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May 31, 2005

TT: Multitudes, multitudes

Last Friday I paid my first visit to the Barnes Foundation, the museum and art school in suburban Philadelphia that is home to Paul Cézanne's Large Bathers and Henri Matisse's Joy of Life. (I was escorted by my old friend Mark Obert-Thorn, the sound engineer whose double-barreled name is known to everyone who collects CD reissues of classical 78s.) The Barnes has been much in the news in recent months, so I won't recapitulate its widely reported travails save to say that it will be moving at some point in the not-too-distant future from its original site to downtown Philadelphia. If you aren't familiar with the history of the Barnes Foundation, you can read all about it here and here.

Fortunately, you don't have to know anything about the convoluted history of the Barnes to be fascinated by the place itself. Dr. Albert Barnes, a man far too peculiar to be sufficiently described by the word "eccentric," spent the better part of a half-century buying paintings and devising the unusual ways in which they are now displayed in the gallery he built in 1925 to house them. I don't know any other museum quite like the Barnes, whose walls are tightly packed with hundreds and hundreds of works by the likes of Cézanne, Daumier, El Greco, Klee, Matisse, Picasso, Renoir, and such early American modernists as Maurice Prendergast, Charles Demuth, and Alfred Maurer, all of them hung without identification save for a tiny tag bearing the artist's last name. (To see photographs of the gallery, go here.)

Like everyone seeing the Barnes for the first time, I was flabbergasted, not merely by the number of masterpieces it contains but also by the sheer acreage of canvas on display, and it took me the better part of an afternoon to sort out my complicated responses. Here are a few verbal snapshots from my visit, scribbled into my notebook on the spot and amplified at leisure:

- I found the excessiveness of the Barnes Foundation to be central to its total effect. Seeing a dozen paintings at a single glance may not be the best way to appreciate any of them individually, but it's certainly exciting, even overwhelming, and there's nothing wrong (to put it mildly!) with being overwhelmed by art.

In addition, I was delighted by the absence of wall labels. As I wrote in this space a couple of years ago, apropos of a visit to "Gyroscope," an exhibition at Washington's Hirshhorn Museum:

As those of you who know me personally are all too aware, I have reached that unhappy age when I am sorely in need of bifocals. Alas, I'm too stubborn/vain/lazy to go to the trouble of getting a pair, so I continue to do without. I noticed for the first time at the Hirshhorn on Friday that I can no longer read the wall labels at museums without taking off my glasses. At first I found this to be irritating, but before long I realized that it was liberating.

Confession time: I have another little problem, which is that my eyes reflexively go to the labels in a group show, very often before I've taken in the works of art they identify. I can't help myself--I'm a slave to the printed word. Only I can't do it anymore. To read the labels, I now have to pull off my glasses and move in close, which takes away all the fun. As a result, I looked at "Gyroscope" the right way, meaning what first and who second, and not infrequently, I didn't even bother to find out who. (In addition to a reasonably generous helping of good stuff, "Gyroscope" contains more than its fair share of crappy art.) Dr. Albert Barnes, who deliberately hung the paintings in the Barnes Collection without labels in order to force visitors to think harder about the art they were there to see, would have been proud of me....

I've just admitted to a naïve-sounding disability which I'm sure will make some of you smile. I came late to the visual arts, and I still fall on my face with humbling regularity. I'm no connoisseur, just a guy who likes to look at paintings, though I trust my eye and my taste. On the other hand, I don't trust them far enough to be absolutely sure I'm always seeing paintings, not reputations, which is one of the minor reasons why I think I'll put off getting that first pair of bifocals for a little while longer.

Now that I've finally broken down and started wearing bifocals, I find myself tempted once again to read before looking. You can't do that at the Barnes. So much the better. It keeps you honest.

- Barnes hung his paintings in non-chronological groupings intended to help the novice viewer see the similarities between the compositional devices employed by different artists from different periods. Alas, most of his painstaking arrangements struck me as naïve: I quickly tired of their rigid pyramidal symmetry, and the picture-to-picture "rhyming" rarely seemed other than obvious (though I'm sure students find it instructive, which of course is what Barnes had in mind).

The only juxtaposition that I found eye-opening was the wall on which watercolors by Cézanne and Charles Demuth are hung side by side--along with two Japanese fans. That taught me something. (I hadn't realized, by the way, that Barnes collected Demuth in such depth. Never before had I seen so many of his marvelous watercolors in one place.)

- I was surprised by how many paintings I saw on my second pass through the galleries that I'd failed to notice the first time through--including more than a few of the ones I ended up liking best. (I actually mistook one postcard-sized Daumier for a switchplate.) The problem, I think, is that Albert Barnes' taste for high-key color was so pronounced, even exaggerated, that the collection as a whole, with its relentless emphasis on the intense reds and oranges of his beloved Renoirs, has the unintended effect of swallowing up smaller and/or less brightly colored paintings of great excellence.

- The Barnes contains 181 Renoirs, most of them late and most of them awful. (Here's a typical example.) Indeed, a day at the Barnes Foundation is almost enough to persuade you that Renoir was a minor painter. You have to flee its stifling atmosphere and remind yourself anew of what a really good Renoir looks like in order to recapture your perspective.

- Barnes was as smart about Cézanne and Matisse as he was silly about Renoir. Granted, you can "know" Cézanne without having gone to the Barnes Foundation: it's a great, great collection, but it doesn't tell you anything about him that you can't find out elsewhere. Not so Matisse. Even after a decade of serious and sustained exposure to his work, a single visit to the Barnes significantly heightened my understanding of Matisse's language and my appreciation of his achievement.

- My favorite individual room in the Barnes was Gallery 10, devoted almost entirely to small paintings. Dominated by Matisse, it's one of the few galleries that contains nothing by Cézanne. I could live in that room.

- It goes almost without saying that the single greatest painting in the Barnes is "The Large Bathers." (I almost hate to admit it, but I don't really care for "The Joy of Life"!) But my personal favorite--the one I'd most like to hang in the Teachout Museum--is a late Cézanne, undated and very likely unfinished, called "Two Pitchers and Fruit." It reminded me strongly of the Phillips Collection's Garden at Les Lauves and is of exactly comparable quality.

Not coincidentally, seeing the Barnes for the first time redoubled my appreciation of the Phillips. While Albert Barnes and Duncan Phillips were both great art collectors whose underlying sensibilities were very similar, Barnes was both obsessive and provincial in a way that Phillips was not. Phillips spent a lifetime cultivating his eye and mind by engaging with the ideas of others; Barnes seems to have listened only to himself, eventually going so far as to create a closed system of aesthetics whose sole purpose was to justify his own prejudices, unleavened by the kind of broadening experience that ultimately led Phillips in such surprising directions. For all his self-evident passion and seriousness, Barnes was incapable of the kind of interior growth that made it possible for Phillips to embrace Mark Rothko and Richard Diebenkorn in his old age.

- I'm glad I waited so long to go to the Barnes for the first time. It's not a place for the casual museumgoer. That's why it will be a crime to move it elsewhere. I'm not talking about the complex legal and fiscal issues at stake in the planned move--I'm not competent to assess those. I'm talking about purely aesthetic matters. The Barnes isn't perfect, not by a long shot, but it's unique, and that's the point of it. Putting aside the distracting effects of the thousands of visitors who will start flocking to the new Barnes the day it opens its doors, the sense of pilgrimage is an essential part of the experience of visiting the Barnes Foundation. You can't just drop by on the spur of the moment--you have to make a reservation in advance and go well out of your way to get there. That contributes enormously to its special quality. Once the Barnes pulls up stakes and moves downtown, this quality will be lost forever, even if the existing galleries are reproduced exactly in its new quarters (which I'll believe when I see it).

Go now. I'm glad I did.

Posted May 31, 12:05 PM

TT: Speaking of Renoir

"People of taste and refinement tell us nowadays that Renoir is one of the great painters of the last century. But in so saying they forget the element of Time, and that it took a great deal of time, well into the present century, before Renoir was hailed as a great artist. To succeed thus in gaining recognition, the original painter, the original writer proceeds on the lines adopted by oculists. The course of treatment they give us by their painting or by their prose is not always agreeable to us. When it is at an end the operator says to us: 'Now look!' And, lo and behold, the world around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us entirely different from the; old world, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from what they used to be, because they are Renoirs, those Renoir types which we persistently refused to see as women. The carriages, too, are Renoirs, and the water, and the sky: we feel tempted to go for a walk in the forest which reminds us of that other which when we first saw it looked like anything in the world except a forest, like for instance a tapestry of innumerable shades but lacking precisely the shades proper to forests. Such is the new and perishable universe which has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe is precipitated by a new painter or writer of original talent."

Marcel Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes

Posted May 31, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"The world of art is a world which has been made by human beings for the direct satisfaction of their wishes. It is the real world stripped of what is meaningless and alien and remolded nearer to the heart's desire."

Albert C. Barnes, The Art in Painting

Posted May 31, 12:00 PM

May 30, 2005

TT: Holiday

I looked at my calendar for the coming week--three deadlines, two performances, a day trip to the Brooklyn Museum of Art and an overnight trip to Washington, D.C., to see Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie at Arena Stage--and decided that what I needed was a day off. So instead of revving up my iBook first thing Sunday morning, I slept late, met a musician friend for brunch, then took her down to Lincoln Center to watch New York City Ballet dance Jerome Robbins' The Goldberg Variations and George Balanchine's Stravinsky Violin Concerto, both of which were new to her. I chose the program as being particularly suitable for a musician, and also because I feel especially close to both ballets, albeit in different ways.

As readers of All in the Dances will recall, I place Stravinsky Violin Concerto very high on the short list of Balanchine's masterpieces:

Balanchine later told [Karin von] Aroldingen and [Patricia] McBride that Stravinsky Violin Concerto was the best ballet he had ever made. To a friend he expressed himself only slightly more modestly: "It is very good! My other ballets?...Okay, but not so good." Had the composer lived to see it, he might well have echoed the tribute he paid to Movements for Piano and Orchestra: "To see Balanchine's choreography of the Movements is to hear the music with one's eyes; and this visual hearing has been a greater revelation to me, I think than to anyone else. The choreography emphasizes relationships of which I had hardly been aware--in the same way--and the performance was like a tour of a building for which I had drawn the plans but never explored the result." Thirty years later, the significance of Stravinsky Violin Concerto is clearer still, for in no other ballet, not even Liebeslieder Walzer, did Balanchine fuse the modern and romantic sides of his personality more indissolubly. It is the ultimate expression of his black-and-white style, and though it may not be his greatest ballet, it is his most perfect one.

The Goldberg Variations isn't quite on that exalted level, but my special feeling for it has a similarly exalted cause: it was while watching it, and immediately afterward, that I had what has been the only mystical experience of my life to date.

This experience took place some fifteen years ago, and I later had occasion to describe it in print in an essay written not long after 9/11:

It had been a fearfully long day at the office, and I was drained and dry when I took my seat in the theater. I actually thought about skipping the performance, but something kept me in my seat long enough to be drawn into it, and soon I was experiencing Bach's crystalline notes and Robbins' heartfelt steps more intensely and completely than I have ever experienced any work of art at any time in my life, before or since. When it was over, I felt a surge of benevolence toward everyone on stage. I left the theater and stood for a long time on the steps leading down to the street, taking deep breaths of the cold night air, filled with a warmth that seemed to buoy me up. Then I flagged a cab, and as we drove down Broadway, I experienced an astonishing sense of release reminiscent of the ecstatic muscular exhaustion you feel after hard physical labor. It was as if all the cares of living in New York City, all the strains of my life, were slipping from my shoulders. The world around me appeared numinous, and I accepted everything in it, even the bright blue graffiti on a passing truck. It occurred to me that this was how a person might feel in the midst of the act of dying....

Grand Central Station came into view. The facade was brightly lit and the clock and the lettering carved into the granite were as crisp and clear as the printing in an expensive book. I drank it all in as I got out of the cab and walked slowly into the main lobby. A three-piece combo was playing some old standard I didn't recognize. I dropped a dollar bill into the trumpet player's open case. I noticed that I had a minute and a half to catch my train, so I ran all the way to the track, plopped down in a seat in the last car, and hardly felt out of breath at all.

W.H. Auden had a similar experience in 1933. As he described it many years later, he felt as though he had been "invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly--because, thanks to the power, I was doing it--what it means to love one's neighbor as oneself." Surely any ballet capable of making you feel that way deserves to be taken very seriously indeed (though no doubt Bach had a hand in it as well!).

While I had no such experience on Sunday afternoon, my friend and I were both moved to tears by what we saw and heard. Yet even though it was my day off, I'm never completely off duty, and as I watched the dancers, I caught myself trying to sort out in my mind exactly what it is that makes Balanchine's ballet better than Robbins'. The closest I could come was this: The Goldberg Variations is a piece of plotless theater, a complicated, carefully staged drama in which the dancers are playing "roles" of various explicable kinds, whereas Stravinsky Violin Concerto is a pure phenomenon, a visual poem whose ultimate meaning is impossible to convey in words. Even though it requires the intercession of dancers and musicians in order to be made manifest, it feels as if it is taking place in your mind, not on a stage--an experience, in short, not quite of this world.

My friend and I parted after the performance, both of us in a state close to ecstasy, embracing under the immense blue sky and reveling in the amazing fact that we were both alive and capable of receiving such beauty. John Lukacs has described the way we felt better than I possibly can:

This is the knowledge that the mystery and the reality of our lives consist in the understanding that we are coming from somewhere and that we are going somewhere, and that between these two mysterious phases God allows us to live and to know that we live while we live. Out of what is darkness to our imperfect minds, for sixty or seventy or eighty years we are living in the light, in the open.

Yesterday--all day--I knew just what he meant.

Posted May 30, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Order seems to come from searching for disorder, and awkwardness from searching for harmony or likeness, or the following of a system. The truest order is what you find already there, or that will be given if you don't try for it. When you arrange, you fail."

Fairfield Porter, letter to Claire Nicholas White (April 13, 1972)

Posted May 30, 12:00 PM

May 27, 2005

TT: Where I'd rather be

I'm taking the train to Philadelphia first thing Friday morning for an art-related day trip. Believe it or not, I've never seen the Barnes Foundation, and I figured I'd better go now while it's still there. Expect a report on Monday, unless I decide to write it on Tuesday.

Have a nice weekend--I plan to. Over to you, OGIC....

Posted May 27, 12:05 PM

TT: Stoppard, Steppenwolf, Shakespeare

It's Friday, and today's Wall Street Journal drama column is a report on my travels to New Haven (where I saw Long Wharf Theatre's revival of Tom Stoppard's Travesties) and Chicago (where I saw Lost Land at Steppenwolf and Romeo and Juliet at Chicago Shakespeare Theater). Two out of three is pretty damn good:

Producer A hires overambitious movie star B to appear on stage in classic play C. Examples: Denzel Washington in "Julius Caesar," Jessica Lange and Christian Slater in "The Glass Menagerie." Intended result: long lines at the box office. Unintended consequence: a grade-Z show. It's called "stunt casting," and it's almost always artistic bad news. On the other hand, it's no stunt when a TV star who also happens to be a seasoned stage performer decides to spend the annual hiatus in his shooting schedule doing some real acting. Sam Waterston of "Law & Order," for instance, is currently appearing in Long Wharf Theatre's production of Tom Stoppard's "Travesties," and he's as good as can be....

It's never a stunt when John Malkovich acts with Steppenwolf. To be sure, Mr. Malkovich is the creepiest of all possible film villains, but he's also a longtime Steppenwolf ensemble member who always comes back to Chicago sooner or later to tread the boards of his old company. At present, alas, he's in Stephen Jeffreys' "Lost Land," an overstuffed historical drama that isn't worthy of him, much less of Martha Lavey, the company's artistic director, who has temporarily abandoned the front office to give an incisive performance....

The only star in Chicago Shakespeare Theater's "Romeo and Juliet" is the playwright, who has been admirably served by Mark Lamos, his loyal and imaginative director....

No link--but don't despair. Not only do they sell the Journal at newsstands for one (1) dollar, but you can also go here and subscribe to the Journal's online edition. Whip out your credit card, click a few keys on your computer, and within seconds you'll be reveling in all the cool stuff in the Weekend Journal section--starting with the unexpurgated text of my review. What's not to like?

Posted May 27, 12:04 PM

TT: To a gas chamber--go!

A friend writes:

"Good God almighty! That woman is a sewer!" Ayn Rand's heavily (and disapprovingly) annotated copy of Mary McCarthy's essay volume The Humanist in the Bathtub, which includes the above comment by Rand on McCarthy, is up for auction at Butterfields along with a lot of other books from Rand's library.

The estimate is $3,000-$5,000. Go here to see for yourself. It's a total hoot.

By the way, don't you love reading the marginalia of famous people? Somebody really ought to put together an anthology....

Posted May 27, 12:03 PM

TT: Ten things I always meant to do

(1) Learn French.

(2) Write a biography of Peter Drucker.

(3) Play bass in a piano-guitar-bass trio.

(4) Ride a tandem bicycle through Central Park on a beautiful spring day (with an appropriate person, of course).

(5) Join the Mile High Club.

(6) Take a trip on the American Orient Express.

(7) Take a helicopter ride through the Grand Canyon.

(8) Watch an opera from the prompter's box.

(9) Walk on my hands without breaking anything important in the process.

(10) This.

O.K., eleven:

(11) Visit the Museo Morandi.

Posted May 27, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

'They went to the theater and afterwards she listened as charmingly as any girl ever had to his dissection of the play. She didn't complain about his surgical cruelty, but seemed, if anything, excited by it. As a middle-class girl, she was used to understatement followed at once by qualification: the only passion in her family being a nonstop concern for people's feelings. Her parents would have hesitated to criticize Mickey Mouse (you haven't heard his side)."

Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison

Posted May 27, 12:00 PM

May 26, 2005

TT: Quotations from Chairman Wystan

"There is no single Greek literary work of art as great as The Divine Comedy; there is no extant series of works by a single Greek literary artist as impressive as the complete plays of Shakespeare; as a period of sustained creative activity in one medium, the seventy-five-odd years of Athenian drama, between the first tragedies of Aeschylus and the last comedy of Aristophanes, are surpassed by the hundred and twenty-five years, between Gluck's Orpheus and Verdi's Otello, which comprise the golden age of Italian opera: nevertheless, the bewildered comment of any fifth century Athenian upon our society from Dante's time till our own, and with increasing sharpness every decade, would surely be: 'Yes, I can see all the works of a great civilization; but why cannot I meet any civilized persons? I only encounter specialists, artists who know nothing of science, scientists who know nothing of art, philosophers who have no interest in God, priests who are unconcerned with politics, politicians who only know other politicians.'"

W.H. Auden, "The Greeks and Us" (from Forewords and Afterwords)

Posted May 26, 12:36 PM

TT: Almanac

"There is nothing so pleasant as to give oneself trouble for a person who is worth one's while. For the best of us, the study of the arts, a taste for old things, collections, gardens are all mere ersatz, succedanea, alibis. In the heart of our tub, like Diogenes, we cry out for a man. We cultivate begonias, we trim yews, as a last resort, because yews and begonias submit to treatment. But we should like to give our time to a plant of human growth, if we were sure that he was worth the trouble. That is the whole question: you must know something about yourself. Are you worth my trouble or not?"

Marcel Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes

Posted May 26, 12:34 PM

OGIC: Around and about

- If you don't like spoilers, don't read Max Watman's trenchant, frequently withering group review of the new Ishiguro, McEwan, Canty, and more. But you'd be missing out, and the review comes complete with a rationale for revealing plot points in reviews--basically, that the very notion of "spoiling" makes no sense with regard to literary fiction. I have mixed feelings about that, but I'm in total agreement with him on the brilliance of Canty. As for McEwan, I haven't read Saturday yet, but seemingly have read every last review of it, and I have to say that Watman's main critique of the novel is one that I was surprised not to encounter sooner.

- One Lady Eve views another, with edifying results...such a fantastic movie, that.

- The Lady Megan unearthed this riveting site. You'll laugh. Right up until you cry.

- The New Yorker arrived, and I went straight to the back of the book. There I encountered Hilton Als's review of a new production of Miss Julie but could never quite catch my breath enough to take it in as, from the first mention of Strindberg's name, all I could think of was this. As the Lady Tushnet might say, hee hee! Gooooordian knot....

Posted May 26, 12:15 PM

TT: Untrivial trivia

From today's New York Times story on Merv Griffin:

He still receives royalties from the "Jeopardy!" theme, which he wrote in less than a minute. "That little 30 seconds has made me a fortune, millions," he crowed. How much exactly? "You don't want to know." Please, Mr. Griffin, do share. "Probably close to $70-80 million."

Life is unfair.

Posted May 26, 1:09 AM

May 25, 2005

TT: Ahead of the ticker

The original-cast album of Adam Guettel's The Light in the Piazza was released yesterday. I've been listening to my advance copy ever since it arrived, and I've been feeling something unusual and unexpected: I'm angry with those benighted drama critics whose mixed-to-poor reviews of this extraordinary show may have kept unsuspecting people from seeing it.

Fortunately, Stephen Holden of the New York Times, one of the most receptive and perceptive critics I know (he ought to write a blog!), has published a deeply comprehending review of the CD, and for the moment I can do no better than to quote from it:

"The Light in the Piazza," whose sublime original cast album was released today by Nonesuch Records, has the most intensely romantic score of any Broadway musical since "West Side Story," unless you count Andrew Lloyd Webber's kitschy, pontificating melodic oratory for "The Phantom of the Opera." There is nothing kitschy about Mr. Guettel's songs, which share with Stephen Sondheim's equally great but less overtly tuneful score for "Passion" a fascination with mad love.

Exquisitely arranged and orchestrated by the composer with Ted Sperling and Bruce Coughlin, "The Light in the Piazza" unfolds as a diaphanous swirl of strings and harp, flecked with reeds, guitar and delicate percussion; the more you listen to it, the more its mists assume form and substance....

Because Mr. Guettel is the grandson of Richard Rodgers, one of the all-time greatest Broadway melodists, the score suggests a personal conversation between generations. "The Light in the Piazza" takes place only four years after the Broadway opening of the Rodgers and Hammerstein blockbuster "South Pacific."

Mr. Guettel's songs share the heady romantic spirit of "Some Enchanted Evening" and "Younger Than Springtime," ballads from that show that helped define the catechism of courtship in post-World War II America. If his melodies suggest sophisticated, angular refractions of his grandfather's, his lyrics question the homilies attached to Rodgers's melodies....

I'll be writing more about The Light in the Piazza, here or elsewhere, but for the moment I suggest you heed Holden's words and buy the original-cast CD right now--then go see the show for yourself.

As I mentioned above, I got my copy of The Light in the Piazza slightly in advance of the rest of the listening public. This is one of the great privileges of being a critic: I'm listening to Erin McKeown's We Will Become Like Birds, and you're not. (It comes out June 28.) Sarah and I were talking a couple of weeks ago about how thrilled we were when publishers started sending us review copies of unpublished books. Believe it or not, I still have my first set of bound galleys, stuffed in a box somewhere or other. They're 23 years old, which is how long I've been a book reviewer, God help me. Even so, I can still remember exactly how it felt when I opened the envelope and held them in my hand: I knew something the rest of the world didn't.

That's the way I'm feeling right this minute as I listen to Erin McKeown sing "Air." Eight months ago, Our Girl called me on her cell phone from the street outside the Chicago club where she'd just heard McKeown sing that as-yet-unrecorded song. She was so excited about discovering a wonderful new artist that she couldn't wait to go home and e-mail me--she had to call and tell me on the spot. Now I'm hearing the very same song for the very first time, and feeling the same overwhelming desire to spread the word. Fortunately, I don't have to call all of you up one at a time. I love blogging. I love music. I love art. Truth to tell, I love pretty much everything, at least for the moment. Art will do that to you.

Posted May 25, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"During my time as a soldier in the First World War I was a member of a string quartet which served our commanding officer as a means of escape from the miseries of war. He was a great music-lover and a connoisseur and admirer of French art. It was no wonder, then, that his dearest wish was to hear Debussy's String Quartet. We rehearsed the work and played it to him with much feeling at a private concert. Just after we had finished the slow movement the signals officer burst in and reported in great consternation that the news of Debussy's death had just come through on the radio. We did not continue our performance. It was as if the spirit had been removed from our playing. But now we felt for the first time how much more music is than just style, technique and an expression of personal feeling. Here music transcended all political barriers, national hatred and the horrors of war. Never before or since have I felt so clearly in which direction music must be made to go."

Paul Hindemith (quoted in Geoffrey Skelton, Paul Hindemith: The Man Behind the Music)

Posted May 25, 12:00 PM

TT: In a nutshell

A reader writes:

Blogging has become the intellectual's TV set.

I wish I'd said that. (I will, Oscar, I will!)

Posted May 25, 11:07 AM

May 24, 2005

OGIC: The reluctant diarist reconsiders

Last week I mused about diaries kept and unkept, kempt and unkempt, pretentious and pedestrian. I was feeling rather cynical about the whole endeavor. But one reader's response made me think again:

I kept journals/diaries as a teenager, inspired by the diaries my great-grandfather kept since he was 19 until a few months before he died at 94. In it are recorded India's independence, the birth of his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, cases he won (he was a lawyer), progress on the books he wrote (in English--they were short stories), his first trip to England, the passing of his wife--he wrote them with every intention that they would be read by others. In fact, he kept them near his writing desk and would browse in them from time to time.

After a few "journal"-like attempts in the decade that followed, I wrote very little.

I started again a couple of years ago. They are from Moleskin and there is a page a day following the calendar year.I was motivated to start and keep them fairly updated because of the sense that days were slipping into months and into years without any "account" of them.

What did I do the summer of 2001? Was I happy? Did my back hurt? Did I take walks? What did I cook for dinner? What happened on Friday nights? Did I call my parents? What did they say? You get the drift. It's banal all right, but it's my banal life.

I also started drawing/sketching/painting and would love to keep a sketch diary but haven't gotten around to it yet. But this diary is a start. I do enjoy flipping back or reading earlier years and as you say, can reconstruct my day if, in fact, something memorable happened. And yes, some days the entries are a litany of complaints.

I glue ticket stubs right on the page; I have to-do lists written in too, so it goes with me everywhere. If there is an almanac entry that speaks to me, I will copy it down; as I will play/music/movie recommendations from you or Terry! It stays open in front of me most of my day at work, so I can scribble something down quickly when I have a moment. I also enjoy the physical act of writing--not typing, but picking up my fountain pen with sepia ink and writing and watch the ink dry.

However, my diary is quite private--I am not counting on anyone else reading it (oh, the ego). And no one will award any prizes for this writing!

As for the sketch diary, ask me again in a year.

The existence of my correspondent's great-grandfather's journals, and her access to them, are the best possible argument for conscientious diary-keeping. I would give much for a similar record of my great-grandparents' or grandparents' days. It's almost enough to make me start up again, right after I burn the old, self-indulgent ones. One needs two diary tracks, really--and many, many blank books, o joy--to do the thing right.

Let me also assent to the proposition that the sensual pleasure of handwriting is a not insignificant part of the draw of diary-keeping. I use roller ball pens, not fountain pens and sepia ink, but I still feel I know just what the writer of the above means. My thanks to her for this generous response to my call for diary stories.

Posted May 24, 12:31 PM

OGIC: My recent delinquency

Oh no! I missed my first weekend since switching to weekend blogging. Contrary to what you may expect I'm going to say about that, it's not Terry's fault. Mostly.

Terry did, of course, keep me very busy for most of the weekend, what with two plays, several meals, and six Gilmore Girls. But I deposited him at Midway Airport around two o'clock Sunday, and still had most of a day stretched out promisingly before me. Oh, the things I would accomplish. Or so it seemed.

I accomplished exactly one thing. What kept me away from the old blog-and-chain was a task that was something new for me: I was serving as a screener for a writing contest that drew many, many entries. My job was to winnow down a few hundred to, well, as few as possible. Despite several bouts of concentrated reading over the last few weeks, I still had a pile of entries to get through yesterday, as well as the task of converting the towering stacks I'd been generating--"probable," "borderline," and "NO"--into a final list of recommendations I could stand by.

I felt as though I was near the end yesterday but, as anybody out there knows who has done work like this, you never really cease refining and recalibrating your standards in response to the fluctuating quality of the field. You can't know what an above-average piece of work looks like until you have read most of the entries. So the closer I got to the end of the pile, the more my anxiety grew that I had miscategorized the entries I'd read earlier. So when I reached the pile's bottom, I went back to the beginning. Suffice it to say that blogging time, along with a fair chunk of sleeping time, fell by the wayside last night--but for the sterling cause of literary justice. Anyway, I appreciate your patience and will try to make up for my absence during the week.

Posted May 24, 12:13 PM

TT: Red alert

Yikes, yikes, yikes! One of my deadlines was moved up a day, causing a catastrophic meltdown of my schedule. As a result, I spent all of Monday writing like a madman and most of the evening watching a movie about which I have to knock out an essay later in the week. (It was Look at Me, about which Our Girl was exactly right, thus leaving me with the unenviable task of trying to figure out how to say differently what she already said perfectly.)

Bottom line: I probably won't be posting again until Wednesday, if then. Almanac entries will appear as usual, and I may plead for sympathy from time to time, but don't expect much more than crumbs.

For now, do the usual: ooch on over to "Sites to See" and immerse yourself in the marvels of the blogosphere. And when you speak of me, speak well....

Posted May 24, 12:05 PM

TT: Quotations from Chairman Wystan

"Half the literature, highbrow and popular, produced in the West during the past four hundred years has been based on the false assumption that what is an exceptional experience is or ought to be a universal one. Under its influence so many millions of persons have persuaded themselves they were 'in love' when their experience could be fully and accurately described by the more brutal four-letter words, that one is sometimes tempted to doubt if the experience is ever genuine, even when, or especially when, it seems to have happened to oneself."

W.H. Auden, "The Protestant Mystics" (in Forewords and Afterwords)

Posted May 24, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Since actors had ceased to be for me exclusively the depositaries, in their diction and playing, of an artistic truth, they had begun to interest me in themselves; I amused myself, pretending that what I saw before me were the characters in some old humorous novel, by watching, struck by the fresh face of the young man who had just come into the stalls, the heroine listen distractedly to the declaration of love which the juvenile lead in the piece was addressing to her, while he, through the fiery torrent of his impassioned speech, still kept a burning gaze fixed on an old lady seated in a stage box, whose magnificent pearls had caught his eye; and thus, thanks especially to the information that Saint-Loup gave me as to the private lives of the players, I saw another drama, mute but expressive, enacted beneath the words of the spoken drama which in itself, although of no merit, interested me also; for I could feel in it that there were budding and opening for an hour in the glare of the footlights, created out of the agglutination on the face of an actor of another face of grease paint and pasteboard, on his own human soul the words of a part.

"These ephemeral vivid personalities which the characters are in a play that is entertaining also, whom one loves, admires, pities, whom one would like to see again after one has left the theatre, but who by that time are already disintegrated into a comedian who is no longer in the position which he occupied in the play, a text which no longer shews one the comedian's face, a coloured powder which a handkerchief wipes off, who have returned in short to elements that contain nothing of them, since their dissolution, effected so soon after the end of the show, make us--like the dissolution of a dear friend--begin to doubt the reality of our ego and meditate on the mystery of death."

Marcel Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes

Posted May 24, 12:00 PM

TT: Mailbag

To begin with, several readers caught me with my pants down when I claimed the other day, apropos of W.H. Auden, that Forewords and Afterwords was "the only essay collection Auden published in his lifetime." Not so, not so! It was preceded by The Dyer's Hand, which is actually on my bookshelf, whereas Forewords and Afterwords was stuck in the back of my closet. This was double-barreled dumbness: I somehow had it lodged in my mind that The Dyer's Hand was based on a series of lectures. (Wrong book--that's The Enchaféd Flood.) A million pardons for my memory lapse.

Now, on to a couple of interesting pieces of correspondence:

- "Apropos of nothing, except that Auden always makes me think of Kultur, your line in the Proust questionnaire that your idea of--Hell? unhappiness? what was it?--was ‘Siegfried' made me laugh aloud, an achievement you share with your man Mencken, Amis and a very few others."

I'm honored. I myself rarely laugh out loud when reading, so rarely that I can actually remember some of the specific passages that have made me do so. I don't think that H.L. Mencken has ever done it for me, but I remember vividly that Kingsley Amis rang the bell on my first reading of Lucky Jim when his anti-hero ordered an "octuple whisky." I've also done it a couple of times when reading P.J. O'Rourke, and I went out of my way years ago to mention the fact in a New York Times Book Review piece (of which I no longer have a copy, alas).

Why is it that humor on the page, no matter how funny, tends not to provoke an audible response from the reader? Or am I and my correspondent exceptional in our tendency to keep our mirth to ourselves? It happens that I'm an unusually loud laugher in public--so much so that at least one performer who knows me in private life has spotted my hoot from the stage. (She said she found it reassuring.) Must people like me be part of a crowd in order to be sufficiently disinhibited to emit the peculiar noises known as laughter? I doubt it, since I also laugh out loud when watching TV alone.

Any and all explanations will be gratefully received.

- "Unsolicited advice to my favorite blogger: we know you're a very busy man and we understand you have to make room for other things more important (yes!) than the blog. But sometimes it seems as if your every other paragraph carries this message. Awright, awreddy!"

Touché and/or ouch! It's guilt speaking, of course: I find it almost impossible not to post without first explaining why I'm not going to be posting. Such is the merciless work ethic that rules my productive life. I keep saying that I'll try to take unexplained time off from the blog, and I keep not doing it. Looks like the time has come to give it another try. In any case, I appreciate the nudge.

Posted May 24, 9:50 AM

May 23, 2005

TT: Idiosyncratic routine

I don't know anyone in New York who hasn't claimed at one time or another that the value of taking a vacation is outweighed by the difficulty of cleaning up the mess that accumulates while you're out of the office. Alas, I haven't been on a vacation, but I did take the weekend off to see plays in Chicago with Our Girl, and on my return I found the usual intimidating pile of snail mail, e-mail, and packages waiting for me.

As always, I briefly considered shoving it into a corner and pretending it wasn't there, but I knew I'd have to jump back on the merry-go-round first thing Monday morning (four deadlines, two plays, two movies, two lunches, an awards ceremony, and an out-of-town trip between now and Saturday), so instead I dumped it all on the kitchen table, placed a garbage bag on the floor next to my chair, and started tearing open envelopes. Once everything was sorted and the obvious junk pitched, I went back into the kitchen, took a box of Teddy Grahams and a bottle of seltzer out of the refrigerator, returned to the table and went through all the snail mail, eating and drinking as I read. Then I booted up my computer and started in on the e-mail. By the time I'd trashed the spam and finished answering the good stuff, I'd already received replies from the first three people I'd written.

Somewhere along the way, I muttered the all-too-familiar mantra of the busy New Yorker returned from a brief visit to elsewhere: It isn't worth it. You might as well stay home. Only I knew better. Even when you leave town on business, as I did this past weekend, at least you're somewhere else. No, it's not a vacation, but it's different, a stick of dynamite that blasts you out of your accustomed ways of doing things. Instead of dining on the Upper West Side and hailing a cab at exactly 7:20, I visit unfamiliar restaurants, sleep in unfamiliar beds, see actors I've never seen before, meet and greet new faces. I come home refreshed and inspired...and then I sit down at the kitchen table and start tearing open envelopes.

Like death and taxes, the mail is always with me, both good (an advance copy of the original-cast CD of The Light in the Piazza) and bad (a short stack of press releases inviting me to concerts I wouldn't dream of attending other than at gunpoint). Years of experience have taught me that the pleasure of shoving it all in a corner tonight will be more than offset by the pain of opening twice as much of it tomorrow afternoon. I slog tonight so that the next day's slog will seem marginally less Sisyphean--and so the Teachout Museum, also known as my living room, won't look unpleasingly messy when I stroll through it in the morning on the way to the shower. (One of the unintended consequences of collecting art in a small Upper West Side apartment is that you start to feel uncomfortable whenever you throw your clothes on the floor instead of hanging them neatly in the closet.)

Such is a piece of the price I pay for the life I lead, and you don't need to remind me that the moment I decide to stop paying it, somebody else will be more than happy to take my place. Only I don't intend to stop paying it, at least not any time soon. The embarrassing truth is that I love my daily grind, even when I can't stand it, which isn't very often. Sure, there are days when you have to go see Denzel Washington in Julius Caesar, but there are other days when you get to go see Tracy Letts in Orson's Shadow or Kristin Chenoweth in The Apple Tree, and you never waste time thinking about the one when you're reveling in the other.

Yes, I love my work, except when I return from the road at the end of a crowded weekend and spend a balmy Sunday night sitting alone at the kitchen table, munching Teddy Grahams and silently stuffing a garbage bag with press releases sent by publicists who insist on calling me "Ms. Terry Teachout." (Are you listening, New York City Ballet?) I wouldn't mind skipping that part. No matter what you do in life, there's always a part you wouldn't mind skipping.

Posted May 23, 12:05 PM

TT: P.S.

I won't be answering my phone until eleven a.m., if then. Should you need to talk to me, you'll have to throw a rock through my bedroom window.

Live with it.

Posted May 23, 12:05 PM

TT: Pledge drive

No, we don't want you to send us any money (not unless you can spare a life-changingly significant sum, in which case we accept with pleasure!). But do this, please:

If you read "About Last Night" regularly and enjoy doing so, tell a friend about us.

Do it right now.

We return you now to our regularly scheduled posting. That was painless, wasn't it?

Posted May 23, 12:04 PM

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- W.H. Auden's poetry needs no endorsement from me, but I never fail to be surprised by how many well-read people are unaware that he was also a prolific critic and essayist. I was cleaning out a closet the other day and ran across a slightly bent paperback copy of Forewords and Afterwords, the only essay collection Auden published in his lifetime (the Princeton University Press uniform edition of his complete works will ultimately contain all of his essays and reviews). I've no idea how one of my favorite books ended up underneath my toolbox, especially since I could see at a glance that I'd marked a half-dozen passages I must have meant to transfer to my electronic commonplace book. Instead, I'll post them as almanac entries this week, starting today.

I am, incidentally, still chewing away happily at A la recherche du temps perdu. Not surprisingly, I didn't get a whole lot of reading done on the ground in Chicago, but I spent a pleasant hour with the Duchess de Guermantes at the airport this afternoon. Unlikely as it may sound, A la recherche is ideally suited for planes, trains, and waiting rooms....

- Two composers I know--both of them women, but otherwise very different in age, living circumstances, and stylistic interests--told me separately in the past few days that they found one of the inescapable problems of being a professional composer to be the fact that you spend so much time alone. This is also true of writing, but I've never found the solitude necessary for writing to be a problem in and of itself. On the other hand, I do find that I start to get a bit isolated whenever my workaholism flares up and gets out of control. The Web, I suspect, is part of the problem: I use it to provide a change of pace when I've got a lot of deadlines on my plate, and it creates so powerful an illusion of "being in touch" that I sometimes forget to go out and see real live people, or even leave the apartment for anything beyond the most essential errands.

Sooner or later, though, I start feeling the need for actual human contact, which brings me back to my senses, sometimes quite abruptly. E-mail is great--better than great--but it won't give you a kiss on the cheek when you open the door.

- Last week I went for a walk in Central Park with a musician friend, in the course of which the following dialogue took place:

ME Somebody sent me a weird URL the other day.

SHE Weird like how?

ME Well, it was for a site called, uh, maybe "Babes in Classical Music," or "Classical Hotties," or something like that. Anyway, it was a Web site full of pictures of good-looking women musicians, organized by what instrument they play, voice type, whatever. How silly is that? What kind of person would spend all that time putting together a site like that? I mean, get a life, right?

SHE (with dawning horror) The URL wasn't beautyinmusic.com, was it?

ME Yeah, I think that was it.

SHE Er...um...I'm on it.

A beat.

ME (with the maniacal glee of a playground bully) You're on it? And you stood there and let me tell you all about it? I am soooo blogging this!

SHE (embarrassed) Oh, God, no, you can't do that! It's not my fault! I didn't have anything to do with it! I don't even know who does the thing....

ME No way. You're totally busted.

SHE (resigned) Well, at least don't mention my name, all right?

ME (magnanimously) O.K. Your secret is safe with me.

Posted May 23, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"I find Trollope's insistence that writing novels is a craft like making shoes, and his pride in the money he got by writing them, sympathetic. He was aware, of course, that craft and art are not the same: a craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it. But it is unbecoming in an artist to talk about inspiration; that is the reader's business. Again, Trollope would never have denied that his primary reason for writing was that he loved the activity. He once said that as soon as he could no longer write books he would wish to die. He believed that he wrote best when he wrote fastest, and in his case this may well have been true: a good idea for a novel stimulated his pen. Though large sales are not necessarily a proof of aesthetic value, they are evidence that a book has given pleasure to many readers, and every author, however difficult, would like to give pleasure."

W.H. Auden, "A Poet of the Actual" (from Forewords and Afterwords)

Posted May 23, 12:00 PM

May 20, 2005

TT: Out the door and into a cab

Like the song says, I'm goin' to Chicago. (Back when I was in college, I used the wonderful old 1941 Jimmy Rushing-Count Basie recording of "Goin' to Chicago Blues" as the closing theme of my late-night radio show, which my friends used in turn as an accompaniment to all sorts of illicit activities.) Our Girl and I have shows to see, meals to eat, and hours of intensive talking to do, and we won't have nearly enough time for any of these things, since I must return on Sunday night and resume my regular rounds of Manhattan and its environs. We do expect to have as much fun as possible in the time available, though.

OGIC will update you on our activities some time this weekend. I'll be back in the saddle on Monday, though I may not have much to say that morning, seeing as how I probably won't have much time to get it said before I fall into bed on Sunday night.

In the meantime, enjoy your weekend.

Posted May 20, 12:03 PM

TT: All about Orson (and Larry and Ken)

It's Friday, I'm in the Journal, and I'm in a raving mood. The causes this week are Orson's Shadow and Kristin Chenoweth:

Now that Broadway has settled down for the summer, the show to see is Austin Pendleton's "Orson's Shadow," first performed five years ago by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company and currently playing Off Broadway (why did we have to wait so long?) at the Barrow Street Theatre. It's "All About Eve" for eggheads, a thought experiment in which Mr. Pendleton, a veteran actor and sometime playwright, endeavors to imagine what might have happened when Orson Welles (Jeff Still) directed Laurence Olivier (John Judd) and Joan Plowright (Susan Bennett) in Eugène Ionesco's "Rhinoceros" in London in 1960, at the exact moment when Olivier, who had fallen in love with Ms. Plowright, was trying to get up the nerve to end his marriage to Vivien Leigh (Lee Roy Rogers).

The fictional catalyst for this snarl of true-life ego run rampant is Kenneth Tynan (Tracy Letts), the celebrated British drama critic, who knew all the parties concerned and whom Mr. Pendleton employs as the narrator of "Orson's Shadow." In this as in every other aspect of the script, he weaves together fact and fancy with deeply informed audacity....

At intermission I decided that Mr. Pendleton had given us an ingenious entertainment crammed full of good jokes. (Welles: "When and where did you hear the rumor that I've been playing to empty houses?" Tynan: "I heard it tonight, from the other member of the audience.") By evening's end I knew better: "Orson's Shadow" also has something wholly serious to say about the self-destructive impulse that is too often the worm in the rose of genius. I don't know when I've seen a better backstage play....

Kristin Chenoweth might just be the smartest young actress in town. Perhaps that's a peculiar way to describe Broadway's reigning Queen of Cute, but Ms. Chenoweth is more than just a little blonde cutie-pie with a super-sized voice. Anyone who saw her last weekend in City Center's "Encores!" presentation of "The Apple Tree," a triptych of one-act musicals by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick originally produced on Broadway 39 years ago, will know just what I mean.

Ms. Chenoweth played Eve (as in Adam), the jealous princess of "The Lady or the Tiger?" and a frumpy chimney sweep turned ultra-sexy movie star, interpreting all three of her roles with a specificity and precision normally found only in vastly more experienced performers. I got so wrapped up in her ever-fresh line readings and split-second timing that I almost failed to remember what a terrific singer she is, which is a bit like watching "North by Northwest" and paying more attention to James Mason than Cary Grant....

No link, so if you want to read more (including a much less enthusiastic review of Playwrights Horizons' Memory House), buy today's Wall Street Journal and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, in which you will find much cultural coverage of all kinds, all of it interesting. Or go here to subscribe to the Journal's online edition, which is totally worth it.

P.S. Since I saw Orson's Shadow last Saturday night, Tracy Letts was replaced by Sean McNall, about whom more here. If and when time permits, I'll try to go back and see him.

Posted May 20, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

Goin' to Chicago, sorry that I can't take you
Goin' to Chicago, sorry that I can't take you
There's nothin' in Chicago that a monkey woman can do.

When you see me comin', raise your window high
When you see me comin', raise your window high
When you see me passin', baby, hang your head and cry.

Hurry down, sunshine, see what tomorrow bring
Hurry down, sunshine, see what tomorrow bring
The sun went down, tomorrow brought us rain.

You so mean and evil, you do things you ought not do
You so mean and evil, you do things you ought not do
You got my brand of honey, guess I'll have to put up with you.

Jimmy Rushing, "Goin' to Chicago Blues"

Posted May 20, 12:00 PM

May 19, 2005

TT: Clean getaway

Winston Churchill said somewhere or other that there are few things in life more exhilarating than being shot at without effect. I thought of this utterly characteristic remark a few hours ago as I watched a wizard from Ms Mac Consulting wipe the hard drive of my iBook and reinstall the operating system, an experience which I imagine to be not unlike watching in a mirror as a neurosurgeon pokes around in your head with a scalpel.

This unexpected and unwanted adventure into the unknown began last Saturday when I came home from Washington, D.C., booted up my computer, and discovered to my horror that some gremlin had translated all the words on the e-mail toolbar into Dutch. (I know, it sounds crazy, but they really were in Dutch--I checked.) Other peculiar little anomalies had been bobbing up on my screen from time to time in recent weeks, but this one was serious enough that I knew the time had come to seek professional counsel at once or run the risk of sudden and catastrophic paralysis. I got on the phone to Ms Mac and scheduled a Wednesday-morning house call. At the appointed hour, a flute-playing genius by the name of Nicole appeared on my doorstep, sat down at my desk, and started making magic passes over my prostrate iBook, which turned out to be even sicker than either one of us had suspected. Five nervewracking hours later, it was at least as good as new, and I went right out and downed a stiff drink.

One of the nice things about Nicole's approach to computer consulting is that she is unfailingly tactful, by which I mean that she never says things like You mean you don't know what a [fill in the blank] is? Recognizing at once that she was dealing with an innocent, she went out of her way to behave as if my ignorance were perfectly normal. I have no doubt that this is a specifically feminine mode of behavior, having spent far too many hours being stared at in self-evident disbelief by auto mechanics with hairy chests who made no effort whatsoever to disguise their contempt for the kind of guy who doesn't know a socket wrench from a fanbelt (I exaggerate only slightly). If all auto mechanics were like Nicole, there would be peace on earth.

Thanks to her stalwart efforts, I now resume regular blogging activities--and about time, too. I'm off to Chicago at midday Friday to frolic on the aisle with OGIC, but until then I'm yours.

Posted May 19, 12:03 PM

TT: Who says?

My Wall Street Journal review of Kate Whoriskey's Shakespeare Theatre production of The Tempest, in which I suggested that audience members wait to read her program notes until after they'd seen the show, has inspired a couple of very interesting posts elsewhere in the blogosphere. (You'll find them here and here.)

These postings put me in mind of H.L. Mencken's saying that criticism is "prejudice made plausible." He had a point, but some prejudices don't lend themselves to such treatment, or at least shouldn't. I don't like all art, I'm pretty sure I don't like all good art, and I think it's the better part of wisdom for me not to pretend that all the art I dislike is bad. Like everyone else, I have my share of aesthetic allergies, which may or may not necessarily correspond to the Truth About Art.

All other things being equal:

- I prefer short plays, films, novels, and pieces of music to long ones. (I also prefer small paintings to large ones, which is not exactly the same preference but probably a second cousin to it.)

- I prefer comedy to tragedy.

- I prefer prose to poetry.

- I prefer simplicity to complexity.

- I prefer realism to fantasy. (This is why I prefer comedy to tragedy, by the way: I think it's truer to life.)

- I usually have major problems with "documentary" art, or any other kind of idea-driven art. Marcel Duchamp said that he inscribed sentences on his "ready-mades" in order to "carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal." That sums up the kind of art I like least.

- I loathe "artiness."

- I tend not to like camp.

To some extent these prejudices can be made to add up to a rough and ready philosophy of art, but the alert reader will note that they also contain some built-in contradictions. O.K. by me. As I've said time and again, art is empirical: first you make it, then you decide whether it works, then you try to figure out why it works. Similarly, criticism starts with the critic's spontaneous, unmediated response to an aesthetic experience. If it doesn't, it's bad criticism--period.

One of the reasons why I trust my taste is that it not infrequently leads me in surprising directions. I've reviewed more than a few plays and productions for the Journal that didn't conform to my list of prejudices, but which I loved anyway. (Among them were Anna in the Tropics, Charlie Victor Romeo, I Am My Own Wife, Intimate Apparel, Jumpers, Nine Parts of Desire, Private Jokes, Public Places, Rose Rage, and Small Tragedy.) A critic who always knows in advance what he's going to like--or dislike--is writing about the show in his head, not the show in front of him. One sure way to increase the likelihood of surprise is not to look at the printed program at all, and sometimes that's just what I do: I go in, sit down, and see what happens.

In the case of The Tempest, I knew that Ms. Whoriskey claimed to have interpreted Shakespeare's text in a highly political way, which is definitely not my thing--but I'd also been told in advance by a person whose taste I trust without reservation that the production was first-rate, so I split the difference, went in cold, and didn't crack open the program until intermission, by which time I was already head over heels and happy to be. So much the better. It's not uncommon for me to have clear-cut advance expectations about the shows I review, but I'm always willing to be proved wrong, and delighted to admit it in print.

I'm sure several of you out there are already thinking the same thing, and I'm a half-beat ahead of you: doesn't it matter that Kate Whoriskey superimposed a political interpretation on The Tempest and came up with a beautiful production? Duh, yeah, of course. To be sure, my experience suggests very strongly that politicizing Shakespeare (or any other great playwright) tends not to yield good results, but if it works for her, it works for her, regardless of whether it works for anyone else.

As for me, all I care about is the end result. Bore me and I'll fall asleep, even if I agree with every word you say. Astonish me and I'll sit up and take notice, even if I think you're dead wrong. In art, the only unforgivable sin is to be dull.

UPDATE: Mr. Superfluities has posted a list of his own prejudices. While they tend not to run in very close sync with my own, he says some things with which I couldn't agree more enthusiastically. Among them:

Theater's strengths, in this technological age, are that it's simple, it can be cheap and it appeals to a very basic need for physical communion....

Campy popular cultural references mire a work in its own time. It's one thing to offer comment or criticism of the world in which we live; it's another to unthinkingly exploit the popularity of junk in an effort to make our own shows more accessible....

Artists can't afford to be without a familiarity with the other art forms in which they don't work. It also helps when they have a good broad basic understanding of philosophy, psychology, history and science: sometimes to inform their own work, sometimes to be aware of the questions which these disciplines don't answer.

Hear, hear! (Do I smell a meme coming on?)

Posted May 19, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"I have only read Proust in translation. I thought he began well but went dotty half way through like J Joyce in Ulysses. No plan. Nancy [Mitford] says it is uproariously funny throughout & only English & Americans treat it as anything superior to P.G. Wodehouse."

Evelyn Waugh, letter to Margaret FitzHerbert (Aug. 9, 1964)

Posted May 19, 12:00 PM

TT: Words to the wise

I'll be going to Chicago on Friday (sorry that I can't take you!), but if I weren't, I'd be going to Alice Tully Hall to hear "Five Lovers," a recital by soprano Jama Jandrokovic.

Here's the "official" description of the concert:

Soprano Jama Jandrokovic sings texts from her autobiographical collection of poetry, Five Lovers, featuring settings of the texts by leading American composers Lori Laitman, Luna Pearl Woolf and the 2004 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Music, Paul Moravec. Special guests include poet Dana Gioia, pianists Soeyon Kim and Andrew Rosenblum, and the North Sky Ensemble, with violinists Jesse Mills and Colin Jacobsen, violist Max Mandel and cellist Rubin Kodheli. Directed by Gina Lapinski.

Now here's an explanation of the program's significance by my fellow ArtsJournal.com blogger Greg Sandow, a tireless and trenchant advocate of non-traditional classical-music programming:

On Friday, at Tully Hall in New York, a soprano named Jama Jandrokovic will give a recital, consisting of three new song cycles by three composers, all of them settings of her own autobiographical poetry! This really deserves an exclamation point, because normally--to state the obvious--it's people in pop music whose music is explicitly about their own lives. So now here's someone in classical music doing it.

The poems, according to the press release for the concert, "chronicle Ms. Jandrokovic's romantic journey as a recently divorced, newly single young woman in New York City attempting to reinvent herself." I haven't read the poems, and can't say if they're good or bad. But! The very idea of a classical singer doing something like this is revolutionary. The composers are Lori Laitman, Luna Pearl Woolf, and Paul Moravec, and the concert--very good move here--has a stage director. This is not your grandmother's vocal recital.

I know about this concert because I know several of the parties involved, but readers of this blog shouldn't need to be reminded that I don't recommend anything in advance unless I have damned good reason to think it's going to be worth seeing and/or hearing. This will be both.

Jandrokovic's gorgeously designed Web site, with full information on the program, is here.

To purchase tickets, go here.

Posted May 19, 11:29 AM

TT: Untrivial trivia

Things I didn't know till now, gratefully culled from The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film:

- Total number of feature-length commercial sound films of plays by Shakespeare: about 40.

- Average percentage of Shakespeare's original text heard in these films: 25-30%.

- Director who "consistently uses fewer words for each transaction between characters" in his Shakespeare films: Orson Welles.

Posted May 19, 11:01 AM

TT: Check back with me tomorrow, though....

Tyler Green, who blogs at Modern Art Notes, is inviting bloggers to write about their favorite painting in America and their favorite American painting (which I suppose could be one and the same).

This is, of course, an impossible task, but having just said that it can't be done, I'll do it, subject as always to minute-by-minute changes of mind.

As of the time stamp on this posting, the winners are as follows:

- Favorite American painting: Fairfield Porter's The Mirror, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. As regular readers of this blog know, my passion for Porter is boundless--his work is my major preoccupation as a collector--and I can think of a half-dozen of his paintings that I might be inclined to put at the top of this list. "The Mirror," though, seems to me a particularly revealing exemplar of Porter's highly individual brand of realism, and one that I don't get to see often enough because it hangs in a Midwestern museum. All the more reason, then, for me to pay a visit to Kansas City this summer. Good jazz, good barbecue, a good museum with my favorite Porter--what's not to like?

- Favorite painting in America: Paul Cézanne's The Garden at Les Lauves, at the Phillips Collection in Washington. I find its uncalculated ambiguity (which extends all the way to the unanswerable question of whether or not Cézanne had finished it at the time of his death) to be infinitely absorbing. I try to pay it a visit every time I'm in Washington, and I'm always disappointed when it's not hanging (which is rarely).

Posted May 19, 1:50 AM

May 18, 2005

OGIC: Pictures trounce words

Yesterday I was striving to describe some of the infinitely variable moods of Lake Michigan, and tonight Mr. Modern Kicks goes and provides a one-click ticket to an unbelievably perfect--and perfectly beautiful--illustration of what I was babbling on about with these suddenly crude-seeming materials, words: Cynthia King's far more eloquent oil pastels of the very lake, in several of its moods. I haven't decided yet whether seeing her lovely pictures adds steam to the prospective Lake Diary project or just makes it seem terribly unnecessary.

Posted May 18, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"'There is no man,' he began, 'however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man--so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise--unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons and grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that the picture of what we once were, in early youth, may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not deny the truth of it, for it is evidence that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, of the life of studios, of artistic groups--assuming that one is a painter--extracted something that goes beyond them.'"

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

Posted May 18, 12:00 PM

TT: Back home again

I just got back from New Haven, where I drove in order to see Long Wharf Theatre's production of Tom Stoppard's Travesties (I'll be reviewing it next week in The Wall Street Journal). It was a long night and a long drive, and I have four appointments ahead of me today--one of which is a house call from a computer repairwoman. Yikes!

For all these reasons, I rather doubt I'll be posting anything more until Thursday. In my absence, do the obvious: slide over to the right-hand column, scroll down to "Sites to See," and explore the wonderful world of artblogging.

See you later.

Posted May 18, 1:06 AM

May 17, 2005

OGIC: Diaries unkept and unkempt

When Terry posts an "Entry from an Unkept Diary," I look at the title and invariably see "Entry from an Unkempt Diary." This amuses me, but it also reminds me of the journals, very much kept, of my slightly younger self. They are pretty fat and unkempt tomes, stuffed with bits of paper scribbled on at times when the journal wasn't at hand and salted away between the pages or, once in a while, scotch-taped in. It has been years now since I've attempted to keep a regular diary. I'm still a sucker for a nice blank book, however, and I buy them and try to think of other things to fill them up with than end-of-the-day thoughts, which in my case hardly ever failed to amount to small litanies of complaints--about work, about friends, but mostly about those two great sources of dissatisfaction, boyfriends and me, that is, my own fallibilities and failures. Sometimes I'd try to write about things outside the making-me-grumble and making-me-swoon zones, but those labored entries were always the worst: stiff, studied, insufferable. They always raised the same uncomfortable question when I'd finished: who the hell did I think I was writing that for? Just what audience of distinguished prize panelists did I imagine was going to be rooting around in my nightstand drawer for li-terature?

Yecch. Back to slights and betrayals and crushes. That junk, now--that flowed like Leinie's at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap [aside: hellooo, Frommers' best editor!]. But could anything be more banal? Let's just say I'm not so sorry I put a stop to all of that.

Still, these days I continue to like the idea of keeping a record of my daily life, but I lean away from the subjective and toward the objective variety. Not so far in that direction as Andy Warhol--no taxi cab receipts or anything--but definitely in that direction. Off and on, I'll squirrel away my movie ticket stubs. They're dandy little documents, packing quite a bit of data into the space of a couple postage stamps: the date, the movie title, the showtime, the theater's name, the price. This, for me, is the sort of artifact that can evoke a whole day besides: the company, the weather outside, the pre-movie or post-movie meal, the comparing of notes after the show. I very much want to have been keeping this book already, but it always feels too late to start. It feels especially futile now, when I'm tempted out to the movies less and less frequently (a subject for another post). Still, I should do it. If I don't, I'll think of it next year and wish I had started now.

Another possible structured diary I'm always thinking about starting is the Lake Diary. I live a few blocks from Lake Michigan, and it looks different to me every day. If one day it is the same color as the day before, the sky is probably different. If the sky is the same color, too, the texture of the water surface is different. There's not a day I see that lake and don't say to myself--or to whoever is lucky enough to be around--"Look at the lake!" On a day not too long ago, the remarkable visual effect happened to be that while most of the lake surface was soft and nubbly, it turned shiny and glassine in the cup formed where Promontory Point curves back inland to the north. Sometimes lake and sky are both silver-gray, and the horizon is rubbed out or blurred, as if an eraser had been taken to it more or less skillfully. The possible and actual variations within this simple set of elements, lake-sky-color-texture, are infinite. And as certain reading tastes of mine go to show, I'm ever fascinated by subtle variations on a recurring theme (the variable elements in this case being color-damsel-scoundrel-scam).

So what kinds of diaries do you keep or aspire to keep? Tidy? Or un?

Posted May 17, 12:39 PM

TT: The Teachout way

In case you were wondering, I fell off the Proust bandwagon for a couple of weeks. Unlikely as it may sound, my attention was diverted by Conrad Black's Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, which isn't quite as long as A la recherche du temps perdu, though it seemed that way toward the end. Fortunately, I wrapped it up last week, and am now deep into Le Côté de Guermantes, meaning that you can expect a fairly steady stream of Proustian almanac entries and other passing observations in days to come.

Earlier today I dipped into the section on Proust in Anthony Powell's Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers, 1946-1989, and fished out a few neat observations. Here they are:

- "Proust did not at all avoid objections expressed by those who supposed they had been 'put in' his novel, although...the derivations from actual individuals are almost always infinitely combined and adapted. Proust himself observed that authors had to be careful with their friends 'because if my characters turn out to poison people or commit incest later on, they'll think I mean them.'"

- "Proust liked high society in the purely social sense. Coming from a rich but irredeemably middle-class family, having a Jewish mother, his entry into the beau monde of that day was naturally something that required effort on his own part."

(That irredeemably is a nice touch.)

- "One is almost tempted to wonder whether certain critics want to take it out on Proust simply because they feel that he attended more amusing parties than they themselves."

Ouch! But enough blogging--I've got a book to read.

P.S. I am, alas, a hopeless monoglot, but Our Girl is a full-fledged Francophone, and I've been nudging her to accompany me in the simultaneous adventure of reading Proust in the original. Pelt her with encouraging e-mails--maybe she'll succumb....

Posted May 17, 12:03 PM

TT: While you can

Two off-Broadway plays I liked very much are closing very soon. If you haven't seen them, do:

- Heather Raffo's Nine Parts of Desire closes May 22. Here's part of what I wrote about it in The Wall Street Journal:

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

Ms. Raffo's enigmatic title is explained in her epigraph, a maxim of Ali ibn Abu Taleb, founder of the Shia sect and fourth leader of the Islamic world after Mohammed: "God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men." The nine characters she portrays are based on a large and diverse group of real-life women--a doctor, a painter who ran the Saddam Art Center, a left-wing political exile living in London, a young girl who loves the music of 'N Sync--whom she interviewed over the past decade, and she evokes their dissimilar personalities (and appearances) with a precision reminiscent of Jefferson Mays' high-wire acts of multiple impersonation in "I Am My Own Wife." Each one is wholly believable, but not in the straight-from-the-transcript manner of such exercises in theatrical polemic as "Guantánamo." We believe in their reality because Ms. Raffo inhabits each one so fully, both as actor and as author, and because we never feel, not even for a moment, that she is making them tell us what we--or she--want to hear....

- Shockheaded Peter closes May 29. Again, here's an excerpt from my Journal review:

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

Welcome to "Shockheaded Peter," now playing at the Little Shubert for what I hope will be at least a year. This homicidally hilarious British import is a musical version of the "Struwwelpeter" stories of Heinrich Hoffman, the 19th-century German author famous for his cautionary tales of ill-behaved tots who get what they deserve, and then some. (Guess what happened to little Conrad when he kept on sucking his thumbs after Mommy told him to stop?) It is, in theory, a children's show, though the only child I can readily imagine appreciating "Shockheaded Peter" to the fullest would be Wednesday Addams. On the other hand, it may be that I simply don't know enough kids, for the audience at the preview I attended was full of perfectly adorable tots who showed no visible signs of being traumatized by the hijinks on stage.

Fully grown attendees will note that "Shockheaded Peter" owes much to Edward Gorey, though it's not literally derivative of that past master of the macabre. As much as anything else, it's an affectionate parody of turn-of-the-century mustache-twirling melodrama. The set contains enough doors (and trap doors) to furnish at least two French farces. The songs, written by Martin Jacques and performed by the Tiger Lillies, a trio of demented-looking Brits, are--well, creepy. The ensemble cast is fab, with top honors going to Julian Bleach, the cadaverous master of ceremonies, who informs us at one point that "I was trained in London, you know." No doubt, but I wouldn't be surprised if he got his graduate degree from the Peter Lorre School of Drama....

Don't dally--time is short.

Posted May 17, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

Do you miss the scene,
The frenzy, the faces?
And did you trade the whole parade
For a pair of parking places?
And if you had the choice,
Would you still choose to do it all again?
Are you sitting in front of the tube
Watching Annie Hall again?
And do you ever run into that guy
Who used to be you?
Tell me, do you miss New York?
Me, too.

Dave Frishberg, "Do You Miss New York?"

Posted May 17, 12:00 PM

May 16, 2005

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- The Phillips Collection, my favorite museum, owns just one painting by Renoir, The Luncheon of the Boating Party. Duncan Phillips was long in the habit of assembling "units" of works by the artists he loved best, from Cézanne to Rothko, but in Renoir's case he was content to restrict himself to a single example and let it go at that.

Did Phillips really believe that The Luncheon of the Boating Party said everything that needed to be said about Renoir's art--that it was an all-encompassing, all-embracing expression of the essence of Renoir? I don't know, but I do believe there to be certain artists, some of them quite prolific, who can be "summed up" fairly adequately by a single masterpiece. I incline to think that Renoir was one of them, just as I think that all of Leonard Bernstein is in Fancy Free, all of Tennessee Williams in The Glass Menagerie, and all of Jane Austen in any one of her mature novels. (The same thing could be said of a great many abstract painters and jazz musicians.) It isn't that I'd necessarily want to do without the other works of these artists, but I'm not sure you learn anything indispensable about their essential quality by getting to know the whole of their output. To experience their work is like eating a favorite dish: sometimes it's made from superior ingredients, sometimes it's prepared especially well, but it's basically always the same.

If Renoir was that kind of artist, then it's a mark of Duncan Phillips' aesthetic shrewdness that he knew it--just as he knew that Cézanne wasn't.

- One of my closest friends is moving to the West Coast at the end of the month, not for a little while but for good. From my point of view, this has no upside whatsoever (not for me, anyway--she's getting married, and couldn't be happier). Among other things, I can't get used to the idea that in a matter of days she will no longer be a part of my everyday life. Of course it's not as though she's going to die, or join the female equivalent (assuming there is one) of the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance. We'll always have e-mail, and I expect she'll even find her way back to Manhattan from time to time. Nevertheless, the dailiness of our relationship must of necessity come to an end: I won't be able to call her up and ask her if she wants to see a play with me tomorrow night, or have lunch and stop by a gallery later today. I'm sure we'll always be friends, but henceforth we'll be friends in a different way, one I'm simply not able to imagine as of yet.

I don't look forward to losing that precious dailiness. At the same time, I know that its loss will open up space in my life for...what? Will another friend, or several friends, step forward to fill that open space? Will it be filled by someone I don't yet know, or whom I only just met? Might it, too, be filled in a different way?

The good news is that middle age has made me a bit more sanguine about change. Perhaps sanguine isn't quite the right word. Accepting may be closer to the mark. Either way, I do know that I've survived some fairly horrific changes in my own life, and--like the song says--I'm still here:

I've stuffed the dailies
In my shoes,
Strummed ukuleles,
Sung the blues,
Seen all my dreams disappear,
But I'm here.

That's from Stephen Sondheim's Follies. Another song from that famously dark show contains an equally hard piece of wisdom that is no more accessible to the young:

The roads you never take
Go through rocky ground,
Don't they?
The choices that you make
Aren't all that grim.
The worlds I'll never see
Still will be around,
Won't they?
The Ben I'll never be,
Who remembers him?

Maybe not completely inaccessible: I'd never seen Follies when I wrote these words in a book I published fourteen years ago:

I did not yet know that we are born into a vast room whose walls consist of a thousand doors of possibility. Each door is flung open to the world outside, and the room is filled with light and noise. We close some of the doors deliberately, sometimes with fear, sometimes with calm certainty. Others seem to close by themselves, some so quietly that we do not even notice. "I want to play the violin," I said to my parents one day, and nobody bothered to tell me that a half-dozen doors slammed shut at that very moment--not just the door marked BECOMES JAZZ TRUMPET PLAYER but the one that said BECOMES SMALL-TOWN LAWYER AND SPENDS LIFE IN SMALLTOWN, U.S.A., the one my father would someday encourage me to walk through, not knowing that it was already bolted shut....

Perhaps I did understand what Sondheim meant, at least in part, but there was one thing I couldn't have known fourteen years ago, which is that the door you finally walk through leads to another, smaller room. The journey never ends--and the doors never stop closing.

Posted May 16, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won't slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job's done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.

Seamus Heaney, "Scaffolding" (courtesy of Saskia Lane)

Posted May 16, 12:00 PM

May 15, 2005

OGIC: Confessions of a dual citizen

What follows is my essay from last week's Chicago Reader about the oddness, sometimes, of being both a blogger and a newspaper reviewer. It wasn't available online, so I want to share it with those of you who aren't in Chicago or--for shame!--missed the Reader's Spring book issue. I made a couple of tiny changes to it. In a separate post, I note a few things in it that, in the short space of a week, have already changed! Here it goes:

Once upon a time, the life of a freelance book critic could be an eerily quiet affair. In 1995, a couple of years after Simon & Schuster axed the imprint where I'd labored for three years on the bottom rungs of the editorial ladder, I worked some old publishing contacts and snagged a book review assignment for the Baltimore Sun. I had never written for an audience any bigger or more exacting than the desultory skimmers of my college newspaper. More to the point, I had never written anything for money. Failure seemed more of a probability than a possibility, and I proceeded with a caution approaching cold fear.

I pored over that first book the Sun sent me, looking for a smart angle and evidence to support it, but the styles of reading and writing I was absorbing as a teething grad student in the University of Chicago English department were interfering with my ability to produce something that would go down easy with Sunday coffee. A friend, Wall Street Journal theater critic Terry Teachout, whom I'd met when he published his first two books with Simon & Schuster, took one look at my first draft and sent it back for a jargonectomy. Words like "reification," while right at home in your George Eliot seminar paper, assume a sort of, um, "alterity" in a review of a biography of River Phoenix.

Yes, River Phoenix. Anyway, after straining the lumps of academese out of my piece, zipping up the lede, and weighing and reweighing the whole for the balance of seriousness and irreverence due a young-dead-celebrity bio, I faxed it to Baltimore and waited for the world's reaction. And waited. And waited. And I started to get used to the idea that as an out-of-town writer my rigorously considered, delicately hammered piece of prose had been sent, for all intents and purposes, into a black hole.

My review appeared, but I didn't know this for certain until my clips arrived in the mail more than a week after the fact, followed by the check. Actual people who did not raiseme from infancy may even have read the review, in delight or disgust or, more likely, 20 seconds. I had no reason to think they hadn't--and no reason to think they had. The resounding silence came as a minor relief to my inner wallflower but an historic letdown to my ego.

Ten years later this predicament has become so obsolete it's hard to even remember clearly. The sense of resigned irrelevance with which I used to dispatch my work into the black hole has been inverted. I now submit copy with something closer to thrilling apprehension. For a few years now, most critics have been able to count on national exposure via the online editions of the papers they write for. They enjoy a vastly expanded audience, readers have access to all they can eat in book criticism, and it's hard to see how this is anything less than a windfall of cosmic proportions for all. But it's only very recently that online exposure has developed a new wrinkle--the lit bloggers' revenge.

In the summer of 2003 Terry, who is also a music critic for Commentary, became one of the first mainstream arts writers to start a blog. Titled About Last Night, it appears on the ArtsJournal.com site (artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight) and provides a forum for him to write spontaneously about his day-to-day life, share thoughts that don't make it into his paid writing, and generally post whatever pops into his head. A few months after starting the site, Terry invited me to contribute. I jumped at the chance. By then I was writing regularly for the Chicago Tribune as well as the Sun; for this new gig I adopted the pseudonym Our Girl in Chicago (or "OGIC"). I proceeded to post--at first as a Friday guest but eventually throughout the week--about everything from Bob Dylan's memories of Johnny Cash to Henry James on film. I blogged about what I was reading, seeing, and listening to, and sometimes I blogged about critics and criticism.

A blog seemed especially well suited to the last--what I had learned from James Wood's latest review, say, or what a botch Hilton Als had made of a Cat Power profile. One common trait of the best and worst critics, after all, is that they make you want to talk back; before the Web there wasn't much of a viable public forum for doing so. In a small way, I was participating in what has since become an elementary function of the blogosphere: letting the print establishment have it. The fact that under another name I was a member of that establishment was easy to ignore.

At the time I began blogging, the best-known book site was Jessa Crispin's Bookslut, launched in early 2002. A bunch of other lit bloggers matriculated that fall: Sarah Weinman, a Baltimore-based critic of mysteries and crime fiction, started Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, Los Angeles screenwriter Mark Sarvas launched The Elegant Variation, and Chicagoan Sam Jones (who also contributes book reviews to WBEZ's Hello Beautiful!) started transforming his site, Golden Rule Jones, from a compilation of Chicagoland author appearances into a true blog, complete with notes on what he was reading, publishing news, and literary quotations.

This new wave of book blogs attracted a lot of traffic (About Last Night will soon pass one million hits) and, eventually, mainstream media attention, some of it less than flattering. "The gods of the blogosphere really, really like each other--and say so every chance they get," snarked Washington Post writer Jennifer Howard in November 2003. One big, giddy circle jerk was how she described us--"in love with themselves, each other, and the beauty of what they're creating," linking to each other liberally and uncritically, with actual book coverage taking a backseat to schmoozing. Howard's piece so offended the sensibilities of its subjects that none of them seemed to notice that her withering criticism was actually somewhat constructive: a plea from a fervent reader who was "feeling betrayed--and a little bored" by blog content that seemed increasingly aimed at a coterie of insiders.

Howard's complaint was a strongly stated version of a truism. The same qualities that make lit blogs more fun and freewheeling than the book pages--their unedited, uncensored, and unpaid liberty--also make them less accountable to readers, writers, or anyone else. Bloggers, though, almost uniformly took her criticism as an attack, and dug in their heels against their common paper-and-ink antagonist. It was a watershed moment in the establishment of lit blogs as a new faction in the world of literary opinion: we had a blog bloc.

There are plenty of critics-turned-bloggers like me, Terry, and Lizzie Skurnick, who started Old Hag after writing for Mediabistro.com and Baltimore City Paper, and bloggers who have migrated the other way, from cyberspace to the book pages, like Weinman (who now writes for the Baltimore Sun) and Brooklyn-based critic Maud Newton, who started maudnewton.com as a diversion from writing a novel and now writes for Newsday and the Washington Post. But even as more bloggers are absorbed by the publications their blogs were founded to supplement or counter, others are stepping up and formalizing their roles as watchdogs, resulting in a weird, codependent, and potentially explosive relationship. To someone with one foot in sea and one on shore, the whole thing can be a little disorienting.

Until this winter I wrote print reviews and cowrote About Last Night as two entirely different people, though family and friends, and my editors, knew I had an online life as OGIC. I resisted the temptation to have one persona flack the other, but the first time The Elegant Variation linked to one of Laura's reviews, I got a definite charge. As I became friendlier with more bloggers and, inevitably, revealed myself to them, my print stuff got mentioned more often, and--this will come as no surprise to Jennifer Howard--always kindly. This was a new sensation. After nine years of reviewing in a vacuum, I had my first tangible sense of an audience. I relished the feedback and began to anticipate it. To be perfectly honest, I started working harder on my reviews, drafting and redrafting, getting back in touch with the newbie who'd sweated a river over Mr. Phoenix. It was just a hop and a jump from there to wanting an even wider audience and an undivided identity.

I came out as Laura on About Last Night in February. Around the same time, The Elegant Variation kicked off a new weekly feature digesting, critiquing, and grading the Los Angeles Times Book Review. The Times, the sole major U.S. Sunday books supplement to lock all of its online content away from nonsubscribers, was asking for it, having removed itself in this way from the big, chaotic, inclusive conversation that goes on 24/7 on the Internet. Soon enough, though, Mark started slapping letter grades not only on the section as a whole, but on each individual review--a practice sure to strike fear in the heart of even the most practiced, poised, and professional critic. The scrutiny is hardly unfair, but that doesn't mean it ain't scary (and a tad condescending). Gee, I thought when the grades started coming down--thank goodness I don't write for the Times.

I do, however, write for the Tribune. So when Sam "Golden Rule" Jones followed suit and started filing weekly reviews of the Trib's book pages, just a week after I'd lifted the OGIC burka, I caught a little shiver up my spine. I was still getting used to Laura being a quasipublic person--being a blogger turns out to be far more public than being a newspaper critic. All of a sudden, my newly glued-together identity was cracking along the seams again. As a blogger, I felt a certain loyalty to Sam's project. As a friendly acquaintance, I felt a certain loyalty to Sam. As a blog reader and book buyer, I felt grateful for the public service. And as a reviewer? I felt defensive and even a bit indignant. Luckily for me he doesn't lob grenades or even hand down grades. In February he critiqued a review of mine evenhandedly enough to mollify my ignoble feelings. For now.

With all this policing of print reviews, the lingering notion that bloggers are sworn foes of the mainstream book press has become certified common wisdom. Last month, on his blog, critic Scott McLemee starkly voiced the reigning perception: "In general, literary blog discourse often treats the people running newspaper review sections as, de facto, The Enemy." Strong word, that, and particularly sobering if you're regularly switching sides.

Hopefully, today's common wisdom will be tomorrow's old wives' tale. As bloggers continue to play both sides of the street, the enemy line is getting harder and harder to draw cleanly. Already bloggers are changing tactics by throwing their collective influence behind new alternatives to the Sunday books supplement. I'm a member, for example, of a new endeavor called the Litblog Co-op (lbc.typepad.com), which brings together 20 book bloggers to promote and discuss an overlooked literary fiction title every three months. I'm betting that ventures like this one, which present the print media with some actual competition instead of failing grades, will have more staying power than the report cards. The co-op, of course, amounts to an establishment for those who have made their names as alternatives to the literary establishment. Inevitably this attracts its own backlash, and already we participants have received a questionnaire from a writer for a city magazine quizzing us as to whether we might eventually sell out, take graft, or stab each other in the back. I can't speak for my colleagues, but I got the distinct impression that our corruption in any one of these forms would be rather gleefully received.

Posted May 15, 12:43 PM

OGIC: Epilogues

In the Reader essay directly below, I talk at some length about the trend Mark Sarvas started when he began issuing a report card on the Los Angeles Times Book Review in February. (You might not get the sense of a full-fledged trend from the piece; space constraints meant that references to similar report cards on the San Francisco Chronicle and Boston Globe by Conversational Reading and Bookdwarf, respectively, as well as to Ed's Tanenhaus Brownie Watch, were left out.) A few days after my essay appeared, it was announced that the editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Steve Wasserman, was resigning. A few days after that, it was announced that the Times would be making the contents of their Sunday book supplement freely available to nonsubscribers--and so they are.

As chagrined as I am to see part of my essay become instantly obsolete, I'm delighted that we can all read the LATBR again. Thanks, Sarvas.

Also, at the end of the Reader essay, I discuss the Lit Blog Co-op. Here my timing proves a little better: the LBC has announced our first Read This! selection this very day. Hie thee thither.

Posted May 15, 1:28 AM

May 13, 2005

TT: Go south, middle-aged man

That's all from me for this week. I'm off to the Kennedy Center, there to dine with my maximally cool Washington friend and see Alladeen, a wonderful multi-media show by the Builders Association, a remarkable theatrical group with which I've been semi-obsessed ever since I saw Alladeen a year and a half ago at BAM and reviewed it for The Wall Street Journal:

You may not know it, but when you dial an 800 number to order a fruitcake or gripe about your Internet service provider, your call is often answered by an Indian operator who has been given an American-sounding pseudonym, painstakingly (though not always successfully) taught to shed his native accent, and assigned to help you as best he can for the lowest possible per-call price. Half performance art, half documentary, "Alladeen" tells the story of these deracinated residents of Nowhere, U.S.A., who take calls from halfway around the world without ever having seen the distant land they pretend to inhabit....

Marianne Weems, the director and tutelary spirit of "Alladeen," claims the show is all about "the social imagination in an age of corporate colonialism." Not to worry, though: Ms. Weems and her collaborators have turned this PC-speak high concept into a poetic extravaganza that effortlessly blends words, music, film, video art, and the vivid performances of five versatile onstage actors who waft you into the mysterious world of a Bangalore call center.

Here's how much I liked it the first time: I'm going to see it in Washington tonight on my own dime, purely for my pleasure (and that of my friend). How about that?

I'll be back Monday as usual, and blogging, damn it, will be light. I overblogged this week, and I am bruised. I hope you appreciated it! In the meantime, have a nice weekend.

Over to you, OGIC....

Posted May 13, 12:04 PM

TT: Wishful thinking

I sure hope this is true, anyway....

Posted May 13, 12:04 PM

TT: Magic act

Friday again. My Wall Street Journal drama column again. I'm in a v. good mood, thanks to the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., in which I am well pleased:

In theater as in all other art forms, believe what you see, not what you're told. On paper, Shakespeare Theatre's production of "The Tempest" sounds like the worst kind of politico-intellectual stew, Shakespeare run through the theory mill and turned into a Statement for Our Times. On stage, it's a fantastic procession of sights and sounds that will set your head to spinning. Kate Whoriskey, the director, may fancy herself a purveyor of ideas, but in fact she's something infinitely more precious--a natural-born stage magician....

I can't think why we haven't seen more of her in New York. In fact, I'd like to see her "Tempest" in New York, ideally at the Public Theater, where I'm sure it'd knock everybody sideways. Don't wait for it, though--instead, go to Washington and let yourself be enraptured by the most imaginative Shakespeare production I've seen since Propeller's all-male "Midsummer Night's Dream."

Meanwhile, back in Manhattan, I was scarcely less delighted by a new revival of She Stoops to Conquer:

Lest we forget, there's more than one way to skin a classic. The Irish Repertory Theatre's revival of "She Stoops to Conquer," which opened last night, is a resolutely unfantastic, straight-down-the-center staging of Oliver Goldsmith's 1773 farce, devoid of the slightest trace of trickery and played on an old-fashioned drawing-room set whose walls are festooned with no less than 65 gloomy-looking paintings (yes, I counted them). The actors and actresses are bedecked in periwigs and petticoats--and the results couldn't be more pleasing....

No link. WillyoujustbuythedamnpaperforGod'ssake? Or go here and stride boldly forward into the Information Age. (Psst--it's a bargain.)

Posted May 13, 12:03 PM

TT: Elsewhere

What they said:

- Go get 'em, Althouse:

Speaking of sincere, how sincere was Joni Mitchell in "Woodstock"? She didn't attend, and, in fact, she played at the Atlantic City Pop Festival, a few weeks before, and walked off in the middle of her set, after ranting at the audience for failing to pay rapt attention to her. We were milling around, dancing and talking, and acting like a big bunch of hippies. She did not like it one bit. She steered way clear of Woodstock, then wrote a song idealizing it.

"Then can I walk beside you?" she wrote, but the fact is, she didn't want to be anywhere near these people.

- Poor Little Professor! She's been grading papers:

"These works have many similarities and many differences." This. Means. Nothing. Absolutely. Nothing. (Insert instructor banging her forehead against the desk here.)

It gets worse....

- Meanwhile, Laura Lippman wraps up her classroom stint for the year:

Another tradition in the last class--another tradition based on once--is reading the worst review I've ever received. Bear in mind, it's not the cruelest, which was also so wrong-headed that it was easy to dismiss. This is a thoughtful, nuanced piece that judged the work, Every Secret Thing, by the very standards I had set for myself--and rated me a dismal failure. The writer is unknown to me; I can neither dismiss her as a fool nor elevate her to god-like authority.

This is the price, I tell my students. If you get lucky enough to publish and make a life as a writer, you will enter a field where anyone--truly anyone, in our Internet age--can make vicious, even personal, assessments. Get used to it. Toughen up. It's a relatively small price to pay for being published....

Mine aren't quite that big, but here's something I used to do in my own last class: when I taught criticism at Rutgers/Newark, I handed out each week a review by a well-known critic of the past without telling the students who wrote it, then asked them to comment on it. The last handout of the semester was one of my own pieces. Kids say the darnedest things....

- Critical Mass offers a cautionary tale for bloggers everywhere, but especially in the academy:

At SMU, a popular adjunct professor has been fired--or, more precisely, "not renewed"--and the word is that her firing had a lot to do with her blog. Elaine Liner has taught writing as an adjunct at SMU for several years; she is also a local theater critic and, until recently, she led an active anonymous life online as the Phantom Professor, an outspoken critic of the academy whose tales of campus life ultimately hit a little too close to home for her colleagues. Though Liner never told anyone at SMU that she was the Phantom Professor, and while she never named names or identified her place of work, her descriptions of SMU's campus culture and her portraits of students and colleagues were accurate enough that people at SMU began to recognize their school, their friends, their teachers, and even themselves, in Liner's words....

Click through this posting to Liner's blog. Yikes!

- Wax Banks earns an entry in my commonplace book:

Irritation is the sincerest form of flattery.

- Likewise Lileks:

I have no bumperstickers, for the same reason I do not paste editorials with which I agree on the seat of my pants.

(Was it Alison Lurie who coined the phrase "legible clothing"?)

- Same blogger, different day:

Blogging has ruined public social events. Now you have to begin by asking "anyone blogging this?" which is like lining up the wait staff at the Stork Club and asking which one is going to phone Winchell tonight. Then you have to request that certain lines of conversation are off the record--in a bar! A bar, with Prince music playing at levels that would liquefy gorilla prostates at fifty paces. No one can hear anything. Finally, you have to leave the party early to write the blog entry, which consists of coy remarks about all the wonderful things you can't reveal. So people just post pictures with people standing around grinning in the harsh wash of a flash, the inky black of the bar behind them.

We are all on the record now....

- Mr. Superfluities serves up a very useful two-kinds-of paradigm:

In so far as it specifically relates to theater, it occurred to me that, on the off-off-Broadway scene, we can divide theater into two distinct disciplines. The first, Barroom Theater, is the stream that emerged from Cafe Cino and its other raucous siblings: energetic, seeking active engagement from the audience, irreverent. This theater swims in popular culture: it yells, it whoops, it prances, it gets drunk, it takes off its top and drops its pants and lets its inhibitions loose. The second, Gallery Theater, is that which was practiced in the Artists' Theater and similar spaces: contemplative, the performance an object to be observed rather than an activity in which one became engaged, similarly irreverent but somewhat detached from its function as entertainment (though still, we might put it in our intellectualized way, "amusing").

There are vices and virtues to each, of course. As wildly entertaining as Barroom Theater is, it unfortunately tends to pander to its audience's desire for distraction. There's a garrulous "love me, pity me" feel that you get from drunks in the same venue; and speaking of drunks, it's hard to keep their attention, and you have to reach for more spectacular and more vacuous effects just to dissuade their eyes from wandering. On the other hand, Gallery Theater is an insider's game, frequently self-absorbed, self-important and cliquish, and visual art has a tendency to slavish distillation whereas performing art tends to "celebrate" the performative experience (that is, to make lots and lots of noise and shine flashlights into the audience's faces; but most audiences like that, for it makes them feel important)....

Read the whole thing, please.

- Mr. Sandow asks a good question:

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?

- While we're on the subject, guess who said this?

Then there are two developments in music itself that have their origins primarily in the West but that for a long time have affected the whole of mankind in the world culture that is being formed. Modern so-called "classical" music has maneuvered itself, with some exceptions, into an elitist ghetto, which only specialists may enter--and even they do so with what may sometimes be mixed feelings. The music of the masses has broken loose from this and treads a very different path....

(Stop waving your hand, Alex Ross, I know you know.)

- Quotations from Chairman Wayne (Shorter, that is), courtesy of JazzPortraits:

"Miles [Davis] turns around to me this one time," recalls the 71-year-old New Jersey jazz giant, "and he says, 'Wayne, do you ever get tired of playing music that sounds like music?'. Then before I answer, he says 'I know what you mean'. We were on the same page....

"Miles would say, 'You see how Humphrey Bogart walked in that movie? How John Wayne threw that punch? You see how Marlon Brando played with Eva Marie Saint's glove in On the Waterfront?' Miles would say to the young student, 'Play that'."

- James Panero tells you how to spend a lot of money:

Twenty-five hours of Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts" have now been released on DVD. The news should not be taken lightly. It should rather be taken as a cue to order copies immediately. As a boon to home schoolers and to parents concerned with the state, where it still exists, of music education today (drumming for credit, anyone?), these DVDs will be invaluable. Just about anyone--adults and children alike--will find a great deal to take away from the episodes. Bernstein's convincing theories on the connection of folk music to national style are just one example (Episode 9: "Folk Music in the Concert Hall"). The series also includes complete performances of Stravinsky's "Petrouchka" (Episode 11: "Happy Birthday, Igor Stravinsky"), Shostakovich's Symphony No. 9 (Episode 19: "A Birthday Tribute to Shostakovich"), and Aaron Copland guest conducting part of his own Symphony No. 3 (Episode 2: "What is American Music?")....

I remember quite a few of these televised concerts from my childhood. I revisited some of them in adulthood, and my memories were right on the money--they were, and are, wonderful.

- I have a title for Catherine Seipp's first essay collection. She should call it Du côté de chez Walt:

Speaking of memory, my first trip to Disneyland, at age eight, was what first made me ponder the puzzling relationship between memory and reality. Is it better (I thought, as I lay awake in bed for hours that night after we got home) to be on the bobsleds, which only lasts a couple of minutes--or to remember having been on the bobsleds, which lasts forever? If you could go on the bobsleds 100 times, but your memory each time would vanish as soon as you were done, is that really more fun than to go on them only once but remember the experience always?...

- Finally, Supermaud explores a linguistic conundrum:

But at lunch the other day, a friend who hails from D.C. but has a Louisiana mama reminded me of one of the Deep South's most beloved, multi-purpose, and deadly expressions: "bless her heart."

In its most innocuous usage, the phrase is intended to express empathy and understanding, as in: "Why, you've been traveling all day. You must be exhausted, bless your heart. Why don't you go lie down until it's time for dinner?"

But like most things Southern (except sweet tea), the expression has a dark side. Basically, you can say the most slanderous thing you can think of, as long as it's accompanied with a lingering, mournful "bless her heart."...

Or "bless her little heart," as we used to say in Smalltown, U.S.A.

Posted May 13, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"It matters very little to me whether people believe one thing or another. Life is short, even for those who live to a ripe old age, and we must live for the few who know and appreciate us, who judge and absolve us, and for whom we have the same affection and indulgence. The rest I look upon as a mere crowd, lively or sad, loyal or corrupt, from whom there is nothing to be expected but fleeting emotions either pleasant or unpleasant, which leave no trace behind them."

Sarah Bernhardt, Memoirs (courtesy of Think Denk)

Posted May 13, 12:00 PM

TT: Before I go

Read this:

So here are some ideas for improving theater writing in America:

1) Recognize that the relationship between artist and reviewer is one of exploitation. I think it would be harder for reviewers to be snarky if they remembered that it was the bad play they saw that is putting food on their table, or that they get paid more than I do to trash my work. I am not asking for an end to negative or even harsh criticism, god knows, we need it. But what we need even more than that is considered, intelligent, thoughtful criticism that lays out reasons, arguments, analysis instead of "this sucks."...

Yes.

The whole thing is here. Read it all.

Posted May 13, 1:01 AM

May 12, 2005

TT: We've got to stop meeting like this

I don't know what got into me yesterday and today, but I'm blogged out. Really. And I'm going to stop. No more blogging until Friday. I swear. If I post anything else today, look the other way and pretend you didn't see it.

Till tomorrow. Really.

(Oh, er, one more thing: the Top Fives have been updated. It's O.K. to look at those.)

Posted May 12, 12:44 PM

TT: This one's for you, Girl

I just received the Summer 2005 edition of The Sondheim Review (not yet on line), which contains an interview with Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and--surprise, surprise!--a self-confessed Stephen Sondheim fanatic. Says Whedon: "What Sondheim has to say is the most honest, perceptive expression of the human experience that I know."

Here's an excerpt:

Whedon's parents introduced him to Sondheim's musicals when he was a child, and he believes shows like Company and A Little Night Music were formative in the development of his creative vision, one that's "existential and bleak," though shot through with acts of devotion, courage and faith....

If childhood seems a strange time to be exposed to the bitterness and disappointment of early-'70s Sondheim, Whedon counters that it accurately reflected the family experience of his early years. "Sondheim wasn't someone you would go to if you wanted to be told that everything was perfect. Neither were my parents, for that matter--all concerned were greatly relieved when they got divorced. I told my therapist that I knew all of Follies by the age of nine; she said, 'We have our work cut out for us.'"

If you're really good, OGIC, I'll bring a copy of the magazine with me to Chicago next weekend....

Posted May 12, 12:04 PM

TT: Peanut gallery

Someone's been sending me peanuts--the styrofoam kind, to be exact. These malign little chunks of plastic and air may well be the best possible thing with which to pack a box containing a framed work of art, but they also have a sneaky way of insinuating themselves into every corner of the room in which the box in question is opened, which is what happened yesterday afternoon when I took delivery of a well-sealed carton containing the latest addition to the Teachout Museum, a lithograph by Jules Olitski. No sooner did I pry it open than whoom! The whole living room was ankle-deep in white peanuts.

Time out for a little backstory. After I delivered the first two chapters of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong to Harcourt last week, I figured I owed myself a present in return for all that hard work, so I started looking around for a new piece of art. I ran across Olitski's 1995 lithograph Forward Edge in an online auction the very next day, and fell in love at first sight.

By coincidence--or not--I'd only just become seriously interested in Olitski, who prior to that time had been little more than a name to me. To be sure, I'd been wanting for some time to acquire a piece by an important color-field painter to go with my copy of Helen Frankenthaler's Grey Fireworks, but I already had my eye on Circle I-6, a 1978 Kenneth Noland monoprint. Alas, I never did manage to track down an affordable copy (affordable by me, that is), so instead of going off half-cocked and buying something simply to be buying something, I sat tight and waited for inspiration.

Three weeks ago, Ann Freedman of Knoedler & Company sent me a copy of Jules Olitski: Six Decades, the catalogue of a small-scale retrospective in Miami curated by Karen Wilkin, one of my favorite art critics. (It's up through the end of May, should you happen to be in the vicinity.) The first paragraph caught me off guard:

Jules Olitski celebrated his eightieth birthday, in 2002, by exhibiting a series of recent paintings titled With Love and Disregard. The no-holds-barred canvases were so surprising, muscular, and energetic that the uninitiated could have been forgiven for thinking they were the work of an extravagantly gifted, fearless newcomer....Only a lifetime of making and thinking about paintings could generate work at once so obviously indifferent to ordinary notions of beauty (and that much maligned idea, taste) and so confident. Art historians call this kind of brilliant, assured inventiveness in the work of long-lived artists who continue to challenge themselves "late style."

As always, Wilkin had backed up her provocative words with a shrewd and illuminating choice of paintings, and as I flipped through the catalogue, I felt myself getting onto Olitski's wavelength for the first time. By the time I was done, I resolved to add him to the Teachout Museum at the earliest opportunity--which came, improbably enough, just two weeks later.

Even in electronic reproduction, Forward Edge took my breath away, and two years of intensive collecting have taught me to trust that kind of immediate, unhesitating response. I put in an absentee bid, then left town for a wedding. No sooner did I get back to New York than I found that Forward Edge had been knocked down to me for well under my top price.

Further proof that my decision to buy Forward Edge was in tune with the will of the universe came when I hung it yesterday afternoon. I'd planned to spend most of the evening moving things around, but I hit the sweet spot on the very first try. It was as though my living room had been waiting patiently for the arrival of something of whose existence I was hitherto unaware. (I guess it is like falling in love, isn't it?) Now I can't wait to show off the Teachout Museum to the next person who comes calling. For the moment, though, I mean to spend as much time as possible curled up on my couch, basking in the subtly altered mixture of harmonies that fills the air of my home.

Art is good. Life is good. I could do without all those damn peanuts, though.

Posted May 12, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Tony's voice seemed to come from a long way off. There was a weight on Charles again, the same old weight, and it was heavier after that brief moment of freedom. In spite of all those years, in spite of all his striving, it was remarkable how little pleasure he took in final fulfillment. He was a vice-president of the Stuyvesant Bank. It was what he had dreamed of long ago and yet it was not the true texture of early dreams. The whole thing was contrived, as he had said to Nancy, an inevitable result, a strangely hollow climax. It had obviously been written in the stars, bound to happen, and he could not have changed a line of it, being what he was, and Nancy would be pleased, but it was not what he had dreamed.

"'Well, Tony,' he said, 'I guess that means I can send Junior to Exeter,' and Tony Burton was asking why Exeter? He would not send any boy of his to Exeter.

"They were on a different basis already, now that he was a vice-president. Automatically, his thoughts were running along new lines, well-trained, mechanically perfect thoughts, estimating a new situation. There would be no trouble with the directors. There were only five vice-presidents at the Stuyvesant, all of the others older than he, most of them close to the retirement age, like Tony Burton himself. For a moment he thought of Mr. Laurence Lovell on Johnson Street but Mr. Lovell would not have understood, or Jessica either, how far he had gone or what it meant to be a vice-president of the Stuyvesant Bank. Nancy would understand. Nancy had more ambition for him than he had for himself. Nancy would be very proud. They would sell the house at Sycamore Park and get a larger place. They would resign from the Oak Knoll Club. And then there was the sailboat. It had its compensations but it was not what he had dreamed."

John P. Marquand, Point of No Return

Posted May 12, 12:01 PM

May 11, 2005

TT: A smile from the mailbag

A reader writes:

Your "Entries from an Unkept Diary" for today reminds me that I want to thank you for helping me seem somewhat cool to my 22-year-old daughter. I have passed on my CD's of The Lascivious Biddies and Erin McKeown (which I discovered from ALN) to load on her ipod and she lent me the Garden State soundtrack. Your young friends not only keep you up to speed but through you help an even older geezer find musical connections to his daughter. I gave up rock in the mid seventies and listened mostly to classical music and more recently to jazz (I have discovered some outstanding female jazz vocalists thanks to you) but finding out about some of the recent eclectic and alternative music out there is great fun. Thanks!

Like I always say, this is a full-service blog.

Posted May 11, 12:40 PM

TT: Those other awards

I have an interesting chore ahead of me this afternoon. I'll be attending my first meeting as a newly elected member of the New York Drama Critics' Circle, which is not a social club: we convene each May to vote on the annual Drama Critics' Circle awards, which will be announced May 24 at a bash to be held at the Algonquin, with Edward Albee as our special guest. Don't expect any blogging about our double-secret conclave, though, unless a fistfight breaks out, in which case I'm on it like a bonnet.

Coincidentally, this year's Tony nominations were announced yesterday. (For a complete list, go here.) According to Jesse McKinley of the New York Times, the big story was who didn't get asked to the party:

In the competition for leading actor in a play, Denzel Washington, appearing at the Belasco as Brutus in "Julius Caesar," was left off the list, as was Jeff Goldblum, who plays a curious cop in Martin McDonagh's dark comedy "The Pillowman." In the leading-actress category, meanwhile, Jessica Lange was passed over for her performance as the mother in a revival of "The Glass Menagerie," and Natasha Richardson was overlooked for her work in another Tennessee Williams revival, "A Streetcar Named Desire."

None of this, of course, was at all surprising to anyone who keeps a reasonably close eye on theater in New York. The real surprises will come when the awards are handed out on June 5. In the meantime, I thought it might be amusing to do a little preliminary handicapping, so here are my personal picks for the major prizes, accompanied by a smattering of cynical who's-really-gonna-win commentary à la Addison DeWitt, who is soooo not my mentor:

BEST PLAY
- Michael Frayn, Democracy
- John Patrick Shanley, Doubt
- August Wilson, Gem of the Ocean
- Martin McDonagh, The Pillowman

In addition to being my own favorite, Doubt is also a fairly safe bet to win, though The Pillowman is a definite contender, while Democracy has the pseudo-intellectual Anglophile vote sewed up tight. Normally August Wilson would be a prime candidate as well, but my guess is that Radio Golf, the last installment in his ten-play cycle about blacks in America, will win the best-play prize if and when it finally makes it to Broadway (and regardless of whether it's any good).

BEST MUSICAL
- Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
- The Light in the Piazza
- Monty Python's Spamalot
- The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

No contest, alas. Like the Oscars, the Tonys are very respectful of success (if not wholly subservient to it, as Denzel Washington just learned), and Spamalot, lame though it is, had a 99.7% attendance rate last week. The Light in the Piazza and Putnam County Spelling Bee are far more deserving, but they'll split the good-taste vote down the middle.

BEST BOOK OF A MUSICAL
- Jeffrey Lane, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
- Craig Lucas, The Light in the Piazza
- Eric Idle, Monty Python's Spamalot
- Rachel Sheinkin, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

Idle probably has it in the bag, for the reason specified above. Everybody loves Sheinkin's delightful book for Putnam County Spelling Bee, though, so don't count her out quite yet.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
- David Yazbek, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
- Adam Guettel, The Light in the Piazza
- John Du Prez and Eric Idle, Monty Python's Spamalot
- William Finn, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

I'm pretty sure my pick will also be the winner--this one is Adam Guettel's consolation prize.

BEST REVIVAL OF A PLAY
- Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
- David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross
- Ernest Thompson, On Golden Pond
- Reginald Rose, Twelve Angry Men

A tough call, though it shouldn't be: Twelve Angry Men is a good revival of a fair play, On Golden Pond a pretty good revival of a bad play, and Virginia Woolf an uneven revival of a great play.

BEST REVIVAL OF A MUSICAL
- La Cage aux Folles
- Pacific Overtures
- Sweet Charity

Your guess is as good as mine. Pacific Overtures deserves the prize, but Sweet Charity needs it in order to stay open, and I wouldn't be heartbroken if it won.

BEST SPECIAL THEATRICAL EVENT
- Dame Edna: Back with a Vengeance!
- Laugh Whore
- 700 Sundays
- Whoopi: The 20th Anniversary Show

Another safe call, since Billy Crystal has been coining money with 700 Sundays. Too bad: Mario Cantone's Laugh Whore made me laugh harder than anything else I saw on Broadway all season.

BEST LEADING ACTOR IN A PLAY
- Philip Bosco, Twelve Angry Men
- Billy Crudup, The Pillowman
- Bill Irwin, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
- James Earl Jones, On Golden Pond
- Brían F. O'Byrne, Doubt

O'Byrne is brilliant and everyone in town knows it, but Jones (who's pretty damned good himself) will rack up most of the bravo-old-pro vote. We'll see.

BEST LEADING ACTRESS IN A PLAY
- Cherry Jones, Doubt
- Laura Linney, Sight Unseen
- Mary-Louise Parker, Reckless
- Phylicia Rashad, Gem of the Ocean
- Kathleen Turner, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Cherry Jones, by a mile.

BEST LEADING ACTOR IN A MUSICAL
- Hank Azaria, Monty Python's Spamalot
- Gary Beach, La Cage aux Folles
- Norbert Leo Butz, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
- Tim Curry, Monty Python's Spamalot
- John Lithgow, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

I smell another consolation prize coming: Norbert Leo Butz got huge, well-deserved buzz.

BEST LEADING ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL
- Christina Applegate, Sweet Charity
- Victoria Clark, The Light in the Piazza
- Erin Dilly, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
- Sutton Foster, Little Women, The Musical
- Sherie Rene Scott, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

A shoo-in. Victoria Clark is taking this one home, as well she should, though Foster and Scott were also excellent, while Applegate was seriously underrated by the critics (this one not included!).

BEST FEATURED ACTOR IN A PLAY
- Alan Alda, Glengarry Glen Ross
- Gordon Clapp, Glengarry Glen Ross
- David Harbour, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
- Liev Schreiber, Glengarry Glen Ross
- Michael Stuhlbarg, The Pillowman

Liev Schreiber ought to win, but he can't possibly come out on top with two other Glengarry Glen Ross actors nominated in the same category. David Harbour was very fine in Virginia Woolf, and I see him as the difference-splitting choice.

BEST FEATURED ACTRESS IN A PLAY
- Mireille Enos, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
- Heather Goldenhersh, Doubt
- Dana Ivey, The Rivals
- Adriane Lenox, Doubt
- Amy Ryan, A Streetcar Named Desire

If Ryan doesn't get it, I'll stand in Times Square at high noon the next day and yell Stellaaaaaa! until curtain time. Had she not been nominated, though, I would have loved to see the prize go to Heather Goldenhersh, who has great things ahead of her.

BEST FEATURED ACTOR IN A MUSICAL
- Dan Fogler, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
- Marc Kudisch, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
- Michael McGrath, Monty Python's Spamalot
- Matthew Morrison, The Light in the Piazza
- Christopher Sieber, Monty Python's Spamalot

I think Fogler might just pull this one off. On the other hand, why in hell wasn't David Hyde Pierce nominated? His performance of "You Can't Succeed on Broadway (If You Don't Have Any Jews)" was the only thing about Spamalot that did rate a prize.

BEST FEATURED ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL
- Joanna Gleason, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
- Celia Keenan-Bolger, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
- Jan Maxwell, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
- Kelli O'Hara, The Light in the Piazza
- Sara Ramirez, Monty Python's Spamalot

The second toughest call of the night, but Keenan-Bolger's sweetly wistful performance has a decent shot.

BEST DIRECTION OF A PLAY
- John Crowley, The Pillowman
- Scott Ellis, Twelve Angry Men
- Doug Hughes, Doubt
- Joe Mantello, Glengarry Glen Ross

The toughest call of the night, and rightly so. I'll be happy no matter who gets it.

BEST DIRECTION OF A MUSICAL
- James Lapine, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
- Mike Nichols, Monty Python's Spamalot
- Jack O'Brien, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
- Bartlett Sher, The Light in the Piazza

I'd bet next month's rent on Nichols, who isn't undeserving, having done an exemplary job of turd-polishing on Spamalot. Nevertheless, James Lapine's staging of Putnam County Spelling Bee is masterly, and I'l be sorry when he loses, as he will. (Incidentally, Walter Bobbie should have been nominated for Sweet Charity, possibly in place of Bartlett Sher.)

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen of the "About Last Night" Academy of Theatrical Kibitzers. Let the teasing commence first thing on the morning of June 6....

Posted May 11, 12:03 PM

TT: Only in Manhattan

At dinner last night I was served by a friendly brunette with a girl-next-door face who looked oddly familiar to me. Midway through the meal, the coin dropped, and I said to her, "Forgive me for staring, but you look just like an actress who got nominated for a Tony this morning."

"Who?" she asked.

"Celia Keenan-Bolger, for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee."

A complicated expression flashed across her pretty features. "Oh, I know," she said. "I do look like her. And I was up for that part, too, for the longest time. I so wanted it!"

I tipped extra.

Posted May 11, 12:03 PM

TT: Old friend

I just got back from the New York State Theater, where I saw New York City Ballet dance An American in Paris, Christopher Wheeldon's new George Gershwin ballet. I'll have more to say about it later on, both here and in my Washington Post column, but here's something I want to mention right now: I must have heard An American in Paris at least a hundred times, and it still makes me smile. Premiered in 1928, it remains to this day as fresh as tomorrow morning's dandelions.

Not only is An American in Paris an irresistible evocation of Paris in the Twenties, but it's the most fully realized of Gershwin's concert works, a perfect little piece of musical carpentry. No other popular composer, not even Duke Ellington (especially not Ellington, but that's another posting), made the leap into large-scale form with such cool confidence. As Irving Berlin truly said, "George Gershwin is the only song writer I know who became a composer," and this is the piece in which he first brought off the trick. Rhapsody in Blue, composed in 1924, is only slightly better organized than a medley, while the Concerto in F of 1925, though it holds together far better, is still a bit naïve, structurally speaking. Then, three years later, boom! Where on earth did a busy Broadway composer find the time to crack the code of organically developed musical form? Like all acts of genius, it's a mystery, and a miracle.

An American in Paris has been recorded at least as many times as I've heard it, but I'll always have a soft spot for the 1929 premiere recording by Nathaniel Shilkret and the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra, a no-nonsense, cut-to-the-chase interpretation jauntily played by a smallish band of first-string studio musicians, on which you can hear the actual taxi horns that Gershwin brought back from Paris (as well as a celesta solo played by the composer himself). This fragrant period piece is available as part of Historic Gershwin Recordings, a two-CD set that also includes the very first recording of Rhapsody in Blue, made in 1924 by Gershwin and the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. If you don't have it, get it.

Posted May 11, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"The critics' circle was in session when he arrived. They met in the Asshole Room of the Hotel Asshole, as far as Max was concerned. His mind tasted quite foul now, and spewed little bits of garbage into his mouth. He had better not talk too much tonight. He had not written his review, and he felt guilty and hungover about that; not, as he had hoped, roguish and liberated. They sat at a long baize-covered table with various-colored potions in front of them, looking, to Max's yellow eye, like wizards, alchemists, dwarfs.

"They were talking, his fatheaded circle, about the admission of new members. Jack Flashman, wise guy emeritus at the other news magazine, was on the agenda. 'Frankly,' said Isabel Nutley of Women's Thoughts, 'I don't think he quite comes up to our standards.' 'If we had any standards at all, half of you wouldn't be here,' growled the tireless Bruffin. 'Gentlemen, gentlemen,' said the chairman. 'I don't know--who writes the stuff on that magazine anyway? How can you tell? Flashman may be dead, for all we know.' 'He's a gossip writer, for Christsake. What does he know about the theater?' 'What do any of you know about the theater?' 'Gentlemen, gentlemen.' 'Frankly, if Flashman gets in, I quit. I can't stand the guy.' 'That's too damn bad, we'll miss you, honey, but Flashman happens to write for a very important magazine. You can't just ignore it.' 'What's wrong with gossip writing? Most of you don't even reach that level.' 'Gentlemen.'

"As he looked at their small maniac faces round the table, fighting like cannibals over a dead missionary's pants, Max thought, What you need around here is nothing less than a spiritual rebirth. Let me bring it to you! Let me start the ball rolling. But their eyes were crazed, myopic, their voices high and fanatical; they operated out of little glass bowls, and no one could come in.

"'What do you say, Max?'

"'I say, why not?' Max said with staring eyes. 'Why should any man carry through life the stain of being rejected by this damn fool society?'"

Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison

Posted May 11, 12:00 PM

TT: The fruits of our labors

Here's the official press release:

Doubt by John Patrick Shanley today won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play of the 2004-2005 season. The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh received the award for best foreign play. No award was given for best musical. The selections were made at the 69th annual voting meeting of the organization today at the offices of USA Today in Manhattan. Edward Albee, a three-time NYDCC winner, will present the Circle's award for best play at a cocktail reception to be held on Tuesday, May 24, at the Algonquin Hotel where the Circle was founded in 1935....

Founded in 1935, the Circle is comprised of 21 drama critics from daily newspapers, magazines, and wire services based in the New York metropolitan area. Michael Sommers of The Star-Ledger/Newhouse Newspapers is the president of the organization. The New York Drama Critics' Circle Award is the nation's second oldest theatre award, after the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

In addition to Mr. Sommers, the members of the New York Drama Critics' Circle are Clive Barnes of the New York Post; David Cote of Time Out New York; Gordon Cox of Newsday; Michael Feingold of the Village Voice; Robert Feldberg of the Bergen Record; Adam Feldman of Time Out New York; Elysa Gardner of USA Today; John Heilpern of The New York Observer; Howard Kissel of the Daily News; Michael Kuchwara of the Associated Press; Jacques le Sourd of Gannett Newspapers; Ken Mandelbaum of Broadway.com; Jeremy McCarter, The New York Sun; David Rooney of Variety; Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter; David Sheward of Back Stage; John Simon of New York; Terry Teachout of The Wall Street Journal; Linda Winer of Newsday; and Richard Zoglin of Time.

Sorry, no fistfights.  

Posted May 11, 5:43 AM

TT: Life sentence

Overheard at lunch: "When it comes to dating, we're all Dorothy Parkers under the skin."

Here's the scary part: the person I overheard saying it was me....

Posted May 11, 2:23 AM

TT: Off the aisle

From Playbill:

John Simon, who has been theatre critic at New York magazine for newly 40 years, has been dismissed from that position, the critic told Playbill.com.

"I expected it," he said May 10, when asked if New York editor Adam Moss' decision took him by surprise. "Then again, my birthday is coming up, so I didn't think it was a very good birthday present."

Jeremy McCarter, theatre critic for the New York Sun, was named as Simon's replacement. McCarter's first review for New York will appear June 1.

Simon is known equally for his considerable erudition, his longevity as a critic (he is 79) and his vituperative style. His stinging reviews--particularly his sometimes vicious appraisals of performers' physical appearances--have periodically raised calls in the theatre community for his removal.

The timing of the firing is somewhat ironic. This fall, Applause Books will publish three volumes of Simon's collected works: one on his theatre writing, one on music, one on film.

Simon also said he's not ready to lay down the pen. "I still feel quite chipper. I don't feel my writing has somehow faded. If I felt tired, I'd stop, but I don't feel that way."

Read the whole thing here.

I'm sorry to see this happen. As the saying goes, John Simon has forgotten more about theater than I'll ever know. For all the controversies he stirred up over the years, he was and is a critic of the very first rank, not least because of his ability to place what he sees on stage in so wide and deeply informed a cultural context. Even when I disagree with him, I take no one else's opinions as seriously.

Simon's departure from New York will be news. It should be.

Posted May 11, 1:05 AM

May 10, 2005

OGIC:

I know it is far more fashionable these days to bash the ipod than to praise it. But I love mine, and I don't use it in any of the ways that seem to be so obnoxious to people. The earbuds drive me crazy, and I find it unsettling in any case to walk down the street less than fully aware of my surroundings (I was never big on the Walkman either). So for the first year and a half of my pod ownership, I basically used it only in the car with an FM transmitter. This doesn't work in the city, meaning that the only times I used my bauble were on road trips to Detroit, when, on top of playing my favorite music, it drowned out the whining of the cat in the box in the back. Then last Christmas I requested and received a neat little speaker system, thereby increasing my ipod use probably tenfold.

Until today, these were the only two ways I used the ipod with any regularity. Today, however, I found a third good use for it: to help me get through an unpleasant visit to the dentist on the occasion of my first filling in twenty years. In this context, I was well pleased with my toy. But my experience does raise the question: what's the best music to have a tooth filled by?

I adopted a strategy of trial and error: I set the ipod to shuffle, positioned my thumb near the forward button, and resolved to skip or not skip songs according to the principle of utter impulsiveness. And I skipped almost everything, which may just have been nervous energy. But out of all the songs the shuffler served up, what most pleased me was music from Sufjan Stevens's Greetings from Michigan, the Great Lakes State (thanks, Cinetrix). It soothed without stultifying, and was just the thing. Turns out, however, that today's dental drills put their 1985 counterparts to shame, and the whole ordeal lasted barely long enough to be called an ordeal at all, or even to necessitate the services of the itranquilizer. Still good to know that Stevens does the trick, though.

Posted May 10, 12:58 PM

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- I was channel-surfing the other night and ran across Auto Focus, Paul Schrader's biopic about the unsolved murder of Bob Crane, the star of Hogan's Heroes. I didn't see it when it came out in 2002, so I watched the first part out of curiosity. At first I was struck by the concept--a straight-arrow radio host stumbles into sitcom stardom, learns that he can have pretty much anything he wants for the asking, and turns into a full-fledged sex addict--but within a half-hour or so I found myself growing bored. The problem, as is so often the case with fictionalized biography, is that life and art aren't the same thing. No matter how many liberties you take with the life of Bob Crane, you're still stuck in the end with a man who was either dull or ultimately unknowable, neither of which makes for an engrossing narrative.

One of the best examples I know of a work of narrative art based on a real-life model is Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, a novel about a southern politician who at first glance closely resembles Huey Long. What sets All the King's Men apart from lesser works in the same genre is that Willie Stark isn't Huey Long, but a made-up character based on Huey Long. For the most part, his life, both interior and exterior, has been imagined, not adapted, which is one of the reasons why All the King's Men is a great novel, not a clever roman à clef.

So why don't more artists do the same thing? The answer, I realized as I watched Auto Focus, was put with devastating terseness in a review by Edwin Denby of Seventh Symphony, a ballet by Leonide Massine set to Beeethoven's Seventh Symphony: "Like a cigarette company, he is using famous names to advertise his wares."

I can't say it any better than that.

- As I listened to one of the bands that played at the wedding I attended last weekend, I leaned over to a friend and said, "The Eighties, woh, I missed out on all that." To which she crisply replied, "Consider yourself lucky."

I don't know about that, but I do know that I heard very little pop music between the early Eighties and the mid-Nineties, when Our Girl in Chicago took me in hand and made sure I had some knowledge of what was going on out there. Thanks to her unceasing efforts, as well as iMusic and the soundtracks of certain indie flicks and TV shows, I'm no longer completely at sea when my youngest friends make casual reference to the music they like. I was chatting the other day with a twenty-four-year-old woman who asked me out of the blue if I'd ever heard of Zero 7. "Oh, 'In the Waiting Line,' right?" I replied. She looked at me strangely, as if my gray hair had suddenly turned brown. Seized by a pang of integrity, I added, "Don't worry--I heard it on the soundtrack of Garden State. But I do like it!" We both laughed, no doubt for different reasons.

Be that as it may, I'm not at all sure that it was seemly for me to have recognized the Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun" when the wedding band played it on Saturday, much less to have been aware that Erin McKeown was surely thinking of it when she wrote "Queen of Quiet," the first track on Distillation. I mean, I've already had my midlife crisis, right? Nor does it help that the only reason why I recognized it was that it plays over the credits of Grosse Pointe Blank, which just happens to be one of my favorite Nineties movies....

O.K., enough. When you're in a hole, stop digging. I am a middle-aged litterateur of taste, distinction, and elegance, and I wouldn't know Chan Marshall if I bumped into her on the street. I could definitely pick Ani DiFranco out of a lineup, though. (After all, she's a Righteous Babe!)

Posted May 10, 12:03 PM

TT: Mailbag

I upended the mailbag yesterday, and here's some of what fell out:

- "I get my news from the Internet exclusively now. I graze, I move from site to site, follow links to interesting stories, etc. And I haven't watched a major network news show in 15 years--when the Dan Rather flapdoodle about the forged memo hit the net and I got to see some pix of Dan, I was shocked--Jesus, he looks old and ugly. Then I realized, I hadn't seen his mug since 1990. Yeah, it is a revolution, and I am glad to see it. But I do miss the act of picking up a paper every day and reading it on the train to work."

- "I'd appreciate help completing the following sentence: 'If you like Duke Ellington's Never No Lament and Count Basie's The Atomic Mr. Basie, you'll love ----- .' Also, what are the quintessential Louis Armstrong recordings to get my nascent jazz collection moving in that direction?"

The second question is easy. If you don't have any Armstrong, start with Sony's The Essential Louis Armstrong, a two-CD set containing 37 tracks, most of which are in fact either essential Armstrong or close to it.

As for the first question, I know where my correspondent is coming from, but I'm not sure where--or how far--he wants to go. That being the case, I'll point in opposite directions. For a taste of one of the classic big bands of the Thirties at its hottest, try Benny Goodman's On the Air (1937-1938). For a taste of state-of-the-art big-band music circa right this minute, try Bob Brookmeyer's Get Well Soon. No promises, but both CDs are personal favorites of mine.

- "I am too lazy to go back to your post to find the exact wording, but if memory serves me even reasonably well, you wrote that recently you had a difficult time enjoying breakfast because a rather harsh voice was distracting you in the extreme. Years ago I met a man who was introducing me to the gustatory joys of sushi. Up until that time I guess I had a preconceived notion that I wouldn't enjoy the food. He then said rather wisely, at least I thought it wise, 'Don't let your head get in the way of your stomach.' The words hit me over the head like a jackhammer through concrete....So, Mr. Teachout, keep writing your wonderful blog, and don't let your ears get in the way of your stomach."

That's good advice, and like all good advice, it's easier heard than taken. Nevertheless, I'll do my damnedest.

- "I have quite recently become enamored of your blog, but when today you mentioned having been in New York for twenty years (thus allowing me to extrapolate your actual age), I was puzzled despite myself. I know you're not in your twenties anymore, but somehow I cannot shake the feeling that I'm reading the reflections of a young man-about-town in his native New York. I will attribute this to the freshness and vitality of your observations and commentary even after years spent critiquing the arts. Kudos to you and Our Girl for an enlightening blog that still manages to be far from a chore to read. It's a rare find in the arts world."

- "Consider this quote: 'No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey's, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge...when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now' (Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts). And congratulations on your remarkable career!"

- "I am on the cusp of sixty and can advise you that the nostalgia attacks continue unexpected and acute."

Thanks to you all for the kind words--and the warning.

Posted May 10, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"I think there would be something wrong with an elderly man who could enjoy Firbank."

Evelyn Waugh, Paris Review interview (1963)

Posted May 10, 12:00 PM

May 9, 2005

TT: After a fashion

I'm back, sort of, almost.

I spent Friday and Saturday at a rustic resort in the Catskills, totally out of touch with the world (no cell phone, no computer). On Saturday I read a Shakespeare sonnet at a wedding that took place in a green meadow by a running brook, then partied the night away with a queen-sized gaggle of musicians led by the Lascivious Biddies (one of whom was the bride in question, the other three serving as her bridesmaids). I'm not sure refreshed is the exact word for the way I felt come Sunday morning, but I sure was happy.

As always, life intrudes on such finite interludes of bliss, so I arose, breakfasted with a bunch of equally happy, equally bleary-eyed people, hopped in my rented car, drove back to Manhattan, and went straight to a revival of She Stoops to Conquer, about which more Friday. Then I had dinner, returned home, unpacked my bag, chatted on the phone with Our Girl in Chicago, and realized that I was still suffering from the aftereffects of recently having written close to 20,000 words. I prescribed for myself a good night's sleep, followed by a day of very moderate literary endeavor, i.e., none. I might even take a walk!

Full-scale activities resume on Tuesday and continue through the week: deadlines (one compulsory, one self-imposed), performances (four plays, one night at the ballet), appointments of various kinds, yet another trip to Washington, and, as always, blogging. Even when I'm gone, you're not forgotten.

See you Tuesday.

Posted May 09, 12:01 PM

TT: Tell me more

Laurette Taylor's performance as Amanda Wingfield in the original 1945 production of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie is the most vividly remembered piece of acting ever to have taken place on an American stage. Yet nothing remains of it but memories and a few still photographs--some of which can be seen here--since Taylor made no sound films save for the brief screen test included in Broadway: The Golden Age (a documentary you've absolutely got to see, assuming you haven't already). The greatness of her acting is thus like the greatness of Nijinsky's dancing: all who saw her agree on it, but the rest of us must take it on faith.

Or...must we?

After reading that Times story, I did a bit of fugitive Googling, and found something that sent my jaw dropping floorward. It's from the Web site of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which is where Taylor's private papers ended up. I was looking at the HRCRC's description of its Taylor collection when I stumbled onto this statement:

A number of published works and recordings were transferred to the HRHRC book collection....Taylor's recordings, mostly 78 RPM, include The Glass Menagerie (1945); a 1939 WJZ radio broadcast of Peg O' My Heart; Among My Souvenirs (1943); a segment of We The People (1945); a Rudy Vallee radio program (1939); and a very early 1913 voice recording trial done of Laurette Taylor in New York.

Excuse me? Am I the last to learn that that there is a sound recording of some portion of Taylor's legendary performance in The Glass Menagerie? Or is its existence not widely known to scholars of American theater in general and Tennessee Williams' work in particular?

If anybody out there in the blogosphere knows anything at all about this recording, starting with whether or not it really exists, I'd like to hear from you. And if you happen to live in Austin and have access to it (assuming it does in fact exist), I'd really like to hear from you.

Posted May 09, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Many false conceptions are held concerning the nature of tedium. In general it is thought that the interestingness and novelty of the time-content are what 'make the time pass'; that is to say, shorten it; whereas monotony and emptiness check and restrain its flow. That is only true with reservations. Vacuity, monotony, have, indeed, the property of lingering out the moment and the hour and of making them tiresome. But they are capable of contracting and dissipating the larger, the very large time-units, to the point of reducing them to nothing at all. And conversely, a full and interesting content can put wings to the hour and the day; yet it will lend to the general passage of time a weightiness, a breadth and solidity which cause the eventful years to flow more slowly than those poor, bare, empty ones over which the wind passes and they are gone. Thus what we call tedium is rather an abnormal shortening of the time consequent upon monotony. Great spaces of time passed in unbroken uniformity tend to shrink together in a way to make the heart stop beating for fear; when one day is like all the others, then they are all like one; complete uniformity would make the longest life seem short, and as though it had stolen away from us unawares. Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time; which explains why young years pass slowly, while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course. We are aware that the intercalation of periods of change and novelty is the only means by which we can refresh our sense of time, strengthen, retard, and rejuvenate it, and therewith renew our perception of life itself."

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (courtesy of Paul Moravec)

Posted May 09, 12:00 PM

TT: Among the kudzu

I've made a pretty good start at answering all my accumulated blogmail. Thanks for your patience!

The unceasing task of keeping my in-basket empty has been complicated of late by the fact that the "About Last Night" e-mailbox is growing increasingly full of spam and press releases (same difference, mostly), not to mention the usual solicitations for stamina-enhancing products, poorly spelled fundraising appeals from somewhere in Africa, and messages written in Oriental characters of one kind or another, all of which are, er, Greek to me. As a result, the personal e-mail I want to read is getting harder and harder to pluck from the commercial foliage.

If you're a real live human being who reads this blog, please keep on writing. Your mail will be found, opened, read, and answered sooner or later, unless it's in Korean or has a subject header hinting at a breakthrough in the problem of, shall we say, puissance.

If, on the other hand, you're a publicist, I should warn you that I delete press releases sent to "About Last Night" without reading them. Publicists should write to me at my personal e-mail address. (Those publicists who don't know what it is probably shouldn't be writing to me at all, but that's another story.)

P.S. Our Girl has her own mailbox, to which you should write directly if you want to comment on a posting whose title begins with "OGIC." The e-mail buttons for both boxes can be found in the top module of the right-hand column.

Posted May 09, 10:43 AM

May 8, 2005

OGIC: Old Masters on parade

An alert reader tipped me off that I should include links to the paintings Randall Jarrell writes about in the poem below, and he's absolutely right. I'm about to add them to the original post, and I list them here, too:

- Georges La Tour's St. Sebastian Mourned by St. Irene.
- Hugo van der Goes's Nativity, which serves as the central panel of the Portinari Alterpiece, whose wings are also described in the poem and may be viewed here and here.
- And, of course, the justly famous Bruegel painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.

I'll have to get back to you on the Veronese.

I've been thinking of doing some serious winnowing of my book collection, which is slowly but surely taking over the space in which I live. Today, however, was one of those days when I'm reminded of why I hesitate. Unsatisfied with what images I could find online of the van der Goes painting (the Web Museum image linked above is quite good, but I missed it in my earlier Google Image search), I scanned my art books shelf and came up with the big, beautiful Art Treasures of the Uffizi & Pitti, which contains a crisp, gorgeous color plate of the central panel. It was definitely a moment when the hulking mass of bound paper in here looked, for a blessed second, like a library of my own, a collection containing wonders I didn't know I had. What else is in here? When will I stumble on it, and on what unforeseen quest? It's the upside of owning almost twice as many books as you've read. So maybe, I'm now thinking, the object isn't so much to get rid of books as to get to know them a little better.

Posted May 08, 11:41 AM

OGIC: Punch-drunk love

With the coming of The Cod (who talks exactly like he blogs, by the way), food bloggery has regained the luster it had lost, for me at least, when Julie/Julia went offline to become a book. Ever the eager Me-Tooist, I'm fixing to jump on this bandwagon. I'll wisely leave the Art of Cooking to Mr. Cod, however, and content myself with its M.F.K.-approved sister art, the Art of Eating. Well, or, um...in this case the Art of Drinking. Close enough for you?

Which is all preamble to saying that, thanks to my good friends here (at least I want to be their friend), I have discovered a brilliant wine that I'd never heard of before last week. It comes from Austria, of all places, and is my new favorite wine, especially with the warm weather seemingly locked into place now. The varietal is Grüner Veltliner. The glass I had at Lula Cafe tasted like the coldest, crispest, tartest apple you've ever stuck a straw in. There is occasionally a new thing under the sun, or at least a newly exported thing. When I get my first paycheck, I'm buying a case.

Also, in case you don't know, the food at Lula is delish.

Posted May 08, 11:05 AM

OGIC: Reader-ly

If you're in Chicago, you can read my essay on the identity crisis that sometimes comes of being both a newspaper book critic and a book blogger in this week's Chicago Reader. It's not available online, alas.

This week's edition of the Reader is one of their twice-yearly book issues. It also contains a story about blogger Wendy McClure, whose book was just published; a look at the adventures of running Oak Park's indie bookstore The Book Table; a small army of mini-reviews, including a handful by Bookslut; and a lot more. The Spring and Fall Book Specials are really the Reader at its best. They always do a bang-up job with it, so I was delighted to be asked to contribute.

I might be getting a link from the Reader soon to a pdf file of my story. If that doesn't materialize, I'll post some excerpts over the next week.

Posted May 08, 2:32 AM

OGIC: Pictures of a universe

Friday was the 91st anniversary of Randall Jarrell's birth. I'm crazy about his sole novel, Pictures from an Institution, which has provided me and Terry with more than a few fortune cookies and almanacs: see, for instance, one, two, three, four, five, and six. (If Pictures isn't the single most quoted novel on this website, it must be a close second.) And Jarrell's poetry is a reliable pleasure. The following poem belongs to a favorite subgenre of mine, poetry about painting, along with Browning's dramatic monologues "Andrea del Sarto" and "Fra Lippo Lippi," Williams's "Pictures from Bruegel," and Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" (to which Jarrell's poem responds). Enjoy.

* * *

The Old and the New Masters

About suffering, about adoration, the old masters
Disagree. When someone suffers, no one else eats
Or walks or opens the window--no one breathes
As the sufferers watch the sufferer.
In St. Sebastian Mourned by St. Irene
The flame of one torch is the only light.
All the eyes except the maidservant's (she weeps
And covers them with a cloth) are fixed on the shaft
Set in his chest like a column; St. Irene's
Hands are spread in the gesture of the Madonna,
Revealing, accepting, what she does not understand.
Her hands say: "Lo! Behold!"
Beside her a monk's hooded head is bowed, his hands
Are put together in the work of mourning.
It is as if they were still looking at the lance
Piercing the side of Christ, nailed on his cross.
The same nails pierce all their hands and feet, the same
Thin blood, mixed with water, trickles from their sides.
The taste of vinegar is on every tongue
That gasps, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?"
They watch, they are, the one thing in the world.

So, earlier, everything is pointed
In van der Goes' Nativity, toward the naked
Shining baby, like the needle of a compass.
The different orders and sizes of the world:
The angels like Little People, perched in the rafters
Or hovering in mid-air like hummingbirds;
The shepherds, so big and crude, so plainly adoring;
The medium-sized donor, his little family,
And their big patron saints; the Virgin who kneels
Before her child in worship; the Magi out in the hills
With their camels--they ask directions, and have pointed out
By a man kneeling, the true way; the ox
And the donkey, two heads in the manger
So much greater than a human head, who also adore;
Even the offerings, a sheaf of wheat,
A jar and a glass of flowers, are absolutely still
In natural concentration, as they take their part
In the salvation of the natural world.
The time of the world concentrates
On this one instant: far off in the rocks
You can see Mary and Joseph and their donkey
Coming to Bethlehem; on the grassy hillside
Where their flocks are grazing, the shepherds gesticulate
In wonder at the star; and so many hundreds
Of years in the future, the donor, his wife,
And their children are kneeling, looking: everything
That was or will be in the world is fixed
On its small, helpless, human center.

After a while the masters show the crucifixion
In one corner of the canvas: the men come to see
What is important, see that it is not important.
The new masters paint a subject as they please,
And Veronese is prosecuted by the Inquisition
For the dogs playing at the feet of Christ,
The earth is a planet among galaxies.
Later Christ disappears, the dogs disappear: in abstract
Understanding, without adoration, the last master puts
Colors on canvas, a picture of the universe
In which a bright spot somewhere in the corner
Is the small radioactive planet men called Earth.

Posted May 08, 1:21 AM

May 6, 2005

TT: Sweet comic valentine

It's Friday, this is my Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, and everybody else is wrong about Christina Applegate and Sweet Charity:

Walter Bobbie, director of the Broadway revival of "Chicago" that's still going strong after nine years, has done a similarly sterling job here. His staging of the scene in which Charity hides in a closet to avoid embarrassing her kindly benefactor Vittorio (Paul Schoeffler, who is just right) should be taught in drama schools. Denis O'Hare is a hoot as Oscar, Charity's wimpy boyfriend. The sleazy hookers who sing "Big Spender" are so tough, you could strike wet matches off them. Even the pit band catches your ear, in part because of Don Sebesky's gleaming new orchestrations.

As for Ms. Applegate, she's a charmer, winsome, witty and alive. Her singing voice is plenty good enough, and though she's only a so-so hoofer, choreographer Wayne Cilento has done a near-miraculous job of staging her numbers in such a way as to divert your eye from her limitations. Would I have preferred seeing an all-singing-all-dancing Broadway baby like Ms. d'Amboise or Tracy Shayne tear up the stage in "I'm a Brass Band"? Duh, of course--but I really did enjoy watching Ms. Applegate doing her damnedest up there, and I bet this won't be her last musical....

On the other hand, we're all right about Glengarry Glen Ross:

David Mamet won the Pulitzer Prize 20 years ago for "Glengarry Glen Ross," his fathomlessly dark portrait of a group of cutthroat Chicago real-estate salesmen. Now it's back on Broadway, directed by Joe Mantello and performed on a pair of ultra-realistic sets designed by Santo Loquasto in which every detail is on the nose, all the way down to the sickly green paint on the walls of the fluorescent-lit office in which Mr. Mamet's characters snap for "leads" like a tankful of starving piranhas. No less convincing is Liev Schreiber, who plays Richard, the flesh-eating sociopath who'll say anything to close a deal. With his close-cropped hair, sleek bullet head and blowtorch intensity, he looks and sounds positively demonic....

As for the Broadway transfer of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, well, duh, of course:

James Lapine, the director, has rejiggered things slightly but significantly to accommodate the bigger house's thrust stage and arena seating, with results that left me happily bedazzled. The cast of the original production is unchanged--and rightly so, "Putnam County" being perfect in every possible way, zany and touching and super-smart. I predict it will run forever, and I plan to go back and see it yearly. (I've already been three times, once on my own dime.)

(Incidentally, I just got an advance CD of the original-cast album. Too much reverb on the dialogue, but otherwise it's a lovely souvenir.)

No link. Buy the damn paper already, for God's sake. Or go here for a lead.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to drive upstate to read a Shakespeare sonnet at an outdoor wedding....

Posted May 06, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

Sleep, that sometimes shuts up sorrow's eye,
Steal me awhile from mine own company.

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Posted May 06, 12:00 PM

May 5, 2005

OGIC: It helps to be easily amused

What does it help, you ask? What doesn't it, ask I. For the moment what it is helping is proofreading, which is sucking up all my attention tonight and keeping me, for now, from posting the little Randall Jarrell birthday celebration I had planned. So here's what has passed my notably low threshold of amusement so far in the journal issue I'm proofreading tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present:

Mr. "Merlin Heidegger" and the illustrious "Wa Ho Auden."

There are typos, and then there are typos. It's almost a shame to have to fix such gorgeously goofy ones. But we must make the world safe for those who are not so easily amused.

Posted May 05, 11:52 AM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"But I would think there are actually fewer intelligent people watching TV now because the intelligent people are all, you know, writing on their weblog or something."

Steven Johnson, CBC interview

Posted May 05, 11:51 AM

TT: Surprisingly wakeful

I just thought you'd like to know that I did indeed work all night, and that I finished writing the second of the first two chapters of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong a few minutes ago, a couple of hours' worth of line editing excepted. Once that's done, all I have to do is print both chapters out and take them downtown to André Bernard, my editor at Harcourt. I hope he's planning to give me a very good lunch.

Now that I'm done, I'll be heading north tomorrow afternoon for the wedding of my ex-assistant (better known as one of the Lascivious Biddies), at which I'll be reading a Shakespeare sonnet, a first for this newly minted drama critic. I told a friend the other day that I was putting my mouth where my money was!

I'll be posting Friday's almanac entry and the weekly teaser for my Wall Street Journal drama column before I go, but nothing else until Monday. I'm sure you understand. I'm still running fairly smoothly on the vast amount of adrenalin built up by my recent labors and my trip to Washington, D.C., but at some point in the next few hours I have no doubt that the bottom will fall out. That's all right, though: I don't think I've ever been so happy with anything I've written in my whole life as I am with these two chapters.

On which note I'd better be getting back to work. See you later.

Posted May 05, 7:43 AM

TT: Almanac

"I've had some great ovations in my time. When people do that, they must feel something within themselves. I mean you don't just go around waking people up to the effect of saying, 'You know, this music is art.' But it's got to be art because the world has recognized our music from New Orleans, else it would have been dead today. But I always let the other fellow talk about art. 'Cause when we was doing it, we was just glad to be working up on that stage. So for me to be still on earth to hear that word, sounds pretty good. I'm just grateful for every little iota."

Louis Armstrong, Louis Armstrong--A Self-Portrait

Posted May 05, 7:41 AM

TT: Happiness is...

...delivering the first hundred pages of your next book to a waiting editor. Thus, one must imagine me happy (and yes, the reference is intentional). I dropped it off, I came home, I don't have anywhere to go tonight, and what am I doing? Blogging, of course. But briefly, briefly! I'm really sitting in front of my iBook, listening to Donald Fagen's "Century's End" and running my fingers idly over the keyboard, somewhat in the manner of a roomful of monkeys, because I'm soooo burned out. Too much. I think I wrote 20,000 words in the past week and a half. Maybe more. Yikes. Ouch.

Anyway, these are the last words that will ever cross my lips, at least until tonight, when I post tomorrow's almanac entry and drama-column teaser, and then I am going to bed. No alarm. No phone. No nothing.

I'm trying to figure out what this posting is about. I guess it's about being so tightly wired that the process of becoming unwired takes a few hours. At least.

Oh, now I remember what I was going to tell you: I'm not reading my blogmail this week. Forgive me. I'll read it next week.

Enough. See you tonight.

Posted May 05, 5:19 AM

May 4, 2005

TT: The dark side of the farce

Went to Washington, ate my dinner, saw my show, marveled yet again at the maximal coolness of my friend (who, among many other things, makes incredibly funny faces). Returned to New York this morning to find 99 e-mails (not counting blogmail) and two brush fires (one at a magazine, the other at a newspaper). Put them out, went to lunch, and found myself standing on an Upper West Side street corner next to two casually dressed young women who were walking their dogs.

WOMAN NO. 1 So, how's the Prozac working?

WOMAN NO. 2 (beaming down at her dog) Oh, it's just amazing--he doesn't bark nearly as much since we put him on it!

I bet they don't have conversations like that where you come from. Wherever you come from.

Radio silence resumes as of now. Something tells me I'll be up late tonight flogging away at the last item on my itinerary....

Posted May 04, 2:36 AM

TT: Almanac

"The most infuriating thing about men was that they were both predictable and impossible. Their buttons were ridiculously easy to push, but unfortunately, every button came with its own self-destruct program."

Donald E. Westlake, Watch Your Back!

Posted May 04, 2:35 AM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

Old Dominion

The shadows of late afternoon and the odors
of honeysuckle are a congruent sadness.
Everything is easy but wrong. I am walking
across thick lawns under maples in borrowed tennis whites.
It is like the photographs of Randall Jarrell
I stared at on the backs of books in college.
He looked so sad and relaxed in the pictures.
He was translating Chekhov and wore tennis whites.
It puzzled me that in his art, like Chekhov's,
everyone was lost, that the main chance was never seized
because it is only there as a thing to be dreamed of
or because someone somewhere had set the old words
to the old tune: we live by habit and it doesn't hurt.
Now the thwack...thwack of tennis balls being hit
reaches me and it is the first sound of an ax
in the cherry orchard or the sound of machine guns
where the young terrorists are exploding
among poor people on the streets of Los Angeles.
I begin making resolutions: to take risks, not to stay
in the south, to somehow do honor to Randall Jarrell,
never to kill myself. Through the oaks I see the courts,
the nets, the painted boundaries, and the people in tennis
whites who look so graceful from this distance.

Robert Hass

Posted May 04, 1:01 AM

May 3, 2005

OGIC: Mail in

Poking my head in here briefly to relay some highlights from the day's mail:

- Lynn Becker, whose photos of "Cloud Gate" I linked to here over the weekend, has kindly written to clarify what the "armature" around the trees in Millennium Park is doing. "There was a symposium at the Art Institute at the time the park opened," she writes, "and the landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson explained the caged trees--'the hedge'--as protecting the garden from the rampaging hordes making their way after a concert in Gehry's Pritzker Pavllion to the garage entrances on Monroe, and also as creating an outside/insider for her 'secret garden.'" So it's for their own good! And she quotes Gustafson saying more about "pre-figuration": "The armature is basically a pruning guide for the shoulder hedge. It is also based on a theory by Andre LeNotre, which is called prefiguration, in Versailles. He prefigured all the hedges with wood, so you had to wait for, Louis IV had to wait to see what his garden was going to look like. He could imagine it through the prefiguration. The armature is a prefiguration of what the hedge one day will be its shape, and when its pruned, at the every end, the armature will disappear"

Ah. This is helpful to me but not, I think, to the trees, which I persist in wanting to anthropomorphize. I felt the same way about all the tulips when it snowed in Chicago two weekends ago--although, sitting in the Wrigley Field bleachers in that same snow for four hours, I was at least as pitiable as they were. (For those of you who watched that game on WGN, I was the one in the Canadiens toque--apparently such a novelty in post-NHL America that it got me thirty whole seconds of air time.) In any case, raise your hand if you spent your 30th birthday wandering around Versailles, followed by a rousing performance of Carmen at the Bastille Opera House. I may be in a minority here.

My thanks to Lynn.

- I also received some interesting responses to my post about Jenna Elfman and Lauren Graham's döppel-gangliness:

Don't know how big a Superman fan you are, but if you've even the faintest acquaintance with the property at all, then you might share my disappointment that Lauren Graham was not cast as Lois Lane in the upcoming mega-movie.

I would consider signing that petition. Also:

Did you know that [Elfman and Graham] once co-starred in a sitcom together? Townies lasted for about 2 months in 1996; Elfman, Graham, and Molly Ringwald played 20ish waitresses in a Gloucester restaurant. Ringwald was the sensible one, Graham the neurotic, and Elfman the tramp. And the divine Conchata Ferrell was on hand as their boss.

I certainly did not know that, but it's reassuring to learn that they have been seen in the same room together.

Posted May 03, 12:59 PM

TT: Exit, stage south

For those of you who were wondering, I finally finished writing that really long piece for Commentary, and I don't see to be showing any obvious signs of mental or physical disintegration other than being unable to keep my eyes open. I'll be devoting the morning to this Friday's Wall Street Journal drama column, as well as some as-yet-unknown portion of a book review for the Journal. Come lunchtime, though, I'm off to Washington, D.C., where I'll be spending the evening dining with a v. cool friend (maximally cool, as a matter of fact) and taking her to see Shakespeare Theatre's new production of The Tempest, about which I hear interesting things.

Barring the installation of Star Trek-style transporter tubes at my hotel, I won't be back in New York until some time on Wednesday afternoon, so don't expect any postings until Thursday, when I'll return to the blogosphere with, er, something or other. If I haven't finished the second chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong by then, the something-or-other in question might well be a snapshot of me waving goodbye as I assume a new identity and disappear into the Delinquent Author Protection Program forever. (Probably not, though.)

See you Thursday, one way or another.

Posted May 03, 12:04 PM

TT: Entry from an unkept diary

I got a call yesterday from a fact checker at The New Yorker who wanted to know whether H.L. Mencken actually sent the following form letter to angry correspondents: Dear Sir or Madam: You may or may not be right. Would that he had--it's a great story--but in the decade I spent researching and writing The Skeptic, I found not the slightest bit of evidence that he ever sent such a letter to anyone.

What tickled me about this call was that it made me feel like a Grand Old Man. The nice young fellow from The New Yorker asked, "Is this Terry Teachout, author of The Skeptic?" in tones that made me wonder whether I'd just heard a preview of my obituary. I hope my Louis Armstrong book is better than The Skeptic (with which I was pretty damn pleased, to be sure), but for the moment I guess that label is firmly fixed to the bottom of the screen: World's Greatest Authority on H.L. Mencken. Three years after my biography was published, I continue to get a call or two every month from fact checkers and other earnest souls seeking to establish whether or not Mencken really did make some snappy crack or other.

Here's the interesting part: the Mencken quotes about which I get called are always spurious. No exceptions.

Posted May 03, 12:03 PM

TT: Footnote

After I posted last week's Wall Street Journal review of the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which John C. Reilly plays Stanley Kowalski, I got this e-mail from a reader of the blog who is a well-connected theater buff:

I've heard that when John C. Reilly was beginning the shoot of CHICAGO with his costars, the producers--Marty Richards and others--wanted to see what they had before a foot of film was shot. So the cast--Reilly, Zeta-Jones, Zellweger, Gere--assembled for a run-through in some performance space or other, and took seats onstage, with the producers down below. Reilly noticed that Zellweger was REALLY scared; he leaned over and said, soothingly, "Don't worry, Renee, it's just like a play...we're onstage and they're the audience."

Zellweger looked at him, and said, quivering, "But I've never been in a play!'"

If it's not true, don't tell me.

Posted May 03, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"'The thing is, I started in life as a stunt driver.'

"Anne Marie, surprised, said, 'Really?'

"'You may have seen the one,' Chester said, 'where the guy's escaping in the car, they're after him, the street becomes an alleyway, too narrow for the car, he angles sharp right, bumps the right wheels up on the curb, spins sharp left, the car's up on two left wheels, he goes down the alley at a diagonal, drops onto four wheels where it widens out again, ta-ran-ta-rah.'

"'Wow,' Anne Marie said.

"'That was me,' Chester told her. 'We gotta do it in one take, otherwise I'm gonna cream the car against some very stone buildings. I liked that life.'

"John said, 'Was it you in the rest of the picture?'

"'Nah,' Chester said, 'that was some movie star. They even had to bring in somebody else to do his swimming. Anyway, the problem was, that career dried up. They don't need the guys like me now, they got computers to do the stunts.' He shrugged, but looked disgusted. 'People wanna look at a cartoon, a car on a diagonal down the alley, nobody at the wheel, nobody's life at stake, what I say is, it isn't the pictures got worse, it's the audience.'"

Donald E. Westlake, The Road to Ruin

Posted May 03, 12:00 PM

May 2, 2005

TT: So go already

Wonderful news from playbill.com:

Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas' new musical The Light in the Piazza has extended its run at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre through the summer.

The show, which opened on April 18 after a month of previews, will now play until Sept. 4. It was to have closed on June 12.

Though it opened to mixed reviews, Piazza has since become a favorite of New York's awards organizations. It led the Outer Critics Circle Awards nominations with 11 nods, while the Drama Desk organization also nominated it in 11 categories.

In case you missed it, here's part of my Wall Street Journal rave.

What are you waiting for?

Posted May 02, 12:55 PM

TT: Asleep at the wheel

I got out of Sweet Charity late Sunday afternoon, caught a cab going north, went straight home, threw off my clothes, and made ready to climb into the loft and grab a little shut-eye preliminary to spending the evening at my desk, working on all the stuff I've got to write and deliver to various editors between now and Thursday, when I fly the coop to read a Shakespeare sonnet at an upstate wedding (about which more next week).

Fortunately, I decided to check my e-mailbox before crashing, and the first piece of mail I opened was from a friend who wrote, "Are we still on for tonight?" I uttered a well-known monosyllable three or four times in a row, having remembered in a sudden flash of prospective horror that I was supposed to be at the Jazz Standard in forty-five minutes to hear Dena DeRose. I threw my clothes back on, ran downstairs, and caught yet another cab, this one headed south. Somewhat to my surprise, I got to the club on time, and even managed to remain upright and conscious throughout the whole set. (Dena was hot, of course--it was my fault, not hers, that I was a little fuzzy.)

I'm still somewhat shaken by the closeness of my shave. It's true that my itinerary for the week is pretty alarming, but it's been at least a decade since I've flat-out forgotten a show I was scheduled to see. That's the critic's nightmare--especially when his schedule is so tightly packed that he can't work in a repeat performance before filing his review.

I'm not going to try to tell you I've learned my lesson, but I do think it might possibly be a smart idea for me to take my phone off the hook, go straight to bed, and remain horizontal for an absolute minimum of eight hours.

You can wait to hear about the rest of my weekend, right? Good.

P.S. If you still long for fresh copy, I've updated the "Teachout in Commentary," "Second City," and "Teachout Elsewhere" modules in the right-hand column with links to my latest print-media pieces. Read 'em and weep. Or whatever.

Posted May 02, 12:01 PM

TT: Tune in, please

As regular readers of "About Last Night" know, I'm hopelessly addicted to the What's My Line reruns that can be seen early each morning on the Game Show Network. But even if you're not especially interested in the early days of network TV, I absolutely guarantee that you'll be fascinated by the episode scheduled to air early Tuesday morning (it was originally seen on June 3, 1956). Why? Because the first guest is none other than Frank Lloyd Wright.

Set your VCR for 3:30 A.M. Eastern time this Tuesday. This one's a must.

Posted May 02, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"I think that to be an American is an excellent preparation for culture. We have exquisite qualities as a race, and it seems to me that we are ahead of the European races in the fact that more than either of them we can deal freely with forms of civilisation not our own, can pick and choose and assimilate and in short (aesthetically &c) claim our property wherever we find it. To have no national stamp has hitherto been a defect & a drawback; but I think it not unlikely that American writers may yet indicate that a vast intellectual fusion and synthesis of the various National tendencies of the world is the condition of more important achievements than any we have seen. We must of course have something of our own--something distinctive & homogeneous--& I take it that we shall find it in our 'moral consciousness,' our unprecedented spiritual lightness and vigour. In this sense at least we shall have a national cachet.--I expect nothing great during your lifetime or mine perhaps: but my instincts quite agree with yours in looking to see something original and beautiful disengage itself from our ceaseless fermentation and turmoil."

Henry James, letter to Thomas Sergeant Perry (Sept. 20, 1867)

Posted May 02, 12:00 PM

May 1, 2005

OGIC: P.S.

Terry (and everybody), miss you too!

Posted May 01, 8:36 AM

OGIC: Weekend update

Howdy. Sorry to be getting to this so late in the weekend. I've just seen off my weekend guest and am more convinced than ever that guests are a wonderful thing. Not only is my apartment cleaner than usual; not only did I enjoy the considerable pleasure of my friend's company; on top of all that, I doubt I would have caught either Art Chicago in the Park or the Chicago production of Lisa Loomer's play Living Out at American Theater Company (in collaboration with Teatro Vista) if she hadn't visited.

We had a good time at Art Chicago. I spent a lot more time looking at old-guard work (Marin, Cornell, Frankenthaler, Hockney) than new, and I admit to being surprised and feeling a little shortchanged when we ran out of exhibits just as it felt like we were warming up. It says here that the show is indeed smaller and less spectacular than it used to be (thanks to Iconoduel for the link). But the weekender and I used the remainder of the afternoon to take the full tour of Millennium Park, sans bean, sad to say--"Cloud Gate" is still under wraps from the winter, having its seams welded out. With clouds rife in the sky and the light changing rapidly, it would have been a great day to watch the weather reflected in the steel. Through what I hope is the tail end of the cover-up, we piners for the bean can console ourselves with this revealing photo essay about its construction.

The part of Millennium Park I still can't figure out is the part that seems to be a jail for trees. Were they bad? Are they eligible for parole? The Park website is only partly illuminating on this topic--it says that the metal framework hemming in the trees is the "Armature," which "provides a simple and permanent clipping guide for precisely maintaining the curved profile of the mature Shoulder Hedge" and, more mystifyingly still, "also pre-figures the Hedge form." Um, whatever they say. But I can't help waiting for the day when some arboreal activist sets the poor trees free--they truly do look miserable.

After a little late-afternoon wine, potato chips, and napping, we struck out again and met up with my friend the Law Prof and his weekend guest for dinner and the play. Both guests were attorneys, and a little way into the play it was clear that there's no more receptive audience for the lawyer humor that pervades Living Out than a lot of self-deprecating lawyers. This element of the play merely picked up a thread that my companions had gotten going at dinner.

We liked the play, which I picked because it was a Critic's Choice in the Chicago Reader, but more so because I remembered Terry's rave review for the Journal when it premiered in New York in 2003. Lisa Loomer's play follows the intertwined fortunes of two young mothers in Southern California who are employer and employee. Ana is an immigrant from El Salvador raising one child and trying to get a second to the States. Nancy is a Hollywood entertainment lawyer who hires Ana as a nanny for her newborn so she can return to work. Both are well-meaning, and as Terry's review emphasized, the heart of the play is the friendship they almost find despite the yawning gulf of privilege and opportunity dividing them. It's a sobering story, holding out the possibility of connection over this gulf, but holding it just out of reach.

The actors in the ATC production are very good, especially Sandra Marquez in the most important role as Ana. Her colleagues do well too, but there were a few times during the performance I saw when Marquez single-handedly saved a joke with her funny, knowing expressions. I found some of the jokes targeting yuppies too easy by half, especially those aimed at Nancy's doofus Legal-Aid-type husband. Luckily, actor Thomas Gebbia tackles the part with enough gusto to carry some of the lamer jokes by sheer force of spastic energy. After Marquez's, though, the most enchanting performance comes from Tanya Saracho as a Mexican nanny whom Anna befriends; Saracho's character Sandra has a monologue in the second act about a trip to Texas--a beautifully written speech, funny and heartbreaking--that she sends soaring out of the park. (The still here captures a little bit of the exhilaration of her delivery. I haven't looked at the clips, but presumably one of them shows part of this speech.)

Living Out has performances scheduled through May 22. Get your tickets here.

Posted May 01, 8:26 AM

OGIC: Memo to Fametracker

Wow, I just saw a few minutes of a terrible Lifetime movie (redundant, I know) starring Jenna Elfman. I never watched Dharma and Greg, but I did like Elfman in Ed Norton's 2000 film Keeping the Faith. That was a while ago now, and I haven't thought a whit about Elfman in the interim. So when I saw her prowl campily across my small screen just now, it hit me like a freight train: what we have here is the downwardly mobile, blond Lauren Graham. They're eerily alike in manner and stature. If it weren't so obvious who's on an upswing and who's, well, on Lifetime, they'd make a perfect pairing for Fametracker's Two Stars, One Slot feature: battle of the leggy, wisecracking Amazon women.

Posted May 01, 8:25 AM