About Last Night: August 2005 Archives

OGIC: Out of Sight in mind

I'm a huge fan of and proselytizer for the Elmore Leonard-Steven Soderbergh match-made-in-heaven Out of Sight. If someone enters my home not having seen this movie, they find it a tricky thing to leave in the same pure state. My own capacity to watch it has shown no signs of shrinking. So I was gratified to see Quiet Bubble's smart appreciation (thanks to CultureSpace for the pointer). Quoth Bubble:

All of the dialogue, in fact, sings. Since the movie is based on an Elmore Leonard novel, this isn't a surprise. Soderbergh plants great running jokes that build on themselves, so that the payoff for a joke often comes twenty minutes after its inception. Narrative twists and character revelations percolate, so that you have a firm sense of a character's nature and the space s/he takes up in the movie. Even Zahn, the clear buffoon of the movie, is introduced through a hilarious phone conversation between Clooney and his ex-wife (Catherine Keener)--we're prepared for him long before we actually see him.

And:

The Miami of the movie's first half is drenched in sunlit oranges and pastel yellows, and the camera saunters like the overcooked populace. As the plot gets (slightly) darker in tone, so does the color tone. Out of Sight's Detroit, cast in sludgy brown ice and stark blue hues, feels cold and foreboding. The contrast between the two cities is striking, and the film blessedly doesn't try to make them move in visually similar ways.

When Clooney and Lopez sip bourbon and flirt wantonly in a hotel bar, however, the two strains come together beautifully. Lopez's honey-skinned face, candlelit and lovely, looks out a window at white snowflakes and their pale blue reflections on the glass--they blend into the city's night lights so that I can't tell the difference between the two. It's a gorgeous scene, most of all because it shows that Soderbergh could have made Detroit look warm and friendly, but decided not to.

Check, check, and check. What a luxury to have one's own taste validated and explicated.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 1, 2005 1:17 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Big and orange and read all over

So the big orange bible, otherwise known as the Chicago Manual of Style, has its own Web site, complete with questions answers from the editors. Which raises the question: how big a blue-pencil-wielding geek am I? Sizable enough, it turns out, to have read through the entire archive of questions and answers during the last week like a junkie. Yes, it's exactly that bad. But the CMS editors made it easy on me; they address everything thrown at them with clarity, good grace, and considerable wit, making for some surprisingly diverting reading--if, you know, you're a giant blue-pencil-wielding GEEK. Say it with me: One of us! Gobble Gobble!

Send them your burning style question, or just browse the archives for some excellent advice:

Although the sign was incorrect, I'm not sure you should annoy the person who provides the enchiladas.

Words to live by.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 1, 2005 1:40 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

Things I Learned Freshman Year

1. Charlemagne either died or was born or did something with the Holy Roman Empire in 800.
2. By placing one paper bag inside another paper bag you can carry home a milk shake in it.
3. There is a double l in the middle of "parallel."
4. Powder rubbed on the chin will take the place of a shave if the room isn't very light.
5. French nouns ending in "aison" are feminine.
6. Almost everything you need to know about a subject is in the encyclopedia.
7. A tasty sandwich can be made by spreading peanut butter on raisin bread.
8. A floating body displaces its own weight in the liquid in which it floats.
9. A sock with a hole in the toe can be worn inside out with comparative comfort.
10. The chances are against filling an inside straight.
11. There is a law in economics called The Law of Diminishing Returns, which means that after a certain margin is reached returns begin to diminish. This may not be correctly stated, but there is a law by that name.
12. You begin tuning a mandolin with A and tune the other strings from that.

Robert Benchley, "What College Did to Me"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 1, 2005 2:09 AM | Permalink

TT: I couldn't have put it better

From Louis Menand's essay on Edmund Wilson in the current New Yorker:

Wilson did not engage well with literature at the level of the text. He was also not at ease or reliable at the meta-level. He had a journalist's suspicion of abstractions, and he did not think theoretically. When he tried for the broad view--when he undertook to explain the demise of verse as a literary technique, or to describe the alternation of periods of realism with periods of romanticism in modern literature, or to interpret art as compensation for a psychic "wound"--his criticism got reductive very quickly. But he was unsurpassed at the level of the writer and the work. When he gives his tour through "Das Kapital" or "Finnegans Wake" (a book he was excited by) or "Doctor Zhivago" (which he also admired extravagantly), it is as though the book's interior had suddenly been lit up by a thousand-watt bulb. Even readers who thought they already knew the book can see things that they missed, and they realize how partial and muddled their sense of it really was. And the hyper-clarity of the description is complemented by a complete grasp of the corpus, each of the writer's strengths and flaws laid out with juridical precision, no matter how large or problematic the body of work. The result is something better than microscopic analysis; anyone can look through a microscope. The result is a satellite picture....

One of the reasons why I like this description so much (other than that it's perfect) is that it also sums up some of the things I try to do in my own writing, which was deeply influenced by Wilson's back in the days when I was setting up shop as a critic a quarter-century ago. I don't read him much anymore, partly because I once read him so closely that I remember his work too well. But Menand's essay has created in me a fresh appetite for revisiting Wilson, which strikes me as one of the essential attributes of a great piece of literary journalism.

Read the whole thing here, by all means.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 1, 2005 2:55 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

Things I Learned Sophomore Year

1. A good imitation of measles rash can be effected by stabbing the forearm with a stiff whisk-broom.
2. Queen Elizabeth was not above suspicion.
3. In Spanish you pronounce z like th.
4. Nine-tenths of the girls in a girls' college are not pretty.
5. You can sleep undetected in a lecture course by resting the head on the hand as if shadng the eyes.
6. Weakness in drawing technique can be hidden by using a wash instead of black and white line.
7. Quite a respectable bun can be acquired by smoking three or four pipefuls of strong tobacco when you have no food in your stomach.
8. The ancient Phoenicians were really Jews, and got as far north as England where they operated tin mines.
9. You can get dressed much quicker in the morning if the night before when you are going to bed you take off your trousers and underdrawers at once, leaving the latter inside the former.

Robert Benchley, "What College Did to Me"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 1, 2005 11:09 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

The day that some old friend
Said something sad about you,
I knew right then
I was no longer mad about you.
For I'd always gone to pieces
At the mention of your name,
But all that I could say this time was,
"Isn't that a shame?"

David Cantor, "Mad About You"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 1, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Saddle sores

I slept for nine hours Saturday night--the first really good night's sleep I'd had in two weeks. Outside of going to see Yukio Mishima's Modern Noh Plays at the Lincoln Center Festival, I spent the whole day digging myself out from under two weeks' worth of accumulated mail, finishing at one-thirty in the morning. Then I set to the agreeable task of returning my Upper West Side apartment to its normally pristine state. By the time I finally climbed into the loft and turned out the light, the two dozen pictures that hang on my walls were straightened and the piles of Louis Armstrong-related books on the floor of my office neatly squared off (my cleaning woman doesn't believe in right angles). My drama calendar was up to date and the incoming mail had all been read, sorted, and filed, save for a beautifully penned, much-appreciated letter from the West Coast that I put aside to savor at my leisure. It was pure pleasure to arise the next day knowing that the natural order of things had been restored.

Now comes the greater challenge of completing the work I left undone during my visit to Smalltown, U.S.A. I managed to do a certain amount of writing while I was home, but not much. As of this moment I have to finish three and a half pieces and see a play and an art exhibit between now and noon on Wednesday, when the last piece, my drama column for this Friday's Wall Street Journal, comes due. Then I'll pick up a Zipcar from the garage around the corner and vanish for three days. I know where I'm going, but nobody else does, and I mean to keep it that way. The world is too much with me, a disorder for which I've prescribed the best of all possible cures, the sound of running water. I hate to wish time away, but I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to picking up that car and driving over the George Washington Bridge to parts unknown (except to me and my innkeepers).

Like I said, I'll be around between now and then, and I'll probably even do some blogging, though not right away--today is likely to be a trifle hectic. But come Wednesday at noon, I'm shutting the shop down and handing the keys to OGIC. If I pass you on the highway, don't tell anybody you saw me.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 1, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"To write what you are interested in writing and to succeed in getting editors to pay for it, is a feat that may require pretty close calculation and a good deal of ingenuity. You have to learn to load solid matter into notices of ephemeral happenings; you have to develop a resourcefulness at pursuing a line of thought through pieces on miscellaneous and more or less fortuitous subjects; and you have to acquire a technique of slipping over on the routine of editors the deeper independent work which their over-anxious intentness on the fashions of the month or the week have conditioned them automatically to reject."

Edmund Wilson (quoted in Louis Menand, "Missionary," The New Yorker, Aug. 8 and15, 2005)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 2, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Elsewhere

Two weeks with a dialup connection left me starving for a nice long high-speed blogtroll as soon as I got back to New York. I just pulled my line out of the water, and here's some of what I fished up:

- To start with, I stumbled across two very different responses to my recent postings from Smalltown, U.S.A., penned by a pair of preferred bloggers.

- Mr. Gurgling Cod quotes one of my favorite passages from one of my favorite books:

I have eaten bouillabaisse at Marseilles, its cradle and its temple, in my youth, when I was easier to move, and it is mere belly-fodder, ballast for a stevedore, compared with its namesake at New Orleans!

Guess who? (Hint: his favorite color is yellow.)

- Jonathan Yardley reconsiders another of my favorite books, and finds it better than ever. Me, too:

I came back from my trip with enough money to order me another pair of swans. They are on their way from Miami and Mr. Hood, the incumbent swan, little suspects that he is going to have to share his feed dish. He eats out of a vase, as a matter of fact, and has a private dining room. Since his wife died, he has been in love with the bird bath. Typical Southern sense of reality.

No one else but the party in question could possibly have written that paragraph.

- Speaking of southerners, Mr. Godsbody takes the TCCI and has a belated epiphany: Johnny Mercer really is better than Cole Porter. (Told you so.)

- Everyone I know who cares about the state of American film is talking about this interview with David Thomson, the best of all possible film critics:

I think what we're talking about here is a much bigger, much sadder problem, which is that the mainstream of American movies has been terribly disappointing in recent years. The question that faces anyone who loves the medium is whether this is a cyclical thing--a passing dip, so to speak--or whether there might be something much more worrying. I notice that the business itself is beginning to get quite anxious about declining attendance: There has been a big drop-off [in ticket sales] this year. And God knows how much bigger it would have been but for the final Star Wars film. If we didn't have that film--which I think gives a sort of artificial boost to the figures--the first six months of this year would be pretty gloomy. There's a lot of evidence to suggest two things--which could, in fact, be working [in tandem]: that films don't mean as much to audiences anymore, and that they don't mean as much to filmmakers anymore, either....

- On a cheerier note, stop the presses--drive-in theaters are back! Read all about it here.

- Messrs. 2 Blowhards start off with foie gras and end up with this trenchant meditation on an irritating aspect of the American national character:

Perhaps what drives some Americans around the bend is our native tendency to ignore, repress, or deny the aesthetic dimension of life. We debate it. We politicize it. We get literal-minded and pretend not to know what's being talked about.

Being a gung-ho, hard-charging people, we sometimes exploit the aesthetic dimension. We often seem to want to use the promise of satisfaction and/or transcendence to spur ourselves on. We often prefer not-quite-attaining satisfaction to the actual experience of satisfaction. We take our legitimate yearnings and channel them into self-help, into new products that promise to solve problems, into hard-driving ad campaigns, into fantasies of stardom, and into crazy beliefs ranging from New Age cults to the conviction that somewhere there's a job that will make me happy. It's as though we're determined to frustrate ourselves. We doom ourselves to not making it to where we say we want to be....

I think this also explains a lot about some of the deficiencies of American art at its message-driven worst. Our Puritan strain is never very far below the surface.

- Mr. Playgoer explains why there's no point in fixing Broadway, least of all by starting a National Theatre...

- ...Mr. Modern Art Notes explains how to avoid crowds at the Metropolitan Museum of Art...

- ...and Jeff "BuzzMachine" Jarvis (who understands new media better than just about anyone) explains why TV Guide's decision to drop local listings is "an important moment in the history of TV, pop culture, and publishing."

- Speaking of the end of the world, Greg Sandow tells off a classical-music advocate:

A while ago, I heard someone give a keynote speech about classical music, and why it deserves a bigger audience. He was lively, smart, impassioned, witty, a master (among much else) of unstoppable one-liners.

And yet nearly everything he said was wrong. He talked about the superiority of classical music, and about how much our culture needs it. "Everything else is loud!" he said (or words to that effect). We're mezzo-forte music in a fortissimo culture." Only classical music, he said, gave people room for thought and reflection.

Which of course isn't true....

Read the whole thing here, please. It's a must.

- The apocalypse continues: Ms. Killin' Time Being Lazy proves her literary snobbery by turning up her nose at amazon.com's Top 25 Authors. (Talk about depressing lists!)

- Finally, Mr. Rifftides describes a great CD you've never heard...

- ...and Alex Ross pays a tribute to the late David Diamond, one of America's least sufficiently appreciated composers, that is a miracle of journalistic compression. It says everything that needed to be said in two crisp paragraphs. Read, then listen.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 2, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Weekday update

I knocked out nearly three thousand words for Commentary yesterday morning. One piece down, three to go, and then I'm soooo out of here...but I didn't forget about you, not even in the general welter of cash-generating activity. In addition to all the lovely bloglinks to be found immediately below, take a peek at the Top Fives and you'll find four brand-new picks. (I also put up a new "Teachout Elsewhere" item.)

Now, back to work. The Zipcar beckons!

P.S. I reviewed Rachel Howard's The Lost Night: A Daughter's Search for the Truth of Her Father's Murder in this morning's Wall Street Journal. No link, but the Top Five entry will serve as a teaser. Buy the paper. Then buy the book.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 2, 2005 12:05 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Too hot to blog...

In complete sentences, anyway. But check out Elizabeth Gaffney on my favorite novel, Outer Life on book recommendations, William Grimes following Terry's lead with a rave about Rachel Howard's new book, and Hilary Spurling on being Matisse's biographer.

I'll try to check in tomorrow, and to answer my email too. Thanks for your patience in the meantime--the computer and air conditioner are in different rooms.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 3, 2005 1:00 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

Things I Learned Junior Year

1. Emerson left his pastorate because he had some argument about communion.
2. All women are untrustworthy.
3. Pushing your arms back as far as they will go fifty times each day increases your chest measurement.
4. Marcus Aurelius had a son who turned out to be a bad boy.
5. Eight hours of sleep are not necessary.
6. Heraclitus believed that fire was the basis of all life.
7. A good way to keep your trousers pressed is to hang them from the bureau drawer.
8. The chances are that you will never fill an inside straight.
9. The Republicans believe in a centralized government, the Democrats in a de-centralized one.
10. It is not necessarily effeminate to drink tea.

Robert Benchley, "What College Did to Me"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 3, 2005 1:01 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"An artist should be worldwide in his thinking, but implacably national once he begins to create."

Maurice Ravel (interview with Olin Downes, New York Times, 1928)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 3, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Wired

I got up very, very early yesterday morning to write my Washington Post column for this Sunday, went to the gym, then staggered back home to write a piece about Me and You and Everyone We Know. I wrote four hundred words, then fell asleep at my desk. A few minutes later (at least I think it was a few minutes) I woke up and took a peek at the screen of my iBook. This is what I saw:

For the moment, though, American filmgoers remain trapped in a transitional perioddddddddddddddddddddddddddd

The funny part is that the first four hundred words were actually pretty good....

Never before have I fallen asleep in the middle of writing a piece, but in every other way the events of the past few days have been all too typical. This is what happens when I have too much to do in not enough time: I stay up too late, get up too early, and blog compulsively in between deadlines. That's the weird part. You'd think I wouldn't blog at all under such dire circumstances, but as soon as the adrenalin starts to flow, I reach for my iBook, and the only thing that will turn off the tap is sheer exhaustion.

I'm not done yet--I still have to finish the Me and You piece, write and file my Wall Street Journal drama column for this Friday, and correct the galleys of the Commentary essay I wrote on Monday morning--but at least the end really is in sight. The rest is silence: I have a rendezvous with a Zipcar. (I even remembered to buy sunblock for my left arm!) Our Girl will post my Friday drama-column teaser and such almanac entries as I manage to upload before hitting the road. Otherwise, you won't be hearing from me again until Monday.

See you later--and when you speak of me, speak well.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 3, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

Things I Learned Senior Year

1. A dinner coat looks better than full dress.
2. There is as yet no law determining what constitutes trespass in an airplane.
3. Six hours of sleep are not necessary.
4. Bicarbonate of soda taken before retiring makes you feel better the next day.
5. You needn't be fully dressed if you wear a cap and gown to a nine-o'clock recitation.
6. Theater tickets may be charged.
7. Flowers may be charged.
8. May is the shortest month in the year.

Robert Benchley, "What College Did to Me"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 4, 2005 11:40 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures."

Susan Sontag, On Photography

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 4, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"A while to work, and after, holiday."

William Shakespeare, Richard II

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 5, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: You don't have to be Irish

Friday again, and time for my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser (posted by remote control from Chicago with the help of OGIC--I'm still on the road). I devoted most of this week's column to a rave review of the Irish Repertory Theatre's superlative production of Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come!:

Mr. Friel's play is, of course, a modern classic, one of the outstanding English-language plays of the postwar era. Written in 1964, it's a textbook example of how to take an over-familiar situation--the inability of a bright young man to communicate with his stolid, emotionally closed-off father--and make it blazingly fresh and immediate. In a stroke of ingenuity that only seems obvious in retrospect, Mr. Friel has split Gar, who is leaving "the land of the curlew and the snipe" to seek his fortune in far-off Philadelphia, into two people, one public (Michael FitzGerald), the other private (James Kennedy) and invisible save to his flesh-and-blood companion. It is the private Gar who gives voice to the public Gar's interior monologue, a "Lucky Jim"-like stream of frustrated, coruscating mockery directed at the hapless residents of the village in which he lives, and above all at his father, S.B. "Screwballs" O'Donnell (Edwin C. Owens), a gloomy widower who cannot bring himself to express his love and pride for the son he is about to lose....

I could go on and on about the cast, each member of which deserves a separate paragraph of lavish praise (though I mustn't fail to make particular mention of Mr. Owens, who triumphs in the daunting task of illuminating the soul of an all-but-inarticulate man). David Raphel's shabby d�cor is impeccably exact, right down to the cardboard suitcase into which Gar stuffs his earthly goods. As for the staging of Ciar�n O'Reilly, the company's co-founder and producing director, it's so subtle as to be invisible: all you see is the play itself....

No link. To read the whole thing (which also contains a review of Lincoln Center Festival 2005's now-closed production of Yukio Mishima's Modern Noh Plays), buy a copy of Friday's Journal and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, where you'll find all kinds of good stuff about matters artistic and cultural. Or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which I strongly recommend--it's one of the best deals in electronic journalism.

Now, back to the woods. See you Monday.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 5, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

OGIC: The unjading of OG (an interminable series)

Fireworks fit roughly into the same category as famous tourist attractions for me. I never think they will be interesting, and even go out of my way to avoid them. Occasionally I do get roped into seeing them, however, and then I wonder what the hell I was thinking, because they tend to be wonderful. When, as a twelfth-grader in Paris who thought she knew everything and was too cool for most of it, I was dragged reluctantly to the Eiffel Tower--which I knew would be touristy and lame, and besides, I had seen a million pictures--I couldn't believe how dwarfingly gorgeous it was. Way beyond what a picture could convey. (I preferred being on the ground, gazing up, to being on top looking down, though).

This recurring subplot of my life recurred again last night, when I went with a gaggle of friends to see the league-leading Chicago White Sox play Seattle (on what had to be the nicest evening of this year or any other to attend a ball game). Win or lose, the Sox show fireworks after the game on Saturday nights. Sometimes I can hear them from my South Side apartment.

Last night's game chugged along at a brisk pace. Around the seventh inning, I remembered about the obligatory fireworks and groaned silently to myself. So mundane. So tiresome. Hopefully my friends wouldn't want to stick around. Seen one fireworks display, seen 'em all.

That's as may be, but some experiences don't depend on novelty. Five seconds into it, I was rapt. By the end I was grinning like an idiot. Next time fireworks are in the offing I'll roll my eyes and groan--and with any luck, someone will tell me to sit down, shut up, and enjoy the spectacle.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 7, 2005 7:21 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Hunger artists

Mitchissmo has such a good and evocative post on break-ups (via Manhattan Transfer, thanks kindly), it almost makes you long for one. Sure, they make you feel flayed alive and stabbed through the heart, but at least they make you unmistakably feel...still, emphasis on the almost.

Break ups fascinate me. Break ups are like one of those hallways from a 1980s music video: a black and white tunnel in slanted perspective, full of misshapen closed doors, a red ball bouncing away into the distance. Despite the obvious clich�d meanings you know surround you, everything still feels heavy and of great import. It all means something, man.

Don't get me wrong; I despise break ups. In fact, as time goes on I can barely bring myself to the first date in fear of the last one.

Yep. And Allison Moorer has a thoroughly devastating song about just this on Miss Fortune: "Mark My Word." The lyrics don't seem like much on their own, but when she sings it, it'll kill you. The speaker is at the outset of a relationship she wants, and all she can feel is preemptive sorrow and even bitterness. Helplessly and certainly, she's killing the affair before it can find its legs. I always thought of that speaker as simply battered into tragic fatalism, but Mitchissmo's post makes me think she may be harboring a masochistic fascination--one that even the best optimists among us can surely relate to in some corner of our wounded souls.

Back to Mitchissmo:

As we get older our break ups get more intense precisely because life has shown us that goodbyes are often of a certain permanence. There is no going back, no matter what one's intentions are. Of course, break ups are not deaths, but they are deaths of a kind. They are emotional goodbyes, ones that we often try to control in a variety of outlandish ways: sending near funereal bouquets of flowers, crafting the most poetic or well structured email or, better yet, drafting an analog letter so well put and fail-safe it rivals a legal brief. Such actions aim to redirect the sinking ship to new, safe waters. However--and not that I know anything about this--with every effort, it may even push fate along. All of this is why break ups are a good source of comedy and death is, well, not so much. Man and his efforts to defeat Fate is always funny.

The end of a relationship hurts like nothing else because, among other reasons, the object of desire is still out there (alive!). Ah yes, the slow turning from something here to something there, from something present to something past, and the gut wrenching feeling of knowing that it's happening. That door in the slanted hallway is slamming, and don't count on it opening again, buddy boy.

So good it hurts. (And I have totally written that letter. It was masterful.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 7, 2005 7:45 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

My dearest Girl,

I wrote a Letter for you yesterday expecting to have seen your mother. I shall be selfish enough to send it though I know it may give you a little pain, because I wish you to see how unhappy I am for love of you, and endeavour as much as I can to entice you to give up your whole heart to me whose whole existence hangs upon you. You could not step or move an eyelid but it would shoot to my heart--I am greedy of you--Do not think of any thing but me. Do not live as if I was not existing--Do not forget me--But have I any right to say you forget me? Perhaps you think of me all day. Have I any right to wish you to be unhappy for me? You would forgive me for wishing it, if you knew the extreme passion I have that you should love me--and for you to love me as I do you, you must think of no one but me, much less write that sentence. Yesterday and this morning I have been haunted with a sweet vision--I have seen you the whole time in your shepherdess dress. How my senses have ached at it! How my heart has been devoted to it! How my eyes have been full of Tears at it! Indeed I think a real Love is enough to occupy the wildest heart--Your going to town alone, when I heard of it was a shock to me--yet I expected it--promise me you will not for some time, till I get better. Promise me this and fill the paper full of the most endearing names. If you cannot do so with good will, do my Love tell me--say what you think--confess if your heart is too much fasten'd on the world. Perhaps then I may see you at a greater distance, I may not be able to appropriate you so closely to myself. Were you to loose a favorite bird from the cage, how would your eyes ache after it as long as it was in sight; when out of sight you would recover a little. Perhaps if you would, if it is so, confess to me how many things are necessary to you besides me, I might be happier, by being less tantaliz'd. Well may you exclaim, how selfish, how cruel, not to let me enjoy my youth! to wish me to be unhappy! You must be so if you love me--upon my Soul I can be contented with nothing else. If you could really what is call'd enjoy yourself at a Party--if you can smile in peoples faces, and wish them to admire you now, you never have nor ever will love me--I see life in nothing but the certainty of your Love--convince me of it my sweetest. If I am not somehow convinc'd I shall die of agony. If we love we must not live as other men and women do--I cannot brook the wolfsbane of fashion and foppery and tattle. You must be mine to die upon the rack if I want you. I do not pretend to say I have more feeling than my fellows--but I wish you seriously to look over my letters kind and unkind and consider whether the Person who wrote them can be able to endure much longer the agonies and uncertainties which you are so peculiarly made to create--My recovery of bodily health will be of no benefit to me if you are not all mine when I am well. For god's sake save me--or tell me my passion is of too awful a nature for you. Again God bless you.

No--my sweet Fanny--I am wrong. I do not want you to be unhappy--and yet I do, I must while there is so sweet a Beauty--my loveliest my darling! Good bye! I kiss you--O the torments!

John Keats, letter to Fanny Brawne, May 1820

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 7, 2005 9:43 AM | Permalink

TT: Words to the wise (cont'd)

The Irish Repertory Theatre's production of Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come! has just been extended from Sept. 4 to Sept. 25. The uniformly enthusiastic reviews included mine in The Wall Street Journal:

If I had to choose a single company to stand for all that is best and most characteristic about theater in New York, it might just be the Irish Repertory Theatre. Founded in 1988 and located on a dowdy block far from the dazzle of Broadway, it specializes in "Irish and Irish-American theatre presented with a native understanding," acted on a thumbnail-size stage awkwardly tucked into one corner of an L-shaped auditorium and produced with the kind of care and intelligence no amount of money can buy....

"An artist should be world-wide in his thinking, but implacably national once he begins to create." So said Maurice Ravel, whose music is at once quintessentially French and universally intelligible. By the same token, "Philadelphia, Here I Come!" is as Irish as a peat fire, but you don't have to know anything about County Donegal to recognize Mr. Friel's characters. No matter where you come from, you grew up with them. They are as real as family--just like this glorious production of a great play.

For more information, go here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 8, 2005 5:42 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"There has always been the kind of critic that views the musical as being the intellectual brothel. They can go and see the girls and the pretty legs; they don't want to be bothered by the story. They don't want to be asked to feel anything. They want to go and get their jollies."

Alan Jay Lerner (quoted in Donald Knox, The Magic Factory)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 8, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Stoppable object

I just got back from five straight days of travel, three and a half recreational and one and a half theatrical. I had many adventures and have much to tell...but not yet. Instead, I've decided to be smart for once, shut down my iBook, take the phone off the hook, go to bed, and sleep in. I'll blog again at some point on Monday, but it definitely won't be bright and early.

Till then.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 8, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: The dreamlife of critics

The last three weeks...where did they go? I've flown halfway across the country, written four pieces, seen six plays, read nine books, given a lecture, talked on the radio, and driven all over Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania in a pair of rented cars. On top of all this, I watched my mother recover from a major operation (and nursed her through a series of drug-induced hallucinations that seem to have frightened her far less than they did me). Now I'm back home again, with no deadlines to hit until tomorrow morning and no performances to see until Wednesday night. I slept in today, the first time I've managed that feat in well over a month. Later on I plan to tinker with my reviewing schedule, wander over to the gym, dine at Good Enough to Eat, watch a little TV, and straighten the pictures in the Teachout Museum. That sounds like a good day, don't you think?

You know all about my two weeks in Smalltown, U.S.A. I returned from there Friday before last and resumed my usual post-travel frenzy of literary activity, cramming in two visits to the theater, both of them deeply satisfying (see the first of this week's Top Fives for words to the wise). Come Wednesday, a little later in the day than I'd planned, I filed my last piece, picked up a Zipcar, and began a much-anticipated three-day holiday by plunging headlong into New Jersey traffic. It was the first time I'd gotten caught on the fringes of a weekday rush hour, an experience I hope never to repeat. The good news is that my car was equipped with a satellite radio, so I spent the unexpectedly long drive sampling the myriad offerings of XM Radio, with which I was much impressed.

In due course I escaped from the interstate and made my way to Bridgeton House, the inn on the Delaware River where I recently spent a contented night sitting in a rocking chair and watching a thunderstorm from a screened balcony. Alas, the elements weren't as cooperative this time around, but I liked the inn no less well, and I've decided to make it one of my regular getaway spots.

On Thursday I drove through the Delaware Water Gap to Barryville, a tiny Catskills village just across the New York-Pennsylvania border. A friend of mine has been spending the past month teaching gymnastics at a summer camp outside of town, and I figured she wouldn't mind being taken out to dinner after a hard day on the trampoline, so I decided to spend the night somewhere in the general vicinity of her shop. A quick search of the Web having previously led me to Ecce Bed and Breakfast, conveniently located a couple of miles down the road from camp, I made a reservation, showed up at the appointed hour, and was duly escorted to an elegantly appointed bedroom in a house perched on the edge of a bluff three hundred feet above the Delaware River. For once, the Web site understates the case: my room had a huge picture window, and I've never seen a more spectacular view. After a sumptuous dinner of fresh trout, I brought my friend back to the inn so that she could see for herself, and we spent what was left of the evening sitting on the balcony, listening to the enveloping sounds of a warm summer night in the Catskills, chatting companionably about nothing in particular as the light died out of the sky, and wondering if there were a more beautiful place anywhere in the world.

By then it was clear to me that Ecce is not your usual bed-and-breakfast. It was started a year ago by a couple of Wall Street businessmen who heard the chimes at midnight and decided to change their lives before it was too late. Perhaps not surprisingly, the tone and d�cor of their five-room inn are considerably more urbane than those of the comfy, chintzy country retreats where I typically spend my nights on the road. (I certainly can't think of another B-&-B that has pencil-signed Hirschfeld lithographs of Carol Channing and Lucille Ball hanging proudly in the upstairs hall!) At the same time, Ecce lacks nothing in the way of country comforts--there's even a hammock--and my baked spinach omelet, served on a deck overlooking the river, was wonderfully tasty. As I reluctantly pulled out of the parking lot after breakfast, I resolved to come back again as soon as possible.

I spent most of Friday driving up scenic byways and down narrow country lanes, eventually arriving at yet another Catskills village, High Falls, where I checked into Captain Schoonmaker's Bed and Breakfast, a Revolutionary War-era stone house located next to a soul-soothing trout stream and waterfall. I passed a peaceful night in the carriage house, then reported to the dining room at eight for the best breakfast I've ever eaten in my life. (Sorry, Mom.) The eggs were newly laid by the inn's own hens, the sausage was made by a local butcher, the waffles were stuffed with fresh fruit, and for once I couldn't clean my plate, though I did my best and a little bit more.

By then I was feeling the emollient effects of three work-free days in a row, and the thought of returning to New York was almost too sad to bear. Alas, my car was due back at ten-thirty that morning, so I hit the road after breakfast, tuned in Frank's Place on the satellite radio, and let Jonathan Schwartz serenade me as I rolled down the parkway, over the upper deck of the George Washington Bridge, and back into my everyday life. That same night Maud and I went to Harlem to see an outdoor performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Riverbank State Park, and I spent most of Sunday driving to and from Massachusetts to catch Tom Stoppard's On the Razzle at the Williamstown Theatre Festival (read all about it on Friday).

Now I'm sitting at my desk, plugged into the Web and entangled yet again in the busy life of a singleton at large in the big city. My travels seem like last night's dreams, half-recalled and not quite real. Was it really only four days ago that I sat on a deck far above the Delaware River, listening to the crickets chirp? I wouldn't live anywhere else but New York City--I couldn't--but I know very well what I'm missing by doing so, and right at this moment I miss it more than I can say.

UPDATE: One of my very favorite bloggers has similar things on her mind....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 8, 2005 12:33 PM | Permalink

TT: They just don't get it (a continuing series)

Today's unintentionally revealing old-media quote comes from Bob Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, courtesy of Romenesko:

The first thing newspapers need to be able to do successfully is to be able to separate themselves from other news media, from broadcast TV and so on, to establish the idea in the mind of readers that newspapers are the most authoritative and accurate source of news.

Tie that man to a tenure track!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 9, 2005 1:29 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive."

Robert Louis Stevenson, "El Dorado"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 9, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Next thing you know, I'll be eating right

Having spent Monday morning and afternoon doing as I pleased, and part of the evening working on my reviewing calendar, I now find myself faced with two mutually exclusive options:

(A) Stay up late and blog, get up first thing Tuesday and write my drama column for Friday's Journal, and spend the rest of the day in a sleep-deprived haze.

(A) Go to bed at a reasonable hour.

See you Wednesday!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 9, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

The difficult part of love
Is being selfish enough,
Is having the blind persistence
To upset an existence
Just for your own sake.
What cheek it must take.

And then the unselfish side--
How can you be satisfied,
Putting someone else first
So that you come off worst?
My life is for me.
As well ignore gravity.

Still, vicious or virtuous,
Love suits most of us.
Only the bleeder found
Selfish this wrong way round
Is ever wholly rebuffed,
And he can get stuffed.

Philip Larkin, "Love"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 10, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Playlist

Here's what the shuffle-play key of iTunes served up to me this evening:

- Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic, Mahler Fifth Symphony (fourth movement)
- Eighth Blackbird, Moravec Time Gallery (fourth movement)
- Pee Wee Russell, "The Last Time I Saw Chicago"
- Artie Shaw, "St. James Infirmary"
- Fred Astaire, "Night and Day"
- Joseph Szigeti and Nikita Magaloff, Handel D Major Violin Sonata (first movement)
- Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan, "Blight of the Fumblebee"
- Artur Schnabel, Beethoven Piano Sonata, Op. 109 (last movement)
- Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony, Bart�k Concerto for Orchestra (second movement)
- The Police, "Omegaman"
- Marc-Andr� Hamelin, Grainger Country Gardens
- Nancy LaMott, "Good Thing Going/Not a Day Goes By"
- The Who, "I Can See for Miles"
- Ignace Jan Paderewski, Chopin Mazurka, Op. 17/4
- Glenn Miller, "St. Louis Blues" (live)
- Frank Sinatra and the Hollywood String Quartet, "Love Locked Out"
- Fats Waller, "Smarty"
- Talking Heads, "Houses in Motion"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 10, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: They just don't get it (a continuing series)

Today's unintentionally revealing old-media quote comes from Dante Chinni, writing in the Christian Science Monitor on "journalism's fear and loathing of blogs":

To be a serious blogger--one who can devote his time and energy to the job--one needs to make a name for himself, sell ad space, and get paid.

Hear that, all you hopelessly unserious amateur artbloggers who have a life? You're nothing. Nothing. (As opposed to, say, the author of "a twice-monthly political opinion column for the Monitor.")

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 10, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Elsewhere

I haven't quite gotten over the stresses and strains (both good and bad) of the past three weeks, and as a result I find I don't have anything especially original to say this morning! Instead of blathering randomly, I'll leave the blogging to the following well-chosen assortment of my esteemed friends and colleagues. Go get 'em, tigers:

- The adorable Ms. Maccers shares a few "things I have learnt while aging." Some pertinent excerpts:

You will always lose the ones you love the most
Those you hate
Hang around ad infinitem
Taunting you for your failure to kick their arses years ago
Kill ants
Wear black
Eat red fruit
Biceps rock
Small dogs are gay
And so is my ex
Living alone will become a comfort and then a shield
ALWAYS sell the jewelry...

Ooh, yikes! (But she does have a point or two, or three.)

- The indispensable Mr. Something Old, Nothing New reports in extenso on the contents of the forthcoming third volume of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection. Money quote:

I would say, overall, that this is the best selection of cartoons yet, and certainly the most varied....

Mmmm.

- Listen up, OGIC: Mr. Wax Banks has some smart things to say about one of your favorite flicks:

The Insider is an adult movie: though it carries a moral message, it's not simply two and a half hours of moralizing (though I've got to point out that no one lights a single cigarette in this long movie about Big Tobacco--an odd atmospheric choice by Mann). We should be grateful for grownup artists who take on subjects worthy of their talent....

O.K., I give up, I'll watch the damn thing the next time I come to Chicago. Really.

- While we're at it, Mr. Superfluities is no less smart about a major TT-OGIC fave:

Though many swear by the delightful Waiting for Guffman and enjoy All About Eve's wallow in thespian bitchiness, I've found no movie to be quite as accurate and inspiring about theater work than Mike Leigh's 1999 Topsy-Turvy, concerning the creation and premiere of Gilbert and Sullivan's masterpiece The Mikado. In many ways an unusual film for Leigh, who's best known for his semi-improvised films and plays about contemporary British culture, Topsy-Turvy is nonetheless very much in the Leigh tradition of showing everyday work and frustration, even though there often doesn't seem to be much point beyond the ability to endure. Here, though, that everyday work and frustration is located in the artistic community of the theater. In fact, those parts of Topsy-Turvy that many people find boring--mostly the scenes of endless (sometimes fruitless) rehearsal, worry over potentially disastrous financial arrangements and constant professional bickering--seem to me the most fascinating and true-to-life....

Yes.

- Dizzy Gillespie's estate is being auctioned off next month. Here's the online catalogue. Browse and marvel.

- Mr. Manhattan Transfer rhapsodizes on the joys of summer in New York:

Opera in the park, with bits of cheese and chilled Sancerre in plastic cups. Lingering lunches in shaded sidewalk bistros. Rooftop parties overserving beer out of garbage cans filled with ice and sand. Sunrise whiskeys with bartenders in the Rockaways. Girls in short skirts with beads of sweat on the small of their backs. Falling asleep on the lawn alongside the Hudson River. Aperitifs at A60. Midday movies to escape the humidity. Seared tuna salad and buffalo mozzarella and three pinot grigio lunches. The song of the summer. Pretending the subway doesn't exist....

Er, mostly.

- Sarah (all others are imitations), who in my humble opinion is one of the nicest things about summer in New York, has some thoughtful and thought-provoking things to say about reviewers who court conflicts of interest:

How transparent should reviewers be? What constitutes a conflict of interest? These are things I think about constantly...

In a perfect world, a reviewer could completely divorce his or her feelings about a book from everything else. Put it in a vacuum. Isolate it from the larger context of a genre, a literary oeuvre, whatever. And make sure that he or she is only judged by the words appearing on the page.

But of course, that's not the case. In the mystery world, I think reviewers can be divided into two categories: those that mingle, and those that do not. It's a no-brainer as to which one I belong to; I don't believe I would have been able to write any review whatsoever had I not already been an active fan, participating on various internet message boards. And even when there are times when I wish I could drop back, I can't--nor do I particularly want to. Also, here on the blog, I can be as subjective as I like--the URL does bear my name, after all.

Yet it makes things difficult, especially in regards to my column. Luckily I only have five books a month to review, and so in theory, I can endeavor to pick books by people I've never met, never exchanged an email, never socialized with in any way, shape or form. But with every book I view for potential inclusion, I have to ask if there could be any sort of bias involved...

Read the whole thing.

- Here's a vivid and revealing interview with my favorite classical singer, Anne Sofie von Otter, who just turned fifty and doesn't seem too terribly weirded out about it:

She has confessed to being "reserved" and a "control freak," and is a little wary of interviews. Or perhaps she is bored by them--by familiar questions of how she began singing and what her favourite operatic roles are. "Some interviewers are like zombies," she says. "You want to slap them." Having just stepped off a plane, I feel zombie-like and hurriedly suggest the photographer goes first--planting the uncomplaining Von Otter next to trees, on soaking benches, and dangerously near the edge of the lake--while I rethink my questions....

God, but I love that woman. (If you don't yet know what all the fuss is about, buy this CD and be enlightened.)

- Ms. Killin' time being lazy went to see Philadelphia, Here I Come! (which I've been plugging at frequent intervals) and reports back on a disquieting aspect of the show that I failed to notice:

I went to see the show because I know a cast member and I know a crew member--and while I know that almost every waiter in the City is also an actor, it was clear that the audience wasn't made up of "friends of...". Rather, the average age of the audience was 60. Granted, it was a summer Saturday matinee, but still--60? Not great if a theater company wants to survive. The audience needs a median age of 40-ish--difficult to do in these times. Part of that is the rise in ticket prices. I understand that theaters have to pay Equity salaries and IATSE salaries and rent and rental for costumes/props and royalties and other salaries and all that. But it does keep audiences--young, necessary audiences--away....

Again, yes.

- Finally, Howard Kissel, my opposite number at the New York Daily News, tossed off a nifty little feature about what it's like to see The Producers, The Lion King, The Phantom of the Opera, and Chicago from the cheap seats. I wish I'd written it....

- ...just as I wish I'd written this utterly characteristic Galley Cat lead:

I'm not sure I could imagine any combination I'd dislike more than Jonathan Safran Foer and opera....

In the immortal word of James Joyce, mkgnao!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 10, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: One more thing

No, I haven't answered my blogmail, either. But I will. Soon.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 10, 2005 12:06 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Well, I read a lot. I'm no intellectual, you understand, but I like Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Hemingway, John P. Marquand, Louis Auchincloss, and Georges Simenon. He really understands character."

Bing Crosby (in conversation with Nat Hentoff, 1976)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 11, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Words to the wise

A well-placed little bird tells me you can still get tickets to the second and third performances of L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, Mark Morris' full-evening modern-dance staging of the Handel oratorio, next Friday, August 19, and Saturday, August 20, at Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival. (Thursday's opening is about to sell out.)

If you know anything about Morris, you don't need to hear more than that, but if you're unlucky enough never to have seen L'Allegro, it might be worth my quoting what I wrote about this extraordinary work four years ago in the Washington Post:

"L'Allegro" is a whole world of dance in a single evening, everything from childlike pantomime to knockabout comedy to complex groupings reminiscent of George Balanchine in their control and clarity. I wish Morris' dancers did "L'Allegro" in New York each spring, just like New York City Ballet does Balanchine's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," so that we could all revel in it as often as we want....

Since then the Mark Morris Dance Group has taken to performing L'Allegro fairly regularly at Mostly Mozart, though never often enough to suit me. Needless to say, I'll be there--you come, too.

All performances are at eight p.m. at the New York State Theater. For more information, go here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 11, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: So you want to see a show?

Not surprisingly, people in and out of town are always asking me what plays they should see. For this reason, I've decided to start running on Thursdays a regularly updated list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:
- Avenue Q* (musical)
- Chicago (musical)
- Doubt (drama)
- Fiddler on the Roof (musical, family-friendly)
- The Light in the Piazza (musical)
- Sweet Charity (musical)
- The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, family-friendly)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Orson's Shadow (drama)
- Philadelphia, Here I Come! (drama, closes 9/25)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, child-friendly)

CLOSING SOON:
- Glengarry Glen Ross (drama, Broadway, closes 8/28)
- Primo (one-man show, Broadway, closes Sunday)
- The Skin Game (drama, off Broadway, closes Sunday)

REOPENING SOON:
- Sides: The Fear Is Real... (sketch comedy, off Broadway, previews start 8/18)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 11, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT and OGIC: New around here, stranger?

If you came here by way of Instapundit, welcome to "About Last Night," a 24/5-to-7 blog (we come and go on weekends) 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 of "Our Girl in Chicago."

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

All our postings from the past 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 by Douglas McLennan on August 11, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- The other night I went to a play in which a very short actress gave a very good performance. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that a great many of the women to whom I've been attracted over the years have ranged in height from five foot zero to five foot three. I once had occasion to mention this fact to a self-styled feminist, who told me that I clearly had an unnatural need to dominate women. (I'm five foot eight.) I sputtered in reply that one of the most attractive women I know is six feet tall, and it later occurred to me that I also happen to like art songs, novellas, small paintings, and cozy little apartments such as the one in which I so contentedly live.

To this list I would now add plays of no more than two hours' length, performed if at all possible without an intermission. (Remember my Drama Critics' Prayer?) One such show that I recently reviewed is Primo, Sir Anthony Sher's one-man dramatization of Primo Levi's Auschwitz memoir. I went to see it with Sarah, and as my review doubtless made clear, I was deeply moved. I actually started crying shortly after we left the theater, and the two of us walked together in silence for a block or so as I struggled without success to regain my composure.

For some reason I glanced across the street at the marquee of the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, where Sweet Charity is playing. Below it I saw a huge poster on which was emblazoned in jumbo letters the following blurb:

"IT'S A BLAST!"
--Terry Teachout,
The Wall Street Journal

I looked at Sarah and pointed silently at the poster. The absurdity of the juxtaposition caused us both to dissolve on the spot into helpless laughter, and we were still laughing when we finally managed to flag a cab and flee the theater district.

Like the man says, life is pandemonium.

- I recently watched a TV documentary called Ken Russell: In Search of the English Folksong. Like all of Russell's films and TV shows, it stank of self-regard, but there was one moment that struck me as especially awful, even for him. At the top of the hour, an unnamed young woman sang Percy Grainger's seraphically beautiful harmonization of "Brigg Fair," a folk song that Grainger took down in 1905 from the singing of Joseph Taylor, a seventy-two-year-old Lincolnshire bailiff. The camera then cut to Russell sitting at a table with an old phonograph and a stack of 78s, and I realized that he was about to play one of the rarest records ever made, the 1908 performance of "Brigg Fair" that Taylor recorded at Grainger's urging for the Gramophone Company of London. It was one of a dozen folk songs recorded by Taylor in the studio, the very first time that a "genuine peasant folk-singer" had made commercial recordings. "Nothing could be more refreshing," Grainger wrote at the time, "than [Taylor's] hale countrified looks and the happy lilt of his cheery voice....though his age was seventy-five, his looks were those of middle age, while his flowing, ringing tenor voice was well nigh as fresh as that of his son."

I'd long known of the existence of this record (Grainger is one of my favorite composers), but I'd never heard it, and was starting to think I never would. Then, to my amazement and delight, Russell slipped it out of the pile of 78s, placed it on the turntable, and lowered the needle to the spinning shellac surface. From the speakers of my TV set came a century-old sound: It was on the fifth of August, the weather fair and fine/Unto Brigg Fair I did repair, for love I was inclined. I listened with wonder to Joseph Taylor's throaty, ever-so-slightly creaky voice and the fluttering ornaments with which he gracefully decorated the long descending arch of melody. Time was melting away...and then Ken Russell, damn him, started talking. "Bit crackly," he said midway through the second line. "But, you know, it was recorded on a cylinder." (Actually, it wasn't.) "Lovely, isn't it?" He kept on prattling to the very end of the song.

Hell isn't hot enough.

- I met a writer friend for lunch yesterday at Caf� des Artistes. (We used to lunch at less fancy spots, but decided a few months ago that we deserved to live it up.) He's tall, skinny, and a bit of a dandy, and on this occasion he was dressed in a postmodern version of a Tom Wolfe-style ice-cream suit. I, on the other hand, look rather like Roger Ebert, and was wearing one of my Black Outfits. Looking at my friend, I felt as if I were seeing the negative of a self-portrait refracted in a fun-house mirror.

The captain escorted us to a corner table in the back room. "Do you know where we're sitting?" my friend asked me as we looked over our menus. "Peter Jennings' table." I felt a slight frisson of something or other at the thought of our having taken over the table where the anchorman of World News Tonight once held court. It was, I regret to say, my first and only response to the news of his death. It's been years since I watched any of the nightly network newscasts, and though Jennings was the last anchor with whose program I was at all familiar, the man himself failed to make any lasting impression on me. As a result, the tributes that filled the airwaves and obituary pages on Monday left me feeling much the same way I feel whenever a cabby asks me what team I'm rooting for.

Sometimes I wish I were more in touch with such things, but not often. This isn't to say I'm indifferent to them, merely that I feel no need to keep up with them. Perhaps it's a function of increasing age. At any rate, my lack of interest puts me in mind of this 1949 entry from Somerset Maugham's notebook:

For I am like a passenger waiting for his ship at a war-time port. I do not know on which day it will sail, but I am ready to embark at a moment's notice. I leave the sights of the city unvisited. I do not want to see the fine new speedway along which I shall never drive, nor the grand new theatre, with all its modern appliances, in which I shall never sit. I read the papers and flip the pages of a magazine, but when someone offers to lend me a book I refuse because I may not have time to finish it, and in any case with this journey before me I am not of a mind to interest myself in it. I strike up acquaintances at the bar or the card-table, but I do not try to make friends with people from whom I shall so soon be parted. I am on the wing.

I don't see myself in every word of that entry, thank God: I'm still making new friends, and some of the younger ones are among the best I've ever made. On the other hand, it's been ages since I last made any systematic effort to keep up with, say, pop music. If I should happen by chance (or as a consequence of the prodding of OGIC) to hear and like something new, I'll seek it out and tell others about it, but otherwise I'm content to leave the sounds of today to my younger friends. For I, too, am on the wing, and though I trust the flight will be a long and happy one, I doubt I'll come to the end of it saying, If only I'd gotten around to writing an essay about Death Cab for Cutie!

More and more I question the ultimate value of any criticism whose immediate purpose is not to bring its readers into direct contact with beauty (or shorten the amount of time they spend in contact with ugliness). The purpose of my professional life is to make people happier, and I try not to let myself forget that my way of bringing it about can never be anything more than an imperfect means to a blessed end. C.S. Lewis said it better than I can: "If we have to choose, it is always better to read Chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him."

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 11, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT and OGIC: Apologies

ArtsJournal.com has been having severe problems with its server, which prevented us from posting anything until midday and has been more generally slowing us down.

We hope things will be back to normal before long. Until then, bear with us!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 12, 2005 1:58 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"The reader who, instead of being keen to learn, is intent only on finding fault, will simply not learn anything. He likes to criticize."

Arthur Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains (courtesy of Superfluities)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 12, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: The old razzle-dazzle

I drove up to Massachusetts last Sunday to see the Williamstown Theatre Festival's big-budget production of Tom Stoppard's On the Razzle. The night before I went uptown to Harlem to see a free outdoor performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Both shows gave me great pleasure, and I've written about them in today's Wall Street Journal drama column.

In brief:

"On the Razzle" is Mr. Stoppard's English-language adaptation of Johann Nestroy's "Einen jux will er sich machen," the same 1842 play whose subplot Thornton Wilder borrowed for "The Matchmaker," which in turn became "Hello, Dolly!" Any way you dish it up, it's a lunatic spree in which Herr Zangler (Michael McKean, lately of "Hairspray" and "A Mighty Wind"), purveyor of expensive foodstuffs, travels to Vienna in search of romance and promptly sticks his head into a noose of comic chaos tied and tightened by his thrill-seeking assistants Weinberl (Robert Stanton) and Christopher (John Lavelle)....

With 22 speaking parts and a hell of a lot of sets, "On the Razzle" is hard to produce save at a festival, and Roger Rees, Williamstown's new artistic director, is to be commended for giving it the deluxe treatment (Neil Patel's d�cor is Viennese to the hilt). Alas, the near-mathematical exactitude necessary to bring such precisely calculated theatrical craziness to life is not always evident in David Jones' agreeably energetic staging. Visible error is the death of farce, and the matin�e I saw suffered from an uncertain scene change, a premature blackout and a certain looseness of timing here and there.

On the other hand, it's churlish to expect perfection out of a festival production of "On the Razzle," especially so early in its too-short run. I'm sure the show will have tightened up by the time these words see print...

I took the bus up to Riverbank State Park the other night to watch Pulse Ensemble Theatre, augmented by eight neighborhood artists, perform "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in one of the Harlem park's many playgrounds, and the results couldn't have been more engaging.

Alexa Kelly, the director, has given us an urban-style modern-dress staging in which Oberon (Steve Lloyd), Titania (Shirine Babb) and the denizens of their fairy kingdom hail from the Caribbean and frolic to steel-band music. The North Playground of Riverbank Park doubles as a circular amphitheater with three tiers of concrete benches, and Ruben Arana Downs, the designer, has cunningly placed the unit set on top of the playground equipment (shrewd use is made of the sliding board). The acting is variable, but everyone is good enough and a few performers are first-rate, especially Nicole Bowman, who is splendidly lithe and vibrant as Hermia....

No link. To read the whole thing, pick up a copy of today's Journal at your local newsstand and turn to the Weekend Journal section, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will allow you to read my column more or less instantaneously (along with a plenitude of other good stuff).

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 12, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

Once I laughed when I heard you saying
That I'd be playing solitaire,
Uneasy in my easy chair.
It never entered my mind.

Once you told me I was mistaken,
That I'd awaken with the sun
And order orange juice for one.
It never entered my mind.

You have what I lack myself
And now I even have to scratch my back myself.

Once you warned me that if you scorned me
I'd sing the maiden's prayer again
And wish that you were there again
To get into my hair again.
It never entered my mind.

Lorenz Hart, "It Never Entered My Mind" (music by Richard Rodgers)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 15, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Unless I am in love with them, I am delighted to see my friends for an hour, and then I want to be alone like Greta Garbo."

W.H. Auden, letter to Caroline Newton (April 13, 1942)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 15, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Best wishes

Shirley Horn, the great jazz singer-pianist, suffers from diabetes. She lost one of her legs a few years ago as a result of her illness, and now she's on dialysis in a Washington nursing home. I'm told that she'd greatly appreciate "flowers, cards, prayers, etc." If you're one of the many people who has been touched by her music and feel like giving something back in return, here's where she's staying:

Shirley Horn
Gladys Spellman Specialty Hospital and Nursing Center
2900 Mercy Lane
Cheverly, MD 20785

If you don't know Shirley Horn's music, I commend to your attention this fourteen-track sampler drawn from her Verve catalogue. It's a beautiful tribute to a unique and irreplaceable artist.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 15, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Words to the wise

Sides: The Fear Is Real... reopens off Broadway this Thursday at the Culture Project. Here's what I wrote about it last April in The Wall Street Journal:

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

For more information, go here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 15, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Whose family? How friendly?

Last Thursday "About Last Night" launched a new weekly feature, "So You Want to See A Show?" It's a list of recommended shows on and off Broadway, based on my Wall Street Journal theater reviews. In the listing for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, I described the show as "family-friendly."

Later that day a colleague sent me this e-mail:

I have to dissent, I'm afraid, from your description of the "Spelling Bee" as family-friendly--at least if one's family includes pre-teens. When I saw the show, I remember thinking that the "My Unfortunate Erection" song was itself a bit unfortunate, in that the show would have been great for even eight- or 10-year-olds were it not for that out-of-place piece of bawdy. But with it in the show, I'd say that a sort of PG-13 rating is the best one could give it. And even then, I think parents of 13- and 14-year-old daughters might find themselves awfully uncomfortable.

I don't think I'm being priggish here. It's just that with a "family-friendly" endorsement, no small number of folks with pre-teens might take their kids, and those kids will come away with a lot of, er, questions for their parents.

It's funny how having daughters (mine are six and four) hones one's attentions to such issues.

I think my colleague (who is a big-city blue-stater, by the way) has it mostly right, and I think I know why. Not only am I childless, but I haven't spent any considerable amount of time around children since I was one myself. Moreover, it didn't occur to me that most parents would even consider taking pre-teens to The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, or any other show not specifically intended for children. As a general rule I don't think youngsters belong in Broadway or off-Broadway theaters, and when I described Putnam County as "family-friendly," I had teenagers in mind. Hence I didn't consider the possibility that a song whose title is euphemistically listed in the program as "M.U.E." would be a problem for pre-teen children, since I didn't envision them being there. Now I know better.

Where I part company with my colleague--up to a point--is his assumption that "parents of 13- and 14-year-old daughters might find themselves awfully uncomfortable" were they to take them to Putnam County. Indeed they might, but I wonder: how many of their daughters would share their discomfort? In order to answer this question, I sought the counsel of several of my women friends, all of whom were in agreement that no teenage girl of their acquaintance would be surprised, much less discomfited, by any part of the show, specifically including "M.U.E."

To be sure, my women friends are for the most part New Yorkers, whereas the people who see Broadway shows mainly come from elsewhere. As I mulled over this fact, I recalled a letter I received a few months ago from an out-of-town reader of The Wall Street Journal who wanted to know whether it would be all right for him to take his teenagers to see Putnam County. He'd heard that one of the characters was a young girl who was being raised by two gay men, and that one of the scenes treated the Crucifixion humorously. If these things were true, he wrote, he'd be uncomfortable letting his kids see the show.

I gave a lot of careful thought to his letter before replying. I considered pointing out, for instance, that the gay men in question are portrayed as bad parents--though not because they're gay--and that the advice Jesus gives from the cross in Putnam County is both serious and correct. (Interestingly, the character who portrays Jesus is no longer shown on the cross in the restaging of the show now playing on Broadway.)

In the end, though, I decided it would serve no useful purpose for me to make such excuses. It would be understating the case to say that I'm not a moral relativist, but different people do have different standards, and they aren't always predictable. One of the people I took to see Putnam County, for instance, is a devout, impeccably chaste young lady of my acquaintance who asked to go along with me and loved every minute of it, including "M.U.E." As for me, I left no doubt in my original review that I approved of Putnam County, which I described as "that rarity of rarities, a super-smart show that is also a bonafide crowd-pleaser....a musical that is not merely funny, but wise." Still, my correspondent had made clear the standards by which he would judge the show were he to see it, and it seemed no less clear to me that it was my duty as a journalist, as well as a matter of common courtesy, to be as helpful to him as possible--to tell him, in other words, what he wanted to know, not what I thought he should think. So I replied that I was pretty sure he wouldn't feel comfortable taking his children to Putnam County, and left it at that.

All these things went through my mind as I mulled over my casual decision to describe Putnam County as "family-friendly." Whatever my suspicions about the sexual sophistication of the average teenage girl, the purpose of "So You Want to See a Show?" is to offer aid and comfort to the readers of "About Last Night," many of whom have children and live in places other than New York City. At the same time, I don't want to compromise my own standards, or sound like a stuffed shirt. Hence I've decided to add to each listing a movie-style rating, followed by a brief description of any potentially troublesome aspects of the show. In the case of Putnam County, for example, this Thursday's listing will read as follows:

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection).

Perfect? Probably not. I doubt this particular circle can be squared perfectly--but I'll do my best.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 15, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: A day off

You have to live in Manhattan to know how hot it gets here in the middle of August. The only film I can think of that conveys the sheer awfulness of the kind of heat wave that now has us in a tight, slimy stranglehold is Rear Window, whose noirish subject matter puts me in mind of one of my favorite Raymond Chandler quotes: "It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks." Alas, there was nothing dry about the heat in New York this weekend. No sooner did you step outside than it smacked you in the face like a steamy towel wielded by a sadistic barber. (See? Heat waves make everyone Chandleresque, or at least me.)

Saturday, the weather bureau warned us, would be especially brutal. Fortunately, mid-August is the slackest part of the theatrical year, and I had no press previews scheduled, nor was there anything else pressing on my calendar. I'd set the whole day aside for a friend of mine who's moving back to California next week. I slept late and was awakened by a phone call from her. Something urgent, it seemed, had come up at the last minute. Could we possibly reschedule our farewells for later in the week? I said sure and hung up. Then it hit me: I had the rest of the day off.

Being a recovering workaholic, my natural impulse was to sit down and start writing, or at least call a few friends in the hope of filling the empty hours ahead with activity. Instead, I went downstairs to collect the day's mail and found in it a postcard signed with a totally illegible scrawl. It read: What have you been up to? I have not seen much of your stuff recently. Hope all is well. The comical notion of my not having been up to much lately snapped me back to my senses. What better way to spend a sickeningly hot Saturday than to stay inside and do nothing? My refrigerator was full, my DVR backed up with half a dozen unwatched movies, my desk stacked high with piles of unheard CDs, my walls covered with art that longed to be looked at. "The hell with it," I said. "I'm staying home." And so I did.

What did I do all day? I caught up on my e-mail and took a nap. I watched Young Man With a Horn, a deliciously absurd film about a Bix Beiderbecke-like jazz trumpeter that features a lovely piece of acting by Bix's real-life friend Hoagy Carmichael, and Colorado Territory, Raoul Walsh's 1949 scene-by-scene remake of High Sierra, in which the middle-aged gangster originally played by Humphrey Bogart is turned into a black-hatted Western bandit played by Joel McCrea (believe it or not, it's better than the original). I listened to an advance copy of a gorgeous new CD by Trio da Paz that comes out next month, and finished reading the pre-publication galleys of Tunes for 'Toons, a fascinating new book about music in animated cartoons.

The hours flew by unregretted, and at length it was eight-thirty, time for dinner. I ventured outdoors in the still-startling heat, strolled over to Good Enough to Eat, and treated myself to the special, Cajun pork tenderloin with peach chutney. Carrie, the owner, came by my table as I was savoring the last morsel. "What on earth are you doing here on a night like this?" she asked. "Did you know today is the restaurant's twenty-fourth birthday? I'm so glad you came!" Then she signed my check and told the waitress not to take my money. On the way home I looked up and saw an orange half-moon glowing comfortingly in the warm black sky.

In the morning I headed down to the Village to brunch on apricot-and-banana pancakes cooked by a very nice intercontinental businesscouple with an arty streak (he plays bassoon, she violin). Afterward I stepped into the waiting elevator and was joined on the next floor by a gaunt, black-clad woman holding a small robot in the shape of a dog. She cooed at the robot and stroked it tenderly, and it made affectionate-sounding noises in return. "Very convincing," I told her as we got off and walked through the lobby. She glared at me and stalked away. Laughing, I hailed an unairconditioned cab driven by an unwashed sociopath who unceremoniously whisked me back to the world.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 15, 2005 12:05 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"He was mannerly and elegant, his head held back a bit as he talked, as though you were a menu."

James Salter, "Comet" (courtesy of James Handloser)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 16, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"The answers make us wise, but the questions make us human."

Alan Jay Lerner, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 16, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Solemn occasion

Today would have been Bill Evans' seventy-sixth birthday. Here's something I wrote about him in the New York Times Book Review in 1998:

Many jazz musicians resemble their music. Who could have looked more worldly-wise than Duke Ellington, or wittier than Paul Desmond? But sometimes a musician embodies a contradiction, and then you can read it off his face, just as you can see a fault line snaking through a tranquil landscape. Such was the case with Bill Evans. His shining tone and cloudy pastel harmonies transformed such innocuous pop songs as ''Young and Foolish'' and ''The Boy Next Door'' into fleeting visions of infinite grace. Yet the bespectacled, cadaverous ruin who sat hunched over the keyboard like a broken gooseneck lamp seemed at first glance incapable of such Debussyan subtlety; something, one felt sure, must have gone terribly wrong for a man who played like that to have looked like that....

So it did, which is why Evans isn't around to celebrate his birthday with us. But rather than dwell on the unknowable sorrow at the heart of his exquisite artistry, I'd rather point you toward five recorded performances which, taken together, say all that really needs to be said about the most influential jazz pianist of his generation:

- "Young and Foolish," on Everybody Digs Bill Evans

- "My Foolish Heart" and "Some Other Time," on Waltz for Debby

- "Love Theme from Spartacus," on Conversations with Myself

- "I Loves You, Porgy," on Bill Evans at the Montreux Jazz Festival

No one has ever made more beautiful music.

UPDATE: Go here for Doug Ramsey's thoughts on Evans, plus a link to the unofficial Evans Web site.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 16, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Double-header

I'll be spending the coming week covering the New York International Fringe Festival, an undertaking that invariably keeps me jumping. I saw two full-length plays earlier this evening, one at 5:15 and the other at 9:45 (not in the same place, needless to say!), with five more to go between now and next Monday, not to mention a pair of Wall Street Journal deadlines on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings and a performance of Mark Morris' L'Allegro on Thursday at Lincoln Center.

For all these reasons, I'm going straight to bed instead of staying up late to blog. See you when the smoke clears.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 16, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- I wrote what I thought was a pretty funny theater review this morning. It took me two and a half hours to finish the first draft and an hour to polish it. I spent most of that last hour cutting 120 words out of my 1,070-word first draft. None of the cuts was longer than a single sentence--it was mostly a matter of trimming individual words and phrases. The first draft contained all the jokes that made it into the final version I e-mailed to my editor, but they were much funnier when I was done.

To the extent that I have a reputation for being funny (though only on paper, alas), it's probably because I take such pains to trim away superfluous verbiage from my best lines. Wit, I suspect, is mostly a matter of self-editing. Beyond that, I learned a long time ago that one of the easiest ways to be funny is to say exactly what you think. Some critics pull their punches, but I never do. Often I pass over bad things in merciful silence--I try whenever possible to give working actors a break, for instance--but when I do throw a punch, I always go straight for the jaw.

It's not quite the same thing, but Somerset Maugham once wrote a short story called "Jane" about an unsophisticated woman who acquired a reputation as a high-society wit simply by telling the truth:

I'd said the same things for thirty years and no one ever saw anything to laugh at. I thought it must be my clothes or my bobbed hair or my eyeglass. Then I discovered it was because I spoke the truth. It was so unusual that people thought it humorous. One of these days someone else will discover the secret, and when people habitually tell the truth of course there'll be nothing funny in it.

George Bernard Shaw agreed: "My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world." That's what I try to do. An example is my Wall Street Journal review of the recent Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, in which Christian Slater played Tom, the character based on Williams himself. I compared Slater's bluntly straightforward performance to the "careful, over-enunciated" acting of Jessica Lange as his mother: "The bluff, easygoing Mr. Slater is all wrong, too, but at least he acts like a real person, albeit one from some other play (I wanted to send him a telegram at intermission saying DIDN'T ANYBODY TELL YOU TOM IS GAY?)." That's not a joke, nor is it a comic exaggeration. It's a near-verbatim transcript of what I was thinking as I watched Slater on stage--but it's funny.

- Said today by my trainer: "You know, I think God is like a little kid with an ant farm. Sometimes he squashes you, sometimes he only pulls off a couple of legs. Or caves your tunnel in. Or sprays you with Raid."

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 16, 2005 12:49 PM | Permalink

OGIC: High-value targets

Terry does indeed know where to insert the knife--and has a wicked twist of the wrist when it's called for. Another critic pretty well-versed in the art of punishment is Ebert, who has posted this list of the worst movies he has had the misfortune of seeing. It's a nice enough little parade of potshots.

I wonder, though: wouldn't it be so much more fun if one had, you know, seen more than a handful of these movies? (If you have--I'm sorry.) I recently took part in an impromptu summit meeting on bad movies while waiting for Wedding Crashers (not at all bad) to start, during which my friend averred that to make a truly bad movie, you must have pretensions to goodness or, better yet, greatness. I think I agree. Is it news to anyone that "Baby Geniuses" is terrible? How much fun is it to stick your finely honed pin in "Halloween III"? Once in a while Ebert's list gets a little more controversial, and that's where the fun begins. For example, he hates "The Usual Suspects": "Once again, my comprehension began to slip, and finally I wrote down: "To the degree that I do understand, I don't care." Now we're getting somewhere. This is the kind of movie that has actual fans who may take one's derision as an indictment of their judgment and taste. More like this, please.

Which leads to a question. What are your favorite sacred-ish cows to slaughter? And by "sacred-ish," I mean revered, or at least taken seriously, by your own peer group. You know: movies it actually costs you something to cut down. I can ridicule "American Beauty" or a lot of other Best Picture winners until I'm blue in the face, but it takes a Jarmusch-directed roll of the eyes to really get my friends' attention. (About Jarmusch, it's not all that fair a blanket judgment, as I haven't seen a thing the man's made since the highly unwatchable "Night on Earth," while most of the JJ fans I know seem to pin their fandom on "Dead Man," unseen by me. Still, "Night on Earth" was bad enough to instantly tar many a Jarmusch film as of then unmade, and I don't regret missing any of them. But I'm certain to break the boycott at last for Bill Murray in "Broken Flowers" even though I'm growing a little weary of Murray's indie-film rounds-making. It's starting to remind me of the way every city needs their Frank Gehry structure, and a lot of them look interchangeable--these days every young Turk director needs a Bill Murray performance, and a lot of them look pretty interchangeable as well. Give me Bilbao and "Rushmore" and let's move on already.)

But as I was saying: if you were to draw up your own Ebertesque hit list, what would the most controversial entries be? Email me.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 17, 2005 1:20 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"It is sometimes the case with first-rate people that their lives seem to come to an end--sometimes very suddenly--just when they have finished performing their function."

Edmund Wilson, "Lytton Strachey" (in The Shores of Light)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 17, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Entry from an unkept diary

The one thing you can almost never tell an artist friend is that you don't like his art. It's dicey merely to say that you don't understand a particular work, much less that it doesn't speak to you (even if you go out of your way to assure him that the failing is yours). It's all but impossible to have a friendly relationship, or even a cordial one, if you simply don't respond to anything he does. In some cases this is a function of the artist's vanity, but I'm sure that more often it has to do with his deep-seated uncertainties. Many of the artists I know have fragile egos, and though some of them are amazingly successful at hiding this fragility, most are not. As Orson Welles once said to Peter Bogdanovich, "A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day. We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves."

What is less well understood is that the problem runs in both directions. I've met and liked artists whose work I later discovered I didn't much care for, and that fact invariably had an adverse effect on the way I felt about them as people. Indeed, I now go well out of my way to avoid being much more than polite to artists whom I meet socially until I have a chance to look at or listen to their work--and most especially if I like them on sight, as is occasionally the case.

I met the Mutant, a friend of mine who sings jazz, under circumstances that forced us to sit together in a shuttered nightclub and chat for an hour or so one afternoon, then return to the same club that evening to hear a performance by a mutual friend. When we parted, she gave me one of her demo CDs. I'd enjoyed talking to her so much that I actually took a cab straight to my apartment and listened to the whole CD before coming back to the club. Oh, God, I hope this is good, I said to myself all the way home. It was, and we immediately became and remained very close friends. Would that have happened if my response to her singing had been lukewarm? I doubt it.

It is, needless to say, surprisingly easy to admire the work of artists you can't stand personally. In addition, I find it all too easy to steer clear of occasions to review their work, which is why I go out of my way to do the opposite and write favorably about them whenever I can. It's one of the ways I keep myself honest (though I don't write profiles of artists I dislike personally--that's where I draw the line).

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 17, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Elsewhere

Here's some of what I've run across on the Web in the past couple of weeks:

- Jay Rosen, journalism professor and mediablogger extraordinaire, holds forth on the subject of things he used to teach that he no longer believes. Among them:

I used to teach it implicitly: journalism is a profession. Now I think it's a practice, in which pros and amateurs both participate. There were good things about the professional model, and we should retain them. But it's the strength of the social practice that counts, not the health of any so-called profession. That is what J-schools should teach and stand for, I believe. I don't care if they're called professional schools. They should equip the American people to practice journalism by teaching the students who show up, and others out there who may want help....

Yes. Totally. And if you're a blogger, you soooo know what he's talking about.

- Online theater columnist Peter Filichia points out that the list of the ten longest-running plays on Broadway "is the same today as it was on June 13, 1982, the day Deathtrap finally called it quits":

1. Life with Father (3,224 performances)
2. Tobacco Road (3,182)
3. Abie's Irish Rose (2,327)
4. Gemini (1,819)
5. Deathtrap (1,793)
6. Harvey (1,775)
7. Born Yesterday (1,642)
8. Mary, Mary (1,572)
9. The Voice of the Turtle (1,557)
10. Barefoot in the Park (1,530)

He also explains why.

(Incidentally, how many of you recognize all ten of these plays? The only one of which I'd never heard was Gemini.)

- Found object: I saw a new one-woman play about Edna St. Vincent Millay the other night, and came away wondering what her actual speaking voice sounded like. The answer is here.

- Department of Posthumous Praise: The divine Ms. Althouse, who guested on Instapundit last week, used that space to pay a nice little tribute to the late Barbara Bel Geddes, and got a funny and revealing piece of e-mail in return.

I, too, thought Bel Geddes was a babe, especially in Blood on the Moon, one of my all-time favorite Westerns (not yet out on DVD, and why the hell not?).

- We don't do politics here, but Mr. Alicublog was so funny the other day on the subject of conservatives who hate Hollywood that I just had to steer you his way:

I actually think rightwing cinephile Jason Apuzzo has a great idea--that conservatives who are forever bitching about ee-vil Hollywood should cease "verbally 'rebutting' these movies like dour lawyers in a courtroom" and start making movies themselves. I should certainly like to see Halliburton Films' epic production, The Joe McCarthy Nobody Knew, starring John Goodman as a hard-drinking Wisconsin Senator up against International Communism and the Democrat Party, played by James Woods. I would also enjoy a new version of The Grapes of Wrath in which the Joads toss flowers to the men who have come to bulldoze their home, and cheerfully take jobs at roadside hamburger stands built by a dreamy-eyed young Ray Kroc (played by Stephen Baldwin)....

While Mr. A and I rarely see eye to eye on matters of state, nobody, and I mean nobody, does the funky reductio ad absurdum the way he does.

- Ms. Bookish Gardener explores her "presumptuous familiarity" with Oscar Levant, one of my all-time favorite minor celebrities.

- Here's why litbloggers should post more often about out-of-print books...

- ...and here's why they shouldn't get so big for their britches that they forget the whole point of book reviewing (or any other kind of criticism, if I do say so myself).

- Mark Swed takes a long look at which American symphony orchestras are up and which down, and comes up with some interesting conclusions:

The orchestral landscape in America is not what it used to be. Once, American ensembles were lorded over by the "Big Five"--the main orchestras of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Cleveland. East Coast critics, while conceding the orchestral energy emanating from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony, continue to use that proprietary term, but it means nothing. The real scene has no center.

The hot conductors are in Los Angeles (Esa-Pekka Salonen), Boston (James Levine), San Francisco (Michael Tilson Thomas), Atlanta (Robert Spano) and Minneapolis (Osmo Vanska). This fall, David Robertson is expected to put St. Louis on the A-list. In 2006, when [Marin] Alsop begins in Baltimore, it too should join the party....

I don't buy every name on that list, but it's a good starting point for discussion.

- My favorite blogger (who says I can't make a commitment?) goes to an exhibition of art by Richard Tuttle, and compares what she sees there to the recipes of Paul Bertolli:

The presentation of simple principles tends to leave meaning wide open, but Tuttle and Bertolli only flirt with abstraction. Tomato? Plywood? Wire shadow? Summer squash? One cannot help but reference a very personal relationship to these familiar materials, and this bit of "personal referencing" is what provokes comments of the sort I heard wandering through the Tuttle show: "Why, I could do this!" or "My son made a picture just like that in his second grade art class." Sure, and your son could smash a whole tomato in a bowl and call it gazpacho, too. Viewing the simple as "art" is often a challenge and why Restaurant or Museum become almost necessary. Bertolli and Tuttle are virtuosos who turn our focus to something quite primary and basic; while not revolutionary, their work causes one to pay attention and realize that being simple is not so simple at all....

You can cook for me any time, ma'am.

- I love this map, at which I look several times each day. (Have you seen it yet, OGIC?)

- This is the best list I've seen on a blog in, like, ever. Be prepared to spend at least ten minutes relishing it.

- Finally, two from Supermaud, who filets Thomas Wolfe (me, too! me, too!), then remarks on an urban phenomenon I recently noted with similar wistfulness:

There are no stars in the Brooklyn sky at night. And when I say none, I mean zero.

After six years in these parts, their absence begins to seem normal. You actually forget that it's not natural to look to the spire at the top of the Chrysler Building, and to the rest of the Manhattan skyline, for illumination after dark. You notice the moon maybe once a month, when it's red and hanging low in the sky....

That puts me in mind of something I once wrote about small-town life: "A small town needs lots of explaining. It has no tall buildings, and the landmarks are all in your mind. When you look up, you see the sky; when you show somebody the sights, you see yourself."

See you later.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 17, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Rather dullish and decidedly formal

Confronted with the workmanlike diaries of Nathaniel Hawthorne, of whom he is writing a critical biography, Henry James is positively confounded. And, truth be told, a little annoyed!

I have said that Hawthorne was an observer of small things, and indeed he appears to have thought nothing too trivial to be suggestive. His Note-Books give us the measure of his perception of common and casual things, and of his habit of converting them into memoranda. These Note-Books, by the way--this seems as good a place as any other to say it--are a very singular series of volumes; I doubt whether there is anything exactly corresponding with them in the whole body of literature. They were published--in six volumes, issued at intervals--some years after Hawthorne's death, and no person attempting to write an account of the romancer could afford to regret that they should have been given to the world. There is a point of view from which this may be regretted; but the attitude of the biographer is to desire as many documents as possible. I am thankful, then, as a biographer, for the Note-Books; but I am obliged to confess that, though I have just re-read them carefully, I am still at a loss to perceive how they came to be written--what was Hawthorne's purpose in carrying on for so many years this minute and often trivial chronicle. For a person desiring information about him at any cost, it is valuable; it sheds a vivid light upon his character, his habits, the nature of his mind. But we find ourselves wondering what was its value to Hawthorne himself. It is in a very partial degree a register of impressions, and in a still smaller sense a record of emotions. Outward objects play much the large part in it; opinions, convictions, ideas pure and simple, are almost absent. He rarely takes his Note-Book into his confidence, or commits to its pages any reflections that might be adapted for publicity; the simplest way to describe the tone of these extremely objective journals is to say that they read like a series of very pleasant, though rather dullish and decidedly formal, letters, addressed to himself by a man who, having suspicions that they might be opened in the post, should have determined to insert nothing compromising. They contain much that is too futile for things intended for publicity; whereas, on the other hand, as a receptacle of private impressions and opinions, they are curiously cold and empty. They widen, as I have said, our glimpse of Hawthorne's mind (I do not say that they elevate our estimate of it), but they do so by what they fail to contain, as much as by what we find in them.

I haven't read the notebooks in question, but this reminds me for all the world of the sort of observations that Andy Warhol's diaries elicited. But nobody really brought to those the sky-high expectations that James seems to have brought to his predecessor's notebooks. What I love about the above passage is the heated contest of James's impulses to protect Hawthorne and to excoriate him for being so dull, a contest that ends in a stalemate. First, James thinks he's going to be tactful about this and tell you what he really thinks only between the lines: he's thankful for notebooks--"as a biographer." As a reader, one gets the sense, he's about an inch away from tossing them into the fire. Then he gives up the charade: "I am obliged to confess"...that I haven't the foggiest what Hawthorne thought he was up to! Then he's tactful again: the chronicle is valuable...if you want information about Hawthorne "at any cost." And so on.

The reigning note, however, is confusion verging on a sense of having been betrayed by the notebooks' emptiness. You don't often catch James not knowing what to say, but here the discovery of his literary father figure's personal banality has him practically sputtering. Rather affecting, if you ask me.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 18, 2005 3:04 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Mea maxima culpa

I owe a massive apology to Maud and Dan Kennedy for what I wrote two posts down ("The Odd Couple"). I read their posts about the New Yorker Target ads uncarefully to begin with, and then thoughtlessly lumped them in with the sort of commentary I'd read in Slate and Fishbowl NY, which were of an entirely different stripe. And I hadn't seen the actual magazine. Ergo, the actual force of their objection went over my head completely and I posted something deeply stupid. I apologize.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 18, 2005 10:37 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Everybody who collects art has some adventure. There's no question about it--whether it's paying a lot of money for a picture and hanging it in exactly the right spot, or whatever it is. There's never a day goes by in my life that I haven't looked at the things I have. And that's all my life because I started when I was twelve. I don't look at everything, of course. I don't go around and count them. But there are certain things that I have that bring back the whole minute when I first saw them, the impression I had, the things that made me want them."

Vincent Price (quoted in Victoria Price, Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 18, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Small world

Courtesy of our Site Meter world map, here are some places where "About Last Night" has been read in the past twenty-four hours:

Apple Valley, California
Arvada, Colorado
Beaverton, Oregon
Beijing, China
Benton, Missouri
Burnaby, British Columbia
Carlisle, Pennsylvania
Choudrant, Louisiana
Delhi, India
Dublin, Ireland
Halletts Cove, Australia
Hamilton, Bermuda
Irancheh, Iran
Kiev, Ukraine
Knoxville, Iowa
Kochi, Japan
Lisbon, Portugal
Lund, Sweden
Mountlake Terrace, Washington
Oneonta, New York
Oslo, Norway
Parsons, Kansas
Plano, Texas
Prague, Czech Republic
Pukalani, Hawaii
Santiago, Chile
Slough, England
Smyrna, Tennessee
Vienna, Austria

(We were also viewed in unnamed cities in China, Egypt, and Israel.)

Hi, y'all! Come back soon--and tell your friends, wherever they are.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 18, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- Alexander Woollcott's fee in 1929 for "Shouts and Murmurs," his single-page New Yorker column: $200

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $2,160.94

(Source: A. Woollcott: His Life and His World, by Samuel Hopkins Adams)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 18, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: So you want to see a show?

Not surprisingly, people in and out of town are always asking me what plays they should see, so here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:
- Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex)
- Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
- Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content)
- Fiddler on the Roof (musical, G, one scene of mild violence but otherwise family-friendly)
- The Light in the Piazza* (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene)
- Sweet Charity (musical, PG-13, lots of cutesy-pie sexual content)
- The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Orson's Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language)
- Philadelphia, Here I Come! (drama, PG, closes 9/25)
- Sides: The Fear Is Real... (sketch comedy, PG, some implicit sexual content)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly)

CLOSING SOON:
- Glengarry Glen Ross (drama, R, adult subject matter, copious quantities of spectacularly strong language, closes 8/28)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 18, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

OGIC: The odd couple

That I don't understand all of the fuss about Target usurping the New Yorker's ad pages this week must mean that I'm part of the problem. And it would, in fact, be less than honest to deny that I'm a passionate fan of the place. Terry can personally attest to this: before I owned a car, he used to rent one when visiting Chicago and always, but always, cheerfully acceded to my pleas to be driven to Target in said rental during his stay. That, dear readers, is a true blue friend.

But, personal shopping preferences aside, exactly what is it about the infernal New Yorker-Target alliance that is raising so many eyebrows? Is it simply the purchased exclusivity, or is it something about Target being the purchaser? Again, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the notion that anyone would regard Target as less than sublime. But even if I didn't harbor this deep bias, I think I'd still be a lot more disturbed/bemused by, say, those frequently turgid theme issues of the NYer that have seemed so to proliferate over the past few years, and so many of which seem designed to lure ad dollars as much as to lure readers. In these cases the line separating editorial integrity from the bottom line begins to look perilously thin. As far as I can tell, the Target discomfort doesn't have anything to do with fears about the contamination of the editorial side of the magazine--or if it does, they haven't been aired out. So what's the hubbub, bub? What am I missing?

P.S. This isn't an isolated incident of Target-targeting animus, either. Earlier this summer I attended a Chicago architecture event where it was mentioned that a Target may open in the historic Carson, Pirie, Scott Building. I was startled when a large contingent of the audience hissed at the news as though they'd heard that a Wal-Mart was opening in Robie House. Sure, it would be grand if Carson Pirie Scott could live on forever in the great building named for it, but at least we're talking apples and apples; one retailer replacing another hardly seems grounds for a hissy fit. Is the Dayton Company, which owns Target, worse than Saks, which owns Carson (but is trying to sell it)? Related: a few years back, Bloomingdale's moved its Chicago home store into the abandoned Medinah Temple, thereby saving the building from being condemned. So the place where Terry and I once attended an earth-shattering performance of Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand is relegated to retail now--but at least it's still standing, and has even received some loving restoration. Is that all bad?

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 18, 2005 12:40 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Bonus Thurber

"Let us glance at a few brief examples of creative literature in the very young, for which they should have been encouraged, not admonished.

"The small girl critic who wrote, 'This book tells me more about penguins than I wanted to know,' has a technique of clarity and directness that might well be studied by the so-called mature critics of England and the United States, whose tendency, in dealing with books about penguins or anything else, is to write long autobiographical rambles.

"Then there was a little American girl who was asked by her teacher to write a short story about her family. She managed it in a single true and provocative sentence: 'Last night my daddy didn't come home at all.' I told this to a five-year-old moppet I know and asked her if she could do as well, and she said, 'Yes,' and she did. Her short story, in its entirety, went like this: 'My daddy doesn't take anything with him when he goes away except a nightie and whiskey.'...

"Finally, there was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them the day before from our garden. 'I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber was dead, and I hate trees,' said Lisa, thus conjoining in one creative splurge the nursery rhyme about pease porridge cold, the basic plot sense of James M. Cain, and Birnam wood moving upon Dunsinane. Lisa and I were the only unhorrified persons in the room when she brought this out. We knew that her desire to get rid of her mother and my wife at one fell swoop was a pure device of creative literature. As I explained to the two doomed ladies later, it is important to let your little daughters and sons kill you off figuratively, because this is a natural infantile urge that cannot safely be channeled into amenity or what Henry James called 'the twaddle of graciousness.' The child that is scolded or punished for its natural human desire to destroy is likely to turn later to the blackjack, the golf club, or the .32-caliber automatic."

James Thurber, "The Darlings at the Top of the Stairs"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 19, 2005 1:00 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"'I have writers the way other people have mice,' a disturbed hostess has written me. 'What can I do to keep them from arguing, fighting, and throwing highball glasses after dinner? One doesn't dare mention names, such as Herman Melville and Harold Loeb, or the fight is on. What would you suggest?'

"Well, now, it isn't easy to entertain writers and have any fun. You might begin by saying, over the first cocktail, 'I don't want any writers to be mentioned this evening.' Do not make the mistake of adding, 'From Washington Irving to Jack Kerouac,' because that would instantly precipitate an argument about Washington Irving and Jack Kerouac. You might begin by saying, 'The porcupines are getting our artichokes.' This could, of course, lead to literary wrangling and jangling, but everything is a calculated risk when writers are present, even 'My grandfather almost married a Pawnee woman,' or 'I wonder if you gentlemen would help me put the handle back on my icebox.' A writer, of course, can turn anything at all into a literary discussion, and it might be better not to say anything about anything.

"I myself have found, or rather my wife has found, that you can sometimes keep writers from fighting by getting them into some kind of pencil-and-paper game. You could say, for example, 'There are thirty-seven given names and nicknames, male and female, in the word "miracle." I want you all to see how many you can find.' This almost always takes up a good hour, during which the writers are mercifully silent."

James Thurber, "The Porcupines in the Artichokes"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 19, 2005 1:20 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"'Is there mental illness in your family?'

"'No, not really.' Her reply was automatic, and she immediately doubted its veracity. Really, insanity was the only explanation for some of them. But there was no diagnosed mental illness in her family, so she was telling the truth."

Laura Lippman, The Last Place

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 19, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- Amount Benny Goodman charged in 1938 for a one-nighter by his big band: $2,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $25,743

(Source: Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times of Benny Goodman, by Ross Firestone)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 19, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Mailbag

To begin with, I want to thank the sharp-eared reader who read this posting about Joseph Taylor's 1908 recording of "Unto Brigg Fair" and wrote to tell me that it has indeed been transferred to CD. It's part of English Rhapsody, a really lovely collection of music by Frederick Delius, George Butterworth, and Percy Grainger, performed by Mark Elder and the Hall� Orchestra. I have since bought the disc, ripped all 39 seconds' worth of "Unto Brigg Fair," and dumped it into my iPod. I bet I'm the only person in the world whose iPod contains a 1908 recording by Joseph Taylor....

I also want to thank the sharp-eyed reader who read this almanac entry and wrote:

Love your blog, particularly the poetry. But if you google the great "perhaps everything terrible..." line you'll see that although Richard Rhodes incorrectly attributes it to Auden, the line actually comes from Rilke. (Auden's great. Eliot's great. Stevens is great. Merrill can be great. Rilke is the best.)

Arrgh! I don't even have a halfway decent excuse for getting this wrong, because while I usually make a point of tracing all the quotations I use in my daily almanac entries to their original sources, I lifted this one directly from Sherill Tippins' 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 without noticing that Auden was quoting from Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Pardon me while I pull up my pants. (Richard Rhodes can pull up his own damn pants.)

Now, some letters:

- "How unobservant of you and Maud. Stars are indeed visible in the New York City sky--not very many, not very often--but they are the sign of an especially clear night. You see more of them if you live in an apartment building and have access to the roof. I once saw the wisp of a comet from the top of mine. My desk looks over Third Avenue, St. George's Church, and Stuyvesant Park, and I see moons of many different colors and brightness."

Yeah, well, serves us right for not living in high-rise buildings....

- "I loved your post about the problems of recommending a play like '25th Annual....' When I saw it, the first thing I thought was 'this is perfect for the new hot HS musical' (something has to replace 'Fiddler' and 'Oklahoma' and 'Grease'!) but then I heard the 'problem song' and the Jesus-on-the-cross and the gay parents and had to rethink that. At my old school, where most of the children are relatively sophisticated, we decided that the parents of the 4-6 grade students could choose to allow those kids to come to the evening performances of 'Laramie Project' and 'A Chorus Line,' but that we would schedule other activities during the afternoon performance so as to not offend anyone that thought those were too heavy/inappropriate for their child. And several parents did not allow their children to attend (much to the kid's disappointment). Jesus and gay parents aside, any child 11-15 will be laughing at 'M.U.E.' but not for the right reasons--they'll be laughing because it's happened to them, because it's an embarrassing topic, because they're trying to be 'cool,' etc., just as they laugh at the lyrics to 'The Flintstones' ('we'll have a gay old time').Your solution is probably the best, even though it sort of looks like the ratings addenda to the NYTimes movie reviews (which, I think, are getting progressively snarkier)."

- "I was catching up with About Last Night (you write faster than I can read) last night and came across this about several pieces you listed from Bill Evans: 'No one has ever made more beautiful music.' I might have been able to swallow that without gagging had I not been listening to Angela Hewitt's new recording of the Bach keyboard concerti. Come now. Shirley U. Jest."

Well, O.K., maybe I exaggerated in the heat of aesthetic frenzy, but surely Evans' recording of "My Foolish Heart," at the very least, is not unworthy of comparison to Bach, no matter who's at the piano. (And stop calling me Shirley.)

- "I loved the map. I could see the green dot in the heart of Europe and knew that was in fact me reading your blog, as I do every day. (At least, if I was reading the map and the rest of the page correctly.) Very cool. I'm an American living in Prague for 13 years and got turned onto your web page a couple of years ago, which I read religiously. It's a great way for this English major/music major/lawyer/investment banker to keep up with what's really important back home. Your reviews and recommendations are spot on, and I make it a point to chase up (whenever possible) your suggestions. Many thanks for producing such a consistently interesting, honest, enriching and deeply enjoyable body of work."

Right back at all of you. Need I say how much Our Girl and I love hearing from the readers of "About Last Night"? Keep it coming.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 19, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Imagine there's no Lennon

Friday again, and time for the weekly postmortem...er, Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. This time around I slit the throat of Lennon and report on Terrence McNally's Dedication or The Stuff of Dreams:

I give the cast full credit for trying to make something out of nothing, but halfway through the first act I was muttering, "Bring on the deranged assassin!" Alas, "Lennon" needed no Mark David Chapman to supply the coup de gr�ce: It was dead on arrival....

Terrence McNally has a way of writing plays that start well, then go off the tracks. "Dedication or The Stuff of Dreams" is a good example of this bad tendency. For the first half-hour or so, it's a witty, agreeably sentimental backstage play about a middle-aged theatrical couple (Nathan Lane and Alison Fraser) who gave up their dreams of stardom to run a small-town children's theater. Then it hits a pothole and turns into a problem play about a cranky, cancerous grande dame (Marian Seldes) who wants Mr. Lane to euthanize her. Then it hits another pothole and turns into an overripe melodrama about sexual frustration. By the end, Mr. Lane is wearing a dress--but I'll stop there....

There's plenty more where that came from--and this week the Journal has posted a free link to my review on its "Today's Free Features" Web page. To read the whole thing, go here, with the compliments of The Wall Street Journal. Stagebloggers, take note!

(As always, I encourage you to subscribe to the Online Journal by going here. It's soooo worth it.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 19, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: Utterly out of it

I've been invaded by a virus. It must have been sneaking up on me for the past couple of days, but I didn't realize what it was until early yesterday evening, when I started coughing and feeling increasingly crappy at dinner. I then strolled over to Lincoln Center to see Mark Morris' L'Allegro, and by the end of the first act I was clammy and exhausted. I stuck it out, but my weak chest and I passed a thoroughly awful night together. I just cancelled out of the show I was going to see tonight, and I'm planning to spend the rest of the day in bed or near it.

More as it happens, but don't be too terribly surprised if you don't see much of me here on Monday.

Later.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 19, 2005 12:06 PM | Permalink

OGIC: No cow, it turns out, is sacred

Thank you to everyone who has emailed me with their unfavorite movies. Seems there's a little Evil Ebert inside all of us, and it is perfectly delighted to be asked out to play. Time has been short, so regretfully I haven't been able to write most of you back yet. I promise to do so this weekend, and I'll also share your b�tes noires with the rest of the class--watch this space. Moreover, next week I'll turn the question on its head and give you a chance to defend those films that you believe to be insufficiently appreciated. It will be interesting to see whether the invitation to praise results in quite as much mail as the invitation to bury.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 19, 2005 12:59 PM | Permalink

OGIC: White rabbit

I'm late, I'm late, for a very important post...I promised you reader movie rants, and they are forthcoming--just not this weekend, which is now last weekend, alas. And I still have a long night ahead of me before I can rest up for next week, which has insidiously but surely turned into this week, right under my insufficiently efficient nose. Wow: I am really, really bad at Sundays. I'll be back during the week with the goods. Have a nicer Monday than my Sunday, please.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 22, 2005 2:02 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"To have no pride as an actor is fatal. To have the right amount is almost impossible. It gets in the way of good work; the lack of it prevents your taking chances, daring to go further than you have before, risking whatever reputation you have--not with the public, but with your director or playwright. You need to know they will allow you to rehearse awkwardly, embarrassingly, in your search for certain elements in the play. Not carelessly, but with the kind of abandon that only comes with real love.

"Our happiest theatre memories are those when that love exists in equal measures for the actors and the audience. When the play is received as love is received, with trust, unquestioningly. Because it is being given with confidence and truth and, yes, pride. Beautiful pride."

Marian Seldes, The Bright Lights: A Theatre Life

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 22, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- Weekly salary paid to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1937 for screenwriting duties in Hollywood: $1,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $13,334.87

(Source: Steve Chagollan, "F. Scott Fitzgerald Gets a Second Act After All," New York Times, Aug. 21, 2005)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 22, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Inside tracks

- Gene Bertoncini, who plays for happy eaters on Sundays and Mondays at Le Madeleine, is appearing this Thursday at the Jazz Standard in a "celebration" of the release of Quiet Now, his second CD of unaccompanied solos for acoustic guitar. As I wrote in the liner notes for its predecessor, Body and Soul, Gene is

one of those musicians whom I seek out, no matter where they're working. That's the nice thing about living in New York--you can really keep up with great artists like Gene--and that's why I can say with certainty that his playing has gotten better with every passing year. The emotions grow steadily deeper, the harmonies richer and more oblique, the textures more eloquently spare. He was never one to throw around his technique, but now he doesn't waste any notes at all: every one rings true....

For more information, go here.

- Last Dance, Mirra Bank's 2002 cinema-verit� documentary about Pilobolus, is playing on the Sundance Channel tonight at 9:30 p.m. EDT. It's a startlingly frank backstage look at how Pilobolus collaborated with Maurice Sendak to create A Selection, a dance about the Holocaust. I can personally testify to its candor, for I happened to be visiting Pilobolus' rehearsal studio when it was filmed (I was reporting on the making of A Selection for a New York Times story) and ended up becoming one of the film's on-camera talking heads. It is, if I do say so myself, a damned fine piece of work, and since it has yet to be released on DVD, I commend it to your atttention.

For more information, go here.

- Check out all the new Top Fives, O.K.? I may be sick, but I'm still consuming art....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 22, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Eleven things I've learned while sick

(1) The computer is the worst enemy of a workaholic with a chest cold.

(2) The iPod is his best friend (especially if he sleeps in a loft).

(3) Don't watch Red Rock West when you have a fever.

(4) Good movies for invalids: Barbershop, Clueless, Defending Your Life, Speed. (Did you realize that Clueless is now ten years old? Wow.) Also good: Nero Wolfe, Patrick O'Brian, twice- and thrice-read theatrical biographies.

(5) Soup gets tiresome.

(6) Insofar as possible, don't let unwashed dishes pile up in the sink. The resulting spectacle is depressing and inhibits recovery.

(7) If you have to choose between staying dirty and taking a cold shower, take the shower.

(8) There is no truer friend than the one who offers to run errands for you.

(9) When buying groceries under the influence of antihistamines, don't just look at the pictures--read the labels.

(10) All cabbies are sadistic psychopaths. Show no weakness!

(11) Yours is not the only blog in the 'sphere.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 22, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Even a great performance can't spoil a fine composition."

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (quoted in Louis Kaufman, A Fiddler's Tale)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 23, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- Amount Scott Bradley was paid in 1954 to compose the musical score to a Tom and Jerry cartoon for MGM: $1,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $6,904.77

(Source: Daniel Goldmark, Tunes for 'Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 23, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Elsewhere

Don't think I'm not still sick! I'm mostly better, but not entirely. I had to cover the Fringe Festival last night, and my Wall Street Journal drama column is due this morning. So in lieu of original content, I offer you this snapshot of my recent reading:

- Robert Birnbaum interviews Camille Paglia:

CP: I'm on a crusade--it's to say to the poets and the artists, "Stop talking to each other. Stop talking to coteries. I despise coteries in any form. You are speaking to a coterie, OK. Stop the snide references to the rest of the world who didn't vote with you in the last election." This is big. Because we have all separated again. After 9/11, everyone was united. We are separated again thanks to what has happened in politics. People in the art world are full of [a] sanctimonious sense of superiority to most of America. But they must address America, learn to address America. Yes, have your friends, have the people who support what you are doing in the art world, but you have to recover a sense of the general audience and the same thing I am saying to the far right, get over the sneering at art, the stereotyping--

RB: They started it.

CP: Wait a minute. The far right wouldn't have any opinions about art if it weren't for those big incidents in the late '80s to the '90s when some stupid work was committing sacrilege.

RB: You're referring to Andr�s Serrano?
CP: Yeah, some 10th-rate thing. It's always Catholic iconography, I might point out. I am atheist, by the way. It's never Jewish. It's never Muslim. So I am saying this is a scandal. The art world has actually prided itself on getting a rise out of the people on the far right. Thinking, "We're avant-garde." The avant-garde is dead. It has been dead since Andy Warhol appropriated Campbell's Soup labels and Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe into his art. The avant-garde is dead. Thirty years later, 40 years later, people will think they are avant-garde every time some nudnik has a thing about Madonna with elephant dung, "Oh yeah, we are getting a rise out of the Catholic League."...

Read the whole thing here.

- Speaking of countertakes, Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post offers this unexpected slant on The Aristocrats:

For the comics, life is lived onstage, in the limelight, to the love and applause of anonymous crowds. It involves a great deal of travel, friendships with other gifted, crazed people but just as frequently, bitter rivalries, endless feuds, treachery and betrayal. If you win, you win the power of fame, which after the second day gets you nothing but good tables in restaurants where rubes bother you for autographs as you suck down your linguini, the right to fail with a better class of woman and, of course, the emptiness of being unconnected to anything larger than the self.

Boy, that's some act. Whadaya call that act?

The losers....

- And speaking of critics, Mr. Something Old, Nothing New proposes a high-camp grudge match:

Who would win in a fight between the two meanest, cruellest, wisecrackiest critics in the history of movies: Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) in Laura or Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) in All About Eve?

I'm going with DeWitt. Lydecker may be more dangerous in certain respects, but DeWitt has the size advantage, and a cooler head, and more strategic ability. His decision to blackmail and form a weird alliance with Eve (making them, according to some interpretations, 1950's original Ambiguously Gay Duo), is a far sounder strategic decision than Waldo's Pygmalion act with Laura. Addison in three rounds unless Waldo has something stashed in his old clock.

However, if it's a question of who's better at wisecracks, then Lydecker obviously wins....

The title of this posting, by the way, is "Battle of the Evil Critics." I myself would have pleaded not guilty were it not for my most recent Wall Street Journal review, which I fear may have been a touch on the evil side. (Not that there's anything wrong with it!)

- The Little Professor, one of the 'sphere's more obsessive bibliomanes, offers an alarming list of "signs that the books have taken over." Item No. 1:

Your parents send you an article from the L.A. Times that describes the lengths to which people will go to house their personal libraries--converting a garage, for example. It's not clear if this article is meant to be prophetic or admonitory.

Yikes!

- Mr. Jubilation Rising, a blogger new to me, bids a lovely farewell to Vassar Clements, one of the all-time great country fiddlers:

Vassar was a fiddler, plain but not so simple. To borrow part of a line, the violin is a harsh mistress. In symphony halls, it is revered and somewhat feared. In shade-tree string bands, it is just feared. Playing a violin is like spending time with a beauty. Even a virtuoso performance gains only passing admiration, the object of affection usually in a hurry to return to the mirror. But every so often a suitor comes along with the ability to tame. That was Vassar.

It sure was. I spent part of the summer of 1974 kicking around Nashville, playing in broken-bottle joints and looking for Vassar Clements--but that's another story....

- Ms. DevraDoWrite goes to a way scary gig:

It was a sad night. Sad to see an old friend who no longer has what it takes, surrounded by second or third rate musicians. He wears a suit jacket that looks slept in and no one on the bandstand smiles. He wanders on stage alone, and starts to play. I wonder if he begins his program solo, then works up to duo and builds on--then I realize he's just warming up almost as if unaware he's on stage. The pianist arrives, as does the sax. The drummer gets seated. He counts off and they begin just as the bassist walks on stage. They've begun anyway....

(No, I don't know who it was, and I'm glad I don't. I've been to gigs that were just like that.)

- Ms. Searchblog, who blogs about her struggles with chronic depression when not reflecting on other aspects of life, love, and art, waxes especially eloquent in this posting:

If anyone told me nearly two years ago that I would still be fighting to regain my mental health in August 2005, I would have dismissed such projections as delusional, or at least laughable.

Yet here I am--still struggling, still trying so hard to get better, still fighting the good fight.

Each morning when I open my eyes, my first thought is, "OK--I can make it through today. I can do it." Although I've repeated this mantra every morning for almost two years, I don't feel sorry for myself--not at all. It's simply the way my life is lived now: a highly internalized struggle that yields inconsistent results. My major depressive episode led to a terrifying mental breakdown, which resulted in chronic depression. That's the way it is....

Read this one, whether you've been there or not. And be sure to take the test at the end--it's very good for a laugh.

- Mr. CultureSpace does the job on Sin City:

Corruption contrasts with the men's hearts of gold. But this sort of yin-yang balance, this universal dualism, is the type of clich�d, glib sensibility of a twelve-year old, or someone who thinks life is really this simple. I loved Miller's comics when I was young, to be sure. But I grew up....Sin City is devoid of color, but not the kind you see. Rather, it's devoid of the kind you feel, and this is the worst sin of all.

Haven't been. Won't now.

- Lastly and conversely, the adorable Cinetrix posted about Me and You and Everyone We Know back in June, but for some reason it slid past me. Catching up with her thoughts now, I'm struck by her astute and subtle comparison to another of my favorite films:

At the end of Me and You, I felt the way I did after seeing Trust for the first time, or The Dreamlife of Angels: I had been somewhere new and strange and was reluctant to come back to the "real" world; I had fallen in love.

I also can't remember the last time I saw a film so gentle. The narrative ebbs and flows, exerting a tidal pull on the characters, exposing their glistening idiosyncrasies to our gaze for a moment before sweeping them away. I can't wait to see it again....

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

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 23, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

OGIC: "Good" Movies You Hate

Here's the raw list of sacred cattle proffered by our readers, presented in clever subdivisions. Starting tomorrow I'll share some of the actual reviews, which were delightfully bitter and bilious. Ebert who?

THE EVER POPULAR

American Beauty (5 mentions)
Lost in Translation (3)
Breaking the Waves (2)
Platoon (2)
Waking Life (2)
Dances with Wolves (2)
Pulp Fiction (2)

CAPITAL-S SACRED

Citizen Kane
The Third Man
Rear Window
Nashville

I RESPECTFULLY PROTEST!

Rushmore
Barcelona
Last Picture Show
Goodfellas

I HEARTILY CONCUR

About Schmidt
Immortal Beloved
Good Will Hunting
As Good as It Gets
The Natural

A FEW PAIRINGS

Schindler's List and Life Is Beautiful
Fahrenheit 9/11 and Passion of the Christ
2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind

THE CRUISE FACTOR

Vanilla Sky
Magnolia
Collateral

WHO EXACTLY IS GENUFLECTING?

Cheaper by the Dozen
Independence Day
Cabin Boy
Troy

...AND THE REST

Ordinary People, Primary Colors, The Vanishing, The English Patient, The Crying Game, Talented Mr. Ripley, Million Dollar Baby, A Letter to Three Wives, Reds, Short Cuts, Forrest Gump, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happy Endings, Love's Labour's Lost, The Goodbye Girl, Talk to Her, State and Main, Andrei Rublev, Gandhi, Z, Dersu Uzala, October, Mississippi Burning, Dead Man, Everything Quentin Tarantino Has Ever Done, A Clockwork Orange, The Piano, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 23, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: Price was right

I'm in The Wall Street Journal today with a piece about...well, you've kind of got to read it:

As of yesterday, "Atelier de Cannes," a 1958 crayon drawing by Pablo Picasso, was still on sale at www.costco.com. Price: $129,999.99. You'll find it listed under "Gadgets, Gifts & Art," along with art prints by the likes of Chagall, Dufy, Mir�, Modigliani and, er, Peter Max. The quality of these latter works is fairly modest (the Picasso isn't very good, either), but the fact that you can buy them on the Web has brought the warehouse chain reams of free publicity. Yet no one seems to remember that what Costco is doing is nothing new. Forty years ago, Sears, Roebuck & Co. was selling Picassos and Chagalls, not to mention Rembrandts, D�rers, Goyas, Whistlers, Mondrians and Wyeths, all of them bearing the imprimatur of a celebrated connoisseur who was better known for making such grisly movies as "The Fly" and "House of Wax."

Vincent Price is now best remembered for his supporting role in the classic 1944 film noir "Laura," but in the '60s he was a full-fledged movie star, albeit one who never got the girl--at least not while she was still alive. An elegantly campy gent who in his later years specialized in playing pardon-me-sir-while-I-cut-off-your-head psychopaths, Price was also one of Hollywood's most passionate art collectors, a former student at the Courtauld Institute of Art who had been well on his way to becoming an art historian when he abruptly changed course, went on the London and Broadway stages and became an overnight success.

In 1962 Price was approached by George Struthers, Sears's vice president of merchandising, who believed his company could sell fine art to the American public the same way it sold lawn mowers and ladies' underwear. Price agreed to pick the pieces and serve as spokesman, and the Vincent Price Collection of Fine Art was off and running, first in Sears's Denver store, then in other stores across the country, with a mail-order line added the following year....

OpinionJournal.com, the Journal editorial page's Web site, has posted a free link to this piece, so you can read the whole thing by going here. Not that I'd dream of discouraging you from buying a copy of today's paper and turning to the Leisure & Arts page (or, better yet, subscribing to the Online Journal by going here).

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 23, 2005 12:07 PM | Permalink

OGIC: This won't hurt a bit

So I'm hatching this crazy scheme over here that just might work: to get six whole hours of sleep tonight. I've been working fifteen-hour days and am in a pretty pitiable state, so I'm going to make this quick. Here are a handful of my favorite skewerings from the recent Ebert-inspired open call--which doesn't mean I agree with them...necessarily. But there's an art to doing this swiftly and fatally, and these readers have it down.

- Collateral. Oh God. Can we please just agree that it's time for the existential hit-man character to get two in the back of the head in a quiet Italian restaurant? Wised-up, amoral people don't decide to become hit-men because they don't see anything better to do, they become lawyers or lobbyists and make twice as much money without having to run from the police. Being a hit-man is necessarily an unpleasant and short life, and people who go into contract killing generally don't have a lot of other options, so let's just stop it with these Mephisto characters. And if you are going to use one, please don't have him be Tom Cruise talking about jazz.

- Eisenstein's October has been known to induce epileptic seizures in small children. They're the lucky ones.

- State and Main. OK, it's Vermont--get a couple old actors who've never been east of the Valley, put them in flannel shirts and rocking chairs and give them some really. stupid. lines. The part of this which was a send up of Hollywood types was funny, but the "real down home America" part was worse than painful and insulting. And I hate that ingenue with the squinty eyes, Julia Stiles.

- Rear Window. A man fears he may be a witness to a murder. Everyone else tells him he's nuts. They're wrong. That's a plot? Everything Jimmy Stewart's character thinks is happening IS happening. Not a single twist,�surprise, or discovery. Dreadful. And the moment where he blinds the beefy murderous assailant with...a camera flash? Woeful. The only reason to watch: The glorious women. Thelma Ritter gives a perfect performance. And was anyone ever more beautiful than Grace Kelly is here? So gorgeous, it hurts.

- My sacred cow is "Reds," Warren Beatty's 1981 ode to John Reed. I saw it then and remember it like it was yesterday. Clocking in at 200 minutes, the movie just dragged, on and on and on. Around the 60 minute mark, people started stirring, heads bobbing and turning, the realization dawning that we're not even a third of the way through. After the intermission, fewer than half of my fellow theater-goers returned. I sat in an aisle seat, one foot wandering left to the aisle, the other uncertainly planted in front, as the seats around me continued to empty out, frustrated theater-goers muttering to themselves as they all but ran up the aisle. As the movie slowly ground its way into its third hour, I stopped debating whether to leave, the whole thing having become a weird sort of endurance contest, one of those things you do just to say you did it, no matter how excruciating the pain.

And then, of course, Beatty won an Oscar for best director.

Googling "Reds" just now I was heartened to note that no less an authority than Paul Schrader, the writer of "Taxi Driver," among many others, had a similar experience:

"Paul Schrader likes to talk. Fortunately for his listeners, he is a very good storyteller. 'I remember I was over at Paramount, and Warren Beatty and I had been fooling around, doing this Howard Hughes thing. He had made the film "Reds" and he was showing it on the lot, and he wanted me to come. I was so tired. I thought, "Well, I'll sit way in the corner, way in the back. If I fall asleep, I'll fall asleep, and nobody will know." Nobody told me there was an intermission. So the lights come up, everybody from Barry Diller on down is in the room, all of Warren's friends, and I am sound asleep. Afterward, one of Warren's minions came over to me and said that Warren had expressed his displeasure. And I said, "Look, I know it took Warren 10 years to make this movie, but it took me three hours to see it, and I can guarantee you that three hours of my life mean more to me than 10 years of Warren's.'"

Hee. More where these came from tomorrowish. Sleep well!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 24, 2005 1:56 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorl�d ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear. �

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders come
Which only makes you eloquent. �

Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Habit of Perfection"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 24, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- Total cost in 1937 of the 1,340-square-foot Herbert and Katherine Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin, including Frank Lloyd Wright's architect's fee of $450: $5,500

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $73,341.81

(Source: Doreen Ehrlich, Usonian Houses)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 24, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: She's baaaaack

Ms. Cup of Chicha has returned to the blogosphere after an extended absence. She's as wicked as ever. Go say hello!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 24, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Strict observance

Sorry, folks, but that crackling noise you hear in the middle distance is the sound of me burning out. I'm driving up to Connecticut this morning to see a show, which I consider more than sufficient reason not to blog again today. Though I do finally seem to be on the verge of licking this damn cold--I actually took a two-hour nap yesterday afternoon that was blessedly rich in Rapid Eye Movement, something on which I've been severely short since last Thursday....

Anyway, see you tomorrow. Or maybe Friday. (And don't ask me which Friday.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 24, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: Down the road

Up and coming on my calendar:

- SEPTEMBER 14: "Jules Olitski--Matter Embraced: Paintings 1950s and Now" opens at Knoedler & Company

- SEPTEMBER 20: Street date of Trio da Paz's Somewhere (Blue Toucan)

- OCTOBER 11: Street date of Hilary Hahn's first violin-piano CD, a set of four Mozart violin sonatas accompanied by Natalie Zhu (DG)

- OCTOBER 20: "Marks of Distinction: Two Hundred Years of American Watercolors and Drawings from the Hood Museum of Art" opens at the National Academy Museum

- OCTOBER 25: Street date of Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume Three (Warner Home Video)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 25, 2005 1:00 AM | Permalink

TT: When size doesn't matter

My friend and colleague John Rockwell, the chief dance critic of the New York Times, has published a column called "Has Mark Morris Made Only One Masterpiece?" which is so wrong-headed that I felt I had to say something about it at once.

Here's part of what John wrote:

Mark Morris is rightly regarded as the finest modern-dance choreographer of his generation, and his "L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato," a richly varied, deeply moving evening-length setting of Handel's oratorio to Milton's text, is widely believed to be his masterpiece.

But if "L'Allegro," which was created in Brussels in 1988 and concluded its fifth New York run since 1990 at the New York State Theater on Saturday, is Mr. Morris's masterpiece, what's he done since? Should we, as dance lovers and Morris admirers, be concerned that a choreographer still in his prime--he's just shy of 49--and celebrating the 25th anniversary of his company has not produced a comparable triumph in the last 18 years? And if not, why not?...

Size and success are not synonymous. Scattered through the shorter dances that make up the typical mixed-repertory programs of the Mark Morris Dance Group are innumerable gems. But grandeur of scale does make an impact; it stretches out the canvas to allow more room for the rich emotional range and teeming variety of detail that enliven "L'Allegro."

(Read the whole thing here.)

Fudge the point though he does, John is not so implicitly arguing that size and success are synonymous, or something close to it. He remarks in passing, for instance, that "Mr. Morris has delivered eminently serious work in recent years. Like 'V,' set in 2001 to Schumann's E-flat Piano Quintet." Yet that unforgettably compelling one-act dance, together with many other post-L'Allegro works of comparable weight and significance that John neglected to mention, is apparently as nothing when placed next to the full-evening L'Allegro, which to John's way of thinking is Morris' sole and only "masterpiece."

How shall I start dismantling this argument-by-assertion? With the most appropriate possible comparison. Mark Morris is about to turn forty-nine. How many full-evening dances had the greatest of all choreographers, George Balanchine, made by the time he was forty-nine? Er, one. He made The Nutcracker in 1954, shortly before his fiftieth birthday, and while it is an indisputably great and miraculous ballet, I don't know anybody over the age of ten who'd be likely to call it his masterpiece. Too bad poor Mr. B piddled away the remainder of his first five decades on such comparatively minor jobs of work as Apollo, Prodigal Son, Serenade, Concerto Barocco, Ballet Imperial, Symphony in C, Orpheus, The Four Temperaments....

You see my point, of course. Yes, L'Allegro is a masterpiece, probably Morris' greatest achievement to date, and its scope is part and parcel of its greatness. To quote what I myself have written about it, L'Allegro is "a whole world of dance in a single evening, everything from childlike pantomime to knockabout comedy to complex groupings reminiscent of George Balanchine in their control and clarity." This all-encompassing generosity of inspiration is one of the reasons why we respond to it so powerfully. But it's not great because it's long, nor are long works of art necessarily greater than short ones. In my opinion, the greatest ballet of the twentieth century--perhaps the greatest ever made--is Balanchine's half-hour-long Four Temperaments, which contains whole universes of thought and emotion. Jerome Robbins never made a single full-evening dance. Merce Cunningham has made only one, Ocean, and it's no masterpiece. To date Paul Taylor has made two, neither of which has remained in his company's repertory. And as for Morris, I can think of any number of his post-1988 dances which I and many other critics and dance lovers believe to be as good as L'Allegro, even if they're not as long. Dido and Aeneas, Love Song Waltzes, Grand Duo, Rhymes With Silver, The Office, The Argument, V: that's what Mark Morris has "done since," just for starters. So unless you define "masterpiece" as "a person's single greatest achievement," which John is obviously not doing in this context, then what he's written makes no sense at all.

Could it be that John has confused greatness with ambition? Or was he simply spinning out a big idea in haste and without sufficient forethought, as journalists, myself included, have been known to do on occasion when a deadline beckons? Beats me. But I wish he'd left this particular idea in the oven to bake a little longer before he served it forth in the New York Times.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 25, 2005 10:09 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects."

William Hazlitt, "On the Pleasure of Hating"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 25, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- Fee paid by Cosmopolitan in 1932 for U.S. serial rights to Thank You, Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse's first full-length Jeeves novel: $50,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $607,551.90

(Source: Robert McCrum, Wodehouse: A Life)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 25, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:
- Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex)
- Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
- Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content)
- Fiddler on the Roof (musical, G, one scene of mild violence but otherwise family-friendly)
- The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene)
- Sweet Charity (musical, PG-13, lots of cutesy-pie sexual content)
- The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Orson's Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language)
- Philadelphia, Here I Come! (drama, PG, closes Sept. 25)
- Sides: The Fear Is Real... (sketch comedy, PG, some implicit sexual content)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly)

CLOSING SOON:
- Glengarry Glen Ross (drama, R, adult subject matter, copious quantities of spectacularly strong language, closes Sunday)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 25, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Wrapping up rants

Let me share a few last cinematic heresies, with some annotations this time because it's 8:00 and I'm fresh as a daisy compared with my recent blogging sessions:

American Beauty. I know, you picked it, too, but I couldn't resist. From Kevin Spacey, playing the single role he always plays, to Annette Bening, as a gay screenwriter's idea of a castrating hag; from the ridiculously worshipful depiction of a teenage pothead to the implication that a Marine World War II vet is a repressed homosexual Nazi (it was people like Spacey, Alan Ball and Sam Mendes, of course, who actually stopped the Nazis from conquering the world), this breathtakingly mendacious picture of American suburbia takes the cake.

Thank you. I've been really gratified to see how many people actively dislike this movie. I saw it in less than ideal conditions: in a promotional preview on a college campus with Spacey, Mena Suvari, Thora Birch, and Wes Bentley in attendance. The starstruck college kids in the audience hooted and clapped through the whole thing, egging on Spacey's character. My alienation from my surroundings was complete. I've avoided the movie ever since. But judging from what many of you had to say, I wasn't simply swayed the unfavorable circumstances--there was a kernel of discernment at work, too.

Leaving Las Vegas. It seemed like an exercise in piling on the gratuitous misery and despair, and I've realized of late that I think gratuitous despair is much worse than gratuitous sex and violence. (I'm of the Jane Austen "let other pens dwell on guilt and misery" school of thought.) Watching it, I got the feeling that all the critics who praised it were congratulating themselves for being brave and tough-minded enough to watch something that depressing. Blech.

Not having seen this one, I'm not qualified to comment. But what the hell: Blech!

The Natural. Here's the movie I hate that most people like and it usually ends near the top of best sports movies. Honestly, I can never forgive Redford for what he did to this story. Roy Hobbs doesn't hit that home run, he doesn't win the game; no, he fails and everyone thinks he was paid off by gamblers.I don't expect a movie to be 100 percent faithful to its source material, but there has to a point where someone says "You know that story we're making into a movie? This is no longer that story." Yeah, I know Malamud himself seemed OK with it, mainly because he said the movie would cause him to be thought of as something other than a Jewish writer. Sorry, can't find the exact quote. Robert Redford is one of those people I thought would have more respect for the story. For me, his reputation is forever sullied and I'd just like to ask, "WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING? JUST GO MAKE SOME OTHER FREAKIN' BASEBALL STORY YOU HACK!"

Reading this struck an deep chord in me. I read Malamud's novel as a teenager, right around the time the Detroit Tigers had their Cinderella season. Being caught up in baseball made me especially attuned to Roy Hobbs's plight, and I was devastated; it was one of my first truly intense encounters with a truly bleak literary vision. Close on the heels of that, the movie felt like the worst kind of betrayal, and continues to stand as an all-time low in my movie-viewing history.

This next one also loudly rang a bell.

About Schmidt. Look, I grew up in Palo Alto, California, and go through a tin of flavored hummus a day, but the sneering condescension that pervades every shot in this film had me yelling to my friends about the elitist values of Hollywood on the way out of the theater. Oh, look at those poor people in Omaha with their bleak, meaningless lives. I've heard people talk about how sympathetic this movie was, but is there one character who isn't presented as either an asshole or a desperate loser? And does anyone actually still think that Jack Nicholson is a serious actor?

Well, I'm not sure it's Jack Nicholson's fault that for a while now he hasn't been able to play anyone but Jack Nicholson. It probably is. But more to the point, this movie vexed me no end because I was such a fan of Election and Citizen Ruth (and, more lately, Sideways, though--don't write--I'm fully aware of the case against; I'm not convinced, however, that this case, or the one against Lost in Translation, would have gathered so much steam absent the movies' success). I was fully prepared to like Schmidt. I loathed it. Coming from a director who is usually such a precise ironist, the false note of the final scene, especially, left me shocked and disgusted. And yet I suspect that the tonal difference between this film and Election was a matter of millimeters--millimeters that just happened to fall across some crucial line separating lampoon from contempt. (Speaking of Election, Quiet Bubble mentions in passing that it's one of his cows. I'm curious why, but in a way I don't want to know since QB has great taste and I wouldn't want to be talked out of my love for it.)

Next, two brave souls dissent from the common wisdom on a film that I personally have never heard a heartfelt negative word about, Waking Life:

- Earlier this week the Onion A.V. Club blog tossed out the question of what movies have inspired people to walk out of the theater, which got me thinking about this kind of stuff. So I thought I'd mention Richard Linklater's atrocious Waking Life. When it came out, I was in the middle of an extremely rigorous self-imposed academic hell at the University of Chicago, so the sight of Ethan Hawke or Julie Delpy standing on a pseudointellectual soap box spewing out "chicken soup for the soul"-brand political and social philosophy made me physically ill. I think this is a controversial choice, not because I've gotten into arguments about it with my friends (in fact, I haven't allowed any loved ones to see it if I could help it), but because of the rapt expressions of those around me when I was stumbling over them to get myself out of the theater as quickly as possible. I am sure they wouldn't agree with my assessment.

- When I read your post about attacking movies that everyone else loves, I immediately thought of Waking Life. I am alone among my friends who have seen this movie in thinking that it is 90 minutes of repetitive, self-impressed, pseudo-intellectual tripe. For some reason, the pretty pictures and elementary analyses blind the rest of my friends to its shallowness.

Conveeeeeniently, I haven't actually seen the movie and can't take a side. I'm a fan of Linklater, though that principally means I'm a fan of Dazed and Confused (as is the friend who wrote the first of these comments). So this should have been a natural choice for me, but something kept me from seeing it. Now--perhaps--I know what.

Next is another movie I've never seen. In this case, however, I've been congratulating myself on my judgment from the get-go.

Forrest Gump. The idea of the novel (I'm told) is that�the generation of American history from, say, 1960 to 1980 is best rendered as a tale told by an idiot. The book was ironic, get it? Like most of the movies on this list, FG shows no awareness of the possibility of irony. A�movie�so bad as to constitute a small�ethical catastrophe.

There are moments when I feel a shred of curiosity to check in on old Forrest. My idea of this movie's badness is so extreme as to make me think sometimes that it must have been misunderstood somehow. Then the moment passes.

Finally, I wanted to share this ultimate exercise in counter-intuition:

I haven't seen Citizen Kane for many years, perhaps an older me would like it more, but I found it uninvolving when I saw it many years ago. Some of the critical praise seems to emphasize technical accomplishments (camera movement, focus things) which is pretty much not of interest to the average movie goer.

I first saw Citizen Kane in my late twenties. I was a teaching assistant in a course where it was on the syllabus. I had to be ready to field questions and grade papers about it, so I was watching it in large part out of duty, and looking at it in large part as a work of art whose greatness was beyond doubt. (Which didn't really distinguish me from anyone watching it for the first time with an awareness of this reputation.) So it was decided ahead of time that I would find it a masterpiece. Under these circumstances, it can feel very much as though your own discernment, rather than the object of your scrutiny, is what's actually under scrutiny. And yet I think this effect is more pronounced for some acknowledged masterpieces than others. Watching, say, Grand Illusion or All About Eve for the first time, any self-consciousness I might have felt about my responses was soon extinguished by absorption. Not so for Kane.

As I told the reader who sent it, the Kane comment also reminded me of a memorable scene in The Sopranos, when Carmela gets her lady friends together for a movie club in the Sopranos' cushy home theater. For the kickoff, they watch Citizen Kane. It's Carmela's pick; she opens the evening with some critics' comments about the greatness of the movie, and the lights go down. When they come up again, everyone looks at each other rather blankly, halfheartedly attempts to discuss the movie's merits and flaws ("So it was the sled? He shoulda told somebody"; "That guy was so conceited"), and moves on eagerly to neighborhood gossip. Apart from any parallels between Kane and Tony Soprano, the scene appeared to mock the mob wives crowd for emerging from a masterpiece so pristinely unmoved. Hell, I laughed at them. But since my experience of the movie was so heavily weighed upon by its elephantine reputation, I'm not certain, in retrospect, I should have felt quite so superior. At the very least, I'm envious of their opportunity to view the movie relatively baggage-free.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 26, 2005 12:00 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Cameo kitty

The most charming guest blogger perhaps ever is currently starring at Alex Ross's. I love how the mere thought of blogging gives her that deer-in-the-headlights stare. I know how you feel sometimes, Maulina, I know how you feel.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 26, 2005 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

To avoid the clich�s
Of the obituary writers,
Die in obscurity.
A fine bed in a light-filled room
Someone who adores you is at your side
And vowed to silence.

Kenneth Koch, "Aesthetics of Obituary"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 26, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- H.L. Mencken's weekly salary in 1899 for his first job as a Baltimore newspaper reporter: $8

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $177.24

(Source: Terry Teachout, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 26, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: My all-time favorite verse from a rock song

I'm Lester the Nightfly
Hello Baton Rouge
Won't you turn your radio down
Respect the seven second delay we use

So you say there's a race
Of men in the trees
You're for tough legislation
Thanks for calling
I wait all night for calls like these

Donald Fagen, "The Nightfly"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 26, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Maintenance man

I spent an idle hour (yes, I do have them from time to time, every month or two) trolling through "Sites to See," our blogroll. I added several new blogs and sites that caught my eye in recent weeks, as well as dropping a few old ones that had become inactive or tedious. Our Girl, who writes the blogreviews that appear from time to time in the Top Five module, is doing the same. Our goal, as always, is to make "Sites to See" as useful to you as possible, so if you run across a new or little-known blog that you think we might like, drop us an e-mail.

New blogs and sites are marked with an asterisk. Give them a look--along with any of the old blogs and sites you've yet to visit. In the twenty-first century, the 'sphere is the place to be.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 26, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: Snapshots from the Fringe

I reported on this year's New York International Fringe Festival (which runs through Sunday) in today's Wall Street Journal drama column. The most talked-about show I saw was Bridezilla Strikes Back!:

For those who don't keep up with reality TV, "Bridezillas" is the series that follows a group of increasingly demented brides-to-be as they plan their Must...Be...Perfect Weddings. Cynthia Silver, now a faculty member at New York's Atlantic Theater Company, was approached to take part in the first season and jumped at the chance for network TV exposure, taking for granted that it was a straight documentary and not realizing that the producers would edit the cinema-verit� footage to make their subjects look as bitchy and neurotic as possible. Co-written with Kenny Finkle, "Bridezilla Strikes Back!" is the story of how she descended into the double-barreled maelstrom of a wedding and a hit TV show and emerged sadder but wiser.

I assumed Ms. Silver would tell her tale with the wised-up detachment of a media-savvy Manhattanite, but the tone of "Bridezilla Strikes Back!"--frankly confessional, rough around the emotional edges, unexpectedly poignant--is nothing like what I'd expected...

No link, so to read more about this and the four other Fringe Festival I reviewed, buy a copy of today's Journal. (Alternatively, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, where you can read me every week and lots of other good stuff every day.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 26, 2005 12:05 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

Robert Frost, "Design" (courtesy of Rick Brookhiser)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 29, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- Price of the first oil painting ever sold by Milton Avery, purchased by the violinist Louis Kaufman in 1926: $25

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $264.16

(Source: Louis Kaufman, A Fiddler's Tale )

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 29, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Rerun

February 2004:

Without exception, my friends are puzzled by my more than occasional practice of reading biographies from back to front. It puzzles me, too, even though I've been doing it for years, and I can't offer any explanation, however theoretical, for a habit that at first, second, and third glances makes no sense. All I can tell you is that for some reason not yet accessible to introspection, I often prefer to read about a person's life in reverse chronological order, starting with his death and working backwards to his birth....

(If it's new to you, read the whole thing here.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 29, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Half a list

For reasons I can't yet reveal, I just had occasion to draw up a list of my fifteen favorite American movies of the past seven years. I'll share it with you when the time comes, but for the moment I've decided to post a teaser--the twenty runners-up.

In alphabetical order, they were:

About Schmidt
Being John Malkovich
The Cooler
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Garden State
Guinevere
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Lilo & Stitch
The Limey
Lovely and Amazing
Magnolia
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Me and You and Everyone We Know
Pi
The Secret Lives of Dentists
Sideways
Sunshine State
The Tao of Steve
The Whole Nine Yards
Three Kings

Watch this space for the winners....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 29, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: One big blockbuster

"So, what did you do all afternoon?" my friend Allie asked as we settled into our seats to see Junebug .

"I went to MoMA," I told her.

"And did you enjoy yourself?"

I hesitated, still reluctant to commit myself definitively to the unwelcome truth.

"No," I finally said. "I didn't enjoy myself at all. I don't think the new MoMA is a very good place to look at art. It's like a mall, not a museum. A great big supermall."

She nodded. "That's just how I feel," she replied.

It wasn't until last Friday afternoon that I was willing at last to admit what I'd suspected all along: I simply don't like the much-ballyhooed new Museum of Modern Art, which I saw for the first time just before it opened to the public last November. My first impressions had been sharply mixed, but I did my best to side with the strengths of the new building, knowing that such impressions are almost always deceptive. I went back a month later, and since then I'd stayed away, wanting to give the curators a chance to find their footing before I rendered anything like a final judgment.

Sure enough, some things have changed since the new MoMA opened its doors, and one of them is genuinely encouraging. The museum's great Monet "Water Lilies" triptych, which had been hanging in a multi-story atrium across from Barnett Newman's monstrous Broken Obelisk, has now been moved to a small side gallery which it shares with two other late Monets and a pair of large paintings by Bonnard and Vuillard, a modest but nonetheless welcome gesture to civility.

Otherwise, the MoMA I saw on Friday is basically the same MoMA I saw last November, with the same ineradicable problems that were immediately apparent to me (and many others) on first viewing. The exaggerated scale of the building swamps the art it contains, and the austere d�cor is so rigidly uniform in its self-conscious simplicity as to make the museum seem even bigger than it is. As if to compensate--which it doesn't--most of the galleries are as overstuffed with paintings as they are overcrowded with people, making it impossible to concentrate on any one work with anything remotely approaching ease. And while I'm hardly the first person to remark on the mall-like character of the new MoMA, I found it even more oppressive this time around. I came away feeling that visitors were intended not to commune with the art on the walls but to pass by it briskly on the way from the food court to the museum store, sped on their hasty way by the endless banks of escalators that in retrospect strike me as the building's most memorable feature.

Size alone does not make a museum oppressive. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is big, too, but the varied character of its public spaces makes it feel far more compact than it is, like an ensemble of smaller museums that happen to share the same building. You can spend an hour or two in the American wing, for instance, and go home satisfied, knowing that you can always return another day to look at the Vermeers. Not so MoMA, whose architecture and d�cor are all, all of a piece throughout, making it look less like One Big Museum than One Big Blockbuster, "Modernism: A History," a fist-sized pill that must be swallowed in a single desperate gulp or not at all.

Needless to say, it doesn't help that the curators of MoMA long ago imposed on their collection an ideological unanimity that is precisely mirrored in the building's unanimity of style. The Gospel According to MoMA is so well known by now that one thinks of it as a single portmanteau word: C�zannepicassosurrealismabexminimalismpop. That which fits neatly into the museum's official "narrative" is exhibited in depth, sometimes counterproductively so. (The Mondrian gallery is a case in point.) That which fails to fit is either ignored or condescendingly shunted off to one side, as in the now-notorious case of the stairwell to which Milton Avery's Sea Grasses and Blue Sea and a gorgeous pair of abstractions by Richard Diebenkorn have been relegated.

MoMA's idiosyncratic version of the complex story of modernism has been criticized innumerable times, by me among others:

In the old MoMA, prewar American modernists were all but ignored, except for the ones whose work either related to European surrealism (Joseph Cornell) or prefigured abstract expressionism (Milton Avery). Nor were such postwar representationalists as Fairfield Porter given the time of day. Alas, nothing has changed....

The fact that the old MoMA was too small to exhibit more than a fraction of its vast holdings made me wonder whether the new MoMA might possibly be planning to rethink its cramped view of American art before 1945. No such luck. At least for now, Elderfield & Co. haven't even tried.

They still haven't. On Friday I looked into the photography galleries, and saw on one wall a deft juxtaposition: Irving Penn's 1947 dual portrait of H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan hangs side by side with his 1948 study of John Marin, one of America's greatest prewar modern painters. Might this have been a donnish stroke of curatorial wit? Mencken, after all, was violently hostile to modernism in most of its manifestations, as I explained in The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken:

Mencken may not have been the most qualified of observers of the American scene, but he had certainly spent more than enough time in New York City to have some awareness of what was going on there in 1924. The problem was his own lack of curiosity. It is impossible to imagine him dropping by Carnegie Hall for the premiere of Aaron Copland's Organ Symphony, strolling into Alfred Stieglitz's exhibition of the latest watercolors by John Marin, or even paying a visit to the Casino Theatre to see the Marx Brothers in I'll Say She Is. While it is too easy simply to say that he was as much of a philistine as the philistines whose ignorance he loved to denounce, it is not altogether untrue.

Alas, the effect of this clever juxtaposition was greatly diminished by the fact that there was not a single painting, watercolor, or etching by Marin hanging anywhere in the Museum of Modern Art last Friday. There is more than one way to be a philistine.

The vastly increased size of the new MoMA makes its curatorial philosophy seem even more confining in retrospect. The larger MoMA's vision of modernism is writ, the less convincing it looks, especially in light of the contextual separation imposed by the fact that MoMA is a museum of modern art. To visit a medium-sized encyclopedic collection like that of, say, the old Cleveland Museum of Art, where modernism was presented not as an isolated phenomenon but as part of the larger story of Western art--and where, no less importantly, the works of modern art on display were chosen in a brilliantly discriminating way--is a very different experience, as I was reminded when I visited Cleveland last September:

Instead of collecting in depth, Cleveland's curators, like their counterparts at Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum, opted for quality over quantity, and time and again they hit the bull's-eye. When I visited the abstract expressionist gallery last Tuesday, for instance, it contained paintings by William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, sculptures by David Smith and Isamu Noguchi, an Alexander Calder mobile, and a Joseph Cornell box--the whole history of abstract expressionism summed up in fourteen objects, all on display in a single room. Except for the Krasner, each one was of the highest possible quality. The whole museum is like that, more or less.

Next to so civilized a place, or the similarly civilized Phillips Collection, the new MoMA starts to look less like a truly great museum and more like the monomaniacally excessive Barnes Foundation. As I wrote back in June after my first visit to the Barnes:

Not coincidentally, seeing the Barnes for the first time redoubled my appreciation of the Phillips. While Albert Barnes and Duncan Phillips were both great art collectors whose underlying sensibilities were very similar, Barnes was both obsessive and provincial in a way that Phillips was not. Phillips spent a lifetime cultivating his eye and mind by engaging with the ideas of others; Barnes seems to have listened only to himself, eventually going so far as to create a closed system of aesthetics whose sole purpose was to justify his own prejudices...

There can be, of course, no doing without the Museum of Modern Art, if only because it is the home of so many beloved and essential works of art, and because it not infrequently contrives to present them, and others of similar quality, in memorable ways. I can't count the hours I've spent looking at its exhibitions, nor can I even begin to estimate the pleasure and profit I've derived from them. That's why I used to love MoMA, disagree though I always did with its inflexible point of view. No more. I know I haven't paid my last visit there--but I also know that we shall never be again as we were.

UPDATE: Says Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes:

It is fair to ask if museums can be lovable once they hit the 120,000-square foot mark.

It sure is.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 29, 2005 12:05 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Rapid fire

A few brief notes from a harried blogger:

- Last night's Erin McKeown show at Schuba's was a blast whose double aftereffect I'm still feeling: I'm still all charged up from it and at the same time rather crestfallen that it's over. This show was quite different from her appearance last year on the same stage--as one of my companions put it, the brainy chanteuse of Distillation and Grand gave way to the brainy rocker of We Will Become Like Birds for this one--but no less exhilarating. McKeown played almost everything from the new album, recast some old favorites in new tempos, and generally poured her heart out all over the stage. This was not surprising, but the opening act was: Chicago-based folk singer and guitarist Rachel Ries was just captivating with her melodious waterfall of a voice and a very disarming stage presence. Her brand-new album is available here.

- Hooray--as promised, the Chicago Reader recently beefed up its on-line presence, adding features, reviews, and in fact all content to its website, here. The current issue of the free Chicago weekly notably contains a short story by local writer Kevin Guilfoile, of Coudal Partners and Cast of Shadows fame, that comes from a new anthology of Chicago Noir fiction. It's available as a PDF.

- Memo to Random House production: If you must divide "Mussoliniesque"--especially at a page break--the only acceptable division is "Mussolini-esque." Truly.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 29, 2005 12:05 PM | Permalink

TT: Footnote

Shepard Smith of Fox News was on Bourbon Street late Sunday afternoon, carrying a cell phone and watching the diehards party. He ran into one man who was walking his dogs.

"What are you still doing here?" he asked the man incredulously.

"None of your ------- business," the man answered.

I wonder where that guy is now?

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 29, 2005 12:06 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Welcome to the mise en scene

Don't know if anyone else caught the highly ridiculous yet entertaining premiere of Prison Break tonight--don't look at me, I was diligently working on my review that's due later this week!--but if nothing else it was notable for what I believe must be the first prominent use of Chicago's Millennium Park as a dramatic backdrop. And a good use it was, too--I'm told--capitalizing on the Crown Fountain's big, spitting images for their creepy panoptical quality. Perhaps the next episode will treat us to some Bean action; there's a star in the making if I ever saw one. (If you want to catch up, tonight's premiere airs again Thursday at 7:00 pm Bean Daylight Time, 8:00 Eastern.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 30, 2005 1:15 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

I'll go my way by myself, this is the end of romance.
I'll go my way by myself, love is only a dance.
I'll try to apply myself and teach my heart to sing.
I'll go my way by myself like a bird on the wing,
I'll face the unknown, I'll build a world of my own;
No one knows better than I, myself, I'm by myself alone.

Howard Dietz, "By Myself" (music by Arthur Schwartz)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 30, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- Jerome Robbins' royalty in 1944 for each performance by Ballet Theatre of Fancy Free, his first ballet: $10

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $106.83

(Source: Deborah Jowitt, Jerome Robbins)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 30, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Try it (the first in an occasional series)

Most people know Aaron Copland's Rodeo and Billy the Kid (as well they should--they're perfectly wonderful pieces, popular in the best possible way). Surprisingly few concertgoers, though, are familiar with the abstract instrumental pieces of Copland's middle years, which are "abstract" only in the sense that they weren't written to accompany ballets. In fact, you'll find in them the same sweetly austere harmonies and long, leaping arches of melody that make Copland's music so immediately distinctive and quintessentially American in sound and style.

I recommend the Violin Sonata of 1943, which Isaac Stern recorded in 1968 with Copland himself at the piano (he was a fine pianist, crisp and unmannered). It doesn't get played much in concert, and I don't know why, because it's extraordinarily beautiful, from the gentle open-prairie lyricism of the first movement to the stomping vigor of the finale. Maybe it isn't flashy enough for your typical hot-shot virtuoso. All I know is that the Copland Violin Sonata never fails to bring tears to my eyes.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 30, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: A very bloggy story

In light of the continuing crisis in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast, we've decided to resume updating of "Live from Katrina," our list of stormblogs and other useful links. To see it, go here.

* * *

A funny thing happened on the way to my writing what was supposed to have been today's lead posting: I ended up spending half of Sunday and all of Monday creating and maintaining what appears to have been the Web's most comprehensive list of bloggers who were reporting from the scene on Hurricane Katrina.

Needless to say, that had less than nothing to do with the mission statement of "About Last Night," but I did it anyway, and thereby hangs a tale.

Like many, perhaps most Americans, I didn't realize until Sunday afternoon that a Category Five hurricane was headed for New Orleans. I'd spent the whole morning writing a long, involved posting about how I'd become disillusioned with the new Museum of Modern Art. I came up for air, turned on the TV, and discovered to my astonishment that the city about which I'd been writing for the past few months (I'm working on a biography of Louis Armstrong) was at high risk of being blown into the Gulf of Mexico.

Being a blogger, my snap reaction was to head for my iBook and find out what was what. I quickly discovered that lots and lots of people were posting on Hurricane Katrina. But while most of their postings included links to other blogs, no one had thought to assemble a one-stop list of stormblogs and other relevant sites. After bookmarking a few of the best ones, I got the idea to throw together an "About Last Night" posting called "Live from Katrina." The first version, as I recall, contained links to a half-dozen blogs, most of which made mention of one or two other bloggers. I checked out every link I ran across and, when appropriate, added it to my original posting. Within an hour or two, other bloggers, including Jeff Jarvis, were linking to my list, which by then included a number of other informational sites. At that point it occurred to me to send an e-mail to Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit suggesting that he take a look at what I'd done. He linked to it a minute or two later, and the hits started pouring in.

That was when the Web began to work its own mysterious, self-sustaining magic. Stormblogs I didn't yet know about started turning up in my referral log courtesy of the Instapundit link, and I in turn transferred them to my new blogroll, adding other useful links as I discovered them. By the time I went to bed at three-thirty that morning, I realized that my informal little list had turned into a potentially significant resource.

I awoke without benefit of alarm at seven and set to refining my list, indicating which blogs had been updated most recently and posting excerpts from the best ones. Within an hour or two I had created what was for all intents and purposes a manually operated aggregator page of Katrina-related sites. I was supposed to deliver a piece to Commentary at noon that day, but by mid-morning several other high-traffic pages, including MSNBC's Clicked, National Review's The Corner, and The Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web, had linked to "Live from Katrina." I felt I ought to keep on doing what I was doing, so I sent an e-mail to Neal Kozodoy, the editor of Commentary, asking him if he could extend my deadline for a day. He agreed on the spot, and I spent the rest of Monday updating "Live from Katrina" more or less continuously.

By midday Slate's Today's Blogs page had caught up with me:

"Katrina has been downgraded still further to a Category Two storm--that is, disastrous but not apocalyptic," reports converted arts and culture blogger Terry Teachout in a link-stuffed post at About Last Night. "The eye of the storm is now moving across Mississippi to Alabama. New Orleans has already been hit hard, and flood damage appears to be extensive. ... CNN is carrying eyewitness reports of looting. Large pieces of the roof of the Superdome roof, the 'shelter of last resort' for nine thousand stranded locals and tourists, were peeled away by high winds, but the damage was superficial, not structural."

The funny thing was that I hadn't really converted. In addition to "Live from Katrina," Monday's "About Last Night" also included its usual quota of art-related postings, including my MoMA rant and Our Girl's report on a gig by Erin McKeown, all of which were pulling in the usual quota of Monday-morning traffic. It was as if two different blogs--a stormblog and an artblog--were simultaneously inhabiting the same body, and doing so without any apparent conflict.

As Hurricane Katrina finally slowed down and Monday shuddered to a close, I stopped updating "Live from Katrina" and started thinking about the implications of what I'd been doing for the past two days. On the one hand, nothing could have been less typical of "About Last Night" than for me to have thrown myself head first into so unlikely an undertaking. Yet at the same time, nothing could be more characteristic of the new world of new media. One of the most distinctive properies of blogs, after all, is that they are instantly and infinitely malleable at the whim of the blogger. "About Last Night" is about art because Our Girl in Chicago and I want it to be about art. If we decided at noon tomorrow that it would henceforth be about hockey, or smoked salmon, there'd be nothing to stop us from changing course at 12:01. Instead, we decided to make a one-day detour into citizen journalism, and the blogosphere promptly sat up and took notice.

Don't get me wrong. I love newspapers. If I didn't, I wouldn't pour so much of my energy into them. I hope I spend the rest of my life writing for them. But what happened to this blog two days ago is a dramatic demonstration of the two most important properties of the new media: independence and immediacy. I doubt that any print-media editor, however savvy or enlightened, would have let me do what I did with "About Last Night" on Sunday afternoon. I would have had to talk a half-dozen suits into letting me tear up my job description for a day, and by the time I'd finally talked them around (assuming I succeeded in doing so, which probably wouldn't have happened), it would have been too late to bother. As a blogger, I didn't have to talk anyone into letting me do what I wanted--I just did it, with Our Girl's enthusiastic blessing.

Am I glad to get back to artblogging? You bet. I'm beat to the socks.

Am I glad I took a day off from artblogging to try and do some good? Absolutely.

Am I glad I'm a blogger? A hundred thousand times yes.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a deadline to hit....

UPDATE: Here are a couple of messages I found in my e-mailbox when the smoke finally cleared:

- "You've really outdone yourself with your compendium of Hurricane Katrina links. What a fantastic effort--I can't believe every news site hasn't done something similar (but they haven't). And then to read that you're doing this even though you've never been to New Orleans--well, my jaw dropped."

- "I appreciate your posting the list. My family all lives in New Orleans (they're in Alabama at the moment) and no one can even get near their neighborhoods to see how things are going. I can't look at any more photos--New Orleans looks like postwar Berlin in A Foreign Affair--but I like reading the blogs to see how people are doing. Thanks again."

Letters like that make it all worthwhile.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 30, 2005 12:05 PM | Permalink

OGIC: The beat goes on

Two notable follow-ups to last week's overpuffed movie post have rolled in. One fills out the story of the time Carmela Soprano met Charles Foster Kane:

Belatedly read your over-praised movie post in which you cite the Citizen Kane scene from The Sopranos. Carmela hasn't chosen Kane randomly--the film club she has set up is going to go through the AFI 100 Greatest Movies list in order. Which, of course, sets up a great gag in a following episode, when the girls are back together and can't watch #2, Casablanca, because Tony has taken the AV equipment. Carmela says that she "didn't feel like watching Casablanca anyway" and someone asks what the next movie on the list is. Janice picks up the piece of paper to read, "The Godfather." The looks on their faces are priceless.

I'd forgotten the exact circumstances, which much improve the vignette. Thanks to Tosy and Cosh for the rest of the story.

Regarding The Natural, a reader conveys a terrific anecdote from a Michael Farber story in this week's Sports Illustrated:

Tim Hudson said of [Braves rookie outfielder Jeff] Francoeur, "He's like Roy Hobbs. I'm wainting for him to come out of the bullpen and start striking guys out, throwing 98 [mph]. Or to start hitting bombs lefthanded." Francoeur was born the year The Natural hit theaters, but he knows Hudson's reference is to the guy who goes light-tower at the end of the film. Told that in Bernard Malamud's novel the tragic Hobbs strikes out, the rookie laughs and booms, "That's why books suck!"

And that's why I'm no athlete!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 30, 2005 12:56 PM | Permalink

TT: A European perspective on Katrina

A reader from Norway writes:

I just want you to know that I'm one of the many people who are deeply grateful for your list of Katrina blogs.�CNN Europe was very good on the tsunami, but has been maddeningly lame on Katrina.�The crucial test, which they failed ignominiously, was the unexpected levee breaches.�After the hurricane had passed, they went into automatic day-after-the-hurricane mode, serving up the same brief, standard, "well, now it's time for the big clean-up" report every half-hour for hours.�During the same hours, I was reading on Brendan Loy's weblog and other weblogs about the breach in the first levee and the rising waters in New Orleans.�Literally hours went by before CNN Europe picked up on this story, and while Brendan Loy understood the significance of it immediately, CNN Europe reported on it in a perfunctory manner, apparently unable to switch gears quickly because this new development just didn't fit their script.�Incredibly, long after Loy had begun reporting on the rising waters in New Orleans, CNN Europe was still broadcasting the same fatuous day-after-the-hurricane report (including an interview with a French Quarter merchant who was happy that his business had survived intact), the thrust of which was that N.O., thank goodness, had been spared the worst of the storm.

BBC World was even more hopeless.�I've also read articles at the New York Times, Times-Picayune, and other MSM websites, some of them very good.�But overall, the MSM coverage seems incredibly thin compared to the rich tapestry of information provided by the weblogs you've linked to (including readers' comments).�It certainly is a new age in media, and nothing has proven this more surely than the Katrina story.

Another point.�Weirdly, while the tsunami was a major topic of conversation here in Norway for days, nobody seems to be talking about the devastation in New Orleans.�I brought it up yesterday while having drinks with a bunch of friends, and they seemed barely aware of the story and didn't seem to find it interesting or important. They were far more interested in discussing the upcoming Norwegian elections.

We'd be interested in hearing from other readers outside the United States on this topic....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 31, 2005 10:36 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. To open the mind so wide as to keep nothing in it or out of it is not a virtue; it is the vice of the feeble-minded."

G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 31, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- Commissioning fee paid to William Walton by Jascha Heifetz in 1939 for Walton's B Minor Violin Concerto, including two years' worth of exclusive performance rights: $1,493.00

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $19,589.35

(Source: Michael Kennedy, Portrait of Walton)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 31, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Down the road

Up and coming on my calendar:

- SEPTEMBER 20-25: The Bad Plus performs at the Village Vanguard

- SEPTEMBER 25: The Mint Theater presents the world premiere of Walking Down Broadway, an unproduced 1931 play by Dawn Powell

- OCTOBER 11: Street date of the DVD of Me and You and Everyone We Know (MGM)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 31, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: All in

Hurricane Katrina bumped into my end-of-the-month deadline glut, meaning that I had to stay up all last night writing--a Commentary essay from midnight to seven, my Friday Wall Street Journal drama column from seven to ten. John Pancake, my editor at the Washington Post, was able to give me a one-day extension for this Sunday's "Second City" column, which I'll write in the morning.

For the moment, though, I'm cross-eyed and sleep-deprived, so I'm not even going to try to blog. Our Girl, bless her, has taken over our "Live from Katrina" page, which continues to draw heavy traffic. Me, I'm going to post some pre-written items, then crawl into my loft and seek a bit of oblivion.

See you later.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on August 31, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink