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March 31, 2006

TT: Go south, young woman

Today's Wall Street Journal drama column is an off-Broadway triple-header: A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop, Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, and Grey Gardens. Two I liked, one I didn't:

I've never understood why Amy Irving's film career failed to pan out. All I know is that she made some good movies in the '80s, married and divorced Steven Spielberg, moved to Brazil and pretty much dropped off the scope. Now she's back in Manhattan, giving a dynamite performance Off Broadway in a one-woman play about an American artist who, like Ms. Irving, changed course and went south.

Marta Góes' "A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop" is one of those fact-filled shows about a real-life character that feels at times less like a full-fledged play than a canned bio. Fortunately, Bishop's life was interesting enough to make the facts worth seeing....

The original production of "Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris," which ran for 1,847 performances at the Village Gate starting in 1968, is one of Off Broadway's all-time success stories, as well as a prototype of today's jukebox musicals. Now a new team of producers has revived it, this time at the Zipper Theatre, a charmingly run-down cabaret-like dump south of the theater district. Lightning isn't supposed to strike twice in the same place, but I won't be surprised if they get lucky, because this revival is the best-performed musical revue to hit New York in ages....

Whenever I hear the words "cult classic," I look for the nearest exit. Alas, my duty as a critic kept me rooted in my aisle seat throughout "Grey Gardens," the musical version of the 1975 cinéma-vérité documentary that is currently packing them in at Playwrights Horizons. According to the program, the film, which told the creepy story of two impoverished society ladies who spent their sunset years living in a crumbling, cat-infested Long Island summer house, is much admired by gay men. I never saw it, but the stage version, whose book is by Doug Wright, the author of "I Am My Own Wife," made me feel as though I'd sat through a play written in a foreign language....

No link, so get thee to a newsstand, buy a copy of today's Journal, turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, and read the whole thing there. Or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instance access to the complete text of my review, along with plenty of other art-related coverage.

Posted March 31, 12:00 PM

TT: The devil made them do it

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

A Colorado teacher was put on leave by her superintendent last month after showing a video of excerpts from "Faust" to one of her classes. Some parents, it seems, didn't want their kids to see an opera about a devil. Around the same time, a principal in Fulton, Mo., cancelled a student production of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" when he learned that the play was about witches.

You probably read these stories--then forgot about them. Such skirmishes, after all, are commonplace in postmodern America, where long-simmering cultural resentments can boil over without warning. But what happened to Tresa Waggoner, who got in red-hot water for introducing her students to an opera she calls "a great part of our civilization and Western culture," is more than just another black-and-white tale of blue-nosed intolerance in Red America....

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

Posted March 31, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"It is not very comfortable to have the gift of being amused at one's own absurdity."

W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

Posted March 31, 12:00 PM

March 30, 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 and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
- Bridge & Tunnel* (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 9)
- Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content)
- Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter and 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 subject matter, 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:
- Defiance (drama, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes May 7)
- I Love You Because (musical, R, sexual content, reviewed here)
- The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here, closes April 9 and moves to Broadway April 18)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
- Abigail's Party (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes April 8)
- Bernarda Alba (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes April 9)

Posted March 30, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Like most people who cultivate an interest in the arts, Hayward was extremely anxious to be right. He was dogmatic with those who did not venture to assert themselves, but with the self-assertive he was very modest."

W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

Posted March 30, 12:00 PM

March 29, 2006

TT: Almanac

"He knew that an enormous proportion of mankind feels, weirdly but indisputably, a stronger awe for the theatre than almost any other art or activity on earth. He knew that to get in on the inside, to be ‘behind scenes' in the theatre, was to achieve a glamour completely out of proportion to that attached to almost any other profession. He knew that to give to the average person free seats for the theatre (while pretending that such a thing was easy because one was intimately connected with it) gratified such a person a dozen times more than to give him the money for the seats. When anxious to flatter, cajole, or bribe people in the past, he had often himself bought seats at a theatre and then given them away with the pretence that he had come by them through inside influence and that they were of no use to himself."

Patrick Hamilton, Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse

Posted March 29, 12:00 PM

March 28, 2006

TT: Almanac

I came here looking for something
I couldn't find anywhere else.
Hey, I'm not trying to be nobody,
Just want a chance to be myself.
I've done a thousand miles of thumbin',
I've worn holes in both my heels
Trying to find me something better
Here on the streets of Bakersfield.

Spent some time in San Francisco,
I spent a night there in the can.
They threw this drunk man in my jail cell,
I took fifteen dollars from that man.
Left him my watch and my old house key,
Don't want folks thinkin' that I'd steal.
Then I thanked him as I was leaving,
And I headed out for Bakersfield.

You don't know me, but you don't like me.
You say you care less how I feel.
But how many of you that sit and judge me
Have ever walked the streets of Bakersfield?

Homer Joy, "Streets of Bakersfield" (in memory of Buck Owens)

P.S. For a good obit of a great country singer, go here.

Posted March 28, 12:00 PM

March 27, 2006

TT: Almanac

"'But Piers, why did you choose him of all people? I shouldn't have thought you had anything in common.'

"'This having things in common,' said Piers impatiently, 'how overrated it is! Long dreary intellectual conversations, capping each other's obscure quotations--it's so exhausting. It's much more agreeable to come home to some different remarks from the ones one's been hearing all day.'"

Barbara Pym, A Glass of Blessings

Posted March 27, 12:00 PM

March 25, 2006

TT: Saturday in Manhattan

I wrote a piece this morning, then met Maccers at the Dahesh Museum of Art, which has a very nice restaurant. Afterward we strolled up to 59E59 and saw Amy Irving in A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop. At play's end we walked over to Tibor de Nagy to ogle a exhibition of paintings by Jane Freilicher (about which you can read more in the right-hand column).

I'd planned to spend the rest of the afternoon at the gym, but I didn't feel like staying indoors, so even though I wasn't wearing a coat, I walked all the way home at a spectacularly brisk clip. The southeast corner of Central Park was a symphony of pale greens and tans, so I entered the park and headed for Seventy-Second Street, exiting at the Dakota. It was the first time I'd taken so long a walk through the park since Ms. in the wings paid me a visit back in November. By the time I finally charged up the stairs to my apartment, I'd worked up a sweat and felt like a couple of million bucks.

I also felt amazingly grateful, which is something I haven't been feeling nearly enough of late, preoccupied as I've been with thoughts of mortality. Needless to say, the fact that I took a long walk on a pretty day doesn't mean I'm not going to die sooner or later, but the Distinguished Thing seems far, far away as I write these words at the end of a perfect afternoon.

Life is good. Please, Sir, may I have some more?

Posted March 25, 6:07 AM

March 24, 2006

TT: My world (and welcome to it)

I'm back in my Washington hotel room once more, having just wrapped up another excruciatingly long day.

I've been too busy to visit the hotel gym, so I decided to work up a sweat by walking to the Old Post Office instead of taking a cab. As I left the hotel at eight-thirty, I noticed two Secret Service snipers lurking on the White House roof--a sight I'd never seen--as well as a hardy little group of picketers marching up and down the sidewalk, chanting "Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Wal-Mart's got to go!" to the accompaniment of a banging drum as a nearby cameraman clicked away.

The National Council on the Arts met from nine to six (we worked straight through lunch, dining on pasta salad at the conference table). Afterward I hopped a cab to the Phillips Collection, my favorite museum, where I saw a lovely show called Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris, 1870-1910, assembled in collaboration with Tate Britain and installed with exceptional elegance and lucidity by the staff of the Phillips. You can read all about it by clicking the link, so I'll say only that I just saw more paintings by Walter Sickert in a single evening than I'd previously seen in my entire life, in addition to which I also made the acquaintance of some interesting works by several other English artists who are rarely if ever shown in this country. I especially liked a Max Beerbohm-like caricature of Toulouse-Lautrec by William Rothenstein, Beerbohm's classmate and close friend.

(Incidentally, I learned at today's meeting that the Phillips Collection has digitized its entire collection of American paintings, an undertaking for which the NEA helped to pay. Go here and you can browse the museum's online collection, which is a model of art-related Web-site design.)

I went from the Phillips to Olives, where I had a tasty, unhurried, and solitary dinner (I was supposed to meet a friend, but she had to cancel at the last minute). Now I'm about to curl up in bed with Michael Ruhlman's Walk on Water: Inside an Elite Pediatric Surgical Unit, a remarkable book that Our Girl gave me for my fiftieth birthday but which I've only just looked into, perhaps because books about heart surgery aren't the most comforting leisure-time reading for someone who recently survived a bout with congestive heart failure!

On Friday morning the NCA holds a public meeting, after which I'll take the next train back to New York, rest a bit, then head down to the Zipper Theatre to see a press preview of the new off-Broadway revival of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. I have yet another show on Saturday afternoon, followed by a full day of writing for The Wall Street Journal.

Sigh.

* * *

I'll be holed up in one of my secret hideaways all next week, working on Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. I'll probably post a daily almanac entry and the usual Thursday and Friday drama-related stuff, but absolutely no more than that (though I'm sure Our Girl will have something to say from time to time).

Later.

Posted March 24, 12:00 PM

TT: The road to nowhere

I got out of town for the first half of today's Wall Street Journal drama column, a review of Two River Theater Company's new production of Waiting for Godot, which I reviewed in tandem with an off-Broadway stage version of The Screwtape Letters:

Samuel Beckett would have turned 100 next month--but so far, next to no attention has been paid to the Nobel Prize-winning playwright's centennial. Except for an Off-Broadway "Waiting for Godot" that got swallowed up by the transit strike, there have been no Beckett revivals of significance in New York this season (though the Irish Repertory Theatre mounted a very fine "Endgame" last year). According to samuel-beckett.net, the semi-official Beckett Web site, only two full-scale Beckett festivals are being held in the entire U.S., one in Atlanta and the other in Red Bank, a small New Jersey city best known to culture vultures as the home town of Count Basie and Edmund Wilson.

It was news to me that Red Bank is also the home of a theater company, much less that the company in question had the gumption to put on its very own Samuel Beckett Festival. My curiosity having been piqued, I rented a car, drove there last Saturday, and saw a production of "Waiting for Godot" that couldn't have been better....

Clowning about matters metaphysical is not the exclusive privilege of unbelievers. Fellowship for the Performing Arts, an organization that supports "the integration of faith and the arts," is currently presenting an Off-Broadway stage version of C.S. Lewis' "The Screwtape Letters," the wickedly witty epistolary novel in which His Abysmal Sublimity Screwtape, Under Secretary of the Satanic Lowerarchy, instructs his nephew Wormwood, a doltish junior tempter, in the fine art of persuading unwitting humans to part with their souls. It is--if I may say so--one hell of a good show....

No link, naturally, so do the right thing: buy a copy of today's Journal and read the entire review (which is ever so much longer!). Or, as always, you can go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with on-the-spot access to the full text of my review, along with an abundance of additional art-related coverage.

Posted March 24, 12:00 PM

TT: Gotcha

- A reader writes:

Re: strong-voiced opinions and readers who object.

My all-time favorite complaint came from a reader who wrote a letter to the editor near the beginning of my career at the South Bend Tribune. He was objecting to a theater review I had written. The letter began: "Who is this Mark Stryker? He doesn't seem to have any opinions but his own."

Ha!

- A friend writes:

"...some of the paintings are very familiar....attracting hordes of noisy visitors...."

From About Last Night, April 1, 2010: "I was happy when they turned the National Gallery into a Duane Reade, and I'll be even happier later this week when they do the same to the Phillips. These institutions, which have long outlived their day, should be doing something useful, like selling hairspray, cheap soda, and bowel prep kits."

Double ha!

(P.S. To order a really nice book of postcards from the National Gallery's Cézanne in Provence exhibition, go here.)

Posted March 24, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"There's an incredible amount of comedy in this world, and a horrendous amount of tragedy, and you don't want to let the tragedy define what you do."

Dr. Frank Moga (quoted in Michael Ruhlman, Walk on Water: Inside an Elite Pediatric Surgical Unit)

Posted March 24, 12:00 PM

TT: Peekaboo

Guess who said this?

I seem to be really drawn to minor keys. Some people would say, well, they're melancholy or they're dark, but I don't think so. I think they're richer and I get a sense when I listen to a minor key that the composer has somehow worked harder at it.

You'll be surprised.

(Thank you, Alex Ross.)

Incidentally, here's something relevant that I wrote for Commentary a couple of months ago apropos of Mozart's minor-key works:

I refer to the comparatively small number of multi-movement works cast in minor keys--two piano sonatas out of 17, two piano concertos out of 27, two symphonies out of 41. For while these and other minor-key works of like scale are not necessarily of higher quality than their major-key counterparts, they do share a special intensity of expression not found in such major-key masterpieces as the C Major Symphony, K. 551, familiarly known as the "Jupiter."

This intensity manifests itself in many ways, from the turbulence of the first movement of the D Minor Piano Concerto, K. 466, to the crisp austerity of the E Minor Violin Sonata, K. 304. Sometimes, as in the G Minor String Quintet, K. 516, one perceives the minor-key quality as a tint, a single aspect of a carefully balanced, classically poised totality. At other times, as in the unabashedly stern A Minor Piano Sonata, K. 310, it becomes overwhelming, infusing an entire piece with its distinctive coloration. In every case, though, the large-scale minor-key pieces, different as they are from one another, are similar in their power to stir the listener's emotions, just as one feels, whether rightly or wrongly, that Mozart's own emotions were more fully engaged in the act of their creation--that he was somehow playing for higher stakes....

I'd say I'm on the same page as our mystery guest!

Posted March 24, 6:03 AM

March 23, 2006

TT: On the town

I'm writing from Washington, D.C., having just gotten back to my hotel after a very long day, so I'll keep it fairly short:

- I started things off by going straight from the train station to the National Gallery, where I saw Cézanne in Provence, a 117-piece exhibition up through May 7. Some of the paintings are fairly familiar, but at least as many of them are likely to be new to even the most knowledgeable lover of Cézanne's work. Like most blockbuster shows, this one is too much of a muchness, and it's also attracting hordes of noisy visitors--but it's overwhelming all the same, and not to be missed.

For me, the last gallery, which consists mainly of landscapes painted at the end of Cézanne's life, was the most memorable. The Phillips Collection's near-abstract Garden at Les Lauves hangs next to the exit, accompanied by this excerpt from a letter written by the artist in 1905, a year before his death:

Now, being old, nearly 70 years, the sensations of color, which give the light, are for me the reason for the abstractions, which do not allow me to cover my canvas entirely, nor to focus on the edges of objects where their points of contact are fine and delicate; from which it results that my image or picture is incomplete.

The two side galleries devoted to watercolors and color lithographs comprise a show-within-a-show (and aren't nearly as crowded as the main galleries, thank goodness). I saw several of these watercolors at a Princeton University exhibition I reviewed four years ago for The Wall Street Journal:

In France, Cézanne was piling up watercolors by the dozen as early as the 1870s, some obviously sketchy, others so dazzling in their iridescent color and complex composition--an elaborate skein of pencil underdrawing "covered" by overlapping patches of transparent pigment--that it is hard to think of them as mere studies. Yet such may well have been the artist's intent, at least at times, for Renoir claimed to have found discarded Cézanne watercolors littering the fields around Aix-en-Provence....

Not surprisingly, it was a great poet who summed them up best: Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that Cézanne's watercolors consist of "very light pencil outlines, and, here and there, as if just for emphasis and confirmation, there's an accidental scattering of color, a row of spots, wonderfully arranged and with a security of touch: as if mirroring a melody."

(A word to the wise: when you've had enough of the crowds, slip across the corridor to Gallery 70, where you can feast your eyes on John Twachtman's Winter Harmony in near-complete solitude.)

- I went straight from the National Gallery to the White House, where I lunched with two colleagues. I blogged last year about my previous visit to the White House Mess, so this time around I'll say only that the chicken and empanadas were first-rate.

- From there I walked to the Old Post Office, headquarters of the National Endowment for the Arts, and spent the remainder of the afternoon in a closed session of the National Council on the Arts. After wrapping up our first day's discussions, we shared a working dinner with Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, who spoke with passionate idealism about cultural memory in Iran and America. It was our first meeting, and I was forcibly struck by her charm and charisma.

I told Nafisi after dinner that her remarks had put me in mind of the concluding passage of C.S. Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism:

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

Now I'm worn out and ready for bed--Thursday's session starts promptly at nine a.m. and I'm already a couple of hours' behind on sleep. See you tomorrow.

Posted March 23, 12:00 PM

TT: Dear Sir, you cur

Like most people who sell their opinions for a living, I get a certain amount of mail (and e-mail) from readers who beg to differ with me, sometimes quite forcefully. Their letters are typically concise, fair-minded, and intelligent, and I make every effort to answer them personally. From time to time, I also get letters that usually run to about six pages in length and are invariably single-spaced with very narrow margins. More often than not, these correspondents start out by explaining why I'm all wrong about something trivial, and end up revealing that their fillings have been bugged by aliens in the pay of the CIA. Hard experience has taught me never to reply to such mail, though I always enjoy reading it.

Perhaps the most common complaint I get is from people who claim that my writings are full of "unsubstantiated pronouncements" (or nastier words to that effect). This never fails to throw me. Virtually all criticism, after all, is full of "unsubstantiated pronouncements." They're called opinions, and yours are as good as mine. The only difference is that I get paid to write mine down. To be sure, I like to think that my opinions have at least some validity, based as they are on a lifetime of intense professional involvement with the world of art. In the end, though, you must be the judge. If my opinions rarely tally with your perceptions, then chances are you'll stop taking my criticism seriously, no matter how cleverly written it may be. Conversely, if I have a history of steering you straight (or at least making you think twice), then chances are you'll be inclined to give me the benefit of the doubt when I praise a book you haven't read, or a play you didn't see. That's the main reason why I write criticism: I want to share my pleasures. Yes, I sometimes feel the need to smite the heathen, but I'd be perfectly happy to spend the rest of my life writing solely and only about things I like.

Alas, I've found over the years that many people (especially midwesterners, who are trained to say "sir" and "ma'am" and be polite to strangers) become uncomfortable whenever they're confronted with strongly expressed opinions on any subject whatsoever--even positive ones. It took me a long time to figure out the reason why, which is that all positive opinions have negative implications. If the Copland Piano Sonata is the best piece of piano music written by an American, then it follows logically that the Barber Sonata isn't as good. But there's plenty of room at the top: just because the G Minor Symphony is Mozart's finest work for orchestra doesn't mean the "Jupiter" isn't uniquely great in its own way. Besides, it's only my opinion, right?

Lest you suspect me of having succumbed to spineless relativism, let me make haste to declare my firm belief in the existence of absolute artistic truth. When I say I think The Great Gatsby is a better book than The Sun Also Rises, I mean I think The Great Gatsby is a better book than The Sun Also Rises, and I don't mean maybe: if I were appointed Keeper of the Canon of American Masterpieces tomorrow morning, my first act would be to send a memo saying so to every librarian in America. As I see it, then, my duty as a critic is to speak my mind--in this case, my opinion of the relative merits of two great books--as clearly and compellingly as possible. In time this opinion will either be forgotten or make its way into the vast mass of criticism through which posterity will slowly winnow, a process that ultimately leads to the emergence of a consensus of taste. The critics of 2106 may well consider Gatsby to be less good than The Sun Also Rises, or maybe even not very good at all. They may not like either book. The one thing of which you can be sure is this: if I don't speak frankly now, it won't matter what I thought, be it a hundred years from now or next Friday.

But will it matter at all? If artistic truth is absolute, then won't it emerge inevitably over time, regardless of what critics have to say? I believe so. In art, the good guys always win, sooner or (usually) later. Critics can't turn a bad play into a good one, or vice versa. What they can do, if they're perceptive and persuasive enough, is speed up the process by nudging their contemporaries in what they believe to be the right direction. It's fine with me if you like Hedda Gabler better than Three Sisters. I don't feel threatened by the fact that we differ, nor do I feel any compulsion to try to change your mind. I'm not in the mind-changing business--I'm in the mind-opening business. If I can get you to go see a play you've never seen before, and at least consider the possibility that it might be good, then I've done my job.

Having said all this, let me close by speaking directly to those readers who get all steamed up whenever I write something with which they disagree: I'm genuinely sorry that my work upsets you. I don't set out merely to make anyone angry or stir up a fuss. I always mean exactly what I say. Naturally, you're entitled to your opinion--but so am I. So the next time you write, please do me the favor of giving me the benefit of the doubt. Merely because you happen to disagree with me doesn't necessarily mean I'm stupid, or even ignorant. Who knows? I might even be right.

Posted March 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 and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
- Bridge & Tunnel* (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 9)
- Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content)
- Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter and 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 subject matter, 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, reviewed here, closes April 8)
- Bernarda Alba (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes April 9)
- Defiance (drama, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes May 7)
- I Love You Because (musical, R, sexual content, reviewed here)
- The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here, closes April 9 and moves to Broadway April 18)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

Posted March 23, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"'It seems sometimes that we must hurt people we love,' said Fabian, stroking her hair. 'Oscar Wilde said, didn't he...?'

"'Let's not bother about him,' said Jessie. 'I always think he must have been such a bore, saying those witty things all the time. Just imagine seeing him open his mouth to speak and then waiting for it to come out. I couldn't have endured it.'"

Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence

Posted March 23, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Remember me?

I'm getting ready to ease myself back into the blogging way, but here's a little appetizer while I get warmed up: our newest addition to the "Screenblogs" category of the ‘groll, Matt Zoller Seitz's excellent House Next Door, links to a poll to determine the worst Best Picture Oscar winners. Mr. Seitz's terrible ten can be viewed here, and do note that he runs one of the liveliest, most on-point comments threads to be found on this here web.

Talk at you again soon. We have much to discuss.

Posted March 23, 10:55 AM

March 22, 2006

TT: Too many interpretations?

A reader writes, apropos of yesterday's posting on the sorry state of the classical-music concert:

Please don't do classical music any more favors, Terry. Just go back to your CDs and keep telling yourself that Schnabel is the last word on Beethoven.

Of course there is no "last word" on Beethoven, or any other composer--but after a lifetime of listening to multiple interpretations of the classics, I'm simply not interested in the Latest Version of anything. What I care about is the piece itself, far more than the way any one particular artist happens to play it, and now that each and every piece of standard-rep music has been recorded in multiple versions of very high quality, I find I have very little motivation to go out and hear Op. 111 done in yet another way, however "different" or "original" it might happen to be. Yes, the experience of hearing classical music in live performance is in and of itself worthwhile, but when the environment in which one consumes it has been degraded, I'm not so sure it's cost-effective (speaking from an aesthetic point of view) to put up with the distractions.

This, by the way, is an unintended consequence of the invention of recording that nobody foresaw a century ago: that it might eventually make public performance obsolete, or at least moribund. It is, however, something that I've been writing about for years. Here, for instance, is a column called "No, Never" that I wrote for Fi a decade ago. I was talking about how I was no longer interested in listening to new recordings of the standard repertoire, but the same logic applies to my changing feelings about the institution of the traditional classical concert. It sums up what I think so completely that I've decided to post it here rather than trying to say it all again in a different way. I hope it interests you.

* * *

I received in the mail the other day a review copy of a new recording of the Brandenburg Concertos (I won't say by whom), accompanied by a slightly shamefaced letter from a well-meaning publicist (who shall also remain nameless) suggesting that even though I probably wasn't interested in listening to yet another recording of the Brandenburg Concertos, this one was worth my while. Candor from a publicist is as refreshing as it is rare, and I was tempted to give the album a listen for that reason alone, but the temptation passed in mere seconds. At the time I was knee-high in review copies, some of which were really interesting, and most of which were at least marginally more interesting than yet another recording of the Brandenburg Concertos. So I dropped the letter in the wastebasket, placed the CD atop my burgeoning giveaway pile, and meditated, not for the first time, on the folly of re-recording the classics.

What is it that causes an otherwise sensible musician to conclude that the world is waiting breathlessly for him to reduce to digits his interpretation of a score that has already been recorded twenty times or more? Presumably vanity has a little something to do with it, and so does youth--it never ceases to amaze me how many younger classical musicians, singers in particular, don't listen to other people's records--but two other reasons worthy of closer scrutiny come to mind:

- Musicians re-record familiar pieces of music because they think they have something new to say about them that is worthy of preservation and promulgation.

- Musicians also make records to make money, and historically speaking, the standard repertoire has always been what sold best.

I'll come back to the second reason in a moment, but for now let me concentrate on the desire of artists to document their interpretations for posterity, which is almost as old as the invention of a means of doing so--that's why we call records records--and which is, I think, perfectly understandable, if not always forgivable. When Adelina Patti heard the playback of her first 78, she exclaimed, "Ah, my God! Now I understand why I am Patti! Oh, yes! What a voice! What an artist! I understand everything!" I doubt anyone since then has responded quite so effusively to her records (she made them when she was sixty-two years old, a bit late in the game for a coloratura), but it's important to remember that they date from 1905, prior to which time the most celebrated soprano of the nineteenth century had never before heard the sound of her own voice. Being a diva, Madame Patti no doubt instantly took it for granted that opera buffs as yet unborn would want to hear it, too, and sure enough, the old girl was right.

Save for a few eccentric holdouts, classical musicians have from that day to this made as many records as possible, more than a few of which have proved to be of permanent interest. But most of the records made between 1900 and the day before yesterday are either forgotten or soon will be. Posterity is ruthless, and only remembers the best of the best, rave reviews and impressive sales figures notwithstanding. My record collection is a time-lapse simulation of posterity, for I've lived in six different apartments in the past quarter-century, and thus have had to be scrupulous about disposing of review copies that I thought were less than indispensable. You'd be surprised at how many CDs I've given away over the years, and how few I've kept.

To be sure, there are certain works of which I've accumulated a reasonably large number of recorded versions, but very few of them were composed prior to 1800. This isn't because I don't like pre-romantic music, but because I don't find it all that rewarding to compare different interpretations of music written before the dawn of romantic subjectivity. Take the Brandenburg Concertos: I love them passionately, but find it quite possible to scrape along with only four complete sets, the ones conducted by Adolf Busch, Benjamin Britten, Raymond Leppard, and Trevor Pinnock. The Busch, Leppard, and Pinnock sets represent the three major phases to date of evolution in the interpretation of eighteenth-century music (as well as recording technology), while Britten's version earns its place on my shelf by virtue of its status as a wild card--a performance by one great composer of the music of another great composer. As far as I'm concerned, that's enough. Interpretatively speaking, what is there to say about the Brandenburgs that Busch, Britten, Leppard, and Pinnock haven't already said?

I fully expect to be bombarded with letters about that last sentence, some friendly and some obnoxious, but to all of you who are even now booting up your computers, I urge you not to waste your time trying to change my mind. I've been listening to the Brandenburgs ever since I was a teenager--I've even played a few of them, on violin, viola, bass, and in Max Reger's wonderful four-hand piano arrangements--and I long ago decided that immortal though they are, they don't lend themselves to idiosyncratic interpretation. To my mind, the way to play them is beautifully, briskly, and straightforwardly, and between them, my four complete sets cover all the interpretative possibilities I'm interested in experiencing. Anything beyond that is hair-splitting or perversity.

I hasten to point out that this rule of thumb doesn't necessarily apply to nineteenth-century music, in which the performer's personality can and should play a much larger role in the shaping of his interpretations. I've held onto nine of the many recorded versions of the Brahms Second Piano Concerto that have passed through my hands over the years: Cliburn/Reiner, Fischer/Furtwangler, Fleisher/Szell, Gilels/Jochum, Horowitz/Toscanini, Richter/Leinsdorf, Rubinstein/Coates, Schnabel/Boult, and Solomon/Dobrowen. But even that list barely begins to scratch the surface--the last time I looked, there were forty different Brahms Seconds in print--and I wonder just how much I'm likely to get out of any of the new versions that continue to turn up in my mailbox on an annoyingly regular basis.

It so happens that I have reached the time of life when you start wondering when you're going to die, and thinking about what you want to do between now and then. There is a great line about this in Cardinal Newman's Dream of Gerontius, the poem set to music so eloquently by Sir Edward Elgar: "And, ere afresh the ruin on me fall,/Use well the interval." Especially given the fact that we now live in an age when new music has finally gotten good again, I am less and less inclined to use that interval writing about new recordings of old warhorses. I'd much rather hear a piece of music I've never heard than a new recording of the Brandenburgs, no matter how good it is. This isn't to say I can't be surprised, even by baroque music--I still remember how much unexpected pleasure I got out of Gil Shaham's recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons--but there comes a time when the smart man starts following the odds, and in my experience, the odds are that there aren't going to be any more recordings of the Brandenburgs that I really, truly need to hear.

I'm not the only person who's made this discovery, of course: so have most of the smart A&R people at the major classical labels, who are grimly aware that new recordings of the standard repertoire have fallen victim to the law of diminishing returns. I talked not long ago to a young soprano who is very famous, very intelligent, and very realistic, and she told me matter-of-factly that given the current climate of opinion at her label, she didn't expect to record very many of her roles; instead, she intends to stick to imaginatively planned recital discs that have a chance of selling a respectable number of copies. I think she's onto something, and I wish more artists of her generation felt the same way.

I also wish more of today's big-name performers would start taking a closer look at the accessible, attractive music of our time. Until very recently, the surest way for a performer to make it into the history books was not to play old music better than anybody else, but to seek out and perform first-rate new music. I wouldn't be greatly surprised if some of Serge Koussevitzky's recordings are still being played a hundred years from now, but even if they aren't, he'll still be remembered for having premiered the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, a piece he didn't even bother to record commercially. Good performers are never as important as good composers. The best ones know it, and act accordingly.

As for me, I am drawing my personal line in the sand here and now: I do solemnly swear that I will never again review a new recording of the complete Brandenburg Concertos. If you want to get my attention, you'll have to think of another way, preferably not involving plastic explosives. Furthermore, I have every intention of regularly adding other warhorses to my do-not-resuscitate list, so if you want to know what I think of your upcoming recording of Eine kleine Nachtmusik, you'd better get on the stick. I'm sure this decision will cause me to miss out on something good--probably even several hundred somethings--but I don't expect to lose any sleep over it. If God had meant me to spend the middle of my journey writing comparison reviews of two dozen different versions of the Eroica, He would have given me more patience, a bigger apartment, and a longer life.

Posted March 22, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"I pulled myself up and told myself to stop these ridiculous thoughts, wondering why it is that we can never stop trying to analyze the motives of people who have no personal interest in us, in the vain hope of finding that perhaps they may have just a little after all."

Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

Posted March 22, 12:00 PM

March 21, 2006

TT: On the road again

I'm off tomorrow morning to Washington, where I'll be attending a meeting of the National Council on the Arts and looking at paintings at the Phillips Collection and the National Gallery. I may blog from the road, or I may not. Either way, I'll put up my regular Thursday and Friday drama-related postings, so don't despair.

See you soon.

Posted March 21, 12:00 PM

TT: Noises off

I rarely go to classical concerts. It's not that I love the music any less, but over time I've become increasingly alienated from the experience of concertgoing: the noisy audiences, the unimaginative programs, the feeling that not nearly enough is at stake. Now that I'm spending less time out on the town, I find that few classical-music events in New York City are capable of inspiring me to surrender a precious evening I could spend doing something else.

Hence it was unusual--extraordinary, really--that I decided to attend the first two installments of Ian Bostridge's ongoing five-concert series at Zankel Hall, the miniature concert hall downstairs from Carnegie Hall. What possessed me to do such a thing? For openers, I was curious about Bostridge, the Oxford grad turned highbrow tenor who in recent years has emerged as the ultimate critics' darling. I'd very much liked The English Songbook, his recorded recital of turn-of-the-century English art songs, and I wanted to hear how he sounded in the flesh. What's more, the Zankel series, in which Bostridge is singing an imaginatively chosen assortment of music in five widely varied settings, struck me as a kind of best-case scenario for the classical concert as a cultural institution. I was especially interested in the first two programs, an all-Britten evening and a program with string quartet that featured On Wenlock Edge, Ralph Vaughan Williams' cycle on poems by A.E. Housman, and La Bonne Chanson, Gabriel Fauré's exquisite musicalization of the poetry of Verlaine. So I booked press seats for both performances, wondering how they'd strike me.

I mostly enjoyed myself, though Bostridge himself is an odd cookie, a skinny, stork-like caricature of English youth who looks as though he'd wandered off the set of a stage version of Brideshead Revisited. His voice is smallish, reedy, and hopelessly unheroic, and though he's obviously in love with the words he sings, his English diction is fuzzy in the extreme. Yet the overt passion of his singing is hard to resist, and once I got past his surface mannerisms (this is an unsympathetic but funny send-up of his weirdly introverted on-stage demeanor) and accepted him on his own terms, I found his singing involving.

I won't go into detail about the performances themselves, save to say that this review is pretty much what I would have written had I been covering the first concert for a newspaper. Like I said, I had a good time--and yet I can't help but wonder whether a program less precisely suited to my tastes could have lured me into a concert hall, least of all one whose indifferent acoustics are blighted by the near-constant rumble of the New York subway. The trains roared by, the cell phones twittered, my neighbors coughed at regular intervals...but you know how it is. It's been a long time since I attended a classical-music concert given in the presence of a silent, fully attentive audience.

I'm writing these words immediately after having returned from a private concert held in the art-laden living room of a friend of mine who owns a wonderful old Bösendorfer grand. The performer was a serious amateur pianist who played two Beethoven sonatas, Opp. 109 and 111 (frivolous amateurs don't play late Beethoven). I sat close enough to the keyboard to read the music over his shoulder. The audience consisted of twenty people, most of whom knew one another more or less well, and after Op. 111 we retired to the host's dining room for a sit-down meal. That's the way to hear classical music.

Yes, my friend is wealthy, and no, I'm not. I don't even own a piano. But I do have a comfortable chair, a good-quality Nakamichi stereo, and some three thousand CDs, and whenever I please I can take one of them into the living room and listen to it, surrounded by the lithographs and etchings of the Teachout Museum. Had I cared to, I could have stayed home from Zankel Hall last week and spent the evening listening to a recording of On Wenlock Edge by Peter Pears, Benjamin Britten, and the Zorian String Quartet, or a performance of La Bonne Chanson by the great French baritone Charles Panzéra, who knew Fauré and sang for him innumerable times. Can Ian Bostridge compete with that? Yes--just. But not many other classical musicians can.

I still love going to ballet and opera and plays and jazz clubs, mainly because they offer me something I can't get at home. Hearing late Beethoven in my friend's living room was a different kind of experience, to be sure, but it, too, was unique and irreplaceable. Hearing a decently played program of oft-recorded standard repertoire in the company of noisy strangers is not. Why should I come hear you play Op. 111 in Alice Tully Hall when I can stay home and listen to Artur Schnabel playing it?

I should mention, by the way, that the friend I brought with me to Bostridge's recitals didn't know any of the pieces on either program, and her response to them was little short of ecstatic. I don't think she even heard the rumble of the subway. So much the better for her. It may simply be, after all, that I've heard too many concerts in my lifetime. Anthony Powell remarks somewhere in A Dance to the Music of Time that intensive womanizing leads to specialized tastes. But I think it goes deeper than that. In fact, I have a sneaking feeling that the institution of the classical-music concert as we know it has just about run its course--and I won't be sorry to see it go. It's way past time for a change.

UPDATE: A friend of mine heard Ian Bostridge last fall and blogged very interestingly about the experience.

See also Alex Ross' excellent New Yorker piece about Bostridge and Britten.

Posted March 21, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"She's the sort of woman who lives for others--you can always tell the others by their hunted expression."

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Posted March 21, 12:00 PM

March 20, 2006

TT: Seventh-inning stretch

On Saturday afternoon I drove out to Red Bank, New Jersey, to see Two River Theater Company's new production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and on the way home I listened to Donald Fagen's Morph the Cat. The juxtaposition was unplanned--I was so busy last week that the car ride was the first chance I had to listen to Fagen's new solo album--but like so many things in life, it ended up being fortuitous.

Not only are Godot and Morph the Cat both about death, but they take a similarly jaunty attitude toward what W.C. Fields called "the fellow in the bright nightgown," a euphemism that inspired Fagen to write one of his most disquieting songs:

Ten milligrams of Chronax
Will whip you back through time
Past Hebrew kings and furry things
To the birth of humankind
I shared in all of nature's secrets
But when I finally came around
I'm sittin' on the rug gettin' a victory hug
From the fella in the Brite Nitegown

Having recently gotten a close look at the same fellow, I found the one-two punch of Godot and Morph the Cat a bit much for one evening. True, the vaudevillian banter of Vladimir and Estragon is not only witty but can also be invigorating, even inspiring, if you're in the right mood, and I've loved Fagen's music for longer than some of you have been alive. On the other hand, we have it on the best authority that human kind/Cannot bear very much reality, and I'd had enough for the weekend by the time I got home.

So what did I do? I got up first thing Sunday morning and proceeded to write a three-thousand-word essay for Commentary on Dinu Lipatti, the great Romanian pianist who died of Hodgkin's disease in 1950 at the age of thirty-three. Smart move, huh? To be sure, I got to spend the day listening to some of the most beautiful piano playing on record (I especially like the performance of Chopin's Barcarolle on this CD). Still, it was starting to seem as if I were being stalked by the fellow in the bright nightgown.

How do you get your mind off the inevitable? By doing something completely different, I suppose, which may well have been a part of what Mark Morris had in mind when he made his conducting debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the other day. The Mark Morris Dance Group is currently celebrating its twenty-fifth season, and BAM turned itself inside out to mark the occasion. Among other things, Morris popped up in the orchestra pit to lead a chorus and chamber orchestra in the score to Gloria, a wonderful dance he made in 1981 to Vivaldi's Gloria.

While Morris is not the first choreographer to have tried his hand at conducting--George Balanchine used to do it from time to time--I can't think of anyone else alive today who would have been capable of pulling off such a feat. Nor was it a mere stunt: he used a baton and a score, mouthed the Latin words for the benefit of the singers, and controlled the performance with the unflappable assurance of an old pro. (I should know, by the way. Not only was I sitting in an aisle seat with a clear sightline all the way to the pit, but I once played bass in a performance of the Vivaldi Gloria, and I've even done a certain amount of choral conducting myself.)

It occurs to me that I might possibly have had a little something to do with Morris' decision to take up the baton. I wrote a New York Times profile of him six years ago in which I paid special attention to his musicality (it's in the Teachout Reader). I spent quite a bit of time watching him work in the course of writing the piece, and after seeing him rehearse a small group of musicians, I told him that I thought he ought to give serious thought to trying his hand at conducting. It happened that a friend of mine was working at the time as the artistic advisor to a big-city symphony orchestra, and I suggested to my friend that he nudge the management into inviting Morris to lead the orchestra in a concert. Nothing came of it, but when I heard that Morris was going to conduct a performance of Gloria, I couldn't help but wonder whether my not-so-casual suggestion had finally borne fruit.

I mention all this because Morris is about to turn fifty. When you cross the fiftieth meridian, as I did last month, you're more than likely to feel the need for some kind of change, especially if your life has been running fairly smoothly of late. Some people get divorced, others buy an age-inappropriate car. Mark Morris took up conducting, which strikes me as an ingenious and productive response to the stealthy approach of the Distinguished Thing. Me, I called 911 three months ago and checked myself into the nearest hospital, which wasn't nearly as much fun as conducting Vivaldi's Gloria but at least had the advantage of making me feel a whole lot better about turning fifty than I might have otherwise.

And now what? I painted my first painting a couple of weeks ago, and it was so much fun that I'm itching to do it again. On the other hand, it isn't very likely that I'll be showing at a gallery any time soon, and though there's much to be said for fun, I have a feeling that it'll take something more all-consuming to distract me from He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. But I'm damned if I know what it might be, so instead of sitting around the apartment brooding, I finished writing my essay about Dinu Lipatti, strolled around the corner to the gym, and spent a sweaty hour on the rowing machine, listening to Morph the Cat as I kicked valiantly against the pricks.

I used to smile when I saw middle-aged people jogging down the street. Now I know better. In the wise words of Anthony Powell, "Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one's dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction." Except, of course, the direction in which we all advance throughout every minute of every day we spend above ground. At least for the present, I don't care to travel that road any faster than I can help.

Posted March 20, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more."

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Posted March 20, 12:00 PM

March 17, 2006

TT: Cash poor

Friday is here, and I'm waxing wroth in my Friday Wall Street Journal drama column. Neither Ring of Fire nor Entertaining Mr. Sloane pleased me:

And you thought "Lennon" was lousy! Rarely have I been so comprehensively irked by a Broadway show as I was by the latest entry in the jukebox-musical sweepstakes, "Ring of Fire: The Johnny Cash Musical Show." Anyone who loves Cash's music should stay as far away as possible from this 38-song, two-and-a-half-hour tinselthon, which fills the Ethel Barrymore Theatre with the sour smell of bogusness....

Joe Orton's "Entertaining Mr. Sloane" is a black comedy of sexual manners that has lost nothing of its ruthless immediacy in the four decades since its premiere. If anything, Orton's kinky subject matter is more accessible now than it was in 1965, when the first Broadway production closed after just 13 performances. Like most comedies, all "Entertaining Mr. Sloane" needs to make its effect is to be played absolutely straight. Instead, Scott Ellis, the director, has chosen to play it for laughs, encouraging his cast to give the kind of exaggerated, self-conscious performances against which Orton warned. "Unless it's real," he said, "it won't be funny." It isn't--and it's not....

No link, so kindly shell out your weekly dollar at your neighborhood newsstand to read the whole thing. Alternatively, get ambitious and go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with immediate access to the full text of my review, along with plenty of additional art-related coverage (including the Pulitzer-winning film reviews of my eminent colleague Joe Morgenstern, which I recommend wholeheartedly).

Posted March 17, 12:00 PM

TT: Podcasting the Philharmonic

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

Where and when did you last hear the New York Philharmonic? If you don't live in New York City, the answer is most likely, "On an old record." Like most American orchestras, the Philharmonic, aided and abetted by the American Federation of Musicians, priced itself out of the major-label recording business in the '70s, and since then has made only occasional appearances on CD. And what about radio? The Philharmonic's broadcasts used to bring it to every corner of the country. (It was while listening to a Sunday matinee on CBS that many Americans first learned that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.) But traditional classical radio is well on the way to becoming obsolete. In Kentucky, for instance, only one station airs "The New York Philharmonic This Week," the orchestra's long-running series.

Does this mean that the orchestra of Leonard Bernstein and Arturo Toscanini is doomed to become a regional ensemble, known primarily to those who attend its Lincoln Center concerts? Not necessarily. You can also hear the Philharmonic on the Web by going to nyphil.org, where the orchestra's most recent broadcasts are available in streaming audio--but you can only listen to the last program, and you can't download it to your computer to hear at your leisure....

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

Posted March 17, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"If you feel like asking me anything about my 'works' please do--the less great are probably far more explicit than the great, so it wouldn't be like asking Mary McCarthy. On the other hand it is often better not to know things. I liked a poem of yours in the Listener some weeks ago--one rather puzzling line, but poets are not to be asked to explain why and how."

Barbara Pym, letter to Philip Larkin (February 25, 1962)

Posted March 17, 12:00 PM

TT: Gold mine

Broadway: The Golden Age, Rick McKay's wonderful documentary about the greatest days of the Great White Way, has suddenly become a super-hot public-TV pledge-week item. New York's WNET showed it last Sunday opposite the season premiere of The Sopranos, and their phone bank went wild. Now they're planning to show it three more times, on Saturday at ten p.m. and midnight and next Monday at two a.m. (plus two additional showings in April). Other stations have been making the same discovery, and so there'll be showings of Broadway: The Golden Age all across the country this weekend.

Here's part of what I wrote about Broadway: The Golden Age in The Wall Street Journal last year:

Mr. McKay knows when to ease back on the throttle and simply let his subjects talk. And talk they do, often amusingly and always movingly, about what it was like to work alongside such near-forgotten giants as Laurette Taylor (who is seen in her Hollywood screen test, the only sound film she ever made) and Kim Stanley (where on earth did Mr. McKay dredge up what looks like a kinescope of a live performance of "Bus Stop"?). You'll weep--I did--to hear them share their fond memories of crummy apartments, Automat meals and big breaks....

For a complete listing of upcoming TV showings of Broadway: The Golden Age, go here.

Posted March 17, 1:40 AM

March 16, 2006

TT: AWOL

My beautiful new iBook has been suffering from a mysterious complaint, so I called the wonder-working women of Ms Mac, who took it away for a night and brought it back it at noon today, better than new. As a result, though, a whole day went by during which I was unable to blog, read my e-mail, surf the Web, or do any of the things to which I normally devote so much of my waking life. Instead, I curled up on the couch with a short stack of Barbara Pym novels and spent Wednesday afternoon reading for pleasure. When not reading, I looked at the art on the walls. I didn't even listen to music! In the evening I took a cab up to Harlem and dined on pulled pork and smoked sausage at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. Then I returned home, called my mother, watched a little TV, and went to bed early, content with the world.

I had a perfectly lovely time, but by the time Thursday rolled around I was starting to get a little itchy, and I confess to having been slightly relieved when Ms Mac returned my computer and I plugged myself back into the world. It's one thing to take a day off by prior arrangement, another to have it thrust upon you. At any rate, I'm now back in business, chipping away at my accumulated e-mail and already feeling slightly wistful as my impromptu holiday recedes in the rear-view mirror. It was nice whle it lasted....

Posted March 16, 12:59 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 and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
- Bridge & Tunnel* (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 9)
- Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content)
- Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter and 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 subject matter, 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, reviewed here, closes Apr. 8)
- Bernarda Alba (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes April 9)
- Defiance (drama, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes May 7)
- I Love You Because (musical, R, sexual content, reviewed here)
- The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here, closes April 9 and moves to Broadway April 18)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

Posted March 16, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"The way one betrays one's old loves--getting the new one to read Trivia or Matthew Arnold, going to the same churchyard. When we are older there seems no new approach left. The disillusionment of finding out that something (say Trivia) has been his thing with someone else."

Barbara Pym, undated notebook entry (c. 1949)

Posted March 16, 12:00 PM

TT: How well do you know me?

I found this questionnaire in my e-mailbox earlier today and thought it might be fun to answer it in public:

- What time did you get up this morning? Eight a.m.

- Diamonds or pearls? No preference.

- What was the last film you saw at the cinema? Believe it or not, Capote.

- What is your favorite TV show? I really don't have one, though I've been enjoying the reruns of The Equalizer currently playing on Sleuth TV.

- What did you have for breakfast? Grape-Nuts and skim milk, with a few raisins thrown in.

- What is your middle name? Alan.

- What is your favorite cuisine?, Er, yikes, that's a tough one! Maybe sushi?

- What food do you dislike? Blue cheese.

- What is your favorite potato chip? Salt and vinegar, mmmmm.

- What is your favorite CD at the moment? Rosanne Cash's Black Cadillac.

- What kind of car do you drive? I don't have one.

- Favorite sandwich? Grilled ham (smoked salmon is a very close second, though).

- What characteristics do you despise? Thoughtlessness.

- What are your favorite clothes? I don't think much about clothes and don't have any strong preferences.

- If you could go anywhere in the world on vacation, where would you go? Bologna, to see the Museo Morandi.

- What color is your bathroom? Yellow and cornflower blue.

- Favorite brand of clothing? I don't have one.

- Where would you want to retire to? I hope never to retire.

- Favorite time of day? The blue hour.

- Where were you born? Cape Girardeau, Mo.

- Favorite sport to watch? Hockey, with Our Girl.

- Who do you least expect to send this back? Not applicable.

- Who will be the first to respond? Ditto.

- Coke or Pepsi? I like them equally.

- Are you a morning person or night owl? Night owl.

- Any new and exciting news you'd like to share with everyone? Nothing I'm inclined to share just yet.

- What did you want to be when you were little? A fireman.

- What is a favorite childhood memory? Spending holidays with my aunts, uncles, and cousins out in the country.

- What are the different jobs you have had in your life? Musical-instrument repairman, bank teller, jazz musician, library clerk, editor, writer.

- Nicknames? None in current use (I've been going by "Terry" for so long that I don't think of it as a nickname).

- Any piercings? Lord, no.

- Eye color? Brown.

- Ever been to Africa? No.

- Ever been toilet papering? No.

- Been in a car accident? No.

- Favorite day of the week? As a friend of mine likes to say, every day above ground is a good day.

- Favorite restaurant? Good Enough to Eat, of course!

- Favorite flower? I'm not fussy.

- Favorite ice cream? Alas, I'm off ice cream these days.

- Favorite fast food restaurant? Taco Bell.

- Which store would you choose to max out your credit card? Sotheby's.

- Bedtime? These days, 12:30 or so.

- Who are you most curious about their responses to this questionnaire? Our Girl, naturally.

- Last person(s) you went to dinner with? Hilary, Corbin, and Henry.

- What are you listening to right now? The traffic on 82nd Street.

- What is your favorite color? I haven't one.

- How many tattoos do you have? None.

- Who was the last e-mail you got before this one? I can't remember--I was sifting through a whole day's worth of accumulated e-mail, most of it junk, when I found this questionnaire.

- How many people are you sending this e-mail to? Thousands and thousands!

- What time did you finish this e-mail? One-thirty-five p.m.

Posted March 16, 1:35 AM

March 15, 2006

TT: La perfectly swell

It seems I stirred up a considerable fuss with the recent Wall Street Journal column in which I explained why I'd never been crazy about the singing of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. You may be surprised to hear, incidentally, that the fuss came from both directions--I even received an e-mail from a very prominent cabaret singer thanking me for "telling the truth" about Ella and Sarah.

Among the other people from whom I heard was a reader in search of enlightenment:

Very interesting column! I'm not sure I agree about Sarah Vaughan, but I can see right away where you are coming from. I'm sure you are getting a lot of comments about putting Fred Astaire in a list of favorites in an article where you take two legends to task. But again, I take the point. I've always sort of ignored him as someone who "sang like an actor," but your spin makes me see that in a different light.

Astaire is well represented on iTunes. Any recommendations?

This e-mail surprised me, since most of us middle-aged pop-song connnoisseurs take Astaire's vocal excellence so completely for granted that it would never occur to us how anyone could have overlooked his singing. To be sure, he was modest to a fault, and never admitted to having been anything more than a dancer who sang on the side. "He had put together, at his home, a film library of all his dance numbers," André Previn recalls, "but all of them had been shorn of the vocal that precedes the dances. He seemed to be oblivious of the fact that he was many musicians' favorite singer, or if he knew it, he was embarrassed by that fact." To name two, he was the preferred interpreter of Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, a distinction so mind-boggling that mere mortals should bow down humbly before it.

What was it that made Astaire's singing so memorable? His voice was small and reedy, his expressive range seemingly narrow--yet he was equal to the widely varied demands of such passionate songs as "Night and Day" and "One for My Baby," both of which he introduced (the first on Broadway, the second in a film). Perhaps the best way to put it is that he had an uncanny knack for knowing what not to do. If you'll pardon my saying so, Astaire never put a foot wrong: he sang a tune the way it was written, he "read" a lyric with elegant simplicity, and he brought to every song in his huge repertoire the same rhythmic lightness and lift with which he sailed across a dance floor. Though never a jazz singer, he swung with the best of them, and was wholly comfortable in the company of such heavy hitters as Count Basie and Oscar Peterson.

Don't take my word for it, though. In addition to recording dozens of now-standard songs for the soundtracks of his films and TV specials, many of which have been collected on Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers at RKO (Rhino, two CDs), Astaire also made a considerable number of commercial recordings, nearly all of which show him off to splendid effect. Top Hat, White Tie and Tails (ASV Living Era, two CDs) contains decent-sounding transfers of most of the best of his 78s, while Fred Astaire's Finest Hour (Verve) offers a nice selection of the recordings he made with jazz musicians in the Fifties.

iTunes carries Fred Astaire's Finest Hour and some of his other recordings, early and late. If you've only heard the soundtracks of his films, I suggest you start by downloading the nonchalant 1952 performance of "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails" included on Fred Astaire's Finest Hour, which is accompanied by Oscar Peterson, Charlie Shavers, Flip Phillips, Barney Kessel, Ray Brown, and Alvin Stoller. (Whew!) I won't tell you what it is, but there's a neat little surprise at the end of the record that'll put the biggest possible smile on your face.

Posted March 15, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

Isolated in love as in a dark wood,
Our two hearts, breathing their peaceful tenderness,
Will be two nightingales singing in the eventide.

Without anxiety as to what Fate holds in store for us,
We shall walk side by side,
Hand in hand, with the childlike soul

Of those whose mutual love is unalloyed--will it not be so?

Paul Verlaine, "N'est-ce pas?" (trans. Roger Nichols)

Posted March 15, 12:00 PM

March 14, 2006

TT: Making art on company time

What do artists do all day? Many of them spend their working hours alone, sitting at a desk or standing at an easel and wrestling with their imaginations. But others don't have that luxury. If you run a ballet company, for instance, you do your creating in a crowded studio--and you spend most of the day acting more like a CEO than a creative artist.

I went down to Raleigh two weeks ago to pay a visit to Carolina Ballet (and hang out with Ms. Pratie Place). I was there to see Tempest Fantasy, a new ballet by Robert Weiss, the company's artistic director set to Paul Moravec's Pulitzer-winning composition of the same name. In between performances, I spent a day following Weiss around. I'd expected to spend most of it watching the company rehearse. Instead, I got my nose rubbed in the exhausting realities of a choreographer's life.

Weiss is both artistic director and chief executive officer of Carolina Ballet. Though he choreographs roughly half of the ballets danced by the company, the bulk of his time is given over to far less elevated tasks. Here's some of what I saw him do that day:

- He paid a visit to company class, where he watched as two out-of-town dancers looking for work were put through their pliés by Debra Austin and Marin Boieru, the resident ballet masters.

- He huddled with the company's production staff, watching a fuzzy videotape of one of his old ballets to see whether part of the scenery could be cannibalized and recycled for an upcoming production of Cinderella. (Like most dance companies, Carolina Ballet has to pinch pennies, and a big part of Weiss' job is to do so as invisibly as possible.)

- He listened to a recording of a piece of music called Endymion's Sleep that he was thinking of using as the score for a pas de deux to be premiered next month. (It got thumbs up.)

- He inspected a preliminary version of a costume designed for the ballerina who will dance in that pas de deux.

- He took a couple of dozen phone calls, most of them variously urgent (the dancers' contracts were coming up for renewal) and requiring on-the-spot decision-making.

In between calls, Weiss said to me, "Hey, want to watch me make a ballet?" Then he charged out of his office and went barreling down the hall to the main rehearsal studio, where a dozen dancers and a pianist were waiting for him. Without even bothering to change his shoes, he plunged into the finale to a dance version of Francis Poulenc's Gloria that will be premiered on April 6. "It's kind of tense," he told me later. "I mean, there you are in the middle of a roomful of dancers, tapping their feet and waiting for you. You can't just stand there and wring your hands. Even if you don't know what you're going to do next, you have to do something, right or wrong." So instead of waiting prayerfully for inspiration to descend from above, he simply demonstrated the steps he wanted, phrase by phrase, and the dancers in turn repeated his movements. Demonstrate, repeat, correct, polish, repeat, go on to the next phrase: That's how ballets are made. An hour later, another minute and 30 seconds' worth of Gloria was finished.

All this left no time for lunch, so we drove to Weiss' house at day's end to grab a sandwich before going to the A.J. Fletcher Opera House in downtown Raleigh, where Tempest Fantasy was being performed that evening as part of a bill of Shakespeare-themed ballets. "Now you know what it's really like around here," he said as we sat down to eat. "I spend 80% of my time doing the things that make it possible for me to spend the other 20% making new dances. I wish it were the other way around, or even 50-50. But that's the way it is." Then his cell phone rang. "Excuse me," he said. "I've got to take this."

"If you like hot dogs," the saying goes, "stay out of the sausage factory." As Weiss and his stage manager discussed the ramifications of a ballerina's freshly broken finger, I thought of a remark made by George Balanchine, who spent the second half of his life running New York City Ballet, making immortal masterpieces in between solving unglamorous crises. "Choreography, finally, becomes a profession," he said. "In making ballets, you cannot sit and wait for the Muse. Union time hardly allows it, anyhow."

I didn't fully understand what Balanchine meant until I spent a day in Robert Weiss' ballet factory. Yes, "Tempest Fantasy" was gorgeous, a magical piece of storytelling accompanied by one of the finest new pieces of chamber music I've heard in years. But as I watched Shakespeare's tale unfolding with such seeming effortlessness, I kept thinking of the drudgery it took to get those dancers on stage and set them in motion.

Whatever you do for a living, trust me--it's easier.

Posted March 14, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Then let us love one another and laugh. Time passes, and we shall soon laugh no longer--and meanwhile common living is a burden, and earnest men are at siege upon us all around. Let us suffer absurdities, for that is only to suffer one another."

Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome (courtesy of Michael C. Magree)

Posted March 14, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Back to school

My dialogue with Kenneth Burns about Curtis Sittenfeld's novel Prep continues here.

Howdy Kenneth,

I loved the scene you mentioned in which Lee refuses to read aloud in class her essay revealing that her father runs a mattress store. And I think it is in scenes like this that Sittenfeld's novel is discernible as a bona fide adult novel, despite its surface similarities to many a YA book, and as a novel depicting a social reality rather than the sort of idealized world in which simply "being yourself" is a sure road to rewards--the sort of world endemic, but far from limited, to YA. The reader, I submit, knows in her heart of hearts that Lee has sized up her peers' class prejudices acutely and that on some crucial level she is right to suppress the knowledge of her father's occupation. Not because it is shameful, obviously, but because in the setting in which she needs to survive, it will only make things harder. In a lesser novel, Lee's choice would feel like a disappointment and defeat; in this bracingly disillusioned one, it made me feel relieved. Which is not to say it wasn't heartbreaking, too.

As fascinated and moved as I was by Lee's travails, I wouldn't exactly call this a case of identification. It's true--since you have egged me on to get personal--that I switched from public to private school for tenth to twelfth grades and that there was some associated culture shock and loneliness. But my school wasn't Ault (though quite fancy, it was far from the east coast and mostly a day school) and I wasn't Lee. What I identified with in the book had more to do with form than with content--it wasn't the content of Lee's experience that catapulted me back to those good/bad old days, but Sittenfeld's formal approach of accreting an overwhelming multitude of mundane and ephemeral details to represent a way of taking in the world when one is unsure where one belongs in it (doubly for Lee, both by virtue of being a teenager and by virtue of being a fish out of water socially): observing and trying to properly interpret everything in one's path, looking for clues that might chip away at the incomprehensibility of one's surroundings. I think it's pretty amazing that Sittenfeld was able to approximate that perceptual mode so uncannily while not boring us to tears with the details themselves--quite the contrary.

My parting question to you, should you choose to accept it, is this: what did you think of the ready-made structure of the book, which turns each season of Lee's career at Ault into a chapter? Too facile or true to the way teenagers emplot their lives?

xo

OGIC

Posted March 14, 1:19 AM

March 13, 2006

TT: Gearing up

It's time to start blogging again--or at least it would be if I hadn't been too busy of late to sit down and write. In addition to seeing Ring of Fire, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, and Grey Gardens, I also went to Zankel Hall to hear Ian Bostridge, caught Mark Morris' conducting debut in Brooklyn, got to DC Moore Gallery just in time for the last day of their Milton Avery-Jacob Lawrence show, and (drumroll) bought a Marsden Hartley lithograph at auction last Monday, which is now hanging proudly in the Teachout Museum.

Whew, huh? Sounds like the Bad Old Me, right? Well, it was, sort of, except that last week's whirlwhind of art-related activity was (A) the first time I've been anywhere near that busy since I got out of the hospital in December and (B) a one-time deviation from my new, saner lifestyle. I slammed on the brakes as soon as I got home from the theater last night, and I intend to take it nice and slow for the rest of the month.

Having done all those cool things last week, I'll be spending this week and next blogging about them. No rush--I have plenty of stories to tell. For the moment, I'll start by making a major announcement: I painted my very first painting two weeks ago! Here it is, courtesy of Ms. Pratie Place, who talked me into it. (The photo posted on her site is wrong side up, by the way: the left-hand edge of the painting should be on top.) A homely thing, but mine own, and I had great fun doing it....

And now, if you'll pardon me, I've got a drama column to write. See you tomorrow.

Posted March 13, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"I need to feel a love and immediate contact with a picture. I do not like to be lectured by it or instructed to work out a puzzle. Why shouldn't art please immediately?"

Peter Pears (quoted in Christopher Headington, Peter Pears: A Biography)

Posted March 13, 12:00 PM

March 10, 2006

TT: All about Cate

It's Friday, and I'm strictly off Broadway in this week's Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. On tap are BAM Harvey's Hedda Gabler, starring Cate Blanchett, and Lincoln Center's Bernarda Alba, starring Phylicia Rashad:

Everyone who goes to the movies knows how good Cate Blanchett is, which is why the Australian production of "Hedda Gabler" in which she's currently touring is such a hot ticket. But acting in front of an audience is different from acting in front of a camera, and this was her U.S. stage debut. So how'd she do? Stupendously well--except that she reminded me of an old-time movie star. One particular old-time movie star, in fact: Bette Davis.

That's not a knock. Davis was matchless in the right kind of part, and "Hedda Gabler" might well have been her cup of wormwood, especially in the tightened-up, lightened-up "adaptation" of Henrik Ibsen's 1890 play by Andrew Upton (Ms. Blanchett's husband) that the Sydney Theatre Company has brought to Brooklyn....

Speaking of scary women, there's another show in town that you should rush to see: "Bernarda Alba," Michael John LaChiusa's musical version of the 1936 play by Federico García Lorca, which opened Monday at Lincoln Center, just downstairs from Adam Guettel's "The Light in the Piazza." Like Mr. Guettel, Mr. LaChiusa specializes in musical-theater works with the expressive weight of operas that he insists for some inscrutable reason on calling "musicals." Whatever they are, they're theatrical dynamite, and "Bernarda Alba," in which Phylicia Rashad plays the tyrannical mother of a houseful of sexually frustrated young Spanish ladies, is no exception....

No link, not even with a movie star! Buy the paper already. Or, better yet, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with immediate access to the complete text of my review (there's a whole lot more of it), plus plenty of additional art-related coverage.

Posted March 10, 12:00 PM

TT: A jazz Concierto

I'll be in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, though not with my biweekly column (that's next Saturday). Instead, I've contributed the latest installment to "Masterpieces," the Journal's regular feature about important works of art. This time around I've written about one of my favorite jazz albums, Jim Hall's Concierto, whose title track is a jazz version of Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez that also features Chet Baker and Paul Desmond.

Here's a little taste:

Irreverent jazz musicians have been swinging the classics for almost as long as jazz itself has existed. Jelly Roll Morton was playing a stomping version of the "Miserere" from Verdi's "Il Trovatore" in the whorehouses of New Orleans a century ago. Since then the practice of turning familiar pieces of classical music into jazz instrumentals has acquired an impeccable pedigree extending from Art Tatum's jaunty reworking of Dvorak's "Humoresque" all the way to John Lewis' silvery bebop riffs on Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier." But of the many classical works to receive the jazz treatment, the one that continues to be updated most often--and most successfully--is a guitar concerto by a blind Spanish composer who sought to portray in music his anguish over the suffering of his sick wife....

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

Posted March 10, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"The law is not designed to make us honorable, only bearable."

Marie C. Malaro, Museum Governance

Posted March 10, 12:00 PM

March 9, 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 and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
- Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 9)
- Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content)
- Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter and 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)
- The Pajama Game (musical, G, reviewed here, closes June 18)
- Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult subject matter, 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, reviewed here, closes Apr. 8)
- Defiance (drama, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, extended through May 7)
- I Love You Because (musical, R, sexual content, reviewed here)
- The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here, closes April 9 and moves to Broadway April 18)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
- The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Saturday)

Posted March 09, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.

Philip Larkin, "Dockery and Son "

Posted March 09, 12:00 PM

OGIC: More book club

The Prep correspondence continues apace! Over here, Kenneth has posted a response to my first post. More to come tonight or tomorrow in this very space.

Posted March 09, 9:52 AM

March 8, 2006

TT: Almanac

"I suppose there is a lot of fun to be had from reading the quotations on any dust-jacket more than five years old, simply because of reviewers' besetting vice, that of taking, or appearing to take, their contemporaries too seriously."

Philip Larkin, "Lies, Fleas, and Gullible Mayflies"

Posted March 08, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Meet the scenery

It's a far cry from the Teachout Museum, let me tell you, but a picture of this Constable picture, safekept from an otherwise discarded 2002 wall calendar, is what I look at when I'm at my desk. An oil sketch that I saw in person when I was in London more years ago now than I care to believe, "A Lane in Flatford" mesmerizes me even in this humble form. I'm not sure how well you can make it out in the web reproduction, but the detail I'm obsessed with is the leftmost cloud, which meets the tree to its left oddly flush. The paint seems most heavily applied here, and the cloud's white, thick brightness arrests my eye--every day--like a tear in the canvas. This bold cloud is the most aggressive, crispest detail in the picture, but it stops short of the rather fuzzy, sweet tree, meeting it halfway. The question of which is background and which foreground seems strangely, disarmingly unresolved. The picture's verisimilitude breaks down a little.

Honestly, I stare at this picture intermittently for hours most days, but before tonight I couldn't have told you what was in it besides that cloud and treetop. There are figures? A lane? A fence? Huh. So that must be where the painting gets its title. Still, to me, it's a picture of a cloud, and of painting.

Posted March 08, 1:54 AM

OGIC: Sweeter sixteen

The Morning News has kicked off their second annual Tournament of Books, with guest judges including Maud, Mark, Dale Peck, and Brigid Hughes, and entrants ranging from Mary Gaitskill to Kazuo Ishiguro to Zadie Smith. Should be fun, especially for those of us who are immune to the charms of March madness. A tournament for the rest of us, with brackets and everything.

And yet, until this year, some essential element seemed to be missing from the basketball tourney's bookish equivalent...I could never quite put my finger on just what it was.... Oh yeah. Betting.

Well, it's a pale imitation no more--the ever resourceful and creative (not to mention hometown) Coudal Partners have handicapped the books and are taking your bets now at $10 a pop, with all proceeds destined for a worthwhile charity that helps public schools. The prizes, natch, are books. Come to think of it, my forgoing a Janet Gretzky joke here is kind of a prize in its own right....

Posted March 08, 1:02 AM

March 7, 2006

TT: Almanac

"I think that when I began to write more characteristic poetry, I'd found how to make poems as readable as novels, if you see what I mean."

Philip Larkin, interviewed by Neil Powell (Tracks, Summer 1967)

Posted March 07, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Paperback Book club

Note: Over the next week or so, I will be corresponding with my friend Kenneth Burns--who leads a double online life here and here--about Curtis Sittenfeld's novel Prep, recently released in paperback. This is the first installment.

Dear Kenneth,

I was glad to hear that you were also a fan of Prep. Both of us have personal reasons for being interested in the book, and I trust we'll get around to discussing those eventually. To begin, though, I want to touch on what seemed to me the novel's strong points.

I thought the two main qualities that made the novel stand out were its refusal to idealize its protagonist, Lee, and its success at rendering both a problem character and a problem setting with such thick particularity. A few weeks back, Curtis Sittenfeld wrote in the New York Times Book Review about the hell she has taken from some readers for putting at the center of her novel a flawed and sometimes downright unappealing character. For me, this feature was crucial to the book's interest. The basic story Prep tells is of an encounter between strangers, the Ault School and Lee Fiora: the east coast bastion of privilege, and the interloper from the midwest whose romance with and skepticism toward it are both functions of her intense self-consciousness. As determining factors, Lee's psychology and Ault's social dynamic are held in exquisite balance. But the way I'll probably finally remember Prep is as a great portrait of self-consciousness--a form of psychological experience that can practically be honed to an art form by teenage girls (and probably boys, too, but neither Prep nor my own experience can speak to that).

Part of what I loved about Prep was its willingness to take this rawest form of self-consciousness seriously as a social and psychological phenomenon--by mercilessly anatomizing it. I think the novel is about as insightful on such matters as the late great television show Freaks and Geeks (I can't remember whether you were a fan), though it is less comic and much harder on its protagonist. Here I'll pause to note what a fantastically page-turning read Prep is--I zoomed through it at warp speed--and how great the temptation therefore is to dismiss it as fluff. It's one of those books that I would put down only reluctantly and pick up again hungrily, as if it were a letter full of juicy gossip about everyone I've ever known. So the impulse is to dismiss it, and I think that snap judgment is sadly telling about our mistrust of certain kinds of pleasure in reading. (And by "us" I mean, roughly, anyone who ever used the phrase "literary fiction" in earnest, which I do close to daily.)

So Lee hides in the dormitory phone booth or reflects, "I believed then that if you had a good encounter with a person, it was best not to see them again for as long as possible lest you taint the previous interaction." I recognized this way of thinking; it's something I've thought before, but never very consciously. Because of the extremity of Lee's social circumstances and the almost surgical style Sittenfeld employs, the dissection Prep performs--both social and psychological--regularly unearths insights like this, bringing submerged modes of thinking to the surface.

So what did you like about the novel?

Yours,

OGIC

Posted March 07, 10:03 AM

March 6, 2006

TT: As others see us

Like I said, I'm taking a few days off from the blog, but if you want someone else's perspective on where I went and what I did last week, go here and here. I can vouch for the accuracy of this account (especially the part about barbecue).

'Scuse me while I disappear again. See you...er, later. Friday. Sometime. Whenever.

Posted March 06, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"There certainly is a cult of the mad these days: think of all the boys who've been in the bin--I don't understand it. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Hardy--it's the big, sane boys who get the medals. The object of writing is to show life as it is, and if you don't see it like that you're in trouble, not life. "

Philip Larkin, interviewed by John Haffenden (Manchester Guardian, Mar. 31, 1973)

Posted March 06, 12:00 PM

March 3, 2006

TT: No orchids for Ella and Sarah

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

After Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, the two most widely admired singers in the history of jazz are Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. They were officially canonized by inclusion in "The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz" along with Armstrong, Holiday and Bessie Smith, the only vocalists to be so honored. Their recordings, Fitzgerald's in particular, continue to this day to be sliced, diced, repackaged and reissued in box sets and best-of-the-best compilations. To publicly suggest that they might have been less than perfect is thus to pin a bull's-eye on your chest--but I don't much enjoy listening to either one of them, and never have.

In saying so, I know I'm going up against a wealth of highly credentialed contrary opinion....

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

Posted March 03, 12:01 PM

TT: A great week for theater

Friday has arrived, and though I'm elsewhere, Our Girl has kindly consented to post this week's Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. It's a double-barreled hallelujah for two new Off Broadway plays, John Patrick Shanley's Defiance and Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore:

I wouldn't have thought it possible, but John Patrick Shanley has followed up "Doubt," the best play of the 2004-05 season, with a new play of identical quality, performed to perfection by an equally fine cast.

"Defiance" is going to make a star out of Stephen Lang, whom I last saw in "Beyond Glory," his riveting one-man show about eight winners of the Medal of Honor. Alas, "Beyond Glory" hasn't played New York yet (I saw it in Chicago last fall). It belongs here, though, and I have no doubt that some smart producer will bring it to Broadway after seeing Mr. Lang burn up the stage in "Defiance." Here he plays Lt. Col. Morgan Littlefield, a hard-head