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January 31, 2005

TT: Since we met

Remember me? I'm the one who was so absurdly happy last Friday afternoon, and I still am. It helped that I didn't have a huge amount to do over the weekend, though I managed to keep quite sufficiently busy, thank you very much.

Among other things:

- On Saturday afternoon I went to a Broadway matinee, then took the night off (yes!).

- On Sunday morning I wrote the first draft of a 2,000-word essay called "Watching Westerns in Manhattan" for American Cowboy. Bet you didn't know I wrote for them, did you?

- On Sunday evening I had an early dinner with the Mutant, my singer-painter friend, after which we retired to the Teachout Museum, a/k/a my living room, to watch Kind Hearts and Coronets, which both of us were seeing for the first time (O.K., Cinetrix, try not to look so shocked). No sooner did the Mutant head for home than I called my mother in Smalltown, U.S.A., having previously sent a what's-new e-mail to Our Girl, whose chatty reply awaited me when I hung up....

But I'm burying the lead. Here's my stop-press bulletin:

- I kept my hand-on-heart oath to Bass Player, broke out my hitherto unopened watercolor set, and covered one whole sheet of cool-looking paper with homemade, gaily colored hieroglyphics. (I even have a witness--I showed the results to the Mutant earlier this evening.) It was, as I'd hoped, completely absorbing fun, and though I fear I have no obvious aptitude for the making of visual art, I still can't wait to do it again.

What next? Today I get my eyes examined, pay bills, and do a little babysitting. Tomorrow I see my trainer, write my monthly Washington Post column about the arts in New York, and go to a preview of Good Vibrations, the new Beach Boys musical. On Wednesday I write my drama column for Friday's Wall Street Journal. Thursday is up for grabs. Come Friday I'll be off to the nation's capital to lunch with a blogger and watch American Ballet Theatre dance an all-Fokine program at Kennedy Center, followed by two previews back in New York and a birthday (mine).

As always, books will be read (most of them about New Orleans at the turn of the century) and CDs listened to (most of them by Louis Armstrong) in the interstices of all these occurrences.

Such are the ongoing adventures of a New York-based blogger-bon vivant. More as it happens.

Posted January 31, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"I'm a backslider as a non-believer."

Penelope Fitzgerald (quoted in Dean Flower, "A Completely Determined Human Being," Hudson Review, Winter 2005)

Posted January 31, 12:00 PM

TT: In the beginning

One of the ways in which e-mail is transforming our culture is that it is has become the channel by which certain kinds of bad news are increasingly likely to arrive. This morning I opened my mailbox and found a note from an old high-school friend: "I apologize for the impersonal mass e-mail but it is a little quicker...." My heart sank even before I could jump to the next paragraph, which told me that Richard Powell, the man who taught me how to play the violin nearly 40 years ago, died last night. I hadn't heard from him for a long time, but no sooner did I see his name on the screen of my iBook than my head was full of snapshot-clear memories.

So much of life is a matter of pure coincidence (if that's what you think it is). I happened to see a televised concert by the Russian violinist David Oistrakh one Sunday afternoon, and the warmth and passion with which he played the Brahms D Minor Sonata, a piece I'd never heard by a composer I knew only for having written a lullaby, made a fateful impression on me. Dick Powell came to Matthews Elementary School a few months later to administer a musical aptitude test to the fifth grade, and I got a perfect score. This, he informed me the following week, qualified me to play a stringed instrument. I went home and told my astonished parents that I wanted them to buy me a violin, and that was that.

Powell was a small-time jazz bassist turned small-town music teacher who ran the string program in the public schools of my home town. (He told me that he'd played in strip joints once upon a time, which seemed to me unimaginably exotic.) He thought I was talented and went out of his way to encourage me, and within a few years I was playing Bach, Vivaldi, and Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre with the high-school orchestra. It soon became clear to both of us, though, that my musical interests extended well beyond the violin, so he was no less encouraging when I asked to borrow one of the school's plywood basses for the summer. That was the year I taught myself jazz by plucking along with Dave Brubeck's Jazz Goes to College in my bedroom every afternoon, and a year or two later I started playing country music and bluegrass with a band called Sour Mash. It wasn't Bach, but that was all right by him. He had no musical prejudices, and it was in large part because of his openness that I acquired the infinite sense of musical possibility that I carry with me to this day.

I found other mentors as I grew older, but Powell was the first, and there would never be a time when he failed to say whatever encouraging words he thought I needed to hear. He watched me go off to college to major in music, looked on with amusement when I became a part-time music critic for the Kansas City Star, and cheered from the sidelines when I rolled the dice and headed for New York City. By then he'd moved away from Smalltown, U.S.A., but he kept up with my progress, and from time to time his daughter Melodie (a nice name for a musician's child) would let me know how he was doing.

Now Melodie writes to tell me of her father's death, and I find myself filled to overflowing with that most beautiful and transfiguring of emotions, gratitude. No one person, not even me, made me what I am, but Dick Powell ranks very high on the short list of those who did the most along the way. He taught me to read music--and reassured me that it was all right to play by ear, too. He introduced me to the vast world of classical music--but never for a moment suggested that no other musical worlds were worth exploring. I suppose I would have found my way into music on my own sooner or later, but I might well have had a lot to unlearn down the line had I not been fortunate enough to fall into the hands of so open-minded and open-hearted a teacher. He pointed me in the right direction, then gave me a push. I can't think of a better epitaph.

Posted January 31, 10:35 AM

January 28, 2005

TT: And she can write, too

Time again for my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. This Friday I reviewed Little Women: The Musical and the off-Broadway revival of Hurlyburly, and I seem to have cut sharply against the grain of critical wisdom as regards the former:

Sutton Foster is a gawky, gamine version of the young Judy Garland whom the Great Producer Upstairs clearly intended for a revival of Jerome Robbins' "Peter Pan." Until somebody down here gets the message, though, I'll make do with "Little Women: The Musical," the immensely likable stage adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's much-loved 1867 novel that just opened at the Virginia Theatre. Ms. Foster, lately of "Thoroughly Modern Millie," plays Jo, the bookwormy tomboy who "reminded one of a colt," and gets her just right. She's not an immaculate singer--her voice is raw on top--but her spunky charm and hell-for-leather energy are impossible to resist. I didn't even try. Ms. Foster caught my heart on a short string the second the curtain went up, and I twitched at her command all night long.

Apparently I'm one of the few people in America who has neither read "Little Women" nor seen any of the countless stage and screen versions that preceded this one. A quick riffle through the book, though, made it clear that Allan Knee has not only slashed it to ribbons but modernized the dialogue extensively, if not egregiously (the punchlines are all his). In addition, he has turned "Little Women" into a meta-narrative about the writing of "Little Women": Jo, an aspiring author who launches her literary career by churning out swashbuckling tales for the Weekly Volcano, decides to fictionalize her own family life, and the show reaches its climax when she takes pen in hand to write the first chapter of the story we've just seen played out on stage. It's a clever idea, and if the result is more a filet than a full-fledged fish, it still zips along with confidence and skill....

I also had good things to say about Hurlyburly:

It's a grimly funny tale of cocaine and its discontents, written and set in Hollywood in the early '80s and horrifyingly reminiscent in every particular of what I now think of as the Age of Jay McInerney.

I didn't see Mike Nichols' 1984 production, which had an awesome cast--William Hurt, Judith Ivey, Harvey Keitel, Cynthia Nixon, Ron Silver, Jerry Stiller and Sigourney Weaver, believe it or not--but I can't imagine how this one, directed with surgical precision by Scott Elliott, could be bettered. Ethan Hawke, for one, is breathtakingly fine as Eddie, the drug-sodden, woman-hating casting director on whose tortured soul the California sun has set, and Halley Wegryn Gross, Catherine Kellner and Parker Posey are nicely matched as the three women who skitter across his zigzag path....

No link--you've got to pay to read the whole thing. Why not shell out for today's Journal and find out while you're at it how we cover the other arts? Or go the whole hog by clicking here. Either way, you won't be sorry....

Posted January 28, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"'Good, that,' he said to himself, while her eyes rested upon him, black and impenetrable like the mental caverns where revolutionary thought should sit plotting the violent way of its dream of changes. As if anything could be changed! In this world of men nothing can be changed--neither happiness nor misery. They can only be displaced at the cost of corrupted consciences and broken lives--a futile game for arrogant philosophers and sanguinary triflers."

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Posted January 28, 12:00 PM

TT: Boundless

Last night I took two friends, a music critic and a jazz pianist, to watch New York City Ballet dance what George Balanchine's admirers refer to as "the Greek program": Apollo, Orpheus, and Agon, the three great Balanchine-Stravinsky collaborations. The pianist was seeing all three dances for the first time, and the critic had never seen any of Balanchine's ballets. They reacted pretty much the way I'd expected, and we went our separate ways after the performance looking as though we'd all had one too many. Or maybe two.

I got up at seven-thirty this morning, knocked out the last 850 words of an essay on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and shot the piece off to my editor in Washington via e-mail (the galleys are rolling out of my fax machine as I'm typing this sentence). Then I jumped in a cab and headed crosstown to meet my friend Bass Player at Knoedler & Company, where we spent an hour looking at Milton Avery: Onrushing Waves (the show closes on Saturday, so if you haven't seen it yet, don't wait!). From there we went to Tibor de Nagy to see Jane Freilicher: Paintings 1954-2004, she for the first time, I for the second. By then we were booming and zooming, so instead of hitting a third gallery, we decided to grab a bite to eat, after which we talked our heads off. (Bass Player and I are so closely in sync that we don't really need to tell each other what we're thinking, but we do it anyway.)

At length she went downtown to pick up her bass and take a lesson, while I returned home to do...nothing. I have no more appointments today, no deadline to hit, no work of any kind that can't wait, no show to see tonight, and nowhere in particular that I need to be until 1:45 Saturday afternoon. Limitless luxury, in other words, made all the sweeter by the fact that it's so bitterly cold outside. What do I care? My calendar is blank, my refrigerator full. Josh White is playing on my iBook, The Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob, and Kind Hearts and Coronets are cued up on the DVR, and a book I'm looking forward to reading awaits me in the loft. The only thing I have to do in the next twenty-three hours is keep the solemn promise I made with hand on heart to Bass Player at lunch today: I'm going to pop open my watercolor set and put brush to paper before I go to bed tonight.

I know exactly how lucky I am today, in part because I also know how it feels to be so busy that you can't see straight. As a matter of fact, I've been feeling outrageously happy for the past couple of days. Whatever troubles the future may hold in store for me are currently being held in abeyance, and instead of worrying about them, or even thinking about them, I've been following the advice of the man who made the ballets my friends and I saw last night. "Why are you stingy with yourselves?" Mr. B used to ask his dancers. "Why are you holding back? What are you saving for--for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now." And that's where I've been all today: in the moment, and glad to be. Ecstatic, really.

I'll see you Monday.

Posted January 28, 2:56 AM

OGIC: Fallow Friday

Nothing new from my corner today. Life insists on my active participation, besides which my modem connection has gone funky again. I'm expecting a big box of DSL sometime late next week or early the week following, but until that miraculous time I have to type with my hands suspended above the keyboard and holding my breath if I want not to disrupt the dial-up.

Should have lots to say next week, including a wrap-up of Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile at Dominican University Saturday night and possibly a report on what's so great about The Horse's Mouth.

Posted January 28, 1:15 AM

January 27, 2005

TT: Extra large

I went to my framer yesterday afternoon and picked up the presidential commission for my appointment to the National Council on the Arts. It's a splendidly old-fashioned document, about twice the size of a college diploma, printed in copperplate script on thick cream paper by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. It is, of course, a fill-in-the-blank form, starting with a space on top for the current president's name, with the blanks filled in by a calligrapher.

Here's what it says:

To all who shall see these presents, Greeting:

Know ye, that reposing special trust and confidence in the Integrity and Ability of Terence Alan Teachout of New York, I have nominated, and, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, do appoint him as a Member of the National Council on the Arts for a term expiring September 3, 2010, and do authorize and empower him to execute and fulfill the duties of that Office according to law, and to have and to hold the said Office, with all the powers, privileges, and emoluments thereunto of right appertaining, unto him the said Terence Alan Teachout, subject to the conditions prescribed by law.

In testimony whereof, I have caused these Letters to be made Patent, and the Seal of the United States to be thereunto affixed.

Done at the city of Washington this twenty-ninth day of November in the year of our Lord two thousand four and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and twenty-ninth.

It's boldly and illegibly signed at the bottom by the autopens of Secretary of State Rice (whose signature looks like "A.C. Pfft") and President Bush (his is a dead ringer for "Byurze").

The part I like best is the first blank. Reposing special trust and confidence in the--what? Are "Integrity and Ability" reserved for low-level appointments like mine? And if so, what do the presidential commissions of cabinet members say? Is the Secretary of the Interior also praised for his Integrity and Ability? Or does his commission contain doubly juicy superlatives reserved for the exclusive use of Washington's really heavy hitters?

I kind of hate to admit this (well, no, I don't), but I'm irresistibly reminded of a passage from Michael Collins' wonderful Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys in which he describes one of the little-known steps a male astronaut must take when putting on his pressure suit in preparation for being shot into outer space:

Then it's time to don a triangular yellow plastic urine bag by inserting the penis into a rubber receiver built into one corner of it. There are three sizes of receivers (small, medium, large), which are always referred to in more heroic terms: extra large, immense, and unbelievable.

Perhaps the bigger dogs get the equivalent of "extra large" or "immense" on their presidential commissions--though presumably not "unbelievable."

As for those "emoluments," there aren't any. Outside of my traveling expenses whenever I visit Washington on NEA business, this one's on me, and I've been warned that I'll be paying through the nose for the honor of hanging a presidential commission on my wall: I've already filled out enough paperwork to decimate a shady grove, and there'll be plenty more to come before my six-year term expires. That's all right by me. Aside from the fact that you don't say no when the President of the United States asks you to do something for him, I consider it not merely an honor but a privilege to be able to give back something to the arts in America. Art has given special meaning to my life. Now it's my turn.

All this notwithstanding, I figure I'm entitled to a little more than my train fare and the satisfactions of a job well done. Obviously the White House agrees, which I assume is the reason why presidential appointees are given such handsome-looking documents to hang on their walls. It went without saying that I'd put mine in a first-class frame, one identical to the ones I use in the Teachout Museum--but where to hang the damn thing? It's too big to fit in any of the remaining empty spots (of which there are no longer very many) on the walls of my minuscule one-bedroom Upper West Side apartment, and when I considered taking down a piece of art to make room for my commission, my heart sank.

I thought and thought, and suddenly it came to me: why not the bathroom? Not only is it tastefully decorated in cornflower blue and yellow, but it's next to the living room, thus allowing me to show off for my visitors by leaving the door discreetly ajar. But would it be disrespectful to hang a presidential commission there? Though a friend assured me that many actors keep their Oscars in the bathroom, I wasn't satisfied. Such a gesture smacked of phony humility. (As Thomas Mann allegedly said to a fellow writer who was eating a bit too much humble pie, "You're not great enough to be that modest.") Then it struck me as I was giving a new acquaintance a tour of the Teachout Museum that my bathroom also contains a small lithograph by Pierre Bonnard, Le Soleil. If it's good enough for Bonnard, I told myself firmly, it's good enough for a presidential commission. So I took down my Suzanne Farrell poster and hung up my latest acquisition...and you know what? It looks pretty great. Besides, its presence will also help to remind me that no amount of good fortune relieves a man of the inescapable commitments of the flesh. Even a presidential appointee has to spend a certain amount of time in the bathroom each day, just like everyone else.

No doubt I'll move in time to a somewhat larger apartment, and when I do I'm sure I'll find a more appropriate spot for my Official Certificate of Integrity and Ability. For now, though, I like it just fine right where it is.

UPDATE: A friend who should know writes:

I do NOT think commissions are auto penned -- I am fairly certain they are not -- there are not enough of them to do that, and they really are a mark of honor. But I don't think the president's signature is real -- I think that is printed on the commissions at the beginning of each admin. But Condi's sig is, I am almost certain, Condi's sig.

Just so you know.

And another sharp-eyed reader points out that "A.C. Pfft" can't possibly be Condoleezza Rice, who wasn't confirmed until after my commission was signed: it must be Colin Powell. Now that's what I call illegible!

Posted January 27, 12:33 PM

TT: Almanac

"Never lie to a man with NEXIS!"

Glenn Reynolds, "Disclosure and Glass Houses" (MSNBC, Jan. 26, 2005)

Posted January 27, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Serendipity on line 1

Last week I linked to the snapshot of Charles Bukowski found by Colby Cosh in a used copy of the poet's Love Is a Dog from Hell. What started out as a nifty bit of show-and-tell has now turned into an astonishing little story of Colby karma, with comic artist R. Crumb making an unexpected appearance. The photo seems to have found its way into the right hands.

Posted January 27, 1:45 AM

TT: The momentary miracle

Most of my e-mail regarding what I wrote about Johnny Carson's death has turned out to be unexpectedly favorable, but I won't burden you with it. Instead, I want to pass on a thoughtful letter from a reader who disagreed.

* * *

I've been a daily visitor to your delightful blog for several months now. I've never written to you before and I am pained to find myself one of the people commenting about your Johnny Carson post....

I am truly sorry that you got some rude e-mails in response to your thoughts on Mr. Carson's death. I agree that it is quite unreasonable of anyone to be offended by what you wrote. However, I do think that sort of personalized outrage is a common, if illogical, response when the worth of someone or something you love is being questioned. And I think a great many people loved Johnny Carson. Or rather, they loved what they saw him do.

You wrote: "Perhaps he knew how little it means to have once been famous....If he did, then he died a wise man." I could not agree with you more. Almost all fame is ultimately meaningless. However, I don't think it necessarily follows that what he did to achieve his fame is equally without meaning.

I must tell you where I am coming from, so you can understand why I would care enough to write to you about this. I grew up "in the theatre." (Hope that doesn't sound too pretentious). My father is the artistic director of a professional theatre. My mother and sister are both working actresses. As a child I spent my summer days watching rehearsals. As a teenager and young adult I worked backstage, on stage, and finally did some directing myself....

This theatre has been in continual operation for more than 35 years. Because we take no grants and are entirely self-supporting, most of our shows are of the "crowd-pleasing," light comic variety (though occasionally we are able to do something "daring," just for the fun of it). We have staged more than a hundred productions. Some of them have been truly great; most of them have been entertaining. Yet there is no lasting record of any of them. As a girl, I found closing nights wonderfully, horribly poignant because I knew that I would never see that particular show again. Even if Dad did the same play a few years later, it would never be exactly the same. And each of these productions, even the finest of them, is remembered by no more than a couple of thousand people. And my parents have given their lives to this. You said that Johnny Carson was engaged in "that most ephemeral of endeavors." With respect, I think my family has Mr. Carson beat.

It is a cliché that comedy is difficult, but like so many clichés it is true. Johnny Carson's comedy may not have been groundbreaking or revelatory; it may not be for the ages. But he was funny, consistently funny, day in and day out for thirty years. That is quite an achievement.

Escapism may not be high art, but I think that its value is often underrated. In fact, I think "escapism" is a misnomer. We are never truly able to escape from the problems of our lives. But we are able to put them aside, rest for a while, and then, refreshed, get on with things. And that, I think, is what Carson provided: some rest, amusement, and comfort to people who were dealing with stress, worry or grief. And surely that is a good deed. And from a religious perspective, of course, good deeds do leave a lasting record. Even those quickly forgotten by men are remembered by God.

Anyway, enough. Sorry to trouble you with such a long email. And again, thanks for the blog. My upbringing left me with an inherent dislike for the profession of critic, but I have found myself thoroughly enjoying your writing. Please don't tell my parents!

* * *

While I don't agree with my correspondent's appraisal of Carson's gifts as a comedian, that's strictly a matter of opinion. What strikes me about her letter is the way in which she puts her finger on one of the most distinctive aspects of live theater, which is its radical evanescence.

A theatrical production comes together in the moment, exists there for a finite period, then vanishes, never to be seen again. Certain aspects of it may be retrievable (like, say, Jerome Robbins' dances for the original production of Fiddler on the Roof, which have been reproduced for the current Broadway revival), but for the most part it's gone for good. A skillfully made film or telecast may preserve some of its quality (once again, Robbins is the model--the TV version of Peter Pan conveys a remarkably clear sense of what the stage version must have looked and felt like), but never all of it, and in any case such documents are rare indeed.

In a way this is tragic, but it also explains the irresistible romance of theater, which is embodied in the phrase You had to be there. When it comes to a great production of a play, you do have to be there, and if you are, you become a witness to the ineffable. For the rest of your life you can say, "I saw Jefferson Mays in I Am My Own Wife, and it was soooo great...but you know what? You had to be there." And that's part of the magic--part of what makes theater so enduringly indispensable a part of the world of art, even though film and TV long ago pushed it to the cultural sidelines.

I hope what I wrote about Carson, by the way, doesn't leave anyone with the idea that I don't appreciate the not-so-simple joys of being entertained. Like Ed Wynn in Mary Poppins, I love to laugh, and though Johnny Carson didn't make me laugh all that much, especially in his latter days, I owe an incalculable debt to the countless men and women who have, from Shakespearean buffoons to stand-up wizards. Nobody has to tell me that comedy is hard, or that it is a blessing. In fact, I think it's wiser and more profound than tragedy. As I recently observed in an essay on the music of Haydn:

Just as Haydn the man was deeply religious, so was Haydn the artist a classicist of the highest seriousness--but one who did not assume his seriousness to be incompatible with humor. Like most (but not all!) of the greatest artists, he seems to have understood by instinct that "life is such an indissoluble mixture of heartbreak and absurdity that it might be more truly portrayed through the refracting lens of comedy."

I originally wrote those words a few weeks after 9/11, at a moment when artists in New York City and elsewhere were turning their backs on comedy and succumbing to the temptation of portentousness. At such times we are at the mercy of those who confuse seriousness with solemnity--a mistake Haydn never made.

I hope I never make it, either.

(P.S. Most critics are halfwits.)

UPDATE: Another reader writes:

When I was in college I had the privilege of hearing Brendan Gill speak. One thing he said has always stuck with me: we go to the movies by ourselves because it's static, but we go to the theater because each performance holds the possibility that there will be a disaster and we don't want to be alone for that.

Posted January 27, 1:12 AM

January 26, 2005

TT: That's all he wrote

Sorry, no postings today. I wrote a three-thousand-word piece from scratch Tuesday morning, just returned from two sets at a nightclub, and have another deadline this afternoon and a Broadway preview tonight. For the moment, I'm somewhat more than lightly toasted.

I leave you in the caring hands of Our Girl. See you Thursday. Or Friday.

Posted January 26, 12:14 PM

TT: Almanac

"That was my favorite thing about playing England--all the girls looked like Brigitte Bardot, and all the guys looked like me."

Paul Desmond (quoted in Marian McPartland's Jazz World)

Posted January 26, 12:12 PM

TT: Too much information

I awoke a bit earlier than usual this morning, booted up my iBook, started my usual pre-breakfast surf of the Web, and suddenly it hit me...I soooo don't want any information today, except (maybe) the weather. I don't want to know the news, don't want to be in touch, don't want to read anybody's opinion of anything, don't care about the Oscar nominations, don't want to consider the short-term implications of the demise of the C train, don't give a damn about what's happening outside my front door. If I could, I'd cancel all my appointments, take the phone off the hook, ignore all incoming mail (including snail mail), skip my afternoon deadline, correct no proofs, blow off tonight's Broadway press preview, and spend the rest of the day and night in a state of elective mutism, communing with the contents of the Teachout Museum and listening to music about which I have no plans to write.

Alas, I can't do most of those things, or even very many of them. I have to schedule my days off well in advance, then defend them vigilantly against all comers. This isn't one of them. What's more, the mounting intensity of my desire to batten down the hatches suggests to me that I'm in severe need of more than just a day off. The world is too much with me, and I need to hole up and hide out for at least two consecutive days, preferably somewhere else. I can't hear myself thinking. I need some silence.

Like I said, none of that is on the menu, not immediately. But at least I can turn off the incoming information tap all day long, and that's my plan.

Now let's see if I stick to it.

(P.S. Read. Ponder. Shudder.)

Posted January 26, 9:11 AM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"Gulley's old father in this book is taken from life and I, as a boy playing with paint in school holidays, remember very well the feelings of pity and surprise with which I looked at a gilt-framed canvas which he had brought out to show me, and propped against an apple tree among the weeds and cabbage stalks of a Normandy farm garden. I have an idea that it had just come back to him, rejected by the Academy which ten years before had been glad to hang his works. I remember my discomfort, as I realized that this man of fifty or so was appealing for sympathy from me, a boy of sixteen; that there were tears in his eyes as he begged me to look at his beautiful work ('the best thing I ever did') and asked me what had happened to the world which had ceased to admire such real 'true' art, and allowed itself to be cheated by 'daubers"'who could neither draw nor glaze; who dared not attempt 'finish.'

"I was myself in 1905 a devoted Impressionist, one of the 'daubers.' I thought that Impressionism was the only great and true art. I thought that the poor ruined broken-hearted man weeping before me in the sunlight of that squalid vegetable patch, was a pitiable failure, whose tragedy was very easily understood--he had no eye for colour, no respect for pigment, no talent, no right whatsoever to the name of artist.

"I don't know even now what that man's work was worth. I suspect from recollection that in these days it would be once more highly appreciated. For several schools have intervened, and having worked through Impressionism and Post Impressionism, the Fauves and the Cubists, we can look upon the late Victorians with a fresh eye and judge them, outside the passing fashion, for what they really were."

Joyce Cary, 1951 prefatory essay to The Horse's Mouth

Posted January 26, 4:33 AM

January 25, 2005

TT: Thumper's lament

We were flooded with visitors on Sunday and Monday, and they didn't come to read about high culture, either. No, they wanted to see what Our Girl and I wrote about the death of Johnny Carson. It never fails to make me smile when one of our pop-culture posts causes the hits to pour in (posting about off-Broadway shows rarely has that kind of effect!).

Here's something else that interested me: a not-insignificant percentage of our readers were actively offended by the fact that we didn't join in the chorus of praise for Carson. You can't post comments on this blog, but Roger L. Simon linked to what I wrote on Sunday, and a lot of people responded with angry comments. (Go here to read them.)

So far I've only received two sharply critical pieces of personal e-mail, one obscene, the other temperate but unequivocal:

The point is not that there were things to critique about the Carson style. No. The thing is, Johnny Carson was not an artist nor an intellect; he was a personality, and among people above a certain age, a fairly universally beloved personality.

Shame. Might you not have waited a few days to speak ill of the dead?

In addition, other bloggers are starting to weigh in, and this posting is fairly representative of what they're saying:

Terry Teachout, the esteemed art critic and in-house blogger for ArtsJournal.com, has a remembrance of the late Johnny Carson of note for its spectacularly negative view of the seminal comedian. It's all the more spectacular because it's done with the least emotional of tone.

Consider Teachout's closer, which comes perilously close to being contemptuous, something never seen in obituaries, especially hours-old obituaries....

Now look again at what I wrote about Carson. No, it wasn't favorable, and yes, my tone was cool. I was reacting to the floodtide of unctuous celebrity comment in which we were immersed within hours of his passing. But I didn't call him stupid or offensive or evil--in fact, I didn't say anything personal about him at all. My point was that his comedy was inoffensive and ephemeral, and that I suspected it wouldn't be remembered for very long. It isn't obvious because I didn't mean for it to be, but in a sense I was writing about Carson's own celebrity from a religious perspective. "Perhaps he knew how little it means to have once been famous," I said in closing. If he did, then he died a wise man.

I can think of a lot of plausible responses to what I wrote (one of which I've already posted). But why on earth would anyone be offended by it? And what possible difference would it have made for me to wait a day, or even a week, to post it? Johnny Carson didn't read what I wrote, and I can't imagine he would have cared if he had. De mortuis nil nisi bonum has never made any sense to me whatsoever, nor is it practiced by the infinitely more robust obituarists who write for English newspapers. For them, the statute of limitations on candor expires when the death certificate is signed. I think that's as it should be, though to be honest all along is better still. I like what Rex Stout made Nero Wolfe say in The Black Mountain when he had occasion to speak frankly about his recently murdered best friend:

I pay him the tribute of speaking of him and feeling about him precisely as I did when he lived; the insult would be to smear his corpse with the honey excreted by my fear of death.

It's also worth pointing out that I didn't go on Oprah and call Carson a talentless hack (which I don't think he was). Instead, I posted what I had to say on a blog, where it's been seen by something like ten thousand viewers so far--not an insignificant figure, but trivial by comparison to the hundreds of thousands of people who presumably tuned in to one of the various TV tributes to Carson that aired on Sunday night. Exactly how is that shameful?

The funny thing is that I'm not known for being nasty. Most of the reviews I write are favorable, mainly because I'm an enthusiast who seeks out opportunities to write about things I like. I believe that silence is the most powerful form of negative criticism, and when I do feel obliged to drop the big one, I try to be careful to drop it only on those in a position to shoot back. I go out of my way not to slam little-known actors or musicians. A dead superstar, by contrast, seems to me fair game--yet it's been quite a while since anything I wrote provoked such furious responses.

So what's all the fuss about? I'm not altogether sure, but I'm not even slightly surprised, because I've been stirring up similar fusses all my life. I got my start as a critic in Kansas City, which is about as close to the center of the midwest as you can get, and I noticed early on that a great many readers of the Kansas City Star were actively averse to the frank expression of unfavorable opinion--any unfavorable opinion, however mild. These chronically agreeable people clearly agreed with Thumper's mother in Bambi, who said, "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all." Not surprisingly, they thought me rude, but more than that, they seemed to take what I wrote personally. It was as if they felt threatened by the mere existence of someone who disagreed with them.

This attitude puzzled me, and does to this day. I wish I could plumb it more deeply, but I can't, possibly because I don't share it. I don't care what other critics think unless I know their work well and respect it, and even then I'm not threatened by their disagreement. Sometimes it may cause me to rethink my own opinion--there are a few critics with whom I don't differ lightly--but what's wrong with that? I don't mind changing my mind. I'd rather be right than consistent.

Which brings us back to the late Johnny Carson. To those readers who didn't like what I wrote about him, I say: what's it to you? Why do you care? I'm just a guy with a blog. If you don't like it, start one of your own. That's the wonderful thing about the blogosphere--it puts all its participants on a potentially equal footing, something that was never true of the mainstream media. By all means feel free to get into the game. But let me give you fair warning: blogging isn't for the thin-skinned. If you were offended by what I wrote about Carson, wait till you start opening your e-mail.

Here's something I posted last year:

These three words, when used in the same paragraph, automatically turn my ears off:

(1) Offended

(2) Demand

(3) Apologize

I'll stand by that.

Posted January 25, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

But whatever lies behind the door
There is nothing much to do
Angel or devil, I don't care
For in front of that door, there is you

Jacques Brel, "My Death" (translated by Mort Schuman and Eric Blau)

Posted January 25, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Take my metaphor. Please.

It must be so stressful to be the designated pop culture obituarist at your publication when someone like Johnny Carson dies. Everyone, but everyone is going to run a competing piece. Not only every print publication in English, but now bloggers, too. Pesky never-sleeping bloggers, overcrowding the field. Everyone is going to pull out all the stops for this one. Everyone wants to turn out the single remembrance that will be remembered, that will be the beacon in an undifferentiated sea of "he was the man Americans went to bed with." How will you make sure your appreciation stands out among the multitude?

Answer: you will try. Really, really hard.

The formula that Carson perfected was beautiful. First came the stand-up routine, in which, as the audience sat at home, he stood erect as a needle, puncturing presidents, public figures, and celebrities. He was the Midwestern needle in a haystack, which no one could find and blunt, who emerged from the haystack every night to lash out at large, impersonal forces and then withdrew as sleep and morning beckoned.

Americans went to bed with a needle. All I can say is, ouch.

Posted January 25, 1:20 AM

January 24, 2005

TT: Touches of class

OGIC pointed the other day to a fascinating post by Colby Cosh on class differences among journalists, correctly (and testily) noting that there aren't many:

I bring this up because becoming a political writer has had the perverse effect of radicalizing me, emotionally, about class matters. I followed what now seems like a pretty singular path into this job; the enormous majority of my colleagues, on all points of the political spectrum, seem to have backgrounds that can safely be described as affluent. There are exceptions, but very few....

I've noticed the same thing, at least among political journalists, though not quite so much when it comes to people who write about the arts, which are by their nature more purely meritocratic. I've also noticed a tendency on the part of some of my readers (not you--you know me better than that--but those who encounter me only in print), as well as more than a few of my colleagues, to take for granted that I must have come from a fancy home and had an expensive education, being a ballet-quaffing art collector and all. Not surprisingly, then, Colby's post set me to thinking about the circuitous, illogical road I took to the world of art, and how it shaped the way I think about artistic and cultural matters.

The family into which I was born could best be described as small-town middle class. We didn't belong to the country club, didn't go to one of the upper-crust churches, didn't travel very much or very far. Except for a few summer trips to Gatlinburg, a sort-of-resort town in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, and a single midwinter vacation in Florida, we mostly stuck to southeast Missouri and its immediate environs. I never made it to Disneyland (and still haven't), much less Europe, New York, or even Washington. I flew for the first time as a senior in high school, and I've never ridden (or wanted to ride) a horse.

My father was in hardware. He ran a store in my home town, went briefly and unsuccessfully into business on his own, then hit the road as a salesman for a couple of medium-sized wholesale distributors who kept him on the move. He spent his last years running the hardware department of a rural lumber yard. He loved big-band jazz, especially Stan Kenton, but had no other aesthetic interests, and if he ever read a book (other than the half-dozen James Bond novels he kept tucked away in a drawer of his bathroom), I don't know about it.

My mother came from a town far smaller than Smalltown, U.S.A. She was baptized in a river, grew up on a Depression-era farm, and looked upon Smalltown as the closest available equivalent of a big city, moving there as soon as she graduated from high school and landing the first in a long string of quasi-secretarial jobs that continues to this day. She loved books and music but had to find out about them pretty much on her own, and her other cultural opportunities were severely limited. I took her to see her first ballet, her first museum, and her first professionally produced play, in all cases long after I'd grown up and left home.

How, then, did I catch the fire? I was lucky in three ways, the first of which was the high quality of the Smalltown public school system. We had a surprisingly good music program, and I took full advantage of it. (I must have been the only boy in my elementary school who liked music appreciation class.) We also had a number of townspeople who were sufficiently interested in art to launch and sustain an amateur theater group and a Community Concerts series. Finally, I grew up at a time when the powers-that-be at CBS, NBC, and ABC were obliged by the FCC to air a certain amount of cultural programming, not just in what used to be called the "Sunday-afternoon cultural ghetto" (God, does that phrase date me) but in prime time as well.

All these things were manifestations of what I refer to in the introduction to A Terry Teachout Reader as the culture of "middlebrow aspiration":

Just as city dwellers can't understand what it meant for the residents of a rural town to wake up one day and find themselves within driving distance of a Wal-Mart, so are they incapable of properly appreciating the true significance of middlebrow culture. For all its flaws, it nurtured at least two generations' worth of Americans who, like me, went on to become full-fledged highbrows--but highbrows who, while accepting the existence of a hierarchy of values in art, never lost sight of the value of popular culture.

Though middlebrow cultural aspiration was already on its last legs when I came along, small towns tend to be a bit behind the curve. Not only did I get a stiff dose of it, but it took: I studied music, tried out for plays, read books by the carload, and spent virtually every nickel of my modest allowance on records of every imaginable kind. What's more, my parents, puzzled though they were by my burgeoning strangeness, backed me to the hilt. They took me to the public library as often as I cared to go, and later on they bought me an encyclopedia, a violin, a piano, a guitar, and an electric bass, spending money they couldn't easily spare in order to give me opportunities they'd never had to explore a world of whose existence they were largely unaware.

These opportunities, as I've said, didn't include travel, and so it wasn't until I went to college that I went to my first museum and saw my first operas and ballets. I didn't go very far from home: I received my undergraduate degree, the only one I have, from a small Southern Baptist college near Kansas City. Still, I made the most of what it had to offer, and by the time I was twenty years old I knew I wanted to pursue the life of art. Wishing alone wasn't enough--I spent much of my late twenties fumbling at random--but I moved to New York in 1985 to take an entry-level job at Harper's Magazine, and from then on the path was fairly straight and unexpectedly smooth, a few scary potholes notwithstanding.

Make of my story what you will, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find in it any evidence of privilege, though I don't claim to have been particularly disadvantaged, either. Louis Armstrong was born in a one-room shack on an unpaved alley in the poorest and roughest part of New Orleans, the scion of a part-time whore and a factory worker who abandoned him and his mother when he was a baby. That's a hard row to hoe. Mine was easy by comparison, but it didn't offer me any cultural shortcuts, either, least of all the ones available to any middle-class child who happens to grow up in a reasonably large city. Nor did I have the advantage of going to what is popularly known as a "good school." I suppose we might have been able to swing it, my parents' limited financial resources notwithstanding, but the truth is that it simply never occurred to me, not for a moment, that I could have gone to Harvard, Yale, or Columbia, much less that I might have wanted to do so.

The world has changed greatly since I was young. The diversification of the media and the emergence of the Internet have made it much smaller, in the process widening our collective sense of possibility. At the same time, the middlebrow culture of aspiration is long gone: Americans as a group are no longer encouraged to believe in the intrinsic moral value of high culture, and many of the institutions that arose from that belief are as a result either dead or in terminal decline. I can't tell you to what extent the Web compensates for our loss of cultural faith. My guess is that it's a wash at best, but I don't have any children and don't know any teenagers, so I'm not in a position to report from the field. And while the cultural opportunities I had were far from exceptional, even in small towns, it's also true that I was an unusual child.

All this notwithstanding, I still think my early experience is not without continuing relevance. I have any number of friends, some my age and some much younger, who grew up in approximately similar circumstances and went on to lead the life of art, and I believe that many (if not most) other people, given sufficient aptitude and application, can do as we did. And while I occasionally wish I'd had certain kinds of opportunities that never came my way, I'm mostly glad that everything in my life happened just as it did. Instead of spending my whole life as a dedicated practitioner of a single art form, I've become a professional appreciator of all the arts, and I can't think of a better way to make a living. Yet it might not have come to pass had I lived down the street from a museum, or taken my first piano lesson at the age of three, or gone to a school whose professors might well have pressured me to canalize my energies toward a single goal.

As for my class loyalties, such as they are, they haven't changed a bit. I love New York, but I couldn't even begin to pass for a native, even when I don my All-Black Outfit and venture south of Theatre Row, or put on a suit for an opening night. People with backgrounds like mine have been known to retreat into snobbery in order to conceal their origins, but I'm homemade and proud to be. Oscar Wilde said that a cynic was someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, which suggests that a snob might be someone who appreciates the prestige of everything and the beauty of nothing. That's not me. I cry at the theater and buy prints because I like to look at them. I'm too enthusiastic to be cool and too shy to be clubbable. I am, in short, a small-town boy at large in the biggest of all big cities, having myself a time.

Posted January 24, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"I have been torn all my writing life by two conflicting desires--the journalistic desire to say it at once and have it done, and the more scholarly desire to say it carefully and with some regard to fundamental ideas and permanent values."

H.L. Mencken, unpublished note (1941)

Posted January 24, 12:00 PM

TT: Beatrice, meet Beatrix

Litblogger Ron Hogan, who writes Beatrice, launched a new blog this morning under the auspices of artsjournal.com, our illustrious host. It's called Beatrix, and it's not the same as Beatrice. I'll let Ron explain the difference:

How did this season's hot books generate their heat? And why do other novels surrounded by buzz turn into duds? Beatrix openly speculates about these questions in the form of a "book review review." I'll watch the major book reviewers to discern patterns of taste and/or critical strategy, and sometimes I'll follow a book through the review matrix to see how opinions coalesce or wildly diverge. Occasionally, I'll get the reviewers themselves to answer a few questions so we can learn more about where they're coming from--maybe I'll even find an author or two willing to review their reviewers....

Beatrice continues as an author-driven blog; in addition to gathering news items about various writers, it also includes original insights from them in the form of interviews, blog excerpts, and guest articles. My hope is that Beatrice and Beatrix will each be a standalone blog worthy of your attention...and although you don't have to read them both, I hope you will.

We will. You should.

By the way, it's been quite a while since I last explained the relationship of "About Last Night" to artsjournal.com, and we're getting a whole lot of hits today on account of yesterday's postings about Johnny Carson (yikes!). So here goes:

"About Last Night" is hosted by artsjournal.com, a daily digest of English-language arts and cultural journalism--news stories, reviews, commentaries--drawn from newspapers, magazines, Web sites, and blogs around the world. Ever since it was featured in the New York Times in 2003, artsjournal.com has become essential daily reading for art-conscious Web surfers everywhere.

A year and a half ago, artsjournal.com began launching a series of arts-related blogs, most but not all of them subject-specific. Scroll down to the bottom of the right-hand column and you'll find descriptions of and links to all of these blogs, of which "About Last Night" was the first. It's quite a portfolio, and worth your regular attention.

If you read "About Last Night" but don't look at artsjournal.com, you're missing a big bet. I check it out every morning. It's how I know what's going on in the world of art. Take a look. And while you're at it, say hello to Beatrix for me.

Posted January 24, 11:19 AM

OGIC: Cars and stars

The RSS feed alone from Ann Althouse's blog is providing quite a bit of drama today. Her post headings tell a story entire, and although it starts out dicey, it seems to have a happy ending. Here are the headlines in order from oldest to newest:

I just wrecked my car! -- 22 hours ago

After the wreck. --17 hours ago

The morning after the car wreck. --7 hours ago

Car shopping! --5 hours ago

The resiliency of the human spirit is a thing to behold. Thank goodness nobody was seriously hurt. And that in the end there was shopping.

Also at Althouse.com you'll find that the good professor has read Newsweek's pre-Oscar-nomination actor interviews so you don't have to. She shares all the good bits here, including this eyebrow-raiser from Ponce de Leonardo DiCaprio:

This art form is only 100 years old, and I am truly curious to see how the medium is going to change in the next couple hundred years.

And we're truly curious to see how you plan on doing that, Leo.

Posted January 24, 3:58 AM

OGIC: The temptation of Hockey Girl 1*

Some kindly intentioned emailers have been inquiring whether this news makes me hopeful. To be honest with you, it just makes me want to cry. I feel a little like a deflated punching bag after last week's ups and downs in the world of no-hockey. It's the same old story: we were led to hope just a little bit, knowing better. We found ourselves, at the end of the week and two bargaining sessions, smacked back down. Our own fault, I'm sure. Which is why this week I'm going to leave it at a mirthless "HA!" and get back to my reading.

You know, I think it is undeniable that this winter I have been a more productive and sociable member of society than usual. I believe, too, that I've had more time and mental space to attend to books, art, music, world news, my friends, blogging, and piles and piles of beauteous snow. And I know the winter has still been a little prosaic and joyless and dead. Such is my affliction.

* Yes, that's how I am known among a certain set of friends, I just discovered. I actually don't mind, but they should feel lucky it's not Hockey Girl 2 or 3. Verrrrrry lucky.

Posted January 24, 2:54 AM

TT: Today's wildest posting by an artblogger

Don't ask questions--just go here.

(P.S. You should read her on her not-so-wild days, too.)

Posted January 24, 2:36 AM

OGIC: Anywhere but anywhere but here

That's where I'll be on this day next week (possibly wearing my large-lettered "OGIC" hoodie, à la Ray Nicolette). And I quote:

Film critic and historian David Thomson will discuss his new book, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, Monday, January 31 at 7pm at 57th Street Books, 1301 E. 57th St. in Hyde Park. For more information, call (773) 684-1300 or visit www.semcoop.com.

Film critic and historian David Thomson explores the entire ecology of Hollywood and American movies in his absorbing new history-cum-sociological study-cum-philosophical meditation. Thomson chronicles, analyzes and deconstructs Hollywood, exploring the personalities, the films, the business and the culture of the movies, as well as the place of the movies in American culture. He asks, and tries to answer, questions that would daunt most of his thumbs-up-thumbs-down colleagues: "What have movies done to us?" and "Do movies offer education or rather a lifetime of impossible desire?"

David Thomson is a teacher, critic and author, whose books include The Biographical Dictionary of Film.

Even if I weren't automatically sold on a talk by the author of my favorite movie tome, this press release might well have lured me there. Publicity materials are not, after all, customary lurking grounds for out-and-out snarkery like "thumbs-up-thumbs-down colleagues." That may be more of a little snarl than a big bite, but it's meaner for coming from a bookstore in certain people's backyard.

Posted January 24, 2:04 AM

OGIC: Max Fischer directing, I presume

Reason #127 to appreciate Gilmore Girls?

The Stars Hollow Elementary School production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

The event is not, unfortunately, actually witnessed by the Girls nor by the viewing audience. A minor disappointment that, but some things are best left to the imagination.

Posted January 24, 1:52 AM

OGIC: Well-adjusted

Terry and a couple other helpful souls have written to answer my earlier question.

In 1978 Kenneth Tynan received $15,000 for his New Yorker profile of Johnny Carson. Today the equivalent would be a cool $43,501.85. Curiosity quenched.

Posted January 24, 1:40 AM

OGIC: Sketch in four strokes

Over at Tingle Alley, Carrie was provoked by the news of Johnny Carson's death to do a little research. She went to Kenneth Tynan's diaries and looked up entries relating to the writer's 1978 New Yorker profile of Carson. In these she found a portrait in miniature of the writing life--or of one kind of writing life, anyway.

There's enough in Tynan's diary to make one shudder at such a life. He has cause to damn the New Yorker staff as "the inquisitorial logicians on 43rd Street." But the redeeming moments are in there, too. After he turned in the piece and waited an agonizing week, the cash-strapped Tynan got good news from William Shawn:

He thinks the piece "stunning" and "marvellous"...

And better news from William Shawn:

...$15,000.

I believe Terry has in his possession a secret decoder ring that will tell us what that is in 2005 dollars. I, for one, would be interested [read: pruriently curious] to know.

Posted January 24, 1:18 AM

January 23, 2005

TT: Johnny Carson, R.I.P.

Johnny Carson, who died this morning at the age of 79, devoted most of his adult life to that most ephemeral of endeavors, hosting a late-night talk show. I must have seen several hundred episodes of The Tonight Show in my lifetime, and I even went out of my way to watch the last one, yet I doubt I've thought of Carson more than once or twice in the thirteen years since he retired, just as I doubt that anyone now alive can quote from memory anything he said on any subject whatsoever.

By an odd coincidence, I happened to see a clip from The Tonight Show last night, on stage at the Acorn Theatre, where the New Group is reviving David Rabe's Hurlyburly, a play set in Hollywood in the early Eighties. In the last scene, Ethan Hawke watches TV as he snorts all the cocaine he can cram up his nose, and it's Carson that he watches, ranting wildly all the while. It startled me to hear again the once-familiar theme song and Ed McMahon's stentorian Heeeeeere's...Johnny!, yet a moment later I asked myself, How many people in this theater recognize the man on the screen? Not many, I fear.

Strange, then, to think that Carson was once one of the most powerful people in show business, that he could make (or break) careers, that his quips were quoted constantly, at least in the first years of his tenure. He gradually lost interest in The Tonight Show, appearing less and less frequently and to steadily diminishing effect, and in his last few seasons he bordered on self-caricature. Not that there'd ever been much to parody: his comedy routines were dullish, his charmingly casual manner too slender a reed to support vivid impersonation. My parents' generation recalls Steve Allen and Jack Paar, his predecessors, in a way they don't and won't recall Carson, partly because TV was still something of a novelty back then but mostly because they were so much more idiosyncratic as personalities, Paar in particular. What's more, they took chances, something Carson never did. He always played it safe.

The obits are being written now, the TV retrospectives being readied for tonight's newscasts, and I'm sure they'll be properly sentimental and respectful. I might even tune in NBC, his old network, to see what they have to offer. But probably not: I'm increasingly disinclined to wallow in nostalgia about nothing, which is what will be on tap for the next couple of days. And after that? A fast fade to black, I expect. American popular culture is cruel and brutal when it comes to the immediate past: it respects only extreme youth, and has no time for the day before yesterday.

All of which somehow makes me feel sorry for Johnny Carson. I wonder what he thought of his life's work? Or how he felt about having lived long enough to disappear into the memory hole? At least he had the dignity to vanish completely, retreating into private life instead of trying to hang on to celebrity by his fingernails. Perhaps he knew how little it means to have once been famous.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis reflects on Carson and the common culture.

Also, a reader writes, summing up what I suspect a lot of other people are feeling tonight:

It would be wrong to gauge Johnny Carson's fame in the ordinary ways: What lasting words did he leave? What lasting monument? What lasting anything, for that matter. He wasn't famous for being great; he was famous for being familiar. He was always there. He was always okay. Always sorta funny, sorta personable. Just plain sorta. I can recall a number of high points of my life when I was particularly daunted or worried -- first having moved out of my parents' home; first having been married; first visting New York to flog my work; these times and others -- and I recall  how at each of these times I would tune it to the Tonight Show (or my wife & I would tune in) and there was Johnny: sorta funny, sorta risque, sort of a friend. I never saw the guy in person, on the street, but I'm sure that if I had I could not have resisted overiding my better judgment and accosting him with a "Hi, Johnny!" as though we were old pals.

This is just to say that even though, yes, he was only a pixelated picture on a tacky TV studio stage (I visited it once: it looked like the set of a High School play decorated with Elmer's glue and glitter) and, as you point out, he's now pretty much forgotten -- certainly unknown to teens and young adults -- I still mourn him like a lost friend.

For what it's worth, that's how I felt when Charles Kuralt died.

Posted January 23, 3:06 AM

OGIC: Carson captured

The very long, very ambivalent entry for Johnny Carson in David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film contains too many truly bon bon mots to cite them all here. You may as well throw a dart. I don't have a dart, but I choose an excerpt that captures the man's characteristic contradiction by invoking another popular icon of his heyday:

He was all antennae, sweeping an audience for sullenness or the sweet mercy that liked him. "I don't know why, but I'm in a silly mood tonight," he'd claim, a thousand times, trying to believe it. Whereas Johnny Carson was about as silly as Jack Nicklaus putting for money.

For what it's worth, I'm a little too young to know what I think about Carson. My parents watched him, but by the time I was staying up that late there was Letterman, whose first NBC show I'd watch after my parents had gone to bed. So I have a certain nostalgia-once-removed for Carson's Tonight Show. It was the show I mildly looked forward to being old enough to watch, but whose appeal had dwindled and been displaced by the time I was.

Posted January 23, 3:04 AM

January 21, 2005

TT: Youth will be (dis)served

It's Friday, and I'm in The Wall Street Journal with a review of Harold and Maude: The Musical, plus a report on Harvey Fierstein's debut as Tevye in the Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof.

The former was, eh, not so hot:

For years now, Tom Jones, whose list of credits includes the book and lyrics for "The Fantasticks," has had his eye on "Harold and Maude," the 1971 cult movie about a 20-year-old suicidal misfit who falls hard for a fey 80-year-old widow. When Harvey Schmidt, his longtime collaborator, declined the challenge of writing music for so quirky a project, the undaunted Mr. Jones teamed up with a younger composer, Joseph Thalken. They brought the finished product to New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse, where "Harold and Maude: The Musical" is running through Feb. 6, with Estelle Parsons playing the part created in the film by Ruth Gordon.

Would that the fruits of Mr. Jones' protracted labors were more satisfying. Alas, "Harold and Maude" doesn't fly, in part because the redeeming peculiarities of the film, an all-you-need-is-love-love-love period piece, have been carefully watered down by Mr. Jones to accommodate easily ruffled suburban sensibilities. What's left is a decorously brief fling between Harold and Maude that still fails to pass the eeuuww test, portrayed with a starry-eyed tweeness that made my teeth itch....

The latter was, somewhat to my surprise, really fine, if a bit odd in spots:

Mr. Fierstein, last seen on Broadway in "Hairspray," isn't an obvious candidate for the part of Tevye. Aside from not getting to wear a dress, he has to sing several demanding songs, and his voice, which sounds like a bullfrog stuck in a double bass, makes a decidedly odd impression in "Sunrise, Sunset" and "Sabbath Prayer." (Believe it or not, he croaks some of his numbers in keys so low that the orchestra has to transpose them up to meet him in the middle.) Still, he more than makes up in comic prowess for what he lacks in vocal luster, and though he hasn't combed all the "Hairspray" out of his intermittently flouncy mugging, Mr. Fierstein rises effortlessly--as well as believably--to "Fiddler"'s not-infrequent moments of high drama....

No link, and there's much, much more, including a review of a third show, Washington's Arena Stage revival of Hallelujah, Baby! To see what you're missing, buy a copy of today's Journal (duh), or click here and get with the program.

Posted January 21, 6:24 AM

TT: Almanac

"Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian's life can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx--my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me--we're sinning! We're succeeding! We're human after all!)."

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Posted January 21, 6:10 AM

TT: AWOL

Pardon me for not having done the usual this morning. I was prepping last night in order to conduct the very first interview for my Louis Armstrong biography, and today I spent six amazingly absorbing hours talking to George Avakian, who knew Armstrong from 1940 on and was his record producer in the mid-Fifties. Avakian, who was born in 1919, appears to remember everything that ever happened to him, and revels in sharing his memories with serious-minded interviewers who've done their homework. I had, and I filled up four cassettes with his detailed recollections of Armstrong, on and off the job. We're not quite done yet, but I covered a lot of ground, and I expect to start writing the first draft of the prologue some time next week.

It isn't easy to write a biography of a man you never met, even someone like Armstrong who left behind a substantial body of correspondence and reminiscence. By the time I started writing about H.L. Mencken, who died in 1956, everyone who had known him at all well was long gone, and I had to work from written source material alone. Though Armstrong died in 1971, there aren't many people left who knew him well enough to speak with confidence about his character and personality, much less who collaborated with him closely enough to describe his working methods. Oral-history transcripts are precious, sometimes priceless, but the one thing you can't do with them is ask the interviewees your own questions. When I turned on my tape recorder this morning, I felt as if magic casements were about to open, and when I turned it off late in the afternoon, I knew they had.

Anyway, my apologies for not posting my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, which will go up shortly, along with today's almanac entry. Now you know why, and I bet you don't blame me one bit....

Posted January 21, 5:54 AM

OGIC: Thingamajigs we love

Last night the ipod played Lucinda Williams's "Jackson" and the Breeders' "Drivin' on 9" practically back-to-back, which I thought was awfully clever of it. These are my two favorite songs about driving--songs while driving, really--dating back to well before I was a driver myself. Driving can be an opiate, and the narrators of both songs seem under its influence. They treat the names of their destinations like talismans, hopefully investing them with emotional significance the places haven't actually yet taken on. Musically, both songs have simple, even naïve structures, though I hasten to add that I don't really know what I'm talking about.

But speaking of ipods, mine slips smoothly into the dock of this sleek little donut, otherwise known as the Harman JBL On Stage speaker system. It's fabulous. I found mine under a tree but you can locate one at Amazon or here, where I imagine they will let you listen to or fondle it before you plunk down your hard-earned cash. The speaker is highly portable, holds its own against the pod in terms of style, and sounds great, both to mine and more exacting ears. Doing dishes? Newly tolerable this year.

Posted January 21, 2:25 AM

January 20, 2005

OGIC: Reading around

- Erin O'Connor has discovered the wonder that is Shirley Hazzard's Transit of Venus. She gets further than I ever did in explaining what makes the novel so palpably different from other books one reads, what gives it its unmistakable aura:

The novel cannot be read quickly and still be read well. Its nuance demands a dipping method of reading, in which the reader stops reading frequently to consider what she has just read, and in which the reader routinely disrupts her forward progress to reread a passage whose precision cannot fully be grasped at once. It's a rare and exquisite pleasure to read this way and to be rewarded for it, a reminder that nothing is ever bland, and that the closer one attends to the details of life, the more there is to see, to know, and to feel.

I received for Christmas the Hazzard novel you never hear about, The Bay of Noon. I've read just a few pages and won't be able to return to it anytime very soon. My brief initial foray revealed the fine writing and keen eye I would have expected--but not that, you know, that thing (snaps fingers). That thing is a rare thing. Truth be told, it would be a little disappointing to find out it's replicable.

- Mr. Elegant Variation is multi-talented. I very much enjoyed his super-short story at Pindeldyboz. "The Everhappy Eterna Comfort Band™" may be a diminutive thing, but it has some teeth on it.

- Finally, Colby Cosh writes fascinatingly here on the relative homogeneity of journalists' class backgrounds and the difference of his own from the norm. Here's a swatch:

If you compared the average working physicist to the average working journalist, I believe you'd find that the latter had parents whose income was much higher. And I believe this is so even though it's the physicist who is ostensibly in greater need of early-life educational advantages, an encouraging household milieu, and (to stick one toe into Larry Summers territory) inheritable cognitive endowments. This happens not because journalism is a cliquish, incestuous business, or just because it is; it's also because a child of intellectuals or businessmen just has a much easier time imagining getting paid for doing mental work and nothing else.

Posted January 20, 11:54 AM

OGIC: In which WebCrimson defeats me

I accidentally (or, more accurately, in wretched impatience) posted my last item twice. As soon as I saw that this had happened, our blog service provider slowed down to more or less a full stop (please note that I am the last known blogger still using a dial-up connection, although these medieval days are numbered).

Fifteen minutes of tearing my hair out ensued, but I was at last able to delete one of the doubles. An hour later, they were both still appearing here. Now I've gone in and deleted the second copy, with no apparent effect on the appearance of this page. Presumably at some point they will both vanish; as soon as possible after that, I'll marshal as much forbearance as I can and post the errant post--precisely once.

Long story short: I do know I appear to be repeating myself, thanks. Thanks.

Posted January 20, 7:20 AM

OGIC: In which WebCrimson defeats me

I accidentally (or, more accurately, in wretched impatience) posted my last item twice. As soon as I saw that this had happened, our blog service provider slowed down to more or less a full stop (please note that I am the last known blogger still using a dial-up connection, although these medieval days are numbered).

Fifteen minutes of tearing my hair out ensued, but I was at last able to delete one of the doubles. An hour later, they were both still appearing here. Now I've gone in and deleted the second copy, with no apparent effect on the appearance of this page. Presumably at some point they will both vanish; as soon as possible after that, I'll marshal as much forbearance as I can and post the errant post--precisely once.

Long story short: I do know I appear to be repeating myself, thanks. Thanks.

UPDATE: All fixed!

Posted January 20, 7:20 AM

OGIC: Barfly at rest

What's that you say? You already visited Colby Cosh today on my recommendation? Well, turn yourself right around and head back there if you want to see the snapshot of a festive Charles Bukowski gotten up all Tom-Wolfe-style that Colby found in a book once upon a time. Be sure to take in his reading of the captured moment, too--it's amusing and rings awfully true.

Bonus materials: Bukowski v. Thomas in the Clash of the Tightest: History's Greatest Drunks Square Off.

Posted January 20, 6:48 AM

OGIC: It came from Outer space

After careful consideration, and having duly consulted with my co-blogger, I've come to the conclusion that the mysterious proprietor of Outer Life is the Charles Lamb of our time, or the Charles Lamb of our medium--I'm not sure which, but he's the Charles Lamb of something. His recent posting "Birthday at Buddy's"--as observant, dry, and economical as his usual fare but somehow even more hilarious--is what pushed me over the fence from simply enjoying his essays to reaching for superlatives. If you aren't already reading him, what are you doing with your life?

"Brithday at Buddy's" begins:

The invitation arrived on Tuesday for a birthday party on Sunday. At 10:00 am. Bowling at Buddy's Bowl-O-Rama. For a four year old. Bouncy and lunch to follow at the house.

Late invitation -- strike one. Bowling for four year olds -- strike two. 10:00 am on a Sunday morning -- strike three. So I threw the invitation out.

You'll want to read the rest.

Outer Life appears to have been around for about ten months. I've been reading it regularly for about two, which means there's a nice plump archive for me to plunder greedily over the next little while. Some posts I've especially liked so far (both culled from a greatest hits list in OL's right-hand column called "Some Old Posts"--what, did he pick them by throwing darts?): "Mr. Tiki and the Boogie Boys" and "A Farewell to Golf," which will no doubt strike some as an inconceivable sentiment (hi Dad!).

Good deed for the day: check.

UPDATE: Outer Life promises he'll "keep a sharp eye on my sister."

Posted January 20, 6:02 AM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"One needs only to be old enough in order to be as young as one will."

Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres

Posted January 20, 5:04 AM

TT: Absence makes the heart grow fonder

I'm staying out of sight until Friday: deadlines, appointments, interviews, paperwork, performances. Our Girl will keep you fed until I return.

Have fun, and don't make a mess while I'm gone.

Posted January 20, 1:23 AM

TT: Almanac

The sleepless nights,
The daily fights,
The quick toboggan when you reach the heights--
I miss the kisses and I miss the bites.
I wish I were in love again!
The broken dates,
The endless waits,
The lovely loving and the hateful hates.
The conversation with the flying plates--
I wish I were in love again!

Lorenz Hart, "I Wish I Were in Love Again" (music by Richard Rodgers)

Posted January 20, 1:22 AM

January 19, 2005

TT: Almanac

"Magic is directed almost entirely to men, you know. And it's a return for them to boyhood, childhood. It has nothing to do with women, who hate it--it irritates them. They don't like to be fooled. And men do."

Orson Welles (quoted in David Thomson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles)

Posted January 19, 12:00 PM

TT: Unseparated at birth

When you have an unusual last name--in my case, extremely unusual--it's always startling to stumble across it in print and realize that the party in question isn't you. This has been happening quite a bit in recent days, so I thought perhaps I should explain that I am not Zephyr Teachout, nor have I had anything to say, in print or out, regarding Daily Kos' relationship with the Howard Dean campaign, in which Zephyr played a prominent and widely reported role. Nor will I. Ever. You can count on it. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, visit Zephyr's blog for details.)

To be sure, I've always wanted to meet Zephyr, with whom I exchanged friendly e-mails around the time that her name first started popping up in news reports about the Dean campaign. She's obviously very smart and very nice, and we concluded that we must be related--I mean, how could two Teachouts not be related? I hope our paths cross someday.

Nevertheless, she's not me, nor am I her.

Posted January 19, 10:21 AM

OGIC: Truer confessions

Responses to last week's post on demonstrative reading have been all over the map. Most people I heard from seemed to take for granted the attention-seeking dimension of reading in public and wondered what all my fuss was about. I suppose it's become a banal observation what with the boom in Starbuck's-sitting and, of course, the invasion of the bookstore-cafes. More to the point, though, I shied away in my post from admitting just how painfully self-conscious this variety of reading could be when I was younger. Sometimes there was very little turning of pages at all but very much furtive looking up to see whether I'd been noticed. I must have looked ridiculous. Also, on rare occasions I managed to stick myself with a book I really, really didn't want to read. I drew the line at books in other languages, but New Directions translations could be irresistible. These days I'm unlikely to be seen reading anything very impressive at all, since it's the Westlakes (but not the Starks, mind you, which are trade paperbacks), John D. MacDonalds, and Reginald Hills that fit best in my purse.

Over at Tingle Alley, Carrie has come up with a few delicious anecdotes about demonstrative reading gone wrong. Herein you'll find the memorable lament "Oh no, you're one of those girls who walk around reading Cortázar."

Meanwhile, one correspondent prefers to keep his reading choices to himself, thank you very much:

I've never been comfortable reading in public. This is probably a relic of growing up around kids who'd beat up any poindexter seen with a book. It probably also has something to do with my insecurity, worrying that some hoity-toity type will spy my reading material and reveal my inferior taste for everyone to see.

Another reader brings up a point that never occurred to me: perhaps that weathered Celine edition I thought so becoming at 17 was actually screaming "Unapproachable!" and even looked, to some blinkered eyes, downright unfeminine:

I used to engage in much demonstrative reading in Ann Arbor coffee shops, though often because I was actually reading what I wanted (not because I picked up The American Scholar or Far Eastern Economic Review just to seem cool). Finally (though this didn't stop me) a female classmate told me that I'd never get a date because I looked too smart and scared guys away. Well, I didn't get many dates then with or without the books so I just kept on reading and married an equally nerdy reader.

This all sounds so healthy and reasonable, I'm starting to think the category of demonstrative reading needs to be subdivided into the innocent and the guilty. A friend here in Chicago is sharp and shameless in dissecting the latter:

I'm a total repeat offender. I think it's one of those fantasies that is kind of irresistible to the bookish-- so seductive because we can fool ourselves into thinking that our act of preening is instead the result of a kind of self-absorption that we (and, I think we imagine, the person who discovers or recognizes or understands us) would see as noble, as opposed to all the vulgar acts of self-absorptive display that the intellectually unwashed engage in at the gym, the lake front, or some wretched nightclub. I remember during my second year of grad school looking for a book at Barnes & Noble, and they had set up this mini Starbuxian coffee-shop next to the philosophy section, and I remember being genuinely offended (!) when seeing this yuppie guy sitting at a table in horn-rims and a black turtleneck (heh--this was still the early 90s) thumbing through some Barthes while sipping his latte-cappuccino. The nerve! Co-opting the pose I was suffering through graduate school to earn. Of course I was feeling these things totally unironically and with an embarrassing lack of self awareness.

Read three John Grishams and a Da Vinci Code on the steps of the AIC and your sins will be forgiven, darling.

Posted January 19, 1:06 AM

January 18, 2005

TT: Inquiring minds

I recently noticed in our referral log that somebody had been sent to "About Last Night" as a result of searching Google for "terry + teachout + gay." Curious as to what else this anonymous investigator succeeded in turning up, I clicked through to the search results and saw...well, not much. Outside of my review of Mystic River (in which I mentioned Marcia Gay Harden) and a passing reference to Cole Porter's The Gay Divorce, I found only coincidental juxtapositions of those three words that happened to pop up on the same URL. If someone out there in cyberspace was longing for the lowdown on my private life, I fear the party in question came up empty-handed.

I can't help but wonder what prompted this mysterious electronic inquiry. Might it have been an uncomfortable reader who, puzzled by my consistent failure to conform to his firmly settled politico-aesthetic preconceptions, longed to stuff me into a more reassuring pigeonhole? Or was he merely looking to add an item or two to a file somewhere or other? In either case, my suggestion is simple: ask Our Girl. She knows all my secrets. (So do the FBI and the White House, but they're not telling.)

Alas, anyone who knows me more than casually would be likely to dissolve into helpless giggles if asked such a question. My sexual preferences are laughably self-evident, not to mention single-minded, though I doubt you could figure them out by administering a cultural questionnaire via e-mail. I mean, what kind of weirdo likes Rio Bravo and Pacific Overtures? Or Mark Morris and the Louvin Brothers? (Well, Mark does, but then he's really weird.)

The point being, of course, that it simply doesn't matter, nor should it (unless you're going out on a date with me, in which case it's highly relevant). I don't put all of myself on this blog, or into my published writings, but the part I exhibit in public is absolutely, unequivocally the real right thing. I am, in short, what I seem to be, and if you don't think it adds up, let that be a lesson to you: the only way to stuff a human being into a pigeonhole is to cut off pieces until he fits.

UPDATE: I came back from lunch to find a new search in the referral log: "terry + teachout + claims + he + isn't + gay." Oh, puh-leeze.

Posted January 18, 12:43 PM

TT: Snapshot

Overheard:

HE: I want somebody to love me.

SHE: I want somebody to pay me.

Posted January 18, 12:04 PM

TT: Did you ever have one of these days?

On Saturday morning I sat down at my desk and started writing my Louis Armstrong biography. By mid-afternoon I'd finished drafting the 850-word preface. I think it's good, and so did several friends to whom I sent the paragraph I liked best. Then I broke down the main events and transition points of Armstrong's life story into an eight-chapter outline, using fragments from Armstrong's own writings for chapter titles (just as I did with The Skeptic).

Feeling that I'd done enough for one day, I shut up my iBook and took a cab to the opening of the Jane Freilicher retrospective currently on view at Tibor de Nagy Gallery. I was joined by a friend who knows his way around the art world, and when we arrived he said to me, "Would you like to meet Jane?" She's one of my favorite painters--one of her prints is in the Teachout Museum--so naturally I said yes. My friend took me up to Freilicher and made the introduction, and she shook my hand and said, "Oh, yes, I know who you are--I really liked your Balanchine book." Had there been an open window handy, I would have jumped out of it and floated all the way down to Park Avenue.

Instead, I descended to the street via conventional means, had fondue with friends at La Bonne Soupe, then strolled over to Zankel Hall, the small auditorium beneath Carnegie Hall, where Chris Thile, the stupefyingly virtuosic mandolin player of Nickel Creek, was giving a duet recital in the company of Edgar Meyer, the best bass player of any kind in the known universe. The music they played together was by turns complex, direct, funky, pensive, and ecstatic, and the two of them were in such touchingly high spirits that I was forcibly reminded of why it is that we speak of playing music.

After the second number, Chris looked at the audience, his mouth a perfect O of bliss, and shouted, "Carnegie...freaking...Hall!" The crowd exploded in laughter and cheers.

I went straight home from there but couldn't sleep for sheer happiness, so I stayed up and wrote until two in the morning. It was an amazing day, but in a way the most amazing thing about it was that it wasn't an especially unusual day. I have days like that all the time--maybe not quite that showstoppingly fine, but often pretty damn close.

How lucky am I? You don't have to tell me. I soooo know.

Posted January 18, 12:02 PM

TT: Elsewhere

- Mr. Alicublog goes to the movies:

Also revisited Kubrick's Lolita. Like Wilder in Kiss Me, Stupid, Kubrick was doggedly exploring the terrain of 60s sex comedy; unlike Wilder, he has no skill at sex comedy of any sort -- the best male sex-comedians dance at the edge of misogyny, whereas Kubrick had long since progressed from misogyny to misanthropy. I can see why he was attracted to Humbert's obsession, but having to deal with the female half of the equation appears to have baffled him: The moments of sympathy for Charlotte Haze seem tacked on like guilty afterthoughts and Sue Lyon is practically exterminated as Lolita -- only her body and brash tone survive....

Yes, totally. (I don't like Stanley Kubrick at all, by the way. I, too, watched Lolita on cable the other night, but only to wallow in James Mason's dark-brown, Yorkshire-tinged accent. I can't think of a Hollywood voice I like better, male or female.)

- The ever-satisfying Ms. Household Opera goes to the annual Modern Language Association convention and breathes a sigh of relief at having resumed her civilian status:

But well before the end of it, I was thanking multiple deities that I will never again have to write in the machete mode of criticism. By this I mean the kind of literature scholarship that frames all its main points as a demolition of everyone else's main points, like mowing down those around you by swinging a machete around. In graduate school it didn't take me long to tire of academic writing in which the argument was preceded by hatchet-jobs on the prior work of Professors X, Y, and Z; I hated writing like that even more. Hearing it again from the lips of senior scholars, some of whom posed their entire talks as point-by-point refutations of someone else's article, reminded me of everything that put me off the idea of writing the sorts of things one gets tenure for. At one point, I had the odd feeling that I was watching a large group of people standing on a tiny patch of ground, elbowing and jostling each other for more space, all trying to outshout each other.

No wonder I so often used to feel like no matter how hard I worked, I could never be good enough. Blargh. I don't miss it one little bit....

Blargh. Is that better or worse than arrgh?

- Comes now The Little Professor, that mysterious but nonetheless self-evidently cool non-civilian Victorianist, with a link to an almanac-worthy remark by Colin Burrow, followed by reflections thereon. The quote:

"Shakespeare may or may not have been Catholic, but generally if a document that sounds too good to be true is found exactly where you'd hope to find it and then goes missing in mysterious circumstances it is indeed too good to be true."

Sad but true, as any halfway decent biographer (or journalist! or journalist!) can tell you.

- An unknown visitor to the new MoMA recently damaged Anne Truitt's "Catawba," which is no longer on display. Tyler has the scoop, plus links. (Scroll up and down for more.)

- Mr. Decline and Fall, an American living in Iraq, keeps his ears open:

What do they listen to? Let's just say that there's very little sense of "cool" or "trendy" in their listening habits. One can't expect people who have spent their lives living under Saddam's thumb to have any real sense of hipster do's and don't's, but even those who have lived in America for a while and have come back here to work as linguists can almost be relied upon to be fans of Celine Dion. It's actually gotten to the point where as soon as a discussion of music begins, I say to the nearest Arab, "You like Celine Dion, don't you?" They always reply in the affirmative.

On some level this completely un-self-conscious appreciation of melody and the human voice is refreshing in a world where you are sometimes identified by your music preference. When someone says they like Billy Ray Cyrus or DMX or Franz Ferdinand or Marilyn Manson, we assume that tells us something about them. Unaware of the pitfalls of music-as-identity, these folks just listen to what they enjoy. On the other hand, I can't shake the thought that Western Music consists in their eyes of nothing but insipid crap....

Yesterday I was getting an Arabic lesson from a local national friend when he looked across my desk and saw the new Nirvana box set. I explained, through words and gestures, about Nirvana's music and Kurt Cobain's untimely demise and concluded very quickly that he would not be able to appreciate what an earth-shattering event "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was, so I showed him my iPod. I dialed up Ella Fitgerald singing "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," but he didn't like the fact that he couldn't understand the words. So I let him listed to Edith Piaf singing "La Vie en Rose" with the thought that if neither of us knew what was going on lyrically we'd be on the same page. No dice: "Too old," he said.

Then I decided to try an instrumental selection: one of J.S. Bach's Violin Concertos, played by Hilary Hahn. He had never heard anything like it before. For a moment I pondered the stark implications of a culture that had heard Yanni but not Mozart, Celine Dion but not Ella Fitgerald, Country but not Blues. "This is a much bigger clash of cultures than I had ever imagined," I heard myself say. But the look on his face as he struggled to turn the volume up on that exquisite music made it all better....

I sure hope somebody out there tells Hilary Hahn about this posting. (You may need to scroll down a bit to find it, by the way.)

- Speaking of great moments in Western culture, Mr. From the Floor recently paid a visit to the "Mona Lisa":

The point of seeing the piece, for almost all visitors, is to say that they have seen it. Tourists don't really go to the Louvre to look at the Mona Lisa. They go so that when they return home they can tell friends that they saw the painting.

Those of us who spend time looking at and writing about art tend to be condescending toward the masses that gather in front of da Vinci's painting--looking, as they do, to the work to provide validation for their trip to Paris.

Unfortunately, though, many of us do the same. Reading through top ten list after top ten list this month in both the print media and around the blogosphere has made me realize that too many art writers neglect seeing exhibitions in their haste to prepare for saying that they have seen them....

Oh, yes. Yes-and-a-half.

- Lastly, Lileks reflects on some non-political aspects of the great red-blue divide:

I love some bustle. I prefer to commute to the bustle, however, not be embustled 24-7. Myriad options are nice, but I suspect that 84% of these options consist of "ethnic food, readily available," and the other 12% are made up of museums and concerts most urban dwellers rarely have time to attend.

But at least they're there if you want them! In any case, it's somehow flattering to know you live in a place where someone, right now, is setting up an art installation that forces us to rethink the way we think about something. Anything. Except the historical failure of art installations to make anyone rethink about anything, ever....

Or you get exhilarated, depending on your mood and temperament, or depending on something as simple and unique as turning a corner in Manhattan during the blue hour, looking through a store window into a salon, heading up the sidewalk with the traffic streaming the other way, forty stories of lights rising up on either side, and thinking: nowhere else but here, and here I am. Having lived on the East Coast, I can see why some people love it. And I understand why I didn't, in the end. At some point in your life you may think I'd prefer a little less public urination, if I might. The fact that some prefer the Big City strikes me as utterly unremarkable, and I'd bet that most people in Red states don't think much about why Blue staters like to live in concentrated urban centers. Why? Because they don't care. They know that the big cities have advantages the rural areas lack, but they're not that important to them, and they don't worry about what they're missing. If they do, then they move....

Speaking as one who did--but continues to retain his home ties--I'd say this is exactly right.

Posted January 18, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"'The so-called conscientiousness of the great majority of painters is nothing but perfection in the art of boring. If it were possible, these fellows would labor with equal care over the backs of their pictures."

Eugène Delacroix, journal entry (July 18, 1850)

Posted January 18, 12:00 PM

TT: New face of 2005

I just got back from the Algonquin Hotel, where Jessica Molaskey made her Oak Room debut earlier this evening. She tore the joint up. It was the best debut I've seen there since Diana Krall first played the Algonquin eight years ago, and one of the strongest and most polished cabaret sets I've ever seen.

Molaskey is a Broadway baby (Crazy for You, Dream) who read the writing on the wall when good parts for old-fashioned musical-comedy actors started drying up in the late Nineties. Instead of cursing the looming darkness, she retrofitted herself as a cabaret singer with the help of her husband, the jazz singer-guitarist John Pizzarelli. She started off by making guest appearances on his New York gigs, and they began to collaborate in the recording studio (they were already writing excellent songs together--she has an enviable knack for witty wordplay). At first she had trouble accustoming herself to the intimate scale of cabaret, a problem she shared with most Broadway performers who've tried to make the switch. My guess is that she found it intimidating. But somewhere along the line she figured out how to play to a small, attentive crowd, and the payoff came tonight.

Molaskey's soft-edged bass-flute voice would be easy on the ears even if she didn't have such a deft way with words. In fact, she sings like the smart actor she is, making the most of a lyric without ever succumbing to the temptation to make a meal of it. Instead, all is subtlety: a wry smile here, an arched eyebrow there, just enough between-song patter to grease the audience's wheels, and everywhere an enveloping, inviting warmth that lights up her fetching jolie-laide features and makes them shimmer. As of now, I'd say she's got the sexy-girl-next-door market sewed up tight. Being the fine songwriter she is, it stands to reason that she really knows how to pick songs, and tonight's set was a savvy blend of the time-tested ("Make Believe") and the unexpected ("Stepsisters' Lament"). Not surprisingly, she likes a good medley: I loved the way she dropped a pinch of "Big Spender" into "Hey, Look Me Over." As for the duet version of Stephen Sondheim's "Getting Married Today" and Jon Hendricks' "Cloudburst" that she sang with husband John, all I can say is...wow. Octuple wow.

For the most part, Pizzarelli stuck to the role of loyal sideman, teaming up with his brother Martin on bass and the superlative Larry Goldings on piano to provide the kind of smooth, swinging, utterly assured support of which most cabaret singers can only dream in vain. A show-stopping entertainer in his own right, he scrupulously refrained from scene-stealing, and it was wonderful to see the pride on his face as he watched his wife sashay through the show without dropping a stitch.

If I sound excited, it's because the buzz of Molaskey's debut hasn't yet worn off. I'm still flying. The good news is that you don't have to take my word for it, since most of the songs she sang are on her latest CD, Make Believe. Give it a spin. If listening to Make Believe doesn't make you want to come down to the Oak Room and behold the birth of a new cabaret star, maybe you need to get your batteries charged. Or changed.

* * *

Jessica Molaskey is at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel through Saturday, Jan. 29. The music starts at nine o'clock, with an 11:30 show added on Fridays and Saturdays.

For more information, go here.

Posted January 18, 11:32 AM

TT: Just in case

I was here yesterday, even if you weren't. Keep going after you hit today's almanac entry and you'll find something very personal and (I hope) worth reading.

Posted January 18, 10:15 AM

January 17, 2005

TT: A voice from the past

I don't mind admitting that it shook me to receive an e-mail the other day whose return address was NancyLaMott@aol.com. Even though it didn't really come from beyond the grave, it had something of the same disorienting impact, if only for a moment.

Here's what it said:

Midder Music Records is thrilled to announce the release of a brand-new Nancy LaMott CD, "Nancy LaMott: Live at Tavern on the Green," the first new Nancy LaMott release in eight years.

Recorded live at Nancy's last engagement at Tavern on the Green, just seven weeks before her untimely death, this CD is filled with radiant, joyful, gorgeously sung performances, as well as charming, funny, often touching patter.

Featuring some of your favorite Nancy LaMott standards plus many songs you've never heard her sing on CD before, this CD captures, for all time, the magic that was Nancy live.

SPECIAL OFFER!

CD's don't hit the stores until February 1, but you can order them online right now at a special price, by going to nancylamott.com.

Order "Nancy LaMott: Live at Tavern on the Green," or any of Nancy's other six CD's (they're all being re-released) before February 1, and pay only $13.98 plus shipping and handling (a $3.00 discount).

Offer good until February 1 only.

Nancy's back at last! SPREAD THE WORD!

Midder Music sent me an advance copy of Live at Tavern on the Green last week. At first I was reluctant to listen to it--afraid, really. I was in the audience when it was taped, in October of 1995, shortly after Nancy told me that the cancer for which she was being treated had spread to her liver. I knew as I watched her perform that she might not live much longer, though I was doing my best not to think about it any more than I could help. She knew, too, and the songs she chose to sing that night would have given her secret away to anyone who was paying attention: "The People That You Never Get to Love." "Sailin' On." "I Didn't Know What Time It Was." "The Promise (I'll Never Say Goodbye)." Not that you would have guessed it from the open-hearted, uninhibited way she sang them, the same way she sang everything, as if there wouldn't be any more tomorrows. Only this time there really weren't: I had Thanksgiving dinner with Nancy and her fiancé three weeks later, and the next time I saw her was on her deathbed.

Six years went by before I could bear to listen to any of her records again. (How she would have hated that!) Even now I couldn't begin to imagine what it would feel like to hear how her singing voice sounded on the last night I heard it in person. But I finally got up the nerve to put on Live at Tavern on the Green, and like so many of the things we dread most, it turned out to be not nearly so hurtful as I'd feared.

Of course I cried--a lot--but I smiled, too, both at the songs and at her unpretentious between-song patter. She told jokes. She talked about having finally met "the someone" (it was Pete Zapp, the man she married on the night she died). She behaved as though everyone in the Chestnut Room were an intimate friend. That was her way: it was part of her charm, on stage and off. It wasn't that I'd forgotten how sweet and funny she was, but so many years had slipped away that I'd forgotten exactly how it felt to sit across a restaurant table from her after the ballet, chattering happily about nothing in particular, or to pick up the phone and hear her say "Hi, it's LaMottski!" Those memories had faded, as all memories must, yet all at once they became shiny new.

She sang beautifully on that crisp October night--you would have had to know her very, very well to realize that her strength was fading fast, or that she was wearing a wig to hide her baldness--and every song she sang brings back a separate memory. I listened to "Waters of March" and remembered what fits the complicated lyrics used to give her. (I'd seen her drop the ball completely at the Algonquin a few months earlier, not long before she went into the hospital for chemotherapy. Our Girl was there, too, and I'm sure she remembers how I all but fell on the floor laughing as poor Nancy fumbled helplessly, and hopelessly, for the right words.) I listened to "I Got the Sun in the Morning" and remembered the long, blissful day we spent together in a recording studio in Astoria as she laid down the vocal tracks for her final album. I listened to her introduce the encore, James Taylor's "Secret O' Life," with the same line she always used, always to the same infallible effect: "Relax, this is cabaret--there's always an encore!" As that last song spun to a close, I thought, Oh, God, I guess I'll always miss her, each and every day, all the days of my life.

I'm not very objective when it comes to Nancy--I loved her too much for that--but I can tell you that Live at Tavern on the Green is a good and representative example of her live shows. If you were lucky enough to hear her in a club, it'll remind you of what she sounded like, and if you weren't, it'll show you what you missed. And if you've never heard her at all, you'll hear what I had in mind when I wrote these words about her, nine long years ago:

What I heard...was a warm, husky mezzo-soprano voice that seemed twice as big as the woman in whom it was housed; a vivid yet unaffected way with lyrics; and a quality at once sensuous and achingly idealistic. Later, after I had met Nancy, I would write that her singing sounded "as if the girl next door had snuck out at two a.m. to make a little whoopee with her steady boyfriend," a description that delighted her no end.

How glad I am to hear my friend's voice once more.

* * *

To place an advance order for Live at Tavern on the Green, or any of Nancy LaMott's other CDs, go here.

Tell your friends--all of them. Spread the word.

Posted January 17, 12:01 PM

TT: Fresh

Note that the Top Fives are all new this morning! Look, ponder, click through, investigate....

Posted January 17, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Hence the despotic and all-absorbing power of art, as also its astonishing power of soothing: it frees from every human care, it establishes the artifex, artist or artisan, in a world apart, cloistered, defined and absolute, in which to devote all the strength and intelligence of his manhood to the service of the thing which he is making. This is true of every art; the ennui of living and willing ceases on the threshold of every studio or workshop."

Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism

Posted January 17, 12:00 PM

January 14, 2005

TT: Invisible women

Friday aga