About Last Night: September 2005 Archives

TT: Almanac

At century's end
Nobody's holding out for heaven
It's not for creatures here below
We just suit up for a game
The name of which we used to know
By now it's second nature

Scratch the cab
We can grab the local
Let's get to the love scene, my friend
Which means look, maybe touch
But beyond that not too much
Dumb love in the city
At century's end

Donald Fagen and Timothy Mayer, "Century's End" (music by Fagen)

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

TT: Number, please

- Amount paid in 1913 by Henry Clay Frick to Joseph Duveen for Romans d'amour et de la jeunesse, Jean-Honor� Fragonard's fourteen-panel sequence now on display in the Frick Collection's Fragonard Room: $1,000,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $19,109,908.63

(Source: Meryle Secrest, Duveen: A Life in Art)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 1, 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 strong language)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly)

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

TT: The vanished trail

I've never been to New Orleans, though I always meant to go, and was planning to pay a visit this fall. I started writing a biography of Louis Armstrong back in January, and the time had come for me to pay a visit to Tulane University's Hogan Jazz Archive and start trawling through its massive collection of documents and other source material. More than that, I wanted to see Armstrong's home town for myself at long last. It was mostly a matter of curiosity: I'd been reading about New Orleans all my life, and I longed to put the flesh of first-hand observation on all that I'd learned from books.

Needless to say, book learning is not to be despised. For one thing, it made it possible for me to write the first paragraph of the first chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong:

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

I showed that passage to several friends of mine who knew New Orleans well, not telling them I'd never been there until after they'd read and commented on it. None of them suspected that it was the unaided product of book learning, a fact of which I'm sinfully proud.

Nevertheless, I took it for granted that I'd need to spend some time wandering around New Orleans in order to write Hotter Than That, though the more I thought about it, the more I wondered exactly what it was I expected to find there. Armstrong left New Orleans in 1922, never to return save as a visitor. The only home he ever owned is in Queens, New York, not far from the Louis Armstrong Archives, to which his fourth wife Lucille left his papers and personal effects, and Flushing Cemetery, where he was laid to rest in 1971. All the really important sites of his youth vanished long, long ago: the honky-tonks where he played his first gigs, the children's home where he learned to play cornet, the shack on Jane Alley where he was born. Even Jane Alley itself has been swallowed up by urban renewal. Nothing recognizable remains of Storyville, the whites-only red-light district to which he delivered coal as a boy, or black Storyville, the violent slum where he grew up, and the guidebooks warn visitors in no uncertain terms to steer cleer of Louis Armstrong Park ("It's still a bad idea to walk through the park alone day or night").

It was different when I was writing about H.L. Mencken. A half-century after his death, Mencken's scent is still strong in Baltimore. All three of his homes still exist, and I spent a day in the Hollins Street row house in which he spent nearly the whole of his childhood and all but a few years of his adult life. His personal library and the bulk of his private papers belong to the Enoch Pratt Free Library, where qualified scholars can rummage through them at will. I spent innumerable hours doing just that, and dined several times just around the corner at Marconi's, one of his favorite restaurants. I even made a point of visiting his grave. It's no exaggeration to say that I simply couldn't have written The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken without passing a vast amount of time in Baltimore.

By comparison, New Orleans contains few surviving traces of Louis Armstrong, yet it never occurred to me for a moment not to go there. To some extent, I suppose, it would have been in the nature of a pilgrimage. Though he had no illusions about it, Armstrong loved New Orleans with all his heart, and wrote about it in his autobiography with surprisingly uncomplicated affection. For that reason alone, I felt I owed it to his memory to pay the place a visit. Moreover, I was well aware that New Orleans is a city like no other, and it seemed self-evident to me that I owed it to myself to walk the streets and smell the air.

Such, at any rate, was my plan. Then came Hurricane Katrina, and as I sat in front of my TV on Sunday and Monday, gawking at the unfolding disaster and in the process seeing more of New Orleans than I had in the whole of my preceding life, I realized that I'd missed my chance. It's not at all clear how much of New Orleans will be left to see when the waters subside and the folks come back home, and the greater part of what remains will doubtless have been altered beyond recognition by the time I finally get there. Or perhaps not: New Orleans, I gather, is as much a way of life as a place to live, and the lure of that lifestyle may well be powerful enough to inspire its surviving citizens to restore it to something closely resembling what it was mere days ago. But even if they do, it won't be the same.

Josh Levin, who grew up in New Orleans, wrote the other day about how it felt to watch his home town drown on TV:

As the endlessly looping aerial footage shows little more than a giant lake with highway overpasses peeking out, I'm glad I wasn't there and terrified I never will be again. A friend from high school told me he took the scenic route out of town on Sunday morning so he could remember the places he needed to remember: Molly's at the Market, the Warehouse District, the Uptown JCC, the corner of St. Charles Avenue where he drank his first beer. I squint at the screen, searching for some kind of landmark to say goodbye to, but the only thing that's recognizable is the Superdome, which now looks like a potato with the skin peeled off to reveal the rotten insides....

I don't remember much of what I did when I went down to visit my folks a few months ago: ate some fried seafood at some hole in the wall, went to my grandparents' house, probably walked under the canopy of oak trees in Audubon Park. Maybe it's a heartless thing to say when there are still people down there in the muck, but it's tragic to think of all those beautiful trees, in the park and on the Uptown streets that I drove through every day, toppled and on the ground, waiting to be chopped into bits and trucked away. There are friends' houses that will no doubt be so much flotsam, neighborhood restaurants that won't serve another oyster po' boy, bars where the jukebox won't ever play Allen Toussaint or Ernie K-Doe again.

I can't know how that feels. I think I'm glad I can't. But this I do know: I'm still going to go to New Orleans, once the levees are rebuilt and the floodwaters have receded. Maybe not right away, but soon, even if there's nothing left to see there but the shadows of shadows. Now more than ever, I owe it to Louis, and to the music I used to play and will always love so well.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 1, 2005 12:05 PM | Permalink

TT and OGIC: New around here, stranger?

If you came here in search of information about Hurricane Katrina and are curious to know what else this blog has to offer under normal circumstances...

Welcome to "About Last Night," a 24/5 blog hosted by Terry Teachout, who writes about the arts in New York City and elsewhere, and Laura Demanski, who writes from Chicago under the no-longer-a-pseudonym "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 September 1, 2005 12:06 PM | Permalink

TT: Katrina in Prague

In response to this posting, another reader writes:

The story is getting major coverage in Prague: large page 1 articles in the major dailies, and it's the lead story on the television news. When I met my Czech teacher this morning for my language lesson, she (a wonderful 77 year-old granny) expressed her heartfelt condolences to me and America generally (of course, she has also got a granddaughter living in Panama City, FL, so she may be paying slightly more attention to it than most people here.) She also expressed her withering contempt for the Czech President, who apparently has yet to express his condolences to his American counterpart.

As part of "New Europe," the Czechs are generally pro-American but are certainly more ambivalent in their relationship with the US than the Poles. Still, the fact that the Katrina stories have displaced the usual summer political scandals from the media shows the Czechs' innate sensitivity and interest in the wider world around them. It could also have to do with the fact that, three years ago at this time, Prague endured its worst flooding in 500 years, so that very fresh and painful memory has generated considerable sympathy for what the beleaguered Gulf Coast residents are now going through.

Many thanks and all the best to you and OGIC as you keep up this important work!

And thanks to you for writing....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 1, 2005 12:35 PM | Permalink

TT and OGIC: Live from Katrina

Regular twice-daily updates to "Live from Katrina" come to an end tonight. On Sunday morning Terry will be traveling to Washington, D.C., and from there to Wisconsin (about which more in due course). He'll be blogging from the road as often as possible, but posting of all kinds will be unpredictably intermittent until his return to New York on September 15.

As of Monday, "Live from Katrina" will no longer appear at the top of "About Last Night"'s front page, but the URL will remain active indefinitely, along with all our links to Katrina-related blogs and other Web sites.

Our thanks to everyone who's written in recent days with words of praise and encouragement. What we did wasn't much--not compared to the valiant efforts of those on the ground in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast--but we did our best to spread the word.

If you haven't made a donation to relief for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, scroll down and do it now. Dig a little deeper in your pocket and give a little more than you think you can afford. The more it hurts you, the more it'll help them.

(To skip directly to Friday's art-related postings, go here.)

* * *

Here's a list of bloggers who've been posting from/near/about New Orleans and the Gulf Coast:

- Beans...It Happens (reports on conditions in St. Charles Parish and elsewhere)
- Black Cat Bone (blogging by a Mississippi artist familiar with New Orleans)
- Josh Britton (an essential source for news updates and LSU-related information)
- DeadlyKatrina.com
- Electric Mist (first-person blogging from Baton Rouge)
- Everything and Nothing (blogging from Jackson, Miss.)
- A Frolic of My Own (blogging from the New Orleans area)
- Eyes on Katrina (a newspaper blog from South Mississippi)
- Rex Hammock (blogging from Nashville)
- Hurricane Harbor (blogging from Miami)
- Hurricane Katrina (blogging from Baton Rouge, with new posts appearing at the bottom of the page)
- Hurricane Katrina--First Reports (a Web page from the American Association of Museums containing information on the post-Katrina condition of museums and other cultural institutions in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region)
- Insomnia (excerpts from postings by New Orleans LiveJournal users)
- Katrina and the Arts (a regularly updated posting at Tyler Green's "Modern Art Notes" blog, covering "Katrina's impact on cultural institutions and the like in Louisiana and Mississippi")
- Katrina Help Wiki Portal (a how-to-help info site)
- Katrinacane's Friends* (more New Orleans LiveJournal entries)
- Kaye's Hurricane Katrina Blog (sporadic postings from Baton Rouge)
- Lone Star Times (live blogging from the Astrodome in Houston)
- Brendan Loy (an essential source for Katrina-related local newslinks and summaries and other information, including e-mail from readers in the affected areas)
- Michelle Malkin (a wide-ranging source of links to Katrina-related stories)
- Jeff Masters (a highly knowledgeable weatherblogger)
- Metroblogging New Orleans (a group blog)
- mgno.com, a/k/a "The Interdictor" (frequently updated reports from New Orleans, plus extensive comments)
- One Hand Clapping (blogging from Tennessee)
- Overtaken by Events
- paultwo (a Baton Rouge-based photoblog)
- Pitch & Green
- Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog (updates from New Orleans)
- a small victory (blogging "good-news" stories from New Orleans)
- Storm Digest (frequently updated)
- Tulane University Emergency Information
- Updates as They Come In on Katrina (WWL-TV's news blog, constantly updated, an essential source for bulletins from the only New Orleans TV station that has been able to stay on the air continuously throughout the crisis)

* * *

Artsjournal.com, which hosts "About Last Night," has a separate page called "Hurricane Katrina & The Arts" with links to sites and stories about the effects of Katrina on the arts community.

* * *

Here's a link to the AP's national wire, to which Katrina-related stories are being posted around the clock.

Here's the breaking-news page from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which also has an in-house blog, "Notebook from the Hurricane Bunker," that is now posting messages from evacuees and those searching for them. Both pages are must reading for anyone wanting to know what's happening on the ground in New Orleans.

Also on the paper's Web site is a missing persons forum.

Two other sites are serving as clearinghouses for those trying to get information about friends and family, looking for temporary shelter, or looking for opportunities to volunteer: craigslist New Orleans and katrinacheckin.org. NowPublic is a message board with photos of missing persons. N.O. Pundit is a group of message boards for Orleans Parish survivors, family members, etc., organized by neighborhood.

Hibernia Corporation is requesting that all of its employees who live in areas impacted by Hurricane Katrina call the following toll-free number: 1-800-707-0489. They want to find out where you are and how you're doing. If you need help, they will put you in touch with the right resources. If you see anyone you know who works for Hibernia, please pass along this message to them. Please identify yourself as a Hibernia employee when you call.

Here's a page of Katrina-related e-mail received by the BBC and updated regularly.

Here's an automated aggregrator page of Katrina-related bloglinks.

Here's a transcript of a 2002 radio documentary detailing a worst-case scenario for Category Five hurricane damage in New Orleans.

And here's a feature from the Times-Picayune on the same subject. (This one will make your hair stand on end.)

* * *

Here's an extensive list of flood-aid links recommended by bloggers throughout the 'sphere.

Our Girl and I recommend the McCormick Tribune Foundation in Chicago, which is matching donations to its Hurricane Katrina Relief Campaign, $1 for every $2 given. Contributions can be made here.

The Southeastern Museums Conference has started a "Hurricane Katrina Fund" to help support post-Katrina repair and conservation efforts at museums affected by the hurricane and its aftermath. For information on how to contribute, go here.

Ben Jaffe, manager (and bass player) at Preservation Hall, has announced a fund to help support New Orleans musicians who have been left destitute by the storm. For information, go here.

HurricAid is a group blog devoted to disseminating information about aid efforts.

NBC-TV will be broadcasting a hurricane-relief benefit tonight at eight p.m. EDT (live on the East Coast, via tape delay on the West Coast).

* * *

Here's a sad and beautiful elegy for the New Orleans that used to be, written by a man who knew it well and holds out hope for its eventual restoration.

For a more pessimistic view, go here.

* * *

Finally, a personal word from Terry to all those bloggers posting from the Gulf Coast, and everyone else who was caught in the path of Katrina: we New Yorkers know about disasters, and our hearts are with you. May the world reach out to you as it did to us.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 2, 2005 4:46 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"You see them on the bus in the morning: girls reading the newspaper, girls with lending-library novels and girls simply staring off into space. If it is not a rainy day and the bus is not crowded with strap-hangers pushing one another up the aisle you can see each face clearly. Each of them is a self-contained little mask, decorated with cosmetics, keeping its private thoughts secluded in a public vehicle. Some of these girls are going to their offices because each day is another step to the success they dream of, and others are going to work because they cannot live without the money, and some are going because that's where they go on weekdays and they never give it another thought. They go to their typing pool or their calculating machines as to a waiting place, a limbo for single girls who are waiting for love and marriage. Perhaps the girl reading her plastic-covered lending-library novel is reading of love, or perhaps she is simply looking at the page and thinking of herself. X meets Y and there is magic. Or X meets Y and there is nothing; it might not have been that kind of year, maybe a year or two from now Y would have looked much more desirable to X. Or perhaps X meets Z and falls desperately in love, a kind of self-hypnosis, when a year or two later if X had only then met Z she might have been spared."

Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

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

TT: Number, please

- Samuel Clemens' average net share of the box-office take for one of his 1884-85 lectures: $155.34

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $3,073.59

(Source: Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 2, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Rerun

September 2003:

If we think a house or painting or photograph or ballet is beautiful, we want it with us always. But the catch is that the more pieces of the past we succeed in preserving, the less space and time we have in which to display and contemplate the present. Too many lovers of art live exclusively in the past. I understand the temptation--I feel it myself--but it strikes me that we have an obligation to keep one eye fixed in the moment, and that becomes a lot harder to do when you're pulling a long, long train of classics of which the new is merely the caboose. Needless to say, this is a problem without a solution. The only thing you can do is fiddle with the proportions and try to get them right, or at least righter....

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

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

TT: And now for something completely different

My Wall Street Journal colleague Eric Gibson reviews Hilary Spurling's Matisse the Master, the second volume of her masterly biography of Henri Matisse, in today's paper:

Ms. Spurling's second volume is a worthy successor to her first, "The Unknown Matisse." That earlier book revealed an artist impelled toward modernism almost in spite of himself. It also raised the bar for artist-biographies, so splendid were Ms. Spurling's gifts as an interpreter and chronicler....

Ms. Spurling's book--like Matisse's art, in fact--is poised and measured, though charged with intense emotion. Her narrative gifts, combined with her extensive quotations from the family's correspondence, give the book an immediacy that makes us silent witnesses to a long drama of creativity and ordeal. When the last page is turned, we are likely to feel as emotionally drained as the artist did when he finished a painting. And then we are left to weigh it all up, on one side the surpassing artistic achievement and on the other its terrible price.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 2, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: A "Friend" indeed

It's Friday, time again for my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I reviewed two musicals this week, one out of town (Goodspeed Musicals' revival of The Boy Friend, directed by Julie Andrews) and one not (the Public Theater's Shakespeare-in-the-Park revival of Two Gentlemen of Verona). The first was good, the second wasn't:

Ms. Andrews, who no longer performs, made her Broadway debut in "The Boy Friend" 51 years ago (sorry to be ungallant, but it's no secret). Now she's elected to pass on a half-century of accumulated stage wisdom to her youthful charges, and it shows, not least in the singing of Jessica Grov�, who plays Polly, Ms. Andrews' old role. Without stooping to imitation, Ms. Grov� neatly contrives to suggest her mentor's lyrical yet exact soprano voice. But, then, it's obvious that Madame Director worked overtime to make sure all her charges spoke and sang crystal-clearly, for which I couldn't be more grateful.

The show itself is a spoonful of sugar minus the medicine, a giddy spoof of the flossy conventions of British musical comedy in the Age of the Flapper. Beyond putting a shine on everybody's diction, Ms. Andrews' chief contribution appears to have been to make sure the cast doesn't overegg the pudding. Polly's romance with Tony (Sean Palmer), for instance, is played surprisingly straight, and profits from it. This isn't to say the funny stuff is thrown away, merely that it isn't allowed to cloy....

As Ms. Andrews so pleasantly reminds us, period pieces can be charming as long as the period itself was charming, or is made to seem so. I assume, therefore, that everyone responsible for the Public Theater's latest Shakespeare in the Park debacle, a revival of "Two Gentlemen of Verona," must have thought the early '70s were a real whee. Certainly this oafish 1971 musical-comedy adaptation of Shakespeare's play reeks-I believe that's the right word-of their shagadelic essence. Even Riccardo Hern�ndez' unit set, an amoeba-shaped platform covered with pink and yellow polkadots and anchored on either end by a pair of spiral staircases, looks like something you might have seen once upon a time on "Laugh-In," or maybe "The Dean Martin Show." The only thing missing is the fireman's pole.

Galt MacDermot, the man who brought you "Hair," wrote the peace-love-rock-'n'-roll score, which is so relentlessly insipid that I found it all but impossible to endure, by which I mean that it made me long in vain for instant death, or at least a fainting spell....

No link, but there's more where that came from, so buy a copy of today's Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 2, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Music that does not nourish you spiritually is not music, only aural sensations."

David Diamond (quoted in Crisis, September 2005)

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

TT: Number, please

- Price paid in 1957 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (Number 30): $30,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $203,881.98

(Source: Irving Sandler, A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 5, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Rerun

July 2004:

No one who hasn't written a book can know what it feels like to see it set up in type for the first time. Your own manuscript, however neatly printed it may be, simply isn't the real thing. It's homemade, and looks that way. You can edit it as painstakingly as you like, but you still don't know what your words will sound like in your inner ear until you see the thing itself. It's unnerving, half scary and half thrilling, to pull the proofs out of their package and start riffling through them, pretending to look for typos (and sometimes finding them) but mostly just gazing raptly at each page, feeling your half-forgotten sentences and paragraphs quiver to life....

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

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

TT: Elsewhere

At the moment I'm somewhere en route from Washington, D.C., to here. Yes, you'll be hearing all about it in due course, but for now, content yourselves with this capsule version of my recent explorations in the blogosphere:

- By way of Conversational Reading, a fondly remembered excerpt from an interview with Vladimir Nabokov:

INTERVIEWER: And the function of the editor? Has one ever had literary advice to offer?

NABOKOV: By "editor" I suppose you mean proofreader. Among these I have known limpid creatures of limitless tact and tenderness who would discuss with me a semicolon as if it were a point of honor--which, indeed, a point of art often is. But I have also come across a few pompous avuncular brutes who would attempt to "make suggestions" which I countered with a thunderous "stet"!

(Hee hee hee.)

- Words to the wise from Jeff Jarvis:

There is no need to define "blog." I doubt there ever was such a call to define "newspaper" or "television" or "radio" or "book"--or, for that matter, "telephone" or "instant messenger." A blog is merely a tool that lets you do anything from change the world to share your shopping list. People will use it however they wish. And it is way too soon in the invention of uses for this tool to limit it with a set definition. That's why I resist even calling it a medium; it is a means of sharing information and also of interacting: It's more about conversation than content so far. I think it is equally tiresome and useless to argue about whether blogs are journalism, for journalism is not limited by the tool or medium or person used in the act. Blogs are whatever they want to be. Blogs are whatever we make them. Defining "blog" is a fool's errand.

I don't entirely agree, but I agree a lot more now than I did a year and a half ago.

- Good news from Playbill:

A new film written and directed by playwright/screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan will likely begin filming in September.

Variety reports that Lonergan's "Margaret" will be filmed in New York with Scott Rudin, Gary Gilbert and Sydney Pollack serving as producers. Anna Paquin has signed on to the project, and negotiations are currently underway with Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo, J. Smith-Cameron and Jeannie Berlin.

"Margaret," according to the industry paper, concerns "a Gotham teen, her actress mother and the girl who tries to make amends for her complicity in a terrible traffic accident."

Lonergan's stage plays include The Waverly Gallery, Lobby Hero and This Is Our Youth. He also wrote the screenplays for "Analyze This," "You Can Count On Me," "The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle" and "Gangs of New York."

I can't wait.

- Speaking of good playwrights, Mr. Superfluities is smart about why Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? still makes Broadway audiences squirm:

Virginia Woolf, in its unforgiving portrait of the illusions that support a long-term relationship and the hostility and envy that give the American, educated, professional upper-middle-class its fuel, is a glance into a mirror. If you're going to take your wife or girlfriend out for dinner and a show, you may be better off with something other than Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Now that Broadway is an amusement park rather than the locus of an art form, it provides escape (even excellent, thoughtful, well-crafted examples of escape like Doubt), not inward-turning dissection....

- Mr. Alicublog (who really ought to meet Mr. Superfluities) goes to Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin and draws a similarly sharp-witted distinction about one of my favorite actresses:

In Being John Malkovitch Catherine Keener's character is a delightful surprise; in Virgin the woman Keener plays is earthy, quirky, and sweet--that is, a compilation of descriptive terms for the Catherine Keener persona, all of which I adore, but which add up to considerably less than a character....

(The last movie I watched before the levees broke, by the way, was Living in Oblivion. Ooooh, is she ever good in that.)

- Speaking of movies, Lileks has fun with a film noir...

- ...while Mr. Rifftides shows what George Balanchine and John Coltrane had in common.

- Ms. Killin' Time Being Lazy just introduced me to Cat and Girl, a webcomic "drawn" by a twenty-six-year-old wit from Brooklyn. I smell a major addiction coming on, if not a print-media essay.

- Finally, Mr. Outer Life rhapsodizes as only he can on his Favorite Restaurant:

And that's all it was to me, that place with the best pastrami sandwich, until a few years ago when it became so much more: My Favorite Restaurant. I remember the day well, it was lunch, on a Saturday, the crowd waiting for a table spilling out into the parking lot, as usual, and while waiting I read a newspaper review posted on the window. This deli, sandwiched between a tile store and a dive bar in a non-descript strip mall across from some tenements in the middle of the sort of dystopic suburban sprawl that causes your average New Urbanist to wail and gnash his teeth in despair, was, according to the critic, not only the best deli in the city, it was one of the best restaurants.

Now I know what you're thinking, because it's exactly what my wife thought, namely, that seeing it so highly-rated is what elevated my esteem for it, but that's not quite the way it happened. No, I resolved, on reading that review, to branch out, to try something other than the Number One pastrami sandwich, for what struck me more than the review's conclusion was the review's long list of do-not-miss items, items I'd somehow managed to miss.

So I tried the matzo ball soup...

Where? Where? WHERE?

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 5, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"I thought, on the train, how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes & barrens & wilds. It still dwarfs & terrifies & crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens & orchards & fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless."

Wallace Stevens, notebook entry, 1904 (courtesy of Paul Moravec)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 6, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- Weekly salary paid in 1927 to Bix Beiderbecke for playing cornet in the Paul Whiteman Orchestra: $200

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $2,092.32

(Source: Jean Pierre Lion, Bix: The Definitive Biography of a Jazz Legend)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 6, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Try it

I've written quite a bit in this space about Brian Friel's 1964 play Philadelphia, Here I Come! Currently being revived off Broadway by the Irish Repertory Theatre, it's the raucously funny, intensely poignant story of an angry young Irishman, his talkative alter ego, and the aging, uncommunicative father who can't put his feelings for his son into words.

If you live too far from New York to see the Irish Rep's superlative production, there's an alternative: Friel adapted his play for the screen in 1975, and the film version will be telecast Sunday, September 18, at 10:30 a.m. EDT on Trio. The effect is very different from that of the stage play: film, being an essentially realistic medium, lends itself less well to the portrayal of such fantastic devices as an imaginary alter ego visible only to the audience. Still, the essence of the play remains intact, and the fact that the film was shot on location in Ireland lends a different kind of "authenticity" to the results.

For more information on the telecast, go here. To order Philadelphia, Here I Come! on DVD, go here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 6, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: I guess you'll have to dream the rest

I'm on the road today, freshly embarked on a week's worth of wandering in Wisconsin, reviewing plays and visiting buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Right at this moment, I'm sitting in the Schwartz House in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, one of the three Wright houses available for short-term rental to the general public. To be exact, I'm sitting at the built-in desk in the nook shown in the top two photos, listening to Appalachian Spring on my iPod, clicking away at my iBook, and trying to persuade myself that I really do need to go to bed. It didn't occur to me when I arranged to spend the night here that I might find it too exciting to get any sleep....

I'm writing about this trip for The Wall Street Journal, so I mustn't give the whole show away for free, but I'll share a little taste with you: contrary to anything you may have heard or read about Wright's houses, this one is comfortable. Incredibly so. Who knew?

I think I'd better sign off now, since I have a very long day ahead of me. I'll do my best to check in tomorrow night, but don't be shocked if I drop off the scope for a day or two.

Yes, I'm having fun yet.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 6, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Words lead us into clich�s not involved with the order of art making or the visions which are the artist's references. Art comes from dreams and visions and not verbal philosophies."

David Smith, notebook entry, 1954

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 7, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- Total production cost in 1927 of Buster Keaton's feature film The General: $750,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $7,846,215.94

(Source: Edward McPherson, Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 7, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Down the road

Up and coming on my calendar:

- OCTOBER 17: Julia Dollison celebrates the release of Observatory, her first CD, with a one-nighter at the Jazz Standard

- OCTOBER 18: Press opening of the Manhattan Theatre Club revival of Alan Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular

- OCTOBER 26: Publication date of Classic American Popular Song: The Second Half-Century, 1950-2000, by David Jenness and Don Velsey (Routledge)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 7, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: This is Louisss, Dolly!

Jerry Jazz Musician, the online magazine, interviewed me at length this month about Hotter Than That, my Louis Armstrong biography-in-the-making:

I guess you could call me an intellectual, although I don't write just for intellectuals, or in a sense even for intellectuals. I just write for people, for folks, and while this Armstrong book--like the Mencken book before it--will be the product of a lot of scholarly inquiry and knowledge and thinking, I want the end product to be something that my mother can read. I want to explain Louis to her in the light of all of the technical things that I know about him, but I want that technical superstructure to be completely disassembled, packed and put away. In the end, the book should be a story, the story of a remarkable man, totally accessible to the reader who is not a musician, scholar or intellectual, but who simply wants to learn about him....

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 7, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: One is a wanderer

On Tuesday I awoke an hour ahead of the alarm clock, wrenched from fitful sleep by the unbelievable but nonetheless self-evident fact that I was lying in the master bedroom of the Schwartz House in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, designed in 1939 by Frank Lloyd Wright. Unwilling to waste another slugabed moment, I rolled out of bed and started prowling through the house in my bare feet, stopping just long enough to switch on my iPod and portable speakers and resume the completely unscientific experiment I'd begun the night before. What kind of music sounds best in a Wright house? Should the occasion ever present itself to you, I recommend Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring and Piano Sonata, Samuel Barber's Summer Music, and Pat Metheny's Bright Size Life.

At ten I heard an unfamiliar buzz. Realizing after a startled instant that it was the doorbell, I ran sixty-three feet from one end of the house to the other and opened the door for Gail Fox, a Two Rivers art historian who has spent the past couple of decades documenting the Schwartz House and knows more about it than I know about George Balanchine. We spent three lively hours touring the house and grounds, in the course of which she proved to be an enthusiast of the very best kind, irresistibly voluble and eager to answer the most arcane questions I could think up. Then I packed my bag, tucked the key under the doormat for the next occupant, and hit the road for Spring Green, home of American Players Theatre, which I'll be seeing later in the week, and Taliesin, Wright's home and headquarters, which I'll be touring today.

Having no more appointments for the rest of the day and nothing left to do but find a place to eat, I slipped off the interstate and drove along two-lane highways to Spring Green, passing through a dozen friendly-looking villages with such quaint names as Sauk City, Lodi (Just about a year ago I set out on the road/Seekin' my fame and fortune, lookin' for a pot of gold), and Prairie du Sac as I listened to Lee Wiley, Erin McKeown, and Peter Pears' recording of Schubert's Winterreise (suitable music for a solitary wanderer). It occurred to me toward day's end that I ought to be lonely, having spent the preceding five hours driving by myself down near-deserted roads, but by then the late-afternoon sun had dipped far enough in the sky to cover the cornfields with a glowing yellow blanket, and all at once my heart swelled with gratitude. How beautiful the world is, I thought, and how lucky I am to be in the midst of it! It was the first time I'd felt that way since Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans.

Now I'm sitting in a nondescript motel room in Spring Green, listening to Count Basie's Jive at Five and digesting the heart-attack special I consumed an hour ago at a steak house up the road. It's been a week since I last slept a full night, and I don't have to be anywhere until ten in the morning, when I'm expected at Taliesin. From there I'll head over to Madison to dine with Ann Althouse and see the Madison Repertory Theatre. That will put an end to my tranquil interlude--but not before I pay a long-deferred visit to the land of dreams.

See you tomorrow.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 7, 2005 12:05 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"To be right is the most terrific personal state that nobody is interested in."

Franz Kline (quoted in Frank O'Hara: Standing Still and Walking in New York)

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

TT: Number, please

- Weekly salary in 1935 of all employees of the WPA's Federal Theatre Project, including Orson Welles and John Houseman: $23.86

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $329.39

(Source: Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 8, 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)
- Sides: The Fear Is Real... (sketch comedy, PG, some strong language)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly)

CLOSING SOON:
- Philadelphia, Here I Come! (drama, PG, closes Sept. 25)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 8, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Stay, thou art fair

I'm sitting in a Madison hotel room that looks out on Lake Mendota, so tired from Wednesday's wanderings that I can barely see straight. You'll have to wait until tomorrow for a fuller account of my adventures, but I do want to say something now about my visit to Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's home and headquarters. I spent most of the morning and afternoon walking the grounds, escorted by Keiran Murphy, one of Taleisin's resident archivists and historians. Keiran was kind enough to serve as my tour guide for the day, though calling her that would be like calling Hilary Hahn a fiddler. Never in my life have I been given a more sensitive and comprehending tour of anything, anywhere. Listening to her talk about Wright and looking at everything she pointed out, I felt as if my eyes had opened to twice their normal size.

At the end of the day, Keiran and I stood together on a hill overlooking Taliesin, gazing at the house and the vast, all-encompassing view beyond it. (You can see the foot of the hill at the right-hand edge of this photo.) For a moment I didn't trust myself to speak.

"I guess you get used to everything," I finally said, "but I don't see how anyone could get used to seeing this every day."

"Oh, you do," Keiran replied. "Most of the time, anyway. Except when the wind and sun and humidity are just right. When everything is right." She paused. "Then it's so beautiful, it hurts."

"Such beauty as hurts to behold," I said, thinking of the first line of a poem by Paul Goodman that I love:

Such beauty as hurts to behold
and so gentle as salves the wound:
I am shivering though it is not cold
and dark as in a swoon.

She nodded. We stood in silence for a little while longer, clinging vainly to the passing moment.

"I guess we'd better go back to the world," I said at last.

"I guess we'd better," she said, and we walked down the hill to the house.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 8, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: Fanciful thoughts in a hotel room

As I trolled the Web in my Milwaukee hotel after dinner, I ran across this fugitive fantasy spun by my favorite blogger during choir practice:

These notes we sing are like a little community of people, and you can't hold a person too tight for fear of extinguishing their creative impulses--their musical "movement" and direction, if you will. Yes, let them go, let them wander and explore. The best you can do is offer guidance, sustain them somehow, and give shape to their meanderings. Dear Palestrina. If I had to live in a piece of music...well, it couldn't get any better than that.

Like Jack Benny, I'm thinking it over. If I had to live in a piece of music...but exactly what might that mean? It's a complex, oddly self-revealing fantasy, one that necessarily entails something not unlike an act of synesthesia. Would I be a constituent part of the piece in question--a chord, say? Or would the piece as a whole be the world in which I lived, going to and fro and walking up and down in it? I can think of some chords I'd like to be (the first chord of the "Eroica" Symphony), as well as a few of the other kind (Le Sacre du printemps, anyone?). Still, it's a lot easier to imagine a piece of music as a physical environment--a room, a house, a neighborhood.

The top five pieces of music I wouldn't want to live inside:

(1) Sibelius Tapiola (too cold)
(2) Shostakovich Fourteenth Symphony (too depressing)
(3) Anything by Philip Glass (too boring)
(4) Bart�k Fourth String Quartet (too nerve-racking)
(5) John Coltrane "Giant Steps" (too confusing)

Conversely, a Palestrina mass would surely be very nice indeed, austere yet tranquil, while a Mozart divertimento would doubtless be equally pleasing in a different way, like an elegantly apppointed room. (Actually, I know just what that would feel like, because I've seen George Balanchine's Divertimento No. 15.) Recent experiments suggest that middle-period Copland might be satisfying, too. But if we're talking the long haul--a life sentence--then I'd definitely opt for something in A major by Schubert. Is there a piece of music more redolent of solace than the A Major Rondo, D. 951? If so, I haven't heard it....

But now I've got to go see a play! Catch you later.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 9, 2005 7:18 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof."

P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

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

TT: Number, please

- Fee paid in 1956 by Art News for a 100-word review of an art exhibit: $3

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $20.69

(Source: Irving Sandler, A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 9, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Rerun

December 2003:

I belong to the last generation to have grown up without VCRs. Born in 1956, I was raised in a small town that had one movie theater. The only "arty" films I saw in high school were 2001: A Space Odyssey and Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. The nearest public TV station was in St. Louis, just beyond the range of our rooftop antenna--this was before the invention of cable TV--so it wasn't until I left home to go to college that I saw any old movies other than an occasional Saturday-afternoon John Wayne....

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

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

TT: Moving right along

Here's my life in a nutshell:

- On Wednesday night I was in Madison, dining with the divine Ms. Althouse (who is not only great fun but knows how to pick a good restaurant) and watching a preview of Madison Repertory Theatre's production of Rembrandt's Gift, a new play by Tina Howe.

- I got up this morning, checked my e-mail and the "About Last Night" referral log, and discovered that a blogger I'd never heard of has been reading my Wisconsin postings and thinks they're "vapid and cloyingly precious," not to mention "lower-middlebrow." Interested in knowing exactly what sort of writing the blogger in question thought was worth reading, I spent a few minutes looking over the self-written "serialized blog novels" he'd posted elsewhere on his site, an experience I commend to all connoisseurs of unpublished fiction.

- I spent the next couple of hours driving around Madison in search of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, of which I found several. Then I headed back to Spring Green, checked into the same motel I occupied two nights ago, and took a well-deserved nap.

- This evening I went to see American Players Theatre's production of Ferenc Molnar's The Play's the Thing, performed in an English-language version by none other than P.G. Wodehouse.

- Tomorrow I'm off to Milwaukee, where I'll tour the Milwaukee Art Museum and attend a performance by Milwaukee Repertory Theatre of A Flea in Her Ear.

- On Saturday it's back to Spring Green for performances of Macbeth in the afternoon and Candida in the evening.

- On Sunday I'll be seeing one last play, Tartuffe, then spending the night in another Wright house, the Seth Peterson Cottage.

Forgive my terseness, but I really did just get back from the theater and am longing to shed my clothes and crawl into bed! You won't be hearing from me again until Monday, and by now I expect you can see why. I'm still having fun yet, but I'll be more than ready to head for home come Monday afternoon. I'll post that day and possibly on Tuesday as well, but I'll definitely be taking Wednesday and Thursday off, about which more later. For now, have a nice weekend.

(By the way, I'm not in today's Wall Street Journal, which is why there's no drama-column teaser this week. I'll be back at the same old stand as usual next Friday.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 9, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"The lesson I learned from the Charlie d�b�cle is that you've got to punch your weight. Charlie was out of my class: too pretty, too smart, too witty, too much."

Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

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

TT: Number, please

- Cost in 1908 of single-sided Victrola Red Seal Record No. 96200, the sextet from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor (playing time: four minutes and one second), performed by Enrico Caruso, Marcella Sembrich, Antonio Scotti, Marcel Journet, Gina Severina and Francesco Daddi: $7

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $138.54

(Source: Mark Obert-Thorn)

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

TT: Rerun

December 2003:

Would that it were more widely understood that high art is good for you--not in the fallacious "Mozart-effect" sense, but in the far more profound sense of soulcraft. Alas, that uplifting notion has largely vanished from American culture. In matters of high art, we must start from zero: we actually have to make the case that listening to operas by Mozart and Verdi and looking at ballets by Balanchine and Tudor are pleasurable experiences.

Fortunately, the strongest card in our hands is that we're telling the truth, an amazing and miraculous fact that it's never too late to discover, even if you've never held a clarinet or stood at a barre or wielded a paintbrush...

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

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

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- Anyone who questions the commoditization of baby-boom ideals need only reflect on the fact that I recently ate my breakfast at a hotel in downtown Milwaukee to the accompaniment of a Muzak version of Steely Dan's "Monkey in Your Soul." All popular culture begins in rebellion and ends in infomercials.

- I drove up to Connecticut the other day to see Goodspeed Musicals' production of The Boy Friend and have lunch with Paul Moravec. We went to the River Tavern in Chester, a tiny restaurant-pub with wonderful food, in whose front window the waitress seated us. A few minutes later, a prosperous-looking businessman-yuppie type sat down at the next table, roughly two feet away. He ate in silence as Paul and I chatted away cheerfully and volubly about everything under the sun--the Pulitzer Prizes, my Louis Armstrong biography, his latest composition, the difference between opera and oratorio--and departed without a word before we were through.

A couple of minutes later, Paul called for our check.

"It's been taken care of," the waitress informed us with a grin. "The man sitting next to you paid for your lunch."

We gaped speechlessly at one another. Then we burst out laughing, jointly left a big tip for the waitress, and went on our way.

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

TT: Very big news (for me, anyway)

Those of you who keep up with the newspaper business are doubtless aware that The Wall Street Journal is launching its long-awaited Saturday edition this week. What you don't know--this is the first public announcement--is that I'll be writing a new biweekly column called "Sightings" for the Leisure & Arts page in the new paper's "Pursuits" section. I'll be writing about the arts in America--all the arts, and not just in New York City but from coast to coast. (Yes, I'll continue to write the Journal's Friday drama column as well. Broadway isn't getting rid of me that easily.)

To find out more about what I'll be up to in "Sightings," pick up a copy of the first Saturday Wall Street Journal on September 17 and read my inaugural column. If you're already a Journal subscriber, off or on line, you'll automatically receive the Saturday edition as part of your subscription. Otherwise, buy a copy at your favorite newsstand and check me out.

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

TT: Out of the woods

This is where I am tonight, a Frank Lloyd Wright cottage perched on the edge of a heavily wooded bluff overlooking Wisconsin's Mirror Lake. I'm two miles from the Wisconsin Dells as the crow flies, though that viper's tangle of water parks, roller coasters, resort hotels, and candy stores seems at least half a continent away from the stone terrace I'm sharing with a couple of curious squirrels. I dug the iPod out of my suitcase a little while ago and pressed the shuffle-play button, and what came crashing out of the speakers, much to my bemusement, was Stephen Sondheim's "Color and Light": Order...design...composition...tone...form. Check and double check.

By the time most of you get around to reading these words, I'll be somewhere in the middle of the protracted process of making my way from Mirror Lake to my Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan. A two-and-a-half-hour drive, two flights, a cab, and the thing is done (sigh). The Teachout Museum awaits me. Also a ton of snail mail. Also a Wall Street Journal deadline, which I have to hit before lunchtime on Tuesday. Also a major development in my professional life, which comes to pass first thing Saturday morning. (See immediately below for details.)

Conclusion: I need a break, not merely from blogging but also from the beck and call of my lunatic schedule.

Solution: I'm blowing town for a couple of days, purely for my own pleasure.

I'll go up the spout tomorrow afternoon, mere minutes after I file Friday's Journal drama column (that's the deadline). I won't post again, not even one measly little almanac entry, until Friday. Between now and then, my whereabouts will be known only to a tightly knit group of intimates, all sworn to absolute secrecy on pain of excommunication.

Commandments:

I shall attend no performances of any kind, nor shall I read any improving books.

I shall not check my e-mail.

I shall not turn on my cell phone (it doesn't work where I'm going, anyway).

See you Friday.

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

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"Intellectual responses are known as opinions and Mary had them and had them. Still she was so little of an ideologue as to be sometimes unsettling in her refusal of tribal reaction--left or right, male or female, that sort of thing. She was doggedly personal and often this meant being so aslant that there was, in this determined rationalist, an endearing crankiness, very American and homespun somehow. This was true especially in domestic matters, which held a high place in her life. There she is grinding the coffee beans of a morning in a wonderful wooden and iron contraption that seemed to me designed for muscle-building--a workout it was. In her acceptance speech upon receiving the MacDowell Colony Medal for Literature she said that she did not believe in laborsaving devices. And thus she kept on year after year, up to her last days, clacking away on her old green Hermes non-electric typewriter, with a feeling that this effort and the others were akin to the genuine in the arts--to the handmade."

Elizabeth Hardwick, foreword to Mary McCarthy's Intellectual Memoirs

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 14, 2005 1:39 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

(Pardon my Mary McCarthy kick, the latest in a series...)

"The arts have aged too, and it is impossible for them to 'go back,' just as it is impossible to recapture the youth or reinstitute a handicraft economy, like the one Ruskin dreamed of. These things are beyond our control and independent of our will. I, for instance, would like, more than anything else, to write like Tolstoy; I imagine that I still see something resembling the world Tolstoy saw. But my pen or my typewriter simply balks; it 'sees' differently from me and records what to me, as a person, are distortions and angularities. Anyone who has read my work will be at a loss to find any connection with Tolstoy; to Tolstoy himself both I and my work wold be anathema. I myself might reform, but my work never could; it could never 'go straight,' even if I were much more gifted than I am. Most novelists today, I suspect, would like to 'go straight'; we are conscious of being twisted when we write. This is the self-consciousness, the squirming, of the form we work in; we are stuck in the phylogenesis of the novel."

Mary McCarthy, "Characters in Fiction"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 15, 2005 1:10 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Five books enter, one book leaves

Don't let the placid website fool you. For the last two months, like industrious shoe-stitching elves, the members of the Litblog Co-op have been busy behind the scenes nominating, reading, and voting on books. Today we unveil the outcome of our labors, the novel we've selected to throw our collective promotional prowess behind this fall. Watch this space for the big scoop. And keep watching as the four runners-up are revealed, one a day, into next week.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 15, 2005 12:32 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

Picture and book remain,
An acre of green grass
For air and exercise,
Now strength of body goes;
Midnight, an old house
Where nothing stirs but a mouse.

My temptation is quiet.
Here at life's end
Neither loose imagination,
Nor the mill of the mind
Consuming its rag and bone,
Can make the truth known.

Grant me an old man's frenzy,
Myself must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call;

A mind Michael Angelo knew
That can pierce the clouds,
Or inspired by frenzy
Shake the dead in their shrouds;
Forgotten else by mankind,
An old man's eagle mind.

W.B. Yeats, "An Acre of Grass"

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

TT: Number, please

- Cost of one of the 50 investor's shares in the original 1949 Broadway production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: $2,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $15,348.59

(Source: Richard Schickel, Elia Kazan: A Biography)

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

TT: Synchronicities

It occurred to me as I drove off in my Zipcar Tuesday afternoon that some people might find my forthcoming journey...well, supererogatory. After all, I'd just spent eight days tearing around Wisconsin in a rented car, looking at plays, visiting museums, and sleeping in Frank Lloyd Wright houses. Why on earth would I want to jump in another rented car and drive off to the Catskills less than twenty-four hours after coming back to New York?

The difference, of course, is that I went there not to look at plays and museums but to do nothing. Now, nobody ever does absolutely nothing, at least not strictly speaking. I spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday driving up and down country lanes in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, listening to the satellite radio in my Zipcar (I'm especially fond of "Frank's Place," "Savoy Express," and "X Country"), and reading the galleys of a new biography of Elia Kazan. On the other hand, I did these things when I wanted to, not when I had to, and when not doing them I sat in comfortable chairs on quiet balconies and looked at two of the prettiest views I know. Except for reading the book, I couldn't have done any of this at home. That's why I got up on Tuesday morning, wrote my drama column, packed the smallest possible bag, and returned to the road.

I don't usually bring my iBook with me when I take short trips, but I had to this time, since it was necessary that I stay in touch with The Wall Street Journal to resolve any last-minute problems with the launch of my Saturday column, which was still working its way down the production line as I left town. Having admitted this much, I'll go further and confess what a few of you already know, which is that I also succumbed more than once to the temptation to check the rest of my e-mail. (Naughty, naughty!) In it I found this note from an old friend, written apropos of a recent posting:

I felt, during my chemotherapy, that I lived in the Goldberg Variations, because it was the universe.

I've never undergone chemotherapy (though I've watched it being given many times), but I have had a not entirely dissimilar experience with Bach's Goldberg Variations. If you're going to have mystical experiences accompanied by a piece of music, I guess you can't do much better than the Goldbergs, and should the time ever come when I find myself in an extremity as dire as being on the business end of chemotherapy, I hope I'll have the presence of mind to recall that reassuring fact.

I thought about my friend's message late Wednesday night as I sat in a rocking chair on a screened-in balcony overlooking the Delaware River. His wasn't the only piece of mail I had occasion to answer on my trip. That very morning I'd stopped at a Catskills post office to send eight postcards to a West Coast blogger with whom I've been exchanging handwritten snail mail of late. Each of them bore a reproduction of a painting by an artist I like, the artists in question being Milton Avery, Richard Diebenkorn, Hans Hofmann, Winslow Homer, Wassily Kandinsky, Edouard Manet, Henri Matisse, and Fairfield Porter.

This correspondence was inspired by my new friend, who wrote to me a few weeks ago as follows:

Isn't it nice to open letters, too? In a funny way, I think all the email/blogging returns an almost romantic, Victorian specialness to pen & paper correspondence.

Until I answered her note, it had been years since I'd last sent anyone a handwritten letter longer than the compass of a notecard. Part of what inspired me to do so was her handwriting, which is neat, fresh, and a delight to behold. It took the place of the imagined sound of her voice: I felt as if she were sitting across a table, telling me about herself, and I felt irresistibly inspired to reciprocate.

My own hand, alas, is not so easy or rewarding. I'm left-handed, with an ink-smudging overhand hook so exaggerated that my first-grade teacher, who in 1962 was already a thoroughly cranky old woman, tried briefly and vainly to get me to write with my right hand. I've found penmanship awkward ever since, which is why I learned to type as a boy and why I took so readily to e-mail as a grownup. Yet my correspondent was right: convenient though e-mail is, there's something uncanny about receiving a handwritten letter, and no less uncanny about sending one. To be sure, we also exchange e-mail on occasion, but what we say to one another in our own hands (what a perfect phrase!) is subtly but nonetheless distinctly different in tone and character from the notes we send electronically, and while I wouldn't want to go back to snail mail on a full-time basis, it always makes me smile to peer in my mailbox and see her handwriting twinkling among the bills and press releases.

One of the postcards I sent her from the Catskills was a list of ten pieces of piano music to which I feel especially close (she's a pianist). Three, as it happened, were musical impressions of water, and all are on my iPod, so I decided as I rocked away in the near-silent night to listen to Dinu Lipatti's 1948 recording of the Chopin Barcarolle, Vladimir Horowitz's 1966 recording of Debussy's L'isle joyeuse, and Alfred Cortot's 1931 recording of Ravel's Jeux d'eau. I first heard these classic performances some thirty years ago, and by now I know them well enough that I tend not to return to them too often, but hearing them again as I sat by a river at night brought them back to life. I wondered as I listened what my friend was doing. Was she practicing piano? Looking at the Pacific Ocean? Listening to Chopin or Debussy or Ravel? Might she somehow sense that she was on my mind?

When Jeux d'eau was over, I felt the need to hear a bit more music before calling it a night, so I dialed up Carlos Salz�do's glittering, gorgeous Chanson dans la nuit and the "Moonlight" interlude from Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, a portrait in music of the sight and sound of moonlight on the sea, now disturbing, now consoling. The performance on my iPod is by Leonard Bernstein and the Boston Symphony, recorded live at the last concert Bernstein gave before his death, and that in turn made me think of my other friend, who (as John Wayne once put it) "licked the Big C" and lived to tell the tale.

By then I was more than ready for bed. I checked my e-mail once more before retiring, and sure enough, I found a note from my piano-playing correspondent, written while I'd been sitting on the balcony. I marveled at the chain of coincidence (if you believe in coincidence) that put two far-flung friends into one another's minds at more or less the same moment on a warm, muggy September night. Then I turned out the light and went to sleep, listening to the thrum of the crickets down by the riverside.

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

TT: Reminder

"Sightings," my new biweekly column about the arts in America, kicks off tomorrow morning in the inaugural issue of the Saturday Wall Street Journal, on sale at your local newsstand. Don't miss it!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 16, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: No laughing matters

Friday again, and time for another Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. This week I review Jean Cocteau Repertory's off-Broadway revival of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and a Washington production of Shakespeare's Othello, both of them enthusiastically:

Lorinda Lisitza, the excellent Pirate Jenny of the Cocteau's production of "The Threepenny Opera," is even better this time around as Mother Courage, the brutally cynical camp-follower who means to survive the Thirty Years' War no matter what it takes, not knowing that she is purchasing her "survival" with pieces of her soul. (It isn't hard to imagine her sloshing through the waterlogged streets of New Orleans, filling her cart to the brim with looted goods.) Made up to look like the haggard older sister of one of Vermeer's serious young women, Ms. Lisitza also gets ample opportunity to show off her formidable skills as a cabaret singer, and while Paul Dessau's settings of Brecht's lyrics are nondescript, you'd swear they were tuneful when she sings them....

The Shakespeare Theatre Company is currently putting on an "Othello" so fine that I don't see how it could be bettered, except maybe by bringing it to Broadway, where even more people could see it.

This "Othello" is played as straight as [David] Fuller's "Mother Courage," with no overlay of conceptual hoo-hawry to loosen the grip of Shakespeare's terrible tale of jealousy and envy run amok. Michael Kahn, the company's artistic director, has put his actors on a dirt-plain set built of unfinished boards, dressed them in period costumes, given them plenty of room to do their stuff and (I suspect) told them not to dawdle....

I also pass on a bit of theatrical news:

William Finn's "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee" is having a "parent/teacher night" on Oct. 2 at 7:30. Translation: This performance is for adults only. Jay Reiss plays the vice principal in charge of responding to the question, "Could you use that word in a sentence, please?" Some of the sentences he came up with in rehearsal were, um, child-unfriendly. Mr. Reiss plans to trot them out in public Sunday after next for the first time...

No link, and there's plenty more where that came from, so buy a copy of today's Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 16, 2005 12:05 PM | Permalink

TT: Get out of town

Today marks the publication of the inaugural issue of the Saturday Wall Street Journal. It also marks my debut as a columnist for the "Pursuits" section of the new Saturday paper. In "Sightings," to be published every other week in "Pursuits," I'll be covering the arts in America. Here's a taste of my first column:

Remember "View of the World From 9th Avenue," the 1976 New Yorker cover in which Saul Steinberg depicted New York City as the outsized capital of a squashed-together U.S.? It's still good for a laugh--but when it comes to the arts in America, Mr. Steinberg's comically chauvinistic scene bears little resemblance to reality....

I live and work in New York, and I'm happy to be here. Still, I learned long ago that if you want to stay in touch with the best of what's happening right now, you've got to look beyond the city limits--no matter where you live. The Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Carolina Ballet, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Miami City Ballet, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Washington's Phillips Collection, the San Francisco Symphony: All rank high on my personal list of America's top arts organizations, and all are a long, long way from Ninth Avenue....

The Journal has been kind enough to post a free link to Saturday's "Sightings" column. To read the whole thing, go here.

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

TT: Almanac

"The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

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

TT: Number, please

- Weekly salary paid to Frank Sinatra and Buddy Rich in 1940 as members of Tommy Dorsey's big band: $125

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $1,663.39

(Source: Peter J. Levinson, Tommy Dorsey: Livin' in a Great Big Way)

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

TT: Rerun

December 2003:

I've lived in New York for the better part of two decades now, and you'd think I'd have gotten used to it. In a way, I suppose I have, but even now all it takes is a whiff of the unexpected and I catch myself boggling at that which the native New Yorker really does take for granted. As for my visits to Smalltown, U.S.A., they invariably leave me feeling like yesterday's immigrant, marveling at things no small-town boy can ever really dismiss as commonplace, no matter how long he lives in the capital of the world....

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

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

TT: Words to the wise (2)

I'm still soooo into Cat and Girl. Join me, won't you?

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

TT: Words to the wise (1)

A friend drew my attention over the weekend to the music of a New York-based singer-songwriter named Farah Alvin. As it happens, I'd heard Alvin before, but under the worst possible circumstances: she was part of the hard-working ensemble in The Look of Love: The Songs of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, a deservedly short-lived Broadway revue about which I had only brutal things to say in The Wall Street Journal back in 2003. Little did I know that as The Look of Love was going down for the count, Alvin was in the process of putting out a really exceptional debut album called Someday. You can read about it here and buy it here, and I strongly suggest you do both.

CD Baby, the Web store that specializes in independently released albums, classifies Someday as "jazz-influenced folk-rock," which comes pretty damn close to the mark in just four well-chosen words. All I can usefully add is that Someday is full of lots and lots of everything I like in pop music: good tunes, smart lyrics, gorgeous singing, spare and striking arrangements.

I especially like "Tragedienne," a song about two women whose friendship is on the rocks:

It used to be you and me against the world,
A motley crew of two tenacious wits.
It used to be you and me were thick as thieves,
But now I guess you want to call it quits.
Why don't you be the woman you used to be?
Why don't you be my friend again?
Why not rewrite your life as a comedy,
Tragedienne?

If you've enjoyed the music of Erin McKeown, Jonatha Brooke, Allison Moorer, Luciana Souza, Dave's True Story, the Lascivious Biddies, or any of the other slightly off-center singer-songwriters and pop groups championed in the past by the like-minded proprietors of this blog, my guess is that Farah Alvin will suit you right down to the ground. Check her out. (You, too, OGIC!)

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

TT: A fl�neur's notes

Mother Nature decided to send the citizens of New York one last heat wave before letting us take our black turtlenecks out of mothballs. Lucky me--I rubbed my nose in it Friday morning. Rarely am I absolutely required to take crowded subways, but I had a 10:30 appointment in the section of Brooklyn known to scenesters and the cognoscenti as "Dumbo" (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), and unless your trusty chauffeur is waiting patiently at curbside, the only way to get there from here on a weekday morning is via subway. That's how I did it, and I hated every second of the ride. The subway car was hot, smelly, and crowded, and the humidity at street level was so high that I felt as though I were being garrotted by a vicious odalisque in a Turkish bath.

The one good part of the trip was that I saw Middagh Street, the site of the now-legendary Brooklyn residence where W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Carson McCullers, and Gypsy Rose Lee all kept communal house back in 1940. (Sherill Tippins wrote about it earlier this year in February House.) Alas, 7 Middagh was torn down in 1945 to make room for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and nothing now remains of it but an unmarked spot on the sidewalk. Still, I got to stroll past that historic address on my way to St. Ann's Warehouse, where the Builders Association is currently rehearsing its new show, Super Vision, which opens November 29 at BAM Harvey in Brooklyn.

I got interested in the Builders Association after seeing its last show, Alladeen, about which I raved in The Wall Street Journal, so when I was invited to a private runthrough of two sections of Super Vision, I jumped at the chance, heavy weather notwithstanding. It's a multimedia documentary-fantasy-tone poem about "dataveillance" in the twenty-first century, and if that sounds a bit off the wall to you, I strongly suggest you go here and view the trailer, which will tell you more about Super Vision than I possibly can. All I'll add for now is that having seen fifteen minutes' worth of Super Vision, I intend to see the whole thing at least twice when it comes to BAM.

I returned to the Teachout Museum from Dumbo to discover that I'd bought a new piece of art. Specifically, I turned out to be the high bidder on a 1942 color lithograph by Pierre Bonnard called Femme assise dans sa bagnoire, one of the long, increasingly phantasmagoric series of paintings, prints, and works on paper in which Marthe, Bonnard's mistress, is shown bathing. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to pick up my latest acquisition--I had to spend the rest of the afternoon at my desk--so I'll be stopping by Swann Galleries to collect it some time today.

(Speaking of art, I spent part of Friday sifting through my accumulated snail mail of the past couple of weeks, and was thereby reminded of two gallery shows I mean to go see as soon as possible, Jules Olitski's Matter Embraced: Paintings 1950s and Now, up at Knoedler & Company through Nov. 5, and Neil Welliver: A Memorial Exhibition, up at Alexandre Gallery through Oct. 22. I'll report back to you in due course, but don't wait for me--I'd bet the rent that both shows will be well worth a visit.)

Once I wrapped up the day's work, I caught a crosstown bus to the Upper East Side and met my friend Meg at the Metropolitan Museum, where we looked at a very important show that nearly slipped past me, Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams, His Art and His Textiles, which closes next Sunday. I can't believe I came so close to missing this breathtaking exhibition, one of the finest of the Met's "teaching shows," an orgy of color that is at once highly informative and enjoyable in the extreme (unlike, say, MoMA's recent C�zanne/Pissarro show, which I found enervatingly didactic). If you haven't gone, it's not too late, and if you have, it's not too late to go again.

And that was my Friday, except for the climactic treat that awaited me at one minute past midnight, when The Wall Street Journal posted my first "Sightings" column on its Web site, a great and glorious moment I'd been awaiting anxiously. Now, of course, the moment's over, and I've got to get cracking on my second column, but it sure did feel good to see it in print at last.

This will be a crazy-busy week, by the way, ending in yet another out-of-town trip: I'm headed for Chicago on Friday afternoon to visit Our Girl and see a couple of shows, Chicago Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and Stephen Lang's Beyond Glory at the Goodman Theatre. I expect to be busy as hell between now and the time the plane takes off, so posting is likely to be a bit on the skimpy side. Not to worry too much, though: OGIC and I solemnly swear to have something good for you to read each morning, terse though it may occasionally have to be.

Enough for now. A Bonnard waits for me!

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

TT: Almanac

"It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail."

Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 20, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- Cover price of Vol. 1, No. 1 of The New Yorker, published in 1925: 15 cents

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $1.62

(Source: Thomas Kunkel, Genius in Disguise)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 20, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Lost illusions

I'd hoped to put together a nice big juicy posting of links to other artblogs and art-related sites, but it just didn't happen and won't until tomorrow, if then. Lots of other things happened instead, nearly all of them work-related, though two were strictly private: I picked up my new Bonnard lithograph (which is now being framed) and got my hair cut, the latter a mere two weeks late! I looked soooo unkempt and uncared-for a mere twenty-four hours ago, but now I'm nice and neat again....

Anyway, I doubt I'll have anything more for you until Wednesday, but hope springs eternal. In the meantime, go look at some of those other cool blogs listed in the right-hand column, O.K.?

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 20, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: In the red zone

Excerpt from an e-mail sent to a friend in San Francisco twelve hours ago:

I'm feeling a bit, er, frazzled. I got up at six and wrote the drama column, sent it off and went to the gym at eleven to be pushed around by my trainer, came back to my desk to resume work from yesterday on my Frank Lloyd Wright piece, and am now standing by for what we call the "playback" of the drama column (i.e., the copyedited version, incorporating queries and requests for fixes). After that I have to do laundry, pick up my framed Bonnard (I hope, I hope!), book myself into a bunch of play previews, read the day's incoming snail mail, talk to a Rounder Records publicist about the new Jelly Roll Morton reissue package, and catch the late set at the Village Vanguard tonight. In between all this mishegoss I'm (A) bidding on a restrike of a Matisse etching and (B) reading the first volume of Hilary Spurling's wonderful Matisse biography. Tomorrow is very similar, Thursday somewhat less loony, and on Friday it's off to Chicago. Whee! I took some time off last week, right? I forget....

Here's the rest of the story: I just now got back from taking Bass Player, my kindred spirit, to the Vanguard (she'd never been!) to hear the Bad Plus play selections from their new CD, Suspicious Activity? Yes, they were incredible, and yes, I love New York, but I'm on the leading edge of a meltdown, and if I don't get at least ten hours of sleep starting right now, they won't have to cremate me to scatter my ashes--all they'll have to do is vacuum them up from the floor of my office.

(A bad sign: I tried to take off my glasses a moment ago and discovered that they were already off.)

Later. Much later. Way later.

Oh, yes, one more thing: the Bonnard wasn't ready. And I didn't get the Matisse, either. (I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman.) All the more reason to sleep late....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 21, 2005 1:10 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Who knows what true loneliness is--not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad."

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 21, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- Commissioning fee paid in 1940 to Paul Hindemith by George Balanchine for the score of The Four Temperaments: $250

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $3,326.77

(Source: Luther Noss, Paul Hindemith in the United States)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 21, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they'd claim their hands were clean.

A jackal doesn't understand remorse.
Lions and lice don't waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they're right?

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they're light.

On this third planet of the sun
among the signs of bestiality
A clear conscience is Number One.

Wislawa Szymborska, "In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself" (trans. Stanislaw Baraczak and Clare Cavanagh)

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

TT: Number, please

- Total fee paid to Arturo Toscanini for conducting the first ten-concert season of the NBC Symphony in 1937-38, including a $5,000 bonus to cover his U.S. income tax: $45,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $579,217.54

(Source: Mortimer H. Frank, Arturo Toscanini: The NBC Years)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 22, 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:
- Mother Courage (drama with songs, PG-13, adult subject matter)
- Orson's Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language)
- Sides: The Fear Is Real... (sketch comedy, PG, some strong language)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
- Philadelphia, Here I Come! (drama, PG, closes Sunday)

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

TT: Elsewhere

Here's some of what I've been reading on the Web in recent weeks:

- Lance Mannion finds something new to say about the death of Bob Denver...

Movies always seem part of their times. In fact, they are windows back in their time. But television shows seem always to take place in the present. We've been watching a lot of old Dick Van Dyke shows lately, thanks to Netflix, and although the black and white world of Rob and Laura looks as old-fashioned as my parents' wedding album (not surprisingly), and many of the characters' attitudes towards life, work, sex, marriage, and the suburbs were 10 years out of date when the show was being made, the Petries' imaginary world still feels like the world I live in now, while a movie made in the early 60s, even one in color, like--just to pick another comedy about young marrieds that's just as dated in its attitudes about men, women, sex, and marriage--Barefoot in the Park feels very much like a period piece....

- ...and Paul Mitchinson finds something equally new to say about the death of Robert Moog:

Electronic music does not usher in the Communist apocalypse, but it does change the way we create music and listen to music. It has vastly expanded the universe of sound, and given a power to composers previously undreamed-of. But it has, by necessity, severely restricted the power, the imagination, and--dare I say?--the intelligence of the audience, who are no longer asked to assist the composer in perceiving musical nuances. This is the root, I think, of the "coldness" that many people perceive in electronic music. By asserting absolute control over every aspect of his music, the composer has unwittingly disposed of one of the most powerful tools of expression--the audience's own imagination....

- Mr. Think Denk dines on sushi, rereads The Golden Bowl, practices a Bach partita for the umpteenth time, and has an epiphany:

This is really when the practicing pays off; when music and all its business seems quite worthwhile: when you "get" something, even if it might mostly vanish tomorrow, and might never make it out over the airwaves to your listeners, even if it may end up, finally, being something you only share between yourself and J.S. ... I shouldn't have begun by saying I lived "with" the dead. Rather, for that one sentence: I lived through the dead. Visions of Bach in his candlelight scribbling. That crusty old Lutheran might have stopped having more children in Heaven and taken a moment to give me, secular self-absorbed New Yorker, a little life....

- Ms. twang twang twang, yet another musician who can really, really write, reports from a stop she made in the middle of a European tour:

As a mark of respect, and perhaps because there is nothing normal to say, talking is not allowed in Auschwitz. That didn't stop some tourists, as they photographed reams of women's hair on their mobile phones. Did you also, you fat-arsed westerners, snap the commandant's corpseskin lampshades? The false limbs removed from cripples before they themselves were removed to "take a shower"? Did you munch a hotdog after the baby clothes? Did you see them?

As with chatter, the camps usually permit no music. There is no joy here, and without joy you can't have music--only sound. The photographs of the camp orchestra, forced to play marches as the prisoners went to work, are grotesque, music "raped and degraded" (survivor August Kowalczyk). It's horrible, too, that the Nazis loved music. It stirs up emotions, and if people feel what they are told, they will believe it....

- Our beloved Erin McKeown was on WNYC-FM's Soundcheck last week. You can listen to her via streaming audio by going here.

- Ms. Pratie Place, who lives in North Carolina, went to see Junebug, which was filmed there:

Our hometown papers predictably heap fulsome praise on "our" movies--this one qualifies since director Phil Morrison and screenwriter Angus MacLachlan are Winston-Salem natives. The local fare has, then, often disappointed me--but not this time.

In fact even though the glowing review by a famously and preposterously pompous local reviewer whom I have detested for years made me want to dislike the movie, I just couldn't. It is beautiful to look at, and the screenplay is intelligent and beautiful; funny and sad; woven of natural, unselfconscious moments.

The acting is transparent (highest praise); the characters are believable, charismatic, full of energy. I came away loving them all, even the grouchy, difficult ones....

- Cassandra, call your office: The Wall Street Journal posts a free link to a story about a blogger who got sued because of the comments on his site. I told you so!

Read. Ponder. Read again.

- You need a laugh now, right? Well, here it is: The ORIGINAL Illustrated Catalog of ACME Products, guaranteed to malfunction when used as instructed. Coyotes, beware!

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

OGIC: Cameo appearance

Yesterday I posted over at the Litblog Co-op about the book I nominated for the LBC Fall 2005 Read This! selection. It's a remarkable novel by Nadeem Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers. I think I kind of hogged the blog--the post goes on and on and on--and I didn't even scratch the surface of what impressed me about the book. Check it out, and by all means seek out this book if you're in the mood for an enveloping family drama told in prose to get drunk on. (In a good way!)

P.S. Terry wrote and asked why I didn't post an excerpt here. I replied that this was a very good question. Here's a slice:

Aslam is great at unearthing rich psychologies like Kaukab's in an emotionally potent way; he's great at interiors. But that's a bit misleading, since another distinction of his novel is the way it reflexively looks outward to see in: a great deal of what we know about the characters is divined through detailed representations of the world as they see it. The thickly descriptive style through which Aslam achieves this will, I imagine, prove overly rich for some readers. Seven metaphors and similes on the first page alone sounds alarming, doesn't it? But--apart from the fact that many of them are stunning--metaphoric language is more than a vehicle here, and certainly more than just ornament. It's close to being a provisional philosophy.

The metaphors and similies that carpet Aslam's prose have individual beauty and collective significance, evoking a world in which hardly anything isn't strikingly like something else--a world of underlying connectedness. Juxtaposed with the divisions and strife that characterize the social world the novel depicts, this connectedness comes to seem a necessity, and those who attend to it--Shamas and Kaukab included, the murderers not--are small heroes doing everyday justice to both the variety of the world and its unity.

That gives you the flavor. To get the context, go read the whole thing. As they say.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 22, 2005 12:35 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"We are unable to live nakedly. We must constantly wrap ourselves in a cocoon of mental constructs, our changing styles of philosophy, poetry, art. We invest meaning in that which is opposed to meaning; that ceaseless labor, that spinning is the most purely human of our activities."

Czeslaw Milosz, "Essay in Which the Author Confesses That He Is on the Side of Man, for Lack of Anything Better"

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

TT: Number, please

- Commissioning fee paid to Aaron Copland by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge in 1944 for the score of Martha Graham's Appalachian Spring: $500

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $5,341.70

(Source: Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland Since 1943)

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

TT: A state of (theatrical) grace

Friday again, and time as usual for my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. This week I report on my recent visit to Wisconsin, where I saw performances by American Players Theatre, Madison Repertory Theatre, and the Milwaukee Repertory Theater:

What's in Wisconsin, America's dairyland? Cheese (naturally), beer, bratwurst, cranberries, the Green Bay Packers and thousands of glacial lakes. Also the Milwaukee Art Museum, an insufficiently celebrated institution whose spectacular new pavilion, designed by Santiago Calatrava, has already become a regional landmark. And--no, I wasn't forgetting--lots and lots of theater companies, three of which I saw on a recent visit that left me quite impressed....

All in all, my week in Wisconsin was hugely satisfying, and I only wish I'd had time to catch a few more plays while I was there. I don't know whether theater-loving Wisconsinites realize how lucky they've got it, but I can assure them that they don't need to go to New York--or even Chicago--to see a good show.

For details, pick up a copy of today's Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will allow you to read my column in its entirety, not to mention all sorts of other cool stuff.

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

TT: Hitting the road

I'm off to Chicago today to visit Our Girl and see a couple of plays. I'll be returning to New York at midday Monday. What effect my travels will have on what gets posted in this space come Monday morning remains to be seen. For that matter, OGIC and I might even blog a bit over the weekend, depending on what we get up to in Chicago. Look in on us and see for yourself!

(Did you notice all the new Top Fives, by the way?)

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

TT: Almanac

"Not all, but too many of the best writers, composers, and artists of our time begin to be acclaimed only when they no longer have anything to say and take to performing instead of stating. This is how they first become accessible to broad taste, which is lazy taste, and by the same token to the processes of publicity and consecration. As long as they were trammeled up in the urgency of getting things said they were too difficult, too 'controversial.'"

Clement Greenberg, Hofmann

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

TT: Number, please

- Weekly salary paid to John Coltrane by Thelonious Monk in 1957 for playing tenor saxophone in Monk's quartet: $100

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $679.61

(Source: Lewis Porter, JazzTimes, October 2005)

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

TT: Smiles of a late summer night

Our Girl and I have been tearing around Chicago for the past two days, looking at plays, taping radio shows, and eating too well. (I'm using her computer, which is why this posting is signed with her name.) The only cloud on the horizon is that I'll be returning to New York first thing this morning, sigh.

More later, perhaps even later today. Normal blogging will resume tomorrow. Until then, see you in Manhattan!

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

OGIC: Fortune cookie

i waved my hope around like a cheap flag
whose colors had faded
whose emblem was laughable.

Erin McKeown, "Love in 2 Parts"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 27, 2005 2:31 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Down at heels

Monday was a pretty bad day. First I had to send Terry off, to return who knows when, and then, in my excitement for one of our first truly autumnal days, I unwittingly donned what soon revealed themselves to be cruel shoes. It was a small catastrophe. I've just redressed the backs of my heels and am headed to bed, pausing only to share with you a blog entry that actually managed to make me laugh through some of the pain. The first line is a grabber:

Ah, to be young enough that it is still possible to lose one's shoe in a tree.

Today seemed to be the day for precocious kids on the web. This also appeared, in the Slate diary of writer-director Judd Apatow, who will always be held in esteem around these parts for having executive-produced Freaks and Geeks:

My daughter Maude was 5 when she realized that Barney had only one expression. She couldn't stop laughing when she noticed this. She ran around the living room with this psychotic Barney smile which never changed, and then started saying, "I'm happy. I'm sad." She laughed some more and then screamed, "Help me! I don't know how to feel."

Stop being so knowing and adorable, children. You're making your elders feel prematurely obsolete.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 27, 2005 2:35 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written, but I know it's true."

Stephen King, On Writing

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 27, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- Commissioning fee paid to Henri Matisse by Dr. Albert C. Barnes in three installments between 1930 and 1933 for painting The Dance, a mural installed at the Barnes Foundation: $30,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $406,389.23

(Source: Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 27, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Sparring with wakefulness

I didn't know how tired I was until I got back to my Manhattan apartment, spent a long time grappling with my accumulated snail mail, fell into bed for what was supposed to be a brief, refreshing nap...and awoke five hours later. I think I'll call it a day. Instead of trying to write, I'll sit and contemplate the newest addition to the Teachout Museum, an exquisite little Vuillard etching that came in the mail while I was in Chicago. (The online image only suggests the fineness of detail.) I knocked it down for a price so modest that I'm still giggling.

A hell of a week lies before me--three deadlines, three plays, a night at the ballet, and a drunken birthday bash for a friend--but comparatively normal blogging will resume tomorrow, somehow....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 27, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

SEPTIMUS: When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.

THOMASINA: Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?

Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 28, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- Weekly alimony paid to Mary McCarthy by Edmund Wilson in 1945: $60

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $630.29

(Source: Lewis M. Dabney, Edmund Wilson)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 28, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Still struggling

So far, this week's schedule has proved to be a bit more than I can chew without choking. I'll try to blog today, but you probably won't see me again until tomorrow.

Sorry.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 28, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Meet me on 21st Street

Our ArtsJournal colleague Tyler Green is excited about the upcoming Sean Scully show at Washington's Phillips Collection. I recently stumbled on a Journal of Contemporary Art interview with the artist and was absorbed. He has many provocative things to say and says them with eloquence and urgency.

Click through to see some of his luminous paintings as well as the full interview:

When I was young I was extremely political. We talked about this the other night. I don't think there is such a thing as effective political art. There is only art that is politicized. You either do politics or you do not. I wasn't interested in pretending to be political while I was an artist. There is another aspect to it. I came from an Irish background and started out life as an immigrant. I went to a convent school and I was yanked out because my parents had a big argument with them and I was put into a state school, which was full of emptiness and violence. In other words, I moved from something very exotic and difficult, but rich and full of mystery and the belief in another reality, in a reality that we couldn't see, that we could only imagine, into something that dealt with just what you could see. What you could imagine did not even seem to be a question. I found the banality of it crushing and the shock profoundly disturbing. I think at that point, taking all of those things into account, at some early moment in my life I decided I was going to be an artist.

Reminds me of Mary McCarthy's romance with her Catholic schooling. There's also this:

Davis: Did Warhol ruin art?

Scully: No, I don't think Warhol ruined art because I don't find Warhol that important. You have to be very important to be able to ruin art.

After the Phillips, the Scully show goes to Fort Worth, Cincinnati, and the Met.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 29, 2005 1:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Imagine a Nazi masterpiece, if you can. At the bottom of that pit lies some truth, about art and life. But it is an elusive truth."

Tom Stoppard (quoted in the New York Times, Feb. 20, 1984)

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

TT: Number, please

- Advance paid to Edmund Wilson by W.W. Norton in 1939 for The Wound and the Bow: $800

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $10,496.64

(Source: Lewis M. Dabney, Edmund Wilson)

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

TT: Whoops, almost forgot

In addition to my weekly drama column, I have a book review in today's Wall Street Journal. It's of Daniel Goldmark's Tunes for 'Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon:

"Tunes for 'Toons," says Mr. Goldmark, an assistant professor of music history at Case Western Reserve University, is "a set of case studies rather than an all-encompassing history," for which reason he devotes whole chapters to Carl Stalling of Warner Bros. and Scott Bradley of MGM, who between them scored most of the major non-Disney animated shorts and thereby "helped establish the public's notion of what cartoon scores should sound like." Their sharply contrasting styles are described with well- informed clarity: Stalling used recycled pop songs in the collage-like manner of a silent-movie accompanist, while Bradley preferred through-composed scores with unmistakable touches of modernism....

As usual, no link. You know what to do.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 30, 2005 2:01 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"I believe in mess, tears, pain, self-abasement, loss of self-respect, nakedness. Not caring doesn't seem much different from not loving."

Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing

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

TT: Number, please

- Annual salary (including $3,000 in expenses) paid to Edmund Wilson in 1943 for writing a weekly book review for The New Yorker: $13,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $147,356.17

(Source: Lewis M. Dabney, Edmund Wilson)

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

TT: Above and beyond

Yes, yes, I know, it's Friday, but the past week (almost past, anyway) was way more than I could handle, which is why I'm just now getting around to posting the weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. Sorry about that.

In today's column I report on three shows, two in Chicago and one in New York. The Chicago shows are Stephen Lang's Beyond Glory, now playing at the Goodman Theatre, and Barbara Gaines' new staging of The Merchant of Venice, now playing at Chicago Shakespeare Theater:

"Beyond Glory" has toured the U.S. in the past year, but it hasn't come anywhere near New York. It ought to. Broadway and Off Broadway have seen some hugely impressive one-person performances in the past couple of seasons, foremost among them Jefferson Mays in "I Am My Own Wife," Heather Raffo in "Nine Parts of Desire" and Sir Anthony Sher in "Primo." This show is that good....
Adapted by Mr. Lang from the book by Larry Smith, it consists of eight first-person monologues by recipients of the Medal of Honor, given for "gallantry and intrepidity...above and beyond the call of duty." You can't get much more military than that. But Mr. Lang's one-man play is no simple-minded piece of flag-waving. It is an unsparingly direct portrait of men at war, pushed into narrow corners and faced with hard choices. It is also one of the richest, most complex pieces of acting I've seen in my theatergoing life....

Ms. Gaines' "Merchant" grapples head-on with the chief problem the play poses for today's audiences, which is that Shakespeare's portrayal of Shylock is widely felt to be openly (if not merely) anti-Semitic. It does so by underlining every reference to Shylock's Jewishness, to the point where the incessant repetition of the word "Jew" shrieks as shrilly as fingernails on a chalkboard. Not that the man himself is spared: Mike Nussbaum plays Shylock as a smug semi-gentleman in a three-piece suit whose elegant cut cannot conceal his raging bloodlust. Yet the more savagely he is treated by the other characters--to the point of being beaten and spat upon in a dark alley--the more intelligible his hateful longings start to seem....

I also saw Playwrights Horizons' production of James Lapine's Fran's Bed, starring Mia Farrow:

Like most of Mr. Lapine's work, "Fran's Bed" is more than a little bit glib, but it isn't heartless, and he tucks a thought-provoking twist that took me completely by surprise into the very last scene. As for the acting, it's first-rate: Ms. Farrow is focused and exact, and Heather Burns and Julia Stiles, who play her daughters, are perfectly sisterly....

No link. To read the whole thing, of which there's plenty more, pick up a copy of today's Wall Street Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal. A few quick keystrokes will give you immediate access to the paper's complete contents, which include lots of arts coverage and other cool stuff.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 30, 2005 12:31 PM | Permalink

TT: Look back in befuddlement

I woke up at eleven-thirty this morning, having just finished my first full night's sleep in a week.

Last weekend was wonderfully eventful, but Daffy, Our Girl's cat, inserted a claw into the inflatable bed on which I sleep when visiting Chicago, with predictable results. I was already tired (not to mention sore) by the time I got back to New York on Monday, and things spiraled from bad to worse with scary efficiency. Since then I've written three pieces, two for The Wall Street Journal and a much longer one for Commentary, and seen two performances, a full-evening bill of ballets by Christopher Wheeldon and a new play by Warren Leight, the author of Side Man. All this high-octane aesthetic activity revved my brain up to so frenzied a pitch that I couldn't turn it off, also with predictable results.

Would that I could stand down today, but I have quite a bit of work to do this afternoon and another play to see tonight. The good news is that I don't have to file any more pieces until next Tuesday, and my schedule for the coming week is rather more reasonable (for me, that is). Among other things, I plan to sleep a lot!

Anyway, that's what I've been up to this week in lieu of blogging. I knew you'd understand.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 30, 2005 12:33 PM | Permalink

TT: ...and listen on Sunday

Our Girl and I will be appearing this Sunday on Hello Beautiful!, Chicago Public Radio's weekly arts show. We'll be talking about Beyond Glory, Stephen Lang's one-man play about eight winners of the Medal of Honor, which we saw last weekend in Chicago (and which I reviewed in today's Wall Street Journal). Edward Lifson, the host, will also be interviewing Lang live in the studio and playing recorded sound bites from the production.

If you live in the Chicago area, Hello Beautiful! airs Sundays at ten a.m. CDT (that's eleven a.m. EDT) on WBEZ, 91.5 FM. Listeners elsewhere can tune in via Web-based streaming audio by going here.

(Should you miss us on Sunday morning, go here to access the Hello Beautiful! online audio library.)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 30, 2005 12:52 PM | Permalink

TT: Read me on Saturday...

"Sightings," the biweekly column about the arts in America that I'm writing for the new Saturday edition of The Wall Street Journal, will be in the "Pursuits" section of tomorrow's paper. Pick up a copy and take a peek, won't you?

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 30, 2005 12:53 PM | Permalink