« June 2004 | Main | August 2004 »

July 30, 2004

TT: Art for Arthur's sake

I'm not here--I'm on the way back from the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, where I saw Design for Living last night--but Our Girl has kindly done me the favor of posting the weekly teaser for my Wall Street Journal theater column. This time around, I reviewed the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Arthur Miller's After the Fall, an autobiographical play in which Marilyn Monroe figures prominently, and Lincoln Center Festival's The Elephant Vanishes, a theater piece created by Simon McBurney of Complicite.

Not to put too fine a point on it, After the Fall is a major disaster:

Of the American playwrights who made it big in the '40s and '50s, Arthur Miller is the one whose star has dipped lowest. To be sure, he's still big in Europe, mostly for the obvious reasons (European critics eat up talky plays about how the U.S. is a wasteland of vulgar, small-minded conformism). Yet only three new shows by Mr. Miller have been produced on Broadway in the past quarter-century--none of them successfully--and though several of his earlier plays have had solid runs in revival, the ever-ubiquitous "Death of a Salesman" is the only one that now seems a good bet to hold the stage permanently.

So what possessed the Roundabout Theatre Company to exhume "After the Fall," a lead-plated example of the horrors that result when a humorless playwright unfurls his midlife crisis for all the world to see? Don't ask me--I'm a critic, not a producer. All I know is that this preeningly self-important play, written in 1964 and revived last night at the American Airlines Theatre, ranks right up there with "Bombay Dreams" on my list of Unendurable Clunkers of 2004....

The only time Mr. Miller manages to break free of his solipsism, however briefly, is in the first couple of scenes involving Maggie/Marilyn. Apparently she managed to get his attention, just as Carla Gugino gets ours. A TV starlet, this is her Broadway debut, and while she makes the mistake of imitating Monroe instead of suggesting her, she does it with powerfully seductive conviction. Once she extricates herself from this misbegotten production, my guess is that Ms. Gugino will soon go on to much better things.

Nobody else in "After the Fall" is memorable, least of all Peter Krause, another Broadway debutant who bears an uncanny resemblance to Greg Marmalard, the smooth-faced, toadying frat boy of "Animal House." Mr. Krause is best known for playing an undertaker in the trendy TV series "Six Feet Under," which seems appropriate enough, since he's a hopeless stiff on stage. I'm not sure exactly how much secondary blame for the remainder of this mess should attach to Michael Mayer, the director, but there's more than enough to go around.

The Elephant Vanishes, on the other hand, was almost perfectly wonderful:

No small part of the trouble with "After the Fall" is that Mr. Miller, who hasn't a poetic bone in his body (though he thinks he does), tried in vain to write a lyrical memory play. True lyric theater is all about poetry--the poetry of the ear and eye alike--and "The Elephant Vanishes," directed by Simon McBurney and co-produced by the Setagaya Public Theatre of Tokyo and Complicite, Mr. McBurney's London-based theatrical troupe, is one of the most bewitchingly poetic things I've been lucky enough to see on a stage.

Presented by Lincoln Center Festival 2004, "The Elephant Vanishes," performed in Japanese with English-language supertitles, was adapted by Mr. McBurney from the short stories of Haruki Murakami, whose surrealistic tales of Tokyo are hugely popular in Japan. Mr. McBurney has turned them into a fine-grained multi-media fantasy about the loneliness and mystery of postmodern Japanese urban life--an avant-garde "Lost in Translation," if you will. Though the New York State Theater was a bit too large for the production to register properly, the eerily discontinous vignettes spun by Mr. McBurney out of Mr. Murakami's prose somehow managed to fill its cavernous interior to enthralling effect.

No link. Don't just sit there--buy a copy of the Journal and read me. Or, better yet, subscribe.

Posted July 30, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"She was a diffused, Salon photograph; and yet she must have had in the depths of her wistful soul a Gift or Daemon that once or twice a year awoke, whispered to her a sentence she could repeat--to the world's astonishment--and then turned back to sleep. Dr. Rosenbaum had first been aware of this Daemon when Miss Batterson retorted, to a colleague's objection that all Benton students read that in high school: 'There is no book that all my students have read.' Dr. Rosenbaum knew that it is in sentences like this, and not in the pages of Spengler, that one has brought home to one the twilight of the West."

Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

Posted July 30, 12:00 PM

July 28, 2004

TT: Almanac

"There ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it, and ain't agoing to no more."

Samuel Clemens, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Posted July 28, 12:02 PM

TT: Bloggers Anonymous

A reader writes:

Sad to see you succumbing to the powers of the internet. I'm 34, which is on the cusp of the information age, but perhaps more aligned with the younger generation since my undergrad was at MIT and grad school in academia before the internet meant that I've been actively using email since age 17. You're experiencing the joys of the instant communication, but not seeing the loss. A not-very-shy guy asked me out via the web, once, while actually emailing me from another terminal in the same room. Maybe he thought it was cute, but it highlights the fact that our on-line personality matters more than our in-person personality now. When I hated grad school, I went and complained to my friends from college, far away. Good to have as a resource in a way, but a crutch in terms of forcing me to bond with the people I was in grad school with, forcing me to deal with the present.

I see that all the time. I remember one of the earliest times I saw a cell phone user - a mother, eating with her kids (in the college dining hall! must be visitors), talking to someone else about something inane. My brother, the techno-geek, couldn't understand my issues with that scene. You see it everywhere - kids using the library terminals to play games; bored people using it to look at porn sites. Back in the day, it seemed like we used our spare time better. I spend far too much time, myself, on reading blogs - responding like this one, to someone who won't remember me tomorrow. I'm not a new friend, or acquaintance, I'm a face in a crowd. I should be studying, reading - and I just decided NOT to go to a concert tonight because I haven't done the work I should have done today. I'm sure there are similar losses - people who don't write novels or compose poems because that spare time gets spent browsing the net.

But, more obviously, if blogging with me and other far-away-arts-lovers means you DON'T connect with that person next to you - on the bus, in the restaurant, on the plane - there's a real loss. You gain a community, but lose a more important, living breathing community with more diversity. Ya know?

Technology is an absolute good, you say. Maybe. It seems an irreversible good, meaning that if you aren't on the internet, then the community changes without you. I'm without cell-phone or notebook or palm, but the people around me are less open to chatting with strangers because they have them, so I may as well get them....

That's my advice - get out, get out, get out. Life is out there, live it. My advice to myself as well, but I've been hooked for longer than you have. Okay, back to work, or else I have to cancel tomorrow's concert as well.

I'm not quite sure I'm the most logical recipient of this advice. After all, I usually attend at least four performances (and often more) each week, and I almost always bring a friend or two with me. What's more, I find e-mail an unmixed blessing, not least because it allows me to maintain face-to-face friendships more efficiently. Nor do I think I communicate with strangers at the expense of friends. If anything, I've made new face-to-face friends through blogging, including several of the people whose blogs can be found in the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column. As for the matter of diversity, what could be more diverse than the worldwide "community" of people who read "About Last Night?

Sure, we've all seen the way some folks use postmodern information technology to avoid direct human contact, sometimes deliberately and sometimes thoughtlessly, as in the case of the Inconsiderate Cell-Phone Man caricatured in those movie-theater ads. (I almost sang that jingle the other day to a noisy idiot seated immediately in front of me on an airplane.) Everything under the sun--including great art--can be used in life-denying ways.

Still, I can't go along with the notion that blogs are by definition a waste of everybody's valuable spare time, which is more or less what my correspondent is implying. Jennicam, maybe, but she's out of business, while Maud and Sarah and Chicha and all the smart, thoughtful art bloggers whom I read daily are thriving. And well they should be, for what they do, aside from being valuable in its own right, also has the potential to increase the number of people reading good books and going to concerts (and, presumably, chatting with one another at intermission).

Which returns us to the mission of "About Last Night": Our Girl and I write this blog in order to stimulate and diversify the art-related interests of our readers. To put it another way, "About Last Night" is a means, not an end--and I know from our e-mailbox that it is constantly leading people to try new things.

On which optimistic note I'm headed for bed. My cold is marginally better, but I've got to rent a car and drive to Massachusetts tomorrow afternoon to see a performance of Noël Coward's Design for Living (see, I do so get out!), and if I don't get a whole lot of sleep between now and then, I'm likely to end up in a ditch.

In the meantime, please excuse my intermittent absences from this space, which will continue until Monday. I miss you all--but I'll be back.

Posted July 28, 9:51 AM

TT: Who needs to read?

A reader writes:

While listening to Dana Gioia speak on the recent survey on fiction reading (and his take on what that means), an equivocating thought came to me. I've been a pastor and teacher for 20 some years, working with congregations and talking to students in colleges or Elderhostel/Life-Long Learner participants. As you probably know, survey data on church attendance is far above what a simple, real world check will reveal (65+% say they go to church 4 times a month or more on surveys, but a worship census shows it simply can't be above 40%, nearer 30%). Just in the last few years, the annual Gallup surveys are noting a drop in those long standing numbers, even as church attendance seems to be perking back up.

What we assume out here in Pastor-land, with a few sociologists of religion riding shotgun, is that it used to be socially very important to say you went to church...even if you didn't. As it has become much more acceptable in general discourse to admit freely that you don't go to church at all, let alone often, survey data is starting to track closer to reality.

My suspicion -- which makes the problem no less, only different -- is that it is now socially much more acceptable to admit that you haven't read "War and Peace" or "To The Lighthouse" even among educated company, while similarly there is less social value to claiming you have...whether you've done so or not.

As a voracious reader of fiction, non-fiction, and lids of tea packaging or stray receipts if that's all there is to hand, I can recall many occasions in high school and college where I realized, to my thrilled horror, that Teacher X or Professor Y had not actually read the book they were manglingly alluding to. Similar events in dinner party/backyard conversation over the years made me realize that the total number of unread books everyone has read is...wait, as you've pointed out recently, David Lodge has already trod this ground full well.

But in the last 5-10 years, folks from freshmen students in classes to my wife's colleagues in academia are likely to say in response to literary references "Haven't read it," in tones indicating they're not gonna, you can't make 'em, and whatsittoya?

So my equivocating point is: has fiction reading really dropped off? Can we correlate for some other variable (sales, library circulation) to crossreference? And is it possible that the problem is that folks don't feel the need to fake having read or be seen as a reader of fiction as a social value -- and if so, I find it double intriguing that such a loss of felt need to keep up such appearances fictionally speaking correlated so well with worship attendance trends (or classical music, fer that matter).

It seems an important distinction, and I don't hear that the survey response is picking up on the possibility.

As regular readers of "About Last Night" know, I've been asked not to comment on the activities of the National Endowment for the Arts--including its recently released survey of changing American reading habits--while my nomination to the National Council on the Arts awaits consideration by the Senate. But the questions this reader poses are so interesting and provocative that I wanted to pass them on anyway.

Any thoughts, OGIC?

Posted July 28, 9:22 AM

OGIC: Consumer reports

The Wall Street Journal (subscription only) reports today that, without making a big fuss about it, Amazon.com has taken measures recently to encourage users to use their real names when posting reviews:

Earlier this month, the Web retailer quietly launched a new system, dubbed Real Names, that encourages users to append to their product reviews the name that appears on the credit card they have registered with Amazon. A logo saying "Real Name" appears beside such customer comments.

Amazon still allows reviewers to sign their comments with pen names, effectively concealing their identity from other Amazon users. But even these reviewers need to supply a credit card or purchase history. Previously, users could easily open multiple Amazon accounts from which they could post multiple reviews of the same product. The new system is intended to block that practice.

Many of you will remember the brouhaha on Amazon Canada a few months back, when the real names of anonymous and pseudonymous posters were inadvertently revealed, exposing all manner of fixing (authors reviewing their own books under fake names) and sabotage (folks going undercover to savage their enemies' books). Also revealed in the incident was the growing influence of these customer reviews, and the company's new policies only underline how seriously it takes them as part of the service it offers. "What we're trying to do with this is add to the credibility of the content on this site," says a spokeswoman. There's more to the plan:

Over time, reviewers who opt to use pen names could become less visible on the site. Under the system in which users rate the usefulness of reviews, the most highly rated reviews appear in higher, more prominent sections of Amazon's pages. If users believe that reviews with real names attached are more valuable, those will become the most visible on the site.

All of this makes me feel a bit prescient. Several years ago, when Amazon hadn't yet started selling colanders and flip-flops, and "blog" was what I might say when the milk turned, I wrote a little piece about the site's reader reviews for a publication that shall remain anonymous (and thus of dubious credibility). The article was sort of a lite version of the blog triumphalism you see all the time now (including from yours truly): Everyman now has a voice! Sometimes it speaks wisely; sometimes it's absurd! And it just may be revolutionary.

Posted July 28, 2:16 AM

July 27, 2004

TT: Here but not here

I got back to New York late last night from my family reunion in Smalltown, U.S.A., fell into bed, and arose first thing this morning with what appears to be a summer cold. Great. I'm writing for The Wall Street Journal this morning and the Washington Post tomorrow, after which I head for Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., to see a couple of plays, so a summer cold is just what I need at this juncture, don't you think?

Anyway, I may post a bit later today or some time tomorrow if my head clears, but don't be surprised if I opt for elective mutism instead. In any case, I'll be back for real on Sunday, and you'll hear from me then, assuming this cold, if it is a cold, doesn't prove fatal. (Hey, it could happen!)

See you sometime.

UPDATE: The cold's winning. So far, I've written two paragraphs of my Journal piece. All I seem to be able to do is read proofs and blow my nose. Would anyone care to bring me some chicken soup? Or perhaps a nice mug of cyanide?

Posted July 27, 9:57 AM

TT: Almanac

"The charm of getting home, as I see it, is the charm of getting back to what is inextricably my own--to things familiar and long loved, to things that belong to me alone and none other. I have lived in one house in Baltimore for nearly forty-five years. It has changed in that time, as I have--but somehow it still remains the same. No conceivable decorator's masterpiece could give me the same ease. It is as much a part of me as my two hands. If I had to leave it I'd be as certainly crippled as if I lost a leg."

H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: Fifth Series

Posted July 27, 6:19 AM

TT: Almost as good as chicken soup

A reader writes:

I want you to know how much I enjoy and appreciate your blog, and now your book. A Terry Teachout Reader was waiting for me when I arrived home from work last night, courtesy of amazon.com. After dinner I read the introduction, the first three essays, and then skipped to the back to read your moving tribute to Nancy Lamott, whom I first heard of reading "About Last Night." At that point I had to put Come Rain or Come Shine on, and it occurred to me while listening that Nancy's music was not the only thing I had to thank you for. I saw Ghost World and The Last Days of Disco, movies I'd never heard of, due to you. I watched, and enjoyed, Out of the Past last week on TCM and I taped In a Lonely Place, which I'll watch this weekend. The last time we were in NYC, my wife and I saw Wonderful Town, based on your review. I'm right now on the web here at work ordering some of Dawn Powell's books because your essay about her intrigued me. I could go on and on but the point is, you are performing a real service for me and (I'm sure) countless others - pointing us towards great art and great performers that we may not have heard about otherwise, and identifying what makes them great in a clear, lucid writing style. Of course, it doesn't hurt that my opinions often match up with yours, evidenced by my TCCI of 65%. At any rate, I felt I must let you know how much you're appreciated. Keep up the good work - lots of people like myself depend on it. And thanks.

Thanks to you, sir. That was just what a sick blogger needed to find in his e-mailbox on a gray afternoon.

Posted July 27, 5:40 AM

OGIC: More from M.F.K.

The matched set of Fortune Cookies below, once I had posted them, set me to thinking. I yield to no one in my adoration of M.F.K. Fisher--not even to W. H. Auden, who said of her, "I do not know of anyone in the United States today who writes better prose"--but after I typed in and reread the longer of the two quotations, it struck me as haughty and unpleasant. I worried that it might give readers unfamiliar with her work the wrong impression of Fisher.

What I had in mind in putting together the post, of course, was the striking contrast between Fisher's description of herself at nineteen in the first quotation, and her self-assessment at thirty in the second. Only after posting did I recognize the second extract as uncharacteristically off-putting. In context, it serves as the set-up and counterpoint to a self-critical remembrance of one of those men Fisher angers with her independence, and it works very differently than it does in isolation.

In another meditation on the subject of eating alone, Fisher is more her usual self. This appears in An Alphabet for Gourmets, where "A is for Dining Alone."

And the kind people--they are the ones who have made me feel the loneliest. Wherever I have lived, they have indeed been kind--up to a certain point. They have poured cocktails for me, and praised me generously for things I have written to their liking, and showed me their children. And I have seen the discreetly drawn curtains to their family dining rooms, so different from the uncluttered, spinsterish emptiness of my own one room. Behind the far door to the kitchen I have sensed, with the mystic materialism of a hungry woman, the presence of honest-to-God fried chops, peas and carrots, a jello salad, and lemon meringue pie--none of which I like and all of which I admire in theory and would give my eyeteeth to be offered. But the kind people always murmur, "We'd love to have you stay to supper sometime. We wouldn't dare, of course, the simple way we eat and all."

As I leave, by myself, two nice plump kind neighbors come in. They say howdo, and then good-by with obvious relief, after a polite, respectful mention of culinary literature as represented, no matter how doubtfully, by me. They sniff the fine creeping straightforward smells in the hall and living room, with silent thanks that they are not condemned to my daily fare of quails financière, pâté de Strasbourg truffé en brioche, sole Marguéry, bombe vanille au Cointreau. They close the door on me.

I drive home by way of the corner Thriftmart to pick up another box of Ry Krisp, which with a can of tomato soup and a glass of California sherry will make a good nourishing meal for me as I sit on my tuffet in a circle of proofs and pocket detective stories.

Even that, wonderful as it is, suffers some deformation in being yanked out of the full essay it belongs in. I continually encounter this problem with Fisher: she's very difficult to excerpt satisfyingly. It's one mark of a really masterful writer: search as you may, you just can't find the "money graf," or even two such grafs, or three. They're all necessary, and they all droop a bit in isolation. They aren't pearls strung together but a whole interdependent nervous system. You either throw up your hands and reproduce the whole thing--which seems to me neither practical nor ethical--or you compromise as I have done here, gritting your teeth and severing vital cords between the extract and the text around it, despite how violent it feels.

Posted July 27, 5:12 AM

OGIC: Fortune cookies

"I was horribly self-conscious; I wanted everybody to look at me and think me the most fascinating creature in the world, and yet I died a small hideous death if I saw even one person throw a casual glance at me."

M.F.K. Fisher, "The Measure of My Powers" (1927)

* * *

"More often than not people who see me on trains and in ships, or in restaurants, feel a kind of resentment of me since I taught myself to enjoy being alone. Women are puzzled, which they hate to be, and jealous of the way I am served, with such agreeable courtesy, and of what I am eating and drinking, which is almost never the sort of thing they order for themselves. And men are puzzled too, in a more personal way. I anger them as males.

"I am sorry. I do not like to do that, or puzzle the women either. But if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence. Men see me eating in public, and I look as if I 'knew my way around'; and yet I make it plain that I know my way around without them, and that upsets them.

"I know what I want, and I usually get it because I am adaptable to locales. I order meals that are more typically masculine than feminine, if feminine means whipped-cream-and-cherries. I like good wines, or good drinkin'-likka, and beers and ales. I like waiters; I think the woman who said that waiters are much nicer than people was right, and quite often waitresses are too. So they are always nice to me, which is a sure way to annoy other diners whose soup, quite often, they would like to spit in.

"And all these reasons, and probably a thousand others, like the way I wear my hair and what shade my lipstick is, make people look strangely at me, resentfully, with a kind of hurt bafflement, when I dine alone."

M.F.K. Fisher, "The Lemming to the Sea" (1938)

(Both essays appear in The Gastronomical Me.)

Posted July 27, 4:27 AM

OGIC: Distant cousin of the lipogram

Here's a more revealing version of yesterday's story:

Boulevard Diner, ele_en-forty.
I down a hot cup of java.
It's too quiet.
As a gun barrel whacks my noggin
I realize Dixie set me _p.

And here's another story belonging to the same rarefied genre:

"Jefe--a burro I view like a pet--
vs. a burrow I dig.
I can tell my ass from a hole in the ground!"
Don Qu_xote eyed Sanc_o Panza: "I get it."

Ninety-eight letters--the same ninety-eight letters--and two blanks. That's right, they're Scrabblegrams: they use all the letters and only the letters in Scrabble to tell a coherent if brief tale. Don Quixote was composed by Eric Chaikin, director of Word Wars, who must have felt smiled upon when it struck him that the names of the novel's two main characters took care of the Q, the X, and the Z in one fell swoop. Boulevard Diner was written by Eric's brother Andrew Chaikin, who maintains a website about all his many endeavors here.

Perhaps it's not quite A Void, but it delights and impresses the hell out of me.

Posted July 27, 4:21 AM

July 26, 2004

OGIC: A few good links

- James Lileks goes shopping for a new duvet:

Several styles are available for purchase: Laura Ashley having a screaming acid fit, Clown Pelt, creepy-crawly paisley, and one sage-hued item that I can only describe as "ribbed for her pleasure."

Clown Pelt. Heh.

- In Slate, Timothy Noah points out that the Kerry campaign's close-reading skills are in need of a tune-up.

Last month, Chatterbox urged John Kerry to drop the campaign slogan, "Let America be America again." Instead, Kerry has wrapped his arms more tightly around the slogan's regrettable source. As Chatterbox noted in the earlier column, "Let America be America again" comes from a poem published in 1938 by the Harlem renaissance poet Langston Hughes. But Hughes intended the line ironically. A black man living in the pre-civil rights era would have had to be insane to look back to a golden age of freedom and equality in America, and Hughes was not insane. Hughes was, rather, an enthusiastic cheerleader for the Soviet Union at the time he wrote "Let America Be America Again," which explains the poem's agitprop tone.

- In the Chicago Tribune book section, Scott McLemee looks askance at Dale Peck's Hatchet Jobs and puts the Great Snark Debate in depressing perspective:

What is worrisome about contemporary book commentary is not that someone with Peck's habitual mean-spiritedness has carved out a name for himself--though it does suggest that criticism is now as much a part of the entertainment industry as gangster rap and extreme makeovers. People laugh at his jokes, or at the skinhead Paul Bunyan impersonation on the cover of his book, or both. Yet they overlook his efforts to be thoughtful, which are, if anything, just as funny. Adolescents often feel the need to philosophize, after a fashion. And I'm afraid that is precisely the impression left whenever Peck turns from strident denunciation of a particular novelist to sweeping generalizations about the culture. Still, the latter are a necessary element of criticism--part of the job of sorting and judging literature and of making sense of life itself. Peck may do it badly, but what makes the situation a crisis is that scarcely anyone cares.

Posted July 26, 12:48 PM

OGIC: Ponderable

This ultra-short story seems simple enough, but it was composed under a rather exacting restriction. Can you figure out what it is?

Boulevard Diner, eleven-forty.
I down a hot cup of java.
It's too quiet.
As a gun barrel whacks my noggin,
I realize Dixie set me up.

I'll post another such story tonight.

(Yes, I concede that you can find the answer through strategic Googling. But wouldn't it be more fun not to?)

Posted July 26, 2:22 AM

OGIC: Check in later, alligator

It is my frequent practice to draft blog posts in bed late at night, email the drafts to my work address, and pass out with the ibook on my lap. In the morning I get to work, spruce up the drafts as time allows, and post them. So went last night, but I stumbled into the office this morning to find my work and personal email down and my drafts adrift in cyberspace. The techies say our email will be back up later this afternoon, which could mean tomorrow. Please do check back in--I'll have lots to post once email is back, and in the meantime I should be able to muster some bits and pieces. And if you sent me any email since last night? I have a better excuse than usual for being slow to write back [cue eye-rolling among my beleaguered correspondents].

Posted July 26, 2:07 AM

OGIC: Gentle nudge

All you Chicagoans, Word Wars is now playing up at Facets. It won't be there for long. Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Wilmington loved it. Your faithful correspondent is somewhat partial, but loved it, too (scroll down).

Posted July 26, 1:31 AM

July 23, 2004

TT: Not exactly ribbeting

I'm in The Wall Street Journal this morning, writing about The Frogs, the new Nathan Lane-Stephen Sondheim musical, greatly expanded from Burt Shevelove's original 1974 adaptation and choreographed and directed by Susan Stroman. The buzz was bad, and as so often is the case, it was accurate:

Unfortunately, Mr. Lane and his collaborators have forgotten the Iron Law of Modern Musical Comedy, which is that no musical, no matter how good its songs may be, can succeed without a bulletproof book. What works in a straight play does not necessarily supply enough emotional energy to propel a musical. As rewritten by Shevelove and bulked up by Mr. Lane, the largely plotless "Frogs" is driven by its one- and two-liners, which aren't even close to funny enough to keep the show afloat: "What kind of a god are you? "The kind with lower back problems."...

So what works? Pretty much everything else. Ms. Stroman's spectacular staging of the title number, in which evil right-wing frogs fly through the air on bungee cords, is one of her happiest choreographic inspirations. The set and costumes, by Giles Cadle and the peerless William Ivey Long, are unimprovably good. Mr. Sondheim's score includes three first-class songs, two old and one new. The new one, "Ariadne," is a spare, elegiac ballad of regret sung by Mr. Lane (limply, I'm afraid, though he does his best). From the original "Frogs" come "Invocation and Instructions to the Audience," a raucous curtain-going-up prelude, and "Fear No More," a tender setting of Shakespeare's poignant lyric from "Cymbeline." It's the only time Mr. Sondheim has set another man's words, and the results are exquisite--one of his most haunting musical inspirations.

You'd think a show with so much going for it would soar like a skyrocket. Instead, "The Frogs," which runs through Oct. 10, stumbles through the first act and fizzles out at the end, all because of an ill-crafted book. It's an object lesson in Musical Comedy 101. Too bad it cost the students so much to sign up for the class.

I also wrote about Broadway: The Golden Age Rick McKay's marvelous documentary, which you will find in the Top Five module of the right-hand column. Some additional details from this morning's review:

Mr. McKay knows when to ease back on the throttle and simply let his subjects talk. And talk they do, often amusingly and always movingly, about what it was like to work alongside such near-forgotten giants as Laurette Taylor (who is seen in her Hollywood screen test, the only sound film she ever made) and Kim Stanley (where on earth did Mr. McKay dredge up what looks like a kinescope of a live performance of "Bus Stop"?). You'll weep--I did--to hear them share their fond memories of crummy apartments, Automat meals and big breaks.

Produced and marketed on half a shoestring, this one-man labor of love is slowly making its way across America, one screen at a time. At present it's playing in Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, with additional openings scheduled for Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, San Diego, Washington, and other cities. (Go to www.broadwaythemovie.com for further information.) If it's not coming to an art house near you, call and complain. A DVD will be released in due course, but "Broadway: The Golden Age," like the performers to whom it pays unforgettably eloquent tribute, deserves to be seen in a theater--even one that sells popcorn.

No link--the Journal expects you to pay for your pleasures. To read the whole thing, buy this morning's paper and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, where you'll find me, Joe Morgenstern on film, and lots and lots of other irresistibly readable things.

Posted July 23, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"The only difference between comedy and tragedy is the point of view."

Howard Hawks (quoted in Todd McCarthy, Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood)

Posted July 23, 12:00 PM

July 22, 2004

TT: Almanac

When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.

Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my cloak and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.

Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store,
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.

Philip Larkin, "A Study of Reading Habits"

Posted July 22, 12:00 PM

July 21, 2004

TT: 'Scuse me while I disappear

I have two intense days' worth of writing and playgoing ahead of me. Then I'm off to Smalltown, U.S.A., first thing Friday morning (the car comes at 4:30) for a family reunion. Next week I'll be writing like a madman for a couple of hectic days in New York, after which I'm off again to see plays in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.

My point? You won't be seeing much of me in this space for the next couple of weeks, save for the odd almanac entry. I'll look in whenever I can, but mostly I'll be leaving you in the lovely hands of Our Girl in Chicago. Enjoy the pleasure of her company. I always do.

Later.

Posted July 21, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"John Pickford, BBC World Service, came to interview me about George Orwell. A pleasant young man, but the questions these people put are impossible to answer. One wonders whether the generality of people expected easy answers to the human condition before their minds were rotted by popular journalism, TV, the notion that all life's problems could be answered off the cuff by TV 'personalities,' suchlike, in two or three sentences. All the same there is perhaps a faint impression of a person given by the worlds, demeanour, of a friend."

Anthony Powell, Journals 1982-1986, entry for October 27, 1983

Posted July 21, 12:00 PM

TT: Never too late

Two "About Last Night" readers wrote to let me know that Tim Page, the classical music critic of the Washington Post and an old friend of mine, mentioned me in a Post online chat earlier today. I'm vain enough to want to pass on what Tim said:

The book that's dazzled me lately is by another friend, Terry Teachout. A Terry Teachout Reader (Yale) covers all the arts -- film, dance, music (of all kinds), literature, and any variety of crossroads. Even when I find myself in disagreement with Terry, the fact remains that this is a book one vividly enjoys disagreeing with -- one test of truly stimulating criticism. (How many of us found ourselves in this field in order to "win" arguments with critics of the past -- Haggin, Thomson, Schonberg...!) A strong personality -- and spectacularly unpredictable.

The part I like is the last two words.

Posted July 21, 11:05 AM

TT: Made manifest

Life is going by too fast today. I went to Lincoln Center last night to see a press preview of The Frogs, the new Nathan Lane-Stephen Sondheim musical. This morning I lashed myself to the mast and wrote my Wall Street Journal theater column for Friday in a single sitting. After that I filled out yet another National Council on the Arts-related form, this one for the Senate, then ran around in the noonday sun getting it notarized, making photocopies of various personal documents, and shipping the results off to Washington, D.C., via Federal Express. (The NEA warned me to FedEx everything--their incoming snail mail is irradiated and often delayed as a result, sometimes forever.) Tonight I return to Lincoln Center, this time to see Complicité's production of The Elephant Vanishes, and in between I should have spent at least an hour or two hacking away at my Commentary essay on Isaac Bashevis Singer. But I didn't. Instead, I knocked off for an hour and took my first look at the page proofs of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, which arrived this morning and have been sitting on my kitchen table ever since.

No one who hasn't written a book can know what it feels like to see it set up in type for the first time. Your own manuscript, however neatly printed it may be, simply isn't the real thing. It's homemade, and looks that way. You can edit it as painstakingly as you like, but you still don't know what your words will sound like in your inner ear until you see the thing itself. It's unnerving, half scary and half thrilling, to pull the proofs out of their package and start riffling through them, pretending to look for typos (and sometimes finding them) but mostly just gazing raptly at each page, feeling your half-forgotten sentences and paragraphs quiver to life.

In Newspaper Days, H.L. Mencken wrote a wonderful description (quoted in my Mencken biography) of the day that he received the page proofs of his very first full-length book. He was twenty-five years old and an up-and-coming young man at the Baltimore Herald, edited by Lynn Meekins. As he recalled years later,

I was so enchanted that I could not resist taking the proofs to the office and showing them to Meekins--on the pretense, as I recall, of consulting him about a doubtful passage. He seemed almost as happy about it as I was. "If you live to be two hundred years old," he said, "you will never forget this day. It is one of the great days of your life, and maybe the greatest. You will write other books, but none of them will ever give you half the thrill of this one. Go to your office, lock the door, and sit down to read your proofs. Nothing going on in the office can be as important. Take the whole day off, and enjoy yourself." I naturally protested, saying that this or that had to be looked to. "Nonsense!" replied Meekins. "Let all those things take care of themselves. I order you to do nothing whatsoever until you have finished with the proofs. If anything pops up I'll have it sent to me." So I locked myself in as he commanded, and had a shining day indeed, and I can still remember its unparalleled glow after all these years.

Meekins was right--it only feels that way once--but even after you've written a half-dozen books, you never, ever take your first look at a new set of page proofs for granted. I just finished reading mine, and as I glanced at the first chapter, my eyes grew moist. It seemed impossible that I'd written all those words mere months ago. I simply couldn't think my way back into the fearfully intense state of arousal with which I'd raced against the clock to finish the manuscript and ship it off to Harcourt. I felt oddly detached from the thick stack of photocopied pages I held in my hand, detached and proud at the same time, the way one might feel while watching a child graduate from college. Had I really written this book? Could it possibly be as good as it looked?

I glanced at the living-room clock: five p.m. Time to jump in the shower, get dressed, and head downtown to meet a friend for a quick pre-theater dinner. The spell was broken, the moment over. Life had begun again.

Posted July 21, 5:25 AM

OGIC: The airwaves are ours...

Or the blogwaves are theirs; it hasn't quite all shaken out yet. The point is that bloggers and WBEZ, Chicago's NPR station, are finding themselves in various forms of collaboration, both more and less formal, this month.

First up, ALN friend and fellow culture blogger Sam Golden Rule Jones has been brought on as the book critic of Ed Lifson's new Sunday arts show, Hello Beautiful. This is a brilliant move. Sam will focus on Chicago writers; last week he reviewed a book with "strong bones," Irene Zabytko's story collection Luba Leaves Home. Sam reflected on the relative paucity of well-known fiction about women coming of age in Chicago--relative to the bevy of Bellows and Farrells writing about young men--and found that Zabytko is "particularly good at showing a young woman's difficult devotion to both her bonds and her dreams." Hear Sam's sparkling review for yourself. He returns next week with a review of Ward Just's latest, An Unfinished Season. I'll be listening.

The shoe is on the other foot too this week, as Gretchen Helfrich, who anchors WBEZ's consistently fascinating interview show Odyssey, will be guest blogging at Preposterous Universe beginning Friday. Gretchen is fiercely smart and knowledgeable and has a sense of humor, so it will be fun to see what happens when Preposterous's regular proprietor (oog, try saying that five times fast), physicist Sean Carroll, hands her the reins. Go check it out now, while Sean's still in the house--only about half of his content is about physics, making fully half of it comprehensible to science know-nothings like me.

In other switcheroo news, I'm going to teach my mother's fifth-grade class for a day while she edits, blogs, and goes home to watch seven consecutive episodes of "Law and Order." Somebody should write a book about it.

Posted July 21, 5:19 AM

OGIC: One from the memory banks

Not the most ambitious all-time feat of memorization, but:

My lizard, my lively writher,
May your limbs never wither,
May the eyes in your face
Survive the green ice
Of envy's mean gaze;
May you live out your life
Without hate, without grief,
And your hair ever blaze,
In the sun, in the sun,
When I am undone,
When I am no one.

It's Theodore Roethke, published in 1964, and I had to look up the punctuation and the title: "Wish for a Young Wife."

Meanwhile, such bloggers as Maud Newton, Carrie at Tingle Alley, and Will Baude at Crescat Sententia have spun off on a variety of tangents from my original post about the joys of memorizing poetry. Each of these folks takes the topic in their own new direction, with fascinating results all around. It's all very bloggy and good.

Posted July 21, 4:33 AM

July 20, 2004

TT: Quotations from Chairman Nick

As I mentioned a week or two ago, I've been rereading Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time in preparation for writing a review of Michael Barber's Anthony Powell: A Life, out in September from Duckworth Overlook. At lunch with Maud the other day, I was trying to describe Powell's technique of alternating Hemingway-like naturalistic dialogue with discursive commentary by Nick Jenkins, the narrator of Dance and Powell's fictional alter ego. I've been posting quotations from Dance as almanac entries of late, but I've dogeared so many pages since I started rereading it that I thought it might be fun to go ahead and empty the whole bag.

Forgive me if some of these quotes have already been posted. As an old Powellian, my experience has been that they profit from repetition!

- "Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one's dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction." (A Question of Upbringing)

- "I felt unsettled and dissatisfied, though not in the least drunk. On the contrary, my brain seemed to be working all at once with quite unusual clarity. Indeed, I found myself almost deciding to sit down, as soon as I reached my room, and attempt to compose a series of essays on human life and character in the manner of, say, Montaigne, so icily etched in my mind at that moment appeared the actions and nature of those with whom that night I had been spending my time. However, second thoughts convinced me that any such efforts at composition would be inadvisable at such an hour. The first thing to do on reaching home would be to try and achieve some sleep. In the morning, literary matters might be reconsidered." (A Buyer's Market)

- "These hinterlands are frequently, even compulsively, crossed at one time or another by almost all who practise the arts, usually in the need to earn a living; but the arts themselves, so it appeared to me as I considered the matter, by their ultimately sensual essence, are, in the long run, inimical to those who pursue power for its own sake. Conversely, the artist who traffics in power does so, if not necessarily disastrously, at least at considerable risk." (A Buyer's Market)

- "Prejudice was to be avoided if--as I had idly pictured him--Members were to form the basis of a character in a novel. Alternatively, prejudice might prove the very elemtn through which to capture and pin down unequivocally the otherwise elusive nature of what was of interest, discarding by its selective power the empty, unprofitable shell making up that side of Members untranslatable into terms of art; concentrating his final essence, his position, as it were, in eternity, into the medium of words." (The Acceptance World)

- "I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some ‘ordinary' world into which it is possible at will to wander. All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary." (The Acceptance World)

- "Life is full of internal dramas, instantaneous and sensational, played to an audience of one." (At Lady Molly's)

- "A certain amount of brick-throwing might even be a good thing. There comes a moment in the career of most artists, if they are any good, when attacks on their work take a form almost more acceptable than praise." (Casanova's Chinese Restaurant)

- "Erridge, a rebel whose life had been exasperatingly lacking in persecution, had enjoyed independence of parental control, plenty of money, assured social position, early in life. Since leaving school he had been deprived of all the typical grudges within the grasp of most young men. Some of these grudges, it was true, he had later developed with fair success by artificial means, grudges being, in a measure, part and parcel of his political approach." (The Kindly Ones)

- "One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people can be. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be." (The Kindly Ones)

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

- "I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already." (The Valley of Bones)

- "Lovell was an odd mixture of realism and romanticism; more specifically, he was, like quite a lot of people, romantic about being a realist." (The Soldier's Art)

- "How one envies the rich quality of a reviewer's life. All the things to which those Fleet Street Jesuses feel suprior. Their universal knowledge, exquisite taste, idyllic loves, happy married life, optimism, scholarship, knowledge of the true meaning of life, freedom from sexual temptation, simplicity of heart, sympathy for the masses, compassion for the unfortunate, generosity--particularly the last, in welcoming with open arms every phoney who appears on the horizon. It's not surprising that in the eyes of most reviewers a mere writer's experiences seem so often trivial, sordid, lacking in meaning." (Books Do Furnish a Room)

- "You know growing old's like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed." (Temporary Kings)

- "People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reserve is the case. Because a novel's invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. The biographer, even at his highest and best, can be only tentative, empirical. The autobiographer, for his part, is imprisoned in his own egotism. He must always be suspect." (Hearing Secret Harmonies)

Posted July 20, 12:02 PM

TT: This, that

In case you haven't noticed, slip over to the right-hand column and feast your eyes on four brand-new Top Five picks. (It would have been five, but I haven't yet managed to get to a show of Joan Mitchell lithographs on which I have my eye. Be patient.)

Incidentally, our traffic has bumped sharply upward of late, and it shows no signs of sinking back. Don't rest on your laurels--tell a friend about "About Last Night"! The more, the merrier.

Posted July 20, 12:01 PM

TT: Guest almanac

"After the lunch conference I run into my cousin Nell Lovell on the steps of the library--where I go occasionally to read liberal and conservative periodicals. Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upside down: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive."

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (courtesy of Doug Ramsey)

Posted July 20, 12:00 PM

OGIC: By heart

I was excited to find this piece in City Journal extolling the educational benefits of memorizing poetry. "Empower" is a word I mostly tuned out long ago, but this use of it seems to me warranted: "Progressive educators call it 'drill and kill,' but learning poetry by heart empowers kids."

I wish I had more poetry committed to memory, and every now and then I make a plan to learn, for instance, a poem a month. Lately, alas, such enlightened self-improvement plans haven't had much chance of surviving the onrush of everyday demands. The last poem I half-learned was W. H. Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," where the biggest hurdles come early, but the last half is all downhill. I always found Auden's poem to be one that almost entreats you to learn it. Read it just once through, and chances are good you'll come away with the commanding cadence of "the day of his death was a dark cold day" echoing in your ears well into tomorrow.

Michael Knox Beran has a fuller account than I do of what is so valuable in learning poetry by heart--an expression, by the way, that he takes somewhat literally. Here he talks about what, exactly, the heart has to do with it:

Some of the ancient methods, [St. Augustine biographer Peter] Brown conceded, strike a modern mind as "servile": but the paradoxical result of this early servitude was mental liberation. Augustine, Brown wrote, came "to love what he was learning. He had developed, through this education, a phenomenal memory, a tenacious attention to detail, an art of opening the heart, that still moves us as we read his Confessions." In Virgil's epic picture of the multiple passions of human life--paternal, filial, pious, romantic, patriotic, heroic--Augustine found a key to understanding his own heart, and in the rhetorical perfection of the Aeneid's speeches he found a key with which to unlock the hearts of others.

"An art of opening the heart": this is a nice way of capturing the extra-intellectual aspects of memorizing poetry. To memorize something effectively, you have to expend some interpretive effort on it, and with this effort you wind up in something like a conversation with the text. Grasping at least the literal meaning--not necessarily as easy as you might think, I've learned in my teaching--is the most efficient way of mastering a poem, so you can't help but learn something more than just the words in the process. And the richer the text, the more there is to absorb. It's sad that such a truly mind-expanding practice has been saddled with a reputation as just the opposite.

Here's a brief history of my happy career as a memorizer of poetry. I had a teacher in elementary school who made us learn and recite poetry, as well as some famous orations, weekly: "The Walrus and the Carpenter," "Paul Revere's Ride," The Gettysburg Address, and "Casey at the Bat," to name a few. In high school we memorized speeches from Shakespeare and, most rewardingly of all, stretches of "The Canterbury Tales" in the original Middle English, with audiotapes as aids. During and after college, I memorized some Romantic and Victorian poetry in the process of writing papers (sometimes, of course, memorizing happens by accident in the course of studying something intently) and, later, just for the pleasure of it. The one poem I'm certain I'll take to my grave is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," one of the most melodious and indelible works in the language. Once you know it, its music leads you inexorably from one line to the next. If you're looking for something to start with, I highly recommend Coleridge's heady little fragment. It's got a wicked hook.

Here's some more of what Beran has to say, all of it more empirical and less impressionistic than my free-associating:

No less important, memorizing poetry turns on kids' language capability. It not only teaches them to articulate English words; it heightens their feel for the intricacies and complexities of the English language--an indispensable attainment if they are to go on to speak, write, and read English with ease. Susan Wise Bauer, author of The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, argues that memorization "builds into children's minds an ability to use complex English syntax." The student "who memorizes poetry will internalize" the "rhythmic, beautiful patterns" of the English language. These patterns then become "part of the student's 'language store,' those wells that we all use every day in writing and speaking." Without memorization, the student's "language store," Bauer says, will be limited: memorization stocks "the language store with a whole new set of language patterns."

It also stocks those bins with a generous supply of the English language's rich accumulation of words. Research suggests that the size of a child's vocabulary plays an important part in determining the quality of his language-comprehension skills. "The greater and wider the vocabulary," says education historian Ravitch, "the greater one's comprehension of increasingly difficult material." Bauer points out that if "a student reads a word in a novel, she might or might not remember it for later use. But when she commits it to memory in proper context (as the memorization of lines of poetry requires), she is much more likely to have it at her 'mental fingertips' for use in her own speaking and writing."

Terry also reminds me that "when Nabokov taught in America, he gave his students extra credit on their final exams for disgorging accurately memorized excerpts from the works under discussion," which I'd heard but forgotten.

Posted July 20, 7:33 AM

July 19, 2004

TT: His aim is true

I went on Saturday night to hear the North American premiere of Il Sogno, Elvis Costello's first full-length orchestral work. It's a ballet score based on A Midsummer Night's Dream, composed in 2000 for an Italian dance troupe, and the Brooklyn Phiharmonic performed it as the climax of a three-night Costello mini-festival presented by the Lincoln Center Festival.

Though I'm a Costello fan, I confess to having had a small critical chip on my shoulder. But as I reported in this morning's Washington Post, Il Sogno deserves to be taken seriously:

Not only did Costello write it without assistance, he orchestrated it as well, and though the Brooklyn Philharmonic, conducted by Brad Lubman, was conspicuously underrehearsed, the performance was decent enough to leave no doubt that Costello knows what he's doing. The scoring isn't perfect -- the middle register is cluttered and thick-sounding at times, and the vibraphone is used to sugary excess -- but it's perfectly competent.

That alone made my jaw drop. Even Duke Ellington relied on professional orchestrators when writing for symphony orchestra, while Paul McCartney hired so many collaborators to help him produce the embarrassingly bloated "Standing Stone" that I described it at the time of its 1997 premiere as "the first as-told-to symphony." What's more, "Il Sogno" ("The Dream" in Italian), though it rambles a bit, is more than just a long string of songlike cameos placed end to end: Costello has channeled his thematic material into simple, formal structures that he uses in the disciplined manner of a bona fide classical composer....

It's not cut-rate Prokofiev or Bernstein, but a lively, ingratiating piece of mainstream modernism, with decorous snippets of symphonic rock and jazz thrown in from time to time to spice things up. If anything, it's too polite: Costello was clearly on his best musical behavior when he wrote it, and I'm sure he felt he had something to prove to all the "legit" musicians who took it for granted that no mere rock star could bring off so ambitious an undertaking....

Mind you, Costello doesn't need to write large-scale orchestral works to be taken seriously as an artist. Rock has produced no better songwriter. But if he really wants to set up shop as a part-time classical composer, he'll need to polish his craft still further. After the unexpected success of "Rhapsody in Blue," Gershwin toiled for 11 years and ended up with "Porgy and Bess." Is Costello in it for the long haul? Or will "Il Sogno" turn out to be a fluke? I hope not.

Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: Alex Ross has a fascinatingly different take on Il Sogno. You can tell from reading our pieces side by side that we were, as the saying goes, at the same concert--only we didn't come to the same conclusions.

Posted July 19, 12:04 PM

TT: Elsewhere

Once again, it's time for the regular "About Last Night" Monday-morning Web surf. Here are some links from the past week that I thought worth passing on:

- In case you haven't seen it yet, Anne E. Kornblut, the Boston Globe's senior political correspondent, put together a neat little are-you-red-or-blue culture quiz for Slate. Go here to take it.

- The Out of the Past bandwagon continues to pick up speed! Something Old, Nothing New has posted some characteristically shrewd reflections of his own on the quintessential film noir:

The popularity of the film noir was in part, I think, a way of increasing sex and violence in movies -- sex implied rather than shown, of course -- without violating the rule that movies had to be moral and uplifting. A film noir shows or implies all kinds of debauchery, but then adds that all the debauched people get punished in the end. (Or in the case of The Big Sleep, gets the audience so confused that they can't tell who committed which act of debauchery.) It's the equivalent of those early Cecil B. DeMille movies where two hours of orgies are followed by five minutes of spiritual uplift.

- New to "Sites to See" is a blog by West Coast dance critic Rachel Howard called Footnotes (great title). Howard writes in defense of assigning star ratings to performances:

But why shouldn't we recommend dance performances to one another with various degrees of enthusiasm? Why shouldn't we codify that degree of excitement in a symbol that will bring more readers to dance reviews? Instead, right now, the absence of a rating signals to the Everyman Joe reader, "Don't bother reading about this show, it's very serious and too arty for you and therefore can't possibly be entertaining."

Somewhat to my surprise, I agree--though I've never been good at coming up with letter grades and star ratings on the rare occasions when magazines and newspapers require me to supply them. Nevertheless, Howard has persuaded me that it's not a bad idea.

- Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes interviews Jerry Saltz, art critic of the Village Voice. Money quote:

People often ask me, "Why do you write about things that you don't like?" And it breaks my heart. You would never say that to a sportswriter or a restaurant critic or a film reviewer or a book reviewer. But in the art world, for some reason, people get down on or even demonize you for saying something is faulty. It's a very Bush-Cheney time. I think writing what you really think is a way of showing art respect.

Once again, I agree, at least in principle, even though I happen to think I'm better at writing about what I like. Most other critics aren't--and they ought to work harder at it.

- More on Fahrenheit 9/11 and the problem of political art, this time from Steven Zeitchik of Publishers Weekly, who writes in The Wall Street Journal:

Of course, the documentary form doesn't always function this way. At its best--e.g., Frederick Wiseman's films on high schools and hospitals, the weird constellations of "Crumb" and "Capturing the Friedmans," the Vietnam-centered "Hearts and Minds"--it is propelled by a sense of discovery. Neither filmmaker nor viewer knows what he is getting into until he really starts busying himself with it.

Movies like "Outfoxed," "Control Room" and "Fahrenheit 9/11" work differently. They begin by knowing their thesis--and their audience--and operate backward. In the process, artists keen to point up the propagandistic efforts of others show themselves all too willing to take part in such efforts themselves.

Yet to call these films propaganda is also to misunderstand them. They don't seek to convince the unconvinced or herd the untamed. They aim directly at the sheep....Call them flockumentaries, movies people attend en masse, to nestle together in easy confirmation of their most cherished beliefs--to learn, really, what they already know.

- Courtesy of Gnostical Turpitude, a fun piece by Philip Hensher on indexes with character:

A fine example came last year with Ruth Dudley Edwards's book about Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King. The author had a very difficult time with King's appalling widow, Dame Ruth Railton, a woman for whom very few people ever had a good word. The book itself was a model of restraint when dealing with her excesses, but when it came to the index, the gloves came off, in part running: "marriage; psychic powers believed in by King; disliked by his friends; King wants as musical director of ATV; encourages his megalomania; increasing possessiveness... moves to Ireland with King; denounces Cudlipp; hatred of Ireland; gets rid of family correspondence; cocoons King from children and grandchildren; and King's death; disposes of his money; treatment of his family; traumatises Secker and Warburg."

I've never done anything like that in any of my books, but I've been tempted....

- Michele Williams, call your office. (And no, the rest of you aren't supposed to get it. This is a coded announcement going out to Smalltown, U.S.A. We return you now to our regularly scheduled posting.)

- A point to ponder, from Dan Henninger's Wall Street Journal column about the survey of American literary reading habits issued two weeks ago by the National Endowment for the Arts:

It's also worth noting that while the Endowment explicitly says mysteries are literature, its definition doesn't include biography or history. Thus, taking a month to read Ron Chernow's magnificent biography of Alexander Hamilton doesn't count. Surely it should.

Under normal circumstances, my next sentence would have started "Speaking as a biographer," but now that my nomination to the National Council on the Arts has been announced, I'm not supposed to write anything about the NEA, good or bad, until the Senate votes on me. So I won't.

- A friend of mine who recently had a baby swears that this is her all-time favorite New Yorker cartoon. In fact, she actually thought of sending it out as a birth announcement. (I guess it beats the old Charles Addams cartoon whose caption, if I remember correctly, was "Congratulations...it's a baby!")

- Speaking of The New Yorker, yes, Alex, I noticed the anagrams for "Terry Teachout" in the title of your posting celebrating the first anniversary of "About Last Night." Very clever. This brought to mind a posting from a year ago in which I reported the results of my own anagrammatic self-analysis. For those who've forgotten, these were the best ones:

Reroute thy act
Outcry at three
Hey, actor, utter!
Etch your tater
Treachery tout
That cuter yore
Ratty, cute hero
Retract ye thou!

And my own favorite:

The Tory Curate

- Finally, Ed outs Our Girl. Who knew?

Posted July 19, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"The good parts of a book may be something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life--and one is as good as the other."

Ernest Hemingway, letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sept. 4, 1929

Posted July 19, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Chicagocentric

- In The New Republic, Jed Perl calls the Art Institute of Chicago's new Seurat show a golden opportunity, but one that the AIC fumbled:

"Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte" is the latest salute to the museum's crown jewel, and while the show's strengths do honor to the painting and to the city, the exhibition is very, very far from being an unadulterated success. Its failures speak volumes about what the people who run today's museums think the public wants--and how, perhaps, in the eighty years since La Grande Jatte came into the museum's collection, the people in charge at the Art Institute have shrunk their assumptions about what the public can absorb. A transcendent medium-sized exhibition has been nearly ruined by the museum's insistence on producing a multimedia extravaganza....

A great chance to educate the public has been botched in Chicago. For Seurat's studies for La Grande Jatte, seen in such dazzling profusion, tell a story of the workings of the imagination that anybody can understand without audio-visual assistance. The one thing that the Art Institute has been wise to include is an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of paper, a handout that is available as you enter the crucial phase of the show, which contains a reproduction of La Grande Jatte and a brief explanation of the way that the studies for the painting have been grouped in order to reflect, as best we can understand, the stages of Seurat's thinking. Walking around with this information sheet, people can begin to grasp Seurat's strenuous process of trial and error, and his arrival at the riveting vision of the final painting. One morning, I saw a woman and what I expect was her second- or third-grade daughter making their way around the room. The girl was picking out the changes, the shifts that Seurat made as he developed and honed his ideas. All it took were her eyes and her native intelligence. She didn't need a movie to help her compare a study of a figure to the figure in the painting, and she didn't need a simulated zoom-in to enable her to look at the texture of Seurat's paint strokes. By looking directly, by seeing things for herself, this girl was taking possession of the painting. The magic of creation is there for all to see, for all to embrace, if only the museum would let people get on with it.

Perl's review has much to say about Seurat's virtues as well as this particular show's failings. I'll try to go see the exhibit anyway; the painting is so iconic and ubiquitous here in Chicago that I think I stopped really seeing it years ago. It will be good to go and take a fresh look.

- Word Wars, the Scrabble documentary whose directors I interviewed last January, is finally hitting Chicago. It opens at Facets Cinémathèque this Friday for a week, plus in a matinee screening each of the following two Saturdays (July 31 and August 7). Go, go, go! I finally caught the movie myself last weekend at Cambridge's Brattle, incidentally the former stomping grounds of the lovely Cinetrix, who apparently still haunts the place--after the screening I spilled out of the theater into Harvard Square and ran directly into her while still squinting dazedly in the sunlight. I'm fairly sure she wasn't just a figment of my sun-drunk imagination, as she, the 'Fesser, and I later successfully met up to get, um, drink-drunk. (There should be more room in life for matinees, and post-matinee squinting; already intoxicated by the movie, if it was any good at all, you swoon and swerve in the surprising light. It's a minor, but excellent, brand of euphoria.)

I loved the movie and, yes, I would say that even if it hadn't been made by one of my oldest friends. It's a slice of a life you've probably never imagined. The obvious comparison is with Spellbound, and what the Word Wars characters lack in youthful charm, they more than make up for in eccentricity and passion. They're there by active choice, and the film makes clear that professional Scrabble is not a life you choose for any dispassionate reason. There's no percentage in it, yet the competition is cutthroat. What the main characters go through may fit many viewers' definition of suffering. And yet they're happy, in their way, and the most unguarded of them are especially fascinating. Marlon Hill in particular, from the mean streets of Baltimore, steals the show. Here is a man who will put to rest forever any illusions you may have that this is a game solely for introverts or nerds. There are many kinds of intelligence; part of what's fascinating about Word Wars is how it shows you that even within a group of people with one particular, ridiculously specialized talent, there is an enormously wide range of ways of being good. Marlon, having the most unorthodox ways, establishes the range. And, well, the guy's a star. Did I say it already? Go, go, go!

- This greenest of cities has a brand-new park, which I haven't yet seen up close. From the pictures, it seems to me that the giant mirrored jelly bean is the pièce de résistance. I look forward to seeing myself in it in the very near future, and will certainly report back on the experience.

Posted July 19, 6:16 AM

July 16, 2004

TT: Resident artisan

A reader writes:

I'm curious, and it might be worth blogging about: what does your work space look like? I once saw a photo book of writers' studies, and I spent hours poring over photographs of desks, bookshelves, odd pieces of detritus thumbtacked to the walls, and I came away believing (perhaps wrongly) that I knew a bit more about each of them. We know some of what is on the walls, so what about the rest?

I work at home in a small office-bedroom whose third-floor window looks down on a quiet, tree-lined block of Upper West Side brownstones. The window is to my left, a clothes closet to my right, and over the closet is a sleeping loft. (The ceilings in my apartment are unusually high.) The walls are white, the furniture black, the rug black and tan. I sit on a cheap, creaky swivel chair. My desk is one of those Danish-style slab-and-tube jobs: four shelves, no drawers. The shelf on which I work holds my iBook, a pair of good-quality desktop speakers hooked up to the computer (I often listen to music while I write), a phone-fax-answering machine, an external zip drive, and a tall, sometimes shaky stack of review CDs. My printer is on the bottom shelf. The shelf immediately above eye level holds a few framed pictures, a flashlight (just in case), and two short stacks of review copies and bound galleys of forthcoming books.

On the top shelf are:

- The Library of America's Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works
- Four hardbound Viking Portables: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Johnson & Boswell
- An old Modern Library collection of Montaigne's essays
- Dostoyevsky's Demons
- Kenneth Minogue's Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology
- Arlene Croce's Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker
- David Thomson's New Biographical Dictionary of Film
- H.L. Mencken's New Dictionary of Quotations
- The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
- Fowler's Modern English Usage
- A Terry Teachout Reader

To my immediate left, below the window sill, are two neat stacks of books and papers. To my right is a small wheeled hutch that contains office supplies and other papers. Atop the hutch are two boxes full of Giorgio Morandi and Fairfield Porter notecards, a small rock from the shore of Isle au Haut, and a Cup of Chicha coffee mug full of pens and pencils. Beyond it is an electronic keyboard on a floor stand, and beyond the keyboard, next to the closet, is a case of books about music. Behind my chair are seven custom-made cases containing 3,000 CDs.

Hanging on the walls are:

- A framed gold record given to me by the members of Nickel Creek
- A Hatch Show Print poster advertising a concert by Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys, printed from the original blocks
- A poster advertising a 1974 Hans Hofmann show at André Emmerich Gallery
- A blue-and-gold poster from New York City Ballet's 1982 Stravinsky Centennial Celebration

Only one item in the Teachout Museum can be seen from my desk, a Joseph Cornell-like assemblage put together by Paul Taylor out of the original newspaper version of "The Importance of Being Less Earnest," one of the essays in the Teachout Reader. It hangs by the keyboard. My prints are all next door in the living room, where they can't distract me from the day's work.

Now, what does all that tell you about me?

Posted July 16, 12:04 PM

TT: The reader over your shoulder

My posting about the potential embarrassments of reading in public has brought in some delightful responses, but none better than this:

Your reminiscences brought to mind some less-than-pleasant scenes from my days as a pre-adolescent, adolescent and post-adolescent bookworm...and one story you might find amusing.

It was back in '74 or '75, at Dumont High School in N.J.; one day, standing outside the auditorium waiting to go into an assembly or something, I had my nose stuck in Harold Pinter's "The Homecoming." A very perky, very blonde, reasonably sweet cheerleader noticed what I was reading and said, "Oh, that's so cool!"

Well, naturally I was kind of...flabbergasted. But hey, you never know with people...and I did have one of those lusting-from-afar crushes on the young lady, so I said something fairly lame, along the lines of, "Yeah it's really something," to which she replied with an eager "Uh-huh."

Not knowing where to take this, I thought I would make a joke. "I think the Drama Club ought to do this sometime." And she beamed and said, "Yes, absolutely." And then she paused and said, "Who do you think should play John-boy?"

It took me a few seconds before I put it together and realized that she was under the impression that what I was reading was the script for the television movie that served as the pilot for the series "The Waltons," also titled "The Homecoming." I was bitterly disappointed for a second, and then relieved to be returned to the reality I knew.

So be wary of that fantasy waitress....

Actually, all the waitresses at Good Enough to Eat, my neighborhood hangout, are maximally cool. Several are performers of various kinds, and when possible I go to see their shows. (Where are you now, Shannon Hope Lee?) As for the other restaurants in the immediate vicinity, though, I make no promises!

Posted July 16, 12:03 PM

TT: If not now, when?

"About Last Night" got written up yesterday in Publishers Lunch, the daily publishing-industry e-mail newsletter (go here to subscribe). I thought what they said might interest you:

Finally, the big blog occasion this week is the one-year anniversary of cultural critic Terry Teachout's abundant blog About Last Night. He writes, "Blogs are the 21st-century counterpart of the periodical essays of the eighteenth century, the Spectators and Ramblers and Idlers that supplied familiar essayists with what was then the ideal vehicle for their intensely personal reflections. Blogging stands in the sharpest possible contrast to the corporate journalism that exerted so powerful an effect on writing in the twentieth century."

Other bloggers write to celebrate the generally rising profile, quality and influence of blogs. What strikes me is the way Teachout has utterly changed his profile as a critic and his relationship with his audience through his blog in just a year. It's no accident that he's had three books coming during the year that he's been blogging, and he's developed a meaningful connection with a large circle of readers (he cites about half a million page views).

As I noted on my BEA blogger panel, what writers do best is write. Blogs are a great way of letting writers connect on a regular basis with readers, and attract new audiences and fans, while still keeping whatever respectful distance they like and having the power of their words rule the day. I still can't figure out why everyone isn't getting their authors to blog.

Beats me.

Posted July 16, 12:02 PM

TT: Starring Kristen Johnston

I'm back in The Wall Street Journal again this morning, reviewing the Public Theater's Central Park production of Much Ado About Nothing and a one-woman off-off-Broadway show, Janine Squillari's I Need a Guy Who Blinks.

Much Ado was slow to get off the ground, but Kristen Johnston was great right from the start:

The six-foot-tall alien of TV's "Third Rock from the Sun" also has an impressive track record on stage, including a vital performance earlier this year in the New Group's revival of Wallace Shawn's obnoxious "Aunt Dan and Lemon," and though she's a Shakespearean debutante, she clearly has great things ahead of her. As Beatrice, the hard-nosed bride-to-be of "Much Ado," Ms. Johnston bestrides the stage like a full-fledged star, seizing your attention with every word she speaks (and even when not speaking--I couldn't take my eyes off her in the crowd scenes). Her dark-brown baritone voice cleaves the air like a well-honed knife, one that she not infrequently turns on herself. Not only does she have the happy knack of knowing how to be funny and rueful at the same time, but her handsome, wide-mouthed face, at once sexy and silly, was custom-made for comedy. When she orders her hapless suitor Benedick (Jimmy Smits) to "kill Claudio," you want to run right out and tie the noose.

The trouble with the first three-fifths of the play is that David Esbjornson, the director, has failed to create a convincing setting for Ms. Johnston's magical presence. He has updated the play to Sicily circa 1919, but for no apparent reason other than to appeal to the "Under the Tuscan Sun" crowd, and his puzzling period references (including a bizarre scene set in a Futurist disco) shed no light on Shakespeare's sufficiently luminous text....

Then came the wedding scene, and everything started to hum. Mr. Esbjornson shook off the confusing superfluities of the previous acts and homed in on the play's emotional truths, and all at once the whole cast snapped to attention. It was like a helicopter taking off. Actors who had been slightly off target suddenly got the point: Mr. Waterston became frighteningly angry, Mr. Smits charmingly funny, and Brian Murray, who had hitherto fallen flat as Dogberry, the idiot constable, turned before our eyes into a gloriously plummy-voiced boob whose every polysyllabic malapropism brought down the house. Nobody on stage put a foot wrong for the rest of the night.

I Need a Guy Who Blinks may not be Shakespeare, but it's hair-raisingly relevant:

An 80-minute monologue in which Ms. Squillari describes a disastrous string of bad dates, bad relationships and bad breakups, it is every Gen-X woman's worst nightmare come to life--plus laughs. Ms. Squillari claims to have an infallible track record when it comes to dating: "Granted, I may not have always made the best choices in men. In fact, I've never made a good choice in men." Fortunately, she was taking notes as she lurched from bed to bed, and she tells her horror stories with a self-loathing glee guaranteed to make every man in the audience take stock of his own peculiarities. I especially liked the questionnaire she created in order to screen out losers up front: "How many people are involved in a monogamous relationship? (A) One. (B) Two. (C) Three."

No link, so if you want to read the whole thing (and if not, why not?), buy a Friday Journal, turn to the "Weekend Section," and look for my drama column right next to the Wall Street Journal/ZAGAT Theater Survey. Or subscribe to The Wall Street Journal Online by going here. That's what I do.

Posted July 16, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Wearing a dinner jacket, Umfraville was otherwise unchanged from the night we had met at Foppa's. Trim, horsey, perfectly at ease with himself, and everyone around him, he managed at the same time to suggest the proximity of an abyss of scandal and bankruptcy threatening at any moment to engulf himself, and anyone else unfortunate enough to be within his immediate vicinity when the crash came. The charm he exercised over people was perhaps largely due to this ability to juggle with two contrasting, apparently contradictory attributes; the one, an underlying implication of sinister, disturbing undercurrents: the other, a soothing power to reassure and entertain. These incompatible elements were always to be felt warring with each other whenever he was present. He was like an actor who suddenly appears on the stage to the accompaniment of a roll of thunder, yet who utterly captivates his audience a second later, while their nerves are still on edge, by crooning a sentimental song."

Anthony Powell, At Lady Molly's

Posted July 16, 12:00 PM

July 15, 2004

TT: Whoops, you missed me!

I appeared Wednesday afternoon on Soundcheck, John Schaefer's daily radio show about the arts in New York City. We chatted about the Teachout Reader, middlebrow culture, and the first anniversary of "About Last Night." Alas, it slipped my mind that the show airs live each day on WNYC (it's a good thing I got there early!), and so I forgot to post about it in advance of airtime.

If you're curious, the program has already been archived, and you can listen to it by going here.

(The WNYC Web site, incidentally, describes me as a "serial blogger." Stop me before I post again!)

Posted July 15, 12:03 PM

TT: Our far-flung correspondents

You'd be surprised--or maybe not--by who reads "About Last Night." Bob Brookmeyer, the composer and jazz trombonist about whom I've blogged on several occasions, wrote the other day to comment on my approving link to a posting in which artsjournal.com blogger Kyle Gann declared that "the entire body of serialist music produced nothing that will ever mean much to anyone beyond composers and new-musicians interested in its technical aspects."

Says Brookmeyer:

2 cases in point put a dent in the "beyond my ken" reaction -- Berg's Violin Concerto (one of the most moving pieces I have ever heard) and Webern's Symphony Op. 21, which I -- at age 20 -- declared "the only perfect music I have ever heard" -- both of these date back to 1950, for me, and time has only increased my love and wonder at the beauty and clarity "organization" can bring to bear. Berg, who was always regarded as the connection to the past, was one of the most organized composers in history, yet much of his music sounds almost improvised. SOMETIMES the means justify the ends. Much the same, for me, with electronic music. It all depends on the composer.

I agree, at least in principle (though not about the Webern Symphony, which has never made sense to me except when used as a ballet score by George Balanchine). The Berg Violin Concerto, for instance, also strikes me as profoundly moving. It is, however, a very special case, a piece of serial music based on a tone row whose interlocking major and minor triads are manipulated by Berg to create quasi-tonal effects. I think its appeal is essentially theatrical, by which I mean it's not so much pure music as a piece of "representational" art in which Berg uses the tension between tonality and atonality to portray an extra-musical emotional state. (He does the same thing in Wozzeck, though the fact that Wozzeck is an opera makes it more obvious.) That doesn't mean the concerto isn't beautiful, though. Brookmeyer is right: like every other variety of art, music is an essentially empirical operation to which theory is ultimately irrelevant. What works, works. The fact that most atonal music doesn't work says something relevant about the fundamental problems of atonality--but that doesn't make it impossible for a genius to compose a piece of atonal music that does. In art, all definitions are slippery, which is one of the things that makes it so miraculous.

(If you've never heard the Berg Violin Concerto, by the way, I'm especially fond of this recording.)

Another reader of "About Last Night," Toni Bentley, rose to the bait I offered in a recent posting in which I announced that I'd finally bowed to her wishes and watched The Red Shoes. Not only was Toni delighted that I liked it so much, but she sent me a speech she gave at a recent West Coast screening of Michael Powell's 1948 film.

Here's part of what she said:

On a more personal note I would like to comment as a former classical ballet dancer on the depiction of the dance world as portrayed in this film as demanding, difficult, and frequently physically painful--all of which is accurate. What is perhaps even more revolutionary now than in 1948 is that this film, while not denying the hardships and sacrifices, actually extols them as the worthwhile price of achieving great art. The dance world continues today to receive criticism as being a profession that demands too much of its young aspirants for a career that is brief, badly paid, elitist, undemocratic, and can be abruptly ended with an injury in the blink of an eye. I cannot in all honesty tell you that any of these complaints are not true. But more often than not these are the complaints of those who don't actually dance, but those who observe--and, perhaps, covet the stage. What I can say, from the other side of the footlights, is that the reward of achieving some measure of transcendent beauty for those of us who pursued it, and for our appreciative audiences, was worth every bloody toe and every drop of sweat. And besides, democracy has never had much to do with making great art.

The movie that you are about to see is that rare work that argues that art is not only important but possibly the most important thing in life. "The Red Shoes," wrote Michael Powell in his autobiography, "is an insolent, haunting picture the way it takes for granted that nothing matters but art, and that art is something worth dying for." Ballet, in its deft defiance of gravity itself, is the ultimate metaphor for this transcendence of our wretched mortality. In our time of much meaningless death and much bad and boring art, The Red Shoes, 56 years after its premiere, feels like a breath of fresh air--and a call to arms--for Dedication, Beauty and Passion of the kind that helps the rest of us find meaning in something that surpasses our mere mortal selves.

I couldn't have put it better.

Posted July 15, 12:02 PM

TT: An embarrassment of congratulations

Between "About Last Night"'s first anniversary and my nomination to the National Council on the Arts, our mailbox is bulging. Here are some e-letters that caught my eye:

- "Congratulations on your first anniversary as a blogger. I've more or less been reading you from the beginning--I don't think I caught on right away, but once I figured out what you were up to, I went back and caught up with the first two or three weeks I'd missed. I was interested to see that you'd spent a happy afternoon scrolling through your About Last Night archives, not long after your post about not keeping keepsakes, and tossing out most of your old print clips. Is a dust-free, spatially invisible archive somehow different for you from a drawer full of yellowed clippings? Personally, if my scribblings are available online, I don't bother with a printout, yet I do still maintain a drawer of my older magazine articles and increasingly brittle newspaper cuttings--just in case I need them for quick reference, of course."

Well, "About Last Night" archives itself automatically with no additional effort from me! As for the old newspaper clippings, I feel considerably lighter for having consigned them to the recycling bin--but check back with me once I finish transferring my entire CD library to my iBook, which at this rate should happen early in the 22nd century....

- "My heartfelt congratulations on your first anniversary in the blogosphere. Hope you have many more. By the time I discovered your blog some about eight months ago, I had been a long-time reader of your essays in Commentary. It was your piece on David Helfgott -- you were, I believe, the only critic not to have been fooled by that spectacle and to have had the courage to say so -- that made me a permanent devotee. If your blog could have a sub-title, I would suggest: ‘Everything you always suspected about art but were afraid to say.' Those of us who have always loved Chandler, Sinatra and Mitchum and have not had much use for Brando, Larry Kramer or Phillip Glass, can now say so at a Manhattan cocktail party without feeling like we're committing a grave social sin. Thank you for that."

Somehow I doubt that regular consumption of "About Last Night" is likely to improve anyone's comfort level at Manhattan cocktail parties. As for the essay in question, "The David Helfgott Show," I made a point of including it in A Terry Teachout Reader. I'm proud of it--not least because more than one practicing psychiatrist wrote at the time of its original publication to congratulate me for my honesty. That's the kind of fan mail a writer remembers.

- "I am not sure exactly how long I have been reading your blog, but it must be a while now, since I recognized a number of the ‘greatest hits' you selected. It was interesting to read your childhood memories of being considered an egghead and an odd duck. I also spent a lot of time reading and following obscure topics. I can certainly relate to feeling embarrassed at being caught reading a book in public. And yet, I really didn't become much of an intellectual. I like some jazz, mostly stuff like Erroll Garner and Jimmie Lunceford, but am not terribly knowledge. Oh sure, I like Miles, but who doesn't? I liked Filles de Kilimanjaro and On the Corner, and that's rather suspicious. Let's face it -- I'm just much much more passionate and informed about hip-hop and soul music. I've listened to some classical, the basic stuff everyone knows. I like Charles Ives, but couldn't begin to explain why. I don't know anything about opera or ballet. There's a long list of great novels I've never read; on the other hand, there's a longer list of paperback mysteries I have. Point being, I find your blog to fill me in on things I know nothing about. Occasionally, things go over my head, but not due to your writing."

Whenever "About Last Night" has a high-traffic day, OGIC and I publish a pre-written posting for the benefit of first-time visitors. This is part of what it says:

Our interests are wide-ranging, and we think there are plenty of other people like us out there in cyberspace, plus still more who long to wander off their beaten paths but aren't sure which way to turn.

That's why we're especially pleased whenever we get letters like this one.

Thanks to all of you--and to all who've sent good wishes in recent days. Like I said yesterday, you are why we write this blog.

Posted July 15, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

What happened to Brie and Chablis?
Both Brie and Chablis used to be
The sort of thing everyone ate
When goat cheese and Napa Merlot
Weren't purchased by those in the know,
And monkfish was thought of as bait.

And why did authorities ban
From restaurants all coq au vin?
And then disappeared sole meunière,
Then banished, with little ado,
Beef Wellington--and Stroganoff, too.
Then cancelled the chocolate éclair.

Then hollandaise sauce got the boot,
And kiwis stopped being the fruit
That every chef loved to included
Like quiches, or coquilles St. Jacques,
They turned into something to mock--
The fruit that all chic chefs eschewed.

You miss, let's say, trout amandine?
Take hope from some menus I've seen:
Fondue has been spotted of late
And--yes, to my near disbelief--
Tartare not from tuna, but beef.
They all may return. Just you wait.

Calvin Trillin, "What Happened to Brie and Chablis?"

Posted July 15, 12:01 PM

July 14, 2004

TT: One and counting

"About Last Night," the first artsjournal.com blog to go live, made its debut a year ago today. Go here to read what I posted on July 14, 2003.

I was, so far as I know, the first widely read print-media critic to launch a daily blog about the arts, and my single-handed assault on the blogosphere didn't exactly trigger an avalanche of imitators (though the artsjournal.com blogroster now contains a number of other familiar faces, and Alex Ross of The New Yorker, much to my delight, recently started a blog of his own). Instead, something far more interesting and significant happened: the blogosphere invaded the print media. Several of the artbloggers listed in the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column, many of whom started blogging before I did and most of whom were unknown before they started blogging, now write for newspapers and magazines. Yet they continue to blog as well. Why? Because blogging, which operates according to its own homegrown rules, has evolved into a brand-new style of journalism indigenous to the Web, one whose exciting blend of immediacy and informality has its own unique appeal to readers--and writers. I know I'm hooked.

A theologian I know once told me that technology is not merely neutral, but a positive good. I'm no Luddite, but I had trouble getting his point. Now, after a year of blogging, I understand it completely. Blogs are the 21st-century counterpart of the periodical essays of the eighteenth century, the Spectators and Ramblers and Idlers that supplied familiar essayists with what was then the ideal vehicle for their intensely personal reflections. Blogging stands in the sharpest possible contrast to the corporate journalism that exerted so powerful an effect on writing in the twentieth century. Instead of the homogenized semi-anonymity of a mass-circulation magazine, it offers writers the opportunity to practice the old-fashioned art of individual journalism, self-published, unmediated, and interactive. That's a good example of what my theologian friend meant: the highest purpose of the Internet, a seemingly impersonal piece of postmodern technology, has turned out to be its unique ability to bring creatures of flesh and blood closer together.

I started "About Last Night" because I'd come to believe that the print media were losing interest in the fine arts. I suspected that serious arts journalism was destined to migrate to the Web, which is the perfect medium for cultural niche marketing, and it struck me that as an arts journalist, I might therefore do well to investigate its possibilities. At the same time, I never meant for this blog to be devoted to high art alone. Of the hundreds of thousands of words I've posted here to date, I think these might be the most important:

I don't think The Long Goodbye is as good a book as The Great Gatsby, and I believe the difference between the two books is hugely important. But I also don't think it's absurd to compare them, and I probably re-read one as often as the other.

The point is that I accept the existence of hierarchies of quality without feeling oppressed by them. I have plenty of room in my life for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler, for Aaron Copland and Louis Armstrong, for George Balanchine and Fred Astaire, and I love them all without confusing their relative merits, much less jumping to the conclusion that all merits are relative.

In case you hadn't noticed, that's part of what this blog is all about--a big part.

It sure is, and it still is.

To all of you who read "About Last Night" regularly, I want to express my deepest gratitude for your support. You are why I write this blog.

As for Our Girl in Chicago, who became my co-blogger last fall, I can't say enough good things about her. "About Last Night" is a better blog--and infinitely more fun to write--because of her "additional dialogue."

And to the other bloggers out there in the 'sphere who have befriended and advised me, thanks for being so patient with a terminally unhip boomer who decided to get crazy and plunge head first into your brave new world. You're teaching me a lot, every day.

Much else has happened to me in the year just past. I published a book, wrote another one, and had a third come out in paperback. The Teachout Museum, which started out as a couple of prints on my wall, became a serious and passionate pursuit, so much so that I'll be giving a lecture about it next March at my favorite museum, the Phillips Collection (watch this space for details). I visited a Maine island, rode a roller coaster for the first time, consumed an enormous amount of art, and was investigated by the FBI. But of all the things I did, I suspect that starting this blog will prove in the not-so-long run to have been the most consequential. I've been present at the creation (well, almost) of a totally new journalistic medium, the first one to come along since the invention of TV, and I've enjoyed every minute of it.

So I'll close by thanking Doug McLennan, the mastermind of artsjournal.com, who called me up out of the blue one afternoon and said, "How'd you like to write a blog for me?" Three weeks later--one year ago today--"About Last Night" was born. Since then, it's racked up more than 430,000 page views and is now being read in thirteen time zones around the world. That's a start.

Posted July 14, 12:03 PM

TT: Down memory lane

Blogging is a fugitive medium, which is at once its charm and its flaw. I've spun some of what I've written for "About Last Night" into print-media pieces (and vice versa), but most of it has disappeared into the ether. On the other hand, everything posted on this blog is electronically archived, and I recently spent a sunny afternoon trolling through my postings of the past year. Here are some that caught my eye:

- "In the words of one of the gazillion e-mails I've received since opening for business on Monday, 'Do you realize that once you start blogging, you cease to have a life?' That's what a new blogger likes to hear at 1:18 in the morning as he wonders whether he remembered to put in all the serial commas." (Alias terryteachout.com, July 16, 2003.)

- "I've come to feel that as a rule, the thing I do best is point people in the direction of that which and those whom I love. Let somebody else ice Piss Christ--I'd rather spend my remaining hours on earth telling you how beautiful The Open Window is, especially if you've never seen it before. In the long run, silence may be the most powerful form of negative criticism." (Let's drop the big one (and see what happens), August 6.)

- "If we think a house or painting or photograph or ballet is beautiful, we want it with us always. But the catch is that the more pieces of the past we succeed in preserving, the less space and time we have in which to display and contemplate the present. Too many lovers of art live exclusively in the past. I understand the temptation--I feel it myself--but it strikes me that we have an obligation to keep one eye fixed in the moment, and that becomes a lot harder to do when you're pulling a long, long train of classics of which the new is merely the caboose. Needless to say, this is a problem without a solution. The only thing you can do is fiddle with the proportions and try to get them right, or at least righter." (Going, going, September 25.)

- "Somebody (me, I guess) ought to write an essay about how jazz has come to be used as a cultural signifier in films, TV shows, and ads, an infallible indicator of upper-middle-class hipness. That's part of the reason why a pathbreaking musical statement has become so ubiquitous--but not the biggest part. Kind of Blue, lest we forget, was always popular. It was a hit in 1959, too. Why? Because for all its undeniable radicalism, Kind of Blue is also accessible and memorable. You don't have to know what modal improvisation is to revel in its spare, lucid textures. You don't even have to know who Miles, Trane, Cannonball, and Bill Evans were. Yes, they're doing astounding things--but they don't hit you over the head with their innovations, or try to tie your ears in knots. The results are simple, beautiful, and new, and the last of these is not the first." (Kind of omnipresent, October 21.)

- "Above all, blogging is fun. And that's one thing I don't get from Jennifer Howard's eat-your-spinach account of life in the blogosphere: a sense of how much fun we're all having out here. ‘We' meaning TMFTML and Maud and Cup of Chicha and Old Hag and Bookslut and the thousands of nice people who visit us every day. It's not a private party. There's no secret handshake. All you have to do is click on a link. Or not. But we hope you do." (Not exactly Heathers, November 15.)

- "Is it just me, or are any of you out there offended by the tone of the countless clever-clever op-eds, think pieces, and thumbsuckers of the past couple of days that have sought to ‘interpret' and pseudo-intellectualize the Michael Jackson story? Jackson's arrest isn't a Media Phenomenon, nor is it a sign of the times. It's a news story about an alleged pedophile, one who has spent millions of dollars to keep himself out of jail. And I don't give a good goddamn about the social significance of his mug shot, either. If he did what he's said to have done, I want to see him in a jail cell, and once he's there, my interest in him will be over and done with." (While I'm at it, November 22.)

- "I believe devoutly and passionately in the permanent significance of classical music. What's more, I believe truly great music is being written right this minute. But pop culture isn't going away, and that means symphony orchestras have to build their own audiences. If they don't, nobody else will. And if their audiences are shrinking, it means they're doing a bad job--period. It doesn't matter whether they're playing well. It doesn't matter whether they're playing good music. If nobody's listening, something's wrong. You can spend all day assigning blame, or you can try to figure out what to do to change things. There is no third way. Minds won't open themselves." (It's dark in here, damn it, December 1.)

- "Jenni Ringley has earned herself a footnote in the history of the information age: she will be remembered as the Milton Berle of the Web. She was present at the creation of a radically innovative form of interpersonal communication, and used it to show the world her underwear. What's more, the world turned out to be interested in her underwear--briefly. Then something more interesting came along, and Jenni's underwear turned out not to be soooooo special after all." (14:59, December 9.)

- "I'm always struck by the small things that distinguish my home town in southeast Missouri from my adopted home, the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I'd never really noticed until today, for instance, but the only houses that are architecturally 'modern' in any recognizable sense are a half-dozen Frank Lloyd Wright knockoffs built in the late Fifties. Similarly, you rarely see reproductions of modern art on anybody's walls. It's as though time had stopped in 1900." (A visit to Red America, December 23.)

- "Once a year, every working art critic should be required to attend a blockbuster show on a weekend or holiday. He should buy a ticket with his own money, line up with the citizenry, fight his way through the crowds, listen to an audio tour--and pay close attention to what his fellow museumgoers are saying and doing. In short, he should be forced to remind himself on a regular basis of how ordinary people experience art, and marvel at the fact that they keep coming back in spite of everything." (