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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 again, and I'm in The Wall Street Journal with reviews of two off-Broadway plays, Heather Raffo's Nine Parts of Desire and Noël Coward's After the Ball.

Nine Parts of Desire is nothing short of extraordinary:

How do we know what we think we know about life in Iraq? After the re-election of George W. Bush, the continued fighting there was the top news story of 2004, yet the agenda-driven, visually oriented accounts of the mainstream media had little to say about the everyday existence of the Iraqi people, and told us next to nothing about their feelings and fears. It is as though we were waging a war in a land populated by stick figures--which may help to explain why it is an artist who has done what so few reporters have even thought to do, and done it with a persuasiveness that fewer still could hope to rival.

Heather Raffo, the Iraqi-American playwright and performer of "Nine Parts of Desire," directed by Joanna Settle and now playing Off Broadway at Manhattan Ensemble Theater, brings us closer to the inner life of Iraq than a thousand slick-surfaced TV reports. Yet her beautifully shaped one-woman play is a play, not a stodgily earnest piece of documentary theater, and therein lies its singular force and compulsion: It is persuasive precisely because it is beautiful.

Ms. Raffo's enigmatic title is explained in her epigraph, a maxim of Ali ibn Abu Taleb, founder of the Shia sect and fourth leader of the Islamic world after Mohammed: "God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men." The nine characters she portrays are based on a large and diverse group of real-life women--a doctor, a painter who ran the Saddam Art Center, a left-wing political exile living in London, a young girl who loves the music of ‘N Sync--whom she interviewed over the past decade...We believe in their reality because Ms. Raffo inhabits each one so fully, both as actor and as author, and because we never feel, not even for a moment, that she is making them tell us what we--or she--want to hear.

After the Ball isn't that good, but I really liked it:

We don't get much Noël Coward in Manhattan, so it's a pleasure to point you to the Irish Repertory Theatre's vest-pocket Off Broadway production of "After the Ball," one of the Master's least well-known musicals. Originally produced in London in 1954, this is, amazingly enough, its American premiere, and the Irish Rep, despite the cruel limitations of its L-shaped house and miniature stage, has made the most of the tools at hand, turning a lavish operetta into an intimate entertainment that gives much satisfaction.

"After the Ball" is a musical version of Oscar Wilde's "Lady Windermere's Fan," an epigram-encrusted melodrama about a Woman with a Secret (it's the play in which Wilde famously defined a cynic as "a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing"). Coward kept the epigrams and added a batch of songs, mostly sentimental ballads à la "Bitter Sweet" rather than the crisply pointed comic numbers for which he is best remembered as a songwriter. Not all of them come from of his top drawer, but more than enough are good enough, and one, the droll "Something on a Tray," is (or ought to be) a Coward standard....

No link--the Journal doesn't give my stuff away for free. To read the whole thing (of which there's plenty more), buy today's paper at your neighborhood newsstand, or go here to subscribe to the online version of the Journal. It's worth it.

Posted January 14, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"True ‘compassion' leads to sharing another person's pain; it does not kill the person whose suffering we cannot bear."

John Paul II, Evangelium vitae (courtesy of Eve Tushnet)

Posted January 14, 12:00 PM

January 13, 2005

TT: Almanac

"Life is a great mystery. Is everybody a different person when they are with somebody else?"

Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy (courtesy of Eve Tushnet)

Posted January 13, 12:00 PM

OGIC: All the pretty brains

I've been remiss in not mentioning The Conversation, a film-blogger roundtable spearheaded by our friend and yours The Cinetrix. Look in as she and her colleagues dissect last year in film and dish about the swiftly approaching Golden Globes. (And if you're only going to watch one awards show this season, make it the Globes. So much less boring and insufferable than that other show, not that I won't watch it too. But I won't like it.)

Posted January 13, 5:56 AM

OGIC: Demonstrative reading

Growing up, I used books to set myself apart. Like the young Jane Eyre, I found in them a salve for occasional loneliness (I had friends--honest I did!--but no siblings), but also a source of distinction, an emblem of a certain sensibility. There's no question I wanted to be noticed reading, and that such concerns played a small but certain role in my choice of reading material. This is a little embarrassing to admit, but I don't think it should be. It struck me recently when I watched some early episodes of Gilmore Girls. Sixteen-year-old Rory comes to her first boyfriend's attention by reading on a park bench. What he particularly notices was that she gets so lost in her reading that she fails to notice anything going on around her, including an actual fistfight; and that she reads impressive books: "this week it's Moby Dick. Last week it was Anna Karenina" (I'm paraphrasing here). This is a fantasy on a fairly obvious level: who, after all, reads 800-page novels in a week? Even if they don't have to go to school and keep their overgrown-adolescent mother perpetually entertained? The fantasy that really charges this scenario, though, is that someone will notice our private-in-public reading, draw the proper conclusions about our adorable heart and admirable mind, and possibly even fall in love with us. I need to think more about this funny but pervasive notion of getting lost in a book as a bid for a social encounter. Any thoughts?

Posted January 13, 5:17 AM

OGIC: Blogs today

- Giving me pleasure.

- Giving me pause.

- Giving me the giggles:

When I was an editor, there was a freelance writer working for the paper who had a strange inability to jump to the chase. If you assigned him a piece on, say, a gallery opening of an artist/blacksmith around town, he'd feel compelled to use the lede of his article to elucidate the history of iron through the ages, pausing with reverence at the moment when man first harnessed the power of fire, until, about word 1200, just as you were thinking, "F--k, I never knew that about smelting," he'd get to an actual review of the exhibit.

Funny thing is, I sympathize completely with both editrice Carrie and that unidentified writer.

Posted January 13, 4:57 AM

OGIC: Maeotian Boeotian frog concert, heh heh heh

That last fortune cookie bears some explaining. I've been leafing through Yale University Press's new Swinburne collection all morning, grateful for the review copy that arrived from YUP (a one-time OGIC employer) unbidden. I've never been able to crack the code that might grant me appreciation, perhaps even enjoyment, of Swinburne's difficult poetry. He's long sat, face to the wall, with George Meredith in the dimly-lit corner this Victorianist reserves for barely-readable Victorians. And yet I've secretly felt all along that the fault must be mine, that if I work hard enough at it I might actually come to love their work. Well, Meredith's anyway.

So this week arrives the new Yale Swinburne volume, co-edited by the redoubtable Jerome McGann, which includes excerpts from the poet's criticism. There are considerations of Baudelaire, Byron, Arnold, Blake, and Charlotte and Emily Brontë. This, I realize, could be my way in to Swinburne. I love reading what famous writers thought of other famous writers, especially their contemporaries. In the piece on Charlotte B., where Brontë represents genius, and George Eliot is trotted out into the ring to duke it out with her as the representative of intellect, I just know I'm getting a fortune cookie out of the fisticuffs. (As you can divine from the cookie, though, in this match the fix is most definitely in.)

I found the cookie, as you see, in Swinburne's championing of genius as self-correcting and alert, which has the further implication that mere intellect is distracted by self-love and puffery. But it's clear enough that I should have ended before the paragraph break. I had in fact gone so far as to close the quotation marks there, but as I read on, wide-eyed, Swinburne went so spectacularly off the rails with his Serbonian bog of blundering presumption (can you picture the good Miss Mary Ann Evans slogging through it?) that I couldn't resist extending the cookie. My apologies. Sometimes lunacy can be so picturesque.

Posted January 13, 3:28 AM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"That great genius is liable to great error the world has ever been willing, if not more than willing, to admit; that great genius not equally balanced by great intellect is not one half as liable to go one half as wrong as intellect unequally counterpoised by genius, is a truth less popular and less familiar, but neither less important nor less indisputable. That Charlotte Brontë, a woman of the first order of genius, could go very wrong indeed, there are whole scenes and entire characters in her work which afford more than ample proof. But George Eliot, a woman of the first order of intellect, has once and again shown how much further and more steadily and more hopelessly and more irretrievably and more intolerably wrong it is possible for mere intellect to go than it ever can be possible for mere genius...

"Where genius takes one false step in the twilight and draws back by instinct, intelligence once misguided will take a thousand without the slightest diffidence; will put its best foot foremost in the pitchy darkness, step out gallantly through all brakes and quagmires till stuck fast up to the middle, and higher yet, in some blind Serbonian bog of blundering presumption, and thence will not improbably strike up a psalm of hoarse thanksgiving or shrill self-gratulation, to be echoed from afar by the thousand marshy throats of a Maeotian or Boeotian frog concert, for the grace here given it to have set a triumphant foot on the solid rock, and planted a steady flagstaff on the summits of supreme and unsurpassable success."

Charles Algernon Swinburne, "A Note on Charlotte Brontë" (1877)

Posted January 13, 3:05 AM

January 12, 2005

TT: Soon to be elsewhere

Nothing more from me until Monday--I'm going to Washington to review a play, and I don't plan to bring my iBook with me. Our Girl will keep you occupied until I come back, and I'll try to remember to have her post my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser on Friday morning.

Have a nice weekend. I plan to.

Posted January 12, 12:02 PM

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- A kind but candid friend once told me that I was "pathetically undomestic," which seems about right. Among other things, I can never remember from one bottle to the next how to use a corkscrew (which may be a blessing in disguise), nor have I any other kitchen-related skills beyond the primeval. But my worst moments come at the rare intervals when I feel obliged out of common decency to change the sheets in my loft. Even when I slept in an ordinary bed, I was never capable of correctly aligning a contour sheet without a minimum of three preliminary tries--and that was when I had patterned sheets. Upon moving to my present loft-equipped apartment two years ago, I switched to black sheets, thinking they'd look more stylish. They did and do, but if you were to see me thrashing around up there, trying without success to figure out which corner to grab first, you wouldn't know whether to laugh or cry. Middle-aged bachelorhood is no joke.

- I got a cardboard tube in the mail the other day containing the official presidential commission appointing me to the National Council on the Arts. No, it's not calligraphed on sheepskin, but it's still pretty damned impressive, and wonderfully quaint-looking to boot. I took it straight to my framer, even though I don't have a proper place to hang it (presidential commissions are a lot bigger than, say, your average college diploma). I want to hang it in plain sight of all my guests, but would I really be willing to take down a piece of art for the sole purpose of assuaging my vanity?

Perhaps this is a character test in disguise.

- A friend of mine writes to tell me that I was "courageous" to have praised Kathie Lee Gifford's new musical. This made me laugh. "Courage" is when you stare down a crazy man with a gun in a dark alley. It doesn't take "courage" to disagree with the conventional critical wisdom, especially when you don't hang out with theater people, which I mostly don't. I know a grand total of two actors and three drama critics, none of whom is likely to pull a switchblade on me for having rather liked Kathie Lee's show. (O.K., maybe John Simon.)

No doubt it helps that my publishers stand so solidly behind me. When Paul Gigot, the editorial-page editor of The Wall Street Journal, asked me to become the paper's drama critic, I warned him that some of the things I wrote would be likely to bring heat. "That's what we had in mind," he replied. From that day to this, I've never been asked to water down a review prior to publication, nor has the paper's management ever criticized me retrospectively for any opinion I've seen fit to express on the drama page. That kind of backing makes it easy to be "courageous."

- I was listening to music on my iBook as I dressed for the theater this evening, and the whim of the shuffle key served up the "Mort de Mélisande" from Fauré's incidental music for Pelléas et Mélisande as I pulled on my pants. It's one of the saddest pieces of music I know, and I listened to it in complete stillness, moved afresh by its darkly laconic majesty. As I always do, I thought of Emeralds, the ballet George Balanchine made to a half-dozen pieces of orchestral music by Fauré, which ends with this particular movement. I knew the music long before I'd heard of the ballet, but once I saw Emeralds I could never again hear Pelléas without seeing Balanchine's steps in my mind's eye.

I wrote about the end of Emeralds in All in the Dances:

In 1976, he added a coda to "Emeralds," a pas de sept in which the principal dancers of the ballet enact the stately sorrow of the incidental music Gabriel Fauré composed to accompany the death of Mélisande in Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande. At the very end, the ballerinas slip into the wings, vanishing like mist burned off by the morning sun, while their deserted cavaliers, left alone on the stage, sink down on one knee and gesture skyward in salute to...what? He never said.

Ever since I wrote that paragraph, I also think of my own words whenever I hear the "Mort de Mélisande." This is, to put it mildly, more than a little bit impertinent: I don't have it in me to write anything worthy of that music, much less the corresponding moment in Emeralds. Still, I did the best I could, and as a result words, music, and moment are now fused in my memory, impertinently but inescapably. That's the writer's curse: we can't help but "see" the world through our own words, instead of using our eyes and ears. The problem is that words are never good enough.

- I have three friends who speak English with unmistakably foreign accents, and I love to listen to them talk, no matter how aimlessly or trivially. Is that childish of me? I used to think it had something to do with the fact that I'm both insufficiently traveled and a hopeless monoglot, exactly the sort of person who's a sucker for an accent. But, then, there are American accents that I find especially winsome, as well as others that make me feel as if someone were rooting around in my ear with a rat-tail file. Could it be that some accents are more musical than others? Or is it all nothing more than a matter of individual taste? I myself speak in a penny-plain Missouri accent that has been flattened out to the point of nondescriptness by long residence in Manhattan, yet many people claim to find my speaking voice attractive. Go figure.

Posted January 12, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Those who go from the bedazzlement and vertigo of Leaves of Grass to the laborious perusal of any of the pious biographies of its author always feel cheated. In the greyish, mediocre pages of those works, they hunt for the vagabond demigod revealed in the poetry and are astonished not to find him."

Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions (courtesy of Doug Ramsey)

Posted January 12, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Three poker books

As far as I'm concerned, the whole poker craze has been milked way past dry and needs to go away. Love the game, love McManus, but fake celebrities playing with fake money on Bravo? No game is interesting enough to prop that up.

However, the media milking has had at least one solid-gold benefit: ushering back into print A. Alvarez's 1983 book on the World Series of Poker, The Biggest Game in Town. Originally published as a two-part essay in The New Yorker, Alvarez's book first came to my attention in 1992. The book had gone out of print, and I had to order the New Yorker back issues in order to read it. Sadly, these got lost somewhere between Manhattan and Chicago when I moved the following year.

How thrilled I was, then, to learn that Chronicle Books has brought back The Biggest Game in book form. They also happen to have done so, as is their wont, in great style--the new trade paper edition is lovingly and bewitchingly designed, from the stylized tumbling poker chips on the front cover to the pretty club-heart, spade-diamond patterns gracing the endpapers. It's so nice to see a book this good get the really head-turning production it deserves.

Alvarez, best known for his literary criticism and his friendship with Sylvia Plath, ranges as widely in his interests as any writer I can think of, and writes better than most of them. In addition to poetry, fiction, and criticism, he has books on suicide, divorce, sleep, and North Sea oil rigs. His indelible portrait of the WSOP and its setting, Benny Binion's Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas, is a historical portrait now that the casino (and the tournament) have new corporate owners. The Horseshoe will never again be as Alvarez described it: "down-home," family-owned, "shabby, ill-lit, and crowded at all hours," with patriarch Benny holding court in a restaurant upstairs and one of his sons always visible down on the floor, running things while chatting up the dealers and players all the while. Now that the Horseshoe's body has been snatched by Harrah's, Alvarez's book has documentary as well as literary value. It also pioneered a literary sub-sub-genre that has turned out to have surprising legs. It observes a critical distance from its subject, however, that most poker narratives are helpless to maintain in the face of the game's seductiveness. This is what makes it essential, and what makes it of interest even to readers who couldn't care less about poker but would walk a mile for a perfect sentence.

Representative quotation: "The casinos lie out there on the baked earth like extravagant toys discarded on a beach, their signs looping, beckoning, spiraling, and fizzing recklessly, as in that moment of glory just before the batteries run down."

Another poker book that fell out of print for several years is back in circulation: Anthony Holden's comparatively workmanlike but compulsively readable Big Deal: One Year as a Professional Poker Player. Big Deal is sort of the competent but comparatively dull older brother to Jim McManus's flashily virtuosic Positively Fifth Street, which steals its predecessor's concept but buffs it to such a high gloss that nobody much remembers the original. Like McManus, Holden is a professional writer and amateur player who finagled his way into the granddaddy game and then chronicled the experience. Alvarez appears in these pages as a character, the dean of the nominally friendly Tuesday night game in London where Holden cuts his teeth before storming Las Vegas. This is a book for people who have gobbled up Alvarez and McManus and still hunger for more of the same. If not as artful as Biggest Game nor as gripping as Fifth Street, Holden's book is a fun ramble.

Representative quotation: "This event is the only one in the poker calendar which has the pros visibly on edge, anxious about their reputations, wondering if this could at last be their year. At Table Eight, Seat One, sat the most apprehensive of the lot--a lone, pallid Briton whose life had been building towards this moment for as long as he could remember. At this moment all his long and careful months of psychological preparation flew straight out the air-conditioning vents. He was a hopeless bundle of nerves, unsure of his tactics, confused about odds and outs, wondering what had possessed him to put himself through this ordeal."

If Alvarez's and Holden's books never would have been reprinted without ESPN airing the WSOP in prime time and Positively Fifth Street taking off the way it did, Katy Lederer's Poker Face: A Girlhood among Gamblers is a book that might never have been written at all. Lederer is little sister to two of the best and best-known poker players in the world. She dabbled in the game herself after college and probably had the native talent to go pro, but became a poet instead of a player. Her life story shuttles from the fusty private school in New Hampshire where her father taught English to poetry seminars at Berkeley to the gleaming McMansion on the outskirts of Vegas where her brother and mother ran a sports book in between poker nights. These are the raw materials of an amazing book. Poker Face, unfortunately, is not that book.

That's not to say it isn't worth reading. Lederer is a good writer and a brave one; it can't have been easy to portray her family as unflatteringly as she sometimes does. But the book is full of promising moments and beginnings of insights that pass into the ether, maddeningly underexplored. A tough editor clearly could have done wonders for the book simply by pressing Lederer to say more--more about everything--and to work harder to unearth the connections between, for instance, the board games her family constantly played for fun and the casino games they later played for profit. Or between the allure of Vegas and the pull of writing. Or, to get at the heart of the matter, between these people's gambling talent, their gambling compulsion, and their failure as a family.

I won't tell you not to read Poker Face, even though it disappointed me medium-deeply. Its ingredients are fascinating even if sadly undercooked. I think I'd actually have enjoyed it enormously if I hadn't felt haunted by the greatish book it might have been.

Representative quotation: "My brother kept asking me what I thought, how I liked [Las Vegas], and I beamed. Polished and proud, he was unafraid of anything. I was unafraid of anything. I stood at the brink of the casino floor, the lights and dings of the slot machines ringing in my ears, the cranks of roulette wheels spinning and spinning. It was the first time in my life that I didn't feel lied to."

Posted January 12, 6:44 AM

January 11, 2005

TT: On your mark, get set

Sometime in the middle of Saturday night, I figured out how I wanted to start my Louis Armstrong biography. I've been more or less ready to write for the past month or two, but inspiration refused to flow, which in my case usually means that I haven't yet answered some fundamental question of form. I had roughly the same problem (as you may recall) when I started writing All in the Dances a year ago, and no sooner did I correct my false start than I was off and sprinting. I'm hoping for the same results this year: I'd like to wrap up the prologue and complete a working draft of the first chapter by April 1 at the latest.

I thought about telling you the specific details of my early-morning inspiration, but I'm afraid to jinx myself, so I won't, at least not yet. We'll see how it takes shape over the next few weeks. I'll know I'm on the right track if the opening section of the prologue falls into place easily and uneventfully, and should that happen I might open the bag and give you a peek inside.

Somebody asked me the other day if I've ever suffered from writer's block. It's a subject that interests me greatly, so much so that I actually gave thought a number of years ago to writing a book about it. My answer was that long years of writing to inflexible deadlines had knocked most of the psychological self-indulgence out of me, making it possible for me to compose on command, but that I still experienced on occasion many of the anxieties associated with writer's block, only sped up. It's sort of like David Ives' one-act play about fruit flies: I'm perfectly capable of going through all the usual pre-compositional horrors, but they rarely last for more than a day. For me, the big problem is when I simply don't want to sit down and write, which is usually. Writing a first draft isn't pleasurable to me (as opposed to editing, which I enjoy).

Be that as it may, I'm ready to get going in earnest. Igor Stravinsky, who wrote most of his music to commission, once said that when he knew how long a piece was supposed to be, he got excited. I know what he meant. I've been thinking about Louis for months, waiting patiently for the coin to drop in my head, and now it seems to have happened. The first sentence hasn't come to me yet (that's the next step), but at least I know the approximate shape of the container into which I plan to pour the story of his eventful life. At last, I'm excited.

Posted January 11, 12:02 PM

TT: Terryoke

"Be at the northwest corner of Madison and 38th at eight o'clock sharp," the voice on the answering machine said. "Wear black." I wouldn't normally go out of my way to respond to so peremptory a summons, but the voice was familiar and the occasion was an appointment, so I donned my Black Outfit, jumped in a cab, and proceeded as instructed to the rendezvous point.

Time out for a little backstory: I'm a passionate fan of the Lascivious Biddies, the New York-based jazz-pop combo for whose recently released debut CD, Get Lucky, I wrote the liner notes. (They're also pioneer podcasters--go here to hear.) They'd been wanting to take me to dinner to celebrate the release of Get Lucky, so they told me to keep Monday night open and wait for further instructions. The instructions arrived by phone this afternoon, and at eight o'clock sharp I was met on the aforementioned corner by a black-clad Biddie who whispered the secret word in my ear, took me by the arm, and led me a half-block west to...a karaoke bar.

Unlikely as it may sound, seeing as how I'm a New York artblogger and all, I'd never been to a karaoke bar. The closest I'd come was reading Maud's blog and seeing Lost in Translation. So not only was I being thrust into a new milieu, but my guides were a quartet of professional musicians who all happened to be karaoke buffs. The results were, to put it mildly, a hoot and a half, though it took me a little while to catch on. As I watched the lyrics to "Bette Davis Eyes" flash on the screen, I asked, "But...where's the music?" (I was the best sight-singer in my freshman music-theory class.) Once the hysterical laughter died down, the Biddies agreed unanimously that this was the geekiest remark ever made in a karaoke bar, and we started flipping through the songbook, looking for songs to sing. The book itself was a monument to kitsch--an encyclopedia-sized list of every cheesy top-40 song released in the past quarter-century--and as for the videos, all I can say is that I was spellbound by their surrealistic awfulness.

The Biddies, it turns out, are way serious about karaoke (they even have girl-group dance routines worked out for their favorite songs), and their savoir-faire inevitably attracted the attention of the other patrons, none of whom appeared to suspect that there were ringers in their midst. One cheerful fellow sloshed up to our table and said, "You guys are really good--didja know that?" My companions smiled demurely.

It was made known to me in due course that I wouldn't be allowed to go home without at least participating in a group sing, so when Lee Ann Westover called for "Moon River," I chimed in with a discreet harmony line. As if by prearrangement, the rest of the band abruptly fell silent, and as I switched hastily to the lead, it hit me that the song was playing in C major, Andy Williams' key, suitable only for very high baritones. Middle age having turned me into a low bass, alarming things started to happen as I sang We're after the same rainbow's end. Fortunately, I'd had sake with my sushi, and I joined in the chorus of catcalls that greeted my bloodcurdling attempt at a high D. This loosened me up no end, and I even went so far as to join in the chorus to "Do You Know the Way to San José?" a little later on.

As we parted, the Biddies assured me that I was welcome to join them whenever I liked, and we made tentative plans to celebrate my forty-ninth birthday at the same bar on February 6. I'm not sure the world is quite ready to hear me raise my voice in song again--but, then, the world isn't invited.

Posted January 11, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Subtlety chases the obvious in a never-ending spiral and never quite catches it."

Rex Stout, The Silent Speaker

Posted January 11, 12:00 PM

January 10, 2005

TT: Troupers

Maccers and I went to hear Audra McDonald on Friday at the Rose Theater, the gorgeous fifth-floor centerpiece of Lincoln Center's new Columbus Circle performing-arts complex. No sooner did we get off the elevator than I spotted a pair of musician friends in the lobby, who hastened to tell us that McDonald had canceled Thursday's concert, which was supposed to have been the official opening night of this year's American Songbook series. Sure enough, McDonald came on stage, perched herself gingerly on a high stool, and told the audience that her daughter gave her a case of intestinal flu that had knocked her flat the night before.

To our amazement and relief, she got through the whole program, and though she mostly sang sitting down, sipping gingerly from a bottle of Gatorade, she sounded just like herself. The only other apparent sign of distress I could detect was that she sang a bit flat from time to time, which was perfectly forgivable under the circumstances. Otherwise she performed very much in the manner to which she has long since accustomed us, one that I admiringly described a couple of years ago in a New York Times profile:

Ms. McDonald is a true theatrical singer, trained to bounce her voice off the back wall, be it in a Broadway house or a concert hall. Such performers are never at their best in nightclubs, though Ms. McDonald (who listens mostly to jazz in her spare time) can and does function fairly comfortably in cabarets like Joe's Pub...

Her tangy soprano and powerfully evocative way with words are as effective on record as in concert. (Listen to the way she bites into the most savage quatrain Lorenz Hart ever wrote, from "I Wish I Were in Love Again": "When love congeals/It soon reveals/The faint aroma of performing seals,/The double-crossing of a pair of heels.") Happy Songs (Nonesuch), in fact, is as close to perfect as an album of standards performed by a theatrical singer can possibly be. The only thing it lacks is intimacy. Yes, Ms. McDonald scales down her vocal gestures with self-effacing skill, steering clear of the italicized exaggeration that makes queen-sized personalities such as Betty Buckley all but unlistenable on record. But even in a soft-spoken ballad like "I Must Have That Man," she sings as though she is on stage, playing to an attentive crowd.

Not surprisingly, that is where she feels most at home. "I had a great time at Joe's Pub," she said, "and I don't want to diminish the importance of that kind of place to me--you can really get into the words there, be completely vulnerable and naked--but you can't do everything you want to do in that kind of environment."

I had Saturday off, and how did I spend it? I went to a Broadway show, naturally. To be specific, I went to the Ambassador Theatre to see Chicago, this time as a civilian instead of a critic. I love Chicago, and I adore the current Broadway revival, among the most brilliantly effective productions of a dance-driven musical to have graced the Great White Way. Unfortunately, my previous visit to the Ambassador Theatre had left a bad taste in my mouth, as I duly reported in The Wall Street Journal:

I taxied up to the Ambassador Theatre to see Melanie Griffith play Roxie Hart in "Chicago." This 1996 revival, smartly directed by Walter Bobbie and flashily choreographed by Ann Reinking in the style of Bob Fosse, the show's creator, got an added jolt of publicity when Rob Marshall's lively film version of the most cynical musical ever to open on Broadway became a runaway hit. The insertion of a medium-sized movie star into so long-running a production is doubtless intended to rope in Broadway novices who've never heard of Fosse, much less Ms. Reinking. (It can't hurt that Antonio Banderas, Ms. Griffith's husband, is appearing just across the street in "Nine.")

Alas, "Chicago"'s new star is sucker bait: Ms. Griffith sings like a cat with a cold, dances like a junior-high cheerleader and reads her lines like a cross between Jennifer Tilly and Betty Boop. She was so bad, in fact, that I felt embarrassed for the rest of the otherwise solid cast...If I were Melanie Griffith, I'd blush at the thought of sharing a stage with such consummate professionals. I guess being a movie star means never having to say you're sorry.

I'd been wanting to go back to Chicago ever since Griffith moved on, but when I tried to include it in a Journal column I wrote last summer about long-running musicals, I ran into an unexpected roadblock:

If I had to guess, I'd say that most vacationing out-of-towners who take in a Broadway show probably do so in the summer. Unfortunately, that can be the worst time of year for playgoing. Actors go on vacations, too, and it's in the summertime that you're most likely to get stuck with understudies, second-stringers and temporary substitutes for the stars who lit up the sky on opening night. Nobody tells you that at the box office, though, nor are your hundred-dollar tickets plastered with stickers warning the inexperienced theatergoer that many hits go creaky in the knees after a year or so. That's why Broadway producers don't like critics to drop in on routine performances of long-running shows. When I inquired the other day about revisiting "Chicago," for example, the publicist turned me down flat. "Too many understudies right now," he told me....

A couple of weeks ago, a reader of "About Last Night" told me that Chicago was looking especially good these days, so I bit the bullet and went, not as the Big Bad Drama Critic of The Wall Street Journal but strictly as a regular guy who felt like catching a Saturday matinee on his day off. This time around, Roxie was being played by Tracy Shayne, an old Broadway hand (she's had long runs as a replacement in A Chorus Line, Les Miz, and Phantom) who was subbing for the vacationing Charlotte d'Amboise. I'd never heard of her, but my correspondent assured me that she was terrific, so I decided to see for myself, and you know what? She was terrific. Shayne is a tough little pixie, professional to the hilt and a pure pleasure to watch, who knows exactly what Roxie Hart is all about. Not only is she a superb dancer, but she's also a damned fine singer with a well-placed, vividly tinted voice (I think she ought to try her hand at cabaret). Good singing is a commodity that can no longer be taken for granted on Broadway, least of all now that slightly faded Hollywood stars are in demand to take over the lead roles of hit shows in need of a box-office boost. Lauren Hutton, for example, is excellent in Wonderful Town, but her singing is no better than good enough. I can think of worse things--starting with Melanie Griffith--but I can't tell you what a relief it was to hear a major musical-comedy role sung really, really well, from the first note to the last.

Chicago would have been worth seeing (and hearing) just for Tracy Shayne, but I was no less happily surprised by the overall quality of the show, all the more so because the role of Velma Kelly was played by an understudy, Donna Marie Asbury, another dancer-who-can-really-sing who got her bumpy start as one of the fresh-faced kids in the ill-fated original cast of Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along. Asbury gave a strong performance, as did the rest of the cast, and I went home as happy as I could be, even though I hadn't seen a single star all afternoon.

One of my favorite pieces in the Teachout Museum is "Composition," a 1962 color serigraph by Stuart Davis. Most of Davis' prints are way too rich for my blood, but I was able to afford "Composition" because it was published in a large edition of 500 copies, and because Davis died before he could sign any of them. Now one of those unsigned prints hangs over my bookshelves, crisp and jazzy and deeply satisfying to behold. Am I any less delighted to own it because it isn't signed? I don't think so. Of course I'd be pleased if it were, but I buy prints because I want to look at them, not for their investment value.

I thought of "Composition" as I rode the subway home last Saturday afternoon. Why is it that so many people need the imprimatur of a big name in order to enjoy a Broadway show? No doubt it has a lot to do with the staggeringly high price of theater tickets, which has a way of corrupting our aesthetic responses: if you're paying $100 for an orchestra seat, you want to see somebody famous up there, even if she isn't any good. You want, so to speak, to see the signature.

I won't pretend that I'm entirely immune to this temptation. Whenever I show off my copy of John Marin's "Downtown. The El," I always point out that it's pencil-signed in the margin, the same way I've been known to brag about having seen certain big-name performers in the flesh. Nevertheless, I'm fairly pure-hearted when it comes to art, and just as I treasure my unsigned copy of Stuart Davis' "Composition," so, too, did I have the time of my life seeing Tracy Shayne in Chicago, even though I didn't know who she was before I got to the Ambassador Theatre. Whoever she is, she's a trouper, like Audra McDonald, and that's what theater is all about. The world is full of wonderful artists who never become rich or famous, who do what they do simply because they love it with all their hearts. God bless them, every one.

Posted January 10, 12:02 PM

TT: The year in review

These questions have been bouncing around the blogosphere (I got them from Household Opera). Here goes nothing:

1. What did you do in 2004 that you'd never done before? (A) I took a spontaneous vacation. (B) I let the White House sic the FBI on me.

2. Did you keep your New Year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year? I've never been one to make New Year's resolutions--my mind doesn't work that way.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? Yes, and now I'm a sometime babysitter as a result (I guess that belongs under #1, too).

4. Did anyone close to you die? No.

5. What countries did you visit? None--I was too busy.

6. What would you like to have in 2005 that you lacked in 2004? (A) A romance. (B) A Morandi etching. (I'd gladly settle for either, but I'm not hanging by my thumbs.)

7. What date from 2004 will remain etched upon your memory? None. I've never been good at remembering dates--I always have to look them up. The last one I remember is the one we all remember.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? The publication of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine and A Terry Teachout Reader. I haven't had many two-book years!

9. What was your biggest failure? I promised myself that I'd try my hand at watercolor in 2004. I bought a starter set in September, but I have yet to moisten a brush.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Just the flu.

11. What was the best thing you bought? Max Beerbohm's 1913 caricature of Percy Grainger.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? Answering that question is what I do for a living. Spend an hour trolling through the "About Last Night" archives and you can answer it for yourself.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? Ditto.

14. Where did most of your money go? Art and taxes (which beats death and taxes).

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? I can't even begin to list all the things that fill the bill--I seem to spend my life in a perpetual state of arousal.

16. What song/album will always remind you of 2004? (A) Song: Diana Krall's version of Joni Mitchell's "Black Crow." (B) Album: Luciana Souza's Neruda.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

- Happier or sadder? Somewhat happier.
- Thinner or fatter? About the same.
- Richer or poorer? Definitely poorer, but mainly because of the Teachout Museum, so I'm not complaining.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of? Taking the night off.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of? Sitting through plays by...oh, never mind, I gave him a hard enough time last year.

20. How will you be spending Christmas? Go here for retrospective details.

21. Who did you spend the most time on the phone with? Our Girl in Chicago.

22. Did you fall in love in 2004? No (sigh).

23. How many one-night stands in this last year? None. That's soooo not my thing.

24. What was your favorite TV program? I don't see enough TV to answer this question (unless you count the What's My Line? kinescopes I watch every night on the Game Show Network).

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year? So far as I know, I don't really hate anyone (that's also not my thing).

26. What was the best book(s) you read? The Library of America's Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery? Erin McKeown.

28. What did you want and get? A new friend.

29. What did you want and not get? None of your business.

30. What were your favorite films of this year? Sideways, The Incredibles, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Triplets of Belleville, and Garden State (sorry to be so obvious).

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I had dinner at Café Luxembourg with three gorgeous women who helped me celebrate my forty-eighth birthday in high style.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? See #6.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2004? I upgraded my haircut and bought my very first all-black outfit.

34. What kept you sane? Art and my friends, not necessarily in that order.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? Elastigirl.

36. What political issue stirred you the most? Not on this blog, you don't.

37. Who did you miss? Nancy LaMott.

38. Who was the best new person you met? (A) A fellow blogger who must, alas, remain nameless. (B) The person referred to in #28.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2004. My name is Terry, and I'm a workaholic.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year. (A) Carolyn Leigh's "I Walk a Little Faster": Can't begin to see my future shine as yet,/No sign as yet/You're mine as yet./Rushing toward a face I can't define as yet,/Keep bumping into walls,/Taking lots of falls. (B) Ani DiFranco's "Superhero": And every pop song on the radio/Is suddenly speaking to me/Art may imitate life/But life imitates TV.

Posted January 10, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"We must look and look and look till we live in the painting and for a fleeting moment become identified with it. If we do not succeed in loving what through the ages has been loved, it is useless to lie ourselves into believing that we do. A good rough test is whether we feel that it is reconciling us with life."

Bernard Berenson (quoted in Meryle Secrest, Duveen: A Life in Art)

Posted January 10, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"It is a sad fact of human relations that unqualified adulation often produces from the adored one contempt and a kick in the chops."

Heather Mac Donald in Slate

Posted January 10, 5:39 AM

OGIC: It lives

It breathes. It talks. It eats (principally lots and lots of this, as it did not see fit to grocery-shop until this afternoon, despite having returned to Chicago Thursday night). It websurfs. It even almost blogs....

Posted January 10, 4:42 AM

TT: So I don't have to

I was going to try to put Ms. MoorishGirl's book deal in perspective, but Mr. Elegant Variation beat me to it. Read him and you'll know what I think. I have nothing to add but...you rule, Laila! Today you're the Queen of the Blogosphere.

Posted January 10, 4:41 AM

January 7, 2005

TT: Touch that dial! Please!

I'm on the air today. To be exact, I'll be sharing a microphone with John Schaefer this afternoon on WNYC's Soundcheck. Here's the official version of what we've got cooked up:

Rounding out Soundcheck's week-long traversal of the musical highs and lows of 2004, music and drama critic Terry Teachout joins us to discuss some of his artistic highlights of 2004. From Diana Krall's cover of Joni Mitchell's "Black Crow", to the reopening of the MoMA, to some of the New York Philharmonic's most successful performances, Teachout and host John Schaefer will cover the year's best. We also ask our listeners for their highlights. You can call in during the show or e-mail us at: soundcheck@wnyc.org.

Soundcheck airs in New York weekdays at two p.m. EST on 93.9 FM. You don't have to be a New Yorker to join in the fun, though--WNYC can also be heard live via streaming audio by Web surfers around the world. To learn more about today's broadcast, to "tune in" online, or to listen after the fact to the archived version of today's broadcast, click here.

As Mr. Osgood says, see you on the radio.

(P.S. The photo of me on the Soundcheck Web site is a personal favorite.)

Posted January 07, 12:06 PM

TT: No need to be an ogre

I took two weeks off from my Wall Street Journal drama column, but now I'm back this morning with reviews of Under the Bridge, the new Kathie Lee Gifford-David Pomeranz musical, and Daniel Goldfarb's Modern Orthodox, which stars Craig "Music Man" Bierko, Jason "American Pie" Biggs, and Molly "Pretty in Pink" Ringwald.

Regarding Under the Bridge, grab your hat and hold on tight:

When the word got out that Kathie Lee Gifford had written the book and lyrics for a "family-friendly" musical that was all set to open Off Broadway, the resulting rumble of lip-smacking anticipation reminded me of nothing so much as the way many Manhattanites felt when it first hit them that Martha Stewart might actually do time. This, after all, is the town that brought you "Avenue Q," a show so cynical that it contains a number called "Schadenfreude" ("Right now you are down and out and feeling really crappy/And when I see how sad you are/It sort of makes me...happy!"). I don't have any strong opinions either way about Mrs. Gifford, but most of my friends affect to find her relentlessly cheery peppiness revolting, so much so that I couldn't find anyone to accompany me to "Under the Bridge," which opened last night at the Zipper Theatre.

Well, folks, I hate to disappoint you, but...I liked it.

"Under the Bridge" is a musical adaptation of Natalie Savage Carlson's "The Family Under the Bridge," the still-popular 1958 children's book in which Armand, a homeless Paris bum (played in the show by Ed Dixon), comes to the rescue of the freshly widowed Madame Calcet (Jacquelyn Piro) and her three children (Alexa Ehrlich, Maggie Watts and Andrew Blake Zutty), whose landlord has put them out on the street because they can no longer pay the rent. It's a sentimental heartwarmer of a tale, complete with the expected happy ending, and for the most part Mrs. Gifford has transferred it to the stage efficiently....

My feelings about Modern Orthodox were rather more complicated:

Daniel Goldfarb's "Modern Orthodox," now playing at Dodger Stages, is a very commercial comedy about a very interesting subject: the squirmy discomfort that certain secular Jews feel in the presence of their believing brethren....

Ben and Hershel are at once contemptuous of and oddly attracted to one another. Just as Ben is repelled by Hershel's straight-from-the-shoulder vulgarity, so is Hershel horrified by Ben's "ersatz" Jewishness: "Are you conservative?" "Reform. Er, secular, really. Whatever you'd call a high holiday Jew." "A gentile." (Pow!) Yet each sees in the other something he lacks--and for which he longs.

All this might well have added up to scaldingly hot stuff, but Mr. Goldfarb has opted for Neil Simon-type punchlines over Philip Roth-type satire....

You were expecting maybe a link? To read the whole thing--of which there's a lot more--buy today's Journal at your neighborhood newsstand, or go here to subscribe to the reasonably priced online version of the Journal. (That's how I read me.)

Posted January 07, 12:03 PM

TT: Elsewhere

- Publishers Weekly has a new editor, and major changes are in the offing. Sarah explains it all for you:

Is the magazine actually obsolete? Not as long as they keep the focus on what people pay most attention to--the reviews. One thing I have noticed of late is that more and more of these reviews appear closer to the publication date, which seems rather pointless--if it's a trade publication, shouldn't it be ahead of the curve of newspaper reviews or online pundits? A month is too short a lead time; two or three might work better in order to keep PW as a leading contributor to industry dialogue instead of morphing into a dinosaur....

- Tyler sends an open letter to the Big Cheese at the Museum of Modern Art:

You've got operational problems, Glenn. The crowds in your museum are so massive that it's endangering the art. I saw people bumping into sculptures, even paintings, because the galleries were so crowded. And you need more guards--the fourth floor galleries and the contemporary galleries were so full of people that anyone who wanted to touch a painting could. Heck, I saw women with strollers bumping into the art. If Gordon Matta-Clark was alive, he'd be comin' after you with a chainsaw after what I saw people doing to his work in your museum.

And the cameras, Glenn. You must ban cameras from the building. I must have seen about 100 flashes go off in five hours. The guards simply can't keep up with every camera flash that happens. It's bad for the art and it's bad for the viewing experience of everyone else in the room....

- Jolly Days sharply reduces the number of degrees separating Renata Tebaldi from Jason Alexander:

Renata Tebaldi's death sent me surfing to Apple's iTunes store. I purchased what is a high point in human expression, certainly in 20th century western performance, Tebaldi's O mio babbino caro. This painfully beautiful, far-too-short piece, sitting in the midst of a comic opera that could have been plotted by Larry David -- amazing....

This Puccini piece is almost more perfect for its surprising launching pad: Gianni Schicchi. Puccini's genius enlivens an ancient tale derived from a 14th century commentary on Dante's Florence. (The plot is often incorrectly associated with a passage in Dante's Divine Comedy) It could easily be a plot concocted by Seinfeld's George to get Susan's money -- with Kramer mucking it up again no doubt....

That's what we recovering musicians call an enharmonic modulation....

- My competitor-pal Robert Gottlieb, author of that other Balanchine book, has a damned good roundup of the year in dance in his New York Observer column:

The year ended with a bang, not a whimper. The Trocks--O.K., fact-checkers, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo--turned up for two weeks of fun and games at the Joyce, and even though there were longueurs, they gave us a very needed shot in the arm. Because, let's face it, 2004 was a bumpy ride....

If you're even halfway interested in ballet or modern dance, this one's an absolute must-read.

UPDATE: For more on the Trocks, go here.

- Rachel Howard, who blogs at Footnotes, is about to publish a memoir (which I intend to read the second it comes out), and the prospect of going public about a dark episode in her past is causing her to think some interesting thoughts about blogging:

I'm not hesitant to share unflattering details about myself, at least not in hardback. Yet posting on this website--so much less exposing--still feels like such an unnatural and worrisome process. I didn't come to blogging freely; my husband, a political blog addict, insisted I should do it and found the designer for this site. The blog has proven useful: It aggregates my freelance work and gives me an online calling card. But I've never truly taken to it. Not for me the casually confidential working diary of a Terry Teachout or the biting, devil-may-care running commentary of an Old Hag. Every time I type an entry I have to think "Is this interesting to anyone but me? Does it tell too much about me? Too little?" and worst of all, "Why am I doing this?" And usually the true answer is because I think I should. As for why I think I should, I'll leave the further psychologizing to the therapist's office.

Why the reticence online when I'm so unguarded in my memoir? I blame the conversational nature of blogging. I'm not shy, but I'm not a chatty person. I can fake outgoingness at a party for about as long as it takes to greet the hostess, and by forty-five minutes I'm trying to nudge my husband toward the door. I detest talking about myself except with known friends, or even talking about my opinions, and if pressed to make small talk at a social gathering, I usually end up interviewing others. Writing has always been different. In writing a memoir or a novel, I'm not forcing myself upon anyone; no one has to nod along with fake interest. If I work hard enough on a page, someone may want to read it. If I fail to engage them, they can put it down....

Next week at "About Last Night": the unvarnished truth about my sex life, in five daily installments! (O.K., maybe we'll do Our Girl's sex life instead.)

Posted January 07, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Art depends on the solitude of inspired, talented, or neurotic egotists. In its expression, it may ease their agonies (for half an hour); it may bring delight and consolation to some--those hearing Mahler's Ninth one night in San Francisco. But Mahler's Ninth on that occasion did not house one homeless person. Renoir's La Grande Illusion, unequalled in its antiwar sentiments, was prelude to a fresh war. The moment art finds or claims any utility it is dragged before the court of justification, and that is a forlorn process. I think it is correct to see, and insist, that art demands the single-minded, profitless dedication of time, life, and materials to the quest."

David Thomson, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood

Posted January 07, 12:00 PM

January 6, 2005

TT: Almanac

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Posted January 06, 12:00 PM

January 5, 2005

TT: The show aquatic

Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique, whose off-Broadway revival I reviewed for The Wall Street Journal back in September, closed on Sunday. To mark the occasion, Twist invited me to come see the show again--only this time from backstage. I immediately took him up on the offer, bringing Our Girl with me to Dodger Stages to see the final performance. It was an unforgettable spectacle, especially for someone as stagestruck as I am. I did my fair share of acting in high school and college, but for me the real romance of the theater was to be found backstage, not in the spotlight, so I jumped at the priceless opportunity to watch Twist's puppeteers from the far side of the curtain.

If you've never seen Symphonie Fantastique, my Wall Street Journal review gives a fairly clear idea of what it looks like out front:

Like "The Bald Soprano," it's a theatrical magic act that all but defies explanation, if not description. To put it as simply as possible, "Symphonie Fantastique" is an abstract, wordless puppet show performed in a 1,000-gallon tank of water and accompanied by a recording of Hector Berlioz's "Fantastic Symphony." That doesn't tell you much, does it? If anything, so straightforward a description is likely to be offputting, especially to the casual theatergoer who doesn't much care for puppets in the first place, so I'll try to flesh things out a bit.

What you see in "Symphonie Fantastique" is one wall of a shallow glass tank into which five wet-suited puppeteers dip and slosh 180 peculiar-looking objects, none of which even remotely resembles Charlie McCarthy. Inspired by the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky and Berlioz's own program for the "Fantastic Symphony," Mr. Twist uses this equipment to conjure up a bewitching string of complex scenes that unfold with the nagging compulsion of a love story (which is what Berlioz's symphony is, more or less). The puppeteers are hidden from view by a black wall, and the tank, which looks rather like a flat-screen television, is lit so cunningly and colorfully that you soon become disoriented and surrender joyously to the illusions being created before your amazed eyes.

In the end, literal descriptions of what "happens" in "Symphonie Fantastique" must inevitably fall short of conveying its loony, inscrutable beauty. Metaphor is the only way to suggest its essence. I've now seen "Symphonie Fantastique" something like a half-dozen times, starting with its original off-off-Broadway production at the HERE Arts Center, and I described a previous incarnation as looking like "a cross between George Balanchine, Paul Klee and Chuck Jones." If that sounds good to you, head for Dodger Stages and prepare to be entranced.

Seen from the other side of the wall, Twist's inscrutable illusions looked and sounded more like a fistfight in a dark alley on a rainy night. Soggy puppets and props sailed drippingly through the air, the black-clad puppeteers grunted and cursed and howled along with Berlioz, and I sat quietly in a corner with my mouth hanging open, alternately thinking Oh, that's how they do it!, I have the coolest job in the whole world, and Maybe I should have brought a raincoat (a towel was supplied, fortunately). Every once in a while I'd snatch a hasty glance at a TV monitor that showed what it looked like from the front of the house. What I saw there was beautiful, but what I saw with my unaided eyes seemed chaotic to the point of insanity, and I kept reminding myself that it wasn't--that the deceptively wild tumult was in fact choreographed down to the last splash.

Here's another thought that crossed my mind as I sat in the wings: might it be that live theater in all its endless varieties is the most unselfish of the art forms? When I played bass in my college orchestra, for instance, I participated completely in the musical experience as it was happening. I could hear the piece unfolding, and reveled in the multihued sound of the ensemble of which I was a part. But the gifted artisans who enacted Symphonie Fantastique at Dodger Stages saw nothing but a huge tank of water into which they stuck odd-shaped objects and sloshed them around. The visual experience thereby brought into being was reserved exclusively for the audience. The performers had to take it on faith.

Watching Twist's puppeteers splash and curse and sing, I was reminded of George Balanchine's famous remark that dancers, like angels, carry a message but do not themselves experience it. Of course they must experience something pleasurable--otherwise they wouldn't keep doing it day after day--but they don't get to see what we see, not even when they see themselves after the fact on film or videotape. The same goes for puppeteers, and for actors of all kinds. Theirs is the burden, ours the blessing.

Posted January 05, 12:48 PM

TT: Shoutout

My good friend Tyler Green, who blogs at Modern Art Notes, is yanking my chain:

I disagree with my esteemed AJ colleague Terry Teachout about the lack of usefulness of specialized critical fields. There is value to readers in specialized knowledge, in a critic spending hours and hours studying, thinking about and examining a certain field....what about providing context, insight and original thinking about contemporary art when the premiere of Alias is on at 8 tonight and there's a new novel to be read? What about doing the legwork to look at all that a critic has to look at in order to speak with some level of insight?

Er, did I really say critical specialization wasn't useful? Because it is, or can be, for all the good reasons Tyler mentions--but only so long as the specialist remains conscious and appreciative of the place of his specialty in the larger world of art. Critics who lack or lose this awareness become provincial, which is the curse of certain branches of criticism (dance in particular). What do they know of modernism who only modern art know? Answer: not enough.

I don't offer my own experience as a model for all critics, by the way. I started out years ago as a critical specialist (in music), but gradually began writing about other things that interested me simply because...I wanted to. And I hope I'm properly modest about what I can and can't do. To quote from my introduction to A Terry Teachout Reader, "I am all too aware that when I discuss any art form other than music, it is as a more or less well-informed amateur, not a practitioner. The only claim that I would make for myself is that because I chose not to remain a specialist, I thereby acquired a feel for the unity of the arts that has had its own value." At least I think so, anyway!

Yes, I do believe good critics should be encouraged to write outside their specialties. (Bad critics, conversely, should be encouraged to take up other lines of work.) But specialization in and of itself is no bad thing, so long as it doesn't lead in bad directions. My favorite art critic, Fairfield Porter, was in one sense the ultimate specialist--a professional painter who wrote about art when not making it. He was also a part-time poet and a deeply thoughtful man whose aesthetic interests (and knowledge) ranged very widely. Don't you wish he'd taken the time to write on occasion about other art forms as well? I do, just as I'm excited that the anything-but-provincial music critic John Rockwell will soon become the chief dance critic of the New York Times. He may be wrong--a lot--but at least he'll be interesting.

One more quote, this one from the mission statement for "About Last Night":

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and elsewhere...It's about all the arts, not just one or two. Clement Greenberg, the great art critic, believed that "in the long run there are only two kinds of art: the good and the bad. This difference cuts across all other differences in art. At the same time, it makes all art one....the experience of art is the same in kind or order despite all differences in works of art themselves." We feel the same way, which is why we write about so many different things. We think many people--maybe most--approach art with a similarly wide-ranging appreciation. By writing each day about our own experiences as consumers and critics, we hope to create a meeting place in cyberspace for arts lovers who are curious, adventurous, and unafraid of the unfamiliar.

I think that sums up my thinking, and Our Girl's, fairly well. And I bet Tyler doesn't really disagree with us, either.

UPDATE: Scroll up from Tyler's original posting to see incoming responses from his other readers. See also Alex Ross:

I ask this, though: if the ideal critic writes about classical music and nothing but, where would you put G. B. Shaw? E. T. A. Hoffmann? Wagner? The writer who can encompass more than one realm is the one whose words will resonate longest. The best piece of music criticism I've read in a decade was Alan Hollinghurst's TLS review of the Bayreuth Ring in 2000. Why? Because he didn't write like a parochial expert; he wrote like the major novelist he is. In an ideal world, poets, presidents, painters, and priests would talk about music, and there would be no critics. We're just filling the void....

Posted January 05, 12:10 PM

TT: Elsewhere

- Bookish Gardener has made what at first glance appears to be a very significant music-related discovery about Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady. Click on the link and see for yourself.

- Jeff Jarvis, who blogs at BuzzMachine, digests the findings of the important new Pew Internet and American Life study:

27% of internet users say they read blogs, a 58% jump from the 17% who told us they were blog readers in February. This means that by the end of 2004 32 million Americans were blog readers.... At the same time, for all the excitement about blogs and the media coverage of them, blogs have not yet become recognized by a majority of internet users. Only 38% of all internet users know what a blog is. The rest are not sure what the term "blog" means.

His comment:

Hell, at this stage in the birth of the web, I'll bet just as many people didn't know what the hell HTML was. The fact that almost 40 percent of online Americans know what blogs are is amazing.

I agree. Read the rest. This is no fad.

- The adorable Maccers spent Christmas in an ashram:

The temperature will go below freezing tonight and the electric heater that I have in the cabin doesn't seem to be taking the edge off the chill. There are three electric bars which are trying to fight the icy winds coming through the two inch gaps under the door and around the windows. Two other things which have been filling me with a sense of foreboding are the large baskets filled with tambourines (tambourines!) I spied in the meditation hall and the hand holding Hare Krishna chanting we have to do before dinner. All of us in the kitchen. Singing over the vegetable curry. If I have to do that again, I very well might be fasting during my entire stay....

Eeuuww.

- Champion mystery writer Laura Lippman has trenchant things to say about her chosen line of work:

Crime fiction has its share of jerry-built and dilapidated stock, but the genre is sturdy, its possibilities endless. Come on in, but don't think you'll transform it via the literary equivalents of granite counter-tops and Viking stoves. Like the rowhouses of Baltimore, thrown up in the 19th century to house the working class, the only thing great crime fiction has transcended is those who would render it transitory....

Take that, Edmund Wilson!

Posted January 05, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Greek tragedy is the tragedy of necessity; i.e., the feeling aroused in the spectator is ‘What a pity it had to be this way'; Christian tragedy is the tragedy of possibility, ‘What a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise.'"

W.H. Auden, "The Christian Tragic Hero" (courtesy of Peter Robinson)

Posted January 05, 12:00 PM

TT: Apropos of Will Eisner

If you know who I'm talking about, and that he died on Monday, you'll definitely want to read this appreciation by Michael Barrier.

(Read this, too.)

Posted January 05, 3:25 AM

TT: P.P.C.

If you don't mind, I believe I'll take Thursday off. I'm feeling a bit fried from the cumulative effects of the past few weeks' labors, and I've got to write my Wall Street Journal column first thing in the morning.

I'm not sure when my trusty co-blogger gets back to Chicago, but when she does I know she'll have tales of her own to tell. Maybe tomorrow, maybe Friday....

Anyway, later. Go read some other blog. You know where to find 'em.

Posted January 05, 1:13 AM

TT: In or out?

I was never an admirer, much less a fan, of Susan Sontag, but I confess to being fascinated by the retrospective brouhaha over whether the New York Times should have outed her--which it didn't--in its long, unabashedly admiring obituary. Not surprisingly, Andrew Sullivan has been linking to much of the relevant post-obit commentary, and today he's posted a long and telling excerpt from a Sontag interview conducted in 2000:

She says she has been in love seven times in her life, which seems quite a lot. "No, hang on," she says. "Actually, it's nine. Five women, four men." She will talk about her bisexuality quite openly now. It's simple, she says. "As I've become less attractive to men, so I've found myself more with women. It's what happens. Ask any woman my age. More women come on to you than men. And women are fantastic. Around 40, women blossom. Women are a work-in-progress. Men burn out." She doesn't have a lover now, she lives alone. The rumours about her and the photographer Annie Leibovitz are, she says, without foundation. They are close friends.

Maybe it sounds foolish, she says. "Maybe everyone will think I have an aberrant life, or a low sex drive. Maybe I am consigning myself to the asexual here. But speaking candidly, and only for myself, there are so many things in my life now that are more important to me than my sexuality. My relationship with my son, David. My writing. Even my moral passions seem to me to be far more defining than my erotic life. People can conclude from this what they want."

(You'll find lots of other interesting Sontag-related stuff on Sullivan's site, but his permalinks don't always point directly to specific postings, so the best thing to do is go there, scroll down, and keep scrolling.)

Should the Times have described Sontag as a lesbian, or bisexual, or however you want to put it? Speaking as a biographer, I think it's absurd not to be frank about such matters. Regardless of a person's wishes, the statute of limitations on candor expires when the death certificate is signed, and when the person in question is important, it's no less important to tell the truth, insofar as it's known or can be determined. I once read a long, posthumously published biography of the American composer Samuel Barber in which the words "homosexual" and "gay" were nowhere to be found, even though everybody in the music business knew perfectly well that Barber was gay (and even though the author had written at length about a goodly number of his lovers). That's just crazy.

At the same time, though, I think biographers--and writers of obituaries--should be careful about engaging in the sort of idiot reductionism one typically finds in what Joyce Carol Oates has called "pathography." What Sontag said in that interview is worth taking to heart--and not just in her own case. Whatever else she was or wasn't, she was definitely a complicated woman, too complicated to be summed up in a single word. So am I. So are you.

Posted January 05, 1:00 AM

January 4, 2005

TT: Memo to OGIC

Dear OGIC: In case you're wondering, your black blouse is hanging patiently in my coat closet, making everything smell much prettier. (I still can't figure out whose watch we found in the cabinet above the kitchen sink, though.)

Posted January 04, 12:57 PM

TT: Mailbox

Our readers write:

- "You are doubtlessly correct that the word posses will fail to catch up with the word ‘blog.' Not soon will its scrawny neck get stretched. But admit that a word so preeminently without felicity or grace, if it does not deserve to die, must not expect to be loved. The considerable onomatopoetic value of the word has been tragically wasted: blog is tuned to affliction, deep pain, infliction, galloping infection, whatever it was that Grendel's mother had in mind for Beowulf. It is a fork with a definite pitch that has gotten into the wrong bag. ‘New York bloggers have been blogging without surcease over the Met's production of Mozart's Magic Flute.' Impossible, no? It will be a hundred years before this lump of coal becomes an 8-ball."

- "Your quote from E.B. White reminded me of the ending to Edward Hirsch's essay, 'Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man,' in A William Maxwell Portrait (one of the books I requested and received for Christmas):

‘I can't reconcile myself to the fact that he is gone. The night before he passed away I stood on the sidewalk outside his apartment building and burst into tears. I was grieving in advance. I couldn't bear to be without him. I still can't. William Maxwell knew something about inconsolable grief. People hurried by on either side of me, but no one even glanced my way. It started to rain. The night opened its arms. New York City is a place where one can weep on the sidewalk in perfect privacy.'"

- "Best wishes for '05. I'm a big fan--although what you've cost me in CDs and books does not bear contemplation."

Hey, it's a nice problem to have....

Posted January 04, 12:05 PM

TT: Things to come (and go)

- It's "Critics Week" at WNYC's Soundcheck, and I'll be taking my turn at the microphone this Friday. Here's what the show's Web site says about my upcoming appearance:

Terry Teachout, drama critic for the Wall Street Journal and music critic of Commentary, offers his favorites of 2004 from across the cultural spectrum. The week rounds out by allowing listeners to weigh in on their picks of the year.

Soundcheck airs in New York weekdays at two p.m. on 93.9 FM. To find out more about this week's episodes (mine included), or to listen online via streaming audio, go here.

- "The Art of Romare Bearden" closes this Sunday at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and I'm ashamed to confess that I haven't been to see it yet. I know, I know, I've been busy as hell, but Bearden is one of my favorite American artists, so I'm going to do my very best to get there this week. If you're in the same boat, go here for more information.

Posted January 04, 12:04 PM

TT: Housekeeping

With Our Girl gone, I've been consoling myself by working on the right-hand column. In addition to updating the "Teachout in Commentary" and "Second City" modules with fresh links, I also undertook a major revision of "Sites to See," the "About Last Night" blogroll. I've added a bunch of new blogs, as well as replacing a few old ones that either got knocked off inadvertently or were temporarily inactive, and I've also reorganized some of the categories under which the blogs are listed. We'll be doing some compensatory pruning in the next few days, and you can also expect some new Top Fives shortly. (For those who wrote to tell me that the link to my new Commentary essay on Haydn was broken, it's fixed now.)

Here are the "Sites to See" categories, from top to bottom:

- ART LINKS: Web sites (including artsjournal.com, "About Last Night"'s invaluable host) that provide regularly updated links to English-language news stories and commentary about the arts.

- ART BLOGS: Blogs that are primarily (but not always exclusively) about the arts. We don't break them out into different art forms--i.e., books, music, whatever--because we want to encourage interdisciplinary surfing.

- MEDIA/GOSSIP: Blogs and Web sites about the media and/or gossip (duh).

- PUBLICATIONS: Mainstream media Web sites, usually with substantial art-related content. (Whenever possible, we link directly to the arts pages of these sites.)

- RADIO: Art-related sites devoted to specific radio shows or hosted by radio stations. (This one's new.)

- ARTIST SITES: Non-blog sites with frequently updated content maintained by artists and performers who interest us. (This is new, too.)

- CRITIC SITES: Ditto, only for critics.

- USEFUL SITES: Mostly reference-type sites about the arts and related subjects, plus a couple of on-line stores we like.

- OTHER BLOGS: Interesting blogs and bloggish sites that are not primarily arts-oriented.

Our Girl and I encourage you to comment on "Sites to See." Bear in mind, though, that we're mainly interested in hearing about artblogs and art-related sites that we haven't yet discovered, or gotten around to blogrolling. We're especially eager to build up "Radio Sites" as quickly as possible, and we also want to blogroll all the best arts pages of America's regional newspapers.

If you have a new or underappreciated artblog that you think our readers might find interesting, feel free to send us your URL. Please don't ask us to exchange links, though--we don't do that. If your blog looks interesting to us, we'll keep an eye on it, and if it remains both interesting and active, we'll add it to "Sites to See."

Now, go visit a blog you've never read before.

Posted January 04, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"I don't want to own anything that won't fit in my coffin."

Fred Allen (quoted in John Dunning, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)

Posted January 04, 12:00 PM

January 3, 2005

TT: Lots and lots of elsewhere

I've been bookmarking toothsome links for weeks, but only just found sufficient time to knock them together into a posting. Some turned out to have a short shelf life, but these are all fresh:

- My Wall Street Journal colleague Eric Gibson nailed it last week:

If Americans are generous, they are also vain. That's the sad conclusion to be drawn from the fact almost every new concert hall, museum, hospital wing and university building bears at least one donor's name. The "naming opportunity," as it is called, is the instrument of choice for development officers--their tried-and-true method of coaxing money from wealthy people. The strategy has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for worthy causes. But with its bald pandering, it has also corrupted the true spirit of philanthropy....

According to Leslie Lenkowsky, a professor at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, anonymous philanthropy accounts for only about 1% of total annual giving--a drop in the bucket. The number might be larger, but anonymous philanthropy, by its nature, doesn't receive much publicity. There are no published surveys that might give it visibility and present it as an attractive option. Business Week, the Chronicle of Philanthropy and Slate all overlook it. "The fund-raising community dislikes it," says Mr. Lenkowsky. "Named donors are like seals of approval and are thought to generate more funds."

It is long past time for someone to publish an annual list of the country's largest anonymous donations. The idea would be not to recognize individuals, as other lists do--an impossible task anyway--but to celebrate the spirit in which such gifts were made and, by encouraging more of them, to help American philanthropy recover its honor. Perhaps such a list could, over time, make anonymous giving so fashionable as to eliminate "named giving" altogether, or at least reduce its greedy prominence....

- Household Opera on being a city person:

I'm troubled by the mindset that everyone has to do their own thing, have their own vehicle, own their own house, go their own way, pull their own weight, not lean on other people, not reach out, not connect, not be reminded of the millions of other lives going on in the world (and if you don't, you're a freak, or a naive Pollyanna who'll just get mugged or knifed). It's the same thing that bothers me when I read about how people in this country are getting less and less involved with social groups outside their families, bowling by themselves, not going to the movies when they can sit in their living rooms and enjoy "home theater," and retreating more and more into the private sphere....

Me, too.

- I am soooo into twang twang twang, the British harpist-blogger (you can move to Manhattan any time now, Helen!). Here's another example of why:

Is it possible to be a perfect artist? To deal plainly, there is always more to do. That is the performer's Catch-22, striving for something we can only manage in patches, if at all. As Eliot remarks in The Dry Salvages, "For most of us this is the aim/Never here to be realised./Who are only undefeated/Because we have gone on trying." But that is why it is moving to see a performance. It is heroic--it carries on regardless of difficulty, and it aspires to something that, because it does not come easily, is rare and precious. When somebody performs astoundingly well, they defy their human limitations and deliver something rich and strange....

- I recently stumbled across a now-mislaid link to a site that included a long list of "break-up lines of the philosophers." Way geeky, but also way cool. Excerpts:

The Solipsist: It's not you, it's me.

The Rationalist, v. 3.0: If you can't see your faults, there's nothing more I can say.

The Atheist: These things just happen.

The Kantian: You lied to me!

The Hegelian: Do we have to go through this again?

- Another cool list, this one of "the things I will not do when I direct a Shakespeare production on stage or film" (and no, I can't remember where I found this link, either). Highlights:

1. The ghost of Hamlet's father will not be played by the entire ensemble underneath a giant piece of diaphanous black material....

4. I will not imply that Hamlet is sleeping with his mother, or wants to....

12. I will not cast actresses as Helena and Hermia who are the same height.

13. Richard II's minions will not be made to wear pink....

25. I will not use long red ribbons to represent blood, particularly if the long red ribbons bear an unnerving resemblance to pasta.

To the unknown author of this list: a grateful drama critic salutes you!

- Alex Ross (whom OGIC and I ran into at the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday) posts on a bloodcurdling phenomenon:

Just now I found myself typing the sentence, "La Mer, of course, depicts the sea." Has anyone else had the experience of more or less forgetting how to write--not to mention forgetting how to talk or think--toward the end of a book-writing process? The other troubling sensation I have is that the more verbiage I produce, the farther I am from being done.

You don't know the half of it, buddy. Just wait till you spend ten years working on a book....

- Alicublog, my favorite Blue American grouch, has also been known to write on matters apolitical. Somebody sent me a link to a mini-essay he posted last year on Glen Campbell's recording of a pop song I love, Jimmy Webb's "Wichita Lineman":

That Jimmy Webb song is basically a dramatic fragment: a lineman in a barren stretch of the Great Plains during wintertime talks about the burdens of his business and the burdens of his love in alternating passages, but with a similar attitude: it's hard work, and things might go wrong at any time. It's pretty sophisticated for mainstream 60s pop, but it's the arrangement on this record that lifts it into glory. The orchestral sweeps and twang guitar are perfectly normal--a little C&W, a little Living Strings--but because the song is so weird, they actually promote rather than assuage a feeling of unease, like a haggard-looking guy at the end of a bar methodically peeling the labels off each of his beers. The main riff supports the feeling: the telegraphic guitar part, thin and insistent, cushioned in distant, ethereal strings....

Nice, really nice, except that I think maybe he underestimates the quality of the song itself, perhaps just a little. Listen to this recording and see if you don't agree.

UPDATE: A reader just wrote to remind me of the original link that led me to this posting. Thanks for helping me give credit where it's due....

- My Balanchine book inspired the anonymous author of Searchblog to post something that touched me:

Apparently, it is ballet that will provide my ultimate salvation. It has come to my rescue on three significant occasions: during my childhood, at the outset of my major depression a year ago, and more recently when I plunged into a similar depressive episode. On each occasion, it was the exquisite beauty of ballet that redeemed me.

There is nothing in my childhood that would portend my intense love of dance, especially classical ballet. I grew up in a hardscrabble industrial town, several of my grandparents were immigrants, and "the arts" was something that strange men in capes and berets did with each other....

Don't I know it.

- On the other side of the coin, here's a retired dancer who reminisces wryly about the mixed blessing of appearing in Balanchine's Nutcracker, year in and year out:

My first adult role was Grandmother in the Party Scene of the first act. The Grandfather I was paired with was Misha Arshansky, a pal of Balanchine's. I would be prepped for our solemn entrance with penciled age lines, a gray wig and a dowdy lace shawl. Then we would shuffle and hunch through the frolicking kids until I made my exit, and had exactly 18 minutes to transform myself into one of the shimmering Snowflakes. I'd throw off the wig, wipe away my "wrinkles," get my pointe shoes on and my tulle skirt in place and return to the wings in time to dance through the rising drifts of confetti snow. Onstage, I'd keep my eyes squinty and my mouth closed. The stuff was coated with some fireproof material, and if a piece got lodged in your throat, it tasted awful and you couldn't cough to get rid of it. Ballet rule No. 1: music from the pit, silence from the stage....

Memo to parents: remember to be more grateful next time.

- Speaking of dance, my Washington Post colleague Sarah Kaufman wrote a great profile of Paul Taylor the other day:

When he's creating a new dance, Taylor overnights in the 19th-century house he owns in New York's SoHo, within walking distance of his company's studios. But it is here, on Long Island's North Fork, where a hillside of gnarled trees leads to an unbroken view of Long Island Sound, where Taylor spends most of his time. Snugly tucked in among the bare, twisted flora, his wind-beaten house is more of a burrow, like something furry animals would inhabit in a children's book. Taylor has owned it since the 1970s....

That's exactly right.

- My Stupid Dog expands thoughtfully on what I wrote last month apropos of True Grit:

I suspect that as a cinematic genre, the Western might integrate language and action more thoroughly--and successfully--than most other types of filmic narrative. In this stark terrain, where civilization is ostensibly absent (even though its artifacts are everywhere), characters have little to do but fight and talk to each other. They do both in abundance....

- Old Hag is on a John P. Marquand kick, and the novel she likes best, Point of No Return, is big with me, too, as I've previously mentioned in this space (scroll down).

Says the Hag:

Have you been looking for a book that combines an anthropological examination of a small New England town with the vagaries of lost rich-girl love with a desperate, almost frantic crisis revolving around a promotion at a bank? Have you ever suspected that such a book could be the best book in the world, with a heart-stopping last line that rivals Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider closing ("Now, there would be time for everything") with its simultaneous blast of redemption and cruel irony? Well, have you? Look no further.

- The Brazilian Muse muses on the birth of a life-changing obsession:

I'm glad that Brazil found me when it did. Better late than never, I say. Because my interest in the music coincided with my move to the city, that curiosity for all things Brazilian helped introduce me to a whole side of New York City that I never would have found otherwise. It wasn't because of New York that I discovered Brazilian music, but it was thanks to New York that my love for that music and culture could grow and thrive and evolve....

Yes on both counts. New York is the cafeteria of obsessions.

Lastly, two technology-related posts deserving of a quick peek:

- Here's a nifty little primer for those who've run across the word "podcasting" but don't quite know what it is, much less how it works. (Trust me, it's going to be big.)

- As for this, I smell a brilliant idea whose time is near--or here. When the price comes down a bit, I'm so there....

Posted January 03, 12:05 PM

TT: Four little letters

Gleaned from the wires:

DETROIT (AP) -- From wardrobe malfunctions to erectile dysfunction, it's been a tough year all around for the guardians of English--language purists from blue, red and battleground states who long to say "You're fired!" to offensive words and phrases.

More than 2,000 nominations arrived in Michigan's far north, where a committee at Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie released its 2005 compilation of language irritants Friday.

Among the 22 expressions on the "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness" are "blog," "sale event," "body wash" and "zero percent APR financing."

"We're über-serious about this list," said committee organizer Tom Pink, referring to the German prefix meaning "over" or "super" that increasingly finds its way into English.

Group members act as "linguistic sounding boards," said John Shibley, co-compiler of the list.

"People talk back to their TVs, radios, computers, etc., when words and phrases make them angry or frustrated," he said. "Diminishing `word-rage' makes the world a more peaceful place."

Now in its 30th year, the banned word list has drawn imitators and critics....

Shibley said the Lake Superior State group compiles the list in the spirit of fun, and going through old lists can be "like coming across a lost script from an Austin Powers movie."

Banishment nominees have included metrosexual (2003), chad (2001), paradigm (1994), baby boomers (1989) and détente (1976).

Count me among the critics, not merely because this group of linguistic Luddites has chosen to ban "blog," but because their list of past nominees for banishment makes embarrassingly clear how undiscriminating these unhappy folk are. I can't imagine that "metrosexual" and "chad" will have much staying power, but "baby boomers"? They wanted to ban that one in 1989? And as for "détente," it has of course passed permanently into the language in the sense intended in 1976 (and long before).

It's true that the word "blog" is--well, ugly. Early in the life of this blog, there was even a brief discussion of whether we ought to come up with a better name for what we do. Naturally it got nowhere, since "blog" was by then already well established in common usage. And why did it put down roots so quickly? Because it was a near-perfect, highly purposeful coinage: a four-letter monosyllable presumably forged not by some glib journalist but by an actual blogger, one which was immediately adopted by all who ran across it because it gave a memorable name to something significant. (Somehow I doubt the world was waiting for "metrosexual.") Such is the organic process by which new words are coined, taken up, and accepted into the language, and to argue against its validity is like trying to repeal the weather.

Needless to say, there will always be fussbudgets eager to tell us that Things Shouldn't Be That Way. I know people who think life would be better without computers, that rock should never have happened, that modernism was a mistake, that the Renaissance was the great wrong turn in Western history. When confronted by yet another specimen of such posturing, I smile--and shrug. It was in response to this mindset that I wrote what have turned out to be the most widely repeated words yet posted on this blog:

Sometimes different is better, and sometimes, maybe most of the time, it's just different. The thing is to try to understand the nature of the difference--and, insofar as possible, to think of ways in which new culture-shaping technologies can be used in the service of old values....I'm old-fashioned--but my attachment is to essences, not embodiments.

That goes for words, too. "Blog" may not be an especially pretty word, but it works--and, like the technology to which it gives a name, it's here to stay, like it or not. Get used to it. Better yet, start one. Make it your New Year's resolution.

UPDATE: See this Denver Post appreciation of the litblogging scene, in which David Milofsky makes enthusiastic mention of several of our illustrious colleagues. The money quote:

I would trade passion for polish any day, and if there's an in-group among bloggers, it's one that seems remarkably inclusive. They're far from perfect, but for those of us who occasionally despair at the lack of a literary audience in this country, the growing emergence of litblogs is reason for celebration.

He gets it.

Posted January 03, 12:03 PM

TT: Almanac

"For the artist, the focus on self, on personal development and artistic destiny, is a drive that excludes everything else. Normally endowed people living normal lives see it as inexcusable selfishness."

Ada Louise Huxtable, Frank Lloyd Wright

Posted January 03, 12:00 PM

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- I once had a significant other who could easily have stepped out of a Nancy Mitford novel, or a children's book. Among other things, it was her custom to anthropomorphize everything she ran across. Animals, books, housewares, pieces of furniture: all were endowed with personalities in her high-flying mind. I'd never done that kind of thing myself, my natural sense of fantasy being deficient to the point of nonexistence (I must have been a painfully literal child). Close proximity to so fantastic a person eventually gave me an appreciation for her flights of fancy, though, and to this day I occasionally catch myself thinking in something of the same way. As I walked home this morning from the bagel store, I noticed that the sidewalks were lined with discarded Christmas trees, and I thought: Oh, poor things! Were they well lit and handsomely trimmed? Did they look down on great piles of beautifully wrapped presents? Are they cold and lonely now? Or do they feel fulfilled?

- At breakfast with Our Girl the other day, my memory abruptly disgorged a long-lost fact: Arthur Rubinstein, the classical pianist, reread all of Proust, including George Painter's two-volume biography, in the year before he went blind. I can't recall whether he knew for sure that his sight was going or merely had a premonition of trouble ahead, but I do know he later declared himself to have been deeply satisfied by the way he'd spent his last sighted months.

I wonder what I'd do in like circumstances. I don't think I'd go out of my way to read anything at all, though I can see why someone else might want to do so, reading with the eyes being an experience utterly different from "reading" with the ears. (I've never listened to an entire book from cover to cover--I get too impatient.) But if not A la recherche du temps perdu, then what? I suppose the obvious thing would be to hit the museums one more time. On the other hand, I could imagine finding that too painful, knowing that I'd soon be deprived of such experiences together. And if I did it anyway, would I try to see as many masterpieces as possible, or concentrate on a few special favorites in the hopes of retaining them in my mind for a little while longer?

I suppose a philosopher might choose instead to continue his normal life, endeavoring to savor each day's ordinary experiences to the fullest. Alas, I'm not a philosopher, merely a greedy aesthete who'd take a Balanchine ballet over a Balanchine-blue sky any day of the week. Does that mean I live my life once removed from the "real" world? Or are the aesthetic experiences of which the life of art is constituted as "real" as blue skies and fiery orange sunsets?

Posted January 03, 11:26 AM

TT: Rear-view mirror

Our Girl is now on her way back to Chicago, where she'll post in the next day or two about our weekend adventures. Watch this space for all the sordid details.

As for me, all I can say is that the gaiety of nations has been severely diminished....

Posted January 03, 10:43 AM

TT: Don't encourage him

Blogospheric bulletin: it turned out to be a mere coma, not the Real Right Distinguished Thing....

Posted January 03, 4:05 AM