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February 28, 2005

OGIC: Woulda coulda shoulda, Oscar

In the end, I don't care what the Academy does. Hell, I might even take a certain satisfaction in seeing my favorites robbed of what I think they deserve. But in the moment, it's gratifying and honest to put your heart out there for the underdogs you love and to experience the punch in the gut when they lose. So I did right by Sideways tonight: let myself really hope it might win a few, and let myself feel the sting when it mostly didn't.

Meanwhile, Michael Blowhard finally saw Sideways--just in time to see the Academy give it the dismissive little pat on the head that was its single award, for Best Adapted Screenplay--and we should all be glad, because he's written a wonderfully perceptive appreciation. His post deftly breaks down a pivotal scene in the film, giving it the really close reading it merits, and then turns into a wider-ranging reflection on the joys of the movie close-up:

My one small film-pedant reflection on seeing this film? I was grateful to be reminded of how powerful movie closeups can be. Sandra Oh isn't in the movie as much as I hoped she'd be. But she and Payne sketch in a convincing portrait of a confident yet vulnerable, frisky yet intelligent woman with just a few well-chosen actions and closeups.

The film's most beautiful closeup is of Madsen. She and Giammatti are on Oh's porch, getting used to each other's company. Payne gives Madsen a short monologue about what wine has meant to her, and he discreetly moves the camera in as she speaks with feeling and reverence. Everything is quiet. It's evening in wine country. Your senses are awakened; the fragrances in the air are gentle, the night's sounds are distant, the evening's food and wine are having their effect. And a luscious, generous woman is--with warmth, fervor, and grace--opening herself up. I don't know how the audiences you saw the movie with reacted to this brief passage, but some of the people around me were sniffling. Wait a minute, I was sniffling.

I think we weren't moved because the scene was sad, except in its awareness that life itself is finally sad. (Payne is of Greek descent, and he seems to me to have a Mediterranean, deep, and inborn acceptance of life's tragic sides.) I think that people were moved instead by the moment's combo of beauty and gentle appreciation. Without utilizing any advanced-technology whoopdedo, Payne and Madsen were working magic. Something transfiguring was happening; radiance was pouring through the screen. (The Wife whispered to me after the scene was over, "That's my kind of special effect.") When Giamatti bolts--he can't handle what's being unwrapped and offered to him--we know for damn sure how deep his sad-sackness and depression go, and how far he's got to come back. We're left alone for a second with Madsen, feeling the moment fade away.

Movie histories tend to make much of careers, spectacle, economics, business, and technology. Important topics, of course. But the fact is also that closeups have always been experienced as one of film's most amazing gifts...

Read the rest! I'm tempted to quote more, but better you go read it over there. Sideways-wise, I'll just say that despite my stubbornly voting for both Virginia Madsen and Thomas Haden Church while knowing they were bad bets, I still won the pool at the party I attended. The prize was made out of chocolate, which is always okay with me.

Posted February 28, 12:49 PM

TT: We interrupt this interruption

I'm so busy that I wasn't planning to blog again until Tuesday at the earliest, but I couldn't wait to tell you about my very first visit to Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola, Jazz at Lincoln Center's Columbus Circle nightclub, from which I returned a few minutes ago after hearing a breathtaking set by Jim Hall and his quartet. As regular readers of this blog know, I consider Hall to be the greatest living jazz guitarist, a tersely lyrical magician who gets more and more music out of fewer and fewer notes. He outdid himself this evening, playing a version of "All the Things You Are" so spare and elliptical that Count Basie might well have thought it understated. If you haven't heard his latest CD, Magic Meeting, go here and buy it at once.

As I say, this was my first peek inside Dizzy's Club C*c*-C*la (I henceforth refuse to spell out the loathsome name in full), and I was impressed. Aside from everything else, it's the most attractive jazz club in New York, with a bandstand placed directly in front of a glass wall that looks out on the Manhattan skyline. The blond bentwood walls are acoustically gratifying. The service is discreet, the food good. If you're there strictly for the music, the bar is both unusually long and strategically placed so as to supply a clear view of the musicians. The cover charge is $30 a head, neither cheap nor unprecedentedly high. I'll be back.

That's all for now--Louis awaits. See you a bit later in the week. Go get 'em, OGIC!

P.S. No, I didn't watch the Oscars. Why bother? Did anything even remotely surprising happen there? My trainer will testify that I called it for Million Dollar Baby last week....

Posted February 28, 12:01 PM

TT: Right before your eyes

Here's yet another plug for the two lectures I'll be giving in Washington, D.C., next week:

- I'll be delivering a Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute at 5:30 on Monday, March 7. The topic is "The Problem of Political Art." For more information, go here.

- I'll be delivering a Duncan Phillips Lecture under the auspices of the Phillips Collection at 6:30 on Wednesday, March 9. The topic is "Multiple Modernisms: What a Novice Collector Learned from Duncan Phillips." The lecture will take place at the Women's National Democratic Club, and reservations are required. Five pieces from the Teachout Museum (by Milton Avery, Jane Freilicher, John Marin, Fairfield Porter, and Neil Welliver) will be on display. For more information, go here.

If you're an "About Last Night" reader, come up afterward and say hello. All requests to autograph books will be happily honored!

Posted February 28, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room."

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Posted February 28, 12:00 PM

TT: Absolute distinctions

Currently making the rounds of the blogosphere are lists of Ten Things I've Done That You Probably Haven't (I got the idea from Eve Tushnet). So here goes. In no particular order, I've:

- Watched an opera singer drop dead on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, run to the nearest pay phone, called the city desk of a newspaper, and shouted, "Get me rewrite!"

- Taken part in a bottle-rocket duel in the middle of a bean field (I have a scar on my right hand to prove it).

- Fallen all the way down a spiral staircase.

- Stolen a city-limits sign and used it as a prop for a dust-jacket photo.

- Shaken hands with Bill Monroe, father of bluegrass, backstage at the Grand Ole Opry.

- Made out on the floor of a radio studio while hosting a live after-midnight jazz show (no, the mike wasn't open).

- Taken a three-hour ride in the back of a hearse.

- Read and reviewed a full-length book between nine a.m. and one p.m. of the same business day.

- Been mugged at gunpoint on New Year's Eve.

- Barely escaped serious injury from a falling chandelier.

Posted February 28, 9:11 AM

OGIC: Adventures with Netflix

So I finally, finally watched McCabe and Mrs. Miller over the weekend. I thought it was beautiful. Strangely for a movie I've been hearing about almost all my life, it struck me as an entirely new thing in the world--I realized nearly as soon as it started that I'd never seen so much as a scene or a still from it. That's odd, isn't it?

Some plot points, I think, escaped me. Didn't bother me much. What will stay with me is the killer combination of those achingly lovely vistas (was ever a film better served by letterboxing?) and the Leonard Cohen soundtrack, so anachronistic and yet so fitting. Why "achingly" lovely? Because as the characters go about their work against these gorgeous backdrops, you realize, first, that the beauty is ordinary to them and, second, that their work is the beginning of the process of deleting it.

I still like The Long Goodbye best among Altmans--no contest--and California Split second. But I think there's a place after that for McCabe.

Posted February 28, 1:09 AM

February 27, 2005

OGIC: Read me!

Bart Schneider's new novel Beautiful Inez is about a troubled classical violinist and her affair with a younger woman. It should be of special interest to ALN readers--its treatment of music is knowledgeable, intricate, and intense. My review of the book appears in today's Chicago Tribune; here's a taste of what I say:

Inez's implacable depression is this novel's true subject, and Schneider turns out one of the least reductive literary representations of the malady I've encountered. He recognizes that a simple logic of cause and effect cannot satisfactorily account for a full-blown case of depression like the one that oppresses Inez. Hers has specific causes, to be sure, some of them acute. But, true to reality, no more can one or two of them be isolated and called determining than the string section can take primary credit for the impact of an orchestra concert. By the time we know her, Inez's depression has hardened from a condition to be diagnosed into a fact to be assimilated. And there is--blackest irony--something symphonic about it.

...Schneider drew much of the new novel's passionate, detailed--and hauntingly ambivalent--evocations of music from his father, a concert violinist with the San Francisco Symphony. If depression is this novel's subject, music is the sine qua non in which it's steeped. Entwined in some enigmatic alliance with madness, music confers great blessings and takes enormous tolls here. In the book's amazing pivotal scene--Inez's impromptu solo concert at a mental institution--the blessings and the tolls become indistinguishable.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted February 27, 3:13 AM

February 25, 2005

TT: A touch of gore(y)

It's Friday, meaning that you'll find my weekly drama column in this morning's Wall Street Journal. Today it's a triple-header--an import, a revival, and a new play.

First up is Shockheaded Peter, in which I took extreme delight:

An actor who looks not unlike a freshly exhumed corpse strolls onto the stage of what looks very much like a blown-up toy theater. He fixes a fishy-eyed stare upon the hushed audience...and stands there. And stands there. Finally, to the sound of nervous titters, he speaks. "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls," he intones in a voice of ripest ham, "I am the grrreatest actor that has ever existed!" Then he leaves.

Welcome to "Shockheaded Peter," now playing at the Little Shubert for what I hope will be at least a year. This homicidally hilarious British import is a musical version of the "Struwwelpeter" stories of Heinrich Hoffman, the 19th-century German author famous for his cautionary tales of ill-behaved tots who get what they deserve, and then some. (Guess what happened to little Conrad when he kept on sucking his thumbs after Mommy told him to stop?) It is, in theory, a children's show, though the only child I can readily imagine appreciating "Shockheaded Peter" to the fullest would be Wednesday Addams....

Next up is the Irish Repertory Theatre's splendid production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame:

If you were bothered by the twitchy excesses of the Worth Street Theater Company's "Happy Days," rest assured that "Endgame" is played straight down the middle. You couldn't ask for a stronger cast (Alvin Epstein, amazingly enough, appeared in the American premieres of "Endgame" and "Waiting for Godot"). Nor do I see how Charlotte Moore's simple, self-effacing staging could possibly be improved. To see it in a house as intimate as the Irish Rep is more than a pleasure--it's a privilege....

Last is On the Mountain, about which I had substantial but not necessarily fatal reservations:

The first 15 minutes of Christopher Shinn's "On the Mountain," now playing through March 13 at Playwrights Horizons, contain references to AA, Ashton Kutcher, iPods, Radiohead, Tori Amos, group therapy, cell phones and Prozac. At the mention of the last of these, I snuck a peek at my watch, turned to my companion for the evening and whispered, "This isn't a play, it's a magazine article."

Fortunately, I was wrong. "On the Mountain" really is a play, albeit one of a very particular kind: It's a Gen-X kitchen-sink drama, right down to the kitchen sink....

No link. To read the whole thing (of which there's much more), get thee to a newsstand, or go here and proceed as instructed.

Posted February 25, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Take that Kreutzer Sonata, for instance, how can that first presto be played in a drawing-room among ladies in low-necked dresses? To hear that played, to clap a little, and then to eat ices and talk of the latest scandal? Such things should only be played on certain important significant occasions, and then only when certain actions answering to such music are wanted; play it then and do what the music has moved you to. Otherwise an awakening of energy and feeling unsuited both to the time and the place, to which no outlet is given, cannot but act harmfully. At any rate that piece had a terrible effect on me; it was as if quite new feelings, new possibilities, of which I had till then been unaware, had been revealed to me. ‘That's how it is: not at all as I used to think and live, but that way,' something seemed to say within me."

Lev Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata (trans. Aylmer and Louise Maude)

Posted February 25, 12:00 PM

TT: Reading matter

If you haven't read Ben Ratliff's interview with Pat Metheny in today's New York Times, do it now.

Three samples:

- "The guitar for me is a translation device. It's not a goal. And in some ways jazz isn't a destination for me. For me, jazz is a vehicle that takes you to the true destination--a musical one that describes all kinds of stuff about the human condition and the way music works."

- "Well, for me, let's keep jazz as folk music. Let's not make jazz classical music. Let's keep it as street music, as people's everyday-life music. Let's see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they're living in, as what they build their lives as musicians around. It's a cliché, but it's such a valuable one: something that is the most personal becomes the most universal."

- "It's like when you first wake up in the morning and you don't really think about what you're doing, and maybe you write your best stuff. You're not in the way."

- "B-flat minor, the saddest of all keys."

UPDATE: For another point of view, read Alex Ross on E-flat minor, "the key of death."

Posted February 25, 11:44 AM

TT: And counting

Eleven years ago I read an amusing book called Going, Going, Gone: Vanishing Americana that catalogued the long march of obsolescence through postwar America. It occurred to me as I opened my medicine cabinet this morning that the time had come for someone to publish a new book on the same subject. To that end, here are a few of the things I no longer use, do, or see:

- Toothpaste in tubes. I bought my last tube three years ago. Now my toothpaste comes out of a squeeze bottle.

- Ketchup in glass bottles. Ditto.

- Newspapers and magazines on paper. I can't remember the last time I read one (except for a couple of the magazines for which I write). If I can't read it on line, I don't read it.

- Fax machines. I have one, but I rarely use it more than twice a month, both ways.

- Going to the post office to mail packages. I use FedEx and UPS almost exclusively.

- Black discs and cassettes. I got rid of the remnants of my collection when I moved to this apartment two years ago. I no longer own a turntable or a cassette deck.

- TV commercials. I now watch all TV programs after the fact (having previously recorded them on my DVR), meaning that I only see commercials as they whiz by silently and at very high speed.

- Typewriters. I disposed of my last one ten years ago. The only thing I miss about it is not having to address envelopes by hand...

- Stationery. ...but since I rarely write personal letters on paper, it follows that I rarely address envelopes. Nor do I have fancy stationery with an elegant-looking letterhead. I used to, but that was three addresses ago. When I feel the occasional need to write a letter by hand, I use cards decorated with reproductions of paintings I like (I favor the Morandi notecards sold by the Phillips Collection).

- Going to the library. I don't even have a library card anymore. If I really need a book I don't own, I order a cheap used copy through amazon.com.

- Electric can openers. I don't own one. Most of the cans I open nowadays have pop-top lids.

- Floppy disks. I back up my computer on line every night.

- "Water-cooler" TV shows. The last TV series to be viewed on a regular basis by more than a handful of my friends was The Sopranos.

- The evening news. My family watched Walter Cronkite religiously, and my mother still watches Dan Rather each night after supper. Not counting visits home, I can't remember the last time I watched an evening newscast (or a Sunday-morning talk show).

- Dinner parties. I didn't go to more than two or three last year.

- Renting videos. Again, I do it maybe three times a year, tops.

O tempora...

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis has picked up on this thread. Among his nominees: stick shifts, corded phones, videotape, ice-cube trays, Christmas cards, and downtowns. His readers are commenting, too, and some of them are really angry, for reasons I find utterly inscrutable....

Posted February 25, 11:10 AM

February 24, 2005

TT: A little list

Done:

- WEDNESDAY: Finished a 6,100-word rough draft of the first chapter of the Louis Armstrong biography, which I am now tentatively calling Hotter than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong (go here, scroll down, and click on the appropriate link to hear why). Met Maccers at Playwrights Horizons for a press preview of On the Mountain, followed by dinner at Le Madeleine, where she told me war stories from the dating front that made my hair stand up. I had nothing to offer in return but a tale so mild in the telling that I considered slinking out of the restaurant in shame. (She was quite nice about it, actually.)

To do:

- THURSDAY: Get up early to write Piece No. 1, my Wall Street Journal theater column, due at noon today. Houseguest arrives circa noon. Lunch at Good Enough to Eat, followed by intensive editing on Hotter than That, followed by dinner (allegedly to be prepared by houseguest) and nostalgic chitchat.

- FRIDAY: Get up early to write Piece No. 2, an essay about The Aviator and Being Julia, due by day's end. Cram in as much Hotter than That editing as time permits. Take houseguest to dinner, followed by a press preview of David Mamet's Romance.

- SATURDAY: Turn houseguest loose on an unsuspecting city. Finish editing first chapter of Hotter than That (si capax). Take Friend No. 1 to Lincoln Center to see her very first Apollo.

- SUNDAY: Start writing Piece No. 3, a Commentary essay about Joseph Horowitz's Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall, due by end of business on Monday. Take houseguest to dinner, followed by Jim Hall at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola (has there ever been a dumber name for a jazz club?).

- MONDAY: Houseguest departs at 9:30. Meet Friend No. 2 (a/k/a Bass Player) at the Metropolitan Museum at ten for a press preview of Diane Arbus Revelations. Finish writing Piece No. 3. Start drafting second chapter of Hotter than That.

- TUESDAY: Get up early to start writing Piece No. 4, my monthly "Second City" column for Sunday's Washington Post, due by day's end. Take Friend No. 3 to dinner, followed by a press preview of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot.

- WEDNESDAY: Continue drafting second chapter of Hotter than That. Take Friend No. 4 to dinner, followed by a press preview of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

- THURSDAY: Collapse of middle-aged party. Memorial service to be announced later. (This has a suspiciously familiar ring. Will I ever learn?)

Posted February 24, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason."

Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s (all other versions of this quote are inauthentic and/or apocryphal)

Posted February 24, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can only guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone?"

Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

Posted February 24, 11:23 AM

OGIC: Make mine a double

Excellent development: Bravo gets smart and installs the Cinetrix as their "Awardsmania" blogger. Through Monday she will be playing both home and away.

Posted February 24, 10:31 AM

February 23, 2005

TT: The fame that got away

I'm in this morning's Wall Street Journal with a piece commemorating the centennial of the birth of Harold Arlen:

The greatest American popular songwriter of the 20th century was born a century ago last Tuesday. Warning: You may not know his name....

Arlen never quite managed to reach the top rung of renown, and though dozens of his songs are firmly stamped on America's collective memory, he hasn't a fraction of the name-above-the-title recognition of George Gershwin or Cole Porter. Only his peers fully grasped his greatness, among them Irving Berlin, who summed it up with characteristic economy when Arlen died in 1986: "He wasn't as well known as some of us, but he was a better songwriter than most of us and will be missed by all of us."

Why isn't Arlen better known in his own right? One reason, perhaps the main one, is that his gifts were essentially undramatic. Though he knew how to write a show-stopper, his most characteristic songs were such intimate, introspective monologues as the yearning "That Old Black Magic" and the despairing "One for My Baby." Like Johnny Mercer, the finest of the many talented lyricists with whom he worked, Arlen preferred evoking a mood to driving a plot. As a result, he never wrote a successful Broadway musical--most of his hits were hand-crafted for Hollywood films--and his reputation was built song by song, not show by show....

No link. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of today's Journal, or (better yet) go here and subscribe to the online edition. It's a bargain.

Posted February 23, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"There ought to be a limit (she thought as she steered the bronze Chrysler through the cemetery gate) on the number of open graves you had to look down into in any given lifetime."

Jon Hassler, North of Hope

Posted February 23, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Mr. Plimpton and Mr. Deedy

When we last tuned in to the adventures or misadventures of the post-Plimpton Paris Review, the Board of Directors had announced that they would not renew the contract of editor Brigid Hughes. Hughes by all accounts had been trying to keep the prestigious but not popular journal steered as near as possible to the trail her mentor George Plimpton had blazed for it. On the news of her certain departure, observers speculated that the board had different ideas about little matters like circulation and profitability, and were taking delayed advantage of the power vacuum left by Plimpton's death to remake the Review as a more relevant and remunerative publication.

At the time, all of this reminded me powerfully of something. But I didn't figure out what it was until this week: the opening scenes of an 1894 short story by Henry James, "The Death of the Lion." The story is freely available for downloading here. "The Death of the Lion" is narrated by the right-hand man of the recently deceased editor of a London weekly that has been taken over by a Mr. Pinhorn (is there anyone who is better at names than James at his best?). Mr. Pinhorn is all about the numbers.

Mr. Pinhorn was my "chief," as he was called in the office: he had accepted the high mission of bringing the paper up. This was a weekly periodical, and had been supposed to be almost past redemption when he took hold of it. It was Mr. Deedy who had let it down so dreadfully--he was never mentioned in the office now save in connection with that misdemeanour. Young as I was I had been in a manner taken over from Mr. Deedy, who had been owner as well as editor; forming part of a promiscuous lot, mainly plant and office-furniture, which poor Mrs. Deedy, in her bereavement and depression, parted with at a rough valuation. I could account for my continuity only on the supposition that I had been cheap. I rather resented the practice of fathering all flatness on my late protector, who was in his unhonoured grave; but as I had my way to make I found matter enough for complacency in being on a "staff." At the same time I was aware that I was exposed to suspicion as a product of the old lowering system. This made me feel that I was doubly bound to have ideas, and had doubtless been at the bottom of my proposing to Mr. Pinhorn that I should lay my lean hands on Neil Paraday. I remember he looked at me as if he had never heard of this celebrity, who indeed at that moment was by no means in the middle of the heavens; and even when I had knowingly explained he expressed but little confidence in the demand for any such matter. When I had reminded him that the great principle on which we were supposed to work was just to create the demand we required, he considered a moment and then rejoined: "I see; you want to write him up."

Pinhorn, we learn, has turned a genteel journal into a glorified gossip rag. Under Deedy the journal appears to have been mainly critical; Pinhorn has turned it into a fin-de-siècle People Magazine. In hatching his plan to write something about the literary light Neil Paraday, the narrator is trying to thread a a very small needle, maintaining a shred of the old high-mindedness of the journal under Deedy while satisfying Pinhorn's demand for newsworthiness. In the interest of giving his piece the appearance of being a scoop, he arranges to visit the reclusive author Paraday at home.

I was unregenerate, as I have hinted, and I was not concerned to straighten out the journalistic morals of my chief, feeling them indeed to be an abyss over the edge of which it was better not to peer. Really to be there this time moreover was a vision that made the idea of writing something subtle about Neil Paraday only the more inspiring. I would be as considerate as even Mr. Deedy could have wished, and yet I should be as present as only Mr. Pinhorn could conceive. My allusion to the sequestered manner in which Mr. Paraday lived (which had formed part of my explanation, though I knew of it only by hearsay) was, I could divine, very much what had made Mr. Pinhorn bite. It struck him as inconsistent with the success of his paper that anyone should be so sequestered as that. Moreover, was not an immediate exposure of everything just what the public wanted? Mr. Pinhorn effectually called me to order by reminding me of the promptness with which I had met Miss Braby at Liverpool, on her return from her fiasco in the States. Hadn't we published, while its freshness and flavour were unimpaired, Miss Braby's own version of that great international episode? I felt somewhat uneasy at this coupling of the actress and the author...

So the narrator gets "bundled off" to Paraday's, where he sits down and writes "merely a finicking, feverish study of my author's talent"--i.e., something purely critical, dirt not included. Pinhorn's response is rapid:

That night my manuscript came back from Mr. Pinhorn, accompanied with a letter, of which the gist was the desire to know what I meant by sending him such stuff....Mr. Pinhorn's note was not only a rebuke decidedly stern, but an invitation immediately to send him (it was the case to say so) the genuine article, the revealing and reverberating sketch to the promise of which--and of which alone--I owed my squandered privilege.

This the narrator declines to do, marking the end of his tenure with the journal--his dismissal by the board, so to speak. The eventual fate of his critical piece goes to show whose side the reading public is on:

A week or two later I recast my peccant paper, and giving it a particular application to Mr. Paraday's new book, obtained for it the hospitality of another journal, where, I must admit, Mr. Pinhorn was so far justified that it attracted not the least attention.

This is grim, but not altogether easy to parse. Am I wrong to think that, despite the common pessimism of James's story (and for an even direr take on the 1890s literary scene, see George Gissing's 1891 novel New Grub Street) and today's Paris Review watchdogs, there's something slightly leavening in the realization that, 110 years on, it's essentially the same battle still being fought? This implies, at least, that it hasn't yet been lost. Besides which, we don't yet know what the new PR will look like, and under whose guidance it will be transformed--though there seems little doubt that transformed it will be. Finally, although the narrator of "Death of the Lion" seems decidedly on the side of the angels as far as the struggle for publishing's soul goes, that doesn't mean he's necessarily such an appealing figure himself. He has more than a little in common with the half-ridiculous, half-monstrous narrator of "The Aspern Papers," another Jamesian literary leech. Ambivalence, as usual in James and in life, carries the day.

I actually want to say more about "The Death of the Lion" and its portrait of a devolving literary sphere--there are some choice bits I've left out. Alas, it will have to wait until after I do a little (paid) finicking, feverish study of my own.

Posted February 23, 3:46 AM

February 22, 2005

TT: Roll 'em

I've spent the last two days working on the prologue to my Louis Armstrong biography, and I think it's going well. Very well, actually. In fact, I seem to be on a roll, and so I plan to keep on rolling for at least another day or two. My hope is to have the entire prologue roughed out by dinnertime and substantially polished by week's end. I've been in an elevated state ever since Friday night: hundreds of facts that had previously been spinning around in my head have now started to clump together and take coherent shape. It's the most exciting part of a writer's life, and I'm right in the middle of it....

I'll keep you posted, but don't expect to hear much more from me until I stop for gas. In the meantime, cross your fingers and wish me well.

P.S. You go, Girl! It's damned well about time that my formerly anonymous co-blogger dropped the veil and identified herself as (among other things) the dedicatee of the Teachout Reader. I kept waiting for somebody to make the connection!

Posted February 22, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"When you're an egoist, none of the harm you do is intentional."

Whit Stillman, screenplay for Metropolitan

Posted February 22, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Items in brief

- Andre Mayer of CBC Arts presents the case against covers.

- Edie, the lucky (and now famous) kitty with the installation art of her own, is an absolute dead ringer for the more philistine creature who resides chez moi.

- The Little Professor asks a select few academic buzzwords to please just go away.

- Ever wonder what cheap-thrill-seeking gardeners look for at the newsstand? The Bookish Gardener has your answer. It feels a bit salacious to ask this now, but--when Spring?

Posted February 22, 11:49 AM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"It is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and painting--all the various products of art--as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in painting; of sound, in music; of rhythmical words, in poetry. In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principle--that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind--is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism."

Walter Pater, "The School of Giorgione," The Renaissance

Posted February 22, 2:43 AM

February 21, 2005

TT: Almanac

"We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He choose this as the way in which they should break, so be it."

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Posted February 21, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Recent de-veil-ments

Some readers have emailed to ask why I turned in my pseudonymity yesterday. Some are frankly disapproving: "You were the mystery to be solved, the puzzle with the missing piece. Now, the illusion is ruined and the game is over." Ruined! Gosh, when you put it like that, I almost have second thoughts! I may never attain true mysteriousness again.

Almost second thoughts...but not quite. It's not something I'd undo, even if I somehow could--Eternal Sunshine-style, say, or like Glory in season five of Buffy. Hey, what's a little brainwashing among friends?

Well, I can't undo it. And I wouldn't. Therefore I won't. Your brains are safe. But why do it, and why now? Essentially, I got tired of being two half-people who couldn't share each other's work with their respective audiences. I've been reviewing books for about ten years, but more regularly in the last year or so. From now on I'll ask my editors to include the URL for About Last Night in the biographical note beneath my newspaper reviews, and hope that this brings new visitors here. And, more important, I'll link to my reviews on this page and start blogging more openly about the reviewing racket, which is something I've always wished I could do.

For example, in December I wrote positively, even glowingly, about Robert Anderson's novel on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Little Fugue, for the Baltimore Sun. Given the tired subject matter, I looked forward to this assignment with very low hopes indeed. As I wrote for the Sun:

I'll be frank: another morbid promenade over the well-trampled ground of Sylvia Plath's suicide isn't my idea of a good time. After the many existing biographies, memoirs, studies, and at least one novelization--all topped off with the strictly decorative cherry of last year's Gwyneth Paltrow biopic--can there possibly be anything new to say? Isn't this whole affair becoming a bit, well, obsessive and ghoulish? If we put a penny in a jar each time someone references Plath's death, and remove a penny each time someone references her poetry, does anyone truly believe we will ever empty that jar?

The novel, thankfully, defied my expectations.

These are some of the questions that buzz in my head as I crack open Robert Anderson's new novel about Plath's death, Little Fugue (named after a poem she wrote in 1962). The first chapter does little to allay my skepticism. Plath has always been a powerful magnet for other writers' self-dramatics; true to form, the first few pages here are overwrought: "She is a fire that has burned low of its own severity. She lies in her grave now, still awake." At this point I am considering joining her. Then, something totally unexpected happens: Little Fugue grabs me and holds on.

That review went on to explain why, even though I thought the novel did not succeed in its furthest-reaching ambitions, I still found it immersing and impressive. Its portraits of Hughes and his lover Assia Wevill struck me as vivid and nuanced, especially the haunting depiction of Wevill's childhood in a war-torn Middle East.

The novel got far less positive notices than mine in the most prominent places: The New York Times Book Review, where Richard Eder weighed in, and the Washington Post Book World, where Michael Schaub, whose coblogging at Bookslut I find delightful, came down particularly hard on it in a sharp, witty piece.

I could see both these reviewers' points in criticizing the novel, and yet they weren't enough to make me reconsider my positive take on it. And here the blog could have come in awfully handy: it would have been the perfect place to call attention to these smart critics' assessments while reiterating my own different view. As a buyer and reader of novels, I like to look at reviews in constellations rather than in isolation whenever possible (which is why I think Ron Hogan's new "Book Review Review" blog, Beatrix, is such a brilliant idea). And I would have done just that--if I hadn't been pseudonymous.

Well, I'm pseudonymous no more--though I will hang onto my OGIC tag, which has grown on me over time (like KFC, I never use the spelled-out version myself, though others may, and have my blessing). So you can expect more from me here on books and reviewing, and perhaps on some other previously-skirted subjects that haven't occurred to me yet in this brave new world. I am, after all, making this up as I go along....

Posted February 21, 7:32 AM

February 20, 2005

OGIC: Blind item

Who's that Girl?

Posted February 20, 2:13 AM

February 18, 2005

TT: Don't worry--be happy

It's Friday, meaning that my drama column is in The Wall Street Journal. This week I reported on two shows, Samuel Beckett's Happy Days and City Center's four-performance concert version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

The first I liked, with one major qualification:

"I know it's supposed to be tragic, but there are lots of gags...I'm not sure, but the writer's no phony." So said Bert Lahr to his agent after reading "Waiting for Godot." Six months later, Samuel Beckett's avant-garde play opened on Broadway with the Cowardly Lion starring opposite E.G. Marshall, giving what by all accounts was the performance of a lifetime. (The production was recorded by Columbia in 1956, but has yet to be reissued on CD.) Now Lea DeLaria, another rubbery-faced comedian-singer who is best known to New York audiences as the high-voltage Hildy of the Public Theater's 1998 production of "On the Town," is starring in the Worth Street Theater Company's Off Broadway revival of Beckett's "Happy Days"...

Ms. DeLaria and Jeff Cohen, the director of this revival, have placed much (though by no means all) of their emphasis on the humor of "Happy Days," an approach that plays to Ms. DeLaria's formidable strengths. A superbly vital and aggressive comedian, she fills the theater with energy, and does it standing still. If the results aren't always convincing, it's because the cooks have overegged the pudding: Ms. DeLaria puts a fresh comic spin on each line, sometimes on each phrase, and Beckett's carefully chosen words are too often buried under a hectic avalanche of twitches, tics and takes. Still, it's a performance we're seeing, not a reading, and if Ms. DeLaria is occasionally irritating, she's never, ever dull....

I wanted to like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn more than I did, but the show was the problem:

Alas, "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" is a soft grape that's been squeezed too hard. In turning her 496-page novel into a two-hour musical-comedy book, Betty Smith and George Abbott threw out the richness of detail that made it so memorable, and spooned sugar over Smith's unexpectedly tough-minded portrayal of a misguided marriage gone sour. The score is similarly lacking in bite, though it contains two good songs, "Make the Man Love Me" and "He Had Refinement." Better luck next time....

No link. Plan A: go buy a copy of today's Journal. Plan B: go here and follow orders.

Posted February 18, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Unlike John, I had come back, not to stay, but only for an hour or so--long enough to see and to savor again, for the first time in nearly five years, that small and surprisingly unchanged part of the city where I was born and had spent so much of my life, where I knew every building and back alley as well as I knew my own front yard, where I had been a young priest, where I had had my own parish, and where, as in no place else, I had belonged, I had been at home. I suppose it's the mark of the provincial man, but in any case I find that I have a special and lasting love for this place which is so obviously just a place, which has no particular beauty or grace or grandeur of scene, but which is, quite simply, a neighborhood, my neighborhood, a compound of sights and smells and sounds that have furnished all my years. What kind of man is it who, after almost fifty years, can still spend half his time remembering the cry of the chestnut man, as it came floating down the street on a winter night...?

"And the people, all the people, the people one knew and understood almost by instinct, who had warmth and wit and kindness and an astonishing cascading rush of words--and who also had long and unforgiving memories, and tongues that cut like knives...."

Edwin O'Connor, The Edge of Sadness

Posted February 18, 12:00 PM

February 17, 2005

TT: New York time

A reader passes on this quote from Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony and one of the artists I admire most:

For seventeen years, I lived in New York. It was a wonderful adventure, a great part of my life. But, after a while, it began to bother me that the whole purpose of living in those concrete canyons--the world of right angles--was all the cultural events that you could take in. That somehow seemed to put a lot of pressure on the cultural events. Unless you have attended three operas and five ballets and six new restaurants this week, you're not keeping up. I found that people taking in these events weren't thinking about them, but they were sure listing them. There was a lot of "have you seen this," but not enough of "what was this like for you?" As I reach this advanced age [sixty], the luxury of having time to think, to savor it, has become important to me.

The quote was new to me, but the sentiment wasn't. It's something I think about often. (Well, fairly often.) New York is a cultural echo chamber, and it's noisy inside. Especially if you do what I do for a living, you're always aware that there's exciting stuff going on every day, and you feel compelled to try to see and hear as much of it as you possibly can, since that's the whole point of living here. Of course New York is full of wonderful people, too--I've never had so many good friends as I do right now--but we're all here for the same reason, which is to be as close to the center of things as we can get. No doubt there are also plenty of hermits in Manhattan, but I tend not to run into them at intermission.

I don't claim to be the most spiritual person in the world, but I'm very much aware of the dangers of living in a place that puts so many obstacles in the path of contemplation. Last year I posted an almanac entry by Santiago Ramon y Cajál: "Small inward treasure does he possess who, to feel alive, needs every hour the tumult of the street, the emotion of the theatre, and the small talk of society." (It's the epigraph to the Jerome Robbins-Leonard Bernstein ballet Facsimile.) I don't think I need those things every hour, or even every day, but it's perilously easy to become habituated to the unceasing stimulus of life in New York, and before you know it you lose touch with the quiet at the heart of things, and your soul starts to shrivel.

Do I get out of town often enough? Do I take the phone off the hook often enough? Do I sit in my living room and revel in the Teachout Museum often enough? To all of the above, even the last, my answer is a reluctant no. Yet I do these things often enough to know when I need to be doing them more often: I feel their absence, and sooner or later I act on that feeling. If I didn't I'd go mad, or cease to be myself.

Having said this, I freely acknowledge that my enthusiastic embrace of the world of art is deliberate. A friend reminded me the other day of W. Jackson Bate's remark that Dr. Johnson, my hero, had "a great experiencing nature." I aspire to that. I've spent three or four longish stretches of my life in comparative isolation, during which I spent most of my time reading, writing, and thinking. Today I'm drawing on the capital I accumulated back then--and I'm also accumulating a different kind of capital, the kind you get by experiencing art passionately and regularly. I'm sure the time will come when I no longer want to be out on the town so much (or am no longer capable of it), and then I'll have a well-stocked cellar of memories on which to draw.

One of these days I hope to write a short, pithy book about the unity of the arts, the sort of book that is the product of much experience and much contemplation. Right now I'm getting the experience. The contemplation will come later. Or not. Leonard Woolf's last volume of autobiography is called The Journey Not the Arrival Matters. I don't know whether he was right, but I do know that the arrival, unlike the journey, is out of my hands.

I hasten to point out, by the way, that Michael Tilson Thomas is a great artist, while I am...well, a pretty good journalist. He's also a decade my senior, which means that he ought to be stepping back from the fray and allowing his inward treasure to crystallize into aesthetic wisdom. For me, there'll be time enough to do that later, and if there isn't, I can't imagine that it'll be the world's loss. Unlike Thomas, the best I have to offer as a writer arises from my going to and fro in the world of art, then coming home to report on my enthusiasms and excitements. That's what I do and what I love to do, and so long as I keep on loving it I'll keep on doing it--with an occasional day off to sit quietly, catch my breath, and be enveloped by the waiting silence.

Posted February 17, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Thought works in silence, so does virtue. One might erect statues to silence."

Thomas Carlyle, diary entry (September 1830)

Posted February 17, 12:00 PM

TT and OGIC: New around here, stranger?

We've been getting a lot of fresh traffic lately (no doubt in part because Peggy Noonan mentioned us this morning in her OpinionJournal column about blogging and bloggers). So if this is your first visit, or even your second, welcome to "About Last Night," a 24/5 blog hosted by artsjournal.com on which Terry Teachout writes about the arts in New York City and elsewhere, assisted by the pseudonymous Our Girl in Chicago, who writes from...Chicago.

(In case you're wondering, this blog has two URLs, the one you're seeing at the top of your screen right now and the easier-to-remember www.terryteachout.com. Either one will bring you here.)

All our postings from the past seven days are visible in reverse chronological order on this page. Terry's start with "TT," Our Girl's with "OGIC." In addition, the entire contents of this site are archived chronologically and can be accessed by clicking "ALN Archives" at the top of the right-hand column.

You can read more about us, and about "About Last Night," by going to the right-hand column and clicking in the appropriate places. You'll also find various other toothsome features there, including our regularly updated Top Five list of things to see, hear, read and otherwise do, links to Terry's most recent newspaper and magazine articles, and "Sites to See," a list of links to other blogs and Web sites with art-related content. If you're curious about the arty part of the blogosphere, you've come to the right site: "Sites to See" will point you in all sorts of interesting directions, and all roads lead back to "About Last Night."

As if all that weren't enough, you can write to us by clicking either one of the "Write Us" buttons. We read our mail, and answer it, too, so long as you're minimally polite. (Be patient, though. We get a lot of it.)

The only other thing you need to know is that "About Last Night" is about all the arts, high, medium, and low: film, drama, painting, dance, fiction, TV, music of all kinds, whatever. Our interests are wide-ranging, and we think there are plenty of other people like us out there in cyberspace, plus still more who long to wander off their beaten paths but aren't sure which way to turn.

If you're one of the above, we're glad you came. Enjoy. Peruse. Tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com. And come back tomorrow.

Posted February 17, 10:56 AM

TT: Progress report

I stopped saving printed copies of my published pieces long ago--I threw most of them out when I put together the Teachout Reader--but I recently pried open a half-forgotten cardboard box stuck in the back of a closet and found a short stack of fading newspaper clips, one of which I thought worth calling to your attention.

In 1999 I wrote a piece for the Sunday New York Times called "Loved the LP, Waiting for the CD" in which I listed "13 first-rate jazz albums recorded from 1955 to 1982, none of which has ever appeared on CD in the United States." Since then, six of the albums I mentioned have finally made it to compact disc: Jim Hall Live!, Bobby Hackett's Gotham Jazz Scene, Ahmad Jamal's Chamber Music of the New Jazz, Roger Kellaway Cello Quartet (but not Come to the Meadow, the Cello Quartet's second album for A&M), Gerry Mulligan Meets Johnny Hodges, and Pee Wee Russell's New Groove. (A seventh, Stan Getz's Poetry, was reissued in 2001 but quickly went out of print, though it's still available as a Japanese import.)

Here are the remaining albums, all of them still in limbo, along with what I wrote about them six years ago:

- Sidney Bechet Has Young Ideas (World Pacific, 1957). "The great New Orleans reedman spent much of the 1950s fronting bands made up of second-rate European musicians, but his last album, a quartet set in which he was accompanied by the French bebop pianist Martial Solal (with ur-bop drummer Kenny Clarke sitting in on six tracks), is a thrilling exception. Bechet always rose to a challenge, and Solal's probing playing kept him on his toes."

- JoAnne Brackeen, Keyed In (Columbia, 1979). "Ms. Brackeen's lone flirtation with a major label produced two albums, both of which went out of print with unseemly haste (Columbia's late-'70s commitment to serious jazz was momentary) and are now unjustly forgotten. This one, a vibrant collection of originals that teams her with the bassist Eddie Gomez and the drummer Jack DeJohnette, ranks among the most impressive piano trio albums of the past quarter-century."

- Gary Burton Quartet, Easy as Pie and Picture This (ECM, 1980 and 1982). "Mr. Burton rarely works with horn players, but this superlative quartet, which featured Jim Odgren on alto saxophone, is the strongest working group the vibraphonist has led since the Larry Coryell-Steve Swallow-Roy Haynes lineup of the late '60s. Why ECM hasn't reissued its two studio albums is a mystery--they're both gems."

- Bud Freeman and Two Guitars, Something Tender (United Artists, 1962). "George Barnes and Carl Kress, who worked together from 1961 until Kress' death in 1965, were the foremost jazz guitar duo of the postwar era. The tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman joined them in the studio for this exquisite trio album, ideally suited for after-hours listening."

I'm still hoping to see these classic albums on CD--and Come to the Meadow, too. Is anybody listening out there in reissueland?

Posted February 17, 10:29 AM

February 16, 2005

TT: The first time

I went last week to hear the premiere of Morph, a wonderful new piece for string orchestra by Paul Moravec, whose Pulitzer-winning Tempest Fantasy is now out on CD. A couple of days later, Paul sent me this e-mail:

A great experience for a composer to invent something--two-dimensional, in black-and-white in the studio, I-think-it's-going-to-work-but-who-knows?--and then suddenly there it is in 3-D, living color, and it works like gangbusters. The piece made me listen as a disinterested audience member to a considerable extent. Of course I know how it goes, but as they were playing I was sitting there thinking, Gee, what happens next?

Boy, do I ever know how that feels. Writing a book is one thing, but holding it in your hand is something else again, though the really big moment comes when you first see the text set up in type. All at once your words have a life of their own--they're not just pixels on a screen--and you can feel them slipping out of your control and into the world, there to make their way among strangers. It's terrifying. It's also thrilling.

All of which reminds me to do something I originally intended to do a couple of weeks ago. I wrote the liner notes for Paul's Tempest Fantasy CD, and it occurs to me that those of you who haven't yet heard any of his music might be interested in reading what I had to say about it. (If you've already bought the CD, pardon my redundancy!)

* * *

Paul Moravec lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, two blocks north of me, and whenever I bump into him on the street, I say, "Is that a Pulitzer laureate I see strolling down the sidewalk?" He always laughs and looks embarrassed--but pleased, too, as well he should. Winning the Pulitzer Prize for music, as Paul did in 2004 for Tempest Fantasy, is no small thing, especially when you've been laboring in relative obscurity for years. To be sure, Paul is well known and respected within the tight little world of American classical composers, but a household name he isn't. Yet not only did winning the Pulitzer get his name into every major newspaper in the United States, it also gave him permanent entrée to a club whose other members include Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Samuel Barber, Gian-Carlo Menotti, Ned Rorem, George Rochberg, and John Corigliano. That's fast company.

I was especially gratified by Paul's Pulitzer because I'd been writing about his music with passionate enthusiasm for a decade, ever since I first heard the elegant, soaringly melodic violin sonata he composed for Maria Bachmann and Jon Klibonoff in 1992. In the lexicon of criticism, the word "great" is the reddest of flags; only time can tell whether a work of art is great, and when you use the word to describe a living composer, or a brand-new piece, you're leading with your chin. Still, there's something about great art that makes itself manifest on the spot, a commingling of immediacy and elusiveness that causes you to want to re-experience it as soon as possible, and that's how I felt when I heard the Violin Sonata. It reminded me of what George Bernard Shaw wrote about hearing Elgar's Enigma Variations for the first time: "For my part, I expected nothing from any English composer...But when I heard the Variations (which had not attracted me to the concert) I sat up and said ‘Whew!' I knew we had got it at last."

Shaw's encounter with the Enigma Variations took place in 1900, at a time when English music had hit a dead end and seemed unlikely ever to be revived. Nine decades later, American music appeared to be in similar shape. The hard-edged, over-complicated works of such dedicated devotees of atonality as Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter had long dominated the new-music scene. To be sure, the stranglehold of the "complexity boys" (as Virgil Thomson called them) had been challenged by such older American tonalists as Ned Rorem, David Diamond, and Leonard Bernstein, then weakened significantly in the Eighties by the fast-rising popularity of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams. But the stuttering chatter of minimalism was too simple-minded to satisfy my longing for intelligible yet challenging new scores, and I feared that the mainstream of classical music might have dried up for good.

That's why the Moravec Violin Sonata hit me so hard. It acknowledged the eternal verity articulated a half-century ago by Paul Hindemith: "Music, as long as it exists, will always take its departure from the major triad and return to it. The musician cannot escape it any more than the painter his primary colors, or the architect his three dimensions....In the world of tones, the triad corresponds to the force of gravity. It serves as our constant guiding point, our unit of measure, even in those sections of compositions which avoid it." For Paul, triadically based harmony, the tonal language of all Western music from Bach to rock, was a given--yet he used it with a freshness and individuality that made it sound as current as the morning paper.

I started following his career closely, and soon discovered that he was one of a number of younger American composers (he was born in 1957) who wrote classical music that was at once unmistakably contemporary and firmly rooted in the techniques of the past. I dubbed them "New Tonalists" in an essay I wrote for Commentary in 1997, singling out Paul as a key figure in the movement:

Though their music varies widely in style, all of them speak the language of tonality, and do so without irony or self-consciousness. This is what sets them apart from the postmodern movement: they are neither embarrassed nor paralyzed by tradition....Moravec uses post-Debussyan tonality not to comment on an older style but to make a direct statement of his own.

With each successive premiere, I grew increasingly certain that Paul was the real right thing, a great composer in the great tradition, and I continued to write about him whenever I got the chance, learning in the process that he was also an exceptionally articulate spokesman for his art, one whose comments on music revealed a deeply philosophical turn of mind. "Musically, I say what I mean and mean what I say," he told me when I interviewed him for an essay about the New Tonalism called "Back to the Future" that appeared in Time in 2000. "The irony in my music is not glibly postmodern but, rather, the essence of making audible the human experience of ambiguity." Needless to say, most composers don't talk that way, but Paul does (though he can also be side-splittingly funny).

What he meant by that subtle remark is demonstrated by the music on this album. I'll leave it to him to describe Mood Swings, Scherzo, B.A.S.S. Variations, and Tempest Fantasy in his own words, but I do want to add that despite the considerable, at times formidable complexity of these tough-minded works, which are anything but "easy" in the way they translate experience and emotion into the realm of sound, their complexities are never gratuitous. To put it another way, these powerfully moving pieces make sense. Their harmonies are lucid and logical, their melodies indelibly noble. They are, literally, eloquent, the painstakingly wrought utterances of an artist who believes with all his heart in the possibility of beauty. I know no other music written today that moves me more.

Such music cuts sharply against the grain of trendiness, and for a long time I wondered whether the rest of the world would ever catch up with Paul. But he kept at it, gradually building up a reputation as a composer of warmly expressive, consummately crafted pieces, and while most of the big-city critics continued to overlook his work (Tim Page of the Washington Post is an honorable exception), performers and audiences embraced it with growing enthusiasm. Then came the Pulitzer Prize, and now this album, on which you can hear four of Paul's finest pieces performed by the superlative musicians for whom they were written. As I listened, I thought of something that Ned Rorem, another long-unfashionable composer who has lived to see the restoration of tonality, said when he won his own Pulitzer: "I've never run with the pack, composing according to fashion; I've always been a lone wolf, composing according to need. The Red Queen said you've got to run fast to stay in one place. I stayed in one place. Now it's clear I've run fast." So has Paul Moravec.

An hour or so after the Pulitzers for 2004 were announced, I got an overseas telephone call from Paul, who was vacationing in Sicily. He was clearly thrilled by the news, but reacted with his usual sense of humor.

"Do you realize that I'm going to be in the World Almanac next year?" he asked me.

"And every other year--from now on," I replied.

Posted February 16, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones."

Samuel Beckett, Happy Days

Posted February 16, 12:00 PM

TT: Take a gander

For those of you who've never visited the Teachout Museum, here are the five pieces that will be on display at my Duncan Phillips Lecture in Washington, D.C., on March 9:

- John Marin, 1870-1953
Downtown, the El, 1921
Etching
Second impression,
published by The New Republic
in Six American Etchings, 1924

- Milton Avery, 1893-1965
March at a Table, 1948
Drypoint
Published in Laurels Portfolio,
No. 4, 1948

- Fairfield Porter, 1907-1975
The Table, 1971
Color lithograph

- Neil Welliver, 1929-
Night Scene, 1981-82
Color woodcut

- Jane Freilicher, 1924-
Late Afternoon, Southampton, 1999
Color hard ground etching
with spit bite aquatint and drypoint

Come and see!

Posted February 16, 3:08 AM

February 15, 2005

TT: Heads and tails

I don't care for conceptual art and have no opinion of Christo, but I do live half a block from Central Park, making it hard for me to be altogether indifferent to "The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979-2005," seeing as how it's visible from my doorstep. Bass Player came by my place on Saturday for a pre-ballet hang, so we figured we might as well stroll into the park and take a peek on the way to brunch. Ten minutes later we strolled back out again. The Gates hadn't struck either one of us as beautiful or memorable, though it might simply have been that we weren't in a receptive mood (I intend to try again next week).

Obviously others felt differently--the park was crowded and the atmosphere festive--and it occurred to me that I ought to be pleased that so many people had come to Central Park to experience a work of art, regardless of its quality. But the more I eavesdropped, the more clearly I realized that most of them were doing nothing of the kind: they'd simply come to see what everybody was talking about. Art had nothing to do with it. They might as well have been going to Six Flags to ride a new roller coaster.

After brunch we went down to Lincoln Center to see New York City Ballet. The bill of fare consisted of a fair-to-goodish performance of a masterpiece, George Balanchine's Jewels, and the orchestra played badly. Yet the flaws didn't matter. Maybe it was that Bass Player had never seen any Balanchine, and was self-evidently carried away. Or perhaps it had something to do with the strong emotions that had been discharged in me earlier in the week by the response to my piece about Nancy LaMott. Whatever the reason, I was overwhelmed by the performance. It was as though some obscuring veil had been peeled away: I saw through a glass, but not darkly. As I watched the dancers, I couldn't help but think of Christo's spectacle, and wonder what definition of the word "art" could possibly encompass both phenomena. (The performance, by the way, was sold out.)

I returned home from the ballet, climbed into my loft, and immediately fell into a deep, dream-laden sleep. I woke up spontaneously an hour later, as fresh and happy as could be, and stayed that way for the rest of the weekend.

Posted February 15, 12:30 PM

TT: The great pretender

Arthur Miller died too late on Thursday for my Wall Street Journal drama column to note his passing. Instead, I've marked the occasion with a piece on today's Leisure & Arts page.

Regular readers won't be surprised to learn that I'm pretty tough on the author of Death of a Salesman, for whom my admiration was sharply qualified:

I recently described "After the Fall," the 1964 play in which Miller first made fictional use of his unsuccessful marriage to Marilyn Monroe, as "a lead-plated example of the horrors that result when a humorless playwright unfurls his midlife crisis for all the world to see," written by a man "who hasn't a poetic bone in his body (though he thinks he does)." For me, that was his biggest flaw. He was, literally, pretentious: He pretended to have big ideas and the ability to express them with a touch of poetry, when in fact he had neither. His final play, "Finishing the Picture," was yet another rehash of the Monroe-Miller ménage in which he resorted one last time to what I referred to in this space last fall as "pseudo-poetic burble" ("What we had that was alive and crazy has been pounded into some hateful, ordinary dust").

I wonder how much attention would now be paid to Miller if he hadn't married Monroe, and if the House Un-American Activities Committee hadn't made the mistake of subpoenaing him in 1956 to testify about his Communist ties (which were extensive, though he always denied having been an actual party member), thereby bringing about his citation for contempt of Congress when he refused to "name names." The one made him a pop-culture footnote, the other a liberal icon.

The irony is that the smartest critics of Miller's own generation, virtually all of whom shared his left-wing views, held his plays in a different kind of contempt. Back then he took his roughest beatings from the likes of Eric Bentley, Mary McCarthy, Kenneth Tynan and Robert Warshow, who found him heavy-handed and insufferably preachy. Tynan, for instance, wrote that "The Crucible" "suggests a sensibility blunted by the insistence of an outraged conscience: it has the over-simplifications of poster art." Bull's-eye....

Read the whole thing here. (Really!)

Posted February 15, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

VLADIMIR: Moron!

ESTRAGON: Vermin!

VLADIMIR: Abortion!

ESTRAGON: Morpion!

VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat!

ESTRAGON: Curate!

VLADIMIR: Cretin!

ESTRAGON (with finality): Crritic!

VLADIMIR: Oh!

He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Posted February 15, 12:00 PM

TT: Words, words, words

As regular readers of this blog may recall, I'll be giving two lectures in Washington, D.C., early in March. In case you'd like to come to one or both, here's the official scoop:

- I'll be delivering a Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute at 5:30 on Monday, March 7. The topic is "The Problem of Political Art":

Can political art fully satisfy the claims of truth and beauty? Or is it fatally compromised by the passionate desire to persuade? The drama critic of The Wall Street Journal offers a report from the front lines on the increasing politicization of art in 21st-century America--and the growing inclination of contemporary artists to take the political views of their audiences for granted.

For more information, go here.

- I'll be delivering a Duncan Phillips Lecture under the auspices of the Phillips Collection at 6:30 on Wednesday, March 9. The topic is "Multiple Modernisms: What a Novice Collector Learned from Duncan Phillips":

For much of the twentieth century, the Museum of Modern Art's version of modernism dominated American taste. Foremost among the dissenters from its austere canon was Duncan Phillips, whose color-driven, explicitly sensuous "modernism" stands in sharp contrast to the Gospel According to MoMA. Unlike most New Yorkers, critic Terry Teachout formed his tastes by looking at The Phillips Collection, and when he began to collect American art, he kept Duncan Phillips' precepts firmly in mind. In this lecture, Mr. Teachout looks at Phillips' alternate canon and speculates on what might have caught Duncan Phillips' eye if he had lived another quarter century.

The lecture will take place at the Women's National Democratic Club, and reservations are required. Five pieces from the Teachout Museum, including Milton Avery's "March at a Table" and John Marin's "Downtown. The El," will be on display.

For more information, go here.

If you're an "About Last Night" reader, stop by and say hello!

Posted February 15, 4:09 AM

February 14, 2005

TT: Almanac

"Compared with the exclusive ideal of work as activity, leisure implies (in the first place) an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being 'busy,' but letting things happen.

"Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality: only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear. Silence, as it is used in this context, does not mean 'dumbness' or 'noiselessness'; it means more nearly that the soul's power to 'answer' to the reality of the world is left undisturbed. For leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation."

Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (trans. Alexander Dru)

Posted February 14, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Valentines from the blogosphere

A couple of cynical ones that caught my eye:

- Gwenda Bond's funny memories of a detractor:

In college, I wrote a column about how much I hated V-day. I turned it in late, as usual, handing it in to lay-out and going off to sleep a few hours. I walked in to my first class the next morning to the hush that can only be brought about by one's editor putting one's mug shot above a giant heart with a giant NO symbol across it.

- And the inimitable prose stylings of Mr. Outer Life, which it would be pointless to try to excerpt.

Posted February 14, 2:21 AM

OGIC: Kris Kristofferson blues

Last fall, a friend asked me to join his Pub Trivia team. This sort of thing is totally my cup of tea--you readers may think you already have a fair sense of the depths of my nerdiness, but you don't know the half of it.

Little surprise, then, that the trivia took, and over the months I've learned--and imbibed--a lot. The team has even made a little money. But the single most important and immutable thing I have learned at Pub Trivia is this:

The answers you don't know on Tuesday night will be dropped in your lap by a fickle fate on, roughly, Wednesday morning. Right after you don't need them anymore. You can practically set your watch.

For example, in January we missed a question about something that happens in the first few pages of the Watchmen comic book. Later that week, one team member received from his brother, as a late Hanukkah gift, Watchmen. A quite late Hanukkah gift, I might add.

Then last week we were asked who wrote the song "Me and Bobby McGee," and were stumped. We made a respectable if uninspired guess of Willie Nelson; the answer turned out to be Kris Kristofferson; we grumbled and sighed and hit each other upside the head, and eventually came in second.

Fast forward to last night. I'm working on the laptop with the Grammys on as background noise, glancing up only occasionally. Hey, who's that strolling across the stage and into my living room? Oh, look at that, it's Kris Kristofferson, introducing a Janis Joplin tribute. What's that he's saying? Oh, it's "I wrote 'Me and Bobby McGee,'" more or less. Oh, Kris Kristofferson! You sing, you write, you act, you probably dance and juggle, you're a Rhodes Scholar, but oh, your execrable timing.

Posted February 14, 2:03 AM

February 13, 2005

TT and OGIC: And the winner is...

This just in from the Grammy Awards:

Category 49

Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album
Concert in the Garden
Maria Schneider Orchestra

Our heartfelt congratulations!

Posted February 13, 8:00 AM

February 11, 2005

TT: Brush with greatness

My life is a congeries of implausibly cool things, some large and some small, and one of the coolest of them is the fact that I meet the most interesting people. On Thursday, for example, I got to share a studio at WNYC-FM with Dan Hicks, whose music I've loved for thirty years. I'm pleased to report that he is--as I expected and hoped--the very soul of unflappability.

If you weren't listening live to yesterday's Soundcheck, on which I talked about Pat Metheny, go here to download the archived version. It's not that I said anything stupefyingly brilliant in the first half of the show (though I had great fun as usual batting the conversational ball back and forth with host John Schaefer). No, the news of the day was that Hicks had everybody in the control room rolling on the floor as he chatted amiably about his new Hot Licks album, Selected Shorts. I plan to buy a copy the next time I get within five blocks of a record store. (O.K., ten.)

You'll also hear Hicks trot out a brand-new word, equivalate:

I was more acoustic...but I was able to play right along in rock contexts, and it was talked about in Rolling Stone right away, which I liked--which I equivalate to maybe pop.

That's an excellent word. Don't go looking for it in the dictionary--yet--but I certainly plan to work it into my pieces as often as possible from now on.

How lucky am I? So way.

Posted February 11, 12:03 PM

TT: W-O-N-D-E-R-F-U-L

I had a lovely week at the theater, and today's drama column, in which I review The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and the Storm Theatre's revival of The Shoemaker's Holiday, is proof thereof.

Putnam County is soooo da bomb:

Sometimes you can tell how good a show is going to be as soon as it starts. "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee" was like that. The lights went down, the five-piece orchestra struck up, and an anxious-looking teenager walked on stage and sang, "At the 25th annual Putnam County Spelling Bee/My parents keep on telling me/Just being here is winning/Although/I know it isn't so." Pow! All at once Second Stage Theatre was filled with the warm, knowing laughter of a roomful of people who knew they were about to have their socks charmed off.

Let me pause for a moment so you can go right out and buy tickets, because William Finn, the writer-composer of "Falsettos" and "A New Brain," and Rachel Sheinkin, author of the funniest musical-comedy book to come along in years, have blown the bull's-eye off the target. "Putnam County" (as I'll call it for short) is that rarity of rarities, a super-smart show that is also a bonafide crowd-pleaser. Directed by James Lapine, Stephen Sondheim's longtime collaborator, it's the best new musical I've covered, "Avenue Q" included, since I started writing this column. In fact, it's the best show in town, and if it doesn't move to Broadway sooner rather than later (it runs off Broadway through March 6), I'll cook and eat my unabridged dictionary....

I had almost as much fun at The Shoemaker's Holiday:

Thomas Dekker's "The Shoemaker's Holiday," first performed in 1600, hasn't received a major New York production since 1937, when Orson Welles staged it for his Mercury Theatre. Now it's being presented by the Storm Theatre, a tiny troupe of which I'd never heard until its press release popped up in my mailbox a couple of weeks ago (the company performs in a black-box theater a block from Broadway). The only reason I bothered to go was because I'd never seen Dekker's most popular play on stage.

Well, guess what? It's a peach. Peter Dobbins, artistic director of the Storm Theatre, strikes a perfect balance between bawdiness and deep feeling, something that Welles' heavily cut, coarsely comic staging failed by all accounts to do. Dekker's prithee-put-a-sock-in-it-old-codswallop dialogue is played to the hilt, especially by Hugh Brandon Kelly, the shoemaker-turned-sheriff (I'd kill for a big bass voice like that), and shameless scene-stealing is the order of the day (Amanda Cronk makes the funniest faces imaginable). Yet the serious parts are given full value, too....

No link. Do the newsstand thing, or the online edition thing.

P.S. Since my review went to press, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee has extended its off-Broadway run to March 20. Don't wait for it to move to Broadway--go now.

Posted February 11, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Deep in his heart he hankers to be an artist of some sort, but he is only an actor. To be an actor was his adolescent dream and has been his means of livelihood for fifty years or more; but although he has no complaints about that (indeed it would be ungrateful of him to make any) he knows that an actor is usually no more than an assortment of odds and ends which barely add up to a whole man. An actor is an interpreter of other men's words, often a soul which wishes to reveal itself to the world but dare not, a craftsman, a bag of tricks, a vanity bag, a cool observer of mankind, a child, and at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerise a group of innocents."

Alec Guinness, Blessings in Disguise

Posted February 11, 12:00 PM

OGIC: From the north

When most people imagine an ideal vacation, they head toward the equator in their minds. I dream in the opposite direction, magnetically attracted toward the nearest pole, to places like the Scottish Highlands and Denali National Park. Perhaps this, in addition to hockey love and frequent youthful border crossings, explains my lifelong Canada crush. Or perhaps mutual adoration set in after my star turn in a 1970s television spot for the CBC kiddie show The Friendly Giant (I was discovered in a Toronto park, mastered my line "I like Jerome the Giraffe" like a pro, and received one pre-Loonie Canadian dollar for my trouble.) I don't know--as with most crushes, I'm less interested in understanding it than enjoying it. And I don't think it has a thing to do with my getting a lot of enjoyment lately out of the newish CBC arts site. A few highlights:

- An appreciation/lamentation of Arrested Development--appreciating the show, lamenting the non-viewers who are dealing it a slow but certain death--here. Notable quote:

Maybe Arrested Development is the last great sitcom we'll get for free.

- A snappy overview of recent movies about weddings, here. NQ:

As the movie wedding approaches, the bride is destined to be relieved of that thing called "agency," and she's grateful for it. At the end of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Nia Vardalos, looking like a cloud vomited on her, thanks her family for their intolerance and intrusion. For a while pre-nuptially, she was actually in the process of toughening up and learning to stand up to her bossy family, but weddings demand the softening of women. Even the excellent The Philadelphia Story required Katherine Hepburn to slough off her haughty Hepburnness so Cary Grant could steal her away from the uptight idiot she only thought she liked. The transformation from calloused cellar sweeper to Cinderella princess is easy; just stick a toe into a glittery, loan-financed slipper. In modern wedding movies, love and marriage turns Type A career women--Roberts in Runaway Bride; Jennifer Lopez in The Wedding Planner--into...what?

- An anti-book-club rant, here. I've never been in a book club, so the author's pretty much singing to the choir here. In my experience, enough years of grad school tend to undermine the appeal. I myself am far more inclined to form a television club.

- This nuanced piece about the problems, aesthetic and ethical, inherent in making a film about genocide. This subject has been on my mind in a half-processed way lately, simply because I want to go see Hotel Rwanda but have failed to try to talk a friend into it. Nobody in my circle is apparently inclined to go. That doesn't mean they won't--but it does mean that to get them to, I have to do something akin to talking it up. Hmnh. Given the subject matter, I haven't found any way of doing this that won't surely sound bizarre or even ghoulish.

NQ:

Of course, such unimaginable moments have occurred, and are occurring, but do they lose their power when they become cinematic tropes, reducing horror to a plot point or a hero's redemption? The danger of moviemaking is that it somehow levels genocide, and evil becomes as significant, or insignificant, as the predictable beats of a thriller or an epic weepie.

Posted February 11, 11:38 AM

OGIC: Hungry ear

Speaking of neologisms (which Terry was here) and of Lance Mannion (which I was here), I like Lance's neologism "Almodovarianally" in that same post, though to my ear something about that word wants to be stretched out even longer--to, say, "Almodovarianesqueishly."

It's like we used to say in high school: "You can beat a dead gift horse against the current, but you can't make him drink spilt milk."

And that, I think, is a sufficiently ridiculous note on which to close shop for the weekend. Have a good one.

Posted February 11, 4:02 AM

February 10, 2005

TT: See you on the radio

One last reminder: I'll be on WNYC-FM's Soundcheck this afternoon, talking about the Pat Metheny Group's new CD, The Way Up, an hour-long jazz composition by Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays that's just been released by Nonesuch. I'll also be talking about other attempts by jazz composers to grapple with the problem of large-scale form.

In addition, Dan Hicks--yes, that Dan Hicks--will be stopping by the studio to talk about his new album, Selected Shorts. I've been a Hot Licks fan ever since high school (in fact, I'm listening to Where's the Money? as I write these words), and I'm soooo looking forward to meeting His Coolness.

Soundcheck airs live in New York at two p.m. on 93.9 FM. To find out more about today's show, to tune in online via streaming audio, or to listen after the fact by accessing the Soundcheck archive, go here. I'll be heard at the top of the hour.

Give a listen.

Posted February 10, 12:53 PM

TT: Afterword

When Nancy LaMott died in 1995, her friends and colleagues, myself among them, swore they'd never let her be forgotten. It was a promise more easily made than kept. I wrote a long essay about her for Commentary (the one collected in the Teachout Reader), and Jonathan Schwartz continued to play her records on his various radio shows, but once Nancy's albums disappeared into limbo, there wasn't a whole lot more we could do to keep her memory green. Though she was well known in the tight little world of New York cabaret, she had only just begun to make an impression outside it, and within a couple of years of her death it had faded almost beyond recognition. I tried on occasion to interest newspaper and magazine editors in a piece about her, but the answer was always the same: why would anyone care about a half-forgotten cabaret singer whose records were out of print?

So when Midder Music announced that it would be releasing Live at Tavern on the Green, Nancy's first live album, and reissuing her other recordings, I knew the time had come for me to try to keep my promise. I wasn't optimistic. She'd been dead for nine years, and though the circumstances of her death were intrinsically interesting, even romantic, I had no reason to suppose that very many people would now be interested in reading about her. Still, I was determined to give it a shot, and Eric Gibson, my editor at The Wall Street Journal, agreed to give me enough space to tell the tale as best I could. I sat down first thing Monday morning, wrote "An Encore for Nancy LaMott," sent it off to Eric, and held my breath.

The piece ran in Wednesday's Journal, and no sooner did people start reading the paper than Live at Tavern on the Green started climbing up the amazon.com music chart. On Tuesday night it had been hovering around #300. Twenty-four hours later it had settled at #8, right behind Green Day's American Idiot, Tina Turner's All the Best, and U2's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and just ahead of Norah Jones' Come Away With Me. I'm amazed, and not a little humbled. Grateful, too, for it wouldn't have happened had Eric not been willing to trust my judgment and lend me a prime chunk of real estate in the Journal so that I could write a few heartfelt words about an old friend who was also a great artist.

I don't know what the future holds in store for Live at Tavern on the Green. My hope, of course, is that the ripples from my piece will continue to spread. But even if this is as good as it gets, I'll always have the satisfaction of knowing that hundreds of thousands of people read about Nancy LaMott yesterday, and that what I wrote moved some of them to buy one or more of her albums. That's good enough for me.

If you didn't see my piece in Wednesday's Journal, here's part of what I wrote:

Everything was going Nancy LaMott's way in 1995. She was appearing regularly at Manhattan's fanciest nightspots, from the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel on down. Her heartfelt, irresistibly appealing versions of such standards as "How Deep Is the Ocean" and "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" had started to catch the media's ear. She made her Carnegie Hall debut and recorded her first album with an orchestra, "Listen to My Heart." She even sang at the White House. Then the clock ran out. Nancy died of uterine cancer that December, leaving behind a quarter of a million dollars' worth of bookings she didn't live to fulfill, six records that quickly went out of print and a grieving husband whom she married in her hospital room, an hour and a half before she died. She was just 43 years old.

It's a tale almost too sad to tell--but now, at long last, it has something like a happy ending. Just in time for Valentine's Day, Midder Music, Nancy's record label, has brought out "Live at Tavern on the Green," her first CD to be released since 1997, and reissued her earlier albums, which became caught up in a legal dispute shortly after her death and have since been unavailable....

I won't pretend to be objective about Nancy--we were too close for that--but I was hardly the only critic to know her for what she was. John Simon, one of the toughest customers in New York, said that "she fully fathoms what a song is about, and then, rather than merely singing it, lives it." Stephen Holden put it a different way in her New York Times obituary: "She brought to everything she sang a clean, clear sense of line, impeccable enunciation and a deep understanding of how a good song could convey a lifetime's experience." All this is on "Live at Tavern on the Green," along with a special quality I tried to put in words when I wrote in the New York Daily News that she sounded "sincere and sensuous at the same time, as if the girl next door had snuck out at two a.m. to make a little whoopee with her steady boyfriend."

I've often tried to imagine what might have happened to Nancy had she lived even a little longer. A few months after her death, the listening public discovered Diana Krall's equally appealing way with a standard, and she began her fast climb to well-deserved fame. Would Nancy have caught the same wave of nostalgia for the romantic ballads of yesteryear, and become a full-fledged star? I think so, and with the release of "Live at Tavern on the Green" and the reissue of her other albums (my favorite of which is "Come Rain or Come Shine: The Songs of Johnny Mercer"), she has a second, posthumous chance to reach all the people who might have fallen in love with her singing a decade ago if they'd only known about it.

At the end of Nancy's shows, she would leave the bandstand for a moment, then come straight back, grin at the audience and tell them, "Relax, this is cabaret--there's always an encore." She trots out that surefire line at the end of "Live at Tavern on the Green," and it tugged at my heart to hear her speak those well-remembered words again. Now, nine years later, Nancy LaMott has finally come back for an encore. It's about time.

If you haven't yet climbed aboard the bandwagon, go here, order one of Nancy's CDs, and find out what those of us lucky enough to have known and loved her have been missing all these years.

Posted February 10, 12:36 PM

TT: Almanac

"Words with ‘k' in them are funny. Casey Stengel, that's a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny. Cupcake is funny. Tomato is not funny. Cookie is funny. Cucumber is funny. Car keys. Cleveland...Cleveland is funny. Maryland is not funny. Then, there's chicken. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny."

Neil Simon, The Sunshine Boys

Posted February 10, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"First off, following your heart is a really bad idea. This is why we have civilization, so people don't do that.

"Hearts are like pirate caves. They are reputedly full of hidden treasures but usually when you open one up a whole lot of bats, spiders, and angry bears come rushing out, and there's no gold."

Lance Mannion, Lance Mannion

Posted February 10, 11:17 AM

February 9, 2005

TT: An encore for Nancy

I'm in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal with a piece about my beloved friend Nancy LaMott, the nonpareil cabaret singer who died nine years ago, and her newly released CD, Live at Tavern on the Green:

"Live at Tavern on the Green" is the only recording of any of Nancy's live shows to have been released commercially. It was taped at her final public performance. She was wearing a wig, having lost her bottle-blonde hair to chemotherapy. Seven weeks later, she was dead. Yet her sweetly husky mezzo-soprano voice had somehow remained untouched by the terrible disease that would soon take her away from all the things for which she'd longed, and she sang as if she knew she'd never have another chance. When she was done, the Chestnut Room of New York's Tavern on the Green exploded in rapturous applause. That's how I remember it, anyway, and I was there....

No link, so pick up a copy of today's Journal if you're out and about today. This one means a lot to me.

(To order Live at Tavern on the Green and Nancy's other albums, go here.)

UPDATE: Live at Tavern on the Green is shooting up the amazon.com sales charts today. It's the #17 music seller as of this hour, up from roughly #300 last night. I can't even begin to say how gratified I am, though of course it's mixed with bittersweetness....

MORE: Now it's #7. It's been climbing steadily all day.

Posted February 09, 12:03 PM

TT: Turn your radio on

I'm not sure whether I mentioned it, but I've just become a regular contributor to WNYC's Soundcheck. Henceforth I'll be dropping by the studio at least once a month to talk to John Schaefer, the show's host, about matters musical. Yay! I soooo love radio....

My next appearance on Soundcheck will be on Thursday, and the subject is The Way Up, the hour-long Pat Metheny-Lyle Mays composition for the Pat Metheny Group that's just been released on CD by Nonesuch, Metheny's new record label. I'll also be talking about how other jazz composers from Duke Ellington to Maria Schneider have grappled--some successfully, some disastrously--with the challenge of large-scale musical form. I think it'll be worth hearing, if only because (A) John is the perfect on-air conversational partner and (B) we'll be playing excerpts from The Way Up and other works.

Soundcheck airs in New York live each weekday at two p.m. on 93.9 FM. To find out more about the program, or to listen online via streaming audio, go here. I'll be heard at the top of the hour. Give us a listen.

(To read more about The Way Up, go here.)

Posted February 09, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility; humility is endless.

T.S. Eliot, "East Coker"

Posted February 09, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"To be really good, you have to be willing to have everybody in the world hate you."

Amy Sherman-Palladino, Gilmore Girls creator, interviewed in the New York Times

(Thanks to the dashing Bondgirl for this and a trove of other GG links on the occasion of the show's 100th ep.)

Posted February 09, 2:23 AM

February 8, 2005

TT: Almanac

"I chose my career deliberately at the age of twenty-one. I had a naturally ingenious and constructive mind and the taste for writing. I was youthfully zealous of good fame. There seemed few ways, of which a writer need not be ashamed, by which he could make a decent living. To produce something, saleable in large quantities to the public, which had absolutely nothing of myself in it; to sell something for which the kind of people I liked and respected, would have a use; that was what I sought, and detective stories fulfilled the purpose. They were an art which admitted of classical canons of technique and taste. Their writing was painful--though much less painful than any other form would have been--because I have the unhappy combination of being both lazy and fastidious. It was immune, anyway, from the obnoxious comment to which lighter work is exposed. ‘How you must revel in writing your delicious books, Mr. So-and-So.' My friend Roger Simmonds, who was with me at the University and set up as a professional humorist at the same time as I wrote Vengeance at the Vatican, is constantly plagued by that kind of remark. Instead, women say to me, ‘How difficult it must be to think of all those complicated clues, Mr. Plant.' I agree. ‘It is, intolerably difficult.'"

Evelyn Waugh, Work Suspended

Posted February 08, 12:00 PM

TT: They say it's my birthday

Things have been jumping here. Actually, I guess they're always jumping in one way or another, but for the past few days I've been unusually busy, even for me, and happy to be.

It all started last Friday when I went down to Washington, D.C., to watch American Ballet Theatre roll out a major dance-reclamation project, a full evening of one-act ballets by Michel Fokine, the once-mighty pre-Balanchine choreographer whose work has mostly disappeared from the international dance repertory in the course of the last half-century. Not that there were any great surprises on the bill (Les Sylphides, Petrushka, Spectre of the Rose, and a revival of Polovtsian Dances staged by Frederic Franklin), but it was still hugely interesting to see a whole evening's worth of Fokine's choreography in a single sitting, ABT danced it convincingly, and I got to see Ethan Stiefel and Amanda McKerrow in Petrushka. What's not to like?

It was also exciting to hear Stravinsky's music for Petrushka used as an accompaniment to dancing rather than as a free-standing concert piece. I hadn't seen the ballet in ages (not since the Joffrey Ballet last did it in New York, if memory serves), and though Petrushka is an enthralling musical experience in its own right, it acquires a whole new level of meaning and implication when you can see those matchlessly vital Stravinsky rhythms being brought to visual life on stage, the way the composer intended. I mentioned the other day that I'd taken a New York music critic to see his very first Balanchine ballets. It was an all-Stravinsky program--Apollo, Orpheus, and Agon--and when it was over he told me that he felt as though he'd never fully understood the music until now. Petrushka is the same way, and as much as I love Stravinsky's pungent score, I love it best of all in the theater, where it belongs. Cheers to ABT for bringing it back after too long an absence.

(ABT's Fokine program, by the way, will also be danced at New York's Metropolitan Opera House as part of the company's upcoming season, which runs May 26-July 16. Mark your calendar. As my colleague Tobi Tobias pointed out last October on "Seeing Things," her artsjournal.com blog, "This brave, admirable venture, clearly not driven by the commercial concerns that dominate arts management nowadays, looks like the impulse of an institution trying to retrieve its soul." You said it, Tobi.)

Back in New York, I saw press previews of two plays. The first was The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, William Finn's new musical, which opened last night to reviews that appear so far to be uniformly raving, as well as the kind of press attention, including a New York Times Magazine story, that usually ensures long lines at the box office. I also saw an off-off-Broadway revival of an Elizabethan comedy, Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday, that hasn't received a major New York production, so far as I know, since Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre presented it on Broadway in 1937. I'm reviewing both shows in Friday's Wall Street Journal, so I'll save my own opinions until then. (Watch this space for a taste.)

Sunday was my forty-ninth birthday, and a gaggle of my jazz friends took me to Café Luxembourg for dinner that evening and showered me with gifts. The Mutant, bless her, presented me with her latest painting, a Hofmannesque magenta-and-orange companion piece to the one she did for me last year. A good time was had by all.

Needless to say, none of this frenzied activity stopped me from writing. On Saturday I had a working session with the woman who's helping me research my biography of Louis Armstrong (she brought me buried treasure from the New York Philharmonic Archive!). On Sunday morning I knocked out a lecture that I'll be delivering in Washington next month, and yesterday morning I wrote a piece that will be running on the Journal's arts page later this week.

And now what? Well, tonight I'm going to a concert by the String Orchestra of New York City, which is premiering Morph, a new composition by Paul Moravec. Tomorrow I write my Wall Street Journal drama column. On Thursday I head downtown to the studios of WNYC-FM for a guest spot on Soundcheck, where I'll be talking with John Schaefer about The Way Up, Pat Metheny's new CD. The entire album is devoted to a new hour-long composition created by the guitarist for the Pat Metheny Group, and I'll also be discussing some earlier attempts by jazz musicians to create formally coherent large-scale compositions intended for performance by jazz ensembles.

Whew, huh? Well, that's my life, and the most recent installment of it has been pretty exciting. As Robert Louis Stevenson said, The world is so full of a number of things,/I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. I am, way.

P.S. Yes, my blogmail is backed up. Forgive me! I'll get to it, but not right away.

Posted February 08, 9:52 AM

TT: Where have I been all these years?

Duh, it only just hit me that I'd forgotten to update the "Second City" and "Teachout Elsewhere" modules of the right-hand column with my latest print-media stuff. Maybe I had too much fun this weekend!

Anyway, it's done now. Feast your eyes.

Posted February 08, 1:59 AM

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- Eve Tushnet has posted a list of her personal tics and clichés:

I don't think I've written a story without using "pale" or (especially!) "blank" at least once. I blame Harold Bloom for the latter--go read his chapter on Emily Dickinson in The Western Canon, right now! I know one of the reasons I like "Grosse Pointe Blank" is that last word in the title....For some reason, I've twice written the "Sorry I'm late"/"You're not late--I'm early" exchange. And the early person is always the villain of the piece. This is one of those things that make me suspect I really don't understand how my own mind works.

I wonder how many writers have a like degree of insight into their own idiosyncrasies? Probably not a very large number (i.e., next to none), which is why a really good parody like The Mote in the Middle Distance, Max Beerbohm's brilliant spoof of Henry James ("It was with the sense of a, for him, very memorable something that he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively, left it"), is not only the cruelest but the most creative form of criticism.

I usually know most of my own clichés when I see them, and I think I could write a pretty good self-parody, but it probably wouldn't be as good as these, for the simple reason that I'm not a masochist....

- My trainer, a twentysomething stud who wants to be an actor (and is, somewhat to my surprise, a good one), recently shared with me his "three-point plan" for dating. It was, shall we say, alarmingly straightforward. Since most of my women friends are on the youngish side, I'm always on the qui vive for insight into their generational quirks, so I was more than happy to hear his point of view. Alas, I have a sneaking feeling that it's not all that applicable to the special needs of an aesthete of a certain age. When did I get to be so old? As I confessed to a friend the other day, "I feel like a visitor from another planet, discreetly trying to figure out the local customs without catching the eye of the Men in Black." So far I seem to be doing all right--or at least well enough--but I doubt the world is ready for me to start putting the Three-Point Plan into practice.

If only I were Dave Frishberg, I could write a song about all the interesting things I've learned in the past couple of years. No, wait--he already did:

I was ready
Like a goose that's cooked to perfection,
But I was open
For a left to the low midsection.
I'd been through it
Like a plumber who cleans the drains out,
But I blew it
When the good Lord passed all the brains out.
I was ready
Just like Oswald was ready for Ruby,
Like Michael Dukakis was ready to star on TV.
I was poised and well-prepared,
But who knew--and, what's more, who cared?
I was ready for her,
Nelson Eddy for her,
I was ready for her,
But she wasn't ready for me.

That's my kind of romantic ballad.

Posted February 08, 1:10 AM

February 7, 2005

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- Like every other critic in the world, I noticed long ago that it was easier to write bad reviews than good ones, and I could never think of a succinct explanation of why this should be so. Then, shortly af