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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