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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 there wasn't much I could do except keep on working.

I did, however, have a bit of time for introspection, and as April 1 approached, I realized, somewhat to my surprise, that everything was getting easier. The last three chapters of the book seemed to write themselves, and the four pieces poured out of my head without incident. Not only did I line-edit the complete manuscript of All in the Dances in a single ten-hour marathon, but on April 1, the day after I delivered the manuscript to Harcourt, I wrote a 4,000-word essay for Commentary in one day-long sitting, correcting the proofs the next morning as I waited for my plane. (My Commentary essays normally take two or three days to write.)

What happened? Was it simply that my mind had been concentrated wonderfully by the prospect of a hanging? Or might it be that the more you work, the more you can work? I think both factors probably played a part. Whenever the going gets tough, my friends typically hear me mutter James Burnham's mantra, "If there's no alternative, there's no problem." I must have said it at least a couple of hundred times last month. But I also believe that simply by virtue of the fact that I had been exercising my writing muscle so regularly for so extended a period of time, the act of writing came more easily to me. Granted, I have the gift of facility, and daily blogging has honed it still further (I don't think I could have finished All in the Dances in three months if I hadn't spent the preceding six months writing "About Last Night"), but I can't remember any other time in my life when I've been so prolific for so long a period.

When it was all over, of course, I crashed. I was so wired that first weekend that I watched two back-to-back performances of Robert Weiss' Messiah without blinking, but within a day or two of my return to New York, I was sleeping for ten hours at a stretch. I could barely bring myself to write anything at all. Only in the last few days have I started to feel more or less like myself, and I'm still not quite back at the top of my game: it took me twice as long as usual to write this week's theater column, nor have I yet resumed anything remotely approaching my usual performance schedule.

All this makes me wonder about the ultimate capacity of the brain for work. People who write for a living know that writing is at least partly a physical act (my body temperature goes up when I'm working). At the same time, the role of the mind in writing is unpredictable, often weirdly so. I've always admired those businesslike novelists who rise early each weekday and hammer out a thousand words before lunch, but I've never been one of them: I start writing shortly before a piece is due, almost always at the last practicable moment. And while years of daily journalism long ago broke me of writer's block, I frequently feel an aversion to the act of writing, a species of accidie that can be all but impossible to overcome. Is it a simple failure of will? Or might it be a signal from my mind that I'm not quite ready to start writing a piece and need to lay fallow a little while longer?

It may be that my nightmarish February and March gave me a distorted glimpse of what it would feel like to be a thousand-word-a-day man, churning out prose according to a strict schedule. Or perhaps what I was experiencing was closer to an addiction, one so powerful that all other aspects of life receded before the categorical imperative of satisfying the daily craving. Whatever it was, I didn't like it--or, to be exact, I don't like it. During that last week of intense work, I felt exhilarated and exhausted at the same time. Now I feel as if I were a machine that overheated, or bent a gear after being run too fast. I don't much care to think of myself as a machine, but it comes pretty close to describing the sensation of having written far too much for far too long.

Posted April 14, 6:31 AM

OGIC: Tax girl

Unless some IRS wag has playfully planted fortune cookie material somewhere deep in the pages of 2003 1040 Instructions, you can expect to hear from me again no sooner than tomorrow.

(Oh, and p. 23, sentence 5, in case you were wondering: "Do not include interest earned on your IRA or Coverdell education savings account.")

Posted April 14, 5:42 AM

April 13, 2004

TT: Almanac

"The Philistine is not indifferent to fine art: he hates it."

George Bernard Shaw, "Utopian Gilbert and Sullivan"

Posted April 13, 12:01 PM

TT: Consumables

- Yesterday I watched Turner Classic Movies' two-part documentary on Cecil B. de Mille, who is a lot more interesting in theory than practice (though I really do like The Greatest Show on Earth).

- I also read most of another Barbara Pym novel, Quartet in Autumn.

- Now playing on iTunes: "Tour's End," a "Sweet Georgia Brown" contrafact (that's musicologist talk) from Stan Getz and the Oscar Peterson Trio. It swings like hell--and without a drummer, thank you very much.

(Incidentally, a reader writes to tell me that Matchbook, the Ralph Towner-Gary Burton CD I listened to yesterday, is in print in Europe and can be ordered by going here.)

Posted April 13, 12:00 PM

OGIC: My turn

Playing the game that Ed has sent coursing through the blogosphere like a virus, I picked up Samuel Johnson's Literary Criticism, and came up with a veritable fortune cookie:

"The present life is to all a state of infelicity; every man, like an author, believes himself to merit more than he obtains, and solaces the present with the prospect of the future; others, indeed, suffer those disappointments in silence, of which the writer complains, to shew how well he has learnt the art of lamentation."

Posted April 13, 11:59 AM

TT: Hither and yon

- This is the most obsessive Web site I've ever seen.

- Says Ed, who got it from Caterina.net:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

RESULTS: The Great Gatsby, in The Viking Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald: "'I can't complain,' answered Wilson unconvincingly."

Sorry, Ed. I guess it's back to my morning bagel....

Posted April 13, 10:17 AM

TT: Neighborhood non-landmark

Apropos of Our Girl's posting about Dortmunder (see below), I hasten to point out that the O.J. Bar & Grill is (or would be if it existed) around the corner from my front door.

I have a feeling that my part of the Upper West Side has changed more than a little bit in the thirtysomething years since Donald Westlake started writing about Rollo and his grubby customers....

Posted April 13, 4:00 AM

TT: Vita brevis

I had lunch today with a friend who reads out loud to his wife (and she to him). They've been doing it for years, and are quite ambitious in their choice of material. Not long ago, they finished reading Don Quixote to one another--but not in its entirety. They skipped most of the self-contained episodes not involving the Don and Sancho Panza, and my friend guesses that they ended up reading only about 80% of the book, if not a bit less. Even so, it took them roughly two months to wrap the whole thing up.

This got us to talking about the question of loooong books, and whether or not it's proper to abridge them, or read abridgements of them. One celebrated case in point is Boswell's Life of Johnson, a book I love with all my heart, but which I now prefer to read in the ruthless abridgement Louis Kronenberger made for inclusion in Viking's Portable Johnson & Boswell (long out of print, though it shouldn't be). Similarly, any number of plays and operas are customarily staged with cuts, and I see no reason for zealous producers to discontinue that merciful practice. Even Shakespeare benefits from trimming.

All this makes me wonder whether my attention span might possibly be shrinking as I grow older. I suspect it is, and I suspect I know why. For one thing, younger people have energy to burn, as well as the idealism necessary to propel themselves from one end of Siegfried to the other. After all, they're still getting their cultural cards punched. My card, by contrast, is pretty well punched out, though I still have yet to read The Possessed, or see a production of Peer Gynt. What's more, my appetite for the new is sufficiently strong that I'm disinclined to see yet another Tristan or Giselle. I already know how those masterpieces go, and I doubt I'll be changing my mind about them at this point in my life, at least not to any significant degree.

Besides, how many more novels do I have time to read, or plays to see? If I'm lucky, I'm somewhere on the far side of the middle of life, meaning that every book I read brings me that much closer to the dark encounter (or, as Henry James called it, the distinguished thing). This knowledge doesn't fill me with the desire to read nothing but great literature between now and then--man cannot live by classics alone--but it does make me less willing to devote disproportionate tracts of time to the consumption of individual works of art that violate the iron law of aesthetic economy. Do I really want to read Proust again before I die? The answer is yes, but I have my doubts about Moby-Dick, nor do I have the faintest intention of revisiting Lohengrin.

The older I get, the more I treasure those artists blessed with the twin gifts of terseness and lightness. Oddly enough, these gifts aren't always granted in tandem: James' middle-period novels, for instance, are long and light, which is why I can still read them with pleasure. Likewise The Marriage of Figaro, though I freely confess that I prefer the much shorter Falstaff. When I say "light," by the way, I don't mean "frivolous." I'm talking about texture. There's nothing the least bit frivolous about The Moviegoer, but Walker Percy's prose isn't thick--it flows with ingratiating ease. Similarly, George Balanchine was the most serious of artists, but he never beat you over the head with his profundity. Symphony in C is a supremely great work of art so light that it seems to fly past the eye in a matter of seconds. I could watch it once a week.

Which brings us back to one of my unpunched holes: I've never read Don Quixote. As I listened to my friend describe the pleasure that he and his wife got out of reading it to one another, I found myself sorely tempted to give it a go--but if I do, I'll skip at will, and I'd be perfectly happy to read a well-made abridgement. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, says the Good (and Long) Book, do it with all thy might. That's good advice, but so is this: The night cometh when no man can work. It was one of Dr. Johnson's favorite Biblical verses, and as Boswell informs us, "He scarcely ever read a book through from cover to cover in his life, but he had the faculty of seizing the essence of any work of literature by judicious skipping." As usual, I'm with Johnson. I'd rather have read some of a lot of books than all of a few.

Posted April 13, 3:40 AM

OGIC: The Dortmunder workout

So much ALN love for Ed today! His ears may be burning, but I can't pass up passing along his link to this Donald Westlake Dortmunder shortie, which contains such marvels as this:

Rollo the bartender, observing the world from a three-point stance--large feet solidly planted on the duckboards behind the bar, elbow atop the cash register drawer--seemed too absorbed either by the conversation or in contemplation of the possibility of health to notice the arrival of a new customer. In any event, he didn't even twitch, just stood there like a genre painting of himself, while the first regular said, "Well, whatever the word is, the point is, if you got your health you got everything."

"I don't see how that follows," the second regular said. "You could have your health and still not have a Pontiac Trans Am."

Some of my favorite scenes in the Dortmunder novels take place in this selfsame O.J. Bar & Grill. Thanks to Ed for pointing it out, and to Mr. Westlake for generously sharing the story with his website's readers. It's more than enough to make me go buy the book in which it appears.

Posted April 13, 1:52 AM

April 12, 2004

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"But our successful novelist of to-day begins when he is two- or three-and-twenty. He 'catches on,' as they say, and he becomes a laborious professional writer. He toils at his novels as if he were the manager of a bank or the captain of an ocean steamer. In one narrow groove he slides up and down, up and down, growing infinitely skilful at his task of making bricks out of straw. He finishes the last page of 'The Writhing Victim' in the morning, lunches at his club, has a nap; and, after dinner, writes the first page of 'The Swart Sombrero.' He cannot describe a trade or a profession, for he knows none but his own. He has no time to look at life, and he goes on weaving fancies out of the ever-dwindling stores of his childish and boyish memories. As these grow exhausted, his works get more and more shadowy, till at last even the long-suffering public that once loved his merits, and then grew tolerant of his tricks, can endure him no longer."

Edmund Gosse, "The Tyranny of the Novel" (1892)

Posted April 12, 12:28 PM

TT: Almanac

"Reject all para-normal phenomena. It's the only way to remain sane."

Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw

Posted April 12, 12:27 PM

TT: Sign from the Times

Kate Bolick reviewed A Terry Teachout Reader in yesterday's New York Times Book Review:

Cultural critics may lack the depth of knowledge that comes with specialization, but Terry Teachout's self-issued carte blanche to submerge himself in whatever he wants (he is the music critic of Commentary, the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, and ''critic-for-hire'' on everything from opera to television for many other publications) has left him with an unusual and singular perspective on the last 15 years of American cultural activity. Now that the country has crossed its ''great cultural and technological divide,'' Teachout writes, as well as finally left postmodernism behind, he hopes his collection will ''have some value as a chronicle, a road map of how we got from there to here.'' That the 58 engaging essays in ''A Terry Teachout Reader,'' on subjects ranging from Dawn Powell and Louis Armstrong to David Ives and Martha Graham, tell us as much about America as they do about Teachout's evolving sensibility makes the book an intellectual memoir by way of enthusiasms. His detailed snapshots of bygone cultural moments are introduced by a thoughtful history of our cultural climate over the last half-century.

If you haven't yet ordered a copy, go here and do so.

Posted April 12, 12:27 PM

TT: Let no new thing arise (usually)

Here's something you might have missed, courtesy of the Chicago Tribune:

MILWAUKEE -- Joseph J. Zimmermann Jr., who invented the telephone answering machine in 1948 and patented it a year later, has died at age 92.

Mr. Zimmermann, who died March 31, said in a 1949 interview with the Milwaukee Journal that he got the idea for the device as the owner of an air-conditioning and heating company when he could not afford to hire a secretary to take calls while he was out of the office.

The first machine, the Electronic Secretary Model R1, was made up of a box that lifted the telephone receiver from its cradle when the phone rang; a box containing a control panel with a 78-r.p.m. record player inside that played a recorded greeting; and a wire recorder on top of the second box for recording a series of 30-second messages.

Mr. Zimmermann teamed with businessman and fellow engineer George Danner to start Waukesha, Wis.-based Electronic Secretary Industries. More than 6,000 answering machines were in use in 1957 when the two sold the company, and the patent rights, to General Telephone Corp., which later became GTE.

"The only modern inventions that have been of any real use to me are the typewriter and the Pullman car," H.L. Mencken told a reporter for Life in 1946. Kurt Andersen asked me the other day whether I thought Mencken would have taken to blogging. I think it's possible (just), but I'm absolutely sure he would have bought an answering machine. I've used one for the past quarter-century, and I can't imagine how I ever got through the day without it. I even bought my septuagenarian mother her first answering machine, and though it took her a year or so to get used to it, she now finds it indispensable. Can you think of a postwar invention with a higher ratio of social significance to cost?

Posted April 12, 12:26 PM

TT: Real and surreal

I'm not the first blogger to link to Chicha's devastating takedown of The Swan, but just in case you haven't read it yet, do so at once:

Other shows have had equally shallow and enraging premises--remember Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? But the premise always drew equally shallow and enraging contestants, while the contestants on The Swan don't seem shallow so much as insecure and clueless. The show itself is the villain, the only target for our hatred. But the question is, is The Swan purposefully loathsome, or just deeply hypocritical?...

The answer is yes.

Speaking of reality TV, Tom Shales, the Washington Post's TV critic, also "reviews" broadcast news coverage, and his comments on Condoleezza's Rice testimony are worth pondering:

If it were to be viewed as a battle, or a sporting event, or a contest -- and of course that would be wrong -- then Condoleezza Rice won it. Indeed, the national security adviser did so well and seemed so firmly in command of the situation yesterday, when she testified under oath before the 9/11 commission, that one had to wonder why the White House spent so much time and energy trying to keep her from having to appear....

I've long had mixed feelings about this kind of reviewing, but I'm also well aware that in a world where most people get their news by watching TV, every occurrence is a performance, and to ignore that fact is to disregard the nature of reality in the age of information.

As it happens, I had lunch with a Washington Post editor the same day Shales' piece appeared, and I asked him, "The only thing I can't figure out is this: why didn't the Post start it up front instead of in the Style section?"

"Because it was an opinion piece," he replied.

So it was--and so what? I don't see the Post on paper, so I don't know what was on its front page last Friday, but my guess is that Shales' piece was far more to the point of the day's events than at least some of the news stories deemed worthy of page-one placement. Is there really so great a difference between unabashed opinion journalism and the "news analysis" (sometimes labeled as such, sometimes not) regularly published on the front pages of most major papers? Bloggers don't think so--which I suspect is one of the reasons why their audience is growing daily, while the readership of newspapers continues to shrink.

Posted April 12, 12:24 PM

TT: Little lists

Critical Mass liked my recent posting on reading lists (the one that inspired me to launch "Consumables").

Here's what she said in preface to posting her own list:

In a much earlier incarnation of this blog, I used to maintain a running list of my own reading. I was always surprised by how much traffic my reading list page attracted. I liked contemplating the list just as I like contemplating my own (vastly overcrowded) bookshelves--there's a sort of mnemonic quality to both activities that is at once soothing and inspiring--but I was quite intrigued to see how many other people were also interested in the list. As Terry says, such lists are approximations of people's shelves, and as such they offer both insight into the lister's mind and suggest new directions the reader of the list might take in his or her own reading....

Not surprisingly, her readers are posting their own lists as comments.

Have I started something? I sure hope so.

Posted April 12, 12:21 PM

TT: Consumables

- On Saturday night I went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (now maybe Our Girl will tell me what she thought of it!), and last night I watched Joel McCrea in Jacques Tourneur's Stars in My Crown--ideal Easter fare for a small-town boy who loves Westerns.

- Continuing on my Barbara Pym kick, I'm now reading An Unsuitable Attachment, whose characters include Faustina, one of my all-time favorite fictional cats.

- Now playing on iTunes: Ralph Towner's "Icarus," recorded by Towner and Gary Burton on Matchbook, one of the most beautiful duo albums ever made. Vibraharp and acoustic twelve-string guitar may sound like an odd match on paper, but on this CD they go together like strawberries and champagne. (Lots of other people think so, too, as you'll find out when you click on the link and see how much a second-hand copy costs.)

UPDATE: I'd forgotten that OGIC already wrote about Eternal Sunshine.

What she said.

Posted April 12, 12:00 PM

April 11, 2004

TT: Almanac

"One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited His goodness, you are done with Him. The Aylmers whom Hawthorne saw as a menace have multiplied. Busy cutting down human imperfection, they are making headway also on the raw material of good. Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus' hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber."

Flannery O'Connor, introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann

Posted April 11, 12:00 PM

April 10, 2004

TT: What it's all about

A reader writes:

I am a regular visitor to your website, often first thing in the morning or later during lunch. I have always found the arts interesting but somewhat difficult to grasp. Not so much because they are above me, but my busy life, between spending time with my four young boys, my wife and work, allows little time left to pursue the arts. You provide me with a porthole to view them at least on a very general level. I have taken some of your musical recommendations as they are the easiest for me to indulge in. The Paul Desmond Quartet Live disc is most enjoyable. While I am a neophyte in the jazz world I have listened to Coltrane, Miles, Brubeck, Marsalis and such and enjoyed them.

Anyway, my point is that I had listened to Norah Jones' first CD when it came out awhile back and enjoyed it. I found it fresh and different but the thing that really was great about it was that I could turn on the radio and hear it with little searching and effort. While I agree after several listens there is nothing new or interesting that you hear, being able to actually understand the lyrics, decent vocals and having a melody played on pop radio stations was so very refreshing.

After reading your comments on her first album I would agree that it definitely belongs in the pop/country category and not jazz and that her music is pleasant enough. And that I think is the point or question. The Norah Jones CD was a hit I think because of one its novelty and two there was actual singing and music as opposed to much of the garble in pop music. It was great to have something so different pumping through the major airwaves and easily available, somewhat along the lines of the middlebrow culture that you have mentioned was regularly available on TV back in the day. I see it as people having a thirst for more culture but they are so busy with their lives that they don't know where to begin and the major broadcasters have no interest in providing it to the public.

I know that it is the case with me and it is the reason that I turn to your website. For ways that I can quickly absorb some culture. I try out some of the music, I follow the links you post to art work. Anything to give me a quick culture hit in my limited free time. I wish I could absorb more of the real thing but as I mentioned above life gets int the way. Until my kids grow a little older I will just have to make do with the tasty morsels you leave me on your website and attempt to follow up on them as often as possible.

And for that I will thank you.

I wish I'd gotten this e-mail prior to taping my upcoming appearance on Kurt Andersen's Studio 360, because Andersen and I talked about how arts blogs have the potential to do exactly what my correspondent has in mind. I don't know whether that section of the interview will make the final cut, but I do want to say that right from the start, I've sought to use "About Last Night" not only to communicate with full-fledged urban aesthetes, but also to make the world of art more accessible to ordinary folks who "have a thirst for more culture."

Back in the Fifties, mass-circulation organs of middlebrow culture like Time and Life fulfilled that function, and did so wonderfully well. Now they don't even try. I was staggered to learn, for instance, that the only note Time is taking of this year's arts Pulitzers will be to run a piece about The Known World (which, needless to say, it failed to review on publication). How is it possible that a weekly newsmagazine which ostensibly covers the arts could find no space even to mention Paul Moravec or Doug Wright?

Instead of cursing the journalistic darkness, I started "About Last Night," and whenever I get letters like this one, I know it's starting to spread a little light. You can help. Please--please--tell a friend about Our Girl and me. Our traffic has been rising steadily ever since we went live last August (we received more than 50,000 page views in March), but the world is still full of lots and lots of people who are waiting to discover a blog like this, whether they know it or not. In fact, they might not even know what a blog is! So give them a nudge. They'll be glad you did. We'll be glad you did.

Posted April 10, 12:54 PM

TT: Housekeeping

I just added several interesting-looking blogs to the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column. Check them out. In addition, I've posted links to the on-line archives of three important New York-based arts critics, Peter G. Davis (classical music), Hilton Kramer (art), and John Simon (theater). You can read their latest pieces each week by clicking on their "Sites to See" links.

Next, I'll reevaluate all of our currently listed blogs and prune out the ones that are now inactive or haven't retained their initial interest.

(See what happens when you finally finish a book? All of a sudden you've got time to play with your blog!)

Posted April 10, 12:23 PM

TT: Consumables

- Last night I saw Luciana Souza's opening night at Joe's Pub. The house was sold out and the music was so beautiful that even the bartenders crushed their ice with reasonable discretion. As if that weren't enough, I got to meet Janis Siegel, on whom I've had an intermittent crush ever since high school (she came to see the show and went backstage to tell Souza that it was "perfect"). I'm pleased to say that she lived up to my expectations--she's v., v. cool.

- I'm still reading Barbara Pym's A Very Private Eye. Here's a quote:

Richard has been reading some of my books--I gave him Excellent Women and A Glass of Blessings--do you think that a good choice? E.W. he found terribly sad, but witty--why is it that men find my books so sad? Women don't particularly. Perhaps they (men) have a slight guilt feeling that this is what they do to us, and yet really it isn't as bad as all that.

- Now playing on iTunes: Mischa Levitzki's 1933 recording of Mendelssohn's Rondo Capriccioso. I wouldn't sell my soul to be able to play piano like that, but I might rent it....

Posted April 10, 11:50 AM

TT: Almanac

"The goods that a writer produces can never be impersonal; his character gets into them as certainly as it gets into the work of any other creative artist, and he must be prepared to endure investigation of it, and speculation upon it, and even gossip about it."

H.L. Mencken, My Life as Author and Editor

Posted April 10, 1:56 AM

April 9, 2004

TT: Almanac

"The opera: consistency of character and reality of events are qualities which need not be accompanied by music."

Karl Kraus, Beim Wort genommen

Posted April 09, 12:02 PM

TT: Half a loaf, spread with caviar

I'm in The Wall Street Journal this morning, reviewing Stephen Belber's Match, which opened at the Plymouth Theatre last night. The play itself is somewhat uneven (though very funny), but Frank Langella's performance is wonderful:

"Match" might have been written for the sole purpose of giving Mr. Langella a platinum-plated chance to flounce his stuff. No sooner does the curtain go up than he grabs the reins and gallops down a theatrical steeplechase that leads straight from outrageous bitchery to unadorned, heartfelt emotion. If Mr. Langella doesn't own this play, then at least he's got a thousand-year lease.

He's so exciting, in fact, that "Match" comes off looking rather better than it really is. Not that Mr. Belber's play is shoddy goods--far from it--but it's possible to head for the subway thinking you've seen something other than a highly efficient tearjerker lightly sprinkled with honesty, a somewhat deceptive impression for which the star of the show deserves most of the credit.

Alas, you're going to have to take my word for it, since "Match" is built around a series of surprises that critical etiquette forbids me to disclose. Were it a clunker, I might blow the gaff out of sheer spite, but it's so entertaining that I wouldn't dream of spoiling the fun. This much, however, I can say: Mr. Langella plays Tobi Powell, a first-class dancer turned second-class choreographer who now teaches at Juilliard and lives in a dingy, souvenir-crammed apartment far from the scenes of his flaming youth. Shy, mousy Lisa Davis (Jane Adams) and her regular-guy husband Mike (Ray Liotta) pay him a visit, ostensibly to interview him for Lisa's dissertation about ballet in New York in the '50s. Before long, though, the "interview" has morphed into an inquisition, Mike has revealed himself to be a raving homophobe who can no longer conceal his disgust at Tobi's effeminacy, and...well, I'd better stop there....

No link, so to find out more--though not too much more--buy this morning's Journal, turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, and give me the once-over.

Posted April 09, 12:01 PM

TT: Luncheon update

I gave Mr. Elegant Variation a tour of the Musée Teachout yesterday. I inscribed his freshly bought copy of A Terry Teachout Reader, he knelt and kissed my ring, and we repaired to Good Enough to Eat, my neighborhood hangout, where he confessed to being of Hungarian parentage and told scabrous stories about other West Coast bloggers who must remain nameless for fear of possible litigation. Then he headed out into the rain for a downtown rendezvous with a bunch of drunken East Coast bloggers.

If he never posts again, you'll know why.

Posted April 09, 12:01 PM

TT: Hither and yon

In lieu of me:

- By way of Bookish Gardener (new in "Sites to See," and very highly recommended) comes this link to a Dutch Web site devoted to paintings of women reading. I'm not quite sure why I think this is so cool, but I do.

- You're going to hear Luciana Souza tonight at Joe's Pub, right? No? Well, at least pay a visit to the Web site of WNYC-FM and check out her guest shot on John Schaefer's Soundcheck, which aired yesterday and has now been archived. Go here to listen.

- In case you haven't read enough about The Triplets of Belleville, animation expert Michael Barrier reviews it on his Web site, which isn't quite a blog but nevertheless contains lots of interesting stuff, updated semi-regularly. Everything Barrier writes is worth reading.

- This one's purely for fun: Elsa has written a sort of found poem (I can't explain it any better) based on Mr. TMFTML's blogroll. Most amusing.

- My Stupid Dog tells us what Tony Kushner and Tim LaHaye have in common:

Kushner's entire oeuvre prior to Homebody/Kabul could be considered an extended exercise in red-diaper fundamentalism. His wilder moments, like the physical manifestation of the Devil in Bright Room Called Day, the character of Thomas Browne's Soul in Hydrotaphia, or the postmortem appearance of the Rosenbergs in Angels in America: Perestroika, aren't crass attempts to perk up an otherwise dull evening by invoking the supernatural. In these scenes, Kushner concretizes his belief system, and tries to will its obvious falsehoods into the realm of objective, unquestioned truth.

Usually we notice such desperate rhetorical strategies only when they come from the Far Right: Take, for example, the much-discredited system of dispensationalist eschatology espoused throughout Tim LaHaye's Left Behind books. Kushner's drama offers occasional glimpses into the mind of its fundamentalist author, much as the Left Behind books do, though in Kushner's case that fundamentalism is Marxist-Leninist rather than Christian-traditionalist....

- Everybody's posting to and commenting on Camille Paglia's essay on "The Magic of Images: Word and Picture in a Media Age," which I liked but found more than a little self-consciously showy, as is her wont. The best take I've seen so far is from The Reading Experience (readability: 100%).

- Finally, start your weekend off right by going here and scrolling down approximately seven screens to the listing for James P. Johnson's 1927 recording of "Snowy Morning Blues" (the 1944 remake is almost as good). Click on the link and RealAudio will pour something into your computer that's guaranteed to make you smile.

See you tomorrow, unless I check back in today. Meanwhile, keep an eye peeled for Our Girl, whose return to the blogosphere, she claims, is fairly imminent.

Posted April 09, 12:00 PM

TT: Found objects

James Tata recently posted a list of "the last twenty books of fiction or literary essays I have read." I enjoy reading this kind of list, in much the same way that I like looking at other people's bookshelves. When the listkeepers in question also happen to be famous, of course, the results are interesting for a different reason. Justice Holmes, for example, kept a written record of every book he read as an adult, and I find it both amusing and illuminating to know that he read (among many other things) both Swann's Way and Rex Stout. Yet I take equal pleasure in knowing what my fellow bloggers are reading, looking at, or listening to, not only because I'm interested in them as personalities but also because such knowledge can lift me out of my own preoccupations and preconceptions. Though I own a wide variety of books and CDs, I have a tendency to run the plow through the same old furrows when left to my own devices. Sometimes a passing mention by a fellow blogger reminds me of a book I love but haven't reread for years, or makes me want to click through to amazon.com and buy one I have yet to read.

I also like the fugitive nature of reading lists, which I find wholly compatible with the fugitive nature of blogging itself. One of the things I missed while I was working on All in the Dances was the welter of discussion set off by the posting in which Return of the Reluctant suggested that bloggers ought to set their sights higher: "This whole ‘link plus commentary' business is about as difficult as microwaving a burrito. I think blogs can do better. I know I can do better. There's something extant in the form that has made us all lazy." I'm for that (up to a point, Lord Copper!), but I'd also be sad if my favorite blogs were to lose the informality that is, at least to my way of thinking, a major part of the medium's appeal. I also find that I'm disinclined to read looooong quasi-essays on line (though that may well change over time as I become more habituated to the practice). For my part, I think of "About Last Night" as a kind of public notebook, one in which there is room for both considered reflection and fleeting fancy.

In any case, there's plenty of room on the Web for people to do whatever they want. The trick, as always, is to make yourself do it. I'm a great fan of features like Shaken and Stirred's "worms," in which she mentions a song that happened to invade her ear that day--but do I do anything like that? Nope. The only thing that appears on this blog each day is my almanac entry, in which I occasionally (but not usually) hint at my current reading. Perhaps I'll try experimenting with a daily posting in which I simply mention some work of art consumed by me in the preceding twenty-four hours. In fact, I'm definitely going to do that, and you'll let me know what you think of the results.

James Tata's reading list was prefaced by this sober reflection:

I find myself writing here about the books I have been reading much less often than I thought I would when I started this blog. Some of the reasons are because I'm a very slow reader, I select the books I read much more haphazardly than I wish I did, and I find that my opinions of books are not easily summarized in the time I am able to devote to this blog. The bulk of my writing time is given over either to writing I get paid for or writing I hope I will eventually get paid for. I don't think I am the only blogger for whom this is true. Despite the hopes of many, blogs will not become the primary forum for literary journalism so long as the writing in them is done for free. We might hope that blogs will fill the void left as the NY Times and other paying venues reduce their commitment to reviews of fiction and poetry, but work of the highest quality will never be done as a hobby, whether it be literary criticism, teaching, computer programming, or basketball.

About that, I'm not so sure. While we have it on the very best authority that no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money, the fact remains that neither Our Girl nor I make a cent off this blog. (Perhaps someday we will, but that's not why we're doing it now.) Is what we post on "About Last Night" of the "highest quality"? That's for you to judge, though my inclination would be to say that the difference is one not so much of quality as of kind. If you're looking for my Definitive Thoughts on a given subject, order a copy of A Terry Teachout Reader or follow the links in the right-hand column to my published pieces. What I post here, by contrast, is strictly provisional--a peep into the workshop.

That doesn't mean I take it less seriously. I was sitting next to a wealthy businessman at a dinner party a couple of weeks ago, and he asked me, out of the blue, what I'd do if I didn't have any "financial concerns." Had I been a bit quicker on the uptake, I might have said a few choice words about how a poor writer like me would be inspired to unforeseen heights of brilliance were a Morandi etching to be hung over his desk. Instead, I blurted out the first thing that popped into my mind. "I'd be tempted," I told him, "to take a year off and do nothing but blog." Not that I'd ever really do such a thing--I'm too firmly committed to my print-media gigs, and I enjoy them too much to give them up--but I'd be powerfully tempted to spend a whole year experimenting with the seemingly infinite possibilities of blogging.

Which brings me back to something James said: "Despite the hopes of many, blogs will not become the primary forum for literary journalism so long as the writing in them is done for free." Probably not. But blogging offers other possibilities, both to professionals and (especially) amateurs. We don't have to replace the Times Book Review. For that matter, we don't need to replace the Times Book Review, or any other existing print-media publication. What draws me to the blogosphere is the fact that it lets me do something new. Time will tell whether or not it's worth doing, but I'm already sure of one thing, which is that I'm having fun doing it--and no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for fun.

UPDATE: Says Bookslut:

This blog works the same way as my shelves. It's arranged specifically by what I am interested in....I refuse to change my posting habits. I fear my blog would be less boring if I couldn't enjoy a book about Bobby Fischer, a wonderful A. L. Kennedy novel, and rereading a classic all at the same time.

I think something went slightly askew in that last sentence, but my guess is that Bookslut and I are on the same page here.

Posted April 09, 11:34 AM

OGIC: Art of remembering

OK, I'm going to be easing back into this thing you call blogging, starting now. Thanks to those who missed me; that really makes a girl feel guilty...er, good.

Hm, what's this greater-than sign? Oh yeah, coding. It's all beginning to waft back.

To kick things off again, I wanted to call attention to something excellent I read today. An ex-colleague of Colby Cosh's died recently, and Colby has posted a really indelible remembrance of him. You're unlikely to have heard of Candian reporter Terry Johnson; his death won't make the faintest ripple in the wider world. But Colby's artful, unsentimental character sketch surely will make you remember him. It put me a little bit in mind of the late great Robert McG. Thomas, the idiosyncratic obituarist for the New York Times, but it's a different ball of wax--a stickier one--to effectively memorialize someone you knew. Colby's piece is less anecdote-driven than Thomas's obits, and fundamentally different in that it's a record of personal experience. Although the subject was as eccentric as any of Thomas's, Colby captures him in an everyday key and produces a condensed, vivid character study. Here's a taste:

Terry was so defenceless against the basic demands of life that he never, to anyone's knowledge, owned a winter coat during the time he lived in Edmonton. A fellow housemate made an annual ritual of frogmarching him to the barber to get his Karl Marx beard and his spirit-of-'68 hair hacked at. No piece of furniture in the common area of the house lacked for holes made by his cigarettes. He had the barest acquaintance with bathing and probably none, in his adulthood, of dentistry. He made do, defiantly. Somehow he acquired a whole wardrobe of other people's clothing; one got the distinct impression he didn't get it from Goodwill or Value Village, but that he just somehow gravitated home from the pub wearing a bowling shirt with "Larry" on the breast pocket.

In short, he seems now to have been an addict in training. When I lived with him I knew him to possess no vices more severe than beer, in modest bachelor quantities, and pot, in quite massive ones. Actually, he had one that was arguably more harmful, at least to his ability to meet deadlines: video games, particuarly Sid Meier's Civilization. No one ever burned a deadline with more determination than Terry Johnson. The rest of us copy-breeders began to get nervous around Friday sundown, with the magazine going off to the printer on Sunday, but Terry would carry on Minesweeping until Saturday afternoon and not give it an apparent second thought. He would vanish from home and office for 48 hours at a time when he was supposed to be quizzing farmers about genetically modified seed or fuel prices.

The alive quality of this sets me to wondering, should Colby drop some of the opinionating and get to work on a novel? (Partial answer: not if that means he would stop covering the NHL playoffs.)

Posted April 09, 5:18 AM

TT: One for the price of two

If I were Our Girl in Chicago, I'd be much prettier.

(And no, she's not Joseph Epstein, either.)

Posted April 09, 3:49 AM

TT: Consumables

- Last night I watched the new Criterion Collection DVD of Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street. Was there ever a full-fledged movie star who looked weirder than Richard Widmark?

- Today I'm reading Barbara Pym's A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters. V. relaxing fare for a brain strained by excessive writing.

- Now playing on iTunes: Stephen Hough's recording of Federico Mompou's Charme pour inspirer l'amour. (I should be so lucky.)

Posted April 09, 3:00 AM

April 8, 2004

TT: Almanac

"One of the troubles of our time is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters."

W.H. Auden, letter to Louise Bogan, May 18, 1942

Posted April 08, 12:08 PM

TT: Alas, not by me

I keep meaning to write something, but I can't stop reading long enough to do so. Here are some more of my recent gleanings from the Web:

- Over in the Top Five module of the right-hand column, I've posted a few heartfelt words in praise of Jane Freilicher: Recent Work, up at Tibor de Nagy through Apr. 24. Now Hilton Kramer has reviewed the same show at length for the New York Observer:

Cloudy skylines and vivid floral bouquets, still-lifes and landscapes, nasturtiums and petunias lording it over Manhattan's imposing cityscape, the rectilinear cityscape itself dissolved into a phantom Cubist still-life--these are some of the suggestive incongruities to be savored in Jane Freilicher's new paintings at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Brilliantly rendered floral color commands the foreground in most of these paintings, while views of the city, seen in a distant haze through an upper-story window, have a mirage-like quality--too shadowy to be entirely real, yet never venturing into the kind of fantasy we associate with surrealism....

Abstractionism in color is particularly evident in her two Flora paintings on handmade paper, with their shallow-spaced, all-over structure, and an abstractionist impulse can be seen in all of her recent paintings. It's even more emphatically stated in Seascape, another painting on handmade paper, which has a structure of stacked horizontal forms.

All of this suggests that what we've been witnessing--though not always acknowledging--in the history of American art since the 1950's is a widespread movement among representational painters to come to terms with the powerhouse influence of the Abstract Expressionists. Not only as a critic but also as a painter, this was an issue that Fairfield Porter was absolutely obsessed with: In writing about abstract painting, he often went looking for its subject matter, and in writing about realist painting, he was mainly concerned with pure pictorial form.

What this also suggests is that, in the long term, representational painters may have derived greater benefits--pictorial, aesthetic benefits--from the Abstract Expressionists than abstract painters have. It may be heresy to suggest this, but in the presence of Ms. Freilicher's current exhibition, it's a heresy worth thinking about....

Read the whole thing here. Then go see the show. It's not to be missed.

- Golden Rule Jones has run 17 arts blogs through an on-line tool that tests Web sites for "readability." According to the creator of the tool in question, "A level above 12 indicates the writing sample is too hard for most people to read." Mr. Jones scored 12.9, Our Girl and I a paltry 12.2. The thorniest thicket, not surprisingly, was The Reading Experience (16.5), while Return of the Reluctant and Old Hag both racked up a spectacularly fluffy 10.1.

I guess that makes us lower-middlebrows, right?

- Sarah won an award! Good for her.

- Jeff Jarvis recalls his tenure at People, apropos of that magazine's thirtieth anniversary:

I was at People during a few crucial cultural changes. While I was there, the audience fragmented before our very eyes. It used to be that we could put a No. 1 TV show on the cover and, zap, it would sell. But suddenly -- thanks to the most revolutionary device ever invented, the remote control -- that changed.

I remember my managing editor and mentor, Pat Ryan, coming down the hall more than once shouting at me, "TV's dead, Jarvis, it's dead." That meant another Dallas cover had inexplicably bombed. The audience sat asunder.

Welcome to the future of media and culture.

The audience took control of their entertainment (just as, today, we are taking control of their news and media). Cable grew. VCRs were just starting to be sold. We were no longer captive to three networks. We watched what we wanted to watch.

The truth is that our time in a shared national experience was short -- it lasted only from the moment TV reached critical mass until the mid-80s and the spread of the cultural bomb we called the clicker. "Who Shot J.R." was our last single shared experience. Even now, when we watch a war, we watch it through CNN's eyes or FoxNews' or the Internet's.

Some lament the passing of that shared national experience. I don't. It was a tyranny: rule by the mass (or rather, what executives thought the masses should or would want). Now the individual is in charge again....

- Finally, MoorishGirl brings us this stunning story of a modest author:

When Edwidge Danticat went on Radio Times on WHYY-FM (90.9) the other day to talk about her new novel, The Dew Breaker, callers didn't want to discuss plot or character. They had bigger questions for the Haitian-born writer. Like: "Is there hope for Haiti?"...

"I find it difficult being a spokesperson," said the shy, soft-spoken, 35-year-old novelist, who gave a reading at the main branch of the Free Library. "I don't think in an op-ed way. I don't always have an immediate response. My work is my soapbox. What I hope is that people will read that and then want to find out more about Haiti."

Excuse me while I relocate my jaw.

Posted April 08, 11:58 AM

TT: Down the middle and into the past

Newly minted Pulitzer laureate Anne Applebaum has an interesting take on the rise and fall of the middlebrow:

I've recently been to two literary award ceremonies -- this week's was just an announcement -- and both times I've lost. Maybe losers bring their own bitter, twisted emotions to their recollections of such events, but I still don't think it's wrong to describe the "literary" contingent at both events as, well, bitter and twisted. On both evenings, prize committee chairmen got up to praise the novel or historical work they'd selected, invariably adding a phrase or two about how, in "today's world" such works are "ever more necessary." Anyone talking about criticism described the lonely life of a critic; anyone talking about poetry became downright defensive. Most of the winners, in fact, were very brief. It was as if the gap between the nice things being said about them inside the room and the hostility of the world outside was too unbearable to discuss.

I'm not quite sure how it got to be this way -- writers of heavy books on one side, mass media on the other -- because it wasn't always so. The great American cultural blender once produced whole art forms, such as Broadway musicals and jazz, that might well be described as a blend of the two. But nowadays, that gap is so wide that I'm not even sure the old descriptions of the various forms of "culture" -- highbrow, middlebrow, popular -- even make sense any more. Does Edward P. Jones, the Washingtonian whose eloquent novel, "The Known World," won a Pulitzer Prize this week, even inhabit the same universe as MTV? Does anybody who reads one watch the other?...

This happens to be one of the major themes of A Terry Teachout Reader, which The Elegant Variation (with whom I'm having lunch today) tells me is now on sale in a major New York bookstore, Coliseum. That's my first Manhattan sighting.

Not to plug myself excessively, especially since Maud has made it unnecessary by posting an item about the Teachout Reader toward which I point you with immodest pleasure. She's a friend (and says so), so you're welcome to take her praise with a stalactite or two of salt, but I still hope you like it as much as she did.

Posted April 08, 11:53 AM

TT: The future is...later

Via artsjournal.com, our invaluable host, comes this fascinating story about a robot conductor (no jokes just yet, please):

The latest human activity to be mastered by robots was demonstrated recently when Sony's QRIO bot successfully conducted an entire orchestra.

The 58-centimetre-tall humanoid robot led the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in a unique rendition of Beethoven's 5th symphony during a concert held at the Bunkamura Orchard Hall in Tokyo on 15 March....

The full story is here, together with a link to a short RealPlayer videoclip of an excerpt from the "unique rendition." Take a look--but listen, too. While I can think of a few conductors on whom QRIO's "interpretation" of Beethoven's Fifth might possibly be an improvement, I think it's likely to be a little while longer before Lorin Maazel needs to start sweating.

Posted April 08, 11:24 AM

TT: Mission statement

At our Studio 360 taping yesterday, Kurt Andersen asked me about the thumbs-up/thumbs-down tendency in modern-day reviewing. This morning, I found in my mailbox an essay about criticism from an interesting-looking Web site called Charlie Suisman's Manhattan User's Guide:

With a film, say, or a book, a negative review may not be helpful, but the thing itself continues to exist, regardless of critical reaction. The inherently ephemeral nature of restaurants and theatre productions means that negative critical reaction can effectively close a business down. That makes the critic's words in those fields especially fraught. There are reviewers out there who consider themselves consumer advocates, helping readers spend their money wisely. It's a thumbs up/thumbs down mentality and there's nothing inherently wrong with it. But the best critics have always brought much more to their analyses: crucially, a sense of context and the weight of institutional memory.

If you're reviewing a play by, say, Jon Robin Baitz, you can't be an effective advocate for the reader if you don't bring full knowledge of Mr. Baitz's career to the table. And not just that: you should also be able to place the play in historical, stylistic, and theatrical context. Critics (good critics, in our view) have taken something of a curatorial role. Think of Pauline Kael on movies. It's not really about nurturing, we wouldn't call it "being supportive", but it is at least cognizant of an artist's career, of a trajectory, of how the threads have come to together. It may be tough love, but the love for the form (and often for the practitioners) comes through. The artist and the critic are in it for the long haul....

Institutional memory takes two forms. There's the institutional memory of the critic's own paper and there's the institutional memory of the industry being reviewed. Both need to inform the analysis. Of course a reviewer will reach his or her own conclusions, but being heedless of what came before leads to exactly the kind of disjointed, decontextualized appraisal that understandably drives artists, and chefs, and readers to varying states of distraction....

I like that. And I wish I'd read it before the taping.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted April 08, 11:07 AM

April 7, 2004

TT: Do not adjust your set

"About Last Night" continues to have intermittent server problems, which is why you've only heard from us intermittently for the past day or so.

Be patient. We'll be back.

Posted April 07, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"A woman was walking along one of the paths with a dog on a lead. She wore a grey tweed coat and transparent pink nylon gloves, and carried two books from the public library in a contraption of rubber straps. What is the use of noticing such details? Dulcie asked herself. It isn't as if I were a novelist or a private detective. Presumably such a faculty might be said to add to one' s enjoyment of life, but so often what one observed was neitehr amusing nor interesting, but just upsetting."

Barbara Pym, No Fond Return of Love

Posted April 07, 12:01 PM

TT: Words to the wise

Neruda, Luciana Souza's new CD, is out this week. I wrote the liner notes:

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

"People say, oh, you're so eclectic, and I usually say that I really don't look at styles any more," Luciana once told me. "I recognize, well, it's classical music or contemporary this or jazz that, or Brazilian, but I'm not worried about that. Only I don't want to be categorized as ‘the Brazilian singer.' I look, I sound, I am, I wouldn't want to escape that--Portuguese is a delicious language to sing in--but I didn't want to be just that. Let people decide for themselves what I am, and if they don't like it, they can get their refund on the way out."

That says it all, I think. Luciana doesn't care about definitions in a book. She makes music. She is made of music. "I used to be very focused on, is what I do O.K. for you and for you and for you?" she says. "You ask that kind of thing as a younger person. Is what I'm doing relevant, is it valid, does it have quality, is it hip? I used to ask myself all these things, and now I'm asking less, because I know my music is all these things and none of these things, all the time."...

Luciana will be performing Neruda live this Friday at Joe's Pub, with repeat performances on April 16, 23, and 30. All shows start at 9:30 and reservations are essential.

To buy Neruda (or to listen to excerpts), go here. To find out more about Luciana's upcoming performances at Joe's Pub, go here.

Posted April 07, 12:00 PM

TT: Adventures of an author

Earlier today, I went all the way downtown to the studios of WNYC to tape an episode of Studio 360, Kurt Andersen's weekly radio series on art and culture. This particular show is about criticism, and I'm the critic in question. The occasion (naturally) was the publication of A Terry Teachout Reader, and Andersen and I had a lengthy and exceptionally wide-ranging conversation about what I do and how I do it. I've been interviewed on quite a few radio shows over the years, but this one was especially satisfying--the questions were smart and to the point, and I had more than enough time to answer them in detail.

New Yorkers can hear my appearance on Studio 360 at ten a.m. next Saturday, April 17, on WNYC-FM (93.9), or at seven p.m. next Sunday, April 18, on WNYC-AM (820). No matter where you live, you can also listen on the Web in live streaming audio by going here.

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, give a listen, O.K.? I think it'll be fun.

Posted April 07, 8:14 AM

April 6, 2004

TT: Almanac

"The three hurried downstairs, to find, not the gay dog they expected, but a young man, colourless, toneless, who had already the mournful eyes above a drooping moustache that are so common in London, and that haunt some streets of the city like accusing presences. One guessed him as the third generation, grandson to the shepherd or ploughboy whom civilization had sucked into the town; as one of the thousands who have lost the life of the body and failed to reach the life of the spirit. Hints of robustness survived in him, more than a hint of primitive good looks, and Margaret, noting the spine that might have been straight, and the chest that might have broadened, wondered whether it paid to give up the glory of the animal for a tail coat and a couple of ideas. Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it. She knew this type very well--the vague aspirations, the mental dishonesty, the familiarity with the outsides of books. She knew the very tones in which he would address her. She was only unprepared for an example of her own visiting-card."

E.M. Forster, Howards End

Posted April 06, 12:00 PM

TT: Near misses

As I read over this morning's Pulitzer coverage, I noticed that the runners-up for the drama prize that went to Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife were a pair of plays I panned in The Wall Street Journal.

One was Omnium Gatherum. With all due respect to Old Hag's current guest blogger, who loved it, I thought otherwise:

For openers, the play, co-written by Theresa Rebeck ("Bad Dates") and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, is a drawing-room comedy set at a chic dinner party in what at first blush appears to be a high-rise apartment overlooking Ground Zero. The dizzy hostess (Kristine Nielsen) and her guests are all coarsely realized caricatures: an ultra-fey Cambridge don (Dean Nolen), a cosmopolitan Arab (Edward A. Hajj), a you-go-girl black matron (Melanna Gray), a humorless vegan (Jenny Bacon), even a loud-mouthed right-winger (Phillip Clark). (I'd like to see the chic dinner party to which he got invited.) In an inept attempt at subtlety, each guest is made to say one or two things inconsistent with his or her caricature--though somebody ought to tell the authors that making the fey Brit a raving Israel-hater was more accurate than they might have guessed.

What next? Well, Guest No. 6 turns out to be a fireman (Joseph Lyle Taylor), who (of course) speaks in dese-dem-doseisms and (also of course) has a climactic monologue in which he tells what he saw on 9/11. The witty chit-chat (next to none of which is amusing) degenerates into boozy sniping. The vegan confesses that she's...pregnant! The hostess announces that she's invited a Mystery Guest (Amir Arison), who turns out to be...an Arab terrorist! The fireman admits that he's really...dead! In fact, all the guests are dead, and as if that weren't enough of a cliché, they're in hell. So is the audience, though most of them didn't seem to know it, since I heard no groans when this last fact was revealed....

My personal trainer, who knows a thing or two about pop culture, recently described "Seabiscuit" to me as "a smart movie for dumb people." "Omnium Gatherum," by contrast, is a dumb play for--and by--people who think they're smart.

No less horrible was Man from Nebraska, which I saw on a trip to Chicago in January:

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

Two bullets dodged! I'd say that's a good day's work.

Posted April 06, 7:00 AM

April 5, 2004

TT: Almanac

"There can be no better explanation or proof of the existence of God than the fact that I have a film career."

Kevin Smith (at a college Q-&-A session, courtesy of Futurballa)

Posted April 05, 12:00 PM

TT: Something new

"Fiddlers Three," my latest essay for Commentary, is now available on line.

To view it during the month of April, go to the "Teachout in Commentary" module of the right-hand column and click in the appropriate place.

Posted April 05, 10:52 AM

TT: Historical footnote

Most of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical compositions of the past were undistinguished and are now deservedly forgotten, but here are some of the well-remembered winners that preceded Paul Moravec's Tempest Fantasy:

1945: Aaron Copland, Appalachian Spring
1947: Charles Ives, Symphony No. 3
1949: Virgil Thomson, Louisiana Story (film score)
1950: Gian Carlo Menotti, The Consul
1958: Samuel Barber, Vanessa
1963: Samuel Barber, Piano Concerto

That's nice company.

Arabesque has recorded Tempest Fantasy for release on CD later this year, together with Mood Swings, another of Moravec's strongest pieces of chamber music. I'll let you know when it comes out.

UPDATE: I just got a call from Moravec, who's spending his spring break in Sicily (he teaches at Adelphi University). He's feeling pretty bubbly, needless to say.

"Do you realize that I'm going to be in the World Almanac next year?" he asked.

"And every other year from now on," I replied.

It's a very cool thing to win a Pulitzer....

Posted April 05, 7:04 AM

TT: The Pulitzer Prizes for 2004

The server for "About Last Night" melted down seconds after this year's Pulitzer Prizes were announced, making it impossible for me to post immediately, as I'd planned to do. The crash was particularly irksome in light of the fact that three of the prizes were deeply and personally satisfying to me:

- Paul Moravec, a great composer (and I don't use that adjective lightly) whose music I've championed for years, won for Tempest Fantasy, a five-star masterpiece which has just been recorded (watch this space for details).

If you think all modern music is ugly and meaningless, you haven't heard Moravec's. He's one of a group of composers I've dubbed the New Tonalists, and he figures prominently in A Terry Teachout Reader, where I quote him as follows: "Trying to compose beautiful things, I say what I mean and mean what I say. The irony in my work is not glibly postmodern, but rather the essence of making audible the experience of fundamental paradox and ambiguity." Beautiful is definitely the word: I can't think of another classical composer of the baby-boom generation whose work means more to me. The Pulitzer committee, which has a famously bad track record when it comes to music, has done itself proud this year. (Incidentally, I just saw on the wires that the other finalists for this year's music prize were Steve Reich and Peter Lieberson.)

Says jazz composer Maria Schneider, a Moravec fan: "YAY!" I couldn't have put it better myself.

- Anne Applebaum won the general nonfiction prize for Gulag: A History, a National Book Awards finalist (I was one of the NBA judges). Most of you probably know about Applebaum and Gulag by now, so I'll say only that I regard it as one of the most important American books of the past quarter-century, regardless of genre. It's handsomely written and brutally honest--no small achievement, either, considering the longstanding unwillingness of so very many influential people to acknowledge the horrible truths set forth by Applebaum in such unsparing detail. It's damned well about time.

If you haven't read Gulag, you must.

- Doug Wright won the drama prize for I Am My Own Wife, a play I've been touting with wild abandon ever since I first saw it last year. "This show deserves every prize there is," I wrote in The Wall Street Journal when it transferred to Broadway. For now, this one will do quite nicely.

Here's part of what I wrote about the original off-Broadway production:

I don't begrudge Vanessa Redgrave her well-deserved Tony for "Long Day's Journey Into Night," but simple justice compels me to add that the best actress currently appearing in New York is neither on Broadway nor a woman. It's Jefferson Mays, the star of Doug Wright's "I Am My Own Wife," off-Broadway's latest dispatch from the wilder shores of gender identity, in which Mr. Mays plays Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, an East German transvestite with more than one secret under her skirt....

Not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Doug Wright met Charlotte, the 65-year-old owner of an East Berlin museum of knickknacks from the 1890s. Mr. Wright saw "her" as a gay hero, a courageous changeling who had "navigated a path between the two most repressive regimes the Western world has ever known--the Nazis and the Communists--in a pair of heels," and started interviewing her with the intention of writing a play. Sounds earnest, no? But as Mr. Wright discovered, Charlotte was no hero: To save her own skin, she became an informer for the East German secret police, going so far as to turn in one of her best friends.

Everything about "I Am My Own Wife" is outstanding, from Moisés Kaufman's limpid direction to the deceptively simple stage design of Derek McLane. But the real hero of the evening is Mr. Wright, who hides nothing from the audience, not even his still-powerful longing to idealize Charlotte. "I need to believe in her stories as much as she does," he admits--yet he pays us the supreme compliment of letting us make up our own minds about this complex creature, instead of telling us what progressive minds ought to think.

For a complete list of winners, go here.

UPDATE: NPR's Performance Today has put together a piece on Paul Moravec. Go here to hear an excerpt from Tempest Fantasy (plus a phone interview with me).

Posted April 05, 3:43 AM

TT: Alas, not by me

Not only have I not been blogging, I haven't even been reading blogs (at least not very much), so I dived into the deep end of the pool last night and regaled myself after a month-long layoff. Here's some of what I found, out there in the 'sphere:

- Via Jolly Days, these wise words from a 1972 interview with Isaac Bashevis Singer:

I really don't believe that literature can influence life to any great degree. Art is a force, but without a vector. Like the waves of the sea it flows forward and backward, but the net result is static. While I believe that fiction requires a story and should appear dynamic, it actually describes human character and personality, which remains almost constant.

I'd say that art stirs the mind but never moves it far in one direction or another. Admirers of Dostoevsky and Goethe were Nazis who played with the skulls of childrren. The hope that great literature can bring peace or make the human race better is without basis. When readers ask me about the message of my works I tell them that the greatest message we've got is the Ten Commandments. They are short, precise, clear. We don't need new messages, and they will certainly not be found in novels, good or bad.

- Sarah reports on a tiny factual error Lawrence Block made in his latest mystery novel--and the hundreds and hundreds of readers who've written to tell him about it. A funny, depressing, thoroughly cautionary tale. (He is, of course, going nuts, poor man.)

- Via Arts & Letters Daily, Walter Laqueur reviews a new collection of essays by Sir Isaiah Berlin about culture under the Soviets. Berlin visited Russia in 1945, where he met with a number of writers and intellectuals:

It could not have been easy to gain their confidence, for they had not the faintest idea about the identity of this visitor from another world and whether he could be trusted. But once such trust was established, they did not go back. They wanted to know the fate of literary figures in the West -- they were aware that Marcel Proust and James Joyce were no longer alive, but were less sure about Virginia Woolf. Both Akhmatova and Pasternak had no doubts about their place in the history of Russian culture, certain in the '40s and '50s that they were the greatest living Russian poets. Living in isolation, they occasionally developed beliefs that were more than a little bizarre. Akhmatova thought that Berlin's visit to her in 1945 had made Stalin so furious that he launched the Cold War. Or the famous story of Stalin's (only ever) phone call to Pasternak -- the dictator wanted to know whether Osip Mandelstam was a truly great poet, the corollary being that his life might be spared. Pasternak defended Mandelstam, albeit not wholeheartedly, but said that the truly crucial issue was that he, Pasternak, be given an early opportunity to meet Comrade Stalin to discuss some philosophical-spiritual problems of world-shaking importance. Stalin must have thought Pasternak a holy fool....

- Via artsjournal.com, our invaluable host, Boston Globe reports on the NEA's "Shakespeare in American Communities" tour, in the process suggesting that those journalists (and bloggers) who can't believe the NEA could possibly do anything good nowadays should take a second look:

After the curtain came down on a touring production of "Othello" in South Bend, Ind., a middle-age woman approached a cast member.

"I came a Shakespeare virgin," she confided, "and am going home a blushing bride."

This little anecdote tickles Joe Dowling, the artistic director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, which is putting on the "Othello" tour. It tells him that what he's trying to do -- help people break through their preconceptions that the Bard is "too hard" or "too boring" -- is working....

- Says The Forager in a month-old posting with which I just caught up:

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

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

Now, I like The Sopranos, but my life wouldn't be different if I stopped watching it or even if it never existed at all. Backlash, by attacking the critical consensus, reminds us how artificial and insignificant that consensus really is. It reminds us that our personal choices about what we like to watch or what we like to listen to aren't as important as we'd like to think.

- How "grammatically sound" am I? According to this quiz, it seems I am a Grammar God, which is a nice thing to find out after a lifetime spent at the typewriter and its successor technologies, especially since I'm strictly a play-by-ear man when it comes to the finer points of English (I know how, but not why).

- I caught only one new movie during my Balanchine-related hiatus, The Ladykillers, which I saw purely for professional reasons. My review hasn't been published yet, but until then, our beloved Cinetrix says all that needs to be said:

The Ladykillers feels like a summer stock version of a Coen Brothers movie. Forget asking how well the remake stands up to the original Ealing comedy. There is no joy, no sense of getting away with anything here....

I have now added the Coen brothers to my permanent do-not-review list. Ars longa, vita brevis.

Posted April 05, 2:43 AM

April 4, 2004

TT: Audible

To hear W.B. Yeats reciting "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," go here, scroll down approximately one screen to "RealAudio file of Yeats reciting Innisfree," and click on the link.

Is it good? I dunno--but it's him.

Posted April 04, 8:49 AM

TT: Almanac

"He was experiencing that stage of love which seems to consist only of patient waiting, but his nature was better suited to it than some would have been."

Barbara Pym, Less than Angels

Posted April 04, 8:45 AM

TT: Restoration

I returned from North Carolina this afternoon (about which more tomorrow) and promptly set to work on "About Last Night," which (as I'm sure you know) hasn't exactly been in the front of my mind for the past month or so. Now that All in the Dances is finished, I'm raring to go, and I've started out by completely updating the right-hand column, in which you will now find:

- A fresh set of Top Fives

- My latest "Second City" column, which appeared in today's Washington Post

- Two new pieces in "Teachout Elsewhere"

I start blogging in earnest on Monday, and I have lots of stuff up my sleeve, so watch this space.

It's nice to be back.

Posted April 04, 8:38 AM

April 2, 2004

TT: Sonic lollipop

Very indirectly via Chicha (who flatters me ever so sweetly), here's a RealAudio sound clip of James Joyce reading "Anna Livia Plurabelle" in 1924, plus Sylvia Beach's fascinating reminiscence of how the recording happened to be made.

Dig that brogue.

Posted April 02, 12:16 PM

TT: Almanac

"Resolve: To be altogether more advanced and intelligent, to have more friendships and fewer affairs, to write and read more than I eat and drink, to revisit Paris and write a prize novel."

Cyril Connolly, The Condemned Playground

Posted April 02, 12:04 PM

TT: I can't believe I wrote the whole thing

No rest for the weary: I spent the whole damn day writing the last of four pieces that came due the same week as All in the Dances, my Balanchine book. This one was my monthly Commentary essay, about Solomon Volkov's Shostakovich and Stalin and Richard Kostelanetz's Aaron Copland: A Reader (aren't you wondering how those two books fit together?), and it ended up being four thousand words long. I started it Thursday morning and finished it at 11:30 Thursday night. Now I'm going to bed. Tomorrow (today, actually) I'll catch a plane to Raleigh, N.C., to spend two days looking at Carolina Ballet, and I'll be back some time on Sunday.

Until then, there will be no further blogging from me. In fact, there will be no further writing of any kind from me. Not counting the book and the blog, I've produced roughly 8,000 words of publishable prose since Monday morning, and that's soooo much more than enough. Right now you couldn't pay me to inscribe a copy of A Terry Teachout Reader. (Really!)

Believe it or not, though, it's nice to be back. I missed you while I was gone, a lot. And though I still have Balanchine-related chores awaiting me next week--I've got to choose the illustrations--I plan to spend plenty of time right here at "About Last Night." So keep your eyes peeled for further cultural bulletins.

See you Sunday.

Posted April 02, 12:01 PM

TT: Sighted scene, stole same

It's Friday--do you know where I am? In The Wall Street Journal, of course, reviewing Arthur Penn's revival of Larry Gelbart's Sly Fox, starring Richard Dreyfuss and Eric Stoltz, and Barbara Cook's Broadway.

Sly Fox isn't perfect, but it's damned good for what it is:

"Sly Fox" is, of course, Mr. Gelbart's very loose rendering of Ben Jonson's "Volpone," relocated from seventeenth-century Venice to nineteenth-century San Francisco, where the noted conman Foxwell J. Sly (Mr. Dreyfuss) and his not-so-trusty servant Simon Able (Mr. Stoltz) have set up shop for the purpose of fleecing a bunch of equally dishonest folk. In this modernized version, little of Jonson's play survives but the plot (Mr. Gelbart claims not even to have read Jonson, relying instead on a 1927 German-language adaptation of "Volpone" by Stefan Zweig), atop which are sprinkled several thousand jokes about greed and hypocrisy. All the characters talk like Groucho Marx, squeezing off punchlines like bullets from a burp gun, and while many go wide of their targets, enough hit the bull's-eye to keep you flailing with laughter....

As Sly, Mr. Dreyfuss is going up against still-vivid memories of George C. Scott and Robert Preston, his predecessors in the role, and though I never saw either of them on stage, my guess is that he falls a little bit short, perhaps because he's--well, a little bit short. I envisioned Foxwell J. Sly as a Falstaffian rascal, and Mr. Dreyfuss' finicky voice and compact frame didn't quite live up to my expectations. Nevertheless, he's more than good enough to get the job done, and even better as Judge Thunder J. Bastardson, under whose wary eye the cast of "Sly Fox" conducts a seminar on scene stealing that is glorious to behold.

As for Barbara Cook's Broadway, well, it's pretty fabulous:

Speaking of old pros, Barbara Cook used to sing ingenue roles on Broadway back in the Fifties and Sixties, the salad days of musical comedy. Now she's 76 years old and stars in one-woman shows about those same salad days. Her latest such effort, "Barbara Cook's Broadway," is running through April 18 at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, the same house where Christopher Plummer is starring in "King Lear," also through April 18. (Ms. Cook performs on Mr. Plummer's days off.) Go see it. She sings 15 wonderful show tunes, some familiar and some not, all interpreted in a totally straightforward style that keeps the spotlight on the songs, not the singer. When not making music, Ms. Cook tells tales out of school, including an anecdote about Elaine Stritch that's worth at least half the price of admission.

No link. Just buy the Journal, O.K.? It's only a dollar. Then send ‘em a letter saying how wonderful I am. They like letters.

Posted April 02, 12:00 PM

April 1, 2004

TT: Loud and clear

I found this note in my e-mailbox yesterday:

I'm so proud. I saw the the headline "Finishing the Book" and immediately knew you were going to be referencing Sunday in the Park with George.

As someone in my early twenties just emerging from a South Georgia town about the size of Smalltown, U.S.A. (15,000, give or take), I've been following "About Last Night" eagerly from its beginning last summer, and it's been a welcome expansion of my horizons. I've got you to thank for Avenue Q, Helen Frankenthaler, and TMFTML, just to name a few. It's also occasionally been a reassurance. (Maybe there's not something wrong with me because I don't love Virginia Woolf; maybe I shouldn't consider a rural background a permanent sentence to second-class cultural citizenship....)

I'm afraid that it's a deceptively seductive medium, and I've come to feel oddly close to you and OGIC and many of the people in your right-hand column after what's nearly been a three-season-immersion. There was a little inner debate on whether to address you as "Terry" or "Mr. Teachout." South Georgia won. I've really got no reason to write other than to say thank you.

P.S. Congratulations on the Balanchine book. I hear that sort of thing isn't easy, any way you look at it.

Right from the start, Our Girl and I hoped that "About Last Night" would be read not just in New York, Chicago, and cities of similar size and presumed sophistication, but all over the country. Well, we got our wish. Yes, we're most frequently read in the eastern time zone of the United States, but most days we also get hits from as many as thirteen other time zones, along with mail from readers living in the most unlikely-sounding places--only it turns out that they're not so unlikely after all. Modern communications technology has made the world of art universally accessible to all who care to partake of it, and the Web has gone beyond that to transform the cultural conversation. Time was when people like OGIC and me did all the talking. Now it's a two-way street.

So to our happy reader from South Georgia, as well as to all the rest of you out there in cyberspace, our thanks for listening--and even more for writing. We feel every bit as close to you as you do to us. And don't forget to tell your friends what they're missing.

Posted April 01, 10:51 AM

TT: Adventures of an author

I went to Harcourt yesterday afternoon to drop off the manuscript of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, the book whose fitful progress I've been chronicling on this blog for the past three months. Oddly enough, I'd never seen the headquarters of my new publisher, with whom I signed a two-book contract a little less than a year ago (the contract was delivered and collected by messenger), so I thought it would be both courteous and fun to bring in the manuscript myself.

I showed up a few minutes early and waited briefly in a lobby decorated with photographs of noted Harcourt authors past and present, wondering whether the day might come when I would be deemed worthy of display cheek by jowl with T.S. Eliot and Alice Walker. Then André Bernard, my editor, escorted me to his fifteenth-floor office, which has a panoramic view of the Flatiron Building, Edith Wharton's birthplace, and the golden-domed rooftop eyrie where Stanford White cavorted with his ladyfriends. That's a view.

I gave André the box containing the manuscript. He saw me and raised me by clicking away at his computer for a moment and retrieving the design for the dust jacket of All in the Dances, which had just been e-mailed from San Diego earlier that day. "What do you think?" he asked tentatively. I stammered out wildly enthusiastic noises in reply. To have one beautifully designed book published in a single year is quite nice enough. To know that you're going to be two for two is...well, a whole lot nicer.

It was drizzling as I left Harcourt, and I'd never felt so tired in my life. Or so happy.

Posted April 01, 10:17 AM

TT: Almanac

"What work I owed I postponed until it had to be churned out in a flush of rage over my being disturbed by it."

Jack Richardson, Memoir of a Gambler

Posted April 01, 10:17 AM

TT: And I feel fine

I jumped in a cab last night and told the driver, "Carnegie Hall, please."

"Excuse me?"

"Carnegie Hall, please." Silence. Then it hit me. "Do you know the address of Carnegie Hall?" I asked, trying to conceal my astonishment.

"Er, no, sir," he replied, tearing himself away momentarily from his cellphone. "I don't."

To you this may seem trivial, but I fear it isn't. I've been taking cabs to Carnegie Hall for almost 20 years, and in all that time, no cabby has ever had to ask me where it was--until last night.

I don't even want to think about what that means.

Posted April 01, 10:08 AM