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August 31, 2004

OGIC: Terry Teachout, call your office

In the Boston Globe, Alex Beam blows the whistle on the newest big doping scandal:

There is, of course, the old-fashioned explanation for why the Buckleys, the Winchesters, and the John Updikes of the world make the rest of us look like clock-watching quill-pushers: hard work. But I have dismissed the possibility that these writers might have studied harder in school, read more books, or spent more hours at the desk than a grasshopper such as I. Or that they are simply more gifted than I am. They must be on something.

(Link via the back-with-a-vengeance Old Hag.)

Posted August 31, 5:08 AM

OGIC: 50 Tracks, revisited

Lots of good feedback on last week's link to CBC's "50 Tracks," much of it focused on the hip-hop. Quoth the 'Fesser, "I bemoan the Clashlessness of the CBC list, and would toss 4 back, and ask the dealer for 4 new to go with Public Enemy as my hole card." Musician extraordinaire and FOOGIC Kenneth Burns is more inclined to praise the panel for what they got right; one senses his expectations for this sort of exercise have been sanded down to a bare sliver: "The CBC is rightly taking pains to have its 80s ranking include hip-hop. It's an essential 80s pop genre, but it's routinely ignored in at least the more fatuous remembrances of the decade. I'm thinking especially of 80s radio stations, which mostly play 'Come On Eileen.'"

And don't forget its 70s roots, writes Andrew Lindemann Malone, who blogs at Spam-o-matic:

I'm not sure what you'd knock off in the 1970s to make room for it (oh, wait, I am sure--the Joni Mitchell joint), but "Flashlight" was not only the apex of the genius of George Clinton and Parliament but of 1970s funk, and you can't get to two hip-hop songs in the 1980s without funk in the 1970s.

Speaking of which, I was surprised to see "The Message" on there. Not that I dispute its quality--if "Rapper's Delight" and "The Breaks" were the first hip-hop hits, "The Message" was the first song that indicated that hip-hop could address the world around it from a unique perspective. But if you're talking essentiality, "Fight the Power" would seem to have a greater claim than "The Message," since it also addresses itself to the inequities of society but does so with a flurry of samples and genuinely dislocating beat that act as musical analogues to Chuck D's exhortations-something "The Message"'s undeniably seductive dance-floor beat just can't boast.

No luck on this reader's well-defended 90s prediction, however:

I'm going to confine myself, regarding the nineties, to speculating that Dr. Dre's "Nuthin' but a G Thang" will represent hip-hop on that honor roll. For better or worse, this was the song that had white kids all over the 'burbs wanting to pimp their rides and mack their hoes; it's the purest expression of G-funk, and G-funk was what brought hip-hop into the limelight. Whether this was a good way for white America to view black America, from a distance and through a fantasy, is something for the sociologists, not the musicologists, to debate.

The 90s selections, as well the ten listener-elected songs that round out the 50 (i.e., the back door through which the 'Fesser's Clash slips in), can be viewed here. Note, please, that the OGIC pick, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"--low-hanging fruit though it admittedly is--sits atop the 90s in all its obviousness, essential enough to stymie the instinctive obscurantism of not one, not two, not even three, but four rock-critics-with-a-soapbox!

UPDATE: Andrew Lindemann Malone has further thoughts on the 90s list here.

Posted August 31, 2:50 AM

OGIC: Laugh, cry, repeat

Erin O'Connor is thinking out loud about rereading at her blog Critical Mass. An English teacher, she has some particularly interesting things to say about the differences between rereading for pleasure and rereading for work:

I don't usually reread because there is so much out there in the world that I am eager to read for the first time. I've been gluttonous about books since I was very small, and I've never lost that kid-in-a-candy-shop feeling I used to get as a child, sitting in front of shelves full of books, almost overwhelmed by the readerly goodness that was bound between their covers. A family friend once gave me a book binge as a birthday present, and recalls a nine-year-old me sitting on the floor in front of the young adults section in B. Dalton's, declaring that I was "paralyzed by indecision."

But not rereading is my private habit in my personal reading life. As an English teacher, rereading is professionally necessary, part of the job, and often a very enjoyable part, too. Academic overspecialization being what it is, most of the books in which I am massively well reread are nineteenth-century English novels: I know my Jane Austen, my Brontes, my Dickens, my Collins, my Gaskell, my Eliot, my Thackeray, my Trollope, my Hardy, and my Conrad inside out, and I know them from teaching them repeatedly to class after class of college students who are more (or less) interested in rounding out their literary knowledge, or, more pragmatically, in knocking off a distribution requirement while easing course schedules heavy in science and math. There are some works I have read and taught too many times. They have become old, stale, too familiar, ironically, to be teachable any more, since to teach a work of literature well, you must strike a difficult balance between knowing that work intimately, and not knowing it so well that it has ceased to surprise you. When a work gets so stale that you cannot respond to it any longer, it's time to not teach it for the indefinite future. Jane Eyre is one of these for me, as are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Bram Stoker's Dracula. They've been out of rotation for a few years, freshening up for future teacherly use.

But teacherly rereading is hothouse rereading: it's forced rereading for a particular purpose, not voluntary rereading for the sheer interest and delight of rediscovering or renewing one's connection with a particular author or work. I had a teacher in graduate school who liked to say that we should all reread George Eliot's Middlemarch once every five years. His point was that there is so much in that novel that it effectively grows and changes as we do: It's a different book every five years, because we are different people from one half decade to the next. He was right.

I don't reread books terribly often, but when I do it's generally in the pursuit of comfort, like eating macaroni and cheese in the middle of the winter. For a long time I read Pride and Prejudice every Christmas vacation. Other books I faithfully return to: The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy; In the Cage by Henry James; Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth; some of Dawn Powell's books; and assorted mysteries including Westlake, John D. MacDonald, and pre-Hannibal Thomas Harris. Quite a conventional list of its kind, I imagine.

(Incidentally, Erin's mention of B. Dalton's, a name I haven't heard in eons, really whips of memories of the bad old pre-revolutionary days [the revolution in question being, of course, the national expansion of Borders] when it was the Dalton's at the mall or nothing. The next time someone gets snide about Borders in my earshot, I'm going to raise that unlovely specter of the Dalton's at the mall.)

Posted August 31, 2:30 AM

August 30, 2004

OGIC: Becky's makeover

I knew that something seemed off about those trailers for the new film version of Vanity Fair, however sumptuous the cast and sets: the devious Becky Sharp as a straightforward heroine? Holy gross misreading, Batman! Also, the cresting music and earnestly intoned voiceover hardly capture the rollicking, irreverent narration of the original. This very interesting New York Times piece, however, made me feel a little better. It reports that Mira Nair well knew what she was doing when she took such liberties with William Makepeace Thackeray's 1847-48 novel. And it offers up some of the fascinating nitty-gritty of Nair's intimate back-and-forth with Thackeray:

The new "Vanity Fair" takes a few wild departures, too, but the changes are never accidental, and sometimes not so far from the source as they seem. When Becky triumphantly rides off on an elephant in India it may seem that the director is inventing a "Becky Goes to Jodhpur" moment. Not at all. Her heroine is acting out an adventure that Thackeray's Becky could only dream about. Specifically, she dreamed about it in Chapter 3, when Thackeray creates a fantasy in which Becky had married Amelia's brother, Jos, a civil servant posted to India, had put on "diamond-necklaces, and had mounted upon an elephant." A throwaway line in the novel becomes one of the film's most extravagant scenes, emblematic of how Ms. Nair and Mr. Fellowes have lifted bits from Thackeray and presented them in a sparkling new way. Ms. Nair shot this brief Indian scene to replace one originally filmed in the English countryside. "It was, for me, a wink," she said.

A filmmaking style to capture an English major's heart, that. I suppose I should have given the director of Monsoon Wedding the benefit of the doubt in the first place.

[Special added bonus materials! Gawk at Thackeray's original illustrations for his greatest novel here.]

Posted August 30, 11:22 AM

OGIC: Unprodigious

Terry and I have many avocations in common. Music isn't one of them. When it comes to music, I'm all but hopeless. In third grade I was kicked out of the kiddie choir, which had been billed as all-inclusive. Fourth grade was the year we picked instruments for band lessons. I wanted to play the flute. All of the girls in my school played flute or clarinet, and the flute was in my estimation the prettier of the two instruments, both physically and musically. I remember waiting my turn during the first class meeting for a consultation with the band teacher, who was assigning instruments. I remember announcing my intention to play flute. I remember the teacher presenting me with the mouthpiece of a flute to try out. And I remember his dour pronouncement that my mouth was "wrong" for flute and that, perforce, I would play clarinet.

Is it any wonder that I loathed clarinet and soon gave it up?

Oh, but my musical misadventures don't end there. It so happens that I have extraordinarily long fingers (straight from my grandmother), so I was pegged early by family and friends as a potential piano whiz. One fine birthday, a piano turned up in the family room, courtesy of generous parents who were always ready to indulge any interest I leaned toward. Alas, I never could find it in me to commit to lessons, and the piano was sold, an all but unplunked white elephant, a couple of years later. (I blame the band teacher.)

Moving on to Exhibit D: At my high school there was a long-standing tradition that the junior girls sang a sentimental tune for the seniors at convocation. This was a tradition not taken lightly, but looked on as an expression of debt and respect, a moment to set aside cattiness and cliquery, a meaningful step in our inheritance of the senior class mantle--not something one did for singing's sake, but something that was right and good to do. A month's worth of after-school practices apparently couldn't help a really hard case; during the actual performance my normally kind friend Robin, standing next to me, whispered could I please mouth the words because my singing, however well-intentioned, was throwing her off tune.

With that checkered history, it's been a good long time since I ventured again to sing or play music in public. (At home or in the car alone? A different story--much to the cat's regret, I'm sure.) I dream of being able to carry a tune, though, and the desire has made me almost single-minded about the music I Iisten to: all women singers, all the time. OK, I exaggerate, but only slightly. I've been working on my itunes library this weekend, and a quick count reveals that about 60% of the library consists of either solo women artists or bands with female lead vocalists. That's a sight lower than I would have guessed, but it has to be higher than average. More to the point is that it's the women's music that I'm usually listening to, that I thirst for, that hits me where I live: Patsy, Lucinda, Polly Jean, Lauryn, Chan, Aimee, Kim & Kelly (and Tanya!), Luciana, Emmylou, and on and on. These singers can reduce me to a dead swoon in a way no man's singing ever does, and all I can think to attribute it to is my own futile, sometimes feverish wish to sing well myself.

This base sexism in my musical taste is really anomalous. In the other arts, most of which I actually know something about--painting, fiction, poetry--an artist's gender doesn't factor into my preferences or judgments at all. I gravitated toward women writers when I was younger, but that was part and parcel of a typical youthful desire to find my own experiences illuminated in my reading. That understandable urge not only has faded at 30-something, but has been replaced by its opposite, a desire to learn about places, people, and times further and further removed from my life. The more omnivorous my taste becomes, and the shorter life gets, the less I wish to screen my reading by any criteria other than quality.

But music-wise, I'll take the women just about every time. Lately I've been deliriously high on Allison Moorer, about whom you can learn more at her artful website, here. I first found out about Moorer from Terry, natch, who knows my predilection for chanteuses well and has indulged it lavishly over the years. But--and this is where the whole musical-anti-prodigy theme comes into play--sometimes it takes me an absurdly long time to really hear what I listen to. So although I've been listening to Moorer for a good two years, and I fell head over heels for her album Miss Fortune when it came out late in 2002, the last couple of weeks have found me listening to this album for perhaps the hundredth time and only now recognizing some of the more unassuming, quietly amazing songs for the little masterpieces they are. Like I said, I'm just kind of hopeless and remedial that way.

OK, this post is awfully long already. So tomorrow I'll continue with a second part about the particular charms of Miss Fortune, how I happened to come back to it recently, the experience of "discovering" tracks after so long, and how it is they could hide their wonderfulness in plain sight all that time. This last certainly has something to do with my tin ear, but not, I think, everything.

Posted August 30, 4:59 AM

OGIC: All I know is I'm clean as a whistle

If convention blogging you must have, don't look at us. I recommend you stroll on over here, where they're sure to keep you entertained.

Overdue low curtsy: Colby Cosh, who pointed it out during the Dems' convention.

Posted August 30, 4:47 AM

August 27, 2004

TT: Who was that masked man?

Regular readers know that I've been putting the pedal to the metal for most of the summer, both here and in my various day jobs, and it struck me that I'd earned a little time off. The Republican convention seemed like a perfect opportunity for a Manhattan-based aesthete to shut up shop, so I went to The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, hat in hand, and asked if I could skip a couple of deadlines. They said yes (not, I hope, with relief!).

Even though I write "About Last Night" for love, not money, it's still hard work, and I need a break from it no less than from my paying gigs. So starting at midnight tonight, I'm going up the spout for a week. In spite of all temptations, I won't be posting or checking my e-mailbox again until Monday, September 6. Until then, the blog belongs to Our Girl in Chicago, who is all freshened up after her recent hiatus and has scads and piles of things about which she longs to write.

What will I do? Where will I be? I'm not telling. Perhaps I'll don a false mustache and walk the streets of New York incognito, eavesdropping on conventioneers. Perhaps I'll flag a freight train and let it whisk me off to parts unknown. All I can say is that I plan to do no writing of any kind between now and September 6, except for a few hastily scrawled words on the odd postcard. Otherwise, I'm standing mute.

Have fun while I'm gone. Send lots of nice mail to Our Girl. Check out all those other cool blogs listed in the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column.

Not to worry--I'll be back.

Posted August 27, 12:05 PM

TT: Is seeing believing?

Friday again, and I'm back in The Wall Street Journal with my weekly drama column. Today's centerpiece is Guantánamo: "Honor Bound to Defend Freedom," which I found problematic for a whole welter of reasons:

"Guantánamo" is a dramatization by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo of material drawn from interviews, letters, transcripts of public hearings and other documents. It asserts that several British nationals currently detained at the U.S. naval base on Cuba's Guantánamo Bay are innocent--and that all 585 detainees, whom the Pentagon claims are terrorists with ties to al Qaeda or the Taliban, are being treated like "animals."

Theatrically speaking, the trouble with "Guantánamo," which opened last night at 45 Bleecker, is that it isn't really a play. The script consists of undigested slabs of talk, coarsely woven together and staged by Nicolas Kent and Sacha Wares in the manner of a political cartoon, with some actors addressing the audience directly and others miming in the background on a sketchy prison-camp set. Though the performers, including Kathleen Chalfant ("Wit"), do their best to give it life, the first act is dull, and while the second act is more compelling, it's still dramatically inert. (The audience response at the preview I saw was tepid.)

But "Guantánamo" isn't a debate, either. Instead, it's more like a reading of the court record of a show trial in which only one side was allowed to speak....

I also reported on six New York International Fringe Festival plays, all of them favorably. Since five of the six shows are still open (Chris Earle's brilliantly polished Radio :30 has ended its run), I'll reprint my capsule reviews here, with a strong recommendation that you try to catch at least one of them between now and Sunday:

- "The Bicycle Men," written and performed by a lunatic quartet of Chicago-based comedians, is a zany mini-musical about a nerdy American tourist (Dave Lewman) whose bicycle breaks down in a French village. Deliciously Francophobic mayhem ensues, interrupted at random intervals by totally irrelevant songs. A hoot and a half (Players Theatre, Saturday at 4:45 p.m.).

- Negin Farsad's "Bootleg Islam" is an eye-opening I-was-there monologue by a second-generation Iranian-American woman who went to Tehran for her cousin's wedding and saw more than she bargained for. More a stand-up routine than a fully developed one-person show, but smart, funny and fascinating all the same (Paul Sharpe Contemporary Art, Friday at 9:15 p.m. and Saturday at 7 p.m.).

- "Go Robot Go," written by and starring Julie Shavers, is a school-of-"Avenue-Q" play with music (the band does most of the singing) about late-capitalist alienation among the twentysomething cubicle dwellers of New York. Philip Carluzzo's score needs to be built up, but the script, staging and performances--especially Ms. Shavers' sweetly gawky star turn--are ready for prime time (Our Lady of Pompeii Demo Hall, Saturday at 9 p.m.).

- Colin Campbell's "Golden Prospects: A Los Angeles Melodrama" is a postmodern boo-and-hisser about dirty work in the orange groves and oil fields of sunny California. Lively, unpretentious fun (Linhart Theatre, Sunday at 2:45 p.m.).

- Rolin Jones' "The Jammer: A Roller Derby Love Story" is a charmer about a nice Catholic boy from Coney Island (Kevin Rich) who skates his way to the small time. Though the script is a bit too thin to stand on its own, it'd make a fabulous book for a rock-and-roller-skate musical. Outstanding direction and choreography by Greg Felden and Tim Acito (Players Theatre, Friday at 5 p.m.).

No link. You know what to do.

Posted August 27, 12:03 PM

TT: Guest almanac

"I hate my deafness; it's a comic infirmity as opposed to blindness which is a tragic infirmity."

David Lodge, quoted in the Daily Telegraph, Aug. 23, 2004 (by way of MoorishGirl)

Posted August 27, 12:00 PM

OGIC: The half-million

A few hours ago, About Last Night logged its 500,000th page view. From my perspective especially, this is a humbling and amazing figure--far more amazing, I daresay, to we bloggers than to you readers. The only thing I really want to say on this subject is simple but very deeply felt: thanks. For reading, for linking, for writing, and for blogrolling us. I'm sure that all goes double for Terry.

The weekend is now officially on, and any stray cocktails that might happen to cross my path as it proceeds will be drunk to you, dear readers.

Posted August 27, 9:54 AM

TT: Signoff

I just got back from Theater Row, where I thought I was going to see the budding young actor who doubles as my trainer carry a sword in a studio performance of Terence's The Eunuch. (Keep the jokes to yourself, please.) Alas, the studio door was locked and the box office unhelpful, so I hailed a cab and headed uptown to my apartment, which is currently in a fleeting state of grace, the cleaning lady having come and gone. All surfaces are dusted, all corners straightened, all flowers watered. A fellow blogger poked her head in to see the Teachout Museum yesterday afternoon and said, "It looks...monastic!" Well, maybe not quite, but 'twill serve, 'twill serve.

I have one more piece to finish before I shut the shop down, a Commentary essay on Jerome Robbins, and on the way home I tried to decide whether to stay up late or get up early. As the cab picked its way north, I saw that the night sky over Manhattan was full of alien presences--low-flying blimps and helicopters hovering in all the wrong places--so I decided to knock off for the evening, watch Cary Grant and Leslie Caron in Father Goose, and leave Robbins for tomorrow morning. If the bad guys are planning to pay a visit, I'd prefer not to be writing about West Side Story when they come. Besides, I don't often get to spend a quiet evening in my apartment when it's neat and tidy, and I'd just as soon spend it sitting in the living room, alternately watching TV and communing with the contents of the Teachout Museum. You don't really appreciate your surroundings when you're hunched over a hot iBook, tapping away.

Of course I don't really think there's trouble afoot, at least not imminently. I'm mainly just beat to the socks--it's been a long, long week--and happy to have an excuse, however far-fetched, to down my tools. I took a nap this afternoon and dreamed I was editing a paragraph from my Robbins essay. It's bad enough when you dream about the piece you're writing, but when you dream about editing the piece you're writing, you know you need to take a break. This, needless to say, is exactly what I'm planning to do. You won't be hearing from me again until September 6. Like the cleaning lady, I've done my best to make things neat and tidy for Our Girl in Chicago. In fact, I just finished updating the Top Five module of the right-hand column, which now contains four brand-new postings for your edification. I was briefly tempted to check my e-mailbox one last time before signing off, but I decided against it, so if you wrote to me today in the hopes of getting an immediate reply, you're out of luck.

Me, I'm in luck. Not counting Christmas, it's been a year since I took a whole week off, and I can already taste it. In the meantime, Cary Grant awaits, followed by rapid eye movement, followed by a couple of thousand words on the iBook, followed by...but that's a secret. I'll tell you what I did after it's done.

For now, have fun with Our Girl. I see that people in thirteen time zones are reading "About Last Night" as I write these words. May all of them, and all of you, wish me well.

Posted August 27, 9:16 AM

OGIC: ISO hockey-mad culture bloggers

Sigh. Alex Ross is a deplorable tease. Come back from vacation already, Tyler Green! (And hey ionarts, how are you doin'?)

Posted August 27, 1:22 AM

August 26, 2004

TT: They lost it at the movies

I'm in The Wall Street Journal today, a special midweek appearance--I wrote a piece for the Leisure & Arts page, a short tribute to Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, and David Raksin, all of whom died recently. Here's part of what I said:

Three important American composers died this past month. Had they written operas or symphonies, their deaths would have been front-page news. Instead, Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith and David Raksin scored Hollywood films, and so they never got the respect they deserved. (Raksin's New York Times obituary, for instance, was written not by a music critic but by Aljean Harmetz, an entertainment reporter.) Yet their best work was fully deserving of critical attention....

Why weren't these talented men more widely known in their lifetimes? Because the art they practiced was long treated as an ugly stepchild by classical music critics, most of whom took it for granted that anyone who chose to work in Hollywood had sold his soul to the devil of commercialism for the highest possible price. Even a distinguished, solidly established European composer like Miklós Rózsa was written off by narrow-minded highbrows after he wrote the music for such box-office smashes as "Double Indemnity" and "Ben-Hur."

As a result of this bigoted attitude, few major American classical composers dared to moonlight in Hollywood (except for Aaron Copland, who scored "Of Mice and Men," "Our Town" and "The Heiress," the last of which won him a well-deserved Oscar). Instead, most of the outstanding film composers of the 20th century were full-time specialists who rarely if ever wrote concert music. Nor is it likely that they would have had much luck with it, since the vast majority of them were traditionally inclined, tune-prone artists who adhered wholeheartedly to the natural law of tonality at a time when their classical counterparts were bowing to the iron will of the atonal avant-garde--and alienating audiences in the process.

Now that the stranglehold of late modernism has given way at last to the deliberate accessibility of minimalism, so has movie music come to be widely regarded as an idiom worthy of closer critical scrutiny. The yearningly romantic scores of Bernard Herrmann, who worked with Orson Welles ("Citizen Kane"), Alfred Hitchcock ("Vertigo"), François Truffaut ("Fahrenheit 451") and Martin Scorsese ("Taxi Driver"), are well on the way to becoming concert-hall staples, and the finest work of Bernstein, Goldsmith and Raksin can't be far behind....

No link, alas, so if you want to read more, buy a copy of today's Journal, or go here to subscribe to the online edition. I recommend the latter.

Posted August 26, 12:06 PM

TT: Words to the wise

I almost forgot to mention that Karrin Allyson, one of my very favorite jazz singers, is appearing through September 5 at Le Jazz au Bar, New York's newest high-end nightclub. She's touring in support of her latest CD, Wild for You, which contains subtly reworked jazz interpretations of 13 songs by Elton John, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Carly Simon, and Cat Stevens--the AM-radio music Allyson grew up on in the days before she discovered and embraced jazz. Like everything she does, it's purest pleasure.

Here's part of what I wrote in the Washington Post about her last album, In Blue:

Outside of moving from Kansas City to Manhattan a couple of years ago, Allyson (whose first name is pronounced KAH-rin) has consistently refused to play by The Rules. Yes, she's good-looking, but she doesn't glam up for gigs or pretend to be fresh out of college. She's a fully grown woman who has been making records her way for a decade now, singing what she likes and working with players she knows, shimmying up the greasy pole of renown inch by inch. The two Grammy nominations she received for last year's "Ballads: Remembering John Coltrane" suggest that the rest of the world is finally starting to catch up with her--and about time, too.

Allyson has a slender, smallish voice, precisely focused and pleasingly rough around the edges, whose distinctive timbre is at once plaintive and engaging. You can tell she knows all about life's ups and downs, and this album is more about the latter than the former. Don't be misled by the title, though, for "In Blue" isn't an all-blues program. As always, Allyson has cast her net far more widely and imaginatively, choosing 13 songs that range in tone from the sophisticated sorrow of Bobby Troup's "The Meaning of the Blues" to the no-nonsense earthiness of "Evil Gal Blues," an old Dinah Washington specialty ("I'll burn you like a candle, honey, I'm gonna burn you at both ends"). In between these two stylistic bookends is plenty of room for every other imaginable shade of blue, including a pair of dark-hued standards, "How Long Has This Been Going On?" and "Angel Eyes," that fit the prevailing mood perfectly.

Go--and if you're there on Saturday, look for me.

Posted August 26, 12:04 PM

TT: Wishful thinking

I'm not funny, and wish I were. Witty, yes, sometimes, and I'm pretty good at making an audience laugh when lecturing (a situation in which the prevailing standards are admittedly fairly low). But plain old drop-dead funny? Absolutely not. The only time I ever brought down a house was when I contrived to be hit in the face with a cream pie in front of an audience of pubescent classmates who thought they were going to be forced to listen to me give a prize-winning speech as part of a talent contest. That stopped the show. Short of such skullduggery, though, I lacked the power to impose my personality on a crowd, and still do. As a naughty but honest colleague said of Leopold Godowsky, a legendary turn-of-the-century pianist who was miraculous in the studio but dull in the concert hall, my aura extends for about five feet. This incapacity has made it hard for me to be funny and impossible for me to be either an actor or a conductor, two professions toward which I was briefly drawn when I was young and foolish.

I also wish I were graceful. Gerry Mulligan wrote a song called "Just Want to Sing and Dance Like Fred Astaire," which has always been my own vain wish. Instead, I suffer from a chronic condition dubbed Inanimate Object Trouble by the playwright George S. Kaufman, who suffered from the same disorder. I'm a dropper and a tripper, and I don't need anything to fall over in order to fall--my shadow is quite sufficient, thanks. This problem I attribute to my lifelong left-handedness. I once read a study whose authors concluded that most of the variance in the lifespans of lefties and righties (we die younger) can be explained by the fact that left-handed people are accident-prone. It seems we're more likely to crash cars, cut off our pedal extremities with power saws, and other such domestic tragedies. The study went on to suggest that our curious penchant for self-destruction is due to the fact that the world is arranged to suit the convenience of right-handed people, a hard truth I learned the first time I picked up a pair of scissors.

Whatever the reason, I gave up on sports as fast as I could, and never made serious attempts to master any manual skills other than typing and playing assorted musical instruments. At the former I was and am a virtuoso. At the latter I was solidly competent without touching the high C of maximal dexterity. I got work as a jazz musician because I had a good ear, knew all the old standards, and was a reliable sideman, but I never did get to be much of a soloist. What I liked to do was keep perfect time, which is more a function of mind over matter than anything else. Hence I fell in love at an early age with Count Basie's original rhythm section--four unshowily graceful cats who did nothing but swing like the wind--and when I discovered the records they made on their own in 1938, minus the Basie band, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. If I could have played music like that for a living, I'd have never become a writer. Alas, jazz in 1978 was completely different from jazz in 1938, and in any case I was too bourgeois to spend my life playing music in gin joints until sunup.

Having ruled out all possible alternatives, I succumbed to the inevitable and became a critic, which turned out to be what I should have done in the first place. Never since then have I doubted that I made the right choice. Instead of acting in boulevard comedies, playing jazz in nightclubs, dancing pas de deux with sylph-like women, or tossing off John Marin-like watercolors with a dazzling twist of the wrist, I write appreciatively of those who do. I can't imagine anything more delightful than to write a profile of a little-known artist that makes him better known, and I know from experience that my abilities in this line of work are cherished by those who've been on the receiving end of them.

So no, I'm not frustrated--I'm fulfilled. I know exactly how lucky I am. I adore my work. And would I give it up in a heartbeat in order to be able to dance like Fred Astaire, or play piano like Count Basie? Please don't embarrass me by asking.

On the other hand, Astaire probably would have cut off his left foot in order to write songs like Irving Berlin, a thought I find oddly comforting. I don't know about Basie, though. If he had any thwarted aspirations, I'm not aware of them. He might well have been one of the few people in the world who was perfectly happy to do what he did and be who he was, and I think he would have been right to be. That's the way his music sounds--an eternal present in which no one is tempted to take thought for the morrow.

Basie's divinely carefree music reminds me of something I wrote about George Balanchine in All in the Dances:

Having come so close to death at so young an age, he determined instead to spend the rest of his days living in the present. It was a resolution from which he never wavered. Of all his oft-repeated refrains, the most familiar was Do it now! "Why are you stingy with yourselves?" he would ask his dancers. "Why are you holding back? What are you saving for--for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now." His ruthlessly practical approach to running a dance company was rooted in the hard-won knowledge that his next breath might be his last. He worked within the means available at the moment, using them to the fullest, never wasting time longing for better dancers or a bigger budget: "A dog is going to remain a dog, even if you want to have a cat; you're not going to have a cat, so you better take care of the dog because that's what you're going to have." He ran his private life along the same lines: when he had money, he spent it lavishly, on himself and others, and when he didn't, he lived frugally. "You know," he said, "I am really a dead man. I was supposed to die and I didn't, and so now everything I do is second chance. That is why I enjoy every day. I don't look back. I don't look forward. Only now." This dance, this meal, this woman: that was his world.

And yes, I wish I could be like that, too. It's the spiritual equivalent of physical gracefulness. But at least it's a habit of being to which even the clumsy and unfunny among us can aspire. Not in this lifetime will I do a gargouillade or play Beethoven's Op. 111 like Artur Schnabel, but I can try to live in the moment today, and try again tomorrow and the day after that--and while I'm at it, I can listen to Count Basie all I want. I can think of worse bargains.

Posted August 26, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

What, still alive at twenty-two,
A clean, upstanding chap like you?
Sure, if your throat 'tis hard to slit,
Slit your girl's, and swing for it.

Like enough, you won't be glad,
When they come to hang you, lad:
But bacon's not the only thing
That's cured by hanging from a string.

So, when the spilt ink of the night
Spreads o'er the blotting-pad of light,
Lads whose job is still to do
Shall whet their knives, and think of you.

Hugh Kingsmill ("after A.E. Housman"), The Table of Truth

Posted August 26, 12:00 PM

TT: Mid-afternoon pick-me-up

Do this:

(1) Go here.

(2) Scroll down to the link that says "Northwest Passage."

(3) Read what Lileks says.

(4) Click on the link, which will cause your computer to download an mp3 file containing Woody Herman's 1946 recording of "Northwest Passage."

(5) Crank up the volume really loud.

(6) Enjoy yourself.

Optional extra-credit assignment:

(7) Read "Elegy for the Woodchopper," the chapter about Herman in A Terry Teachout Reader.

Posted August 26, 3:50 AM

OGIC: Essentialism

On one leg of my delightful recent vacation (about which more soon) I was close enough to the northern border to be able to listen to CBC Radio One, where I heard an installment of a miniseries called "50 Tracks". Proceeding one decade at a time, the show's host Jian Ghomeshi and his guests are picking the fifty essential songs of the 20th century. Last week's show covered the 1980s, which yielded:

1. "Billie Jean" [Michael Jackson]
2. "With or Without You" [U2]
3. "Message" [Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five]
4. "Fight the Power" [Public Enemy]
5. In a tie, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" [Joy Division] and "When Doves Cry" [Prince]

The runners-up were Eddy Grant's "Electric Avenue" and "Hungry Like the Wolf" by Duran Duran.

Now, I'm a child of the 80s, and it's the popular music from this decade that stirs up the strongest raw feeling in me. The music I love from these years, and the music I hate, rings up equally high readings on the nostalgia meter. All of it, the good and the bad, sounds affectingly like my life once upon a time. Somebody, I can't remember who, said "memory is the key to everything, but with it comes nostalgia, which is the key to nothing," a dictum I sort of loathe but grudgingly credit--although, then again, I don't think my own attachment to nostalgia is an illusion that it will unlock or illuminate anything. To flip-flop yet some more, maybe nostalgia is the key to lists like this. In other words, it's the key to something--just not something meaningful.

It turns out that "essential" is a tricky criterion to pin down, though not a bad one if you take it, as I do, as connoting influence and quality in roughly equal parts, along with a soupçon of, you know, je ne sais quoi (this is where the nostalgia comes in). By these standards, there's nothing on the Radio One's 1980s list that absolutely begs to be lopped off, and yet it's an oddly unsatisfying laundry list. Is it trying to be too representative? Is it too focused on including essential artists at the expense of great songs? Surely Michael Jackson and Prince need to be there, but the panelists' cases for including these particular songs from their respective 1980s oeuvres carried a whiff of compromise and overthinking, as though the songs were bundles of abstract qualities that needed to be checked off.

And though it may be awfully lowest-common-denominator of me, I have to question how Joy Division ended up in the top 5 while Duran Duran, a single well-chosen chord of whose music elicits a positively Pavlovian response in everyone I know who hit 16 during the 80s, didn't make the cut. A friend raised the similar question of Madonna (if she cracked our list, we agreed, it would be with "Material Girl").

And so the CBC's list does its proper work: starting some good snarling brawls. (OK, I'm not much of a snarler, but you get my drift.) Take a look at the whole list here and send some fighting words. I'll also accept predictions for the top five from the 90s, a decade that sounds altogether fuzzier to my by-then-post-teenage ears. I'll go ahead and shoot the fish in a barrel that is "Smells Like Teen Spirit," but beyond that I'm stumped.

Posted August 26, 3:35 AM

OGIC: Wish I were there

Cinetrix is recommending to New Yorkers a BAM film series that starts today, I Can Hear the Guitar: Selected by Olivier Assayas. You should, of course, always heed the Cinetrix's directives. Much like Dr. Science, she knows more than you do. But in this case even more than usual.

The series slate includes a movie I adore and long to see again, Assayas's own Cold Water. Alas, it's a hard movie to get your hands on. Originally made for French television as a sort of after-school special pour sophisticates, it's a compact, eloquent, and utterly affecting little mood piece. Here's BAM's précis:

Made as part of a series produced by French television depicting autobiographical stories of filmmakers at age 16, Assayas' contribution takes place in 1972. Young lovers Gilles and Christine are separated after she gets caught during a robbery attempt. She is committed and he drifts aimlessly, until a rendezvous at a party in the country. Cold Water features the most celebrated sequence in any Assayas film, an astounding set piece scored to 60s rock-n-roll playing, and often repeating mid-song, from a turntable.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Terry will be at one of the four screenings next Friday, September 3d: 2:00, 4:30, 6:50, or 9:15. (I'm planning on hounding him into it.) So be sure to say Hey, Terr!

Posted August 26, 3:21 AM

August 25, 2004

TT: Almanac

"Men are all either dates, potential dates, or date substitutes."

Whit Stillman, screenplay for Metropolitan

Posted August 25, 12:02 PM

TT: Spin the bottle, kick the can

I went to six shows presented by the New York International Fringe Festival over the weekend, and they were all good, every last one of them. Alas, I can't tell you which ones just yet, because I'll be reviewing them in this Friday's Wall Street Journal. But I can say that the festival runs through Sunday, and that if you live in or near New York, you'd be well advised to check out at least a few of its offerings.

The New York Times has already reviewed a number of Fringe Festival shows (their selection criteria, by the way, look to be about as random as mine), and two of their favorites will also be figuring prominently in my column on Friday, so you might want to check out their theater page and see if any of the recommendations ring your bell.

For more information on the Fringe Festival, including synopses of and photos from all 200-plus shows, go here and start browsing. I can't promise that you'll hit the jackpot, but I did it six times in a row, which ought to count for something.

Posted August 25, 10:56 AM

TT: Spherewatch

Just because I haven't been blogging doesn't mean I haven't been reading blogs. Here's some of what I gleaned in the past couple of weeks:

- David Raksin, Jerry Goldsmith, and Elmer Bernstein, three of the most important film-music composers of the twentieth century, all died recently. I marked their passing by writing a piece that will run in The Wall Street Journal as soon as a hole opens up. In the meantime, Alex Ross posted thoughtful comments on their deaths, which can be found here, here, here, and here. I especially like this one:

"Sounds like a film score" is the put-down of choice for tonal orchestral music. "Serious" composers are supposed to suffer neglect in their lifetimes, with the gratitude of posterity their invisible reward. The my-time-will-come mindset was especially widespread in the twentieth century, with composers believing that if they invented a new sound or came up with a "big idea" they would win their place in history. The result was a great deal of superficially difficult, emotionally disposable music, whose ultimate historical value is now very much in question. By contrast, it seems certain that in a hundred years people will still be talking about Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo, Goldsmith's Chinatown, Raksin's Laura. They have gone down in history, because they found a way to make their music matter.

I like what I said, but I wish I'd said that, too.

- Tobi Tobias was at the Mark Morris performance on which I bailed out at intermission because of exhaustion. In lieu of what I might have written, read what she wrote:

From the start, Morris has gone in for nonconformity when it comes to the bodies he chooses to animate his work. Instead of selecting for uniformity and conventional notions of a physical ideal, he has regularly assembled a miniature motley society of the small, the stocky, the lushly ample, the tall-and-skinny beanpole type, the delicate, the blunt, and, yes, a few whose ballet teachers may have had high hopes of placing in one of those finalists-only classical companies that go by their initials. The flat-footed and those whom the gods of turn-out have not favored have their place with Morris, as do the fresh and frank American girl and the sultry glamour girl (Betty and Veronica, if you will), the beach hero and the fellow into whose face the beach hero kicks the sand. And of course the company has always been multi-ethnic--so thoroughly so that, simply by appearing, it defies tokenism, demonstrating that there are an infinite number of ways to be Caucasian, black, Asian, or a mix thereof....

- Speaking of Mark Morris, guess who has a stalker? Me! If only I knew what she looked like....

- A reader sent me a link to a cool on-line short story which is sort of about one of my all-time favorite actors:

That night I dream about Robert Mitchum. I'm in the middle of the street. Old Tucson or something. And he's walking toward me obscured by this swirling sand. He's also singing. I can make out the words to "Thunder Road." I can see the black cowboy boots but I can't quite make out his bohunky face. He's maybe twenty yards away before the wind begins to die down. And then I see him. It's Mitchum all right, and he's still singing. I can't move. My feet won't obey my brain. I want to run. Because Mitchum is wearing a dress. One of those Gunsmoke Miss Kitty numbers. Ostrich plumes and fishnets. Ultima II Sexxxy Red lipstick on his thick lips. He stops in front of me. A spaghetti western moment. And then he says, "Pucker up."...

- Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt on Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, in TLS:

Sometimes it seems as though I can never get away from him: "Tell me, you are a Canadian pianist, known as a Bach specialist, and winner of the international piano competition held in his memory – what influence did Glenn Gould have on you and were you afraid to be in his shadow?". "No" is always the answer to the latter part of the question. (It is Bach who scares me, not Gould.) As a kid I saw him regularly on Canadian television. "Who's that kook?", I asked my parents. Playing with his nose practically on the keyboard, and always at tempos that even at that age I knew were bizarre, he was clearly recognizable as a serious presence in Canadian musical life, but not, perhaps, one to be closely imitated. I recall a Bach class in the music festival at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto (where Gould himself played as a teenager) in which we all had to perform a Two- or Three-part Invention. One boy got up, obviously copying Gould in every respect, right down to the mannerisms. When he didn't win, he complained to the judge, "Why didn't you give me first prize? I played that exactly like Glenn Gould!". The adjudicator answered, "I happen not to like Glenn Gould."...

Read the whole thing here, please. I wish more artists would write pieces like this. Criticism is too important to be left to the critics.

- Something Old, Nothing New on reality TV:

How long will reality shows continue to dominate television? I'd guess that, as with prime-time game shows in the late '50s, the popularity of reality shows will continue until a major scandal. I think that someday, a popular reality show will turn out to have been complely rigged -- not just "staged" to a certain extent, as all reality shows are, but planned out and with the winner decided in advance. I think this will happen because the need to keep viewers tuning in will drive some desperate producer to fix the outcome in favour of a more popular participant, just as Twenty-One did with Charles Van Doren). And if that happens, it might seriously hurt not only that show, but nearly all reality shows. Because - and I know this is a shockingly iconoclastic thing to say - the appeal of reality shows is that they're, well, real. Even if they are "staged" to some extent, with producers encouraging the participants to do this and move here and smile at the camera, we want to believe that the things we see are really happening to real people. If there's ever a reality-show scandal comparable to the game-show scandals, a lot of viewers won't be able to believe that anymore....

I think this is exactly right.

- From ...something slant, new cultural perspectives on "Chopsticks":

At the risk of being branded someone who quibbles context for personally motivated political reasons, though, I hereby submit that "Chopsticks" wasn't originally titled "Chopsticks" but "The Celebrated Chop Waltz," written by 16 year old Euphemia Allen and published in London circa 1877 under the name Arthur de Lulli. The instructions, apparently, were that "the melody be played with both hands held sideways, little fingers down, and the keys struck with a chopping motion." [Think wood. Or karate. Or tomahawk.] Thus chop = hatchet here.

But wait, there's more!...

Once again, read it all.

- Erik's Rants on top-ten lists:

Tyler Green has asked art bloggers to list their ten favorite artists as of the moment of typing them. His list amazed me for the simple reason that he includes four artists from my list along with an artist I completely loathe. I would like to see him talk more about this, but I find it amazing that someone who lists Diebenkorn and Matisse would like Newman....

I know just how he feels. To read a top-ten list by a writer you respect that contains four of your favorites and somebody you despise is a thoroughly disorienting experience--though sometimes in a good way.

Pardon me for repeating myself, but take it away, Hans Keller: "As soon as I detest something I ask myself why I like it."

- Belatedly but not leastly, heartfelt congratulations to Sarah for her new gig as mystery critic of the Baltimore Sun. Speaking as H.L. Mencken's biographer, I believe I can say with absolute authority that she's going to rock.

Posted August 25, 10:45 AM

TT: The creative process

A serious amateur painter I know sent me this stream-of-consciousness paragraph describing her decision to embark on a new canvas:

God, there's nothing on TV. I wish I could just do something fun to cheer myself up. I could just walk down to the corner and get some french fries and doughnuts. That's what I used to do to cheer myself up...but that doesn't work anymore, remember? Oh yeah, that's right. Hey, I have an idea. How about painting? That's it!! But I can't possibly do that right now, not with my room being so messy--I don't deserve to paint. Wait a minute, that's not right! I do deserve to paint, whether my room is clean or not. Hmm...I know...I'll go wash the dishes and call it even. Okay, good, I feel better having cleaned the dishes. Maybe I should just go ahead and start cleaning my room while I'm at it. No, the idea was to treat myself to something fun. Okay, I'll do it! But can I really actually just start painting, just like that? Sure, why not? No reason. What's stopping me? Nothing. Well...okay then...here I go!!!

I don't mind admitting that I've written more than a few pieces in my lifetime that got started in more or less the same way.

Posted August 25, 10:10 AM

OGIC: No more nose to the wall

Now and then it would vanish for hours from the scene,
But alas, be discovered inside a tureen.

Edward Gorey's books constitute a micro-genre unto themselves. They don't belong to any preexisting category, and they contain their own subgenres. One of my favorite of these subgenres is the Crashing Creature story, which to my recollection consists of two works, "The Osbick Bird" and "The Doubtful Guest" (pictures and full text here). The first of these begins:

An osbick bird flew down and sat
On Emblus Fingby's bowler hat.
It had not done so for a whim
But meant to come and live with him.

Similarly, the antihero of "The Doubtful Guest" appears unannounced one night. It has come to stay.

When they answered the bell on that wild winter night,
There was no one expected--and no one in sight.
Then they saw something standing on top of an urn,
Whose peculiar appearance gave them quite a turn.
All at once it leapt down and ran into the hall,
Where it chose to remain with its nose to the wall.
It was seemingly deaf to whatever they said,
So at last they stopped screaming, and went off to bed.
It joined them at breakfast and presently ate
All the syrup and toast and a part of a plate.

Through the middle of the story we hear of the Guest's habits, none of them charming (with the possible exception of "peeling the soles of its white canvas shoes"). And the ending reveals that there is no end:

It came seventeen years ago, and to this day
It has shown no intention of going away.

Which is all by way of saying that I'm feeling a bit like the Doubtful Guest around the blog these days: moody, moochy, and mute. But all this is about to change. More blogging imminently. Doubtless.

UPDATE: I know what you're wondering: any visuals on the Osbick Bird? The best pic I can find, (darkly) hilariously, is on a coffee mug that you can purchase for a measly $7 from the Funeral Consumers Alliance (scroll down). They also offer a Gashlycrumb Tinies mug and a Gorey refrigerator magnet reading "Matters of Life and Death Inside." Can't say they don't have a sense of humor.

Posted August 25, 2:49 AM

August 24, 2004

TT: Five-day forecast

Current conditions: I saw two plays on Monday, with another two set for Tuesday and Saturday, plus a film screening and a nightclub set. In addition, I've got to hit four deadlines between now and Friday afternoon.

The forecast: minimal blogging until Friday.

The good news: Our Girl is back in Chicago, and has stories to tell. I'm hoping that she'll return to the blog in force in the next day or two.

Later.

Posted August 24, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Obvious symmetry usually closes the episode before it begins."

Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography

Posted August 24, 12:00 PM

August 23, 2004

TT: Where were you when the lights went out?

Here's what I blogged a year and eight days ago:

A funny thing happened on the way to the theater yesterday afternoon. I was sitting at my desk, sending one last e-mail before I departed for a Fringe Festival performance of a musical about Robert Blake, when the lights quivered, dimmed, and died. Figuring the power on my Upper West Side block had gone out, I put my shoes on, walked downstairs in the dark, caught a cab...and realized by the time we'd gone 20 blocks that it wasn't just my neighborhood. Assuming that there wouldn't be any shows to see that day, I told the cabby to turn around.

Eighteen hours later, here I am, very sweaty and insufficiently slept but otherwise none the worse for wear. The power's back on in my neighborhood, some of the restaurants are open, and I'm in the process of figuring out what to do next....

I never did get around to seeing that musical about Robert Blake. Instead, I took refuge in a neighbor's apartment, not caring to be alone, and spent the night listening to a wind-up radio and sweating. Had it not been so hot, it would have been fun. Like most New Yorkers trapped in the blackout of 2003, I'd briefly feared that 9/11 was repeating itself, and once I knew it wasn't, I was so relieved that nothing else mattered.

A year later, I find myself doing much the same thing, minus the flashlights and candles. I'm sitting at the same desk, clicking away at my iBook and putting into order my first impressions of the five plays I just finished seeing at the New York International Fringe Festival. I'll be reviewing those plays, and three others, in this Friday's Wall Street Journal, so I mustn't jump the gun, but I can say that I got quite a bit of pleasure out of my weekend of nonstop playgoing. Unlike last year, the weather in Manhattan has been intermittently temperate, though I did come close to smothering once or twice, few places in the world being less pleasant than a black-box theater without air conditioning on a humid August day. I got caught in a cloudburst on Saturday afternoon--but I don't mind getting wet. I had to trudge up six flights of steep, slippery stairs to see one show--but I didn't fall, and in any case I needed the exercise. Most of the seats in which I sat were variously uncomfortable--but there's nothing like a good show to make you forget a bad seat.

Truth to tell, I love the Fringe Festival, even when it's not so good. Seeing live actors in a small theater performing a new play by a writer about whom you know nothing can be one of the most exhilarating experiences imaginable. It can also be unutterably tedious, but my batting average so far has been excellent. Either I'm just lucky, or I'm starting to get the hang of picking Fringe shows (I endured a couple of stinkers last year).

I've been doing more than perching myself on folding chairs in black-box theaters. Last night, for instance, I went to the Jazz Standard, my favorite New York nightclub, to hear Gene Bertoncini and Michael Moore, who for many years were the best working guitar-bass duo in jazz. Back in the Eighties, they were all but joined at the hip. You could hear them most Sundays at a now-defunct, much-lamented Italian restaurant called Zinno, and they cut a number of first-rate CDs as well. Alas, Bertoncini and Moore called it quits in 1989--Whitney Balliett wrote a lovely New Yorker essay about their decision to part--and though the separation was perfectly friendly, it's been years since they last played together in a New York club.

Not surprisingly, the Jazz Standard was crawling with musicians all weekend long, it being that kind of place, comfortable and welcoming. (Among those present on Sunday were Peter Washington, Bill Charlap's indispensable bassist, and Luciana Souza, who needs no introduction to regular readers of "About Last Night.") Musicians usually play especially well for their peers, and Bertoncini and Moore obliged with a vengeance, kicking off the first set with a medium-tempo version of Neal Hefti's "Li'l Darlin'" that swung like the whole Count Basie band rolled into two.

After the set was over, I climbed the stairs to the street and walked a few blocks before hailing a cab, accompanied by two musician friends in no more of a hurry to get home than I was. We headed up Fifth Avenue, refreshed by the unexpectedly cool night air, and gazed with delight at the Empire State Building, whose upper stories were brilliantly lit in green and white in honor of the independence of Pakistan, those being the colors of the Pakistani flag. As we strolled past the shuttered storefronts, looking for all the world like the three happy sailors of On the Town, I remembered a conversation I'd had earlier in the day with another friend. We'd seen a Fringe matinee, then taken high tea at Tea and Sympathy and done some window shopping in Greenwich Village.

"This is absolutely the only place to live," I told her. "Nowhere else."

"Oh, I guess it's all right to visit other places," she replied. "And you could live somewhere else for six months, if you had to. Or maybe even a year."

"But only if you don't give up your lease," I said firmly.

We giggled, knowing perfectly well that neither one of us had the slightest intention of going anywhere else for more than a week or two.

Were we being heedless? As I thought of our exchange, a familiar stanza that acquired ominous new overtones not so long ago popped unbidden into my head:

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

But I shook it off, knowing that I was neither unhappy nor afraid of the cool, clear night. Instead, I was glad to be exactly where I was, living my life instead of waiting for it to begin. I still am. So long as the lights stay on and the music keeps playing, this--right here, right now--is home.

Posted August 23, 12:03 PM

TT: Almanac

"You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound."

P.G. Wodehouse, "Jeeves Takes Charge"

Posted August 23, 12:00 PM

TT: Master Hitchcock's Avery

I've seen most of Alfred Hitchcock's major films, but for some reason Rope had eluded me until last week, when it popped up on Turner Classic Movies as part of a Jimmy Stewart marathon. Like most cinephiles, I didn't find it very impressive, though I was fascinated to see John Dall camping it up as one of the two gotta-be-gay murderers, having only recently watched his straight-down-the-center performance as the hapless bank robber-victim of Gun Crazy.

That said, one thing about Rope struck me quite forcibly. In fact, it astonished me. About ten minutes or so into the first reel, Hitchcock's wandering camera came to rest in front of a painting hanging in the dining room of the elaborate breakaway set on which Rope was filmed. As Dall and Farley Granger chatted away, I said to myself, "By God, that's a Milton Avery." To be exact, it appears to be a portrait of March Avery, the artist's daughter, painted some time in the mid-to-late Forties. (This isn't the painting I saw, but it's of roughly the same vintage and style.) What's more, it looks like the real thing, not a reproduction. Rope dates from 1948, the same year that Avery made March at a Table, a copy of which hangs in the Teachout Museum. Hence it's well within the realm of possibility that I saw exactly what I thought I saw.

Why was I surprised? Because one rarely if ever runs across important modern American paintings in Hollywood movies. When a painting is seen in some millionaire's living room, it's almost always a fairly obvious copy of a French Impressionist or post-impressionist canvas. To be sure, I've spotted mock-Rothkos once or twice, nor is it uncommon to encounter Andy Warhol-type eye candy, but the only bonafide example of high American modernism that I can recall off the top of my head is the Morris Louis that hangs in Walter Matthau's apartment in Elaine May's A New Leaf. (It's definitely the real thing--André Emmerich, Louis' gallery at the time, is mentioned in the credits.)

So how on earth did a Milton Avery find its way into the decor of Rope, along with a half-dozen other paintings that looked equally plausible? I've read a lot about Hitchcock, but I can't remember any mention of the paintings seen in Rope, nor did a quick check of the various books about Hitchcock on my shelves tell me anything useful. Puzzled, I turned to Google, and within seconds turned up this paragraph from an on-line biographical sketch of Hitchcock:

The Hitchcocks were interested in art, mainly by modern painters such as the Mexican David Alfaro Siqueiros and the Cuban Fidelio Ponce León. In later years, they purchased works by Raoul Dufy, Maurice de Vlaminck, Maurice Utrillo, Georges Rouault, Chaïm Soutine, Albert Gleizes, Milton Avery, Pierre Soulages, Auguste Rodin, Georges Braque's "birds series" and Paul Klee, who he called once his favorite painter.

Could it be that Alfred Hitchcock used his own art collection in Rope? While this list of artists is certainly suggestive, I've never seen an actual catalogue raisonné of the Hitchcock collection. Was it broken up after his death? If so, who bought his Avery? (It's not reproduced in any of my Avery catalogues.) And was it the same one in front of which John Dall and Farley Granger spoke lightly of murder as a fine art?

Any light that connoisseurs can shed on this admittedly arcane puzzle will be more than welcome. (Tyler Green, call your office!) In addition, I'd also love to hear about other verifiable on-screen sightings of modern American art, which I will gladly pass on. I have a sneaking feeling, though, that I might just be the first person ever to notice--or at least to report--what must have been Milton Avery's lone appearance on the silver screen.

Posted August 23, 2:14 AM

August 20, 2004

TT: Never before, probably again

I arrived at the New York State Theater last night in a state of near-exhaustion. I'd been racing the engine pretty hard for several days in a row, shorting myself on sleep in the process, and that day had been especially long (I went out to Brooklyn to interview Madeleine Peyroux, a singer whom regular readers of "About Last Night" know that I greatly admire). Under normal circumstances I would have been taking better care of myself, especially since I have to see eight plays and write five pieces between now and next Friday. Alas, I'd grown a little self-neglectful, and by the time I fell into my seat I was running on fumes.

The curtain went up on the Mark Morris Dance Group, and within minutes I realized that I was having trouble making sense out of A Lake, the first work on the program. I didn't have much more luck with Marble Halls, a lovely ensemble piece set to the Bach Violin-Oboe Concerto. At that point I leaned over to my companion for the evening and whispered, "I'm going home at intermission."

Needless to say, I don't normally bail out of performances, and I never leave a play that I'm reviewing for The Wall Street Journal, no matter how awful it may be, until the bitter end. The idea of missing the second half of a Mark Morris performance would normally be horrifying to me. This time around, though, I knew I wasn't all there, and as much as I hated to miss Jesu, Meine Freude, which I've never seen, I figured I'd better quit while I was behind. So I did.

The rest of the story is quickly told: I went straight to bed and slept for eleven hours. Now I feel surprisingly human again. And while I have a New York International Fringe Festival performance on my plate today, it's a matinee, meaning that I can and will do the same thing tonight.

To all of you who've been writing to urge me to take it a bit easier: I read you loud and clear.

Posted August 20, 10:55 AM

TT: Six Flags over Transylvania

I got a trifle intemperate in today's Wall Street Journal, where I reviewed Dracula: The Musical, not very affectionately:

Frank Wildhorn, the Rodney Dangerfield of Broadway, is no more likely to get any respect for "Dracula: The Musical," which opened last night at the Belasco Theater, than for his previous shows. I don't wish to inflict needless pain on innocent bystanders, so if you actually liked "Jekyll & Hyde" or "The Scarlet Pimpernel," my suggestion is that you stop reading now, since I bring not peace but a sword -- or, rather, a wooden stake.

Actually, Mr. Wildhorn's watery score isn't the worst thing about "Dracula." His is more a sin of omission, since he has neglected to write any tunes capable of being remembered for longer than 10 seconds at a time, meaning that you forget them before they're over. (Believe me, it's better that way.) No, the villains-in-chief are Don Black ("Bombay Dreams") and Christopher Hampton ("Sunset Boulevard"), who share blame for the cliché-crammed book and lead-footed lyrics. It's possible to ignore the music, but there's no way to get around the awful words that gush from the stage like blood from a severed artery....

"Dracula: The Musical" is more the sort of show you'd expect to see at a theme park with money to burn -- and nearly every cent of it spent on special effects. When he's not plunging through trapdoors or crawling out of coffins, Count Dracula (Tom Hewitt) is zooming through the air with the assistance of Flying by Foy, the folks who brought you "Peter Pan." Alas, Des McAnuff, the director, has yet to figure out that even the most eye-catching trick reaches a point of diminishing returns after the first dozen or so repetitions.

Did I mention the orchestra? Well, there isn't one, only three instrumentalists and three synthesizer players who labor mightily to produce sounds better suited to accompanying a discount video game....

On the other hand, I had good things to say about Horton Foote's The Day Emily Married, now playing at Primary Stages' 59E59 theater complex:

The near-nonagenarian playwright, better known to the public at large for his screenplays (including the Oscar-winning "Tender Mercies"), has reached into his trunk of unproduced scripts and pulled out this tough-minded tale of domestic woe, in which the twice-married Emily (Hallie Foote) and her greedy second husband, Richard (James Colby), move in with Lyd (Estelle Parsons) and Lee (William Biff McGuire), Emily's aged, fast-failing parents. Things get bad, then worse, and before long it becomes clear that the only one with any hope of redemption is Emily -- and that the only way she can seek it is by wounding her parents beyond the possibility of healing.

"The Day Emily Married" is far from original (it's two parts "Little Foxes," one part "Glass Menagerie"), but Mr. Foote mixes his familiar ingredients with the practiced skill of a veteran druggist, and the results are both well made and finely played. Ms. Foote, the playwright's daughter, is especially good, investing Emily with the vinegary edge of a frustrated woman on the brink of a lonely middle age. Michael Wilson directs with self-effacing precision, and Jeff Cowie's set, two rooms of a small-town farm house by the highway, is wholly true to life. (The creaky screen door alone deserves a prize for authenticity.)...

No link, so go buy yourself a Journal to read the whole review. Or subscribe to the online edition--an excellent idea, if I do say so myself--by going here.

Posted August 20, 10:52 AM

TT: Almanac

"The big public likes interpretations that are explanations. For me, music is crystal clear and self-explanatory. Therefore, when I am performing I only propose my feelings."

Gérard Souzay (quoted in the New York Times' obituary, Aug. 19, 2004)

Posted August 20, 10:51 AM

August 19, 2004

TT: Almanac

"Apart from emulative envy, the only aspect of envy that does not seem to me pejorative is a form of envy I have myself felt, as I suspect have others who are reading this book: the envy that I think of as faith envy. This is the envy one feels for those who have the true and deep and intelligent religious faith that sees them through the darkest of crises, death among them. If one is oneself without faith and wishes to feel this emotion, I cannot recommend a better place to find it than in the letters of Flannery O'Connor. There one will discover a woman still in her thirties, who, after coming into her radiant talent, knows she is going to die well before her time and, owing to her Catholicism, faces her end without voicing complaint or fear. I not long ago heard, in Vienna, what seemed to me a perfect rendering of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and was hugely moved by it, but how much more would I have been moved, I could not help wonder, if I were in a state of full religious belief, since the Ninth Symphony seems to me in many ways a religious work. Faith envy is envy, alas, about which one can do nothing but quietly harbor it."

Joseph Epstein, Envy

Posted August 19, 12:00 PM

TT: Another one of those days

Frenzied telephone calls all morning (I'm booking myself into this weekend's New York International Fringe Festival even as we speak), an interview in Brooklyn this afternoon (I'm the -er, not the -ee), Mark Morris at Lincoln Center tonight...you get the picture. Expect no further postings until Friday.

Till then.

Posted August 19, 10:45 AM

August 18, 2004

TT: Almanac

"Only the young have such moments. I don't mean the very young. No. The very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection."

Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line

Posted August 18, 12:08 PM

TT: Maybe not today

My assistant's hard drive crashed yesterday, thus throwing our smoothly running operation into a tizzy. This being a writing-for-money day, I may not be getting back to you again until tomorrow. Then again, maybe I will. We'll see.

Later.

P.S. Our Girl in Chicago is on vacation. She promised to tell you so, but I think she left in too much of a hurry to bid you farewell. Think lovely thoughts and she might try to post from her insecure, undisclosed location. Or maybe not.

Posted August 18, 10:43 AM

TT: Seventeen thousand words

I just signed off on the photo insert for All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, which contains 14 "images," as we say in the book biz. Together with the frontispiece and two photos reproduced on the dust jacket, that comes to a total of 17 images with which I tried to sum up Balanchine's life and work as completely as I could.

I think every biography of an artist should contain as many well-chosen photos as the budget will permit--especially a biography of a visual artist like Balanchine. The trick, of course, is to integrate them with the text. Ideally, you want to second-guess the reader and include images of everything and everyone mentioned in the book about which (or whom) he might be curious.

To that elusive end, I looked for:

- A photo of each individual discussed at length in the book.

- A photo of each Balanchine ballet described in detail in the book.

- A mixture of small-group and large-ensemble photos.

- A mixture of performance photos, rehearsal photos, and posed images taken in the photographer's studio.

- Portraits of Balanchine taken at different times in his life.

- At least one photo illustrative of his interest in music.

Since the insert could be no more than eight pages long, I talked Harcourt into including a frontispiece (that is, a photo opposite the title page) and putting photos on the front and back of the dust jacket. Then I drew up a wish list and sent Meital Waibsnaider, my trusty research assistant, down to the New York City Ballet Archives at Lincoln Center to do my dirty work for me. She returned with a pile of pictures carefully chosen to my specifications, from which we selected most (but not all!) of the 17 photos reproduced in All in the Dances.

Between them, these 17 photos illustrate:

- Thirteen major Balanchine ballets, Apollo, Prodigal Son, Serenade, Concerto Barocco, Symphony in C, Orpheus, The Four Temperaments, La Valse, Agon, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Liebeslieder Walzer, Don Quixote, and Stravinsky Violin Concerto, 11 of which receive more than passing mention in the text.

- Five of the many ballerinas with whom Balanchine is known to have been in love: Alexandra Danilova, Maria Tallchief, Tanaquil Le Clercq, Diana Adams, and Suzanne Farrell.

- Twelve other dancers with whom he worked closely: Mikhail Baryshnikov, Jacques d'Amboise, Jillana, Serge Lifar, Nicholas Magallanes, Peter Martins, Kay Mazzo, Arthur Mitchell, Francisco Moncion, Violette Verdy, Edward Villella, and Patricia Wilde.

- Lincoln Kirstein, Jerome Robbins, and Igor Stravinsky, his three most important offstage colleagues.

- A 1938 photo by Walker Evans that shows Balanchine seated at a piano, playing from a score.

Looking at the results now, I regret that I failed to include Tamara Geva, Serge Diaghilev, Allegra Kent, and Patricia McBride, all of whom are mentioned prominently in the text. I also wish I'd found room for an illustration of Balanchine's work in Hollywood and on Broadway--perhaps a rehearsal shot from The Goldwyn Follies, which starred Vera Zorina, his third wife. And one major ballet discussed in All in the Dances, The Nutcracker, slipped through my net.

For the most part, though, I'm delighted with the finished product. Not only did we contrive to cram a huge amount of information about George Balanchine into just 17 images, but nearly all of them are aesthetically pleasing in their own right. (The photographers include Costas, Walker Evans, Fred Fehl, Paul Kolnik, George Platt Lynes, and Martha Swope.)

See how complicated it is to put together a good photo insert? It's not just a matter of sitting down one afternoon and flipping through a couple of bulging scrapbooks. Meital and I have been working on this one for more than two months, and we (well, she) had a hell of a time tracking down certain photos and obtaining permission to reprint them. Still, it was worth the trouble. Should you happen to read All in the Dances, the chances are good that you'll be able to see much of what I'm talking about--at least to the limited extent that any still picture can rightly be said to "illustrate" a ballet, or capture the ephemeral essence of a stage performer's personality.

If I sound proud, that's because I am. From the beginning, I wanted the images in All in the Dances to complement the text as fully and sensitively as possible. I think they do. I hope you think so, too.

UPDATE: I just got an e-mail from Harcourt's managing editor in San Diego, informing me that he's been unable to obtain high-resolution scans of two photos. The next-to-last minute having arrived, he wants me to FedEx him my personal copies of the books in which these two photos were first published. Fortunately, I happen to own both volumes, so it's off to the nearest FedEx office.

That's how books get published in the information age!

Posted August 18, 3:44 AM

August 17, 2004

TT: Inklings

A friend writes, apropos of yesterday's posting about my Balanchine book:

Congratulations on the completion of the book on Mr. B. And when can we expect the Armstrong opus?

I suppose you could say that the seeds of my next book, a full-length biography of Louis Armstrong, were planted three years ago, when I was writing an essay for the New York Times about Armstrong's centenary in which I called him "jazz's most eminent Victorian." (The Teachout Reader contains a longer version of this piece.) Struck by the way in which Armstrong's autobiographical writings point up the intensity of his work ethic, I'd thought it might be worth paying a visit to his home in Queens, which at that time was not yet open to the public. So I arranged for Michael Cogswell, who runs the Louis Armstrong Archives, where Armstrong's papers and personal effects are preserved, to give me a private tour of the Armstrong house (it's good to write for the Times, even as a freelancer). That tour inspired these words:

In a review of Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words and The Louis Armstrong Companion, Brian Harker, an assistant professor of music at Brigham Young University, remarked that Armstrong was "a product of turn-of-the-century African American ideology, especially that of Booker T. Washington. Like Washington, Armstrong was an accommodationist, determined to play--and win--by the rules of the white majority." This is true as far as it goes, but it overlooks the fact that most jazz musicians, black and white alike, come from middle-class backgrounds, while most of those who are born poor strive mightily--and, more often than not, successfully--to join the ranks of the middle class. Anyone who doubts that Armstrong filled the latter bill need only visit his home, located some seven blocks from Shea Stadium in a shabby but respectable part of Queens. It is a modest three-story frame house whose elaborate interior is uncannily reminiscent of Graceland, Elvis Presley's gaudy Memphis mansion. From the Jetsons-style kitchen-of-the-future to the silver wallpaper and golden faucets of the master bathroom, the Armstrong house looks exactly like what it is: the residence of a poor southern boy who grew up and made good.

Unlike Graceland, though, it is neither oppressive nor embarrassing. As one stands in Armstrong's smallish study (whose decorations include, among other things, a portrait of the trumpeter painted by Tony Bennett), it is impossible not to be touched to the heart by the aspiration that is visible wherever you look. This, you sense, was the home of a working man, one bursting with a pride that came not from what he had but from what he did. The American dream has had no more loyal exemplar. "I never want to be anything more than I am, what I don't have I don't need," he wrote. "My home with Lucille [his fourth wife] is good, but you don't see me in no big estates and yachts, that ain't gonna play your horn for you. When the guys come from taking a walk around the estate they ain't got no breath to blow that horn."

As he drove me from the house to Queens College, where the Armstrong Archives are located, Cogswell asked casually if I'd thought of writing an Armstrong biography. I told him that I'd only just put a Mencken biography to bed after ten years of struggle, and that the thought of doing the whole thing all over again was too horrific to contemplate. I suppose I must have meant what I said, but it's no less true that I'd been stirred--perhaps more deeply than I knew--by my first sight of the Armstrong house, which brought tears to my eyes. The wheels were already starting to turn.

A year later, I gave an interview to Publishers Weekly on the occasion of the publication of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken. It contained the following paragraph:

Teachout isn't sure which of several book ideas might come to fruition. "I don't contemplate writing another biography, though I'm really glad I did this one. I'm a scholar manqué, like a lot of journalists, and to do a fully annotated book based on primary source material was my chance to be a full professor without having to put up with all the nonsense. I'm not sure I need to do it again."

Truth to tell, I was sure I didn't. Or so I thought. But a couple of months later, as I lay in bed in a hotel room not far from Washington's Union Station, mulling over a lecture about Mencken that I'd just delivered, an idea hit me from out of nowhere like an arrow in the middle of my forehead: I should write a biography of Louis. It really did come to me just like that--and the more I thought about it, the better it sounded. Like Mencken, Armstrong was a quintessentially American figure. Like Mencken, none of Armstrong's previous biographers had managed to get him on paper in all his fascinating complexity. Like Mencken, he was a packrat who saved everything, and most of what he saved, like his home in Queens, has been preserved and impeccably organized for the use of researchers. And having written my first biography, I'd learned enough along the way to have an easier time with the next one...right?

By the time I got back from Washington, I'd talked myself into writing another biography. Shortly thereafter, to my amazement, Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu, my agents, talked me into writing two--and it didn't take much talking, either. Glen and Lynn wanted me to build on the success of The Skeptic by bringing out a fairly short book as soon as possible. I mentioned that I was interested in writing a brief life, and when Lynn suggested over a celebratory dinner that George Balanchine might be a good subject, I agreed on the spot. It had never before occurred to me to write a book about Balanchine, but no sooner were the words out of Lynn's mouth than I fell in love with her idea: first Mr. B, then Satchmo.

That dinner was a year and a half ago. Last Friday, with All in the Dances ready for the printer, I rented a car and headed for Queens, accompanied by Stephanie Steward, my research assistant. We'd been planning for weeks to spend a day visiting the Armstrong house and archive--an orientation tour for Steph, so to speak. The house was opened to the public as a museum last October, but as I turned the corner onto what is now Louis Armstrong Place for the first time in three years, I saw that nothing much had changed but the street sign. The block was still shabby but respectable, a textbook example of a working-class neighborhood, and except for the garage, which has been turned into a reception center and museum shop, the house looks the way it did in 2001: the same gaudy wallpaper, the same gold faucets, the same touchingly elaborate furnishings, right down to Tony Bennett's oil painting of Armstrong. Steph's eyes were as big as hubcaps. As for me, I felt like laughing and crying at the same time.

When the tour was over, I said to Steph, "I know how I want to start the book."

"Really? How?"

"Just like this. Coming to Louis' house and taking a tour."

She thought about it for a moment, then nodded. "Awesome," she said.

We'll see whether my idea holds up over three or four years' worth of research and writing. But even if I should change my mind later on, it won't matter. The important part is that I'm off and running. As of last Friday, I'm officially at work on my next book.

Posted August 17, 12:11 PM

TT: Almanac

"America is a country of children. The New Yorkers are a little more grown up, but not much. Once some friend of mine put me on a ferry to Coney Island. This, Tsutsik, I wish you could see. It is a city in which everything is for play--shooting at tin ducklings, visiting a museum where they show a girl with two heads, letting an astrologer plot your horoscope and a medium call up the soul of your grandfather in the beyond. No place lacks vulgarity, but the vulgarity of Coney Island is of a special kind, friendly, with a tolerance that says, ‘I play my game and you play your game.' As I walked around there and ate a hot dog--this is what they call a sausage--it occurred to me that I was seeing the future of mankind. You can even call it the time of the Messiah. One day all people will realize there is not a single idea that can really be called true--that everything is a game--nationalism, internationalism, religion, atheism, spiritualism, materialism, even suicide."

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shosha

Posted August 17, 9:33 AM

August 16, 2004

TT: Point of no return

I just sent an e-mail to Harcourt containing my final changes and corrections to the second-pass proofs of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine. "I am now signed off on the text of All in the Dances," I wrote, taking a deep breath as I typed those words and another as I clicked the send button. Barring any unexpected glitches (or last-minute catches) at Harcourt's end, the book that goes to the printer this week will be the book whose text I have approved. I'm all done.

I've been feeling rather strange about All in the Dances in recent weeks, and especially since I started working on the galleys last month. I spent a full decade at work on The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, and by the end of that time, it had become an oppressive, inescapable presence in my life, not unlike the "heavy bear who goes with me" of Delmore Schwartz's once-familiar poem. I wanted nothing more than to be rid of it. All in the Dances, by contrast, took me just three months to write, and throughout that period I was simultaneously preoccupied with the imminent publication of A Terry Teachout Reader. Before I knew it, one book was written, another in the stores, and within weeks I'd embarked on the lengthy process of seeing the first one into print. As a result, the experience of writing All in the Dances now seems unreal, almost dreamlike to me. Did I really write it this past winter? Could it possibly be ready to ship off to the printer?

The second-pass proofs arrived via Federal Express last Friday, and I spent yesterday and this morning combing through them line by line, hoping against hope that my eye had not yet grown so numb as to cause me to overlook any remaining mistakes. In the end, the list of changes I e-mailed to San Diego was reassuringly short, but not so short as to make me distrust my good judgment. I fixed two outright errors, one a mistranscribed word in a Serge Diaghilev letter (I spotted that one), the other a tiny but embarrassingly significant factual slip-up in the next-to-last chapter (the managing editor spotted that one, God bless him). I changed or deleted five repeated words and phrases (my personal bugaboo). I made minor adjustments of emphasis to two phrases, the second of which was in the very last paragraph of the book (got to get that one right!). I changed two punctuation marks and queried the hyphenation of three words. Finally, I asked the editor to make two typographical adjustments, both of which will be invisible to anyone not fanatically obsessed with such dainty matters.

So that's that. I'm not quite finished--I still have to approve the layout of the photo insert and proofread the captions--but the book itself is now definitively complete. And yes, I still feel more than a little bit strange, this time for reasons I couldn't put into words until just now, when a coin dropped in my head and I recalled something Samuel Johnson wrote in the final installment of The Idler, his second and last series of periodical essays:

Though the Idler and his readers have contracted no close friendship, they are perhaps both unwilling to part. There are few things not purely evil of which we can say, without some emotion of uneasiness, "this is the last." Those who never could agree together shed tears when mutual discontent has determined them to final separation; of a place which has been frequently visited though without pleasure, the last look is taken with heaviness of heart; and the Idler, with all his chillness of tranquillity, is not wholly unaffected by the thought that his last essay is now before him.

This secret horror of the last is inseparable from a thinking being whose life is limited, and to whom death is dreadful. We always make a secret comparison between a part and the whole; the termination of any period of life reminds us that life itself has likewise its termination; when we have done anything for the last time, we involuntarily reflect that a part of the days allotted us is past, and that as more is past there is less remaining.

Grim thoughts to be thinking about a book of which I'm still intensely proud! (The doubts and second thoughts will come calling later on.) But they're all of a piece with the uneasy feelings that most of us New Yorkers are experiencing these days. As I drove through the Lincoln Tunnel last Friday afternoon, and rode past Citicorp Center in a cab late Saturday night, I saw cars filled with unsleeping policemen, on guard against unknown nightmares. I've been hearing more helicopters in the air of late--or perhaps I'm simply noticing them more often. We're all thinking night thoughts in broad daylight, and there's nothing to be done about them but live our lives. George Balanchine, who nearly died of tuberculosis as a young man, had something to say about that: "You know, I am really a dead man. I was supposed to die and I didn't, and so now everything I do is second chance. That is why I enjoy every day. I don't look back. I don't look forward. Only now."

Dr. Johnson is my hero, the man I admire most and from whose life and work I have drawn inspiration throughout my own life--but today I'm with Mr. B. All in the Dances is finished. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't do any more to it. Now it's time to move on to the day's next task. I have a lot of things to do this afternoon, after which I plan to dine with a friend and go see a movie. Tomorrow will have to take care of itself. It always does.

Posted August 16, 12:08 PM

TT: Down by the river

Six days ago I was putting the finishing touches on a Wall Street Journal drama column. I was bone-tired and still a bit wheezy from my recent illness, and every sentence was a struggle. At length I decided I was done, hit a couple of keys on my iBook and sent the column to my editor, packed a bag, stumbled downstairs, and hailed a cab.

Ten minutes later I was in Grand Central Station, surrounded by cold-eyed soldiers in camouflage outfits. Ten minutes after that I was on a train, surrounded by a dozen brass-voiced construction workers who were chatting in the manner of the towel-snappers in a high-school locker room. The air conditioner was broken and the temperature inside the car was 95 degrees. (I know this because one of the construction workers had a thermometer and was taking bets from his friends on how hot it was.) At first I tried to look at the whole thing as a spiritual exercise, but I gave up at Spuyten Duyvil and spent the next half-hour longing for my fellow passengers to drop dead.

The construction workers bailed out at Peekskill and the car fell blessedly silent. A few minutes later the train pulled into Cold Spring. No sooner had I finished the three-block walk to the Hudson House Inn than I felt the weight of the past three weeks slipping once more from my shoulders. I checked in, took a cold shower and a long nap, and spent the next day and a half doing nothing. Not exactly nothing, of course--you never do "nothing," just as there's no such thing as "silence" outside of an empty anechoic chamber--but as little as it's possible for a work-obsessed urbanite to do. I ate five good meals, read a P.G. Wodehouse novel, indulged in a little light channel-surfing, and sat on a park bench by the Hudson River, listening to the birds and crickets and watching the sailboats glide by. Outside of chatting with the very nice women at the front desk and talking to my mother and three friends on my cell phone, I doubt I spoke more than a couple of hundred words aloud.

Come Thursday morning I repacked my bag, walked back up the hill to the train station, and returned in due course to my desk in Manhattan, where 158 e-mails awaited me. Since then I've seen an off-Broadway play and visited a downtown club, written a set of liner notes for a CD by a band I like, spent a day at the Louis Armstrong House and Archives, watched a movie on TV, listened to my first Ani DiFranco album, and made my last corrections to the second-pass proofs of All in the Dances.

Had these things happened a month ago, I would have hastened to cram them into a breathless "Consumables" posting, but I was persuaded to do otherwise after running across my own obituary on the Web:

Critic Terry Teachout Consumes Too Much Art, Violently Explodes

MANHATTAN – In news that has the arts world reeling, Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout exploded yesterday after consuming too much art.

In New York, art lovers are asking whether the fatal tragedy could have been prevented.

According to one art historian, "Most critics don't eat art. But it has been known to happen from time to time. What's surprising in this case is that Teachout actually wrote about his strange proclivities on the Internet."

Teachout's weblog "About Last Night" featured periodic entries titled "Consumables," in which Teachout listed the art he was consuming. In a recent entry, for example, Teachout admitted to chomping down the "bound galleys" of Robert McCrum's Wodehouse: A Life, as well as Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time....

At the site of the explosion, men in coveralls have been working tirelessly to clean and sanitize the area. "It was a real mess," said one worker. "I don't claim to be smart enough to understand much of it, but I've found bits of several movie DVRs, the top part of a stand-up bass, two opera librettos, and several pages from Barbara Pym's A Very Private Eye. All of it was quite chewed up."

I know an omen when I see one, so I've decided to cool it, at least for a little while longer. I may write about all the things I've done since returning from Cold Spring, or not. Or I might write about some of them. The week ahead is fairly busy (one Wall Street Journal deadline, one Broadway preview, one performance by the Mark Morris Dance Group), and I've promised myself to ramp up to it as gradually as possible instead of following my normal practice and jumping in head first. In any case, there are a lot of other things I want to write about, and a lot of other blogs with which I want to catch up. So we'll see.

Having said all that, I'll add two things more: I missed you, and it's nice to be back.

Posted August 16, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Most biographies are built around a series of abiding questions. They are often the same questions, such as, Did you love her? or Were you happy? or Didn't he know that was a mistake? It is in their nature, and their beauty, that such questions can never be satisfied. There may be answers, but they are usually too many, or too terrific--'Rosebud' is one of those great answers that makes it harder to know the question."

David Thomson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles

Posted August 16, 12:00 PM

August 13, 2004

TT: Sub standards

I'm in today's Wall Street Journal, this week with a report on my recent visits to three long-running Broadway musicals, The Lion King, Mamma Mia!, and Movin' Out. I was curious to see how they'd look and sound after such long runs--especially in the summer, when Broadway shows are typically hit by a plague of cast changes and substitute performers. The results, not surprisingly, were mixed.

The Lion King looked best:

One reason why it's so solid after all these years is that Julie Taymor's puppet-driven staging doesn't require world-class acting to make its effect. It's less a traditional musical than a pageant, and at its best it's a transportingly beautiful one. The catch is that none of the current principals are especially good singers, meaning that many of the solo numbers fall flat. This underlines the only other weakness of "The Lion King," which is that it is two shows, not one. The bold stage pictures and thrilling African-style choral numbers that make it so powerfully original sit uneasily alongside the juvenile fart jokes and insipid Elton John-Tim Rice ballads that make it so painfully Disneyesque. Even at its most cartoonish, "The Lion King" is worth seeing--very much so--but the producers should think about bringing in some new blood....

Mamma Mia! is also in great shape, if you can stand the show:

Broadway debutante Jenny Fellner and Broadway veteran Dee Hoty, the stars of the current cast, are terrific (Ms. Fellner charmed my socks off), and the rest of the company backs them up with improbable enthusiasm. Whether that's enough to put a smile on your face depends on your tolerance for camped-up dance routines set to artificially flavored bubblegum rock. Mine, I learned, is low.

I had similar problems with Movin' Out:

"Movin' Out," the Billy Joel-Twyla Tharp all-dance "musical" (the only performers who sing are the members of the onstage band), also benefits from the energetic dancing of its excellent ensemble, which includes several members of the original cast, most notably Ashley Tuttle, an American Ballet Theatre ballerina who is delightful in the nice-girl role. I was warned in advance that I'd be seeing the usual summertime miscellany of subs and alternates, but whoever they were, they hoofed their hearts out.

The band, alas, has clearly performed Mr. Joel's greatest hits several hundred times too many and is now on automatic pilot--competent but robotic. As for the choreography, it looks like every other kids-at-the-gym dance that Ms. Tharp has choreographed over the past three decades, and the vestigial plot, in which three New Jersey boys go off to Vietnam and learn about life's cruelty, merely serves to make the proceedings more pretentious....

No link. For further theater-related opinionizing (including playgoing advice for visiting Republicans and their families), you can (A) buy today's Journal or (B) subscribe to the online edition by going here. Both options are excellent.

Posted August 13, 9:10 AM

TT: Almanac

"Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French."

P.G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins

Posted August 13, 8:59 AM

August 10, 2004

TT: Start here

A reader writes:

Could you please name five jazz CDs the beginning listener should own?

Another reader writes:

I have loved watching dance over the years, but have almost no idea of what goes where and why. Could you please recommend four or five books that might give me a formal and historical introduction to the art?

I love e-mail like this, and I never get tired of answering it.

To Reader No. 1, here are five CDs containing music that I listen to often, all of it jazz but otherwise extremely varied in style:

- The Essential Louis Armstrong (Sony). A brand-new two-CD set by the greatest of all jazz musicians, not perfectly chosen but full of good things and easy to find.

- Duke Ellington, Masterpieces 1926-1949 (Proper). An unusually low-priced four-CD imported box set that contains most of Ellington's best pre-LP recordings.

- Ken Burns Jazz Collection: The Definitive Charlie Parker (Sony). An exceptionally good single-disc introduction to bebop's key figure.

- Miles Davis, Kind of Blue (Sony). The most popular and influential jazz album of the Fifties.

- Pat Metheny, Bright Size Life (ECM). One of the earliest and most successful attempts to "fuse" jazz and rock. It still sounds fresh.

If you don't like any of these recordings, you probably won't like jazz.

Reader No. 2 should read these books, in this order:

- Robert Greskovic, Ballet 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving the Ballet (Hyperion). The best introductory book about ballet ever written, by the much-admired dance critic of The Wall Street Journal.

- Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick, No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (Yale). A comprehensive, well-written, impeccably reliable history of ballet and modern dance.

- Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry (Yale). The only available collection of writings by the most important dance critic of the century.

- Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker: An Arlene Croce Reader (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A superbly edited one-volume collection of reviews by the outstanding dance critic of the postwar era.

And, if I do say so myself:

- Terry Teachout, All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine (Harcourt). A short book about the greatest of all choreographers, written specifically for those who have either just discovered Balanchine's ballets or are eager to do so. It's out in November.

Posted August 10, 12:03 PM

TT: Two...one...

Speaking of All in the Dances, I just wrote and e-mailed to Harcourt, my publisher, a draft of the "flap copy," publisher-speak for the description of the book and its author that will appear on the dust jacket. Here's what I wrote:

Martha Graham said that watching George Balanchine choreograph a ballet was like "watching light pass through a prism. The music passes through him, and in the same natural yet marvelous way that a prism refracts light, he refracts music into dance." Twenty years after his death, the ruthless, enigmatic founder of New York City Ballet still dominates the world of dance. He worked with Serge Diaghilev--and Sam Goldwyn. He made ballets to the music of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky--and to "The Stars and Stripes Forever." A Russian émigré who fell hopelessly in love with American culture, his four marriages and countless affairs (all of them with beautiful young ballerinas) became tabloid fodder. Though he turned ballet into a truly modern art, his plotless, seemingly abstract dances were as romantic as the genius who made them. "Put a man and a girl on the stage and the