About Last Night: July 2004 Archives

TT: Almanac

"Until I actually faced it, I believed that it would not be difficult to write a short story, but now I recognized the complete loneliness of the trade as I stared at my blank paper. I was no longer dealing with facts. My mind was groping in the lamplight in an effort to draw the illusion of living people out of thin air. It had never occurred to me until that moment that the effort would be fatiguing or unpleasant; it had never occurred to me that it would be worse than manual labor. And when I sat down before the table on a creaking bedroom chair, I did not realize that I should be doing this sort of thing for years. I did not realize that writing would almost always be a disagreeable task, and that nothing which one sets down on paper ever wholly approximates the conception of the mind. As soon as I faced it, I did not want to write. Instead my intelligence presented a number of excuses for stopping before I started. The light was bad, the chair was uncomfortable; I felt tired; I wanted to read a book. I would always be seeking for excuses, ever after, not to write; and I have often wondered why I began at all."

John P. Marquand, Wickford Point

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 1, 2004 9:20 AM | Permalink

TT: Report from the whirlpool

I went to the Blue Note last night to hear Gary Burton, who was playing a one-nighter to mark the release of his marvelous new album, Generations. After I booked a table for two, I learned that Madeleine Peyroux would be opening for him. Normally I flinch at the prospect of an opening act--I've heard some pretty grisly ones, especially at the Blue Note--but this time I perked right up.

Peyroux first caught my ear several years ago when Jonathan Schwartz played her version of Patsy Cline's "Walkin' After Midnight" on his radio show. It's a lazy, loping performance, a half-notch slower than Cline's original recording, with an exotic bayou flavor and a discreetly percolating organ in the background, half country and half soul. What really grabbed my attention, though, was the singing. Peyroux sounded just like Billie Holiday in the mid-Forties--the same salty rasp, the same squeezed-out upward spurts and languorous swoops. She didn't sound like an imitator, though, partly because the song (and arrangement) were radically different from anything Holiday would ever have dreamed of singing, save in some peculiar parallel universe.

Upon further investigation I discovered that "Walkin' After Midnight" came from Dreamland, Peyroux's 1996 debut album, which is uneven but full of interesting things. What really surprised me, though, was that it was her only record. Not only had she released nothing after Dreamland, but she appeared to have dropped off the scope altogether. Needless to say, these things happen, and a quick search of the Web hinted at some possible reasons: Peyroux was just 23 years old when she released Dreamland, and her weight had fluctuated drastically since then, suggesting that she'd been weathering some sort of personal crisis. So I filed her name away in my head and heard no more of her until four months ago, when I read that she'd signed with Rounder Records, the Massachusetts-based country-bluegrass-jazz label whose best-known artist is Alison Krauss. Then, earlier this week, Concord Jazz's publicist sent me an e-mail telling me that Peyroux would be opening for Gary Burton, and I thought, Good--now I can find out what's happened to her.

The answer is that she's lost a lot of weight, and now looks rather like Patricia Barber. She still sounds like Billie Holiday, and when you hear her talk you realize that it's not an imitation, simply the voice that comes out of her throat. In addition, Peyroux plays acoustic guitar in a down-home finger-picking style reminiscent of Leon Redbone, and her choice of material is no less Redbone-ish, running to a pleasingly off-center combination of standards, contemporary ballads, and obscure old-timey tunes. She seems quite shy (though apparently not incapacitatingly so), but that doesn't stop her from singing in a restrained yet emotionally direct way that I found powerfully appealing. Peyroux appeared with an instrumental trio that didn't sound as if it had done a whole lot of rehearsing, but the results were more than agreeable, and when she announced from the bandstand that her "sophomore" album, Careless Love, was coming out in September, I leaned over to my companion for the evening and whispered, "I want to write about her." I'd bet the rent that she has a story to tell--assuming she feels like telling it--but my main interest is in spreading the word about a fine artist who seems at last to be coming into her own.

Peyroux sang for a bit less than an hour, after which Gary Burton's Generations, as his new quintet is billed, took the stand. As he launched into "First Impression," the Steely Dan-like opening track from Generations, it occurred to me that I hadn't heard any of his working groups in person for at least a quarter-century (though I've heard him live in various other settings). That surprised me, because Burton has been one of my favorite jazz musicians for much longer than that. After Red Norvo, he is the great vibraharpist, among the most innovative players in the history of jazz, not just technically but stylistically as well. For reasons I find inexplicable, he rarely gets credit for having been one of the very first fusion players, a well-known fact that nonetheless goes unmentioned in the jazz article in the revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Part of the problem, I suspect, is that his influential early albums for RCA went out of print in the Seventies and remained unavailable until fairly recently, when they finally began to turn up on CD. In any case, I've been listening to him closely and attentively ever since I first saw the Burton Quartet on TV back in my high-school days, and rarely does a week go by without my tasting his cool, bright, unfailingly joyous blend of jazz, rock, and a pinch of classical music.

Generations also features a sixteen-year-old guitarist named Julian Lage who is touring with Burton this summer (I assume he'll be going back to school in the fall). Burton, of course, is also one of jazz's great pedagogues--he's retiring from the Berklee College of Music this year after a three-decade stint--and jazz fans with long memories will recall that one of the other guitar prodigies to pass through his band was a kid by the name of Pat Metheny. So even though Lage's highly competent playing on Generations lacked real individuality, I took it for granted that he'd be worth watching anyway, and I was right. The solo he played last night on "Test of Time," a slowish blues by longtime Burton pianist Makoto Ozone, was memorable--hot, focused, remarkably well-shaped--and as he tossed it off, Burton stood in the bend of the piano, grinning like a proud father whose son had just graduated at the head of the class.

Burton's own playing was, as always, perfect, which I suspect is why he doesn't often get the kind of critical attention he deserves. He's one of the most consistent musicians in jazz, a virtuoso of Tatumesque command, and the shimmering, near-glossy surface of his solos has a way of deflecting careful scrutiny. You're forever tempted to relax and delight in the sensuous appeal of their glittering tintinnabulation, whereas you have to listen closely to break through to the subtle workings of the musical mind that shapes those cascades of notes.

On Generations, Burton and Lage collaborated with Ozone, James Genus, and Clarence Penn, but the band Burton brought into the Blue Note is a brand-new working group (this was, in fact, its first gig), with Vadim Neselovsky on piano, Luques Curtis on bass, and James Williams on drums. I'd say it still has some shaking down left to do--the ensembles occasionally sounded cluttered, especially on the up-tempo numbers, and Williams' drumming struck me as rather too busy. Even so, I'm sure that a couple of months on the road will work wonders, and in any case you couldn't help but be excited by the energy with which the players tore into the tunes, all of which were from Generations. Burton himself was plainly inspired by the new setting, and perhaps also by the knowledge that his teaching days are over. Whatever the reason, he played like a crateful of firecrackers going off.

I was sitting next to the bandstand, entranced as usual by the balletic spectacle of Burton manipulating his four mallets with two hands, and as I watched in happy amazement, I was reminded yet again of why I live in New York. Not only was I seeing Gary Burton's new group from a distance of five feet, but I also had the unexpected pleasure of hearing a greatly gifted singer in the process of rediscovering herself--in the same club, on the same night. It struck me that what makes New York so special is the endless opportunities it provides for just such juxtapositions. I saw and heard any number of marvelous things (including Gary Burton) back when I lived in Kansas City, but they were almost always dished up separately, and there was no feeling of abundance about the city's artistic fare, much less surprise. You knew at the beginning of the season who'd be coming to town that year--Count Basie in October, Twyla Tharp in November, a Monet retrospective in January--and you made your plans accordingly. New York, by contrast, is utterly resistant to such careful advance planning: I know in a general sort of way what I'll be seeing in November or March, but I also know my plans must remain subject to radical revision at the last possible minute. As a result, I'm never, ever bored, least of all last night at the Blue Note.

Perhaps the day will come when I'll feel the need to retreat to a smaller, quieter city, and if that happens I'm sure I'll be content to scale back my kid-in-a-candy-store schedule accordingly. Such economy has its own advantages: as I've written elsewhere, the residents of medium-sized cities become vested in their artistic activities in a way that rarely happens here. Each individual event means more when you don't have an unceasing superabundance of great events to choose from. But until that day comes, I plan to keep on hurling myself into the whirlpool, night after night and week after week, reveling in the chaos and surprise of life in New York.

* * *

Madeleine Peyroux will be playing at the Blue Note through Sunday. For information, go here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 1, 2004 10:48 AM | Permalink

TT: It could happen to you

Via Instapundit (who just linked to my Marlon Brando posting, glory be!), this e-mail from one Mark Miller:

I'm a researcher for People magazine and I'm trying to track down anyone who has had a blog entry backfire on him or her either professionally or personally. Any help you can be is totally appreciated.

That's a great question, which is why I'm passing it on. You can e-mail Miller at markjmill@yahoo.com.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 2, 2004 2:16 AM | Permalink

TT: Galley slave

National Review Online asked me what I was reading this summer. Click here and scroll down to the bottom of the page to find out.

(I might add that I also plan to follow OGIC's orders and do the Shirley Hazzard thing as soon as my desk is a little clearer!)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 2, 2004 2:33 AM | Permalink

OGIC: The Stepford freak

Fans of Freaks and Geeks, say goodbye to Lindsay Weir. Linda Cardellini, who played the charmingly confused Michigan teenager, has remade herself and her distinctively expressive features right out of existence.

Here are some pix of Cardellini as Lindsay, circa 1999 and wholly adorable. (UPDATE: Having trouble linking to the photo I wanted, but you should be able to see it by going to this fine website and clicking on "Photo Gallery." It's the fourth photo in the second row.)

Here's Cardellini last December, looking a little blonder, a little sleeker, a little more like your run-of-the-mill starlet--but still pretty much herself. Same round face, apple cheeks, and heart-shaped mouth

And--brace yourself--here's Cardellini this March, looking like a bleached-out, botoxed forty-year-old. Nary a ghost of Lindsay, or character, in sight. She sure doesn't have to worry about being cast as a mathlete anymore.

Join a generic new show, get a generic new look, I guess. Yeah, I'm emotional. And I have big ol' case of the freaks, er, creeps.

Related: An oldie but goodie, Nathalie's definitive take on the loathsome The Swan and the creeping social acceptibility of plastic surgery as routine maintenance. And Terry's explanation of why Lindsay and F & G mattered.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 2, 2004 2:39 AM | Permalink

TT: The action's in Jersey (and on the Bowery)

I wandered far afield for today's Wall Street Journal drama column. For openers, I went to Millburn, N.J., to see the Paper Mill Playhouse's production of Guys and Dolls, starring Karen Ziemba as Miss Adelaide:

The Paper Mill Playhouse, which has been doing business for upwards of 60 years, is known for presenting solid musical-comedy revivals, among them a "Follies" so fine that it served as the basis for the first complete recording of Stephen Sondheim's score. The productions usually include a sprinkling of big-leaguers, often in roles with which they're not identified (Betty Buckley, for instance, played Mama Rose in Paper Mill's 1998 "Gypsy"). The 1,200-seat proscenium-stage theater is comfortable and well-appointed, with a leafy courtyard that makes for agreeable intermissions, and Millburn, the small New Jersey town where the Paper Mill Playhouse is located, is easy to reach by car or train.

So what's the catch? Beats me. This "Guys and Dolls," which runs through July 18, is as surefire as a stacked deck. To begin with, Paper Mill is using the gaudy sets designed by Tony Walton for the 1992 Broadway revival and subsequently retooled for that production's national tour. No sooner does the curtain rise than you find yourself grinning happily at Mr. Walton's Day-Glo cartoons of Times Square in the long-gone days of snap-brim hats and evening papers. They instantaneously create a raffish mood that's exactly right for a show described by its creators as "a musical fable of Broadway."

To say that Ms. Ziemba fits in is the grossest of understatements. With her endearingly funny face and comprehensively danceworthy legs, she was born to play Adelaide, and "Guys and Dolls" makes far better use of her great talents than did her most recent Broadway outing, the stale "Never Gonna Dance." I found Michael Mastro a notch too nebbishy as Nathan, but Robert Cuccioli and Kate Baldwin are pleasingly romantic as Sky, the dashing gambler in search of round-the-clock action, and Sarah Brown, the Salvation Army doll for whom he falls hard....

Meanwhile, back on Manhattan's Lower East Side, I took in the Jean Cocteau Repertory's off-off-Broadway production of the Brecht-Weill Threepenny Opera:

Unlike "Guys and Dolls," "The Threepenny Opera" was meant to be staged on the cheap, and this vest-pocket version is nothing if not frugal. The Bouwerie Lane Theatre--located, appropriately enough, on the Bowery, New York's historic Skid Row--is approximately the size of a size-10 shoebox, with a stage somewhat larger than a postcard that Roman Tatarowicz, the designer, has filled with what looks suspiciously like junk from the next alley. On the other hand, what could be more suitable? "Threepenny," after all, is a tale of the lowest of low life, and director David Fuller has made the most of the resources at hand, drawing pungent acting out of a lively cast of unknowns (I was particularly impressed with Lorinda Lisitza as Jenny, Angus Hepburn as Peachum and Stephanie Lynge as Polly).

The Cocteau is performing "Threepenny" in Marc Blitzstein's familiar English-language adaptation, which softens some of the hacksaw-hard edges of Bertolt Brecht's book and lyrics but has the advantage of being thoroughly singable. Mr. Fuller's straight-from-the-shoulder staging is unostentatiously Brechtian in its directness (many of the characters enter and exit through the theater's emergency door), and though Kurt Weill's now-acrid, now-oily score is banged out on an upright piano of the tin-pan type, there being no room or money for additional players, even that unfortunate deficiency seems almost appropriate to the occasion....

No link. You know what to do. It only costs a buck. Get with the program.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 2, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"When you are young enough, I thought, all sorts of unrevealed possibilities make you a person, but afterwards when there are no more possibilities you become a type."

John P. Marquand, Wickford Point

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 2, 2004 12:03 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Bet you can't read just once

At the consistently wonderful Tingle Alley, Carrie is aflutter about the paperback release of Shirley Hazzard's National Book Award winner The Great Fire. You usually have to wait a year for the paperback, but Picador jumped the gun by a few months. It is nice not to have to wait until fall for it, and I daresay they'll sell a few more copies by making it available for summer reading. I know I've handed over my fourteen bucks, and the book is in the queue.

Carrie talks about what it was like to read the novel when she took it out of the library last fall:

I borrowed The Great Fire from the library -- and from the first page thought it was incredible. When I got to a particularly beautiful sentence I would stop and, because it was a library copy and couldn't get marked up, write it down in my journal. At some point, I realized I was transcribing the entire novel by longhand. It was ridiculous.

Great minds read alike! This uncannily echoes my account of reading Hazzard's 1980 novel and Official OGIC Object of Veneration Transit of Venus last spring:

I find myself reading almost every sentence a second time successively. It's the first book I've ever read and reread simultaneously.

What's more, the revelation at the end of TOV (no relation) changes and deepens the meaning of everything that has preceded it, and will send you straight back to the beginning for yet another rereading. Will this book ever let go of me?

If you aren't reading Tingle Alley every day, you're missing out.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 2, 2004 12:52 PM | Permalink

TT: Non-contender

The second half of the first sentence of the New York Times's obituary of Marlon Brando claims that his "erratic career, obstinate eccentricities and recurring tragedies prevented him from fully realizing the promise of his early genius, has died." For what it's worth, I never cared for Brando, not even in A Streetcar Named Desire--I thought he was a self-indulgent, undisciplined ham--but it strikes me that his admirers, however fervent, ought to squirm at the use of the word "genius" to describe him.

For that matter, I doubt that any actor who doesn't also write or direct can properly be described as a genius. (One film does not an oeuvre make, least of all One-Eyed Jacks.) I'm not normally fussy about usage, but one thing that does bother me is what I call Definitional Inflation, and if the word "genius" means anything at all, it means Definition 6 in the Shorter Oxford:

Inborn exalted intellectual power; instinctive and extraordinary imaginative, creative, or inventive capacity, freq. opp. to talent; a person having this.

I suppose you might say that certain interpretative artists have had that kind of power or capacity, but when you compare them to the truly creative artists whose works they interpret, you start to see how high the bar ought to be set. In an art form like jazz, where composition and performance are fused indissolubly, the difference between creator and interpreter is radically ambiguous. In acting, it isn't: Shakespeare would be Shakespeare if John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier had never been born. In fact (and I'm smiling as I say this, though I'm more than halfway serious), it may be that actors have more in common with critics than with playwrights. They serve as intermediaries between the creative artist and his audience, helping to narrow the gap across which the divine spark of comprehension must fly.

A few film actors--Bogart, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Marilyn Monroe, possibly Robert Mitchum, certainly John Wayne--have succeeded in constructing personas so magnetic as to float permanently free from their actual bodies of on-screen work. Brando wasn't that kind of larger-than-life artist, though it's conceivable that he could have been if he'd worked harder at it. Instead, like lesser mortals, he will be remembered as much for the quality of the films in which he appeared as for the quality of the performances he gave. Judged by that standard, my guess is that his memory will fade quickly, since so few of his films are worth seeing today. As for the performances themselves, it's David Thomson, as usual, who nails it:

Too often, he impersonated characters he had thought out, rather than discover them in himself. Today, for instance, it is hardly possible to be moved by him in On the Waterfront for noticing the vast technical trick he is performing....even allowing for his disillusion with movies, we have to feel a kind of laziness, or a decisive lack of ambition, compared, say, with Olivier.

As epitaphs go, that's a sad one.

UPDATE: Sarah writes:

Jeez...leave the office for a few hours and you're the one who breaks the news (to me at least) about Marlon Brando's death. Anyway, I also think that with time, people will scratch their heads about why he was worshipped so much in certain circles, because so much of the body of work he left behind ranged from disappointing to downright terrible.

But every time I think of Brando, I think of two things: one, James Dean, who also had a similar "magnetism" on screen, but who didn't live long enough for people's appreciation of such. And two, that Brando's ticks and mannerisms always came across to me as a vestige of his early stage career, where the "genius" notices started piling up in the first place. Qualities that work to the back of a playhouse just end up being too caged or hemmed in as applied to a theatrical screen.

Maybe the ultimate problem is that Brando outlived his usefulness in the wrong medium. If James Dean had lived to be 80, would he have had the same kind of momentous decline in fortune and in role choice? Would we even be talking about him at all? I guess it's just that in recent years, any time I saw Brando interviewed, he had this quizzical look as if he was surprised to still be on this earth. He didn't age well, and I doubt his acting will, either. Some people leave too early; others really do stay far too late.

Astute as always.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 2, 2004 12:54 PM | Permalink

TT: Just passing through

I know I'm not supposed to be here, but I did want to let you know that things are happening up and down the right-hand column: "Teachout in Commentary," "Second City," "Teachout's Top Five," and "Teachout Elsewhere" have all been updated with brand-new material. Sidle over and take a peek.

We return you now to our irregularly scheduled holiday.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 3, 2004 10:56 AM | Permalink

TT: Hostage to fortune

People are always asking me if there's some especially dumb movie, song, TV show, or book of which I'm fond for no obvious reason, and I'm never able to come up with an answer off the top of my head. Well, I was channel-surfing this afternoon and finally ran across a good solid all-purpose reply which I will henceforth trot out whenever asked: I love Uncle Buck.

Now go away and stop bugging me.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 5, 2004 5:05 AM | Permalink

TT: If you had to choose

1. Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly?
2. The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises?
3. Count Basie or Duke Ellington?
4. Cats or dogs?
5. Matisse or Picasso?
6. Yeats or Eliot?
7. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin?
8. Flannery O'Connor or John Updike?
9. To Have and Have Not or Casablanca?
10. Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning?
11. The Who or the Stones?
12. Philip Larkin or Sylvia Plath?
13. Trollope or Dickens?
14. Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald?
15. Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy?
16. The Moviegoer or The End of the Affair?
17. George Balanchine or Martha Graham?
18. Hot dogs or hamburgers?
19. Letterman or Leno?
20. Wilco or Cat Power?
21. Verdi or Wagner?
22. Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe?
23. Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash?
24. Kingsley or Martin Amis?
25. Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando?
26. Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp?
27. Vermeer or Rembrandt?
28. Tchaikovsky or Chopin?
29. Red wine or white?
30. No�l Coward or Oscar Wilde?
31. Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity?
32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev?
33. Mikhail Baryshnikov or Rudolf Nureyev?
34. Constable or Turner?
35. The Searchers or Rio Bravo?
36. Comedy or tragedy?
37. Fall or spring?
38. Manet or Monet?
39. The Sopranos or The Simpsons?
40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin?
41. Joseph Conrad or Henry James?
42. Sunset or sunrise?
43. Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter?
44. Mac or PC?
45. New York or Los Angeles?
46. Partisan Review or Horizon?
47. Stax or Motown?
48. Van Gogh or Gauguin?
49. Steely Dan or Elvis Costello?
50. Reading a blog or reading a magazine?
51. John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier?
52. Only the Lonely or Songs for Swingin' Lovers?
53. Chinatown or Bonnie and Clyde?
54. Ghost World or Election?
55. Minimalism or conceptual art?
56. Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny?
57. Modernism or postmodernism?
58. Batman or Spider-Man?
59. Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams?
60. Johnson or Boswell?
61. Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf?
62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show?
63. An Eames chair or a Noguchi table?
64. Out of the Past or Double Indemnity?
65. The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni?
66. Blue or green?
67. A Midsummer Night's Dream or As You Like It?
68. Ballet or opera?
69. Film or live theater?
70. Acoustic or electric?
71. North by Northwest or Vertigo?
72. Sargent or Whistler?
73. V.S. Naipaul or Milan Kundera?
74. The Music Man or Oklahoma?
75. Sushi, yes or no?
76. The New Yorker under Ross or Shawn?
77. Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee?
78. The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove?
79. Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham?
80. Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe?
81. Diana Krall or Norah Jones?
82. Watercolor or pastel?
83. Bus or subway?
84. Stravinsky or Schoenberg?
85. Crunchy or smooth peanut butter?
86. Willa Cather or Theodore Dreiser?
87. Schubert or Mozart?
88. The Fifties or the Twenties?
89. Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick?
90. Thomas Mann or James Joyce?
91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins?
92. Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman?
93. Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill?
94. Liz Phair or Aimee Mann?
95. Italian or French cooking?
96. Bach on piano or harpsichord?
97. Anchovies, yes or no?
98. Short novels or long ones?
99. Swing or bebop?
100. "The Last Judgment" or "The Last Supper"?

Close readers of "About Last Night" may already have guessed that I'd choose column A over column B in all cases--but some calls would be much closer than others, while others remain subject to change without notice....

How about you? What's your Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index?

(If you answered all 100 questions, your TCCI is the number of answers from column A. If you left some of the questions blank because you weren't familiar with one or both of the possible answers, your TCCI is the number of column-A answers divided by the total number of questions that you answered.)

UPDATE: If you came directly to this posting via a link, go here to learn what the TCCI is all about.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 5, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"It was my definite conviction that the family had never behaved worse, that they had never been more obtuse and dull. I explained to Bill that Sunday lunch was always awful.

"'It's like home,' Bill said, 'it's like home anywhere.'

"'Is it that way where you live?' I asked.

"'It's that way anywhere. God Almighty, it's sad.'

"'Why is it sad?' I asked.

"'It's sad,' Bill said, 'because they try so hard. It's sad because we don't like anything they do. We're thinking about one sort of thing, and they're thinking about something else.'

"It was the first time I realized Bill was clever."

John P. Marquand, H.M. Pulham, Esquire

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 5, 2004 12:03 PM | Permalink

OGIC: What I chose

1. Fred Astaire over Gene Kelly
2. The Great Gatsby over The Sun Also Rises
3. Duke Ellington over Count Basie, I guess.
4. Cats over dogs
5. Matisse over Picasso
6. Yeats over Eliot
7. Buster Keaton over Charlie Chaplin
8. Flannery O'Connor over John Updike
9. To Have and Have Not has been sitting on my tv for months, courtesy of Netflix, and I fully expect to prefer it to Casablanca. Terry and the Cinetrix can't be wrong.
10. Jackson Pollock over Willem de Kooning
11. The Stones over the Who
12. Philip Larkin over Sylvia Plath
13. Dickens over Trollope
14. Billie Holiday over Ella Fitzgerald
15. Tolstoy over Dostoyevsky
16. The End of the Affair over The Moviegoer
17. George Balanchine over Martha Graham
18. Hamburgers over hot dogs
19. Letterman over Leno in a landslide.
20. Cat Power over Wilco
21. Verdi over Wagner
22. Grace Kelly over Marilyn Monroe
23. Johnny Cash over Bill Monroe
24. Martin over Kingsley Amis
25. Robert Mitchum over Marlon Brando
26. Mark Morris over Twyla Tharp
27. Vermeer over Rembrandt
28. Chopin over Tchaikovsky
29. White wine over red, this being summertime.
30. Oscar Wilde over No�l Coward
31. Grosse Pointe Blank over High Fidelity
32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev? Pass!
33. Mikhail Baryshnikov over Rudolf Nureyev
34. Constable over Turner
35. Love Rio Bravo, have not seen The Searchers. Pass.
36. Comedy over tragedy
37. Fall over spring
38. Manet over Monet
39. The Sopranos over The Simpsons
40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin? Pass!
41. Henry James over Joseph Conrad
42. Sunrise over sunset
43. Johnny Mercer over Cole Porter (a relatively uninformed choice).
44. Mac over PC forever, or as long as Apple stays in business.
45. New York over Los Angeles
46. Partisan Review over Horizon
47. Motown over Stax, and always GM
48. Van Gogh over Gauguin
49. Elvis Costello over Steely Dan
50. Reading a blog over reading a magazine
51. Laurence Olivier over John Gielgud
52. Only the Lonely over Songs for Swingin' Lovers
53. Chinatown over Bonnie and Clyde
54. Ghost World over Election, but a toughie.
55. Minimalism over conceptual art
56. Bugs Bunny over Daffy Duck
57. Modernism over postmodernism
58. Batman over Spider-Man
59. Lucinda Williams over Emmylou Harris, but couldn't do without either.
60. Johnson over Boswell
61. Jane Austen over Virginia Woolf
62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show? Before my time, so pass.
63. An Eames chair over a Noguchi table. Pleases the eye, and you can nap in it.
64. Out of the Past over Double Indemnity
65. The Marriage of Figaro over Don Giovanni
66. Blue over green
67. As You Like It over A Midsummer Night's Dream
68. Ballet over opera
69. Film over live theater
70. Acoustic over electric
71. North by Northwest over Vertigo
72. Sargent over Whistler
73. V.S. Naipaul over Milan Kundera
74. Oklahoma over The Music Man
75. Sushi, yes
76. The New Yorker under Ross over Shawn
77. Tennessee Williams over Edward Albee
78. The Wings of the Dove over The Portrait of a Lady
79. Paul Taylor over Merce Cunningham
80. Mies van der Rohe over Frank Lloyd Wright
81. Diana Krall over Norah Jones
82. Watercolor over pastel
83. Bus over subway
84. Stravinsky over Schoenberg
85. Crunchy over smooth peanut butter
86. Theodore Dreiser over Willa Cather
87. Mozart over Schubert
88. The Twenties over the Fifties
89. Huckleberry Finn over Moby-Dick
90. James Joyce over Thomas Mann
91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins? Pass.
92. Emily Dickinson over Walt Whitman
93. Winston Churchill over Abraham Lincoln
94. Liz Phair over Aimee Mann, but just.
95. Italian over French cooking
96. Bach on piano over harpsichord
97. Anchovies, not in any identifiable form, which I'll take as a no.
98. Long novels over short novels
99. Swing or bebop? Pass.
100. "The Last Judgment" over "The Last Supper"

This gives me a TCCI of 68%. To be honest, it's rather lower than I would have predicted. What about you, Terry? We've certainly influenced each other's taste a great deal over the years, and we started out with some considerable overlap, but it's interesting to see which of our predispositions have stubbornly resisted such influence. You surprise me sometimes here, but seldom and mildly: The Who, Conrad, Constable (my efforts not wasted!), The Searchers, Daffy Duck, Emily Dickinson.

I would be really interested to see how you scored on a similar test designed by me. You know I'd make you squirm.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 6, 2004 3:03 AM | Permalink

TT: You go, Girl

Our Girl in Chicago challenges me (see immediately below) to take what I suppose would have to be called the OGICCCI.

I say, bring it on!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 6, 2004 3:44 AM | Permalink

TT: Mailbox

While we're on the subject, here's some reader mail about the TCCI:

- "The Searchers or Rio Bravo? Neither. Trite male weepies the both of them."

- "Yeats and Vermeer are at least close. Trollope should get your critic's license yanked. What's interesting is that you prefer Dostoyevsky to Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky and Dickens are quite different--Dickens has no religion, Dostoyevsky has no affection--but they both offer heightened, slightly hallucinogenic versions of reality. Trollope may not be fit to do more than shine Tolstoy's shoes, but they both claim to offer The Thing Itself, in large swatches. This is what makes lists fun."

- "Bach on piano vs. harpsichord--maybe I told you this story--if so, stop me here--but as a child doing the local music competition circuit, I came across that issue in what became my first example of biased judging. Picture the 10 year old me playing some 3 part invention as influenced by a Russian piano teacher. Then picture the same me with a stricken look when told by the judge that I had violated one of his tenets in not playing the piece �as if it were for the harpsichord.' The winner was a very nice, shy young Korean girl who did just as he asked--because she had no hand strength and could barely punch the piano keys. (And her teacher later apologized to my parents for what had happened!) After that I was never much of a fan of harpsichords..."

- "Don't make me choose between Elvis Costello and Steely Dan. That one is way too hard. Otherwise, my hunch is that we line up about 90 percent of the time."

- "13/20, or 65%. I deleted a few to make it an even 20, but they were all prejudicial: I think I would like T. Williams better than Albee, but I haven't read/seen the latter. Same with Simpsons over Sopranos. It had to be 20 instead of 100 since I'm not as familiar with as many kinds of culture as you are. In addition, the "barely-passing" score might be my youth (how many teenagers read you Terry? I'm one) and inexperience. I suspect I'd find myself agreeing with you a lot on musical theater and jazz as I start listening to more of it..."

- "Re the TCCI: agree with 45; disagree with 20 (most stridently with your preference for Tchaikovsky over Chopin and Daffy Duck over Bugs Bunny); DKI (in lawyer-speak, deny knowledge or information as to one or both) with 23; dislike both choices in 9 (most notably Pollock and De Kooning); unable to choose between comedy and tragedy, and do not understand the juxtaposition of Lincoln and Churchill (what exactly is being compared?). I think I am short one or two. It was fun. Thanks."

- "Like you I am an A type with the following exceptions: No. 75 is a Sushi-no and I am an old smoothie when it comes to No. 85 [peanut butter]. No. 14 is up for grabs as it would be hard for me to choose between Billie and Ella."

- "Ah, paralysis! Some of the choices are so obvious (and frequently the second, non-Terry choice), but so many of them brought me to a complete mental stasis that I was endangering my breakfast hour. I guess I have wimpy values, alas. Or more catholic taste."

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 6, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT and OGIC: New around here, stranger?

If this is your first visit, welcome to "About Last Night," a 24/5 blog hosted by artsjournal.com on which Terry Teachout writes about the arts in New York City and elsewhere, assisted by the pseudonymous Our Girl in Chicago, who writes from...Chicago.

(In case you're wondering, this blog has two URLs, the one you're seeing at the top of your screen right now and the easier-to-remember www.terryteachout.com. Either one will bring you here.)

All our postings from the past seven days are visible in reverse chronological order on this page. Terry's start with "TT," Our Girl's with "OGIC." In addition, the entire contents of this site are archived chronologically and can be accessed by clicking "ALN Archives" at the top of the right-hand column.

You can read more about us, and about "About Last Night," by going to the right-hand column and clicking in the appropriate places. You'll also find various other toothsome features there, including our regularly updated Top Five list of things to see, hear, read and otherwise do, links to Terry's most recent newspaper and magazine articles, and "Sites to See," a list of links to other blogs and Web sites with art-related content. If you're curious about the arty part of the blogosphere, you've come to the right site: "Sites to See" will point you in all sorts of interesting directions, and all roads lead back to "About Last Night."

As if all that weren't enough, you can write to us by clicking either one of the "Write Us" buttons. We read our mail, and answer it, too, so long as you're minimally polite. (Be patient, though. We get a lot of it.)

The only other thing you need to know is that "About Last Night" is about all the arts, high, medium, and low: film, drama, painting, dance, fiction, TV, music of all kinds, whatever. Our interests are wide-ranging, and we think there are plenty of other people like us out there in cyberspace, plus still more who long to wander off their beaten paths but aren't sure which way to turn.

If you're one of the above, we're glad you came. Enjoy. Peruse. Tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com. And come back tomorrow.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 6, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Either/or

If you took yesterday off, you missed the unveiling of the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index. Click on the link and take the test, or at least look at it, before reading the rest of this posting.

* * *

For those of you who had nothing better to do on Monday than visit "About Last Night," the TCCI was a joke--but a serious one.

I spent the evening of July 4 at home, eating deep-dish pizza and watching An American in Paris with a friend who just got back from her first trip to Paris. She asked me to compare the dancing styles of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. I did so, going on to explain that the Astaire-Kelly dichotomy was an example of the two-kinds-of-people heuristic at its most powerfully explanatory (I didn't put it like that, though!). If I tell you that I prefer Astaire to Kelly, you've learned something about me that can help you make educated guesses about certain of my other aesthetic preferences, and the more such data you have in hand, the better you'll understand how my taste works.

Two Kinds of People is, of course, a cool party game, and I improvised a few similar examples to prove my point: Balanchine/Graham, Verdi/Wagner, Matisse/Picasso. But it's just as easy to come up with examples that measure different aesthetic polarities--The Great Gatsby versus The Sun Also Rises, for instance. Nor is my own taste always consistent (about which more later). I think Howard Hawks was a better director than John Ford, but I also think Ford's The Searchers is a greater film than Hawks' Rio Bravo, if not by much.

Now it happens that I studied statistics and experimental design during my two-year stint as a psych major, back when I still thought I wanted to become a shrink. As a result, it occurred to me that if you collected enough data points about the taste of an individual, you could easily put together a test that would provide a fairly accurate measure of the extent to which the test-taker resembled the test-maker. It was this insight that inspired me to create the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index, a battery of 100 questions that measures how closely your taste agrees with mine.

Aside from making the test easier to score, the reason why the TCCI consists of 100 questions is to pull the results as far away as possible from any one axis of taste. To this end, I constructed the questions in a variety of ways:

- Some measure your preference for opposing but not mutually exclusive alternatives ("Matisse or Picasso?"), while others require you to make an either-or choice ("Sushi, yes or no?").

- Some, by contrast, ask you to choose between similar but not identical alternatives ("Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity?").

- A few ask you to choose what I consider to be the lesser of two evils ("Minimalism or conceptual art?").

- Some questions aren't about the arts ("Bus or subway?").

- A few questions were purposely framed to be difficult for particular friends of mine to answer: Maud, for instance, loves Walker Percy's The Moviegoer and Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, while Our Girl in Chicago owns both an Eames chair and a Noguchi table. I did this partly for fun and partly to increase the test's subtlety.

- For the same reason, I made the TCCI a forced-choice test, meaning that each question compels you to choose between a pair of alternatives, both of which may seem at first glance to be equally attractive. If there were only ten questions, the results might end up being too arbitrary (especially if some of the questions asked you to choose between alternatives with which you weren't sufficiently familiar), but in a 100-question test, the flaws of each individual question become proportionately less significant and the results more accurate.

So what does the TCCI do, accurately or otherwise? It measures the extent to which your taste resembles mine--but that's all. What's more, you probably noticed in taking the test that my taste can't be "explained" by any one principle or theory. Had I scrambled the order of the alternatives and asked you to guess my answers based on your prior knowledge of my work, I doubt many of you would have scored much higher than, oh, 70%, unless you also knew me personally and very well indeed. Yes, I'm a classicist, but I also prefer Schubert to Mozart, which tells you...what?

This brings us to why I created the TCCI in the first place. A few weeks ago, Parabasis, one of my fellow arts bloggers, posted an item taking me to task for the review of "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection" that I wrote for the Washington Post back in 1999, then posted here apropos of the London warehouse fire that destroyed some of the art included in that show. I didn't agree with him, but I thought his comments defensible and not at all rude.

I was, however, taken aback by this prefatory remark:

Terry's also a good deal more conservative than I am, at least in taste (Balanchine instead of Trisha Brown or Cunningham, Satchmo instead of 'Trane, etc.).

Well, guess what? The fourth essay in A Terry Teachout Reader, "Merce Cunningham: Pale Horse, Pale Rider," is a lengthy tribute to Cunningham. And while I do indeed prefer Louis Armstrong to John Coltrane, regular visitors to "About Last Night" shouldn't need to be reminded that I've written enthusiastically about such indisputably contemporary jazz musicians as John Scofield, Maria Schneider, Luciana Souza, and the Bad Plus, none of whom makes music that is "conservative" in any obvious sense of the word. Whatever else I am, I'm not so predictable that my taste can be summed up that way.

Are there other critics whose taste is as predictable as that? Sure--bad ones. And how can you tell they're bad? Precisely because they are that predictable. Taste is not an ideology. It's a personal response to the immediate experience of art. If your responses to new or unfamiliar art are wholly predictable, it means that instead of allowing experience to reshape and refine your taste, you're forcing your perceptions into the pigeonhole of your pre-existing opinions. That's the opposite of what a good critic does.

I don't think my taste is incoherent. To me it makes perfect sense, and I know it well enough to be able to second-guess my responses to new art with modest confidence. But I'm always prepared to change my mind on the spot, and I do so all the time. I didn't expect to like William Forsythe's One Flat Thing, reproduced--but I loved it, and said so. I expected to hate Edward Hall's Rose Rage--but instead I ended up giving it an enthusiastic review.

My point is that when it comes to art, I'm not an either/or thinker. Alas, such thinking holds powerful sway in America today, especially now that our political discourse has become so intensely oppositional. We live in an age when the dangerous implications of such sayings as Who says A must say B, The personal is political, and Pas d'ennemis � gauche (or droit, for that matter) are no longer widely understood, much less acknowledged. I'm sure there are plenty of people, for instance, who take it for granted that I'm a homophobe simply because I don't like Tony Kushner's plays (a "fact" that would doubtless come as a surprise to Mark Morris, or to the author and director of I Am My Own Wife). By the same logic, the fact that I love Aaron Copland's music should make me a Stalinist. G.K. Chesterton said the last word about that poisonous style of thinking: "�My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, �My mother, drunk or sober.'"

Hence the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index, a holiday jeu d'esprit which, as promised, also turns out to be more than a little bit serious. It is also, I hope, a useful reminder to readers of "About Last Night" to steer clear of the Great Simplifiers who seek to stuff us all into cultural pigeonholes. The good news is that I don't stuff so easy--and my guess is that you don't, either, even if you do insist on preferring Cat Power to Wilco or white wine to red.

UPDATE: Go here to see how other bloggers scored on the TCCI.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 6, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"ADMIRATION, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves."

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 6, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Defending Roz

As I noted here, David Thomson is a harsh judge of Rosalind Russell, giving all of the credit to Cary Grant for "goading [her] into being bearable" in His Girl Friday. A friend writes:

"You can see where in an age of the slowly burning Hepburn and Bacall, the bright magnesium flash of Russell can be a bit blinding."

Very apt and very gentlemanly, that.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 7, 2004 4:01 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Simply divine

Caterina.net has posted a mesmerizing list of types of divination. Be honest: How many of these have you found occasion to use?

I'll cop to aeromancy, anthroposcopy, bibliomancy, cartomancy, cledonomancy, horoscopy, oneiromancy, physiognomy, psychometry, and zoomancy.

(Nobody said the divination had to be successful.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 7, 2004 5:23 AM | Permalink

TT: Naive but well-meaning

Sarah, whose TCCI is 58%, now writes to say that I've "created a monster." I certainly didn't expect the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index to spread so cancerously throughout the blogosphere. I'm trying to keep up with the scores posted to date by those bloggers listed in "Sites to See," but it isn't easy (I can't even begin to keep up with the non-blogrolled responses). So far, here are the ones I've seen:

Banana Oil, 70%.
Bookish Gardener, 57%.
Brandywine Books, 67%.
Collected Miscellany, 68%.
Crescat Sententia, 40%.
Elegant Variation, 47%.
A Fool in the Forest, 64.38%.
Futurballa, 47%.
Mixolydian Mode, 52%.
Rake's Progress, 59%.
The Reading Experience, 43%.
The Rest Is Noise, 55%.
Return of the Reluctant, 54%. (Don't miss Ed's parody!)
...something slant, 58% "or thereabouts."
Superfluities, 41%.
James Tata, 49%.
Tingle Alley, "60%ish."

(More than a few bloggers have posted answers but no score. If you want to make the roster, do your own math.)

God of the Machine appears not to have taken the TCCI, but he does make an observation about it that had already occurred to me, which is that it would not only be possible but interesting to apply factor analysis to everybody's answers:

Interdisciplinary clusters will be best of all; if we find, for example, that nearly everyone who prefers Astaire to Kelly also prefers Matisse to Picasso and Keaton to Chaplin, then we might be on to something. We examine the clusters, looking for commonalities. Looking for rules, in other words. Although Terry's taste, or the taste of any educated person, cannot be explained by one principle or theory -- this is a reasonable working definition of "cultivated" -- I would wager that it can be explained pretty well by several...

Speaking of rules, a regular "About Last Night" reader writes:

In general -- and with all exceptions duly noted -- I think your preferences reflect a taste for lightness over heaviness, for charm over depth (as conventionally understood). As I grow older, that is the direction in which my taste is headed. Do you agree that aging has something to do with it?

Very perceptive. But while I think aging may have something to do with it, I think the effects in my case are limited. My taste has always run more or less in those directions: French over German, "comic" (broadly speaking) over tragic, short over long, color over line. In the best of all possible two-kinds-of-people divide, that formulated by Schiller, I tend to opt for "naive" over "sentimental." As Sir Isaiah Berlin explains, "naive" artists are those "who create naturally, who are not troubled by the burden of the tragic disorder of life, who do not seek salvation in art as some people seek personal salvation in religion or Socialism or nationalism." He cited Verdi as the quintessential example of the naive artist of genius. For me, it's Balanchine.

And a close friend writes:

The only thing on this list that surprised me is that you chose Daffy Duck over Bugs Bunny.

Yeah, well....

UPDATE: The indispensable Sarah now proposes a major new taste-measurement paradigm:

I suppose I could add some of my own questions to draft my own CCI, but prior to Terry's post, I'd given some thought to what I call Immutables--those elements of individual tastes that will never be swayed, never be altered no matter who tries to do so. And to take things to perhaps an extreme level, if you attempt to be friends with someone who doesn't agree with your Immutables, then the friendship is doomed....

OGIC and I will get to work on this one right away!

P.S. Rumor has it that Supermaud is about to make a TCCI-related announcement....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 7, 2004 10:02 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Drawing the line

Sarah's "Immutables" category drives a hard bargain. Immutables are "individual tastes that will never be swayed, never be altered no matter who tries to do so. And to take things to perhaps an extreme level, if you attempt to be friends with someone who doesn't agree with your Immutables, then the friendship is doomed." Gee, that does sound extreme. Do we all have second-degree Immutables? Do I? Just off the top of my head I'd say that, while you don't have to love Edward Gorey to be my friend, if you don't get him, we might not have a lot to talk about.

It may well be, though, that I have good friends who don't get him and it just hasn't come up. I definitely have friends who don't like Buffy, Lucinda Williams, Henry James, or other keystones of my cultural life. I often find there's more to be gotten out of a robust disagreement with someone I like and respect than from mutual admiration of each other's impeccable taste. And the joy of converting someone--well, that's the great potential reward for engaging in such debates.

Nope, I'm racking my brain but I can only answer this question theoretically. A specific aesthetic disagreement has never thrown over any budding or actual friendship of mine. However, I once had a potential friend who didn't enjoy eating. That proved insurmountable. It was then, as the relationship sputtered, that I first understood how much my social life revolved around food (and still does): dinner parties, cooking together, pizza-and-television, expeditions to Afghani or Ethiopian restaurants, and so on. Eating something wonderful together, in my experience, can cement or deepen a friendship. This is one of M.F.K. Fisher's great subjects. It is memorably treated in what I think is the first essay in The Gastronomical Me, about a childhood picnic with her sister and father that marked the first time she became really aware of her father as an individual, rather than just one of her parents, and began to form a separate bond with him (a pie is implicated).

I take full responsibility for the interruption of my nascent friendship with the poor, pitiable food-phobe and wish her well--my own perhaps overdeveloped delight in good food didn't seem to bother her any, and I credit her tolerance--but I just couldn't carry on. Her attitude toward food, which was part fearful, part resigned, tended to kill all my pleasure in it. Maybe, then, my true Immutable is M.F.K.--if you can't appreciate her appetite or her divine prose, a famous friendship might not be in our cards.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 7, 2004 11:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Did you ever have to make up your mind?

A reader writes, apropos of my posting on Who Framed Roger Rabbit:

I love Roger Rabbit, also, and think it is the real Chinatown II, as opposed to that train-wreck of a movie, The Two Jakes, a movie I so wanted to be better than it was.

Well put.

I might add that there's an essay to be written--though not today--on the effects of wishful thinking on critics. I know I've been swayed by it many times, and up to a point I think it's forgivable, the point in question being the second time that a favored artist lets you down hard. That's when you need to sit up and start paying closer attention to what you're actually seeing (as opposed to what you wish you were seeing).

No critic should ever forget that initial disappointment in a work of art not infrequently gives way to deeper understanding on closer acquaintance. In the case of an artist I really respect, I always try to take it for granted that I'm the problem, not the work of art...but not indefinitely. You can only disappoint me so many times before I lose patience--and interest.

I quoted the ever-apropos G.K. Chesterton the other day, and I'll do it again now: "Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid."

As for The Two Jakes, well, I simply couldn't fool myself: I knew it was awful.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 7, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Guest almanac

"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks."

Raymond Chandler, "Red Wind" (courtesy of Kenneth R. Shaw)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 7, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortunate cookie

A "fortunate cookie," I've just decided, is an on-topic fortune cookie. Terry's "Almanac" entries, as you already know if you've been paying attention, are very often related, more or less subtly, to something else that one of us has posted lately. My fortune cookies, in contrast, tend to be randomly seized upon.

This weekend, however, I had my nose buried in one of Reginald Hill's beguiling Dalziel and Pascoe mysteries (my undying gratitude to the Weisses for putting me onto these), and I jotted down several nice bits. One of them popped straight to mind when I read this rather withering reader comment in Terry's post-Index Mailbox: "The Searchers or Rio Bravo? Neither. Trite male weepies the both of them."

Here's the serendipitous cookie:

"Her camera appeared to require as little reloading as one of those guns the good cowboys used to have in the pre-psychological westerns."

Reginald Hill, An April Shroud

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 7, 2004 12:11 PM | Permalink

TT: Closing notices

The Public Theater's well-reviewed revival of The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer's 1984 AIDS play, closed abruptly last week after just sixty-three performances, none of which sold out. "I'll tell you one thing: I will never write another play again," Kramer told the New York Times. "I mean, when are we all going to realize that people don't want to go to the theater anymore?" That is, you might say, a trifle solipsistic. I remember the original production of The Normal Heart vividly, and also unfavorably, it having been little more than a noisy piece of sermonizing. Hence I didn't bother attending, much less reviewing, the revival. Once was enough.

Conversely, I didn't catch the original run of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins a decade and a half ago, which was why I went out of my way to see and write about the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival at Studio 54. While I thought the show itself had major problems, I was as impressed by the production as were my fellow critics. But ordinary theatergoers begged to differ, and so Assassins will close, barring a miracle, on July 18.

To date, Sondheim has made no whiny public statements about the failure of Assassins to find an audience, that not being his style. He did, however, express concern prior to opening night that the show might give offense to those whom he considers politically benighted. "I live in a liberal community, which is happy to bring into question things about this country," he told a reporter for Time, a statement I found--well, smug. I called him on it when I reviewed the show for The Wall Street Journal:

Whenever Mr. Sondheim and John Weidman, his librettist, attend to the twisted souls of John Wilkes Booth (Michael Cerveris), Lee Harvey Oswald (Neil Patrick Harris), and their partners in ignominy, "Assassins" holds you in its grip like a demented strangler--but no sooner do they seek to use these sad creatures to score debating points than it turns as jejune as a college revue.

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

Aside from being sophomoric, this rigidly reductive thesis clashes with the core of "Assassins," a series of nine sharply drawn sketches of successful and would-be presidential assassins. Not surprisingly, this is the part of the show where Mr. Sondheim finds his footing, since his other musicals are exclusively concerned not with ideas but feelings (or the inability to feel). Not even in "Sweeney Todd," which purports to locate its antihero's murderous rage in the dehumanizing context of 19th-century British industrialism, does he betray any real interest in or understanding of politics. For Mr. Sondheim, the political is personal, and no matter how hard he and Mr. Weidman try to persuade us that their desperate characters are meaningful symbols of mass alienation, we persist in seeing them as individual objects of pity united only in their varied forms of despair: "There's another national anthem, folks,/For those who never win,/For the suckers,/For the pikers,/For the ones who might have been."

Do the lives of these misfits have any larger meaning? Perhaps, but you can't prove it by "Assassins," which merely asserts their significance rather than demonstrating it--and that's where the show runs off the road. To be effective, political theater must deal in fact, not fancy, and most of America's presidential assassins were in fact driven not by ideology but madness. "Assassins" leaves no doubt of that, especially in "The Ballad of Guiteau," in which Charles Guiteau (Denis O'Hare), who shot and killed James Garfield, displays his megalomania to spectacular effect. And what do such delusions tell us about the validity of the American dream? Nothing, which is why "Assassins" makes no sense.

I doubt it's altogether coincidental that the authors of Assassins and The Normal Heart presupposed the prior agreement of their audiences with the shows' underlying political premises. Tim Robbins' Embedded was like that, too, as are (surprise) the plays of Tony Kushner. The trouble with this kind of playwriting, as with any other kind of highly politicized art, is that it's lazy. You might even go so far as to say that it arises from an entitlement mentality--the assumption that so long as you think all the right things, you need not make the extra effort to transform your ideas into a fully realized work of art.

Two paragraphs buried deep in the Times story about The Normal Heart gave that game away with embarrassing clarity:

Still, producers thought that its political subject and gay heroes might attract audiences, especially on a Gay Pride weekend in an election year.

But sales for last weekend--gay pride--were awful, Mr. Kramer said. "That was the straw that broke the camel's back," he said. "If your own people aren't going to support you, that really hurts someone like me."

Note the planted axiom: gay people should have supported The Normal Heart. Why? Because they're gay, that's why. But they didn't, just as Sondheim's "liberal community" has declined to turn out in sufficient numbers to keep Assassins open. Now, no demographic group in America is as reliably liberal--or contains, I suspect, as many gays--as the regular theatergoers of Manhattan and its environs. Does that make all those inconsiderate stay-at-homes insufficiently liberal? Or insufficiently gay? Somehow I doubt it.

Larry Kramer did, however, say something sensible about the revival of The Normal Heart, though it may have been unintentional: "It speaks very ill of us, meaning all the people today involved in culture and entertainment, that we can produce this stuff and in no way market it to the world." I'm not suggesting that the failure of his play was a failure of marketing, though. Rather, I have in mind the characteristic failing of political art, which is that its makers fail to understand the need to effectively "market" their ideas by embodying them in works of art capable of commanding the attention of an audience consisting in part--perhaps even in large part--of people who don't already believe in them.

I quoted David Denby's review of Fahrenheit 9/11 the other day, but what he said is worth repeating:

Michael Moore has become a sensational entertainer of the already converted, but his enduring problem as a political artist is that he has never known how to change anyone's politics.

Which begs a more difficult question: can art change anyone's politics? I don't mean in the sense of persuading ninnies that the CIA killed John Kennedy, but in the deeper and more thoroughgoing sense of effecting a genuine transformation in one's view of the world.

W.H. Auden thought not:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

Clement Greenberg said much the same thing, less poetically but more transparently: "Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art." I incline that way as well, but my own view is more nuanced. The insurmountable problem of explicitly political art, it seems to me, is that it is, literally, exclusive. As a result, it fails in what I take to be one of the defining responsibilities of aesthetically serious art, which is to aspire to universality, speaking (at least potentially) to all men in all conditions.

The only way art can do this is by reposing, in Dr. Johnson's immortal words, on the stability of truth. By embodying and dramatizing truth, it brings us closer to understanding the nature of the human condition. And might such an enterprise be political? In a way, I suppose, though one must never forget that political opinions are epiphenomenal: they arise from experience rather than preceding it. (If they don't, those who hold them are by definition out of touch with reality.) As for me, I know that my experience of great art has shaped my philosophy of life, which in turn informs my political views. But has great art ever had a direct effect on those views? Not in my experience. Nor can I think offhand of even one truly great work of art that was created with the specific intention of changing anyone's political views. If you want to do that with your art, you must accept going in that the results will be less than great--and if that doesn't bother you, fine. Greenberg got that right, too: "There are, of course, more important things than art: life itself, what actually happens to you. This may sound silly, but I have to say it, given what I've heard art-silly people say all my life: I say that if you have to choose between life and happiness or art, remember always to choose life and happiness." This may mean choosing politics over art, especially if you're not a good artist to begin with.

Which brings us back to The Normal Heart and Assassins. Larry Kramer, alas, isn't a good artist. Stephen Sondheim is a very good artist, but one who in this case allowed his aesthetic priorities to be skewed by his political passions. And you know what? The results of both men's best efforts went belly-up at the box office. Maybe that means ordinary playgoers are simply too stupid, or craven, to know a good thing when they see one. Or maybe it means they're too smart to fall for bad art, even when they happen to agree with its political premises.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 8, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"There can be no doubt that the dedicated Balzacian must accept a torrent of vulgarity, but, in matters of situation and behaviour, a great deal of improbability too. Never mind. Balzac's improbabilities do not prevent many of his least likely climaxes from being the best ones. Besides--something never to be forgotten--with all novelists one must put up with something."

Anthony Powell, Messengers of Day

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 8, 2004 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Remnants

I've always been oddly unsentimental about objects, and I don't know why. Perhaps it's simply a manifestation of a preference that I mentioned a few months ago apropos of the rise of pay-per-song Web sites and the resulting decline of the record as art object: "I'm old-fashioned--but my attachment is to essences, not embodiments." Or maybe it has more to do with the fact that I've spent the past quarter-century moving from one small apartment to another (two in Kansas City, one in Illinois, four in the New York area), a practice that tends to inhibit the accumulation of superfluous stuff.

Whatever the reason, I haven't kept many souvenirs of my past life. Nearly all those dating from my childhood and adolescence--my old Roth violin, my high-school yearbooks, a scraggly pair of stuffed cats named Russell and Louise--are at my mother's house in Smalltown, U.S.A, which is where I expect they'll stay. Beyond that, next to nothing remains. I've never saved the manuscripts of my books, for instance, and I got rid of all my tattered old clippings after putting together A Terry Teachout Reader. I sold two-thirds of my library when I moved to my present apartment, mainly in order to have room to hang the art I was starting to collect. I don't keep programs from the performances I review, nor do I have any photograph albums (in fact, I don't even own a camera). The only pictures I have on display are the ones of my parents, Our Girl in Chicago, and my old friend Nancy LaMott that are on my desk, plus a snapshot taken in an old-time photo booth immediately after I completed my first roller-coaster ride. A mottled, surf-pocked stone from the shore of Isle au Haut, the Maine island to which I traveled last fall in search of the spot that Fairfield Porter portrayed in a lithograph I own, rests atop my incoming mail. One of my paintings was done by a friend. And outside of a few inscribed books and a bare handful of unsorted photos crammed randomly in a drawer, that's pretty much it. Except for these few relics, I live almost entirely in the present, surrounded by books, CDs, and the art on my walls.

If my uncluttered existence strikes you as austere, all I can say is that I'm not unsentimental about other things. I'm the easiest of weepers, always ready to turn on the taps while watching an old movie or listening to a piece of music with personal associations. Nor am I shy about quarrying my past life for literary purposes (one of my books is a memoir). Yet for whatever reason, I prefer to travel light--as lightly, that is, as a man who owns twenty prints, two paintings, a pastel, a Max Beerbohm caricature, a small assemblage by Paul Taylor, a cel set-up of Jerry Mouse, several hundred books, and a couple of thousand CDs is capable of traveling--and I never think about the things I haven't saved.

So it was with no small amount of surprise that I found myself confronted the other day with three grocery sacks full of miscellaneous papers retrieved from an old desk I'd left behind in my previous apartment. I'd completely forgotten the contents of that desk, and though I didn't expect them to include anything important, I thought I ought to give them a quick sifting just to be sure.

I threw out most of what I found. I saw no reason, for instance, to hang onto a two-inch-thick stack of photocopied pieces I'd written for the New York Daily News during my tenure as its classical music and dance critic, though I did shake my head at the thought of the hundreds of thousands of words I've published in the twenty-seven years since my very first concert review appeared in the Kansas City Star. Middle age has its cold consolations, one of which is the knowledge that you're not nearly as important as you thought you were, or hoped someday to become. I used to save copies of everything I wrote, and for a few years I even kept an up-to-date bibliography of my magazine pieces! Now I marvel at the vanity that once led me to think my every printed utterance worthy of preservation.

Only one of those pieces held my attention for more than the time it took me to pitch it in the nearest wastebasket: a copy of the first piece I wrote for Commentary, a review of James Baldwin's The Price of the Ticket published in December of 1985, six months after I moved to New York. I remember how hard I worked on it, and how proud I was to have "cracked" Commentary. Today it sounds hopelessly stiff and earnest, which is why I left it out of the Teachout Reader. What on earth could have possessed Norman Podhoretz to find a place for that immature effort in his book-review section? He told me the first draft was too "knowing," the best piece of advice any editor has ever given me, and I revised it nervously, hoping to pass muster, never imagining that I would write hundreds more pieces for Commentary, eventually becoming its music critic. Would it have pleased me to know these things back in 1985? Or might it have dulled the tang of my first sale?

I didn't expect to find a Metropolitan Opera program among my forgotten papers, though no sooner did I look at it than I knew why I'd saved it. I went to the Metropolitan Opera House on the evening of January 5, 1996, fully expecting to review the company premiere of Leos Janacek's The Makropulos Case for the Daily News. Instead, I ended up writing a front-page story about how one of the singers in the production died on stage, a minute and a half into the first act. The opening scene of The Makropulos Case is set in a law office where Vitek, a clerk, is looking up the files for a suit that has been dragging on for close to a century. To symbolize the tortuous snarl of Gregor v. Prus, designer Anthony Ward turned the entire back wall of the set into a forty-foot-high filing cabinet containing hundreds of drawers. Enter Vitek, played by a character tenor named Richard Versalle. As the curtain rose, he made his entrance, climbed up a tall ladder and pulled a file out of one of the drawers. "Too bad you can only live so long," he sang in Czech. Then he let go of the ladder and fell mutely to the stage, landing on his back with a terrible crash.

Three thousand people gasped. David Robertson, the conductor, waved the orchestra to a halt and shouted, "Are you all right, Richard?" Versalle didn't speak or move, and the curtain was quickly lowered. I sat frozen in my aisle seat, stunned by what I had seen. Then I pulled myself together and ran to the press room to find out what had happened. A company spokesman told the rapidly growing band of critics and hangers-on what little he knew: Versalle had been rushed by ambulance to the nearest hospital. We started firing questions at him. How old was Versalle? When did he make his Met debut? Did he have a wife and children? I scribbled the answers (63, 1978, yes) on my program and pushed through the crowd to the nearest pay phone, where I dropped a quarter in the slot, dialed the number of the Daily News city desk, and spoke three words that had never before crossed my lips other than in jest: "Get me rewrite." Eight years later, I leafed through the program of that unfinished performance, looking at my barely decipherable notes. As souvenirs go, it was a good one, and I decided to keep it.

Almost as evocative was a sheaf of birthday cards given to me on my fortieth birthday, a month and a day after The Makropulos Case's abortive opening night. It was a strange and somber event, for my friend Nancy had died only a few weeks before, and I was nowhere near getting over the shock of her loss. Still, you only turn forty once (if at all), and I didn't want to disappoint the friends who'd planned a party to mark the occasion, so we went through with it and had a surprisingly good time, considering. Tucked inside the cards was a short stack of photographs, most of them of my parents, my niece, and the various cats I've owned over the years. I saved four of the best ones, along with a fading snapshot of Harry Jenks, a half-blind Kansas City jazz pianist with whom I used to sit in back in my college days (he could play just like Art Tatum, by which I don't mean sort of like Art Tatum), and a picture of Our Girl in Chicago standing in front of a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Oak Park, Illinois, dressed in white from head to toe and looking like a warm summer day come to life.

I also found two wallet-sized photos of Libby Miller, an adored friend from Smalltown, U.S.A., with whom I ran a lemonade stand once upon a time. I had a crush on her but was too shy to do anything about it. Libby joined the Air Force after graduating from high school, and I played piano at her wedding. Then she vanished from sight, as the friends of our youth are all too prone to do, and I heard nothing more from her for a quarter-century. Not long ago she called me up from out of the blue, and I learned that she'd divorced and remarried, retired from the Air Force, settled down in rural Washington, and taken up watercolor painting as a full-time hobby. I Googled her as we talked, found one of her watercolors on the Web, and saw with a start that my long-lost friend had somehow transformed herself into Elizabeth Michailoff, a bonafide artist. Now I held two of her fresh-faced high-school pictures in my hand, marveling at the myriad changes that thirty years' worth of living had wrought.

I slipped the pictures and birthday cards into my Makropulos Case program, left everything else for the garbage collector, and headed back to my apartment, feeling wistful and unsettled, the way we so often feel after a brief immersion in the irretrievable past. Two packages awaited me on my return. I slit open the first one and was astonished to find a gorgeous, near-abstract marine watercolor by Libby--or Elizabeth, as I suppose I ought to call her now. With it was a note: "I painted the tide flats in February--and I have enjoyed how it turned out. When I started thinking of a painting to send to you, I kept returning to it. I don't know why. But I do know why I wanted to send you one. You were such a great friend to me at a time when I dearly needed someone I could go to and just be me. You gave me that gift and now in a very small way--I wanted to return the kindness. So I hope you do enjoy it." I do, dear Libby, I do.

The second package contained a handsomely carpentered wooden box with an elegant latch and a Georgian-blue lid on which was pasted a label reading as follows: "�TT Reader' Wooden Jigsaw Puzzle. 42 pieces, hand cut by Jack-in-the-Box Puzzles." Inside it was a jigsaw-puzzle version of the dust jacket of the Teachout Reader--but no invoice or accompanying cover letter. Who could have sent me so ingenious a present? I racked my brain for an answer, and at last the light dawned: this was the belated birthday present that Our Girl in Chicago had been promising me ever since February. We usually give one another books or CDs, but my last present to her had been rather fancier than that, and she had evidently been inspired to respond in kind.

Our Girl and I met fifteen years ago, back when she was the assistant to my then-editor at my then-publishing house, fresh out of college and wet behind the ears but already full of cleverness and life. Since then we've been the closest of friends, even though half a continent has separated us for the past decade. Not a day goes by that we don't exchange e-mail or talk on the phone. Yet her inescapable absence from my daily life still saddens me, and the presence of her picture on my desk can only do so much to make up for it. Now she had sent me the perfect present, wholly personal and characteristic in every possible way, and I knew I would keep it for as long as I lived and think of her every time I looked at it.

"I sometimes feel the temptation to live in the past," I wrote in the introduction to the Teachout Reader, "but one can truly live only in the moment." I stand by that sentence, but surely the beginning of wisdom lies in knowing when to make an exception to even the soundest of rules. So I placed my summer snapshot of Our Girl inside the wooden puzzle box and put it on my bookshelf, right in front of my uniform edition of the complete works of Henry James, her favorite writer. I wrapped up Libby's watercolor and took it to the neighborhood framer. Then I spent the rest of the day basking in the warmth that two unexpected presents had brought to the uncluttered, austerely beautiful home in which I live.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 9, 2004 1:09 AM | Permalink

TT: Onward and upward with the TCCI

"About Last Night" appears to be on the way to breaking its all-time record for single-day traffic, mainly because the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index, in addition to having been mentioned in yesterday's "Hip Clicks" column on the USA Today Web site, was linked early this morning by Political Animal, Kevin Drum's Washington Monthly blog. In the immortal Time-style words of Wolcott Gibbs, "Where it will all end, knows God!"

In Our Girl's temporary absence, I'm trying to stay on top of the scores posted by the various bloggers listed in "Sites to See." Here's the complete roster to date:

Banana Oil, 70%.
Bookish Gardener, 57%.
Brandywine Books, 67%.
Collected Miscellany, 68%.
Crescat Sententia, 40%.
Elegant Variation, 47%.
A Fool in the Forest, 64.38%.
Futurballa, 47%.
Gnostical Turpitude, 72%.
Mixolydian Mode, 52%.
Maud Newton, 54%.
MoorishGirl, 44%.
Rake's Progress, 59%.
The Reading Experience, 43%.
The Rest Is Noise, 55%.
Return of the Reluctant, 54%.
Shaken & Stirred, 73%.
Something Old, Nothing New, 45%.
...something slant, 58% "or thereabouts."
Superfluities, 41%.
James Tata, 49%.
Tingle Alley, "60%ish."
Sarah Weinman, 58%.

To all those bloggers who've posted answers but no score: do your own math if you want to hang with the popular kids!

As for reaction to the TCCI, Ed has converted the results into a USA Today-style graphic, while Gideon Strauss posted this funny response:

I've decided not only to test how far my tastes differ from that of Mr. Teachout, but also how much less informed my tastes are. So I will give myself two scores: my TCCI score, and a score for the number of paired items out of a hundred on Teachout's list for which I had any idea what he is talking about (which I will call the Teachout Cultural Superiority Index or TCSI, so that my TCSI score will measure how close I am to his perfect 100)....

Read the whole thing here.

Gnostical Turpitude actually went to the trouble of writing a longish essay about the TCCI. Among his astute observations:

[T]he questions posed by Teachout reminded me of "Humiliations," a parlor game that appears in the David Lodge novel Changing Places. In that game, players confess the titles of books they've never read, receiving one point for every player who has read the book in question; hence, the winner is the competitor who has never read the books that are most familiar to his opponents.

There's a certain odd thrill to announcing that I've never read anything by Thomas Mann, that I've never read either Huck Finn or Moby-Dick, and that I've never been to (or read) an Edward Albee play. (As the professor in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe might say, "What do they teach them in the schools these days?!") I'd imagine that the thrill I've just described is similar to the feeling one experiences after winning a round of Humiliations!...

Read the whole thing here.

This seems as good a time as any to confess that I once organized a game of Humiliation (I'm not positive, but I think it's in the singular) at a garden party of budding young New York intellectuals who were all friendly enough to play honestly. I thought I'd die laughing, or at least throw up. No, I won't tell you who was playing or what other sordid admissions were made, but I will admit that I stopped the show by acknowledging that I once reviewed a literary biography of an author with whose novels and short stories I was totally unfamiliar. It was a long, long time ago....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 9, 2004 3:58 AM | Permalink

TT: You heard it here first

The White House announced this afternoon that President Bush will be nominating me to serve on the National Council on the Arts, the civilian panel that advises the National Endowment for the Arts and its chairman, Dana Gioia.

(For those of you not familiar with the intricacies of the federal arts bureaucracy, go here to find out exactly what the Council does.)

This is a volunteer post, meaning that I won't be paid for my labors, but it does require Senate confirmation, meaning that I was recently investigated by the FBI (which is a story in itself) and have filled out a stack of papers not dissimilar in size to an unabridged dictionary. As close readers of this site may recall, I also had myself fingerprinted back in April, and now you know why.

I had to give the White House my full legal name, which I never, ever use, and that explains why the official announcement refers to me as "Terence Alan Teachout." Maybe they'll change it, someday....

Beyond that, there's not much to tell. The NEA will be issuing a press release about my nomination, and I'll post a link to it as soon as it goes up on their Web site. The Senate will either confirm me or not, and if it does, I'll serve a six-year term. Yes, I'll continue to write about the arts, here and elsewhere, but I've been requested not to make any public statements about the NEA or its activities until my name comes before the Senate, so don't ask me.

This much I'll happily say: I'm grateful to the President for giving me the opportunity to serve on the Council. It's an honor. I hope the Senate finds me worthy of confirmation.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 9, 2004 5:00 AM | Permalink

TT: AWOL

In case you bought this morning's Wall Street Journal to read my drama column...it's not there. I took a week off, the first time I've skipped a Friday since January. I earned it.

Not to worry: I'll be doing business at the same old stand next Friday. And you can still buy the paper, you know! It's got all the usual cool "Weekend Journal" stuff, only minus me.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 9, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Consumables

Though I didn't go to any plays last weekend or this week, I managed to keep busy. Here's some of what I've been up to:

- On Thursday I went to Birdland to hear Roger Kellaway and Bill Charlap play two-piano jazz. Both of them have figured prominently on this blog in recent months, so I won't sing their individual praises. What I will say is that the set I caught last night was the best live two-piano jazz performance I've heard in my life--including a concert that Tommy Flanagan and Hank Jones gave together in Kansas City back when the world was young. Their version of "Blue in Green" suggested an off-the-cuff collaboration between Bill Evans and Maurice Ravel, while the ferociously competitive up-tempo "Strike Up the Band" with which they set the proceedings in motion sounded like two guys shooting Roman candles at each other in a locked room. ("Lotta black notes on that page," Charlap said to me afterward, grinning slyly.) As if all this hadn't been more than sufficiently awe-inspiring, the remarkable young classical violinist Yue, about whom more another day, sat in on "Nuages" and "In a Sentimental Mood" and made an equally strong impression.

Words to the wise: Kellaway, Charlap, and Yue will be at Birdland through Saturday. Do not miss this gig.

- I spent Tuesday and Wednesday at the Metropolitan Opera House, watching the first two nights of Lincoln Center Festival's Ashton Celebration, a two-week-long minifestival of the ballets of Sir Frederick Ashton, England's greatest choreographer. Both performances were mixed bills danced by the Joffrey Ballet, the Birmingham Royal Ballet, and K-Ballet, a Japanese troupe. I plan to write at length about what I saw over the coming weekend. For now, take a look at Seeing Things, the artsjournal.com blog for which dance critic Tobi Tobias is covering the Ashton Celebration. I don't agree with everything Tobi says, but she's damned smart and always to be taken very seriously.

In addition, you might also be interested in reading "Sc�nes de Ballet," a review-essay about Julie Kavanagh's Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton that I wrote for the New York Times Book Review in 1997.

- I'm reading the bound galleys of Robert McCrum's Wodehouse: A Life, out in November from Norton, and rereading Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time (which I do every couple of years) in preparation for reviewing Michael Barber's Anthony Powell: A Life, out in September from Duckworth Overlook.

- I spent the weekend catching up with movies, past and present. Among other things, I saw Before Sunset (Sleepless in Seattle for eggheads) and Napoleon Dynamite (see my concise rave on top of the Top Five module in the right-hand column) in the theater, as well as Louis Malle's Atlantic City (sentimental fluff, but Burt Lancaster is soooo good) at home.

- Now playing on iTunes: Donald Fagen's "Century's End," a little-known but way cool song from the soundtrack of the spectacularly misbegotten film version of Bright Lights, Big City. Even though it's a solo track by Fagen, it's currently available on CD as part of Steely Dan Gold.

That ought to hold you for a while.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 9, 2004 12:33 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"I'm no intellectual, you understand, but I like Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Hemingway, John P. Marquand, Louis Auchincloss, and Simenon."

Bing Crosby (quoted in Nat Hentoff, Listen to the Stories)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 9, 2004 12:34 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"For I am like a passenger waiting for his ship at a war-time port. I do not know on which day it will sail, but I am ready to embark at a moment's notice. I leave the sights of the city unvisited. I do not want to see the fine new speedway along which I shall never drive, nor the grand new theatre, with all its modern appliances, in which I shall never sit. I read the papers and flip the pages of a magazine, but when someone offers to lend me a book I refuse because I may not have time to finish it, and in any case with this journey before me I am not of a mind to interest myself in it. I strike up acquaintances at the bar or the card-table, but I do not try to make friends with people from whom I shall so soon be parted. I am on the wing."

W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 12, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Elsewhere

Time once again (well, this is only the second time, but I'm trying to turn it into a trend) for the Monday-morning Web surf. Here are some things that caught my eye:

- Though minimalism has never appealed to me even slightly--not in music, not in the visual arts--the always acute Tyler Green of artsjournal.com's Modern Art Notes puts his finger on why others beg to differ:

For many years now museums have been where secular America goes to church. In an era where most mainstream entertainment is designed to be as baroquely overblown as possible (what else could possibly explain The Rock?), museums provide rich visual quiet.

The current run of minimalism shows makes clearer than ever that museums are the new churches. Some minimalist art is hard, flat and repelling (think Judd, early Stella, Andre). It provides the viewer with something wonderful to look at, but it doesn't give the viewer a place to go within the work (like Matisse does). Instead, it forces the viewer to examine his own response to the work as much as the work itself....

The conventional wisdom in the art world had long been that minimalism is difficult, but strong attendance for minimalism shows exposes that theory as elitist bunk. Museum boards, the folks who fund these shows, apparently love minimalism too. That's no surprise: Museum boards are now what main-line Protestant church boards used to be: the bastion of the moneyed establishment. Museums are the new churches. The sudden prevalence of minimalism makes that clearer than ever.

- Speaking of the other side of the coin, Kyle Gann, another artsjournal.com blogger, writes an epitaph for an unloved corpse:

But I also think that aside from Berio's Sinfonia, Babbitt's Philomel, maybe Zimmermann's Requiem, and a couple of other pieces with textual elements, 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. There will always be interest in serialist music - it's always fascinating when people pour tremendous creative energy into something that doesn't appear to mean anything. Write some apparent nonsense, and people will study it for centuries! - look at the endurance of Finnegans Wake. It's fascinating that people once wrote music that tried to alienate people. But again, once you reach a certain age it becomes less fascinating, and one can start to feel a certain urgency for connecting with that which can be understood. I think....

- Sarah has a nice post on the relative importance (or unimportance) of first lines in literature. Like most people who've worked for newspapers for any length of time, I'm acutely lead-conscious. I can't continue writing a piece until I have the first sentence locked in (though I don't always write the rest of the piece in beginning-to-end order). Books, I think, are different--you usually don't pick a book up unless you already have a reason to read it--and I never judge them by their first lines. Instead, I use what I call the "core-sampling" method, opening the book at random to two or three different spots to get a feel for how well it's written. If I'm disappointed every time (or if I run across one or more obvious untruths in a work of nonfiction), chances are I won't go on with it.

Having said this, I'll add that my electronic commonplace book does contain a section called "Opening Lines, Great." Here's my favorite one: "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear." How could you not keep reading?

- Others have linked to "Hip, But Inscrutable: Music Reviews at NPR," a genteel rant against obscurantism by Jeffrey A. Dvorkin, NPR's ombudsman, but his piece was so boneheaded that I wanted to make sure it reached as many readers as possible:

NPR regularly reviews new music. This is good, since it takes NPR listeners out of what is familiar and exposes them to what is happening in other parts of the culture.

The problem, according to some listeners, is that NPR's reviews are too hip to be good journalism. In short, some musical commentary, especially on All Things Considered, is incomprehensible to some listeners, and I confess, to me....

Modern music, and especially rock 'n' roll, was always about who was "in" and who was not. Nothing is more embarrassing than older people claiming to dig the latest sounds.

This is a quandary for NPR. How does NPR reach out to a younger group of listeners without irritating its older core? If NPR's music journalism is really meant for that younger audience, then irritating older listeners is a price young radio producers are willing to pay.

NPR needs to do music reviews but they need to be written so all listeners are able to understand the criticism and the music. The reviews should give listeners a glimpse of something new, even if it is hard to understand (or like).

Now, I could easily imagine a parallel universe in which these complaints were valid. But when I read the actual reviews singled out by Dvorkin for criticism, I cringed--and not at the reviewers, either. Here, for instance, is a description of the music of the Magnetic Fields:

The songs themselves are the draw. They're disciplined little gems of composition, poison-pen letters set in the first person and caustic, coffee-shop observations propelled by not particularly heroic desires. The best of them tell about being deluded in love or not being able to let go of an old flame. And even under Merritt's dour storm clouds, they gleam.

If NPR's ombudsman is concerned about the accessibility of a review like that, then NPR needs a new ombudsman.

- The New York Times ran an important story last week about ArtistShare, the new Web-based music-distribution technology that Maria Schneider is using to distribute her latest CD:

In the last decade, Maria Schneider, who regularly wins prizes for best composer and best big-band arranger in jazz, has made three albums on the Enja record label. Each sold about 20,000 copies -- very good numbers for jazz. She didn't make a dime off any of them. On two of them, she lost money.

So recently, she went off the grid. She became the first musician to sign with a company called ArtistShare. Rather than go through labels, distributors and retailers, ArtistShare sells discs over the Web and turns over all the proceeds (minus a small fee) to the artist.

Her new CD, "Concert in the Garden," went on sale last Thursday exclusively through www.mariaschneider.com. If it sells one-quarter as many copies as any of her previous discs, she will do better than break even. If it sells half as many, she will earn tens of thousands of dollars.

"Making an album takes lots of time and effort," Ms. Schneider said in her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. "It takes me two or three years to write the music. Then there are the rehearsals, the studio time, the mixing and mastering. It would be nice to get something back for it. The thought that I could actually make a profit off my records -- that's unbelievable, really."...

If you want to read more about the future of recorded music, click here and ponder.

- Also of interest is the Times' story about the decision of Pilobolus Dance Theater to hire Itamar Kubovy as executive director and give him the authority to overrule any of the four artistic directors, who had hitherto run the company by collective consensus throughout its three-decade-long history. I've spent quite a bit of time watching Pilobolus up close (I even appear in Last Dance, Mirra Bank's 2002 cin�ma-v�rit� documentary about the making of "A Selection," on which the members of Pilobolus collaborated with Maurice Sendak), and I've long wondered whether the group would manage to survive the growing internal strife caused by its laborious manner of decision-making. It seems they were worried about the same thing:

Mr. Kubovy agreed that the situation bears an eerie likeness to John Guare's "Lydie Breeze" plays, which he directed four summers ago at the New York Theater Workshop. Set in the late 19th century, the tale begins with three men and a female mentor who set up a commune on Nantucket. Rising tensions within the group eventually lead to murder and suicide.

Things have never gotten so dire at Pilobolus, and if Mr. Kubovy can help it, they never will. "A director's role is to protect the play," he said. "I feel like the play here is Pilobolus, and I'm the protector; I have to make sure that individual impulses don't run wild at the wrong moment."

I wish him the best of luck.

- Here's Mark Cousins, writing in Prospect:

The whole point about cinema, surely, is the close-up of the human face. Huge images such as the Sphinx, Mount Rushmore and the colossal statues in Greece and Rome established the sense of wonder to be had in gazing at magnified physiognomy, but until the movies, such depictions were rare. Even in vast paintings - of battles, landscapes, coronations - the human beings tended to be no more than twice or thrice our size. But Greta Garbo's inscrutable face was hundreds of times bigger than that of those who read their own thoughts into it. Therein lies the wonder of the movies.

It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that cinema is currently undergoing a flight from close-ups. It does this every now and again, as if bored with the effortless way in which macro-imagery can enrapture....

Read the whole thing here.

- Finally, whatever your politics, I sincerely hope you find this funny.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 12, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Into the present

Classic film noir (the black-and-white kind) has been inexcusably slow to make its way onto DVD, but a whole freshet of noir titles was released the other day, the greatest of which is Out of the Past. Most buffs regard this 1947 Jacques Tourneur picture as the quintessential film noir, and it definitely has all the expected accoutrements: Robert Mitchum as a hapless anti-hero dragged out of his nine-to-five life by the hand of fate, Jane Greer as the most fatale of all possible femmes, a Daniel Mainwaring script full of convincingly counterfeited Chandlerisms, malevolently dark cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca, an age-of-anxiety score by Roy Webb...what's not to like? As for Tourneur's direction, it's full of atmosphere and self-effacing ingenuity from the opening credits onward. With the possible exception of Canyon Passage, he never made a better film.

Takers of the TCCI will recall that I preferred Out of the Past to Double Indemnity, though not by much. Even if you beg to differ, I can't imagine failing to find it on the top-five classic noir list of any serious moviegoer, along with In a Lonely Place, Detour, and either Gun Crazy (also newly reissued), Scarlet Street (whose current DVD version was ineptly transferred from a bad print), or Touch of Evil (which is less a film noir than a commentary on the genre, though marvelously overripe and excellent of its kind). Some other favorites of mine are The Big Combo, Raw Deal, Pickup on South Street, The Narrow Margin, On Dangerous Ground, Night and the City, and Pitfall, the last four of which have yet to make it to DVD, though you can often find used VHS copies if you look hard enough.

If Out of the Past tops the list, it's because Tourneur and his collaborators struck just the right balance between action and fatalism, a combination nicely caught in this crisp exchange between Mitchum and Greer. They're ostensibly talking about roulette, but of course they mean something completely different:

"That's not the way to win."

"Is there a way to win?"

"There's a way to lose more slowly."

The DVD is nothing fancy, a clean, well-lighted print and not much else--no trailer, for instance, and James Ursini's commentary sounds too off-the-cuff to suit me. Still, it'll do. Film noir, I'm told, is a largely masculine taste, though I had no difficulty in hooking Our Girl (one look at In a Lonely Place and she was a goner). I once called it "the porn of pessimists," and certainly some folks just aren't on its bleak wavelength. But if you're even slightly convertible, Out of the Past will get you there with bullets to spare.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 12, 2004 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: Beneath the waves

Stunned is the word for the way I feel as a result of the continuing flood of links to the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index. I'm not even trying to keep up with the responses anymore, but it seems that everybody and his cat is taking the TCCI and commenting on it. (For the final tally of scored responses by "Sites to See" artbloggers--the last one I'm going to post, anyway--go here.) It's a mystery to me that a quiz I threw together to amuse and edify my readers ended up being the Shot Heard 'Round The Blogosphere. "About Last Night" has never pulled so much traffic in a single week, and my hope is that at least a few of the strangers who came here to take the TCCI will become regular readers.

Conversely, the response to Friday's late-afternoon announcement that President Bush will be nominating me to sit on the National Council on the Arts, about which more here, is only just starting to trickle in. So far, it's equally gratifying, albeit in a different way. Pre-confirmation etiquette forbids my responding other than in generalities, but I thank all those who've written and posted--well, nearly all--for their kind and supportive words. (As for the exception, you know who you are, but believe me, I'm still laughing.)

I'm ramping up to a couple of fairly intense weeks of writing and performance-going, meaning that blogging may get a bit thin at times. Fortunately, Our Girl is back in Chicago, and I've no doubt that she'll take up the slack with her customary verve and charm.

For the moment, be sure to watch this space on Wednesday for a very special group of postings about which I'll say nothing in advance other than that they mark a great occasion....

UPDATE: The National Endowment for the Arts has just issued a press release about my nomination. To read it, go here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 12, 2004 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: Invitation to a shunning

I've been preoccupied (my mother broke her arm yesterday) and only just read about the widely reported skirmish in which Stanley Crouch took a slap at Dale Peck.

I'm no admirer of Dale Peck, so this is presumably where I should toss off some witty plague-on-both-your-houses crack. Unfortunately, I don't think what Crouch did is even slightly amusing. I think it's disgusting--though not exactly surprising. As owners of A Terry Teachout Reader are well aware, I think Crouch is a musical ignoramus with an embarrassingly purple prose style. Among other repellent things, he flirts avidly with reverse racism in his jazz criticism. He's more than happy to play the race card whenever it suits his interests (as he has done with me), though he writes contemptuously of others who do the same thing. Some, I'm told, find him a charming rascal, but I'm not nearly enough of a hypocrite to be charmed by people who make nicey-nice in private after they insult you in public. I didn't think my opinion of him could sink much lower. I was mistaken.

I decided some time ago to have nothing more to do with Stanley Crouch. Since then, I've declined invitations to appear with him in public and on radio, nor will I knowingly participate in any published symposium in which he takes part. As far as I'm concerned, he's an unperson. And instead of tittering over his latest escapade, I think the rest of the literary world would now do well to do likewise.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 13, 2004 10:05 AM | Permalink

TT: In a plain brown wrapper

I was reading Anthony Powell's At Lady Molly's as I ate lunch at a neighborhood restaurant the other afternoon. A waitress approached the table and asked, "Hey, whatcha reading?" Long experience has taught me never to answer this question other than noncommittally, so I showed her the spine of the book and said, in a fairly friendly tone of voice, "Oh, just a novel." She lit up like a sunbeam and replied, "Wow, that's cool!"

The week before, I'd had a less satisfying encounter with a waitress who took an interest in my bound galley of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Collected Stories: A Friend of Kafka to Passions. She asked what I was reading. "A book of short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer," I replied. She looked at me blankly, so I added, "He wrote in Yiddish," to which she responded, "Yiddish? What's that?"

In Manhattan, encounters like these are the price you pay for reading in restaurants, and they usually make me squirm. I think the origins of my discomfort must go all the way back to my small-town youth, when I was rarely to be seen without a book in hand. Even as a child, my reading habits were fairly advanced, and I got kidded mercilessly for toting around such triple-decker novels as Moby-Dick and Les Miserables. The teasing of my peers had an aggressive edge ("Hey, man, Teachout reads the encyclopedia!"), whereas my elders were merely puzzled, but the net result was to make me self-conscious whenever anyone asked what I was reading. Nearly four decades later, that question still makes me tighten up a bit, fully expecting to be razzed, and though it rarely happens nowadays, the resulting exchanges nonetheless tend to leave me feeling like a lifetime member of the awkward squad.

From childhood onward, I was acutely aware of the gap that separated me from my classmates. It's not that I was treated badly, because I wasn't. Most of the residents of Smalltown, U.S.A., treated me quite nicely, rather like a cute little dog who could extract square roots with his paw. The problem was that they treated me differently, and once it was clear that I was also musically talented, my situation became impossible. By then, everybody in town knew who I was--Bert and Evelyn's boy, the smart one--and there was no hiding from my citywide reputation as Smalltown's number-one egghead.

What saved me, paradoxically, was that I was physically clumsy. Even if I'd wanted to be a rebel, there wasn't a whole lot I could do other than read, write, and play music, a state of affairs that forced me to accept myself as I was. What's more, I was always sensitive to beauty--first in words, then in music--and so I derived boundless pleasure from my strange appetites. In any case, I was never wholly without friends, and I even managed to find myself a girlfriend midway through high school, a development that made my father breathe easier, he having been deathly afraid that his oldest son would grow up...well, peculiar. (That was never in the cards, but it wasn't something I could have discussed with him, even reassuringly.)

Once I left Smalltown for the big city, I started to make friends whose interests resembled mine more closely, and in time learned to suppress the self-consciousness of my childhood. Yet it can still be inflamed by a certain kind of kidding, some of which has lately been occasioned by the blogosphere-wide spread of the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index. You'd be surprised--or not--by how many bloggers have posted comments about the TCCI that basically boil down to "Dude, this thing's soooo highbrow!" Such talk rarely fails to trigger the same squirmy sensation I experience whenever a well-meaning stranger asks what I'm reading. Even now, there's a part of me that wishes I knew all about baseball instead of ballet.

I'm sure this is part of why I later fell in love with westerns and film noir, and it probably also has something to do with my youthful decision to concentrate on playing jazz instead of classical music. I don't mean to denigrate those pop-culture pursuits--far from it--but for me, they were as close as I could come to being a regular guy, and I was distressed to discover that they didn't do much to narrow the gap. Being a John Wayne fan (which I am) helps a little, maybe even more than a little, but being a Raymond Chandler fan does nothing to disarm those who don't read any books at all.

If I sound neurotic about my interests, I'm not. I like being a drama critic who collects American prints, hangs out with jazz musicians, and writes books about people like George Balanchine and H.L. Mencken. I wouldn't have me any other way. But you never get completely over your childhood, and my guess is that I'll spend the rest of my life being evasive whenever a waitress asks what I'm reading--at least until one glances at my copy of The Locusts Have No King and says, "Cool, but I like A Time to Be Born better." As the Duke might have said, that'll be the day.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 13, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Get in the game

A reader asks:

Have you written about the state of music criticism in major daily newspapers? The realization becomes stronger with every review that I read, especially of those specific concerts that I attend, that the "music critics" [of my local newspaper] are not critics, but occasional reviewers and mainly typists. One in particular writes like an adolescent. How does he get away with it? He writes as if he has no editor. He is condescending, limited, contradictory and flatulent with zircon-encrusted notions about relative value/new music/warhorse programming and other phony issues. He does not know much and it seems that whatever editor he has knows even less.

Is this the case in most cities? I mainly read the New York Times and do find individual writer bias. But the quality of writing is much higher than in -----. Please review the reviewers some time. Maybe I am out of touch and what I read in ----- is as good as it gets. But I am disappointed that the newspapers get away with pretending that their coverage is real or useful. If you have a comment, please relay it.

I edited out the name of the city in question because I've never read the work of the critics to whom my correspondent refers. In any case, much the same thing could easily be said of countless other provincial arts critics. It's a chronic problem, one that will never be cured, though it can be ameliorated to some extent, at least for a time.

My correspondent puts his finger on one part of the problem when he remarks of a particular critic that "whatever editor he has knows even less." Of course there are any number of honorable exceptions--I wouldn't care to tell you how often my own editors have saved me from dumb blunders--but given the way newspapers operate, it's inevitable that many, perhaps most of their arts critics will usually be hired and supervised by editors who simply don't know what they're writing about.

What to do? I blogged about the problem of incompetent critics a year ago, and offered this partial solution:

It's not a popular view among my colleagues, but I think most of the best critics--not all, but most--have had at least some professional experience in at least one of the arts about which they write. I know I try to write not as a lofty figure from on high, smashing stone tablets over the heads of ballerinas and prima donnas, but as someone who has spent his entire adult life immersed in the world of art, both as a critic and as a practitioner. I was also fortunate to have served my apprenticeship as a critic in a middle-sized city, because it taught me that criticism is not written in a vacuum. It touches real people, people of flesh and blood, and sometimes it hurts them. If you don't know that--and I mean really know it--you shouldn't be a critic. And you're more likely to know it when you've lived and worked in a city small enough that there's a better-than-even chance of your meeting the people you write about at intermission.

Unfortunately, such critics are rarely content to stay in the middle-sized cities where they're so desperately needed. Instead, they get pulled up the food chain to big-city papers, leaving their former readers bereft.

So is there an alternative to bad newspaper criticism? Of course--and you're looking at it. Those who know better than the maladroit critics of their hometown papers should put their money where their mouths are and start arts blogs. I'll tell you a little secret: newspaper editors and publishers are incredibly thin-skinned, so much so that they'll do anything to avoid answering their detractors, at least in public. But the recent experience of media-savvy political blogs suggests that an alert, aggressive, well-informed blogger with patience and determination can make a difference, and I think that's no less true when it comes to the arts. Even if you don't persuade the local paper to hire a better critic, you'll have created an alternative voice, one that might in time become important and influential. Believe me, stranger things have happened in the blogosphere.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 13, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Guest almanac

"I was moderately happy. At least at the moment I was happy, but not for the reasons given above. The reason I was happy was that I was reading for perhaps the fourth or fifth time a Raymond Chandler novel. It gave me pleasure (no, I'll put it more strongly: it didn't just give me pleasure, it was the only way I could stand my life) to sit there in old goldgreen Louisiana under the levee and read, not about General Beauregard, but about Philip Marlowe taking a bottle out of his desk drawer in his crummy office in seedy Los Angeles in 1933 and drinking alone and all those from-nowhere people living in stucco bungalows perched in Laurel Canyon. The only way I could stand my life in Louisiana, where I had everything, was to read about crummy lonesome Los Angeles in the 1930's. Maybe that should have told me something. If I was happy, it was an odd sort of happiness."

Walker Percy, Lancelot (courtesy of Eve Tushnet)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 13, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Consumables

Here's the latest from the world of art:

- I scaled back my performance-going in preparation for the coming torrent of work, but I did get to Central Park on Saturday to see the Public Theater's Shakespeare-in-the-Park production of Much Ado About Nothing, which I'll be covering for The Wall Street Journal.

- Though I spent much of the rest of the weekend blogging, I did make time to watch three DVR-stockpiled movies, the best of which was Michael Powell's The Red Shoes. Even though I'm a devoted balletomane, I somehow made it to the age of 48 without having seen this most celebrated of highbrow backstage movies, and Toni Bentley has been pushing me for months to plug that hole in my cultural armor. Now I've done so, and loved every minute of it, for The Red Shoes mixes over-the-top and stiff-upper-lip in a way I found irresistible. What nobody ever told me is that it's also a smart movie, smart in a way to which (say) the preposterous The Turning Point can't even begin to compare, firmly rooted in sharp-eyed observation and executed on the highest possible level of craftsmanship. I suppose it's better to have seen it as a teenager, but I wouldn't have missed my belated first viewing of The Red Shoes for the world.

I also looked at two well-known Hollywood movies of the Forties, Michael Curtiz's no-nonsense adaptation of Jack London's The Sea Wolf (strong performances by Edward G. Robinson and Ida Lupino, plus one of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's best scores) and William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (high-minded treacle, compellingly acted and accompanied by another superb score, this time by Hugo Friedhofer).

- Now playing on iTunes: Constant Lambert's score for Tiresias, a 1951 ballet by Sir Frederick Ashton. It was the last composition Lambert completed before dying of drink that same year. Between watching The Red Shoes, re-reading Anthony Powell's Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (in which Lambert figures prominently, thinly disguised as "Hugh Moreland"), and watching the Lincoln Center Festival's Ashton Celebration (which featured Dante Sonata, set to Lambert's orchestral arrangement of Liszt's Apres un lecture de Dante), it was inevitable that I'd want to hear some of Lambert's own inimitably piquant music. What a tragedy his early death was!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 13, 2004 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Teaser

Be here Wednesday for a big surprise!

(Well, maybe not that big, but it'll still be cool....)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 13, 2004 12:06 PM | Permalink

OGIC: I'll never be a poet laureate...

But bear with me. The anniversary of About Last Night sneaked up on me. Most days, I would probably give a little start if you reminded me we weren't always thus. I wasn't here at the beginning, but I was loitering just behind the scenes, interested as hell but still occupying some sort of limbo between ardent blog reader and bona fide blogger (my personal anniversary, not counting guest blogging, comes in October). As Terry says below and Sarah echoes here, the last year has been an explosive one for culture blogging. It's hard to imagine that when Terry started this site, I didn't yet know about TMFTML, Maud, Cup of Chicha, or Old Hag. And Elegant Variation, Pullquote, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, Return of the Reluctant--essential daily reads that seem like permanent fixtures--didn't exist. Golden Rule Jones was primarily a listings site. The cabal was not incorporated, not yet a splinter under Jennifer Howard's skin. And the fact that I can't remember the first time I noticed half these blogs is, I think, testament to the excellent openness of this world.

This landscape changes fast. About Last Night has itself undergone some semi-dramatic reinvention during the year of its existence. The two major changes: moving from a fixed daily posting to a looser, rolling schedule; and adding, ahem, a co-blogger. In retrospect, both of these seem natural if not inevitable developments, reflecting perhaps the two great distinguishing features of the technology: its instantaneity and the way it facilitates conversation and community. Michael Blowhard happened to reflect on the origins of his site this week, talking about how his and the now-retired Friedrich von B's traditional opening salutations were a vestige of their early practice of simply blogging their email. Although Terry and I don't often include the salutation here, much of our blogging is in that spirit, if not straight from our email. (Although our friendship began in person when I worked for his publisher, it was cemented through a robust email correspondence that began after I moved to Chicago.) Always a shy type, I sometimes still experience a paralyzing brand of stage fright when trying to put together a post; simply typing the words "Dear Terry" at the beginning of the draft is a reliable trick for shaking off my reticence and some of the stiff formality of my early drafts. So, a resounding yes to everything Terry said earlier today about the intensely personal nature of the medium. And, while I don't think the irrelevance of the print media is quite nigh, I do love the way blogs have made stories in publications like the New York Times no longer the last word on a topic, but a starting point for discussion, dispute, elaboration, and amplification from every point of view.

None of these thoughts are particularly original, but today I'll settle for being apropos. I second Terry's thanks to Doug McLennan, all our blogger friends, and especially everyone who reads us. Coattails can be a beautiful thing, and I may have come in on Terry's, but now you're stuck with me!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 14, 2004 3:44 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

Good times and bum times,
I've seen them all and, my dear,
I'm still here.
Plush velvet sometimes,
Sometimes just pretzels and beer,
But I'm here.
I've run the gamut,
A to Z.
Three cheers and dammit,
C'est la vie.
I got through all of last year
And I'm here.
Lord knows, at least I've been there,
And I'm here!
Look who's here!
I'm still here!

Stephen Sondheim, "I'm Still Here" (from Follies)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 14, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

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." (When size matters, January 7, 2004.)

- "6. Blogging puts professionals and amateurs on an even footing. That's why so many professional writers dislike and distrust it." (Notes on blogging, February 1.)

- "All I can say for sure is that I've never been intimate with anyone lacking a sense of humor, or truly loved a work of art by a humorless artist. That might just be the most revealing thing about me." (Clubbability, February 27.)

- "Three months ago, All in the Dances didn't exist. Over the years I'd told dozens of people all about George Balanchine's life and work, but every time I had to start fresh. Now there's an inch-thick pile of paper on my kitchen table with a title page on top, the gateway to a world I made, and even though I'll be reviewing a Broadway play tomorrow morning, then writing my Washington Post column in the afternoon, part of me is still back in that world of shadows." (Finishing the book, March 31.)

- "I'd rather go to good plays than bad ones, just as I'd rather be happy than unhappy--and maybe that explains why I'm a critic instead of a creator. I've been desperately unhappy on many occasions in my life, but never did it occur to me that I might profit from my misery, much less write a sonata about it. All I wanted was for it to stop." (Gladder to be happy, April 22.)

- "At the time of the original publication of one of the best essays in A Terry Teachout Reader, I received a letter of praise from a well-known author who singled out for particular comment a sentence I hadn't written. To be sure, it had been implicit in my draft, but I didn't make it fully manifest: my editor did the job for me, and I gladly accepted his contribution. That sentence now appears in the Teachout Reader without benefit of asterisk or footnote. It's taken for granted that I wrote it, and I don't propose to blow the whistle on myself now. That's what good editors do--they make your stuff better by any means necessary, and they keep their mouths shut about it." (Ghost writers in the sky, May 13.)

- "Few biographers and fewer critics long outlive their own time, and I doubt I'll be one of them. More likely I will go down in history as the first known owner of Hart-Davis 631, and in 2104 some art historian specializing in the Edwardian era will click on that entry in a computerized catalogue raisonn�, scratch his head, and say, �Who was that fellow with the odd name? Did it ever occur to him that the only thing he'd be remembered for was having owned a Max Beerbohm caricature and edited an H.L. Mencken anthology?' Indeed it did--and let it be said, if not necessarily remembered, that the prospect made me smile." (A peep into the future, June 7.)

- "By removing myself from the scenes of my professional excesses--the desk, the computer, the city itself--I had catapulted myself out of my confining routine. Instead of reconstituting it in Cold Spring, I happily frittered away the better part of two whole days without a second thought. Anywhere you go, there you are: so runs a favorite saying of mine, yet in my case it turned out to be not so true as I'd always thought. Yes, I was still me, but a slightly different me, one unexpectedly content to be idle. Perhaps I had rediscovered a part of me that my father had buried under the weight of his own obsessions. Perhaps I had simply figured out for myself what my friends always knew, which is that to do and to be are not necessarily the same thing, at least not when you're sitting by the Hudson River, watching the sun set behind a green-topped mountain." (Nothing to do, June 24.)

- "Middle age has its cold consolations, one of which is the knowledge that you're not nearly as important as you thought you were, or hoped someday to become. I used to save copies of everything I wrote, and for a few years I even kept an up-to-date bibliography of my magazine pieces! Now I marvel at the vanity that once led me to think my every printed utterance worthy of preservation." (Remnants, July 9, 2004.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 14, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 14, 2004 12:03 PM | Permalink

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 meuni�re,
Then banished, with little ado,
Beef Wellington--and Stroganoff, too.
Then cancelled the chocolate �clair.

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 15, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 15, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 15, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 15, 2004 12:03 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 16, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 16, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 16, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 16, 2004 12:03 PM | Permalink

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 Andr� 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 by Douglas McLennan on July 16, 2004 12:04 PM | Permalink

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 Cin�math�que 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 pi�ce de r�sistance. I look forward to seeing myself in it in the very near future, and will certainly report back on the experience.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on July 19, 2004 6:16 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 19, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 19, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 19, 2004 12:04 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 20, 2004 7:33 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 20, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 20, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 20, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 21, 2004 4:33 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 21, 2004 5:19 AM | Permalink

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 Complicit�'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 by Douglas McLennan on July 21, 2004 5:25 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 21, 2004 11:05 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 21, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 21, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 22, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 23, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 23, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 26, 2004 1:31 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 26, 2004 2:07 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 26, 2004 2:22 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 26, 2004 12:48 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 27, 2004 4:21 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 27, 2004 4:27 AM | Permalink

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 financi�re, p�t� de Strasbourg truff� en brioche, sole Margu�ry, 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 by Douglas McLennan on July 27, 2004 5:12 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 27, 2004 5:40 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 27, 2004 6:19 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 27, 2004 9:57 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 28, 2004 2:16 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 28, 2004 9:22 AM | Permalink

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 No�l 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 by Douglas McLennan on July 28, 2004 9:51 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 28, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 30, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on July 30, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink