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December 31, 2004

TT: Reciprocity

Said to me over dinner last night: "So, am I going to read about this tomorrow?"

Here's the funny part: the person who said it was a blogger....

Posted December 31, 2:19 AM

TT: Down to the wire

OGIC and I have been busy, and will continue to be (though we did find just enough time for her to show me my first episode of Gilmore Girls, which I adored). You might hear from us again today, or not. If we vanish up the spout until Monday, assume we're having fun, and do likewise.

Happy New Year!

Posted December 31, 1:04 AM

TT: Almanac

"Half the great comedians I've had in my shows and that I paid a lot of money to and who made my customers shriek were not only not funny to me, but I couldn't understand why they were funny to anybody."

Florenz Ziegfeld (quoted in Ken Bloom and Frank Vlastnik, Broadway Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time)

Posted December 31, 1:02 AM

December 30, 2004

TT: Continued sunny weather

All's well here, though I haven't been able to nudge Our Girl into blogging yet. I think she's having too much fun!

More as it happens. I have to finish up a piece, but I'll try to post something later in the day once it's finally written and moved.

Later.

Posted December 30, 12:04 PM

TT: Almanac

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill
He sounds too blue to fly
The midnight train is whining low
I'm so lonesome I could cry.

I've never seen a night so long
When time goes crawling by
The moon just went behind the clouds
To hide its face and cry.

Hank Williams, "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry"

Posted December 30, 12:01 PM

TT: Another low-carb substance-free post

I've been longing for weeks now to pull together a huge post of cool links (while simultaneously updating "Sites to See"), and went so far the other day as to sift and prune my lengthy list of bookmarks in preparation for the Great Elsewhere Posting. But is this it? No, this is not it. Nor am I holding forth on recently consumed high art, for the good reason that I haven't consumed any, at least not in the past couple of days. I got back to New York late Tuesday afternoon, and Our Girl showed up on my doorstep eight hours later. All I've had time to do since then is catch up with my accumulated snail mail, stay on top of the incoming e-mail, tinker with my theater calendar for January and February, and embark on the gratifying process of showing off my co-blogger to a select list of blogbuddies (as well a few culturally challenged no-blog types).

The one gainful thing I've managed to do is finish writing my next Commentary essay, which is about the letters of classical composers. I tried to write it in Smalltown, but my mother shifted into Full Distraction Mode With Deflector Shields when I spent a whole day writing my "Second City" column for this Sunday's Washington Post, and the most I could manage after that was to read two relevant books, draft the opening section, and think through the whole piece in my head. In fact, I wasn't able to get down to serious business until...well, er, one a.m. this morning.

First, OGIC and I watched a DVD of Near Dark after returning from Blogdinner No. 1 (we're soooo into vampires). Then we listened to music and talked nonstop for a couple of hours (we're still getting used to the simple pleasure of being in the same room). Then I sighed deeply, arose from my comfy berth on the couch, bid my guest farewell, took a scaldingly hot shower and a stiff dose of aspirin, and retired to my office. Four hours later the piece was done, after which I ascended to my loft, fell asleep instantly, and awoke without benefit of alarm at 9:30, wrenched into consciousness by what sleep specialists call my clock-dependent alerting (that's what wakes you up at two in the morning the day after you fly to Europe). I found in my e-mailbox a note from the editor of Commentary, asking me what the hell I was doing sending him pieces at five-thirty in the morning (of course he knew--that's just his way of being polite) and promising that he'd send me back galleys to read and correct later today.

That, my friends, is journalism.

As for my previous Commentary essay, a paean to Haydn, it's in the issue that was just mailed out to subscribers, and I'll be posting a link in the right-hand column as soon as it becomes available on the magazine's Web site. In fact, OGIC and I will be posting quite a bit of other fresh stuff in the right-hand column between now and Monday--look for it. In addition, I'll make her sit down at my desk sooner or later and blog about what a great time she's having. And I do solemnly swear that the Great Elsewhere Posting will materialize at some point in the next few days.

For now, though, it's back to living in the moment, or maybe slightly behind it. Our Girl, who was previously asleep on an inflatable bed placed in the middle of the Teachout Museum, is now making interesting sounds suggestive of potential wakefulness. We're having lunch with an old friend--OGIC's first boss in New York and my first book editor--followed by more schedule-tinkering and mail-answering, followed by Blogdinner No. 2, followed by more conversation and music and DVDs. Nor would I be even slightly surprised if a nap takes place somewhere in there. Sounds like a full day to me.

Posted December 30, 11:37 AM

TT: A little list

Slate asked an assortment of writers and other culture types to answer this question: "Which cultural happening most amazed or disappointed you this year?" Among those present are Hilton Als, Rachel Cohen, Stanley Crouch, Daniel "Lemony Snicket" Handler, Jim Holt, Neil LaBute, Jane Smiley, Dana "Liz Penn" Stevens, and me.

To see what we said, go here.

Posted December 30, 6:09 AM

TT: Artie Shaw, R.I.P.

Artie Shaw, the clarinetist and bandleader who was the last great survivor of the swing era, has died in Los Angeles at the age of 94. Here's a wire-service obit from NPR.

I profiled Shaw in the New York Times on his ninetieth birthday, and posted the text of that piece on "About Last Night" earlier this year. To read it, go here, where you will also find links to some of his finest recordings. (I've been told that Shaw himself liked this piece.)

UPDATE: The Washington Post appears to be the first major newspaper out of the box with a lengthy in-house Shaw obituary on its Web site. (The New York Times is still running Reuters wire-service copy as of this hour.)

MORE: The Times just posted its obit, a blandly institutional piece that was obviously written years ago by the late John S. Wilson and updated only slightly since then. We'll see how they do tomorrow morning.

MORE: Not at all to my surprise, the Times opted to go with its stockpiled obit, a lame response to the death of a great American musician. I guess he was too old for anyone over there to care....

Posted December 30, 5:32 AM

December 29, 2004

TT: Back where I come from

I flew into LaGuardia at the blue hour, the moment when the city lights overlap with the fast-fading sunset. The air was full of translucent droplets of snow, diffusing the late-afternoon light still further, and as my cab rolled across the Upper East Side, down Museum Mile, and through Central Park, I thought, New York doesn't even have to try to be beautiful--it just is. Of course the beauty of the blue hour means different things to different people, and sometimes even to the same person: I can imagine finding it either romantic or depressing, depending on my mood. Not currently being disposed to either extreme, I was content to call it beautiful and let it go at that.

The last sound I heard before I got in my rental car this morning and headed for the Smalltown city limits was a train whistle. My brother tells me that more freight trains have been passing through Smalltown lately, and though the tracks are halfway across town from my mother's house, you can still hear the whistles loud and clear. My mother thinks they sound mournful, but I never thought so. They used to make me curious about the big world somewhere down the track, and now that I live in that big world, they remind me that I have things to do back there.

My kitchen table is usually piled high with mail when I come back from Smalltown, especially when I've been gone for a week or more, but this time there wasn't a thing--it's at the post office, waiting to be picked up. All I found were flowers in a vase and groceries in the refrigerator, courtesy of my adorable assistant, and in the absence of any visible signs of the urgent tasks that await me come morning, I decided to take the rest of the night off.

No doubt I'd have done better to roll up my sleeves and get cracking, especially since I have a piece to write, a sackful of mail to answer, a half-dozen theatrical previews to schedule, a dozen phone calls to make, and a houseguest arriving in the afternoon, immediately followed by a week's worth of more or less nonstop activity. Still, it was a long day--I had to get up early in the morning, pack my bags, scrape the frost off the car, and drive all the way to the airport in St. Louis--and I had a feeling that I might possibly be better served by spending an hour or so reacquainting myself with the Teachout Museum, then curling up on the couch to watch a few of the episodes of What's My Line? that my DVR harvested for me last week. So that's what I'm doing, after which I mean to take a book to bed and read myself to sleep. Tomorrow will have to take care of itself, and if it doesn't, that's just too damn bad. Tonight is for me.

Posted December 29, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city's walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky."

E.B. White, Here Is New York

Posted December 29, 12:00 PM

TT: Hither (not yon!)

Our Girl in Chicago is now on New York's Upper West Side, napping on a couch in the middle of the Teachout Museum in preparation for just short of a week's worth of nonstop partying and art consumption. (I was going to make her write this posting herself, but I think she needs a little REM sleep before the festivities commence.)

Later this evening we'll be meeting Megan McArdle and the Mutant, respectively my tallest and shortest friends, for dinner at Good Enough to Eat, the official "About Last Night" hangout. If you're in the neighborhood, stop by our table and kiss the rings!

More anon.

Posted December 29, 4:06 AM

December 28, 2004

TT: Eastward bound

That's it from Smalltown, U.S.A. The next time you hear from me, I'll be back at my desk on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Don't be surprised if I fail to post again until Wednesday, when Our Girl in Chicago joins me in New York for a week of mad hilarity (I can't wait to see her start hitting the bars with Maud in tow). Oh, the humanity!

In the meantime, many thanks for all the e-mail you've sent in recent days. It's nice to know you're out there.

Later.

Posted December 28, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"There is no bottom. There is no low. You never know what you're going to see next. There's no worst--it does amaze me what people do to other people, that's what's crazy about it--but there's no worst. You know what I'm saying?"

Anonymous Chicago policeman (quoted in Connie Fletcher, What Cops Know)

Posted December 28, 12:00 PM

December 27, 2004

TT: Almanac

"Remember when a year felt like a long time?"

"I sure do."

Craig Lucas, screenplay for The Secret Lives of Dentists (adapted from The Age of Grief, by Jane Smiley)

Posted December 27, 12:00 PM

TT: They knew what they wanted

Three recent searches that brought the searchers to "About Last Night":

- "Where was John Betjeman born?"

- "The convention and genre on which reality TV draws."

- "I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me." (And yes, I know where that quote comes from--do you?)

Posted December 27, 10:38 AM

TT: Out from under

The Great Blizzard of 2004 is officially over and done with. The snow has stopped falling and the ice has started melting, and my mother and I emerged from our brick-veneered cave a few hours ago, blinking at the bright sunlight, out of the house at long last to dine at a restaurant--Applebee's, to be specific--for the first time since we'd holed up on Tuesday night. (Actually, my brother and I had slithered north on an inch-thick sheet of ice to pick up a present on Friday morning, but we lied and told my mother that the ice had already melted, so it didn't count.) Instead of attending the various family gatherings that were called on account of snow, I stayed home, opened presents, ate leftovers and various regional delicacies, answered e-mail, and watched movies.

The presents under the tree included two showstoppers, one funny, the other touching. My brother gave me a framed check for one dollar, drawn on the City of Smalltown, U.S.A., and representing his entire salary as a city councilman for 2004. (It was a souvenir of my having made the very first contribution to his campaign fund.) In return, the rest of the family chipped in to buy him a plane ticket to Washington, D.C., where he'll watch me be sworn in as a member of the National Council on the Arts and spend a couple of days doing the town. My mother is no longer up to that kind of long-distance traveling, so he'll be the Teachout family's official representative at the ceremony. Needless to say, tears were shed by more than one person in the room when that package was opened.

Among the regional delicacies that I've consumed since the snow started falling were a foot-long stick of summer sausage and a half-pound of hickory-smoked cheese from Esicar's Old Hickory Smokehouse, two robust foodstuffs not readily available on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I also bought and ate three GooGoo Clusters, the circular candy bar that is Nashville's second most important contribution to American culture. So far the weather has stopped me from dining at Dexter Barbecue, but I'm hoping to gnaw on a rib or two before I hit the road.

I got an e-mail yesterday from my friend Laura, about whose wedding I posted last week. She saw what I wrote after she got back from her honeymoon in Branson, Missouri, and said she liked it (whew!). So, I gather, did a lot of other folks, including a reader of "About Last Night" who lives in Taiwan. It tickled me no end to know that my description of a small-town wedding in Missouri had been read and appreciated halfway around the world, and it also reminded me--as if I needed reminding--of how extraordinary an effect blogging has already had on the writing life.

I watched three films over the weekend that I hadn't seen since their release, and one I'd never seen at all. My mother surprised me a few days ago by mentioned in passing that Mary Poppins was her favorite movie (who knew?), so we watched it on Christmas night, immediately following Miracle on 34th Street, which was new to me. I hadn't seen Mary Poppins since my parents took me to a roadshow screening in Memphis in 1964, and was happily surprised by the effectiveness of the pre-digital animated effects (the songs are pretty damn good, too). We also watched Animal House, which my mother liked even more than Napoleon Dynamite. As for me, I hadn't seen an uncut print of Animal House since my undergraduate days, and was delighted anew by all the clever little touches that time had wiped from my memory. (Remember how Fawn Lebowitz dies? In a kiln explosion.)

Best of all, though, was The Secret Lives of Dentists, which struck me as even better on a second viewing than when I saw it last winter, though I stand by what I wrote then:

Scarcely less impressive, and no less serious, is Alan Rudolph's The Secret Lives of Dentists, an occasionally over-flamboyant but mostly straightforward study of the devastating effects of adultery on the marriage of two no-longer-young dentists (Campbell Scott and Hope Davis) so caught up in raising their children that they forget to love one another. Davis is shiveringly good as the guilty party, but Scott has the larger and more demanding part--nothing is harder than making an audience care about an emotionally inhibited character--and brings it off with self-effacing skill.

(The film to which I was comparing it, by the way, was Lost in Translation, and I wound up the review by commenting on American Splendor as well. What a month that was!)

Now, alas, the end of my stay is nigh. I have one day and night left, after which I fly back to Manhattan on Tuesday morning in order to greet Our Girl in Chicago on Wednesday afternoon, and I have to finish and file my "Second City" column for this Sunday's Washington Post before I leave town. Naturally, I've been putting it off. I hate working in Smalltown. (Blogging isn't work.) But I don't dare procrastinate any longer, so I'm going to get up first thing in the morning--well, second thing--and do my duty.

When I leave, it'll be with the usual mixed feelings. I have a million things to do in New York, and I'll be more than ready to get back to my desk. I love my work--probably more than I should--and I love my friends with all my heart. I even love New York, though it took me long enough to admit it to myself. (I didn't really make up my mind about New York until after 9/11.) It is the place of my real life, and increasingly of my memories as well. I won't be surprised if I spend the rest of my days there, whereas it isn't likely that I'll ever again spend more than a week or two at a time in Smalltown. Yet this town, and this house, are what I think of when I think of home.

As I write these words, I'm listening to a record by a friend of mine, a Brazilian singer who lives in New York and became an American citizen earlier this year. Right now she's in São Paulo visiting her family, and I know her heart is as cloven as mine. I asked her once what language she dreamed in. "English, mostly," she said, "but with an accent." So, too, do I dream in and of New York--but with an accent.

When do we acquire the grace to feel at home where we are? Do we ever? Or can we do no better than to make a home for our own children, who will grow up and do the same for their children?

I wrote those words in 1991, a few years after I moved to New York. I still can't answer any of the questions I asked back then, perhaps because I have no children for whom to make a home, and now wonder whether I ever will. More and more I find myself wondering, too, what home means, and where it is. Yet at least I know where it used to be. Not everyone knows half as much.

Posted December 27, 1:13 AM

December 24, 2004

TT: Plan B

I was awakened on Thursday by the sound of clanking and hammering in the basement. It seems that one of my mother's half-century-old pipes picked the middle of the Great Blizzard of 2004 as the perfect time to spring a leak. Fortunately, my brother had the day off, discovered the leak by chance, and fixed it with minimal fuss. He can do that kind of thing, as well as every other kind of thing in the world that requires mechanical skill, whereas I can't do much of anything beyond hanging and rehanging the pictures in the Teachout Museum. My poor father did his best to teach me how to fend for myself in the world of inanimate objects, but my brother scooped up all the relevant chromosomes, forcing me to live by my wits. Not that he's short on wits, but he's the strong, silent type (which didn't stop him from winning a seat on the Smalltown City Council--he's the family pol!), and as a rule he prefers doing things to discussing them. Our common ground is narrow--Westerns and family matters pretty much cover it--but we're very close, especially for two such dissimilar folk, and if I were to find myself in the kind of jam that required bail or a getaway car, I'd call him first.

The blizzard is over, by the way, and though there's just short of a foot of snow on the ground, life in Smalltown is slowly returning to normal. My brother and I took care of the day's errands, after which I spent the afternoon working on my Washington Post column and reading one of the books I brought home to prepare for my next Commentary essay. I haven't heard from Our Girl, but the Mutant has re-established contact via e-mail, and other holiday-related news is trickling into my mailbox from New York and Washington: it seems that one of my blogfriends is en route to an ashram in California, while another is headed for a dentist's chair. I also learned, much to my delight, that Rachel Howard, the West Coast dance critic-blogger, praised All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine in the San Francisco Chronicle. (This link will take you there.) That's my kind of Christmas present!

Alas, it turns out that our plans for Friday have been derailed by the weatherman. The surviving members of my mother's family, plus such children and grandchildren as are within reach, have been getting together on Christmas Eve since time immemorial. My mother didn't feel up to cooking for the whole clan this year, though, so we decided to eat out instead, and El Bracero being the only restaurant in Smalltown that's open tonight, we figured on having chimichangas for Christmas. That was the plan, anyway, but the highways aren't yet clear enough to allow the older siblings to drive with confidence, so our Christmas-eve family dinner has been cancelled. Sad news, to be sure, but my mother and I mean to make the most of it. Instead of slipping and sliding along the snow-covered streets of Smalltown, we'll stay home, bake a turkey roll, watch Miracle on 34th Street (which I've never seen, believe it or not), and be grateful that we're in the same place at the same time.

I don't expect to be posting again until next week. Wherever you are and whatever you're doing between now and then, may it lift up your hearts as high as being with my family has lifted mine.

Merry Christmas!

Posted December 24, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past,
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Robert Frost, "The Oven Bird"

Posted December 24, 12:00 PM

December 23, 2004

TT: Underneath it all

As of this moment, Smalltown is covered with ten inches of snow, and more is supposed to come before morning. My brother spent the better part of the day skidding around southeast Missouri in a truck. Not me. I went outside just once, trudging to the end of the driveway to collect today's Smalltown Standard Democrat (no hyphen, please). Though my mother begged me to pull on a pair of my late father's boots first, I ventured forth into the winter night without even bothering to don a coat. I'm pretty sure she wanted to spank me when I came back in, but instead she settled for giving me a lecture about the dangers of catching cold. That done, we ate dinner, watched the weather on TV, then switched over to The Blues Brothers on AMC. I don't expect there'll be any more trips to the video store until Sunday, meaning that we've got to make the four movies I rented yesterday last until then.

For those of you who just joined us, I'm home for the holidays, and "About Last Night" is emanating from a rickety old card table set up in the middle of the guest bedroom of my mother's house in Smalltown, U.S.A., located midway between St. Louis and Memphis. Smalltown is dialup country, meaning that it takes forever for me to tap my blogmail (thanks to all of you who wrote about my recent postings, by the way!), while most of my preferred blogs and Web sites load even more slowly. On the other hand, it's not entirely unpleasant to be semi-detached from the outside world, and I can always count on the Standard Democrat to take care of my urgent news-related needs. Here are some of Wednesday's headlines: Races Heating Up for School Boards. Hefty Fine Is Handed Down. Post Office Working Overtime. Holiday Drivers Must Take Extra Precautions. Casket Truck Driver Busted. Party Planned.

Needless to say, my mother and I haven't been seeing many people since the snow started falling, but we did run into Mrs. Yeakey, my former babysitter, in Wal-Mart on Tuesday afternooon, just before we went home to hunker down for the big blow. Improbable as it may seem, the woman who took care of me four decades ago whenever my parents felt the need for a night on the town is alive, well, and as spry-looking as ever. (She'd attained a certain age even then, meaning that she must be eighty or so now.) Nobody ever gets very far away from his past in a small town--there's always somebody just around the corner who knew you when you were in kneepants, and has at least one embarrassing story to tell.

I called Our Girl in Chicago in Detroit (she's visiting her own family for the holidays) and the Mutant in New York (she isn't) earlier this evening. Neither one was home, though, so my mother and I decided to live dangerously and raid our dwindling video stash for a second feature, Napoleon Dynamite. You might not think a seventy-four-year-old woman from Smalltown would find such fare amusing, but she's always been receptive to off-center comedies, this one included.

We said goodnight after the credits rolled, and I set the thermostat and withdrew to my bedroom, there to check my e-mail one last time and choose a book with which to read myself to sleep. I looked out the window a moment ago and saw that the footprints I made when I picked up the Standard Democrat have vanished beneath a fresh layer of snow. I can't see any tire tracks, either, which isn't surprising. It's been hours since anyone drove down our street. The only sounds I hear are the muffled whirr of the winter wind, the rumble of the downstairs furnace, and the unsure buzz of the ancient alarm clock on my nightstand that would wake me up if I needed to be anywhere on time come morning, which I don't. Maybe I'll do a little work on one of my unfinished pieces tomorrow--or maybe not. I haven't yet tired of the exquisite privilege of having nothing to do.

Posted December 23, 12:53 PM

TT: Almanac

Sleepwalking through the all-night drugstore
Baptized in fluorescent light
I found religion in the greeting-card aisle
Now I know Hallmark was right
And every pop song on the radio
Is suddenly speaking to me
Art may imitate life
But life imitates TV.

Ani DiFranco, "Superhero"

Posted December 23, 12:52 PM

TT: Day remnant

After trying in vain to make some headway on my Washington Post column, I decided to clear my head by taking an afternoon nap. I'd been reading earlier in the day about how the young Gustav Mahler played the first movement of his Second Symphony on the piano for Hans von Bülow, who hated it. No sooner did my head hit the pillow than I dreamed I was improvising in C minor (the key of Mahler's symphony) on my mother's living-room spinet. I felt the presence of someone in the room, and glanced back to see that Mahler was looking over my shoulder, making a face of extreme displeasure. I got up from the piano bench to let him take over, and just as he was about to start playing, the doorbell rang--the real one--and I woke up....

Posted December 23, 6:23 AM

December 22, 2004

TT: Almanac

"Let your characters talk a little longer about a little less."

True Boardman (quoted in Leonard Maltin, The Great American Broadcast: A Celebration of Radio's Golden Age)

Posted December 22, 12:20 PM

TT: Waiting for snow in Smalltown

A friend writes:

How is it to be home? What do your days consist of? Tell me tell me.

My days are for the most part happily uneventful. I always sleep late. I usually take my mother out to lunch (nowhere fancy--there aren't any fancy places to take her in Smalltown!), after which we run whatever errands may need running. I brought home a couple of unfinished pieces that require my attention, but I haven't yet started working on them. My brother and his family, who live three blocks away, frequently poke their heads in after dinner; otherwise, my mother and I do the dishes, watch a little TV or a movie, and chat contentedly about old times, local gossip, and whatever I may have been up to since my last visit home. She goes to bed around ten-thirty, after which I surf the Web, answer the day's e-mail, blog a bit, and read myself to sleep. I packed four new books, David Thomson's The Whole Equation, Ada Louise Huxtable's brief life of Frank Lloyd Wright, the new Willem de Kooning biography, and the galleys of Doug Ramsey's biography of Paul Desmond--more than I needed, but I've always been overambitious when it comes to holiday reading.

That's normally about the size of it, but yesterday was different. We'd been talking about driving to Cape Girardeau to polish off our Christmas shopping, and when the weatherman told us on Monday that it was going to snow on Wednesday, we figured we'd better stop procrastinating and get the rest of it done while we still could. It happened that my mother's boss was buying lunch in Cape on Tuesday for all the girls in the office (my septuagenarian mother, who continues to work in the mornings, finds it highly gratifying to be thought of as "one of the girls"), so I joined the party, and after lunch we got in my rental car and whizzed around town, keeping an eye on the cloud-filled sky in between stops. Once we'd worked our way to the bottom of the checklist, we turned around and headed for home. I popped a Louis Armstrong album into the CD player and told stories about Louis' New Orleans childhood as we listened to "Blues in the Night" and "Just One of Those Things" and watched the clouds grow thicker.

Back in Smalltown, we picked up some just-in-case groceries, filled a prescription, bought one last present at Wal-Mart, and rented four videos that I thought my mother might enjoy seeing, The Secret Lives of Dentists, Napoleon Dynamite, Open Range (she likes Westerns), and Stuck on You. We got home just in time to catch the five o'clock weather on TV. It started raining around ten, right on time, and I went to bed with the benign glow of achievement that comes from knowing that you're as ready as you can possibly be for a two-day blow.

I woke before sunrise, looked out my bedroom window, and saw at least two inches of snow glittering beneath the streetlights of Hickory Drive. Content at last, I got back in bed and returned to my mundane dreams.

Posted December 22, 11:15 AM

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- To pick up on the theme of an earlier posting, my newest friend is in the same key as I am--or, to use a metaphor drawn from a different realm, we're on the same page, and we realized it almost as soon as we met. A person who knows us both well told me that she thought we were "long-lost siblings, separated at birth and finally together again." Such intense and immediate rapport is a gift akin to grace, and thus never to be taken lightly, not least because it is so rare.

Only yesterday, she ended an e-mail to me with the following sentence: "Hoping your dreams entertain--let me know if any good ones grant you the luck of remembering." As I read it, I asked myself, What part of my destiny is to be made manifest by my having found a friend capable of saying such a thing to me within days of our first meeting?

- Being a writer is a strange business: you have an experience, and right in the middle of it words start taking shape in your head. The trick, I suppose, is not to let the words get between you and the experience. I'm usually pretty good about that, but I can recall more than one occasion in my life when I found myself thinking coolly detached thoughts in the least likely and least appropriate of circumstances, from intimate moments to deathbed scenes. I can't think of many traits that are less attractive, since the point of life is to live it while it's happening, but the writer in me is always on duty, and though he frequently nods off at his post, it doesn't take much to wake him up.

- I don't often surprise Our Girl in Chicago, but I brought the trick off the other day when I mentioned in passing that I'd never in my life asked a woman out simply because I thought she was cute. Our Girl was astonished to hear this, and told me so.

Posted December 22, 11:11 AM

December 21, 2004

TT: A wedding

I haven't taken part in many weddings in my life, and none at all in recent years, so when my friend Laura asked me to read the Eighty-Fourth Psalm at her wedding last Saturday, I juggled my holiday plans and found a way to get myself to the church on time.

It wasn't as easy as it sounds. Laura is a writer who's been living in Washington, D.C., for the past few years, but like me, she was born and raised in a small Missouri town, and when it came time for her to marry, she chose to tie the knot at home. It's a four-hour drive from her town to mine, a bit too long to be casually undertaken in winter weather. Fortunately, she scheduled her wedding on the same day I was planning to go home for Christmas, so instead of driving straight from St. Louis to Smalltown, U.S.A., as I normally do, I picked up a rental car at the airport, drove to the church, got Laura married off, turned around, and headed for home.

A small-town church wedding is a thing unto itself, especially if you were to compare it to the last wedding I attended, a catered affair held in the banquet room of a fancy Westchester County restaurant and presided over by a wisecracking rabbi. Small-town men of the cloth are rarely heard to crack wise at weddings, nor does the food served at the wedding dinners over which they preside typically run to the overelaborate. Laura's menu, for instance, consisted of baked ham and hashbrown casserole, served up piping hot in the fellowship hall of the First Christian Church of Columbia, Missouri. I can't tell you how many meals I've eaten in such halls over the years, none of them fancy and all of them good, though this would be the first one I'd been served while listening to the sounds of a local DJ who specialized in such Fifties standards as Peggy Lee's "Fever." Not exactly the sort of thing you expect to hear in a fellowship hall, I thought with a smile as I sipped my non-alcoholic punch.

The sanctuary of the church was bedecked with poinsettas and lit by candles, and every pew as far as my dazzled eye could see was jammed full of people who acted as though they knew one another, which they probably did. Having changed hurriedly into my travel-crumpled suit in the men's room, I waited for my cue in the vestibule, eavesdropping on the family and friends of the bride and groom and delighting in snatches of the kind of talk you rarely hear at a Westchester County wedding ("So how do you like my new suit, honey? Didn't I tell you I was gonna buy me a suit for the wedding?"). Then I took my place by the pulpit and watched Laura walk down the aisle, and at the appointed moment I stood and spoke the ancient words she had asked me to read, not daring to catch her eye for fear of choking up:

How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord Almighty!

My soul yearns, even faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.

Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may have her young--a place near your altar, O Lord Almighty, my King and my God.

I sat down again to watch my beloved friend embark on her new life. She looked flushed and radiant and determined, and I, perhaps not surprisingly, found myself tugged between hope for her future and curiosity about my own. The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is uncomfortable for me at best, and I'd been at loose emotional ends for the past couple of weeks. (You know your emotions are up in the air when every piece of music you hear, good and bad alike, makes you cry.) Now I was sitting in a place redolent of my long-ago youth, at once utterly alien and utterly familiar, feeling not unlike the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, who wandered through her palace at midnight, stopping all the clocks, trying to turn her back on time.

I will...I will...you may kiss the bride. A kilted bagpiper stationed in the balcony struck up the Ode to Joy, Laura and her Ben marched back down the aisle, and a few minutes later I was dishing up hashbrown casserole and wondering whether I'd be able to make it all the way to Smalltown, U.S.A., before bedtime. I'd warned my mother that I'd probably spend the night in a motel just south of St. Louis, but the clock on the wall of the fellowship hall told me that I could be home by midnight, weather and coincidence permitting, so I kissed the bride and her sisters, got in my car, and drove around town until I found an exit to the highway, alone with my double-edged memories.

To the solitary stranger, the highways of Missouri are flat and harsh-looking in wintertime. Only the traveler for whom they point toward home can find anything like beauty in mile upon mile of leafless trees and drab brown fields. To me they are as lovely as a Corot--but only when the sun lights up the vast blue dome of sky. At night you can see nothing but the thin ribbon of road and the cold silver stars hanging above the plains, and you switch on the radio half from boredom and half from fear of the dark. I skated impatiently across the dial, finding nothing but slick-sounding FM stations whose music seemed untouched by human hands. I pushed a different button, and out of the misty static of the AM band came a sound so recognizable that I stopped breathing for one astonished moment. It was the voice of Porter Wagoner, introducing a commercial for Martha White Flour. I had accidentally tuned in WSM in Nashville, and now I was listening to the Grand Ole Opry, wafted on the frigid night air all the way from Opryland, U.S.A., to the waiting radio of a rental car headed east on I-70 for St. Louis and points beyond.

Next to nothing had changed about the Opry since I'd last heard it: Porter Wagoner soon gave way to Whispering Bill Anderson, who in turn introduced Del McCoury, the dean of bluegrass, who sang "Blue Christmas" in the high, hacksaw tenor he had honed during his years on the road with Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys. I remembered with perfect clarity how it felt to sit in the balcony of the Ryman Auditorium when I was sixteen years old, looking down on the distant stage that all the greats of country music had trod. Once my mother and her father had listened to the Opry every Saturday night, and for a brief moment my teenaged self had actually dreamed of playing there.

Life had carried me far away from that dream, just as the Opry itself had moved from the penny-plain Ryman to an expensive new home on the outskirts of town. Even Martha White Flour, the cheerful-voiced announcer proclaimed, had a Web site now. Change and decay in all around I see? No, not really. Porter Wagoner and Whispering Bill, after all, were still singing of lost love in the weather-whacked voices I had known as a boy, and their mournful laments were somehow transformed into tidings of comfort and joy as I rolled through the night. Thirty years had slipped away since I'd packed my bags and gone forth to find my place in the world, yet I was coming home again to the same house on the same street in the same town in the same corner of Missouri, listening to the same music. Am I, then, the same person? I asked myself. And does it matter if I'm not?

As I pulled off I-70 to steer around St. Louis, I took my cell phone out of my shoulder bag and called my mother. "I'm making pretty good time," I told her, "so I think I'll come all the way home tonight. Don't stay up for me--I won't get in until half past midnight--but leave the porch light on."

"I will," she said. "Pull off if you get sleepy, all right? Do you promise?"

"I will, Mom," I said. "I promise."

Two hours later I eased into the driveway of her house, unlocked the back door as quietly as I could, and tiptoed down the hall to my old bedroom, dragging my battered suitcases behind me. Whoever I am, I'm home again, I told myself as I pushed open the door and saw the homemade redwood bookshelf and the faded portrait of Abraham Lincoln that has hung by the door to the bathroom for as long as I can remember. I crawled into bed, pulled the covers up to my chin, listened for the freight-train whistles keening halfway across town, and slowly drifted off to sleep, a worn-out, middle-aged sparrow come home to rest.

Posted December 21, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

It might be a fight like you see on the screen
A swain getting slain for the love of a queen
Some great Shakespearean scene
Where a ghost and a prince meet
And everyone ends in mincemeat.

Howard Dietz, "That's Entertainment" (music by Arthur Schwartz)

Posted December 21, 12:00 PM

December 20, 2004

TT: Not in residence

I made it to Smalltown, U.S.A., in one piece. More in due course, but for the moment I'm taking it easy.

Later.

Posted December 20, 12:03 PM

TT: Almanac

"Class presidents and football heroes, he had finally come to learn, required careful and suspicious watching. They were like the potted hyacinths and daffodils that he sometimes bought for Sylvia in midwinter--spectacular but they often yellowed around the edges once you brought them home. The same was true with bright young men who had come along too fast. They were tired because of premature effort, or else overconfidence had made them arrogant. At best the cards were stacked against someone who made good too young. Willis could see now that he had once been in this same dubious category. He could no longer wonder, as he once had, that Mr. Beakney had made no effort to keep him. In fact Mr. Beakney must have been relieved to let him go--gray suit, trimmed hair, polished Oxfords, sharp mind and everything--because he had come along too fast for the age of twenty-nine."

John P. Marquand, Sincerely, Willis Wayde

Posted December 20, 12:00 PM

TT: In your ear

Veteran readers of this blog know that I'm a great fan of old-time radio, and I like nothing better than to spend an otherwise uneventful morning leafing through some detail-packed book whose subject is the shows of the Thirties and Forties in which my parents delighted. Today I've been amusing myself with Gerald Nachman's Raised on Radio, which bears the extensively informative subtitle "In Quest of The Lone Ranger, Jack Benny, Amos 'n' Andy, The Shadow, Mary Noble, The Great Gildersleeve, Fibber McGee and Molly, Bill Stern, Our Miss Brooks, Henry Aldrich, The Quiz Kids, Mr. First Nighter, Fred Allen, Vic and Sade, Jack Armstrong, Arthur Godfrey, Bob and Ray, The Barbour Family, Henry Morgan, Our Gal Sunday, Joe Friday, and Other Lost Heroes from Radio's Heyday." (If none of these names rings a bell, go here and start nosing around. You can listen for free to one show from each series.)

I just ran across the following paragraph, which is so evocative that I wanted to share it with you. It describes the on-air efforts of radio horrormaster Arch Oboler, best known for the series Lights Out:

Oboler was a speedy writer who, at his own dinner parties, would excuse himself at 11 P.M. and return at 1 A.M. with a finished script. He often got ideas from listening to sound-effects records, and took special delight in devising grotesque effects. His scare tactics included the sound of a man frying in the electric chair (sizzling bacon), bones being snapped (spareribs or Life Savers crushed between teeth), heads being severed (chopped cabbages), a knife slicing through a man's body (a slab of pork cut in two), and, most grisly of all, somebody eating human flesh (wet noodles squished with a bathroom plunger). Oboler cooked up a delicious pantryful of terror. The series' most celebrated audio effect--a man being turned inside out--was achieved by turning a watery rubber glove inside out to the accompaniment of crushed berry baskets, to simulate broken bones.

Eeuuww! Foley "artists" be damned: that was the golden age of sound effects.

Posted December 20, 1:44 AM

December 17, 2004

TT: Up to a point, Lord Copper

Says Instapundit:

I don't think most bloggers are blogging away in the expectation of getting rich. Some will, and some larger (but still small) number will be comfortably well off, or at least make enough money to pay the hosting fees. But people blog so that they can express themselves--to be producers, not consumers--and we see this impulse across the world of new and alternative media. But it's not really new. Lots of musicians play music in spite of the fact that most of them won't get rich....They do it because they like to play, and they want their music heard. I think the same kind of thing drives most bloggers, too. It's certainly what's driven me. And while some people will drop out after a while (heck, most people will drop out after a while) the blogosphere will remain.

All absolutely true, as far as it goes, and I'd even venture to say that "citizen journalism" in its countless varieties will prove over time to be the most significant part of blogging. But one of the reasons why I started blogging was in the long-range expectation that to do so would ultimately provide me with an additional source of income, one that might someday compensate for the mainstream media's steadily declining interest in the arts. Note the multiple temporal qualifiers with which that sentence is studded! I've discovered (not to my surprise) that I love blogging for its own sake, and I expect to go on doing it for some time to come, regardless of whether or not it ever becomes profitable. Nevertheless, my oft-repeated prophecy about the blogosphere--that it is the place to which serious commentary about the arts is destined to migrate--will not come true until and unless it becomes possible for serious, committed artbloggers to make a reasonable amount of money from their blogs.

One thing that compensates to some degree for the continuing unprofitability of artblogging is the fact that the blogosphere is now "hot," meaning that some of the best bloggers are starting to attract mainstream media attention simply by virtue of the fact that they're working in a brand-new medium. This allows them to leverage their small-scale celebrity into print-media gigs of various kinds. I couldn't be happier about this development, since it means that the blogosphere is now providing talented unknowns with a new and better way to become known. (Not coincidentally, all my blogger friends are writers of whom I'd never heard until they started blogging.)

My own situation is, of course, different, and I think this difference may explain why so comparatively few established professional writers have embraced blogging: they can't see what's in it for them. Having done it for a year and a half, I know what's in it for me. Not only do I relish the direct contact with readers that it makes possible, but my imagination is stimulated by blogging, which lets me try out ideas in public that very often find their way into my print-media pieces. Even when I don't end up doing anything with these ideas, they quite often set me to thinking in unforeseen ways that lead me in more productive directions. I can already see that this speculative, experimental aspect of blogging, coupled with the immediacy and lack of editorial interference, is what makes the medium so addictive. (It also gives me another way to flog my books.) But be that as it may, I am a professional writer, meaning that I earn my living by selling my words, and I sincerely hope the day comes when I can earn some part of that living by blogging--especially since it's so much fun.

Don't worry: Our Girl and I aren't planning to ask you to subscribe, at least not any time soon! We would, however, be greatly obliged if you'd tell your friends about "About Last Night." Our readership has been growing, slowly but steadily, ever since we went live in the summer of 2003. The steady part we like, but we wouldn't mind seeing our numbers grow a bit faster. So if you like what you see here, spread the word.

Posted December 17, 12:33 PM

TT: The bard of discomfort

It's drama-column time! I reviewed three plays in today's Wall Street Journal: Neil LaBute's Fat Pig, Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals, and Paula Vogel's The Baltimore Waltz.

To my absolute amazement, I really liked Fat Pig:

I'm sure I'm not the only theatergoer who's had trouble making up his mind about Neil LaBute, whose powerful new play, "Fat Pig," opened Wednesday at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. No one is better than Mr. LaBute at sketching the outlines of a relationship: A few quick strokes of casual-sounding dialogue and it's right there in front of you. Nor has he any rivals at the dark art of making an audience anxious: Time and again his characters say and do things so disturbing, and so unexpected, that you all but break out in a sweat of discomfort as you watch them warily circling one another, looking for a chance to shove in the blade. Yet his work is also blighted by a coarse didacticism that too often manifests itself in here's-what-it-all-means speeches as blatant as an episode of "Dragnet," and I've never felt inclined to write in unmixed praise of anything he's done--until now.

Why is "Fat Pig" different? Partly, I think, because the point of this hard-edged little fable, produced by MCC Theater and running through Jan. 15, is so self-evident that Mr. LaBute feels no need to harp on it. As the lights go up, we see Helen (Ashlie Atkinson), a bright, funny, seriously overweight young woman, eating to excess in a cafeteria. Tom (Jeremy Piven), a somewhat less bright, reasonably good-looking white-collar gent, sits down at her table. They strike up a conversation, and Tom discovers, to his obvious surprise, that he finds her appealing. No sooner does she give him her phone number (a typically LaButeian touch) than we meet Tom's friend Carter (Andrew McCarthy), a viciously callous yuppie who regards his interest in Helen with contemptuous pity, and Jeannie (Keri Russell, formerly of TV's "Felicity"), Tom's alarmingly thin semi-girlfriend, who is reduced to a frenzy of self-loathing at the thought that he might prefer a "fat bitch" to her. With that, the game's afoot, and you know somebody's going to get hurt--badly.

Can love really conquer all? It's to Mr. LaBute's credit that he stares down this tough question without blinking, seconded by the performances of his four-person cast and the taut staging of Jo Bonney ("Living Out"). In Ms. Bonney's knowing hands, each scene is screwed up to the highest possible degree ot tension without slopping over into sadistic excess, and none of the characters is ever permitted to overplay his or her hand....

Not so The Rivals, which I loved and expected to:

It's been a long time between drinks for Richard Brinsley Sheridan's "The Rivals," written in 1775 and last seen on Broadway in 1942. Now Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater is putting on a sumptuous new production of Sheridan's classic comedy that isn't even slightly musty.

Directed at a brisk canter by Mark Lamos ("Big Bill"), this delightfully noisy tale of two young couples and their discontents offers its good-sized cast of scene-stealers plenty of prime opportunities to strut their stuff. Who comes out on top? That's an impossible call, though Dana Ivey has more than her share of the best lines as the linguistically challenged Mrs. Malaprop ("Female punctuation forbids me to say more!"). You'll revel in the lewd, gravelly basso of Brian Murray as Sir Lucius O'Trigger; you'll be touched by the unforced warmth and sincerity of Carrie Preston as Julia Melville; you'll be thrilled by the infallible comic authority of Richard Easton as Sir Anthony Absolute. As for John Lee Beatty's too-good-to-be-true set, which depicts a block of townhouses in Bath, it'll knock you out even before you've gotten settled in your seat....

Nor was I much surprised by my strong negative response to The Baltimore Waltz, since Paula Vogel's been disappointing me for quite some time now:

Paula Vogel's "The Baltimore Waltz," playing through Jan. 9 at the Signature Theatre Company's Peter Norton Space, is a nauseatingly coy black comedy about AIDS. Written in 1989, it's being revived as part of the Signature's season-long series of productions of Ms. Vogel's plays. Her brother died of AIDS not long before she started writing the play, and I trust that it helped ease her sorrow, but that doesn't make the results any more artful.

The only good thing about "The Baltimore Waltz" is the ever-wondrous Kristen Johnston, cast in what I take to be the semi-autobiographical role of a woman who, upon learning that her brother (David Marshall Grant) is dying of AIDS, dreams that she has been infected by a deadly virus caught from unclean toilet seats and known as Acquired Toilet Disease, or ATD ("It seems to be an affliction, so far, of single schoolteachers"). This, I fear, is Ms. Vogel's sensible-shoes version of Swiftian irony, and it is a tribute to Ms. Johnston's powers as a comedienne that she actually contrives to squash a few laughs out of it....

No link. To read the whole thing, buy today's Journal, or go here and follow orders.

Posted December 17, 12:04 PM

TT: Rainbow connections

I mentioned the other day that Dvorak's String Sextet was written in "A major, that most divinely innocent of keys." Now a reader writes to ask:

Is there something intrinsic to the key of A major that makes it more innocent than any other? Is it innocent only when strings are playing in it? What about a piano? If it's a brass sextet playing, is A major more or less innocent than B-flat major? Does the emotion a key conveys depend partly, mainly or entirely on what instrument(s) is (are) playing? Were you being whimsical?

I heard Billy Joel say once (1985) that he hated E major. I couldn't imagine having a feeling about a particular key. I still can't.

Any help in assuaging this bafflement would be welcome.

Wonderful questions all, and fearsomely difficult to answer--impossible, really, though I'll do what I can.

To begin with, I was being perfectly serious about the key of A major. I think most musicians feel that certain keys have "characters" or "personalities," though I suspect they feel this way because they have come to associate those keys with specific pieces of music. For instance, I associate A major with a cluster of celebrated compositions whose expressive content I would describe as somehow suggestive of innocence. In addition to the Dvorak Sextet and Schubert's "Trout" Quintet and A Major Rondo for piano duet, Mozart wrote a great many such pieces, most famously the the A Major Piano Concerto, K. 488, and the Clarinet Quintet. D minor, by contrast, is widely thought to be a "demonic" key, threatening and unstable, whereas G major strikes most musicians as warm, friendly, and down to earth. (I once told Nancy LaMott that she was "a real G-major kind of girl," and I didn't have to explain to her what I meant.)

All this, of course, begs my reader's question: are there intrinsic, non-arbitrary reasons why so many composers have tended to choose specific keys in which to make certain kinds of music? Donald Tovey, the great English musicologist, believed that all such key-related associations had to do with the relative "distance" of a given key from C major. (The larger the number of sharps or flats in the key signature, the greater the distance, and the farther the key is removed from the fundamental stability and repose of C major, the "home key" of Western music.) In addition, most musical instruments have perceptibly different tonal qualities when played in particular keys or key families.

Alas, none of this really explains what makes A major sound innocent, so in an attempt to shed more light on the matter, I looked up "key" in the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and found this paragraph:

Keys are often said to possess characteristics associated with various extra-musical emotional states. While there has never been a consensus on these associations, the material basis for these attributions was at one time quite real: because of inequalities in actual temperament, each mode acquired a unique intonation and thus its own distinctive "tone," and the sense that each mode had its own musical characteristics was strong enough to persist even in circumstances in which equal temperament was abstractly assumed. Though highly specific with respect to different repertories and listeners, these expressive qualties fall into two basic categories, which conform to the basic difference--often asserted as an opposition--between major and minor: major is heard to be brighter and more cheerful than minor, which in comparison is darker and sadder.

You have to know quite a bit about music to make sense of the middle part of this "explanation," but it's worth noting that according to the author, the "expressive qualities" of given keys are often "highly specific" with respect to individual listeners. Since I experience the expressive qualities of keys as something like a cross between a color and an emotion, "hating" the key of E minor would be like hating, say, dark blue-green, a notion that strikes me as alien but not altogether absurd (one might well speak of "hating" fear, just as you might hate the taste of cauliflower). In any case, other musicians have had prejudices similar to that of Billy Joel: Sviatoslav Richter, the great Russian pianist, mentioned more than once in his diary that he disliked the key of F minor.

It's probably worth mentioning that I had perfect pitch when I was a working musician, but that I lost it when I stopped playing an instrument regularly and fell out of touch with the physical materials of music-making. I still have perfect relative pitch, but my mental key center has sagged a half-step. Ask me to sing an A and I'll sing an A-flat (unless I stop to think about it, in which case I'll remember to transpose the note I hear in my head up a half-step to compensate). Nevertheless, the Dvorak String Sextet still sounds innocent to me.

I sometimes wonder whether lay listeners who lack this kind of perceptual sensitivity might possibly experience music in more or less the same way that an achromatically color-blind person (that is, someone who sees the world in black and white) experiences visual stimuli, at least when compared to someone like me. To be sure, I'm not a synaesthete: I don't see specific colors when I hear specific sounds. I do, however, experience key signatures and harmonies in a way I take to be analogous to the perception of color, and because I have perfect relative pitch, this also means that I always "know where I am" when listening to a piece of tonal music.

Let me try to explain myself a bit more impressionistically, though I don't know whether it'll help. When I listen to a piece of tonal music, be it a symphonic movement or a three-minute song, I feel as though I'm listening to a short story or novel being read aloud rather than looking at a painting. On the other hand, I experience this musical "story" as a kind of perceptual space through which I move at a rate of speed determined by the composer, in rather the same way that one might envision the "world" of a novel in pictorial terms. And though this space is abstract--I don't "see" anything when I listen--I'm definitely in a "place" where significant events are unfolding in a meaningful order, even though their meaning cannot be expressed in words or represented by colors and shapes.

That makes sense, doesn't it? No? Well, I'll try one last comparison: if you've ever seen a plotless ballet by George Balanchine, that will give you a very rough idea of what I'm experiencing when I listen to music.

UPDATE: Sarah writes to remind me of those wonderful lines from Cole Porter's "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye": "There's no love song finer/But how strange the change from major to minor/Ev'ry time we say goodbye." (Here's the best recording of that perfect song.) She also passes on this great one-liner:

My favorite quote about keys was attributed to the klezmer clarinetist Sid Beckerman, though he probably stole it from someone else: "D minor: it's not just a key, it's a living!"

That's a musician's joke.

Posted December 17, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Stephen admired his learning, his skill in diagnosis, and his wonderful handing of his lunatics; Choate could often bring comfort to those who seemed so deeply sunk in their own private hell as to be beyond all communication, and although he had some dangerous patients he had never been attacked. Choate's ideas on war, slavery, and the exploitation of the Indians were eminently sound; his way of spending his considerable private means on others was wholly admirable; and sometimes, when Stephen was talking to Choate he would consider that earnest face with its unusually large, dark, kindly eyes and wonder whether he was not looking at a saint: at other times a spirit of contradiction would rise, and although he could not really defend poverty, war, or injustice he would feel inclined to find excuses for slavery. He would feel that there was too much indignation mingled with the benevolence, even though the indignation was undeniably righteous; that Dr. Choate indulged in goodness as some indulged in evil; and that he was so enamoured of his role that he would make any sacrifice to sustain it. Choate had no humour, or he would never have linked drink and tobacco to issues so very much more important--Stephen liked his glass of wine and his cigar--and he was certainly guilty of deliberate meekness on occasion. Perhaps there was some silliness there: might it be that silliness and love of one's fellow men were inseparable?"

Patrick O'Brian, The Fortune of War

Posted December 17, 12:00 PM

TT: That'll have to hold you (revised version)

That's soooo it for me. And yes, I know I said that earlier today, but this time I really mean it. I'm hitting the road first thing Saturday morning, not to resettle in Smalltown, U.S.A., until some time on Sunday (I'm going straight from the St. Louis airport to a wedding in the middle of Missouri, then turning around and heading for points southeast). I won't be blogging again until Monday at the earliest.

I do, however, plan to report from Smalltown with reasonable if not excessive regularity, just like I did last year. Even when I'm not posting, I'll be thinking of you. And I'll also be updating the right-hand column from time to time, starting with the three brand-new Top Fives I just posted. "About Last Night" never sleeps!

Which reminds me: did I tell you that Our Girl in Chicago will be coming to New York shortly after Christmas? I'm planning to show her off to all my blogfriends on New Year's Eve, and certain selected luminaries may even be allowed to see her without the mask. She'll be posting from here, so keep your eyes peeled for staggering revelations.

So long for now. Happy happy joy joy.

P.S. Oh, yes, one more thing: don't forget to buy copies of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine and A Terry Teachout Reader for the as-yet-ungifted on your Christmas list!

Now I'm done. Finally. Really.

Posted December 17, 8:46 AM

December 16, 2004

TT: Guilt me not

So little energy, so much on my mind! I want to post a dozen things, but I can't get the car to start. Aside from the writing-for-money I have to wrap up and send off so that I can go west to Smalltown, U.S.A., with a clear conscience, I seem to be feeling the accumulated effects of weeks of overwork, exacerbated by the flu I finally shook off this past weekend. In short, I need a rest, and my hope (no doubt futile) is that I'll get one in Smalltown, the continuous hum and buzz of family life notwithstanding. I'm bringing my iBook with me for the holidays, in the hope that I'll spring back to life, but for the moment I think I need to lie fallow.

Incidentally, I got some nice e-mail from those of you who heard me on Soundcheck the other day, to which I can only say that I enjoyed myself as much as you enjoyed me. (I don't mean that quite the way it sounds.) John Schaefer and I have always had excellent chemistry, and whenever I chat with him on the air without notes or prior preparation, I catch myself wondering whether it might be more fun to talk on the radio for a living than to sit at my desk for hours on end, putting premeditated words into precise order...but no! That way lies the fate of Desmond MacCarthy, Robert Benchley, and all those other writers who lost their appetite for Getting It Down on Paper. I'll flirt with radio--indeed, I might even engage in heavy petting on a semi-regular basis, assuming she were to make me a sufficiently enticing offer--but that's where it stops. Honest.

I've also received several different versions of the following letter, which was inspired by a passing remark I posted the other day:

I'm one of those unfortunate folk who is allergic to most of the Major American Novelists who came of age in the Fifties. Roth, Bellow, Mailer, Updike: all leave me cold as last month's fish.

To which an old friend whom I haven't seen in far too long replied:

So liberating to read your admission of an allergy to "important" 50's-burgeoned Major American Novelists Roth, Bellow, Mailer, Updike, all of whom I have tried to "appreciate" and detest...mainly because I couldn't respect them due to their awful lack of ability to create memorable, fully realized female characters...do you suppose that a possible reason for your allergy is that you are, like your beloved Balanchine, a Man who Loves Women?

As you can see, the author of this particular e-mail knows me very well. For as long as I can remember, all but a handful of my closest friends have been women, and it thus stands to reason that I'd tend to find women-unfriendly writers tedious. What's more, I can think of several less-than-important novelists (Elmore Leonard comes to mind) whom I enjoy in part because their women characters are both "fully realized" and extremely likable. On the other hand, none of this explains why I'm also so powerfully drawn to noir tale-telling, both on paper and on screen, which is about as misogynistic as it gets (though the noir writers, Raymond Chandler above all, seem as a rule to be more afraid of women than disgusted by them). Any ideas?

Oh, and in case you're wondering, I know exactly what I'm up to: even as I earnestly explain why I'm not going to post today, I'm succumbing to the stealthy undertow of blogging. Yes, I've been watching the referral log, and I have a few pithy comments to make about...but they'll have to wait. Instead, I'm shutting the shop down and leaving the rest of my inchoate thoughts unrecorded, at least for the moment. They'll keep. I'll keep. And I'll keep better for having taken another day off.

See you Friday.

Posted December 16, 12:02 PM

TT: Another pair of ears

I just burned the following mix for a friend:

- Aaron Copland, "Down a Country Lane" (original version for piano)
- Bill Frisell, "My Man's Gone Now"
- Claire Lynch, "Jealousy"
- Erin McKeown, "A Better Wife"
- Jonatha Brooke, "Is This All"
- Steely Dan, "Any Major Dude Will Tell You"
- Selim Palmgren, "West Finnish Dance" (played by Benno Moiseiwitsch)
- Luciana Souza, "Doce de Coco"
- Pat Metheny, "Midwestern Night's Dream"
- Emmanuel Chabrier, "Idyll" (orchestral version, from Suite pastorale)
- Tony Rice Unit, "Neon Tetra"
- Percy Grainger, "Brigg Fair" (sung by Peter Pears and the Linden Singers)
- Nickel Creek, "Seven Wonders"
- Ned Rorem, "The Lordly Hudson" (sung by Susan Graham)
- Mary Foster Conklin, "Mad About You"
- Bill Charlap, "A Quiet Girl"
- Gabriel Fauré, "Epithalame" (from Shylock)
- Aimee Mann, "Save Me"
- Skip James, "Devil Got My Woman"
- Jerry Goldsmith, Chinatown (final cue)
- Bill Evans, "The Bad and the Beautiful"
- Mabel Mercer, "The World Today"
- Nancy LaMott, "Surrey with the Fringe on Top"
- François Couperin, "The Mysterious Barricades" (arranged for eleven-string guitar by Göran Söllscher)

Posted December 16, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"So maybe movies are always about the faces on the screen, as opposed to the minds that constructed them?"

David Thomson, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood

Posted December 16, 12:00 PM

TT: Work in progress

Here's a sentence I just wrote:

Rare is the male artist capable of withstanding the blandishments of a determined woman who is intelligent, humorless, sufficiently fawning, and sexually available.

Now guess which woman I had in mind....

UPDATE: We have a winner! Alas, the reader who guessed Alma Mahler signs his/her e-mail only with an address, so I can't give credit where it's due, but you know who you are.

Other early guesses included Simone de Beauvoir, Gala Dali, Lil Hardin Armstrong (Louis' second wife), Lillian Hellman, Bianca Jagger, Mary McCarthy, Marilyn Monroe (but was she really humorless?), Yoko Ono, Judith Regan (whom I hope doesn't read this blog!), George Sand (extra points for that one), and Elizabeth Taylor.

Posted December 16, 2:42 AM

December 15, 2004

TT: Almanac

"Every immigrant is broken, sometimes beautifully."

Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, de Kooning: An American Master

Posted December 15, 12:00 PM

TT: Status report

This is another writing-for-money day, so I don't expect to do any posting, though I might break that promise later in the afternoon should things go unusually well.

If you haven't poked your head in lately, OGIC and I were quite busy on Monday and Tuesday, so take a look.

Otherwise, I'll see you tomorrow. In the meantime, why not visit one of the many blogs listed in the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column? They're full of good stuff, too....

Posted December 15, 11:22 AM

TT: Speaking of the Bad Sex Award...

You know whose sex scenes always advance the plot and deepen our knowledge of the characters? John Sayles.

UPDATE: A reader writes: "Who else's sex scenes always advance the plot--Jane Austen."

Posted December 15, 10:03 AM

December 14, 2004

TT: Turn your radio on

I'll be on WNYC's Soundcheck this afternoon, talking about George Balanchine's version of The Nutcracker, which figures prominently (big surprise) in All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine.

If you live in the New York City area and expect to be near a radio at two p.m. EST, tune in 93.9 FM and give a listen.

If not, go to the Soundcheck Web page, where you can listen to the program from anywhere in the world on your computer, either via live streaming audio or by accessing the Soundcheck online archive.

See you on the radio, as Charles Osgood says. (At least I think it's him.)

UPDATE: It's all done, and it was great fun. (I always love doing Soundcheck.) If you didn't hear me live, check out the archived broadcast.

Posted December 14, 12:04 PM

TT: Extra-special bonus quote

It can't be a full-fledged almanac entry unless I can source it precisely (please keep this in mind when sending in quotations), but Patrick Wahl e-mailed me an undated excerpt from a USA Today story about the new U2 album, and I liked it so much that I had to pass it along anyway:

Dismantling [How to Dismantle an Atomic] Bomb's origins, Bono recalls an early version of "Vertigo" that was massaged, hammered, tweaked and lubed before it sailed through two mixes and got U2's unanimous stamp of "very good," which meant not good enough.

"Very good," Bono says, "is the enemy of great. You think great is right next door. It's not. It's in another country."

Well said, Mr. Bono, sir.

Posted December 14, 12:03 PM

TT: A little list

Last month I asked you you to recommend a book or two for me to read, specifying that it be "short, intelligent, amusing, reasonably easy to find, and no more than modestly demanding." Here are the recommendations I received in return:

- The Beginning of Spring, by Penelope Fitzgerald
- Berlin Noir, a trilogy by Phillip Kerr
- Billie Dyer, by William Maxwell
- The Birth of the Modern, by Paul Johnson
- The Book Against God, by James Wood
- A Chance Meeting, by Rachel Cohen
- The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor
- The Dalkey Archive, by Flann O'Brien
- The Diary of Helena Morley (translated by Elizabeth Bishop)
- Dwarf Rapes Nun; Flees in UFO, by Arnold Sawislak
- Evenings with the Orchestra, by Hector Berlioz
- The Feud, by Thomas Berger
- Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig
- Hooking Up, by Tom Wolfe
- Journey to the Land of the Flies, by Aldo Buzzi
- Love and War in the Appenines, by Eric Newby
- Georges Simenon's Maigret novels
- A New Life, by Bernard Malamud
- O, My America!, by Johanna Kaplan
- The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing, by William Maxwell
- An Old Man's Love, by Anthony Trollope
- An Open Book, by Michael Dirda
- The Provincial Lady in Soviet Russia, by E.M. Delafield
- The Pushcart War, by Jean Merrill
- Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation, by William Gass
- The Rebbetzin, by Chaim Grade
- The Russian Debutante's Handbook, by Gary Shteyngart
- A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, by Eric Newby
- Tempest Tost, by Robertson Davies
- Thursday Next, a series of novels by Jasper Fforde
- The Total View of Taftly, by Scott Morris
- The Tunnel, by William H. Gass
- Wakefield, by Andrei Codrescu
- What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, by Daniel Pool

For the record, one of the books on this list is an all-time personal favorite, and I'm mentioned at length (not favorably, either!) in another one. The really great thing about the list, though, is that I've only read six of the books on it, if you count the dozen-odd Maigret novels I've read over the years as one superbook. I'm amazed and delighted (if not surprised) by the wide-ranging taste of the readers of "About Last Night," and I plan to take advantage of it in the coming weeks and months. Thanks to you all.

P.S. To the comedian who recommended The Birth of the Modern, I ask, what's your idea of a long book?

Posted December 14, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Dear World, I am leaving you because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool--good luck."

George Sanders, suicide note (1972)

Posted December 14, 12:00 PM

December 13, 2004

TT: Prize packages

Nobody in the business takes the classical-music Grammies seriously, even when deserving albums are nominated (which happens more often than you might think). The jazz Grammies are different, even when undeserving albums are nominated (which also happens more often than you might think), for a timely nomination can give a significant boost to an artist's career. Thus it's with the greatest of pleasure that I take note of the fact that several "About Last Night" faves got the nod last week:

- For best large jazz ensemble album, Bob Brookmeyer's Get Well Soon and Maria Schneider's Concert in the Garden.

- For best instrumental composition, Schneider's "Bulería, Soleá y Rumba" (included on Concert in the Garden) and Schneider's "Three Romances," recorded by the University of Miami Concert Jazz Band on Romances.

- For best jazz instrumental album, individual or group, the Bill Charlap Trio's Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein.

- For best jazz instrumental solo, Donny McCaslin on Schneider's "Bulería, Soleá y Rumba" and John Scofield on "Wee" (included on EnRoute).

- For best historical reissue and best album notes (by Loren Schoenberg), Woody Herman's The Complete Columbia Recordings Of Woody Herman And His Orchestra & Woodchoppers (1945-1947), available only by mail order from Mosaic Records.

I think these more than make up for Queen Latifah's nomination for best jazz vocal album, don't you? (We simply won't talk about the scandalous omission of Luciana Souza's exquisite Neruda.)

I might add--because it's hugely significant--that Concert in the Garden is only available on line from Maria Schneider's Web site, which uses ArtistShare's radical new Web-based technology to market Schneider's music directly to listeners. In effect, Schneider is now her own record label. That's the future, folks.

I am, needless to say, torn in twain by the fact that Schneider and Brookmeyer, both of whom I admire extravagantly and without reserve, were both nominated for best big-band CD, especially since their albums are both sensationally good. (Isn't it a wonderful coincidence, by the way, that Schneider studied composition with Brookmeyer? He's so proud of her that he could explode.)

I e-mailed congratulations to them last week, adding, "But who am I going to root for?" To which Brookmeyer instantly replied, "The Red Sox, of course."

That's a good answer.

Posted December 13, 12:45 PM

TT: Randomizer

- Reflections in D Minor, one of the art-and-life blogs I read regularly, distributed its First Annual Me Too Weblog Awards the other day. I won one: "The Professional Journalist Who Actually Gets Blogging Award." This pleased me no end, in part because I remember the fuss I kicked up by posting my notes on blogging several months ago (and yes, it was presumptuous of me!).

A steadily growing number of professional journalists have waded into the blogosphere since Our Girl and I set up shop in this space, some of whom clearly get it and some of whom just as clearly don't. It's not for me to say to which category I belong, but one thing I do know is that I've tried to get it--that is, to approach blogging on its own distinctive terms. I'm glad to see that Reflections in D Minor agrees.

If I were handing out my own set of awards, by the way, I'd give a similar one to Alex Ross, whose page started out as a boring old links-to-my-print-media-stuff billboard but evolved with impressive and gratifying speed into a bonafide blog. Alex gets it, too.

- A great conductor died the other day, but hardly anybody noticed, and I doubt that many readers of this blog would have known his name. Yet Frederick Fennell was one of the most gifted and individual conductors of the century just past. The reason why he failed to make a significant impression on the listening public-at-large was that he spent virtually the whole of his career conducting concert bands. What John Philip Sousa started, Fennell finished by founding the Eastman Wind Ensemble in 1952. Together with that peerless group, he made a long series of band recordings for Mercury whose vigor, precision, and technical finesse have never been equaled, much less surpassed. One of them, Percy Grainger's Lincolnshire Posy, is in my opinion one of the greatest recordings of the 20th century--and note that I didn't say "greatest band recordings," either.

The New York Times published a too-short obituary of Fennell that ends with this anecdote, circulated via e-mail by Cathy Martensen, Fennell's daughter:

Ms. Martensen recounted that on his deathbed Mr. Fennell said, "I cannot die without a drummer." She added that his last words were: "I hear him. I'm O.K. now."

I hope I have the presence of mind to say something half so appropriate when the Distinguished Thing pays me a call.

- A reader wrote to ask if I'd post a list of my favorite Christmas albums and/or songs. Truth to tell, I'm not fond of very many pop-music Christmas albums, most of which run to the cheesy (this one being an obvious exception). I do, however, have a favorite Christmas song, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." It's a simple, graceful ballad that just happens to be about Christmas, and it rarely fails to move me to tears. Though it's been recorded hundreds of times, I still think Judy Garland's first version is the best. (That's how you can tell I'm straight, all superficial cultural indications to the contrary: I prefer Garland's early recordings.)

As for classical-style albums, I have two particular favorites, Robert Shaw's elegantly sung Songs of Angels: Christmas Hymns and Carols and the King's College Choir's recording of Benjamin Britten's A Ceremony of Carols, a modern masterpiece that, like "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," just happens to be about Christmas.

- Speaking of A Ceremony of Carols, which is one of every self-respecting harpist's top five bread-and-butter pieces (it's scored for boys' choir and harp), I've been meaning for weeks now to plug one of the smartest blogs in the 'sphere, Helen Radice's twang twang twang. Radice is a professional harpist who lives in England and blogs about her everyday life as a working musician, not infrequently pausing to make amplifying remarks that have a way of sticking in my mind:

It is hard to play classical music if you bottle up what you feel. Traditionally it is not concerned with spectacle and focuses instead on the emotional, the spiritual, and so on. But when you go on stage you put on a show, acting confident when you don't feel confident. And despite the adage that courage is acting bravely no matter how scared you really are, because in music you cannot lie, it is not the same. I love show business, but it is not the same.

I don't know a thing about Radice other than what she posts on her blog, but I sure wish she'd move to Manhattan and start hanging with all the other New York-based bloggers. I bet she'd fit right in.

- A lot of music on the blog this morning, huh? (Even the almanac entry is about an imaginary composer.) Don't ask me how I got so preoccupied, though it could have something to do with the fact that I just made a megacool new friend who is, like Helen Radice, a working musician. That might explain why my mind has been running in musical circles for the past few days. No doubt a better balance will reassert itself as the week wears on...

- ...or not. I have three or four print-media pieces to write this week before heading for Smalltown, U.S.A, on Saturday morning (I'm thinking of trying to wheedle a week's grace out of one of my more susceptible editors), so I don't expect to post with my usual demoralizing regularity. I'll do my best to at least keep my hand in, though, and I'll also be bringing my iBook home for the holidays, so don't worry about going cold turkey. I'll be around.

Now excuse the hell out of me while I go make some money....

Posted December 13, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"He began to laugh uncontrollably, quite in the old manner. Then, with an effort, he stopped. He was almost breathless, coughing hard. At the end of this near paroxysm he looked less ill, more exhausted. The information had greatly cheered him.

"'No, really, that's too much. Am I to be suffocated by nostalgia? Will that be my end? I should not be at all surprised. I can see the headline:

MUSICIAN DIES OF NOSTALGIA

"'They'd put someone like Gossage on to the obit. "Mr. Hugh Moreland--probably just Hugh Moreland these days--(writes our Music Critic), at a fashionable gathering last night--I'm sure Gossage still talks about fashionable gatherings--succumbed to an acute attack of nostalgia, a malady to which he had been a martyr for years. His best-known works, etc., etc...."'"

Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings

Posted December 13, 12:00 PM

TT: Concurrence

I'm totally with OGIC on M.F.K. Fisher (see immediately below). I think she's the American Colette, another wonderful writer whom some dried-up anhedonic types Just Don't Get. I've introduced a dozen close friends to her work over the years, and not one has failed to warm to her. This isn't to say that you absolutely have to like Fisher (or Colette) if you want to be my friend, but apparently it doesn't hurt.

As for critics who poke holes just to hear the pop, that's awfully undergraduate, don't you think?

When I was an undergraduate, studying music criticism with the late John Haskins, who was then the music critic of the Kansas City Star, I brought in a paper for his perusal in which I declared that I didn't like Schumann. He said, mildly, "You know, Terry, that says more about you than it does about Schumann." As I pulled the arrow out of my forehead, I realized that I'd just learned a priceless lesson: if you're going to express a personal prejudice in a review, one that causes you to dissent decisively from a long-standing verdict of posterity, do it ruefully, in full awareness that your inability to appreciate an obviously great artist is a failure of taste that separates you from the communion of truth.

(And no, Wagner doesn't count.)

Posted December 13, 10:31 AM

OGIC: Next time, bring a sharper pin

Do you get the feeling that Laura Shapiro, reviewing the new M. F. K. Fisher biography for the New York Times Book Review, is not so entranced with the book's subject?

Though her subject was food, it needn't have been: she could have been writing about clocks or Christmas trees, and they would have sent her prose wafting dizzily into the realms of love, death and desire, just as tangerines and oysters did....

Readers tumbled blissfully into the concoctions of sensuality and fantasy that swirled across her pages, and to many aspiring authors her style was irresistible. A heady narcissism, feverishly laced with romantic innuendo, became the new mode in evocative food writing. [all emphasis added]

I recognize myself in there--the reader who has read Fisher blissfully again and again--but Fisher herself, as far as I'm concerned, doesn't answer to Shapiro's snarky descriptions. In the third paragraph of the review, Shapiro as much as admits that she's the opposite of a fan:

But who was she? Who was that mysterious woman sitting alone in a restaurant, relishing a meal she had chosen so astutely that the other diners, even the waiters, were stunned? Who was that narrator so elusive we can only picture her veiled? Anyone who has ever asked this question, either in pleasure or in mounting irritation, will pounce....

You can guess which way Shapiro asked that question. Irritation is the keynote of this dismissive and bored review. It ultimately ends up "pouncing," indeed, on some of the less pleasant of biographer Joan Reardon's revelations about Fisher. Shapiro seems to have been only too glad to hear them. If I sound irritated myself, it's not because I require other readers to share my near-veneration (yeah, I'll cop to it) of Fisher's prose but because Shapiro doesn't bother to actually make any sort of real case against it. She instead lazily slings around some snide innuendo that conjures up, weirdly, a flighty Fisher whose aesthetic has a lot in common with a perfume commercial. Which is ridiculous, as I'll explain below. As a bonus, the review manages to condescend mightily to Fisher's admirers, who "tumble" into the books rather than reading them, and the most dedicated of whom are suspected of being "aspiring authors" (the horror!) or trend-surfing foodies. If you ask me, she seems awfully suspicious--suspiciously suspicious--of pleasure, in eating or reading. And so, perhaps, not the ideal reviewer of Poet of the Appetites.

Far more fair, balanced, and credible in his description of Fisher's work is Brian Thomas Gallagher, who reviews the same biography for Bookforum this month (kisses hereby blown to Cinetrix for the link-up):

M.F.K. Fisher is, more than anything else, a literary seductress. Her writing, always sensual but never decadent, draws the reader near her. Whether she is at the dinner table, on a transatlantic cruise, on a country walk in Dijon, or somewhere else more private, one wishes to join her in her pleasures.

This focus on the proximity of the experiences Fisher describes in her best essays is just right. Most of the pleasures she evokes are modest, small, tactile. Even if she does make great claims for their metaphysical significance, the pleasures themselves remain lodged in the sensual world with all its contingencies.

Gallagher also gives Fisher's readers a little credit for being sophisticated enough to know that her writings did not record the gospel truth:

There was already little doubt that M.F.K. Fisher the protagonist differed significantly from M.F.K. Fisher the person. It would be hard for any reader of Fisher to believe that she was at once as naive and as worldly as she comes across in her writing. Moreover, such conceits are part of autobiography, and in fact, the writer herself acknowledged this. In a letter to her psychiatrist in 1950, she wondered, "Do I marry M.F.K. Fisher and retire with him-her-it to an ivory tower and turn out yearly masterpieces of unimportant prose?" So while belaboring the fact that there are two Fishers, what Poet of the Appetites does not do well is explore the meaning of the relationship between them.

For this sober paragraph I'm grateful, especially after the gotcha tone of Shapiro's review, and her overreaching for an original response to Fisher's work--to the point of ceasing to see that work clearly. Her detractions reminded me of a small aside in a (fascinating) essay (that you should read) in the New Republic last week (do read it). Here Rochelle Gurstein writes about the painter Raphael's present-day detractors, specifically Michael Kimmelman at the New York Times: "When Kimmelman says he doesn't 'get' Raphael, there is hardly a ripple (except for the irritation felt by those who are tired of critics who try to say shocking things)." I wouldn't mind entertaining such detractions if they were critically persuasive. Shapiro isn't out to persuade, or even shock (that would require more energy than she brings)--just to puncture.

The best news here is reported in Gallagher's review:

Fortunately, to coincide with the biography, North Point press has just reissued five of her best works. An Alphabet for Gourmets, Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf, Serve It Forth, and, Fisher's loveliest book, The Gastronomical Me, have all recently become available in paperback (though one is still probably better off with the single-volume collection The Art of Eating, which contains them all).

And here is the only particular in Gallagher's review I must take issue with. Spring for the five individual volumes; they're lovely objects, especially the photographs of Fisher that grace their covers, which Bookforum has smartly reproduced alongside the review.

As for me, I may well return to those fab five in the near future. But I'll skip the biography, thanks anyway.

Posted December 13, 4:58 AM

TT: In memory of...

As the days go by,
I keep thinking, "When does it end?
Where's the day I'll have started forgetting?"
But I just go on
Thinking and sweating
And cursing and crying
And turning and reaching
And waking and dying
And no,
Not a day goes by,
Not a blessed day
But you're still somewhere part of my life
And you won't go away.

Stephen Sondheim, "Not a Day Goes By" (from Merrily We Roll Along)

Posted December 13, 1:47 AM

TT: Backward glance

I was just thinking...what a wonderful year it's been. In addition to publishing two books, being appointed to the National Council on the Arts, and buying a few more lithographs than I could afford, I've experienced every imaginable kind of aesthetic pleasure, from the music of Jonatha Brooke and Erin McKeown to such terrific new plays as Doubt, Intimate Apparel, Charlie Victor Romeo, and Private Jokes, Public Places. I heard Hilary Hahn play the Elgar Violin Concerto. I haunted the nightclubs of New York, where I heard more great jazz than I can possibly list here. I saw Sideways and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I threw myself head first into Lucas Schoormans' Giorgio Morandi show. I reread the complete works of Evelyn Waugh. I saw Kristin Chenoweth sing Cunegonde. And those are just the things that come immediately to mind! Were I to look back over my blog entries and "Second City" columns for 2004, I'm sure I'd blush to recall some of the good things that are temporarily slipping my middle-aged mind.

I've also made some wonderful friends, not a few of them such fellow bloggers as Maud, Sarah, Chicha (a/k/a Galley Cat), and Maccers, whose postings first brought them to my attention, but who have since become a part of my corporeal life as well.

How lucky am I? Words can't even begin to say. Thanks to you all, hither and yon, for taking part in the fun--and thanks above all to Our Girl in Chicago, my adored co-blogger, who has been improving my life for more than a decade.

Posted December 13, 1:34 AM

December 10, 2004

TT: Much more Mr. Nice Guy

I reviewed four plays in this morning's Wall Street Journal, Billy Crystal's 700 Sundays, the Broadway revival of La Cage aux Folles, August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean, and Caryl Churchill's A Number.

Rather to my surprise, 700 Sundays was the best of the lot, despite its predictable weaknesses:

Go figure: Billy Crystal, who got his big break playing the first openly gay character on a network TV series, has ended up as a sort of 21st-century Bob Hope, the safe-as-milk middle-aged establishment comic who hosts the Oscars and is now making his Broadway debut with a one-man "play" at the Broadhurst Theatre about his charmed life as a loyal son, husband and father. Small wonder that "700 Sundays," with advance sales of $8 million plus, is on the inside track to be Broadway's uranium-plated smash of the season. And here's the biggest surprise of all: It's actually a pretty good show. Who says nice guys finish last?

I put "play" in quotes because "700 Sundays," like so many one-person shows, occupies an uncertain middle ground between standup routine and full-fledged play. Simply to tell the story of your life in monologue form may or may not be interesting, but it's rarely dramatic in the ordinary understanding of the word, and Mr. Crystal's luck has been too good to give his long string of essentially benign anecdotes the ruthless forward movement one demands from a play....

Mr. Crystal seems to be aware of the need to ratchet up the tension in his tale-telling, and when he recalls such potentially radioactive events as the death of his father, you can all but see him struggling to drag "700 Sundays" onto a higher plane of expressivity. Alas, he is barely capable of talking for more than 30 seconds without slipping in a punchline--a compulsion that is especially jolting whenever he tries to be serious....

La Cage aux Folles, on the other hand, was...well, read for yourself:

Once upon a time, "La Cage aux Folles" was a sweet little French film about a couple of graying gents, one of them a flouncy-to-the-max drag queen, who run a nightclub in St. Tropez. Stripped of the louche details, it turned out to be an unexpectedly touching study of the surmountable absurdities of middle-aged love and became the sleeper hit of 1978. Five years later, Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman got their hot little hands on this hot little property, pumped in several thousand tons of hot air, and thereby turned it into a monstrously inflated tourist trap of a musical that ran for 1,761 performances. Now "La Cage aux Folles" has returned to Broadway's Marquis Theatre, there to titillate a new generation of taste-challenged ticketholders.

Or maybe not. Times, after all, have changed greatly since 1983, and what once seemed ooh-so-risqué to Broadway audiences may well strike their children as dated beyond recall. For one thing, homosexuality has long since become a commonplace of American popular culture, not least on the New York stage, and you no longer get automatic PC points for merely showing two guys holding hands, even if one of them is a drag queen. In addition, the caravan of musical taste has also moved on, and I can't imagine that Mr. Herman's cynically cornball ditties (complete with banjo accompaniment) will have much to offer viewers suckled on "Avenue Q." As for Mr. Fierstein's book, it covers up Jean Poiret's original script with a plywood veneer of applause-sign jokes so thick as to completely obscure the wryness and warmth that made it so winning.

I didn't see the 1983 production, which was directed by Arthur Laurents, a man who knows his theatrical onions, but it must have been better than this glitzmobile. Daniel Davis and Gary Beach make no impression at all in the lead roles; Jerry Zaks's staging and Jerry Mitchell's dance numbers are similarly unmemorable; Scott Pask's sets are week-old cheddar. Even the chorus line gives transvestism a bad name....

Gem of the Ocean just wasn't my thing:

Everybody else in the world seems to think that August Wilson is the Great American Playwright, but I've found his cycle of history plays about the black experience in America to be far too self-consciously poetic, and "Gem of the Ocean," the latest installment, is no exception.

Those who beg to differ will need no urging to see this one, though, and even if you don't much care for Mr. Wilson's style, you'll be thrilled by Phylicia Rashad's queen-size performance as Aunt Ester, the 285-year-old clairvoyant who makes her first onstage appearance in "Gem of the Ocean" after having been talked about in eight previous plays. I didn't know Ms. Rashad could really act until I saw her in "A Raisin in the Sun" last year--I just figured she was the best of all possible Clair Huxtables--but now I'd go see her in anything, no questions asked....

And A Number was plain old disappointing:

Don't believe a word of the ballyhoo about Caryl Churchill's "A Number," running through Jan. 16 at the New York Theatre Workshop. For all Ms. Churchill's deckle-edged standing among the ranks of contemporary English playwrights, her latest effort is nothing more than a bagatelle, a one-act, 65-minute play whose clever premise (a father confronts three of his cloned sons) cannot conceal its slightness. Considered purely as a conversation piece, it starts off strongly, sags in the middle, then picks up speed at the end, not quite in time to save the day....

No link, alas, since there's plenty more where that came from. To read the whole thing, get off your behind and go buy a Journal. (For the lazy man's alternative, click here.)

Posted December 10, 12:04 PM

TT: Almanac

"The theatre is an attack on mankind carried out by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal. Art's relation with its client is here at its closest and most immediate. In other arts, we can blame the client: he is stupid, unsophisticated, inattentive, dull. But the theatre must, if need be, stoop--and stoop--until it attains the direct, the universal communication which other artists can afford to seek more deviously and at their ease."

Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea (courtesy of Mindy Alter)

Posted December 10, 12:00 PM

December 9, 2004

TT: Dear Diary

7:05 A.M.: I wake up an hour and a half ahead of the alarm clock, notice with disgust that sentences are already starting to take shape in my head, sigh deeply, and crawl down from the loft to face the inevitable and start writing my Friday column for The Wall Street Journal, an extra-long four-play special.

9:00 A.M.: Laura Lippman arrives on my doorstep for a tour of the Teachout Museum, after which we stroll over to Good Enough to Eat. (Mmmm, bacon waffles!) Laura and I are old friends who rarely see one another nowadays, since she lives in Baltimore and spends half the year writing mysteries and the other half flying around the country on author tours, so we always try to have breakfast together whenever she's in Manhattan for more than a day. She brings greetings from Lizzie and Sarah, and I in turn tell her to go see Doubt as soon as she can. We then exchange the latest high-octane media gossip, furtively glancing around the room every few minutes to make sure nobody is eavesdropping.

11 A.M. Back to the office to finish my column, spurred on by an e-mail from my editor asking when the hell I'll be filing. (Actually, she was perfectly nice about it, but I like feeling put upon.)

12:35 P.M. All done! I ship the column off to the Journal, then check my e-mail. Maccers says I should bring Apple Blossoms II with me to the Phillips for my lecture. At the moment I'm inclined to agree, but I'm fickle when it comes to my favorites....

12:45 P.M.: Tidings of great joy: Our Girl in Chicago calls to say she can come to New York on December 29 to spend a few days as my houseguest. Midway through our chat I fire off a round-robin e-mail to all our blogfriends, advising them to make appointments now to meet the mysterious OGIC in person.

1:15 P.M.: My copy editor at the Journal returns my column with four easy-to-fix queries. I knock them off, then pause briefly to catch my breath and look out the window. Is that sunshine I see out there?

1:20 P.M.: Karen Wilkin reviewed the new Museum of Modern Art for the Leisure & Arts page of yesterday's Journal. I bookmarked her piece for later perusal, and now I read the last paragraph with approval:

But one glaring omission goes beyond such differences to become a serious distortion of art history. American modernism before Abstract Expressionism is virtually absent at the new MoMA. Only token representation is accorded pivotal figures like Stuart Davis and Arthur Dove; other influential pioneers, such as Marsden Hartley, are ignored. Davis is relegated to a corridor, hardly an appropriate place for an American master accorded a retrospective at MoMA in 1945. Clearly some things haven't changed for the better at the new museum. Let's hope it's a temporary aberration.

This gives me an idea. I call the Mutant on her cell phone and schedule a last-minute rendezvous.

2:00 P.M.: As if I didn't have enough to do today, I head down to MoMA and meet the Mutant, who teaches voice at the New School on Wednesdays and has three hours off between classes. We spend an hour and half looking at art, then grab a bite in the second-floor café. This is my first trip to the new MoMA since it opened to the public, and the galleries, as I'd suspected, don't look nearly so cavernous when they're full of gawkers. It's the Mutant's first MoMA visit ever (she came to New York after the old museum had closed), and the permanent collection blows her away, especially the Matisses, the Klees, and a gallery of paintings by Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Helen Frankenthaler, and Morris Louis. "I think I'm just beginning to figure out that these guys were having fun," she says, grinning.

4:45 P.M.: Back home to collect today's snail mail (not too much, thank God) and check my e-mail.

5:30 P.M.: To bed for a pre-theater nap (an absolute must on days when I'm double- or triple-booked--otherwise I'm likely to nod off in my aisle seat).

6:40 P.M.: I revive myself with a scaldingly hot shower, tug a black sweater over my red, swollen flesh, and hail a cab for the theater district, calling my mother in Smalltown, U.S.A., from the back seat. (I almost always give my mother a call on the way to the theater, an idea I got from a rich friend who places all his calls from his limousine in order to save time. I may not have a limousine, but at least I've got a cell phone, not to mention a mother.)

7:45 P.M.: To the Signature Theatre Company's Peter Norton Space to meet the Chichalicious Galley Cat and see Kristen Johnston (yum!) in Paula Vogel's The Baltimore Waltz, which I'll be reviewing next week. Galley Cat claims to have seen only three plays in her life prior to our first meeting, but in fact she's a preternaturally shrewd theatergoer whose brain I always pick with care whenever we see a show together, stealing all the good lines I can carry off with me.

9:25 P.M.: To the Chimichurri Grill for a post-theater supper with the Cat. We discuss the play, our fellow bloggers, mood disorders, crushes past and present, and various other topics.

11:45 P.M.: Home for the night. The floor under my desk is ankle-deep in scripts, discarded press releases, crumpled envelopes, and the rest of the detritus of a writing day. If I had a lick of sense, I'd straighten up the office and fall into bed. Instead, I look at my schedule and note with relief that I have no morning or afternoon appointments on Thursday. (I'm meeting one of my Brazilian friends in the evening to hear Hilary Hahn with the New York Philharmonic.) Who needs sleep? I ask myself, kick aside the mess, check my e-mail, crank up Booker T. and the MGs on iTunes, and start blogging....

Posted December 09, 12:32 PM

TT: Almanac

"The life of the spirit, like that of the body, is inevitably the source of ‘unease.' The dead alone are in complete repose."

Henri de Lubac, Theology in History (courtesy of Michael Magree, S.J.)

Posted December 09, 12:31 PM

TT: Another country

I just got back from Lincoln Center, where I heard Hilary Hahn play the Elgar Violin Concerto with Sir Colin Davis and the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall. I rarely go to orchestral concerts nowadays--it's been months since I last heard the Philharmonic live, and I only went this time at the urging of a friend--and I was struck anew by how alienated I am from the increasingly tedious experience of traditional classical concertgoing, at least as it's practiced in Manhattan. The ugly hall, the gray acoustics, the snidely knowing intermission chat, the coughing and ill-timed applause and near-complete lack of young faces in the audience: all these depress me so much that I find it hard to push them aside and attend to the music. The first half of the program, Janacek's Taras Bulba and Sibelius' En Saga, was well played, but I simply wasn't there: I pulled my head into my shell and sat it out.

Not so the second half. For one thing, Hilary Hahn is an extraordinary artist, far more so than is generally understood, her fast-rising fame notwithstanding. I wrote about her four years ago in Time, whose editors had just dubbed her "America's best young classical musician," a fatuous mass-media plaudit that I did my best to put into some kind of sane perspective:

Yes, classical-music whiz kids are as common as laid-off dot.com executives, but Hilary Hahn is no robotic virtuoso. Her tone is lean and sweet, her interpretations smart and unshowy; even the hardest-boiled prodigy-hating critics in the business go all mushy when she plays Bach, Beethoven, Barber and Bernstein....

Hahn began studying violin at the age of four, entered Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music at 10 and signed an exclusive recording contract with Sony Classical at 16. But she doesn't think of herself as a prodigy. "A prodigy, in my mind, is someone who practices eight hours a day and has a big concert career at 13," she once told a reporter. "That's not my style. I practice maybe half that much, and I've had a pretty normal life."

"Normal" may not be a totally accurate way to describe the life of someone who made her debut with a major orchestra when she was 12 years old. Still, Hahn has a point. The hot glare of big-media publicity can affect prodigies like a sun lamp: first you blossom, then you blister. But this wunderkind has paced her career sensibly, steering clear of the pitfalls that await unformed artists who push themselves (or are pushed) too hard. Now, at 21, she is a fully mature musician with a style all her own....

Listening to Hahn's glowing recording of Samuel Barber's gently poetic Violin Concerto, one has the same feeling of intimacy as if the two of you were having dinner together. Only a very real person--a whole self--can make music that way. Far too many prodigies crash, burn and vanish, but this remarkable young woman seems here to stay.

All this was true enough when I wrote it, but it doesn't come anywhere near describing what I heard a couple of hours ago. Hahn is now a profoundly gifted woman who has somehow retained much of the child prodigy's mystery. Her playing is simple and wholly unaffected, though in no way naïve. Perhaps the right word is transparent: "I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed," Igor Stravinsky once remarked, and that's more or less how Hahn played Elgar this evening. The only thing I can compare it to is the similarly transparent artistry of Dinu Lipatti, the great Rumanian pianist who died absurdly young a half-century ago, leaving behind a dozen-odd recordings whose purity and directness will never be surpassed. To hear such artists is to wonder in vain where their inspiration comes from. Especially when they're young, one feels they might almost be angels, carrying a message they themselves cannot yet fully comprehend.

To hear the Elgar Violin Concerto played in such a way is overwhelming, in part because Sir Edward Elgar was himself a formidably complicated child of the Victorian era whose music reflects the extremes of his scarred psyche. As I wrote earlier this year in Commentary:

He was an artist who longed to be a gentleman, two things that would never be less compatible than at the time and in the place where he lived....

Elgar was born into England's lower middle class, the son of a provincial piano tuner and shopkeeper. Though his exceptional gifts became evident in early childhood, his father could not afford to give the boy a proper musical education. Instead, he became that rarity of rarities, a self-taught classical composer. It was taken for granted that he would become a music teacher and instrumentalist, so he studied violin on a catch-as-catch-can basis, but he did not go to college or attend a conservatory.

Modern-day readers unaware of the peculiarities of Victorian England's classical-music culture are unlikely to appreciate Elgar's situation. Then as now, it was impossible for a classical musician to earn a living solely by composing. Instead, the English musical establishment was dominated by "gentleman composers" with university degrees who taught on the conservatory level. Full-time professional performers, by contrast, were comparable in status to tradesmen, essential but not respectable. The result was an amateur culture that had produced no world-class composers (the last one, Henry Purcell, had died in 1695) and no native-born soloists or conductors of the first rank.

Had Elgar been a different sort of man, he might have responded to these obstacles in a different sort of way--as, for instance, did George Bernard Shaw, an admirer with whom he became friendly in later life. But unlike Shaw, who cared nothing for respectability, Elgar believed that the world owed him both a living and a social position consistent with his talent, and he conducted himself accordingly....

Worldly success had come too late and after too hard a struggle for him to feel secure in his own skin, and though he eventually transformed himself into the very model of a perfect English gentleman, those who knew him best knew better. As late as 1897 he brusquely declined an invitation to an upper-class luncheon party, sending a note informing the hostess that she "would not wish your board to be disgraced by the presence of a piano-tuner's son and his wife."

I wonder what kind of music Elgar would have written had he succeeded in freeing himself from the gentlemanly fetters of his upbringing. I never cease to be delighted by the way a certain kind of English emigrant responds to the expansive tone and temper of American life. Time and again I've heard such folk express their relief in words not greatly different from the ones John Cleese wrote for himself to speak in A Fish Called Wanda:

Wanda, do you have any idea what it's like being English? Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of doing the wrong thing, of saying to someone "Are you married?" and hearing "My wife left me this morning," or saying "Do you have children?" and being told they all burned to death on Wednesday. You see, Wanda, we're all terrified of embarrassment. That's why we're so...dead. Most of my friends are dead, you know, we have these piles of corpses to dinner. But you're alive, God bless you, and I want to be, I'm so fed up with all this!

Might Elgar have been a different composer had he turned his back on the class whose ranks he sought to penetrate? It's impossible to know, for he chose instead to play up and play the game, though the mask of rectitude he wore barely fit and was constantly slipping. To quote again from my Commentary essay: "Elgar was a man in the grip of his own ever-churning emotions. 'English music is white and evades everything,' he wrote. Not so his own music, which mirrored the manic-depressive swings of his temperament as precisely as a fever chart. Within the span of a single piece--even a single movement--he darts from exultation to despair and back again." From one pole to the other: such was his fate. He knew ecstasy, but only for fleeting moments, and the essential quality of a work like the B Minor Violin Concerto is a passionate yet strangely innocent longing that speaks of ultimate unfulfillment. It is in no way surprising to discover that Elgar intended it as a musical portrait of a woman friend with whom he had what appears to have been an intense but unconsummated romance--an amitié amoureuse carried to characteristic extremes.

Such a piece might have been made for an ex-prodigy to play, and just as the sixteen-year-old Yehudi Menuhin recorded it so beautifully that his performance, conducted by the composer, has remained continuously in print ever since 1932, so did Hilary Hahn give a performance tonight so beautiful that I expect to remember it as long as I live. I wept to hear Elgar's unfulfilled yearnings confided from the stage of Avery Fisher Hall with such heartfelt simplicity, and as I walked home in the rain after the concert, I realized with a start that I'd forgotten all about the coughers and chatterers. They might have been a million miles away. Or maybe I was.

* * *

Tonight's program will be repeated on Saturday at eight. For more information, go here.

Posted December 09, 11:16 AM

December 8, 2004

TT: Sursum corda

It rained all day, so I didn't take a walk, and I dined on sushi (a block closer to here) instead of going to Good Enough to Eat (and thus getting even wetter). Otherwise, I stuck pretty closely to the published plan for My Day Off. I spent rather too much time at the computer, but at least I didn't post anything. In fact, I did no work of any kind, save for taking out the garbage. I spent big chunks of the afternoon and evening curled up on the couch with a couple of books, listening to music, alternately gazing at a candle and the art on the walls, and letting my mind wander wherever it pleased.

Yes, I checked my e-mail from time to time--too often, I'm sure, though I'm happy to have opened a message from the Phillips Collection in Washington. As I think I mentioned a few weeks ago, I'll be going to Washington, D.C., on March 9 to deliver a Duncan Phillips Lecture, and I've decided to talk about how my taste in modern art was shaped by that of Duncan Phillips, and the corollary effect that looking at the Phillips Collection over the years has had on the formation of the Teachout Museum. Well, somebody at the Phillips wrote today to suggest that I might want to bring along a half-dozen of the pieces in my collection and hang them in the room where I'll be speaking. Now I've got to figure out which ones! Naturally, I'm inclined to pack my most recent acquisition, Fairfield Porter's "Apple Blossoms II" (to see it, go here and scroll down), but I've got three months to make up my mind, so I expect to do plenty of dithering between now and then. At any rate, I spent much of the evening looking at the art on the walls, mulling over the possibilities....

I doubt you'll be entirely surprised to hear that my day off left me feeling both happy and a bit blue (saudade, as my Brazilian friends say). It didn't help that one of the pieces of music to which I listened, Constant Lambert's Tiresias, is intensely melancholy, nor did the weather brighten my spirits. Nevertheless, I know full well that the main reason for my cafard (as Lambert liked to call it) was that I allowed a whole day to go by without distracting myself with work or companionship, as we workaholics are inclined to do. Instead, I let myself be alone with my thoughts, not all of which were comforting. Fortunately, I had the good sense to lift up my heart at day's end with Dvorak's String Sextet, which is in A major, that most divinely innocent of keys, and went to bed with its open strings ringing joyously in my inner ear.

Life is good, whether it feels that way or not.

Posted December 08, 12:05 PM

TT: Field trip

Surprise! I'm in today's Wall Street Journal with a special bonus piece, a review of a museum exhibition that will be of particular interest to dance buffs:

George Balanchine, the greatest choreographer of the 20th century, famously compared ballets to butterflies: "A breath, a memory, then gone." Thanks to the timely invention of the video recorder, Balanchine saw most of his own masterpieces preserved for posterity, but things were different when he was getting his start. Of the dozen-odd major dances he made for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes between 1925 and 1929, only two, "Apollo" and "Prodigal Son," have survived. In fact, no more than a half-dozen works from the entire repertory of the Ballets Russes, perhaps the single most influential company in the history of ballet, continue to be danced in anything remotely resembling their original state. The others died with the men and women who staged and performed them, and though some of those birds of paradise were amazingly hardy--the ballerina Alicia Markova, for example, died only last week, having just attained the great age of 94--few systematic efforts were made to tap their memories and reconstruct the lost ballets they recalled.

Once a ballet is lost, though, there are often more than imperfect memories by which to envision it. Costumes and set designs, still photographs, even printed programs: All these can help tell us why we had to be there. Alas, well-curated museum shows of such material are usually few and far between, but the centenary of Balanchine's birth has brought some indisputable doozies, the most recent of which is "Ballets Russes to Balanchine: Dance at the Wadsworth Atheneum," on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford through Jan. 2.

As well as being a museum of the highest quality, the Atheneum has two unique ties to the world of ballet. In 1933, A. Everett "Chick" Austin, the flamboyantly imaginative director who dragged his recalcitrant trustees into the modern era by their heels, bought the collection of Ballets Russes designs amassed by Serge Lifar, Diaghilev's last premier danseur. In a single stroke the museum acquired a priceless cache of works by the likes of Matisse, Picasso, Derain, de Chirico and Rouault for the knocked-down Depression-era sum of $10,000 (a mere $130,000 in today's dollars). Earlier that same year, Austin offered to let Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein use the Atheneum as the home of the ballet company they longed to start. Though its small stage would prove inadequate to Balanchine's needs, it was Austin and his wealthy friends who put up the money to bring the choreographer from Europe to America, where he and Kirstein later launched New York City Ballet, successor to the Ballets Russes as the focal point of creativity in 20th-century ballet.

These twin achievements are documented and celebrated in "Ballets Russes to Balanchine." Organized by Eric M. Zafran, Carol Dean Krute and Susan Hood, it's crammed full of so many treasures that merely to mention a half-dozen of them is to indicate its splendor. You can see Léon Bakst's 1912 costume design for Vaslav Nijinsky in "Afternoon of a Faun," a supple medley of pencil, tempera and gold paint that is almost shockingly evocative of the once-notorious dancing of Diaghilev's best-known lover. You can see the actual costumes for such epochal dance collaborations as the Stravinsky-Nijinsky "Rite of Spring" (1913, décor by Nikolai Roerich). You can see original set designs for two of the Ballets Russes' surviving dances, Bronislava Nijinska's "Les Noces" (1923, décor by Nathalie Gontcharova) and Balanchine's "Prodigal Son" (1929, décor by Georges Rouault), both executed with such breath-catching immediacy that they can be viewed not merely as suggestive souvenirs but as fully viable works of art in their own right. You can even see--and marvel at--three Ballets Russes costumes hand-painted by Henri Matisse himself....

No link, as usual. If you want to read the whole thing, you have the usual options: (1) Buy a Journal. (2) Go here and follow orders.

Posted December 08, 12:04 PM

TT and OGIC: Calling all polyglots

Would someone out there be so kind as to translate this link for us, please? It's been bringing in a lot of traffic:

Bela citação de Alec Guinness no About Last Night (um dos melhores blogs de todos, methinks).

Thanks in advance.

UPDATE: Courtesy of Bill Walsh, this translation from the Portuguese: "Beautiful Alec Guinness quotation from About Last Night (one of the best blogs of all, methinks)."

We preen, happily.

Posted December 08, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

You're browsing through a second-hand bookstore
And you see her in non-fiction, V through Y.
She looks up from World War II
And then you catch her catching you catching her eye,
And you quickly turn away your wishful stare
And take a sudden interest in your shoes.
If you only had the courage--but you don't.
She turns and leaves, and you both lose.

Rupert Holmes, "The People That You Never Get to Love"

Posted December 08, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Making a list

What do you get for the 'tween who has everything? How about Hello Kitty exposed? It's scientific and artistic.

(Nod and a wink to Encyclopedia Hanasiana.)

Posted December 08, 7:17 AM

OGIC: Mea culpa

Email is owed. Oh, is it owed. I'm getting right on this. I do worry that my chronic tardiness in responding may give people the wrong, wrong, wrong impression that I feel anything less than delirious when you email me. Seriously, it makes my day. More, please.

However, production of all kinds has slowed for the moment as the housecat has temporarily taken the upper hand over the ibook in the Three Years' Lap War. I'm stretching to type this. (And so many uncontested surfaces available--but who wants those? Not cats, that's for damn sure.) But as soon as the tide turns, I'm yours. The email will flow.

Posted December 08, 4:35 AM

OGIC: Annals of discovery

Sansho dayu (Sansho the Bailiff) is Kenji Mizoguchi's 1954 film about a family torn brutally asunder by politics in medieval Japan. Not having seen very much classic Japanese cinema at all before, I'm unequipped to say anything very informed about it. The movie is about a strange and distant past; it was made in an era that's obviously less distant but, in terms of film history at least, something of a middle age. Furthermore, it takes place in what is for me a faraway, unknown country. So my sense of distance from what I was seeing was doubled or tripled, and it was sometimes hard to sort through the several varieties of foreignness at work. Like reading one of Walter Scott's historical novels, watching the movie sometimes felt like looking through two pairs of glasses. Aesthetically speaking, this amounted to something of a gift: watching most historical films, I find it hard to let go of my awareness of the filmmakers' efforts at verisimilitude, but with Sansho the Bailiff I had to remind myself periodically that what I was seeing was not recorded six hundred years ago.

The family in the story is doomed by the egalitarian ideas of the husband and father, a provincial governor sent into exile in the film's opening scenes. Without knowing something about Japanese history (i.e., more than I know), it's hard to say whether the enlightened views on human rights and human dignity the main character inherits from his exiled father are historically plausible, or are more likely Mizoguchi's own twentieth-century values projected on his characters. But although these historical questions remained alive for me throughout, the real heart of the film is the smaller-scale family drama--which, perhaps paradoxically, is animated by values that look far more ancient from our perspective--and the serenely beautiful photography. According to David Thomson, the director's trademark and major contribution to the art is his way of telling intimate stories through visual means:

The use of the camera to convey emotional ideas or intelligent feelings is the definition of cinema derived from Mizoguchi's films. He is supreme in the realization of internal states in external views.

Thomson goes on to quote Jacques Rivette, director of perhaps the film with the most vise-like grip on my imagination, on Mizoguchi's supremacy over other Japanese masters:

You can compare only what is comparable and that which aims high enough. Mizoguchi, alone, imposes a feeling of a unique world and language, is answerable only to himself. If Mizoguchi captivates us, it is because he never sets out deliberately to do so and never takes sides with the spectator.

Thomson also uses a particularly nice metaphor to explain why one should jump at any chance to see Mizoguchi's work on the big screen, as I was fortunate enough to see Sansho:

Despite all its advantages for research and preservation, video is unkind to any movie and cruel to any great movie. Mizoguchi worked with scale, space, and movement, and movement on a TV set is like a fish moving across a tank, whereas movement on a real screen is that of a great fish passing us in the water.

Wait, did I say that was a "nice" metaphor? It's fabulous.

Eager to soak up informed perspectives on Mizoguchi after seeing Sansho, I also looked at an essay by Donald Richie, who offered excellent biographical information and quotations from the director himself. Two of these strike me as especially noteworthy. The first will sound familiar to U.S. filmgoers, and collapses some of the distance between movie-making in Japan in the 1950s and in Hollywood today:

I made my first film in 1921 [sic; actually 1922] and have been working at my craft for thirty years now. If I reflect on what I've done I see a long series of arguments and compromises with capitalists (they are called producers today) in an effort to make films which I myself might like. I've often been forced to accept work that I knew I wouldn't be successful with...This has happened over and over again. I'm not telling you all this to excuse myself--the same thing happens to filmmakers all over the world.

And, finally:

You want me to speak about my art? That's impossible. A filmmaker has nothing to say which is worth saying.

I don't think that's false modesty. I think that's a nice way of saying "Just watch my damn films." And we all should watch his, whenever possible.

Posted December 08, 3:58 AM

December 7, 2004

TT: You have your orders

I have the whole day off, starting now and ending Wednesday morning when the alarm clock detonates. No plays, no deadlines, no appointments, no performances, no dates, no nothing.

I was discussing my upcoming day off with the Bass Player, my fellow workaholic, and we agreed that whatever the phrase "a day off" may mean, it definitely does not mean thinking of useful stuff to do today that I could in point of fact do tomorrow.

Instead, it means:

- Sleeping late.

- Sitting in my small but elegantly appointed living room, listening to CDs I'm never going to review and/or reading a book purely for my pleasure.

- Not writing anything.

- Taking an unscheduled stroll to nowhere (but only if I feel like it).

- Looking at and meditating on the Teachout Museum, asking myself which piece I like best right this minute.

- Not writing anything.

- Dining at Good Enough to Eat and hoping my favorite waitress is on duty.

In light of all these caveats, allow me to repeat my recent set of instructions to the readers of "About Last Night": if I post anything more today, don't read it.

You may, however, send me a testy e-mail telling me to log off at once (or words to that effect).

Later. I've got a rendezvous with the sandman.

P.S. Did I mention not writing anything?

Posted December 07, 12:05 PM

TT: Words into pictures

Here's a paragraph I wrote last year, apropos of Robert Benton's film version of The Human Stain:

I've seen any number of first-rate movies made out of novels I've never read. To Have and Have Not, In a Lonely Place, The Night of the Hunter, Vertigo, True Grit: all are important to me in their varied ways, and I'm sure the books on which they were based are worth reading, too. (Well, maybe not To Have and Have Not.) So why haven't I checked out the originals? Because the films are so satisfying in their own right that I feel no need to know their sources. From time to time I've made a point of doing so, and usually been disappointed--James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential and Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, for instance, aren't nearly as effective on the page as on the screen.

I recalled these words the other day as I read a posting on Lance Mannion's blog. Mannion is a fan of Charles Portis' True Grit, the novel on which the 1969 movie is based, and he posted this scene from the book, an encounter between Rooster Cogburn, a federal marshal, and Lucky Ned Pepper, the bandit he's been chasing:

Lucky Ned Pepper said, "Well, Rooster, will you give us the road? We have business elsewhere!"

Rooster said, "Harold, I want you and your brother to stand clear! I have no interest in you today! Stand clear and you will not be hurt!"

Harold Permalee's answer was to crow like a rooster, and the "Cock-a-doodle-doo!" brought a hearty laugh from his brother Farrell.

Lucky Ned Pepper said, "What is your intention? Do you think one on four is a dogfall?"

Rooster said, "I mean to kill you in one minute, Ned, or see you hanged in Fort Smith at Judge Parker's convenience! Which will you have?"

Lucky Ned Pepper laughed. He said, "I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man!"

Rooster said, "Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!" and he took the reins in his teeth and pulled the other saddle revolver and drove his spurs into the flanks of his strong horse Bo and charged directly at the bandits. It was a sight to see. He held the revolvers wide on either side of the head of his plunging steed. The four bandits accepted the challenge and they likewise pulled their arms and charged their ponies ahead.

It was some daring move on the part of the deputy marshall whose manliness and grit I had doubted. No grit? Rooster Cogburn? Not much!

This is the big scene in the film of True Grit--the one everybody remembers--and if you've seen it, you'll realize that Marguerite Roberts, who wrote the screenplay, lifted the dialogue straight from the novel. I'm not saying it's more effective on paper. Once you've seen it on the screen, with John Wayne and Robert Duvall staring one another down across a clearing, you can't imagine it any other way. But it's not the pictures you remember: it's the words. And while Wayne and Duvall speak them with exquisite appropriateness, they wouldn't have had anything to say had Portis not written those exact words in the first place.

Now, I'm not out to start the gazillionth argument so far this week on the auteur theory of filmmaking. That's soooo Sixties (and Seventies and Eighties and Nineties). Instead, I have a different question to ask: ought a critic to be responsible for examining the source material of the films he reviews?

In one sense, of course, it doesn't matter who wrote the words spoken by Wayne and Duvall in True Grit: the important thing is that they're the right words. What I'm wondering is whether a critic can do his job properly without having direct knowledge of the extent to which a film adaptation of a pre-existing novel draws on its source.

I'm of two minds about this matter. In my review of The Human Stain, I went on to say:

Conversely, I almost always recoil with anticipated horror from movies based on great novels that I know and love, for the perfectly good reason that they aren't necessary. I don't need to see what the characters in The Portrait of a Lady or The Age of Innocence look like: I already know. As I've said before in this space, a great work of art is complete in and of itself, and can only be effectively translated into a different medium by being subjected to a radical imaginative transformation, the ultimate object of which is the creation of a new art work that can be fully experienced and appreciated without reference to its source. Anything short of that is a waste of time.

That much I'll stand by. But then I added:

Somewhere in between these extremes lie those films based on "important" novels that aren't any good. I suspect Philip Roth's The Human Stain belongs in this category, but I don't know because I haven't read it, and don't plan to. I'm one of those unfortunate folk who is allergic to most of the Major American Novelists who came of age in the Fifties. Roth, Bellow, Mailer, Updike: all leave me cold as last month's fish. My guess, however, is that Robert Benton and Nicholas Meyer, the director and screenwriter of The Human Stain, have made a good-faith effort to preserve the essence of Philip Roth's novel--and that this is why the movie doesn't work....

Looking back on this passage, it now strikes me as more than a little bit irresponsible for me to have made such a wild guess instead of reading the book. On the other hand, full-time film reviewers (of which I'm not one) rarely have sufficient time to do the research that would allow them to intelligently compare film adaptations to their sources. The classics, yes--we all at least pretend to have read them--and it's also taken for granted that film-to-source comparisons will be made in the case of Gone With the Wind-type blockbusters, if only because the first thing everybody wants to know about such films is how faithful the screen version is to the original book. But when it comes to old movies adapted from obscure novels, who bothers? I think I remember Sarah mentioning somewhere that she'd read In a Lonely Place, but I can't say I know anyone who's read all of The Night of the Hunter.

Again, though, does it really matter? Film, after all, is a radically collaborative process in which creative responsibility can only be assigned tentatively and on a case-by-case basis. This is something that all but the most rabid auteuristes accept as a given--but it's also one of the reasons why most of us prose-oriented types have a sneaking suspicion that film is by definition a lesser art form than the novel. We like the idea that every word of a novel is personally written by the person who signs it (even though we also know that an anonymous editor may well have played a more or less substantial part in its creation), just as the billionaires among us will happily pay more for a Rembrandt than a studio-of-Rembrandt, even though the collaboratively produced painting might be better in aesthetic quality (or physical condition) than the bonafide solo effort.

In short, most of us stubbornly persist in believing in aesthetic heroes, a belief which I think goes a long way toward explaining why the auteur theory caught on. It goes against human nature to accept the attributional ambiguity inherent in the process of making films, in the same way that you'd think less of, say, Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony were some musicologist to discover that it had been orchestrated by a student of the composer. Is that logical? Not really. It's the work that matters, not the attribution--yet there's a difference between knowing that to be true and feeling it in your bones. It takes a special kind of confidence to buy an unsigned painting without a provenance, based solely on the evidence of your eye. Most of us aren't nearly so sure of ourselves. We like to see that signature in the lower right-hand corner.

As for me, I'm delighted to find out that Charles Portis wrote the words that John Wayne and Robert Duvall spoke in the climactic scene of True Grit, and I'm more inclined as a result to read his novel than I was last week. Even so, I reluctantly confess that I'm even more inclined to pull the DVD off the shelf and watch the movie yet again, and maybe even show it to one of my women friends who's never before seen a Western and insists they can't possibly be any good. Were there world enough and time....

UPDATE: Lance Mannion responds, interestingly.

Posted December 07, 12:02 PM

TT: Special double almanac

The sun's gone dim, and
The moon's turned black;
For I loved him, and
He didn't love back.

Dorothy Parker, "Two-Volume Novel"

"Avoid any girl who you think looks even hotter when she is miserable. You will destroy each other."

Manhattan Transfer, "The Emotionally Unavailable Alcoholic's Guide to Holiday Romance"

Posted December 07, 12:00 PM

December 6, 2004

TT: This is my life

In addition to sleeping for ten hours on Friday, doing the same on Saturday, seeing two plays, unwrapping the latest addition to the Teachout Museum (about which more later), and dining with Maccers (who is, as I'd been told, the last word in peachy), I spent the weekend updating the "Teachout in Commentary," "Second City," "Teachout Elsewhere" and "TT-OGIC Top Five" modules of the right-hand column. Take a look and see what's new.

I've got a piece-for-money to write this morning and yet another play to review tonight, but that doesn't mean you won't be hearing more from me as the day wears on. (Nor does it mean that you will.)

Posted December 06, 12:05 PM

TT: Hostages to fortune

I was talking with a bass-playing friend of mine about how much classical music meant to us, and it occurred to me after we parted to draw up a purely personal list of favorite works about which I have especially strong feelings. Here it is, with the caveat that I make no overarching claims for the significance of this list. I don't think these are necessarily the greatest or most beautiful pieces of music ever written, but they are--right now--the pieces I love best and can't imagine living without. Each one is linked to a CD version that I especially like:

- Bach Chorale Prelude "Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele," BWV 654

- Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto, Op. 58

- Britten Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, Op. 31

- Chopin Barcarolle, Op. 60

- Copland Piano Sonata

- Elgar Introduction and Allegro for Strings, Op. 47

- Debussy Violin Sonata in G Minor

- Fauré "Clair de lune," Op. 46/2

- Hindemith Harp Sonata

- Mendelssohn Octet for Strings, Op. 20

- Mozart Piano Concerto in A Major, K. 488

- Ravel String Quartet in F Major

- Schubert A Major Rondo, D. 951

- Shostakovich Symphony No. 14

- Stravinsky Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1947 version)

- Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, Op. 35

- Verdi Falstaff

- Walton Variations on a Theme of Paul Hindemith

Posted December 06, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"In the dress circle, Doctor Smith and Doctor Jakes enjoyed themselves as true Shakespeareans always enjoy themselves, arguing between each act about the reading of the parts, and the way the lines were said. Fortunately, they found plenty to disapprove of, or they would not have enjoyed themselves at all."

Noel Streatfeild, Ballet Shoes (courtesy of Laura Lippman)

Posted December 06, 12:00 PM

December 3, 2004

TT: Words to the wise

"Giorgio Morandi: Late Paintings 1950-1964" closes Saturday at Lucas Schoormans Gallery. It's the first Morandi exhibition in New York since 1981. God only knows when there'll be another one. Please don't miss it.

(To read what I wrote about this remarkable show last month in the Washington Post, go here.)

The gallery, which is at 508 W. 26th St., has just published an exquisite little catalogue. To order a copy, e-mail info@lucasschoormans.com, or call 212-243-3159. I suspect that supplies are limited, so don't dally.

Posted December 03, 12:02 PM

TT: The West did it (but Japan helped)

Friday again, and I've reviewed two shows in today's Wall Street Journal, the Roundabout Theatre Company's Pacific Overtures and Playwrights Horizons' Rodney's Wife.

Pacific Overtures is a triumph:

This is one of the most entrancingly beautiful shows ever to come to Broadway. Even if you don't like it, you won't be sorry to have seen it.

Originally produced in 1976, "Pacific Overtures" tells the once-familiar story of the naval expedition led by Commodore Perry that opened Japan to the West in 1853--but tells it from the Japanese point of view. The characters are played by Asian-Americans (Perry is a giant monster in a mask). John Weidman's book makes use of narrative techniques derived from Noh theater, while Mr. Sondheim's iridescent score melds the spare, percussive textures of Japanese music with his own Ravel-perfumed harmonies.

What makes this production still more individual is that it has been staged and choreographed by a Japanese director, Amon Miyamoto. When I first saw it a few years ago at the Lincoln Center Festival, it was even sung in Japanese (with English supertitles). That deliciously distancing touch is gone from this English-language version, but Mr. Miyamoto and his designers have otherwise been careful to present "Pacific Overtures" in an idiomatically Japanese style, with simple décor that implies as much as it states. The staging is a synthesis of dance and naturalistic movement so thoroughgoing as to recall the similar approach of Jerome Robbins in "West Side Story." It is masterly in every way....

Mr. Miyamoto was wise not to italicize any of the parts of "Pacific Overtures" that can be read as anti-American, especially since I'm sure there wasn't a soul in Studio 54 who didn't get the point. (The capacity of New York playgoers for liberal guilt is infinite.) In any case, the show mostly steers clear of cheap ugly-Americanism. It is, rather, a subtle meditation on the myriad ways in which two cultures can misunderstand one another--the Japanese themselves are portrayed no less frankly than their "barbarian" visitors--and its true subject is the inescapable tragedy of the coming of modernity, which takes as much as it gives....

The second isn't, but you should think about seeing it anyway:

I didn't like all of Richard Nelson's "Rodney's Wife," which opened Wednesday at Playwrights Horizons, but it didn't bore me for a second, either, and the good parts, of which there are many, are most impressive.

It's hard to write about "Rodney's Wife" because the plot turns on a showstopping surprise that I mustn't give away (though I figured it out at least a half-hour before Mr. Nelson officially tipped his hand). Suffice it to say that the play is about an over-the-hill movie star (David Strathairn), his bitchy second wife (Haviland Morris), his recently widowed sister (Maryann Plunkett), his visibly upset daughter (Jessica Chastain) and the daughter's fiancé (Jesse Pennington), all of whom are thrown together in Rome circa 1962 for a dinner party that soon degenerates into a near-orgy of passive-aggressive sniping. Two of the characters, we learn, are keeping an explosive secret from the others, and all hell breaks loose when it finally comes out (get the hint?).

The bad parts include a gratuitous prologue and epilogue and a pat, unconvincing denouement. The good parts include lots of sharp-eared dialogue, directed with a sure hand by Mr. Nelson himself and performed by a cast that never lets you down....

No link. Get yourself a Journal, or go here and do it the easy way.

Posted December 03, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

O soft embalmer of the still midnight!
    Shutting with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower'd from the light,
    Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
    In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes,
Or wait the amen, ere thy poppy throws
    Around my bed its lulling charities;
    Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;
Save me from curious conscience, that still lords
    Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
    And seal the hushed casket of my soul.

John Keats, "To Sleep"

Posted December 03, 12:00 PM

December 2, 2004

TT: A burnt-out case

Sorry not to have posted anything today, but I'm run ragged and seriously underslept, and it's been all I could do simply to drag myself from point A to point F. Friday isn't likely to be much different, but I'll do my best to show my face. (Cheers to OGIC for taking up the slack!)

Later.

Posted December 02, 7:14 AM

TT: Almanac

"It is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously."

Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide

Posted December 02, 6:40 AM

OGIC: Grazing

A sampling from the recent cultural menu chez OGIC:

LISTENING: Erin McKeown, Distillation. I went on and on recently about her more recent album, Grand, and stand by my enthused prattling then. Distillation took me longer to warm up to, but its hold may be the stronger for that. If Grand charms your socks off, this album haunts you barefoot.

NETFLICKING: Richard Loncraine's 1995 Richard III, starring Ian McKellen and Jim Broadbent and set lavishly in 1930s England. This was okay. McKellen is hammy, which seems to be by directorial design. (And by the way, check out Sir Ian's home page, which--disturbingly or touchingly, I can't decide--really looks homemade.) Broadbent makes a great, quietly calculating Buckingham, blending in with the background like a less loyal, more lizardy Tom Hagen. I also liked Annette Bening and Robert Downey, Jr., as Queen Elizabeth and her brother the earl of Rivers. They're both wonderfully game at playing merry, mutually infatuated callowness in the carefree scenes before Richard really gets down to work. But I never could make out what was gained by the historical displacement of the story, other than the opportunities for visual sumptuousness offered by thirties style. Moving the action forward several centuries, though, should also work to highlight what's universal in the play's substance, enlarging its scope. This film somehow manages to shrink a giant--even if it does look great doing it.

ALSO NETFLICKING: The Secret Lives of Dentists. Thumbs way up. Sort of an American Beauty with recognizable human beings.

To be continued...

Posted December 02, 6:24 AM

OGIC: Christmas with the cranks

Blogger John Scalzi remembers the 10 Least Successful Christmas Specials. Who among you lit types could forget "An Algonquin Round Table Christmas" (1927)?

Alexander Woolcott, Franklin Pierce Adams, George Kaufman, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker were the stars of this 1927 NBC Red radio network special, one of the earliest Christmas specials ever performed. Unfortunately the principals, lured to the table for an unusual evening gathering by the promise of free drinks and pirogies, appeared unaware they were live and on the air, avoiding witty seasonal banter to concentrate on trashing absent Round Tabler Edna Ferber's latest novel, Mother Knows Best, and complaining, in progressively drunken fashion, about their lack of sex lives. Seasonal material of a sort finally appears in the 23rd minute when Dorothy Parker, already on her fifth drink, can be heard to remark, "one more of these and I'll be sliding down Santa's chimney." The feed was cut shortly thereafter. NBC Red's 1928 holiday special "Christmas with the Fitzgeralds" was similarly unsuccessful.

And if you like that, how could you possibly resist "Ayn Rand's A Selfish Christmas" (1951), "A Muppet Christmas with Zbigniew Brzezinski" (1978), or "Noam Chomsky: Deconstructing Christmas" (1998)? You'd have to have a heart of stone. Link via Colby, with whom I have to agree when he says he'd really like to see a bunch of these. Round up the cast of Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle posthaste!

Uhh...on second thought, let's round up the cast of Best in Show instead.

Posted December 02, 5:18 AM

OGIC: Sob story

Today marked the second time I have locked myself out of my car. It's a lousy enough situation by itself, but I seem to have a disposition to pile on exacerbating factors. The first time, I was driving from Chicago to Detroit on a hot June day with the cat in the back seat. I had stopped for some of the cheap gas they sell in West Michigan. My cell phone, newly acquired expressly for the purpose of aiding in any emergencies that might crop up while I was driving a newly acquired car, was of course in the car. But the moment when I realized my mistake wasn't even the scariest of this episode. That came a few minutes later when I asked the cashier if she had any advice and she replied, in utter earnest and rather eagerly, "You got a hammer?"

If I'd had a hammer, I'm reasonably sure it would have been locked in the car. Damn good thing, too.

I was bailed out that time. While I got on the pay phone to AAA and settled in for a wait while poor Daffy melted away in the car, a local mechanic, name of Papa Bear, happened to pull in to fill up his wrecker. With striking facility he slim-jimmed his way into the car and I was back on the road east, away from this world where smashing a car window with a hammer seems like a viable solution to anything.

Today was different: not hot but cold, no trapped animal but a running car. No Papa Bear. No bailing out. The car and I were idling, waiting for the defroster to melt away a little obstructive ice on the rear window, when somebody started lobbying hard to have my parking space. Much too much the obliging type for my own good, I got out to quickly scrape away what ice remained. Mysteriously to me (gremlins?), the door ended up locked. Inside the car: car keys, house keys, purse, spare car keys, wallet, cell phone. Outside the car: me, scraper, gloves. Those scrapers are extremely useful when there's ice on your car. Other times? Not so much. It wasn't even my nifty-keen Red Wings scraper, humph.

The would-be parker rolled down her window, asked whether I'd locked myself out of the car, and registered regret that it was indeed so--regret for my distress or her inconvenience, I could not say. In any case, she found another spot within spitting distance, and seemed to be considering whether to offer any help to me, when out of the blue my friend Katie appeared with her devastatingly adorable child Siobhan and--more important, just this once--a cell phone she could spare for a little while. Ms. Not-Just-Any-Spot scurried into her nearby building, clearly relieved. As bad as the afternoon was, I must admit that Katie happening along was such a stunning little miracle that I almost feel churlish complaining about everything else. Almost.

Long story short: after trying a few local parties (University police, unmanned repair shop), I got in touch with good old AAA and joined on the spot. I even managed to dredge my American Express card number and expiration date from the recesses of my memory, digit by digit, to pay the fee. (Of this I am quite proud, even though all it probably means is that I shop too much on the internet.) They dispatched a locksmith who arrived after about 90 minutes, three times as long as billed. In fairness, Precise-Parking Lady let me into the warm vestibule of her building when she rediscovered me ten minutes before the locksmith showed. By that time, I was cutting quite a pathetic figure (and may have milked it a bit).

All told: Two hours. Thirty degrees. Maximum misery. All my dreams of being a sherpa died today.

I'm warm now. I cranked all the radiators in the apartment, closed what storm windows were still open, put on three layers of clothes and rolled myself up in a blanket until the temperature in here reached 83. After cracking a few windows and closing a couple radiators, I've attained a comfy 72--a fine atmosphere, don't you think, in which to recreate the (actual arts-related) posts lost in the ether this afternoon when a suddenly disconnected modem cable made the ibook seize up, initiating this whole sorry series of events. I'll reconstruct those for you as soon as I've had a little sleep. Tomorrow: much blogging, no excuses.

Posted December 02, 4:42 AM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"As a food and travel writer, what I do for a living may seem trivial, but whenever I think of it as ephemeral to the great issues of the day, I am reminded of a scene in the play 'The Diary of Anne Frank.' Isolated for months in an attic but still believing they will soon escape, the family fantasizes about the first thing each member will do when they return to the world outside. Anne says she yearns to go to a dance. The teenage boy wants to go to a movie, a western movie! And the adults all start remembering and dreaming of a wonderful pastry shop, a good stew, a romantic restaurant with thick linen and fine wines. None, not one, declares that the first thing he wants to do is to change the political structure of Europe."

John Mariani, "Gluttony, Reconsidered" (with thanks to Felix Salmon for the Topic Magazine link)

Posted December 02, 2:16 AM

December 1, 2004

TT: Absolutely no show today (I swear!)

I am soooo overpressed with sail (see yesterday's blog for details) that I have definitely decided not to post anymore today. Instead I'll write a piece, visit a couple of galleries, get my hair cut, see Pacific Overtures, and go to bed at a reasonably reasonable hour. But no blogging. None.

If I post anything, don't read it.

See you tomorrow.

P.S. Our Girl just called from Chicago to say that her modem is temporarily (she hopes) fried. We suggest you make use of the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column and visit some other cool blog today.

Posted December 01, 12:11 PM

TT: Almanac

"Laughton belonged to that generation of Englishmen to whom the nature of English social existence in the twenties and thirties was essentially false--pompous and restrictive. Sex had something to do with it--but language, customs, rubric were even more oppressive. ‘I was the guest of the Savage Club in London, and Sir Austin Chamberlain made a speech. I was sitting next to Nelson Doubleday the publisher. Sir Austin was polite and imperturbable. At the end of the speech Nelson Doubleday said to me, "Charlie, however thin you cut it, it's still baloney," and I suddenly wanted to get on a boat and go back to New York so bad I could taste it.'

"Auden or Isherwood might have said the very same thing."

Simon Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor

Posted December 01, 12:10 PM

OGIC: Scotch tape yesterday, scotch neat today

Hooray, it was only the modem cable! A mere $18 poorer, I'm back in business. If only driving to the computer store had been so easy and cheap...story of my horrible day to follow, as soon as I regain feeling in my extremities.

Posted December 01, 7:33 AM

OGIC: Veddy high-tech

Surprise, it's the technologically challenged half of ALN! As Terry reported earlier, I've been having modem troubles; for a goodly portion of Tuesday I was not able to hold an internet connection for more than a minute or two at a time. I guessed I would need a new USB cable, or a new modem, or even (shudder) a new computer. Well, glory be: for the time being, anyway, a little ingenuity and--I kid you not--Magic Tape seem to have done the trick. Scotch tape always has been one of my favorite office supplies. But I've never fixed a computer with it before; Magic, indeed.

So that's the good news. The bad? The clocks are scowling 3:00 at me. I'm off to bed--further posting will have to wait until midday tomorrow, 3M willing. In the meantime, good night, good morning, and happy December.

Posted December 01, 3:53 AM