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April 29, 2005

TT: Wrong guy, nice try

Here's how busy I am: I almost forgot to post the weekly teaser for my Friday Wall Street Journal drama column. Yikes! Fortunately, I came to my senses at half past midnight, possibly because I'd been listening to a live recording by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony of Sibelius' Fourth Symphony, an experience not altogether dissimilar to having a bucket of ice water dumped over your head on a really hot day.

Now that I'm reconnected with my cerebral cortex, please allow me to draw your attention to my reviews of A Streetcar Named Desire and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, both of which are definitely worth seeing, albeit for very different reasons:

Most of the people I know who've seen (or heard about) the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of "A Streetcar Named Desire," which opened Tuesday at Studio 54, agree that John C. Reilly, who plays Stanley Kowalski, should have played Mitch instead. Nor do I beg to differ: Mr. Reilly is one of the best actors around, but he looks and sounds like a natural-born nice guy, just the kind of fellow who in real life might well make the mistake of falling for a loosely screwed dame like Blanche DuBois. That's Mitch all over, whereas Stanley is trouble on a stick, a walking, talking phallus who's as likely to knock a girl down and rape her as give her a lecture on the vices and versas of the Napoleonic Code. A Stanley who lacks the hard edge of sexual threat can't be right, no matter what else he has to offer.

Mr. Reilly, with his smiling eyes and bulbous clown nose, is all wrong as Stanley. But because he's also a smart, thoughtful artist with lots and lots to offer, he finds things in the part that previous actors, Marlon Brando included, have hitherto failed to suggest. Do you remember, for instance, what Stanley does for a living? No? Well, he's a traveling salesman--and Mr. Reilly brilliantly conveys his glad-handing, back-slapping side, an aspect of his character that's easy to overlook. He's also desperately, even abjectly in love with Stella (played to prize-winning perfection by Amy Ryan), and Mr. Reilly nails that, too. Never do you doubt that he'd do anything to hold onto his similarly obsessed wife. If this be miscasting, then Mr. Reilly, for all his inescapable limitations, makes the most of it....

I don't have any kids of my own, but I think I know a good time when I see one, and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," now playing at the Hilton Theatre, has fun written all over it. For openers, there's that car, a $1.4 million racer that, uh, flies. (I know, I know, it isn't really flying, but the illusion of flight contrived by designer Anthony Ward is jaw-droppingly persuasive.) There's also a flying villain, fancy sets, two confetti drops, and--not least--a high-octane cast led by Raúl Esparza as Caractacus Potts, the eccentric inventor who put the bang bang in Chitty Chitty....

No link. (You knew that.) Buy a copy of today's Journal to read the whole thing, of which there's oodles more. Or go here to subscribe to the Journal's online edition, the best bargain in newspaper journalism. Either way, you can't miss.

Posted April 29, 12:44 PM

TT: Too much information (and that's just tough)

Until last week I hadn't peered into Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (familiarly known in Shakespearean English as Remembrance of Things Past for reasons known only to Proust's first translator, C.K. Scott Moncrieff) since college days, save to check the odd quote from time to time. Don't ask me why, but when I flew my Upper West Side coop for a couple of days of silence and sunshine by the Hudson River, I tossed the first installment of the Modern Library's 1934 two-volume omnibus edition of A la recherche into my shoulder bag. I cracked it open as I sat by the river, and since then I haven't looked back.

No sooner did I return to Manhattan than I was filled with an irresistible desire to listen to the piece of music that is the real-life model for the imaginary sonata by M. Vinteuil with whose "little phrase" the narrator of A la recherche is obsessed (and which is the subject of today's almanac entry). If you've read George Painter's biography of Proust, you know what it is. If not, read on, bearing in mind that Reynaldo Hahn, the musician referred to below, was Proust's lover:

Reynaldo's traditionalism was no doubt salutary for himself, but would only have been disastrous for Proust: it could never have led to the invention of Vinteuil. To please Reynaldo he did his best to like Saint-Saëns: he wrote two articles in Le Gaulois of 14 January and 11 December 1895, in which, however, his attempts at praise only succeeded in displaying his reservations. "Saint-Saëns uses archaism to legitimise modernity; he bestows upon a commonplace, step by step, through the ingenious, personal, sublime appropriateness of his style, the value of an original creation...he is a musical humanist," says Proust very truly. And yet, it was from Reynaldo's tuition and from the charming, meritorious but secondary music of Saint-Saëns, that the "little phrase" of the Vinteuil Sonata took its beginning.

It was perhaps at Mme Lemaire's, and played by [Eugène] Ysaÿe ("his rendering is splendid, majestic and luminous, with admirable form," wrote Reynaldo in his diary), that Proust first heard the Saint-Saëns Sonata in D Minor for violin and piano. His imagination was captured by the chief theme of the first movement, a mediocre but haunting melody whose only musical merit is its simplicity, and whose fascination comes from its very banality, like that of a popular song or dance-tune, and its incessant repetition....Afterwards, in Reynaldo's room at 6 Rue du Cirque, with its enormous stone fireplace, or in the dining-room at 9 Boulevard Malesherbes, Proust would say: "Play me that bit I like, Reynaldo--you know, the 'little phrase.'" So the little phrase of Saint-Saëns became the "national anthem" of his love for Reynaldo, as Vinteuil's became that of Swann's love for Odette.

I yield to no one in my admiration for Painter's skills as a biographer, but as a music critic he left something to be desired. For this reason, I suggest you listen Saint-Saëns' D Minor Violin Sonata and try hearing for yourself what Proust heard in it. Alas, Jascha Heifetz's zephyr-swift, supremely aristocratic recording is currently out of print, but this version ought to be quite serviceable. (The "little phrase" is heard for the first time about a minute and a half into the first movement.) I put it on as soon as I got back from Cold Spring, and I've been listening to it ever since.

Would that Eugène Ysaÿe himself had recorded the "little phrase," but his recordings all date from 1912 and 1913, back when nobody thought a whole violin sonata was worth waxing. He did, however, record 15 short encore pieces, four of which are included on a two-CD anthology called The Great Violinists: Recordings from 1900-1913. The sound is dim and Ysaÿe himself was rather past his prime, but they still offer a treasurable glimpse of the immensely characterful playing of a legendary turn-of-the-century artist.

While we're on the subject of Proust-related recordings, I delight in telling you that Reynaldo Hahn also cut a double handful of ancient, scratchy 78s on which he can be heard singing, among other things, some of his own songs, all of them sung to his own deft piano accompaniment. He had a small, throaty baritone voice that didn't amount to much, but listen to his 1909 performance of "Offrande" (the text is by Verlaine) and you'll hear what I can do no better than to describe as the quintessence of all things French. Alan Blyth conveys its quality nicely:

Hahn's dry, evocative baritone runs through the song rather more quickly than one would expect; I cannot make up my mind whether that is because he wants it to be heard as a single, trancelike supplication to the loved one with many phrases taken in a single breath, or whether his frail voice simply could not sustain it at a slower pace. I incline to the former view. Whatever the reason, it is a reading that is so haunting that repeat performances are imperative, like the need to drink yet another glass of a dry eau de vie.

Exactly.

By the way, you'd probably better get used to hearing way the hell too much about Proust for at least the next couple of weeks. I'm totally immersed, and happy to be. To be sure, it's kind of strange to be revisiting A la recherche at the same time that I'm working on my Louis Armstrong biography, but the six-degrees-of-separation game will take you from Marcel to Louis in two easy steps, by way of Armstrong's friend Bix Beiderbecke...but I'll save that one for another day.

Posted April 29, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"When the least obvious beauties of Vinteuil's sonata were revealed to me, already, borne by the force of habit beyond the reach of my sensibility, those that I had from the first distinguished and preferred in it were beginning to escape, to avoid me. Since I was able only in successive moments to enjoy all the pleasures that this sonata gave me, I never possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself. But, less disappointing than life is, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best. In Vinteuil's sonata the beauties that one discovers at once are those also of which one most soon grows tired, and for the same reason, no doubt, namely that they are less different from what one already knows. But when those first apparitions have withdrawn, there is left for our enjoyment some passage which its composition, too new and strange to offer anything but confusion to our mind, had made indistinguishable and so preserved intact; and this, which we have been meeting every day and have not guessed it, which has thus been held in reserve for us, which by the sheer force of its beauty has become invisible and has remained unknown, this comes to us last of all. But this also must be the last that we shall relinquish. And we shall love it longer than the rest because we have taken longer to get to love it."

Marcel Proust, A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff)

Posted April 29, 12:00 PM

TT: Handoff

In case you've forgotten, or haven't been paying attention, the brainy and beauteous Our Girl in Chicago, who has a new job that's keeping her busy all the way from Monday to Friday, is now occupying the "About Last Night" blogger's chair on weekends, while I devote myself exclusively to chronicling the life, times, and dietary practices of Louis Armstrong. I don't know what she's got planned for this weekend, but I know it'll be good, so come take a peek.

As for me, I'll be back on Monday, probably neither rested nor refreshed, though I do plan to engage in a whole lot of cool activities when not whacking away at the old iBook. To be perfectly honest, I'd rather stay in bed, but duty calls. In the meantime, be sure to look in on OGIC while I'm doing the town.

(By the way, Girl, I miss you!)

Posted April 29, 2:04 AM

April 28, 2005

TT: A week in the life

THURSDAY: Up early for breakfast with Laura Lippman, who's in town for the Edgar Awards. Spend remainder of morning working on dummy layout for new Wall Street Journal capsule-review box. Lunch with Naomi Schaefer Riley to celebrate publication of her first book, God on the Quad (I helped!). Spend afternoon and evening frenziedly writing 10,000-word essay for Commentary about future of blogging, due next Monday. (It was supposed to be the first half of a two-part 7,000-word essay due this Monday, but my editor developed an acute case of folie de grandeur when I turned in the first installment, and now I'm tied to the tracks of the next issue.) Write, code, and post tomorrow's Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, along with witty reminder that Our Girl in Chicago now blogs on weekends only. Try to remember to take walk, look at Teachout Museum, read more Proust, call Mom in Smalltown, U.S.A., and go to bed no later than midnight. Do not hang by thumbs.

FRIDAY: Spend whole day frantically trying to polish off Commentary essay ahead of schedule, thus making it possible to spend weekend working on first chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong (which I rashly promised to deliver by hand to my editor at Harcourt over lunch next Thursday). Nap as needed. Meet newest friend (in whom I am well pleased) for dinner and preview of Broadway transfer of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Be sure to tell her how megacool she looked on TV the other night.

SATURDAY: Brunch with out-of-town jazz friends, followed by matinee preview of Glengarry Glen Ross, followed by as much writing as I can stand.

SUNDAY: Finish Commentary essay if it's not already done (if not, why not?). Otherwise, spend morning working on Hotter Than That. Cross fingers and pray that press preview of Sweet Charity takes place as expected this afternoon (it still hasn't been confirmed!). Catch Dena DeRose's first set at the Jazz Standard (see below). Blog if possible. If not, post unapologetic link to this posting.

MONDAY: D-Day at Commentary. Spend morning working on Hotter Than That and afternoon writing Wall Street Journal book review from scratch. Dinner in neighborhood, followed by in-house movie with visiting friend from deepest Brooklyn (viewing options include The Lavender Hill Mob, Sherlock, Jr., and The Palm Beach Story).

TUESDAY: Write Wall Street Journal theater column for Friday. If Sweet Charity preview took place on Sunday, catch train to Washington, D.C., to see Shakespeare Theatre's production of The Tempest. Otherwise, spend afternoon working on Hotter Than That, followed by evening preview of Sweet Charity (in which case this week's drama column will get written and filed tomorrow instead of today).

WEDNESDAY: Return to New York (if not already there) and finish first chapter of Hotter Than That. Suicide is not an option!

THURSDAY: D-Day No. 2. Go to bed after lunch. Stay there. Do not go out for dinner. Do not answer phone. Do not surf Web. Do not blog.

Posted April 28, 12:03 PM

TT: Words to the wise

- I just got back from Birdland, where Gary Burton is appearing with his new quintet through Saturday. If you took my advice and bought their brand-new CD, Next Generation, you won't need any further urging to go. Burton is, as ever and always, one of jazz's most thoughtful and creative virtuosos, and he never fails to surround himself with high-class sidemen. Teenage whiz-kid guitarist Julian Lage, for instance, has come a long, long way since I first saw him with Burton a year ago: he's now officially a monster. (For those of you who don't speak jazz, that's a good thing.)

This was, by the way, the first chance I've ever had to watch Burton play vibes up close and from the front. Seeing him manipulate his four mallets at something approaching Mach 2 is like chatting with a member of a more highly evolved species, which is why I found it oddly comforting when he accidentally dropped two mallets on the floor midway through his solo on Lage's "First Impression." It made me feel, oh, maybe one-tenth of one percent less clumsy than usual. It also reminded me of George Bernard Shaw's suggestion to the young Jascha Heifetz (probably apocryphal, but it's the sort of thing Shaw would have said to Heifetz) that he play at least one wrong note every night before going to bed "because the gods are jealous of perfection." Me, too.

- Dena DeRose, one of my favorite singer-pianists, opens Friday at the Jazz Standard for a three-day run. She, too, has a new CD, A Walk in the Park, on which she demonstrates the tremendous growth in her singing since she first hit Manhattan a decade or so ago. Her sidemen for the album and the gig are Martin Wind and Matt Wilson, to whom the cognoscenti need no introduction. I'll be there on Sunday.

P.S. Both clubs have good kitchens. Take advantage of them.

Posted April 28, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"If, however, despite all the analogies which I was to perceive later on between the writer and the man, I had not at first sight, in Mme. Swann's drawing-room, believed that this could be Bergotte, the author of so many divine books, who stood before me, perhaps I was not altogether wrong, for he himself did not, in the strict sense of the word, 'believe' it either. He did not believe it because he shewed a great assiduity in the presence of fashionable people (and yet he was not a snob), of literary men and journalists who were vastly inferior to himself. Of course he had long since learned, from the suffrage of his readers, that he had genius, compared to which social position and official rank were as nothing. He had learned that he had genius, but he did not believe it because he continued to simulate deference towards mediocre writers in order to succeed, shortly, in becoming an Academician, whereas the Academy and the Faubourg Saint-Germain have no more to do with that part of the Eternal Mind which is the author of the works of Bergotte than with the law of causality or the idea of God. That also he knew, but as a kleptomaniac knows, without profiting by the knowledge, that it is wrong to steal. And the man with the little beard and snail-shell nose knew and used all the tricks of the gentleman who pockets your spoons, in his efforts to reach the coveted academic chair, or some duchess or other who could dispose of several votes at the election, but while on his way to them he would endeavour to make sure that no one who would consider the pursuit of such an object a vice in him should see what he was doing. He was only half-successful; one could hear, alternating with the speech of the true Bergotte, that of the other Bergotte, ambitious, utterly selfish, who thought it not worth his while to speak of any but his powerful, rich or noble friends, so as to enhance his own position, he who in his books, when he was really himself, had so well portrayed the charm, pure as a mountain spring, of poverty."

Marcel Proust, A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff)

Posted April 28, 12:00 PM

TT: Waving goodbye

Here's Rick Brookhiser in the New York Observer:

Terry Teachout has a lively arts blog called "About Last Night" (www.terryteachout.com), in which he reviews the passing scene and his own life. When he is not doing these things, he urges artists and other readers to get with the Internet age. We are slow learners, so he can sound like the sergeant-major barking orders at the native levies. But since he is always interesting and often right, these exhortations to obey our online overlords are worth reading, too.

Mr. Teachout linked a speech by Rupert Murdoch to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, on the future of daily newspapers. Mr. Murdoch owns more newspapers than you do, so his opinions on the medium are not an idle thumb-suck....As I read it, Rupert Murdoch was being polite. What he was telling his colleagues was: Newspapers are dead.

Newspapers were more than the particular paper you read. They were part of the dawn, with toothpaste, coffee and trying to find the right sock. You got a rape and a war, weather and box scores, James Reston or Jimmy Breslin. If you read The Times, you got "Reports From Greenland Are Unclear." If you read the tabs, you got "RIPS OUT HEART, STOMPS ON IT." Now that's all gone. Now, three or six times a day, you get Glenn and Jonah and Mickey and Andrew and Drudge and Debka. You get Page 3 and hyper-Catholics, Bush Lied and Iraq the Model, hobbits in prehistoric Indonesia and elephants who foresaw the tsunami. You definitely do not get Thomas L. Friedman. If you need to, you can check a line in Blackstone's Commentaries or The Duke of Earl. It's like channel surfing, only there are thousands more channels and you spend even less time on any of them. It all takes 15 minutes, and after a meal or a trip to the water cooler, you do it all again....

Read the whole thing here. Then go here for Jay Rosen's up-to-the-minute survey of the "instant literature" on the mainstream media's "big digital migration." It's a must.

Remember how things feel right this minute. You're watching a revolution in progress.

Posted April 28, 11:55 AM

April 27, 2005

TT: Eleven perfectly lovely records

- Benjamin Britten, Nocturnal after John Dowland (played by Julian Bream)

- Frank Sinatra and the Hollywood String Quartet, "With Every Breath I Take" (from Close to You)

- Paul Dukas, Villanelle (played by Dennis Brain and Gerald Moore)

- James Taylor, "Something in the Way She Moves" (remade for Greatest Hits)

- Franz Schubert, Rondo in A Major, D. 951 (performed by Artur and Karl Ulrich Schnabel)

- The Byrds, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" (from Ballad of Easy Rider)

- François Couperin, Les baricades mistérieuses (played by Igor Kipnis)

- Stan Getz and Bob Brookmeyer, "Who Could Care" (from Stan Getz/Bob Brookmeyer, Recorded Fall 1961)

- Emanuel Chabrier, Idyll (performed by Paul Paray and the Detroit Symphony)

- Luciana Souza, "Doce de Coco" (from Brazilian Duos)

- Stephen Sondheim, "Fear No More" (from the original-cast album of The Frogs)

Why eleven, you ask? (You did ask, right?) Because I've decided to strike a blow against ten-item lists. Down with arbitrary limitations! My next list may contain seven items, or thirteen....

Posted April 27, 12:03 PM

TT: Entry from an unkept diary

I noticed the other day that I'd stopped taking time off on weekends. No, it's not that I'm in the vise-like grip of an obsession: it's that my weekly routine gradually changed without my quite realizing it. Now that I'm a working drama critic, I usually see press previews of Broadway and off-Broadway shows on Saturday and Sunday, making it all but impossible for me to get out of town (save by complicated prior arrangement) or do much of anything else. Of course this doesn't preclude my knocking off for a couple of days in the middle of the week, but since I've never in my life had a job that required me to work on weekends, I'm finding it hard to get used to thinking in terms of taking, say, Wednesdays and Thursdays off. My recent trip to Cold Spring was a step in the right direction, but the fact that I hadn't been there since November says something unpleasant about my continuing failure to adjust to the rhythms of my new life. More often than not I spend the entire week writing and going to other performances, then glance at my schedule on Friday night and suddenly remember that I'm not done yet.

An old friend of mine used to take every Friday night off without fail. He'd come home from work, retire to his study, eat dinner from a tray, and spend the whole evening listening to his huge, meticulously organized collection of 78s, through which he worked his way in strict alphabetical order every few years. No matter what else was happening in the world, however dire it might be (or seem to be), he shut the shop down one night a week and disappeared from the world. I spent many Friday nights with him in the last two years of his life, and I enjoyed them not only because he was a great listener, but also because spending the evening with him prevented me from spending it in an aisle seat or a noisy nightclub, or at my desk.

In the years since my friend died, I've never had a night of the week I could always call my own, and though I have countless excuses for my inability to do as he did, I know it's really my fault--just as it's my fault that I'm writing this paragraph when I know I should be snuggled up in my loft, reading Proust in preparation for a good night's sleep. Perhaps my first novel will start like this: For a long time I used to go to bed really, really late....

Posted April 27, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"It is glory--to have been tested, to have had our little quality and cast our little spell. The thing is to have made somebody care."

Henry James, "The Middle Years"

Posted April 27, 12:00 PM

TT: Up to the nanosecond

Last night I tuned in the CBS Evening News, that cobwebby bastion of Old Media, and what did I see? A segment on podcasting featuring none other than the Lascivious Biddies, whose new CD, Get Lucky, sports liner notes by none other than...yours truly.

Memo to posterity: I soooo knew them when.

UPDATE: To view the story, go here. (Jeepers, but Bob Schieffer looks his age....)

Posted April 27, 1:35 AM

April 26, 2005

TT: Elsewhere

Time once again to upend the bag and pour out a pile of v. cool and/or amusing links.

- Michael Blowhard on the mysterious profession:

Actors generally don't know who they really are. They find a center only when they pour themselves into the container of a "character"; they become most fully who they are when they turn themselves into someone else. Actors are often charming and gifted creatures, but they'll drive you crazy too. An actress might say one thing at 8 a.m. and then say something completely contradictory at 4 p.m. She wouldn't be bothered by this because in both cases she's been true to her feelings of the moment--and because being "true to the moment," whatever it happens to be, is what being an actor is all about. Men in romantic relationships with actresses often find these women a terrific turn-on--the passion! The excitement! The responsiveness! Yet the men often spend a lot of time scratching their heads in bewilderment too, wondering if anyone's truly home....

This has not been my experience with actors, but I know plenty of people who beg to differ. Maybe I've just been lucky. (Or not.)

- Mr. Alicublog finally catches up with Sideways (what kept him?), and has some objections mixed with praise:

So what's good? Mostly stuff that (forgive me) ripens over the course of the film. The dramaturgy is wicked smart. For example, throughout most of Sideways I wondered, what do these two guys see in each other? They spend most of the movie savagely attacking each other's actions and motivations. Good friends may do that, of course, but underneath it all you expect to see traces at least of the ties that bind.

Payne was subtle about this--maybe over-subtle. The big clues came late: the attack at the golf course, and especially Miles' reclamation of Jack's wallet. After these the rest of their relationship, and the whole movie, made more sense. Jack may seem like a heedless horndog and Miles a volatile lush, but each has a strain of madness that the other can enjoy, if only because it's different and thereby more exciting to him than his own....

- Mr. Thinking About Art has had it up to here, or maybe there, with theory:

What in the world does it add to the art viewing experience of 99.9% of the general public? Not much, I think. Certainly there is a place for theory in our academic institutions and surely contextualizing art among all the various -ism's is valuable. But Jerry Saltz's piece blasting Damien Hirst is a perfect example of why theory in art criticism and reviews in mostly useless. Give me Saltz's 885 words without theory any day of the week. Saltz's article actually means something to me. I can feel his experience of Hirst's work. I can connect to his opinion. I can sense Saltz's emotional response to the work.

Anyone can learn art theory if they wish. I'd venture a guess that if you took 100 art historians and asked them to write a theory-based critique of Hirst's show, you'd get 100 very similar writing samples. It's not unique like economic theory isn't unique. We can all learn it. For me, econometrics is much more exciting and insightful. You can use some theory and techniques, but without some creativity and a personal approach, you'll get stale results. Art for me is the same way and it's why I write my reviews from a personal, opinionated viewpoint. Some may say, "We've all got opinions!" And my response would be, "That's the point!" We don't all have knowledge of theory....

- Guess who?

Confession time: We've never been able to finish, or even get half of the way through, a novel by Saul Bellow. Maybe it's the language, which seems a bit overdone to us. Maybe it's how discursive and repetitive the books are. Maybe the alleged revolution that he brought to the writing of the American novel has already been so thoroughly absorbed that we're unable to appreciate how groundbreaking it truly is. In any event, we're prepared to admit that the fault must lie with us: Enough of the people we admire and respect claim him as a genius; perhaps he's the sort of writer that demands more attention be paid than our usual reading style (naked on the couch, a flask of bourbon at our side, Motorhead's Orgasmatron blasting from the hi-fi) allows....

- Admirers (and non-admirers) of Truman Capote will have a field day with the Lawrence Journal-World's elaborate package of freshly reported stories commemorating the 40th anniversary of the publication of In Cold Blood. Here's the beauty part: they were all written by college students. Print-media journalism may not be dead after all....

- Supermaud stumbles across a copy of another of my beloved books, the Viking Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald. (I wonder why it went out of print?)

- "Heather," the semi-anonymous California pianist who blogs at in the wings, one of my current faves, describes what it feels like to turn pages for another pianist:

The requirements for this duty are straightforward enough: make yourself invisible, make sure you never turn too early or too late, make sure you never turn two pages at once, make sure to turn back pages when repeats are taken, and make sure to turn ahead to codas. Considering how long I've been reading music, page turning ought to allow me the lucky opportunity to study the pianist's technique, from fingering to pedaling to words muttered under the breath, but really, my levels of attention and perception rise near to performance level when I take that seat. And damn but I forgot how fast the second and fourth movements of Fauré's C minor piano quartet move! Stand up. Reach across. Flip. Sit down. Stand up. Reach across. Whew!...

BTDT, Heather. Way.

- Speaking of pianists, Michael Kimmelman, an amateur pianist who has also been known to write about art, has an essay about William Kapell in The New York Review of Books that's a must:

Was there any greater American pianist born during the last century than Kapell? Perhaps not. Certainly he was the most famous American-born player until Van Cliburn. He was a jukebox star during the 1940s, thanks to his performance of Khachaturian's Piano Concerto, a noisy showpiece that Kapell came to resent, in the way that Rachmaninoff came to loathe his own Prelude in C-sharp Minor.

He was also a stereotype of a native New Yorker: bright, brash, tactless, competitive, funny, cocky, and thin-skinned. He could be exceptionally generous and also nasty. He was a nervous, obsessive person--and meticulous (he kept a diary to record, down to the minute, how long he practiced each piece, toting up the numbers month after month)....

- Oh, just in case you were wondering, the Mozart Effect is a fraud.

- Needless to say, quite a few people have sent me this (which doesn't make it any less funny).

- Greg Sandow, my fellow artsjournal.com blogger, talks sense:

You can't blame people as individuals for not liking the music you think they should like. Or at least you can't blame them without understanding why they feel the way they do. This becomes quite a conundrum, I think, because abstract expressionist painters (whose style might be more or less analogous to atonal modernist music) have a much easier time with the public. People like their work. As I've mentioned many times in many contexts, there were lines around the block when MoMA had a Jackson Pollock show. So why doesn't music work that way?...

- Tobi Tobias, another artsjournal.com colleague, offers a close reading of Rock of Ages, Mark Morris' new dance, that leaves me with nothing more to say (which puts me in a hell of a spot, since I have to say something about it later today!). Here's a snippet:

This year, the Mark Morris Dance Group brought no brand-new, grand-slam work to its annual season at BAM. The sole novelty was a piece that had its premiere last fall, way west, in Berkeley, California. But it's a honey. Rock of Ages, set to the adagio movement of Schubert's Piano Trio in E flat, is a small, quiet dance that, like meditative deep breathing, expands the consciousness until it seems to reach the deepest feelings and an ever-widening understanding of how the world works.

Its population of four, plainly dressed, enters one by one from the four corners of the stage, briefly converges at the center of the space, then moves on (though a pair pauses briefly, side by side), each person simply continuing along the diagonal path prescribed by his or her first step. The ending reiterates this action, which is clearly the simple message of the dance: We exist alone; we meet when we occupy a common space; we interact in passing, our identity left essentially unaltered; we part-because it is only natural that we should....

- In related news, Maccers makes a major dance-related discovery:

Anyway, someone please remind me next time I am plugging in credit card numbers into websites that I don't like the story form of dance. I like abstract. And short skirts. Let me see the legs.

Me, too, mostly, except when otherwise.

- Spam, spam, spam:

Sender: Alrick.M.Bwalugari
Recipient: benedictxvi@vatican.va
RE: I NEED YOUR URGENT ASSISTANCE PLEASE

Dear Mr. XVI,

I am Alrick Mohammed Bwalugari, the son of the late Nigerian Los Angeles Head of Sacristans who died on the 6th of June 1999 while in active services. Following the sudden death of my father, Usher Bullem Shitika, the present Diocean Government has thrown my family and I into a state of utter confusion, frustration, and hopelessness, much like the state your detractors are in. I have been subjected to inhuman physical and physiological torture, like being forced to listen to the Protestant hymns and hippy folk tunes and being forced to view liturgical dancing girls....

- Finally, here's a truly great time-waster. Warning: I soooo defy you to blow less than five minutes on it....

Posted April 26, 12:02 PM

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- A good friend of mine is friendly with the significant other of a person to whom I gave a bad review the other day. (Sorry to be so roundabout, but I don't want to leave any tracks.) Shortly thereafter, my friend made the mistake of mentioning to her friend that we were friends, whereupon--as Lester Young used to put it--she felt a draft. I was sorry to hear it, but glad she told me. Too often those who do what I do for a living overlook the fact that we're writing about real people. We should never forget, or be allowed to forget, that we are capable of causing hurt and doing harm. Even the famous have feelings.

- My colleagues are forever encouraging me to make embarrassing taste-related revelations along the lines of the treasurable fact that Lionel and Diana Trilling were Kojak fans. (This reminds me to report the stop-press news that Sir John Gielgud liked Cheers, in part because he found Ted Danson sexy.) Alas, I never seem able to oblige, not because I'm unwilling but because I simply can't come up with anything sufficiently uncultivated on the spot. So when I thought of a good one the other day, I resolved to pass it on to you at the earliest opportunity: two of the very first songs I downloaded from iTunes were Blue Öyster Cult's "Before the Kiss, a Redcap" and "I'm on the Lamb (But I Ain't No Sheep)." Those were the only Blue Öyster Cult songs I wanted, but I definitely wanted them.

Satisfied?

Posted April 26, 12:02 PM

TT: One of these days

I haven't read my blogmail for the past few days. I won't read it for the next few days, or at least not until I finish writing my three remaining print-media pieces. It's nothing personal, I swear. I promise to read it all and get back to you all, sooner or later.

(O.K., later. But not too much later.)

Posted April 26, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential loneliness of my life--and it seems to be the port also, in sooth, to which my course again finally directs itself! This loneliness (since I mention it)--what is it still but the deepest thing about one? Deeper, about me, at any rate, than anything else; deeper than my 'genius,' deeper than my 'discipline,' deeper than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep counterminings of art."

Henry James, letter to W. Morton Fullerton (1900)

Posted April 26, 12:00 PM

April 25, 2005

TT: Twentieth

I moved to New York twenty years ago this month. It never occurred to me as a young man that I would someday live here, and I'm still capable of being taken aback by the improbable fact that I do. Just the other day I was riding across the Brooklyn Bridge in a cab, and as I glanced out the window at the skyline of lower Manhattan, the city suddenly looked strange to me, as if I'd never seen it before. Perhaps you can never feel completely at home in a city to which you move at the ripe old age of twenty-nine.

I celebrated my twentieth anniversary as a New Yorker by slipping out of town for a few days--an appropriate gesture, I think, since Manhattan, for all its myriad wonders, has a way of getting on your nerves after a couple of months' worth of continuous exposure. As I sat on a park bench by the Hudson River, basking in the sunshine and idly turning the pages of Du côté de chez Swann, I caught myself thinking about how different the world was when I came to New York. Among other things:

- The World Trade Center was still standing.

- So was the Berlin Wall.

- I was using the first VCR I'd ever owned.

- I hadn't bought my first CD player or fax machine.

- I had yet to use a personal computer, much less buy one.

- Cell phones didn't exist.

- None of my books was written. (For that matter, none of the pieces collected in the Teachout Reader was written.)

- I'd never seen a ballet by George Balanchine (not counting The Nutcracker) or a painting by Pierre Bonnard.

- Our Girl in Chicago was still in high school--and three of the people whom I now number among my closest friends weren't yet old enough to go to grade school.

Since then, my life has undergone countless other changes, a few of them fairly dramatic. I buried a parent and a best friend. I became a drama critic, and acquired a niece. I was investigated by the FBI, voted on by the Senate, and sworn in by a Supreme Court justice. I started a blog. And I began to think of myself as a New Yorker, which some might say was the biggest change of all.

What surprises me most, though, is that I don't spend all that much time thinking about such things. Some, yes--I'm as susceptible to unexpected attacks of acute nostalgia as any other middle-aged guy--but for the most part I tend to be preoccupied with the next piece I have to file and the next show I have to see. What I wrote about Balanchine a year ago is in many ways true of me as well:

Of all his oft-repeated refrains, the most familiar was Do it now! "Why are you stingy with yourselves?" he would ask his dancers. "Why are you holding back? What are you saving for--for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now." His ruthlessly practical approach to running a dance company was rooted in the hard-won knowledge that his next breath might be his last. He worked within the means available at the moment, using them to the fullest, never wasting time longing for better dancers or a bigger budget: "A dog is going to remain a dog, even if you want to have a cat; you're not going to have a cat, so you better take care of the dog because that's what you're going to have." He ran his private life along the same lines: when he had money, he spent it lavishly, on himself and others, and when he didn't, he lived frugally. "You know," he said, "I am really a dead man. I was supposed to die and I didn't, and so now everything I do is second chance. That is why I enjoy every day. I don't look back. I don't look forward. Only now." This dance, this meal, this woman: that was his world.

Perhaps my tendency to live in the present is merely a phase I'm going through. My impression is that most people grow increasingly preoccupied with the past as they grow older. It may be that my work helps to anchor me in the present moment, and I'm sure that living in New York and spending so much of my time in the company of younger people have had a similar effect. But whatever the reasons, I mostly like my life, and most of the time I like it very much indeed, which is why I enjoy sharing bits and pieces of it with you.

Marcel Proust, in whose imagined world I am currently immersed, assures us that happiness "serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible." He might be right, but I prefer to think otherwise. At least for the moment, I propose instead to cast my lot with Justice Holmes, who in old age told an old friend,

I was repining at the thought of my slow progress--how few new ideas I had or picked up--when it occurred to me to think of the total of life and how the greater part was wholly absorbed in living and continuing life--victuals--procreation--rest and eternal terror. And I bid myself accept the common lot; an adequate vitality would say daily, "God, what a good sleep I've had," "My eye, that was dinner," "Now for a fine rattling walk"--in short, life as an end in itself.

Of course I hope I can do a bit better than that, but at the very least I'll gladly aspire to accepting the common lot. Today I'll do my best to write a piece, take a walk, call my mother, read a couple of dozen pages of Proust, and spend a few minutes looking at the Teachout Museum. If at day's end I've accomplished all these things, I'll go to bed content--and if I haven't, I'll do the same. Like the cops say, Rule No. 1 is to go home alive at the end of your shift. Every day is a victory over the abyss.

See you tomorrow.

Posted April 25, 12:03 PM

TT: Bark and the world barks with you

For those who've been elsewhere of late, we're batting around the possibility of coming up with a more striking name for the mental disorder known as "clinical depression." One reader wrote to remind us that Winston Churchill referred to his own depression as "the black dog," and a couple of classicists obligingly translated that homely phrase into resonantly medical-sounding Latin.

Now my brother writes:

The phrase you wrote about a few days ago, "black dog": Truckers use that term when they have been on the road, usually past their legal hours, too long. It's when you start to haze over and the white line dashes start to take on the appearence of two eyes in the head of a black dog. Patrick Swayze starred in a movie with the same title.

I think we may be onto something here....

Posted April 25, 12:02 PM

TT: This, that, the other thing

In case you didn't see her announcement last Wednesday, Our Girl in Chicago has a new job and two full hands. In order to maintain her sanity, she's decided to post mainly on Saturdays and Sundays (though you shouldn't be too terribly surprised if she should poke her head in on the odd weekday), meaning that "About Last Night" now returns to its former status as a full-service 24/7 blog.

As for me, I'm back from my brief holiday on the Hudson River and reasonably raring to go. Take a look at the right-hand column and you'll find new stuff here and there (including a fresh pair of Top Fives). I've got four Old Media pieces to write this week, so I don't know how much blogging I'll be doing between now and Friday, but I'm sure there'll be more than there ought to be. Watch this space and marvel at my irrepressible logorrhea.

Posted April 25, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

When I remember bygone days
I think how evening follows morn;
So many I loved were not yet dead,
So many I love were not yet born.

Ogden Nash, "The Middle"

Posted April 25, 12:00 PM

April 24, 2005

OGIC: Visible books

I wrote a review recently (it's not yet published) of Kevin Canty's Winslow in Love, a novel about a poet. I was struck by how readily I accepted that the novel's protagonist Winslow was a good poet, even though I couldn't read his poetry; I became interested in the question of how Canty got me on board using only indirect evidence of Winslow's talent. The most direct way, but perhaps the most foolhardy (even if Canty were a poet as well as a novelist), would have been to let the reader actually read Winslow's poems. It surprised me how few books I could think of, among the many books about writers out there, that use this device. I thought of two: Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, which isn't about the poem's author but its critic, and A. S. Byatt's Possession, which is also more about the scholars studying the poets whose work appears than about the poets themselves. There must be more, I thought. So, as you may remember, I opened the question up to the readers of About Last Night.

The flood of email that followed, supplemented by blog posts at Tingle Alley, Critical Mass, and Sheila O'Malley, was gratifying. As I posted back then, it soon became clear that John Irving's The World According to Garp was the widely-read, well-known book I should have thought of. But many others were also mentioned:

Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago
Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad
David Markson, Springer's Progress
Carol Shields, Swann
Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish
Jorstein Gaarder, Sophie's World
Honore de Balzac, Lost Illusions
Stephen King, The Dark Half
Stephen King, Misery
Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds
Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift
Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides
Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Jasper Fforde, Thursday Next series
Anthony Burgess, Enderby tetrology
Paul Auster, Oracle Night
J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello
Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Tobias Wolff, Old School
Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys
Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters
Philip Roth, My Life as a Man
Percival Everett, Erasure
Elliott Baker, A Fine Madness
Wyndham Lewis, Self-Condemned
Stephen King, The Body
George Gissing, New Grub Street
Booth Tarkington, Penrod
Lydia Davis, The End of the Story
James McCourt, Time Remaining
Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs
Cathleen Schine, Rameau's Neice
Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers

I can't vouch that all of these fit the description, since I've read only a few of them. (To clarify the description, I was thinking of writing with professional aspirations, not diaries or letters, which are far more common; epistolary novels have a healthy body of criticism all their own.) A couple of correspondents had further thoughts on the device that I thought worth sharing. Aaron Haspel from God of the Machine echoed my own thinking on the subject, but more eloquently:

Most novelists have more sense than to try to recreate their characters' work. The recreation usually proves a disappointment, especially if the writing character is supposed to be a great genius, as he so often is. It's tough enough to write well in your own voice, let alone in someone else's. This is why in Franny and Zooey Salinger wisely confines himself to Seymour Glass's juvenilia. Pale Fire succeeds because John Shade is a mock-genius and the 999-line poem is a burlesque.

It's certainly a giant risk. For all but the most skilled and imaginative authors, writing a character's writing is probably the quickest way to destroy that character's credibility as a writer. If you really succeed at producing a sustained sample of good fictional writing, you expend the toil of writing, say, a book and a half for the credit and recompense of writing only one. And you risk leaving your readers high and dry; if the book-within-the-book is all that great, they may feel cheated not being able to read the whole thing. Perhaps it's for this reason that Irving gives us a short story by Garp, something reproducible in its entirety. My friend Joshua Kosman, classical music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, is extremely edifying not only on Garp, but on the topic at large:

The obvious example is John Irving's The World According to Garp, which not only includes a complete piece of Garp's fiction, but makes it the basis of his entire career as a writer. It's a pretty daring stunt, I always thought. Think about it: Young Garp sets out to become a writer, and first makes his name with a short story called "The Pension Grillparzer." Thereafter his career has some ups and downs, and he has periodic crises of confidence, etc. But whenever he's in doubt, someone will say to him, "But look--you're an amazingly good writer! After all, you wrote 'The Pension Grillparzer'! So don't give up!" In other words, the entire notion of him as a writer is predicated on his having turned out this one terrific short story. And Irving includes in the novel the entire text of 'The Pension Grillparzer,' and--it's incredibly good. Whew!

In fact, I have a category I collect of narrative works that conform to this pattern. It's a very small and select list. The criteria are: 1) The work contains within it another work, either complete or in part, that is actually created and displayed, not merely described. 2) The artistic success of the inner work is essential to the plot of the outer, and 3) the artistic judgment that is required by the outer narrative is in fact correct (i.e., 'Pension Grillparzer' really is as good as the characters in The World According to Garp all think it is).

The founding members of this class are Garp and Wagner's "Die Meistersinger," which is about a guy who wins a singing prize contest by inventing a song that somewhat conforms to and somewhat transcends the rules of the medieval singing guild. You actually hear the song being created line by line, and damned if it isn't every bit as phenomenal as the plot of the opera demands. There was a third work in this category, but I've forgotten now what it is.

One that notably doesn't make it, by the way, is Woody Allen's Crimes & Misdemeanors. You may remember that he plays a filmmaker whose career is going nowhere and who's very bitter about it. And late in the film, you actually see a piece of the film that the character has been working on all this time--and it's horrible! But of course since it's Woody Allen, who clearly can't distinguish between good films and bad ones, there's no way to know whether that's intentional or not.

Anyway, to return to the original query: Another example, but less on point than Garp is Steven Millhauser's wonderful first novel, Edwin Mullhouse. Dunno if you've ever read it, but it's a sort of Pale Fire-esque thing about two eleven-year-old boys, one of whom is writing the biography of the other. Edwin's magnum opus, a novel called "Cartoons," isn't actually reproduced, but there's about a 10-page description of it that is breathtaking.

Wow--we can only hope that Joshua's full-length article about the phenomenon will eventually appear! He's thought about this a lot more than I have. To answer his question, I haven't read Edwin Mullhouse, but I've enjoyed some of Millhauser's other books. Little Kingdoms contains one of my favorite short stories, "Catalogue of the Exhibition," which tells the chilling gothic tale of a fictional Romantic-era painter's life and loves through the sole means of catalog descriptions of his paintings. Millhauser makes you really "see" the paintings, rendering his story roughly the visual equivalent of the novels listed above.

Finally, a commenter at Tingle Alley showed me the way to the wonderful Invisible Library, a site that seems, sadly, not to be actively updated any longer. It provides an extensive catalog of "books that only appear in other books," and a generous list of related links and references. Among the latter is a link to Max Beerbohm's essay "Books within Books," which provides me with the epilogue for this very long post:

I am shy of masterpieces; nor is this merely because of the many times I have been disappointed at not finding anything at all like what the publishers expected me to find. As a matter of fact, those disappointments are dim in my memory: it is long since I ceased to take publishers' opinions as my guide. I trust now, for what I ought to read, to the advice of a few highly literary friends. But so soon as I am told that I "must" read this or that, and have replied that I instantly will, I become strangely loth to do anything of the sort. And what I like about books within books is that they never can prick my conscience. It is extraordinarily comfortable that they don't exist.

Posted April 24, 9:20 AM

OGIC: Look at Me

The turning point of Agnès Jaoui's film Look at Me (in French, Comme un image or "Like a picture") is easy to miss. It occurs in a split second while Jaoui's character Sylvia drives home from a party with Lolita, a young singer she's been coaching. Lolita isn't a professional, and Sylvia has been reluctant to give her time beyond what she spends with the group Lolita belongs to--they're talented amateurs preparing a concert together, and the implication is that Sylvia is a high-level professional coach who is doing them something of a favor. The work isn't truly interesting to her, but she feels it's a good cause, to a point. When Lolita presses her for individual practice time, Sylvia demurs--until she discovers that Lolita's father is Étienne Cassard, a famous author whom her literary husband, and apparently all of France, reveres. Introductions are made, and before you can say "the bees in their hive," the two women are on their way to a weekend in the country with Étienne, his young wife, Sylvia's husband, and sundry relations and hangers-on.

The first evening, Lolita takes Sylvia along to a nearby party where she's going to meet up with her on-again, off-again boyfriend Matheiu. Mathieu dances with her, then sneaks off with a prettier, thinner girl. From a distance, Lolita sees them together, and the increasingly sympathetic Sylvia sees Lolita see them. Driving back to the house, Lolita vents about finding out Mathieu for just another in a long train of people who have used her to get to her father. Sylvia immediately recognizes herself in the description, and we see her see it in the briefest flicker of a shadow across her features. It comes as an unpleasant but--since she's decent--not an unwelcome revelation. They have become friends by now anyway, but Sylvia knows she only gave them the chance to because Lolita is Étienne's daughter. From here on out the friendship takes on another dimension.

In this interview, Jaoui discusses her film in terms of the kind of social power Étienne holds and wields ruthlessly. In various ways, the weaker characters in the film buckle under that power. The movie, by this light, is about how the stronger characters learn to resist. There's something flattening about this approach, though. It doesn't begin to suggest the degree of feeling in the film, most of it emanating from Marilou Berry's passionate Lolita. She can't get to her father's heart; the most he could be said to do is tolerate her. Her singing, which is very beautiful and at which she's ultimately triumphant, is a pursuit undertaken largely to impress and attract him, as well as to emulate him and his writing. But he just keeps ignoring her, with exceptions for those times when he needs love. He calls her "my big girl" and tries unconvincingly to pass it off as a term of endearment.

The story ends perfectly to my mind, with Sylvia instrumental in getting Lolita where she needs to be. The reluctant help Sylvia gives her with her singing in the first half is mirrored by the support she gives her as a friend and advocate in the second. My companion had quibbles with the ending, the kind of quibbles that start great conversations. And enough in the ending is left ambiguous or left to the imagination to make such post-film conversations not just possible but almost necessary. This useful ambiguity, as well as the way the action revolves around the uneven skill and progress with which various characters read the crisscrossing social dynamics at play (some, of course, never get it and never will), make the movie a very Jamesian affair. I loved it.

Posted April 24, 4:09 AM

April 22, 2005

TT: Sondheim's heir

I'm not here--I'm still holed up at my undisclosed location, watching the river flow--but my Friday Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser is reaching you on schedule by way of Our Girl in Chicago, who posted it for me at the usual appointed hour. (Look at the bottom of this posting and you'll see her stamp, not mine.)

I went to all this trouble because I wanted to be sure that the word got out about The Light in the Piazza, the new Broadway musical adapted by Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas from Elizabeth Spencer's 1959 novella. It's a must:

Adam Guettel, the most gifted and promising theater composer of his generation, has returned to the stage after a nine-year absence with "The Light in the Piazza." To call it the best new musical I've reviewed in this space, "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee" included, is to understate the case. It is, in fact, the best new musical to open in New York since "Passion," and Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater has done itself proud by bringing so important a show to Broadway....

The score, radiantly orchestrated by Mr. Guettel and conductor Ted Sperling for a 15-piece chamber ensemble built around a harp, is a shimmering evocation of Italian sunshine, dappled with touches of sorrow. Comparisons to Stephen Sondheim being inevitable, I should say at once that Mr. Guettel resembles Mr. Sondheim only in the richness of his imagination. His harmonic language is more astringent and wide-ranging, his lyrics more conversational (you won't go away talking about his rhyme schemes). He is, in short, his own man, and in "The Light in the Piazza" he has written a musical directly comparable in seriousness of purpose to "Passion" or "Sweeney Todd" without sounding anything like either of those shows....

If you live in or near New York, make every possible effort to go. If not, Nonesuch will be releasing the original-cast CD of The Light in the Piazza on May 24. (To place an advance order, go here.)

I also reviewed Jeffrey Hatcher's A Picasso, a play about an imaginary 1941 encounter between Pablo Picasso and a Nazi interrogator:

It's reasonably intelligent and reasonably entertaining, though I doubt the real Picasso would have cracked quite all those one-liners under such dire circumstances ("Divorced?" "I keep trying"), much less stalked around the basement of a Paris art gallery like Groucho Marx in a tailcoat....

No link. To read the whole thing--and I have much more to say about The Light in the Piazza--buy this morning's Journal and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, or go here to subscribe to the Journal's online edition. I recommend the latter, enthusiastically.

Posted April 22, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Art must give suddenly, all at once the shock of life, the sensation of breathing."

Constantin Brancusi (quoted in Dorothy Dudley, "Brancusi," Dial, Feb. 1927)

Posted April 22, 12:00 PM

April 21, 2005

TT: Almanac

"During those last weeks of the Bishop's life he thought very little about death; it was the Past he was leaving. The future would take care of itself. But he had an intellectual curiosity about dying; about the changes that took place in a man's beliefs and scale of values. More and more life seemed to him an experience of the Ego, in no sense the Ego itself. This conviction, he believed, was something apart from his religious life; it was an enlightenment that came to him as a man, a human creature. And he noticed that he judged conduct differently now; his own and that of others. The mistakes of his life seemed unimportant; accidents that had occurred en route, like the shipwreck in Galveston harbour, or the runaway in which he was hurt when he was first on his way to New Mexico in search of his Bishopric."

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

Posted April 21, 12:00 PM

April 20, 2005

OGIC: In which our heroine gains a livelihood

I'm starting a new job today! That's good news, and something I've been working on since mid-winter. It does mean, however, that I'm going to have a lot less free-floating time on my hands during which to blog--i.e., no time at all during my weekdays, and a lot less on weeknights. But...hey, Saturday. Hey, Sunday. How're you doin'?

That's right, I'm moving in on those lonely blank days on the ALN calendar. I'm Weekend Girl now. Look at it this way: you won't be getting less content, you'll just be getting it seven days a week instead of five, with nary a lull. And if you hate picking through all that OGIC dross looking for TT gold, your reading will be much simplified!

Now that I've said this, it could be I'll turn around and discover that precisely the thing I most want to do after a long day sitting at a computer in the office is to come home and sit in front of a different computer in my living room. Maybe weeknights will find me newly unstoppable; I'm not ruling out the possibility. Even if they don't, there will surely be items that I just can't wait until the weekend to post about. But in general? See you Saturday with bells on. (The first thing I plan to do this weekend is finally recap the panoply of responses I got to my books-within-books query a while back. Besides a highly helpful catalog of far more specimens than I knew existed, I received a number of interesting observations about the risks and rewards of this particular act of literary derring-do. Good stuff, so do check in.)

Posted April 20, 12:55 PM

TT: Almanac

Clifford (to audience) I am twenty-one years old, out of college, out of work. On line for my first unemployment check. It is 1977. As I inch my way up the beginner's line, I spot my father, who is over there (points) to sign for what, his four millionth check. As a jazz musician, he is sort of always there. There's the National Endowment for the Arts, which is money for classical musicians, and there's the New York State Bureau of Unemployment, which gives grants to jazz musicians. It's a two-tiered system.

Warren Leight, Side Man

Posted April 20, 12:00 PM

April 19, 2005

OGIC: PR wizards of ID

I am forever in your debt, Eric McErlain, for calling my attention to this resolution that recently hit the table in the Idaho House of Representatives:

A CONCURRENT RESOLUTION STATING LEGISLATIVE FINDINGS AND COMMENDING JARED AND JERUSHA HESS AND THE CITY OF PRESTON FOR THE PRODUCTION OF THE MOVIE "NAPOLEON DYNAMITE."

Be It Resolved by the Legislature of the State of Idaho:

WHEREAS, the State of Idaho recognizes the vision, talent and creativity of Jared and Jerusha Hess in the writing and production of "Napoleon Dynamite"; and WHEREAS, the scenic and beautiful City of Preston, County of Franklin and the State of Idaho are experiencing increased tourism and economic growth; and WHEREAS, filmmaker Jared Hess is a native Idahoan who was educated in the Idaho public school system; and WHEREAS, the Preston High School administration and staff, particularly the cafeteria staff, have enjoyed notoriety and worldwide attention; and WHEREAS, tater tots figure prominently in this film thus promoting Idaho's most famous export; and WHEREAS, the friendship between Napoleon and Pedro has furthered multiethnic relationships; and WHEREAS, Uncle Rico's football skills are a testament to Idaho athletics; and WHEREAS, Napoleon's bicycle and Kip's skateboard promote better air quality and carpooling as alternatives to fuel-dependent methods of transportation; and WHEREAS, Grandma's trip to the St. Anthony Sand Dunes highlights a long-honored Idaho vacation destination; and WHEREAS, Rico and Kip's Tupperware sales and Deb's keychains and glamour shots promote entrepreneurism and self-sufficiency in Idaho's small towns; and WHEREAS, Napoleon's artistic rendition of Trisha is an example of the importance of the visual arts in K-12 education; and WHEREAS, the schoolwide Preston High School student body elections foster an awareness in Idaho's youth of public service and civic duty; and WHEREAS, the "Happy Hands" club and the requirement that candidates for school president present a skit is an example of the importance of theater arts in K-12 education; and WHEREAS, Pedro's efforts to bake a cake for Summer illustrate the positive connection between culinary skills to lifelong relationships; and WHEREAS, Kip's relationship with LaFawnduh is a tribute to e-commerce and Idaho's technology-driven industry; and WHEREAS, Kip and LaFawnduh's wedding shows Idaho's commitment to healthy marriages; and WHEREAS, the prevalence of cooked steak as a primary food group pays tribute to Idaho's beef industry; and WHEREAS, Napoleon's tetherball dexterity emphasizes the importance of physical education in Idaho public schools; and WHEREAS, Tina the llama, the chickens with large talons, the 4-H milk cows, and the Honeymoon Stallion showcase Idaho's animal husbandry; and WHEREAS, any members of the House of Representatives or the Senate of the Legislature of the State of Idaho who choose to vote "Nay" on this concurrent resolution are "FREAKIN' IDIOTS!"...

It passed, 69-0-1, and a good time was had by all. Napoleon Dynamite, much as I enjoyed it, never made me want to go to Idaho, but these guys almost do.

Posted April 19, 12:05 PM

TT: Almanac

"It is interesting how action has been stolen almost completely by the screen nowadays, and the theatre is more and more given over to psychological exposition, with almost embarrassingly realistic dialogue and atmosphere and character taking the place of story situations--not the long-winded perorations of Shaw and Ibsen, but the nostalgia mixed with violence which is also so characteristic of Tennessee Williams and other American dramatists."

Sir John Gielgud, letter to Kate Terry Gielgud (Nov. 23, 1950)

Posted April 19, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"'Do you know, Mr. Yule, that you have suggested a capital idea to me? If I were to take up your views, I think it isn't at all unlikely that I might make a good thing of writing against writing. It should be my literary specialty to rail against literature. The reading public should pay me for telling them that they oughtn't to read. I must think it over.'"

George Gissing, New Grub Street

Posted April 19, 1:50 AM

April 18, 2005

OGIC: The cream in my coffee

Outer Life is back from hiatus. And where do you suppose he was all that time? Disneyland! There's much more where this came from:

I've just escaped from Tomorrowland, that horrific dystopian vision of an inhuman robotic plastic video game action hero future, looking in vain for Yesterdayland, that fabled place where children were seen but not heard. Instead I ended up in Toon Town, a surrealist landscape blending the Great Depression, film noir and talking animals into something very unsettling....

The Disney store only stocked the children's version of Benadryl, so I'm staggering through the park alternately swilling cherry-flavored Benadryl, which makes me sleepy and dopey, and sipping coffee, which makes me happy. Then I get sneezy again, which makes me grumpy. I suppose I'm finally getting into the spirit of the place as I wildly veer in and out of various dwarf personae.

Better him than us. Far, far better.

Posted April 18, 12:59 PM

TT: Omen

My normally trusty iBook threw a curve ball at my head today. We're both still on our feet, if a little woozy, but I think I may need to seek advice of counsel, so to speak, once I polish off the week's deadlines (I have two).

It occurs to me that the universe might possibly be sending me a message, and that it might be smart for me to pay attention. I was turned up to eleven for all of March and the first part of April, and even though the heat is mostly off now, I can tell that I haven't yet flushed the adrenalin out of my system. I'm still having trouble sleeping--I can't seem to switch my mind off--and my tongue has gotten a bit too sharp for its own good, both in and out of print. Truth to tell, I'm not much enjoying my own company these days (except when I'm writing about Louis Armstrong, but I can't do that all the time, much as my publisher would like it!).

Since my iBook is probably going to need a sleepover and I'd already arranged to hit the road for a couple of days, I think I'll take a little vacation from the blog while I'm at it. Don't expect to see me again until Friday at the earliest--maybe Monday, if I have any sense. That may not put things completely right, but it can't hurt, can it?

By the time I rejoin you, I'll have spent several hours listening to the Hudson flow gently by my park bench, and with a little bit of luck my keel will be somewhat more even. I'll miss you--I've really enjoyed posting lately, even when I was at my most driven--but I hope you'll like me better when I come back.

Have a nice week. I'll try to do the same. Take it away, OGIC!

Posted April 18, 12:03 PM

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- My guest for the Broadway revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was an actress friend. We were both disappointed at intermission (and stayed that way in the second half), and in the process of trying to explain our unhappiness to one another, I said, "Bill Irwin is the wrong voice type for George--way too light, a tenor in a baritone part." She immediately replied, "You're thinking like a music critic. If he was really inside the role, that wouldn't matter." Of course I was, and of course she was right: in a straight play, there's no such thing as a "tenor" part. (Or is there? George Bernard Shaw thought in terms of voice types when writing his plays--but, then, he was a music critic.)

"The world presents itself to me, not chiefly as a complex of visual sensations, but as a complex of aural sensations," H.L. Mencken, himself a sometime music critic, once wrote. I'm far more aesthetically polydextrous (if that's a word) than he was, but my long experience as a musician did make me so sensitive to what comes in through the ear that it may well amount to a kind of bias. I know, for instance, that it has a great deal to do with the way I respond to people in my daily life. At brunch yesterday, I was seated near a woman whose voice was so harsh and grating that it interfered with my ability to enjoy my meal.

Here's something I wrote a few years ago:

I like voices. My best friend is a woman whose speaking voice sounded so engaging to me on the phone that I asked her to lunch, sight unseen. (We've been friends for seven years now, so I must have been on to something.) Not surprisingly, I also like singers of all kinds, from cool Swedish mezzo-sopranos who specialize in nineteenth-century German lieder to rumbling bassos from Texas who wear white Stetsons and sing sardonic ditties with titles like "My Wife Thinks You're Dead." I once wrote a profile of a jazz singer in which I described her voice as sounding like "wild honey with a spoonful of Scotch," and it was probably the happiest moment of my professional life when I showed up at a nightclub to hear her sing and saw those words printed on a poster hanging outside.

The singers in question were Anne Sofie von Otter, Junior Brown, and Diana Krall, but can you guess who the woman on the phone was? Our Girl in Chicago, of course.

- Everybody I know seems to be in a reading group these days. Just to be different, I've joined a three-member movie group. Member No. 1 is a young writer who hasn't seen many movies and wants to find out what she's been missing. Member No. 2 is my punctual friend, who loves movies but hasn't seen many black-and-white ones and wants to find out what she's been missing. Accordingly, we gathered in the Teachout Museum (i.e., my living room) on Sunday evening, ordered pizza, and watched, at my suggestion, Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place. It was a hit, though both my guests were startled--and rightly so--at how frightening Humphrey Bogart was. That kind of self-lacerating, unsparing anger isn't something you expect to see out of a Hollywood star circa 1950, especially one who had established himself as a romantic lead. No wonder the film didn't do well then, and no wonder it's so greatly admired now.

Next month, Grand Illusion....

Posted April 18, 12:01 PM

TT: Eternally obsolete

Six years ago I wrote an essay for The Wall Street Journal called "Tolstoy's Contraption" (it's in the Teachout Reader) in which I suggested that theater and the novel were "obsolete artistic technologies." This must be the most misunderstood piece I've ever written--Saul Bellow definitely misunderstood it--which most likely means that I failed to make myself clear.

Here are the operative paragraphs:

It's no secret that the power of novels to shape the national conversation has declined precipitously since the days when J.D. Salinger and Norman Mailer were household names...

For Americans under the age of thirty, film has largely replaced the novel as the dominant mode of artistic expression, just as the compact disc has become the "successor technology" to the phonograph record. No novel by any Gen-X author has achieved a fraction of the cultural currency of, say, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Movies like this are to today's twenty- and thirtysomethings what The Catcher in the Rye and On the Road were to the baby boomers....

We are not accustomed to thinking of art forms as technologies, but that is what they are--which means they can be rendered moribund by new technological developments, in the way that silent films gave way to talkies and radio to TV. Well into the eighteenth century, for example, most of the West's great storytellers wrote plays, not novels. But the development of modern printing techniques made it feasible for books to be sold at lower prices, allowing storytellers to reach large numbers of readers individually; they then turned to writing novels, and by the twentieth century the theatrical play had come to be widely regarded as a cultural backwater. To be sure, important plays continue to be written and produced, but few watch them (unless they are made into movies).

Four years later, I became the Journal's drama critic, which doubtless struck a great many people as condign punishment for publishing so grave a heresy. But it never occurred to me when I wrote "Tolstoy's Contraption" that anyone would ignore that last sentence. My point wasn't that plays were no longer worth writing, or that all new plays were bad: it was that in a mass culture, live theater is not a major player in the cultural conversation, simply by virtue of the fact that comparatively few people see it. To write a play is not an efficient way of attracting the attention of very large numbers of people, and the novel (by which I mean serious literary fiction, not The Da Vinci Code), it seems to me, is headed in the same direction.

Is that bad? Only if you're the sort of "artist" who treats your art as an instrumentality, a means of accomplishing something exterior to art and its true purposes. If you write plays (or serious novels) in order to advance a cause (or to make a lot of money), you're probably wasting your time. If, on the other hand, your interest is in art for its own soul-illuminating sake, you're in the right business. Merely because very large numbers of people don't go to the theater doesn't mean that plays aren't worth writing and producing. Quite the contrary, it means that those of us who love theater--and I love it passionately--are thereby freed to concentrate on its unique properties, undistracted by secondary considerations.

All this came to my mind in the course of a recent rereading of David Thomson's Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles. Most people think of Welles as a filmmaker, but he started out on the stage, and I suspect he would done better to stay there. To be sure, we would have been deprived of Citizen Kane, but as wonderful as Kane is, I can think of far worse fates. Thomson understands this, as the following imaginary dialogue shows:

[T]he movies--if I may say so--their beauty is too available.

How's that?

There was a time of my life, the 1970s, when I regularly taught Citizen Kane, going through it in a class, in detail, looking at the film over and over again. I probably saw it ten times a year.

And?

I wearied of it. I had to stop seeing it. It became only its tricks, do you understand? It lost its life. Welles felt the same, I think. Consider how many times he saw every detail in the editing, how he labored over its grace. He reached a point where he could not see it ever again. It made him feel...futile, cynical even, empty. Films can do that.

But a play.

Ah yes. I think nearly every day of plays I've seen, or even plays I directed. Nothing remains of them. Or much of them. I have Sondheim's Into the Woods on video in a filmed performance. And I like to see that. But it does not match what I felt that Sunday matinee at the Martin Beck Theatre--the marvel and danger of it, the cries of the audience, the passion of being there....

The passion of being there. That's what it's all about, isn't it? That's the one thing theater can do for you that film will never be able to do (or the novel, for that matter). It puts you in the same room, the same space, with the experience you're having, and it requires you to make a pilgrimage to that given space at an appointed time in order to have the experience. It expects more of you. Such an experience is qualitatively different in effect from anything the mass media, ubiquitous as they are, can possibly offer. It is also, by definition, an experience available only to a limited number of people--a self-selected elite.

All of us now living have grown up with the mass media, whose effect on art has been at once to democratize it and to distort the values of many artists. I'm for democratizing the arts--or, rather, democratizing access to the arts. I believe devoutly that far more people are capable of appreciating serious art than are currently experiencing it. I don't believe, however, that everyone is capable of appreciating it, nor do I think that a work of art is in any sense better because it is being experienced by a larger number of people. Ubiquity is not the same thing as importance, and those who hanker after the former are unlikely to achieve the latter.

Artists (and arts administrators) who were temporarily fooled into converting to the twin gospels of more-is-better and bigger-is-better are now starting to see how grossly they were misled by the mass-media promise of infinite plenty. It occurs to me that the conditions under which today's artists grew up will someday be seen as a prolonged aberration from the historical norm, one that is now being corrected with a vengeance. I doubt, to take just one example, that every good-sized city in America is prepared to support a full-time resident professional symphony orchestra, much less an orchestra and an opera company and a theater company and a ballet company and a museum. This sad but inescapable fact explains why so many regional orchestras are now devoting most of their time to accompanying pop singers, and why so many regional museums feel obliged to fill their galleries with imported blockbuster shows from elsewhere. The balloon has burst.

One piece of good news is that arts journalism is being transformed before our eyes by the rise of Web-based new media--and just in the nick of time. The old mass media were and are zero-sum operations, as advocates of literary fiction have been discovering to their dismay in recent years. Allocate more space (or air time) to one topic and you have that much less space available for all other topics: novels compete with memoirs, classical music with jazz, theater with film, indie flicks with special-effects extravaganzas. Now that most of us live in one-newspaper towns, and now that newspapers themselves are struggling for survival, that's turned into an iron law.

The Web is different: it permits you to publish a "newspaper" or "magazine" of your very own without having to pay for ink, paper, bricks, and mortar--much less a graduate degree in journalism. What it doesn't guarantee, however, is that such "newspapers" will ever be read by millions of people, or that their publishers will be able to give up their day jobs. Artblogging will never be a true mass medium because serious art doesn't appeal to a mass audience. And what's wrong with that? Bigger isn't better, and the world doesn't owe artists a living, much less critics and editors. As I wrote in this space last year in response to an e-mail from an aspiring screenwriter:

As we city folk have a tendency to forget, America is a big country, and the smart people don't all live in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. In fact, most of them don't. From my art-oriented point of view, the most valuable thing about the new media is their ability to distribute high culture (a phrase I don't define narrowly, by the way) to smart people who don't live in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, I hasten to remind my correspondent that those who want to make serious art must take it for granted that they won't make serious money doing so. If that's what you're in it for, don't even think about writing indie screenplays or literary novels or symphonies--go work for Donald Trump. Making art is its own reward, or ought to be. George Balanchine...was once asked why the members of New York City Ballet's pit orchestra were paid less than New York City's garbagemen. His answer? "Because garbage stinks."

Which brings us back to the alleged obsolescence of live theater. Of course it isn't obsolete, not in any way that really matters, any more than paint on a canvas or words on a page are obsolete. It's simply reverted to its normal place in the natural order of things--and that's good. One of the best shows I've seen this season, Sides: The Fear Is Real, is performed by six unknown actors in a shoebox-sized theater. It couldn't have been a bit better if it had been performed on TV for an audience of millions. Of course I'd like for more people to see it. That's why I gave it a good review in The Wall Street Journal, as well as on this blog. Nevertheless, that wouldn't make it better. (It might even make it worse, considering what you have to do in order to get a show on TV.)

Art isn't religion, but it has something important in common with religion: it's a form of soulcraft. Souls can only be changed one by one, and each one is as supremely important as the next. Hence there are no small audiences, only small-souled artists. Blessed are the arts that can be experienced by a mere handful of people at a time, for theirs is the kingdom of beauty at its most intense and precious. Orson Welles might not have made Citizen Kane if he'd remembered that, but he probably would have been a happier man--and a better artist.

Posted April 18, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"[Kenneth] Tynan is a brilliant but rather odious young fellow, who is good when he is enthusiastic, but cheap and personal when he dislikes anyone's work (he hates mine). I said once 'Tynan is very good to read as long as it isn't you' but he is shrewd and readable all the same, only lacking in any respect for the tradition and of course he has seen nothing earlier than 1946! And he thinks theatre must be propaganda of some sort, and if it is merely entertainment (even if it includes it being art) it is not worth anything at all, which seems very boring to me."

Sir John Gielgud, letter to Stark Young (Sept. 15, 1958)

Posted April 18, 12:00 PM

OGIC: At long last meme

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?
Shirley Hazzard's Transit of Venus, which still seems to me, a year after reading it, a crazily improbable object. Like the Easter Island statues or Falling Water--if it disappeared from existence and couldn't be put in front of your face, you'd have to take it for myth.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
"In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you." Oh, if I must!

The last book you bought was...?
A one-two-three punch: The World According to Garp, Doctor Zhivago, and Saturday.

The last book you read was...?
I reread Thomas Harris's Red Dragon.

What are you currently reading?
John Dufresne, Johnny Too Bad.

Five books you would take to a desert island...
The Wings of the Dove for love;
The Canterbury Tales for the crowd of voices;
Paradise Lost for insurance against exhausting my resources;
a Pogo collection for funny animals;
and, in a bit of a gamble, something I've never read...let's say Lost Illusions.

Who are you passing this stick on to and why?
Kenneth at Back with Interest because our taste in books is so different;
Sam at Golden Rule Jones because I'm hungry for an update;
and Miguel at Modern Kicks because he'll need some purely mental exercise after running the Boston Marathon today!

Posted April 18, 4:26 AM

TT: Yeah, O.K., just one more

The latest visitor to the Teachout Museum writes:

Not that there's been much room in my head the last two days for anything but those captivating images on your walls. What a triumphant combination of an eclectic taste with an integrated vision: visual heaven in a small space. Many thanks.

That's what a slightly vain collector likes to hear!

Posted April 18, 1:17 AM

TT: A positively final appearance

A reader writes:

Re your question of what to re-name clinical depression: Winston Churchill referred to his depression as his "black dog." I don't know either Greek or Latin, but if that were translated into one of those languages and the resulting phrase rolled off the tongue nicely, an -ia could be appended and this might be a good title with an interesting pedigree.

Any of you classicists out there care to help us out?

UPDATE: Several readers write....

- "i guess black dog would be canis niger, making for canis nigeria or canis nigerium, but i prefer black cloud, so perhaps niger nubigena (the later meaning born of a cloud). or niger nubiferia (nubifer meaning cloud bearing). or the redundant niger praenubilus (praenubilus meaning very cloudy or dark). or perhaps a reversal with a tweak sounds best/worst: praenubilus nigerium."

- "Canisnigeria would be the exact word in Latin. But it might remind some people of e-mail spam."

- "I'm no classicist, but I know there are several '-ia' words that capture aspects of clinical depression: melancholia, anhedonia (wasn't that what Woody Allen was originally going to call Annie Hall?), abulia. Maybe the problem is that we're looking for a single word to describe a complex condition. Another thought: the depressive state seems akin to a this-worldly form of the Hebrew Bible's concept of the attenuated existence of the dwellers in sheol, so maybe we should be looking for a Hebrew or Yiddish inspired coinage."

Posted April 18, 1:00 AM

April 17, 2005

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"He had thought Shiloh haunted, its beauty sinister like flags.

"Now, drifting between memory and narcotic sleep, he saw that Shiloh was not sinister; it was indifferent. Beautiful Shiloh could witness anything. Its unforgivable beauty simply underscored the indifference of nature, the Green Machine. The loveliness of Shiloh mocked our plight."

Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

Posted April 17, 1:26 AM

April 15, 2005

TT: Whodunnit? Don't ask

I had a great week at the theater: three shows, three winners. Granted, I'd already seen and liked two of the shows in question, but good is good, right?

Anyway, here's the weekly teaser for my Wall Street Journal drama column, which leads off with a slightly qualified but nonetheless definite rave for The Pillowman:

The National Theatre of Great Britain has shipped yet another show to Broadway, and unlike "Democracy," this one's a winner, if a weird one. Martin McDonagh's "The Pillowman," now playing at the Booth Theatre, is a loose-jointed, slightly rambling shocker by the author of "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," performed by a cast of American actors led by Billy Crudup and Jeff Goldblum. I had my doubts at intermission, but by evening's end I'd succumbed--though perhaps that isn't quite the right word--to Mr. McDonagh's tale of a writer whose darkest fantasies come to messy life....

It's not entirely clear what Mr. McDonagh is up to in "The Pillowman." Is it a postmodern metanarrative? A black comedy about life under Stalinism? A parable of the unintended consequences of the writer's art? Beats me, and in the first act the unclarity is extreme enough at times to suggest a switchboard whose plugs are stuck in the wrong holes. Not so the second, more closely woven part, which builds to a predictable but still horrifying climax that hits you like...well, like a bullet in the back of the head.

As for John Patrick Shanley's splendid Doubt, which has transferred to Broadway and won a Pulitzer Prize, I saw pretty much what I expected to see:

I'm pleased to say that it looks good, John Lee Beatty's spare, suggestive set having been discreetly altered to fill the much higher opening of the proscenium stage of the Walter Kerr Theatre.

Brían F. O'Byrne and Cherry Jones have also heightened the scale of their bravura performances as Father Flynn, who may or may not have molested a young boy, and Sister Aloysius, who has no doubt of his guilt and is determined to muscle him out of her parish whatever the cost--including, if need be, her own soul. While I miss the charged intimacy they brought to the Off Broadway production, what they're doing now is no less effective for having been expanded in emotional scale (and volume) to accommodate the needs of a much larger audience....

Last is Sides: The Fear Is Real, an off-Broadway show that I commend most emphatically to your attention:

Collectively written by the six terrific Asian-American performers who make up Mr. Miyagi's Theatre Company, "Sides" is a zany catalogue of everything that can possibly go wrong at an audition. Pretentious playwrights, sexually omnivorous casting directors, fresh-out-of-school actors caught in the chokehold of stage fright: all are portrayed with such demented gusto that you barely stop laughing long enough to catch your breath. Pay no attention to the inside-baseball title, which refers to the script handouts given to actors who try out for a role in a play, TV show or film. Civilians will find "Sides" fully intelligible--and rib-crackingly funny.

I first saw "Sides" two years ago at the New York International Fringe Festival, and since then I've been hoping that it would have an Off Broadway run. My wish has come true: It's playing through May 1 at PS122. I'm sure this won't be your last chance to see it, but why wait? Catch it now and in five years you can tell all your friends how you first saw Sekiya Billman, Cindy Cheung, Paul Juhn, Peter Kim, Hoon Lee and Rodney To back when they were still struggling actors.

No link, for reasons more than adequately explained here. To read the whole thing, buy today's Journal at your neighborhood newsstand, or stride boldly forward into the new age of electronic media by going here.

Posted April 15, 12:06 PM

TT: From the trenches

My posting on Rupert Murdoch's recent speech about new media and its implications for artists is starting to attract attention. In addition to links from such media-oriented sites as unmediated.org, Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine, and Jay Rosen at PressThink, I've also been getting some very interesting mail. One reader, a Hollywood agent, wrote:

Am sending as many of my agents and clients as I can to your posting today, "Memo from Cassandra." I've been on the reinvention bandwagon with actors since 1995. In my trade the great lie is that once you are on the merry-go-round you are on it forever. Untrue! I've witnessed career after career dry up because of the actor's fear, masked by smugness, of change. Uncle Rupert put this incredible culture shift entirely into perspective. Bob Garfield pointed out similiar changes in television that warrant complete reinvention of the medium in a groundbreaking Advertising Age article just last week.

Funny how it's just as difficult to sell the "reinvention" concept in '05 as it was in '95, especially to actors. It's odd too that the artists who portray characters that represent and sometimes even create cultural shifts wouldn't know a cultural shift if they fell over it.

Thank you for this.

My pleasure (though perhaps that's not quite the right way to put it!). I mean to keep writing about this, by the way....

Posted April 15, 12:04 PM

TT: Words, words, words

I'm six thousand words into the first chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong (I've already written the eight-thousand-word prologue), and I'm so pleased at how well it's going that I'm almost afraid to admit it. Writing The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken was agony in slow motion--sort of like spending a decade skinning yourself with a butter knife--and I wrote All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine so quickly that the pain didn't have time to register until the book was in production. Not so Hotter Than That, which is coming very easily. Your response to the snippet I posted the other day has been wonderfully encouraging, though the truth is that I haven't needed a whole lot of encouraging, at least not this week: I can hardly wait to sit down at my iBook each morning. I especially like a comment that Our Girl passed on from her father, who told her, "The beginning of Terry's book reads like a novel." Yes!

I know it won't always go this well, if only because my reviewing schedule often prevents me from getting any work done on the book for a week or two at a time. For the moment, though, I'm still in the land of bliss, and with a little bit of luck I'll have the first chapter finished by Monday, after which I plan to blow town for a couple of desperately needed days of untheatrical, computer-free down time at my favorite undisclosed location. (I called yesterday to make a reservation. The manager, bless her, asked, "Where've you been all winter?")

As for today, I'm planning to write four or five pages of Hotter Than That, hit a couple of galleries and have dinner with a friend, then come straight home and knock out another couple of pages before crashing. Another thrilling night in the life of a cosmopolitan drama critic? Maybe not, but I've got the muse sitting on my shoulder, and I intend to make the most of her presence before she flies away.

Have a nice weekend.

Posted April 15, 12:03 PM

TT: Almanac

"The one infallible symptom of greatness is the capacity for double vision. They know that all absolutes are heretical but that one can only act in a given circumstance by assuming one. Knowing themselves, they are skeptical about human nature but not despairing; they know that they are weak but not helpless: perfection is impossible but one can be or do better worse. They are unconventional but not bohemian; it never occurs to them to think in terms of convention. Conscious of achievement and vocation they are conscious of how little depends on their free will and how much they are vehicles for powers they can never fully understand but to which they can listen. Objective about themselves with the objectivity of the truly humble, they often shock the conceited out of their wits: e.g. Goethe's remark 'What do the Germans want? Have they not me?' Knowing that the only suffering that can be avoided is the attempt to escape from suffering, they are funny and enjoy life."

W.H. Auden, "The Double Focus: Sandburg's Lincoln" (Common Sense, March 1940)

Posted April 15, 12:00 PM

TT and OGIC: Hopeful housekeeping

Take a look at the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column and you'll notice some drastic changes, mostly inspired by the fact that our roster of artblogs had grown unmanageably long.

As an experiment:

- We've broken the first section of the blogroll, formerly known as Artblogs, into seven different categories: Litblogs, Randomblogs (i.e., blogs that roam unpredictably across the cultural map), Schoolblogs (i.e., art-oriented blogs with a specifically academic slant), Screenblogs, Sightblogs (i.e., blogs about the visual arts), Soundblogs, and Stageblogs (i.e., blogs about theater and dance). If "About Last Night" were part of our roll, it'd be a Randomblog.

- The second section of the blogroll now contains three kinds of art-oriented non-blog sites: Artists, Critics, and Art Links.

- The third section is devoted to Other Blogs (i.e., interesting blogs that occasionally touch on artistic matters but are primarily about something else).

- The fourth, media-oriented section contains three categories: Media/Gossip, Radio (i.e., art-oriented sites maintained by radio stations or specific radio programs), and Print (i.e., art-oriented sites maintained by magazines and newspapers).

- Last is a section of miscellaneous Useful Sites.

Recent additions to the blogroll are followed by an asterisk (*).

Once again, this is an experiment, and thus subject to extensive tinkering. No doubt some blogs belong in categories other than the ones in which they're presently found, and we'll move them there sooner or later. In addition, we'll keep on adding promising-looking blogs and sites on a trial basis as we stumble across them. (Don't hesitate to tell us about anything you'd like to see on our blogroll.)

Above all, our hope is that subdividing "Sites to See" into a larger number of categories will help you use it more effectively. Conversely, our fear is that organizing the artblogs by subject matter will cut down on the frequency with which you explore blogs that might be slightly off your beaten path. Remember that the whole point of "About Last Night" is to encourage cultural cross-pollination. Keep that in mind as you troll up and down our blogroll.

Let us know what you think. We want "Sites to See" to be useful to you--and we read our mail.

Happy hunting.

UPDATE: OGIC just had a brainstorm, as a result of which we've changed "Randomblogs" to "Omniblogs." Much better.

Posted April 15, 2:41 AM

April 14, 2005

TT: Memo from Cassandra

No matter what you think of Rupert Murdoch, you need to read the speech he gave yesterday to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Jeff Jarvis has posted a fileted version, plus a link to the full text. Some pertinent excerpts:

We need to realize that the next generation of people accessing news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source, have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when and how they will get it, where they will get it from, and who they will get it from....

What is happening right before us is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don't want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don't want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them what's important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don't want news presented as gospel.

Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle....

In the face of this revolution, however, we've been slow to react. We've sat by and watched while our newspapers have gradually lost circulation. Where four out of every five Americans in 1964 read a paper every day, today, only half do. Among just younger readers, the numbers are even worse, as I've just shown....

There are a number of reasons for our inertness in the face of this advance. First, for centuries, newspapers as a medium enjoyed a virtual information monopoly – roughly from the birth of the printing press to the rise of radio. We never had a reason to second-guess what we were doing. Second, even after the advent of television, a slow but steady decline in readership was masked by population growth that kept circulations reasonably intact. Third, even after absolute circulations started to decline in the 1990s, profitability did not.

But those days are gone. The trends are against us.

So unless we awaken to these changes, and adapt quickly, we will, as an industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans or, worse, many of us will disappear altogether.

I venture to say that not one newspaper represented in this room lacks a website. Yet how many of us can honestly say that we are taking maximum advantage of those websites to serve our readers, to strengthen our businesses, or to meet head-on what readers increasingly say is important to them in receiving their news?

If you're reading this blog, you know what Murdoch means. Newspapers are in trouble, yet they show few signs of rethinking what they do and how they do it. My own guess is that most of them won't. It seems to me highly unlikely that whatever eventually replaces newspapers--and they will be replaced, sooner rather than later--is going to be invented by the same people who are currently publishing newspapers. Established institutions rarely if ever transform themselves, least of all in response to external threats to their existence. (Here's an exception.) Instead, they are replaced by brand-new institutions that spring up in response to those same threats, seeing them as an opportunity.

Like I said, you already know what I'm talking about. But if you're an artist, ask yourself this: how are you using the new media to interact with your audience and spread the word about your work?

Specifically:

- Do you have a Web site? If so, do you update it regularly with fresh news of your activities, including links to stories about you that are published or broadcast in the mainstream media, or on other Web sites?

- Is your performance calendar up to date?

- Do you have an e-mailbox on your site? How often do you check it?

- Does your site contain a wide-ranging assortment of downloadable print-quality photographs of you and/or your work?

- Do you make prominent mention of the URL of your site whenever and wherever possible? Have you considered putting up a banner at your public appearances that has your URL on it in big, bold letters? Is the URL easy to remember--i.e., www.yourname.com?

- Can people who visit your site read, view, or listen to free samples of your work?

- Do you make your work available for sale through the site? If you're a visual artist, do you sell original works or prints via the Web? If you're a musician, is it possible to download recordings of your music? Do you know what ArtistShare is?

- Have you considered starting a blog, or keeping an online journal?

- Do you know what podcasting is?

I've said this before, but it can't be said often enough: the mainstream media aren't especially interested in serious art, and such interest as they do have is diminishing daily. If you're looking to big-city newspapers to start reviewing more literary fiction, or to PBS to telecast more ballet and modern dance, or to your local radio station to continue carrying the Metropolitan Opera's Saturday broadcasts, you're kidding yourself. They don't care. Which leaves you with two options. You can sit around complaining about their indifference--or you can do an end run around them and use the new media to reach out directly to your audience, both existing and potential.

Again, you know all this. Right? But what are you doing about it?

Here's Murdoch again:

Like many of you, I'm a digital immigrant. I wasn't weaned on the web, nor coddled on a computer. Instead, I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few proprietors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know. My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives....

The peculiar challenge then, is for us digital immigrants – many of whom are in positions to determine how news is assembled and disseminated – to apply a digital mindset to a set of challenges that we unfortunately have limited to no first-hand experience dealing with.

I know exactly what he means. I, too, am a middle-aged digital immigrant--but I'm here, now, communicating directly with you via a medium that barely existed five years ago. No, it wasn't easy, but I've rethought my expectations about what the mainstream media can do for me, and now I'm starting to do some of it myself. You can do the same thing, so long as you let go of your preconceptions about the dominant role of the old media in your professional life. (If I were an Internet entrepreneur instead of a writer, by the way, I'd launch a business devoted to creating a state-of-the-art presence on the Web for busy artists who don't know their way around a computer.)

Here's a model of an effective, well-designed Web site. And here's something Jeff Jarvis posted today about how local newspapers might rethink the way they do business in light of the emergence of new media. It's a thought experiment, an attempt to shake off the chokehold of the this-is-how-we've-always-done-it mindset. Read it. Then try applying the same kind of thinking to the way you do business as an artist.

Don't wait for the revolution. Start it yourself.

Posted April 14, 12:43 PM

TT: Where we are

I'm in New York, writing about Louis Armstrong. OGIC is in Chicago, hacking away at a short stack of deadlines. If it's fresh postings you want, go to the right-hand column, scroll down to "Sites to See," and start clicking. If you can't find something you like there, you don't like enough stuff.

Later.

Posted April 14, 12:03 PM

TT: Tossing a pebble

I had dinner earlier this evening with my friend and neighbor Paul Moravec, a composer whose music is mentioned not infrequently in this space. Something you may not know about Paul (other than that he does a terrific impersonation of John Lennon) is that he has a long history of clinical depression, by which I don't mean occasional periods of moderate melancholy. As he explained in an interview earlier this year with the San Francisco Chronicle, he has "been suicidal, hospitalized twice for clinical depression and, 10 years ago, was treated with electroshock therapy."

Fortunately, Paul not only survived but prevailed, and even managed to compose a remarkable piece of music, Mood Swings, that was directly inspired by his illness. Since winning the Pulitzer Prize last year, he's started talking publicly about his successful struggle, and he mentioned at dinner that he's been struck by the number of people who got in touch with him after reading his San Francisco Chronicle interview in order to tell him of their own experiences with depression. Unlikely as it may seem, many Americans continue to shy away from frank talk about mental illness, and Paul's correspondents have been going out of their way to praise him for his candor.

Paul said something else that stuck in my mind. He told me that he was troubled by the fact that the word "depression" has come to be used more or less interchangeably to describe both persistent sadness and a form of mental illness so virulent as to be life-threatening. "What we need," he added, "is a different word for clinical depression--a new word. One that has the same emotional impact as, say, leukemia."

Deliberate attempts to alter established linguistic usage rarely get anywhere. As every blogger knows, newly coined words must be organically absorbed into the language by way of everyday usage. Some words, like blog itself, catch on quickly because of their simplicity and self-evident utility, whereas too-clever coinages like bleg remain on the fringes of common usage and in time are dropped and forgotten. Still, I think Paul has a point. Clinical depression really is a thing unto itself, qualitatively different from the milder mood disorders that are so frequently lumped together with it. Perhaps we do need a better word for clinical depression, something that more clearly suggests its devastating, incapacitating intensity.

Alas, I have no brilliant ideas, nor am I announcing a word-coining contest. Successful new words are not created by smart people sitting around a cybertable tossing out ideas. On the other hand, the Web is a never-ending demonstration of what has come to be known as the butterfly effect. As Edward Lorenz wrote in the 1963 paper in which he coined the phrase, "One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull's wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever." Perhaps someday we'll all be using an indelibly vivid word for clinical depression whose coinage can be traced back step by step to this posting, a not quite offhand flap of the wings of an interested party who just happened to have a blog....

Posted April 14, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"I have yet to meet a poetry-lover who was not an introvert, or an introvert who was not unhappy in adolescence. At school, particularly, maybe, if, as in my own case, it is a boarding school, he sees the extrovert successful, happy, and good and himself unpopular or neglected; and what is hardest to bear is not unpopularity, but the consciousness that it is deserved, that he is grubby and inferior and frightened and dull. Knowing no other kind of society than the contingent, he imagines that this arrangement is part of the eternal scheme of things, that he is doomed to a life of failure and envy. It is not till he grows up, till years later he runs across the heroes of his school days and finds them grown commonplace and sterile, that he realizes that the introvert is the lucky one, the best adapted to an industrial civilization, the collective values of which are so infantile that he alone can grow, who has educated his phantasies and learned how to draw upon the resources of his inner life. At the time however his adolescence is unpleasant enough. Unable to imagine a society in which he would feel at home, and warned by some mysterious instinct from running back for consolation to the gracious or terrifying figures of childhood, he turns away from the human to the non-human: homesick he will seek, not his mother, but mountains or autumn woods, friendless he will mutely observe the least shy of the wild animals, and the growing life within him will express itself in a devotion to music and thoughts upon mutability and death. Art for him will be something infinitely precious, pessimistic, and hostile to life. If it speaks of love, it must be love frustrated, for all success seems to him noisy and vulgar; if it moralizes, it must counsel a stoic resignation, for the world he knows is well content with itself and will not change."

W.H. Auden, "A Literary Transference" (Southern Review, Summer 1940)

Posted April 14, 12:00 PM

TT: Oh, by the way, zip it

Yes, I've noticed that whenever I post a message saying that posting today is going to be light, it tends to be followed by a flood of additional postings. And no, I haven't figured out what mysterious kink in my psyche is responsible for this phenomenon.

Anyway, I'm probably not going to post very much on Friday, unless I change my mind and decide to post a whole lot of stuff.

Thanks for asking.

Posted April 14, 10:32 AM

April 13, 2005

TT: A little taste

This is the first paragraph of the first chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. I hope you like it.

* * *

To the northerner New Orleans is another country, seductive and disorienting, a steamy, shabby paradise of spicy cooking, wrought-iron balconies, and streets called Elysian Fields and Desire, a place where the signs advertise such mysterious commodities as po-boys and muffuletta and no one is buried under ground. We'll take the boat to the land of dreams, the pilgrim hears in his mind's ear as he prowls the Vieux Carré, pushing through the noisy hordes of tipsy visitors, wondering whether the land of his dreams still exists, or ever did. Rarely does he linger long enough to pierce the thick veneer of local color with which the natives shield themselves from the tourist trade. At the end of his stay he knows little more than when he came, and goes back home to his bookshelf to puzzle out all that he has seen and smelled and tasted. A.J. Liebling, a well-traveled visitor from up north, saw New Orleans as a Mediterranean port transplanted to the Gulf of Mexico, a town of civilized pleasures whose settlers "carried with them a culture that had ripened properly, on the tree." He knew what he was seeing, but Walker Percy, who lived and died there, cast a cooler eye on the same sights: "The ironwork on the balconies sags like rotten lace. Little French cottages hide behind high walls. Through deep sweating carriageways one catches glimpses of courtyards gone to jungle." Unlike Liebling, he also caught the scent of decay....

Posted April 13, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Those who say that their childhood was the happiest period of their lives must, one suspects, have been the victims of perpetual misfortune in later years. For there is no reason to suppose that the period of childhood is inevitably happier than any other. The only thing for which children are to be envied is their exuberant vitality. This is apt to be mistaken for happiness. For true happiness, however, there must be a certain degree of experience. The ordinary pleasures of childhood are similar to those of a dog when it is given its dinner or taken out for a walk, a behaviouristic, tail-wagging business, and, as for childhood being care-free, I know from my own experience, that black care can sit behind us even on our rocking-horses."

Lord Berners, First Childhood

Posted April 13, 12:00 PM

TT: Happy ending

From the New York Times obituary of Stanley Sadie, editor of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, who died the other day of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis:

Mr. Sadie had spent three weeks at a hospital in London, but was intent on returning home in time for the first concert in a music series that he and his wife run in a church near their home. The concert, on Sunday evening, was an all-Beethoven program performed by the Chilingirian String Quartet. Mr. Sadie was able to stay for the first half, but felt unwell and went home to bed. At the conclusion of the performance, the quartet went to Mr. Sadie's house, set up quietly in his bedroom, and performed the slow movement of Beethoven's Quartet No. 16 in F (Op. 135) as he drifted in and out of sleep.

He died at home the next day.

Posted April 13, 10:40 AM

April 12, 2005

TT: Almanac

"I have always taken an almost intoxicating delight in 'perilous laughter,' that is to say laughter which, either from good manners or fear, has to be controlled at all costs. The kind of laughter which, on solemn occasions or in the presence of the great, sometimes wells up within one with such violence that the human frame is nearly shattered in the course of its suppression."

Lord Berners, First Childhood

Posted April 12, 12:00 PM

April 11, 2005

TT: Everywhere you go, there he is

A reader writes:

I just came back from Budapest, and on Wednesday, March 30th, went into the Museum of Fine Arts (known in Hungarian as Szépmuvészeti Múzeum). At the top of the entrance stairs is an outdoor cafe and a loudspeaker was playing, just a few miles from the Danube--"Up the Lazy River," with Louis Armstrong singing and playing. The Museum is located on Hosök tere, which means "Heroes' Square," a fitting place for our great Louis!

You've got that right.

Posted April 11, 12:03 PM

TT: Ready, set, wait

I spend more time waiting for people in front of theaters, concert halls, and nightclubs than anyone I know. The reason is that I'm always given two press tickets to the shows I see, and I always invite a friend to fill the second seat. (Actually, I didn't have the nerve to ask anyone to accompany me to All Shook Up, but that was an exception.) Since I'm at shows of one kind or another at least three nights a week...well, you figure it out.

I try not to get my knickers in a twist when little things go wrong, and I think I've become fairly good over the years at avoiding needless exasperation. (I used to be awful at it.) On the other hand, I really can't be late to the shows I see, since I'm there for professional reasons, so I start to get antsy whenever a guest fails to arrive at 7:45. After years of pointless suffering, I finally started giving the same speech to all my escortees: Meet me in front of the theater fifteen minutes before curtain time. If you're not there five minutes before curtain, I'll leave your ticket at the box office in your name and meet you inside.

My fifteen-and-five plan made it possible for me to consider the behavior of my friends from a detached, even sociological point of view, and I soon noticed that only one of them, a woman in publishing who makes a fetish of punctuality, can be counted on to show up at 7:45 on the nose. Another is habitually early. (She is, unlikely as it may sound, a jazz singer.) The rest are late to varying degrees. Most show up at some unpredictable point between 7:50 and 7:54, looking mildly anxious as they push their way through the crowd on the sidewalk and catch my waiting eye. A few like to arrive at 7:55:30, usually as I'm scrawling their name on the ticket preparatory to depositing it at the box office.

This leaves five friends who usually come to the theater between 8:03 and 8:05. (No eight o'clock curtain in New York ever rises before 8:05.) They are, in ascending order of delinquency:

- Two writers from the outer boroughs who work at home and come straight from their desks to the theater, thus exposing themselves to the caprices of mass transit.

- A reporter who has a way of getting stuck on the phone just as she's getting ready to leave the office.

- A civilian who is so notoriously unreliable that at one time I made it a rule never to take her to a show without our dining together first, thus ensuring that I'd know where she was at curtain time.

- An artist (I won't identify her medium, though she knows who she is) who has never been on time for anything in her life, though she always has interesting, sometimes spectacular excuses for her lateness. I'll never forget the time she called me on my cell phone from the wrong theater six blocks up the street, then ran all the way to the right one. (Thank God she works out.)

Back in the benighted days before I came up with the fifteen-and-five plan, I used to get irritated at these five delinquents. Then I realized that to do so was pointless, since they clearly weren't going to change their lifelong habits for me (or, I assume, anyone else). I didn't want to deprive myself of the pleasures of their company, so I figured out how to manage their chronic lateness in such a way as to make it tolerable. Now it doesn't bother me, except in the case of the artist, who cuts it closer than anyone I know. More than once she's run down the aisle and dropped into her seat just as the house lights were dimming. She drives me crazy, if not quite enough for me to stop taking her to shows. Quite. Yet.

Most people don't have this kind of perspective on their circle of friends, just as most people have never been unlucky enough to edit an anthology containing essays by a dozen of their best friends. (I'm pleased to say that I managed to do so without alienating any of the friends in question, though I did consider murdering two of them.) But I do, and what puzzles me after all these years is this: why is it that only two of my friends meet me on time? Because none of the others do, not ever. As in never. N-E-V-E-R. And you know what? Even though I know they're going to be a little late, and have an ironclad policy in place ensuring that I'll be in my seat when the curtain goes up, I still get antsy waiting for them, every damn time.

Might it possibly be that I'm the one who's in need of an attitude adjustment? Surely not. That would be blaming the victim, right? No?

Posted April 11, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Why does it happen so quickly? You throw a stone into the air and it has to overcome gravity, so its rise is slow, and that is why the days of childhood are so long and leisurely. But as the stone falls, it goes faster and faster, with a velocity of thirty-two feet per second, so that your sense of time finally is that of a rush into death. As the Book of Job puts it, ‘My days fly faster than the weaver's shuttle.' Towards the end you rush towards the earth, towards death. What does this acceleration signify? Why is it that the days of childhood seem to last for years, whereas in old age the days resemble those flutter books you used to buy in ‘specialty' shops--you rippled the pages with your thumb and you'd see a comic performance--a hula dancer or a dog at a hydrant. That's how fast it goes. And the question is what happens to your original sense of being when the thumb of time flutters your penultimate pages? Everybody, I believe, will know exactly what I am talking about."

Saul Bellow, quoted in Salmagundi, Spring-Summer 1995 (courtesy of Jess Joseph)

Posted April 11, 12:00 PM

TT: A man, a plan, a night off

I spent pretty much the whole morning and afternoon working on Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. The result was 2,000 polished words that carry Louis from 1905 to 1913--the formative years of his childhood. Not only am I hugely pleased with the day's work, but I'm still hot enough that I could probably keep on pushing forward until two or three in the morning. Instead, I've decided to shut the shop down and resume work tomorrow afternoon. This cuts sharply against the grain of my workaholic nature, suggesting that it's exactly what I ought to do.

No writing to do, no show to see, no dinner date...what will I do with myself? Well, here are four possibilities that sound especially good:

- Listen to the original soundtrack CD of Bernard Herrmann's dark, desperate score for Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground, which just arrived in today's mail.

- Continue reading the bound galleys of The Lost Night: A Daughter's Search for the Truth of Her Father's Murder, a memoir by danceblogger Rachel Howard, which arrived on Saturday.

- Watch one of the remaining Gilmore Girls episodes stockpiled on the hard drive of my DVR.

- Turn the computer off now. Absolutely no more e-mail or blogging until tomorrow night.

What's not to like? See you later. The next words you read will be somebody else's....

P.S. Read this and smile. (He gets it, by the way.)

Posted April 11, 8:41 AM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"Sometimes it seems like writing novels has become a contemporary form of expression, expression of self. Much like being a Renaissance gentleman writing a sonnet. It's seen as a thing that anyone with a reasonable amount of education can do, and it's your duty as a citizen to write a half-dozen novels."

Ian McEwan, interviewed in Salon

Posted April 11, 4:38 AM

OGIC: Show me where to sign

An open letter I can get behind. Even though I never finished Preston Falls and might choose to phrase things a bit differently, I do love me some Jernigan. That guy will make you laugh ("I had my usual thoughts about everything being debased") and make you laugh and cry:

I ran into the house but Rick was already in there shouting into the telephone, and back outside a crowd had gathered around the car and the van. But nobody was getting too close. It looked like a scene out of an old Twilight Zone, neighbors on some little suburban street looking at the flying saucer whose arrival would soon reveal what fascists they all were. Pretty inappropriate thing to be thinking, but. The whole thing, in fact, looked as if it were in black and white. I should have gone and pushed through the crowd and done something. Later they told me it had been over instantly: no blame. Right. But at any rate, I walked around the end of the garage instead and back to the pool, now deserted. I climbed the steps up onto the deck, felt like I was going to black out, quick sat down on something, and when the shiny flecks stopped swimming in front of my eyes I looked down and saw her wet footprints fading.

Well, I remember being awfully impressed with that last image when I first read this book as a young 'un, anyway--I remember sucking my breath in at it. Now I'm not so sure. It doesn't affect me to nearly the same degree, whether simply because I'm more discerning now or because it's the sort of thing that rings the bell only the one time you don't see it coming.

Jernigan is an amazing book in any case, and alone makes Gates fair game for Mr. Demko's, er, encouragement.

Posted April 11, 4:22 AM

OGIC: Cleanliness is next to...bookishness?

Dove's massive giveaway of a book of Oprah Winfrey's magazine columns, in exchange for free advertising inside the book, is neither the first nor the most consequential instance in American publishing history of books selling soap. I quote from Rosemary Ashton's introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition of Mrs. Humphrey Ward's triple-decker novel Robert Elsmere:

Published in 1888, when its author was aged 36, the work became an immediate and enduring bestseller. It went on to achieve even greater sales, mainly in pirated editions, in America. Within a year of its publication, Robert Elsmere--less a mere book than "a momentous public event," as Henry James put it--appears to have sold about 40,000 copies in Britain and 200,000 in America. So extraordinary was the behaviour of American booksellers and entrepreneurs, one of whom gave the book away free with every purchase of a bar of Balsam Fir Soap, that the case for pushing through at last an International Copyright Bill was made largely with reference to the fortunes of Robert Elsmere in America. The bill came into effect in 1891.

So what's Mrs. Ward's piracy-smashing and just-plain-smashing success all about? No sensation novel hers, but "a long, serious, detailed account of the loss of orthodox faith of a young clergyman, Robert Elsmere, and the consequent straings on his marriage to an Evangelical wife." That's Ashton again. I'm sorry to have to borrow her words, since I actually did read this book once upon a time, though strictly out of duty when I was a student of British fiction of this period. My memory of Elsmere is highly sketchy, my book itself dutifully underlined and check-marked, though not, I see, much festooned with actual notes. As a novel it's more than competent but unremarkable. If you are in the market for a quickie history of nineteenth-century religious issues in England, however, it's probably as cushy a ride as you're going to find.

Perhaps the most popular novel of its age, now forgotten by all but scholars. I wonder what will be the Robert Elsmere of our time? More to the point, I wonder what won't.

Posted April 11, 2:22 AM

OGIC: Bloggers seek shy types for fun, publicity

Here's a new webby, bookish project (my favorite kind) that I'm part of: the Litblog Co-op. Idea's this: four times a year the participating bloggers will throw their collective influence behind a book they really, really like--something that's not poised to get a great deal of attention from the print media. The real beauty of the concept? Twenty highly opinionated individuals, enabled by technology to settle on a single book without any actual brawling! Of course, I could always drive to Golden Rule Jones's to kick him if absolutely necessary. But the rest of the far-flung LBC are probably safe.

Check out the fledgling site. Make our job harder--and imperil Sam's shins--by submitting book recommendations. And stay tuned: on May 15th the first selection will be announced. And please note some of the excellent company in which this finds me.

Posted April 11, 2:08 AM

April 8, 2005

TT: Little Caesar

It's Friday, and the fruits of my recent nonstop playgoing are on display in this morning's Wall Street Journal drama column, which contains reviews of four New York shows: Julius Caesar, On Golden Pond, Steel Magnolias, and the Lincoln Center American Songbook concert version (now closed) of Stephen Sondheim's Passion.

Julius Caesar is a toxic waste dump:

According to the posters, Denzel Washington is the star of "Julius Caesar," which opened Sunday at the Belasco Theatre. The fine young ladies in the balcony signified agreement by squealing when he made his entrance in a sharp-looking business suit, this being a modern-dress version of Shakespeare's classic tale of dirty work in ancient Rome. Don't let appearances fool you, though: The real star of this mostly horrible show is Colm Feore, who is high-strung and lustrously precise as Cassius. Next to him, Mr. Washington comes off like a well-meaning amateur, standing stiff as a weathervane and gabbling his way through Brutus' lines. Sometimes he snaps into focus, but for the most part he stalks haplessly through Daniel Sullivan's hopelessly confused updating, which is set in some unknown country--perhaps the one where modern-dress Shakespeare productions go to die....

On Golden Pond is a terrible play, unredeemed by the very best efforts of James Earl Jones:

Needless to say, it's great to have Mr. Jones back on Broadway, from which he has been absent since 1987. Would that the vehicle for his return were worthy! He's still got the best pipes in the business, but to hear them, you've got to sit through the damn play. I gather from the press release that this is "the first major production to feature African-American performers." O.K. by me, but no matter what color you paint the Thayers--or how well you act them--they're still phony. My reluctant advice: If you feel the need to be manipulated, go see a chiropractor....

Steel Magnolias, making its Broadway debut in this revival, is an unpretentious commercial charmer:

Robert Harling's 1987 play about the comical clients of Truvy's Beauty Spot is, of course, actor-proof. I last saw it performed by a stageful of Orthodox Jewish schoolgirls, and it was still funny. Nevertheless, it profits from the attentions of professionals, and this cast is nothing if not professional. Don't ask me why Marsha Mason was cast as a grumpy Louisiana broad, but everyone else, Frances Sternhagen very much included, is just right or close to it. Christine Ebersole gives a nicely lemony performance as M'Lynn (think Eve Arden), Delta Burke shrewdly underplays Truvy (don't think Dolly Parton), and Broadway debutantes Rebecca Gayheart and Lily Rabe are charming as Shelby and Annelle....

And Passion was predictably fine, with one unexpected qualification:

Patti LuPone was especially fine as the sickly, unbeautiful Fosca, whose desperate obsession with Giorgio (Michael Cerveris) pulls him inexorably away from his married lover Clara (Audra McDonald). Paul Gemignani, Mr. Sondheim's preferred conductor, made Jonathan Tunick's orchestrations sound more luscious than ever. As for the score, it's beyond praise, a musical achievement comparable in quality to "Sweeney Todd." I can't say better than that.

I had only one reservation about "Passion," which is that Ms. McDonald's singing is becoming infested with scoopy mannerisms that have no place among Mr. Sondheim's spare vocal lines....

As usual, no link. Buy today's Journal and look me up in the Weekend Journal section, or go here and subscribe to the Online Journal, which gives you access to all the paper's cultural coverage (highly recommended, if I do say so myself).

Posted April 08, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Mr. Miles was the Mathematical master, and for that very reason especially detestable to me, for whom mathematics was anathema. He was also a prig, the type of pedantically superior, insular prig which England, above all other countries, manages to produce in its perfection. Nearly every sentence that proceeded from his lips had so exasperating a flavour that it excited a wild sense of irritation, even when one agreed with him.

"I have recently discovered his exact counterpart in an English musical critic, whose name cannot be mentioned, as he is unfortunately still alive. In this man's articles and books I noticed a certain tone that reminded me forcibly of Mr. Miles, so that I was curious to meet him to see if the resemblance went any further. It did indeed; and I was confronted with an almost perfect replica of the Mathematical master at Elmley. I was taken back to those far-off days and my memory was refreshed as effectively as by any of the scents, tastes and tactile aids to recollection discovered by Proust. There was the same anaemic earnestness, the same superior disparagement of things that escaped his comprehension, the same milk-and-water voice upon which a University twang lay like a thin layer of vinegar. His personality, just like that of Mr. Miles, excited all those sentiments of irritation that can only be relieved by the application of a well-aimed kick. If it were not for the fact that the respective dates of births and deaths overlapped I should be inclined to believe in a reincarnation."

Lord Berners, First Childhood

Posted April 08, 12:00 PM

TT: Neil Welliver, R.I.P.

I read in the morning papers of the death of Neil Welliver, who is represented in the Teachout Museum by the woodcut Night Scene, which I took to Washington with me last month to show at my Phillips Lecture. I met Welliver by chance a few years ago, and wrote about the encounter in "Second City," my Washington Post column:

Tibor de Nagy Gallery is showing a singularly beautiful retrospective of prints by Neil Welliver, who lives in Maine and paints cool-colored, thickly brushed backwoods landscapes that have a touch of the "all-over" canvas-covering abstraction of the New York School. When I went to the counter to buy a copy of the exhibition catalogue, there was no one there to help me but a crusty, bald-headed gent who was grumbling amiably to another visitor about "goddamn snotty New Yorkers." I picked up a catalogue and pulled out my wallet, and he peered suspiciously at me. Then he grinned. "Would you like me to sign it?" he asked.

To read the New York Times obituary, go here.

Posted April 08, 10:42 AM

TT: I couldn't have put it better

Speaking of brushes with greatness, here's Laura Lippman:

So when I saw Stephen Sondheim a few months ago in a midtown restaurant, what did I do? Absolutely nothing. Oh, I looked. I agree with Nora Ephron's definition of celebrity--someone you would stand up in a restaurant to see--but I was already standing. I looked and I beamed and I thought: Hey, I just saw Pacific Overtures! But it never occurred to me to try and approach him. Not because I was embarrassed to be a fan, but because I was content to be one, if that makes sense.

Fandom is a complicated, often reviled state. I've heard people speak derisively about someone going "fan boy" or "fan girl," but I've never been able to share the derision. Sometimes, I even go out of my way to do something nerdily fannish--sending an (unanswered) e-mail to Zilpha Keatley Snyder, shaking Clint Eastwood's hand, going to a State House press conference to see Cal Ripken Jr. in the flesh. One advantage to never having been cool...is that it frees up a lot of energy that otherwise would be invested in pride. Plus, I have to think it's good karma, sending one's gratitude out into the world. And, sure enough, sometimes it comes back, in the most rewarding and surprising ways.

But I also know that I can't, in a restaurant encounter, say anything uniquely meaningful to someone whose work has meant so much to me. I cannot make Stephen Sondheim my new best friend, no matter what clever, obscure references I make. ("I became a mystery writer because of The Last of Sheila." Not true, but it would probably get his attention.) So I settled for being just a fan, although I always tell people who use that phrase in front of me to leave out the "just." It's not a state that requires modifiers or self-deprecation. Isn't everyone a fan of someone or something? I hope so.

I felt the same way about Jerome Robbins, passing up several opportunities to speak to him on the street. And if I were to find myself seated two tables away from Sondheim, I'd do--or, rather, not do--exactly the same thing.

(Part of what brought Laura's posting to mind, by the way, is that I had lunch yesterday with a musician friend of mine who has reached a point in her career when people occasionally recognize her on the street. That must be an interesting sensation....)

Posted April 08, 6:25 AM

April 7, 2005

OGIC: Best. Readers. Ever.

If you ask it, they will answer. Thanks to all of the readers who lent their brains for picking yesterday and this morning, taking on my question about fiction containing fictional fiction/poetry--or better, as one correspondent puts it, "writers writing writers' writing." This actually goes to what's only a minor point in the review I'm writing, but the input was helpful in a few different ways. First, I figured out what was the elephant in the room I was overlooking--it's apparently The World According to Garp, which was cited by a majority of people who wrote and which I haven't read but soon will have. Second, I have added several other titles to my Read Me! list. I can't in good conscience write about any of these in my piece, not having read them, but I can happily put them in the queue. Third, there was simply a lot of good food for thought in the (veritable torrent of) email I received. I'm planning a longer follow-up post, to be written after the review.

When the review appears, I'll certainly link to it here. In the meantime, thanks to everyone who helped. You guys are so much better than ye olde Google.

Posted April 07, 12:46 PM

TT: Me and Louis

I really think I blogged enough on Wednesday, don't you? I checked, and it came to about 3,500 words, the length of one of my Commentary essays. I guess that answers the question of whether or not I'd still write if I didn't get paid for it....

Anyway, the whole of Thursday will be devoted exclusively to Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong, followed by a trip downtown to see a play that I will be viewing in the company of a Blogger to Be Named Later.

See you Friday.

Posted April 07, 12:01 PM

TT: Elsewhere

I've been stockpiling cool links for the past couple of months (some of which I poached long ago from other bloggers whose names I've forgotten--please forgive me in advance!). Now that I finally have a free evening, I'll empty the bulging bag. Enjoy.

- Sarah mulls over a question with which I, too, have been much preoccupied of late:

Persona can be a very, very tricky thing. In my own case I tend to present different sides of myself to different people so who knows how many different versions of "me" actually exist. But I remember when I first met Jennifer Weiner last fall, and she has a very open public manner--the kind that makes people believe they could instantly be her friend. And I definitely felt that, but also wondered how easy it could be for people to misinterpret that vibe and try to get "too close" and possibly overstep boundaries....

It's a good question, and it begs others: how "real" are the public faces of public figures? And how real ought they to be? When you create a second self for public consumption, does it tend over time to swallow up the private self? Or can a bright line be drawn between the two?

- Here's another good question: should autobiographers tell the truth? Brenda Coulter thinks so:

Years ago, my husband was a huge James Herriot fan. He read every one of Herriot's books and he lived for the weekly installment of PBS's All Creatures Great and Small. So when I, thinking of Arthurian legend and a Wagnerian opera, suggested that we name our first child Tristan, my husband eagerly assented because he admired the irrepressible Tristan Farnon he'd read about in the Herriot books.

I, too, thought Herriot's stories were warm and funny. But I quickly lost interest in the author when I learned he had been writing novels rather than memoirs....

Give me the truth or give me a made-up story. Just don't mix the two and leave me to wonder which I'm reading.

- My Stupid Dog on Branson:

In Branson, the lion's share of "music shows" consist of people who can no longer sing, performing to people who can no longer hear....

Yikes!

- Here's the funniest spoof I've seen in ages...

- ...and here's the best map.

- Unsnobbish wisdom From the Floor:

Tourists don't really go to the Louvre to look at the Mona Lisa. They go so that when they return home they can tell friends that they saw the painting.

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

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

- Speaking of lists, I love this one.

- Cinetrix answers a trivia question that's been on my mind ever since L.A. Confidential was released...

- ...while Kulturblog unlocks the secrets of Technicolor. The teaser: "I'll bet you all didn't know that Technicolor films were shot on black and white film." (Correct.)

- Department of Really Beautiful Soundbites: Listen to the singing of Roland Hayes here. (If you don't know who he was, click on the link and find out.)

- Speaking of singers, "Heather," a California pianist who blogs (and very thoughtfully, too) at in the wings, meditates on the eternal mysteries:

They always wore the most flattering shades of lipstick and the sexiest, must-have-been-bought-abroad shoes. Their necks never without a prettily patterned scarf, they talked of where to go for perfectly plucked eyebrows, fresh lemon wedges and curative cups of tea. The men carried their ribcages high, but effortlessly, mindlessly; I always envied that ability to preen so easily. Singers. So bee-yoo-ti-ful, but not without a bad rap: can't count, can't read music, and completely paranoid about the "health" of their instrument. Accompanying my way through their (also enviable) art song repertoire, I developed a quick "like it" or "don't" response to vocal quality, to the tone of individual voices, but I found it more difficult to qualify the actual mechanical skills of singing and what, exactly, made one singer so musically convincing and another one just kind of fumbling to the end of the song....

- Lileks is no Luddite:

Sometimes I think you have to be middle aged to realize how cool things are. You grow up with MP3s and iPods, as my daughter will, and it's the way things are. If you remember the KUNK-KUNK of an 8-track tape, having a featherweight gumpack that holds a billion bits of music is really quite remarkable....And then there's the cellphones and the tiny cameras and the widescreen TVs and home computers that sing to each other silently across the world; wonders, all. This really is the future I wanted. Although I expected longer battery life.

- Finally, Alex Ross answers all your questions.

Posted April 07, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"'My dear Father,' he said, 'I am afraid that there are very few unprejudiced persons in the world. People generally try to make facts fit philosophies rather than to make philosophies fit facts.'"

Bruce Marshall, Father Malachy's Miracle

Posted April 07, 12:00 PM

TT: It's everywhere...

...and now it's here, courtesy of Bookish Gardener:

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be? Boswell's Life of Johnson.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character? Matilda Wilson, in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time.

The last book you bought was...? New Orleans UnMasqued, by S. Frederick Starr (thank you, Alicublog).

The last book you read was...? A Distant Prospect, by Lord Berners.

What are you currently reading? W.H. Auden, Prose, Volume II: 1939-1948.

Five books you would take to a desert island... Boswell's Life, The Brothers Karamazov (or maybe Demons), the Library of America Flannery O'Connor, The Portrait of a Lady, and A la recherche. (We'll assume for the sake of argument that the guest hut on the island in question contains a King James Bible and a complete set of Shakespeare, just as all such quizzes about music really ought to take Mozart for granted.)

Who are you passing this stick on to and why? Duh, who else? Go get 'em, Girl.

(And yes, I cheated. I'll get back to Louis this afternoon.)

Posted April 07, 10:34 AM

April 6, 2005

TT: Department of highly original excuses

Just received from someone who hasn't written for days and days:

I think I owe you about five million emails. I need to write about panthers, but then I shall return.

Talk about teasers!

Posted April 06, 12:27 PM

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- I wrote a drama column for The Wall Street Journal yesterday. My editor kicked it back to me with the observation that I'd already used the word "clunker" three times so far this season, and would I please come up with a different way to describe the play in question? At once delighted and puzzled by his apparent omniscience, I wrote back to ask how the hell he could possibly know such a thing. It turns out that Journal editors have access to an online archive which allows them to make electronic queries of precisely that sort. My editor, who had a vague inkling of having run across the word "clunker" in one of my recent reviews, checked it out and hit pay dirt.

I was, as I say, delighted to have been caught in the act. Not surprisingly, we all have our personal clichés, needless to say, and when you write as much as I do, it's inevitable, alas, that you'll overuse more than a few of them from time to time. (The preceding sentence contains six of them.) Doubtless (that's seven) the day will come, if it hasn't already, when some busybody writes a piece of software that will automatically check for such repetitions throughout the whole of a journalist's oeuvre.

I'm sure that, too, will be a good thing, though I confess to finding it a bit frightening to contemplate. Among other things, I write a thousand-word drama column each week, which adds up to a book's worth of prose every other year. That's a lot of adjectives, only so many of which can be meaningfully applied to the stages of New York, Washington, and Chicago. Should I ever be asked to put together a volume of my theater reviews, I'm sure they'll require a not-inconsiderable amount of editing merely to trim away redundancies and repetitions.

To what extent, then, ought a prolific writer of a certain age be expected to avoid repeating himself? I guess I'm going to find out....

- "Never sleep with anyone you only like well enough," a friend told me the other day, apropos (I hope!) of nothing in particular. I turned this provocative piece of advice over in my mind several times, arriving at no settled conclusion about its general applicability as a rule of life. It did, however, remind me of another half-remembered piece of advice that I've never gotten around to tracking down. I'm pretty sure it was said to Garson Kanin by Leland Hayward, the theatrical agent, and I think it's in Kanin's Tracy and Hepburn, of which I don't have a copy. At any rate, this is more or less how it goes: "Never start off by asking for what you'd be willing to settle for." Inspired by my vigilant editor at the Journal, I just spent a few minutes surfing the Web to pin down the exact wording, but came up empty-handed. (If anyone out there in the 'sphere happens to know the quote or own the book, an accurate rendering would be greatly appreciated.)

Yet my investigation wasn't pointless, for in the process a second half-remembered quote bubbled to the surface of my stream of consciousness, and amazon.com's search-inside-the-book feature sent me to it with a bare minimum of fuss. It's on the last page of A Life on the Road, Charles Kuralt's autobiography, and it was said to him by the humorist Harry Golden: "When you get to be my age, sonny, all you ever think about are the women you could have gone to bed with and didn't."

"I laughed, then," Kuralt added--the last line of the book.

What did we do without the Web? Got more work done, probably.

- I had, as expected, a very pleasant dinner with Alex Ross and Helen Radice. As I walked home from the restaurant, it struck me that I couldn't remember the last time I'd spent a whole evening in the exclusive company of classical musicians. This is all the more surprising given the fact that I am, or used to be, a classical musician, and have spent a good-sized chunk of my life (including the greater part of last Tuesday and Wednesday) writing about classical music. On the other hand, if you were to wake me up in the middle of the night and ask me what I was, I probably wouldn't say, "Why, a musician, of course!" I don't spend most of my time writing or thinking about classical music, or even listening to it. In recent years I've been mostly interested in painting and the theater, and before that I went through a lengthy period of intense involvement in dance. Yet I felt entirely comfortable gossiping with Alex and Helen: it was as if I'd never been away.

Somehow all this reminds me of something Henry James said in an 1888 letter (found, of course, on the Web):

I have not the least hesitation in saying that I aspire to write in such a way that it would be impossible to an outsider to say whether I am, at a given moment, an American writing about England or an Englishman writing about America (dealing as I do with both countries,) & so far from being ashamed of such an ambiguity I should be exceedingly proud of it, for it would be highly civilized.

That's sort of what I aspire to be: a critic who moves among the arts so freely and naturally that it's not immediately obvious which one he knows best. I like to think I've had some success at achieving that goal, but I also know in my heart of hearts that I'm a musician first, if not necessarily last and definitely not always. It's my native tongue--my first love, the one you never quite forget, no matter how many may have followed.

- I just got an urgent e-mail from an editor informing me that Saul Bellow died earlier today and asking if I wanted to write an appreciation. I said no, not merely because I'M TAKING WEDNESDAY OFF!! but because Bellow never really interested me, not as a writer and not as a man. I didn't find him at all sympathetic, yet he didn't irritate me enough to cause the accretion of a strong negative opinion. He simply wasn't on my screen (except when he took a shot at me in the New York Times, but that's another story).

Might it have been a generational thing? Among the New York intellectuals, Bellow was a fixed star, a literary giant about whom you had to have an opinion, be it good or bad. I don't think that's true today, and I wonder how well his work will be remembered ten years from now, or even five. My guess--and it's nothing more than that--is that he'll be seen as a period piece. That doesn't exactly add up to an appreciation, does it?

Five years ago, by the way, I would have said yes to that editor, run straight to the nearest bookstore, come back with a tall stack of paperbacks, and stayed up all night knocking out a thousand words of well-honed prose. I may be a workaholic, but at least I'm no longer a degenerate one.

UPDATE: Rick Brookhiser puts his finger on certain aspects of Bellow's work that I found especially tedious. And Galley Cat is tracking the postmortem bounce in sales of Bellow's books on amazon.com.

Posted April 06, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"The voice is the focus of so much comment on Welles's performances, early and late, that it is worth observing that any huge natural endowment is a double-edged sword for a performer. The greatest artists--Olivier and Margot Fonteyn spring to mind--are those of modest natural endowments who have worked and worked to extend them, thus developing in themselves disciplines and hard-won strength which open up worlds of expression and imagination unknown to those who had it all for nothing."

Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu

Posted April 06, 12:00 PM

TT: Immodest pleasures from the mailbag

Two readers write:

- "I just want it to be known that I am, I would guess, the first person to have given up your blog for Lent. Take that as a compliment. I find your blog so enjoyable that a significant part of my Lenten discipline was to read you only on Sundays for forty days. It has made Eastertime that much more special."

- "I've been meaning to read The Skeptic. I finally got around to it & wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed it. About twenty years ago, on a rainy morning, I found my way to Hollins Street, befriended some grad student who was living there, and spent hours in old Henry's chair, trolling through his library. A blissful day. Your portrait seems just. Thanks for the book."

Posted April 06, 10:47 AM

TT: Bonus almanac

"Many years ago, I was told the following story: Broadway producer Leland Hayward was about to put Maxwell Anderson's Anne of the Thousand Days onto the stage. He asked the author whom he envisaged as the ideal actor to portray Henry the Eighth. The playwright thought about it, then mentioned a good, safe, workmanlike actor of very little panache. ‘No, no,' said Hayward. ‘Suppose there were absolutely no problems in getting anyone in the world you wanted--who would you name?'

"Anderson immediately said, ‘Rex Harrison, but you'll never be able to get him.'

"Whereupon the producer grinned and said, ‘Why not ask him?' Then he made the necessary calls and, indeed, procured Rex Harrison's services.

"‘There's a lesson in this, Max,' said the legendary Mr. Hayward. ‘Never start out asking for someone you would eventually settle for.'"

André Previn, No Minor Chords: My Days in Hollywood (courtesy of Marla Carew)

Posted April 06, 3:51 AM

TT: Haircut

The cleaning lady chased me out of my office today, beyond the reach of e-mail and phone calls and the Web, so I fled the apartment and ventured out into the cool blue sunshine. The sidewalks of my Upper West Side neighborhood were thick with strollers, all of them headed toward Central Park. I walked in the other direction, and before I knew it I was walking through the front door of Antonio's Barber Shop, Get haircut having figured prominently on my yellow desktop stickie for the past couple of weeks.

I like Antonio's, mostly because it reminds me of all the other barber shops I've visited regularly. Not the mall-type franchise stores that I patronized in college--I never liked those--but the ones in Smalltown, U.S.A., where I got my hair trimmed in the company of older men who chatted pleasantly about matters of no interest as the radio purred softly in the background. I found a place like that when I first moved to New York twenty years ago, and last year I found another one in my own neighborhood. You don't hear much English at Antonio's, just the soothing murmur of Spanish-language conversations whose subject matter is scarcely less intelligible to me than the talk of business and sports that I recall from my Smalltown days. This afternoon the TV was tuned to a baseball game--the Yankees versus the Red Sox, I think--and I liked that, too. I closed my eyes, listened to the click and hum of the barber's tools, moved my head on command, and imagined myself when young.

Alas, imagination gave way to harsh reality when I opened my eyes and saw the salt-and-pepper locks that littered the floor around my chair. Perhaps I'm not quite being fair to myself, since most of my hair is still a comfortably mousy shade of brown, and from a distance it's almost possible to overlook the fact that much of it has turned steely gray. Today, though, no pretending was possible: I'm all grown up.

Do I feel grown up? Who does? Sometimes I feel sixteen, sometimes sixty, usually somewhere in between, but never, ever forty-nine. Nor can I decide what effect my young friends have on my sense of self. Do they make me feel younger--or older? I honestly can't say, though one thing I know, or think I know, is that my barber makes me look younger. So my friends tell me, at any rate, and I've chosen to believe them. Ever since I started going to Antonio's, which is close enough to my front door to make casual visits practical, my hair has been both a good deal shorter and considerably more kempt. Add to that the fancy new rimless eyeglasses the Mutant picked out for me last month, and you get...what? A middle-aged writer with graying hair and hip-looking bifocals, that's what.

My progressive bifocals (the telltale line that separates the two parts of the lens is invisible) are the only deliberate attempt I've ever made to conceal an outward sign of advancing age. It's never occurred to me, for instance, to color my hair, nor do I ask my barber to make me look younger. "Not too short," I say, and he takes it from there. As he fulfilled my gnomic request this afternoon, I sat passively in the chair and found myself recalling, somewhat to my surprise, a stanza by a poet for whom I've never much cared:

Youth ended, I shall try
My gain or loss thereby;
Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold:
And I shall weigh the same,
Give life its praise or blame:
Young, all lay in dispute; I shall know, being old.

And shall I? Shall any of us? I was talking the other evening to a fellow critic seated behind me on the aisle of a Broadway theater. He's eighty, and doesn't look it, nor does he feel it. "I don't feel a day over sixty-five," he told me. "I keep waiting for all that wisdom that's supposed to come with old age--but it hasn't come yet."

As for me, all I know is that nothing I imagined for myself when young has come to pass: everything is different, utterly so. I'm not a schoolteacher, not a jazz musician, not the chief music critic of a major metropolitan newspaper, not a syndicated columnist, not settled and secure. Nor am I the person I expected to be, calm and detached and philosophical: I still cry without warning, laugh too loud, lose my head and heart too easily, the same way I did a quarter-century ago. The person I was is the person I am, only older. Might that be wisdom of a sort?

I came home from Antonio's to find my apartment slightly askew, the way it always is after my cleaning lady comes to call. The prints on the walls are slightly crooked, the furniture not quite in the right place. A stranger's hand has passed over the neatly squared-off surface of my life and mussed it up. Usually I spend five or ten minutes setting everything to rights, but today I decided to leave it as is. All I did was throw the windows open, hopefully.

Posted April 06, 3:20 AM

OGIC: All-points bulletin

I just emailed Terry with a question that has come up in something I'm writing, and he offered the brilliant suggestion that I ask all of you, too.

There are a lot of novels about writers. There aren't so many novels about writers in which the (real) novelist attempts to recreate his character's work. I can think of two off the top of my head, but both of them are somewhat anomalous: Nabokov's Pale Fire, of course, and A. S. Byatt's Possession (both featuring poetry, interestingly). Neither of these is, strictly speaking, about the writers whose work appears, however. There must be more out there. What am I forgetting--what, that is, that's good or at least well-known?

Much obliged, dear readers.

Posted April 06, 2:58 AM

April 5, 2005

TT: Almanac

Some shoes go dancing
Every night.
Some shoes go living it up
Left and right.
Places with music playing.
Laughter and noise and wine.
Hundreds of shoes all swaying.
Not mine.

Some shoes take cruises
Far away
Their skies are tropical blue,
Never gray
Toes up against the railing,
Watching the water shine
Hundreds of shoes gone sailing...

Right now they're off
Exploring
Some exotic street,
Champagne pouring
In the moonlight...
Now they're dancing
Feet to feet...

I see them tiptoe lightly
Up a winding stair,
Slipped off nightly
In the darkness
Next to someone else's pair...

You won't catch my shoes
On the town
They're sturdy, sensible things,
Basic brown.
Not ones to fly away in,
Dance or make love or cruise.
Wish I could spend one day in
Someone else's shoes.

Lynn Ahrens, "Shoes" (music by Stephen Flaherty)

Posted April 05, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Same hard place, new rock

Sorry gang, I'm still all jammed up over here--or, I should say, jammed up again after the briefest of respites. Both blogging and emailing remain on hold. She's been busy lately, however, and during that lovely, lapsed break I recall taking great interest in this and its companion piece.

P.S. I ordered spring, but the kitchen sent summer. I'm sending it back to be cooled down about ten degrees.

Posted April 05, 5:18 AM

April 4, 2005

TT: Outtakes

One of the curses of writing a biography is that you spend the rest of your life remembering things you meant to put in but somehow forgot at the last minute.

In honor of the current Broadway revival of Julius Caesar, as well as in the no doubt vain hope of cooling off my overheated head, I've been rereading Simon Callow's Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu, to my way of thinking one of the best theatrical biographies ever written (it covers Welles' life up through the release of Citizen Kane). Not only is it every bit as good as I remembered, but it also contains two fascinating snippets of information that I intended to include in my Mencken and Balanchine books. Alas, they slipped through the cracks, so I'll share them with you now, ruefully:

- Why did Welles and John Houseman call their company the Mercury Theatre? Says Callow: "The new venture's name--so perfectly apt--was casually assumed after their first planning meal when their eyes idly lit on a two-year-old copy of the bracingly radical magazine edited by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, American Mercury; their winged feet barely hit the ground thereafter."

- I mentioned in All in the Dances that Welles was at one point romantically entangled with Vera Zorina, George Balanchine's second or third wife (depending on whether you count Alexandra Danilova, to whom everyone wrongly thought he was married). I forgot to add, however, that Welles referred to Balanchine in passing in his very first radio show for CBS, a Mercury Theatre of the Air adaptation of Dracula. As Callow explains, "There is the odd private joke: in Dracula, one of the men overboard is called Balanchine, a jest for the personal amusement of the ballerina Vera Zorina...‘Balanchine! Balanchine! Is Balanchine below?' the sailors cry. ‘Balanchine's gone!--Like the other!--Like all the others!' For those who knew what the joke meant, [Welles] was delighted to boast, in this oblique fashion, of his conquest."

Feel free to print out this posting and insert it in the appropriate places of your copies of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken and All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine.

If you don't have copies of The Skeptic and All in the Dances...well, jeepers, what's been keeping you?

Posted April 04, 12:46 PM

TT: The palace of wisdom

If the month of March came close to doing me in, then the week just past should by all rights have been the last straw: five plays, three deadlines, and countless other chores, all coming on the heels of a week-long trip to Washington to attend my first National Council on the Arts meeting. Too much of a whole lot of good things, in short, and by Thursday I was feeling the strain, not least because somewhere along the way I apparently forgot how to go to sleep--though I did finally remember to fill my ice trays. (Thanks, Ali!)

So what on earth possessed me to cram one more item into my schedule? Because I did: I went to the Beacon Theater to hear the Pat Metheny Group perform The Way Up, the new Metheny-Lyle Mays composition about which I spoke last month on Soundcheck. Short of going on a fifty-mile overnight hike, it was the dumbest thing I could possibly have done, not least because Metheny and his band are notorious for playing really, really long shows. This time around, they started out by performing The Way Up in its album-length entirety. Then, without benefit of intermission, they launched into an extended greatest-hits set that went on for yet another hour and a half.

That is, to put it mildly, a hell of a lot of music, and the Pat Metheny Group doesn't go through the motions, either: I don't know when I last saw so much energy discharged in the course of a single evening. I was already tired when I got to the theater, and once I realized that Metheny was going to keep on rocking until eleven at the earliest, my heart sank. "A little too much is just enough for me," Ned Rorem says, but I've always begged to differ. I like art songs, small paintings, beautifully wrought novellas, one-act plays, and concerts that leave you wanting more. (I don't believe I've ever shared my Drama Critics' Prayer with you: Dear God, if it can't be good, let it be short.) Besides, The Way Up is a complex piece of writing that demands of its listeners a substantial amount of sustained concentration. Because of this, I'm not so sure it was ideally served by being presented as part of so long a program. I know I didn't want to hear anything else after it was over, any more than I care to see another ballet after watching New York City Ballet dance Jerome Robbins' eighty-minute-long Goldberg Variations, despite the fact that NYCB always follows it with a chaser.

All this notwithstanding, I stayed to the bitter end, mostly because my companion for the evening was a Pat Metheny buff who would have been more than happy to spend the whole night listening to his music. I didn't want to leave her high and dry, so I stuck it out--and sure enough, I got my second wind before long and came roaring back to life. What's more, the next-to-last song, a trio version of "Farmer's Trust" played with feathery delicacy by Metheny, Mays, and Steve Rodby, turned out to be one of the high points of the evening.

By then, of course, I was wound up tight and thrilled to pieces, and I would have gladly stuck around for at least another hour or two. It was, alas, a purely temporary buzz, one that wore off as soon as the music stopped. By the time I finally made it home, I was too tired to do much of anything, even fall asleep. Instead of going to bed, I collapsed in a heap on the couch and stared numbly at the TV until half past way too late. Still, I wasn't sorry to have spent so much time with the Pat Metheny Group, not even slightly. Nothing in moderation: so reads the epitaph on Ernie Kovacs' tombstone in Forest Lawn. I'm not sure how wise a rule of life that is--Kovacs died at forty-three--but even those of us who believe devoutly in the gospel of proportion in all things should occasionally make a point of spending an evening traveling the road of excess, if only to remind ourselves of what we're missing out on by being so damnably moderate.

Speaking of, er, moderation, I've got yet another deadline waiting in the wings, so I'll see you tomorrow, or whenever....

Posted April 04, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"I wound up with Othello, Lear and Macbeth and one is inclined to be silent about them--they are so stupendous. Othello is disagreeable to me because his villain comes down front and tells you he is a villain and what nasty things he means to do, and chance favors him unfairly, but the talk is so tremendous that you forgive that. As to Shakespeare generally, apart from the superlative passages, as I believe I said the other day, he can talk better than Richard II or Macbeth or any of the rest of them, and he gives you his talk without too much regard to whose mouth he uses. It is a transcendent echo of life rather than life. How far is our pleasure in his language a matter of education and convention like that in the language of the Bible or the French delight in snoring tirades in Alexandrine verse which gives me no pleasure at all?"

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Harold Laski (1922)

Posted April 04, 12:00 PM

TT: No show tomorrow

That's all, folks. Not only did I post a lot more than I expected today, but I also wrote a piece from scratch when I didn't need to. All this suggests that I'm (A) stuck on Full Speed Ahead and (B) out of gas, which is (C) a dangerous combination, especially if you're (D) pathologically inclined to overwork.

I'm dining Tuesday night with two bloggers, Alex Ross and Helen Radice of twang twang twang, and that's going to be the sum total of my activities for the day. If I post anything, flame me.

See you Wednesday.

Posted April 04, 7:20 AM

OGIC: Splendiferously allusive

I picked up my much-thumbed copy of Thomas Harris's Red Dragon this weekend, happy to realize that enough time has passed since my last reading that I can come back to it afresh. And fresh it is--I'm finding that I'd forgotten most of the details, and the details are where Harris is at his wry, observant best. His writing is larded with allusions and references, mainly to the history of crime, but opening up onto all manner of other subjects. What I'm discovering is that the book is enhanced by having a wired computer at hand while one reads it, the better to Google various names and terms. Here are a few interesting trails the first third of the book alone has set me off on:

- Remember how, in the prehistory of Harris's novels, Will Graham recognized Hannibal Lecter as the killer he was looking for and got him put away? The story is briefly recounted in Red Dragon: during a routine interview with a potential witness, Graham glimpsed a familiar old medical text on a shelf in Lecter's psychiatric office. He mentally flashed on one of the book's illustrations, "Wound Man," an early modern medical training diagram that the killer had reconstructed in a kind of tableau mordant at one of the murder scenes. An excellent detail made more lurid and more educational by the visual aid. And for the record, count me in the camp that believes the otherwise great Anthony Hopkins has turned Lecter less interesting, not more--into a bit of a clown, sadly.

- A reference by a minor character to Joseph Yablonski, previously uncomprehended by me, this time led me to learn a little something about the charming history of the United Mine Workers.

- A reference to Dr. William Beaumont triggered a hazy memory of visiting some museum as a child--it must have been this one--that featured a hypnotically icky set of dioramas depicting the good doctor's famed experiments on Alexis St. Martin's open stomach. I could find no web-based evidence that said exhibit still exists, which is truly a shame. Nothing snaps a museum-weary youth's attention to order quite like a dollhouse figure dangling food on a string into a hole in another doll's abdomen. Rooting around fruitlessly for evidence that the exhibit lives on, I found this potentially exciting claim (scroll down to "Literature") that Dr. Beaumont traveled for a time with a far more illustrious Alexis: M. de Tocqueville lui-même. Wow, this guy was twice the historical figure I thought he was, at least. Are you kidding me? Well, yes. This apparent stunning revelation led me to a truly dandy site, for which I am grateful despite quickly finding there that...it's the wrong Beaumont. Gustave, not William. A Frenchman, not an American. Tsk tsk, Mackinac Island Tourist Bureau. Do your homework!

More to come? We'll see. This is definitely the slowest I've ever read one of Harris's books, but possibly the most fun I've ever had doing so. (I haven't read Black Sunday, and Hannibal was a joke. But this book and Silence of the Lambs are little cabinets of wonders, and damn good novels to boot.)

UPDATE: Links fixed.

Posted April 04, 4:06 AM

TT: And the winners are...

This year's Pulitzer Prizes have been announced. Alas, WebCrimson, the server for artsjournal.com, went down seconds after the news broke at three p.m. (the same thing happened last year), so I was unable to post until now. I'm belatedly delighted to report, however, that my colleague Joe Morgenstern, who reviews film for The Wall Street Journal, won a Pulitzer for criticism, and that John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, which I praised in the Journal earlier this year as "the best new play of the season," has won the drama prize.

For a full list of winners and finalists, go here.

Posted April 04, 3:17 AM

April 1, 2005

TT: There's something about Amanda

In case you're wondering what I've been doing since I got back to New York, part of the answer can be found in my drama column in this morning's Wall Street Journal, in which I review four, count 'em, four shows, This Is How It Goes, Dessa Rose, Moonlight & Magnolias, and the Kennedy Center's production of Mister Roberts.

Off we go in a breathless rush:

- Neil LaBute, who got my hopes up with "Fat Pig," has let them back down again in "This Is How It Goes," running through April 17 at the Public Theater. Not all the way, I'm relieved to say: This compact tale of a romantic triangle with an interracial twist has its moments of nerve-shredding tension. But the jack-in-the-box plot twists are contrived in a way that sits awkwardly alongside Mr. LaBute's ruthless dialogue, and it's about time he swore off more than a few of his personal clichés (enough already with the cute meetings!)...

All of which brings us to Amanda Peet ("The Whole Nine Yards"), an up-and-coming starlet who is wonderfully natural and direct as the spouse in question, eschewing the glammed-up look of her films and offering instead the kind of no-nonsense performance one never expects and rarely gets from a young movie actress. I'd like to see her on Broadway, soon....

- Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty are definitely on the wrong track with "Dessa Rose," an eat-your-spinach musical about slavery in the Bad Old South that proclaims its choking earnestness in the very first line, "We are descended from a long strong line of women." All the more frustrating, then, that so much of "Dessa Rose," which plays at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater through May 29, is so impressive....

- If you long to see a play about slavery, I recommend the Manhattan Theatre Club's production of Ron Hutchinson's "Moonlight & Magnolias," an unpretentious piece of slapstick about how producer David O. Selznick (Douglas Sills), screenwriter Ben Hecht (Matthew Arkin) and director Victor Fleming (David Rasche) teamed up to rewrite the script for "Gone With the Wind" in five days flat. Any resemblance to real-life events is strictly coincidental, but Mr. Hutchinson keeps the punch lines coming...

- Where are the smash hits of yesteryear? One of the smashiest is on display at the Kennedy Center, which has exhumed "Mister Roberts," a service comedy that opened in 1948, ran for 1,157 performances, won four Tonys, and hasn't been seen on Broadway since. Now it's playing through Sunday as part of "A New America: The 1940s and the Arts," an interdisciplinary festival currently in progress at the Kennedy Center--and you know what? It's good stuff. Robert Longbottom's staging is efficient and effective, the ensemble cast takes care of business, and Andrew Jackness' just-like-a-ship set is a pleasure to behold....

Whew, huh? No link. Buy the damn paper, or subscribe to the Online Journal by going here.

That's it. I'm done. Back to the salt mines. See you Monday, unless I collapse and/or enroll in the Overworked Critic Protection Program....

Posted April 01, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

Loving you
Is not a choice,
It's who I am.

Loving you
Is not a choice
And not much reason
To rejoice,

But it gives me purpose,
Gives me voice,
To say to the world:

This is why I live.
You are why I live.

Stephen Sondheim, "Loving You" (from Passion)

Posted April 01, 12:00 PM