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October 31, 2005

TT: Still in the barrel

I remain severely overpressed with sail, and that's not likely to change anytime soon. Not only do I have to hit three deadlines this week, but I'll be going to five performances, one of them in Washington (where I'll also be attending a meeting of the National Council on the Arts) and two in North Carolina (where I'll be seeing Carolina Ballet). Hence blogging is likely to be sporadic and fragmentary between now and next Monday. From me, anyway: Our Girl is hoping to pick up some of the slack, which will be nice, since she's been in the barrel herself and is only just starting to emerge.

You'll find an "Elsewhere" posting immediately below and a couple of new Top Fives in the right-hand column. I also expect to be updating "Sites to See" in my spare time, such as it is. Otherwise, keep your eyes peeled for this and that, and wish me luck!

P.S. In case you haven't guessed, I'm still way behind on answering my e-mail and will remain so for the next couple of days.

Posted October 31, 12:05 PM

TT: Elsewhere

In lieu of original Monday-morning content, here's a peek at my recent Web-based reading:

- I've been meaning to blog this "Talk of the Town" item for weeks:

Turn to page 1,850 of the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia and you'll find an entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, fountain designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled "Flags Up!" Mountweazel, the encyclopedia indicates, was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to die "at 3 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine."

If Mountweazel is not a household name, even in fountain-designing or mailbox-photography circles, that is because she never existed. "It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright," Richard Steins, who was one of the volume's editors, said the other day. "If someone copied Lillian, then we'd know they'd stolen from us."...

In German, this kind of entry is known as a nihilartikel, about which you can read much more here.

For more information about the now-legendary Dag Henrik Esrum-Hellerup nihilartikel that was spirited into the first edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, go here.

- Department of Constructive Criticism: Mr. Modern Art Notes offers a list of "five things museums do that I like."

- Mr. Modern Kicks reports on the Neil Welliver retrospective at the Portland Museum of Art:

Welliver painted Maine for a reason. His works offer an exceptionally direct intuition of the feeling of woods. In some paintings, where trees and branches lay fallen in the marsh and dark clouds gather above, one can almost sense the exact temperature of the fall afternoon, how muddy the ground is, the smell of earth and decaying wood in the chilled air and the promise of rain....

Oh, how I wish I could see it...

- ...and how I wish I could afford this. (Needless to say, any wealthy blogfans who'd care to present me with a token of their overflowing gratitude may feel free to do so by clicking on the link.)

- Speaking of art, I seem to be in a work of it...

- ...and speaking of me, I recently joined the Bad Plus, James Carter, Jason Moran, Dan Morgenstern, and various other musical types in contributing to a Jerry Jazz Musician symposium on "the greatest saxophone solo in the history of jazz." Here's part of what I wrote:

It's so concise, so completely to the point: he gets on, he gets off, and when it's over you know exactly what he meant to tell you and feel the way he wanted you to feel, all in three lapidary minutes. "Grace comes," Merce Cunningham said, "when the energy for the given situation is full and there is no excess." If a record can do that, this one does....

Care to guess which record I'm talking about?

- Finally, this story from my hometown newspaper filled me with the most powerful nostalgia imaginable...

- ...as did my discovery of this primitive but nonetheless wonderful Web site, through which you can purchase the product about which I rhapsodized here.

Happy chewing!

Posted October 31, 12:04 PM

TT: Rerun

November 2003:

In New York City, drama critics don't usually attend opening-night performances of plays. We go to press previews instead, meaning that we rarely see Famous People in the audience--they generally come to the official first night. Alas, I have a celebrity disability, meaning that I almost never recognize them in the flesh. My companion for the evening, however, was a virtuoso celebrity-spotter, and everywhere she looked she saw famous faces...from the distant past. Jack Klugman, Arlene Dahl, Joan Collins, folks like that. (I kept waiting for her to point out Walter Winchell.)

Where were all the under-70 celebrities? Or do they even come to Broadway shows anymore?...

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

Posted October 31, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Bing Crosby's estimated total income in 1936: $508,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $6,841,857.61

(Source: Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams)

Posted October 31, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of ‘culture.'"

John Cage (courtesy of oboeinsight)

Posted October 31, 12:01 PM

OGIC: Quick hello

This rare early weekday morning appearance is brought to you by all the clocks in my house that I forgot to set back yesterday.

Happy halloween!

Posted October 31, 9:09 AM

October 28, 2005

TT: In the bud

A friend writes:

It was only in the last few years I developed the spine to stop reading a book if I don't like it. Now I even throw one in the trash if I really hate it. The one from which I most recently defected was "The Great Fire" by Shirley Hazzard, and I feel guilty because so many classy people like it, but it just irritated the hell out of me.

Alas, I have no opinion of Shirley Hazzard (sorry, OGIC), but I wholeheartedly endorse pulling the plug on books you don't like. Nor have I ever had a problem with doing so, though it may have more to do with my being a professional journalist than having a well-developed spine. Journalists, after all, are chronic skippers and skimmers. We have to be, since we spend much of our working lives "getting up" subjects about which we too often know little or nothing prior to being assigned to write about them. I've reached the point in my career where I pick most of my own subjects, but back when I wasn't in a position to be so choosy, I was more than willing to say yes to any assignment, however arcane. I learned to simulate the appearance of knowledge--this is what is meant by the well-known saying that a journalist's mind is a mile wide and a quarter-inch deep--and one of the ways I did it was by learning how to strain the gist out of a book without reading it from cover to cover.

It stands to reason that Dr. Johnson, one of the all-time great skippers, should have spoken the last word on those who insist on "reading books through":

This is surely a strange advice; you may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep them for life. A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?

Except for my correspondent, the only person I can think of who has had such a problem was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Justice Holmes was constitutionally incapable of putting down an unfinished book until he reached extreme old age and finally came to his senses. But, then, Justice Holmes was a prime specimen of that queerest and least comprehensible of breeds, the secular puritan. As Edmund Wilson explains in Patriotic Gore:

His reading is dominated by a sense of duty and a Puritanical fear of idleness. He feels that he must grapple with certain works, quite apart from any pleasure they give him, and, once having begun a book, no matter how dull or verbose it is, he must read every word to the end. He is always imagining--this is humorous, of course, but it shows a habit of mind--that God, at the Judgment Day, will ask him to report on the books which he ought to have read but hasn't.

I greatly admire Holmes, but I love Dr. Johnson, and this is one of the reasons why. He had what he called "a bottom of good sense," and for all his extreme peculiarities, it rarely let him down. Whatever the subject, you can usually count on him to cut through the posturing and get to the point. I, too, take it for granted that God has better things to do than inquire as to my reading habits--though He may well want a word with me about one or two books that I reviewed in my incautious youth without first having read them from cover to cover!

These lapses notwithstanding, I'd say Dr. Johnson hit it on the nose. I expect a lot out of the books I read, and when they fail to deliver the goods, I toss them aside with a clear conscience and no second thoughts. Life is so very short--and so often shorter than we expect--that it seems a fearful mistake to waste even the tiniest part of it submitting voluntarily to unnecessary boredom. Bad enough that my job sometimes requires me to sit through plays whose sheer awfulness is self-evident well before the end of the first scene. So if you really want me to read each and every page of your thousand-page biography of Millard Fillmore, send me a check. I have my price.

Posted October 28, 12:05 PM

TT: The continuing crunch

If you're wondering why I haven't answered any of your e-mails in recent days, the answer is that I'm swamped and floundering. Too much work, not enough time, arrgh, yikes.

Stand by. It may take another day or two, but this, too, shall pass.

Posted October 28, 12:05 PM

TT: The re-Producers

Today is Friday, meaning that this morning's Wall Street Journal contains my weekly drama column. I wrote about three shows, two on Broadway and one near it: Neil Simon's The Odd Couple, Wendy Wasserstein's Third, and Rick Najera's Latinologues. In all three cases, my feelings were mixed:

Instead of Oscar, the slovenly sportswriter, [Nathan] Lane should have played the maddeningly fussy Felix--and I bet he knows it, too. Maybe that's why he spends the first act channeling Groucho Marx. Not until after intermission does he find his own path into the part, and even then you keep thinking about how Walter Matthau read the same lines in the movie....

Were Mr. Simon's insert-flap-A-in-slot-B jokes ever funny? I remember chortling at them as a boy, but now they mostly leave me cold. In fact, the whole first act of "The Odd Couple" feels less like a comedy than a set of instructions for making an audience laugh....

Wendy Wasserstein, who has been absent from the New York stage for the past few years, has returned with "Third," now playing at Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theater. I wish it were good. I wanted it to be. Ms. Wasserstein, who won a Pulitzer in 1989 for "The Heidi Chronicles," is one of our best theatrical journalists, a keen-eared social observer with a knack for summing up cultural watershed moments like the coming of age of the baby boomers and putting them on stage to memorable effect. But "Third" is neither memorable nor convincing in its portrayal of a radical feminist beset by midlife doubts. Instead, it's sentimental to a fault--and false at its squishy-soft core....

Why is it that most ethnic humor, were it to be spoken out loud and in public by someone not of the ethnic group in question, would be considered a hate crime? In Rick Najera's "Latinologues," an evening of standup comedy monologues spliced together to simulate a four-person play, every Latino-related cliché I've ever heard is trotted out and served up as gospel truth...

No link, naturally. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of the Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, Web-based journalism's best bargain.

P.S. "Sightings," my biweekly Journal column about the arts in America, will be in the "Pursuits" section of tomorrow's paper. Check it out.

UPDATE: The Journal has posted a free link to today's drama column. Go here to read the whole thing.

Mr. Something Old, Nothing New thinks the Odd Couple TV series was superior to the play, and explains why--persuasively. (Most of the comedy professionals I know agree with this assessment, by the way.)

Posted October 28, 12:04 PM

TT: Rerun

October 2003:

As anyone knows who's been in journalism for more than the past 20 minutes or so, fact checking is an increasingly lost art. Time was when many magazines--if not most--rigorously checked every factual assertion made in every story they published. When I was writing profiles for Mirabella nine years ago, the checkers even required me to give them my interview tapes. But by the time I got to Time, the rigor had loosened considerably. My Time stories about the arts were "self-checked," a wonderfully Orwellian euphemism meaning that they weren't checked at all--it was assumed that I knew what I was talking about....

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

Posted October 28, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Advance paid in 1973 to Stephen King by Doubleday for Carrie: $2,500

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $11,038.50

(Source: Stephen King, On Writing)

Posted October 28, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning to life and that there are limits to human understanding. So we lay down a heavy burden and are made humble. This is what Shakespearian tragedy accomplishes for us."

Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography

Posted October 28, 12:01 PM

OGIC: The vanishing

So where have I been?

In no particular order: at the office, watching baseball in bars, at the godforsaken Bears-Ravens game in the cold stubborn rain (mitigating factors: disenchanted traveling Baltimore fans in the next row coldly assessing the state of the game, viz., "This is like watching the Ravens play the Ravens"; national anthem performed by Styx), subsequently in bed for the better part of a day, to the airport to pick up a friend who stayed here for several days, at the movies seeing something wicked this way hop, watching the 8-1 Red Wings at a kind friend's house when they were on OLN, watching the 9-1 Red Wings here when they were on local television (all leading up to watching the 10-1 Red Wings in the flesh this Saturday at the United Center, whee!), eating out at the Twisted Spoke, Lula Cafe, and the Original Pancake House, getting my hair cut, to Best Buy to purchase a Tivo, back to Best Buy the next week to enable a friend to do the same...and, far, far too much of the time, messing around in the Puzzle Boat (thank you, Eric. I think). Whew.

More relevantly to the concerns of this blog, I popped my head in at the Lit Blog Co-op today, in the comments, to join Golden Rule Jones and C. Max McGee in their enlightening discussion of Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers (which you really should read). I may have a review essay in print this weekend, in which case I'll post a link. And in the coming days, I hope to ease myself back into regular blogging again. Until soon.

Posted October 28, 1:14 AM

October 27, 2005

TT: Here but not here

I'm temporarily preoccupied with writing for money. Excuse me while I earn a living! You'll find lots of places to visit in the right-hand column, assuming you've already read everything in this column.

See you tomorrow.

Posted October 27, 12:04 PM

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:
- Absurd Person Singular (comedy, PG, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 18, reviewed here)
- Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
- Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
- Dirty Rotten Scoundrels* (musical, R, extremely vulgar, reviewed here)
- Doubt* (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)
- Fiddler on the Roof (musical, G, one scene of mild violence but otherwise family-friendly, closes Jan. 8, reviewed here)
- The Light in the Piazza* (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)
- Sweet Charity (musical, PG-13, lots of cutesy-pie sexual content, reviewed here)
- 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, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Orson's Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language, closes Dec. 31, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
- The Caterers (drama, R, violence, strong language, explicit sexual situations, reviewed here, closes Sunday)
- Sides: The Fear Is Real... (sketch comedy, PG, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Sunday)

Posted October 27, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Royalty paid in 1940 to Aaron Copland for each performance of his score for the Eugene Loring ballet Billy the Kid: $40

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $532.28

(Source: Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: 1900 Through 1942)

Posted October 27, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly."

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne

Posted October 27, 12:01 PM

October 26, 2005

TT: Elsewhere

Recent reading, randomly arranged:

- Here, at last, is the rest of the story about the German edition of Deidre Bair's biography of Carl Jung:

Random House has ended a literary dispute over a biography of Carl Gustav Jung by publishing a new version this month in Germany without special annotations and material from the Swiss heirs who had complained about "factual errors" and "misleading" information about the psychiatrist.

The biography by Deirdre Bair, which was published earlier in the United States, has been the subject of a struggle between the author and some members of Jung's family who disputed many facts in the book...

Fearing a potential lawsuit, Random House in Germany decided to insert two pages of the Jung family's version of descriptions and facts in the book, which one of its imprints, Knaus Verlag, planned to publish this month. But last week the book appeared in German bookstores without the family's material....

Good.

- Mr. Outer Life identifies an important cultural phenomenon:

So it was with some surprise a few weeks ago that I recognized a celebrity in my daughter's classroom. We were there for back-to-school night and he walked in late, causing every head to turn. As the heads turned back and the room erupted in silent whispers of "Is that him?," I knew it was, for he starred in a sitcom I'd watched when I was a kid and his well-preserved face had denied and defied the intervening decades.

As soon as the teacher stopped talking the celeb made a beeline for the door, leaving the rest of us to mill about and speak of his presence in awed, hushed tones. Apparently he's not a washed-up has-been, fodder for "Where Are They Now?" features. No, he's still a real celebrity, starring on a hit TV show and living with his beautiful wife and beautiful children in a beautiful house in the most beautiful part of town.

As they talked, I detected celebrity validation in the air, that peace of mind we get when a celebrity endorses us by doing what we do....

- Ms. Pratie Place's daughter/co-blogger, who lives in Manhattan, puts her finger on a mystery:

I was at boyfriend's house the other day (parents' house, in the suburbs) and I went down to get something the basement. And just as I hit the bottom of the stairs, I got the oddest feeling. I felt--not quite sick--but just very strange. And what I realized it was, was, silence. There was no traffic, no office, no TV. There was no noise. My ears were ringing with silence. And it was good, but I didn't feel quite as good as you might think....

I never sleep well the first night I'm back in Smalltown, U.S.A., on a visit. It's too quiet.

- Excellent green-room advice from Mr. Think Denk:

I just finished this last weekend playing the Franck Quintet for piano and strings, a piece which apparently many people have trouble taking seriously. Last season I played this work at the end of a tour in Sayville or Islip (I don't quite remember) and a man afterwards said some very unkind things about the piece, in a tone of voice I cannot forgive. This kind of dismissiveness I find very upsetting. Suddenly it seemed to me the five of us had driven out in the rain in a rental car, very tired, had nearly gotten lost in Long Island, and had worked hard in an unpleasant-sounding hall to bring the piece across, and some jerk had to mouth off...I worked myself into an inner rage about this, and came as close as I ever had to yelling at someone backstage. The Franck Quintet is, anyway, the Franck Quintet; either you "buy it" or you don't. And if you don't buy it, don't take it out on the musicians...

As it happens, I used not to buy it--but now I do. (For what it's worth, the older I get, the more music I like.)

- Mr. Something Old, Nothing New remembers the late Charles Rocket, who cut his throat the other day:

His best-known TV guest appearance was probably as Bruce Willis's brother in the second season premiere of "Moonlighting," competing with Willis for the attentions of Cybill Shepherd. He was a failed con man who started the episode by trying to plug the ultimate miracle product, "Rich 'n Thin," by doing the first and (deliberately) worst rap number by a white guy in prime-time TV....

Not only do I remember that episode, but until a few years ago, God help me, I could have recited most of the lyrics from memory. Strange how cluttered a middle-aged head gets....

- Ms. Household Opera asks (and answers) a wonderful question:

Which movie scenes always make you cry (and which ones always make you laugh)?

I'm not in the mood to generate original content today, but suffice it to say that our lists overlap.

- Says Mr. From the Floor:

Today, one doesn't even need to have basic technical skills to publish a website. There is only one barrier to entry remaining for someone who wants to become a voice in the culture at large: the ability to think and write clearly. Granted, that's still a large barrier, but there have always been more people interested in being journalists and critics than there have been publications to support them. Today one doesn't need the backing of a major publication to develop a voice and establish a dedicated readership.

Today the editorial, printing, and distribution functions have almost no impact on how a writer develops credibility and reaches an audience of readers. Readers are rapidly migrating away from pay-for-use information services (in print or on the web) and turning to free sites hosted by print publications and to other information providers (like bloggers) for current cultural content. Researchers are becoming more reliant on search engine results for information and less reliant on proprietary systems and pay-for-use archives. By hiding their writers behind a curtain that readers must pay to open, mainstream publications are diluting their historical roles in the culture as conveyors of information and tastemakers....

Yes I said yes I will yes. The problem, alas, is that my bosses at The Wall Street Journal (unlike nearly everybody else in the newspaper business) turn a tidy profit by making the Journal's contents available on a subscription-only basis. I wish I could link to the stuff I write for them--but I'm awfully fond of earning a living, too. A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox!

- Rich food for thought from Mr. Superfluities:

I can only go by the evidence of my own experience, small and insignificant in the larger scheme as that is. But it is this: that art, so far from engaging the world, should provide the means by which we are encouraged to transcend it. Turning from the ridiculous to the sublime, it is this which differentiates works like, say, Tristan, the canvases of Mark Rothko and the music of Morton Feldman from works like Angels in America, the canvases of Rauschenberg and the music of--oh, I don't know, everybody from Eminem to Kander & Ebb. As Kant will happily tell you, there's no escaping the boundaries of human sensual experience, but as Schopenhauer will whisper in your ear, you can always seek to transcend it through renunciation of the world and through the highest expressions of sensuality itself. Art and religion provide the means for that renunciation....

- Er, this is my life.

And by the way, Ms. A, thanks for the plug:

Who is your favorite political blogger? Favorite non-political blogger?

Political: Instapundit. Nonpolitical: About Last Night.

We always scroll down.

- Oh, yes, Lileks has been peeking, too:

Me, I love lunch. So little hangs on lunch; your expectations are low and easily met. So it's hard to be pleased by however it goes. Some people like variety; others have the same thing every day because they can, and because it's the one meal where a family man really has complete control. Breakfast might be drawn from the shifting stores of cereal and fruit; dinner is variable by law, because we'd all rebel if the same thing was served each night. Even the single man objects. The single man in his lowest state rotates between fast-food outlets, because even the dullest example of the genre knows there is something inexcusable about eating McDonald's every night....

As for me, all I can say is that if I didn't live two blocks away from Good Enough to Eat, I'd be reduced within days to the most desperate and pitiful of singletonian culinary extremities--sort of like one of Barbara Pym's characters, only male, if you know what I mean.

- No matter what you do for a living, this is harder.

- Says Mr. CultureSpace:

I don't know how accurate Capote is, and, to a certain extent, it doesn't matter. A film, I have always believed, must work within its own parameters; its faithfulness to its source material is secondary, if it matters at all....

O.K., I take the point--but what if the "source material" is the historical record? Does it "matter" if an artfully made docudrama contains significant distortions that large numbers of ordinary folk come to regard as the whole truth and nothing but?

Just asking.

- San Francisco's de Young Museum has moved to a new building. My favorite blogger offers a characteristic report on the change of venue:

The northwest corner of the new de Young Museum twists skyward, as if it's been pinched between an oversized thumb and forefinger and given a good tug. Maybe Jack's giant wanted the museum back but (wary of the San Franciscan) decided against it and let go. And so the tower remains, with nowhere to hide and with a mesh-like copper exterior that simultaneously conceals and reveals its vague internal movements. It takes a few moments to realize that what moves is actually a swarm of people up on the observation deck. The lively shimmer and shadow tones down the tower's looming ominousness and promises fairytale views to all who enter the museum proper....

[W]hat is the function of an art museum--of the building itself--and what are the effects of being contained within one? Holding art still, a museum invites stilled observations, yet a well-designed floorplan creates movement, a necessary counterpoint to all the stillness....

How I wish I'd been there!

- Says The Little Professor:

A few years ago, I had several students who declared, somewhat indignantly, that they couldn't "relate" to The Tempest. ("Well, I should hope not," I wanted to respond--but didn't.) I understand the desire to find something familiar in a text, the yearning to find one's own priorities and needs nested there. But there's something so depressing about "I can't relate to it": it presumes that the reader's mental activity can end once she stumbles across unfamiliar (or unpleasant) ideas....

Amen, sister.

- Lastly, if you haven't seen this, look at it right this second. (You'll need QuickTime to view it.)

Posted October 26, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Fee paid in 1942 to Agnes de Mille by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (exclusive of subsequent performance royalties) for choreographing Rodeo: $500

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $6,273.97

(Source: Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: 1900 Through 1942)

Posted October 26, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"There are critics who love the theatre, who manage to express a sort of positive enthusiasm for the theatrical craft even with shows they dislike, and despite having had a wretched evening, remain infectious, enthusiastic and lacking in malice.

"On the other hand, there are those who neither know nor care about theatre. They are disgruntled sports writers or fashion reporters, doubtful poets or failed dramatists, who've been promoted sideways into what their editor considers to be a fairly harmless area--rather as prime ministers tend to reward colleagues who have fallen from grace by making them arts ministers.

"Many of us in the theatre spend our lives being concerned about the views of such people. My advice is don't. Be grateful for the good or constructive ones and disregard the bad ones. If possible read neither, certainly not until much later. Life's too short."

Alan Ayckbourn, The Crafty Art of Playmaking

Posted October 26, 12:01 PM

October 25, 2005

TT: Rebirth

American Ballet Theatre, which is appearing at New York's City Center through November 6, is dancing Apollo, George Balanchine's first collaboration with Igor Stravinsky and his oldest surviving ballet (Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes premiered it in 1928). What's more, they're doing it with the rarely performed birth scene, which I've only seen twice on stage in my eighteen years of dancegoing.

Not surprisingly, I have a lot to say about Apollo in All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, including this explanation of how and why Balanchine cut the birth scene:

Apollo is a portrait of the Greek god of song and music, danced by a cast of seven and accompanied by a small string orchestra. As the curtain rises, Leto gives birth to the young Apollo, who is freed from his swaddling clothes by two handmaidens. He takes up his lyre and plays, then dances about the stage, exploring his godly powers. He is joined by Calliope, the muse of poetry; Polyhymnia, the muse of mime; and Terpsichore, the muse of dance. Each muse dances a solo variation for Apollo, "instructing" him in her art. He dances with Terpsichore alone, then with all three muses. Having achieved his maturity, he then ascends Mount Parnassus to join Zeus, his father, in Olympus, followed by the muses, as Leto and her handmaidens bid him farewell from the earth below.

In 1979 Balanchine eliminated the roles of Leto and the handmaidens, cut the birth scene, and rechoreographed the finale so that Apollo and the muses pose in a sunlit peacock-like formation at center stage instead of ascending to Olympus. He apparently felt that the opening scenes had become dated and were out of keeping with the tone of the rest of the dance. ("I know why I changed it, I took out all the garbage--that's why!" he told an interviewer in 1981.) New York City Ballet now performs Apollo only in this shortened version, originally created for Mikhail Baryshnikov, but many other companies continue to dance the birth scene.

I think Balanchine was dead wrong, and the performance I saw on Sunday afternoon, in which Ethan Stiefel danced the title role, showed why.

This is what I wrote about Stiefel several years ago for a Time profile that never made it into print:

In recent seasons, Stiefel has appeared in a startlingly wide range of ballets--Le Corsaire, Billy the Kid, Balanchine's Apollo, even contemporary works by Mark Morris and Twyla Tharp--moving from role to role with a casual virtuosity and unmannered grace that are as all-American as Fred Astaire. No less typically American is his eagerness to take chances: "I'm not saying that I can do everything, but I'll definitely try everything. I don't want people to say I'm a great classical ballet dancer, or a modern dancer, or any one kind of dancer. I'm a dancer, period." Well, not quite. In fact, he is the greatest American-born male ballet dancer to come along since Edward Villella, and quite possibly the most exciting, of either sex and from any country, since Baryshnikov. Period.

I stand by those words, and Sunday's performance gave me fresh reasons to do so. Unlike any other Apollo I've been lucky enough to see on stage, Stiefel understands that the young Apollo is young and unformed, and that it is the muses who must teach him the meaning of beauty. Accordingly, his dancing throughout the first part of the ballet is raw and wild--just what you'd expect from a newborn god, in other words--and it is the prefatory birth scene that puts the wildness in context. On Sunday I found it nothing short of revelatory.

You have four more chances to see Apollo in New York, on October 27, November 2, and at both performances on November 5. Stiefel will only be dancing Apollo once more, on November 2, but all four performances have been staged by Richard Tanner, and so I expect they'll be worth seeing no matter who's in them. Go--especially if you've been disappointed in recent seasons by New York City Ballet's slick, flattened-out performances of the ballet Balanchine called "the turning point of my life."

(Incidentally, Andante has put out a three-disc box set of performances by Stravinsky which includes, among other things, the very first CD release of the little-known recording of Apollo Stravinsky made in 1950 with a pickup ensemble of top New York string players billed as the RCA Victor Orchestra. It's a little scrappy in spots but for the most part incredibly vivid and revealing, and I commend it to your attention as well.)

Posted October 25, 12:05 PM

TT: Walking the walk

Last night I went downtown in the pouring rain to see a workshop performance of In Private/In Public, a double bill of one-act plays written by George Hunka (also known as Mr. Superfluities) and directed by Isaac Butler (also known as Mr. Parabasis), two dramabloggers of strong opinions not always identical to my own! I got soaked--but it was worth it.

Both plays deal with relationships gone grossly wrong. In Private, the curtain-raiser, is a darkly drawn sketch of obsessional love, while In Public, the longer of the two, is a "serious comedy" à la Alan Ayckbourn that's chockful of unsettlingly sharp-edged punch lines. Not only are the plays deftly staged, but the acting, by Darian Dauchan, Abe Goldfarb, Daryl Lathon, Sasha Taublieb, and Jennifer Gordon Thomas, is first-rate. Remember those names--you'll hear them again, and not just from me.

Alas, there's only one more performance, tonight at eight o'clock at manhattantheatresource, right around the corner from Washington Square Park. The theater is very small, so if you want to come--and I hope you do--call 212-501-4751 to make a reservation.

For more information, go here.

Posted October 25, 12:04 PM

TT: I couldn't have put it better myself

A friend writes:

"We had dinner last week in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Connecticut. It was beautiful--everywhere the eye went it found something to delight it. Wright's big public rooms have found a ghastly afterlife in today's McMansions. He's not responsible for that, but he is responsible for the tiny kitchen, bathroom and bedrooms, the smoking chimneys, and the leaky roof--all traits, the owners assured us, of other Wright houses (they belong to a Wright homeowners' association).

"I suppose the Parthenon would be drafty."

Posted October 25, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Aaron Copland's total income in 1941: $4,577.61

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $60,311.58

(Source: Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: 1900 Through 1942)

Posted October 25, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"I mean, this may sound ridiculous, but I've never to this day really known what most women think about anything. Completely closed book to me. I mean, God bless them, what would we do without them. But I've never understood them. I mean, damn it all, one minute you're having a perfectly good time and the next, you suddenly see them there like--some old sports jacket or something--literally beginning to come apart at the seams. Floods of tears, smashing your pots, banging the furniture about. God knows what. Both my wives, God bless them, they've given me a great deal of pleasure over the years but, by God, they've cost me a fortune in fixtures and fittings. All the same. Couldn't do without them, could we. I suppose."

Alan Ayckbourn, Absurd Person Singular

Posted October 25, 12:01 PM

October 24, 2005

TT: Chimes at midnight

I haven't seen much opera lately--Broadway has been keeping me hopping--but when the Met announced that Bryn Terfel, whom Our Girl and I admire greatly, would be singing the title role in Falstaff, my favorite opera, I knew I had to be there. The only question was who to bring along. Having recently subjected the beauteous Maccers to a third-rate play, it struck me that she might be a worthy seatmate, and though she's been preoccupied with starting a cult, she agreed to join me on Saturday for dinner and Verdi.

On Thursday afternoon the Met press office left a message on my voice mail in New York. I was holed up at an undisclosed location, taking J.J. Gittes' advice (a fat lot of good it did him!), so I didn't find out until late that night that Terfel, whose longstanding back problems have made him a chronic canceller, was bailing out of Saturday's performance, the last of the run. Sighing deeply, I left a message for Maccers assuring her that she was more than welcome to do the same. No way, she replied the next day, and sure enough, she arrived at the Teachout Museum on Saturday night, no more prepared than I for the comedy of errors that was about to ensue.

I should have known we were headed for harm's way when we showed up at the restaurant and found that its doors were locked (a water main had broken). Unfazed by this ill omen, we improvised a tasty dinner next door, then hustled down to the Met, where things got off to a surprisingly decent start. Louis Otey, who replaced Terfel, is no Falstaff, but he's a good singer and a good sport, and he threw himself into the impossible task of covering for one of opera's most electrifying performers. It helped that Jean-Paul Fouchecourt, the funniest character tenor around (he plays the ugly frog in Mark Morris' staging of Rameau's Platée), was up to his usual tricks as Bardolfo. Moreover, James Levine, who for the past few seasons has been very much an in-and-out runner, rose to the occasion, conducting in a positive and involving manner from the first downbeat on.

The curtain fell on the first scene, and we waited...and waited. "There's trouble in paradise," I whispered to Maccers, and sure enough, a nervous-looking gentleman in a suit materialized seconds later and informed the audience that Fouchecourt had slipped, fallen, and hurt himself during the scene change, and would be replaced by his cover singer. "I think the thing to do is take the first intermission now," the spokesman said. No sooner did the house lights come up then Maccers and I scooted to the bar for champagne, wondering what the next disaster would be.

What happened instead was a not-so-minor miracle, made possible in part by the galvanizing presence of a first-rank artist. I can't say enough good things about Patricia Racette, who was singing Alice Ford on Saturday, so I'll simply repeat here what I wrote about her in the New York Daily News a few years ago on a similar occasion:

Patricia Racette was faced with the unenviable task of replacing the much-loved Renee Fleming as Violetta, the doomed courtesan, in Franco Zeffirelli's expensive new production of La Traviata, which opened Monday at the Metropolitan Opera House. A lesser singer might have clutched under the pressure. Instead, Racette swung for the fences--and smashed the ball out of the park.

Racette is no airheaded coloratura canary, but an outstandingly gifted singing actress who uses her bright, vibrant voice as an instrument of high drama. She caught the hectic desperation just below the surface of the forced gaiety of "Sempre libera," and moved boldly from the black despair of "Addio del passato" to the heart-tearing false hope of the death scene. The wild cheering at evening's end was fully deserved: rarely has an American soprano made so much of so great an opportunity...

Racette was every bit as good on Saturday, and her determination to prevail set her colleagues on fire. Instead of staggering around looking stricken, the cast, Otey very much included, had a ball. It was Maccers' first Falstaff, and she went home happy. It must have been, oh, my twentieth, and so did I.

Was it a great performance, or merely a great occasion? Falstaff, after all, is no knockabout farce but one of Western art's most searching commentaries on the vanity of human wishes, no less so because it says what it has to say with a smile. What makes Verdi's Falstaff immortal is the comic finality with which his remaining delusions of potency are dispelled--and the nobleman's grace with which he accepts his reversal of fortune. Verdi, who was seventy-nine years old when he completed Falstaff, understood such matters in his bones, which is why Falstaff is the most Shakespearean of all operas. Sir John may be a fool to chase after Alice and Meg, but if he is, so are we all, and there is nothing even slightly absurd about the piercing moment when he assures Alice that he was not always the fat, tumescent rake who stands before her:

When I was page to the Duke of Norfolk,
I was slender, a mirage,
light and fair, gentle, gentle.
That was my verdant April season,
the joyous Maytime of my life.
Then I was so lean, so lithe, so slender,
you could have slipped me through a ring.

Arrigo Boito's original Italian words are deliciously light-footed--Quand'ero paggio del Duca di Norfolk/ero sottile, sotille, sotille--and the miniature aria Verdi spins out of them, barely a half-minute long, is no less delicious in its scampery, self-mocking grace. To hear it is to peel away the layers of bluster and behold the humanity of a buffoon who, long after his "verdant April" has turned to chilly October, still craves the comforting sweetness of young love. A little later we see him humiliated, and though he deserves it a hundred times over, we feel a tug of sympathy, knowing there is more to him than mere roguery. Is there a more poignant moment in opera than when he stands before the mocking crowd and joins bravely in their laughter?

Rare is the Falstaff, be it in the opera house or the theater, who understands this (Orson Welles did, with good reason). One could hardly have expected Louis Otey to improvise at the last minute so complex an interpretation, and he didn't: instead, he played Sir John for laughs all the way, and got them. Nor is the Met's ancient Falstaff, performed in the crumbling shell of Franco Zeffirelli's 1964 production, likely to inspire such interpretative subtleties in those forced to work within its constricting limits. Fortunately, Verdi's quicksilver music tells us everything we really need to know, and when the whole cast comes downstage at the very end and joins Sir John in a rousing fugue whose first line is All the world's a joke, it's hard not to suspect that you're hearing more or less what Robert Browning had in mind when he spoke of "the C Major of this life," the key in which young lovers are wed, a husband and wife reconciled, an aging blowhard humbled and forgiven, and the world made whole again.

Of course I cried. Comedy does that to you. So does life.

Posted October 24, 12:05 PM

TT: Marching orders

Found in a fortune cookie at dinner on Sunday:

ACCEPT THE NEXT PROPOSITION YOU HEAR.

I'm still waiting....

Posted October 24, 12:04 PM

TT: Rerun

June 2004:

Could it be that I'm through with series TV for good? I wouldn't be surprised. It's not that I'm a snob about TV. The problem is that I no longer care for the idea of committing myself to weekly installments of anything as repetitive as a dramatic series. I suppose it'd be melodramatic to say that life's too short to spend it watching the same set of characters each week--but melodramatic or not, I think that might be the best way to explain be how I'm feeling these days. For the moment, anyway....

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

Posted October 24, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Elia Kazan's fee in 1950 for directing the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire: $175,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $1,356,567.27

(Source: Richard Schickel, Elia Kazan)

Posted October 24, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,
Sliding by semi-tones till I sink to a minor,--yes,
And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,
Surveying a while the heights I rolled from into the deep;
Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,
The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.

Robert Browning, "Abt Vogler"

Posted October 24, 12:01 PM

TT: Just in case you didn't notice

Four new Top Fives went up this morning and over the weekend. Take a look.

Posted October 24, 11:59 AM

October 21, 2005

TT: Laugh till it hurts

Friday again, and even though I'm not here (I'm off at one of my celebrated undisclosed locations, soaking up silence), Our Girl has been good enough to post the weekly drama-column teaser, in which I gallop wildly from the sublime to the ridiculous.

The trip begins with the Manhattan Theatre Club's revival of Absurd Person Singular:

Alan Ayckbourn is far from unknown in this country--he's had one solid Broadway hit and a couple of respectable runs--but the best of his 60-odd plays aren't nearly as familiar to American audiences as they ought to be. Might that be about to change? Earlier this year, his own production of "Private Fears in Public Places" came to town as part of the "Brits Off Broadway" series at 59E59 and caused a stir, and now the Manhattan Theatre Club, which has long been enthusiastic about his work, has brought "Absurd Person Singular" back to Broadway three decades after its New York premiere, which ran for 591 performances. This revival, directed by John Tillinger, isn't perfect, but it's way more than good enough, and if Mr. Ayckbourn's brand of darkly bittersweet comedy is new to you, it'll make you wonder where he's been all your life....

The next and last stop is In My Life:

About a half-hour into "In My Life," the retchingly whimsical story of J.T. (Christopher J. Hanke), a cute young singer-songwriter who suffers from Tourette's syndrome and a brain tumor, I turned to my seatmate and whispered, "‘Springtime for Hitler.'" If you're not a musical-comedy buff or a Mel Brooks fan, that's the horrible show-within-a-show in "The Producers" which turns out to be so unintentionally funny that it becomes a smash hit. If Joe Brooks, the author-lyricist-composer-director-producer of "In My Life," had cut 15 minutes' worth of balladry and told his excellent cast to play the rest for laughs, he, too, might have had a hit on his hands. Instead, he's getting laughed out of town--on a rail....

No link. Do the usual: (A) Buy the damn paper, O.K.? (B) Go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, a totally great deal.

Posted October 21, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Fee paid in 1924 by Warner Bros. to Alfred A. Knopf for film rights to Willa Cather's A Lost Lady: $12,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $130,224.65

(Source: Cather: Later Novels)

Posted October 21, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Pointing to the briefcase I said: 'How do you know you are going to reject them?'

"'If they were any good, they wouldn't be dropped at my hotel by the writers in person. Some New York agent would have them.'

"'Then why take them at all?'

"'Partly not to hurt feelings. Partly the thousand-to-one chance all publishers live for. But mostly you're at a cocktail party and get introduced to all sorts of people, and some of them have novels written and you are just liquored up enough to be benevolent and full of love for the human race, so you say you'd love to see the script. It is then dropped at your hotel with such sickening speed that you are forced to go through the motions of reading it.'"

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

Posted October 21, 12:01 PM

TT: Shirley Horn, R.I.P.

Shirley Horn, the great jazz singer-pianist, died last night after a long illness. Here's the first obit to hit the blogosphere--there'll be more soon. In the meantime, celebrate her life by listening to the album that first brought her to the attention of the general public.

This is what I wrote for the Washington Post the last time I saw Horn live, at New York's Iridium in 2003:

To Washingtonians, Horn is an old friend, but up here in Second City, she's an Event. None of my friends can remember the last time she sang in a Manhattan nightclub. Her engagement was all the more eventful in light of the fact that it was something of a comeback. Insiders knew that chronic illness had put her in a wheelchair and stopped her from playing piano. It was impossible to imagine anyone else playing for the best self-accompanist in jazz, so when the word got out that she was coming to town, fans marked their calendars, not sure whether to be excited or nervous.

I felt both ways as I waited and waited for Horn to show up. She was a half-hour late, and I was close enough to the bandstand to overhear the members of her trio (including George Mesterhazy on piano, who carried out his unenviable task with skill and discretion) wondering out loud whether she'd go through with it. Finally, she materialized in the wings, and you could almost hear the collective sigh of relief as she was wheeled into place, followed in half a heartbeat by a standing ovation. It was quite an opening--and quite a show. Horn sang in a near-whisper, the whole room leaning on every syllable. "I Got Lost in His Arms" was sly and lustful, "Here's to Life" almost hurtfully poignant. As for "Yesterdays," I can't even begin to tell you what it was like to hear her utter the line "I'm not half the girl I used to be." All I can say is that you could have heard a tear drop--and plenty did, mine included. I dined with three jazz singers a couple of weeks later, and it turned out that they'd all been to see Shirley Horn, and couldn't talk about anything else. I don't know when I've heard anything scarier or braver, or more beautiful....

I miss her already.

UPDATE: Go here for more from NPR, including sound bites and links.

Here's the bio posted by the National Endowment for the Arts after Horn won one of the 2005 Jazz Masters Fellowships.

The Washington Post beat the New York Times to the Web by a day with its staff-written obit. (Ben Ratliff's Times obit is here.) Also of interest is this appreciation by the Post's Richard Harrington.

Here's a tribute from the Bad Plus.

Posted October 21, 3:03 AM

October 20, 2005

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, reviewed here)
- Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
- Dirty Rotten Scoundrels* (musical, R, extremely vulgar, reviewed here)
- Doubt* (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)
- Fiddler on the Roof (musical, G, one scene of mild violence but otherwise family-friendly, reviewed here)
- The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, reviewed here)
- Sweet Charity (musical, PG-13, lots of cutesy-pie sexual content, reviewed here)
- 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, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Orson's Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
- The Caterers (drama, R, violence, strong language, and explicit sexual situations, reviewed here, closes Oct. 30)
- Sides: The Fear Is Real... (sketch comedy, PG, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Oct. 30)

Posted October 20, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Amount paid in 1945 by Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner for a farmhouse, a barn, and five acres of land on Long Island: $5,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $52,524.10

(Source: Jed Perl, New Art City)

Posted October 20, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"'There's so much that I want to tell you,' she said at last, 'and it's hard to explain. My life is full of jealousies and disappointments, you know. You get to hating people who do contemptible work and who get on just as well as you do. There are many disappointments in my profession, and bitter, bitter contempts!' Her face hardened, and looked much older. 'If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up for it, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.'"

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

Posted October 20, 12:01 PM

October 19, 2005

TT: Number, please

- Royalties earned by Willa Cather's My Ántonia in 1918, its first year of publication: $1,300

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $18,771.15

(Source: Cather: Early Novels & Stories)

Posted October 19, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"It's funny to have a priest with a high salary. An artist with a large income is in the same position."

Ad Reinhardt (interview in Artforum, October 1970)

Posted October 19, 12:01 PM

October 18, 2005

TT: Number, please

- Raymond Chandler's fee in 1943 for thirteen weeks of work on the screenplay of Double Indemnity: $9,750

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $110,517.13

(Source: Chandler: Stories & Early Novels)

Posted October 18, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

At the Museum of Modern Art you can sit in the lobby
on the foam-rubber couch; you can rest and smoke,
and view whatever the revolving doors express.
You don't have to go into the galleries at all.

In this arena the exhibits are free and have all
the surprises of art--besides something extra:
sensory restlessness, the play of alternation,
expectation in an incessant spray

thrown from heads, hands, the tendons of ankles.
The shifts and strollings of feet
engender compositions on the shining tiles,
and glide together and pose gambits,

gestures of design, that scatter, rearrange,
trickle into lines, and turn clicking through a wicket
into rooms where caged colors blotch the walls.
You don't have to go to the movie downstairs

to sit on red plush in the snow and fog
of old-fashioned silence. You can see contemporary
Garbos and Chaplins go by right here.
And there's a mesmeric experimental film

constantly reflected on the flat side of the wide
steel-plate pillar opposite the crenellated window.
Non-objective taxis surging west, on Fifty-third,
liquefy in slippery yellows, dusky crimsons,

pearly mauves--and accelerated sunset, a roiled
surf, or cloud-curls undulating--their tubular ribbons
elongations of the coils of light itself
(engine of color) and motion (motor of form).

May Swenson, "At the Museum of Modern Art"

Posted October 18, 12:01 PM

October 17, 2005

TT: Thanks for the memories

Here are two pieces of e-mail I received apropos of my article in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal about spending the night in two Frank Lloyd Wright houses:

- "For the past sixteen years, my wife and I (together with our five children) have resided in a 1901 Wright-designed house in Oak Park, Illinois. During this time, we have come to know quite a few Wright homeowners and many other fans of his. While we have known some to 'suffer in silence' (and some not so silently) when sitting through a long dinner on reproductions of his famous straight-backed chairs, I have never heard any of the homeowners express anything but praise and joy concerning the pleasure of living in their homes and the magic interplay of space and light that Wright managed to create in them. Many consider our home to be one of the early ‘masterpieces,' but it is certainly no museum piece. Like your description of the Schwartz House, it has been occupied by children for much of its 104 years, and our own five have certainly ridden it hard. The spaces absorb and welcome them. As young parents in 1989, we purchased the house as much for its livability as for its beauty. The value of Wright's design is fundamentally in the spaces themselves, not in the famous art glass or other details that adorn them. Even our youngest children unconsciously appreciate that and have told us that we are not allowed to move to any other house!"

- "My grandparents bought a house outside of Milwaukee in the 1920s from a young architect they had met named Frank Wright and lived the rest of their lives in that home. The house was terrific, the furniture and sconces all designed by Mr. Wright (not the dishes). Several small fruit-bearing trees were in the front yard right next to the porch and the way the leaves hung down in the summer always reminded me of the roof of the house. There was a wonderful laundry chute we used to play with when we visited. When I was about eight (1960) we were having a wild pillow fight under the sleepy eye of a babysitter. I threw a triangular-shaped pillow at my sister and clipped one of the sconces right off the wall. When my grandmother died we had no relatives in Milwaukee and so my parents sold it. Unfortunately, when my grandparents bought the home they did not know how important the architect would become and so no official documentation was kept proving who had designed it. The house was sold for a song.

"Some time in the late 1980s I traveled to Milwaukee for my oral medical boards and took a cab out to the house. No one was home. I sat on the porch and ate some of the berries from the trees for ten minutes, keeping the cab waiting.

"Thanks for bringing back some memories."

And thanks to you both for writing.

Posted October 17, 12:04 PM

TT: Rerun

August 2003:

I told a friend of mine at lunch the other day that I thought the day would come when the producers of smart movies aimed at older viewers (i.e., anyone over 21) would bypass theatrical release altogether and market such films in more or less the same way novels are sold in bookstores. If that happens, I'll be sorry to spend less time in theaters. The enveloping experience of watching a good film in a big, dark room--and in the company of a rapt audience--is unique and irreplaceable. Alas, it's already been replaced, at least for most of us who love classic films. How many of the great movies of the past have you seen in a theater? Not many, I suspect, especially if you're under 40 and don't live in a film-friendly city like New York or Chicago...

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

Posted October 17, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Clark Terry's weekly salary in 1951 as a trumpeter in Count Basie's orchestra: $125

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $959.38

(Source: Dempsey Travis, An Autobiography of Black Jazz)

Posted October 17, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Already in 1958, Nell Blaine was worrying in a journal entry about the rise of 'the idea of novelty above all' as well as 'the love of cruelty and art brut of the Post-Atom 2nd string Dadaists.' All this, she wrote, 'has stuck in the craw of many serious artists who may go their own way quietly.' At least until the end of the 1950s, though, Duchamp's and [Ad] Reinhardt's dark, contrarian views were held in check by a gloriously optimistic sense, the sense that [Hans] Hofmann epitomized, that art was organically, dialectically related to the hurly-burly of life--and that art could transcend life. 'Those with a capacity for life, joie de vivre,' Blaine observed, 'will go on in the face of annihilation.'"

Jed Perl, New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century

Posted October 17, 12:01 PM

TT: Slight hiatus

I'm badly bent from recent excesses of work, so I'll be taking the rest of the week off from blogging (except for the usual daily items, which Our Girl has obligingly agreed to post for me). My plan is to retreat to one of my top-secret undisclosed locations sans iBook and watch the river flow.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it:

- Be sure to visit several of the other fine blogs listed in the right-hand column.

- Have a nice week.

P.S. Check out all the new Top Fives!

Posted October 17, 7:51 AM

TT: Behind the curve we're ahead of

I've been inexplicably slow to note the recent publication of Blog!: How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture (CDS, $24.95), a collection of essays and interviews by and with various prominent bloggers. Like most such efforts, it has next to nothing to say about artblogging, but what it does say is said by me: David Kline and Dan Burstein, who put the book together, interviewed me via e-mail last year and have included the results as a four-page Q-&-A.

Here's a brief excerpt:

Are blogs empowering new voices? If so, who? Will they actually change power relationships in society?

They're empowering amateur writers--thousands of them. And it's already clear that blogging offers a platform to gifted amateur writers--and, just as important, it allows these budding young writers to sidestep the traditional media and win recognition on their own. This can't help but change power relationships in the world of journalism. Specifically, it's diminishing the power of traditional-media "gatekeepers" to shape the cultural conversation, which I think is mostly--but not entirely--a good thing....

For more of the same, plus contributions by (among others) Joe Trippi, Markos "Daily Kos" Zuniga, Roger L. Simon, Wonkette, Nick Denton, Adam Curry, Jay Rosen, Andrew Sullivan, and a whole lot of other relevant people, go here to buy the book.

Posted October 17, 7:50 AM

October 15, 2005

TT: Another left turn in Stockholm

It's me again, back in The Wall Street Journal with another edition of "Sightings," my new biweekly column about the arts. The subject, needless to say, is Harold Pinter:

Nothing could have been less unexpected than the news that Harold Pinter had won the Nobel Prize for literature. The only surprise was that he deserved it--which probably wasn't why he got it.

That Mr. Pinter is a distinguished writer is beyond doubt. To be sure, we haven't seen much of his work on Broadway in recent years, but the Roundabout Theatre Company's 2003 revival of "The Caretaker" (1960), a dark comedy about a tramp and two brothers who share a rundown house, served as a valuable reminder that while his opaque, elliptical style has long since hardened into mannerism, Mr. Pinter really did earn his reputation as one of the key voices in postwar British drama. Even Noël Coward, who had no use whatsoever for trendy theatrical innovation, was impressed by his ability to stir up profoundly unsettling emotions through the simplest of means. "'The Caretaker,' on the face of it, is everything I hate most in the theatre--squalor, repetition, lack of actions, etc.--but somehow it seizes hold of you," he wrote in his diary. "Nothing happens except that somehow it does."

Alas, I must confess to suspecting the motives of the members of the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy, which awards the literature prize each October...

No link. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of the Saturday Journal and turn to the "Pursuits" section, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, a decision for which you won't be sorry.

UPDATE: The Journal has posted a free link to this piece. To read the whole thing, go here.

Posted October 15, 1:26 AM

October 14, 2005

TT: Terror, up close and personal

Friday again, and time for this week's Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. Today I reviewed three plays, one off-off-Broadway production (The Caterers) and two out-of-town shows (King Lear in Boston and Leading Ladies in Washington, D.C.). I gave all three a thumbs-up:

Talk about timely: I saw "The Caterers," Jonathan Leaf's new play about an Islamic terrorist and his three hostages, a British filmmaker and a pair of Jewish caterers, a couple of hours after Mayor Bloomberg warned New Yorkers of a possible terrorist assault on the local subway system. The news was still so hot that I had trouble getting a cab to the theater--and "The Caterers" is so nightmarishly believable a portrait of terrorism in action that the friend with whom I saw it had a panic attack when it was over.

Part of my friend's anxiety arose from the fact that "The Caterers" is being performed by a very fine cast (Judith Hawking is especially strong) in an Off-Off Broadway theater small enough that you can smell the powder whenever Mohammed (Brian Wallace) fires his pistol. But Mr. Leaf's play, which was inspired by a real-life incident, is wholly plausible in its own right...

Alvin Epstein is best known in Manhattan for his appearances in the plays of Samuel Beckett. He first attracted attention a half-century ago in the Broadway premiere of "Waiting for Godot" and was most recently heard from this February in the Irish Repertory Theatre's splendid revival of "Endgame." Now he's up in Boston, guesting with the Actors' Shakespeare Project in the best "King Lear" I've ever seen on stage....

I have a weakness for the vanilla-ice-cream farces of Ken Ludwig, the latest of which, "Leading Ladies," is now playing at Washington's Ford's Theatre (yes, that Ford's Theatre). As usual with Mr. Ludwig, this tale of Clark & Gable (Ian Kahn and JD Cullum), two fourth-rate Shakespearean actors who dress up in drag to swindle a small-town heiress (Karen Ziemba) out of an inheritance, is silly, sentimental and efficient to a fault, the fault being that you can see the denouement coming two miles off.

Fortunately, "Leading Ladies" is also funny in a sweet, old-fashioned way that may not have much to do with its purported genre (Mr. Ludwig is too nice a guy to write six-door farce, which thrives on unbridled cruelty) but is agreeable all the same....

As usual, no link. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of this morning's Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, Web-based journalism's best bargain.

UPDATE: The Journal has just posted a free link to this review. Go here to read the whole thing.

Posted October 14, 12:05 PM

TT: Why I'm not answering the phone today

1. I went to bed at two a.m. on Thursday morning.

2. I got up at six-thirty to write my "Sightings" column for Saturday's Wall Street Journal.

3. At nine-fifteen, just as I was starting to draft the last sentence of the column, I received a terse e-mail from Eric Gibson, my editor at the Journal: "Think we need you to comment on Pinter's Nobel for Sightings stedda agreed topic. Can do?"

4. "Pinter's Nobel?" I said to myself, puzzled.

5. I checked the wires and found out that Harold Pinter had just won the Nobel Prize for literature.

6. Oaths were uttered.

7. I put aside Column No. 1 and spent the next five hours drafting and polishing Column No. 2.

8. My assistant showed up fifteen minutes early for an afternoon work session, only to discover that I'd been so busy working on Column No. 2 that I never got around to putting my clothes on. (Yes, she has keys.)

9. More oaths were uttered.

10. I got dressed, quickly.

11. The column got finished and filed shortly thereafter.

12. I staggered to a press preview of Alan Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular. It was raining.

13. I sloshed home after the show, took the phone off the hook, and fell into bed.

If you want to talk to me, call back tomorrow. Or Sunday.

P.S. Read "Sightings" in the "Pursuits" section of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal.

P.P.S. You can always count on Mr. Alicublog to come out swinging!

Posted October 14, 12:04 PM

TT: Rerun

August 2004:

What would you do if you knew you had only a day to live? A week? A year? If a piece of unfinished work rested reproachfully on your desk, would you feel obliged to finish it? If you knew you couldn't get it done in the time remaining, would you try to do as much as you could? Or would you put it aside, smiling wryly at the vanity of human wishes, and spend your last hours communing with better minds than your own?...

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

Posted October 14, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Glenn Gould's average fee for a solo recital in 1964, the last year he performed in public: $3,500

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $21, 124.58

(Source: Kevin Bazzana, Wondrous Strange)

Posted October 14, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"An artist is a person who lives in the triangle which remains after the angle which we may call common sense has been removed from this four-cornered world."

Natsume Soseki, The Three-Cornered World

Posted October 14, 12:01 PM

October 13, 2005

TT: Face time

I mentioned the other day that I'd bought an etching by Hans Hofmann, the great abstract-expressionist painter and teacher whose work I love (you can read all about him in Jed Perl's New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century). What's especially striking about this etching, at least from my point of view, is that it's one of only three figurative works of art out of the two dozen pieces in the Teachout Museum, and the only one in which the subject's face is fully visible. Milton Avery's March at a Table is a portrait of March, the artist's daughter, but her face is concealed, and in Pierre Bonnard's Femme assise dans sa bagnoire, Marthe, the artist's mistress, has turned her head away from the viewer. Since people who buy art normally buy what they like (unless they're snobs or investment-oriented collectors), I always took it for granted that my unconscious avoidance of the human face said something significant about me. But I never did figure out what it was, and in any case my purchase of "Woman's Head" presumably says something no less significant.

The woman in question, by the way, is a most interesting piece of work--pensive, not conventionally "beautiful" by any conventional definition of the word, and yet I can't take my eyes off her. It's been that way ever since I first saw her on line (I bought "Woman's Head" from a Florida auction house). I couldn't have told you why I found her so irresistibly fascinating, but I did, and do.

I reviewed a biography of Maria Callas four years ago for the New York Times. This is part of what I wrote:

Thelonious Monk, no stranger to paradox, once wrote a splintery, deliberately awkward jazz waltz to which he gave the title ''Ugly Beauty.'' He could have written it with Maria Callas in mind. A jolie laide with hard, bony features and a startlingly long nose, she contrived through sheer force of will to persuade audiences that she was a great beauty with an even greater voice. It was, of course, a con job. Her technique was full of holes, and the voice itself was more than a little bit peculiar-sounding, thick and foggy and apt to crash through the guardrails with no warning. The wobbly high C she sings in her 1955 recording of ''O patria mia,'' the big soprano aria from the third act of Aida, is one of the scariest moments in all of recorded opera--it sounds as if someone had grabbed her from behind and was shaking her like a cocktail.

The beauty of Callas's voice was so strangely proportioned that some very discerning people simply cannot hear it...

No doubt some of my friends will be just as puzzled when they first see the ugly beauty who now makes her home in my living room. Nor will I try to persuade them that she's pretty, because she isn't. All I know is that I decided the moment I saw her that I couldn't live without her. Love is like that.

Posted October 13, 12:05 PM

TT: Toward less picturesque speech

Several readers wrote to comment on yesterday's posting about how the phrase No problem has replaced You're welcome as a response to thanks. Here's some of what some of them said:

- "The thing I detest down here [North Carolina] is when you ask a salesperson if they have a three-handled widget and he/she cheerfully says, ‘Sure don't.' As if happy not to be able to help you."

- "Wouldn't the more exact English-language equivalent to ‘de nada' be the old-fashioned ‘Think nothing of it'? It may be antiquated, but that seems to nicely express the humility you're talking about. It may be two syllables longer, but let's bring it back!"

- "Going back at least to the 50's the Minnesotan/Iowan and other Upper Mid-West response to ‘thank you' was ‘you bet.' Explain that one."

You never know when you're going to touch a nerve!

All of which reminds me to point you to this review of a new book by Leslie Savan called Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever. I haven't read it yet, but now I think I will....

Posted October 13, 12:04 PM

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, reviewed here)
- Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
- Dirty Rotten Scoundrels* (musical, R, extremely vulgar, reviewed here)
- Doubt* (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)
- Fiddler on the Roof (musical, G, one scene of mild violence but otherwise family-friendly, reviewed here)
- The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, reviewed here)
- Sweet Charity (musical, PG-13, lots of cutesy-pie sexual content, reviewed here)
- 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, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Orson's Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
- Sides: The Fear Is Real... (sketch comedy, PG, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Oct. 27)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
- No Foreigners Beyond This Point (drama, PG, a brief bedroom scene, reviewed here, closes Sunday)

Posted October 13, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Cost c. 1910 of Louis Armstrong's first cornet, bought from a New Orleans pawnshop: $5

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $102.65

- Price for which the instrument was sold at auction by Sotheby's in 2001: $115,000

(Source: Michael Meckna, Satchmo: The Louis Armstrong Encyclopedia)

Posted October 13, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

Ah, the apple trees,
Sunlit memories
Where the hammock swung.
On our backs we'd lie,
Looking at the sky
Till the stars were strung,
Only last July when the world was young.

Johnny Mercer, "When the World Was Young" (after Angele Vannier)

Posted October 13, 12:01 PM

October 12, 2005

TT: Spending the night with Frank Lloyd Wright

I'm in The Wall Street Journal today, where you'll find my description of what it's like to spend the night in two rentable houses that were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright:

For all their essential similarities, Wright's houses affect their occupants in very different ways. The Peterson Cottage, built in 1959 on the edge of an isolated, heavily wooded bluff overlooking Wisconsin's Mirror Lake, is so tranquil and serene that I felt as though I could sit in meditative silence by its great sandstone hearth for hours on end. The 3,000-square-foot Schwartz House, on the other hand, is located in a built-up residential neigborhood and has the friendly, slightly down-at-heel look of a place that has been occupied by children ever since it was built in 1939. To put it another way, the Peterson Cottage feels like a work of art, the Schwartz House like a comfortable home that just happens to be heart-stoppingly beautiful....

No link, so if you want to read the whole thing, buy a copy of this morning's Journal (price, one dollar) or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, than which you'll search long and far to find a better bargain.

Posted October 12, 12:05 PM

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- Collecting art changes your relationship to art objects in all sorts of ways, some of them surprising. In my own case, it's had an unforeseen effect on my fantasy life. Before I started buying art, I dreamed of owning such pricey objects as, say, a Degas pastel or a Matisse cutout, none of which I could hope to acquire without first taking up a new line of work (bank robbery, say). Now my wildest dreams have become considerably more practical: I'll never be able to afford a Cézanne watercolor, for example, but it's within the realm of remote possibility that I might someday be able to scrape together enough cash to bid on one of his color lithographs.

The simplest way to sum up this shift in perception is to define it as the difference between five- and six-figure fantasies. Not that I can easily imagine myself shelling out a five-figure sum for a painting or print--I've never spent anything remotely close to that on a piece of art--but it's not wholly inconceivable, a fact that lends a touch of savor to my newly "realistic" dreams of future acquisitions. Will I ever add a Cornell box or Morandi etching to the Teachout Museum? Probably not, but I might, just as I might run off one day with the most beautiful woman I know. (Wipe that smirk off your face, love.) No, it's not likely, but it's a hell of a lot more imaginable than my running off with Kristin Chenoweth, right?

- When did No problem! replace You're welcome, sir in the vocabulary of Americans under the age of forty? Though I can see how it must have happened--it's clearly a vulgarization of De nada--the implications of the two expressions are subtly but significantly different. To gracefully turn away thanks by saying "It was nothing" is...well, graceful. To bray "No problem!" is to invite the listener to infer that you haven't been put out in the slightest by his request for help, and wouldn't care to be. I guess that's democracy in action, right?

Speaking of exasperation-provoking clichés, I'd like a word with the originator of the piece of folk wisdom so commonly dished up to singletons no longer actively seeking a companion: Ah, but that's the best way to find one. Could this, too, be a vulgarization of a foreign idea--a watered-down Zen koan, perhaps? Or might it have insinuated its way into the common stock of received wisdom by way of some banal twelve-step slogan as yet unknown to me? Whatever the source, it's the second most irritating piece of well-intended reassurance I know.

The first? That's easy: It's safer than driving! If you like your front teeth, better keep that one to yourself.

Posted October 12, 12:04 PM

TT: Try it

Thomas Waller, universally known as "Fats" for self-evident reasons, is one of the few great jazz musicians who was for a time popular with the public at large, though not for his hugely influential piano playing. In the Thirties and Forties, Waller led a combo billed as "Fats Waller and His Rhythm" that featured his maniacally gleeful singing of ephemeral pop songs. (This is my attempt to transcribe his vocal on "It's a Sin to Tell a Lie.") Waller's eye-rollingly comic side has always made priggish critics squirm, but it was in fact central to both his character and his artistry. Had he never sung a note, he'd still be remembered for the poise and fluidity of such unaccompanied piano solos as the exquisite "I Ain't Got Nobody," but it is because of his life-enhancing singing that he was--and is--beloved.

Most anthologies of classic jazz recordings appear to have been put together on the how-could-they-possibly-have-left-that-one-out principle, but the aptly named The Quintessence: New York-Camden-Los Angeles 1929-1943 (Frémeaux & Associés FA 207, two CDs) really is just as advertised, containing thirty-six unerringly chosen tracks that comprise between them the quintessence of Fats Waller as both singer and pianist. If you can listen to "Baby Brown," "Sweet and Slow," or "You're Not the Only Oyster in the Stew" without breaking out in an ear-to-ear smile, you might as well button up your hair shirt and stick to Machaut or Tori Amos. God didn't mean for you to be happy.

Posted October 12, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Robert Mitchum's weekly salary in 1944 as a first-year contract player for RKO: $350

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $3,739.19

(Source: Lee Server, Robert Mitchum: "Baby, I Don't Care")

Posted October 12, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Pictorial life is not imitated life; it is, on the contrary, a created reality based on the inherent life within every medium of expression. We have only to awaken it."

Hans Hofmann, Search for the Real

Posted October 12, 12:01 PM

TT: Read all over

I awoke very early this morning, took a look at our world map, and saw that "About Last Night" was being read in Australia, China, the Czech Republic, France, Great Britain, India, Iran, Israel, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the Philippines, Spain, and Ukraine.

Hello out there!

Posted October 12, 5:38 AM

October 11, 2005

TT: Words to the wise

Julia Dollison has put out her first CD, Observatory. I wrote the liner notes:

"There's this singer I want you to meet. She's really, really good." I must hear at least three variations per month on that tired old theme, but when Maria Schneider spoke those words to me five years ago, I took them seriously. What kind of jazz singer, I asked myself, would be interesting enough to catch the ear of the outstanding big-band composer of her generation?

Here's the answer.

It starts with the voice: warm, airy, dappled with summer sunshine, technically bulletproof from top to bottom. (Check out those honking low notes in "Your Mind Is on Vacation.") Such voices are born, not made, and Julia Dollison has one. Yet she never coasts on her chops. Instead, she sings like a horn player in love with lyrics, the way Lester Young knew all the words to every ballad he played. Her solos are pointed and meaningful, little musical stories that take you to places you've never been.

Then comes the style, an alchemical blend of jazz and pop that makes Harold Arlen and Rufus Wainwright sound not like strange bedfellows but the oldest of friends. Don't call it "fusion," though: that might smack of calculation, and there's nothing calculated about Julia's singing. She grew up listening to all kinds of music, and now she just sings what she hears, naturally and unselfconsciously.

Did I mention the arrangements? Actually, that's not quite the right word for her root-and-branch deconstructions of standards. They pass through her mind like light through a prism, emerging refracted and transformed. "In a Mellotone" is nudged into a joltingly ironic minor key, while "Night and Day" is superimposed atop a Coltrane-like harmonic steeplechase. "All the Things You Are" becomes a spacious, Latin-flavored soundscape decorated with the pastel washes of overdubbed vocals that are Julia's trademark.

Her own beautifully crafted songs contain the same surprising twists and turns, and their presence here, far from being an indulgence, is an indispensable part of the large-scale compositional scheme of Observatory. For this is no mere string of unrelated tunes but a painstakingly wrought musical self-portrait, one whose organic unity is embodied in the sonic collage with which the album begins. Its meaning is revealed bit by bit and song by song, then made fully manifest at the end, like Rosebud in Citizen Kane.

It says a lot about Julia that she chose to record her first album not with a supportive, semi-anonymous journeyman pianist but in the perilously fast company of Ben Monder, the avant-garde jazz guitarist whose obliquely tilted solos have long been one of the brightest colors in Maria Schneider's palette. Monder is a major instrumental voice in and of his own right, and his powerfully individual playing could easily have blown a lesser singer right out of the studio. Instead, Julia floats serenely above it like a morning star, wafted aloft by the propulsive yet thoughtful interplay of Matt Clohesy and Ted Poor.

As I watched Observatory take shape, I thought, This isn't going to be your ordinary debut album. And sure enough, it isn't. Julia Dollison has something arrestingly new to say. Listen and marvel.

To order Observatory or listen online to excerpts, go here.

Posted October 11, 12:03 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"We look to books not only for stimulation but for reassurance. There is no mention in 'By Its Cover' of Edward Gorey and the quiet, hand-lettered, crosshatchy covers he executed in the fifties for Doubleday Anchor books, but they spoke reassuringly, in the fledgling days of the paperback revolution, of dependability. A wealth of previously hard-to-find treasures, from Melville's 'Redburn' and Gogol's tales to Kierkegaard's 'Fear and Trembling' and Stendhal's long essay on love, were poured into the same staid yet impish mold, the Gorey style of cover."

John Updike, "Deceptively Conceptual: Books and Their Covers"

(Almost a year ago, I thrilled to find a cache of Gorey-illustrated Anchors and Vintages at my local used bookstore.)

Posted October 11, 12:02 PM

TT: Number, please

- Coleman Hawkins' asking price for a week-long nightclub engagement in 1962: $1,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $6,175.21

(Source: John Chilton, The Song of the Hawk)

Posted October 11, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged must end in disappointment."

Samuel Johnson (quoted in James Boswell, Life of Johnson)

Posted October 11, 12:01 PM

October 10, 2005

TT: Trains, planes, and automobiles

On Friday I took the night off from my normal playgoing duties and went to hear Nickel Creek at the new Nokia Theatre in Times Square. I brought along Sarah--it was the payoff for having previously subjected her to a press preview of Lennon--and when the concert was over, she happily agreed that the slate had been wiped clean.

I've been talking up Nickel Creek ever since I first wrote about them in the New York Times four years ago:

At 19, 20 and 24, the fiddler Sara Watkins, the mandolinist Chris Thile and the guitarist Sean Watkins (Sara and Sean are brother and sister) are young and cute enough to guest-star in an episode of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Friendly, giggly and almost alarmingly uncynical, they speak the it's-like-you-know patois of southern California, where they grew up together and started playing bluegrass as children. If you were to run into them on a crosstown bus, you wouldn't guess that they play in a musical idiom closely associated with the rural South. But, then, their sophisticated sound isn't exactly rural--and neither are many of the fans who have bought their debut album, Nickel Creek.

"We play boundaryless music," Mr. Thile said in an interview during a recent visit to New York, and his bandmates nodded in emphatic agreement.

Like Alison Krauss, the angelic-voiced fiddler who produced Nickel Creek, they blend hard-charging bluegrass with sweetly sung acoustic pop; like Edgar Meyer, the protean bassist-composer who moves from bluegrass to Bach and back again, they write carefully structured instrumental pieces that owe as much to classical music as to country. On stage, they ignite this volatile mixture with a high-energy performance style reminiscent of rock 'n' roll. The pencil-thin Mr. Thile chops wildly at his amplified mandolin, flapping and flailing like the tail of a kite in a high wind, flanked by the serene, apple-cheeked Ms. Watkins, who bobs with the beat, and her older brother, a no-nonsense fellow who stands stock still while he plays in the sober-sided manner of John Entwistle of the Who....

Sara, Chris, and Sean haven't changed all that much since I wrote those words, except that their music has grown considerably darker and tougher, as you can hear on their newly released third CD, Why Should the Fire Die? In addition, the influence of Radiohead on their postmodern bluegrass-pop sound is even more apparent now ("We love Radiohead so much it's stupid," Chris told the audience on Friday). But they're as friendly and giggly as ever, and they still put on a devastating live show. As the packed house shrieked over their last encore, I turned to Sarah and said, "I feel like I've been to a spa." And so I did: it had been a hell of a long week and I was dead tired when we arrived at the Nokia, but three hours later I was as fresh as tomorrow's bread.

A good thing, too, since I took the train to Boston first thing Saturday morning (well, at noon, anyway) to kick off a two-day theatrical sprint. It started with a performance by the Actors' Shakespeare Project of King Lear starring Alvin Epstein, a legendary veteran of the American stage who co-starred with Bert Lahr, E.G. Marshall, and Kurt Kasznar in the Broadway premiere of Waiting for Godot in 1956, the year I was born. The next morning I took a cab to Logan Airport and flew from there to Washington, where I saw a matinee of Leading Ladies, Ken Ludwig's new farce, at Ford's Theatre (yes, that Ford's Theatre). The cast included, of all people, John Astin (yes, that John Astin). I then hightailed it to Union Station and caught the next train back to New York, arriving just in time to spend a few minutes purring contentedly over the Teachout Museum's latest acquisition, an etching by Hans Hofmann that I knocked down for an embarrassingly reasonable price, before falling into bed.

And that's how I spent my weekend. How about you?

P.S. I also found time to update the Top Fives (don't ask when, though). Take a look.

Posted October 10, 12:05 PM

TT: Rerun

July 2003:

It's not a popular view among my colleagues, but I think most of the best critics--not all, but most--have had at least some professional experience in at least one of the arts about which they write. I know I try to write not as a lofty figure from on high, smashing stone tablets over the heads of ballerinas and prima donnas, but as someone who has spent his entire adult life immersed in the world of art, both as a critic and as a practitioner. I was also fortunate to have served my apprenticeship as a critic in a middle-sized city, because it taught me that criticism is not written in a vacuum. It touches real people, people of flesh and blood, and sometimes it hurts them. If you don't know that--and I mean really know it--you shouldn't be a critic. And you're more likely to know it when you've lived and worked in a city small enough that there's a better-than-even chance of your meeting the people you write about at intermission....

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

Posted October 10, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Price paid by the Phillips Collection to Alfred Stieglitz's Intimate Gallery in 1926 for Arthur G. Dove's "The Golden Storm," the first painting by Dove to be acquired by a museum: $200

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $2,113.25

(Source: In the American Grain: The Stieglitz Circle at the Phillips Collection)

Posted October 10, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Sir Edgar smiled. 'For a man of your years you have a curious expectation that life runs smoothly,' he said."

Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

Posted October 10, 12:01 PM

OGIC: Wayne Booth, RIP

I've just learned that the great Wayne Booth passed away last night. He was a formidable literary critic and simply a wonderful man. He was as responsible as anyone for my landing in Chicago. Generations of University of Chicago alumni who had the good fortune to be his students will feel this loss acutely. He was the kind of person who commanded enormous respect and just as much affection, and will be greatly missed.

Posted October 10, 11:27 AM

October 7, 2005

TT: Young and foolish, far from home

Friday again, and time for my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I reviewed three plays in this morning's paper, two of which are off-Broadway productions, the Ma-Yi Theater Company's No Foreigners Beyond This Point, a play by Warren Leight (he wrote Side Man), and the Mint Theater Company's Walking Down Broadway, a previously unproduced 1931 play by Dawn Powell. The third is A Naked Girl on the Appian Way, Richard Greenberg's new comedy:

"No Foreigners Beyond This Point" [is] a sharply pointed, similarly autobiographical play about Andrew and Paula (Ean Sheehy and Abby Royle), a pair of wide-eyed American liberals who move to China in 1980 to teach English and find themselves swept up in the wake of Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution.

"No Foreigners" is the last show I ever expected to see at the Culture Project, a downtown redoubt of theatrical leftism. Though it starts out funny, it soon toughens up into a hard-edged portrait of two pink-diaper babies forced to face the dire implications of their parents' political folly. Would that Mr. Leight had skipped the Neil LaBute-like what-it-all-means coda, but for the most part he lets his material speak for itself, never more eloquently than in the startling admission made to Paula by the toadying Vice Principal Huang (Francis Jue): "Curry favor. Always. Curry favor by betraying friends. I think at most, in China, everyone can have one or two friend. At most. Even those, you might not trust when times are rough."...

"Walking Down Broadway" is a period piece, one from whose period we are now far removed, and as such oddly poignant in its effect. Considered solely as a hitherto-unknown piece of writing by America's greatest comic novelist, it's as uneven as you'd expect--you can all but hear Powell fishing for the right tone--but [Christine] Albright is wonderfully touching as Marge, whom Powell fans will recognize as a rough sketch for the plucky New York émigrés of such later novels as "A Time to Be Born."...

"A Naked Girl on the Appian Way," the Roundabout Theatre Company's latest production, is, or purports to be, a comedy about an upper-upper-middle-class couple (Richard Thomas and Jill Clayburgh) with three adopted children, one white (Matthew Morrison), one Dominican (Susan Kelechi Watson), and one Asian (James Yaegashi), the first two of whom are sleeping together and want to get married. The third is bisexual. Oh, yes, Mom's a lesbian...

Mr. Greenberg clearly thinks all this is the stuff of a postmodern "You Can't Take It With You," and the audience at the preview I attended gave every sign of agreement, emitting the self-congratulatory barks of a theaterful of trendy New Yorkers priding themselves on their tolerance. Me, I felt as though I were being dosed with a fast-acting but excruciatingly unpleasant opiate....

No link, and there's lots more where that came from. To see what you're missing, buy today's Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, the best deal in Web-based newspapers.

Posted October 07, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Payment made to George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart by Columbia Pictures in 1936 for film rights to the play You Can't Take It With You: $200,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $2,693,644.73

(Source: Kaufman & Co.: Broadway Comedies)

Posted October 07, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Rejection kills, disappointment only maims."

Audrey Wells, screenplay for The Truth About Cats & Dogs

Posted October 07, 12:01 PM

October 6, 2005

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, reviewed here)
- Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
- Dirty Rotten Scoundrels* (musical, R, extremely vulgar, reviewed here)
- Doubt* (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)
- Fiddler on the Roof (musical, G, one scene of mild violence but otherwise family-friendly, reviewed here)
- The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, reviewed here)
- Sweet Charity (musical, PG-13, lots of cutesy-pie sexual content, reviewed here)
- 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, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Orson's Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
- Sides: The Fear Is Real... (sketch comedy, PG, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Oct. 27)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
- Mother Courage (drama with songs, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Saturday)

Posted October 06, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Rudolf Serkin's fee in 1938 for a piano recital: $1,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $12,871.50

(Source: Stephen Lehmann and Marion Faber, Rudolf Serkin: A Life)

Posted October 06, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man's being alone. It has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament."

Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now

Posted October 06, 12:01 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"If you let in only the brilliant, then you produced bookworms and bench scientists: you ended up as socially irrelevant as the University of Chicago (an institution Harvard officials looked upon and shuddered)."

Malcolm Gladwell, "Getting In: The Social Logic of Ivy League Admissions"

Posted October 06, 2:04 AM

OGIC: The world rights itself

Hockey's back, and I experienced a lovely moment of related sensory overload this evening. After dropping off a friend in Bridgeport, I drove to the end of the block while fiddling with the radio tuner. At the stop sign I looked up to see Cellular One Field just ahead, bathed in light as the White Sox battled the Red Sox in a Very Important Playoff Game inside. Just then, I successfully tuned in the local hockey game as the puck was about to be dropped--the first NHL hockey I had seen or heard in 16 months was really, truly happening! For a few seconds there, before I turned toward the expressway, the glowing not-Comiskey, surrounded by a meaningful-looking halo of light, stood for my thrill at hearing the sounds of hockey again after a long silence. It was kind of like experiencing a synesthesia of the sports rather than the senses. I don't believe they've yet concocted a technical term for that.

I've more or less composed myself by now, but let me indulge in just a wee hockey story to mark the end of Canada's long national nightmare, and mine.

Sam [Pollock] was very impressed with how scientific football coaching had become, and so for a while he tried to adapt their methods to our game. He would wander the highest reaches of the Forum, searching out patterns of play, and if he detected something he would quickly radio Busher Curry, who would be pacing the gangway, a plug in his ear. No sooner would the Busher get Sam's message than he would rush up to Bowman with the words of wisdom. Once, when we were leading the Bruins here, 3-2, with a couple of minutes to go, Sam, watching above, got on the radio to the Busher, who immediately rushed to the bench with the message for Scotty, which Scotty passed on to us. The message was "Sam says don't let them score on you."

That's Doug Risebrough, quoted in Mordecai Richler's Dispatches from the Sporting Life.

Posted October 06, 1:42 AM

October 5, 2005

OGIC: Now It Can Be Heard

I see that the archived version of Terry's and my radio appearance is now available on the Hello Beautiful! website. If you listen, which I recommend, you'll get to hear Terry say a lot of very smart things and you'll get to hear me throw in a few choice adjectives! But most of all, you'll get to hear a thoroughly fascinating interview with Stephen Lang, the actor, writer, and director of the one-man show Beyond Glory, appearing at Chicago's Goodman Theatre through October 16th. Moreover, you'll hear taped excerpts from this astounding show, as well as live ones that Lang recreated in the studio during his live interview with host Edward Lifson. Trust me, this is an interview worth listening to and, especially, a show worth seeing.

Posted October 05, 12:52 PM

TT: Not proven

I haven't had anything to say in print about August Wilson's death, and won't, because it happens that I haven't seen all that much of his work. I rarely sought it out before my midlife conversion to drama criticism--it never sounded like my sort of thing--and Gem of the Ocean, the only play of his I've had occasion to review for The Wall Street Journal, struck me at the time as "far too self-consciously poetic," which for me is the kiss of dramatic death.

I wish I were in a stronger position to stick my oar in, since yesterday's journalistic elegies for Wilson were (to put it mildly) fairly windy. If I had to guess, I'd say that my negative impression of his style, even though it's only based on a couple of his plays, would probably be sustained were I to see five more of them in a row next week, and unlike many of my colleagues, I see nothing wrong with speaking ill of the recently dead, so long as you didn't wait until they died to say what you really thought of them.

On the other hand, I also don't believe in expressing broad-gauge opinions about artists based on insufficient experience of their art. To be sure, I've been around long enough to know that many, perhaps most artists are in some fundamental sense pretty much all of a piece. (If you don't like one Clyfford Still painting, you probably won't like any of them.) But I've also been known to change my mind about artists and works of art as I get to know them better--sometimes quite dramatically.

To quote from the essay to which I just linked:

I've changed my mind about art more than once, and I've learned that I not infrequently start by disliking something and end up liking it. Not always--sometimes I decide on closer acquaintance that a novel or painting isn't as good as I'd thought. More often, though, I realize that it was necessary for me to grow into a fuller understanding of a work of art to which my powers of comprehension were not at first equal.

The music critic Hans Keller said something shrewd about this phenomenon: "As soon as I detest something, I ask myself why I like it." I try to keep that in mind whenever I cover a premiere. I don't mean to say that critics should be wishy-washy, but we should also remember that strong emotions sometimes masquerade as their opposite.

As I say, my guess is that I'm never going to end up liking August Wilson. I know my own taste well enough to suspect as much. But if he really was as good a playwright as his recent obituarists claim, then I'll surely have plenty of opportunities to change my mind in the years to come.

And in the meantime? As Ludwig Wittgenstein so famously said, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." So I was.

UPDATE: Here's a dissent on Wilson (in a predictable place).

Posted October 05, 12:04 PM

TT: Try it

One of the most popular pieces in the Teachout Museum (which I showed off to a New York art critic yesterday afternoon, and which I'll be showing to a curious artist tomorrow) is Jane Freilicher's Late Afternoon, Southampton. I've written about Freilicher more than once, both here and elsewhere, most extensively in a 2002 "Second City" column in which I described her as

one of the chronically underrated group of New York-based representationalists who learned invaluable lessons in composition and paint handling from the abstract expressionists. Freilicher's subject matter is conventional--landscapes, skylines, still lifes--and her palette is soft and even-toned, so much so that you might well be tempted at first glance to dismiss her subtle style as bland. Instead, take a long look at "Dark Afternoon," in which a fractured cubist cityscape serves as backdrop for two houseplants placed on a Cezanne-like tabletop that thrusts them out at the viewer. My guess is that "Dark Afternoon," like most of the other paintings in this lovely show, would be a satisfying work to live with, one that gives up its quiet secrets gradually but never completely....

Alas, Freilicher's paintings as yet hang in few museums, but if your interest has been piqued by any of the above links, a handsome coffee-table monograph about her work was published earlier this year. Jane Freilicher, by Klaus Kertess (Harry N. Abrams, 176 pp., $60), contains more than 150 beautifully reproduced images, plus an accompanying text that tells everything you could possibly want to know about an American artist decidedly worthy of wider recognition.

Put it on your Christmas list--or just give it to yourself.

Posted October 05, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Advance paid to Dawn Powell by Scribner's in 1947 for her novel The Locusts Have No King: $1,500

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $14,196.28

(Source: Tim Page, Dawn Powell)

Posted October 05, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

The soil now gets a rumpling soft and damp,
And small regard to the future of any weed.
The final flat of the hoe's approval stamp
Is reserved for the bed of a few selected seed.

There is seldom more than a man to a harrowed piece.
Men work alone, their lots plowed far apart,
One stringing a chain of seed in an open crease,
And another stumbling after a halting cart.

To the fresh and black of the squares of early mold
The leafless bloom of a plum is fresh and white;
Though there's more than a doubt if the weather is not too cold
For the bees to come and serve its beauty aright.

Wind goes from farm to farm in wave on wave,
But carries no cry of what is hoped to be.
There may be little or much beyond the grave,
But the strong are saying nothing until they see.

Robert Frost, "The Strong Are Saying Nothing"

Posted October 05, 12:01 PM

OGIC: Agog for googly eyes

Count me overjoyed, elated, and ecstatic that the early word on the Wallace and Gromit movie is positive:

"Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" has forced me to ponder the deepest mysteries of cinema. Why, for instance, do certain faces haunt and move us as they do?

I am thinking of Gromit, the mute and loyal animated dog whose selflessness and intelligence can be counted on, when things get really crazy, to save the day. Gromit has no mouth, and yet his face is one of the most expressive ever committed to the screen. In particular, his brow--a protuberance overhanging his spherical, googly eyes--is an almost unmatched register of emotion. Resignation, worry, tenderness and disgust all come alive in that plasticine nub. To keep matters within the DreamWorks menagerie, you might compare Gromit to Shrek, who has the genetic advantages of Mike Myers's Scots burr, a bevy of celebrity-voiced sidekicks and rivals, and state-of-the-art computer-animation technology. Good for him. But Gromit, made by hand and animated by a painstaking stop-motion process, has something Shrek will never acquire in a hundred sequels: a soul.

I had a good feeling about this, and not only on the basis of "The Wrong Trousers" and the other delightful shorts. When I somewhat unaccountably went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory over the summer, the high point of the screening was, by a very wide margin, the trailer for Were-Rabbit.

Posted October 05, 1:50 AM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"So what this writer impressed on me was the fundamental importance of time management, of routine in the life of a writer, that you had to use routine like a tool, like a fulcrum and lever for heavy lifting."

Michael Ruhlman, House: A Memoir

Posted October 05, 1:45 AM

OGIC: Mountain to Mohammed

A few weeks back I reviewed Caryl Phillips's new novel, Dancing in the Dark, for the Baltimore Sun. (In print it appeared right alongside Lizzie Skurnick's review of On Beauty. The bloggers are taking over! We are your overlords.) It didn't appear on the website, so I can't provide a link--but I can cut and paste! I liked the book a good deal more than Brooke Allen, who registered respectful disappointment in the NYTBR last weekend. Until near the end of the novel, I actually thought I agreed with some of Allen's misgivings, but the denouement utterly changed my mind about the entire book.

Dancing in the Dark is a fictional account of the life of Bert Williams, a black American vaudeville performer who found theatrical fame by portraying, in blackface, a character that amounted to a racist caricature. Here's some of what I wrote for the Sun:

One of the most famous entertainers to don blackface on the American stage was a black man. He was Bert Williams, a native West Indian who emigrated to the U.S. with his parents as a boy and became half of the vaudeville team Williams and Walker, the first black performers to make it to Broadway. In Dancing in the Dark, Caryl Phillips ventures to imagine the unknown inner life of this enigmatic historical figure. What his keen novelist's eye discerns behind the multiple masks Williams wore is quietly harrowing.

...The existence of Phillips's Bert Williams is a trial. We sense this even before we know of the compromises that make it so difficult. From the outset, the prose has a somber, almost funereal timbre--the antithesis of the low comedy that characterizes Bert's "foolish blackface antics" on stage. A bracing tonal chiaroscuro results from this juxtaposition of the "clownish roughness and loud vulgarity" that he projects and the profound gravity he contains. Bert cultivates this distance between outside and inside, as though a private existence of monkish reserve could cancel out the exaggerated exuberance of his stage persona.

...The power of Dancing in the Dark builds slowly and almost imperceptibly as Bert shuffles from mirror to stage to mirror again, rubbing away a little more of himself each time he removes his makeup. Together, the book's somberness and its intricate introspection make for a sometimes glacial pace. But the reader's patience is ultimately rewarded. All of the tensions and contradictions engendered by Bert's situation are released in the crises at the end of the novel, and with them comes a world of feeling that has been dammed up to bursting.

On one hand, Bert's black audience grows increasingly disapproving of his trademark character. In expressing their unease, they merely echo the reservations that he has silently harbored from the first time the burnt cork touched his skin. But in an astonishingly moving scene, Bert, having been confronted with objections that he shares, finds himself defending the character he plays--"he shuffles a little, and he may be slow-witted, but we surely recognize this poor man. The essence of my performance is that we know and sympathize with this unfortunate creature."

On the other hand, the white audience whose approval underwrites Bert's livelihood will tolerate no divergence from the caricature they adore. Emboldened by the examples of the proud black professionals and activists around him in Harlem, Bert seizes an opportunity to perform on film without his makeup. The cold reception with which this is met leaves him a lost man for whom all the pathos of the ordinary has-been is multiplied by the baleful effects of racism, politics, and self-loathing.

There were times, I'll admit again, when the novel almost lost me, it was so slow-moving and lugubrious. But it all added up, I thought, to something pretty amazing.

Posted October 05, 1:29 AM

October 4, 2005

TT: In lieu of blogging

If I grow bitterly,
Like a gnarled and stunted tree,
Bearing harshly of my youth
Puckered fruit that sears the mouth;
If I make of my drawn boughs
An inhospitable house,
Out of which I never pry
Towards the water and the sky,
Under which I stand and hide
And hear the day go by outside;
It is that a wind too strong
Bent my back when I was young,
It is that I fear the rain
Lest it blister me again.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Scrub"

Posted October 04, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Price in 1948 of a copy of Truman Capote's newly published book Other Voices, Other Rooms: $2.75

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $22.75

(Source: Diana Trilling, Reviewing the Forties)

Posted October 04, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Imagine our lives: we live for no other reason than to play as well as we are able in the evening, and to that end everything else is cast aside or deferred."

Rudolf Serkin (1936, quoted in Stephen Lehmann and Marion Faber, Rudolf Serkin: A Life)

Posted October 04, 12:01 PM

October 3, 2005

TT: The best medicine

I just came home from a special "parent/teacher" performance of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (the show is usually dark on Sunday nights) to which persons under the age of sixteen were not admitted. A good thing, too, because it was really, really dirty. Also really, really funny: the show ran some twenty minutes long, mostly because of all the extra laughter. Would that I could share a few of the more printable punch lines with you, but I was laughing so hard all evening long that I wasn't able to scrawl any legible notes. Suffice it to say that if another such performance should ever be given, do whatever you have to do to wangle a ticket--and leave the kids at home.

Speaking of fun, you know what? I took Saturday off. No writing, no editing, no chores, no gallery-going, no bound galleys to read, no Broadway press preview. Instead, I watched a couple of dumb movies on TV (Mickey Blue Eyes, forsooth!), stared at the walls (which of course has a different implication in the Teachout Museum than it does in most places), and went to a birthday party for one of my best friends. Oh, and I slept until eleven! Whee!

Now the prose engine is turning over in earnest, but I'm feeling a lot livelier for my day-long rest, in addition to which I have far less on my plate than I did last week. As you can see, blogging is coming easier again: along with today's postings, you'll find plenty of new stuff in the right-hand column, to which I commend your attention.

That's all for today--I've got a deadline to hit, and I'm happy to say that I'm not dreading it. See you Tuesday.

Posted October 03, 12:05 PM

TT: Elsewhere

Here's what I've been reading in between deadlines:

- The exquisite Canadienne serves up some dark thoughts on a subject of interest to us all:

I've always known I am a perfectionist. What I have come to realize, as of late, is that there is one huge problem with being this way: the perfectionist, when judging himself/herself by this standard, is doomed to eternal failure. After a while, there's no joy in doing anything when you consistently fail to live up to an unattainable standard. Right now, in my singing, I am a living breathing wreck of a mess, because I cannot attain anything even close to perfection in my current role....

I don't know how to stop damning myself to eternal failure by being a perfectionist. All I know right now is that I am driving myself crazy with it. I fully realize, objectively, that while performing in this production with this conductor, I will never reach anything even closely resembling my own vision of perfection--nor the conductor's, nor the director's. Regardless, I don't know how to allow myself to strive for anything less. and therein lies my problem. As I write this, I'm remembering Warren Jones in a master class saying "Be excellent. If you try to be perfect, you'll fail. You will succeed at striving for excellence." Maybe that's a better goal. Right now, I don't even feel like even excellence is attainable. The closest I've gotten so far is "o.k."...

As today's almanac entry suggests, it is the fate of most serious artists to bear this cross, though a few are fortunate enough to be graced with the unselfconsciousness that is God's gentlest gift to the gifted. In my case the curse comes and goes (not that I'm any kind of artist, but at least I can imagine what being one would feel like). Sometimes my wheels start spinning, and the next thing I know, I've frittered away pointless hours trying without success to trim a recalcitrant sentence to its ultimate essence.

The good news is that we always get a second chance--not to perfect yesterday's flawed performance, but to do it better tomorrow. Remember the scene in Ron Shelton's Bull Durham in which Tim Robbins, returning to the dugout after having pitched a great inning, is told by Kevin Costner not to get smug about it?

ROBBINS: I was great, eh?

COSTNER: Your fastball was up and your curveball was hanging--in the Show they woulda ripped you.

ROBBINS: Can't you let me enjoy the moment?

COSTNER: The moment's over.

Yes, that's a pointed little sermon about the importance of perfectionism, but it's a coin with two sides: do your best, learn from your mistakes, then move on. Good, bad, or both, the past is past.

- All of which puts me in mind of a recent posting by Brenda Coulter:

Sure, we all want to be published. But if you knew you'd never be published, would you keep writing? Don't worry--there's no wrong answer to that question. But if your answer is that you'd keep writing, then it's you I'm hoping to encourage when I say don't get bogged down in studying the rules [of writing]. They will not ensure publication. In fact, if you allow them to leech the joy from your writing, I believe you'll find the rules will effectively prevent publication.

I think there's something to this, and I also think that blogging has had the effect of liberating thousands of talented amateur writers whose particular gifts may not necessarily fit neatly into the pigeonholes of professional publication. Just because you aren't comfortable writing oped columns or magazine essays doesn't mean you don't have anything valuable to say. How wonderful, then, that the blogosphere allows us to say what we want in the way that best suits us....

- Speaking of the artist's life, here's another eye-opening dispatch from the road by Mr. Think Denk:

As if the glamour of a touring pianist's life needed any further confirmation or evidence, I am now blogging from a Denny's in Lubbock, Texas. Outside, Lubbock's wide, dusty Ave. Q bakes in seemingly endless sunshine, while inside, and particularly backstage at the concert hall, one freezes in extreme air-conditioning. I just left the piano technician safely behind in the chilly hall, a friendly man with a gentle west Texas drawl, and asked him to remove some of the metallic quality from the upper octaves--though I have to admit that asking any technician to do anything to a piano fills me with fear, with second thoughts and self-remonstrances...the devil I know so often seems preferable to the devil I don't. I will have to drown these unnecessary, futile fears in spicy chicken and fries.

Anyone could imagine that after weeks and weeks of just Bach, leaping into the Tchaikovsky piano concerto could be a shock...perhaps only paralleled by the cultural sea-change of leaving Manhattan for Lubbock. As I sat on the floor in the Lubbock baggage claim, awaiting my giant gray bag, beneath an advertisement for irrigation pumps, my face made wan by the inevitable banks of fluorescent light, I charged my phone at a lone necessary socket....

Oh, man, have I ever been there.

- No less illuminating (to stick with today's Mostly Music theme) is this meditation by my favorite blogger:

As a pianist, I am perhaps highly sensitized to the physical manifestation of sound, since the sounds I produce seem held at quite a distance from my body. Once, in the middle of a lesson, a piano teacher picked up a pencil and tapped the eraser from key to key. She said, "I can play this Bach with a pencil. Now you tell me, what's the difference between you--your fingers--and a pencil? Why should I listen to you when I can listen to a pencil?" (That was one of those go-home-and-sob-for-hours lessons.) There are two camps of musicians: those who use the breath and those who touch. (Those who play laptop or any stringed instrument are, I think, in the latter camp with us pianists and percussionists.) What we all have in common is how we use our ears. Lately, I find my ear straining to find ways to embody the music, to flow with the breath, to...be more like a singer.

This reminds me that one of the things I loved most about playing bass was the sheer physicality of wrestling with an instrument as big as I was, wrapping my arms around it and trying to coax it into doing my bidding, gradually realizing that it, too, was a living thing to which I had to be reciprocally responsive. Not unlike, er...well, you know what I mean.

- Enough music already. Here's a rhapsody (I'm being metaphorical!) on the subject of my least favorite punctuation mark...

- ...and a list of "all the art blogs in the known universe." By "art blog," the compiler means "visual art blog," but it's still a very interesting list, one with which I plan to spend quite a bit of time the next time I have quite a bit of time to spend.

- Finally, if you've ever suspected that the shuffle-play key on your iPod wasn't really serving up random strings of tracks...well, I hesitate to say it, but perhaps you'd better go here and feed your paranoia. Just don't send me your therapy bills!

Posted October 03, 12:04 PM

TT: Rerun

January 2004:

Ivy Compton-Burnett, the English novelist, told a friend late in life that she could no longer read Jane Austen with pleasure, not because her admiration for Austen had lessened but because she'd read her novels so many times that she had them virtually by heart, and hence could no longer be surprised by them. When I read that, I wondered: is it really possible to exhaust a masterpiece? Much less an entire art form? I can't imagine being unable to hear anything new in Falstaff or the Mozart G Minor Symphony, though I suppose it could happen. And as for a person who came to feel that music or painting or poetry had nothing more to say to him, he'd be in dire straits indeed....

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

Posted October 03, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Ticket price in 1916 for the inaugural concert of the current incarnation of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra: 15 cents

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $2.74

(Source: Steve Hendry)

Posted October 03, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"A man who makes pictures like the one we were looking at is an unhappy creature, tormented day and night. He relieves himself of his passion in his pictures, but also in spite of himself on the people round him. That is what normal people never understand. They want to enjoy the artists' products--as one might enjoy cows' milk--but they can't put up with the inconvenience, the mud and the flies."

Henri Matisse, c. 1941 (quoted in Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master)

Posted October 03, 12:01 PM

October 1, 2005

TT: Bryan v. Darrow

Here's a taste of my latest "Sightings" column in the "Pursuits" section of the Saturday Wall Street Journal:

Talk about timely: "The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial," a docudrama about the Scopes trial that is L.A. Theatre Works' first show to go on the road, opens Oct. 11 at Humboldt University in Arcata, Calif., mere weeks after a judge in Harrisburg, Pa., began hearing arguments over whether the theory of intelligent design should be taught alongside the theory of evolution in local classrooms. You can't pay for publicity like that. It's a gift from ... er, Charles Darwin? Well, someone, anyway....

"Inherit the Wind" is a work of fiction loosely based on the Scopes trial, one that takes huge liberties with the facts in order to make Bryan and the fundamentalists of Tennessee look like gargoyles and morons. Yet millions of unsuspecting playgoers know what they "know" about the Scopes trial from having seen it. Will those who see or hear "The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial" be better served, factually speaking?

The answer is yes, mostly. The bulk of Mr. Goodchild's script is drawn from the official trial transcript. To be sure, the scene-setting (deck-stacking) narration leaves no doubt as to which side enlightened minds should root for, blandly informing us that religious fundamentalism circa 1925 was linked "in spirit if nothing else" to "the ultra-conservative and violent Ku Klux Klan." But the trial itself is heard as it happened, and is all the more dramatic for being true....

No link, alas. To read the whole thing, pick up a copy of the Saturday Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal.

Posted October 01, 2:21 AM