonpareil tenor saxophonists Pete Christlieb and Warne Marsh on Apogee, their Steely Dan-produced 1978 duet album, now available on CD for the first time with three previously unreleased bonus tracks. I've loved this record ever since I first heard it a quarter-century ago, and wondered why it never made it onto compact disc. Now it has, and I'm ecstatic. "Rapunzel," by the way, is a contrafact of "Land of Make Believe," a song by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, of all people. Three words to the wise: buy this album.

And so to bed. I'm bushed. Don't be surprised if I maintain radio silence on Thursday. I promise to get back to you as soon as things calm down a bit. Not only do I have a hatful of links crying out to be posted, but I want to write a few heartfelt words about Carolina Ballet's remarkable dance version of Handel's Messiah, which I flew down to Raleigh to see immediately after finishing my Balanchine book but haven't had time to blog about other than in passing.

All this and more once the clouds roll by! Meanwhile, I'm still hoping that Our Girl will feel like coming out and playing one of these days....

Posted April 28, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Consumable

Terry's going to fall flat on the floor, I think, when he sees that I've actually posted. Breathe, Terry. Get a glass of water. In your shock, you neglect to notice I have stolen your category. Here I am, though I'm not sure how much more you'll see of me before next week. I have a stiff schedule the next day and a half, followed by what will no doubt be a panicky sprint to the airport to catch a flight to Washington for a bridal shower. And perhaps to make the acquaintance of a blogger or two.

The other night I saw the Italian import I'm Not Scared, which is rated super-fresh over at Rotten Tomatoes.* I wasn't crazy about it, though, and couldn't really put my finger on the reason. As usual, someone else has said it better than I could. Stanley Kauffmann's review hits the nail on the head, and the lack of purpose he points to made the film feel, to me, just the slightest bit prurient. The movie tries to be both a crime story and an evocation of the sensations of childhood, especially the uneven nature of children's understanding, the way they can see certain aspects of the adult world only foggily but others more clearly than adults. I often like this sort of crossover film that's reflective or introspective as well as action-packed, but here the results just come out feeling vaguely exploitative. I get the feeling it was a better book.

*Attention Jon Stewart! Those aren't asterisks, sweetie, those are smashed tomatoes.

Posted April 28, 9:10 AM

April 27, 2004

TT: All circuits are busy

Sorry, but I'm swamped: too many deadlines, too many appointments, too many performances. Instead of blogging, I'm going to bed at a reasonable hour so that I can get up at an unreasonable hour (for me) and write another piece. I'll be back as soon as I can.

In the meantime, set your sights on the right-hand column, scroll down to "Sites to See," and visit some of those cool blogs thereunder.

Later.

Posted April 27, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"She liked to think of herself as a straightforward person. 'People always know where they are with me,' she would say rather smugly; it never occurred to her that people might not always want to know such things."

Barbara Pym, No Fond Return of Love

Posted April 27, 12:00 PM

April 26, 2004

TT: On the up and up

As of this moment, "About Last Night" is being read in thirteen time zones worldwide.

A message to everyone out there: Tell your friends about us. We don't advertise. Instead, we count on you (and our fellow bloggers) to spread the word. This blog isn't just for New Yorkers, or big-city types in general. It's for everyone, everywhere, who's interested in the arts...and tonight it's being read more than halfway around the world.

Thanks for visiting. Next time, bring a friend.

Posted April 26, 12:48 PM

TT: Almanac

"Some years ago I attended an evening of mime by Marcel Marceau, an elaborate exercise in aesthetic purification during which the audience kept applauding its own appreciation of culture and beauty, i.e., every time they thought they recognized what was supposed to be going on. It had been bad enough when Chaplin or Harpo Marx pulled this beauty-of-pathos stuff, and a whole evening of it was truly intolerable. But afterwards, when friends were acclaiming Marceau's artistry, it just wouldn't do to say something like 'I prefer the Ritz Brothers' (though I do, I passionately do). They would think I was being deliberately lowbrow, and if I tried to talk in terms of Marceau's artistry versus Harry Ritz's artistry, it would be stupid, because 'artist' is already too pretentious a term for Harry Ritz and so I would be falsifying what I love him for."

Pauline Kael, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Posted April 26, 12:03 PM

TT: Consumables

Sunday was an all-guitar day, almost. After writing a piece in the morning, I did the following:

- I went to hear the John Pizzarelli Trio play a benefit matinee at New York's P.S. 9, two blocks from my front door. Also on the bill were Tony Tedesco on drums (he plays on Pizzarelli's latest CD, Bossa Nova, out this week from Telarc) and Jessica Molaskey on vocals (Mrs. John Pizzarelli to you, and a warm, charming singer in her own right). Doubling as MCs and guest artists were two small Pizzarellis, one of whom attends P.S. 9 and the other of whom is an alumnus thereof. I'll be writing more about the concert in my Washington Post column this coming Sunday, so for now I'll say only that I had a ball.

- From there I came back home and watched the rest of Panic in the Streets, which was excellent. (Next up, The Letter or Brute Force, depending on how much time I have and how cynical I feel.)

- After a quick pre-prandial nap, I went down to Le Madeleine to eat dinner and listen to Gene Bertoncini's regular Sunday-night solo guitar gig. Again, I'll be writing about it in the Post, but I'll take this opportunity to plug his latest CD, Acoustic Romance, which is as good as it gets.

- I haven't read a word all day. I did, however, place an absentee bid on a Hans Hofmann lithograph, which I suppose can be called an art experience.

Now I'm back home again and headed for bed. No gigs Monday--I'll be spending the entire day writing a Commentary essay on the state of the Broadway musical. That ought to keep me out of trouble until Tuesday. Then I'll write two more pieces, one due on Tuesday and the other on Wednesday. In addition, I'll be out every night through Saturday.

Some blogging may occur in the interstices of this frenzied activity, or not. It all depends. Doesn't that make you feel secure? (Come back, OGIC, all is forgiven!)

Later.

Posted April 26, 12:00 PM

TT: Words to the wise

Maria Schneider sent out this e-mail today:

I am very excited for our next Hunter College concert. It's happening this Thursday, April 29th. We're featuring my teacher and friend, the great Bob Brookmeyer. There will be a pre-concert discussion starting at 6:45 p.m. The concert begins at 8:00. The Kaye Playhouse is located at the corner of 68th Street and Lexington. Call for tickets: 212-772-4448. There is a student price, so students should inquire about that.

If you teach in the area, PLEASE, do pass the word to your students and friends. This is a rare treat to have Bob perform in New York and to listen to him speak about music. One half of the concert consist of my music featuring Bob (including Anthem, which I wrote for Bob, but has never been performed in New York), and for the other half, I am giving Bob my orchestra to play his marvelous music conducted by him. We will be playing Celebration Suite which was recorded by Bob's New Art Orchestra featuring Scott Robinson. Scott will be playing it this Thursday.

I hope you will come and spread the word to your friends. It should be a special night.

It should indeed. Regular readers of this blog don't need to be reminded of what I think of Maria Schneider and Bob Brookmeyer. The opportunity to hear them both on the same bill is...well, I'm not quite sure what to call it. Epochal, maybe. So if you're anywhere near Manhattan on Thursday, go.

For more information, go here.

Posted April 26, 12:00 PM

April 25, 2004

TT: Almanac

"Never play a guy at his own game; nobody makes up a game in order to get beat at it."

Charlie Goldman, quoted in A. J. Liebling, The Sweet Science

Posted April 25, 8:58 AM

TT: Consumables

I'm coming up on one of my four-deadline weeks. The difference is that after what I went through finishing the Balanchine book, I'm not eager to strip any more of my gears with overwork. Theater-wise, this is the busiest time of the season--every producer in town is trying to open a show in time to be eligible for the Tony Awards--so I'm seeing three plays a week on top of my usual hectic performance-going schedule. That's why I decided not to blog yesterday (and kept my promise, glory be!), and it's why you won't be hearing much from me today, either.

Nevertheless, I do have enough steam in the boiler to let you know what I've been up to lately. To wit:

- I saw a press preview of the new Broadway revival of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, starring Phylicia Rashad, Audra MacDonald and Sean "Formerly Known as Puffy" Combs (what's wrong with this picture?), which I'll be covering in Friday's Wall Street Journal.

- Courtesy of the Fox Movie Channel and my trusty digital video recorder, I watched the first part of Panic in the Streets (1950), a noirish Elia Kazan film in which Richard Widmark plays a totally good guy, a health inspector trying to keep New Orleans from being decimated by an outbreak of pneumonic plague. It's pretty good (though I don't know when I'll have time to see the rest of it), but I can't get over the sheer strangeness of Widmark's being on the side of the angels. Like Dan Duryea, he's one of those black-and-white actors who seems to have a crack down the middle, and I keep waiting for him to slap a dame around.

- Today I embark on my biennial rereading of W. Jackson Bate's Samuel Johnson, my favorite modern biography. No special reason--I just looked at my bookshelves yesterday, hoping that a spine would cry out to me, and all at once I thought that it'd be good to spend a little time with my hero, Dr. Johnson.

- I showed the Teachout Museum to a friend yesterday, the same one with whom I'd just seen A Raisin in the Sun She had an interesting and unexpected reaction: "I don't even like modern art, but I like this." Even more surprisingly, she was especially taken with Joan Mitchell's Tree, a multicolored abstract-expressionist lithographic portrayal of...a tree. (No matter how many times they've looked at my prints, I always ask my guests which one they like best today.)

- Now playing on iTunes: David Rose's "Our Waltz," played in the manner of Ahmad Jamal's "Poinciana" by George Shearing and the Robert Farnon Orchestra (it's on How Beautiful is Night). Not a few of my jazz-loving friends find Shearing's orchestra-accompanied albums to be just this side of kitschy, but this one is iridescently soothing.

And now, if you'll be so kind as to excuse me, I'm going to get breakfast, write a review (not of breakfast!), then go see the first of two performances, one or more of which will likely find its way into my Washington Post column next Sunday. Watch this space for details.

Posted April 25, 8:53 AM

April 24, 2004

TT: Almanac

"I'd never say that the works I love most are necessarily the best."

Gustav Holst (quoted in Clifford Bax, Ideas and People)

Posted April 24, 1:18 AM

April 23, 2004

TT: Recount

I see in this morning's Wall Street Journal that I made a small but exasperating mistake in my review of Assassins, in which I refer to "sketches of eight successful and would-be presidential assassins." As the photograph accompanying the review makes embarrassingly clear, there are nine assassins in Assassins. In fact, I meant "eight sketches," not "sketches of eight": Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, who both tried to kill Gerald Ford, are portrayed in the same sketch.

So far, I haven't gotten any calls or e-mail pointing out this slip, but I'm sure they're coming. Arrgh. Gnashing of teeth.

Posted April 23, 12:17 PM

TT: Almanac

"Capri is as charming as ever it was, the people as odd: everybody is very immoral, but fortunately not so dull as those who kick over the traces often are."

W. Somerset Maugham, letter to Violet Hunt (c. 1905)

Posted April 23, 12:01 PM

TT: Consumables

Much to my surprise, I took Thursday off. I'm not good at that--I usually find a way to sneak back into harness--but outside of e-mail and a bit of blogging, I didn't write a word all day, nor did I read a book, watch a DVD, or listen to a CD for purposes of review. Instead, I surfed the Web idly, observed the effects of April sunshine on the Teachout Museum, thought some pleasingly inappropriate thoughts about a couple of interesting people, took a nap, ate two good meals, and made a few schedule-related phone calls.

- Somewhere in there I reread Jeffrey Meyers' Somerset Maugham: A Life preparatory to disposing of it permanently. Meyers is the very model of a professional biographer, alas: earnest, industrious, pedestrian, with a prose style that runs to the slapdash. I actually giggled to see that in the third sentence of the preface, he rendered his subject's middle name as "Somersault," though I simultaneously shuddered to think that so horrendous a mistake should have found its way into a book published by Knopf. If I'd made a mistake like that...but, then, Our Girl gently informed me yesterday that she'd found a teeny-tiny typo in A Terry Teachout Reader. These things happen!

- In addition, I tasted Jack Teagarden: Father of Jazz Trombone, an exemplary three-CD anthology of Teagarden's 78 recordings which has just been released. Said Louis Armstrong: "I think Jack Teagarden moves me more than any musician I know of." Not only that, he sang as well as he played, as you can hear for yourself by going here, scrolling down to "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," and clicking on the link.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'd better get some work done.

Posted April 23, 12:00 PM

TT: Shots in the dark

I'm in The Wall Street Journal today, reviewing two Roundabout Theatre Company shows, Stephen Sondheim's Assassins and Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel.

About Assassins, which tries to make sense of the lives of eight people who killed or tried to kill American presidents, I had mixed feelings. The production is all but perfect, but the show itself, despite marvelous moments, simply doesn't add up. Assassins, I wrote,

takes the form of a carnival sideshow whose brass-voiced barker (Marc Kudisch) invites unhappy passers-by to forget their troubles by stepping right up and taking a potshot at the man in the Oval Office: "No job? Cupboard bare?/One room, no one there?/Hey, pal, don't despair--/You wanna shoot a president?" That's the message of "Assassins," such as it is: if only there were ice cream for everyone, Camelot would still be with us! Instead, we preach the American dream, and some of those born losers who find it hollow seek to even the score with a gun: "And all you have to do/Is/Squeeze your little finger./Ease your little finger back--/You can change the world."

Aside from being sophomoric, this rigidly reductive thesis clashes with the core of "Assassins," a series of sharply drawn sketches of eight successful and would-be presidential assassins. Not surprisingly, this is the part of the show where Mr. Sondheim finds his footing, since his other musicals are exclusively concerned not with ideas but feelings (or the inability to feel). Not even in "Sweeney Todd," which purports to locate its antihero's murderous rage in the dehumanizing context of 19th-century British industrialism, does he betray any real interest in or understanding of politics. For Mr. Sondheim, the political is personal, and no matter how hard he and Mr. Weidman try to persuade us that their desperate characters are meaningful symbols of mass alienation, we persist in seeing them as individual objects of pity united only in their varied forms of despair...

Intimate Apparel, on the other hand, couldn't be better:

It's an old-fashioned domestic tragedy, as simple and true as a silent movie, about an illiterate turn-of-the-century seamstress who falls hard for the wrong man. Uncomplicatedly staged by Daniel Sullivan on a beautifully spare set designed by Derek McLane, "Intimate Apparel" is devoid of surprise save for the fact that it's so good. As for Viola Davis, who leads the superlative cast, she's not just good--she's perfect. Rarely have I seen innocence and yearning blended to such precisely balanced effect. The only thing wrong with Ms. Davis is that the script says she's supposed to be homely, which she isn't (though she acts homely)....

No link, so step right up, hand over one silver dollar, turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, and read the whole thing there.

Posted April 23, 12:00 PM

TT: More adventures of an author

The UPS man brought me a couple of boxes' worth of hardcover copies of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, and I knew that the inevitable moment had come at last: my book has been remaindered. I can't complain, really, since The Skeptic stayed in print for a year and a half, got terrific reviews, and is now available in a handsome-looking trade paperback. Still, you can't help but feel a twinge of dismay when you open the form letter from your publisher advising you that your beloved baby will soon be piled high on the discount tables, there to be sold for humiliatingly low prices. No matter how good a run you had--and I had a better one than I ever dared to hope--the party always ends.

Fortunately, I have A Terry Teachout Reader to distract me, and I also plan to find solace in schadenfreude. I linked a few months ago to a cruelly funny poem by Clive James called "The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered." Now that I have been delivered into the company of mine enemies, I shall take comfort in the concluding stanza:

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error--
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

So there. And should you drop by my place to see the Teachout Museum, be sure to ask for an inscribed copy. I've got plenty.

Posted April 23, 10:09 AM

TT: Enough already

I'm taking Saturday off, unless my resolve wavers. I have a piece to write and a play to see (A Raisin in the Sun, natch), and I think I've written enough for one week.

Our Girl may have something up her sleeve, but if not, I'll see you Sunday.

Posted April 23, 8:05 AM

April 22, 2004

TT: Written in the stars

A friend of mine e-mailed me her horoscope for today, gleaned from the Village Voice's Web site:

You have two options, Virgo. The contrast between them reminds me of the difference between Norah Jones and Ani DiFranco. Jones's work is "tasteful and listenable," said The New York Times, though "nothing much happens in her songs." Shakingthrough.net wrote that though Jones can be maudlin and subdued, she creates "a winning collection of polished (albeit innocuous) gems." About DiFranco, the Times noted that "it's worth putting up with a few overbearing moments to hear someone so willing to take chances." Billboard said DiFranco's latest CD is "raw--for better (the immediacy of the performance) and worse (traces of off-key harmonies)." So which way will you go: bland and classy like Jones, or rough and stimulating like DiFranco?

Here's the funny part: my friend happens to be a jazz singer. Her response: "I have a lot more options than just these two!" I should damned well think so....

Posted April 22, 12:47 PM

TT: Halfway round the world

Right at this moment, "About Last Night" is being read in twelve different time zones.

Hello out there! Tell your friends about us....

Posted April 22, 12:24 PM

TT: Almanac

"Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues."

W.B. Yeats, Dramatis Personae

Posted April 22, 12:21 PM

TT: Consumables

I have all of Thursday off, glory be, so I'll endeavor to do some juicy blogging later in the day. Meanwhile, here's what I consumed on Wednesday:

- I saw a press preview of the Royal National Theatre's revival of Tom Stoppard's Jumpers, which opens in New York on April 25. I'll be reviewing it in next Friday's Wall Street Journal.

- In addition, I looked at extended chunks of a couple of old movies after returning home from the police station and washing my hands (how's that for a teaser?). One was My Darling Clementine, John Ford's version of what happened at the O.K. Corral, the only one of his major Westerns I hadn't seen. Factual it isn't (the only Wyatt Earp film that remotely approximates the truth about the Earp family is Tombstone), but it has a quietly elegiac quality that I found impossible to resist. Not only is each black-and-white scene composed with a painter's eye, but Henry Fonda's performance as Wyatt Earp is remarkably moving--Tom Joad without the corn--and Victor "Beefcake" Mature is unexpectedly good as Doc Holliday.

I also watched part of a new restoration of Sam Wood's 1940 film of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, which includes several members of the original Broadway cast (including Frank Craven as the Stage Manager), plus a score by Aaron Copland that's comparable in quality to Appalachian Spring. If you've never seen it, do, though I suggest you record it off Turner Classic Movies rather than buying any of the currently available DVD versions, all of which appear to be from crappy-looking prints.

- Now playing on iTunes: Pierre Bernac's 78 recording of Francis Poulenc's C., with Poulenc at the piano (hopelessly out of print, I fear). I'm in that kind of mood--what my Brazilian friends call saudade. Maybe it'll lift after a good night's sleep.

Posted April 22, 12:19 PM

TT: Dames with rods

Courtesy of DVD Journal, this long-overdue news:

The good people at Warner are cleaning out the vault with five films noir. John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle will include an introduction by the director and commentary from actor James Whitmore and film scholar Drew Casper. The quintessential 1944 Murder, My Sweet starring Dick Powell and Claire Trevor will offer a track from noir expert Alain Silver. Robert Wise's 1944 The Set-Up with Robert Ryan and Audrey Totter will sport a track from none other than Wise and some guy named Martin Scorsese. The 1947 Out of the Past starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer will find noir buff Jim Ursini on the mic. And Joseph H. Lewis's 1949 Gun Crazy with Peggy Cummins and John Dall will offer a track from the one and only Glenn Erickson (better known as our pal DVD Savant). All street on July 27 individually or in a five-disc Film Noir Classic Collection (SRP $49.92).

You know what to do.

Posted April 22, 10:33 AM

TT: Gladder to be happy

A reader writes, quoting the last sentence of "Fiddlers Three," my recent Commentary essay on Jascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, and Louis Kaufman:

In the realm of art, all things being equal, most people find unhappiness more interesting than joy.

Great insight. But why do you think this is? Is it something particular to particular cultures, or more or less universal in art? And putting "interestingness" aside, what about other characteristics--don't most people somehow also find unhappiness in art more profound or meaningful or important, etc., than happiness?

These are challenging questions for which I don't have any ready answers. I do think, however, that under the aspect of modernism, we're taught to distrust happiness, at least as represented in art (and probably also in life as well). I myself don't feel this way, which is why I gravitate to a great many artists whose view of the world is essentially sunny. On the other hand, that doesn't stop me from embracing the dark side of art, so long as it isn't ponderously dark. Even darkness can be "light," like The Great Gatsby, Mozart in a minor key, or Bonnard at his most obsessive.

I said on Studio 360 the other day that bad reviews are easier to write than good ones, and I wonder whether this might have something to do with the comparative "interestingness" of unhappiness. If you're really, truly happy, it tends to render you inarticulate, which is why happiness is most easily conveyed in the lyric arts: music, ballet, painting, poetry. The characters in a novel or play, conversely, can start out and even end up happy, but if they don't become unhappy at some point along the way, the audience will fall asleep. In much the same way, it's harder (though not impossible!) for me to describe in words what it's like to experience a wholly satisfying work of art. At least for a time, analysis is pointless--what I want to do is sit there and feel. Only in retrospect am I able to think clearly about why a good play was so good, whereas I start honing the scalpel as soon as the curtain comes down on a bad one.

Needless to say, I'd rather go to good plays than bad ones, just as I'd rather be happy than unhappy--and maybe that explains why I'm a critic instead of a creator. I've been desperately unhappy on many occasions in my life, but never did it occur to me that I might profit from my misery, much less write a sonata about it. All I wanted was for it to stop.

This reminds me that Supermaud and I were exchanging e-mails earlier today about the glorious weather in New York. Surely, I said, it was impossible to be too unhappy on a golden day like this, to which she replied that she thought the Romantic poets might have been right about spring. For some reason this reminded me of what Jeeves says somewhere about Nietzsche, whom he regarded as "fundamentally unsound." I think he probably would have said much the same thing about Keats and Shelley--but when it came to spring, he might have given them a pass. Me, too.

Posted April 22, 9:40 AM

April 21, 2004

TT: Adventures of an author

The cleaning lady chased me out of my office this morning, so I decided to get cracking on some chores I'd shoved under the desk. I retired to the back table of Good Enough to Eat, where I ordered waffles and started filling out an inch-thick application (don't ask) that required me to answer all sorts of questions whose answers I couldn't recall off the top of my head (in what month did I move to the apartment where I was living seven years ago?).

Temporarily stymied by the long arm of bureaucracy, I finished my breakfast and strolled over to the neighborhood Barnes & Noble to see whether A Terry Teachout Reader was on sale yet. It wasn't in New Non-Fiction, so I climbed the stairs to the arts section in search of something to read. There I found three copies of the Teachout Reader shelved under Jazz/Blues, meaning that no one at Barnes & Noble had bothered to look at the contents of my book. Only a year ago, I was basking in the red-carpet treatment at that very same store, including an evening reading and deluxe placement for The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken. Now I'm relegated to Jazz/Blues (though at least I got what booksellers call "face-out" placement, meaning that the front of the dust jacket is visible). As Robert Mitchum says in The Lusty Men, "Chicken today, feathers tomorrow."

From there I went to the police station to get myself fingerprinted (I told you it was a long form). I'd never before set foot inside a New York police station, and this one proved to be an oasis of dingy, demoralizing grayness in the middle of a cheery Upper West Side neighborhood. I put myself in the hands of a policeman who reminded me of the chauffeur in My Favorite Year, except that he was the most blasé person I've met in my entire life. As he went to work on my left hand ("Hey, you have great prints!" he assured me, allowing himself an unexpected surge of enthusiasm), it suddenly occurred to me that I was wearing a canary-yellow shirt and that the slightest false move on my part would smear fingerprint ink all over my midriff.

When we were done, the policeman gave me a handful of Fingerprint Ink Removal Towelettes and a useful piece of advice: "You really have to work it to get this stuff off, but it's just ink. When you go home, try some dishwashing liquid. That works pretty good." I struggled with the towelettes for five minutes, said the hell with it, and went home to the kitchen sink. One minute's worth of vigorous massage with Joy and my fingers were as good as new. Not only that, I managed not to get any ink on my shirt. Now all I have to do is finish filling out that endless form and go see Jumpers on Broadway tonight, and I can call it a day.

Glamorous, huh?

UPDATE: Later at lunch, this Chandlerian metaphor came to me: The precinct house was as gray as an old dishtowel.

Posted April 21, 12:11 PM

TT: Almanac

"Marriage excuses no one the freaks' roll-call."

Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw

Posted April 21, 12:01 PM

TT: Consumables

Another dark night, thank God, since I'm covering three plays this coming week, starting with the Broadway revival of Jumpers, from which I should be returning in 24 hours or so. Even so, it was a sufficiently busy day--I wrote this Friday's Wall Street Journal drama column, among other things--and I'm still run down from finishing the Balanchine book. As a result, I (A) didn't consume much art yesterday and (B) don't have much pre-bedtime steam tonight. So I'll be brief, hoping that Our Girl will take up some of the slack:

- I read part of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff over lunch and am about to take it to bed with me. I hadn't looked into it for a number of years, and was happy to see how well it holds up.

- Now playing on iTunes: an advance copy of the Trio Solisti's recording of Paul Moravec's Mood Swings, out this fall from Arabesque Records. The word "great" is commonly misused by critics of my generation (though we deserve some credit for knowing there's such a thing as greatness), but I have no doubt whatsoever that it applies to this piece. I'd stake my reputation on it. Which reminds me of a favorite saying of an actor whose name escapes me: "You bet your life, fella...and you may have to."

That's about all I'm good for. See you tomorrow.

Posted April 21, 12:00 PM

April 20, 2004

TT: Almanac

"He had sensed that in educated America, humor was the number 1 language, for criticism, passion, even cooking: and he set about learning it with grim intelligence."

Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison

Posted April 20, 12:03 PM

TT: As others see us (if we're jerks)

From Edward N. Meyer's Giant Strides: The Legacy of Dick Wellstood, here's a list drawn up by Wellstood of the kinds of people who came to hear him play jazz piano at Hanratty's, the New York saloon where he appeared in the Eighties:

1. The drunken girl who sits on the piano and nuzzles while the boyfriend watches. She plays at you or, as one did once, on the backs of my hands.

2. The singers, about whom the less said the better. It's always worse after Cardiff has won.

3. They who like it and talk about it at length so that I can't play.

4. The ones who mumble inaudibly and expect an answer.

5. The shouters from the back of the room.

6. The glowerers who say nothing.

7. The experts, who, after I have just made a success of a Jelly Roll Morton stomp, request a Cy Coleman song with a meaningful glare and a nasty edge to their voice.

8. The critics, who buttonhole me during the intermission and talk of (1) Tony Jackson, J. Russell Robinson, and Cripple Clarence (if I've played too modern); or (2) McCoy Tyner, Albert Dailey, and Harold Mabern (if they think I've been hopelessly old-fashioned).

9. The know it alls: You're wonderful, surely you compose--what?

10. The Hotel Carlisle executive types: Must you play like THAT?!!

11. The out & out hostile types: You Stunk.

12. The mistaken nitwit, who chides me for having played "Dark Eyes" badly, when in fact what I played was "Bourbon Street."

13. The out of place, who wants to sing Irish songs in a room full of jazz lovers and vice versa.

14. The jury: silent, attentive, well versed, determined. It's important.

15. The jazz lover, who finds shreds of people you never heard of in your playing.

16. The groupie, who just saw Cecil Taylor and knew Peck Kelley well.

17. The total nerds, who compliment me ad infinitum and then ask for the River Seine or the Warsaw Concerto.

If you want to know what manner of music this darkly sardonic wit played when he wasn't exasperated, get a copy of The Classic Jazz Quartet: Complete Recordings, on which Wellstood figures prominently and beautifully. It's one of my all-time favorite albums...and not even slightly angry.

Posted April 20, 12:01 PM

TT: Consumables

- No show Monday. In addition, I spent most of the afternoon and evening playing catch-up--answering accumulated e-mail, working on my calendar, running long-deferred errands--and thus wasn't able to spend much time consuming art. Fortunately, I did have time to start watching John Huston's The Misfits, which I'd never seen, and I liked the first half-hour a lot better than I'd expected. (I normally can't stand Arthur Miller, but his dialogue sounds rather more plausible when spoken by Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe.) More as it happens.

UPDATE: It got awful, alas.

- I read most of Sam Staggs' Close-Up on Sunset Boulevard: Billy Wilder, Norma Desmond, and the Dark Hollywood Dream over lunch and while waiting for an appointment. Alas, it's too campy and not nearly as detailed as Aljean Harmetz's Round Up the Usual Suspects, but I liked it well enough.

- Now playing on iTunes: Teddy Wilson's "Jungle Love," featuring Bobby Hackett on cornet and Johnny Hodges on alto sax, available on this two-CD set of great Wilson sides from the Thirties and Forties. Talk about suave! Fred Astaire would have approved.

Posted April 20, 12:00 PM

April 19, 2004

TT: Mr. Waller, annotated

Fats Waller, after Louis Armstrong the most life-enhancing jazz musician ever to make recordings, is never very far from my iTunes player. Needing a pre-bedtime boost of spirits, I clicked on "It's a Sin to Tell a Lie," one of his celebrated deconstructions of insipid Thirties pop tunes, and began smiling from the first bar onward. It starts with a get-the-hell-out-of-my-way introduction, immediately succeeded by a jaunty chorus of solo piano in which Waller's infallible left hand bounces up and down the keys like a fat man on a pogo stick.

There follows a quintessentially Wallerian vocal that goes something like this, sort of:

Be sure it's true when you say "I love you."
It's a sin to tell a lie-uhhllllrrrry!
[unctuously] Millions of hearts have been broken, yes, yes,
Just because these words were spoken. (You know the words that were spoken? Here it is.)
[simperingly] I love you I love you I love you [in an orotund bass-baritone] I love you. [gleefully] Ha-ha-ha!
Yes, but if you break my heart, I'll break your jaw and then I'll die.
So be sure it's true when you say "I love [twitteringly, in falsetto] yooooou." Ha, ha!
It's a sin to tell a lie. Now get on out there and tell your lie. What is it?

But words fail me. Go here, scroll down, click on the link and rejoice in the real right thing.

Posted April 19, 12:05 PM

TT: How they hangin'?

I was supposed to see two shows yesterday, Assassins in the afternoon and a workshop performance featuring a friend that night, but I read the invitation to the second show wrong and thought the curtain was at eight o'clock instead of five. Fortunately, I noticed my mistake at seven, just as I was getting ready to shut up shop, go downstairs, and catch a cab. Instead of making a pointless trip to the theater district, I found myself with an unplanned night off, and decided to spend part of it rehanging some of my prints.

It happens that I've just acquired a new piece for the Teachout Museum, a copy of Fairfield Porter's Broadway, the 1971 color lithograph I chose at your recommendation to adorn the dust jacket of A Terry Teachout Reader. (I bought it here, in case you're looking to make a purchase from a very nice, very reliable Chicago-area dealer.) It hasn't arrived yet, but I'll have to shift some other pieces around when it does, so I opted to do a bit of preparatory puttering. Since I'm going to hang Broadway over the mantelpiece, the place of honor, I moved the Wolf Kahn monotype that currently occupies that space to a spot over the living-room closet. That's where I'd hung my copy of William Bailey's aquatint Piazza Rotunda, not very happily, so I took down the Porter poster that hangs over the door to my office and put Piazza Rotunda there.

No doubt all this sounds boring, perhaps even precious, but hanging the art you own is an inescapable part of owning it, and it's surprising--astonishing, really--how completely the look and feel of my living room have been altered simply by switching a couple of prints. It makes the prints look different, too, not just the ones I moved but all the others that hang around them. Best of all, I can now see Piazza Rotunda from my love seat, the spot where I normally sit when I'm alone, and I find my refreshed eye going to it constantly. Alas, I must make a special "trip" to the other side of the room to look at the Kahn, but it's the first thing you see when you open the front door, and since most of my guests like it best of all my prints, it'll be as if I'd given them a present.

As for the Porter poster, a handsome reproduction of Lizzie at the Table used to publicize the Whitney Museum's 1984 Porter retrospective, it's going on permanent loan to a neighbor who recently had a baby (a thoroughly appropriate gift, too, since the "Lizzie" of the painting was Porter's own baby daughter). Meanwhile, there's a big empty space over my mantelpiece, waiting patiently to be filled by Broadway, which is not only beautiful in its own right but also a visible symbol of my proudest professional achievement to date, the Teachout Reader.

Anyway, that's how I spent my Sunday evening. I hope you had half as much fun.

Posted April 19, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

His only weakness is a lust for power--
And that is not a weakness, people think,
When unaccompanied by bribes or drink.

Sir John Betjeman, "The Town Clerk's Views"

Posted April 19, 12:01 PM

TT: Consumables

- On Sunday afternoon I went to see the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins, which opens this week at Studio 54 (and which I'll be reviewing in Friday's Wall Street Journal).

- I've been watching Gone With the Wind in installments over the past few days. I'd only seen it twice before, both times in the theater (first in the Seventies, then in the Nineties), and not since I finally got around to reading the book, which impressed me rather more than I expected. As I wrote a few years ago:

"No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures," said Dr. Johnson, right as always. As proof of his point, I offer in evidence Gone With the Wind. Never has a middlebrow bodice-ripper been more widely reviled by highbrow critics, yet ordinary folks continue to buy it, read it, and like it, no matter how often they're told they shouldn't do any of the above....

Gone With the Wind, on the other hand, will keep on being read and relished by the common readers with whom Dr. Johnson rejoiced to concur, for the very good reason that it's a pretty good novel, not to mention a rather surprising one. Over and above the pure pull of plot, it has some unexpectedly shrewd things to say about the vanity of the Glorious Cause (most of which didn't make it into the movie). Ashley Wilkes' anguished letter to his wife Melanie is a case in point: "I see too clearly that we have been betrayed, betrayed by our arrogant Southern selves...by words and catch phrases, prejudices and hatreds coming from the mouths of those highly placed, those men whom we respected and revered--‘King Cotton, Slavery, States' Rights, Damn Yankees.'"

Moreover, Gone with the Wind is peopled with characters whose inconsistencies make them interesting, none more so than Scarlett O'Hara, an unattractive, inexplicably seductive anti-heroine whom Trollope himself might well have been pleased to dream up on an especially good day....

Alas, the movie doesn't hold up nearly so well, save as a sort of apotheosis of Technicolor. The only other costume piece I can think of that uses Technicolor as vividly is John Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Clark Gable and Hattie McDaniel are excellent, Max Steiner's score is wonderful in its old-fashioned way, and the siege and burning of Atlanta are fully as effective--and unexpectedly unsentimental--as I remember them. But Vivien Leigh's two-keyed performance as Scarlett is wearying, while the script scissors out most of the novel's ambiguities, such as they are.

Coming as I do from a small town in the southern half of a border state, one that saw a lynching as late as 1942 and segregated schools well into the Sixties, I've never had much patience with those who romanticize the antebellum South, and especially now that I've read Margaret Mitchell's novel, my guess is that this is the last time I'll ever care to see the film. Sentimental period pieces only work when they evoke periods in which one might want to have lived, however briefly. I can't think of anything more repellent than living in a land whose gentility was bought and paid for with the flesh of men.

- Inspired by the Reflections in D Minor posting to which I linked yesterday, I ripped my CD version of Sir Malcolm Arnold's Ninth Symphony, to which I hadn't listened in a number of years. I really need to "do" Arnold in depth and write a Commentary essay about him. Maybe this fall....

Posted April 19, 12:00 PM

TT: Mmm, schadenfreude!

From the April 6 Valley News of Lebanon, New Hampshire, a story headlined "Professor Dumped by Dartmouth Receives Music Pulitzer":

NEW YORK--A musical work by a former Dartmouth College professor and stories of oppression both home and abroad were rewarded with Pulitzer Prizes yesterday.

The award for music went to Tempest Fantasy by Paul Moravec, who has created more than 80 other compositions. He currently heads the music department at Adelphi University on Long Island, N.Y. Moravec taught at Dartmouth from 1987 to 1995, first as an assistant professor and then as an associate. He was denied tenure at Dartmouth in 1995.

Moravec, who was in Sicily yesterday, told the Valley News by telephone that the Pulitzer was, in part, "vindication" for his rejection by Dartmouth....

Revenge--the gift that keeps on giving.

Posted April 19, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"I like all your new poems so much, you seem to me to be writing nothing but good poems, something theoretically and practically impossible. I ought to explain my rather funny and personal remark about your sestinas: I like your poetry better than anybody's since the Frost-Stevens-Eliot-Moore generation, so I looked with awed wonder at some phrases feeling to me a little like some of my phrases, in your poems; I felt as if, so to speak, some of my wash-cloths were part of a Modigliani collage, or as if my cat had got into a Vuillard."

Randall Jarrell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, February 1957

Posted April 19, 1:46 AM

OGIC: Bishop's bull market

I'm a little late to this party, as to most things. Everybody has been linking to Dana Gioia's excellent piece on Elizabeth Bishop in the New Criterion, but there hasn't been much said about the larger questions raised by the essay. Bishop was Gioia's teacher, and so there's a nice personal angle, but what he's really interested in are the different forces that act on literary reputations, propelling some upward and sinking others. Bishop turns out to be a great case study, having steadily ascended in stature since her death in 1979. It's pretty surprising, at least for a younger reader, to realize how little this ascendance seemed to be in the cards during Bishop's lifetime:

If Bishop's present apotheosis was preordained by Fate, no one told us thirty years ago. At Harvard in 1975 when I studied with Bishop and often spent afternoons chatting with her in a Cambridge teashop, she was a respected elder poet but no literary celebrity. Her seminar on modern American poetry, which I took, had only four other students--a reliable sign of her literary market value in fashion-conscious Cambridge. If John Ashbery exaggerated a few years later when he called Bishop a "writer's writer's writer," it wasn't much of an exaggeration.

So how did Bishop crack the canon so decisively? Gioia points to factors both extrinsic and intrinsic to her work. On one hand, Bishop's reputation benefited from growing academic interest in women's writing and gender criticism in the years following her death. On the other, Gioia argues, the poetry itself does the trick: not only its excellence, a (sometimes) necessary but never sufficient condition for canonicity, but another quality, unfashionable to talk about:

There is something essentially disinterested and noncommittal about Bishop's sensibility that is central to her broad appeal. More than any major American poet of her generation she possessed what John Keats celebrated as "negative capability," the imaginative power "of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." She had a native genius for reflecting the rich complexity of experience without reducing it into abstraction or predetermined moral judgment. She is inclusive by being artfully inconclusive. This quality of her work is not always evident when we read it casually, but once we teach her poems or analyze them seriously, this aspect is hard to ignore. There was once a term commonly used to describe this sort of meaningful ambiguity and openness to diverse kinds of interpretation: universality. Much derided and oddly misconstrued by critical theorists in recent decades, universality remains an inescapable literary notion. The term does not describe literary works that have fixed and identical appeal to all audiences everywhere; rather, universality refers to works that have a remarkable ability to engage very different audiences often in notably different ways.

I know what he means about teaching Bishop. I once taught some of her poems to a freshman humanities class, populated largely by students who had no notion of becoming humanities majors but were there to fulfill a requirement. These budding economists and biologists really perked up reading Bishop, and turned out what was collectively the best group of papers produced in the course.

In a post today on other matters, Erin O'Connor at Critical Mass discusses the related subject of accessibility in academic literary studies. Insofar as the accessibility of literary criticism and the universality of literary works are related, perhaps the misconstrual of the latter that Gioia points to is not so much "odd" as entirely predictable:

Literary scholars' collective hostility toward technology, especially as it expresses membership in a self-described cultural elite and a discipline-specific condescension to those outside it with pretenses to know or understand literature and culture, is closely connected to a deep suspicion of accessibility. Holbo is right that literary studies is one discipline that should be aiming at a wide audience and whose health may be measured in terms of its ability to connect with a public that is larger than its overspecialized self. He is right, too, that one sign of the systemic disorder of literature departments today is that their members are positively hostile to the idea that their relevance may and should be assessed by--horror of horrors--uncredentialed laypersons, the great nonacademic unwashed.

O'Connor's comments come in response to John Holbo's interesting reflections on academic blogging and non-academic literary blogging at Crooked Timber. Nathalie has additional thoughts here.

Posted April 19, 1:26 AM

April 18, 2004

TT: Here, there, and elsewhere

I've more or less resumed my normal performance-going ways, meaning that it's been awhile since I've had time to put together a link-intensive post. Sorry about that! Here are some of the things bouncing around the blogosphere that have caught my eye:

- Modern Art Notes offers wicked speculations on the effects of last week's West Coast power failure on the Monets currently hanging at Las Vegas' Bellagio Casino and Gallery of Fine Art Borrowed from Greedy East Coast Museums:

Among the reasons that accredited museums should not be sending their art to non-accredited spaces is the lack of climate control systems in those non-accredited spaces. Why something like this might happen: The power in the entire Bellagio complex might go out, leaving the MFA Boston's Monet's to cook in the Vegas heat. That would never happen, would it? Oh, but it has....

- Household Opera lists fourteen things she'd rather do than grade papers:

1. Clean the refrigerator.

2. Go to the nearest big grocery store, which is two or three miles away. On foot. (Actually, it's a nice energetic 45-minute hike if the weather is good and I'm in the mood for exercise, which I was yesterday. And I take the bus home, because another 45-minute hike with groceries is too much. But still.)

3. Visit my local knitting store and fondle every type of yarn in succession -- though, to be fair, I do that on non-grading weekends as well....

14. If it comes down to it, chew off my right arm so I'll have an excuse for not writing any more comments.

Writers will sympathize. Especially this one.

- Critical Mass links to David Mamet's reflections on the new London production of Oleanna:

The play's first audience was a group of undergraduates from Brown University. They came to a dress rehearsal. The play ended and I asked the folks what they thought. "Don't you think it's politically questionable," one said, "to have the girl make a false accusation of rape?"

I, in my ignorance, was stunned. I didn't realise it was my job to be politically acceptable. I'd always thought society employed me to be dramatic; further, I wondered what force had so perverted the young that they would think that increasing political enfranchisement of a group rendered a member of that group incapable of error - in effect, rendered her other-than-human....

To which Critical Mass responds:

What Mamet wasn't around to see: Brown's own real life staging of an Oleanna-esque tragedy-cum-farce just four years later....Mamet's play may not have been PC--but in telling the truth as he saw it, and in concentrating on producing powerful drama rather than on driving home a political message, Mamet managed to be quite prescient indeed about what kinds of procedural and personal horror lie latent in the seemingly innocuous question, "Don't you think it's politically questionable ... to have the girl make a false accusation of rape?"

What they said.

- Cup of Chicha raids the commonplace book she kept as a teenager, with rich rewards, followed by another posting in which she serves up some of her favorite sentences from novels.

The Man With the Almanac has his eye on you, Chicha.

- SlowLearner on gigaplexes for live theater:

I remember when George Lucas was suggesting in interviews that huge twenty-screen multi-plexes would actually be a good thing because the exhibitors would have to fill some of those screens with artier or foreign films. I thought this was a pretty stupid thing to say, as I regularly passed theaters with Gone In 60 Seconds on nine screens or whatever, but in the five years since then, at least in New York, Lucas's prediction has been coming true. They can't fill all those screens with Hollywood product, so I keep finding myself watching The Barbarian Invasions or something at the AMC 25 on 42nd Street, of all places.

I bring it up because...what if something similar, on a smaller scale, could work in regional theater. Maybe no one wants to buy complete subsription packages anymore. Maybe no one wants to leave the house to see a play by someone they've never heard of. Fine. But maybe if that unknown play was playing across the hall, or just down the stairs from where the umpteenth Dancing At Lughnasa is playing, and maybe if the crowds for each mingle a little bit after their shows...maybe a little bit of curiosity is aroused out of sheer proximity. As long as I'm here--what's the thing in the little theater about anyway?...

- ...something slant discovers that Brits and Yanks don't punctuate the same way:

I didn't even know that the rules were different until I was in grad school, and then, well, it was too late. [In undergrad I would consult the copy of whatever novel I was writing about (Austen, Woolf, Forster, Byatt) to refresh my memory about the "proper" rules and then despaired when I got them all wrong. So much for that.] For the record the punctuation goes inside the quotation marks if you're using US rules, outside if you're using British. Frankly, the British rules make more sense....

- From the Detroit News, yet another installment of Calling All Line Editors, or, Columns We Never Finished Reading:

I would not normally pick up a book written by a politician whose positions I don't necessarily ascribe to....

- Reflections in D Minor wonders why Sir Malcolm Arnold's Ninth Symphony, composed in 1992, "is not considered one of the greatest symphonies of all time." So do I. (I also rank it with Sibelius' Fourth and Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphonies as one of the saddest symphonies of all time.)

- Instapundit wins the Alexander Pope "But Ne'er So Well Expressed" Prize for Pithiest Sentence Blogged in the Month of April:

George Washington is an icon, and like most icons, he has attracted attention mostly from iconoclasts.

- Johnny Apple has been eating hot dogs in Chicago on the New York Times' tab:

But no place else this side of Frankfurt has a frankfurter stand every three or four blocks, as Chicago does. And no other place anywhere has a catechism of condiments as rigorously defined as Chicago's. A proper Chicago hot dog must be served on a warmed poppy-seed bun (preferably from Rosen's bakery). It must be dressed with a crisp pickle spear, a sweetish fluorescent green relish, a slice or wedge of raw tomato, some chopped onions (or very occasionally grilled onions), a dab or two of yellow mustard, a dusting of celery salt and two or three hot little green chilies, which Chicagoans for some reason always call sport peppers....

Memo to OGIC: discuss. Memo to self: I want this man's job.

- Finally, Return of the Reluctant pays a visit to Fantasy Island, inspired by a Washington Post story about "turf wars" and "low-level spats" in the blogosphere:

NEW YORK (AP): Lit blogger Edward Champion was announced as Maud Newton's bitch last night. Mr. Champion, who lost his right to blog about literature shortly after being beaten to a pulp by Ron Hogan in a backalley brawl last April, had long been targeted by the Final Three: Sarah Weinman, Jessa Crispin and Newton. Mr. Champion's hair has been shaven off and his limbs have been replaced by QWERTY keyboards connected to Google News. Newton and her gang plan to use Mr. Champion as either a modular bookshelf or a footstool....

Don't get your hopes up, Ed. Supermaud can rest her feet on my forehead any old time.

Posted April 18, 12:52 PM

TT: Almanac

"I was repining at the thought of my slow progress--how few new ideas I had or picked up--when it occurred to me to think of the total of life and how the greater part was wholly absorbed in living and continuing life--victuals--procreation--rest and eternal terror. And I bid myself accept the common lot; an adequate vitality would say daily, 'God, what a good sleep I've had,' 'My eye, that was dinner,' 'Now for a fine rattling walk'--in short, life as an end in itself."

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Frederick Pollock, August 21, 1919

Posted April 18, 1:33 AM

TT: Consumables

- I looked at two gallery shows, "Jane Freilicher: Recent Work" at Tibor de Nagy (it was just as good the second time) and "Everyday Mysteries: Modern and Contemporary Still Life" at DC Moore, which included gorgeous paintings by William Bailey, Fairfield Porter, and Jane Wilson. (Both shows close April 24.)

- I saw a new play on Friday, Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel, which I'll be reviewing in next week's Wall Street Journal. Yesterday I finally caught up with Good Bye, Lenin!, which I loved, even though it took me by surprise--I had the mistaken notion that it would be less poignant and more broadly comic.

- I've been reading Aljean Harmetz's Round Up the Usual Suspects and James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans.

- Now playing on iTunes: David Cantor's "Slow Boat to China" (no, it's not the song you know, unless you're v., v. cool), recorded by Mary Foster Conklin on Crazy Eyes.

Posted April 18, 1:26 AM

TT: Absolutely one more time only

Once more with feeling: if you live in or near New York City, you can listen to a repeat broadcast of my Studio 360 interview at seven p.m. tonight night on WNYC-AM (820). In addition, Studio 360 is carried by NPR affiliates across the country. For a list of local stations and air dates, go here.

You can also download the show or listen to it via streaming audio at Studio 360's audio archive.

Posted April 18, 1:04 AM

April 17, 2004

TT: If I do say so myself

I listened to Studio 360 this morning, then went out for brunch with a friend. By the time I got back, I already had a deskful of e-mail and phone messages, plus a link from Maud (whose blog I plugged on the air, along with some others that ended up on the cutting-room floor). This was my first hearing of the edited version, and I was hugely impressed by the skill with which Kurt Andersen and his superb producers compressed and tightened up our lengthy conversation about criticism without distorting its sense in any way. It's not for me to say whether the final product was worth hearing, but I enjoyed listening to it, and I hope you do, too.

If you live in or near New York City, you can listen to a repeat broadcast at seven p.m. Sunday night on WNYC-AM (820). In addition, Studio 360 is carried by NPR affiliates across the country. For a complete list of local stations and air dates, go here. You can also download the show or listen to it via streaming audio by visiting Studio 360's audio archive.

Posted April 17, 1:08 AM

TT: Almanac

"When I was a kid, I wanted a five-dollar watch, then a ten-dollar watch, then a hundred-dollar watch. When I made money, I wanted a Rolex, then a Patek-Philippe. Now I realize that the real luxury is not to know the time."

Jack Straus, quoted in A. Alvarez, The Biggest Game in Town

Posted April 17, 1:02 AM

April 16, 2004

TT: Consumables

- I just got back from the Village Vanguard, where I heard the Bill Charlap Trio play a good-sized chunk of Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein, their new CD (my Washington Post review is here), along with such Charlap-type standards as Gerry Mulligan's "Rocker" and Stephen Sondheim's "Uptown/Downtown."

I showed up early enough to grab a seat five feet from Kenny Washington's end of the bandstand. I can't think of many jazz drummers to whom I'd care to sit that close, but Washington is the man, and he was in stupendously good form. In fact, I've never heard a drummer swing as hard as he did on "Nobody's Heart" (and who else but Charlap would have had the wit to turn that fragile Rodgers-Hart ballad into a medium-tempo swinger?). Right now I feel like sitting down and knocking out a dissertation entitled "The Use of the Hi-Hat in Kenny Washington's Drumming." If they asked me, I could write a book, though I'd rather wait until I've recovered from writing the last one....

- My personal Barbara Pym celebration is drawing to a close: I started rereading her last novel, A Few Green Leaves, over a plateful of pre-Vanguard sushi.

- Earlier today (or, to be exact, yesterday), I watched an hour-long interview with James Garner, an episode of Turner Classic Movies' Private Screenings series that was repeated earlier this week in honor of the network's tenth anniversary. As I mentioned a few months ago, I'm a huge Garner fan, but I'd never seen an interview with him--it seems he doesn't like giving them. I can't imagine why, since he's charming, articulate, and pretty much just like the character he plays in most of his films and TV shows. If I had any steam left, I'd watch one right now, but the loft beckons.

- Now playing on iTunes: Ravel's Introduction and Allegro, as performed by the Hollywood String Quartet. I'm hoping that it'll ease me dreamward.

And yes, I know I promised a bunch of choice links yesterday, but my unexpected houseguest threw me slightly off course. Maybe this afternoon, maybe tomorrow. Either way, I haven't forgotten you!

Posted April 16, 12:04 PM

TT: Almost on the air

One more reminder before the Thing Itself: I'll be appearing this weekend on Studio 360, talking to Kurt Andersen about the art and/or craft of criticism. In New York, the program airs Saturday at ten a.m. on WNYC-FM (93.9) and Sunday at seven p.m. on WNYC-AM (820).

For more information, including links for out-of-town and Web-based listeners, go here.

Posted April 16, 12:03 PM

TT: Terrorists are people, too

It's Friday, so I'm in The Wall Street Journal with a review of Sixteen Wounded, which opened last night. I didn't much care for it:

Whenever I hear anyone call a Broadway show "controversial," I know there's sucker bait dangling at the end of the line. Take "Sixteen Wounded," in which Eliam Kraiem, a young Jewish playwright from California, makes his Broadway debut at the Walter Kerr Theatre with the story of a Palestinian refugee who invites a Jewish baker to become the godfather of his illegitimate son. Yes, there's a sting in the tail, since the refugee in question previously blew up an Israeli bus and killed three children. But Mr. Kraiem's stalwart attempt to humanize the face of terrorism is just the sort of thing guaranteed to please Manhattan playgoers, who like nothing better than poking smugly at the limits of their tolerance. If Satan himself were to materialize in Times Square at high noon tomorrow, you can bet that by 12:05 the streets would be crammed with Upper West Siders eager to hear his side of the story, so long as he promised to check into the Betty Ford Clinic the next day....

If "Sixteen Wounded" were about something other than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I'd be rather more inclined to praise its carefully balanced ambiguities. But, then, that's the trouble with political plays: No matter how artful they are, most people usually end up judging them in part by whether they agree with the author's conclusions. Theatrically speaking, Tim Robbins's "Embedded" is a piece of trash, but it obviously charmed large numbers of viewers who cared more about its heart-on-sleeve politics than its inept craftsmanship. "Sixteen Wounded," by contrast, frames a serious issue--the permissibility of terrorism--in slickly theatrical terms, and thus ends up seeming evasive, even shifty.

No link (but you knew that, right?). Skip your morning doughnut and buy a Journal instead. Admiring e-mail will be read with pleasure. The other kind will be...read.

Posted April 16, 12:03 PM

TT: Yet another selling point

I haven't plugged A Terry Teachout Reader recently (well, not that recently) because I was waiting for the perfect moment to make this staggering revelation: the book contains a hidden clue to the secret identity of Our Girl in Chicago. Some purchasers have already guessed correctly! How can you possibly resist? Click here and order a copy.

The truth is out there.

Posted April 16, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Opportunism is something for which intellectuals have especial talents because of their aptitude for managing vocabulary at the expense of thought."

John Lukacs, Confessions of an Original Sinner

Posted April 16, 12:01 PM

April 15, 2004

TT: Consumables

- Wednesday was a dark night, as we theater people say--no scheduled performance, nor did I improvise one. Instead, I wrote my Wall Street Journal column for Friday, took a nap, blogged, performed miscellaneous accumulated chores, then had dinner with an unexpected house guest who is currently asleep on my inflatable mattress. As a result, I consumed next to no art, save for a few pages of John Wayne: American read over lunch for relaxation.

- Now playing on iTunes: Dizzy Gillespie's 1948 recording of "Manteca," reissued on Dizzy Gillespie: Greatest Hits. I never tire of hearing Chano Pozo whack those congas.

That's it for now--I plan to be in bed within the hour, but I'll be posting a slew of fine links much later today.

Posted April 15, 12:03 PM

TT: News of the day in review

I don't have any, but my brother just e-mailed to tell me that he is now mayor pro tem (that is, vice-mayor) of Smalltown, U.S.A., the Missouri town where we grew up and where he still lives. That's really something.

Don't get me wrong--I'm proud of the course my own life has taken and wouldn't erase a day of it--but seeing my brother's name on the front page of our hometown paper means every bit as much to me as seeing A Terry Teachout Reader in the neighborhood bookstore. He is way cool.

The next time I go home for a visit, I plan to park my mother's car in a no-parking zone. I have a friend at City Hall, you know.

Posted April 15, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Mr. Chamberlain, with Lord Salisbury following steadily on behind, championed the cause of the Outlanders. On paper and for democratic purposes the case was overwhelming. But you can never persuade anyone by reasonable argument to give up his skin."

Winston Churchill, My Early Life

Posted April 15, 12:00 PM

TT: What you mean we, ex-editor man?

I just ran across this sentence in Howell Raines' Atlantic Monthly article about why he is God and the New York Times will never be the same without him:

The Times's image as a bastion of quality had become even more important as tabloid television, Britain's declining newspaper values, and the unsourced ranting of Internet bloggers polluted the journalistic mainstream of the United States.

Perhaps they'll carve it on his tombstone. Whoops--too late! Mistah Raines, he history...and we're still here.

Posted April 15, 1:28 AM

April 14, 2004

TT: Time machine

I came home from Broadway a little while ago and was too wired to go to bed, so I turned on the TV, started channel-surfing, and suddenly found myself watching a snippet from The Sound of Jazz, the famous 1957 show still widely (and rightly) regarded as the finest jazz program ever telecast. Ben Webster was playing a slow blues in F, with Gerry Mulligan nodding in the background, and as the camera panned to Billie Holiday, I realized that the song was "Fine and Mellow" and that the next face I saw would be Lester Young, sick unto death. Sure enough, he stood up, raised his tenor saxophone to his lips and blew one heartbreaking chorus of the blues, spare and fragile and a little bit flat. As he played, the director switched back to Holiday, her face aglow with memories of a time when she and her musical soulmate were at the peak of their powers, long before life ground them under its unforgiving heel. The chorus ended, the screen faded to black, and all at once I was watching a commercial for a product I didn't want or need.

How strange it is to watch TV in the information age, skipping from channel to channel in search of momentary diversion, mostly settling for dross but sometimes stumbling across a fleeting image so simple and true that it makes you catch your breath. I wonder how many people happened to see Lester and Billie at the same moment I did, and how many knew who and what they were seeing. Perhaps I was the only person in the world who saw that flickering black-and-white picture and knew it was a kinescope of The Sound of Jazz. Perhaps there were a dozen of us, or a hundred, or ten thousand. Perhaps one of my fellow viewers will visit "About Last Night" today and read these words, and know he wasn't alone.

UPDATE: Doug Ramsey writes:

In 1992, I toured in Germany and recently liberated Eastern European countries for the United States Information Service as part of its American Speakers program. I was assigned to speak in the afternoons about free press and first amendment issues and in the evenings about jazz. The USIS sent me to Hamburg, Bonn, Frankfurt, Prague, Brno and Bratislava. When, in several cities, the same people showed up for both talks, it struck me that they may have seen the freedom connection between the two subjects that many Americans do not.

My only supplement to the jazz talks was a tape of the kinescope of The Sound Of Jazz. One of my strongest impressions of the jazz evenings was that, in every case, when Lester Young played that almost unbearably beautiful blues chorus and the camera lingered close on Billie's face, I heard a collective sigh from the audience. CBS, the current incarnation of which probably doesn't know that it owns this monument to America, should show The Sound Of Jazz annually in prime time.

That'll be the day. On the other hand, I think the copyright to The Sound of Jazz has lapsed--the various DVD reissues appear to be in the public domain--so perhaps somebody else will do the honors.

POST-UPDATE: I just heard from a reader who was tuned in at the same time. What a wonderfully small world we blogospherites inhabit....

Posted April 14, 12:49 PM

TT: Guest almanac

"Remember that there are only three kinds of things anyone need ever do. (1) Things we ought to do. (2) Things we've got to do. (3) Things we like doing. I say this because some people seem to spend so much of their time doing things for none of these reasons, things like reading books they don't like because other people read them."

C.S. Lewis, letter to a godchild, April 3, 1949 (courtesy of The Buck Stops Here)

Posted April 14, 12:01 PM

TT: Consumables

- Last night I saw the press preview of a new play, Sixteen Wounded, which I'll be reviewing in Friday's Wall Street Journal.

- I've been reading Carlos D'Este's Patton: A Genius for War, from which I learned that George C. Scott's portrayal of Patton in the 1970 biopic was mostly true to life, as was the film itself (except that the real Patton had a high, squeaky voice).

- Now playing on iTunes: Benny Goodman's Six Flats Unfurnished (which wormed its way into my ear some time in mid-afternoon and wouldn't go away, so I finally listened to it for real in an attempt at exorcism).

Posted April 14, 12:00 PM

TT: Broadcast news

Just in case it's slipped your mind, I'll be appearing this coming weekend on Studio 360, Kurt Andersen's weekly radio series on art and culture, talking about criticism and critics (mainly me). New Yorkers can hear the program at ten a.m. this Saturday on WNYC-FM (93.9), or at seven p.m. this Sunday on WNYC-AM (820).

No matter where you live, you can also listen on the Web in live streaming audio by going here. In addition, Studio 360 is carried by NPR affiliates across the country. For a complete list of local stations and air dates, go here.

Once the show has been broadcast, it'll be archived here so that you can hear it at your convenience.

One way or another, tune me in, O.K.? I'm excited.

Posted April 14, 7:10 AM

TT: Thousand-yard dash

"Writing is a muscle," I tell my students. "The more you use it, the stronger it gets." If that's so, then I recently acquired an alarming new insight into what you might call the athletics of writing. I wrote most of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, which is 40,000 words long, in February and March (I spent most of January working my way out of a false start). Other than scaling back sharply on my blogging, I did so without giving up any of my other regular writing commitments. I had to make an April 1 deadline, not only because of the exigencies of book production but also in order to pay my taxes, Harcourt having previously agreed to disburse this year's chunk of my Balanchine-Louis Armstrong advance on delivery of the finished manuscript. (Such is the freelance writer's life!) So unlike most deadlines, which can be surprisingly elastic, I knew this one was the real wrong thing.

What made the last few days of work especially hard was that four of my print-media deadlines, including my regular Washington Post and Commentary articles and a Wall Street Journal theater review, happened to fall in the last week of March. In addition, I had a long-standing commitment to fly to North Carolina on April 2 to look at Carolina Ballet. I'd been hoping to get at least one piece out of the way early, but as the end of the month drew ever nearer, I realized that I'd painted myself into a corner: I'd have to write all four pieces in four days, starting as soon as All in the Dances was in the bag. I cancelled as many evening engagements as I could and made a point of going to bed as early as possible each night, but beyond that th