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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 there is already a story," Balanchine said. "A man and two girls, there's already a plot." In clear, elegant prose, Terry Teachout tells the dramatic story of the greatest choreographer of the 20th century--and explains why his ballets will be even more significant in the century to come.

I always feel a little squirmy about writing my own flap copy, but I think it's important enough to do myself, though I usually ask my publishers to send a preliminary draft. This time, they sent me 85 words, which I expanded and rewrote completely except for the part about "clear, elegant prose," which was their phrase, not mine. Of course I hope All in the Dances is written clearly and elegantly, but it's not for me to say. Still, I thought it moderate enough to let pass. Flap copy is unsigned, and as Dr. Johnson wisely pointed out, "In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath."

Presumably this draft will go through the wringer in San Diego and be sent back to me for revision. If not, it'll be poured into the layout for the dust jacket, which I should be seeing and approving some time in the next few days. Once that's done, there's nothing left to do but lock up the photo insert.

Have I said eeeeek yet?

Posted August 10, 12:03 PM

TT: Annals of stupefying candor

From the New York Times:

After Mr. Bush's Davenport speech, his motorcade zoomed toward the nearby town of Bettendorf, where it stopped at a small farmers' market. The president hopped out of his limousine, strode over to Ken Thomsen's corn stand and bought some half-dozen ears with cash from his pocket. Then he peeled back one of the husks and bit into a raw ear....

Less than 24 hours later, the roadshow was in Ohio as the talk show host encouraged his listeners to speak up with queries for "Ask President Bush."

"Go ahead, yell it out," the president said. "If I don't like the question, I'll reinvent it."

Posted August 10, 12:02 PM

TT: Guest almanac

"Journalist Murray Sayle reputedly said there were only three kinds of pieces: 1) 'We name the guilty man'; 2) 'Arrow points to defective part'; and 3) 'Everything you knew about X is wrong.'"

Mickey Kaus, Kausfiles (Aug. 9, 2004)

Posted August 10, 12:00 PM

TT: One last thought before parting

Are bloggers legally responsible for the postings that appear in their comments sections? So far as I know, this question has yet to go to court, but I won't be at all surprised if it ends up there sooner rather than later, and when it does, you'll feel the earth move.

I've said it before, but I want to say it again, this time with a slightly different spin: if you blog, educate yourself about libel law. Blogging is no longer a hobby for wonks. It's a full-fledged form of electronic journalism. We've made the big time, much faster than most of us ever expected...and that's when the lawyers come calling.

I hope blogging will always remain spontaneous and unpredictable. But it's perfectly possible to be spontaneous and unpredictable without making yourself vulnerable to a libel suit by a litigious jerk with money to burn. Believe me, you don't want to go down in history as a test case.

That's my word to the wise for the day. I now resume radio silence.

Posted August 10, 2:16 AM

TT: A day off (and its aftermath)

I have what in Vicwardian times was quaintly known as "a weak chest," meaning not that my figure is less than Greek (though it is, it is!) but that respiratory ailments are harder on me than on most people. When I get a cold, it has a way of sticking around, and it didn't help that I hit the road for Massachusetts and Washington a few days after coming down with my most recent one. As a result, it didn't go away, and soon I was laid low again. So I did something I normally find almost impossible to do: I took last Wednesday off. I didn't write, didn't blog, didn't set foot out of my apartment, not even to go downstairs and pick up the mail. Surrounded by the temptation to work, I succeeded in putting it behind me for a whole day, and the better part of two more besides.

What do you do when you're too sick to go out but not sick enough to sleep around the clock? Me, I like to reread familiar biographies, and this time around I opted for Peter Heyworth's Otto Klemperer, His Life and Times: 1933-1973, the second volume of one of the few really first-rate biographies of an orchestral conductor. I'm sure it won't strike most of you as promising sickroom fare, but Klemperer's life was unusually interesting. In addition to being a great conductor (as this 1955 recording of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony makes surpassingly clear), he was a full-blown manic depressive who converted from Judaism to Catholicism and back again, which makes for quite a tale. On top of all that, Klemperer is also the answer to one of the all-time great trivia questions, for his son Werner grew up to become an actor who carved his name into the tablets of history by playing the part of Colonel Klink in Hogan's Heroes. A refugee from Nazism who had a well-developed sense of irony, Otto lived long enough to see Hogan's Heroes and find it amusing.

Rereading Heyworth's book, I ran across this wonderful letter sent to Klemperer by Arnold Schoenberg, who may well have been the most arrogant person who ever lived. "After Klemperer had failed to accept an invitation to visit him," Heyworth writes, "Schoenberg wrote a letter of rebuke." Here it is:

I find it inappropriate that the extent or our meetrings should be determined by you...Anyone should consider it a pleasure as well as an honour if I enjoy seeing him often...Do not suppose that I am not aware of the gratitude I owe you for your many successful efforts concerning my material affairs. I am very conscious of that, do not and shall not forget it, and will seize every available opportunity to express my thanks practically. But my sense of order tells me..that every Kulturmensch [that is, "civilized person"] owes me tribute for my cultural achievements.

Isn't that a hoot?

When I feel really lousy, so much so that I'm not even up to the challenge of letting my eyes glide passively over the pages of a thrice-read book, I stick to movies. Last Wednesday night, for instance, I watched Howard Hawks' Red River, which I know well and love, and Only Angels Have Wings, which I'd never seen. Both of them hit the spot. I suspect there's something about Hawks' combination of exquisite cinematic craft and charmingly adolescent pseudo-stoicism that appeals strongly to a middle-aged man with a runny nose.

My day of rest was blissful, and it put me back on the slow road to recovery. But I knew well--too well--that so long as I stayed at home, my obsessive attitude toward work would sooner or later trip me up. Instead, I decided to do something even smarter and get out of town. I'd had such a good time on my first trip to Cold Spring that I figured I might as well do it again, so I called the Hudson House Inn and made a reservation. As soon as I sign off on this week's Wall Street Journal theater column, I'll be catching the next train north from Grand Central Station, and I won't be back until Thursday afternoon. A two-day break may not sound like much to you, but it's a big deal to me, so wish me luck at relaxing.

And so...goodbye. I have a rendezvous with a park bench by the Hudson River. See you around.

Posted August 10, 1:01 AM

August 9, 2004

TT: Blog-o-rama

Here's some of what I picked up in the course of the past week's Web surfing:

- I'm a Stephen Sondheim fan, but not a buff or cultist (there's a difference). Something Old, Nothing New is very funny on the latter:

The term "Sondheim-Firster" was a term I invented to describe the sort of person who likes Stephen Sondheim but doesn't really like musicals. Some of the qualifications for Sondheim-Firster status were:

- Loves SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE and PASSION above all other musicals. Lukewarm about COMPANY and MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG. Thinks INTO THE WOODS is kind of a sellout. Hasn't seen A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM....

- Approvingly calls any Sondheim song "dissonant," whether it is or not....

- Ends a discussion of any Sondheim musical with the phrase "audiences weren't ready for it."...

- Evaluates *any* pre-1970 musical, including Sondheim's, by saying that it has "hints of what was to come later."

- Kind of bored by FOLLIES -- too many show tunes in it -- but knows it must be good because it makes middle-aged people uncomfortable.

I know the type.

- Says ...something slant:

I am always suspicious of writers who are able to compose finely honed reflections on their first days somewhere new and far away -- in elaborate travelogs or journals or carefully crafted daybooks. Not that I'm a great stickler for accuracy, but the minute accounts of the strange, the fabulous, the new so often smack of disingenuous forms of writerly wish fulfillment. If there was any truth in their descriptions, their journals would more likely read:

Day 1 -- Tired.
Day 2 -- Still tired.
Day 3 -- Overwhelmed.

Or is that just me?

Nope.

- Alex took thoughtful note of my posting on the orange alert:

Terry Teachout asks some heavy questions about the point or pointlessness of writing about art in a dangerous time, and answers them movingly. What would I do if only a day remained? It doesn't do my mood much good to contemplate such questions, but at some point or another I would reach for Brahms' Intermezzos Opus 117, and in particular the first, which since age seventeen or so has been the music closest to my heart. Some years ago Radu Lupu made an irreplaceable recording of Brahms' late piano music. It offers something more than beauty -- it gives sympathy, compassion, companionship. Other than that, I'd want to get out of the house and leave art behind. When, on September 11, I left the building from which I'd watched the terror unfold and joined the endless crowd of people walking up Seventh Avenue, I felt one of the most powerful emotions of my life, which was the feeling of belonging to a mass. Strange how seldom our so-called mass culture provides such a feeling. Even the rowdiest entertainments return us to the suburbs of solitude, our disconnectedness rushing back in.

- Similarly thoughtful reflections on TV talk from Shades of Gray (Umbrae Canarum):

What are we to expect from timed, limited, and narrow discussions on the television? Can we expect a serious, and deep, dialogue on any issue that will serendipitously end when a commercial break is required? Or is it more like what one anticipates in a WWE match - a choreographed conflict, with its ups-and-downs, its upsets and sure-things, always completed just in time for this message from "Old Spice"?

Perhaps it is no big thing. And yet, these are the types of shows that are (supposedly) "smart" television. Get away from O'Reilly - think of any other roundtable style program. If it does not degenerate into a shouting match, filled with the quick soundbite tidbits, the sheer lack of time prevents anything more than a superficial consideration of the ideas on the table. Can deep thinking, can true understanding, come from this sort of thing?...

Is there an avenue for the type of conversation that truly is enlightening? I don't know. Especially now, it seems often more the result of dumb luck (or divine providence, depending on your view) that a discussion can come about among the learned, concerned for the good, the true, the beautiful. In previous centuries, where literacy was lacking for many, perhaps these types of dialogues came about more easily, since the number actually able to discuss in an educated way was smaller. Now, we are almost all to a person half-educated, trying to speak the same way, or have chattering pundits speak for us.

But therein lies the problem. What appears to be the avenue for true intellectual discussion seems destroyed by increased literacy and education. There is no way to go back to before. Indeed, I doubt few if any of us would want to go back to such a time. So what now? Perhaps, as time goes on, those who are in love with the Intellect (as Barzun would define it) will find ways. What those ways would be, my imagination is lacking.

One word: radio. It's not perfect, but in the past couple of years I've taken part in a number of radio interviews and conversations that were both pleasurable and stimulating. Especially in this new age of streaming audio, I have a good feeling about the future of radio as a creative medium.

- Thanks to Gnostical Turpitude, I learned that the Guardian ran an interesting profile of Paul Fussell, one that confirmed my longstanding impression of him as a person whom I'd rather read than meet (his vanity is forever peeping through). Nevertheless, Fussell tossed off any number of observant remarks to his interlocutor, as when he observed that H.L. Mencken, once his favorite satirist, was "deficient in the tragic sense." Into those five words are packed much of what it took me a whole book to explain.

- Caroline, or Change, which I loathed and panned (much to its dyspeptic author's displeasure), is closing on Broadway after an unexpectedly short run. One of the show's money men explains why:

Rocco Landesman, the president of Jujamcyn Theaters and a producer of "Caroline," said the show's advance sales took a precipitous drop at the end of August.

"The week of the convention would be absolutely disastrous for us to keep open," he said. "The Republicans are going to be occupied with the convention, and anyone who's not a Republican is going to be out of town."

Ah, yes, the celebrated Mr. Anyone, first cousin to Ms. Everyone I Know. In fact, a recent poll indicated that only 10% of New Yorkers plan to be out of town during the Republican convention. To Mr. Landesman, the rest of us peasants are presumably chopped liver--which may help to explain why Caroline, or Change is closing.

- Finally, Lileks pays a visit to Starbucks:

I was behind a fellow who had ten years on me; he was schooled in the old ways of joe. He placed his order thus:

"A cup of coffee, black."

"Room for cream?"

Pause.

"No."

I was next. What would I like?

"I'd like a medium coffee," I said, since I'll be gol-durned if I ever say "venti" to these people. I'll give them Beijing for Peking, Hindu for Hindoo, but medium will be Medium until the day I die. "Black."

"Room for cream?"

Kids today. They don't know. They've lost the lingo. When you've established that the nature of your coffee is BLACK, cream no longer enters into the picture. Ever. But you could walk up and say "Blorg chulavista spaz mocha" and she'd ask "Room for cream?" It's the script. Hidden cameras record her every word. They beat her with burlap sacks stuffed with beans if she doesn't say the words.

I'm perfectly willing to admit (albeit through clenched teeth) that the self-conscious avoidance of affectation is itself an affectation. In any case, I've never been much of a coffee drinker, and you're not likely to see me stroll into a Starbucks save for the purpose of ordering a mocha frappucino, a drink the mere uttering of whose name makes me cringe with embarrassment. Nevertheless, I know the Old Ways of Joe from black-and-white movies, and if you should ever hear me use Italian to specify the size of a drink in any country other than Italy, you'll know the pod people have paid me a visit.

Posted August 09, 10:36 AM

TT: Words to the wise

The Film Society of Lincoln Center's "Dark Streets and Vast Horizons: The American Vision of Anthony Mann" opens Wednesday at the Walter Reade Theater and runs through Aug. 29. If you're a dyed-in-the-wool film buff, that's all I'll need to tell you (in fact, you'll already know about it). If not, here's part of what the Film Society's Web site has to say about Mann:

Anthony Mann, born Emil Anton Bundesmann, began his career in show business on the New York stage, first as a child actor, then as a production manager, and finally as a director. He was brought to Hollywood by David O. Selznick, and he shot many of the screen tests for Gone with the Wind and Rebecca. He left Selznick in the mid-40s and began his movie-directing career making a series of visually distinctive B pictures, each one more inventive than the next. Of his film noirs of the late 40s, most of them made with the great cameraman John Alton, Manny Farber wrote: "The films of this tin-can de Sade have a Germanic rigor, a caterpillar intimacy, and an original dictionary of ways in which to punish the human body." You can lose yourself in the velvety shadows of those films, and in their beautifully, almost geometrically precise action. Then, in the early 50s, Mann went outdoors with James Stewart and quietly altered the Western genre. Until they quarrelled during the production of Night Passage in 1957, Mann and Stewart made eight marvelous films together, the last seven in a row. The best of them introduced a new frankness to American cinema, thanks to the boldness of Stewart's often dangerously neurotic characterizations, and to the almost supernatural acuity of Mann's eye for the great outdoors....

To which I'd add only that it was Mann, not Alfred Hitchcock, who first put Jimmy Stewart in touch with the dark side of the force, making it possible for him to draw on the near-paralyzing fear he had known as a pilot in World War II and thereby adding a dangerous, disturbing edge to his already accomplished acting. The Stewart you see in Winchester '73 (and, to a lesser extent, in the last reel of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life) is the Stewart of whom Hitchcock would later make such fruitful use in Vertigo.

Mann's Westerns are seen quite regularly on cable TV, but not such earlier exercises in film noir at its hardest and toughest as Raw Deal, which have to be sought out on DVD, usually in blurred, flimsy prints. In any case, you have no idea what you've been missing if you've never seen a classic Western in a theater. Now that the Film Society of Lincoln Center is finally screening all of Mann's major work, I plan to go as often as my schedule permits. I've never seen any of these films on a large screen, nor have I ever seen a decent print of any of Mann's pre-Stewart films. I can't wait.

Highlights:

- The Naked Spur (1955, with Stewart and Robert Ryan), Aug. 11 and 13
- Bend of the River (1952, with Stewart), Aug. 11 and 12
- The Man from Laramie (1955, with Stewart), Aug. 12, 14, and 16
- Winchester '73 (1950, with Stewart and Dan Duryea), Aug. 14
- T-Men (1947, with Dennis O'Keefe), Aug. 21 and 24
- Raw Deal (1948, with O'Keefe and Raymond Burr), Aug. 22 and 24
- Man of the West (1959, with Gary Cooper), Aug. 27 and 29
- Men in War (1957, with Ryan), Aug. 27

For more information, go here.

Posted August 09, 9:33 AM

TT: Almanac

"Music, as long as it exists, will always take its departure from the major triad and return to it. The musician cannot escape it any more than the painter his primary colors, or the architect his three dimensions. In composition, the triad or its direct extensions can never be avoided for more than a short time without completely confusing the listener. If the whim of an architect should produce a building in which all those parts which are normally vertical and horizontal (the floors, the walls and the ceilings) were at an oblique angle, a visitor would not tarry long in this perhaps 'interesting' but useless structure. It is the force of gravity, and no will of ours, that makes us adjust ourselves horizontally and vertically. In the world of tones, the triad corresponds to the force of gravity. It serves as our constant guiding point, our unit of measure, even in those sections of compositions which avoid it."

Paul Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition (1937, trans. Arthur Mendel)

Posted August 09, 9:04 AM

TT: Speaking of reviewers

Supermaud has a review in this week's Washington Post Book World. It's really, really good.

(I do, however, have a question: why didn't she mention her blog in the reviewer's bio?)

Posted August 09, 5:27 AM

TT: Reality check

Just for the sake of argument, let's suppose the following:

I'm the editor of an important book-review supplement. You're a well-known professional writer of good repute. I commission a review of a controversial book from you. You submit a piece that is extremely strident in tone (but not obscene or actionably libelous) and with whose political implications I disagree very strongly. What should I do?

Here are some possible answers:

(A) Kill the review without further discussion.

(B) Rewrite and publish the review without consulting you.

(C) Insist that you rewrite the review to bring it into line with my views.

(D) Insist that you rewrite the review, leaving the opinions intact but toning down the rhetoric considerably.

(E) Sit on the review for two months, then run it in the back of the book.

(F) Run the review on time and feature it prominently, but with a disclaimer stating that it does not represent my views.

(G) Run the review on time and feature it prominently.

These things happen. They've all happened to me at one time or another. But if you answered anything but (G), you have no business being a book-review editor. Period. End of discussion. And if I did anything but (G), my guess is that you'd post a violent anti-me rant on your blog (assuming you had a blog) before the sun went down, accusing me of censorship, prior restraint, and every other awful thing you could think of.

Of course I'm talking about Leon Wieseltier's review of Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint in this week's New York Times Book Review. And Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Book Review, is an old friend of mine (with whom I have not discussed this matter), meaning that you're perfectly welcome to disregard anything I have to say in light of that disclosure. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the First Commandment of Book-Review Editing is that a review commissioned from a professional writer should be published essentially as is, unless it's actionably libelous or incompetently written (by which I mean "written," not "argued"). To kill, rewrite, or request the revision of a review because you disagree with what it says smacks of censorship, perhaps not de jure but certainly de facto, and compromises the integrity of your publication.

Like him or not--and I don't, to put it mildly--Leon Wieseltier is a distinguished editor and writer who runs one of the most admired book-review sections in the magazine business. If you ask him to review a book for you, it's on the assumption that you'll run what he writes. If I asked any of you to review a book for me, it would be on the same assumption.

I'm not defending Checkpoint, which I haven't read. I'm not defending Wieseltier, whose writing I don't admire, meaning that I wouldn't have asked him to review Checkpoint in the first place. I'm not defending Wieseltier's review, which I thought inadequately argued to the point of unseriousness (I think Beatrice gets this just right). I'm not holding forth on the complexity of life in the bloody crossroads (though I think it's worth pointing out that a novelist who writes novels with political content invites political comment--you can't have it both ways). I'm just trying, not for the first time, to explain how the book-review business works, and to encourage the many bloggers who are understandably angry about Wieseltier's review to ask themselves some searching questions about how they think it ought to work.

Start with this one: how would you feel if you thought a review of yours had been killed because of the political views you expressed in it? Or if the editor excused his decision to kill the review by telling you, "I don't feel that you've made your case"?

Then try this one: if you were the editor of a magazine, how would you feel if your readers took it for granted that you agreed with every word printed in it?

UPDATE: The Elegant Variation responds:

I don't think a single blogger is taking issue with Wieseltier because he evinces political ideas we might disagree with. We object because he didn't fulfill his brief as a book reviewer. (If his piece had appeared in The Week in Review, I doubt you'd have heard a peep about it.) Let me pose yet another counter-scenario - I manage to land a NYTBR freelance gig and, reviewing a controversial novel, I hand in, word-for-word, the piece in question. What do you think my future as a reviewer would look like?

Of course I see what Mark means, but it's beside my point: when you ask professional writers to review books for you, you should print what they write, whether you like it or not. I suspect that a lot of people who are weighing in on this issue think otherwise, and I wonder if they realize how slippery a slope they're standing on.

Posted August 09, 3:55 AM

August 6, 2004

OGIC: What the fly on the wall saw

A Boy at the Hogarth Press is Richard Kennedy's slender, unassuming memoir of the time he spent working at Leonard Woolf's publishing house in 1928, when Kennedy was sixteen. As the flap copy has it:

He provides a delightful glimpse into the everyday comings and goings of the Bloomsbury Group and an affectionate recollection of Leonard and Virginia Woolf at work; and, like Lely's portrait of Cromwell, this record does not omit the warts.

"Affectionate" may be going a bit far. Both Woolfs come off here as more than a little cold, self-absorbed, and even absurd. Bevis Hillier, who provided the book's brief introduction, notes:

[Kennedy] was of no consequence to the paladins of Bloomsbury. There was no reason to exercise their wit and charm on him. He saw them at their most unguarded and least artificial. That is what makes his account so fascinating.

And it is, both as a irreverent sketch of Leonard and Virginia and as a glimpse of coterie publishing in 1920s London. It takes the form of a diary, despite having been written forty years after the fact, and Kennedy nicely captures the breezy capriciousness that can characterize both diary-writing and sixteen-year-old boys.

Here's a taste:

I went to supper with the Woolfs. We had strawberries and cream. Mrs W was in a very happy mood. She said she had been to a nightclub the night before and how marvellous it was inventing new foxtrot steps. I thought LW's back looked a bit disapproving as he was dishing out the strawberries. The other guest was George Rylands, a very good-looking young man who had worked for the Woolfs before going to university. We were publishing a book by him called Words and Poetry and McKnight Kauffer had done a design for the cover. George Rylands egged Mrs W on to talk about how much she enjoyed kicking up her heels. I couldn't help feeling a little shocked.

Some people came in with huge bundles of flowers to give her. They had been commissioned to write an article about dirt-track racing. As they were very hard up, they were very anxious to get the job, but the editor had turned down their manuscripts. Mrs W had come to their rescue and written a description of the sport, in which she had compared the roaring machines and the arc lights to a medieval tournament.

Some more people came in after supper. Mrs Woolf started rolling her shag cigarettes. She gave one to an American lady who nearly choked to death.

She started talking about the Hogarth Press in a way that I thought didn't please LW very much, saying it was like keeping a grocer's shop. I think she is rather cruel in spite of the kind rather dreamy way she looks at you. She described Mrs Cartwright as having the step of an elephant and the ferocity of a tiger, which gives a very false impression as Ma Cartwright has no ferocity at all, although she does charge about everywhere. She also described her sliding down the area steps on her bottom, during the frost.

I consider it bad form to laugh at your employees.

All goes well enough until the young Kennedy makes a mistake that gums up Hogarth's plans for a uniform edition of a Very Important Author: Virginia Woolf herself.

LW had returned from Rodmell in a towering rage. Apparently the whole Uniform Edition project has been ruined by me because I have unwittingly instructed Spalding & Hodge to cut the paper the wrong size.

LW brought back a number of sacks of apples and potatoes from Rodmell and I tried to help him hump them up the stairs, but he would not accept any assistance from me. He refuses to speak to me. He had Gossling in and gave him a terrific tongue lashing. Gossling's cheeks went quite pale.

I suppose I have really got the sack. LW says I can't be trusted to do anything but wrap up parcels and that I am the most frightful idiot he has ever had the privilege of meeting in a long career of suffering fools.

I know, I know: beware the testimony of bitter, sacked employees. What made me trust Kennedy's account, though, is that he doesn't pretend to have been better than his famous employers. His faults and foibles are less magnified than theirs because they aren't indulged by everyone around him. But the narrator of this diary is generally callow, petty, insecure, and just plain clueless. Because Kennedy is not at all invested in making his younger self seem very likable or reliable, it's paradoxically easier to credit his unsparing portraits of others. When I finished the book I wasn't thinking "Oh, nasty Woolfs" so much as "Oh, foolish humans." A Boy at the Hogarth Press is a nifty little book, and of course a must-read for Bloomsbury fans.

Posted August 06, 12:46 PM

TT: Travels of a critic

As regular readers know, I saw two out-of-town plays last week, Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, performed at Washington's Kennedy Center, and Noël Coward's Design for Living, performed at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. I wrote about both in this morning's Wall Street Journal--enthusiastically.

First, The Glass Menagerie, in which everything and everybody was good:

The Kennedy Center's "Tennessee Williams Explored" festival, which struck out last month with an unevenly cast "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," has covered itself in glory with Gregory Mosher's spare, unmannered production of "The Glass Menagerie." It's a winner in every way--not least because of Sally Field. Miscast movie stars have killed many a promising show, most recently last year's Broadway revival of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," in which Ashley Judd crashed and fizzled. But Ms. Field, brief though her stage resume may be (she made her Broadway debut just two years ago in Edward Albee's "The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?"), plays the famously difficult role of Amanda Wingfield not in the overbearing fashion of a slumming celebrity but with the simplicity and directness of a true artist.

It helps, of course, that "The Glass Menagerie" is Williams' best play--to my mind, the only first-rate thing he wrote--and that Ms. Field is but one part of an evenly matched ensemble. I wish I had three times as much space in which to rave about Jason Butler Harner (Tom), Jennifer Dundas (Laura) and Corey Brill (the Gentleman Caller), each of whom brings something uniquely personal to Williams' autobiographical portrait of three lost souls trapped in a shabby St. Louis apartment, longing to change their pinched, cramped lives. For that matter, I'm half tempted to say that John Lee Beatty's set, a desert island of dark-brown drabness fenced in by rusty fire escapes and lit by the glaring neon signs of movie houses and dance halls, is as much the star of the show as any of the actors....

Design for Living had one weak link, but otherwise it was a delight:

Campbell Scott, who hasn't been seen on Broadway since 1988 (he's been busy making such fine films as "The Secret Lives of Dentists"), gives a performance worthy of Alfred Lunt, who created the role of Otto in 1933. Cracker-crisp and coolly witty, he hits the bull's-eye with every punch line. As Leo, Steven Weber makes no attempt to imitate Coward, opting instead for a Bertie Woosterish silly-ass tone that plays off nicely against Mr. Scott's suavity. Marisa Tomei, alas, is never quite right as Gilda--she seems at times to be doing Katharine Hepburn, and not very believably, either--but she's sufficiently decorative and doesn't get in the way. Stir in suitably elaborate sets by Hugh Landswehr and a solid supporting cast (Jack Gilpin is especially good as Ernest) and what do you get? Pure pleasure....

No link, so if you want to know what else I had to say, either buy today's Journal or subscribe to the online edition by going here.

Both shows close Sunday.

Posted August 06, 12:05 PM

TT: Memo from the maintenance department

I just added several new blogs to the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column. Check 'em out. If you can't figure out which ones are new, check 'em all out. Think what you could be missing!

P.S. I think I may also have accidentally deleted one blog whose name begins with "S." If you're the victim, please send me an e-mail.

Posted August 06, 12:03 PM

TT: Almanac

"He is a man who has lied and dissembled, and a man who has crawled. He knows the taste of boot-polish. He has suffered kicks in the tonneau of his pantaloons. He has taken orders from his superiors in knavery and he has wooed and flattered his inferiors in sense. His public life is an endless series of evasions and false pretenses. He is willing to embrace any issue, however idiotic, that will get him votes, and he is willing to sacrifice any principle, however sound, that will lose them for him. I do not describe the democratic politician at his inordinate worst; I describe him as he is encountered in the full sunshine of normalcy. He may be, on the one hand, a cross-roads idler striving to get into the State Legislature by grace of the local mortgage-sharks and evangelical clergy, or he may be, on the other, the President of the United States. It is almost an axiom that no man may make a career in politics in the Republic without stooping to such ignobility: it is as necessary as a loud voice."

H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy

Posted August 06, 12:01 PM

TT: A press release I was glad to get

From the 92nd St. Y:

NEW YORK, NY: August 5, 2004 – The 92nd Street Y has named jazz pianist and Blue Note recording artist Bill Charlap artistic director of the Jazz in July festival, beginning in the summer of 2005. Dick Hyman, the pianist and arranger who has held the post since the festival's founding in 1985, announced in May that he was stepping down after 20 years. He will continue to direct the Y's annual winter jazz program, Jazz Piano at the Y.

Mr. Hyman enthusiastically endorsed Charlap, who has performed at the festival many times over the last 15 years. Says Hyman, "I can't think of anyone better suited to help move Jazz in July into the next phase of its life than Bill Charlap. He is a tremendously talented pianist and musician who has a terrific relationship with the 92nd Street Y audience. He is also an accomplished musical director who has recorded and performed extensively with his own trio."...

Charlap plans to retain Jazz in July's focus on traditional and mainstream jazz and the festival's commitment to presenting New York's best jazz performers, with some new variations. His preliminary plans include tributes to George Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael and Nat "King" Cole; an evening devoted to – and featuring – a jazz elder statesman whose life and work link his musical generation and influences with the current crop of players; Charlap's own version of what has become a staple of Jazz in July, the annual "piano party," with a half-dozen pianists representing a wide range of styles; and an evening of small-group, "hard-bop" ‘50s and ‘60s jazz featuring the compositions of Kenny Dorham (1924-1972) and Horace Silver (b. 1928). The performers will be a mix of Jazz in July regulars and Charlap colleagues new to the festival.

I approve.

Posted August 06, 11:52 AM

TT: Where my mouth is

As I mentioned yesterday, Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes posted a list of his ten favorite painters as of that moment, and invited other artbloggers to do the same. (Here's the followup posting.)

I usually jump at the chance to make lists of this kind, but for some inexplicable reason I found this one paralyzing. My ten favorite painters of all time? Ever? No sooner did I start typing names than I clutched--but I still wanted to play. So I decided instead to do something that is both easier and, in a way, potentially more revealing. Here's a complete list of the artists represented in the Teachout Museum:

- Milton Avery (drypoint)
- William Bailey (aquatint with hard ground etching)
- Max Beerbohm (drawing with watercolor wash)
- Nell Blaine (one color lithograph, one painted tile)
- Pierre Bonnard (black-and-white lithograph)
- Stuart Davis (color serigraph)
- Helen Frankenthaler (color serigraph)
- Jane Freilicher (aquatint with hard ground etching)
- Arnold Friedman (black-and-white lithograph)
- Wolf Kahn (monotype)
- Alex Katz (color lithograph)
- John Marin (etching)
- Joan Mitchell (color lithograph)
- Fairfield Porter (four color lithographs)
- Paul Taylor (assemblage)
- John Twachtman (etching)
- Neil Welliver (woodcut)
- Jane Wilson (pastel)

In my mind, there's also a space for the Morandi etching that got away. (Sigh.)

What do I long for most that isn't there? A Vuillard color lithograph, a Hans Hofmann print (that one got away, too), a Kenneth Noland monoprint, and something good (but affordable) by Richard Diebenkorn. As of this moment, anyway.

Posted August 06, 11:34 AM

OGIC: Because the television is on the fritz?

Why do we read? "General principles!" my dad would say. Can't argue with that. But over at Erin O'Connor's Critical Mass, they're getting a little more specific. Erin and her readers are having a lively discussion about some issues raised in Mark Edmundson's New York Times Magazine essay from last week, "The Risk of Reading." Edmundson's is the latest, and I think the best, of a recent flurry of big-media articles springing from discontent with the more insipid varieties of book boosterism. (Christina Nehring's NYTBR piece last month was another.) In the process of addressing the issues Edmundson raises--principally, "Why read?"--Erin recalls a great scene from Cynthia Ozick:

I am reminded of a passage from Cynthia Ozick's Puttermesser Papers, in which the eponymous heroine dreams about a heaven that consists of an eternity spent reading an unending stack of books while consuming an inexhaustible supply of chocolate. It's an image of consumption without consequence (Puttermesser's teeth will never rot, she will never grow fat), cost (in paradise, the books are free, chocolate is free, and there is all the time in the world), or return (Puttermesser never aims to talk about what she reads, or to share her books with others, or to write something herself, or even to stop consuming long enough to digest what she has read). Ozick's portrait of a reader's paradise is a picture of indiscriminate gobbling, and as such it is both profoundly anti-social and massively regressive: book as breast. It's a funny image--but in its sheer extremity it reveals a lot about how readers, and reading, are often regarded in a society that is as wrapped up in the display of work and work-related social performances as ours is.

Erin then raises the following questions for her readers:

How social is reading? Is it an isolating, anti-social activity, or is it, in its quiet way, a profoundly communal act? Is there a value merely in the act of reading, independent of content? If so, how would you describe that value? Why read? Why do you personally read--or, why do you personally not read?

Their answers are illuminating. Hop on over and put your two cents in.

Posted August 06, 5:55 AM

August 5, 2004

TT: Blog-o-rama

It's been way too long since I conducted a tour of the blogosphere. Even when I was feeling thoroughly crappy (i.e., yesterday), I continued to surf the Web and bookmark cool stuff I found along the way. Here's some of it:

- Eat your hearts out, film buffs: Celluloid Eyes has a great list of "movies I am dying to rent/own on DVD and cannot" because (gnashing of teeth) they aren't available on DVD. As she remarks in passing:

Many of these hard-to-find movies are my favorite kind of movie: those delightful, witty, frothy, often surprisingly relevant, sometimes surprisingly naughty American movies from the 1930s.

Why hasn't anybody told me about this blog?

- Zoilus gleans this Elvis Costello quote from the New York Times:

"You're kidding yourself if you believe it when people say, `Oh, that's a political song,' " Mr. Costello said. "No. A political song is one that if you played it to Donald Rumsfeld, he would give up his career and enter a monastery. That would be a political song -- one that affected him so deeply that he would renounce his view of the world. I don't think anybody alive is capable of writing that song. So all you're doing is writing things that matter to you."

To which he appends numerous disagreements, concurrences, and amplifications, among them:

Costello's right, though, that some sort of potentially transformative experience should at least be nosing around the edges of a properly political song - political speech is primarily persuasive, right? And I think...that in art the best mode of persuasion is empathetic, to bring the audience through the experiences that shape the point of view rather than to argue the point of view. (Does arguing ever do anything ever?)

Timely.

- From the Daily Telegraph by way of artsjournal.com, our invaluable host, a smart interview with Stephen Sondheim on the latest London revival of Sweeney Todd:

I remember when I was at college, one of the English professors made what seems an obvious point, but it wasn't obvious to me at the age of 17, that one of the things that keeps Hamlet alive is that every generation brings something new to the performance. It isn't just the poetry; it's that every time you do Hamlet you can take a different view of it - and that's what keeps theatre alive.

With musicals, the audience tend to want to see what they've seen before. Whereas people who go to Hamlet want to see something different.

- I love smart lists, and my super-smart artsjournal.com colleague Tyler Green, who blogs at Modern Art Notes, has published a fine one:

Here are my ten favorite artists. Or at least my ten favorite artists as of when I typed this. And to make this an even sillier exercise, I'll give a one-word summary of what I like best about each artist....

Go see for yourself. Four of Tyler's listees would either make my list or come damned close. One of them makes me run screaming from the room.

- Speaking of lead-with-the-chin lists, Alex Ross, the classical music critic of The New Yorker, has posted a list of 20 non-classical albums he loves (or, as he says, "an irrational series of powerful attractions") on his blog, The Rest Is Noise. I like or love 11 of them. One of these days I'll see Alex and raise him....

- And speaking of The New Yorker, did you see John Updike's essay about Philip Larkin? It contains this beautifully balanced pair of clauses: "Larkin, though modest in manner and production, achieved major eloquence and formal perfection..."

Yes, exactly.

- Advertising can be deceptive--both ways. On my recent visit to the Williamstown Theatre Festival, I spent the night at the Porches Inn, which is located right across the street from MASS MoCA (the too-cute acronym for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art). I loved Porches and intend to stay there again whenever I return to the festival, but had I read this description on the inn's Web site, I might well have thought twice, or maybe even three times, about checking in:

Porches is the most visible manifestation, to-date, of the changes sparked by MASS MoCA. Its 50-plus rooms of retro-edgy, industrial granny chic ambiance make a spirited lodging statement in New England and beyond.

That's got to be a prime candidate for Private Eye's Pseuds Corner.

- Memo to Frank Lloyd Wright buffs: have you stayed here yet?

- The Buck Stops Here has a lovely little tribute to the sheer niceness of classical guitarist Christopher Parkening. I suspect--I hope--that a lot of us have similarly sweet stories about similarly thoughtful celebrities. I know I do.

- Not to beat a dead horse, but several hundred thousand bloggers published their own versions of the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index. Of them, I liked this one best.

- One of the participants in Michael Dirda's recent Washington Post online chat turns out to have been a fan of this blog and several of its brethren. Dirda thinks the Web is incompatible with "bookishness." The chatter begged to differ:

One of the most delightful and unexpected developments on the WWW in the last year or so is the development of a community of literary blogs. These are creating a very real conversation about serious books, including many of those serious books that only infrequently are reviewed in the WP and NYT (and even then are often confined to the genre-ghetto roundups).

Some of my favourites: Terry Teachout occasionally takes a break from reviewing art and plays to write about the very particular joys of reading Donald Westlake. Teresa Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor books has a long-standing blog covering inter alia publishers' slushpiles, pygmy mammoths and sf fandom. It's a small gem -- well worth browsing the archives. Jessa Crispin's Bookslut is an indispensable source of literary gossip and astute judgements on the merits of recent releases. Maud Newton's taste in literature is eclectic but unfailingly good, while her writing style is both direct and elegant. Scott McLemee -- an authority on obscure Marxist sects, Dale Peck and the MLA. All considered, there's never been a better time to seek out good, interesting conversation about books.

To which Dirda, a columnist for Washington Post Book World, replied:

I'm glad you disagree with me, and your tastes in blogs is certainly discriminating, if only because I'm a great Westlake fan (having reviewed him frequently and interviewed him onstage at the Smithsonian). But, despite this chat, I personally find that the Internet sucks up too much time. I enjoy doing this for an hour a week; indeed, might enjoy it for an hour a day. But I'm fundamentally a loner and my communing tends to be with books and their authors rather than my fellow readers. But this is just me. I'm perfectly sociable and charming, but my streak of puritanism is so strong that I can't help but see online discussions as simply fooling around. For a writer it even feels like throwing away good material. But then I probably don't have as many ideas as most bloggers and need to carefully marshal the few I do have.

I of course think otherwise. More than that, I suspect Dirda doesn't look at enough blogs to know what they're really like. For me, "About Last Night" is occasionally a burden (at which times I hand over happily to OGIC), more often a stimulus. As for blogs "sucking up too much time," I wonder if Dirda would say the same thing about magazines....

- Lastly and leastly: O.K., Mr. TMFTML, I laughed at this one, too.

UPDATE: Don't miss Ed's whirlwind tour of the blogosphere, all done in a single paragraph of sentence fragments. Whoosh!

Posted August 05, 11:06 AM

TT: We aim to please

A reader writes:

A man who on the same day can quote Cardinal Newman and Paul Goodman (an unfairly neglected good poet) can be assured I will keep reading him daily.

Not only did I get a kick out of that e-mail, but it occurred to me as I read it that my correspondent had come up with a pretty good mission statement for "About Last Night." Between us, Our Girl in Chicago and I specialize (or try to) in unexpected juxtaposition. We love all the arts, and within each art form we love a large and varied assortment of artists and artworks. It's never seemed to either of us that such things are best appreciated in isolation. Hence the curve balls we throw as often as we can, some big and some, like this one, little. Nor do you have to know anything about Newman or Goodman to enjoy the fun. Nothing pleases me half as much as knowing that something I've written inspired somebody who read it to go read a book he's never read before by an author he's never heard of--or, better still, to go see his first ballet or visit his first art gallery or jazz club. Or whatever.

Maybe that's the best way of describing our specialty here at "About Last Night": whatever, and lots of it.

Posted August 05, 10:12 AM

TT: Help a critic out!

I'm going to be covering the New York International Fringe Festival for my Wall Street Journal drama column later this month. This year's festival, which opens August 13, is presenting shows by 197 "emerging theatre troupes and dance companies." That is, how you say, an impossible task, there being only one of me and I having only enough time to go to a dozen shows at most. What's more, the hardest job is picking the shows. Every once in a while the buzz on a particular performance becomes overwhelming, but for the most part I find myself sifting through a stack of press releases in search of inspiration, wondering if I might do better to use a dart board.

This time around I've decided to enlist the help of those "About Last Night" readers with an interest in theater. So if you know of a particular Fringe show that you expect to be good, either because you're in it or you know somebody who's in it or you've simply heard good things about it, please make haste to send me an e-mail saying so. Be brief, but not too brief (i.e., tell me in a sentence or two why I should see it). I don't promise to take your advice, especially if I get a lot of it, but I do promise to pay attention to it and be grateful for it. Besides, who knows? You might be responsible for my writing a rave of a show I wasn't planning to see as I write these words. Wouldn't that be cool?

Don't delay--I'll be scheduling and booking my Fringe visits early next week.

Posted August 05, 9:53 AM

TT: Almanac

"There is one piece of advice, in a life of study, which I think no one will object to; and that is, every now and then to be completely idle,--to do nothing at all."

Sydney Smith, Lectures on Moral Philosophy

Posted August 05, 9:52 AM

TT: There's no knowledge, but I know it

A reader writes:

I'm a lawyer--I don't believe anything anyone says about themselves or anything else. This world view was confirmed by last night's viewing of the superb Out of the Past.

That one I had to pass on!

Posted August 05, 4:42 AM

TT: Almost missed it

Parabasis took part in the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, and has now posted on his blog a long report about his experiences there. It's a must-read for anyone with a serious interest in the state of American theater.

I especially liked this item:

Writers and directors are slowly starting to be more honest about their antipathy towards each other. It sort of seems to break down like this--directors feel shackled by writers and writers feel exploited by directors. To directors, a production is just one production and the text is a living document not a closed system, so doing something other than what's in the stage directions or the writers' head is not only okay but might be devoutly to be wished. To writers, a play might be alive, but the writer is the only one who has to live with it after the director and actors are done with it. One visiting artist put it best when he said, "When you're doing the first production, you should do make the playwright's vision come to life. But after that, you shouldn't be constantly reviving the same version of a show. Then the show is dead. Like how Streetcar is dead because everyone is essentially doing Kazan's version." I think I'm growing to agree with that assessment. The problem is, so many directors' visions are bad.

Ay, there's the rub!

Posted August 05, 4:32 AM

TT: It's just a cigar

Thank you, Lileks:

Medved had on his show a fellow who wants people to make new sex partners promise not to vote for Bush in exchange for hot monkey love. Or something like that. He insists that this is just a means of "starting the conversation," which I hear from artists all the time. As if we're all just standing here making mute gestures and shrugging, unable to discuss something unless the idea is put forth in Handy Art Form. He also wanted to "remind us of the connection between politics and sex," which officially made him the most dreary fellow I'd heard so far this week. These people always want to remind us of the connection between politics and everything. Politics and hot dogs. (Work conditions in the slaughterhouse!) Politics and lawn mowers. (Illegals keep our grass short!) Politics and Smurf fetishes. Politics and nose picking. It all goes back to that phrase I hated the first time I heard it - the personal is the political. No, the personal is the personal. I remember sitting in a booth at the Valli arguing with someone about the political implications of Mozart – he made music for the ruling class, ergo you had to see it in the context of 18th century Esterhazy intrigue, etc. etc. What an impoverished view of the world. These people can't play "Chopsticks" on the piano without worrying whether they're feeding into some Yellow Peril stereotype from the gilded age. Hey! It's a pentatonic tune! Chinese music is pentatonic! Chinese culture uses chopsticks! It's OKAY!...

(For further thoughts on this subject, see yesterday's almanac entry.)

Posted August 05, 1:48 AM

TT: Antepenultimate

On Monday I was thinking out loud about how an art-loving New Yorker might seek to profit from the knowledge that terrorists were planning to attack his home town in the near future:

It happens that my life was turned inside out in all sorts of ways in the immediate wake of 9/11, but no matter what fears I found myself facing, I almost always managed sooner or later to slip out of the fearful present and immerse myself in the blessed world of art, responding all the more passionately because of my renewed consciousness of life's brevity. Strange that it so often takes a catastrophe, whether personal or public, to make you face a fact that was no less true on 9/10, or 9/12.

So what did I do when I heard the news on Sunday afternoon? I threw myself into correcting the page proofs of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, which had arrived in the mail shortly before I left town for a long weekend of playgoing in Massachusetts and Washington. In a sense, I didn't have much choice--the corrections were due on Monday--but it still struck me as odd that I should have been pouring so much mental energy into so mundane a task in the midst of an orange alert. Granted, it wasn't as if I'd just been told that I'd be hanged the next day, but even so, correcting my proofs somehow seemed an unsuitable response to the news I'd just received.

On the other hand, what should I have been doing? Listening prayerfully to Das Lied von der Erde or the Schubert Cello Quintet? Reading a never-before-read classic--or, alternatively, rereading an especially beloved one? Looking at and meditating on the contents of the Teachout Museum? What would you do if you knew you had only a day to live? A week? A year? If a piece of unfinished work rested reproachfully on your desk, would you feel obliged to finish it? If you knew you couldn't get it done in the time remaining, would you try to do as much as you could? Or would you put it aside, smiling wryly at the vanity of human wishes, and spend your last hours communing with better minds than your own?

I wish I could say I stopped to ask myself one or more of these questions, but I didn't. When duty calls, philosophy must wait. I rolled up my sleeves and went to work, and at some point in the middle of the night I corrected the last page of All in the Dances, e-mailed my changes to the San Diego office of Harcourt, Inc., put the proofs aside, and fell into bed, there to sleep fitfully for what remained of Sunday night and Monday morning.

Needless to say, no truck bombs exploded in Manhattan on Monday, and I've spent a fair amount of time since then reflecting on first and last things. It occurred to me somewhere along the way that I'd just learned a valuable lesson about my personal priorities, one neither good nor bad but simply revealing. After all, I don't have any illusions about All in the Dances. It's a short critical biography of a great choreographer, not a philosophical treatise, and while I do think it's a damned good book, I can't imagine that it'll be read a hundred years hence, nor would I dream of suggesting that its publication will help make the world a significantly better place. So why did I work so hard on it at what might reasonably have been thought to be an inappropriate time? Because I believe deeply in the ennobling sanctity of craft. Because I agree with Ecclesiastes' preacher: Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might. Because it's mine.

I was watching Howard Hawks' Red River yesterday afternoon, a film in which John Wayne has occasion to "read from the Book" over the grave of a man he has just shot to death. He says what movie cowboys usually say on such grim occasions: "We brought nothing into this world, and it's certain we can carry nothing out." As the Duke spoke those words, I looked up from the TV screen at the prints hanging on the wall of my living room. I can't take them with me, either, and though I've arranged to leave them to friends in the event of my death, those well-laid plans would very likely go awry if terrorists struck anywhere near my Upper West Side apartment. Were I to flee for my life, I might possibly think to cram my smallest work of art, a painted tile by Nell Blaine, into my shoulder bag--but probably not. More likely I'd lock the door, run like hell, and never see any of the Teachout Museum again.

Is it, then, a foolish vanity for me to be correcting proofs and collecting art at a time like this? Or is it a pledge of allegiance to the dual republic of beauty and craft? "Art, which resists decay, and the summer lightning of happy love, are all that we can cling to in our lives." So said Alexander Herzen, and I think he was pretty close to the mark. Perhaps nobody will care to read All in the Dances a hundred years hence, but now that I've finished correcting the proofs, Harcourt can and will bring it out even if I get blown up by a truck bomb or choke on a piece of steak, thereby making it possible for somebody, somewhere, to read my posthumously published words and be inspired to go see his first Balanchine ballet. That's a good thing, don't you think? And as for the Teachout Museum, it may indeed be destroyed by fire or picked over by looters, but until that dread day it will continue to give pleasure to me and to my guests--and, should it survive me, to my heirs and assigns.

At any rate, I'm finished with All in the Dances. Or, to be exact, almost finished. I still have to write the dust-jacket copy and sign off on the photo insert. Just two more things to do, both of which could be omitted in a pinch, and my next book can go to press. Ecclesiastes' preacher had something to say about that, too: And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. He sure got that right.

Posted August 05, 1:12 AM

August 4, 2004

TT: The flesh is weak

Who'd have thought it? I'm still struggling with the persistent remnants of last week's chest cold, exacerbated by my recent travels to Williamstown and Washington, and after spending most of Tuesday writing a piece that refused to come easily, I found myself without enough steam to open a doll's envelope. So I gave myself the night off, very possibly followed by a day off. If you don't hear from me again until Thursday, that's why. My head is full of wonderful postings (doubtless the source of all that gooey congestion), but they'll just have to stay in there until I feel like doing more than absolutely nothing.

Later.

Posted August 04, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Americans as a whole do not really care for poems or novels or plays as such, as individual works of art each of which is to a certain extent self-contained and autonomous. They like the generalisations that can be drawn from them or put into them, the messages, the bits of uplift or downpush, the statements, the large imponderables reached as soon and as directly as possible without niggling, limiting, specialising detail (seen in things like character, story, setting, motivation, etc.) and proclaimed as loudly and eye-catchingly as possible."

Kingsley Amis, Memoirs

Posted August 04, 12:00 PM

August 3, 2004

TT: Time out

You didn't really think I could keep on blogging like that for two whole days in a row, did you? I'll be spending most of today hammering away at my Wall Street Journal drama column for Friday, but I'll be back at some point with a Festival of Cool Links accumulated during my two-week intermittent absence from "About Last Night," plus whatever else the spirit moves me to post. Keep an eye peeled.

In the meantime, check out the "Second City" and Top Five modules of the right-hand column, both of which have been updated with the very latest stuff.

Posted August 03, 12:05 PM

TT: Guest almanac

"Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second, then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything--God and our friends and ourselves included--as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred."

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (courtesy of Killin' time being lazy)

Posted August 03, 12:01 PM

August 2, 2004

TT: You come, too

Jazz giant Bob Brookmeyer, a loyal (and frequently mentioned) reader of this site, is bringing his new group, Quartet East, into the Jazz Standard on Wednesday for a four-night stand. Accompanied by Brad Shepik on guitar, Drew Gress on bass, and John Hollenbeck on drums, Brookmeyer will be playing whatever suits him, which I expect will also suit me, he being the best valve trombonist under the sun, a composer of the first rank, and a pretty damn good pianist to boot. (Yes, life is unfair.)

Of course I'll be there. Who won't? For details, click here.

Posted August 02, 12:56 PM

TT: When their lips are moving

I'm not sure whether cuisine qualifies as art (forgive me, Nero Wolfe!), but either way I had to pass on this, er, delicious item from MidHudsonNews.com:

While Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, and their families were having a "lite" lunch at Wendy's in the Town of Newburgh Friday, drumming up local support right after the national convention in Boston, their real lunches were waiting on their bus.

A member of the Kerry advance team called Nikola's Restaurant at the Newburgh Yacht Club the night before and ordered 19 five-star lunches to go that would be picked up at noon Friday. Management at the restaurant, which is operated by CIA graduate chef Michael Dederick, was told the meals would be for the Kerry and Edwards families and actor Ben Affleck who was with them on the tour.

The gourmet meals to go included shrimp vindallo, grilled diver sea scallops, prosciutto, wrapped stuffed chicken, and steak salad. The meals came to about $200....

Sen. Kerry sure didn't have much luck with that particular Wendy's, did he? Maybe he should try eating his shrimp vindallo on the record next time. (What is shrimp vindallo, by the way?)

Posted August 02, 12:40 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"An excellent prison sentence for aesthetes convicted of major crimes might be to require them to translate The Golden Bowl into German."

Joseph Epstein, "The Author as Character"

I'll be good, I promise.

Posted August 02, 1:35 AM

OGIC: Master piece

Joseph Epstein, a passionate and eloquent Jamesian if ever there was one, reviews Colm Toibin's novel of Henry James, The Master, at the Weekly Standard. He's appreciative of Toibin's talent, but not sold on either the book or the general project of fictionalized biography.

Posted August 02, 1:34 AM

TT: Snapshots from the edge

Apropos of today's posting on life in New York now and after 9/11, a friend writes:

1. I went last night to dinner ten blocks from the stock exchange. then I walked down to see how much security there was. not that much! a few trucks. a few police cars. The tunnels were all open, the FDR full like on a Sun night. In new york last night from 6p to midnight I saw all the traffic and people on the streets shopping and eating in outdoor restaurants and thought: we ARE getting like Israelis, no one's scared if someone's gonna blow up a building. A nuke would scare them -- but then nukes scare Israelis.

2. I never wanted to be an Israeli!

3. I find the past few months I'm thinking of the scene late in the book "On the Beach," maybe the movie too. It's when the radiation cloud or whatever is coming, and everyone in Australia decides to go do what they love -- they're all at fishing camps and camping out. And they're singing raucous songs -- Waltzing Matilda. In a little way we're like that -- a lot of people are trying to have more fun and take deeper pleasure -- but it lacks that desperate/frantic quality in "On the Beach," thank goodness.

I agree. Back then, life here had an edge to it, even at the most tender and poignant moments. Now it doesn't--yet.

Posted August 02, 1:28 AM

TT: Before midnight

I can't tell you how good the skyline of Manhattan looked as the Acela Express rolled through Newark yesterday afternoon. Life has kept me jumping of late--a family reunion in Smalltown, U.S.A., a scary stack of post-reunion deadlines, a miserable summer cold, two hasty overnight excursions to the Williamstown Theatre Festival and the Kennedy Center--and for the past few days I've longed for nothing more than to come home to the Teachout Museum, unpack my bag, unplug the phone, curl up on the couch, and watch a few movies. Instead I came home, booted up my iBook to put myself back in touch with the world, and learned that al-Qaida had been planning a little surprise for my adopted home town.

I winced, and thought about how best to reassure my anxious mother back in Smalltown. Then it occurred to me to remind her that nothing much had changed. After all, it's been pretty much taken for granted ever since 9/11 that al-Qaida would hit New York again if it possibly could. The only difference is that we now know, or think we know, some of the specifics of their plans. As for me, I rarely have occasion to go anywhere near Wall Street (I write my Wall Street Journal drama column from home), and I can't remember the last time I set foot in Citicorp Center. Why should I be any more worried now than I was yesterday?

Unhelpful worry is one thing, and I'll do my best to keep it to a minimum. But what about the possible benefits of learning that the chances of New York's being attacked by terrorists are significantly greater than you'd previously thought? Cardinal Newman's Gerontius, after all, wisely reminds himself on his deathbed to "use well the interval," the unknown and unknowable amount of time that separates him from the fast-approaching hour of his demise. How, then, might I take advantage of the knowledge that my own interval could conceivably turn out to be a good deal shorter than I'd planned?

Like most New Yorkers, I thought a lot about that question in the weeks and months following 9/11, and I also had occasion to write about it at monthly intervals in "Second City," my Washington Post column about the arts in New York. I don't keep a diary, so I took a look at some of those old columns yesterday, and I was struck by a theme that wove through them:

- "We're all right, thanks. It took a week or two for us to pull ourselves together, but New Yorkers have finally started to emerge from their holes, looking for all that art offers in times of trial: inspiration, diversion, catharsis, escape. Some of the bustle has gone out of Times Square, and I have yet to visit a jazz club that's been more than two-thirds full. A lot of artists I know are anxious about future fundraising, though they don't like to talk about it, and what you've heard about Broadway is all too true--some shows have closed and many others are struggling, victims of the dried-up tourist trade. Still, I saw a dozen hardy optimists lined up at the box office of ‘The Producers' a half-hour after curtain time one evening last week, hoping to snag returned tickets. Good for them!"

- "The Film Forum showed a handsome-looking print of ‘The General' two weeks ago as part of its recent Keaton retrospective, and people were lined up halfway down the block to get into the 7:30 showing, which featured live piano accompaniment by Steve Sterner. No doubt the audience was lousy with film-studies majors, but that didn't keep them from laughing themselves silly at Keaton's divine foolery. Where there are laughs, there is hope."

- "I went to the Paine Webber Art Gallery to look at ‘Expanding on a Legacy,' a small but choice exhibition of American painting and sculpture on loan from the Montclair Art Museum, which is closed for renovations. Anthrax spores had been discovered in Gov. Pataki's Manhattan office an hour or two before, so the guards were understandably antsy, but that didn't stop me from spending a half-hour basking in the intense silence of Edward Hopper's ‘Coast Guard Station' and George Inness' ‘Delaware Water Gap.' Then I turned a corner and found myself face to face with ‘Snowbound,' a masterpiece of American impressionism in which John H. Twachtman's Connecticut house can just be made out through the thick white drifts of a blizzard. Suddenly I was snatched out of the absurd world around me and wafted into the calm paradise of art. Right now, I can't think of a better place to be."

- "Sometimes the beaten path is the best place to be. I spent the night after Thanksgiving watching New York City Ballet's lavishly decorated ‘Nutcracker,' surrounded by ecstatic children and cool-headed critics (the former are more fun). I couldn't have had a better time, especially when Jennie Somogyi came fizzing onto the stage of the New York State Theater to dance the role of Dewdrop more boldly and high-spiritedly than I'd seen it done since Kyra Nichols was in her prime. I brought a couple of full-grown ‘Nutcracker' novices along with me, and they looked like they'd won the lottery. So they had--and so had I.

"But man cannot live by stars alone, and it struck me that I'd been spending quite a lot of time of late traipsing from institution to institution, gawking at all the usual suspects. I know why: I got caught out of town on September 11, and once I finally made my way back to Manhattan, it meant the world to me to go to places like Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Museum and see for myself that they were still alive and well."

- "I also dropped by the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel to hear Paula West, a West Coast cabaret singer who is tough and hard-swinging, though she has a soft touch of vulnerability and a vivid way with words. At the piano was the infallible Bill Charlap, on whose magic carpet she rode with self-evident pleasure. I caught them at a Friday-night late show, when the crowd was smaller and the mood was right for ‘I Remember You.' West sang Johnny Mercer's perfect lyric with understated passion, and all at once I found myself wrapped up in dark-blue memories of my own. The Algonquin can do that to you, especially when you're listening to a really good singer at midnight, sitting next to a friend who knows what's on your mind and thinking about what most of us are thinking about these days. Be it in an oak-paneled cabaret or a Park Avenue church, I doubt that beauty has ever meant so much to New Yorkers as it does this very moment."

- "Nor will I soon forget my visit to Avery Fisher Hall to hear Ivan Fischer and the New York Philharmonic perform Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony, a vast mural of anguish that is almost too much of a muchness. I hadn't been listening to Mahler since I returned to New York in September after being stranded in the Midwest--I don't know that you need to deliberately jolt your emotions when they're already vibrating like a plucked string--and I doubt I would have gone if a singer friend of mine hadn't mentioned to me at lunch one day that September 11 had left her unable to cry, even after she visited Ground Zero. It struck me that the Fifth Symphony might be just what she needed to break up her interior logjam, so we went, and were stunned--that's the only possible word for it. I think it was an extraordinary performance, but I'm not quite certain, because I was so carried away by the music that I forgot how it was being played. All I know for sure is that it poured off the stage like an avalanche."

Could it be that I--we--were living more intensely in those days? It happens that my life was turned inside out in all sorts of ways in the immediate wake of 9/11, but no matter what fears I found myself facing, I almost always managed sooner or later to slip out of the fearful present and immerse myself in the blessed world of art, responding all the more passionately because of my renewed consciousness of life's brevity. Strange that it so often takes a catastrophe, whether personal or public, to make you face a fact that was no less true on 9/10, or 9/12. Strange, too, that this knowledge inevitably recedes from your awareness: one can no more think incessantly about such things than one can gaze for an hour at the noonday sun. I don't know exactly when it was that my hunger slackened, but a time must have come when I returned at last to "normal," responding in an everyday manner to the endless beauties of the fragile city in which I still choose to live.

Will I be any different today because of what I found out yesterday? I'd like to think that I might possibly recapture some of that febrile intensity, that I will learn yet again the lesson no one learns once and for all. Henry James put it best: "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?"

For my part, I have had much in my life--much success, much love, many friends--and I have beheld countless times what Paul Goodman was writing about in this poem:

Such beauty as hurts to behold
and so gentle as salves the wound:
I am shivering though it is not cold
and dark as in a swoon.

I hope with all my heart that I live long enough to recall those lines ten thousand times more. I also hope I remember each day that I might not be so lucky, and try to live accordingly--and if not each day, then at least this one and the next. May we all remember, here and everywhere.

Posted August 02, 1:15 AM

TT: Symposium

A friend writes:

You have now written books on yourself, H.L. Mencken and George Balanchine, and Louis Armstrong is next. How would they interact at dinner?

Needless to say, I'd revel in the company of all three men, whether separately or together. In addition to being famously companionable, they were good talkers--not to mention eaters and drinkers--and I'd be tempted to ask each of them an endless string of questions in between bites. Alas, cross-examination is a thoroughly unsound basis for a dinner party, and since Mencken had no interest in ballet and dismissed jazz as "undifferentiated musical protoplasm, dying of its own effluvia," it's possible that the conversation might grow a little bumpy if left to its own devices.

Instead, I'd start by nudging my guests toward the safer ground of classical music, to which they were all passionately devoted. With the arrival of the wine steward, I'd encourage a discussion of the relative merits of alcohol and marijuana: Mencken, who once declared himself "omnibibulous," and Armstrong, who rarely let a day go by without getting high, would surely have had fun kicking that topic around. Then I might mention Isadora Duncan, for whose dancing both Balanchine ("To me it was absolutely unbelievable--a drunken, fat woman who for hours was rolling around like a pig") and Mencken ("A mass of puerilities, without any more rational basis than golf or spiritualism") had nothing but contempt. I'm not aware that Armstrong had any strong views about modern dance, but he certainly knew plenty about dancing in general, being a jazz musician, and I'm sure he'd chime in to interesting effect.

Over dessert, the talk would likely turn without prompting to women. Balanchine and Armstrong were both married four times, and though Mencken only tied the knot once, he had his fair share of girlfriends, going so far as to write a book called In Defense of Women. Between the three of them, I dare say quite a bit of light would be shed on the ever-intriguing subject of romance and its discontents.

Don't you think that adds up to a pretty good conversational menu?

Posted August 02, 1:15 AM

TT: Almanac

Swift winds are flying,
Soldiers are marching,
Voices are crying, "What shall we do?"
Cities have fallen,
Sunsets are barren,
Winter is calling--and I love you.

The world today is in a madness.
We've said goodbye to all our merry youth,
And in the midst of bitterness and sadness,
We've only time to tell the truth.

Days now are fleeting.
Time, ever teasing,
Turns every greeting to an adieu.
Planets have shaken,
Each dawn will darken
As we awaken--and I love you.

What we have found
Though the world fall around us
Is simple and sound
And is all that is true.

Each broken starling
We can atone for:
Come to me, darling,
Come be my own, darling,
Come be my own--for I love you.

William Roy, The World Today

Posted August 02, 1:05 AM