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May 31, 2004

TT: Almanac

"Towards the end of my time in London I began to feel as strong a hatred of London as I used to have when I lived there. When first we arrived in London, the place only seemed to me ridiculous and (having to be tolerated only for a couple of months or so) tolerable; but presently it began to oppress me, and the relief of being away from it is immense. All the chatter and clatter and hustle and guzzle--not one single person having a good time, and not one single person thinking of anything but the having of a good time."

Max Beerbohm, letter to Reggie Turner, c. 1914

Posted May 31, 12:05 PM

TT: Gingerly, gingerly

I think--I hope--I learned a thing or two from my unexpected illness, which was all too clearly the result of my having fallen off the workaholism wagon in mid-May. My body thereupon informed me that it was time to take a week off, like it or not, so I did. Now I feel more or less myself again, minus much of my normal stamina but at least capable of doing a reasonable amount of work. A good thing, too! I wrote a piece yesterday and have three more due this week, all deferred from last week. Once they're done, June should prove more reasonable (two of my regular writing commitments are to monthly magazines that don't publish in August). I mean to make it so.

What did I do all week? Mostly I watched movies, ranging in specific gravity from Dazed and Confused to Joseph Mankiewicz's excellent 1953 screen version of Julius Caesar, the latter in honor of Sir John Gielgud (he plays Cassius), whose collected letters were rarely far from my nightstand. In addition, I bid successfully via e-mail on a new piece for the Teachout Museum, about which I'll be rhapsodizing in this space when it arrives on Thursday. I listened to the rough mix of Paul Moravec's new CD, out later this year from Arabesque, which will contain Tempest Fantasy, the piece that won him this year's Pulitzer Prize for music. I saw a couple of foolhardy friends who stopped by to see how I was doing. And that's pretty much it. Except for my inescapable Wall Street Journal drama column, I didn't write, didn't blog, didn't talk on the phone (I couldn't--I lost my voice for three days), didn't go out to see anything or anyone. Instead, I slept as much as I could, ate a lot of soup, and sat on the couch, looking longingly at the spring sunshine through my window.

Toward week's end I felt tempted to throw caution to the winds and go back to work. I felt it all the more strongly when the postman brought me the copyedited manuscript of All in the Dances, my Balanchine book, at which I hadn't taken a single peek since I sent it off to Harcourt two months ago. I'm pleased to say, though, that I left the MS. in its package for two full days. No sooner did I open it up than I sat down and read the book through from end to end, an interesting and scary experience. It's unsettling to read your own writing after it's had time to cool down, and I found an embarrassing factual error in the very first chapter (yikes!), but for the most part I was quite happy with the way it turned out.

Did I learn anything from being out of the loop for six whole days? We'll see. I can't honestly say it was fun--I felt crappy, after all--but there were moments when I caught a glimpse of how it might feel to put down the reins and really take some time off. I'm no good at that, but I'm trying to become so.

Did I miss you? Very much. I didn't dare to peek at my blogmail until the weekend, but when I did I was heartened and comforted by your get-well messages. It's nice to know that "About Last Night" is an important part of so many people's lives. It'll be a few more days before I'm back up to speed, but I'm eager to start posting regularly. I may not have done much last week, but I thought about a lot of things, and I look forward to sharing some of them with you.

In the meantime, I've updated the right-hand column with fresh links and Top Fives, and I also exhumed an old piece of mine that recent events have made newly relevant (see below). I'll post as much as I can in between writing those three pieces. Well, maybe not as much as I can--that's part of what got me in trouble, after all! But "About Last Night" is also an important part of my own life, and I can't wait to get it up and running once more.

Incidentally, Our Girl in Chicago wants me to assure you that she's not dead, either, and you can expect her to be back at the same old blogstand as soon as she cleans up her accumulated holiday mess. In the meantime, we both thank you for your patience and forbearance. You mean a lot to us.

Posted May 31, 12:03 PM

TT: The ear of the behearer

A friend writes:

So I was working out at the gym under the eye of my trainer (about 35, black, born in the Bahamas). The music, which is usually hiphop or rock, switches to jazz, of a recent, inoffensive variety. He says he likes jazz; likes it better than hiphop, and all the other things kids are into. And then he adds, as a plain statement, with no sense of making a point, "For jazz, you have to play an instrument."

My friend thought I needed to laugh. I did, and I did.

Posted May 31, 12:01 PM

TT: Remember when?

The news that a London warehouse fire destroyed more than one hundred works of art belonging to Charles Saatchi promptly set chatterers to chattering, though rarely in an edifying way. One of the few sensible things written to date about the fire and its aftermath came from the pen of Eric Gibson, my colleague at The Wall Street Journal:

Among the works destroyed in the fire were Tracey Emin's "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963-1995," a tent embroidered with the names of her lovers and other friends, and "Hell" by Jake and Dinos Chapman. The brothers had departed from their usual idiom--life-size statues of naked children with genitals where their noses should be--to create a sprawling installation of custom-made toy soldiers committing atrocities.

Art disasters normally have a visceral impact. Such incidents as the looting of the Baghdad Museum last year and the ravaging of Florence's art treasures by floods in 1966 set the mind reeling at the thought of pieces of man's cultural patrimony permanently lost or damaged.

This time, though, I was strangely unmoved. It's not that I think incinerating art is a good thing. It's just that the work of these artists--as of all contemporary artists--is too new and untested to have acquired the cultural heft that makes it seem an indispensable part of one's existence. I regret the fire happened, but I can't quite see it as a body blow to civilization.

Listen to the wailing that followed the conflagration, however, and you'd think the world had come to an end....

It's assumed that because these YBA [Young British Artists] works are trendy and outlandishly expensive (Mr. Saatchi reportedly paid $72,000 for Ms. Emin's tent and almost $1 million for "Hell"), they must be important. These critic-promoters give their pronouncements a veneer of respectability by specious comparisons between contemporary artists and the Old Masters.

All of which makes Monday's disaster not so much a cultural catastrophe as a kind of bonfire of the vanities....

Read the whole thing here.

Gibson's essay, and the disaster (so to speak) that inspired it (ditto), reminded me that at least one of the works of art that went up in smoke, "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With," was included in Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, the Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibition that caused such a ruckus back in 1999. I reviewed that show for the Washington Post, and it occurred to me that what I said about it then might possibly be worth repeating now.

* * *

The cheery brunette dressed in the livery of the Brooklyn Museum of Art looked at me as if I were the answer to her wildest dreams. "Would you like to take the audio tour with David Bowie?" she chirped, headphones in hand. Just above her head was a small yellow sign that read Warning: This exhibition includes works of art that some viewers may find objectionable.

This is "Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection," the biggest news in blockbuster shows since the National Gallery was overrun by hordes of Vermeer lovers. You've probably read all about it--Damien Hirst's giant shark and bisected pig floating in formaldehyde-filled cases, Chris Ofili's elephant-dung-covered portrait of the Virgin Mary--and about how Rudolph Giuliani, New York's mayor and scold-in-chief, tried to stop it from opening by withholding $7 million in annual funding from the museum, which promptly sued the mayor and the city in order to get the money back. As of today, "Sensation" is open for business, and business it will surely do, even at a cool $9.75 a head, not counting audio tours or any of the various knickknacks for sale in the gift shop, including stuffed sharks, lunch boxes and official "Sensation" toilet paper.

"Official" is the right word for "Sensation," and not just because David Bowie likes it, either. Every imaginable Establishment type in New York is backing the museum, not to mention the hundred-plus fancy folk--Annie Leibovitz, Norman Mailer, Steve Martin, Rob Reiner and Tim Robbins among them--who signed a full-page ad in yesterday's New York Times announcing that they were "united in support of the principle that freedom of expression must include the artistic freedom to challenge and offend."

No, you aren't absolutely required to like "Sensation"--though failure to appreciate the transgressive subtleties of such objets d'art as Tracey Emin's "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995" or Mark Wallinger's "Race Class Sex" automatically renders you terminally unhip--but you'd damned well better voice unequivocal agreement that the show must go on, Rudy or (preferably) no Rudy, if you want to keep getting asked to the right cocktail parties.

Me, I don't go to cocktail parties, and I also don't much care for the odious smugness displayed by the likes of Glenn Scott Wright, the London representative for Ofili, painter of "The Holy Virgin Mary," who claims that Giuliani's determination to shut the show down "is both totalitarian and fascist, a reprisal of the Nazi regime's censorship of the contemporary art of its time which it labeled 'degenerate art.' " I suppose it's possible that Ofili has been arrested by the New York branch of the Gestapo and shipped off to a prison camp on Staten Island, but if so, nobody told me about it.

On the other hand, what do I know? I'm just a critic who went to the press preview of "Sensation" on Thursday, and except for one work by Rachel Whiteread, a prettily colored neo-minimalist installation called "Untitled (One-Hundred Spaces)," I found it a great big bore. To be sure, most contemporary British art is boring, and has been for as long as I can remember. (One of the very few redeeming qualities of "Sensation" is that it makes Anglophiles look silly.) British novels and plays are still about class war, British composers are still trying to figure out minimalism, British choreographers are still into angst--and British artists, as "Sensation" reveals at stupefying length, are still trying, poor dears, to be outrageous.

I hasten to assure Jake and Dinos Chapman, for example, that fabricating a fiberglass sculpture consisting of a crowd of naked women in sneakers with penises where their noses ought to be, then calling it "Zygotic acceleration, biogenetic, de-sublimated libidinal model (enlarged x 1000)," isn't going to shock anybody in New York, except maybe Cardinal O'Connor. Nor can any amount of fawning catalogue verbiage--"The revival of formal figurative sculpture ushered in a quirky mix of children's clothing-store innocence stunted by a sprouting adult imagination"--conceal the fact that such art is strictly adolescent stuff, Marcel Duchamp for dull 12-year-olds.

No doubt with this in mind, the anonymous author of the captions accompanying the works in "Sensation" has couched them in the form of condescending little catechisms all too clearly intended to raise the consciousnesses of their benighted viewers. Thus Hirst's "This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed at home" is "explained" to the great unwashed public as follows: "Does this work condemn eating animals? In referring to a childhood rhyme, does its title hint at our loss of innocence when we kill animals? Or does Hirst simply make a plain fact graphically clear?" Forget David Bowie: The museum should have hired Mister Rogers to do the audio tour.

Note, by the way, that the aforementioned caption says nothing about the artistic effect, such as it is, of Hirst's split-pig assemblage. Artistic effects are not what "Sensation" is about; rather, the show is about ideas, meaning that you don't have to like these works in order to "appreciate" them. Once I've told you, for instance, that Marc Quinn's "Self" is a refrigerated Plexiglass box containing a bust of the artist sculpted in his own frozen blood, you know everything there is to know about "Self" that matters. Actually seeing it is superfluous. That's the nice thing about conceptual art: Once described, it need not be experienced.

You now owe me $9.75, but I won't sue you for it, just as I devoutly wish the mayor and the museum weren't dragging each other into court. The only people to emerge from this fracas unmutilated will be the lawyers, though the museum has more at stake and may be likelier to lose, the First Amendment not yet having been rewritten so as to stipulate that Congress shall make no law abridging the absolute right of taxpayer-subsidized museums to spend public monies in whatever way they see fit. It doesn't take an art-hating Philistine to figure out that this is a fight the Brooklyn Museum should never have picked in the first place--least of all over so pitifully lame a show as "Sensation."

* * *

It had been quite some time since I last looked at this piece, or thought about Sensation, but no sooner did I start to reread it than my memories of the show came flooding back, clear and specific--but not vivid, since the show itself wasn't in any way vivid. Instead, I remember it as drab, almost penitential.

Even so, Sensation would play an important part in my art-going life. It was the first time that I'd gone to see a large-scale museum exhibition that had no aesthetic appeal whatsoever, and as such it made a deep and lasting impression on me. Though I wouldn't start buying prints for another four years, seeing and writing about Sensation helped to clarify my sense of what I liked about art, albeit by negative example. It was, literally, an object lesson--and a valuable one. I'm just glad I didn't have to pay for it.

Posted May 31, 12:00 PM

TT: Distant early warning

All in the Dances, my brief life of George Balanchine, is now available for preordering on amazon.com. Don't hang by your thumbs--it won't be published until November. Still, it's fun to look at the amazon.com page of a book I haven't finished editing yet!

To see (or order) for yourself, go here.

Posted May 31, 11:05 AM

TT: Told him so

Alex Ross, the New Yorker's music critic, launched a Web site of his own not long ago. He swore he'd only use it to post links to his print-media pieces, but I warned him that it'd turn into a full-fledged blog if he wasn't careful.

Sure enough, Alex wasn't able to resist the temptation to start posting regularly, and so I've moved The Rest Is Noise to the top section of the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column, where all the other artbloggers live. Take a peek, why don't you?

Posted May 31, 4:35 AM

May 28, 2004

TT: Almanac

"The really damned not only like Hell, they feel loyal to it."

Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

Posted May 28, 12:47 PM

TT: Cameo appearance

Hello, there. To all those who've written, I'm feeling better, though not enough to resume full-scale blogging activities (or any other kind of activities, for that matter). I'm hoping the holiday weekend knits me up more or less completely.

Sick or not, I always manage to write my Friday drama column for The Wall Street Journal, and this week, God knows how, was no exception. I wrote about two shows, Donald Margulies' Sight Unseen and Here Lies Jenny, a new Kurt Weill revue starring Bebe Neuwirth.

I liked Sight Unseen rather better than well enough, mostly because of Laura Linney:

Is there a better American actress than Laura Linney? Judging by the Manhattan Theatre Club's revival of Donald Margulies' "Sight Unseen," playing at the Biltmore through July 11, I'd be hard pressed to think of anyone who qualifies. Every word she speaks and every gesture she makes has the bright ring of gospel truth. To be sure, Ms. Linney is no off-the-rack star. Her serious face and flat, unfancy vowels are as plain--and as beautiful--as a New England meeting house. But that, too, is part of her priceless gift: what she says, you believe.

Ms. Linney does much to ennoble "Sight Unseen," a smart but superficial dramedy that hasn't aged well in the 12 years since its Off-Broadway premiere. It's about Jonathan, a trendy Jewish painter (Ben Shenkman); Patricia, his WASP-y former fiancée (Ms. Linney); and Nick, her husband-on-the-rebound (Byron Jennings). Their triangular interactions are presented in the upside-down manner of "Merrily We Roll Along" (the last scene of each act is a flashback). Jonathan is cynical and miserable, Patricia frustrated and miserable, Nick angry and miserable. No surprises there, a fact which Mr. Margulies' too-clever chronological trickery fails to conceal....

As for Here Lies Jenny, it surprised me--the wrong way:

I'm a great fan of Bebe Neuwirth--who isn't? So I was more than slightly surprised to have been disappointed by "Here Lies Jenny," the late-night Kurt Weill revue directed and conceived by Roger Rees in which Ms. Neuwirth appears through July 24. I was sure it couldn't miss, but "Here Lies Jenny" turned out to be the last thing I expected: dull.

The Zipper Theatre has been dressed down to look like a broken-bottle joint run by George (Ed Dixon), a bartender in an advanced state of disrepair, and patronized by Jim and John (Greg Butler and Shawn Emamjomeh), a pair of pumped-up thugs. Into this den of low-rent debauchery staggers Ms. Neuwirth, a washed-up song-and-dance gal. No words are spoken, but it seems this rathole used to be her hangout once upon a time--or maybe not. For a while I thought she might be slinking back to the place where she got her start--or maybe not. Everything in "Here Lies Jenny" is deliberately left vague, not in an evocative way but in a frustrating one, like watching a bad print of an old movie with the lights on....

No link--visit your local newsstand. And thanks for bearing with me through this exhausting, difficult week! I hope to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed come Monday morning.

Posted May 28, 12:45 PM

May 27, 2004

TT: Almanac

"Don't you know that the only value money has is that it buys time? It's not things; it's not travel; it's time."

Bernard Herrmann, quoted in Steven C. Smith, A Heart at Fire's Center

Posted May 27, 12:14 PM

May 26, 2004

TT: Almanac

"Oh this curse of the theatre--to continue and continue--to improve a little and slip back again, to find the precise formula and not to be able to pin it down--that is our cross, we wretched mummers."

John Gielgud, letter to Dadie Rylands, Dec. 31, 1944

Posted May 26, 12:02 PM

TT: Until further notice

I'm totally out of order--too sick to do much of anything, even read. All I've done for the past couple of days is watch movies: Colorado Territory, Sweet Smell of Success, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Shop Around the Corner, and the second half of They Live by Night (I watched the first half a week ago, then got sidetracked).

Except for my Friday Wall Street Journal drama column, I've canceled or postponed everything on my calendar for the rest of the week. That includes blogging, which will be light to nonexistent for the foreseeable future--in fact, I'm posting Wednesday's items early on Tuesday evening so that I can sleep as late as possible before dragging myself to the iBook to write my only do-or-die piece for the week.

Send a few benign thoughts my way, O.K.?

Posted May 26, 12:00 PM

May 25, 2004

TT: Almanac

"In the end most things in life--perhaps all things--turn out to be appropriate."

Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

Posted May 25, 11:09 AM

TT: Comprehensively blah

Amazing how fast a virus can lay you low, isn't it? I haven't read Catch-22 for years, but I seem to recall that at least one of the characters suffered from a disease called Pianosan Crud, which sounds about right for my own condition. I have deadlines and chores galore, but right now all I seem to be able to do is sit on the couch and watch undemanding movies. (I've also lost my voice, which now sounds like the snapping of a long, thick, wet rubber band.)

Anyway, apologies to all. It's back to the couch for me. See you at some point.

Posted May 25, 11:05 AM

May 24, 2004

TT: Consumables

Who said anything about a summer break? I had way too much to do in the past few days, and I'm feeling it--in fact, I think I may be on the verge of being officially under the weather, which is particularly uncool given the fact that I have to hit four deadlines this week.

At least I racked up a lot of art before white smoke started pouring out from under my hood. To begin with, I saw three plays in three days:

- Here Lies Jenny, Bebe Neuwirth's Kurt Weill revue.

- Chinese Friends Jon Robin Baitz's new play (which I saw with the v., v. cool Sarah, who was in town momentarily).

- The Manhattan Theatre Club's revival of Donald Margulies' Sight Unseen, starring Laura Linney.

All will find their way into The Wall Street Journal sooner or later.

I also visited four gallery shows in quick succession on Saturday:

- Richard Diebenkorn: Works on Paper, up at Artemis Greenberg Van Doren (730 Fifth Ave.) through Saturday, is a museum-quality exhibition of paintings and prints from Diebenkorn's "Ocean Park" and "Clubs & Spades" series. I would have missed this splendid show had Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes not called my attention to it. See Tyler's right-hand column (he's an artsjournal.com blogger) for details, then get right over to Artemis Greenberg Van Doren and see the show while you still can.

- Neil Welliver: Oil Studies, up at Alexandre Gallery (41 E. 57th) through June 18, is an exceptionally beautiful show of preliminary small-scale studies for some thirty-five of Welliver's large-scale paintings portraying the woods of Maine. The difference between the two formats is one of size, not finish, though the effect is different as well: Welliver's oil studies, like Jackson Pollock's small drip paintings, have a concentrated focus that I find especially appealing. (The comparison isn't at all absurd--Welliver, like Fairfield Porter and Nell Blaine, is a committed representationalist who was nonetheless deeply influenced by abstract expressionist, an approach I find hugely sympathetic.)

- Mood Indigo: The Legacy of Duke Ellington, up at Michael Rosenfeld (24 W.57th St.) through July 30, is an interesting but spotty show that purports to provide "a look at jazz and improvisation in American art." In practice, this means a mixed bag ranging from the real right thing (a Stuart Davis gouache from 1947) to pale imitations (a trio of faux Mondrians by Charmion von Wiegand and Burgoyne Diller). Among the interesting curiosities are Hans Hofmann's Composition No. 9, a 1953 oil that incorporates elements suggestive of musical notation, and a painting by jazz drummer George Wettling, who studied with Stuart Davis (you can tell, too). Also on display is Ellington's very own white baby grand. More fun than illuminating, but still worth a peek.

- Jacob Lawrence: Prints and Selected Paintings, up at DC Moore (724 Fifth Ave.) through June 30, is a nice but not thrilling show devoted mostly to Lawrence's late graphic work. His flat planes of color lent themselves to lithography, but by the time he embraced the medium in earnest, his creative fire had ebbed, and though he was recognizably himself, repetition had all too clearly set in.

- Now playing on iTunes: Bob Brookmeyer's Get Well Soon, about which I'm writing later today for this coming Sunday's Washington Post.

Enough for now, and probably for the rest of the day. I've got to husband my energy if I'm going to get through this week in one piece. I promise not to vanish altogether, though--there's lots of stuff about which I want to write.

UPDATE: I spoke a little too soon--I'm definitely out of order. Looks like a spring cold (at best). Headed for bed, will see you all later.

Posted May 24, 10:27 AM

TT: Almanac

"No writer ever truly succeeds. The disparity between the work conceived and the work completed is always too great and the writer merely achieves an acceptable level of failure."

Phillip Caputo, A Rumor of War

Posted May 24, 9:51 AM

OGIC: Good reads

Hello, it's me. I hope and plan to be back blogging in earnest later this week or right after Memorial Day, I really do. For now, while I scramble--and try to recover from last night's wonderfully crushing "Sopranos" ep--here are a few interesting elsewheres to wander:

- In the NY Observer, Hilton Kramer writes about Constable's Skies, the gallery show that Terry so enjoyed--heartless coblogger!--a couple of weeks ago. Here's Kramer:

It's another remarkable feature of the "skying" paintings that, from our historical perspective, so many of them seem to have anticipated the pictorial syntax and emotional tenor of 20th-century Abstract Expressionist painting. They were not, of course, conceived as abstract paintings, yet to our 21st-century eyes, they often bear such a close resemblance to certain modalities of painterly abstraction that it's sometimes difficult to "see" them as scrupulously faithful pictures of the natural world. My guess is that they will be an inspiration for our painters for a long time to come.

As Terry guessed, I am going to miss this show, which closes all too soon. I feel relatively all right about it, however. A few years ago on a putative research trip to London, I spent almost all my time looking for Constables, and found the mother lode of sky paintings in an outer reach of the vast Victoria & Albert Museum from which I was able to find my way back by means of a trail of bread crumbs. Someday, when time allows, I'll write here about why I heretically persist in preferring Constable to Turner.

- Meanwhile, in The New Republic, Ruth Franklin offers a measured assessment of The Believer magazine:

The magazine expresses an enthusiasm for books that most other publications too often either bury or take for granted. This enthusiasm, it must be said, isn't a valid end in itself; it's also anti-intellectual, despite the ongoing search for the perfect syllabus. What The Believer offers is essentially a book club, and no one goes to a book club to talk seriously about books. It's a gathering for fans, and while there's nothing edifying about fandom, there are worse things than books to be a fan of.

- Old news by now, but good enough that I don't care, is James Wood's London Review of Books autopsy of current standard-issue academic lit crit (doubling as a review of Randall Stevenson's Oxford English Literary History, Vol. XII: 1960-2000). No wonder it isn't breathing: it's filled with sawdust.

Stevenson never reflects on a writer's aesthetic intentions, but this may be a blessing in disguise, for in those rare moments when he considers intention at all, he is crudely materialist. An interesting discussion about the way short stories, in this period, ceded ground to novels, and novels in turn became more like short stories, yields to a mystifying generalisation about novels becoming shorter: "Declining economic confidence among publishers, and dwindling stamina or leisure time among readers, encouraged some novelists almost to usurp the short story's usual dimensions. When Ian McEwan moved on from short-story writing, it was to produce a first 'novel', The Cement Garden (1978), not much in excess of one hundred pages." Ah, so that is why McEwan's novels are so short. What layers of evasion are hidden in that careful verb "encouraged".

I like Wood all the time, but this essay made me do a little dance.

Posted May 24, 1:58 AM

May 21, 2004

TT: Hither and yon

I don't usually reprint fan letters, but I got one about A Terry Teachout Reader that I had to share with all of you:

I just finished reading your outstanding book of essays and wanted to thank you for an unadulterated pleasure of a read.

You are currently my Fairfield Porter.

Thanks again for an act of literary kindness and beauty.

I'm still smiling.

Which reminds me: Harcourt's on-line catalogue now includes a page for All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine. Click on the link and you'll get to see the dust jacket. I think it's as good as the one for the Teachout Reader!

Posted May 21, 5:03 AM

TT: On the fly

I've been out of town sans computer, accompanied by a change of shirt and two books, Michael Kennedy's Portrait of Elgar and the first volume of the Library of America's forthcoming set of Isaac Bashevis Singer's short stories, both of which I'm reading at the behest of Commentary.

Portrait of Elgar is an old friend--I'm revisiting it in preparation for writing an essay on Sir Edward Elgar, whom I've never before had occasion to discuss at length in print. He's one of my favorite composers, and I'm trying to make sense out of the peculiar fact that his music has never been popular outside England. As for Singer, I've been up to my ears in his early stories, some but not all of which I knew. Not to tip my hand too far, but the author of whom he reminds me most strongly is Flannery O'Connor! About which much more later this summer....

In the meantime, I've got a couple of hundred e-mails to answer and three shows to see between now and Sunday, so I doubt you'll be hearing from me again until next week, when I'll file a report on my latest adventures in the world of art. In addition to seeing Here Lies Jenny, Chinese Friends, and Sight Unseen, I hope to visit a few galleries on Saturday, and maybe even listen to a bit of music!

See you Monday.

Posted May 21, 3:42 AM

TT: Almanac

"One grows out of pity when it's useless."

Albert Camus, The Plague

Posted May 21, 3:41 AM

TT: One for the show

I just this minute got back to New York and rushed to my waiting iBook to post "About Last Night"'s weekly Wall Street Journal drama-page teaser. Today I reviewed a pair of off-Broadway one-person shows, Jay Johnson's The Two and Only and Sarah Jones' bridge & tunnel.

I liked The Two and Only without reservations:

Mr. Johnson is a ventriloquist (readers with long memories will remember him from the TV series "Soap"), and "The Two and Only" is a show-and-tell reminiscence of his life and work. He loves what he does, and so far as I could tell from "The Two and Only," he is as well-adjusted as a man who talks to wooden dummies can hope to be. What's more, Mr. Johnson is both extremely funny and a super-virtuoso of his mysterious craft. At one point he actually dispenses with props and "throws" his disembodied, wraith-like voice into thin air, a trick so impressive that I'm still agog at the memory of it....

As a boy, Mr. Johnson marveled at the witty ventriloquists who frequented the TV variety shows of yesteryear. Those shows are long gone, but Jay Johnson is still here, throwing his voice in all directions and making case-hardened Manhattan audiences laugh themselves silly without resort to cynicism or vulgarity (except for one FCC-disapproved word whose precisely timed detonation caused the audience to laugh so hard that I briefly feared for the roof of the Atlantic Theater). It says in the program that he "dreamed of this one-man show for most of his life." I couldn't be happier that his dream has finally come true.

I liked bridge & tunnel enormously, too, albeit with one important qualification:

The vibrant physicality of Ms. Jones' nonstop body-snatching is if anything even more exciting than her uncanny ear for accents. I couldn't take my eyes off her large hands, which she can transform in an instant from the air-sculpting precision tools of a mime to the palsied, trembling claws of an old woman. She'd be fun to watch even if she weren't funny to hear, and her loving parodies of the sort of verse you'd be likely to hear at a meeting of Immigrant and Multiculturalist American Poets or Enthusiasts Traveling Toward Optimistic Openness (that's I.A.M.A.P.O.E.T.T.O.O. for short) rarely fail to hit the target dead center.

I liked "bridge & tunnel" so much that I almost hate to point out that it is a risk-free, feel-good show masquerading as a hard-hitting piece of political theater. Ms. Jones would be a better playwright had she dared to challenge her viewers' preconceptions by including even one unsympathetic character in her "cast." Instead, the nominally diverse immigrants in "bridge & tunnel" are all staunch downtown liberals, none of whom would think of uttering a politically incorrect word about any subject whatsoever....

No link. If you want to read the whole thing (and I hope you do), buy Friday's Journal. I'm there, together with a whole lot of other good stuff.

Posted May 21, 3:35 AM

May 20, 2004

TT: Consumables

Wednesday was brisk, but I kept my promise to myself and made room for a little art:

- I read two more Isaac Bashevis Singer stories, "The Gentleman from Cracow" and "The Wife Killer," over lunch. As I mentioned the other day, I'm going to be writing an essay about Singer later this summer for Commentary, the magazine in which many of the stories reprinted in the Library of America's forthcoming three-volume Singer set originally appeared. I love Singer, but I've never written anything about him, and I thought it might be both amusing and oddly appropriate for a small-town WASP to do so for the famously (though never exclusively) Jewish Commentary, in whose pages I normally hold forth on musical matters. I told Neal Kozodoy, the editor, that I wanted to call the piece "A Goy Looks at Singer." Needless to say, we won't, but the piece is already starting to take shape in my head, and I think it's going to be good--and funny.

- I watched a self-edited version of Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night on my trusty DVR, zooming through the dumb stuff (and there's a lot of it) to concentrate on the scenes in which Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger appear together. Anybody who knows anything about the Deep South knows how absurdly implausible Steiger was in the role of a southern sheriff. Even so, he could be a hugely exciting actor in his overripe way, and between them, he and Poitier managed to muster up quite a bit of on-screen chemistry. My finger was never far from the fast-forward key, but I still enjoyed myself.

- Now playing on iTunes, naturally: Louis Armstrong's "Weather Bird," with Earl Hines in the hottest possible pursuit. Has there ever been a better record of anything? (It's been reissued a hundred times, but if you don't already have it in your CD collection, your best bet is to order a copy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1923-1934, Sony's wonderful Armstrong box set.)

I'm off to Washington as soon as I shower and pack. I'll be back some time tomorrow, and I'll try to work in a little pre-weekend blogging before I head out again to catch the first press preview of Bebe Neuwirth's one-woman Kurt Weill show.

Later.

Posted May 20, 10:01 AM

TT: Overture and beginners

Last night I went down to the New School for a panel discussion presented by the Jazz Journalists Association. Those of you who know me are probably wondering whether I've slipped a cog, since I loathe panel discussions and never join professional associations, but this get-together was different. The JJA invited representatives from the Institute of Jazz Studies, the Louis Armstrong House and Archives, and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to talk about their archival holdings and how jazz journalists can make use of them for research purposes.

As you may recall, my next book after All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine will be a full-scale biography of Louis Armstrong (the working title is Still Wailing), on which I expect to spend the next five years or so. Once I get All in the Dances put to bed early next month, I'll start on the Armstrong book at last. I recently received a small but timely grant to hire a research assistant--a luxury I've never had--and I chose Steph Steward, a student of journalism at Rutgers/Newark, where I had the pleasure of teaching a course in criticism for two years. Since Steph was one of my brightest pupils and the Rutgers/Newark library houses the Institute of Jazz Studies, it seemed foreordained that she should spend the summer doing my preliminary research-related dirty work.

When I got the e-mail announcing last night's panel discussion, it struck me that it might be a good way to introduce Steph to the archives where she'll be spending much of her time for the next three months. Little did I know how good it would be. Peggy Alexander, curator of the Armstrong Archives, gave a brilliant multimedia presentation on the marvels therein, including audio clips from Armstrong's personal tape archive; Dan Morgenstern, the celebrated jazz critic and Armstrong authority who runs the Institute of Jazz Studies, talked at fascinating length about the IJS and its holdings. In the audience was the jazz singer-bassist Carline Ray, who knew Armstrong (she was married to Luis Russell, who led Armstrong's big band in the Thirties and Forties).

By evening's end, Steph was so excited that I thought I might have to sedate her--she was ready to start sifting through reels of microfilm that very night. But, then, I was excited, too. I got the idea to write the Armstrong book a year and a half ago, and as soon as my agent sold the proposal to Harcourt, I put it out of my mind. I had to. Between All in the Dances and my new career as a part-time drama critic for The Wall Street Journal, I already had more than enough on my plate. I knew that once I started thinking about Armstrong in earnest, I'd quickly become preoccupied, even obsessed, so I made a point of not listening to his music or giving any thought to the book I'd be writing. Last night, I let myself race my mental engine for the first time.

Louis (everybody calls him that) has meant a great deal to me ever since I was a child. One of my favorite essays in A Terry Teachout Reader is called "Louis Armstrong, Eminent Victorian," and it was in the course of writing that piece that I became inspired to try my hand at an Armstrong biography. This is how it begins and ends:

My favorite Louis Armstrong anecdote concerns his audience with Pope Paul VI. The Holy Father, so the story goes, asked Armstrong if he and his wife had any children. "No, Daddy," the trumpeter cheerfully replied, "but we're still wailing." Though it seems unlikely that Armstrong said anything quite like that, it is the sort of thing one would have wanted him to say, and the two men did in fact meet at the Vatican in 1968--which is, of course, the real point of the story. They were photographed together, and an unmistakable glint of pleasure can be seen on the Pope's tired, worn face; as for Armstrong, he looks blissful. Perhaps he was thinking about how far he had come from New Orleans, where he was born in direst poverty in 1901, the bastard child of a fifteen-year-old whore who had no idea that her son would become the most celebrated American musician of the century....

Armstrong's own moral wholeness was caught in the words his mother spoke to him on her deathbed in 1927: "Son, carry on. You're a good boy. You treat everybody right, and everybody white and colored loves you. You have a good heart. You can't miss." Thirty-seven years later, I saw him for the first time, singing "Hello, Dolly" on The Ed Sullivan Show. I didn't know who the old man with the ear-to-ear smile was, but I can remember my mother calling me into the living room and saying, "This man won't be around forever. Someday you'll be glad you saw him." That was in 1964, back when the public schools in my home town were still segregated, two decades after a black man was dragged from our city jail, hauled through the streets at the end of a rope, and set afire. Yet even in a place where such a monstrous evil had once been wrought, white people came to love Louis Armstrong--and, just as important, to respect him--not merely for the beauty of the music he made but also for the self-evident goodness of the man who made it.

That great smile, then, was no game face, donned to please the paying customers: it told the truth about the man who wore it, a man who did not repine but returned love for hatred and sought salvation through work. "I think I had a beautiful life," he said not long before his death in 1971. "I didn't wish for anything I couldn't get, and I got pretty near everything I wanted because I worked for it." It would be hard to imagine a more suitable epitaph for jazz's most eminent Victorian.

Who wouldn't want to write a book about a man like that? H.L. Mencken, George Balanchine, and now Louis Armstrong: it's a pretty good American trilogy, as American trilogies go, and now the time has come to start sketching the third panel. Well do I know that the hard part is ahead of me, but even so, I can hardly wait to get All in the Dances wrapped up. Another long, straight road is stretched out in front of me, and I'm ready to start running again.

Posted May 20, 9:37 AM

TT: Misery loves company

For most of my life, I've kept my pens and pencils in a coffee mug. It used to be a Miami City Ballet mug, but I knocked that one off my desk and broke it a few weeks ago. Now it's a sturdy white number which sports a colorful (and accurate) self-caricature of the one and only Cup of Chicha, one of "About Last Night"'s favorite bloggers. You can purchase this item, and others no less fetching, by going here.

While I'm on the subject, you may not know that Nathalie Chicha, the blogger in question, has just launched a second blog called Another, which I added to the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column last week. Here's the mission statement of "Another":

This is an online space for my thoughts on depression and literature. My hope is that, in assembling an honest account of my depression and by providing relevant excerpts from writers' autobiographies and psychiatric literature, I can offer readers moments of identification that undermine the loneliness and shame of mental illness. And I suspect that blogs can contribute to the public discourse on depression in ways that more traditional representations of depression can't; since a blog is continually updated, its representation of depression is less likely to hide or mitigate contradictions and ambiguities, and more likely to challenge practiced wisdom and "pop psychology" simplifications....

To which I can only add that speaking as a chronic writer who has his own psychic ups and downs, I think this is a great idea, thoughtfully and imaginatively executed (as if I'd have expected anything else from Chicha).

Take a look--and buy a mug!

Posted May 20, 8:59 AM

TT: Almanac

"Try to preserve an author's style if he is an author and has a style."

Wolcott Gibbs, "Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles"

Posted May 20, 8:45 AM

May 19, 2004

TT: Artless in Manhattan

I watched the tail end of Master and Commander after I got home from a dinner party in Washington Heights last night, then read myself to sleep with the last chapter of David Herbert Donald's Lincoln. That, I regret to say, was that. Outside of a late-morning session at the gym, Tuesday went up in the smoke of a freelancer's chores and an afternoon nap. I didn't have time--or, rather, I didn't make time--to experience any art, save for the Chopin nocturnes and Mozart arias playing in the background at the dinner party. Not only did I see no plays or ballets, but I didn't listen to any music, nor did I read any new Isaac Bashevis Singer stories in between returning phone calls, answering e-mail, and fussing with my schedule. I wouldn't say it was a wasted day, but neither can I say that I stopped very often or smelled many roses. Saddest of all, I didn't even remember to knock off for a half-hour in the afternoon, sit down in my living room, and look at the contents of the Teachout Museum.

Why am I telling you all this? To remind myself that each day offers a new chance to strike a better balance. I have to write a Wall Street Journal review this morning and plan to make a start on another piece in the afternoon, and I'm taking Steph, my research assistant, to an early-evening meeting of jazz archivists (I'll tell you about it tomorrow). All that will surely keep me jumping from breakfast to bedtime, but I hope I remember to leave at least a little time in between for spiritual refreshment.

I live and work in an apartment crammed full of books and CDs and works of art. Outside my office window is a beautiful green tree, and a half-block east of my front door is Central Park. How can I possibly spend a whole day with my face turned from such things? I don't know, but I'll try not to do so, at least not today. Tomorrow can take care of itself.

Posted May 19, 9:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"When Photoplay asked him in 1975 if he was 'fulfilled,' the buzz word of the era, he snapped back, 'Whether you like it or not, when you're sixty-two you're fulfilled.'"

Kate Buford, Burt Lancaster: An American Life

Posted May 19, 8:30 AM

May 18, 2004

TT: Consumables

I lunched with Supermaud at our preferred downtown hangout, La Palapa Rockola (this time we played it smart and stayed out of the sun!), and spent most of the evening at a banquet. Nevertheless, I managed to quaff a good-sized portion of art before, in between, and after those two meals:

- I paid a visit to the press view of The Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection, the first of three planned exhibitions of paintings, sculpture, and drawings left to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Henri Matisse's son, a noted New York art dealer who died in 1989, and his wife, who died three years ago. Alas, it didn't do much for me, which isn't to say that it doesn't contain a number of beautiful pieces, most of them by Matisse the elder. But even the Matisses (most of them works on paper) didn't really gain from being shown as a group, while the more distinguished items by other artists seemed oddly familiar. "Tall Figure," for instance, is a first-class Giacometti bronze, but I've seen plenty of Giacometti bronzes that are just as good and look pretty much the same as this one. In any case, most of the really memorable pieces aren't even from the so-called Matisse Collection: they were purchased from Pierre Matisse's gallery long ago, either by the Met or by private collectors, and were already part of the Met's permanent collection. As for the "new" pieces by artists other than Matisse pére, I would have been more than happy to hang a pair of small Miró etchings in my apartment, but I didn't see a whole lot of other showstoppers on display. I mean, Reg Butler? Leonora Carrington? Paul Delvaux? Raymond Mason?

No doubt the Met's main interest in the Matisse Collection was and is its 30-odd Matisses, which is undoubtedly why the museum's curators romanced Pierre Matisse and his widow for a half-century and agreed to house and exhibit their collection as a collection. I don't mean to sound cynical--that's how big museums work--but as I looked at the Matisse Collection, I couldn't help but think how much wiser and more unselfish it would have been for the Matisses to break up their collection and donate it piece by piece to a couple of dozen smaller regional museums. Instead, they salved their egos by leaving the whole thing to the biggest and richest museum in America, which is why I spent my Monday morning walking briskly through yet another unadventurous school-of-Paris museum exhibition, wondering why I'd bothered to come.

- I watched a second chunk of Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night (unavailable on DVD or videocassette, damn it), which continues to impress me as one of the strongest debuts ever made by an American film director. I also started watching Fred Zinnemann's film version of The Day of the Jackal, but it proved to be sluggishly unentertaining, so I bailed out after twenty tiresome minutes and treated myself to the opening battle scene of Master and Commander, which is every bit as good as I remembered from seeing it in the theater late last year.

- I reread "Gimpel the Fool," the first story in the first volume of the Library of America's forthcoming three-volume set of Isaac Bashevis Singer's complete short stories. (I'm planning to write a long piece about Singer for Commentary later this summer.) I love Singer, but it'd been a while since I last read any of his stories, and I was delighted all over again by "Gimpel."

This passage jumped out at me:

However, I resolved that I would always believe what I was told. What's the good of not believing? Today it's your wife you don't believe; tomorrow it's God Himself you won't take stock in.

- My subway-and-bus book for the week is Kate Buford's Burt Lancaster: An American Life, which is error-prone and overwritten but great fun all the same--not unlike Lancaster himself, if you see what I mean.

- Now playing on iTunes: Benjamin Britten's 1968 recording of the Mozart G Minor Symphony. It's my personal favorite, though I also like Furtwängler, Szell, and Toscanini. Still, it never fails to give me an extra-special frisson to know that I'm listening to a great composer's interpretation of the music of another great composer.

Warning: I'm taking an overnight trip to Washington on Thursday, and I also need to concentrate on work-for-hire for the next three or four days. I'll post when possible and think fondly of you at all other times.

Posted May 18, 9:32 AM

TT: Almanac

"Carl Ender's criterion for buying a picture was that it should repel his senses and his intelligence. Only then could he be sure of having bought a valuable modern work. Long years of practice had brought him to the stage that he would be automatically impressed by anything he disliked, and would react to anything he liked with indignant suspicion. It was by such a method that he had secured his reputation of having an ‘infallible eye'."

Joseph Roth, Right and Left (trans. Michael Hofmann)

Posted May 18, 8:20 AM

May 17, 2004

TT: Just wondering

The sales rank of the Teachout Reader took a sharp upward tick on amazon.com yesterday, suggesting that it was probably reviewed in a big-city Sunday paper--favorably, I hope!

If you saw such a review, favorable or not, would you let me know and (if possible) send me a link? I'll post it, with thanks.

Posted May 17, 8:04 AM

TT: Roads taken

A reader wrote to ask if I'd consider posting a list of books and other works of art that had served as "turning points" in my life as a critic. I've never drawn up such a list, though I once wrote an essay for the New York Times Book Review called "I've Got a Crush on You" (it's in A Terry Teachout Reader) in which I talked about several authors whose styles I'd emulated at different times in my life. But what gave me the idea to become a critic--and what inspired me to become the kind of critic I became?

That's easier asked than answered, but I do know that two books I read for the first time in high school, Edmund Wilson's Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties (1950) and The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950-1965 (1966), were largely responsible for shaping my original understanding of what a critic does. Wilson isn't as widely read as he once was, and I'm not even sure he's all that well remembered. Back in the early Seventies, though, he still cast a long shadow across American literary life. I can't remember how I first heard about him--I'm sure nobody in Smalltown, U.S.A., knew who he was, then or now--but somehow or other I ran across his name and headed straight for the library, where I found two chunky little volumes of the essays he wrote for The New Yorker during his tenure as that magazine's chief book reviewer. I read them over and over again, to the point where I probably could have copied out their tables of contents from memory.

That was the first time I'd studied the work of a major critic at all closely, and the experience left a deep and lasting imprint on my own writing. Wilson's brusquely direct style was journalistic in the best sense of the word: he didn't write down to the middlebrow readers of The New Yorker, but he had a knack for talking about whatever interested him in a way that was both lively and intelligible. Just as important, what interested Wilson almost always turned out to interest me as well. It was in his essays that I first read about Kingsley Amis, W.H. Auden, Max Beerbohm, Raymond Chandler, Cyril Connolly, Edward Gorey, Justice Holmes, Samuel Johnson, Vladimir Nabokov, Anthony Powell, Dawn Powell, Evelyn Waugh, Edith Wharton, and Angus Wilson. That's quite a list.

Wilson, I soon discovered, was a kind of freelance intellectual, a critic without portfolio who chose to make his living as a working journalist rather than by teaching. He had modeled his career after that of H.L. Mencken, and I in turn modeled my career after his, deciding early on that I would try to find a way to make my living by writing for an educated audience of non-specialists about whatever interested me. Even then, I had an inkling that the academy was no place for the cultural dilettante I was in the process of becoming, and I also knew by some fortunate instinct that I didn't want to be a staff writer beholden to a single omnipotent employer. Wilson and Mencken taught me that it was possible to be a full-time freelance critic, and even though I held several "day jobs" before striking out on my own, I knew from the beginning where I wanted to end up.

As I grew older, I found Wilson's style and approach (as well as his taste) somewhat constricting, and I became interested in other critics who would ultimately do far more to shape the sound of my writing. It's been a number of years since I last read either Classics and Commercials or The Bit Between My Teeth. But I still own the copies of both books that I purchased thirty-odd years ago, and whenever my eye happens to fall on either one, I make a point of paying silent homage to the writer who did more than any other to set me on the path I follow to this day.

Posted May 17, 8:03 AM

TT: Consumables

I'm now into the sixth day of hewing to my "About Last Night"-related resolutions (no weekend blogging and no computer after eleven p.m.). Did you know that going to bed at a reasonable hour is refreshing? Or that it's fun to take a walk on a warm summer afternoon? Who knew? And weirdly enough, our traffic on Saturday and Sunday barely declined from its usual level, even though there were no new postings. Go figure....

Be all this as it may, I did manage to consume a certain amount of art over the weekend:

- I saw a matinee of Sarah Jones' bridge & tunnel, about which I'll be writing in The Wall Street Journal.

- I watched a couple of DVR-recorded films harvested from Turner Classic Movies and put on ice for later viewing. Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross (ineptly remade by Steven Soderbergh as The Underneath) is a cherchez-la-femme-noir in which Burt Lancaster sticks his head into Yvonne De Carlo's mouth and gets it bitten off. Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie is a voodoo variation on Jane Eyre that packs an astonishing amount of romantic atmosphere into sixty-eight minutes' worth of low-budget B-movie footage. Both have superlative scores, Criss Cross by Miklós Rózsa and I Walked with a Zombie by Roy Webb, who in a better-regulated world would be at least as famous as Rózsa or Bernard Herrmann.

- I trolled the Web for modern American prints at auction and found a couple of potential bargains. I'm still frustrated from having lost out on that Hans Hofmann lithograph, so wish me luck this time.

- I read Sir John Gielgud: A Life in Letters, about which more in the Top Five module of the right-hand column (completely updated since last week--take a look).

- Now playing on iTunes: Roger Kellaway Cello Quartet, which I reviewed in yesterday's Washington Post (see the "Teachout Elsewhere" module of the right-hand column for a link to my piece). I can't get enough of it.

More as it happens....

Posted May 17, 8:01 AM

TT: Almanac

"Few things pay off better in prestige and hard cash--granted you present it in an entertaining way--than safe fearlessness."

James Agee, Agee on Film

Posted May 17, 8:00 AM

May 14, 2004

TT: The enemy within

As those who know me are all too well aware, I harbor a number of variously morbid notions about work, the worst one being that I feel obliged to do it all the time. A blog is a dangerously efficient way to feed these notions, which is why I finally came to my senses and decided to stop posting on weekends. That, however, was only a start. On Wednesday night, I began Phase Two of my personal program of blog-related mental hygeine: I shut off my computer at 10:45 and didn't turn it on again until Thursday morning. I've learned from experience that when I come home from a performance and go straight to my iBook, I invariably end up blogging, surfing, and e-mailing until two or three in the morning, a habit incompatible with long life. So I went cold turkey on Wednesday, and I'm doing the same thing today. The postings you're reading now were written late Thursday afternoon and stored for publication on Friday. From now on, this computer is going to sleep no later than eleven o'clock each night, followed by its owner.

Needless to say, this may mean...oh, hell, I don't have to explain myself, right? Repeat after me: The computer is my enemy. That's my new mantra. Most likely I'll post something or other every weekday, but it may not be waiting for you first thing in the morning. Instead, I'm going to blog when I blog, and you'll read it when you read it, and we'll both be happier. Cool?

Posted May 14, 12:03 PM

TT: Almanac

"Those who can do, do; those who can't, teach; and those who can't teach work in television."

Sparkle Hayter, What's a Girl Gotta Do

Posted May 14, 12:01 PM

TT: Try, try again

It's Friday, so I'm in The Wall Street Journal, reporting on revivals of two oft-reworked shows. The first is Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul, about which I had mostly but not entirely negative things to say:

Tony Kushner's "Homebody/Kabul," now playing through May 30 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's BAM Harvey Theater, runs for four hours (with two intermissions) and starts off with an hour-long monologue. That's too damn long, even for an especially well-made play, which "Homebody/Kabul" isn't. It is, in fact, three or four plays, none of them well made or mutually compatible, scrambled together into a rambling torrent of verbiage that goes on and on and on.

Would that a machete had been applied to Mr. Kushner's much-revised script, for somewhere amid the domestic melodrama and arch drawing-room comedy is a strong, serious, intellectually challenging play about Islamic fundamentalism and its discontents, one in which the author of "Angels in America" contrives to steer cleer of the agree-with-me-or-burn-in-hell hysterics that are his number-one dramaturgical vice. Alas, his number-two vice, as "Angels in America" proved and "Homebody/Kabul" demonstrates yet again, is that he has no sense of proportion....

The second was the New York Philharmonic's semi-staged concert version (now closed, alas) of Leonard Bernstein's Candide, which I loved, not least for its Cunegonde:

I was overjoyed to learn that the New York Philharmonic was presenting a semi-staged concert version directed by Lonny Price ("Master Harold...and the boys") and featuring a mixed cast of Broadway stars and opera singers. Might this perhaps be the perfectly gauged compromise that hitherto had eluded "Candide" buffs? Not quite--but almost.

Kristin Chenoweth, who took a week off from "Wicked" to appear in "Candide," was the best of all possible Cunegondes, not excluding Barbara Cook, who created the role. Cunegonde, Candide's shopworn sweetheart, is far beyond the reach of ordinary musical-comedy singers, for "Glitter and Be Gay," her big number, is an all-stops-out coloratura aria requiring a rock-solid high E flat. I knew the diminutive Ms. Chenoweth had operatic training, but it never occurred to me that her high notes would have survived years of Broadway belting, much less that she could still nail them with the brilliance and panache of a full-time opera star. Add to that her impish charm and switchblade-sharp timing and...well, let's just say I'm no longer capable of being surprised by the amazing Ms. Chenoweth. After "Glitter and Be Gay," I wouldn't have boggled if she'd picked up the baton and conducted the second act....

No link. To read the whole thing, buy the paper. That's what I do every Friday!

Posted May 14, 12:00 PM

TT: Consumables

I kept my promise--I shut off the iBook at eleven o'clock last night and didn't boot up again until after breakfast. Nor will I blog a single word this coming weekend. To all those who wrote to cheer me on in my newfound resolve, many thanks.

Now, on to yesterday's art:

- I saw The Two and Only, Jay Johnson's one-man show about his life as a ventriloquist, which I'll be reviewing in next week's Wall Street Journal.

- I spent a good chunk of the afternoon looking at a pair of shows currently up at one of my favorite Upper East Side art spots, Salander-O'Reilly Galleries (20 E. 79th St., through June 25). Downstairs is a delightful single-room display of early paintings by Corot. Upstairs is "Constable's Skies," a museum-quality exhibition consisting of two dozen cloud studies and finished paintings by John Constable, including several museum loans. Salander-O'Reilly is billing it as "the first sky studies show by John Constable in the United States," which I think is right. In any case, it's a dazzler. The paintings of clouds made by Constable in 1821 and 1822 rank high among his most compelling works, all the more so because so many of them seem to border on abstraction. (In fact, they're so literally representational that Constable actually inscribed the date, time of day, and weather conditions on the backs of the canvases.)

I almost hate to blog about "Constable's Skies," since Our Girl is a huge Constable fan who will be royally vexed by its presence in New York, she being stuck in Chicago for the immediate future. The good news is that there's an excellent catalogue, though so far it hasn't yet turned up on amazon.com. When it does, I'll post a link.

- I'm rereading Charlton Heston's In the Arena: An Autobiography. Kindly omit boggling: In the Arena is one of the very few books by a movie star that is both intelligent and well-written. (Heston wrote it without benefit of a ghost, I might add--you can tell by the literary idiosyncrasies, including a decidedly shaky grasp of the Theory of the Parenthesis). Not only does Heston shed considerable light on the complex craft of film acting, but he was a class-A raconteur who dishes up polished anecdotes at every possible opportunity. Here's one of my favorites, a story about Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth, in which Heston played a Ringling Bros. manager:

DeMille and the circus was a marriage made in movie heaven. He picked up his Oscar for Best Picture the following spring, and I got an enormous boost in my career. When I went into his office the next morning to congratulate him, he said, "Chuck, you've gotten some fine personal notices for this picture, but I want to read you one that may be the best review you'll ever get in your life."

He then read me a letter from a man who was enchanted with the picture. DeMille had caught not only the look but the feel of the circus perfectly. The cast was wonderful, especially Jimmy Stewart as the clown. Betty Hutton had never been better, nor had Cornel Wilde. "And I was amazed," the writer concluded, "at how well the circus manager did in there with the real actors."

Isn't that a wonderful story?

- Now playing on iTunes: Bill Evans' recording of Alex North's "Love Theme from Spartacus," a track from Conversations with Myself, the 1963 album on which Evans plays three pianos simultaneously, two of them overdubbed. (Somehow it seemed appropriate--I'm currently reading the Ben-Hur chapter of In the Arena.)

"Love Theme from Spartacus," by the way, was my introduction to Evans, back when I was a junior in high school, and I'll never forget the shock of hearing the exquisitely commingled arpeggios with which it begins. This is the most beautiful music I've ever heard, I said to myself, and though I've heard a lot more music since then, I doubt I've heard anything more beautiful.

On which note I'm off in search of further adventures. See you Monday.

Posted May 14, 9:36 AM

May 13, 2004

TT: Almanac

Now on this out of season afternoon
Day schools which cater for the sort of boy
Whose parents go by Pullman once a month
To do a show in town, pour out their young
Into the sharply red October light.
Here were The Drive and Buckhurst Road converge
I watch the rival gangs and am myself
A schoolboy once again in shivering shorts.
I see the dust of sherbet on the chin
Of Andrew Knox well-dress'd, well-born, well-fed,
Even at nine a perfect gentleman,
Willie Buchanan waiting at his side--
Another Scot, eruptions on his skin.
I hear Jack Drayton whistling from the fence
Which hides the copper domes of "Cooch Behar".
That was the signal. So there's no escape.
A race for Willow Way and jump the hedge
Behind the Granville Bowling Club? Too late.
They'll catch me coming out in Seapink Lane.
Across the Garden of Remembrance? No,
That would be blasphemy and bring bad luck.
Well then, I'm for it. Andrew's at me first,
He pinions me in that especial grip
His brother learned in Kobe from a Jap
(No chance for me against the Japanese).
Willie arrives and winds me with a punch
Plum in the tummy, grips the other arm.
"You're to be booted. Hold him steady, chaps!"
A wait for taking aim. Oh trees and sky!
Then crack against the column of my spine,
Blackness and breathlessness and sick with pain
I stumble on the asphalt. Off they go
Away, away, thank God, and out of sight
So that I lie quite still and climb to sense
Too out of breath and strength to make a sound.

Now over Polegate vastly sets the sun;
Dark rise the Downs from darker looking elms,
And out of Southern railway trains to tea
Run happy boys down various Station Roads,
Satchels of homework jogging on their backs,
So trivial and so healthy in the shade
Of these enormous Downs. And when they're home,
When the Post-Toasties mixed with Golden Shred
Make for the kiddies such a scrumptious feast,
Does Mum, the Persil-user, still believe
That there's no Devil and that youth is bliss?
As certain as the sun behind the Downs
And quite as plain to see, the Devil walks.

Sir John Betjeman, "Original Sin on the Sussex Coast"

Posted May 13, 12:00 PM

TT: Consumables

My art engine has finally turned over after a week-long stall. Here's what's I've been up to:

- I hung the Teachout Museum's latest acquisition, Neil Welliver's Night Scene, a thirteen-color woodcut (my first) made in 1982. I spent a pleasant hour yesterday afternoon standing on a rickety ladder, juggling three other prints in order to find exactly the right spot for "Night Scene." Figuring out where to hang a piece of art is half the fun of owning it. (Well, maybe not half, but you know what I mean.)

As it happens, I already own one Welliver print, an unsigned lithograph called "Canada Geese," so I rehung that one in my sleeping loft, which strikes me as the very height of low-budget luxury!

- I read George R. Gaddis' Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America. Austin was the man who turned Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum, long a sleepy backwater far from the beaten path of even the most assiduous museumgoers, into a major center of activity for the modern movement in America. (It was solely because of Austin that the world premiere of the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts took place at the Wadsworth Atheneum, and he also played a key role in bringing George Balanchine to this country.)

Gaddis' book is solid and informative, but I'm struck by a major failure of interpretation on his part: he doesn't seem to have understood that the common thread running through many, perhaps most of Chick Austin's innovations, from Four Saints to his twin passions for the neo-romanticists and seventeenth-century baroque art, was his taste for camp. (I'm not absolutely sure, but I don't think the word "camp" appears anywhere in Magician of the Modern.) This strikes me as close to inexcusable, especially given the fact that his book is reasonably frank about Austin's bisexuality. While you certainly don't have to be gay to grasp such matters--I'm as straight as a stick--it's hard to imagine a homosexual writer making the same mistake.

- I've taken of late to viewing movies in half-hour chunks of in-between time, a practice facilitated by my digital video recorder. Last night I finished watching Howard Zieff's Hearts of the West, a sweet little spoof of the "B" westerns of the Thirties. Jeff Bridges, the star, looked impossibly youthful in 1975. It's hard to imagine that he would someday metamorphose into the Mitchumesque star of noir-flavored films like The Fabulous Baker Boys (which I adore).

- Today I'm nibbling at They Live by Night, Nicholas Ray's 1949 film version of Edward Anderson's Depression-era novel Thieves Like Us. It was Ray's first movie, the only one of his major films I hadn't seen (it's not available on DVD, and I'm not sure there was ever a VHS version, either--thank you, Turner Classic Movies!). More as I make my way through it, but I'm already dazzled by Ray's pioneering use of a helicopter to film the opening sequence. It's excitingly rough and jumpy, nothing like the slick, swoopy aerial cinematography to which we've long since become accustomed.

- Now playing on iTunes: Bill Evans' 1977 trio version of "You Must Believe in Spring," newly reissued on CD. Mmmm.

Enough for now. Alex Ross will be knocking on my door at any moment for a private view of the Teachout Museum. This reminds me to remind you that Alex now has a Web site, The Rest Is Noise, which I added to the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column last night. It's not quite a blog (though it seems to be evolving into one willy-nilly), but it does contain links to Alex's New Yorker essays on music, which I never fail to find provocative and stimulating.

After lunch, it's back to the grindstone (I'm in the process of updating my playgoing schedule for the next couple of months), after which I'll be heading down to the Atlantic Theater to see Jay Johnson's The Two and Only, a one-man play by and about a ventriloquist, which I suppose means that it's really a two-man play, right? Either way, you'll be reading about it in The Wall Street Journal at some point in the near future.

In the meantime, enjoy the weather--I see warm sunshine out my office window, and hope to experience it at first hand sooner or later!

Posted May 13, 11:48 AM

TT: Right twice a day

It's not exactly news that I'm no great fan of Tony Kushner and his public utterances, theatrical or otherwise, but sometimes we do find ourselves on the same page. On Tuesday Kushner gave a speech at a conference of the League of American Theatres and Producers. Most of it was variously silly and self-righteous, as is Kushner's wont, but toward the end he delivered himself of this paragraph:

My little niece, Ciara, who lives in Vienna, has listened all her young life to opera, my brother is first horn of the Vienna Symphoniker and so Ciara has heard, since she was embryonic, great operas, Wagner, Verdi, Massenet, Schonberg, Tchaikovsky. But recently the Vienna Symphoniker played West Side Story. Now we sing Tony and maria duets together, Ciara and I – she's six, she lives in Vienna, she knows nothing of New York nor of American racial strife nor, as is appropriate for any six year old, much about strife period, so why did West Side Story get inside her so instantaneously, and why is she now running about singing My Fair Lady and Oklahoma? I remembered the early and overwhelmingly powerful spell these shows cast when, an adult, I watched the New York Philharmonic do a concert version of Sweeney Todd for Mr. Sondheim's 70th birthday, and feeling the entire audience of jaded, battle-weary adult New Yorkers levitate out of their seats borne aloft on a cloud of compound vapor in which terror and glee and sheer sensual delight were indescribably and perfectly blended – it was ecstasy, pure and simple, and we've all felt it, in the presence of great musical theater – at six or at six hundred, it is instantly recognizable, Bacchic joy, and as close to irresistible and universal as anything other than Shakespeare or Mozart....

I was at the same performance, and that's exactly what it felt like.

(Read the whole thing here--but don't expect miracles!)

Posted May 13, 10:37 AM

TT: Ghost writers in the sky

Ever since I got back from Monticello the other day, I've been thinking about American presidents who could write--not just competently, but with real distinction. The list is very short, and though it has some unexpected names on it (did you know that Calvin Coolidge was a classicist?), I doubt many people would question the presence of Abraham Lincoln at its head. Rhetorically speaking, Lincoln was America's Churchill, and so it's not altogether surprising that I felt the urge to reread David Herbert Donald's Lincoln, by common consent the greatest of modern Lincoln biographies, though I confess to still getting pleasure out of the one-volume abridgement of Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln, albeit for rather different reasons. (Interestingly, Donald isn't snobbish about Sandburg's much-maligned book, which he correctly describes as "the most imaginative and humanly flavorful of all the [Lincoln] biographies.")

One of the passages in Lincoln that struck me most forcibly when I first read it in 1995 was Donald's description of the writing of the First Inaugural Address. It seems that Lincoln had help--quite substantial help, in fact--in drafting the unforgettable last paragraph of that immortal speech. William Seward, soon to become Lincoln's secretary of state, told the president-elect that he needed to "meet and remove prejudice and passion in the South, and despondency and fear in the East," and suggested the following lines:

I close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren....The mystic chords which proceeding from so many battle fields and so many patriot graves pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.

Lincoln rewrote them as follows:

I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies....The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

To compare these two versions is to receive an invaluable lesson in the difference between a good idea and a great piece of writing. Even so, anyone ignorant of American history who saw both versions set up in parallel columns would very likely suspect the second writer of having plagiarized the first one. Without doubt, the coda of the First Inaugural wouldn't have existed had Seward not supplied Lincoln with his preliminary draft--yet what Lincoln did to Seward's clunky prose cannot be dismissed as mere editing. If I may borrow an example from the world of jazz, it's more like what Gil Evans did to the slow movement of Joaquin Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez when he "arranged" Sketches of Spain for Miles Davis. Evans' version of Concierto de Aranjuez is not an "original" composition in the normal meaning of the word. It is based explicitly on Rodrigo's music. Yet it is pure Gil Evans, so completely transformed as to have become an independent composition, one arguably superior to its source material. So who's the composer?

Real editing, even at its best, is a different thing entirely, though the difference can be subtle to the point of tenuity. I worked as a magazine and newspaper editor for many years before becoming a full-time freelance writer, and on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion I edited a piece so extensively that had it been a screenplay, I would have received an on-screen credit. When the piece won a major magazine award a few months later, I smiled wryly, as did my colleagues, yet it never occurred to any of us to blow the whistle on the writer. He "wrote" the piece, and that, so far as we were concerned, was that.

One reason why I kept my mouth shut is that I've been the beneficiary of superior editing on innumerable occasions, never that extensive but at times...well, quite substantial. At the time of the original publication of one of the best essays in A Terry Teachout Reader, I received a letter of praise from a well-known author who singled out for particular comment a sentence I hadn't written. To be sure, it had been implicit in my draft, but I didn't make it fully manifest: my editor did the job for me, and I gladly accepted his contribution. That sentence now appears in the Teachout Reader without benefit of asterisk or footnote. It's taken for granted that I wrote it, and I don't propose to blow the whistle on myself now. That's what good editors do--they make your stuff better by any means necessary, and they keep their mouths shut about it.

I remembered that sentence of "mine" when I read the two drafts of the last paragraph of Lincoln's First Inaugural. It amuses me to know that Lincoln relied so heavily on Seward's contribution--yet I'm awed by the use he made of it. Does that knowledge lessen my admiration for Lincoln the writer and rhetorician? If anything, it makes me admire him all the more. As T.S. Eliot wrote in The Sacred Wood, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion."

I'm neither a poet nor a Lincoln, but I'm a good enough critic to know the carpentry of a great writer when I see it--even if he borrowed the lumber from someone else's yard.

Posted May 13, 9:25 AM

May 12, 2004

TT: Almanac

"Oscar Williams's new book is pleasanter and a little quieter than his old, which gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter."

Randall Jarrell, Kipling, Auden & Co.

Posted May 12, 12:54 PM

TT: Too tired to consume

This is real time: I just got back from Brooklyn, where I saw the opening night of Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul at BAM Harvey. It runs for four hours (don't believe the sign in the lobby that says three hours and 40 minutes), and the subway ride home took something just under forever.

Bedtime now, review in the morning. I'll try to get something good up later in the day. Remember what I said about champagne and roses? Well, it ain't!

Posted May 12, 12:48 PM

May 11, 2004

TT: And I'm the only man, ja!

A reminder for those of you joining us late: this is a four-handed blog, and the other two hands belong to the pseudonymous Our Girl in Chicago, who has returned to the blogosphere after a much-lamented absence. The headlines for her posts begin with "OGIC" (just as mine begin with "TT").

Our Girl also has her very own mailbox, and you can write to her directly by going to the top module of the right-hand column, scrolling down to WRITE US, and clicking on her e-mail address, which is directly below mine. I don't mind reading her mail, but it's ever so much nicer when she gets it straight from you!

A further reminder: if you don't want your incoming letters to get tossed out with the spam, make sure to include an intelligible subject line, i.e., "Your Dumb Post About Subject Lines" or "You're All Wet About Raymond Chandler." Blank subject lines, "Hi Terry!," or emoticons unaccompanied by text tend not to get opened (unless I'm feeling lucky).

We return you now to my irregularly scheduled bedtime.

Posted May 11, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"I feel now that gastronomical perfection can be reached in these combinations: one person dining alone, usually upon a couch or a hill side; two people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good restaurant; six people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good home.

"Three or four people sometimes attain perfection either in public or in private, but they must be very congenial, else the conversation, both spoken and unsaid, which is so essential a counterpoint to the meal's harmony, will turn dull and forced. Usually six people act as whets, or goads, in this byplay and make the whole more casual, if, perhaps, less significant.

"The six sould be capable of decent social behavior: that is, no two of them should be so much in love as to bore the others, nor at the opposite extreme should they be carrying on any sexual or professional feud which could put poison on the plates all must eat from. A good combination would be one married couple, for warm composure; one less firmly established, to add a note of investigation to the talk; and two strangers of either sex, upon whom the better-acquainted diners could sharpen their questioning wits."

M.F.K. Fisher, An Alphabet for Gourmets

Posted May 11, 12:00 PM

TT: (Un)consumables

Alas, I consumed no art today, other than that which hangs on my walls. Instead, I spent the day taking part in a teleconference of farflung judges for an Award to Be Named Later, answering accumulated e-mail, working on my schedule for May and June, and nibbling away at a stack of all the other pesky little chores that make up a full-time freelancer's life. Believe me, it ain't always champagne, roses, and opening nights.

I'm posting earlier than usual so that I can end my lengthy day with a half-hour or so of a Gary Cooper movie, Anthony Mann's Man of the West, but I may not even bother with that. I have to get up first thing in the morning to write a record review, and what appeals most at the moment is at least eight hours' worth of preliminary sleep.

Better luck Tuesday!

Posted May 11, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Let the OG drive

David Bowman, author of the well-titled book Let the Dog Drive, has checked in to say that I should drive (gladly), and to set me straight: the emphasis is equally on "dog" and "drive." As I told him, I more or less realized that, but still found it fun to imagine contexts in which one would say "Let the dog drive," or alternatively, "Let the dog drive." He adds that "Jim Harrison suggested to me that the sequel should be titled Let the Dog Drive Further."

Meanwhile, Lizzie says the book has good word-of-mouth, and in her comments Bowman tells the story behind the novel's Joan Didion blurb. I'm adding his book to my queue.

Here's hoping the dog drives better than Toonces.

Posted May 11, 3:49 AM

May 10, 2004

TT: Attention, please

In the interests of preserving my sanity, I've decided to stop blogging on Saturdays and Sundays. Most other artbloggers (as well as a good many warbloggers) stick to a weekday schedule, and I've decided to go with the flow. OGIC can do whatever she wants, but I myself will henceforth stand mute between Friday evening and Monday morning.

It goes without saying that you'll still be able to visit "About Last Night" 24/7, and those of you in the habit of catching up with us on the weekends need not change your reading habits. Just don't expect anything fresh!

As always, thanks for reading us and writing to us. We're still having fun.

Posted May 10, 12:34 PM

TT: Consumables

O.K., here's the truth: I went to Washington, D.C., sans laptop, following the advice of a famous film cop and doing as little as possible. I didn't see any plays and didn't go to any concerts. (In fact, I didn't listen to any music at all for four straight days, which may be a New World Record.) Instead, I had breakfast with Mr. Modern Art Notes and took in a bunch of paintings. Specifically:

- I finally, finally saw "Discovering Milton Avery" at the Phillips Collection. More later, but I found it fabulous. Check it out, soonest.

- I also went for the first time to the Freer Gallery, where I consumed a lot of Whistlers, none of which caused me to change my mind about the old boy's work (elegant but etiolated), and began what I suspect will be a lengthy process of getting a solid grip on Asian art (which I like very much but about which I know as yet only slightly more than nothing).

- I spent most of Saturday visiting Monticello, which I'd never before seen. Again, more later, but I'll say now that the house, fascinating though it was, didn't exactly make me warm to Thomas Jefferson as a man....

- I went to bed early each night and read myself to sleep. Among the titles on my nightstand were Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye (still his best book, though The Little Sister comes damned close), Meryle Secrest's Frank Lloyd Wright (which I hadn't reread since I reviewed it in 1992), and Jack McLaughlin's Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder (a superior piece of scholarship, guaranteed 100% readable).

(Incidentally, I returned to find in my mailbox the bound galleys of the Library of America's forthcoming three-volume set of Isaac Bashevis Singer's short stories, about which you can expect to hear at regular intervals in the months ahead.)

- Now playing on iTunes: nothing. I'm headed for bed momentarily. The coming week doesn't look too terribly oppressive, so brace yourself for bloggery--my right arm is tanned and I'm rested and ready.

P.S. Fresh Top Fives will be rolled out all this week, starting now. Look and see.

Posted May 10, 12:04 PM

TT: News of the book in review

Thanks to Sarah (who accompanied it with some greatly appreciated praise of her own), I returned from my Secure Undisclosed Location to find Victoria A. Brownworth's review of A Terry Teachout Reader, published in yesterday's Baltimore Sun:

Teachout's engaging style and diversity of tastes means there is something for everyone in this book as he covers subjects from Elvis Presley to John Steinbeck (the newly adopted darling of the Oprah book club) to the end of vinyl to the horrific lynching of an African-American man in the town he grew up in. For those who enjoy criticism, this Reader is a book to savor, get angry with and reflect upon.

If Teachout has one consistent topic it is genius - great (Louis Armstrong), middling (Dawn Powell) and small (Randolph Scott) - and the majority of pieces collected here - essays, profiles, reviews - reflect that attraction. One charming trait of Teachout the cultural critic is he appears to genuinely want his readers to enjoy what he enjoys (those who read criticism know how rare that is in a critic) or at the very least understand why he so enjoys it....

Read the whole thing here.

Posted May 10, 12:03 PM

TT: This looks like a job for Mr. TMFTML

Apropos of last week's posting about whether Raymond Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse attended Dulwich College simultaneously, a reader writes:

Moments in greatness: suppose if Wodehouse had had to fag for Chandler? The parody almost writes itself.

You know who you are. You know what to do.

Posted May 10, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"I send you a criticism on my three volumes, which, I confess, gave me a great deal of pleasure; pray return it to me. I have not the smallest idea who wrote it; but it is evidently written (my own vanity apart) by a very sensible man, and a good writer. Whether I have done what he says I have done, and am what he says I am, I do not know; but he has justly stated what I always aimed at, and what I wished to be."

Sydney Smith, letter to "Mrs. Grote," July 16, 1839

Posted May 10, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"Among Venice's spells is one of peculiar potency: the power to awaken the philistine dozing in the sceptic's breast. People of this kind--dry, prose people of superior intelligence--object to feeling what they are supposed to feel, in the presence of marvels. They wish to feel something else. The extreme of this position is to feel nothing. Such a case was Stendhal's: Venice left him cold. He was there only a short time and departed with barely a comment to pursue an intrigue in Padua. Another lover of Italy, D. H. Lawrence (on one side of his nature, a debunker, a plain home-truth teller like Ruskin before him), put down his first reaction in a poem: 'Abhorrent green, slippery city, Whose Doges were old and had ancient eyes....' And Gibbon 'was afforded some hours of astonishment and some days of disgust by the spectacle of Venice.'"

Mary McCarthy, Venice Observed

Posted May 10, 2:39 AM

OGIC: Take it from the top

Favorite titles are streaming in from readers, in some cases with annotation:

No, But I Saw the Movie
Dewey Defeats Truman
Memories of the Ford Administration
Some Tame Gazelle
Hot Water
We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (attention-getting, of course, but also good because sadness and outrage and helplessness seem built right into the title...)
The Artificial Nigger (bracing, can't not read it after that)
Bend Sinister (a mysteriously evocative title, with good Nabokovian euphony)
All's Well That Ends Well
The Scarlet Letter
Dude, Where's My Country?
Mystery Train (so good, it's been a song and book and movie title)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Operation Shylock
A Kiss to Build a Dream On

And, my new favorite: Let the Dog Drive. Just one question: is the emphasis on "Dog" or "Drive"?

Meanwhile, the originator of the question, Eve Tushnet, has risen to my challenge and named her top five titles:

I'm going to use the same core criterion I used for the "43 favorite movies" list: stickiness. These are five titles I will never be able to get out of my head--titles that shape the way I view the world.

5 EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE
4 GONE WITH THE WIND
3 THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA
2 THE OCTOBER PEOPLE
1 A WINTER'S TALE

As someone who has always been terrible with titles, I feel it's only fair to give terrible titles a nod here, too. They're rarer than you might suppose. The vast majority of book titles are just lukewarm water, serviceable and forgettable. To attain true offensiveness, they almost have to get cute on you, as with my sole (for now) nominee, the true book Castration: An Abbreviated History of Manhood, by Gary Taylor. If I were him, I'd blame the publisher.

Posted May 10, 2:24 AM

OGIC: Because, you see, I have this friend

In the Financial Times, Simon Kuper writes about his weekly soccer game and its weekly aftermath:

For 90 minutes I lumber around kicking people and shouting, at the end of which we have usually lost.

Then I spend the whole week thinking about it. Myself and some of the people close to me are currently going through big things--marriage, divorce, cancer, memory loss--but often, while someone is going on to me about one of the aforesaid, I find myself thinking: "Was my pass bad, or was it Carlos's fault for not coming towards the ball?"

If someone who unduly obsesses over their own athletic performance like this is a goof--

Wodehouse even has a word for my condition. He calls it being a "goof." "'A Goof' . . . One of those unfortunate beings who have allowed the noblest of sports to cut into their souls, like some malignant growth. The goof, you have to understand, is not like you and me. He broods. He becomes morbid. His goofery unfits him for the battles of life."

--what do you call someone who unduly obsesses over the athletic performance of complete strangers?

And, more to the point, do I really want to know?

(Link via Crooked Timber.)

Posted May 10, 1:47 AM

May 7, 2004

TT: One for three

No, I'm not here, nor am I blogging from my secret hideaway. I wrote this posting on Wednesday and stowed it with Our Girl for your Friday-morning delectation.

As usual, I'm in The Wall Street Journal today, this time with reviews of Bryony Lavery's Frozen, Mark Medoff's Prymate, and Neil LaBute's The Distance from Here.

Frozen is brilliant:

Here's a phrase that makes my blood run cold: "That play deals with a lot of really good issues." I myself prefer plays that deal with life, not issues, but the two have been known to overlap on occasion, and it's not unheard of for a really good playwright to use a "really good issue" as the pretext for a voyage into the unchartable labyrinth of human motivation. More often, what you get is a pulpit-pounding sermon with a politically correct moral, but Bryony Lavery's "Frozen," which transferred to Circle in the Square this week after a successful Off-Broadway run, is the polar opposite, an issue-driven play that grinds no axes. It is superior in every way-script, performances, staging, set. If I had tonight off, I'd go see it again....

Prymate is awful:

Esther (Phyllis Frelich), a deaf-mute anthropologist, steals Graham (André de Shields), a gorilla with emphysema to whom she has taught American Sign Language, from a research lab run by her ex-lover Avrum (James Naughton), a heartless scientist who wants to infect Graham with HIV in order to find a cure for AIDS. Accompanied by Allison (Heather Tom), a sexy sign-language interpreter, Avrum tracks down Esther and Graham in the New Mexico wilderness, and...

You get the idea, right? Right. And The Distance from Here isn't much better:

Mr. LaBute, who customarily writes about upper-middle-class folk with too much leisure time on their hands, has chosen this time around to write about a bunch of working-class kids, their mothers, and their mothers' boyfriends. He explains in a program note that "The Distance from Here" is an attempt to "acknowledge a kind of person I've always known well but consciously and constantly marginalized. I never liked the way those kids dressed, or the music they listened to, or the way they talked, so from the beginning they were, in essence, dead to me....They knew, even at sixteen, that they had absolutely no hope in this life."

A lot of really good issues, yes? Well, maybe, if Mr. LaBute actually knew something about his teenaged losers and their hopeless lives. Alas, he hasn't a clue as to how they talk ("I feel you've been wronged"), just as his notion of fully rounded characterization is to make everyone on stage smoke cigarettes and say "whatever" at ten-second intervals....

No link. Whaddya do? Buy a paper! What does it cost? A dollar!

Posted May 07, 12:48 PM

OGIC: Title envy

The always captivating Eve Tushnet has been listing great titles, of books mainly. She comes up with so many, though, that the list quickly becomes a little bit numbing, the titles a little indistinct from each other. I'm curious what she'd say are her top five. Challenge!

Here are a few that I didn't see on her list or those of her readers: Two Girls, Fat and Thin. I Lost It at the Movies (or should I say Kiss Kiss Bang Bang?). The Man without Qualities. The Gastronomical Me. And, what the hell, Consider the Oyster. And of course my all-purpose favorite, The Dud Avocado.

Speaking of Mary Gaitskill, while scanning my bookshelves last night I noticed that her Bad Behavior sits beside Donald Westlake's Good Behavior. I have no memory of having consciously placed them so; perhaps they just sort of gravitated toward each other smittenly when I wasn't looking. Hard to think of two more different books, but the spines do complement each other nicely.

Another title I love, but that is simply puzzling if you don't know anything about the book, is Anthony Burgess's novel about Keats, ABBA ABBA. Also in the context-counts category is the memoir of (Sir) Frank Kermode, Not Entitled, although on second thought, perhaps it's a bit too cutely elliptical.

What else?

Posted May 07, 4:19 AM

May 6, 2004

TT: Almanac

"The essence of dilettantism consists not so much in a lack of high artistic intentions as in the fragility of the technical scaffolding."

Carl Flesch, Memoirs

Posted May 06, 12:00 PM

TT: Consumables

This was an all-theater day, and a long one (but what else is new?).

- I spent the morning and early afternoon writing my Wall Street Journal review for Friday.

- After a couple of hours' worth of miscellaneous busywork, I headed for Avery Fisher Hall, where I saw the New York Philharmonic's semi-staged concert version of Leonard Bernstein's Candide, starring Kristin Chenoweth, directed by Lonny Price, and conducted by Marin Alsop. That's for next Friday's Journal.

- Because of an early curtain and an earlier dinner, I didn't have enough in-between time to do much of anything other than give my guest for the evening a tour of the Teachout Museum and read the first couple of chapters of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake.

- Now playing on iTunes: Helmut Walcha's recording of Bach's chorale prelude Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele, a piece that has long been especially close to my heart. I'm listening to its soft and gentle sublimities in the hopes of winding myself down far enough to get a few hours' worth of sleep. I depart early this morning for a date with a museumful of paintings far from here. I'm not bringing my laptop--I need a break--and I'm won't be back until Sunday. Any blogging that takes place here between now and then will be strictly up to Our Girl. Egg her on!

Later.

P.S. The Teachout Reader ended the day at 202 on amazon.com. Wow!

Posted May 06, 12:00 PM

May 5, 2004

TT: Consumables

Not much to tell, though I only have one more crowded day before I pull up stakes and leave town for a long weekend of laptop-free rest, relaxation, and art consumption at a Secure Undisclosed Location. In the meantime, here's my Tuesday:

- I saw a press preview of Neil LaBute's new play, The Distance from Here, about which I'll be writing in Friday's Wall Street Journal.

- I found out that my absentee bid for a Hans Hofmann lithograph, "Composition," was unsuccessful. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but I got creamed--somebody with money to burn wiped the floor with my pitiful little bid.) In case you're curious, here's what it looked like. Sigh. Arrgh. Oh, to be rich! Alas, I picked the wrong line of work....

- I'm doing Raymond Chandler in between everything else, and today I finished rereading Farewell, My Lovely, partly in the hopes of persuading a friend of mine who recently confessed to having read only The Big Sleep (shame, shame) to embark forthwith on the whole corpus, currently available in an elegant Library of America two-volume edition.

- Now playing on iTunes: "Don't Worry 'Bout Me," recorded live by the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1954 and currently available on Jazz Goes to College. This do I in honor of Doug Ramsey, Paul Desmond's biographer, who left a message last night for me to call him. (If you're reading the blog right now, Doug, the next phone call you get will be from me.)

I'll try to work in another post or two in before I hit the road first thing Thursday morning. I see that Our Girl has finally come in from out of the cold, so if you ask her nicely, maybe she'll keep you company until my return on Sunday night!

Posted May 05, 12:28 PM

TT: Closed circle

I started reviewing books for magazines nearly twenty-three years ago (and no, it doesn't seem like only yesterday). The third or fourth book about which I wrote was Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal, a memoir by Toni Bentley, who was at the time a twenty-two-year-old dancer with New York City Ballet. I can't recall how I heard about her book or why I took an interest in it, since I'd as yet seen only two or three ballets, none of them by George Balanchine. Whatever the reason, I was struck by Bentley's poetic chronicle of a dancer's life, and wrote a review in which I called Winter Season "quite possibly the most revealing book about the world of ballet ever to see print." This is an embarrassingly choice example of a baby critic talking through his hat--I doubt I'd read any other books about the world of ballet in 1982.

Be that as it may, my review found its way into print. I shelved Winter Season and eventually forgot about it, but Bentley's evocative little memoir obviously made a deeper impression on me than I knew, for a decade later I finally got around to seeing my first Balanchine ballet, and within a couple of years I had somehow metamorphosed into a full-fledged dance critic. Now I'm about to publish a book of my own about Balanchine's life and work. Would any of that have happened had I not stumbled across Winter Season in 1982? Maybe--but maybe not.

As for Toni Bentley, she fell victim to a hip injury and stopped dancing a few years after publishing Winter Season. She turned herself into a full-time writer, collaborating with Suzanne Farrell on her autobiography and writing several striking books of her own. I learned a few years ago that we shared an agent, but by then Bentley had moved to Los Angeles, and our paths never crossed. Last year, though, the University Press of Florida brought out a new edition of Winter Season, and a sentence from my 1982 review was printed on the back cover. I smiled to see it, remembering what a powerful effect the book had had on me all those years ago, and what an un