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February 28, 2006

TT: Here's hoping

I'm off to the cardiologist's office. Wish me luck!

See you all tomorrow, one way or the other (or somewhere in between, most likely).

Posted February 28, 12:00 PM

TT: Elsewhere

Recently sighted and bookmarked:

- Says Edward Winkleman:

Warhol is credited with saying (and I paraphrase): The most sincere form of art appreciation is writing a check. Of course Andy would think that--being an artist--but I'm not so sure that's as true today as it was when Andy offered it. The "art" of collecting has evolved since then, and writing a check doesn't seem as sincere in some ways as it had been. When I start to think about how it's changed, the parallel that keeps coming to mind is the practice of fishing. Collectors used to spend the time getting to know the work, the artist, the movement, etc., much as a person with his/her fishing pole had to learn what weight of the line is needed, what bait is best, and what conditions are most ideal to land that big one. Collecting for some folks today is more akin to trawling. Sure, you have to toss out all that seaweed and release the occassional dolphin, but the sheer volume of your haul guarantees something in your net will be worth the effort....

I offer a corollary based on my own experience as a small-time collector: Richer isn't (always) better.

- Mr. Anecdotal Evidence shares a lovely memory. It seems he ran into the great jazz pianist Dave McKenna on the street of a town in upstate New York the day after filing a review of his opening night at a local club:

Next morning, driving to the office, I passed McKenna walking up Erie Boulevard. He was wearing very white, unlaced sneakers, and he walked as though the sidewalk had been sprinkled with tacks. I stopped, he climbed in and asked me to take him to a nearby convenience store where he wanted to buy newspapers to check on his beloved Sox. Back in the car, four or five papers in his lap, McKenna asked if my review was in that morning's edition. I told him where to find it, and had the uniquely uncomfortable experience of watching the subject of a review I had written read it while seated three feet away from me. He took his time reading, grunted a couple of times, cleared his throat and exploded into a laugh that I can remember immediately describing, in the writing compartment of my mind, as Rabelaisian....

(For what it's worth, this is my favorite McKenna album.)

- Ms. Household Opera waxes ecstatic over an experience I take for granted, and shouldn't:

The gods of seat-assignment must have been smiling, because I was in the third row of seats almost directly in front of the stage. I love watching musicians' faces as they play. It's a sight I don't get to see often enough, given how many concerts and operas I've seen from the upper reaches of the balcony. By the end of the evening, I felt as if I knew everyone in the orchestra.

And then there was Magdalena Kožená. To see someone sing at that close range is startling. You're not looking at a remote figure under the spotlights. You're almost near enough to touch another person whose voice seems almost too big to really be issuing from her. You wonder where it all comes from, this braided liquid current of song that contracts to an almost-whisper at some moments and then expands to fill the whole auditorium....

That's the great thing about amateur criticism--it's alive. I think I'm pretty good about staying fresh to the familiar, but even I had temporarily forgotten how privileged I am to sit in such fantastic seats every time I go to the theater (though my seatmates not infrequently remind me, which helps). To hear an orchestra from up close--especially if you've never played in one--is an experience everyone should have, though it may have the unintended consequence of rendering you dissatisfied with your stereo system....

- Mr. Superfluities, who is culling his library, reflects on the approach of the iBook:

I sense that the children growing up around me today won't have the same problem, even if they're as enamored of the written word as I am. They will have their iBooks (saving them money on grossly expensive textbooks so that they can spend more on tuition, or on drinking, at college), like they have their iPods for the music that endlessly accompanies their lives now, one book ("text" is probably the more appropriate word) scrolling down after another on their plasticene touchscreens. And if they download interesting books that they never get around to reading (as they download music that they never get around to hearing), they'll be no different from me. Despite these hundreds of books surrounding me this morning, it's true, I've not read most of them. In this I'm in a great tradition, though. Walter Benjamin reminds me of an anecdote about Anatole France. A visitor (a "philistine," Benjamin coyly says) to France once admired his extraordinarily full library and, in wonder, asked, as all of us bibliophiles are asked, "And you have read all those books, Monsieur France?" France responded, "Not one-tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?"...

Read the whole thing, please.

- Finally, Alex Ross has a link to a madly funny "Twelve-Tone Greatest Hits" infomercial you absolutely must hear.

Posted February 28, 12:00 PM

TT: Rerun

February 2004:

All of which leads me to ask: is the performance of classical music an intellectual activity? Did the breadth of Glenn Gould's culture make him a better interpreter of Bach? I wonder. I've known a lot of musicians in my time, some of whom were damned smart and some of whom were (ahem) less so, and I rarely noticed any clear-cut relationship between what went into their heads and what came out of their fingers or mouths. (In my more limited experience, the same is true of dancers and painters.) I'm not saying that a stupid person can become a successful musician, but I'm not so sure that having read T.S. Eliot equips you to play Beethoven's Op. 111 well. It certainly didn't help Gould....

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

Posted February 28, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern."

Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams (April 8, 1816)

Posted February 28, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Almost forgot...

Happy paczki day! Ah, to be in Hamtramck on Mardi Gras...

Posted February 28, 11:59 AM

OGIC: Minor oddity

Ken Follett's 1978 spy novel The Eye of the Needle contains the following:

"His name is Frederick Bloggs, and he gets annoyed if you make jokes about it."

Color me puzzled. I can see why being named Bloggs might be joke-worthy in 2006. But in 1940, when the novel is set? What gives? Your suggestions/insights invited. Also, sorry I've been away; fresh content from my corner is on the way no later than Wednesday morning.

Posted February 28, 1:43 AM

February 27, 2006

TT: Reassurance

As I prepare for a follow-up visit to my cardiologist tomorrow, I find in my mailbox this message from a reader:

Cheer up! There's an obituary in today's Los Angeles Times for a woman who died of congestive heart failure--at the age of 115!

Born on September 13, 1890 in Mississippi; married for 72 (!) years (1922-1994); never hospitalized in her life until she was 106 (gallstones); could still read the newspaper and sign her name at 114; survived by her 96-year-old son.

Let's see: Hilary Hahn will be 27 this year. So, if you live to be 115, you could review a concert of hers in 2071--when she's 91!

(Of course, there's several "ifs" included in that last sentence.)

Er, there sure are. And of course I'm anxious to hear what the doctor says--how could I not be? Nevertheless, I'm feeling pretty optimistic, not least because I've now lost thirty-one pounds since congestive heart failure sent me to the hospital a little more than two months ago, and have also changed my life in countless other beneficial ways.

All of which reminds me that I never cease to be amazed by the long list of important people born well over a century ago who lived long enough to have their voices recorded for posterity. (Yes, I know where I'm going with this--wait for it.) A few of these recordings have been released on CD in recent years, and these are three of the best collections currently in print:

- About a Hundred Years: A History of Sound Recording (Symposium) contains spoken-word and musical recordings by Sarah Bernhardt, Johannes Brahms, Winston Churchill, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Edison, Mahatma Gandhi, Joseph Joachim, Scott Joplin, Lenin, John Philip Sousa, and Leo Tolstoy, plus a battlefield recording of a World War I gas bombardment made in 1918.

- Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath (Sourcebooks, three CDs and an accompanying book) contains recordings by forty-two poets, including Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and W.B. Yeats.

- In Their Own Voices: The U.S. Presidential Elections of 1908 and 1912 (Marston Records, two CDs) contains recordings by William Jennings Bryan, William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.

Alas, precious few record companies have thought it worth their while to transfer historic spoken-word recordings to CD--which is where the Web comes in. The BBC, for instance, has a page on its Web site containing links to interviews from its vast archives to which anyone can listen via streaming audio. The selection is spotty, even erratic, but it does include a handful of celebrated figures of the relatively distant past, including Yeats, Gandhi, Le Corbusier, Noël Coward, Walter Gropius, George Bernard Shaw, Albert Speer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Evelyn Waugh, and Virginia Woolf.

For the rest, you have to go searching for yourself, and it takes patience. Most of the time you'll come up empty-handed, but every once in a while you hit the jackpot, as I did on Friday. For once I had a free evening--no plays, no concerts, nothing but an early dinner with a friend. I decided to spend part of my night off trolling the Web for sonic curiosities, and I found two spectacular ones.

The first was a 1923 recording by Rudyard Kipling. He's reading an excerpt from a poem called "France," and though the poem itself is an occasional piece of no great interest, I was struck by how cultivated his voice sounded. I suppose I must have been expecting something more closely suited to the plebeian cadences of "Danny Deever."

Even more astonishing, though, was an aircheck of the brief speech Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., gave at the end of a radio tribute broadcast live by CBS on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. Holmes was still sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1931--he retired the following year--and so far as I know, this was the one and only time he went before a microphone.

Justice Holmes was the most eloquent jurist this country has yet produced, and it goes without saying that he rose to the near-final occasion (he died in 1935) with infinite grace:

In this symposium my part is only to sit in silence. To express one's feelings as the end draws nigh is too intimate a task.

But I may mention one thought that comes to me as a listener-in. The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voices of friends and to say to oneself: "The work is done."

But just as one says that, the answer comes: "The race is over, but the work never is done while the power to work remains."

The canter that brings you to a standstill need not be only coming to rest. It cannot be, while you still live. For to live is to function. That is all there is to living.

And so I end with a line from a Latin poet who uttered the message more than fifteen hundred years ago:

"Death plucks my ear and says, Live--I am coming."

G. Edmund White describes the broadcast in detail in the first chapter of his new brief life of Holmes:

The old man sat in his favorite chair in his study. He had a shock of white hair, a long white mustache that flared up at the ends, and piercing eyes that gave him a fierce expression. The year was 1931, and most men favored collars with the ends folded down, but he wore an old-fashioned type with the ends turned up and the tie visible, wrapped around his neck. He also wore an outmoded long coat with a vest. He had gotten dressed up to speak on the radio....

Then he quotes from the first-person account of Harold Laski, a friend whom Holmes had invited to watch him speak that night:

As I looked at him, his eyes seemed far away, and the swift realization that I was watching the face of a very old man, very greatly moved, kept me silent....I saw a new light come into those blue-gray eyes, and then a gay smile that played over all his features. The words he spoke as that smile met the flash of those vivid eyes are as living today in my ears as they were almost seventeen years ago. "When I came back from the Civil War," Holmes said, "my father asked me what I was going to do, and I told him I was going to the Harvard Law School. ‘Pooh!' said my father. ‘What's the use of going to the Harvard Law School? A lawyer cannot be a great man.'" Then there came into his voice an almost wistful tenderness. "I wish," he continued, "that my father could have listened tonight for ony two or three minutes. Then I could have thumbed my nose at him."

Merely to read what Holmes said on that long-ago night is to be stirred to the core. But to actually hear the broadcast--to hear the tremulous yet unexpectedly firm voice of a man who fought in the Civil War, then spent the best part of three decades sitting on the Supreme Court--is an experience of another order altogether. I can't describe it better than I did in the review of About a Hundred Years that I wrote for Fi in 1997:

To hear these ancient records, flawed though they are, is an intensely moving experience. The battered shellac sputters and crackles angrily, and you wonder for a moment what all the fuss could possibly be about--but then the curtain parts and the nineteenth century comes into view for a minute or two, sometimes through a glass darkly, sometimes with the near-hallucinatory sharpness of a Mathew Brady photograph.

How miraculous that such brief glimpses of the fast-receding past have survived into the unsure present--and how wonderful that the Web is now putting them at our fingertips. And how good it is, now that death has plucked my own ear, to be reminded by the electronic ghost of a very great man that the only possible answer to death is life, lived to the hilt.

I'm working on it.

Posted February 27, 12:00 PM

TT: Music to stay alive by

Here's the playlist of iPodded tunes to which I worked out on Saturday:

- Billy Joel, "Big Shot"
- The Beatles, "Birthday"
- Rosanne Cash, "Black Cadillac" (an excellent do-this-or-die choice for lazy heart patients)
- The Violent Femmes, "Blister in the Sun" (which I first heard on the soundtrack of Grosse Pointe Blank)
- Una Mae Carlisle, "Blitzkrieg Baby" (with Lester Young on tenor saxophone)
- Fats Waller, "Blue, Turning Grey Over You" (the 12-inch 78 version)
- Count Basie, "Blues in Hoss' Flat"
- The Benny Goodman Sextet, "Boy Meets Goy" (with Charlie Christian on guitar)
- Swing Out Sister, "Breakout"
- The Rolling Stones, "Brown Sugar"
- Pat Metheny, "Bright Size Life" (with Jaco Pastorius on bass)
- Henry "Red" Allen and Pee Wee Russell, "Bugle Call Rag" (this is one of the celebrated Billy Banks Rhythmakers 78s that Philip Larkin loved so much)
- Elvis Presley, "Burning Love" (a song I'd forgotten all about until I heard it on the soundtrack of Lilo and Stitch)

Incidentally, I saw the following caption on one of the overhead TV sets in the gym midway through my workout:

DON KNOTS [sic] DIES LAST NIGHT OF POOR HEALTH

Hey, it happens.

Posted February 27, 12:00 PM

TT: If you're in need of a smile today...

...click here.

Posted February 27, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"My secretary has been very good in reading to me out of working hours, more serious matters finished. We began yesterday Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves which makes me roar. That chap is master of a light rather original slang that makes life joyous when all the carbonic acid gas seems to have fizzled out of it. Few benefactors can be compared with him."

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Lewis Einstein (Feb. 8, 1931)

Posted February 27, 12:00 PM

February 26, 2006

TT: Calling all listeners

If you're listening to Hello Beautiful!, you've come to the right place. Welcome to "About Last Night," a 24/5 blog hosted by artsjournal.com (we don't usually post on weekends, but we're making an exception today) on which I write about the arts in New York City and elsewhere, aided and abetted by Laura Demanski, who writes from Chicago.

At this moment Laura is in the studios of WBEZ-FM in Chicago, talking with Edward Lifson, the host of Hello Beautiful! I'm sitting at my desk in the office of my apartment on the Upper West Side of New York City, taking part in the conversation via cellphone. As Edward suggested, I'm putting up a post in real time during the show (typing with one hand and holding my cellphone in the other) in order to demonstrate the immediacy of blogging.

If this is your first visit to "About Last Night," our postings of the past seven days are visible in reverse chronological order on this page. Mine start with "TT," Laura's with "OGIC" (which stands for "Our Girl in Chicago," her online nom de plume). In addition, the entire contents of this site are archived chronologically and can be accessed by clicking "ALN Archives" at the top of the right-hand column.

You can read more about us, and about "About Last Night," by going to the right-hand column and clicking in the appropriate places. You'll also find various other toothsome features there, including our regularly updated Top Five list of things to see, hear, read and otherwise do, links to my most recent newspaper and magazine articles, and "Sites to See," a list of links to other blogs and Web sites with art-related content. If you're curious about the arty part of the blogosphere, you've come to the right site: "Sites to See" will point you in all sorts of interesting directions, and all roads lead back to "About Last Night."

As if all that weren't enough, you can write to either one of us by clicking the appropriate "Write Us" button. We read our mail, and answer it, too, so long as you're minimally polite. (Be patient, though. We get a lot of it.)

The only other thing you need to know is that "About Last Night" is about all the arts, high, medium, and low: film, drama, painting, dance, fiction, TV, music of all kinds, whatever. Our interests are wide-ranging, and we think there are plenty of other people like us out there in cyberspace, plus still more who long to wander off their beaten paths but aren't sure which way to turn.

If you're one of the above, we're glad you came. Enjoy. Peruse. Come back Monday...and bring a friend. The easy-to-remember alternate URL is www.terryteachout.com, which will bring you here lickety-split (as, of course, will the longer address currently visible in your browser).

We return you now to Hello Beautiful!

UPDATE: We had a ball. If you missed us and want to listen in, go here--the program will be archived at some point in the next few days, after which you can listen to it online whenever you like.

Posted February 26, 11:13 AM

TT: Sign of the times

From the Associated Press' Don Knotts obituary:

The show [The Andy Griffith Show] was on the air from 1960 to 1968, and was in the top 10 of the Nielsen ratings each season, including a No. 1 ranking its final year. It is one of only three series to bow out at the top: The others are I Love Lucy and Seinfeld.

I didn't know that, and it's more than just a trivia question: it says a lot about how America has changed since 1960. For one thing, no network would now think of giving the green light to a low-keyed sitcom about life in a more or less idyllic southern town. What's more, that kind of long-term popularity has become increasingly rare in TV--and the Nielsen ratings are themselves far less significant than they were in 1960, now that cable TV and time shifting have become ubiquitous and series television must compete with so many other forms of electronic entertainment. When I was young, everybody I knew watched The Andy Griffith Show. Today there are no TV shows that "everybody" watches, and no movies that everyone has seen. Indeed, the American film industry is about to devote its annual prime-time infomercial to celebrating five movies that most Americans haven't seen, don't plan to see, and couldn't even if they wanted to (at least not until they come out on DVD).

None of this is good or bad, merely different, but for a person born in 1956--even one who has kept a fairly close eye on postmodern culture--it's definitely disorienting. And I think it explains why so many people my age have been starting Web sites devoted to Andy Griffith-vintage TV. Of course we're feeling nostalgic for our lost youth, just as our parents felt nostalgic about big-band music. But it's not just that we miss those old shows, and the simpler world view they collectively epitomized: we also miss the fact that they gave us something in common, something to talk about besides the weather. We all know who Don Knotts is, which is why it made us so sad to hear of his death (and why the obituary of a second banana got so much play on the evening newscasts, which are mostly viewed by older people). What percentage of us can recall the name of anyone who competed on American Idol two years ago?

Our Girl and I have lately found it hard to write a post that doesn't mention Philip Larkin, perhaps because he so accurately foresaw so many of the ways in which the world would change under the aspect of postmodernity. Now I find myself thinking of this stanza from a Larkin poem called MCMXIV:

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

Posted February 26, 9:28 AM

February 25, 2006

TT: On the air

Our Girl and I are taking to the airwaves this Sunday morning. We're appearing (so to speak) on Hello Beautiful!, the weekly series about the arts broadcast by WBEZ-FM, Chicago's public-radio station. We'll be discussing the effects of the Web on art and culture with Edward Lifson, the show's host (who recently launched his own blog), and Lynn Becker and Barbara Koenen, the proprietors of two Chicago-based Web sites about the arts.

Our portion of the show starts at 11:06 EST (that's 10:06 CST). If you live in the Chicago area, tune in 91.5 FM. If not, you can listen online via streaming RealAudio by going here and clicking on the "Live Webcast" link in the upper left-hand corner of the page.

If you can't join us tomorrow, Sunday's episode of Hello Beautiful! will be archived here, allowing you to listen at your leisure.

See you on the radio!

Posted February 25, 11:03 AM

February 24, 2006

TT: Cat's pajamas

Today is Friday--time once again for my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I have fulsome things to say about two new musicals, one on Broadway (The Pajama Game) and one off (I Love You Because).

Here's the scoop:

Broadway got what it needed last night: a bulletproof revival of a popular musical. The Roundabout Theatre Company's production of "The Pajama Game," starring Harry Connick Jr., is as close to ideal as the snippiest critic could hope for. The staging is a knockout. The sets and costumes are good-looking. The cast is uniformly appealing--and everybody knows how to sing. Mr. Connick even bangs out a foot-stomping piano solo on "Hernando's Hideaway," the burn-the-house-down second-act showstopper.

Saving Mr. Connick's illustrious presence, the real star of the show is the woman behind the scenes. Kathleen Marshall has now officially proved herself to be a high-voltage choreographer-director in the Jerome Robbins-Bob Fosse mold. (Appropriately enough, she tips her hat to Fosse, who choreographed the original "Pajama Game" in 1954, with a slinky, derby-topped version of "Steam Heat.") Like her 2003 revival of "Wonderful Town," Ms. Marshall's dance-filled production brings the whole stage of the American Airlines Theatre to pulsing, vibrant life....

If you can't get into "The Pajama Game," or can't stomach Broadway's extortionate ticket prices, allow me to direct your attention downtown, where "I Love You Because" is playing at the Village Theatre. Billed as "a modern-day musical love story," this gender-swapping update of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" is everything an Off Broadway mini-musical (six players, one set) should be. Farah Alvin, the best young musical-comedy singer to come along in years, plays Marcy Fitzwilliams (get it?), an arty, free-spirited photographer who can't quite bring herself to go for the buttoned-down Austin Bennet (Colin Hanlon). Stephanie d'Abruzzo, who created the role of Kate Monster in "Avenue Q," is similarly winning as Diana, Darcy's spunky sidekick, who has a fling with Austin's brainless brother (David A. Austin), then falls in love in spite of herself....

No link. Why be cheap? Buy a copy of the Friday Journal--it's only a buck. Or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instant access to the full text of my review, plus lots more art-related coverage.

Posted February 24, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"I am still half living in the world of my Fourth [Symphony].--This one is quite fundamentally different from my other symphonies. But that must be; I could never repeat a state of mind--and as life drives on, so too I follow new tracks in every work. That is why at first it is always so hard for me to get down to work. All the skill that experience has taught one is of no avail. One has to begin to learn all over again for the new thing one sets out to make. So one remains everlastingly a beginner! Once this used to make me anxious and fill me with doubts about myself. But since I have understood how it is, it is my guarantee of the authenticity and permanence of my works."

Gustav Mahler, letter to Nanna Spiegler, Aug. 18, 1900 (courtesy of House of Mirth)

Posted February 24, 12:00 PM

February 23, 2006

TT: We're listening

Our Girl and I asked a couple of weeks ago whether you thought it would be a good idea for us to prune "Sites to See," our blogroll. You responded in the affirmative (overwhelmingly, for the record). We've started paring it down, and we'll continue to do so in the weeks and months to come.

No doubt some good blogs will slip through the cracks along the way. Alas, that's in the nature of things: there are millions of blogs out there in the 'sphere, there's only so much room in the right-hand column, and most of our readers say that "Sites to See" will be more useful to them if it's trimmed to a manageable length.

Thanks to all who responded.

Posted February 23, 12:00 PM

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. 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)
- Bridge & Tunnel* (solo show, PG, some adult subject matter and strong language, reviewed here, extended through July 9)
- Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
- Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)
- The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes July 2, reviewed here)
- Sweeney Todd* (musical, R, adult situations, strong language, 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:
- Abigail's Party (drama, R, adult subject matter, strong language, reviewed here, closes Apr. 8)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
- The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Mar. 11)

Posted February 23, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

The animals that look at us like children
in innocence, in perfect innocence!
The innocence that looks at us! Like children
The animals, the simple animals,
have no idea why legs no longer work.

The food that is refused, the love of sleeping--
in innocence, in childhood innocence
there is a parallel of love. Of sleeping
they're never tired, the dying animals;
sick children too, whose play to them is work.

The animals are little children dying,
brash tigers, household pets--all innocence;
the flames that lit their eyes are also dying,
the animals, the simple animals,
die easily; but hard for us, like work!

Gavin Ewarts, "The Dying Animals"

Posted February 23, 12:00 PM

February 22, 2006

TT: Elsewhere

I was slow to return to the blogosphere after my recent trip to the hospital, but I've been accumulating links ever since then and want to share a few of them with you.

- Ms. Pullquote taught Chinatown to her film class the other day:

A show of hands today revealed that only two people in a group of 64 had seen the movie before, so these were virgin eyes. (Oh, to be able to watch this film again for the first time.) And, boy, did some of them have a problem with the ending. One kid even came up afterward to ask if he'd missed something. I had to say no, the bad guys triumphed. Sorry. Today I tried to give them a little context--the Holocaust, and Manson, and Vietnam, and Watergate--but some still felt cheated of their happy ending. They have a lot more disappointment to look forward to....

- Cathy Siepp, who is battling cancer, discovered Ernie Pyle's wartime journalism not long ago and found it strangely comforting:

Healthy people never really think they're actually going to die; they have a nagging suspicion that somehow an exception will be made in their case. Then when you get very sick, you have the equally delusional thought that somehow you're the only person in the world who has to die before your time. Reading "Brave Men" cheered me up enormously, because it brought me back to reality, reading about all these brave men, mostly very young, who died in battle. (The message I got: See? You're hardly the only one, not at all.) It reminded me of when an old friend of my dad's came to visit from Winnipeg a couple of years ago, still quite rattled from her turbulent flight. She kept herself calm en route thinking of all the people in her life who'd died already. "If they can do it," she pointed out briskly, "so can I!"

Speaking as one who now shares Cathy's preoccupation, I think it might just be time to revisit Pyle, whom I admire extravagantly. (For a well-chosen online anthology of his dispatches, go here.)

- Mr. House of Mirth shares two of my other preoccupations, both more benign:

The holiday blahs rolled in right on schedule, during the third week in December, and hung on until well after the ball dropped on New Year's Eve. Sometimes there's nothing to be done. I took solace from rereading one of my favorite novels, J.F. Powers's Wheat That Springeth Green, with its pragmatic credo: "As for feeling thwarted and useless," muses the priestly protagonist, "he knew what it meant. It meant that he was in touch with reality."

Another solace: hitting the repeat button on the iPod in my coat pocket so I could keep listening to Louis Armstrong's 1933 version of "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues." At the time I wasn't struck by the thematic consistency (he's complaining, I'm complaining). I simply got hooked on this gem from Armstrong's big band phase in the early Thirties, which used to be the subject of endless bitching from his fans. Sure, the guys in Zilner Randolph's orchestra couldn't hold a candle to the rough-and-tumble rapport Armstrong elicited from the Hot Fives and Sevens. Still, you'd have to be deaf to miss the delights of this recording....

To listen to "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues" in streaming audio right this second, go here, scroll down, and click on the link. (Incidentally, I wrote about Wheat That Springeth Green in the Teachout Reader.)

- Mr. Jerry Jazz Musician asked a bunch of varied luminaries this question: "What musical recording(s) changed your life?" Here's my favorite response:

When I was eleven years old, the only music that had reached me deeply, viscerally, at that point, was the often improvised singing by the cantors--the "chazzans," as they were called--in the Orthodox Jewish synagogue. When I was eleven, I remember walking down one of the main streets of Boston. In those days the record stores had public address systems, and suddenly, out of one of those public address systems, I heard the music that made me shout in pleasure, and Boston boys do not shout in the street--not back then. I rushed back into the store, the name of which I still remember, Krey's Music Shop, and I asked the clerk what the music was. He told me it was Artie Shaw's "Nightmare."...

Guess who said it?

- Julia Dollison, one of this blog's favorite jazz singers, just got a huge write-up (registration required) in her new local paper, the Sacramento Bee:

Listening to "Observatory," the wonder is no wonder: Simultaneously light and airy but full-bodied, her voice is rich and dextrous, and she plays with melodies, harmonies, arrangements and nuances of intonation in ways that reinvent standards such as "Night and Day" and "Autumn in New York."

She recorded the tracks for the album in New York before moving to Sacramento, with a trio that features guitarist Ben Monder, who animates her version of the standard "In a Mellotone" with a ripping solo that might thrill Miles Davis....

If you don't have Dollison's debut CD, Observatory, get it.

- Mr. Zayamsbury thinks the way I do:

It's late. I'm tired. And I'm trying to remember this thing Harlan Ellison said once.

"Every writer's success is your success."

I'm a strong advocate for competition in the arts. Lovey-dovey whatever drives me insane. The notion that for some reason everyone's born with the divine right to be a brilliant artist, that all it takes is someone someday just recognizing that you are a special and unique snowflake makes me a bit ill. "Everyone has a novel inside them." Bah.

At the same time, when the day is done, when I read something or see something that's amazing, when the artist just knocks it out of the park, I want to go buy them a drink, give them a hug, and let them talk all night long about how cool it is to complete something that cracks a hole in the world....

- Ms. Pretty Dumb Things is also on my wavelength:

I am a rocker. I can't say that the mod aesthetic doesn't appeal to me with its futuristic clean lines and plastic sheen, but at my entropic heart sullenly slumps the bourbon-soaked hirsute tatters of a rocker, and I cherish its bird-flipping defiance.

Which is why I find the fact that the Rolling Stones were chosen as this year's Superbowl family-safe act disturbing....

- Eye Level, the new (and excellent) blog of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, offers this trenchant criticism of a lukewarm comment about artblogs by an art dealer:

The qualifier gives it away: "seriously authored by qualified people," a sentiment totally contrary to the esprit de corps of the blogosphere. What's in fact great about most blogs is that they are nonseriously authored by nonqualified people. By the best count I've read, there are around 400–500 art blogs in the nation. Assuming even half of those are updated regularly, that amounts to a virtual library of information about artists, trends, and institutions. Even if not all these blogs are of the highest quality, the cream rises--and distributes the best information from the lesser-known blogs. To a certain extent, blogs survive by this network....

- Mr. Cosmic Variance has a moment of synchronicity:

So I was sitting on the bus reading and annotating my lecture notes on electromagnetic inductance for a lecture I was going to give 15 minutes later. A woman got on wearing a very short strapless red dress and medium height heels. She had short curly black hair. She seemed familiar in a way, but I could not place why, and she passed me and sat somewhere at the back of the bus. I carried on reading my notes. A few stops later the woman stood up and stood near the back door waiting for the bus to stop for her. I looked at her again, and it hit me. "She's dressed a bit like Betty Boop, how funny!", I thought to myself.

Then I noticed her little black handbag. I noticed the little mobile phone dangling from it on a strap. Then I noticed that it was a Betty Boop handbag....

- Did you know that Tommy Lee Jones is way into Flannery O'Connor? Ms. Open Book can tell you all about it.

- Mr. Superfluities, who is a drama critic and playwright by trade, just finished a brief stint as...an actor:

Oh, and this acting thing? It's a favor for a friend. But, given the opportunity, I thought I should at least have a taste of what I'm talking about when I ramble on here about the nature of performance. Let me just say that I'm adequate. Not inept and incompetent, but not Marlon Brando or Laurence Olivier either. But there is a certain pride and gratification I get in sharing a stage even for ten minutes with people so much more talented than I am.....

We should all have to do as he did.

- Finally, Mr. Something Old, Nothing New offers a close reading of one of my all-time favorite animated cartoons--with pictures:

We're now used to thinking of "acting" in animation as being synonymous with voice acting--so that the Simpsons voice actors were routinely referred to, in their latest salary dispute, as just "the actors" who play Homer and Lisa and co.--but acting and characterization comes from the animators too. There is hardly any dialogue in Rabbit of Seville, just one spoken line and a few sung lines, and yet Elmer and Bugs are clearly in character throughout, because of the great actors who were listed as "animators."...

You said it, Doc.

Posted February 22, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"The tragical conditions of life imperfectly denoted in The Return of the Native & some other stories of mine I am less & less able to keep out of my work. I often begin a story with the intention of making it brighter & gayer than usual; but the question of conscience soon comes in: & it does not seem right even in novels to wilfully belie one's own views. All comedy, is tragedy, if you only look deep enough into it."

Thomas Hardy, letter to John Addington Symonds, April 1889

Posted February 22, 12:00 PM

February 21, 2006

TT: The Terry Teachout Workout Tape

Ever since my untimely visit to the hospital, I've been spending an hour each day at the neighborhood gym, most of it pulling vigorously on the handle of a rowing machine. Inspired though I am by the passionate desire not to die just yet, I find virtually all heart-healthy activities to be brain-numbingly tedious. Enter my trusty iPod, which now contains 2,893 songs, many of which are suitable for exercise-related purposes. Instead of letting it play at random, I've drawn up a series of playlists of songs to which I listen avidly while tugging away at that damn handle. Each list consists of a dozen or so items, chosen for their brisk tempos and plucked from my computer in strict alphabetical order.

This is List No. 1:

- Count Basie, "9:20 Special" (with Coleman Hawkins on tenor saxophone)
- Del McCoury, "1952 Vincent Black Lightning"
- Fats Waller, "Ain't Misbehavin'" (from the soundtrack of Stormy Weather, with Benny Carter on trumpet and Zutty Singleton on drums)
- Jim and Jesse, "Air Mail Special" (the bluegrass version, not the jazz version)
- Jimi Hendrix, "All Along the Watchtower"
- Vassar Clements, "Avalanche" (from Will the Circle Be Unbroken)
- Fats Waller, "Baby Brown"
- The Beatles, "Back in the U.S.S.R."
- Louis Armstrong, "Beau Koo Jack" (with Earl Hines on piano)
- Blue Öyster Cult, "Before the Kiss, a Redcap"
- Erin McKeown, "Bells and Bombs"
- Nickel Creek, "Best of Luck"

Posted February 21, 12:00 PM

TT: Anew

I came home from the gym one day last week to find that my houseguest, a woman with good taste and a sharp eye, had rehung several pieces in the Teachout Museum. We'd talked about it a few days before, so it didn't come as a total surprise, but I was still startled to find Degas' Dancer Putting on Her Shoe on the north wall of my living room (directly beneath Neil Welliver's Night Scene), Vuillard's Petites etudes dans le square next to the bathroom door (directly beneath Jane Freilicher's Late Afternoon, Southampton), and Hans Hofmann's Woman's Head in place of the clock that used to hang over the door to my kitchen (it now hangs over my stove).

Like most art collectors, I spend an inordinate amount of time fussing over what to put where, and I tend to leave things in place once I decide where they "belong." It had been at least six months since I'd hung anything new, and longer still since I'd moved any of the pieces I already owned. Because of this, I'd forgotten the emotional effect of moving a familiar piece of art, which is not unlike moistening your index finger and inserting it in an electrical outlet: first you're horrified, then you're thrilled. Moving just one piece makes the whole room look different, and moving several pieces can freshen an entire collection--if you move them to the right places. Fortunately, my guest hit the bull's-eye three times in a row. The only catch was that I had to straighten up the living room at once in order to properly appreciate her handiwork, but no sooner was I done than I sat down on the couch and spent ten ecstatic minutes doing nothing but looking at the walls.

Several days have gone by, yet I still feel a buzz whenever I open the front door and step into the living room. It's as if I'd bought three brand-new pieces of art. "A change in the weather," Proust wrote in The Guermantes Way, "is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves." That's what my guest did: she changed the weather inside my apartment, and now I'm basking under a new sun in the sky.

Posted February 21, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

I am pure loneliness
I am empty air
I am drifting cloud.

I have no form
I am boundless
I have no rest.

I have no house
I pass through places
I am indifferent wind.

I am the white bird
Flying away from land
I am the horizon.

I am a wave
That will never reach the shore.

I am an empty shell
Cast up on the sand.

I am the moonlight
On the cottage with no roof.

I am the forgotten dead
In the broken vault on the hill.

I am the old man
Carrying his water in a pail.

I am light traveling in empty space.

I am a diminishing star
Speeding away
Out of the universe.

Kathleen Raines, "The Unloved"

Posted February 21, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Called out at third

It's a safe bet you'll soon be hearing about Dominic Smith, whose first novel The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre appears this month. He's been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, has a story forthcoming in the Atlantic, and he's good. Mercury Visions could have been a greatish novel--Smith has the chops--although I think it would be nice to exempt one or two historical figures from having novels written about them--if there's still time.

Sadly, the novel's not great or even in that general vicinity, and I reveal why in this week's Baltimore Sun book section.

Here's a snippet.

Daguerre's work, like the historical backdrop to his life, is enormously suggestive fodder for a novelist's imagination. His impassioned preoccupation with natural light and its visual and emotional effects formed a natural bridge between art and science, and his career lends itself equally well to explorations of the intuitive, uneven processes of artistic creation and scientific discovery. A short way into his brash debut novel, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, Dominic Smith evocatively posits a formative moment in Daguerre's fascination with light and its yet-untapped powers. At 12, Louis presses his eye to a tear in a curtain:

"The sun was going down behind the grain fields, and as it descended, it shot an orange glow from behind the hedgerows and poplars. Louis held the piece of white linen in front of the small curtain hole and saw, projected on it, the shimmering image of the lone walnut tree that stood by the stone fence. ... The compression of light through the small hole had borne along the image of the walnut tree, projecting it onto the ceiling. Nature could sketch herself."

In Smith's vision of the formation of an artist's imagination, witnessing light's power to fix an image lashes together nature, art and technology in Louis' impressionable mind. And, because in the same scene the boy has fallen for Isobel, the young servant girl tending him, love enters into this web of associations as well - he "fell in love with light and women on the same day."

This too-tidy coincidence makes for a lovely little chapter, but it's also the seedling of the ultimate failure of Smith's nonetheless accomplished and impressive novel.

It's a disappointing debut, but I'd be surprised if Smith doesn't have better novels up his sleeve. Guy can write.

Posted February 21, 1:42 AM

February 20, 2006

TT: On the beach

At midday last Wednesday I pulled the plug on my computer, packed an overnight bag, picked up a Zipcar from the garage around the corner, and hit the road. I'd been feeling fine ever since I left the hospital the week before Christmas, but it struck me that it was time to take a break from my daily rounds, and a look at the calendar told me that I could wedge a quick holiday in between my weekly Wall Street Journal deadlines and last Friday's press preview of The Pajama Game. Having fallen in love with the ocean in the middle of my life, I decided to take a friend to Cape May, an island town at the southern tip of New Jersey, three hours south of Manhattan. It's mostly shuttered in the off season, but a few inns and restaurants stay open for business the year round, and of course the Atlantic Ocean never closes.

As always, the tentacles of everydayness were slow to let me go. I spent most of Wednesday morning exchanging e-mails with my editors at the Journal, who were putting my Saturday column to bed and had a basketful of last-minute queries. It wasn't until noon that was I able to make my getaway. No matter: I'd shed my cares by the time I crossed the George Washington Bridge, fired up the satellite radio in my rented car, and headed for the Garden State Parkway.

Cape May is an odd and charming place, a nineteenth-century seaside resort whose gingerbready Victorian summer homes survived a long stretch of disrepair and have now been restored to their former splendor. Rhythm of the Sea, the bed-and-breakfast at which my friend and I stayed, is a 1915 cottage located directly across the street from the ocean. The easygoing owners, Robyn and Wolfgang Wendt, have painstakingly redecorated the entire house in arts-and-crafts style. Yet it doesn't feel at all like a museum, in part because the Wendts go well out of their way to make their guests comfortable. We felt at home the moment we walked through the door, and the three superlative meals we ate in the blue-walled dining room added immeasurably to our delight.

As I expected, there wasn't much to do on Cape May in February, which suited me fine: I walked on the beach, drove around the island, sat by the living-room fire and read books I wasn't reviewing, and slept deeply and well in my Stickley bed. None of this is to say that my holiday was untroubled, however. For the most part I was as happy as could be, but there's something about a deserted shore in wintertime that has a way of putting night thoughts into the head of a middle-aged man--especially after he's had a brush with death.

I'd brought Philip Larkin's Further Requirements with me, so perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised to find myself recalling unsettling snatches of poetry as I gazed across the street at the moonlit waves. First Keats:

...then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

Then Matthew Arnold:

But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

And then, no doubt inevitably, Aubade, the terrible poem Larkin wrote toward the end of his life after suffering a sleepless night during which he imagined his own death:

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear--no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

Unlike Larkin, I'm not wholly devoid of the gift of faith, but most people touched by modernity, whatever their religious convictions, tremble from time to time at the imagined prospect of "nothing to think with,/Nothing to love or link with." Larkin himself was terrified by the thought of his own death, and made no secret of the fact. Six years after writing "Aubade," he reviewed D.J. Enright's Oxford Book of Death, and you can smell the fear in every sentence:

For in the last analysis the intrusion of death into our lives is so ruthless, so irreversible, so rarely unaccompanied by pain, terror and remorse, that to "anthologize" it, however calmly, quizzically and compassionately, sems at best irrelevant, at worst an error of taste. "Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily," says La Rochefoucauld, and by their nature anthologies do not look steadily, nor do they explain or console: they entertain. And death is not entertaining. The chapter on "Care of the Dying" in any nursing manual makes this point more clearly.

Such bleak thoughts come no less naturally to a man who, like me, was carried down the stairs of his apartment house not long ago and carted away in a waiting ambulance to the nearest hospital, there to spend a nervous week dining on bland, unsalted food and spying the fear in the smiling eyes of the friends at his bedside.

So yes, I trembled--but not for long. Mostly I warmed myself beside the fire and ate the Wendts' lovely meals and thought about how much I love my life, reflecting only occasionally on the blank face of the other side of the coin. It is, after all, as invisible to us as the far side of the cold white moon that shone upon the never-ceasing ocean waves, which will still be breaking on the beach at Cape May long after I am dead and gone to whatever unknowable fate awaits us all. What is visible, and therefore real, is the world that has been so good to me, and whose pleasures I now relish more fully and intensely than ever before: a roaring fire, a well-made soup, the smell of salt air on a cold February night, the company of an understanding friend. Could it be that my night thoughts were the pinch of seasoning that brought out the savor in these simple things, and made me realize anew how very much they mean?

On the way home I tuned in Frank's Place on the satellite radio. Ella, Sarah, Peggy...and then, without warning, a voice I once knew as well as my own, singing a song I love:

You're clear out of this world.
When I'm looking at you
I hear, out of this world,
The music that no mortal ever knew....

After waiting so long for the right time,
After reaching so long for a star,
All at once, from the long and lonely night time
And despite time, here you are.

Ten years ago I sat in the control room of a recording studio and watched my friend Nancy LaMott lay down the vocal track to that song. A few months later, not long after we sat together in her living room and listened to the finished album that contained her performance of "Out of This World," she was dead.

For a long time afterward I couldn't listen to Nancy's singing without crying. Now I listened, dry-eyed but still moved, and found myself thinking of yet another Larkin poem:

The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

No sooner did I return home than I turned on my computer and plugged myself back into the waiting world. I checked my e-mail and found one hundred and eighty messages awaiting me. Sighing deeply, I looked up at the wall above my desk, high on which hangs a lithograph by Fairfield Porter called Ocean I. That, too, survives of him, as Nancy's albums survive of her.

What will survive of me? Not my journalism, surely: we who write for newspapers know all too well how ephemeral our work is. Possibly one or two of my books will be read a decade from now, or even a half-century. Or not: it hardly matters in the end. Far better, I suspect, to be survived by love, whose ripples spread out unpredictably and miraculously across the ocean of life, breaking in time on beaches we will never see, there to be seen by onlookers who never knew us, and to comfort them as we in our turn have been comforted.

Posted February 20, 12:00 PM

TT: Rerun

July 2004:

I was reading Anthony Powell's At Lady Molly's as I ate lunch at a neighborhood restaurant the other afternoon. A waitress approached the table and asked, "Hey, whatcha reading?" Long experience has taught me never to answer this question other than noncommittally, so I showed her the spine of the book and said, in a fairly friendly tone of voice, "Oh, just a novel." She lit up like a sunbeam and replied, "Wow, that's cool!"...

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

Posted February 20, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Reviewing is a whole-time job with a half-time salary, a job in which our best work is always submerged in the criticism of someone else's, where all triumphs are ephemeral and only the drudgery is permanent and where no future is secure except the certainty of turning into a hack."

Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise

Posted February 20, 12:00 PM

February 17, 2006

TT: Kirk Douglas, master painter

Here's a little taste of my next "Sightings" column, which appears biweekly in the "Pursuits" section of the Saturday Wall Street Journal:

Fifty years ago, a film director known for his fluffy musicals rolled up his sleeves and shot a movie about a great artist--and it was good. Not only that, it made money.

Vincente Minnelli's "Lust for Life," which was released on DVD last week, is that rarity of rarities, a high-culture Hollywood biopic that isn't unintentionally funny. To be sure, the snobs of the day tittered at the thought of Kirk Douglas playing Vincent van Gogh, and even now the film doesn't get much respect, though a few latter-day critics have gone out of their way to praise it. One of them is David Thomson, the much-admired author of "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film," who calls "Lust for Life" "as moving as anything in the American cinema." He's right...

As always, there's lots more where that came from. See for yourself--buy a copy of tomorrow's Journal and look me up.

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

Posted February 17, 12:00 PM

TT: Successful succession

All together now: it's Friday! I'm still out of town, so Our Girl has kindly posted the weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, an all-Broadway edition in which I hold forth on the new cast of Doubt and the new revival of Barefoot in the Park:

Few tasks are so ungrateful as replacing the star of a Broadway hit--unless you're Eileen Atkins, who just took over Cherry Jones's part in "Doubt." One of the great stage actresses of our time, Ms. Atkins doesn't appear in the U.S. very often, and her last stint on Broadway was in a shoddy piece of theatrical goods, "The Retreat From Moscow." John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer-winning play, by contrast, gives her plenty of elbow room to pass a miracle. As always, she delivers: Ms. Atkins' stupendous performance is the best piece of acting in town....

Was it Neil Simon who invented the kind of play in which ordinary people talk like stand-up comics? If so, then "Barefoot in the Park," Mr. Simon's first megahit, belongs in the Smithsonian, preferably under glass. I know I'd rather see it there than on Broadway, even in a production as effective as the revival that opened last night at the Cort Theatre. Indeed, this "Barefoot in the Park" is something of a triumph for Scott Elliott, the highbrow director whose whip-smart production of Mike Leigh's "Abigail's Party" is still running Off Broadway. I wouldn't have guessed Mr. Elliott to be the kind of director who'd be really, really good at staging slapstick, but most of the biggest laughs of the evening come from the crackling precision with which he puts Amanda Peet, Patrick Wilson, Jill Clayburgh and Tony Roberts through their physical paces....

No link, so proceed as follows: (1) Buy a copy of the Friday Journal. (2) Go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with immediate access to the full text of my review, along with lots more art-related coverage. (By the way, here's an unsolicited blogospheric tribute to the Journal's arts coverage.)

Posted February 17, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Perfection, which is the passion of so many people, does not interest me. What is important in art is to vibrate oneself and make others vibrate."

George Enescu

Posted February 17, 12:00 PM

February 16, 2006

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. 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)
- Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG, some adult subject matter and strong language, reviewed here, closes Mar. 12)
- Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
- Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)
- The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes July 2, reviewed here)
- Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult situations, strong language, 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:
- Abigail's Party (drama, R, adult subject matter, strong language, reviewed here, closes Apr. 8)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
- The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Mar. 11)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
- In the Continuum (drama, R, adult subject matter, closes Saturday, reviewed here)
- Mrs. Warren's Profession (drama, PG, adult subject matter, closes Sunday, reviewed here).
- The Woman in White (musical, PG, adult subject matter, closes Sunday, reviewed here)

Posted February 16, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Progress celebrates Pyrrhic victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it."

Karl Kraus, "The Discovery of the North Pole," (Die Fackel, Sept. 1909)

Posted February 16, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Slow blogging ahead

I hate to be idle when Terry's away, but I probably don't have much blogging in me this week. Up until last night, I had been working full-throttle against various deadlines with the full cooperation of my health. Within about 12 hours of my being clear and free, however, things broke down throatwise, and I spent today sick in bed. It wasn't the worst day I ever picked to get sick; in between bouts of that ultimate medicine sleep, I found distractions both on the ice and on the page. More to say about the latter soon, I'm sure. Just to remove the element of suspense, I like it, I really like it, though it's also the case that it has seemed heaven-sent for convalescence--the soothing literary equivalent of tea and honeyed toast on a tray.

Planning to rally and report for duty tomorrow morning, so I'm for bed now. I'll at the very least check in tomorrow night. Meantime, check out our confrères in the right-hand column.

Posted February 16, 1:14 AM

February 15, 2006

TT: Almanac

"Why is it that we have enough memory to recollect the most minute circumstances of something that has happened to us, but not enough to remember how many times we have recounted them to the same person?"

La Rochefoucauld, Moral Maxims and Reflections

Posted February 15, 12:00 PM

February 14, 2006

TT: Handing off

Sorry to be so unforthcoming, but the joint is jumping. I wrote all day yesterday and I've got to write all day today, after which I'll go hear the Lascivious Biddies at Makor (you come, too!). On Wednesday morning I'll be heading out of town yet again, returning just in time for a Friday-night preview of the Broadway revival of The Pajama Game on Friday night. I'm not taking my computer with me, either. Instead, I'm leaving my routine postings for Our Girl to publish, and I expect she'll be putting up a few things of her own as well.

See you next week. Happy Valentine's Day!

Posted February 14, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"I'm a romantic--a sentimental person thinks things will last--a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

Posted February 14, 12:00 PM

February 13, 2006

TT and OGIC: Apologies

Our server went down some time Sunday morning and returned to life a few minutes ago. We don't know what went wrong, but we're glad to be back!

Posted February 13, 11:58 AM

TT: Up to your knees out there

I went down to Broadway on Saturday night to see a press preview of the new revival of Barefoot in the Park. It had only just started to snow when I left, and cabs were still easy to find. By the time the play was over, though, the night sky was full of swirling clouds of moist white flakes, and it was snowing furiously when I got up the next morning, having been awakened by the sounds of cheery children and crunching snow shovels. New York City had ground as close to a halt as it ever gets, which isn't very close. The first thing I saw when I looked out my third-floor window was a bundled-up fellow walking his dog.

It was still snowing when I headed back down to Broadway in the afternoon to see the new cast of Doubt. Broadway theaters don't shut down for anything short of a 9/11-magnitude disaster, and the biggest snowstorm ever to hit New York didn't make the cut, so I wrapped myself up tight and hit the road, giving myself an extra twenty minutes just in case.

Blizzards mean different things to different people at different times in their lives. To a fifty-year-old drama critic recovering from congestive heart failure who has to make his way to and from the theater district in two feet of blowing snow, a blizzard can be a fearful nuisance, depending on his schedule and his frame of mind. Fortunately, I live a block away from the subway and wasn't in any great hurry. The streets and sidewalks were slippery but passable, and everyone I saw between my front door and the subway station was smiling. Most New Yorkers, however grumpy they may be on an ordinary day, respond festively to the short-lived chaos of a snowstorm. So did I, in part because I remembered the last time I'd been to a Broadway play in really cold weather, pausing every ten yards or so to catch my breath, wheezing and gasping and wondering whether I'd ever see the Great White Way again. Now I was strolling briskly down the street like everyone else.

No sooner did I reach the subway platform than a Broadway-bound train pulled into the station and whisked me away. I got to the theater district a half-hour ahead of schedule and took temporary shelter in a pizza joint, where I read M.F.K. Fisher's Serve It Forth as I sipped a ginger ale. I looked out at the half-empty streets of the theater district and pondered her wise words:

An early evening meal--a long evening. A long evening--what to do with it? There is a fairly good play, a passable movie, a game of bridge--surely some way to kill a few hours.

But an evening killed is murder of a kind, criminal like any disease, and like disease a thorough-going crime. If Time, so fleeting, must like humans die, let it be filled with good food and good talk, and then embalmed in the perfumes of conviviality.

Though there were more than a few empty seats in the Walter Kerr Theatre, most of the ticketholders had chosen to brave the storm and were clearly in a mood to be wooed. After the last curtain call, Ron Eldred, who recently replaced Brían F. O'Byrne as Father Flynn, the priest suspected of molesting a child in his care, stepped forward to the rim of the stage. "We're all really glad you came out today!" he told us, smiling broadly.

On the way home I stopped at the corner deli to pick up some paper towels. I stood in line at the counter behind a young man and his son. "How can you not like snow on a day like this?" the man said to me. Then I went home to my nice warm apartment, stripped off my wet socks, heated up a plate of leftovers, and settled myself on the couch to watch a little early-evening TV, reveling in the simple pleasure of venturing forth into a blizzard and coming back alive.

Posted February 13, 11:58 AM

TT: Faces in the crowd

I spent the second night of the Blizzard of '06 watching two black-and-white movies. The first, On Dangerous Ground, is one of Nicholas Ray's very best films, and the only film noir to have been scored by Bernard Herrmann (it has yet to turn up on DVD, alas, but the original soundtrack is available on CD). The second, Howard Hawks' Ball of Fire, is a screwball comedy that contains more familiar faces per foot than any other film I know. Written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett in their pre-Double Indemnity days, it stars Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, features the young Dana Andrews and Dan Duryea in supporting roles, and contains a nightclub scene in which Gene Krupa's big band can be seen playing "Drum Boogie" with Roy Eldridge seated proudly in the trumpet section. As if that weren't glory enough, the cast also includes such celebrated character actors as S.Z. "Cuddles" Zakall, the glutinous-voiced Richard Haydn, Leonid Kinskey (he's the bartender in Casablanca), Charles Lane (who played Homer Bedloe in Petticoat Junction and recently turned 101), Henry Travers (now best remembered as Clarence, the wingless angel of It's a Wonderful Life), and Mary Field, everybody's favorite cinematic spinster, who made more movies than I can count.

To top it all off in the highest possible style, the immortal Elisha Cook, Jr., has a walk-on as a waiter. You probably won't know his name unless you have your film trivia down pat, but the chances are very, very good that you'll recognize his face, for Cook, who died in 1995, made his first film in 1930 and his last TV episode in 1988, in between which he played small but splendidly vivid parts in such movies as The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Shane, The Killing, One-Eyed Jacks, and Rosemary's Baby.

I was going to pay tribute to Cook's decidedly weird on-screen persona, but it seems that David Thomson beat me to it:

There are big stars in the movies who pass by, leaving us uninterested. And there are supporting actors whose faces will stop you dead as you flip through an album history. Who really wants to know more about Robert Taylor, say? But who wouldn't want to read a good biography of Elisha Cook Jr.? He was small, scrawny; he was losing his hair, and he had a high-pitched voice; he had eyes screwed into his head with all the desperate resolve of wanting to be taken seriously....Put him in a bad picture, and he made it watchable for ten minutes. Put him in something good and he was a metaphor for glue, or the medium itself. He could make you trust a film.

You could do a whole lot worse than that, posterity-wise.

I don't much feel like arguing about whether old movies are better than new ones--it's a meaningless exercise--but I do think that one of the best things about studio-system Hollywood movies was the omnipresence of such gloriously characterful supporting actors as the ones seen in Ball of Fire. A few journeymen of genius managed to make their mark in the Sixties--Strother Martin and John Vernon come immediately to mind--and the breed is not quite extinct today, as any paid-up member of the M. Emmet and J.T. Walsh fan clubs can tell you. But the old studios specialized in making resourceful use of these scene-stealing wizards, and it was their idiosyncratic presence that added a special richness of texture to the casts of the movies I'm most inclined to watch when there's two feet of snow on the ground and I feel like staying home and keeping myself company.

I bless their memory!

Posted February 13, 11:57 AM

TT: Almanac

"A fresh performance of a 'classic' is only like a new edition of an established masterpiece of literature. And the literary critics do not have to review new editions at any length; they merely publish a paragraph drawing attention to the blue buckram, the gilt-edges, and the bold lettering. They are not expected to sit up late on a chilly night writing a column about nothing new at all. It is a pleasant task sometimes to do this writing about nothing new; it is a challenge to ingenuity, a sort of Chardin problem of setting whites in the foreground against whites in a background that is not far back enough; but the task and the pleasure need not be carried too far--certainly not beyond the extent of a column, with the midnight hour at hand, and the temperature falling, and a distance to cover before the weary scribe gets to his pillow, resigned to the thought that whatever he has written will not be read, ever again, after twelve o'clock the next day, but will go down slowly and unobserved into the general dust."

Neville Cardus, review of a concert by Sir Thomas Beecham and the Hallé Orchestra (Manchester Guardian, Oct. 20, 1938, courtesy of Richard Zuelch)

Posted February 13, 11:56 AM

TT: Request time

If anyone reading this blog knows an especially good restaurant in Cape May, New Jersey, kindly send me an e-mail containing mouthwatering details.

Much obliged!

Posted February 13, 4:03 AM

February 10, 2006

TT: Not their kind, dear

Yes, it's Friday. Yes, I'm in The Wall Street Journal. No, I'm not in New York--OGIC is posting the weekly drama-column teaser in my absence, bless her! Two shows this week, one in New York (Charles Grodin's The Right Kind of People) and one in Chicago (Chicago Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing). Here goes:

Reality-based theater--what I call theatrical journalism--comes in flavors ranging from the poetic ("Henry V") to the pedestrian ("Guantánamo"). Sometimes a purely fictional play may be journalistic in the precision with which it embodies a historical moment (Wendy Wasserstein, who died last week, had a knack for writing plays like that). And every once in a while a show comes along whose journalistic appeal is so strong that you find it interesting even though it really isn't very good. Such is the case with "The Right Kind of People," Charles Grodin's inside look at a Fifth Avenue co-op board, which had its New York premiere last night. Considered solely as a play, "The Right Kind of People" is creaky in the extreme, but if it's dish you're looking for, Mr. Grodin serves it up juicy....

I always make a point of visiting Chicago Shakespeare Theater whenever I'm anywhere near the Windy City. They've yet to let me down, and Marti Maraden maintains their winning streak with her production of "Much Ado About Nothing," in which the play is reset in the mid-19th century to no disruptive effect--the costumes are the main new wrinkle. Ms. Maraden, a well-known Canadian stage director, has brought with her two Canadian actors, Kelli Fox (she's Michael J. Fox's sister) and Jim Mezon, who play Beatrice and Benedick, the quarreling lovers, with enormous charm...

No link. You know what to do to read the whole thing, right? (A) Buy a copy of the Friday Journal. (B) Go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instantaneous access to the complete text of my review, along with much, much more art-related coverage.

Posted February 10, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"If there should be no art it would be impossible that we should know what the other feels."

Moriz Rosenthal, speech at a gala concert in honor of his eightieth birthday (1942)

Posted February 10, 12:00 PM

February 9, 2006

OGIC: Reverse psych, we think

Apropos of my Patrick O'Brian dilemma (skip down a few posts), the inimitable Outer Life writes:

As for O'Brian, I strongly counsel against picking up the books. I have no innate interest in naval stories, little interest in historical novels qua historical novels, a terror of allowing an author to snare me in a 10,000 page trap and, frankly, too many other authors to read in too little time, so you can imagine how I felt ten years ago as he sucked me into his world, forcing me to devour every one of his novels, together with a history of Nelson's navy and a nautical dictionary, and left me begging for more up to the day he died.

The first book, "Master and Commander," has nothing to do with the movie of the same title. Looking back, it is probably the weakest book of the lot. The second book, "Post Captain," containing O'Brian's extended homage to Austen, is, perhaps, the strongest book. It hooked me. Then there's the book in which nothing happens, they just drift aimlessly in the doldrums. For some reason, that was a great book too. And then....

So BEWARE! Learn from my mistake. Don't let this happen to you.

Yes, it sounds like an awful fate. Well, as I said, the leaning tower of Aubrey is in Michigan, where I won't be until March, and I have books to read for reviewing purposes in the immediate future. Have to say, though, the rapidly proliferating piles of unread books around here are starting to haunt me. Later in our conversation, OL reminded me of a post I wrote long ago about the seriously depressing business of calculating, based on age and reading speed and habits, how many more books one can reasonably expect to read in one's lifetime. I can't put my hands on the post just now, but that's fine because it's a sobering enough thought in hazy memory.

The interesting question we eventually wound our way to was this: what percentage of that terribly finite amount of reading do you feel should be earmarked for incontestably Great books, and what percentage of fluff--elegant, witty, and delightful fluff, needless to say--are you comfortable including? I'm thinking a full 50%. But I have another wrench to throw into the machinery: how many of your 200 or 500 or 1,000 books will be books you've already read? For most of us, I'm guessing, this will be a non-negligible number.

Which just makes me wonder: why don't I clear some space for myself in here already? If I'm honest with myself, many of these books are never going to transcend their present status as baubles. I think my psychology runs this way: at any given moment I may be struck by the urge to read a particular book or a particular kind of book, and I want to have all possible options at hand when that urge strikes. While most readers are constantly at work trying to whittle down their to-be-read piles, I think I am half-consciously but nonetheless deliberately trying to build mine up. And succeeding. The problem is that, in the face of such vast possibility, it's easy to buckle under the pressure of having to choose--to read a few pages here, a few pages there, and to be distracted by the presence of other possibilities even after settling in with something. This, I think, is known as promiscuity, and is why I could probably use a good series to temporarily remove the burden of choice.

Posted February 09, 12:06 PM

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. 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)
- Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG, some adult subject matter and strong language, reviewed here, closes Mar. 12)
- Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
- Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)
- The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes July 2, reviewed here)
- Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult situations, strong language, 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)
- The Woman in White (musical, PG, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Abigail's Party (drama, R, adult subject matter, strong language, reviewed here, closes Apr. 8)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
- The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Mar. 11)

CLOSING SOON:
- In the Continuum (drama, R, adult subject matter, extended to Feb. 18, reviewed here)
- Mrs. Warren's Profession (drama, PG, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 19, reviewed here).
- The Woman in White (musical, PG, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 19, reviewed here)

Posted February 09, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Those who love art and seek to understand it will always be anxious to see more, and if they are wise will look at certain objects they admire again and again. But they must avoid the sin of art greed, restrain the appetite to enjoy more than a digestible number of artistic sensations, and resist the temptation to engulf all the forms of art in their minds. In a world where beautiful and virtuous objects are numbered in the millions, the most judicious approach is to acquire a penetrative knowledge of one aspect of art, and on this basis develop a judgment which promotes a general capacity to evaluate quality. In art, a discerning if limited taste is preferable to enthusiastic voracity."

Paul Johnson, Art: A New History

Posted February 09, 12:00 PM

TT: Flowing once more

I'm writing from a secure, undisclosed location (though not my usual one) to announce that I resumed work on Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong yesterday morning after a longish and eventful hiatus. The immediate stimulus was the recent arrival of the galleys of Thomas Brothers' Louis Armstrong's New Orleans, which comes out in March. I'll be writing about it at length in a future issue of Commentary, so suffice it for now to say that it's a very important book. No sooner did I put it down than I felt the irresistible urge to get cracking on Hotter Than That again--further proof, if it were needed, that I'm myself again.

Here's something I wrote earlier today:

The coming of modernity not only shrank America to a manageable size, but drained away much of its romance. In an age of airports and superhighways, the Mississippi River has long since lost the symbolic resonance that Abraham Lincoln evoked in 1863 when he paid tribute to General Grant's victory in Vicksburg by proclaiming that "the Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea." The phrase, borrowed by Lincoln from James Fenimore Cooper, now has a quaint, almost fustian air. How can we who take the miracle of transoceanic flight for granted think of a mere river--even a 3,900-mile-long one that cleaves the country from top to bottom--as the Father of Waters? Those who live near the banks of the Mississippi need no reminding of the fearful extent of its dammed-up wrath, but for most of the rest of us, it is not a destination but a landmark, something to be flown over or driven across on the way from one megalopolis to another....

Now it's back into the barrel again. See you later!

P.S. I've been having such a good time that I forgot to post the Thursday almanac and theater guide before going to bed last night. Scroll down and you'll find them in their usual places.

Posted February 09, 11:02 AM

TT: One more thing

I'm using a dial-up connection this week, which makes it all but impossible to answer my blogmail, though I can read it with a little effort. To all of you who sent greetings on my fiftieth birthday, rest assured that they're much appreciated! And to all of you who pointed out that I'm now entering my sixth decade, not my fifth...well, er, I never said I could count.

Back to work again.

Posted February 09, 2:31 AM

February 8, 2006

TT: Almanac

"'I don't mind what anyone says about my work,' said Allen, 'as long as it's intelligent.'

"'It can't always be what you want to hear,' I said, 'or it wouldn't be intelligent.'"

John P. Marquand, Wickford Point

Posted February 08, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Until soon

I have a hellishly early morning to look forward to today. Terry's away, though he did pop his head in earlier, which was nice to see. The upshot is that posting here will resume late on Wednesday. Peruse our fine blogroll in the meantime, won't you?

Posted February 08, 2:20 AM

February 7, 2006

OGIC: Modern-day Maturin and cold feet

This story makes me really want to see Master and Commander all over again. Which will make my dad invoke the tall stack of O'Brian books he months ago placed so invitingly on the bureau in my room back in Michigan. Could this be the year I finally tackle O'Brian? But what if I fall for him? How will I ever read anything else ever again? That stack positively towers--a commitment must be made. I just don't know if I'm ready for something quite so long-term...

In any case, don't miss the slide show.

Posted February 07, 12:12 PM

TT: Almanac

"The trouble was that he had set out to write a masterpiece. He had tensed his intellectual muscles and had sweated in his earnestness in order to make each word a jewel, each sentence a concise gem of thought, and the whole a symphony of words; and what was worse, you could tell that he had been thinking of what the critics would say."

John P. Marquand, Wickford Point

Posted February 07, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

(This cookie dedicated to Tyler Green)

"In an otherwise generous review of my most recent novel, Barney's Version, that appeared in the London Spectator, Francis King had one caveat. Noting the sharpness of protagonist Barney Panofsky's intelligence and the breadth of his culture, he doubted that he could also be a sports nut. 'Would such a man, obsessed with ice hockey, be able to pronounce with such authority on topics as diverse as the descriptive passages in the novels of P.D. James, Pygmalion as play, musical, and film, the pornography published by Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press and Dr. Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes?--rather strains credulity.'"

Mordecai Richler, "Writers and Sports"

Posted February 07, 2:13 AM

OGIC: Half a book

I was in the Baltimore Sun last weekend with a review of Paul Watkins's novel about English mountaineers in World War II, The Ice Soldier. I found it a starkly divided book, half of it spectacular and half of it pedestrian. All of the best parts took place in the Italian Alps; describing exigent circumstances and this particular landscape seems to bring out the best in Watkins's writing, and when it is good, it is very, very good:

[Watkins's] rendering of wartime and combat is moored to reality by a vivid array of tiny but enormously striking material details: the graininess of the chocolate that serves as emergency rations, for instance, or the "rotten-lung gasping" sound that a flare makes when it is exposing one's position to the enemy. I've seldom read a more precise and sensually anchored representation of deadly confusion than the gripping late scene in which Bromley and his men are surprised by an advance guard of the German army on their way to the glacier.

The same is true of Bromley's final journey to the Alps with his friend Stanley.... This time their quest is idiosyncratic and personal rather than patriotic, but it is no less harrowing. Watkins' writing is at its best when it is focused on the minutiae of human survival in inhospitable conditions and when it is steeped in the Alpine landscape's menacing beauty. The summit that Bromley and Stanley must attempt, Carton's Rock, memorably stands "by itself, and the first impression was of a ship with black sails, moving slowly through an ocean made of clouds. It was like a mirage, shimmering in the heat haze which rose off the ice."

On human strength and frailty in extreme circumstances, Watkins and The Ice Soldier are superb. While I was immersed in Bromley's Alpine adventures, you could not have pried this book from my hands with a crowbar. When it focuses elsewhere, however, the book is often only serviceable, leaning too heavily on bursts of exposition and straining to deliver symbols and metaphors that arrive overdressed or flat-footed. Its pat, happily-ever-after conclusion is especially unworthy of the churning darkness and daunting beauty of its best stretches.

And when it is bad, it is...not horrid exactly, but certainly no better than so-so. Still, on balance, I'd recommend this book if the mountaineering or war angles strike a chord for you.

Posted February 07, 1:34 AM

OGIC: Our inimitable referral logs

We got a hit yesterday afternoon from the results of the following Google search:

"Why didn't the snobbish potatoes want their daughter to marry a news broadcaster?"

And if anyone has a plausible answer to that question, I hope you'll share. I'm so curious, in fact, that there could even be a little something in it for you.

Posted February 07, 1:32 AM

February 6, 2006

TT: What am I doing the rest of my life?

Today is my fiftieth birthday. So far I'm dealing with it surprisingly well, considering that I nearly died two months ago. It helps that an attractive woman d'un âge certain told me the other day that she thought my silver hair was sexy, though her choice of words struck me as something of a mixed blessing (she's the first person ever to have used the word "silver" to describe the color of what used to be a mousy-brown mop once upon a time).

Here's how old I am:

- This is what my home town looked like fifty years ago.
- My maternal grandmother canned fruit and stored it in her root cellar.
- My mother was baptized in a river.
- My father witnessed a lynching.
- Milk used to be delivered to my family's back door.
- We used to leave that door unlocked.
- When I was a boy, I read Li'l Abner and Pogo in the paper every Sunday.
- I caught a train from this depot in 1961. (Now it's a museum, and I gave a lecture there last summer.)
- This is the first movie I ever saw in a theater.
- I know who Clem Kadiddlehopper was.
- I know what CONELRAD was.
- I used to send telegrams.
- I saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show.
- I learned how to type on a machine that looked like this.
- I watched the first moon landing on TV.
- I cast my first presidential ballot in 1976. (Don't ask.)
- I saw Star Wars and Animal House when they were new.
- I saw José Iturbi play the Mozart D Minor Piano Concerto with the Kansas City Philharmonic.
- I reviewed a concert by Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians for the Kansas City Star.
- My last surviving grandparent died two decades ago.
- I bought my first VCR in 1984 and my first PC three years after that.

I wish I were ten years younger, but I wouldn't want to give up what the past decade taught me, though I'm not quite ready to endorse the notion that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Yes, I had a midlife crisis, and no, I didn't buy a red sports car or have a fling with a woman half my age. I got out in one piece, more or less, greatly changed but still myself.

And now...what? The fourth decade of my life, after all, wasn't exactly an unbroken string of disasters. In between driving into personal potholes, I published three books, in which I am (mostly) well pleased, and started work on a fourth, for which I have even higher hopes. I was appointed by the President to the National Council on the Arts, fingerprinted by the New York Police Department, investigated by the FBI, and unanimously confirmed by the Senate, all of which was occasionally irritating but basically pretty cool. I've spent the past three years as drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, a job I never sought that has proved to be more fulfilling than I could possibly have imagined. More recently I began writing a new column for the Saturday Journal, and that, too, is giving me great pleasure. In addition, I taught a college course in criticism, gave a couple of dozen public lectures, and made a like number of radio broadcasts, discovering in the process that talking for money is fun. And--needless to say--I started this blog.

So what do I do next? Like many people, my life has been a series of goals, a things-to-do list, and at fifty I now find myself in the position, at once pleasing and disconcerting, of having accomplished most of them. As for the things I haven't yet done, nearly all of them are things I'm no longer likely to do, assuming I ever was: I doubt, for instance, that I'll learn a second language or write a novel or become a father. I could spend the rest of my life running in place, and I suppose that would be perfectly fine. Except that I know it wouldn't. The time will come, if it hasn't already, when I'll want to try my hand at something new--and I haven't the slightest idea what it might be.

Perhaps the goals of my fifth decade will be purely interior and personal. To be sure, I can't exactly see myself withdrawing from the world, like the politician-turned-mendicant of Rudyard Kipling's "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat":

Next month, when the city had returned to its sun-baked quiet, he did a thing no Englishman would have dreamed of doing; for, so far as the world's affairs went, he died. The jewelled order of his knighthood went back to the Indian Government, and a new Prime Minister was appointed to the charge of affairs, and a great game of General Post began in all the subordinate appointments. The priests knew what had happened, and the people guessed; but India is the one place in the world where a man can do as he pleases and nobody asks why; and the fact that Dewan Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., had resigned position, palace, and power, and taken up the begging-bowl and ochre-coloured dress of a Sunnyasi, or holy man, was considered nothing extraordinary. He had been, as the Old Law recommends, twenty years a youth, twenty years a fighter,--though he had never carried a weapon in his life,--and twenty years head of a household. He had used his wealth and his power for what he knew both to be worth; he had taken honour when it came his way; he had seen men and cities far and near, and men and cities had stood up and honoured him. Now he would let those things go, as a man drops the cloak he no longer needs....

Still, it could be that I've done all that I'm supposed to do out in the land of renown, the place where (as Philip Larkin put it) people pretend to be themselves. Or not: I've lived long enough to know that life is pandemonium and not to be second-guessed. If I hadn't known that already, the events of the last few months would have taught it to me with a vengeance. The wise man is surprised by nothing--and everything.

This is something I wrote last April:

As for me, all I know is that nothing I imagined for myself when young has come to pass: everything is different, utterly so. I'm not a schoolteacher, not a jazz musician, not the chief music critic of a major metropolitan newspaper, not a syndicated columnist, not settled and secure. Nor am I the person I expected to be, calm and detached and philosophical: I still cry without warning, laugh too loud, lose my head and heart too easily, the same way I did a quarter-century ago. The person I was is the person I am, only older. Might that be wisdom of a sort?

I know one more thing now that I didn't know then: I am blissfully, madly happy to be alive.

* * *

I'll be out of town for the rest of the week. See you next Monday.

Posted February 06, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"A watery sunlight breaks through the smoke of the Chef and turns the sky yellow. Elysian Fields glistens like a vat of sulfur; the playground looks as if it alone had survived the end of the world. At last I spy Kate; her stiff little Plymouth comes nosing into my bus stop. There she sits like a bomber pilot, resting on her wheel and looking sideways at the children and not seeing, and she could be I myself, sooty eyed and nowhere.

"Is it possible that-- For a long time I have secretly hoped for the end of the world and believed with Kate and my aunt and Sam Yerger and many other people that only after the end could the few who survive creep out of their holes and discover themselves to be themselves and live as merrily as children among the viny ruins. Is it possible that--it is not too late?

"Iii-oorrr goes the ocean wave, its struts twinkling in the golden light, its skirt swaying to and fro like a young dancing girl."

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Posted February 06, 12:00 PM

February 4, 2006

TT and OGIC: Just wondering

Do you find "Sites to See," our blogroll, too long to be manageable? Or is it useful to you at its present length? We've been contemplating a drastic pruning, but before we do anything so dire, we'd like to know what you think.

Write to either one of us at the mailb