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March 31, 2005

TT: Passion on PBS

In light of Our Girl's recent posting about Stephen Sondheim, I thought I should mention that I just got back from the opening-night performance of Lincoln Center's American Songbook concert version of Sondheim's Passion, starring Patti LuPone and Audra McDonald, which I'll be reviewing in next Friday's Wall Street Journal.

In addition to being a gala for the bejeweled rich, Wednesday's performance doubled as a technical rehearsal for tonight's live telecast of Passion on PBS' Live at Lincoln Center. In New York City, Passion will air at eight o'clock on Channel 13, with a replay at noon Sunday. For more information, go here.

If you live in another city and want to know when and where Passion is airing, go here. (Got that, Girl?)

To purchase the original-cast CD of the 1994 Broadway production of Passion, go here.

Now, if you'll be so kind as to excuse me, I'm off to another show....

Posted March 31, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"The army taught me some great lessons--to be prepared for catastrophe--to endure being bored--and to know that however fine [a] fellow I thought myself in my usual routine there were other situations alongside and many more in which I was inferior to men that I might have looked down upon had not experience taught me to look up."

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Harold Laski (1926)

Posted March 31, 12:00 PM

OGIC: B-chip, activate

I'm hunkering down Terrylike over here under the onus of many deadlines, and flipping my blogging switch to the Off position. Oh, I may try to put up a couple of fortune cookies, but beyond that the pickings will be slim. Also, if you've emailed me recently, it will probably take me a day or two more to respond. Better late than never, right?

Right? Bueller? Anyone?

Ah well. In the meantime, please check out a brand-spanking-new literary group blog, The Valve, some of whose contributors grace the blogroll here. (A little Maud told us.)

Posted March 31, 4:58 AM

March 30, 2005

TT: Almanac

"The inevitable is not wicked. If you can improve on it all right, but it is not necessary to damn the stem because you are the flower."

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Harold Laski (1921)

Posted March 30, 12:00 PM

OGIC: This year's smoothie

Oh--did I mention the temperature in Chicago today reached 72?

Quorum of strawberries, fresh or frozen
Lone banana, sliced
Goodly dollop raspberry sorbet
Liberal spoonful orange juice concentrate
Generous shmear plain yogurt
Decent smattering ice cubes

Blend and be nourished.

Don't worry, I know you know how to make a smoothie. But this one has been working magic for me this young spring, so I felt like sharing.

Posted March 30, 6:07 AM

TT: Portrait of the critic as seriously frazzled

I know I'm way, way too busy when I stop filling the ice trays in my freezer. I belatedly noticed this afternoon that I must have reached that point some time in the past couple of days. Not to worry, though. My head remains above water (just), and I see that OGIC has been keeping you fed and groomed in my unavoidable absence. Isn't she the best?

As for me, I still expect to depart this vortex of overwork some time over the coming weekend and return to the blogosphere on Monday, perhaps not rested but definitely ready.

Later.

Posted March 30, 5:59 AM

OGIC: Critics' corner

- In Slate, Stephen Metcalf argues that Ian McEwan's Saturday, which I hope to find the time to read one day in 2007, isn't about what other critics think it's about. This being 2005, I can't tell you whether he's right. For what it's worth, however, his is the first review of the book I've felt like reading all the way through and, even so, one of the few that didn't tell me more than I wanted to know about the novel's plot.

- Christopher Orr tries to watch Closer with a straight face, an experiment that fails but amuses. (Link via The American Scene, whose Ross Douthat will "rush out to buy a ticket" for any movie panned by David Denby.)

- Don't rush out for this one, Ross. Said Denby likes the awful Upside of Anger and thinks Mike Binder "may be one of the few male directors around who take an active interest in what women are feeling." Sure, if you mean the beautiful, lecherous women with inexplicably low standards who populate Mike Binder's ludicrous fantasies.

- Detractors of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close? (I think that covers everyone except Meghan O'Rourke.) B. R. Myers was already sick up to here of Jonathan Safran Foer when all of you were cuckoo for him. So there.

Posted March 30, 3:41 AM

OGIC: The royal Wes

I was amused to discover, a few months after the fact, that none other than National Geographic interviewed Wes Anderson in December about The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. It's a brief but entertaining softball toss, with Anderson fielding questions like "Did any Lord of the Flies stuff go on? Was there a conch shell?"

It's been a couple of months now since I caught up with The Life Aquatic. After The Royal Tenenbaums I had just about given up on Anderson. I missed Bottle Rocket but enjoyed Rushmore, in no small part thanks to Bill Murray's presence. But in Tenenbaums I couldn't escape the feeling that I was being subjected to some overachieving ninth-grade geek's school project: a lovingly and ingeniously detailed diorama, a thing to behold, but airless and unpeopled. Filled with stars, sure--but unpeopled. It made me want to pat him on the head and go home to read a simple book. When I got a load of the trailer for The Life Aquatic, it just screamed more of the same--a diorama with a Hollywood budget, heaven help us. The Tenenbaums' townhouse taken to the nth degree. I was not hopeful.

To my surprise, however, The Life Aquatic was a pleasure. Even Owen Wilson...especially Owen Wilson? Could be. For whatever reason, I was able to take this movie seriously and even respond to it emotionally, despite the basic premise being even more precious and imaginatively labored than that of Tenenbaums. The closest I've come to figuring out the difference between it and its predecessor is this: animals. They're ubiquitous in The Life Aquatic: real cats and dogs and invented fish, lounging in the background, trotting alongside the characters, populating the aqua. Animals don't do irony, and for me their near-constant presence cut against that overweening irony Anderson is so prone to. Anderson loves deadpan, but these beasties out-deadpan the characters by a mile, with no disingenuousness about it. Maybe his next career move should be to drop those Wilson boys altogether and make some nature specials--I daresay National Geographic would get on board.

Posted March 30, 2:15 AM

March 29, 2005

OGIC: James and giggles, redux

Last week, like an image consultant to the canon, I posted some funny bits from Henry James, sensing that he may not get enough credit for that sort of thing. I also suggested he wear more earth tones, but does he listen to me?

Anyway, I was glad to get a little backup when some other James fans and aficionados chimed in: Robert the Llama Butcher's mom, Lance Mannion, who is especially good on the unfunny Tragic Muse, and Alex Ross. And there's always been Max Beerbohm, who not only was one of the first to see the humor in Henry James but who, er, enhanced it:

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. But just where the deuce had he left it?

(From "The Mote in the Middle Distance" by H*nry J*m*s, by Max Beerbohm, found in A Christmas Garland.)

Posted March 29, 12:15 PM

TT: Almanac

"I vehemently disagree with the 'contempt for the jingles of Kipling.' I agree that Kipling's attitude toward life seems to me wanting in complexity and not interesting--but it will take more than Sassoon to convince me that Kipling ought not to stir the fundamental human emotions. I think he does--and that simple thinkers often do. A student of mine long dead spoke with contempt of the fighting lines in Henry V. His widow was a mainstay of the sympathizers with Sacco and Vanzetti. I was not with him."

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Harold Laski (1928)

Posted March 29, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"Literary criticism, which is bound to pursue meaning, can never really encompass the fact that some things are on the page because they gave the writer pleasure."

Ian McEwan, Paris Review interview

Posted March 29, 3:33 AM

OGIC: Trickle-up effect

I'm belated in pointing out that Tim Hulsey wrote a thoughtful post last week on the occasion of Stephen Sondheim's 75th birthday. I'm a newly minted fan of Sondheim's work--well, of precisely two of his plays so far--and can't offer anything nearly so knowledgable. But I can free-associate!

In 2004 I had my first glimpse of Sondheim's work at a Chicago Shakespeare Theater production of A Little Night Music that swept me off my feet and left me in tears (this, I find, is happening a lot more often the older I get, and bears no necessary relation to the quality of the movie/book/play/sporting event). A few months later, in New York, Terry took me to see an all-stops-pulled-out production of Sweeney Todd at City Opera, and several months after that we saw a tiny, black-box-theater version of Todd back here in Chicago. I guess I got lucky--every one of these stagings was played with talent and conviction, and after spending half a life unaware of the force that is Sondheim, I was half in love.

What pushed me the rest of the way, into a full-fledged liaison with his work, was receiving the original cast recording of A Little Night Music as a Christmas gift. Now I could listen at will, and I learned that the songs more than held up to sustained attention. For a few weeks in January I was listening to nothing but (the neighbors are still looking at me a little funny). Musically the songs are irresistible, but I don't have the expertise to talk about that. The lyrics, however, just slay this former English major, they're so rich and so unbelievably deft at creating and revealing the characters who sing them. But what might get me most is simply the unabashed feeling with which the songs are performed.

To some of you the following transition will seem very sublime-to-ridiculous, but the first time I saw the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical special, "Once More with Feeling," I was braced for the worst, ready to laugh my way through it all. Not at all practiced at watching musical theater, I was deeply suspicious of the entire enterprise. I was surprised, then, when the Buffy musical grabbed me by the heartstrings, but by way, somehow, of the head. The wittiness of many of the lyrics authorized the heart-on-the-sleeve emotion in the show and freed me up to savor it. (Imagine my dismay, then, when at the climactic moment of Buffy's rescue from the dancing demon's spell, my videotape cut to the unlovely mug of Dennis Franz--I had set the VCR that night to tape Buffy followed by NYPD Blue, unaware that the musical ran an hour...plus seven minutes.)

The next day, I ran into an acquaintance who was also a Buffy watcher. I asked her what she'd thought of the musical; she laughed a bit unsurely and said, "I thought it was embarrassing." And while I didn't quite believe her, I also knew exactly what she meant. I had felt a temptation to react that way at first, and even into the middle of the show. Emotional content is so regularly faked, overplayed, and abused on television and in movies, you really feel like you have to start from a position of suspicion toward anything unironical. There's something essentially unironical about singing, though, let alone singing in a musical. This is not to say there aren't plenty of counter-examples, but song just doesn't seem to be the same sort of natural habitat for irony that it is for feeling. In any case, I was pleased to have gotten over my own initial embarrassment toward the musical, and proceeded to establish my liberation beyond a doubt by watching it fifty more times in quick succession. When I showed it to Terry during his next visit to Chicago, he almost immediately noted the heavy influence of Sondheim, and I nodded in sage agreement, having no idea of Sondheim at all.

Obviously I see the influence now. And if one somewhat sad consequence of my new understanding has been to knock down the Buffy musical a slight notch by comparison with its models, I can't help thinking that Joss Whedon provided some crucial paving of my way toward appreciating A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, and (next up) Sunday in the Park with George in full. It would be nice to claim that I wasn't the kind of person who needed to come to it in baby steps, led by an instance of Pop Culture with a capital P, but that's how it happened. The neighbors might be embarrassed for me, hearing show tunes through the thin walls, but I really do love this stuff too much to care.

Posted March 29, 3:02 AM

OGIC: Back by popular demand

If you arrived here by way of Sarah Boxer's article in The New York Times, welcome! If it's movie quotes you want, please check in here for the original post including my five quotes, here for Terry's more distinguished five, here for the big wrap-up Boxer quoted from, and here and here for some personal favorites.

As you'll see if you follow these links, this exercise wasn't really cooked up in the ALN labs but borrowed from our friends at Llama Butchers, who borrowed it themselves, and so on, and so on. In fact, I'm not entirely certain this meme can be traced to its point of origination, which I suppose somehow goes to support Boxer's infinite regression critique of culture blogs. Not that I'm necessarily buying that critique--but she definitely softened me up by building her lead around "Powers of 10," of which I am an enormous fan.

More on the Eames's edutainment film, and on the original chic geeks themselves, can be found starting here--first turn your attention to the clickable black and orange grid to the right. There's a good fifteen minutes of procrastination packed into that little bitty grid.

And if your inner narcissist is at the ready with five movie quotes? Go on, send 'em! I'm done tabulating them, but I never did get tired of reading them--and I'm storing up the best of them for future fortune cookies.

Posted March 29, 1:45 AM

OGIC: All ears

On the basis of his ear for random scraps of conversation, I would venture a guess that this playwright-blogger is good at his chosen craft. If, that is, you think that unscripted-sounding dialogue makes for good plays, which I generally do.

On the other hand, I recently overheard in the soup aisle of the supermarket an apparently authentic exchange that sounded so scripted, I would hesitate to put it in a play, or on a blog like Tim's:

SON: What's "Soup at Hand"?

FATHER: Soup getting out of hand.

Ow. One can't help but suspect that some coaching was involved.

Posted March 29, 1:09 AM

March 28, 2005

TT: Silence and respect

No sooner did my train pull into Penn Station two days ago than I jumped back on the merry-go-round of my New York routine, discovering to my dismay that some prankster had sped it up while I was out of town. I barely had time to pry open my suitcases before I found myself in a cab again, racing downtown to see Neil LaBute's This Is How It Goes with Galley Cat. On Sunday afternoon I took an actress friend to a matinee of Moonlight and Magnolias, and now I have five more shows and three deadlines gurgling down the pipeline, not to mention a chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong that's crying out to be finished. I'm not going to blog at all for the rest of the week, so don't ask me.

Before I vanish into the not-so-distant future, though, I want to record some fugitive impressions of the time I spent playing tourist in the nation's capital. I go to Washington, D.C., mainly to spend time with friends and look at paintings and plays. It had been twenty years since I'd last seen the sights of the city other than through the window of a cab. For that reason, I thought it might be interesting to accompany my brother on his first visit to Washington, seeing whatever he cared to see. So instead of going to the National Gallery and the Phillips Collection, we rode a Tourmobile to Arlington National Cemetery, the National Air and Space Museum, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian Museum of American History, with brief side trips along the way to the White House, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam Memorials. We didn't actually go to the Capitol, but since we were staying in a hotel only a few blocks away from Capitol Hill, we didn't have to. The great dome was omnipresent, visible from wherever we happened to be at any given moment.

That's a lot of stuff to cram into two days, and I was in grave need of sleep by the time I boarded the Acela Express on Saturday afternoon. Still, I wouldn't have willingly passed up a single sight. Like all small-town boys, I'm a gawker at heart, and Washington offers endless opportunities for high-class gawking. Among other things, I saw the Wright Flyer that took to the skies at Kitty Hawk in 1903 and the American flag that flew over Fort McHenry in 1812, the same one that inspired Francis Scott Key to write "The Star-Spangled Banner." I saw a uniform that was worn by George Washington. I saw the stovepipe hat Abraham Lincoln wore to Ford's Theatre the night he was assassinated--and, a few steps away, the nuclear "football" carried by Bill Clinton's military aide.

Best of all, I saw the Declaration of Independence (not to mention the portable wooden desk on which Thomas Jefferson drafted it), the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. If the Museum of American History is the national attic, then the rotunda of the National Archives is the reliquary of our civic religion. It's fun to see little Judy Garland's ruby-red shoes, but it's something altogether different to look upon the original founding documents, faded to near-illegibility but still recognizable at a glance. To have beheld these fragile pieces of parchment mere hours after having taken an oath administered by a Supreme Court justice was...well, awesome.

As for Arlington National Cemetery, my brother and I spent a whole morning there, and could easily have spent a whole day if we'd had more time to spare. It's no place for the flippant--Arlington has a way of making the overheard remarks of ironically inclined visitors sound shameful--but it has much to offer the aesthete, even the soul-deadened kind to whom patriotism is no more than gold-braided bigotry. The simple marble headstones that mark most of the graves are at once ruthlessly functional and timelessly handsome, both individually and en masse, just as the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns is all but balletic in its poised, precise clarity. Next to such pure classicism, the bronze plaque that honors the astronauts who died in the Challenger explosion seems almost sentimental, as much a symbol of its times as the marble tablets are of theirs.

For the most part, though, Arlington is a place of sobering beauty, which is one of the reasons why so few visitors require the reminders provided by the discreet circular signs placed at strategic points along its paths: ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY. SILENCE AND RESPECT. Of course you hear the occasional idiot twitter of a ringing cell phone, or the shouts of children too young to understand what it means to be surrounded by the corpses of a quarter-million of their fellow Americans. Airplanes are constantly roaring overhead, and the lawnmowers pause for no man, dead or alive. Arlington isn't exactly quiet, just serious. Some of its permanent residents are well known, including two presidents, eleven Supreme Court justices, and a couple of movie stars (Lee Marvin and Audie Murphy, both of whom fought in World War II, are buried there), but most were and are obscure, while thousands more are, as their headstones explain, known but to God. All served their country in one way or another, and tens of thousands of them died violent deaths while doing so.

Most tourists go out of their way to visit the graves of John and Jackie Kennedy. I did, too, but once I'd paid my respects, I wandered down the hill where the Kennedys lie, looking for a white headstone that says HOLMES. It's not hard to find, though I doubt that many people seek it out, the name of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., now being known for the most part only to students of American constitutional law. Once upon a time, though, Mr. Justice Holmes was famous enough that Hollywood made a movie about him, a foolish film about a remarkable man. A friend of Henry and William James, Holmes fought for the Union in the Civil War, was wounded in battle three times, became a lawyer and then a judge, was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, and served as an associate justice for nearly three decades, retiring in 1932 at the age of ninety-one, three years before his death.

An eminent Victorian who lived long enough to read and comment on Proust and Hemingway, Holmes looked upon the world with an ice-cold eye, unconsoled by faith and certain only that "[o]ur business is to commit ourselves to life, to accept at once our functions and our ignorance and to offer our heart to fate." I'm not sure how great a jurist he was, and there are any number of things about which I disagree with him passionately, but he was beyond doubt the high court's greatest writer, both of judicial opinions and personal letters (Edmund Wilson wrote an admiring New Yorker essay about his correspondence), and he was by way of being a great man as well.

As a Civil War veteran, Holmes was entitled to burial in Arlington National Cemetery, and when his beloved wife Fanny died in 1929, she was laid to rest there. A month later he wrote to a friend:

I have a lovely spot in Arlington toward the bottom of the hill where the house is, with pine trees, oak, and tulip all about, and where one looks to see a deer trot out (although of course there are no deer). I have ordered a stone of the form conventional for officers which will bear my name, Bvt. Col. And Capt. 20th Mass. Vol. Inf. Civil War--Justice Supreme Court, U.S.--March, 1841--His wife Fanny B. Holmes and the dates. It seemed queer to [be] putting up my own tombstone--but these things are under military direction and I suppose it was necessary to show a soldier's name to account for my wife.

Six years later he joined her beneath the pine trees, and seventy years after that I stood by their graves, silent and respectful, hearing the words of the psalmist in my mind's ear: Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is: that I may know how frail I am. Somewhere in the middle distance I overheard a young boy saying, "I wanna be buried here!" All at once I recalled something else that Holmes wrote: "I believe that force, mitigated so far as may be by good manners, is the ultima ratio, and between two groups that want to make inconsistent kinds of world I see no remedy except force. I may add what I no doubt have said often enough, that it seems to me that every society rests on the death of men..."

With both quotations uneasily commingled in my head, I boarded the Tourmobile that would return me to the land of the living. For all its myriad beauties, Arlington National Cemetery is not a place where one can comfortably tarry, at least not for very long. The next day I was back in New York, sworn in, worn out, and grateful above all things merely to be alive.

"You look really happy," Galley Cat told me at dinner that night.

"I am really happy," I replied.

So I was, and still am. My life is far from perfect, and there are many things about it that I would gladly change, but nobody could hope for a better or more blessed one. May you all have such good fortune, and know it for what it is while it lasts.

See you next week.

Posted March 28, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"'Why, she isn't even crying!' she heard people say at her mother's funeral, as if it was for this moist tribute that people died. People were always wanting children to cry and prove again and again their helplessness, so that they might take advantage of it."

Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

Posted March 28, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Before he came I also had read Henry James' The Ambassadors. All the characters as usual talk H. James, so that I regard it rather as a prolonged analysis and description than as a drama. It brought up Paris to me; but more especially, by a kind of antagonism that it provoked, made me reflect, contrary to Münsterberg's book (The Eternal Values), how personal are our judgments of worth. If a man debates for half an hour whether to put his right or left foot forward while he stands in a puddle, he will think me stupid when I prefer to brusquer the decision. For all I know the fate of the cosmos may hang on it, but I think him stupid as to the growth of ideas, or the law, or whatever my hobby may be. I was struck as usual by the exclusiveness of his criteria and interests. He lives in what seems to me rather a narrow world of taste and refined moral vacillations; but in them he is a master. I can't help preferring him in description and criticism, but he has a circle that thinks him great as a novelist. My general attitude is relatively coarse: let the man take the girl or leave her. I don't care a damn which. Really, I suppose, he, like his brother and the parsons, attaches a kind of transcendental value to personality; whereas my bet is that we have not the kind of cosmic importance that the parsons and philosophers teach. I doubt if a shudder would go through the spheres if the whole ant heap were kerosened."

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Lewis Einstein (1909)

Posted March 28, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Don't go

We like to think positive at About Last Night, so we don't have a "Bottom Five" sidebar. But the worst movie I have seen in a long time is The Upside of Anger, which had an inexplicably easy time of it with the critics. It's true that, as almost everyone reviewing it has noted, Joan Allen is a witty and engaging performer. But that's not enough when a script is this terrible; in my book, Allen's goodness should count against the movie rather than for it, making us wish for her better material. If I had known that the movie was written, directed, and acted in by the man responsible for the dismal HBO comedy The Mind of the Married Man, which aired a few years ago during the six months I had free HBO, I would have steered clear. Having failed this, I apply my efforts now to sparing you.

To a large degree, I hated this movie because I hated its characters. I didn't like this sort of criticism when it was applied to Sideways recently by some of that movie's detractors. But then I didn't feel the charge stood up that Payne glossed over, okayed, or played as a mere joke, say, Miles's pathetic thieving from his mother. On the contrary--when, at the truly painful end of that scene, she offers him as a gift what he has just stolen from her, it puts him in the worst possible light. Sure, the movie asks us to like Miles warts and all, and I did, but this scene is one instance of the writers not letting him off easy, and one reminder that some of his warts are more than just cosmetic. Another critique held that the movie glamorized the characters' alcohol abuse by presenting the wine culture they're steeped in as attractive. If it didn't look at least externally attractive, though, would we have half so good an understanding of Miles and his problems--and his virtues? What do you want, a movie or a public service announcement?

In The Upside of Anger, there's so little understanding of people on the writer-director Mike Binder's part, I couldn't help wondering: does this guy know any? The charmless ones in his movie are more akin to (affluent) bundles of symptoms and psychoses who occasionally spit out a cue to the audience to laugh or "ooh" or cry. Kevin Costner is something of an exception insofar as his presence in the movie has a casual quality, almost as if he had wandered in off a different set entirely. I'm by no means a Costner fan, and the figure he plays here is more or less stolen outright from Terms of Endearment, but his air of just hanging around provided some relief in a film that's contrived everywhere else you look, and whose plot, even so, doesn't always make logical sense.

This shell game of a movie pulls its first cheap trick early: In the first scene we're shown the funeral of some unidentified person. Then we're yanked three years into the past, left to wonder which of the characters will meet an untimely end and, in due course, served several red herrings. Ho-hum. Let 'em (as Hannibal Lecter once advised Francis Dolarhyde) kill them all. Save yourself: skip this movie.

Posted March 28, 4:41 AM

March 25, 2005

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"Maybe that was just it, he thought; maybe you just got to a point where everything around you was strange, where the world had changed sufficiently that you no longer fit in. None of the music sounded like music anymore. None of the dancing looked like dancing. The satin-and-powder fancy world that he saw in the movies--where was it? He had grown up expecting to inhabit that world, and now even the memory, the fancy of that world was disappearing from the earth and he had still not slept with Carole Lombard or Barbara Stanwyck."

Kevin Canty, Winslow in Love

(We children of the seventies and beyond, of course, will experience this particular species of superannuation over the marketing industry's cold, dead body.)

Posted March 25, 12:26 PM

TT: Classic miscues

Friday again, and my drama column in this morning's Wall Street Journal covers three Broadway openings, The Glass Menagerie, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and All Shook Up. None passed my muster:

Two of the greatest American plays of the 20th century were revived on Broadway this week. Both feature familiar faces: Jessica Lange and Christian Slater in Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie," Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin in Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Both were directed by Brits, David Leveaux and Anthony Page--and both productions are crash-and-burn disasters.

By far the worse of the two is "The Glass Menagerie," now playing at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, for which Mr. Leveaux ("Fiddler on the Roof") wins the Eurotrash Award of 2005 by inserting a spectacularly gratuitous subtext into Williams' fragile tale of a dysfunctional family caught in the choking web of genteel poverty. Did it ever occur to you, even for a millisecond, that the shy, crippled Laura Wingfield (Sarah Paulson) might want to have sex with her sensitive brother Tom (Mr. Slater)? No? Well, it did to Mr. Leveaux...

Similarly misguided things are happening at the Longacre Theatre, but at least Mr. Page's version of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" spares us the interfering touches beloved of so many postmodern directors. His blunder was a simpler one, if no less devastating: He cast Bill Irwin as George, the small-time college professor whose marriage to Martha (Ms. Turner), the boss' drunken daughter, has turned him into a monster of passive aggression. I yield to no one in my admiration for Mr. Irwin's great gifts as the tragic clown of such self-written extravaganzas as "The Regard of Flight," but his flip, flat readings of George's blood-soaked quips are as far off the mark in one direction as Mr. Slater's regular-guy Tom Wingfield is in the other....

As for All Shook Up, well...

Think of it as an exercise in commodities trading. The jokes are strictly from Bob Hope's 1955 reject pile ("Hey, you're wearin' blue suede shoes!" "Nobody step on 'em"). The dances, mysteriously credited to two different choreographers, are as memorable as a stump speech by Michael Dukakis. Stephen Oremus' musical arrangements are loud and anonymous....

The rest of "All Shook Up" is theme-park trash, a Broadway musical for people who don't like musicals, or Broadway. Or music. If you found "Mamma Mia!" too intellectually demanding, you've come to the right place.

No link, so if you want to read the whole thing--and there's plenty more where that came from--pick up a copy of this morning's Journal and look me up in the "Weekend Journal" section. Or go here, pull out your credit card, and start clicking.

Posted March 25, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"I think the reason gamblers habitually gamble is to lose. Because they know they have to lose, it's the law of averages. I'm not talking about bookies or gentlemen gamblers. I'm talking about the compulsive, neurotic gambler. Pain is what he's searching for. The emotion of pain. It's much greater than the emotion of pleasure. Bigger, larger, stronger. Therefore more interesting."

Walter Matthau (quoted in Rob Edelman and Audrey Kupferberg, Matthau: A Life)

Posted March 25, 12:00 PM

March 24, 2005

TT: Almanac

"'She still has no taste, thank God,' Ethel thought, comfortingly, but the truth was that Amanda was too successful, too arrogantly on top, to even need good taste. Good taste was the consolation of people who had nothing else, people like her own self, Ethel thought, inferiority feelings leaping back at her like great barn dogs trying to be pets."

Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

Posted March 24, 12:00 PM

TT: Doing the town

I am now officially the Honorable Terry Teachout, having been sworn in this morning (together with Gerard Schwarz and James Ballinger) as a member of the National Council on the Arts. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor dropped by to administer the oath. It was a near-run thing, for Justice O'Connor didn't know when she agreed to do the honors that she and her Supreme Court brethren would be hearing the Terri Schiavo case today. "We had a busy morning!" she said as she arrived, still wearing her judicial robes. I'd never seen her in person, and was surprised by how short she was. Charismatic, too: she's engaging, energetic, and has amazing eyes, dark and snapping.

The oath she administered is the one specified in Section 3331 of the United States Code:

An individual, except the President, elected or appointed to an office of honor or profit in the civil service or uniformed services, shall take the following oath: ''I, AB, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.''

I'd never taken an oath remotely like that--in fact, I'm not sure I've ever taken any oath before today--and as I repeated the words after Justice O'Connor, I suddenly realized that my voice was on the verge of cracking. Maybe it was because I'd looked up and seen my brother standing just fifteen feet away, snapping a picture. On the other hand, it wasn't the first time in the past couple of days that my emotions had been engaged so strongly. Under Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, public sessions of the National Council on the Arts always begin with a performance of an appropriate piece of music, and today we heard the finale of Walter Piston's Fourth Symphony in a recording conducted by Gerard Schwarz, who was seated next to me. My eyes filled with tears as I listened, the same way they'd grown moist the day before as we watched a video clip of Ethan Stiefel and Alessandra Ferri dancing the pas de deux from Sir Frederick Ashton's The Dream. That's one of the biggest differences between a meeting of the National Council on the Arts and one of, say, the board of directors of Citibank. Great art has a way of slipping in under the radar and filling you with extraordinary sensations.

As soon as Justice O'Connor finished swearing us in, she smiled and said, "Now, go do a good job!" To which Jim Ballinger (who knows her) instantly responded, "You, too!" That brought down the house, and the four of us went back to work.

I could tell you all sorts of other things about today's meeting, but I'll pass on just one detail. Gordon Davidson, the outgoing artistic director of Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum, just finished serving a term as a member of the NCA. He had to miss his final meeting, so he came to our first one to say his goodbyes, which consisted of an elegant little speech in which he said something which struck me so forcibly that I scribbled it down on my notepad: "I liked being here because I love asking questions. I think the best art asks the best questions." Me, too.

Chairman Gioia gaveled the proceedings to a close at noon, after which my brother and I said our goodbyes, jumped into a cab, went back to his hotel, changed clothes, caught a Tourmobile bus in front of the National Air and Space Museum, and spent the rest of the day looking at monuments. This is my brother's first trip to Washington, and it's been ages since I last did any tourist-type stuff here. I'd forgotten how stirring an impression the Lincoln Memorial makes, even when it's full of noisy tourists. Once again, I caught myself choking up as I read the so-familiar words carved into the wall: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." Washington has a way of doing that to you, too.

Now we're back in our hotel room, worn out from walking and preparing for what I sincerely hope will be a good night's sleep. Tomorrow we'll be visiting Arlington National Cemetery, the National Archives, and whatever else sounds good, weather permitting. I'll be returning to New York on Saturday, and I expect to be more worn out still--and inordinately happy. It's been an extraordinary week, in all sorts of ways....

One last thing: Dana introduced me this morning as "a critic, biographer, and blogger," adding that I'm "the first blogger ever to serve on the National Council on the Arts." How about that?

Posted March 24, 9:45 AM

OGIC: As promised, funny Henry James

Henry James isn't famed for making people laugh, but when he's guarding his turf an evil sense of humor can rear its toothy head. For example, in the sections of his famous "Art of Fiction" essay where he is responding directly to Walter Besant's lecture of the same name, James is hilariously withering (and Besant's philistinism well deserves it). And in "The Death of the Lion," previously discussed by me here, he takes on literary journalism as personified by the comically monstrous Mr. Morrow, who shows up with a notebook one afternoon at the home of the reclusive author Neil Paraday. Also on the scene is the story's narrator, a critic who considers himself above mere literary fashion and who here interposes himself between the voracious would-be reporter and his reluctant quarry.

Mr. Morrow glared, agreeably, through his glasses: they suggested the electric headlights of some monstrous modern ship, and I felt as if Paraday and I were tossing terrified under his bows. I saw that his momentum was irresistible. "I was confident that I should be the first in the field," he declared. "A great interest is naturally felt in Mr. Paraday's surroundings."

"I hadn't the least idea of it," said Paraday, as if he had been told he had been snoring.

"I find he has not read the article in The Empire," Mr. Morrow remarked to me. "That's so very interesting--it's something to start with," he smiled. He had begun to pull off his gloves, which were violently new, and to look encouragingly round the little garden. As a "surrounding" I felt that I myself had already been taken in; I was a little fish in the stomach of a bigger one. "I represent," our visitor continued, "a syndicate of influential journals, no less than thirty-seven, whose public--whose publics, I may say--are in peculiar sympathy with Mr. Paraday's line of thought. They would greatly appreciate any expression of his views on the subject of the art he so brilliantly practises. Besides my connection with the syndicate just mentioned, I hold a particular commission from The Tatler, whose most prominent department, 'Smatter and Chatter'--I daresay you've often enjoyed it--attracts such attention. I was honoured only last week, as a representative of The Tatler, with the confidence of Guy Walsingham, the author of 'Obsessions.' She expressed herself thoroughly pleased with my sketch of her method; she went so far as to say that I had made her genius more comprehensible even to herself."

...Not because I had brought my mind back, but because our visitor's last words were in my ear, I presently inquired with gloomy irrelevance whether Guy Walsingham were a woman.

"Oh yes, a mere pseudonym; but convenient, you know, for a lady who goes in for the larger latitude. 'Obsessions, by Miss So-and-So,' would look a little odd, but men are more naturally indelicate. Have you peeped into 'Obsessions'?" Mr. Morrow continued sociably to our companion.

Paraday, still absent, remote, made no answer, as if he had not heard the question: a manifestation that appeared to suit the cheerful Mr. Morrow as well as any other. Imperturbably bland, he was a man of resources--he only needed to be on the spot. He had pocketed the whole poor place while Paraday and I were woolgathering, and I could imagine that he had already got his "heads." His system, at any rate, was justified by the inevitability with which I replied, to save my friend the trouble: "Dear, no; he hasn't read it. He doesn't read such things!" I unwarily added.

"Things that are too far over the fence, eh?" I was indeed a godsend to Mr. Morrow. It was the psychological moment; it determined the appearance of his notebook, which, however, he at first kept slightly behind him, as the dentist, approaching his victim, keeps his horrible forceps. "Mr. Paraday holds with the good old proprieties--I see!" And, thinking of the thirty-seven influential journals, I found myself, as I found poor Paraday, helplessly gazing at the promulgation of this inepititude. "There's no point on which distinguished views are so acceptable as on this question--raised perhaps more strikingly than ever by Guy Walsingham--of the permissibility of the larger latitude. I have an appointment, precisely in connection with it, next week, with Dora Forbes, the author of 'The Other Way Round,' which everybody is talking about. Has Mr. Paraday glanced at 'The Other Way Round'?...Dora Forbes, I gather, takes the ground, the same as Guy Walsingham's, that the larger latitude has simply got to come. He holds that it has got to be squarely faced. Of course his sex makes him a less prejudiced witness. But an authoritative word from Mr. Paraday--from the point of view of his sex, you know--would go right round the globe. He takes the line that we haven't got to face it?"

I was bewildered; it sounded somehow as if there were three sexes. My interlocutor's pen was poised, my private responsibility great. I simply sat staring, however, and only found presence of mind to say: "Is this Miss Forbes a gentleman?"

Mr. Morrow hesitated an instant, smiling: "It wouldn't be 'Miss'--there's a wife!"

"I mean, is she a man?"

"The wife?"--Mr. Morrow, for a moment, was as confused as myself. But when I explained that I alluded to Dora Forbes in person he informed me, with visible amusement at my being so out of it, that this was the "pen-name" of an indubitable male--he had a big red moustache. "He only assumes a feminine personality because the ladies are such popular favorites. A great deal of interest is felt in this assumption, and there's every prospect of its being widely imitated."

Who's on first? Of course, the narrator is being skewered here, too, for his pompous, principled disengagement from fashion--absurd as that fashion may be. The narrator is exposed by the prim horror with which he regards Morrow, Morrow principally by his own speeches. If Morrow never opened his mouth, we might well find him sympathetic just by virtue of how effortlessly he moves our priggish narrator to overblown similes involving barges and dentists. We don't have to trust the author's or narrator's assertion that both of these men are ridiculous--James has each character manage to damn himself, just by being himself.

Posted March 24, 1:43 AM

March 23, 2005

TT: The music cure

A friend writes:

A friend of mine told me that she once owned chows who were terrified when it thundered. Two kinds of music calmed them down--Louis Armstrong, and the Goldberg Variations. The only music, it happens, that I could bear during chemotherapy.

Aside from being a remarkable tribute to Louis (and one he would surely have appreciated), this e-mail suggests a fascinating party game, though one that few of my acquaintances, thank God, are qualified to play. To make it a bit more generally accessible, what music do you listen to when the world is way, way too much with you?

Here are ten pieces that have helped me through times of extreme mental disruption:

- Copland Violin Sonata (first movement)

- Mozart A Major Piano Concerto. K. 488 (first movement)

- Ravel Piano Concerto in G (slow movement)

- Dave Brubeck Quartet, "Stardust"

- Gerry Mulligan with Tommy Flanagan, "Lonely Town"

- Stravinsky Apollo

- Bill Evans Trio, "My Foolish Heart"

- Schubert A Major Rondo, D. 951

- Hindemith Flute Sonata (first movement)

- Jim Hall and Pat Metheny, "Farmer's Trust"

Posted March 23, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"‘There you are, Collins,' Colonel Ross said. ‘I think we can get your promotion next week.'

"The warm feeling which came from power to arrange so quickly a considerable favor for somebody else, which was also reasonably sure to be a good stroke of business for himself, lasted him, Colonel Ross supposed, half a minute. In this life, you succeeded when you were young because you never risked letting anyone do anything for you; and when you were old you succeeded, if you did, because you never risked doing yourself what you could pick someone to do for you."

James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor

Posted March 23, 12:00 PM

TT: Too tired to blog

In meetings from nine to six-thirty, then I went straight to a play.

More later. Maybe.

Posted March 23, 11:57 AM

March 22, 2005

TT: Almanac

"Nathaniel Hicks said: ‘Look, Bill. I've worked with writers for years. I know a lot about them. When he writes, Edsell doesn't mean anything personal; any more than he means in that story he could do it better. He just sees a situation he thinks he can write a story about. Then he dresses it up and twists it around to make it a story. That's what they pay him for.'

"‘I suppose that's right,' Major Whitney said uneasily. There might remain in Major Whitney's mind a point he did not, or could not, phrase--what were you to think of a fellow free and friendly to your face, who, all the while, was working away at something that, at elaborate length, in the permanence of print, would hold you up to the ridicule of a large audience? Nathaniel Hicks could only answer by saying: ‘That's the way they are, Bill--‘"

James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor

Posted March 22, 12:00 PM

TT: For literate vocal buffs only

Mr. Gioia, my new boss, "asked" me to draw up a mini-program of ten piano-accompanied English-language settings of Shakespeare. I had roughly fifteen minutes to comply. He didn't tell me why he wanted it. Here's what I came up with, pretty much straight off the top of my head:

- Thomas Morley, "It was a lover and his lass"

- Gerald Finzi, "It was a lover and his lass" (from Let Us Garlands Bring)

- Joseph Haydn, "She never told her love"

- Franz Schubert, "Who is Sylvia?"

- Erich Wolfgang Korngold, "Desdemona's Song" (from Four Shakespeare Songs)

- Amy Beach, "O Mistress Mine" (from Three Shakespeare Songs)

- Peter Warlock, "Sigh no more, ladies"

- Roger Quilter, "Come away, Death"

- Stephen Sondheim, "Fear no more the heat o' the sun" (from The Frogs)

- Dominick Argento, "When icicles hang by the wall" (from Six Elizabethan Songs)

Not bad for a high-pressure improvisation....

Posted March 22, 10:12 AM

TT: More circumstances beyond our control

To those of you who wrote yesterday and this morning to warn me that www.terryteachout.com, the alternate address for "About Last Night," was out of order:

(1) Thanks.

(2) It's fixed.

I return you now to our regularly scheduled blog.

Posted March 22, 9:59 AM

TT: Day one

I just got back to my Washington hotel after my first day of meetings as a member of the National Council on the Arts. I can't tell you what I did today, because this was the first of two days' worth of closed sessions, but I can say that my fellow NCA members are without exception serious, thoughtful, and collegial, and that I've already learned a huge amount about the workings of the National Endowment for the Arts, all of it impressive (to me, anyway).

In lieu of spilling the official beans, let me direct you to a very interesting profile of Dana Gioia, chairman of the NEA, that appeared a couple of days ago in the San Diego Union-Tribune. Here's the money quote:

"I would say that the major reform I've made at the endowment can be summarized pretty easily," Gioia said. "Historically, the National Endowment for the Arts thought of itself as a federal agency that served artists. Today, the NEA sees itself as a federal agency which serves the American public by bringing the best of the arts and arts education to all Americans."

He said the same thing to us today. Read the whole story and you'll see exactly what he meant.

I also took that v. cool friend of mine to the Phillips Collection this morning, where we looked over a beautifully mounted Modigliani retrospective that's an absolute must-see, even if you're not all that enthusiastic about Modigliani (which I'm still not).

Now I've got to get to bed--tomorrow is going to be an even longer day. Stay out of trouble while I'm gone.

Posted March 22, 9:56 AM

OGIC: More elsewhere

The Little Professor has one of her chilling tales from the teaching front. I suspect these may be somewhat more amusing to us than to her. This particular story also reminded me of a wee shred of dialogue from last week's Arrested Development. Teenaged Mabey, discovering that her cousin is getting out of school for a day to go to a Christian camp, decides that perhaps she too should find religion.

Mabey: Do you know where I can get one of those gold chains with a T on it?

Michael (her uncle): Uh, Mabey, that's a cross.

Mabey: Across from what?

Meanwhile, Carrie at Tingle Alley is especially prolific of late, which is always good news in my book. Highlights include an impromptu Division I game of Humiliation and this reflection on James Woods, Marilynne Robinson, and the problem (or not) of the good protagonist. This last item is especially interesting to me right now, as I'm working on reviews of one new novel that takes on this challenge explicitly, with mixed results, and another that follows what some would call the easier, or at least better-traveled, road of employing a protagonist who is pretty much defined by his flaws. I'll have more to say about this when these reviews are finished and printed. For now I'll just note that the latter book seems, on a first consideration, to give me more to grapple with as a reader--more sustenance. Whether these impressions hold up to closer scrutiny, and how much they reflect the relative goodness of the characters, are questions I'll be trying to work out in writing the reviews.

Posted March 22, 3:45 AM

OGIC: In absentia

I'm still out of Chicago, and posting from my corner will continue to be light for the next couple of days. There's lots of worthwhile reading out there, however, beginning with the debutante blog The Gurgling Cod*, the creation of About Last Night pal the Fesser. If he weren't already my friend, he would be making serious headway in that direction with this opening installment of musical links in tribute to hockey's Original Six.

It almost makes up for the time he sent me a Patrick Roy birthday card.

*Wonder whether he's offering any sort of door prize to the first reader to identify his blog's namesake?

Posted March 22, 3:25 AM

March 21, 2005

TT: Chased by a bear

I'm about to leave for Washington, D.C., where I'll:

(1) Be sworn in as a member of the National Council on the Arts and attend my first meeting.

(2) See the Kennedy Center's production of Mister Roberts.

(3) Take a v. cool friend to the Phillips Collection for the first time.

(4) Follow my brother around. (He's coming to Washington to represent the family at my swearing-in, but he has a long list of other stuff he wants to do.)

(5) Try to get some work done on Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong.

I'll be gone until Saturday, and while I'll be taking my iBook with me, it isn't likely that I'll be doing much blogging, given the demands of my itinerary. I promise to check in with you if time permits, though, and of course I'll be back at the old stand next Monday, rain or shine. I'm not sure what OGIC will be up to while I'm gone, but I'm sure she'll be poking her head in from time to time, so be sure to look in on us.

Later. Have a nice week.

P.S. The Top Fives are updated. Take a look!

Posted March 21, 12:03 PM

TT: Answer man

It happens that I've never filled out the celebrated Proust Questionnaire, so when I saw that Searchblog had done so the other day, I thought that doing the same thing might be a nice note on which to hit the road.

Here goes:

- What is your most marked characteristic? Curiosity.

- What is the quality you most like in a man? The ability to argue without becoming angry.

- What is the quality you most like in a woman? A sense of the absurd.

- What do you most value in your friends? Kindness and warmth.

- What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Impatience.

- What is your favorite occupation? Conversation with a loved one over a good meal.

- What is your idea of perfect happiness? The same, minus the meal and in closer proximity.

- What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? Siegfried.

- In which country would you like to live? This one, in the Fifties.

- Who are your favorite writers? Johnson, Trollope, Dostoevsky, James, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Colette, Waugh, Flannery O'Connor, M.F.K. Fisher.

- Who are your favorite poets? Shakespeare, Dickinson, Hardy, Frost, Yeats, Auden, Larkin.

- Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Father Hugh Kennedy, in Edwin O'Connor's The Edge of Sadness. Runner-up: Lucky Jim Dixon.

- Who is your favorite heroine of fiction? Vicky Haven, in Dawn Powell's A Time to Be Born.

- Who are your favorite composers? Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Fauré, Stravinsky, Ravel, Britten, Copland. (If I could add a jazz musician, it'd be Jim Hall.)

- Who are your favorite painters? Chardin, Constable, Cézanne, Bonnard, Morandi, John Marin, Milton Avery, Hans Hofmann, Fairfield Porter, Helen Frankenthaler.

- What are your favorite names? Anne, Ali, Erin, Heather, Kate, Laura, Libby, Tanaquil (all accented on the first syllable, for what it's worth).

- What is it that you most dislike? Smugness. "I detest a man who knows that he knows" (Justice Holmes).

- Which talent would you most like to have? I wish I could dance like Fred Astaire. (I wish I could walk like Fred Astaire.) Failing that, I wish I could play drums like Dave Tough.

- How would you like to die? In a state of grace, after having seen my last, best book through the press.

- What is your current state of mind? Frazzled but expectant.

- What is your motto? "Be generous and delicate and pursue the prize" (Henry James). Alternate motto for especially hectic days: "If there's no alternative, there's no problem" (James Burnham).

Posted March 21, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way: we this way."

William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost

Posted March 21, 12:00 PM

TT: Bobby Short, R.I.P.

I got word while packing of the death this morning of Bobby Short, the great cabaret singer. (Here's the Associated Press obituary.) I met him on my very first trip to New York City, an encounter I recalled in City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy:

My biggest adventure consisted of going by myself to the early show at the Café Carlyle, neatly dressed in a black suit that my mother and I had picked out at a factory outlet store in Bloomfield.

I went to the Café Carlyle because I was, believe it or not, a fan of Bobby Short, a cabaret singer who performs there regularly. I first read about Bobby Short in a piece Rex Reed wrote for Stereo Review back when I was in high school. Hungry for a taste of the glamorous life, I ordered Bobby Short is Mad About Noël Coward and Bobby Short Loves Cole Porter from Collins Piano Company, the only place in Smalltown, U.S.A., where you could place special orders for records. Going to see my idol in person seemed to me the perfect way to round out my trip to New York, so I booked a table for one and turned up half an hour before show time, blissfully ignorant of the fact that the Café Carlyle is an elegant watering hole intended for well-to-do New Yorkers, not teenage boys in ill-fitting black suits.

Not being much of a drinker, I decided to consume my minimum by having a late supper at my tiny table. I tore into my shrimp cocktail with gusto, unaware that anything was wrong until I put down my fork, looked around, and saw that no one else in the room was eating. I might well have died of embarrassment had it not been for the fact that Bobby Short, formerly of Danville, Illinois, spotted me for an out-of-towner the moment he walked through the door and came straight to my table to say hello, an act of kindness for which I am still grateful. I talked about it for weeks, though I knew only three or four people who knew who Bobby Short was, which took most of the starch out of the story after the first few tellings....

I never went back to the Carlyle to see him again, not wanting to disturb that perfect memory, though I continued to listen to his lovely, elegant recordings. I wish I had time to pay fuller tribute to his artistry, but I have to catch a train for Washington. On the other hand, perhaps this reminiscence of a small-town boy at large in the big city is the best possible tribute I could pay to a sophisticated singer who was also, at least to me, a very nice man.

Posted March 21, 10:36 AM

TT: Here I am

I'm posting from a very nice Washington hotel room (you're paying for it, so the least you can do is enjoy it vicariously) after a wild do-this-do-that-no-this morning, followed by a hair-raising cab ride to Penn Station and a tranquil train ride to our nation's capital. I chewed up NEA-related paperwork all the way from New York to Philadelphia, then took a lovely nap. I'm meeting a friend for dinner shortly, after which I'll return to the hotel and try to knock out a few more pages of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. The festivities start tomorrow.

For the moment, I'm listening to Pee Wee Russell on my iBook and marveling yet again at the joys of technology. All I had to do to connect to the blogosphere was stick a plug into the side of my computer and click a few keys, and there...I...was! I don't normally take my computer on trips like this (to do so makes it too tempting to work when I need to be unwinding), but since I had to make an exception, I figured I'd say hello.

Now it's time for dinner. I might blog tomorrow, and I might not. OGIC might or might not do the same. There's just no telling what we'll do!

Later.

Posted March 21, 5:43 AM

March 18, 2005

TT: Here we go again

To begin with, OGIC and I--as well as artsjournal.com in general, including its associated blogs--have been suffering from a severe case of circumstances beyond our control. For reasons not yet explained to me, and which I probably won't understand once they've been explained, none of us has been able to post anything for the past couple of days. (You already knew this if you looked at the main artsjournal.com page, on which Doug McLennan, our fearless leader and host, was able to inscribe a due-to-technical-difficulties notice just before the electronic ceiling caved in.) Hence our collective silence.

OGIC and I both had unposted items in the pipeline when the lights went out, and they are now available for your delectation, along with my postings for today. Our Girl just left town, and I'm not sure when she's coming back, but we're hoping to be in touch by way of that delightfully old-fashioned communications device known as the telephone, and one or the other of us will fill you in thereafter on the details of her impending return to the blogosphere.

As for me, I remain strapped to my desk in New York, but this is the first time since very early Tuesday morning that I've been able to write and post anything longer than an almanac entry. The reason for my absence is, if I do say so myself, pretty sensational: I've finished the first chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. It's an 8,300-word "prologue" in which I begin by jumping boldly into the middle of Armstrong's life, describing in detail his 1956 debut with the New York Philharmonic, a one-nighter that ended up being a turning point in his career. That story told, I devote the rest of the chapter to a scene-setting sketch of Armstrong's personality and historic significance. Readers of The Skeptic will recognize this narrative tactic--I did the same thing with H.L. Mencken in the first chapter--and since it seemed to work well there, I decided to start Hotter Than That in a similar manner.

Eighty-three hundred words: that's not much compared to the hundred-thousand-word whole, but it's a hell of a lot more than nothing, which is what I started with three weeks ago. To put it in a happier-sounding way, I've written one-tenth of Hotter Than That. Either way, I feel incredibly excited, not to mention exhausted, since I wrote and edited most of those 8,300 words very late at night (I was up until five Tuesday morning finishing the first draft). I'm on the scoreboard at last, and I like what I've written so far.

I wish I could open a bottle of champagne and take the rest of the week off, but that isn't going to happen. Not only do I have to go to two more Broadway previews between now and Sunday, but on Monday I board the Acela Express for Washington to attend my first meeting of the National Council on the Arts, and I won't be back in New York until next Saturday afternoon. I'm going to bring my iBook with me, and I plan to spend as much of my spare time as possible working on the next chapter. I doubt I'll be able to do anything more than edit what I've already written, though, so my hope is to get a preliminary draft of the first half of the chapter down on paper, so to speak, before I hit the road on Monday. For this reason, I haven't done a whole lot of celebrating, unless you call going to see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a celebration. (Exorcism is more like it.) Instead, I took a shower and treated myself to an unhurried lunch, then returned to my desk and started describing New Orleans in 1901. Like Crash Davis says in Bull Durham, the moment's over.

Well, not quite over. I e-mailed a copy of the first chapter to my brother in Missouri, and he in turn is printing it out on paper so that my computer-unfriendly mother can read it. In addition, I sent copies to OGIC and a couple of other close friends, and I trust they'll respond with an inspiring combination of lavish praise and helpful suggestions.

As for you folks out there in the 'sphere, you're going to be hearing a lot more about Hotter Than That in the course of the next couple of years, so I won't hose you down any more today. I will, however, share with you a freshly written snippet of the prologue. I hope you like it:

Louis Armstrong's pride was ever and always visible in his glowing smile. You can see it, for example, in a photo taken in 1968 when he met Pope Paul VI at the Vatican, in which a glint of delight can be seen on the pope's tired, worn face. As for Armstrong, he looks blissful. Perhaps he was marveling that a bastard child born in a back alley, one whose mother had mad his school lunches from the pickings of white people's garbage, should have grown up to meet two popes, chat with Ed Murrow, make movies with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, share a stage with Leonard Bernstein, and be recognized in every corner of the earth. Music had brought him all these things, and something more: in return for a lifetime of unswerving dedication, he knew true happiness, and shared it with his fellow men. He might well have told them, with Constantin Brancusi, that "it is pure joy that I offer you." Like other self-made men, it sometimes slipped his mind that his success was due not merely to work and pluck but also to the talent with which he had been born, but he never forgot, not for a moment, that his painstaking mastery of that inchoate talent gave him access to a pleasure so transcendent that all else paled next to it. He said more than once that his music was more important than anything, even his marriages. "When I pick up that horn," he explained, "that's all. The world's behind me, and I don't concentrate on nothin' but it....That my livin' and my life. I love them notes. That why I try to make 'em right. See?"

And now...back to work.

Posted March 18, 12:03 PM

TT: Hol(e)y grail

Friday again, and time for my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I saw two shows, Monty Python's Spamalot and Belfast Blues. Unlike most of the rest of the world, I preferred the second to the first--strongly:

"Spamalot" stars Tim Curry (of "Rocky Horror Picture Show" fame) and David Hyde Pierce (of "Frasier" fame) and is directed by Mike Nichols (of universal fame). Furthermore, I don't doubt that every Monty Python buff in the greater New York area has already bought a ticket. So it is with regret and some surprise that I must report the following bad news: It's a bore....

So what went wrong? For openers, the new songs are mostly Broadway genre parodies that aren't knowing enough to be more than mildly amusing. "The Song That Goes Like This," for example, is a toothless sendup of the faceless first-act ballads with which so many contemporary musicals are afflicted: "A sentimental song/That casts a magic spell/They all will hum along/We'll overact like hell." (Memo to Mr. Idle: Meta is so over.) As for the bright-young-collegiate humor of the book, most of which comes straight from the film, it's both dated and unexpectedly slow-moving. TV-style comedy zips along much faster now than it did when "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" was made, and I found myself squirming in my seat as each bit was dragged out to its well-remembered conclusion, wondering why my 19-year-old self had found the same punch lines so funny....

Belfast Blues, Geraldine Hughes' one-woman play about growing up amid the Irish Troubles, is a very different story:

It's a well-written, grippingly acted piece of work. I even liked it despite being severely allergic to Irish whimsy, in which Ms. Hughes sometimes indulges to excess (she needs to ease off on the wide eyes). For the most part, though, she paints a tough-minded portrait of life in a violent land reduced to collective dementia by the evil confluence of religious zealotry and class resentment....

No link. Go buy the paper--you can spare a dollar. Or go here and discover the joys of a subscription to the Journal's online edition.

Posted March 18, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

I have been long a sleeper; but I trust
My absence doth neglect no great design
Which by my presence might have been concluded.

William Shakespeare, Richard III

Posted March 18, 12:00 PM

March 17, 2005

TT: Almanac

"Along the journey we commonly forget its goal. Almost every vocation is chosen and entered upon as a means to a purpose but is ultimately continued as a final purpose in itself. Forgetting our objectives is the most frequent stupidity in which we indulge ourselves."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow

Posted March 17, 9:27 AM

March 16, 2005

TT: Almanac

"The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn't discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip."

Leon Edel, Paris Review interview (Writers at Work, Eighth Series)

Posted March 16, 12:01 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"She made her characters, held them, to the letter of the law. If one of Gertrude's heroines, running to snatch from the lips of her little daughter a half-emptied bottle of furniture-polish, fell and tore her skirt, Gertrude knew the name of the dressmaker who had made that skirt--and it was the right one for a woman of that class, at that date; she knew the brand of the furniture-polish that the little girl had swallowed; she knew, even, the particular exclamation that such a woman, tearing her skirt at such a moment, would have uttered--the particular sin that the woman, in thinking of her skirt at such a moment, would have committed. (The Church itself had no such casuist as Gertrude.) But how the child felt as it seized and drank the polish, how the mother felt as she caught the child to her breast--about such things as these, which have neither brand nor date, Gertrude was less knowing; would have said impatiently, 'Everybody knows that!'"

Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

Posted March 16, 3:32 AM

March 15, 2005

OGIC: Best guest

Over at Old Hag's, for a limited time, readers have the ear of a New Yorker cartoonist--and she's entertaining suggestions of fresh new cartoon settings! And lest you think that's all, there's a prize.

Posted March 15, 11:42 AM

OGIC: One more game?

Frankly, I probably won't. I am heading to Detroit on Thursday for a long weekend, so it's possible. And I had a good time watching basketball tonight. But why risk spoiling a perfect 1-0 record as a spectator? That's right, the out-of-nowhere Golden Grizzlies, team close to my heart, have a prom date. They kept their qualifying game close when the other team looked scary in the first half (Alabama A&M seemed to be under the impression that only 3-pointers counted, and for a while it looked like they might get away with that), then ran away with it in the second. I hear this next team is a sight more formidable, but--barring some absurd miracle--I think the Grizzlies will mean it when they say in their post-game interviews that they were happy just to be there. You know, like Tom Wolfe in the Morning News Tournament of Books. Oh...wait a minute...the semis? Huh.

By the way, did you know ESPN has a broadcaster called Len Elmore? Can't slip him past a native Detroiter.

Posted March 15, 10:31 AM

OGIC: Not exactly the arts

Go, little engine! I refer, of course, to the Oakland University Golden Grizzlies, who contend tonight for a berth in some big old basketball tournament about which I normally would not care, not even in lieu of the much-missed run-up to the NHL playoffs that should be absorbing all of my sports-dedicated attention right now. But the Golden Grizzlies occupy a special place in the hearts of the Demanskis, and for one special, unprecedented night, I will willingly watch college basketball.

You say 12 and 18? Upset specialists, say I. Go Grizzlies!

Posted March 15, 10:05 AM

OGIC: Exegesis in the slicks

A small new feature has cropped up in the book section of the Atlantic Monthly, unique to the magazine as far as I can tell. It's called "Close Reads," and both installments that I've seen have been written by Christina Schwarz. In the most recent issue she illuminates a single paragraph from an Ann Beattie story, "Find and Replace"; the month before that she gave similar treatment to a tiny passage from John Updike's "Villages" (subscription required for this one, though you can view the passage without it).

I love this feature. There's something faintly fusty about it--back to basics--and yet a really great close reading can be so dazzling (Schwarz does pretty well with hers, unearthing lots from seemingly straightforward extracts while avoiding getting too schoolmarmish about it). There's no room in a typical newspaper or magazine book review to perform analysis quite this detailed, even though it's just the sort of work one hopes critics' larger judgments are built on.

The nice thing about Schwarz's analyses is that they not only unravel the meanings and effects packed into her chosen fragments, but show how they're representative of that author's particular bag of tricks. And there's just something that feels salutary about having these little demonstrations of good reading tucked in among the large-scale reviews. If I were in charge of a book section, I'd lift this idea in a heartbeat. I'm sure there are many, say, book bloggers who would be only too happy to pitch in with some readings.

Posted March 15, 3:00 AM

TT: Man at work

This is to warn you that I'll be deeply immersed in writing Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong for the remainder of the week. Any postings that happen to find their way onto the blog will be...er, fortuitous.

Later.

Posted March 15, 1:05 AM

TT: Almanac

"I'm playin' a date in Florida years ago, livin' in the colored section and I'm playin' my horn for myself one afternoon. A knock come on the door and there's an old, gray-haired flute player from the Philadelphia Orchestra, down there for his health. Walking through that neighborhood, he heard this horn, playing this ‘Cavalleria Rusticana,' which he said he never heard phrased like that before, but still to him it was as if an orchestra was behind it. Well, that what I mean by imagination. That the way I express myself because I read that story and I just put it in spade life--colored life--where this guy in the story, he fooled around with this man's wife and this cat finally picked up on it and stuck him in the back with a knife or somethin' like that."

Louis Armstrong (quoted in The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 20, 1960)

Posted March 15, 1:03 AM

March 14, 2005

TT: Out of the box

For a long time I used to file away clippings of my old magazine articles, but I stopped saving them with the coming of Web-based archives. Now I keep only electronic copies of my stuff, and once I'd put together A Terry Teachout Reader, in which I collected some of the pieces I published between 1987 and 2002, I decided the time had come to dispose of my old clips. Suspecting myself of excessive vanity and pointless nostalgia, I decided, like Thoreau, to simplify my life, so I sold two-thirds of my books and threw out a huge pile of clips and other mementoes, keeping only what I could stuff into one small cardboard box.

Time, however, has a way of doubling back on you. The current occupant of my previous apartment called the other day to tell me that I'd left behind another box of miscellaneous items. It surfaced, she said, in the course of a major housecleaning. Did I want it, or should she throw it out? I thought for a moment, then told her I'd be right over. Curiosity had gotten the better of asceticism. I picked up the box and toted it home.

Here's what I found inside:

- The printed programs of all the plays in which I acted in high school and college, going back to 1972. (Don't ask--I was awful. I had a lot of fun, though.)

- Three souvenirs from my maiden voyage to New York in December of 1975, a week-long trip organized by one of my college professors.

The first was the program for a performance of New York City Ballet's Nutcracker, my first Balanchine ballet. Peter Boal was one of the children in the first-act Christmas party. Now he's retiring from NYCB to become the artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet. Sic transit!

The second was the souvenir program for Harold Prince's Broadway revival of Candide. (Just last week I reviewed New York City Opera's revival of Prince's opera-house production of the same show.)

The third, scrawled in my still-unformed handwriting on a piece of hotel stationery, was an itinerary of everything I did in New York, including the menus of all the meals I ate. That was the week I first tasted onion soup, vichyssoise, ratatouille, pheasant, chicken Kiev, and chocolate mousse. Most of the restaurants at which I made these happy discoveries have long since closed their doors, but the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim are still around, as is the Café Carlyle, where I heard Bobby Short sing Cole Porter (he's retiring this year, too). I also saw Tom Stoppard's Travesties and Alan Ayckbourn's Norman Conquests, a mediocre musical called Shenandoah (it starred John Cullum, whom I've since reviewed twice for The Wall Street Journal), a forgettable concert by the New York Philharmonic, Boris Godunov and Puccini's Trittico at the Met, and two mixed bills danced by American Ballet Theatre, including a performance of Spectre of the Rose by Mikhail Baryshnikov, who had just defected from the Soviet Union. Lauren Bacall was sitting in front of me that evening, and I regret to say that I spent more time looking at her than at Baryshnikov.

- A photocopy of my first professional newspaper review, published in the September 24, 1977 issue of the Kansas City Star. It was of a recital by a Russian violinist named Marek Piskunov, about whom I had mostly nice things to say:

Some musicians are a picture of their playing, and Marek Piskunov is a case in point. He hurls himself into his work with visible abandon, reinforcing accents with an emphatic stamp of the foot, swaying awkwardly with the phrase.

Piskunov's stage presence mirrored his violin playing last night. His style wants some polish. Occsional lapses of intonation and ungainly swells of tone rough up the surface, but a contagious enthusiasm lights the music from within....

I can't recall anything else about the concert, but I do remember that I got up first thing the next morning and drove to the nearest Kansas City Star coin box to buy a dozen copies of the paper (I only paid for one of them, though). That was the only time I ever heard Piskunov play, and a trip to Google yielded up no information about his later career or current whereabouts. I wonder what happened to him?

- A photocopy of my first magazine piece, published in the July 24, 1981 issue of National Review. It was a review of Liebling Abroad, an anthology of the essays of A.J. Liebling, who at that time was all but forgotten. I sent it over the transom to NR, hoping against hope that they'd print it. This is the first paragraph:

In the fashion-torn world of modern literature, the surest guide to posterity's ultimate inclinations may well be the used-book market. Dealers in used and out-of-print volumes know that the reputations of authors living and dead often rest not so much on best-seller lists or critical quarterlies as on the prices readers are willing to pay for the books they want to own. An A.J. Liebling book, for example, will always sell for at least $25; and even a beat-up paperback collection of Liebling pieces will bring $15, no questions asked. One suspects that Liebling, a connoisseur of the raffish who never sold well during his lifetime, would have appreciated so earthy an estimate of his long-term literary value.

The lead is pretentious, but it was clever of me to mention those used-book prices (I still love tucking facts like that into my pieces). The rest of the review, alas, is stiff as a board, except for one phrase I like: I called Liebling "a Beerbohm of the Bowery." Otherwise, I can see why I passed it over for the Teachout Reader. I'm not that sentimental.

Incidentally, those were the days when novice writers enclosed a stamped, self-addressed envelope with their typed manuscripts, and Chilton Williamson, who was National Review's back-of-the-book editor in 1981, used mine to send me his letter of acceptance. I was sure it contained a rejection letter, and I nearly fainted when I tore it open and saw that I'd cracked NR on my first try. I didn't save the letter, but I'll never forget how I felt when I read it.

- A 1986 NR review of The Cosby Show that I almost put in the Teachout Reader, mainly because of the first paragraph:

Situation comedies are the stock exchange of American desire. When breadwinning and housewifery were up, television gave us Leave It to Beaver and My Three Sons. As Americans gradually abandoned the crumbling ideal of the nuclear family and began to look for emotional satisfaction in the surrogate womb of the workplace, new shows like Barney Miller and M*A*S*H began to dominate the sitcom scene. Even Mary Tyler Moore, who cheerfully kept house for Dick Van Dyke in the forgotten days of the New Frontier, worked for a Minneapolis TV station and discreetly slept with handsome young men throughout the reign of Richard Nixon. It wasn't Mary's fault. It wasn't even Nixon's fault. The Nielsens made her do it.

I was thirty years old when I wrote that piece, by which time I was finally starting to sound like myself. It took me long enough!

- A 1987 essay for The American Spectator in which I made the following predictions about television in 2007:

No anchormen. "The entire network news system as we know it is doomed to extinction by the year 2007. The ‘talent,' as they say in the business, costs too much."

More dumb shows. "As usual, the futurologists miscalculated about cable. They thought it would spread faster than it did. But that spread is finally beginning to suck viewers away from the Mighty Three. The major networks will continue to exist, even to thrive, but only by becoming more sedulous in their attempts to pull in the maximum number of morons." (Yes, I'd been reading too much Mencken.)

More smart shows. "On the other hand, the bigger the cable audience, the more cost-effective it becomes for medium- and small-sized outfits to put together shows targeted at a tiny but affluent group of viewers."

No PBS. "Commercial cable services devoted to cultural programming are already competing with PBS for new shows from England and elsewhere....The more first-rate shows they steal from PBS, the harder it will become to justify subsidizing a network which already spends most of its air time broadcasting fund appeals."

All this in 1987, mind you. Maybe I should have become a TV critic.

- A 1994 copy of Mirabella into which I'd tucked a sheaf of clippings about Nancy LaMott, who died one year to the month after my profile of her appeared in that now-defunct magazine. One of them was a photocopy of the article I wrote about Nancy for the New York Daily News a few days after we first met. I hadn't seen it for a decade, and I'd forgotten two of the things she told me that night:

My family visited [New York] when I was 12, and I was already the kind of kid who read Earl Wilson's column and wanted to go to Sardi's and a Broadway show. Instead, we went on a Gray Line tour and saw the Empire State Building.

You know what I'd really like to do? I'd like to have a sitcom of my own. I'd like to be the Mary Tyler Moore of the '90s.

Unlikely as it may sound, I've never felt the slightest pang of regret about consigning so much of my past to the Staten Island landfill. I try as best I can to live in the present, and for the most part I seem to be pretty good at it. But neither am I sorry that I accidentally preserved a few souvenirs of my lost youth, and I think I'll hang onto them, at least for now. Perhaps some loved one of the future will smile at them one day.

Posted March 14, 12:01 PM

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- I got an e-mail last week from a priest I know who reads my Wall Street Journal drama column and likes it. At least I think he does. "So far," he wrote, "you've managed to avoid pseudo-sophistication." That dark qualifier--so far--made me smile. Has he detected a hint of phoniness in my other writings? Or is it merely that he knows most critics don't feel comfortable unless they're running with the pack?

Whatever he meant, I appreciate both the implicit warning and the explicit praise. I know what he means by "pseudo-sophistication," though I can't imagine falling victim to it. Perhaps because I took up drama criticism at a comparatively advanced age, I'm simply not interested in theatrical fashion. In fact, I often don't know what it is at any given moment (though it's rarely hard to guess). Even when I do know, I don't pay any attention: I simply come home from a show, sit down at my iBook, and write what I think. Every once in a while I suspect I'm going to find myself way out on a limb come Friday morning, a prospect that neither pleases nor scares me.

- The Game Show Network's nightly installments of What's My Line? have now reached 1955, the year in which Fred Allen replaced Steve Allen as the show's fourth regular panelist. I doubt that many readers of this blog know who Fred Allen was, since he died in 1956 and is now mainly remembered, if at all, for his long-running radio series of the '30s and '40s. Yet he was one of the best-known comedians of his day, and was widely considered to be not merely a radio comic but a full-fledged wit (James Thurber was one of his biggest fans). Among other things, he wrote two very good books, Treadmill to Oblivion and Much Ado About Me, and a posthumous collection of his letters was published in 1965. An anthology of his writings came out just four years ago. I wonder how many other people my age or younger have read any of these books, much less all of them.

Of all my peculiar claims to singularity, this one may be the most revealing: I've never met another person whose head was crammed full of so much miscellaneous information about people like Fred Allen, most of it utterly useless. To put it another way, I can be boring about more subjects than anyone I know. Fortunately, I'm painfully aware that I suffer from this chronic disability, and sometimes even manage to guard against inflicting it on my friends. I once had an insomniac significant other who claimed to find it tranquilizing to listen to me delivering impromptu lectures on random subjects (she claimed to be particularly fond of hearing me talk about the use of the rhythm guitar in swing-era jazz).

If only I knew half so much about making large amounts of money! Alas, none of my preferred subjects is more than modestly renumerative....

Posted March 14, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter--we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure--news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelve-month, or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy."

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Posted March 14, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"When an item struck his imagination he would sometimes write a sentence or two down in his notebook. He kept the notebook in his overcoat pocket, as he was not the type to write ostentatiously in bars or coffee shops. Just then he felt an image coming up to the surface, something about the faces outside the window, like a whole school of fish turning at once, the silvery bodies in three dimensions, something about the way they didn't recognize themselves as beautiful but just kept on schooling to their separate ends. Then remembered that Pound had gotten there first: petals on a wet, black bough...It was not fair that so many of his best ideas were someone else's."

Kevin Canty, Winslow in Love

Posted March 14, 4:27 AM

OGIC: The other shoe (N to Z)

Movie quotes keep trickling in. It's okay with me--I'll gladly use them as a mine for future fortune cookies. In the meantime, here are a few more personal faves from the initial avalanche:

Buzzards gotta eat, same as worms. (Outlaw Josey Wales)

That's one of the tragedies of this life--that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous. (The Palm Beach Story, written by Preston Sturges)

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. (The Princess Bride)

Let's order sushi and not pay. (Repo Man)

Don't touch the hair! (Saturday Night Fever)

There's no such thing as adventure. There's no such thing as romance. There's only trouble and desire. (Simple Men)

I can't believe I gave my panties to a geek. (Sixteen Candles)

I'm tired of getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop! (Some Like It Hot)

I can't die yet. There are many men I must kill first. (Yojimbo)

Hey, nobody said they had to be profound.

Posted March 14, 4:22 AM

OGIC: Over there

In yesterday's Chicago Tribune I reviewed Stop That Girl by Elizabeth McKenzie, a "novel in stories" that has been covered almost everywhere. It struck me as stripped-down Lorrie Moore--which is almost by definition too stripped down--and it lost me by the end. But I was taken with McKenzie's fresh, promising device of jumping a few years between stories, sometimes leaving important events unnarrated so that the reader experiences them only through their repercussions. This tactic reminded me of Michael Apted's wonderful "Up" documentary film project:

I wanted to like Elizabeth McKenzie's "Stop That Girl" more than I finally did. What made me root for it? It's unsentimental; its young narrator looks at the world through an oddball's eyes; she dispenses with consoling illusions early. The writing has a cool economy, too--it's the opposite of flowery. But most of all, I was intrigued by McKenzie's fresh approach to putting together a short-story collection. She calls "Stop That Girl" a "novel in stories," which may sound dubious: Why stories rather than chapters? Is this more than gratuitous cleverness?

It is. For one thing, all the stories here are capable of standing alone; each has its own arc and logic. What really grabbed me about this device, however, was just what makes Michael Apted's "Up" film series ("Seven Up," "7 Plus Seven," "21 Up," etc.) following a group of Britons from age 7 through (so far) age 42 so appealing: the irresistible fascination of checking in on someone's life progress at intervals. The nine stories that make up "Stop That Girl" cover Ann Ransom's life from age 7 until she's a 20-something mother. But we stop and look in on her only every couple of years, and a lot more happens offstage than on.

McKenzie may really be onto something. I loved the innovative structure of Stop That Girl and the way it messes with conventional novelistic continuity--which is nowhere so drearily entrenched as in coming-of-age novels. But I didn't love the meager story this novel told. In the end I felt that McKenzie took the laudable ideal of economy to an extreme. Her book left me feeling underfed, hungering for more: more description, more emotion, more incident, more of everything. I would love to read a book employing a similar structure while telling a richer story.

Posted March 14, 3:49 AM

March 13, 2005

TT: Apologies

C-SPAN neglected to tell me that "The Problem of Political Art," the Bradley Lecture I delivered last Monday at the American Enterprise Institute, would be airing on Saturday as part of its American Perspectives series. I've been getting e-mail all day from people who saw me holding forth on TV last night. Alas, I was otherwise occupied.

The good news (such as it is) is that anyone with RealVideo can watch the lecture on line as soon as it's posted on C-SPAN's Web site. It isn't up yet, but this is where you'll be able to find it when the time comes, presumably tomorrow or a little later in the week.

Posted March 13, 2:15 AM

March 11, 2005

TT: The best of all possible scores

Friday again. The Wall Street Journal again. Theater again. Two shows this week, Harold Prince's opera-house production of Candide and Woman Before a Glass, a one-woman play about Peggy Guggenheim.

The first I liked very much, with some inescapable but forgivable reservations:

Leonard Bernstein's "Candide" is back on Broadway--almost. New York City Opera, whose Lincoln Center headquarters is a block from Broadway and slightly north of the theater district, has revived its 1982 production of Bernstein's 1956 operetta. Like the show itself, this "Candide" is flawed, but it definitely works, and unlike the semi-staged concert version presented last spring by the New York Philharmonic, which ran for just four performances, it plays through next Saturday, long enough for the word to get out....

Mr. Prince's staging (reproduced by Arthur Masella) is full of good, dirty fun. The cast is generally fine, though Mr. Cullum isn't quite right as Voltaire/Pangloss--he's broad and bluff, not sharp and sardonic--and Ms. Christy, a very good Cunegonde in her own right, inevitably labors in the shadow of Kristin Chenoweth's billion-volt performance with the New York Philharmonic. Nor is the New York State Theater well suited to Richard Wilbur's quick-witted lyrics, which are best heard in a smaller house, ideally on Broadway.

Still, any "Candide" is infinitely better than none at all, and this one is performed with zesty, infectious relish....

The second I thought less successful as a show, but the acting redeems all:

Mercedes Ruehl has taken up residence at the Promenade Theatre, where she is starring in "Woman Before a Glass," a one-woman play by Lanie Robertson about the life and loves of the late Peggy Guggenheim, an American heiress turned art dealer who bought a Venetian palazzo and filled it with her 260-piece collection of avant-garde paintings and sculpture....

Ms. Ruehl is in splendid, even spectacular form. Never having met Guggenheim, I can't tell you whether her performance is true to life, but it's full of life, outrageous and uproarious and, in the end, pitiful....

No link, needless to say. To read the whole thing, buy today's Journal at your favorite newsstand, or go here and subscribe to the online edition. (I recommend the latter.)

Posted March 11, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Not many of the living are so real as the dead that are beloved."

Stark Young, letter to Thomas Wolfe (March 2, 1936)

Posted March 11, 12:00 PM

March 10, 2005

OGIC: Letters A to M

I have to be somewhere else this morning, but fling a fistful of cookies behind me as I head out the door...

"What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." (All About Eve)

"What are you a wizard?! A genius?!" (Best in Show)

"Two dollars!" (Better Off Dead)

"I'll meet you at the place where we did that thing that time." (Broadcast News)

"You can leave in a taxi. If you can't get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff." (Duck Soup)

"What are you lookin' at?" "I'm lookin' at a tin star with a drunk pinned on it." (El Dorado)

"I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me." (In a Lonely Place)

"It's the stuff dreams are made of." (The Maltese Falcon)

Back later.

Posted March 10, 9:15 AM

TT: Overegging the pudding

I returned from Washington this afternoon to find in my e-mailbox this note from a friend who's been worrying about my reputation:

Remember when I said you shouldn't hit every deadline so reliably, because it will make some dunderhead think you're not an artist? In the same spirit, I want you to slow down a little. I want you to start spreading stories of your suffering--up at night, anguished at the burden of capturing such a great man's art, honored by the opportunity to find and focus on Satchmo, listening over and over to his early recordings, hitting the crystal meth a little too hard. (We'll think about that last one.) I just think many people are surprisingly primitive, even intellectuals, sometimes especially intellectuals, and are inclined to see truth in clichés--art is agony, etc. Which of course sometimes it is. But Van Gogh would have been great even if he'd kept all his ears. It appears I'm veering off course. Anyway let's blur your reputation for happy productivity a little....

Once I stopped laughing--which took a minute or two--I gave brief consideration to posting in more or less that vein about my back-to-back voyages to the nation's capital. Alas, the only suffering I underwent was outside the White House Tuesday morning, where I spent fifteen shivering minutes waiting for a cab in a cold, windy rainstorm. Beyond that, the only thing I can honestly tell you is that I'm bone-tired, for which reason the thought of spending the coming weekend writing, even about Louis Armstrong, is somewhat less than attractive. Nevertheless, I had great fun, and I came back with a gorgeous copy of Fairfield Porter's "Ocean II" to add to the Teachout Museum. If this be suffering, I'll have another helping, please.

On that ambiguously sunny note, here are some highlights of my recent travels:

- My Bradley Lecture to the American Enterprise Institute on "The Problem of Political Art" was well attended (by two different bloggers, among others). It was the first speech I'd given while wearing my new bifocals, and I thought my rhythm was a bubble off plumb as a result, but everybody was nice enough to tell me that I sounded just fine, so maybe I did. You can see for yourself on C-SPAN, which will be airing the lecture some time in the next few weeks. (If they tell me, I'll tell you.) In addition, a longer essay on the same subject will appear in the May issue of In Character: A Journal of Everyday Virtues, a new magazine published by the John Templeton Foundation. I'll post a link when one is available.

I dined chez AEI, whose in-house kitchen dished up a sit-down meal for twenty-odd invited guests. I got to eat some of the very good food (mmm, fresh asparagus) before the guests started pelting me with very good questions, some of which I apparently managed to answer to their satisfaction, since they let me have dessert.

- I spent the night in a boutique hotel around the corner from AEI. It shall remain nameless, but I do want to share a few details of my stay there, most of them culled from the promotional literature of what I'll call the Hotel Nirvana. The hotel's slogan is "Om Away From Home." The staff wears Indian-style attire, and the rooms are decorated accordingly. According to a brochure handily placed next to a complimentary copy of Yoga Journal:

From the opulent lobby to the fanciful guestroom, enlightenment pervades every aspect of the guest experience....As the door to the guestroom opens, visitors are drawn into their own pesonal sanctuary. This is their grounded center, their root of awakening. Like a belly laugh of Buddha, the room is both a temple to tranquility and a shrine to amusement....Here, employee of the month is the one who ensures the euphoric bliss of every guest. The concierge is a Sensei, the bellhop is a swami, even the valet is a guru whose every word or action is inspirational and divine.

As if all this weren't enough, three polished stones were placed on my turned-down bedspread in lieu of chocolates, accompanied by a printed card explaining that guests were invited to "use these stones for inspiration and to connect with the richness and magic of their imagination." I'm not sure exactly what they were supposed to do for me (other than break my teeth if I'd tried to eat one before reading the card), but the bed was perfectly fine, and when I finally stopped giggling, I got a halfway decent night's sleep.

- I awoke early the next morning to the sound of rain and the knowledge that my raincoat was hanging serenely in my closet in New York (the weather having been unseasonably springlike on Monday). I checked out of the Hotel Nirvana, caused a cab to materialize, and levitated over to what is now known as the Eisenhower Office Building, where I met a member of the Bush administration who escorted me across the alley to breakfast at (in?) the White House Mess. The gentleman in question, it seems, had read All in the Dances (you're surprised already, right?) and wanted to meet me.

The mess, which is tucked into a corner of the White House basement, is a small paneled room with a low ceiling and eight or nine tables, one or two of which are likely to be occupied at any given moment by people with familiar faces. I sat two tables away from Karl Rove (too far to eavesdrop), and President Bush's father strolled in midway through our meal (he didn't stay for breakfast, though). I ordered corned beef hash, which was served to me on a china plate bearing the presidential seal. I'm pretty sure it came out of a can (which suited me just fine--I love canned corned beef hash).

As for the conversation, I swear I'm not making any of it up. My host led off by telling me he was sorry he'd been unable to attend my Bradley Lecture, to which I replied that he was more than welcome to come hear my Phillips Lecture on Wednesday.

HE: What are you talking about this time?

ME: Well, it's part of the Phillips Collection's lecture series, so I'm going to talk about my own art collection, and how my taste was influenced by looking at the Phillips.

HE: And what do you collect?

ME: Mostly prints by American modernists.

HE (looking interested): Really? Do you happen by any chance to own anything by Fairfield Porter?

I managed to stammer out that I owned five color lithographs by Porter and was picking up a sixth one on Thursday, and that Porter himself would figure prominently in my lecture, but if a thought balloon had appeared over my head at that moment, it would have read, That's the last thing I ever expected to be asked over corned beef hash in (at?) the White House Mess. (Oh, yes, we also talked about Helen Frankenthaler.)

- From there I went to Union Station, climbed aboard the next train for New York, and watched the rain turn to snow as I rumbled north to catch the press opening of New York City Opera's revival of Candide, to which I took an overjoyed young composer friend who couldn't have liked it better.

- I got up unnaturally early the next morning to write my drama column for Friday's Wall Street Journal. Then I removed five prints from the walls (four disappeared into a garment bag, the fifth went under my arm), returned to Penn Station, and caught yet another train for Washington. It was a half-hour late, so instead of stopping at the hotel to freshen up, I went straight to the Phillips Collection and met my handler, who escorted me across Dupont Circle to the Women's National Democratic Club, in whose banquet room the two of us supervised the hanging directly behind the podium of John Marin's "Downtown, the El," Milton Avery's "March at a Table," Fairfield Porter's "The Table