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July 31, 2005
OGIC: Darlings stumble
Sue Miller and Alice Hoffman are critical darlings and big sellers, and for the most part the novels they released this year have been typically warmly received. I review these books, Lost in the Forest and The Ice Queen, in today's Chicago Tribune and find neither quite what it's cracked up to be: one of them disappointed me substantially, the other vastly. Read all about it here.Posted July 31, 1:10 AM
July 29, 2005
TT: On the air
I'll be appearing on KRCU-FM, the public radio station of Southeast Missouri State University, this coming Sunday at three p.m. CDT (that's four p.m. EDT). The program is Going Public, on which I'll be discussing my work as a drama and film critic and the effects of the new media on American journalism.If you live in or near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, tune to 90.9 FM.
To listen live on your computer via streaming audio, go here.
Posted July 29, 12:04 PM
TT: A hot time in the old town
My mother's feeling much better, the heat wave has finally waved goodbye, and all that remains before I return to New York is to post the weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. This time I report on my recent visit to St. Louis, where I saw the Muny Opera's outdoor production of Mame and St. Louis Shakespeare's air-conditioned Henry V:It was my bad luck to arrive in the middle of a 12-alarm heat wave. The temperature rose to 102 degrees, and it was still foully hot and chokingly humid by the time I reached my seat, toting a soft-sided cooler full of prophylactic fluids. I wilted almost immediately, but the rest of the 9,000-strong crowd took the weather in its stride....
I found it fascinating to behold the near-scientific exactitude with which the Muny approaches the problem of producing musicals for extremely large audiences. The costumes are brightly colored, the sets big and bold (I especially liked Steve Gilliam's elaborate rendering of Mame's art-deco apartment). Paul Blake and Diana Baffa-Brill, the director and choreographer, kept the stage patterns eye-catchingly simple. The theater itself has flawless sight lines, and a state-of-the-art sound system projects the dialogue all the way to the very last row of the cheap seats (I checked)....
I was in town too early for the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, whose season opens on Sept. 7 with "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." Fortunately, St. Louis Shakespeare, a classical company founded in 1984, was already up and running with an estimable "Henry V." Robin Weatherall, the director, is better known as a composer (he had a 17-year run with the Royal Shakespeare Company), but you couldn't tell it from this vigorous, unmannered production, played in traditional costumes on the open stage of the Grandel Theatre, a midtown church that has been converted into an attractive performing space....
No link, of course, so to read the whole thing go out and buy a copy of today's Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal (by far the preferable alternative--great paper, great arts coverage, great deal).
Now I've got to catch a plane. See you Monday!
Posted July 29, 12:01 PM
TT: Almanac
"The ability to shift the audience from thinking Poor him! to Poor us! must surely be a mark of greatness in an actor."Simon Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor
Posted July 29, 12:00 PM
July 28, 2005
TT: Local celebrity
"Saw your picture in the paper this morning," said the driver of the shuttle that runs between the parking lot and the front door of the southeast Missouri hospital where my mother is recovering from surgery. Three more people told me the same thing in the lobby, elevator, and fourth-floor corridor. By the time I finally got to her room, I'd figured out that a reporter from one of our two local papers must have come to my Tuesday-night lecture at the Smalltown Depot, and a quick look at the carefully folded copy of the Southeast Missourian conspicuously placed on her bedside table confirmed it: I'd received what small-town newspaper readers universally refer to as "a write-up." What's more, it was a good one, meaning that (A) I was quoted accurately and (B) my photo looked rather more like the fellow I see in the bathroom mirror than the one portrayed on my driver's license.Not that I would have expected anything different. Small-town newspaper reporters rarely go out of their way to publish hatchet jobs, least of all about the Hometown Boy Made Good who comes back for a nostalgic visit. The rules of small-town journalism are very different from those prevailing in the big city. Reporters are not your friends, I've told any number of friends and colleagues preparing to be interviewed by a big-city journalist for the first time. Some of them take my word for it and act accordingly, but others march off to their doom sure that I'm a hardened old cynic and thus not to be trusted. "I just had an epiphany," one of the latter told me after emerging, somewhat scathed, from the lion's den. "A reporter risks nothing by inappropriate revelations, whereas the subject risks everything." I was kind enough not to say I told her so.
Be that as it may, I haven't any complaints with the way the Southeast Missourian and the Standard-Democrat wrote me up. Besides, it was fun to be recognized on the street, though I can see how it might get old. Alas, my fame will last only through Friday, when I fly back to Manhattan and resume the genteel obscurity of a middle-to-highbrow critic who can count his network TV appearances on some of the fingers of one hand. I realized long ago that in America, there's no such thing as a famous writer, only famous actors. My all-time favorite joke is about the, er, Polish starlet who, er, slept with the screenwriter. If I ever write a book about Hollywood, which isn't likely, that'll be the title: She Screwed the Writer. (Or something close to that, anyway.)
I returned from the hospital to find an e-mailbox full of increasingly urgent communications. Among other things, it seems that the producers of one of the shows I was supposed to review in next Friday's Wall Street Journal have postponed its opening night, a decision which forced me to spend a full hour rearranging my schedule for the next two weeks, with further juggling in the offing. In addition, I have three thousand words of deathless prose due in the e-mailbox of a Manhattan editor at some point in the next twenty-four hours, though the editor in question was kind enough to call on Wednesday morning and offer me an unsolicited deadline extension, an act of mercy for which he will store up much heavenly treasure. That doesn't mean I'm not going to try to get the piece in on time, but it does mean I can breathe a little easier tomorrow morning, especially since I'm supposed to tape a local radio interview at one o'clock, arrgh....
Sounds like I'm already back in New York, doesn't it? I got a call yesterday from Bass Player, my great friend, kindred spirit, and fellow workaholic, who is somewhere on the West Coast this week for reasons not dissimilar to the ones that brought me to Smalltown, U.S.A., last week. We traded notes on our respective situations, complained about the work we'd brought home with us, then swore up and down to one another that in spite of everything, we were still managing to set aside A Little Time for Ourselves.
"You know what we sound like?" I said. "A couple of drunks bragging about how many days we've been sober."
She laughed so hard I thought my cell phone was going to explode.
Enough already. It's not too late for me to to get a good night's sleep, so I'll turn off the iBook and give it my best shot. You wouldn't hear from me again until Friday if I had any sense, but who says I have any sense?
Posted July 28, 12:03 PM
TT: Almanac
"'You Stewart?' he asked."'Yeah.'
"'You did a thing in a picture once,' he said. 'Can't remember the name of it, but you were in a room and you said a poem or something about fireflies. That was good.'
"I knew right away what he meant. That's all he said. He was talking about a scene in the picture Come Live with Me that had come out before the war in 1941. He couldn't remember the title, wasn't even sure I was the same guy, but that little thing--didn't even last a minute--he'd remembered all those years. And that's what's so great about the movies. If you're good and God helps you and you're lucky enough to have the kind of personality that comes across, you're giving people little, little tiny pieces of time that they never forget."
James Stewart (quoted in Donald Dewey, James Stewart: A Biography)
Posted July 28, 12:01 PM
July 27, 2005
TT and OGIC: New around here, stranger?
If you came here from the New York Times' new Blogs 101 page, welcome to "About Last Night," a 24/5-to-7 blog (we come and go on weekends) hosted by artsjournal.com on which Terry Teachout writes about the arts in New York City and elsewhere, assisted by Laura Demanski, who writes from Chicago under the no-longer-a-pseudonym "Our Girl in Chicago." (Terry is blogging from his Missouri hometown this week.)In case you're wondering, this blog has two URLs, the one you're seeing at the top of your screen right now and the easier-to-remember www.terryteachout.com. Either one will bring you here.
All our postings from the past week are visible in reverse chronological order on this page. Terry's start with "TT," Laura's with "OGIC." In addition, the entire contents of this site are archived chronologically and can be accessed by clicking "ALN Archives" at the top of the right-hand column.
You can read more about us, and about "About Last Night," by going to the right-hand column and clicking in the appropriate places. You'll also find various other toothsome features there, including our regularly updated Top Five list of things to see, hear, read, and otherwise do, links to Terry's most recent newspaper and magazine articles, and "Sites to See," a list of links to other blogs and Web sites with art-related content. If you're curious about the arty part of the blogosphere, you've come to the right site: "Sites to See" will point you in all sorts of interesting directions, and all roads lead back to "About Last Night."
As if all that weren't enough, you can write to us by clicking either one of the "Write Us" buttons. We read our mail, and answer it, too, so long as you're minimally polite. (Be patient, though. We get a lot of it.)
The only other thing you need to know is that "About Last Night" is about all the arts, high, medium, and low: film, drama, painting, dance, fiction, TV, music of all kinds, whatever. Our interests are wide-ranging, and we think there are plenty of other people like us out there in cyberspace, plus still more who long to wander off their beaten paths but aren't sure which way to turn.
If you're one of the above, we're glad you came. Enjoy. Peruse. Tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com. And come back tomorrow.
Posted July 27, 12:04 PM
TT: Preaching choirward
Attention, Yale University Press: I just sold a caseful of Teachout Readers. The occasion was the lecture I delivered on Tuesday at Smalltown's old train depot, which has been turned into a museum. I spoke about how the new information technology has changed my life as a journalist, and when I was done I spent a good half-hour selling and signing copies of A Terry Teachout Reader. Granted, half the people in the audience knew me when I was in kneepants, but that's still a whole bunch of books.Four things:
- This is the first time in my life that I've ever given a formal lecture without a script or written notes. I was too busy taking care of my mother last week to do my usual painstaking preparations, so I flew blind. It seems to have gone well, though I would have felt more comfortable reading from a prepared, rehearsed text.
- As always, I spoke for a half-hour and took questions for a half-hour, and I'm pleased to say that I've never been asked sharper or more pertinent questions by a lecture audience. Go, home team!
- In the audience was Dr. Joseph Blanton (known to Smalltownians of all ages as "Doctor Joe"), the kindly, all-knowing pediatrician who looked after me from infancy to high school and beyond. It is an awesome thing to gaze out into the upturned faces of a listening crowd and see for the first time in years a man who used to know you inside and out. I had to bite my tongue to keep from choking up.
- The Smalltown Depot is the place from which I caught my very first train. The year was 1962 and my kindergarten class was taking a field trip. We rode a passenger train thirty miles north to Cape Girardeau and were collected by our parents at the station. I vividly remember thinking to myself that riding a train was the most exciting thing I'd ever done in my life and that I wanted to do it again as soon as possible. Alas, passenger service to Smalltown was terminated a couple of years later, and it wasn't until I grew up and moved to New York that I rode another train, realizing at once that my six-year-old self had been right. I think of that maiden voyage every time I ride the Metroliner between New York and Washington, and I always smile at the memory.
I'm so tired now that I could tip over: I got three hours' worth of sleep last night and have dark circles all the way around both my eyes. (I wore one of my black outfits to the lecture so that I'd look dissipated rather than merely exhausted.) I have to wrench myself out of bed at seven this morning to get my mother's car inspected, after which I'll be putting in at least three hours' worth of hard slogging at the iBook. That spells bedtime to me. I may blog again twenty-four hours from now, or I may not....
P.S. I'm sorry I haven't called, OGIC--I miss you!
Posted July 27, 12:03 PM
TT: Almanac
"We all have original sin. I would much rather be able to terrify than to charm."Sir Ralph Richardson (quoted in Garry O'Connor, Ralph Richardson: An Actor's Life)
Posted July 27, 12:01 PM
July 26, 2005
TT: Otherwise occupied
I got back from St. Louis at two this morning, having spent the evening watching an outdoor performance of Mame. The temperature in the city climbed to 102 during the day, and it couldn't have been much cooler by the time I got to the theater. Now I have to hit a deadline, give a speech, visit my mother in the hospital, and--if possible--take a nap.I have a feeling that I'm not going to be blogging again until Wednesday, don't you?
Posted July 26, 8:57 AM
TT: Almanac
"Nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part."Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
Posted July 26, 3:21 AM
July 25, 2005
TT: Having a heat wave
The weather in southeast Missouri is a constant topic of discussion around these parts, mainly because it tends to change so frequently and unexpectedly. Alas, it hasn't changed at all for the past few days, and we're getting sick of it, in some cases literally. On Sunday the bank thermometers touched 100 for the first time this year, and they weren't kidding, either. I drove up to St. Louis at midday to cover a production of Henry V for The Wall Street Journal, and the weather on the far side of my windshield put me in mind of this passage from Louis L'Amour's Hondo:It was hot. A few lost, cotton-ball bunches of cloud drifted in a brassy sky, leaving rare islands of shadow upon the desert's face.
Nothing moved. It was a far, lost land, a land of beige-gray silences and distance where the eye reached out farther and farther to lose itself finally against the sky, and where the only movement was the lazy swing of a remote buzzard.
Fortunately, no buzzards pursued me to St. Louis, nor are they wheeling in the sky over the hospital where my mother is recovering from an operation on her spine. Be that as it may, she had a rocky time of it last week. At one point a misjudged combination of painkiller and muscle relaxant caused her to hallucinate off and on for the better part of two days, and even after what she saw started to tally more closely with what was really there, I had more than a little bit of trouble persuading her to stay in bed.
Never having been a parent or spent more than a day or two at a time nursing anyone, I didn't know how enervating it can be to take care of a loved one who is for all practical purposes helpless. Nor can I imagine what it would feel like to nurse someone with no hope of recovery (my mother has every expectation of returning to good health). The hospital is a forty-five-minute drive from the front door of my mother's house, and I come home each night so tired that it's all I can do to take my clothes off. In addition to giving a lecture on Tuesday, I'm supposed to write three pieces between now and Friday, when I fly back to New York, and though I'm sure I'll get them finished, I've only managed to come up with a single sentence so far. Blogging is easier, but not so easy that the prose comes spurting merrily out of my fingertips, polished and ready to upload. I generally have to sit in my late father's easy chair for at least an hour after coming home before I can think of anything much more coherent to say than My God, I'm tired!
Part of the problem is that I've been ripped out of my daily routine and plunged into a radically different one. I sleep in an unfamiliar bed to the accompaniment of unfamiliar sounds, surrounded by shelves full of unfamiliar books. My iBook rests on a creaky, ink-stained card table, plugged into a sluggish dialup connection that makes Web surfing a chore. My stereo, CDs, and DVDs are halfway across the country (though not my iPod and miniature speakers, glory be). So are my friends. The restaurants here close early, the stores even earlier. It's as if I'm experiencing the disagreeable parts of a vacation without any of the offsetting novelties.
Of course it's for the best of all possible causes, and no sooner do I catch myself complaining than I remember why I'm in Smalltown, U.S.A., and feel a pang of shame. For years my mother took care of me whenever I needed taking care of, wiping my brow and mending my scrapes, listening to me gripe about the slightest ache or pain (I was no better a patient as a boy than I am as a man). If she ever complained, it wasn't to me. Now it's my turn, and you'd think I'd be able to face the moderate rigors of two weeks' part-time nursing duty with more grace.
If I were a better person, I could at least assure myself that this is a spiritual exercise, a refiner's fire that will toughen my character and make me more considerate and forgiving upon my return to Manhattan. Would that it were so. I'm sure the sheer relief of shedding my cares will leave me dizzy with joy come Friday, but I'm no less sure I'll be my old impatient self within a week at most, wondering why the world isn't capable of ordering itself with a more comprehensive regard to my immediate needs. We singletons have a way of expecting such consideration, especially those of us who keep neat apartments in which everything is just so. Solitude makes finicky, self-regarding connoisseurs of us: it's our compensation for living alone.
Interestingly, I haven't thought much about the Teachout Museum since returning to Smalltown, perhaps in part because the drive from here to the hospital is so pretty. I steer clear of the interstate and take Highway 61, known to southeast Missourians as "the old highway," through a couple of dozen miles of rolling farmland. The trees along Highway 61 are so green this week that Technicolor couldn't begin to capture their intensely saturated hue, while the fields really are the "amber waves of grain" New Yorkers sang about so ardently in the days and weeks after 9/11. Art, I'm sure, means more to city dwellers who live far from such natural pleasures, and when I return home to the city, mine will mean more to me. At present, though, I'm happy to revel in the world around me as I drive to and from my temporary job as a caregiver. That seems to be all the beauty I need.
Posted July 25, 12:02 PM
TT: Almanac
"Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us."W.H. Auden, "Romantic or Free?"
Posted July 25, 12:01 PM
July 24, 2005
OGIC: Attention, Chicagoans
Now that I have my tickets, I can safely advise you to go see Erin McKeown at Schuba's August 27th. A great place to see a show, and--I can attest from personal experience--a great place to discover Ms. McKeown.Posted July 24, 11:51 AM
OGIC: Learning from Los Angeles
It's a hundred degrees and I'm writing on deadline! This is what you might call bad planning. We've known for a week, almost, that today would be the hottest day in Chicago in six years. Things might have been arranged in a such a way that I'd be writing in a more leisurely fashion right now. But I didn't arrange them that way, and now I'm affixed to this chair and keyboard for the rest of the day.And I'm way overdue to blog. There's not too big an opening for this, but I have been compiling a little list of things I learned in L.A., on my recent trip:
1. My hands are the same size as James Mason's--with slightly longer fingers.
2. My feet are the same size as Paul Newman's. Ergo, Newman must be of smaller stature than I realized.
3. Call me philistine, but I can't spend too long inside the Getty Center galleries without itching to get outside to the grounds and gardens again.
4. That said, my favorite room in the Getty is the one containing this still life and this portrait (so to speak). Cool details: the half-translucent lemon at the back of the bowl in the still life, and the tree stump that mirrors the rabbit in the, er, rabbit painting.
5. The staff at the Getty is about a hundred times more tolerant than the security crew at Hollywood and Highland of clusters of people loitering with clipboards in hand, solving puzzles. (I believe we might have been mistaken by the latter for Scientologists.)
6. The weather is perfect. But you knew that.
7. The traffic is intolerable. But you knew that.
What's this about clipboards and puzzles, you say? I'll tell you more about that later. For now, suffice it to say that it doesn't have nothing to do with the man about to be crowned Hottie of the Times (Brain division).
Keep cool!
Posted July 24, 8:11 AM
July 23, 2005
TT: Reminder
I can't read my blogmail while I'm using a dialup connection in Smalltown. If you've written to me through the blog, I'll get back to you the first week in August.Apologies.
Posted July 23, 9:41 AM
July 22, 2005
TT: Almanac
"Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing."Sir Ralph Richardson (quoted in Garry O'Connor, Ralph Richardson: An Actor's Life)
Posted July 22, 12:00 PM
TT: On the air
One more thing before I resume my nursing duties this morning: in case you missed it the first time around, WNYC's Studio 360, hosted by Kurt Andersen, is rerunning an episode in which I talk at some length about criticism in America today, and how it's being affected by the new media. I was very pleased by the way it turned out, as were those of you who listened in and wrote to me about it.If you live in the New York area, Studio 360 is heard over WNYC at ten a.m. Saturday on 93.9 FM and seven p.m. Sunday on 820 AM. For a list of radio stations in other cities that carry the show, go here.
To learn more about this particular episode, go here. You can also use the same page to listen via streaming audio or download the episode as a podcast. (To find out more about podcasts and how they work, go here.)
Now, back to work!
Posted July 22, 10:04 AM
July 21, 2005
TT: Walking distance
I sometimes wonder whether the rural Missouri town where I grew up is losing its individuality. I turned on the car radio yesterday morning and found myself listening to "Sympathy for the Devil," which wasn't exactly what I'd expected to hear on a small-town radio station at eight-thirty in the morning. As I drove to the hospital where my mother is recovering from spinal surgery, I found I had to go well out of my way to see the quirky homemade roadside signs that were commonplace when I was a boy: Hail Sale. Green Tomatoes. It's Sweet Corn Season! Now that computer-generated graphics and franchise trademarks are increasingly ubiquitous, Smalltown, U.S.A., is looking more and more like Anyplace, U.S.A.One thing that hasn't changed is the local accent, a pungent brew of flat, twangy Midwestern vowels and soft-centered deep-South elisions like y'all. Some of the locals call it a "brogue," while others refer to it less euphemistically (though by no means critically) as a "hick accent." Call it what you will, it's the way most folks talk down here, and I see no signs of its having been flattened out by the neutralizing effects of movies and network TV. As I waited for the elevator at the hospital the other day, I overheard two self-evidently gay men chatting away in the thickest of hick accents. I'm not quite sure what that proves--probably nothing--but I have no doubt that it's a social detail worth recording.
Even so, the mass media have left their mark on Smalltown in other, more subtle ways. I ordered my breakfast yesterday from a girl whose name tag disclosed that she calls herself "Destinee," a name that could only have been devised by a mother who spent her own childhood watching hours and hours of TV each day. A block or two down the street from the restaurant where I ate my biscuits and gravy is the Powerhouse of God Church, a local institution that doubtless would have been called something rather more sedate a quarter-century ago. Slowly but surely, my home town is being transformed by the urban world far beyond its borders, a world the Web has made instantaneously accessible to everyone everywhere, including here. (Maud learned yesterday that her blog had been hacked when my sister-in-law, who lives three blocks away from my mother's house, pointed the damage out to me via e-mail, after which I passed the word on to Maud in New York, also via e-mail. That's how plugged-in Smalltown is.)
How will our children know the way things used to be? America's artists have tended either to demonize or sentimentalize small-town life. Even my own City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy occasionally errs in the latter direction, a fact I didn't realize when I wrote it. I can think of several movies, Hoosiers and Sling Blade among them, that get some of the details right, and one, Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count on Me, that conveys much of the essence of how it feels to live in a place like Smalltown. But I can't think of any work of art that captures the flavor of small-town life more succinctly than a song by Mary Chapin Carpenter called "I Am a Town":
I'm a town in Carolina
I'm a detour on a ride
For a phone call and a soda
I'm a blur from the driver's side
I'm the last gas for an hour
If you're going twenty-five
I am Texaco and tobacco
I am dust you leave behind
I'm a church beside the highway
Where the ditches never drain
I'm a Baptist like my daddy
And Jesus knows my name
I am memory and stillness
I am lonely in old age
I am not your destination
I am clinging to my ways
I'm a town in Carolina
I am billboards in the fields
I'm an old truck up on cinder blocks
Missing all my wheels
I am Pabst Blue Ribbon, American,
And Southern Serves the South
I am tucked behind the Jaycees sign
On the rural route
Smalltown used to be like that, and some of it still is, if you know where to look. But much of it has changed irrevocably. It says a lot about the nature of those changes that the Smalltown Depot, from which I took my first train ride forty-four years ago, is now a museum. I'm giving a lecture there next Tuesday, which I suppose makes me a museum piece. It said in the local paper yesterday that I'm "one of the East Coast's elite critics," but all I see when I look in the bathroom mirror is a middle-aged Manhattanite who wanders around his home town thinking about places that closed their doors decades ago: Blackburn's, the War Drum, the Malone Theater, Buckner-Ragsdale, the Moore Company, all of them tucked behind the Jaycees sign on the rural route, visible only in the mind's eye of a gray-haired, nostalgia-prone singleton like me.
Posted July 21, 12:02 PM
TT: Almanac
"We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves."James Joyce, Ulysses
Posted July 21, 12:01 PM
TT: Why must the show go on?
I just got home from a twelve-hour shift of amateur nursing, and I'm bushed. I have nothing to say on any subjects other than hospital cuisine (one thumb sideways) and the kindness of professional nurses (three thumbs way, way up). In addition, I took a week off from my Wall Street Journal theater column, so there won't be a teaser tomorrow. Expect no further posts until Monday.Soooo later.
Posted July 21, 9:43 AM
July 20, 2005
TT: Specimen days
- Just fine, thanks. We don't yet know when she'll be coming home from the hospital, but everything else is going swimmingly. She ate a hearty dinner--as hearty as institutional cuisine gets, anyway--and walked fifty feet on the arm of a nurse. Tomorrow she starts physical rehabilitation.
- I'm on dialup for the duration, which makes it difficult for me to read my blogmail. Please don't be surprised (or offended) if you don't hear back from me until early August.
- I wore one of my Hip Black New York Outfits to the hospital this morning (all my other clothes were dirty). When I left to get some lunch, a nurse asked my mother, "How does it feel to have a priest in the family?"
- Here are the headlines on the front page of last night's local paper: (1) "Rain Brought Much Relief for Farmers." (2) "Life-Saver Award Goes to Officer." (3) "Smalltown Resident Gets the Price Right" (i.e., she was picked as a contestant on The Price Is Right). (4) "Sometimes You Spell Allergy Relief, S-H-O-T."
That's how I know I'm back in Smalltown, U.S.A. And glad to be.
- Further proof that there's no place like home: I can walk in total darkness from one end of my mother's house to the other without bumping into anything. (I can't even do that in my own apartment!)
- I brought a big stack of books with me to Smalltown, and so far I've been chewing them up at a rate of approximately one and a third per day. Here's what's on my nightstand:
The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War, by Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi (yes, I read Louis Menand's New Yorker review).
Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, by Penny M. Von Eschen, and Bix: The Definitive Biography of a Jazz Legend, by Jean Pierre Lion (I'm yoking them together for a Commentary essay).
J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story Behind Peter Pan, by Andrew Birkin (I'd been meaning for years to read this book, and when a friend asked me the other day whether there was any truth to Finding Neverland, I decided it was time to put up or shut up).
Elia Kazan: A Biography, by Richard Schickel (now in bound galleys, out in November).
A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry, by Czeslaw Milosz (no special reason, except maybe that Ms. Searchblog admires him so extravagantly).
At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, by A. Roger Ekirch (sent to me by a former protégé who is now a heavy-hitting New York book editor).
That ought to keep me afloat for two weeks, don't you think?
- Our Girl's blogging again! Scroll down and be glad.
Posted July 20, 12:03 PM
TT: Almanac
"Strangers always love us for what we've accomplished, ignoring the fact that, by definition, that very accomplishment no longer touches us."Ned Rorem, letter to Glenway Wescott (August 31, 1967)
Posted July 20, 12:01 PM
July 19, 2005
TT: Smooth operation
Yesterday morning I arose before dawn, took my mother to the hospital where I was born forty-nine years ago, and watched her vanish down a corridor, wondering if I'd see her alive again. Seven hours later I was feeding her ice chips from a plastic spoon and doing my best not to get choked up as I told her she didn't look too bad, considering.In fact, she came through her operation somewhat bloodied (she lost a cupful) but mostly unbowed, and when it was over the surgeon informed us--convincingly--that the prospects for her recovery were excellent. I passed the word to her a couple of hours later in her hospital room, and she smiled wanly. Then I pulled out my cell phone and started calling all the people on the list she'd handed me the night before.
I don't know what you do on the eve of major spinal surgery, but my brother, a man of action, decided the situation called for a cookout and proceeded to barbecue a mountain of pork chops, chicken breasts, and jalapeño sausages on his charcoal grill. Since my mother was under the strictest possible orders to eat no solid food after seven p.m. and we had to hit the road at five-thirty the next day, we dined on the early side. Neither one of us felt much like sleeping after I drove her back home, so we watched The High and the Mighty on AMC. We were nervous and didn't care to admit it, mutually self-evident though it was, so I said the most outrageous thing I could think of in order to break the ice.
"Don't die, Mom," I told her during a commercial. "I didn't pack a suit."
There followed what actors call a beat--well, maybe three--followed by an explosion of wild laughter and a bear hug. Then John Wayne saved the day, and we turned off the TV feeling much better and headed for bed.
Now I'm home alone in the house where I grew up, preparing to fall into the same bed after what I think it's fair to call a really long day. I wanted to post something profound before retiring, but it's all I can do to spell profound. Instead, I'll settle for feeling something profound, and go to sleep.
See you later.
P.S. If you want to know what kind of mother I have, here's the answer: she baked me a cake the day before I came home.
Posted July 19, 12:03 PM
TT: Almanac
Beloved, we are always in the wrong,Handling so clumsily our stupid lives,
Suffering too little or too long,
Too careful even in our selfish loves;
The decorative manias we obey
Die in grimaces round us every day,
Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice
Which utters an absurd command--Rejoice.
W.H. Auden, "In Sickness and in Health"
Posted July 19, 12:01 PM
TT: Words from the wise
A friend who should know writes:One of life's greatest joys is that relief rush that follows a loved one's successful surgery, not to mention the reunion afterwards with whoever had to brave the table. The world briefly seems to be about the simple basics and I wouldn't have it any other way.
What she said.
Now I'm off to the hospital to amuse my mother. Work can wait. Likewise the world. See you tonight.
Posted July 19, 10:23 AM
OGIC: Toe, meet Water
I'm back up and running computerwise, finally, though there are a couple glitches with the email (also, I lost a bunch of July email in the crash, so feel free to write again if you didn't get an answer). Most of the relevant glitches, though, concern my schedule, which is very, very overbooked. Would you believe me if I said I'm going to be back with a vengeance over the weekend? No, I wouldn't believe me either. But that will make it all the more titillating when the threat/promise actually materializes....In the meantime, though, there is one thing that has been on my mind since before the changing of the Macs, which is simply this: the new Erin McKeown totally lives up, and check out those adorable bird innards. Charming, no? The album isn't what my previous experience of Ms. McKeown's music had led me to expect--and I mean this in the best possible way. The capacity to surprise is an excellent thing. Listening to WWBLB (as Terry and I shorthand it), I've found, can be a little like reading a decompressed sestina. And haven't you always wanted to hear a really, really good song about The Columbian Exposition? Of course you have. Case closed!
Posted July 19, 1:42 AM
July 15, 2005
TT: 'We know this shame'
My drama column in today's Wall Street Journal is a tripleheader. First is Primo, Sir Anthony Sher's one-man stage version of Primo Levi's Auschwitz memoir:"Primo" is a very great piece of theater, but the tale, not the teller, is what matters most, and it is to their credit that Sir Anthony and Richard Wilson, his director, have opted for stark simplicity in presenting "If This Is a Man" (originally published in the U.S. as "Survival in Auschwitz"). The set, designed by Hildegard Bechtler, consists of a few concrete walls, a shovelful of gravel and a single wooden chair. Into this cold, bare space walks the bespectacled Sir Anthony, wearing an old cardigan. "It was my good fortune," he says matter-of-factly, "to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944...I was 24, with little wisdom, no experience, and a tendency--encouraged by the life of segregation forced on me by the racial laws--to live in an unrealistic world of my own." Then, without further ado, he flings you into the bowels of hell....
Next up, the Mint Theater's wonderful revival of The Skin Game:
Despite the TV versions of "The Forsyte Saga," John Galsworthy is no longer widely remembered in this country as a novelist, much less a playwright, though he used to be world-famous in both capacities (he actually won the 1932 Nobel Prize for literature). None of his 27 plays has been seen on Broadway since 1931. Now the Mint Theater Company, a tiny off-Broadway troupe with a justly admired knack for exhuming what it calls "buried theatrical treasures," has revived "The Skin Game," a 1920 melodrama about the limits of upward mobility in England, and it proves to be a rattling good show indeed....
Lastly, Shakespeare in the Park:
After a dismaying string of fair-to-middling Shakespeare in the Park offerings, the Public Theater has brought a winner to its outdoor home, Central Park's Delacorte Theater. Mark Lamos's production of "As You Like It" is a summery romp played out on a giant map of the cosmos, with the trees of the park (and Belvedere Castle just beyond) supplying a lovely backdrop for romantic hijinks in the Forest of Arden....
My column for this week is one of the stories in Friday's Journal that's being made available on line in its entirety as part of the Journal's "Today's Free Features" Web page. To read the whole thing, of which there's far more, go here. If you're a blogger, link away!
As usual, you can also read the column on paper by shelling out a dollar for today's Journal or (better yet) going here to subscribe to the Online Journal, Web-based journalism's best deal ever.
UPDATE: The original London production of Primo was telecast and will be released on DVD in the U.S. next month by Kultur. To place an advance order, go here.
Posted July 15, 12:08 PM
TT: Words to the wise
Bill Kirchner, editor of The Oxford Companion to Jazz, writes:In the fall of 2000, The Oxford Companion to Jazz was published--864 pages long, with 60 essays by 59 distinguished musicians, scholars, and critics. In 2001, the Jazz Journalists Association voted it "Best Jazz Book" of the year. And it received over 50 reviews worldwide, about 90 percent of them positive. My favorite "review," though, came from composer-arranger Johnny Mandel, who remarked: "Putting this book together must have been like being contractor for the Ellington band."
I'm pleased to announce that this month, the Companion has just become available in a new paperback edition, complete with a number of small additions and corrections. It can be purchased in bookstores internationally as well as from a variety of Internet outlets. At, I might add, an even more reasonable price than previously: $29.95 U.S. (retail).
If you haven't yet checked out this book (which a number of schools have used as a textbook), I hope that the following list of essays and contributors will serve as encouragement.
- "African Roots of Jazz"--Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.
- "European Roots of Jazz"--William H. Youngren
- "Ragtime Then and Now"--Max Morath
- "The Early Origins of Jazz"--Jeff Taylor
- "New York Roots: Black Broadway, James Reese Europe, Early Pianists"--Thomas L. Riis
- "The Blues in Jazz"--Bob Porter
- "Bessie Smith"--Chris Albertson
- "King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, and Sidney Bechet: Ménage à Trois, New Orleans Style"--Bruce Boyd Raeburn
- "Louis Armstrong"--Dan Morgenstern
- "Bix Beiderbecke"--Digby Fairweather
- "Duke Ellington"--Mark Tucker
- "Hot Music in the 1920s: The 'Jazz Age,' Appearances and Realities"--Richard M. Sudhalter
- "Pianists of the 1920s and 1930s"--Henry Martin
- "Coleman Hawkins"--Kenny Berger
- "Lester Young"--Loren Schoenberg
- "Major Soloists of the 1930s and 1940s"--John McDonough
- "Jazz Singing: Between Blues and Bebop"--Joel E. Siegel
- "Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Billie Holiday"--Patricia Willard
- "Jazz and the American Song"--Gene Lees
- "Pre-Swing Era Big Bands and Jazz Composing and Arranging"--James T. Maher and Jeffrey Sultanof
- "Swing Era Big Bands and Jazz Composing and Arranging"--Max Harrison
- "The Advent of Bebop"--Scott DeVeaux
- "The New Orleans Revival"--Richard Hadlock
- "Charlie Parker"--James Patrick
- "Cool Jazz and West Coast Jazz"--Ted Gioia
- "Jazz and Classical Music: To the Third Stream and Beyond"--Terry Teachout
- "Pianists of the 1940s and 1950s"--Dick Katz
- "Hard Bop"--Gene Seymour
- "Miles Davis"--Bob Belden
- "Big Bands and Jazz Composing and Arranging After World War II"--Doug Ramsey
- "Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus"--Brian Priestley
- "John Coltrane"--Lewis Porter
- "The Avant-Garde, 1949-1967"--Lawrence Kart
- "Pianists of the 1960s and 1970s"--Bob Blumenthal
- "Jazz Singing Since the 1940s"--Will Friedwald
- "Jazz Since 1968"--Peter Keepnews
- "Fusion"--Bill Milkowski
- "Jazz Repertory"--Jeffrey Sultanof
- "Latin Jazz"--Gene Santoro
- "Jazz in Europe: The Real World Music...or The Full Circle"--Mike Zwerin
- "Jazz and Brazilian Music"--Stephanie L. Stein Crease
- "Jazz in Africa: The Ins and Outs"--Howard Mandel
- "Jazz in Japan"--Kiyoshi Koyama
- "Jazz in Canada and Australia"--Terry Martin
- "The Clarinet in Jazz"--Michael Ullman
- "The Saxophone in Jazz"--Don Heckman
- "The Trumpet in Jazz"--Randy Sandke
- "The Trombone in Jazz"--Gunther Schuller
- "The Electric Guitar and Vibraphone in Jazz: Batteries Not Included"--Neil Tesser
- "Miscellaneous Instruments in Jazz"--Christopher Washburne
- "The Bass in Jazz"--Bill Crow
- "Jazz Drumming"--Burt Korall
- "Jazz and Dance"--Robert P. Crease
- "Jazz and Film and Television"--Chuck Berg
- "Jazz Clubs"--Vincent Pelote
- "Jazz and American Literature"--Gerald Early
- "Jazz Criticism"--Ron Welburn
- "Jazz Education"--Charles Beale
- "Recorded Jazz"--Dan Morgenstern
- "Jazz Improvisation and Concepts of Virtuosity"--David Demsey
To order a paperback copy of the revised and corrected Oxford Companion to Jazz, go here. Even if you don't like my chapter (of which I'm actually quite proud), it's still worth every cent.
Posted July 15, 12:03 PM
TT: Almanac
"As uncommon a thing as true love is, it is yet easier to find than true friendship."La Rochefoucauld, Moral Maxims and Reflections
Posted July 15, 12:01 PM
TT: Oh, the humidity!
This is one of those horrible days when nobody in Manhattan is out and about who doesn't need to be. Alas, I do. Not only am I seeing three performances tonight and tomorrow (Merce Cunningham's Ocean, Basil Twist's La bella dormente nel bosco, and another program by Pilobolus), but I have a houseguest arriving on Saturday afternoon and countless errands to run before I hit the road again first thing Sunday morning.All this notwithstanding, I decided to visit an art gallery today, having learned from Ionarts that Salander-O'Reilly, one of my favorite New York galleries, is featuring several of my favorite painters, among them Milton Avery, Jane Freilicher, Arnold Friedman, Marsden Hartley, Albert Kresch, and John Marin, in its summer inventory show, "Scapes/Landscapes." I scooped up two dollars' worth of accumulated nickels, hopped a crosstown bus to 79th and Madison, and there discovered that the summer hours posted on the Salander-O'Reilly Web site are off by an hour. (Fortunately, the show is up through August 26, so I'll get another crack at it.) I wilted briefly in the sun, then noticed that a branch of my bank was right across the street, thus allowing me to do one of my essential pre-trip errands, which cheered me up no end. I returned to my air-conditioned apartment on the next bus, not much the worse for the wear.
As many of you will recall, my upcoming trip to Missouri is neither for pleasure nor business. My mother is undergoing spinal surgery on Monday, so I'll be spending the next two weeks in Smalltown, U.S.A., looking after her while she recuperates. Since I've got a couple of deadlines hanging over my head, I'm bringing my iBook with me, and I hope to be blogging at least intermittently. (I've already freshened the Top Fives in preparation for my departure.) I don't expect to be back on line until Tuesday at the earliest, though, so I thought I'd wave goodbye now.
If I were going to be posting an almanac entry on Monday, this'd be it:
"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."
Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace
See you next week.
Posted July 15, 5:45 AM
July 14, 2005
TT: Almanac
"Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family--but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything."Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock
Posted July 14, 12:01 PM
July 13, 2005
TT: Almanac
"Whoever invented the meeting must have had Hollywood in mind. I think they should consider giving Oscars for meetings: Best Meeting of the Year, Best Supporting Meeting, Best Meeting Based on Material from Another Meeting."William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade
Posted July 13, 12:01 PM
TT: After you get what you want
I spent Wednesday in Washington, D.C., attending two closed sessions of the National Council on the Arts. All fun, all interesting, and my fellow council members are as collegial as can be, but it was still a long, hot, humid day, and when it was over I knew I'd be coming back to a hotel whose air conditioning has proved unequal to the demands of Washington in July. (I've also been having troubles with the hotel's high-speed Internet service.) Hence I didn't care to spend the evening in my room, and it happened that all of my Washington-based friends were either busy or elsewhere tonight.What to do? I treated myself to a good dinner, then went looking for a movie I hadn't seen, which turned out to be Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know. On my way to the theater, I tried to think of the last time I'd spent an evening watching a movie by myself in a city other than New York. When I go out of town, it's usually to visit a friend or cover a performance, so I tend not to be faced with the problem of what to do after dinner. At length I recalled that I'd seen Audrey Wells' Guinevere in Washington's Dupont Circle six years ago. I liked it very much, and I liked Me and You and Everyone We Know even more, but a few minutes into the film, it struck me that (A) I was watching a sad little comedy about the loneliness of postmodern urban life and (B) nobody in the world knew where I was.
Sitting in the sparsely peopled theater, alone with the characters and with myself, I thought of a remark A.J. Liebling made in my favorite of his books, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris:
Granted that in later life a man will have to learn to get along with other people--I learn with horror that the knack is now taught in high school as a "social study"--that is all the more reason there should be a period in his life when he has to get along with nobody but himself. It will be a sweetness to remember.
I think there's quite a bit of truth in that--up to a point. I don't spend too many evenings by myself: I'm in the company of friends far more often than not, watching performances or just hanging out. Sometimes I find myself hungering for solitude, and there are occasions when I'm almost painfully grateful to spend a night with my prints, my CDs, my iBook, and my trusty TV, watching What's My Line?, keeping my own counsel and staying up as late as I like. I've recently discovered, much to my surprise, that I even like vacationing alone. At the same time, I'm no hermit, and like most singletons, I find there are other times when being alone is no fun at all. One is when you finish watching a really good movie and, instead of chatting about it over a drink with a friend, retire to an empty hotel room in a city far from home.
My solitude, fortunately, will only last a single night. Tomorrow morning I'll be meeting my v., v. cool friend Ali for breakfast, after which I'll head over to the Old Post Office for one more NCA session. At twelve-thirty I'm lunching with a fellow newspaperman, then taking a mid-afternoon train to New York. In the evening I'm taking Bass Player, one of my favorite people in the whole world, to see Pilobolus at the Joyce Theater, after which we intend to have a late supper and talk until the waiters start giving us dirty looks. Friday and Saturday will be much the same, and by Sunday, when I fly home to Smalltown, U.S.A., I'll probably be thinking wistfully of my solitary trip to the movies.
Would we all be happier if we were capable of always enjoying to the fullest whatever we're doing at the moment we're doing it? Probably--but then we wouldn't be quite human, would we? Such contentment is not in our natures: we keep one eye on the horizon, and sometimes both, which leaves neither free to see the moments that pass before us in review, each one crying out, Look at me! Aren't I pretty? George Balanchine knew better. "Why are you stingy with yourselves?" he used to ask his dancers. "Why are you holding back? What are you saving for--for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now." But, then, Balanchine was a genius, while I'm just a middle-aged critic, whiling away an idle hour in an overheated hotel room in Washington, hoping it cools down enough for me to get some sleep.
Posted July 13, 10:27 AM
July 12, 2005
TT: Quite enough for one day, thanks
The last 24 hours or so have been, um, hectic. I went to Central Park last night to see As You Like It, arose early this morning to write, edit, and file my review, ran several thousand errands, jumped in a cab at the last possible minute and raced to Penn Station to take the last possible train to Washington, D.C., took another cab from Union Station in Washington to the National Endowment for the Arts, spent the next six hours in meetings (during one of which dinner was served), took yet another cab to my hotel, checked in, turned on and plugged in my iBook, read and responded to 67 e-mails, and now am blogging at last. Did I mention that ArtsJournal's blogging platform was down this morning, making it impossible for me to post prior to hitting the road? Or that the temperature in New York and Washington today was in the approximate vicinity of hellacious? Or that the air conditioner in my expensive hotel room is not adequate?Anyway, I'm done, and I'm about to go to bed. I'll try to post something worth reading at some time or other on Wednesday, but I'm not good for anything more tonight. Do forgive me--I spent the whole day selflessly serving you, the American taxpayer. (If you're not an American taxpayer, I spent the whole day not serving you. Tough.) Now I shall sleep the sleep of the just.
Later.
P.S. In case you didn't notice, four of the Top Fives are new this week. Read 'em.
Posted July 12, 10:47 AM
TT: Almanac
"I'm not a genius. There's no room for genius in the theatre, it's too much trouble."Sir Laurence Olivier (quoted in Simon Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor)
Posted July 12, 10:44 AM
July 11, 2005
TT: Where we've been, where we'll be
I just got off the phone with Our Girl in Chicago. She, too, was elsewhere last week, but she can't tell you about it herself, because no sooner did she come back to the Big Windy than her hard drive started emitting black smoke, then went kaplooey and gave up the ghost. As of tonight she doesn't have an Official Estimated Time to Return to Blogging (or e-mail, for that matter--be patient). I'll keep you posted.As for me, I'll be taking the Metroliner to Washington, D.C., on Tuesday morning to attend a three-day-long meeting of the National Council on the Arts. I'm thinking of taking my iBook with me so that I can blog from my hotel room (which means, of course, that I probably will).
A more extended absence is in the offing, however: I'm off to Smalltown, U.S.A., on Sunday. It isn't a vacation--my mother will be going into the hospital that day for an operation. Not to worry, it isn't anything life-threatening, but it'll be disagreeable at best, so I'm planning to stick around for a couple of weeks. I'll be blogging from there, and you'll hear about everything as it happens.
Given these distractions, don't be surprised if I should vanish unexpectedly and without warning for a whole day, or even two. It probably means I'm in transit, or emptying a bedpan. Whatever it is, wherever I am, I'll be back as soon as possible. Likewise OGIC. After two years' worth of steady blogging, I think it's safe to say that we aren't going anywhere. We like it here, and we like you.
Posted July 11, 12:05 PM
TT: One for the road
Last Tuesday afternoon, having seen too many plays and written too many pieces and desiring to break free of my life for a few short days, I shut my iBook, packed a small bag, picked up a Zipcar at a garage around the corner from my Upper West Side apartment, and drove over the George Washington Bridge, up the Palisades Parkway, past West Point, and across a twisty road cut into the side of Storm King Mountain. Within an hour I was well north of all my usual Hudson Valley haunts, and by suppertime I was rolling into Woodstock, New York, a town that time seems to have left behind--thirty-six years behind, to be exact. My destination was the Woodstock Inn by the Millstream, an old-fashioned motel lately converted into something not unlike a newfangled B&B. The simple yet attractive rooms are a few steps away from what the inn's Web site correctly describes as "a swimming hole gracefully carved from the rocky bed of the Millstream." I sat at a table by the water until it was too dark to keep on reading De Kooning: An American Master. I tried to check my messages, but my cell phone was out of range, so I went to bed, read until I was drowsy, switched off the lamp, and fell asleep.I returned to my brookside table in the morning to partake of what the modest proprietors of the Woodstock Inn are pleased to call a continental breakfast, though in point of fact it includes such tasty treats as smoked salmon and miniature quiches. My original plan had been to go more or less straight from there to my next stop, but ten minutes out of Woodstock I decided to improvise, turned right instead of left, threw open the windows and sunroof, cranked up Miles Davis' 'Round About Midnight, and drove all the way through the Catskill Park to the Pepacton Reservoir, a man-made body of water whose creation required the seizure, condemnation, and flooding in 1955 of four now-forgotten villages to whose former existence four small roadside signs pay tribute. (Donald Westlake once wrote a comic crime novel whose hapless protagonists sought to retrieve a buried stash from one of those underwater towns.) I felt as though I had come at last to the far side of the world, infinitely removed from the irritations of everyday existence.
I stopped for lunch in a mountain town with the quaint name of Roscoe. Spotting a B&B by the side of the road, I resolved on the spot to stay there one day, but since I had another place to be that night, I pointed my Zipcar southward and drove unhurriedly through the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, pausing briefly to take a roadside nap. No sooner did I exit the National Recreation Area than I found myself trapped in the hideous foothills of the Poconos, surrounded by tourist-trap attractions of the grubbiest sort. I drove by a huge sign directing me to Caesars Pocono Palace and declaring that Crosby, Stills & Nash would be playing there in August. Only a week or two before, I'd been wondering whatever had become of Stephen Stills, one of the musical idols of my rock-and-roll youth. Now, mere hours after I'd spent a perfectly happy night in Woodstock, answer there came in the form of a bright neon sign: he plays casinos. To sing the blues you've got to live the tunes...and carry on, I thought, and shuddered.
Before long I was snaking down the Delaware River to Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania, the home of Bridgeton House On-the-Delaware, an inn about which I can't begin to say enough good things. It's on the river, the rooms are handsomely appointed, and most even have their own private riverfront balconies. After driving across the bridge to the Milford Oyster House, there to sup on Crab Norfolk and a garlic-laden salad, I retreated to my balcony to watch the river flow and the fireflies blink. It was a hot and humid night, but before 15 minutes had passed the temperature had plunged at least as many degrees, and the fireflies flew off to make way for a thunderstorm. The lightning exploded over Upper Black Eddy as I looked on, delighting in the gaudy detonations far overhead. A half-hour later the storm was gone, and I climbed gratefully into my soft bed to read February House: The Story of W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America and drift at length into yet another deep, untroubled sleep.
Another tasty breakfast, another unhurried drive across the river and along country roads, and in a couple of hours I had made my roundabout way to the rusty outskirts of Newark. Is there any other place in the world where beauty and ugliness alternate with such dizzying rapidity as in New Jersey? My midday destination was the Newark Museum, where I planned to spend an hour or two looking at "In the American Grain: Dove, Hartley, Marin, O'Keeffe, and Stieglitz," a touring exhibition put together by the Phillips Collection, and inspecting the museum's own permanent collection of American art, about which I'd long heard great things, all of which are true. Alas, the Newark Museum has become yet another of those aging inner-city temples to art that has outlived its clientele and now behaves as though it's slightly embarrassed to display its paintings, hiding them upstairs and explaining their beauties away with the kind of hectoring, didactic wall labels that give art scholarship a bad name. (It says everything about the museum that its own shop sells not a single book or pamphlet describing the permanent collection.) I arrived halfway through a noontime jazz concert, passed up an exhibition called "Here Come the Brides: Fairy Tales, Folklore & Wedding Traditions," and finally made my circuitous way to the upstairs galleries. Except for three stone-faced guards, I was the only living soul there. I oohed and aahed at Marsden Hartley's Still Life--Calla Lilies, Joseph Stella's Voice of the City of New York Interpreted, and Joseph Cornell's Les Constellations Voisines de Pôle, then reveled in a dozen fabulous John Marins and Arthur Doves that haven't been on view for the past couple of years. Yet I don't know when I've seen a sadder museum.
I fled Newark as fast as my Zipcar would carry me, roaring down the New Jersey Turnpike past mile after mile of industrial blight (And was Jerusalem builded here/Among these dark Satanic mills?), arriving in due course at the Jersey Shore, a place I'd heard about for years but never seen. Coming as I do from the middle of America, I find at the age of forty-nine that I can count on the fingers of both hands the number of nights I've slept by an ocean. Like everyone who falls in love with the sea in adulthood, I'm incapable of saying anything about it that hasn't been said a million times before: its ever-changing, self-renewing presence instantly reduces me to clichés. As I sat on the boardwalk and watched the waves that my beloved Fairfield Porter painted so well, I could do no better than to recall the words of Jean de la Ville de Mirmont that Gabriel Fauré set to music with such exquisitely apposite simplicity in L'horizon chimérique, the most perfect of all his song cycles: The sea is infinite and my dreams are wild.
Would that the Jersey Shore were better suited to such romantic reflections! It is what it is, a strip of sandy beach overlooked by the balconies of a thousand tacky condos, crammed to overflowing with noisily joyous vacationers, and I was what I was, a middle-aged aesthete dressed in black, seated on a bench and gazing in silent wonder at the surf. Still and all, I liked it just fine, though I'm probably too old ever to feel what my friend John Pizzarelli feels when he sings I Like Jersey Best:
Traveling down the Turnpike
Heading for the shore
A thought just then occurred to me
I never thought before
I've been a lot of places
Seen pictures of the rest
But of all the places I can think of
I like Jersey best.
I sat by the sea for a good half-hour before I thought to pull out my cell phone and call my mother back in Smalltown, U.S.A. "Listen, Mom," I said, and held the phone up to catch the sound of the waves. "Can you hear the ocean?"
"No, not really...oh, yes! Yes, I can." She paused. "I hate to tell you bad news in the middle of your vacation, but did you hear what happened in London today?"
"No," I said, realizing in a sickening instant what it must have been. "I haven't seen a paper or turned on my car radio since I left New York."
She told me of the four bombs that mere hours before had killed four dozen Londoners on the other side of the ocean by which I sat. All at once I remembered Auden's poem about how suffering "takes place/While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along." On Thursday I was one of those someone elses.
The waves having briefly lost their savor, I gave up my bench and walked across Ocean Avenue to the Cashelmara Inn, my comfortable home for the night, on whose broad, inviting veranda I sat in a rocking chair for a peaceful hour, listening to my iPod, lapping up the sea breeze, and playing idly with the two golden retrievers who call the inn home. After dining at a cheerful restaurant a block away, I retired to my cozy dormered room on the third floor. I slept badly, awakened by a nightmare for whose origins I didn't have to look far.
My window was spattered with fast-falling rain when I got up the next morning. I knew there would be no more sitting on the boardwalk, so I packed my bag resignedly and went down to breakfast. The dining room was occupied by four families and an unattached woman, a bespectacled brunette with sharp, pretty features who read Good Housekeeping while she ate. I cast sidelong glances at the happy families that surrounded us on all sides. Don't be so sure of yourselves, I thought, feeling a wave of silent camaraderie for my fellow singleton. I was once as you are, and someday you may be as we are. Life is pandemonium!
An hour later I was driving back up the New Jersey Turnpike toward the George Washington Bridge, and an hour after that I was unlocking the door of my apartment. I greeted the etchings and lithographs on the walls as if they were my own family, then turned on my iBook for the first time in three days and found 205 pieces of e-mail awaiting me. I closed my eyes and thought of fireflies, smoked salmon, the smell of the ocean, and the half-recalled colors of a painting by Arthur Dove. "I can't wait to do it all again," I said out loud. Then I dragged my chair a little closer to the cluttered desk and started answering my mail, and the tentacles of dailiness reached out and swept me back into their embrace.
Posted July 11, 12:02 PM
TT: Almanac
I wish you would touch meI wish you'd leave me the hell alone
And oh, how I wish this crutch
Didn't leave such an imprint in my bone
All these half-assed wishes
Stretched across the stars
Lead to angry men in cocktail bars.
René Marie, "Wishes"
Posted July 11, 12:01 PM
TT: Almanac
Ten things an older man must never say to a younger woman:1) I'm dying!
2) I can't hear what you're saying!
3) How many fingers are you holding up?
4) Listen to my heart.
5) Take my pulse.
6) What's your name?
7) Is it cold in here?
8) Is it hot in here?
9) Are you in here?
10) What wings are those beating at the window?
Not that a man should stress his youth in a dishonest way
But that he should not unduly emphasize his age.
Kenneth Koch, "The Art of Love"
Posted July 11, 12:01 PM
July 8, 2005
TT: I've been thinking about this poem today
About suffering they were never wrong,The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
W.H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts"
Posted July 08, 4:11 AM
TT: Remember this?
The Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index is a year old this week, so I thought I'd repost it for the benefit of those who missed it the first time around.If you had to choose, would you pick:
1. Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly?
2. The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises?
3. Count Basie or Duke Ellington?
4. Cats or dogs?
5. Matisse or Picasso?
6. Yeats or Eliot?
7. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin?
8. Flannery O'Connor or John Updike?
9. To Have and Have Not or Casablanca?
10. Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning?
11. The Who or the Stones?
12. Philip Larkin or Sylvia Plath?
13. Trollope or Dickens?
14. Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald?
15. Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy?
16. The Moviegoer or The End of the Affair?
17. George Balanchine or Martha Graham?
18. Hot dogs or hamburgers?
19. Letterman or Leno?
20. Wilco or Cat Power?
21. Verdi or Wagner?
22. Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe?
23. Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash?
24. Kingsley or Martin Amis?
25. Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando?
26. Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp?
27. Vermeer or Rembrandt?
28. Tchaikovsky or Chopin?
29. Red wine or white?
30. Noël Coward or Oscar Wilde?
31. Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity?
32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev?
33. Mikhail Baryshnikov or Rudolf Nureyev?
34. Constable or Turner?
35. The Searchers or Rio Bravo?
36. Comedy or tragedy?
37. Fall or spring?
38. Manet or Monet?
39. The Sopranos or The Simpsons?
40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin?
41. Joseph Conrad or Henry James?
42. Sunset or sunrise?
43. Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter?
44. Mac or PC?
45. New York or Los Angeles?
46. Partisan Review or Horizon?
47. Stax or Motown?
48. Van Gogh or Gauguin?
49. Steely Dan or Elvis Costello?
50. Reading a blog or reading a magazine?
51. John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier?
52. Only the Lonely or Songs for Swingin' Lovers?
53. Chinatown or Bonnie and Clyde?
54. Ghost World or Election?
55. Minimalism or conceptual art?
56. Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny?
57. Modernism or postmodernism?
58. Batman or Spider-Man?
59. Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams?
60. Johnson or Boswell?
61. Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf?
62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show?
63. An Eames chair or a Noguchi table?
64. Out of the Past or Double Indemnity?
65. The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni?
66. Blue or green?
67. A Midsummer Night's Dream or As You Like It?
68. Ballet or opera?
69. Film or live theater?
70. Acoustic or electric?
71. North by Northwest or Vertigo?
72. Sargent or Whistler?
73. V.S. Naipaul or Milan Kundera?
74. The Music Man or Oklahoma?
75. Sushi, yes or no?
76. The New Yorker under Ross or Shawn?
77. Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee?
78. The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove?
79. Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham?
80. Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe?
81. Diana Krall or Norah Jones?
82. Watercolor or pastel?
83. Bus or subway?
84. Stravinsky or Schoenberg?
85. Crunchy or smooth peanut butter?
86. Willa Cather or Theodore Dreiser?
87. Schubert or Mozart?
88. The Fifties or the Twenties?
89. Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick?
90. Thomas Mann or James Joyce?
91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins?
92. Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman?
93. Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill?
94. Liz Phair or Aimee Mann?
95. Italian or French cooking?
96. Bach on piano or harpsichord?
97. Anchovies, yes or no?
98. Short novels or long ones?
99. Swing or bebop?
100. "The Last Judgment" or "The Last Supper"?
Close readers of "About Last Night" may already have guessed that I'd choose column A over column B in all cases--but some calls would be much closer than others, while others remain subject to change without notice....
How about you? What's your Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index? If you answered all 100 questions, your TCCI is the number of answers from column A. If you left some of the questions blank because you weren't familiar with one or both of the possible answers, your TCCI is the number of column-A answers divided by the total number of questions that you answered.
(If you're taking the TCCI for the first time, go here when you're done to read last year's explanation of what it's all about.)
Posted July 08, 2:11 AM
TT: Tempest on a hilltop
It's Friday, and I'm back from the road and ready to post my Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I reviewed two out-of-town shows today, the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival's production of The Tempest and Barrington Stage Company's revival of Stephen Sondheim's Follies:When playing Shakespeare out of doors, nothing is so dangerous as a beautiful view. The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival is currently performing "The Tempest" in a tent pitched on the well-kept lawn of the Boscobel Restoration, an 1808 mansion on a high wooded bluff that overlooks the Hudson River. Even after you've spent a pleasant hour picnicking on the grass, the spectacle of the water below and the mountains beyond remains irresistibly seductive. Terrence O'Brien, founder and artistic director of the festival and director of this production, has wisely chosen not to fight the view but blend with it, and the result is a winsome "Tempest" that seems as much a part of its natural surroundings as the silver moon in the night sky overhead....
I've long wondered whether "Follies" might be a small show trapped inside a giant body, in which case it could profit from a bare-bones rethinking along the lines of Stafford Arima's Paper Mill Playhouse revival of "Ragtime." Instead, Julianne Boyd, Barrington Stage Company's artistic director, has stuck as close to the look and feel of the original production of "Follies" as her limited resources will allow, and she's done an impressive job of making the most of the tools at hand, thanks in part to an outstanding cast (whose roster of showgirls includes Donna McKechnie and Marni Nixon!). If the results fail to tell us anything new about "Follies," they nonetheless succeed in bringing a flawed yet eloquent show to pulsing, passionate life.
No link. To read the whole thing, buy this morning's Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal.
Posted July 08, 1:06 AM
TT: Almanac
"Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist."W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand
Posted July 08, 1:00 AM
July 7, 2005
TT: Almanac
"He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth; he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May."William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor
Posted July 07, 12:01 PM
July 6, 2005
TT: Almanac
"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun."Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely
Posted July 06, 12:01 PM
July 5, 2005
OGIC: Joss Whedon, McCarthyite?
I was inspired to post the fortune cookie below after dining last night with friends whose non-Catholic daughter is about to start Catholic school and isn't quite sure what to expect. This reminded me of how passionately Mary McCarthy writes of the superior historical education she received at her convent school. That education was effective, she found, in direct proportion to its high-pitched subjectivity: the conviction with which the nuns cast historical actors as heroes and villains and the inculcation of a powerful rooting interest in the students. The cookie below is part of the chapter of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood that describes this education, "C'est le Premier Pas Qui Coûte." What I wasn't expecting when I plucked this staple of the OGIC canon from its shelf tonight, however, was to find a reference there to a business with essentially the same name as a character in Buffy. No doubt a coincidence...or could it possibly be that Joss Whedon was reading McCarthy when he wrote the fourth season of BTVS, the season in which the Slayer's love interest Riley Finn is introduced? We know Whedon has paid homage to other aesthetic heroes in the Buffy saga, and I can personally vouch that a taste for Sondheim is highly compatible with a taste for McCarthy. Ah, I'm probably delusional. But that name sure jumped out at me like a neon sign.Posted July 05, 12:42 PM
OGIC: Fortune cookie
"And, thanks to the standardization of an archaic rule, the past still vibrated in the convent, a high, sweet note. It was the France of the Restoration that was embalmed in the Sacred Heart atmosphere, like a period room in a museum with a silken cord drawn across it. The quarrels of the philosophes still echoed in the classrooms; the tumbrils had just ceased to creak, and Voltaire grinned in the background. Orthodoxy had been re-established, Louis XVIII ruled, but there was a hint of Orleanism in the air and a whisper of reduced circumstances in the pick-pick of our needles doing fine darning and turning buttonholes. Byron's great star had risen, and, across the sea, America beckoned in the romances of Chateaubriand and Fenimore Cooper and the adventures of the coureurs de bois. Protestantism did not trouble us; we had made our peace with the Huguenots. What we feared was skepticism, deism, and the dread spirit of atheism--France's Lucifer. Monthly, in the study hall, the Mother Superior, Madame MacIllvra, adjured us, daughters of dentists and lawyers, grocers and realtors, heiresses of the Chevrolet agency and of Riley & Finn, contractors, against the sin of doubt, that curse of fine intellects. Her blue eyes clouded and her fair white brow ruffled under her snowy coif as she considered, with true feminine sympathy, the awful fate of Shelley, a young man of good family who had contracted atheism at Oxford."Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
Posted July 05, 12:40 PM
TT: Reverse commute
While most of the rest of the world was thinking about what it'd be doing come the Fourth of July, I was on the road, seeing plays for The Wall Street Journal, sleeping in country inns, and rattling down back roads in the cutest little rental car imaginable (mine was purple).My theatrical odyssey began on Thursday when I picked up my car, escaped from the sickening heat of Manhattan via the George Washington Bridge, and made my unhurried way up Route 9 to the Boscobel Restoration in Garrison, where I ate a catered picnic supper and watched the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival perform The Tempest under a tent pitched on a lawn overlooking the Hudson River. (The "backdrop" looked like this.) It was a humid but otherwise lovely night, and though thunder rumbled onomatopoeically in the distance, the rain was kind enough not to start falling until the show was over.
I found my car in the soggy darkness, drove over Bear Mountain Bridge, and headed north for Storm King Lodge, a cozy B&B housed in a handsome converted barn built into the side of a hill that overlooks the Storm King Art Center. Hal, the genial innkeeper, plays trombone with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, so I got a tasty plateful of music-business gossip along with my Friday-morning omelet. Then I crossed the Hudson for the fourth time in 24 hours and set a course for the Berkshire Mountains, driving along the Housatonic River to Sheffield, Massachusetts, where I saw Barrington Stage Company's new revival of Stephen Sondheim's Follies.
After the show, I checked into Race Brook Lodge, a brookside inn reminiscent of the set for a movie about a hijinks-fraught summer camp. The owner bills it as a "chintz-free rustic alternative" to the twee B&Bs of Sheffield and Great Barrington, and he's right on all counts: Race Brook Lodge is casual, slightly askew, the opposite of fancy, and wholly companionable. I awoke the next morning to the friendly smell of home cooking, came downstairs to breakfast, packed my bags, and went south. The heat wave had broken in the night, so I rolled down my windows and cranked up Erin McKeown on the CD player, in no doubt whatsoever that I have the best job in the world.
As for the rest of the weekend, I spent it holed up in my adopted home town, which was balmy, breezy, and half-empty, the majority of New Yorkers having long since departed for points north, south, east, and west. Given good weather and nothing to do, the Upper West Side is wonderfully habitable on holiday weekends, and I took advantage of its tranquil delights, dining at an uncrowded Good Enough to Eat, hanging out with a couple of friends who, like me, had chosen to stay in town, and communing with the Teachout Museum.
Today Manhattan is full of sunburned travelers, few of whom look as though they'd profited greatly from their travels. Believe me, I'm not feeling smug: I went for more than a decade without taking a vacation, and it's only been in the past year that I discovered the value of getting out of town. I know, too, how fortunate I am to be able to live perpendicular to the rest of the world, slipping away in the middle of the week and coming back on Friday to write and go to the theater. In fact, I'm just about to do it all over again: I'm taking Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday off, and I'm not even going to see any plays while I'm gone. Instead, I plan to spend three computer-free nights reading Proust, listening to my iPod, and sleeping next to three different bodies of water, one of which will be an ocean. I think I deserve it, don't you?
See you Friday. Or maybe Monday.
P.S. If you're in urgent need of something to read, you'll find it in the next posting, not to mention the right-hand column, which is chock full of fresh stuff.
Posted July 05, 12:02 PM
TT: Elsewhere
I thought I ought to leave some reading matter behind to tide you over until I get back, so here's a bunch:- John Lahr is onto something here:
Bannered across the poster for London's new hit musical "Billy Elliot" (at the Victoria Palace)--a collaboration between two of the country's mightiest showmen, the director Stephen Daldry and the composer Sir Elton John--is an unbuttoned quotation from the usually buttoned-down British broadsheet the Daily Telegraph. "The greatest British musical I have ever seen," it says. What, I wonder, are the other great British musicals? "Salad Days"? "The Boy Friend"? "Cats"? The British love musicals; they just don't do them very well. The problem, it seems to me, is spiritual. The jazz of American optimism, which lends elation and energy to the form, is somehow alien to the ironic British spirit. At its buoyant core, the American musical is the expression of a land of plenty. England, on the other hand, is a land of scarcity--the Land of No, as a friend of mine calls it....
- On the other hand, this is one of the most vulgar pieces about theater (or anything else) that I've run across in ages:
The true legacy of Shakespeare in the Park is not the education of the unlettered masses; nor did [Joseph] Papp create (or desire to create) a stateside equivalent of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Shakespeare in the Park is a benediction for intellectual daytrippers--an attempt to convince us that a few hours spent sweating in Central Park is culture earned the hard way....
(The inspiration for this pissy little essay, by the way, was Mark Lamos' production of As You Like It. To be sure, I haven't seen it yet, and I've written some very sharp things about the past couple of years' worth of Shakespeare in the Park productions. On the other hand, Lamos is one of the best stage directors we have, which suggests to me that the author wrote his piece before he saw the show--not an unheard-of practice among journalists.)
- I've done this--though never on the way to a show! (If the reference doesn't ring a bell, go here for, er, enlightenment.)
- Mr. Modern Art Notes drew my attention to this painter, and now I'm soooo curious to see his stuff in the flesh. Take a look and see if you don't feel the same way.
- For those who wonder why I'm forever singing the praises of Bob Brookmeyer, go straight to this amazon.com list of his best CDs and buy one. You can pick at random--they're all terrific.
- Ms. Bookish Gardener has gone all warm and fuzzy over the great jazz pianist Hank Jones....
- ...while Jonathan Yardley waxes appreciative of Wilfrid Sheed's half-forgotten comic novel Office Politics:
Its singularly unheroic protagonist, George Wren, is "number-four editor" at a little magazine called the Outsider, based in shabby New York offices, that boasts "21,000 subscribers (it used to be 27,000), a small, nagging deficit, a reputation that shrank a little every time a subscriber died." It's "just another little magazine . . . staggering through life in an endless dribble of opinion," but--ta-da!--it "had once been endorsed by Adlai Stevenson and Madame Pandit Nehru" and George believes in it passionately, so much so that three months ago he took a pay cut from $13,000 (at CBS) to $7,500 just for the privilege of becoming a part of it.
Actually, put that in the past tense, because George is no longer sure there's much at the Outsider worth believing in. Its charismatic editor, a transplanted Brit named Gilbert Twining, has loads of facile charm and wields a keen editorial pen, but whether there's anything behind the charm is open to question. The rest of the magazine's tiny staff is a conglomeration of oddballs and misfits "hand-picked" by Twining, apparently "on some principle of interlocking incompatibility."...
To which I would only add that Sheed's Max Jamison is at least as good.
- In case you haven't read The Skeptic, you may not know that H.L. Mencken translated Nietzsche's The Antichrist. I recently stumbled by chance across a Web-based e-text of his English-language version, complete with an utterly characteristic preface in which Mencken's good and bad sides are placed on simultaneous display. (Rarely has his weirdly idiosyncratic anti-Semitism, for example, been epitomized so concisely.) It's one of his least well-known essays, and shouldn't be.
- Finally, some thoughts from Lileks about the joys of staying off interstate highways:
Ten connects Minneapolis to Fargo. And vice versa, of course. It always has. Before the Interstate, Ten was the road between here and there, two lanes of concrete slabs that bothered your shocks and made the wheel jump in your hands. But it kept your attention. Strung along Ten were all the towns set up in the early days of the trains, improbable hamlets with names like Motley and Dilworth. Each larger town was halved by a perpendicular artery, and each of those roads split off into endless capillaries. If you wanted to get lost, you started on Ten and kept going until the pavement turned to gravel and the gravel turned to dirt. If you wanted to, that is. We didn't; we were headed to Fargo.
It's three and a half hours by Interstate, if you speed, and you get out of the city in good time. It's four and a half on the Highway. You spend part of that hour slowing to limp through towns great and mean, places that have a swinging yellow light and a bar and a gas station, places that creep up to the road like some old wounded beast, places that had the lucky to have Ten march right through the center of things so you could sample the signage: Kiwanis Lions Elks Guns Gas Food Camping Liquor Motel Bait Feed, and incidentally speed limits are strictly enforced. You don't doubt it. You slow. Everyone does. Then the sign says 65 and you do 75. Twenty miles later there's another. These are the towns you usually know only as a name on the Interstate signs. It's nice to finally meet them....
By the time you get around to reading these words, I'll be doing the same thing, only in a different place. I hope I enjoy it half as much. (I expect to.)
Posted July 05, 12:02 PM
TT: Almanac
"Some are 'industrious,' and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to such I have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do,--work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers."Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Posted July 05, 12:01 PM
OGIC: Blaming the equipment
I'm on pins and needles over here. Every so often my lovely iBook starts to clickety-clack somewhere in its forward left innards, and functionality is temporarily suspended. This morning the phenomenon persisted for three hours, and I thought the computer was a goner. It came back to life, however, and I was able to back up the important files. No fits and starts since early afternoon now, though I've been laying off using it much for fear of inadvertently administering the coup de grace to what has been a much-loved machine. So far so good this evening, but I'm breathing in its direction as little as possible.The jury's out on whether I'll try to get this guy fixed or take the plunge and replace him. He's three and a half years old, which is twenty-four in dog years and some far more advanced age in computer years. The current version of the same machine has twice as fast a processor and costs $300 less than what I paid in 2002, so it's tempting and probably a smart way to go. In any case, I'll be leaving the computer with the Mac docs and thinking over my options while in Los Angeles this week for some gallivanting around the Getty, taking meetings with a fellow blogger or two, and generally taking a break from everyday things. What I won't be doing is blogging, but with any luck will be back next week with one or another properly functioning machine, a few LA stories, and a fresh head of steam. In the meantime, do visit all our fine feathered friends to the right, and enjoy the short week.
Posted July 05, 12:00 PM
July 4, 2005
TT: Milestone
Like many a middle-aged man with a taste for poetry and a preoccupation with lost possibilities, I caught myself thinking the other day of the first stanza of Dante's Divine Comedy. It can be translated in countless ways, but comes most fully to the point in the most literal of renderings: In the middle of the journey of our life/I found myself in a dark wood,/for the straight way was lost. One of my fellow bloggers has lately been reflecting on the meaning of the expression "midlife crisis," but she and her readers are so preoccupied with the more florid symptoms of that often-absurd phenomenon that they seem to have lost sight of the thing itself, the terrible moment in the middle of the journey when you wander into a dark wood and suddenly notice that you can no longer see the signposts that led you there.That moment came for me when death first touched my life. I'd somehow managed to make it to the age of thirty-nine without losing anyone to whom I was close. Then one day the bolts of lightning started falling all around me. First my best friend, then my father, and in the twinkling of an eye I was picking up the paper each morning and turning to the obituary page. I'd joined the club, the society of those who no longer need reminding that we all die sooner or later--and that some of us die too soon. Such knowledge changes a man permanently, and often the first outward sign of the change is the predictably embarrassing behavior popularly associated with midlife crises.
Aside from these transient embarrassments, the trouble with middle age is that people keep dying on you, and the longer you live, the more often you lose the ones who mattered most when you were young. A few months ago I checked my e-mail and discovered that Richard Powell, my first music teacher, had died. On Friday I called my mother and learned with like abruptness of the death of Gordon Beaver, who taught me how to play piano and led the choirs in which I sang as a boy.
A few quick clicks on my iBook brought me to his obituary:
Born May 8, 1933, in St. Joseph, son of the late Leroy C. and Julia Waite Beaver, he had been a member of the Army National Guard and received a degree in music arts at Central Methodist University in Fayette in 1955 and a master's degree in music education from the University of Missouri in Columbia. He was a member of the First United Methodist Church in Sikeston where he directed the church choir for over 25 years. He directed and helped form the Sikeston High School Concert Choir, taught music at the Sikeston Junior and Senior High Schools for 30 years, and took high school choir students from Southeast Missouri to Europe during the summers for three years. He also gave piano lessons and directed the Sikeston Community Choir for 20 years and played for the Sikeston Little Theatre musical productions for many years.
That's all the Web has to say about him, and it isn't enough. My own memories could easily fill a chapter of a book. We met 35 years ago, the summer before I entered high school. I'd decided that I needed to learn how to play piano in order to be a fully rounded musician; Beaver was generally thought to be the best piano teacher in town, and though it wasn't his custom to work with late starters, Richard Powell urged him to take me on. He proved to be a genial, slightly cynical fellow and no kind of disciplinarian whatsoever, and we soon found ourselves spending almost as much time talking as we did playing, though he did manage to nudge me through a handful of Bach inventions and Beethoven sonatinas, as well as a stack of the semi-popular piano solos that once were the stock in trade of small-town piano teachers throughout America. (Remember John W. Schaum?) I can still play one of them, "Salt Water Boogie," from memory.
I have a sneaking suspicion that he didn't much care for classical music--we didn't sing it very often in the high-school choruses he led--but he was passionate about the making of music, and threw himself into it with unflagging abandon. His enthusiasm was what I took away from the hours I spent with him, along with a feeling that, like me, he didn't quite fit into the world into which he'd been born. I'm sure that's why he went out of his way to be so kind to me: he must have sensed that I, too, was something of a fish out of water, and that it might be a long time before I found the right pond in which to swim. So instead of insisting that I spend hour upon hour polishing my scales in contrary motion, he let me tell him of my hopes and dreams and puzzlements, gently encouraging me to chase after whatever distant stars seemed to me most interesting.
I never became much of a piano player, and it wasn't until I got to college that I started working with teachers who bulldozed me into learning intermezzi by Brahms and preludes by Debussy. But by then I knew I wasn't destined to be much of a piano player, and that it didn't matter in the slightest. For me, playing the piano would always be a small part of something infinitely larger, and I think in retrospect I may have been fortunate to have fallen into the hands of a teacher who understood that.
The day after my mother told me of Gordon Beaver's death, I got an e-mail from an old and beloved friend:
I'm sure your mother called you for this one. I read in the paper that Mr. B. died this week. I believe the service is today, actually. I don't mean to sound so cut and dried about it, it's just that all these childhood icons are dying and I DON'T LIKE IT.
Nor do I, Lee, not one little bit. In the middle of the journey of my life I found myself in a dark wood, and though I finally seem to have reached its far edge and started to make my way back into the light, one thing hasn't changed: the people that I love keep dying on me. I noticed to my surprise a few years ago that most of my closest friends were now a good deal younger than I am. This is one of the gifts middle age gives us to compensate for that which it takes away, and I'm as grateful for it as I can be. Still, no gift, however generous, can possibly make up for the empty feeling with which we say farewell to the kindly men and women who once upon a time helped to show us what we were.
Posted July 04, 12:02 PM
TT: Almanac
"America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an élite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment."W.H. Auden, introduction to Faber Book of Modern American Verse
Posted July 04, 12:01 PM
July 1, 2005
TT: Southern-fried Shakespeare
I'm in The Wall Street Journal this morning with a report on my visit to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, which I found wholly satisfactory.Some pertinent excerpts:
Rarely has anything so delightful as the Alabama Shakespeare Festival been situated in a more depressing location. To get there, you drive past downtown Montgomery, pull off the interstate and plunge into a tangle of six-lane suburban sprawl so congested as to make the hardiest of urban planners reach for a triple dose of Xanax. Strip malls, fast-food joints, megachurches the size of Wal-Marts...but then you take a sharp right turn and find yourself in the middle of a 250-acre park that looks as though it had been landscaped by Grant Wood and mowed daily by a thousand well-paid gardeners. Down one lane is the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts; down the other, the Carolyn Blount Theatre, home of one of America's most ambitious and impressive theatrical enterprises. It is, if a weekend visitor to the Bible Belt dare say so, the damnedest thing imaginable....
No small part of the fun of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival is the opportunity it gives you to see a smallish troupe of actors playing sharply varied roles in quick succession. Last Thursday and Friday, for instance, I watched Ruth Eglsaer whack it out of the park three times in a row. She was tough and sardonic as the rebellious daughter of Tom Stoppard's "The Real Thing," properly despairing as the anguished fiancée of Arthur Miller's "All My Sons" and a delectable hoyden-in-drag as Rosalind in "As You Like It" (with Lauren Bloom providing charming support as Celia). Nor was she the only performer to catch my eye: Douglas Rees and Kathleen McCall made a big splash as the unabashedly bawdy Petruchio and Kate of Susan Willis' raucous "Taming of the Shrew," while Ray Chambers's dark, incisive Coriolanus was masterly.
ASF's house style in Shakespeare is conservatively modern, flexible in setting (Geoffrey Sherman, the company's newly appointed artistic director, has relocated "Coriolanus" to Fascist Italy) but never heavy-handed or willfully arbitrary. Even in contemporary repertory, the productions I saw were direct and transparent, allowing the scripts to speak for themselves....
No link this week (sigh). To read the whole thing, of which there is much more, buy this morning's Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal in the twinkling of an eye and the clicking of a few keys. Yes, you'll have to give them money, too, but it's still a good deal....
Posted July 01, 12:03 PM
TT: Almanac
"Come, woo me, woo me; for now I am in a holiday humor, and like enough to consent."William Shakespeare, As You Like It
Posted July 01, 12:01 PM