About Last Night: April 2006 Archives

TT: Fangs for nothing

Once again my drama column in today's Wall Street Journal is an extra-long triple-decker job. This week's shows are The Wedding Singer, Lestat, and The History Boys:

It's commodity week on Broadway, where two big-budget musicals with blue-chip pedigrees have just opened. "The Wedding Singer" is based on Adam Sandler's 1998 movie, which grossed $80 million in the U.S. alone. "Lestat" is a stage version of Anne Rice's best-selling "Vampire Chronicles" with songs by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Unless I miss my guess, one show will be a huge hit, the other a humiliating flop.

The hit is "The Wedding Singer," among the most ingenious and amusing musical adaptations of a Hollywood film ever to reach Broadway....

"Lestat" will surely go down in history as one of Broadway's costliest disasters. The only thing about it that's worth seeing is Derek McLane's super-spectacular set, which will go to waste unless somebody does something quick. My suggestion is that Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures, the producers of "Lestat," close the show this weekend, then hire Joss Whedon, the creator of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," to write a new musical using Mr. McLane's designs. Buffy on Broadway--now there's a concept....

The National Theatre of Great Britain has brought Alan Bennett's "The History Boys" to New York for a ten-week run, where it will doubtless send shivers down the spines of Anglophiles and snobs. Whether such folk are numerous enough to fill the Broadhurst Theatre all summer long remains to be seen, since Mr. Bennett hasn't had a Broadway hit since "Beyond the Fringe," which opened in 1962. For my part, I'm at a loss to say what I thought of "The History Boys." Never before has a play left me with feelings so mixed that I couldn't decide whether I liked it or not....

I wasn't quite persuaded, at least not on first viewing, that "The History Boys" is an effective indictment of the amoral sophistry I take to be Mr. Bennett's ultimate target. To be glibly critical of glibness is--well--glib.

No link, so buy the paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with immediate access to the full text of my review, plus lots of additional art-related coverage.

TT: Get a life--somewhere else

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

If you're an actor, New York is the perfect place to be a waiter. As anyone who lives here knows, the old joke is as true now as it ever was. Most New York artists do something else for a living, and wish they didn't. Back when I worked in an inner-city bank from nine to five and played jazz after hours, the term for an artist's rent-paying sideline was "day job." Now, according to a playwright I know, it's "slave job." Either way, it's no fun, and by most accounts it's getting tougher. "Creative Workers Count," a new study by the Freelancers Union that you can read by going to www.workingtoday.org, cites chapter and verse to prove the point....

It was, however, another passage in "Creative Workers Count" that made me sit up and think: "New York's high concentration of creative professionals relative to other metropolitan areas gives the city a distinct competitive advantage in creative industries. But recent trends indicate that this competitive advantage may soon be threatened as creative workers relocate to cities, such as Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis/St. Paul, that offer a lower cost of living and developing creative centers."

What's so bad about that?

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

TT: Almanac

"I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen."

Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet (Jan. 31, 1852)

TT: The lost language of candor

I hate spin. Really, really hate it, with an Orwellian passion. I bristle whenever I see it in print or hear it on TV. And I just saw a prime example of it in the New York Daily News gossip column, which is reporting that Jim Kelly, the managing editor of Time, is about to step down. Asked to comment, a Time spokeswoman replied, "Jim Kelly is very much in charge of charting the current and future course of Time magazine. Beyond that, we never comment on speculation regarding personnel matters."

When I see that kind of statement, I reach for my garrote. A simple No comment would have been fine--but no, the unnamed spokeswoman in question had to take the opportunity to slip in a little grease, couched in slickly anti-human phrases that might just as easily have been generated by a Spin Robot.

A moment ago I alluded to George Orwell, whose 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" (which you can read here, and should if you haven't already) is rlghtly regarded as the locus classicus of all discussions of modern euphemism. But I don't think Orwell's target, which was the corruption of language by political orthodoxy, is quite the same as mine. Here's the key paragraph of his essay:

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases--bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder--one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity....

Very good, and still very true. But the new kind of spin that enrages me is a different proposition altogether. It's not unconscious: it's wholly knowing, a deliberate attempt to use speech not for the purposes of communication but for the purposes of manipulation, to corrupt the whole process of human interaction by making no statement that is not agenda-driven. It's as if our culture had been taken over by lawyers--which, of course, it has. For modern spin is not so much pol-speak as lawyer-speak, with a dollop of Madison Avenue stirred in for bad measure. It's half Safety First (never admit anything, however insignificant, that could possibly be used against you in court) and half salesmanship (never pass up a chance, however gratuitous, to plug the product). When I hear official spokesmen emitting phrases like the ones I quoted above, I feel not as if I were watching a marionette, but as if they were trying to make me a marionette.

I've complained about this kind of thing before, on which occasion I quoted the greatest piece of unspin ever uttered by a public figure, General Joe Stilwell's statement to the press after Japanese troops forced his men to retreat from Burma to India: "I claim we took a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is as humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, and go back and retake it." No doubt I'll quote it again, and no doubt I'll do so, as before, in vain. Or maybe not. For I see no indication that lawyer-speak spin, endemic though it has become, is any more effective an instrument of public persuasion than the similarly synthetic taglines that Hollywood studios have been using for years to pitch their wares to the public. She was the first. This time it's war. Who gives a crap? Anybody who decides to spend ten bucks on a movie because he sees a phrase like that on a poster deserves to see that movie, preferably ten times a day until he dies.

Yes, I'm feeling grumpy. This is one of my hobby horses, though I don't make a habit of mounting it in public, and I promise not to do it again for a minimum of six months. But that doesn't mean I'm not bristling.

Posted April 28, 11:36 AM

April 27, 2006

TT: Just in case you were wondering

It's very nice to be blogging regularly again. And yes, I plan to keep it up. How about that?

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)
- Awake and Sing! (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes June 11)
- 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 Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here, now in previews for a Broadway reopening on May 3)
- 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:
- I Love You Because (musical, R, sexual content, reviewed here)
- Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
- A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop (one-woman show, PG, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sunday)

CLOSING SOON:
- Defiance (drama, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes June 4)

TT: Familiar faces

Carl Van Vechten is one of those fascinating minor characters who, like Zelig or Forrest Gump, was forever popping up in the damnedest places. At various times in his life (he died in 1964) he was a music critic, a dance critic, a novelist manqu�, a self-appointed publicist for the Harlem Renaissance, and--perhaps most lastingly--a self-taught photographer who specialized in celebrity portraits. (He was also gay, and his hitherto unknown homoerotic photos are about to be published for the first time.) He seems to have known everybody who was anybody, and if they were famous he took their pictures. The Library of Congress Web site has a pretty good online gallery of his portraits, many of which, like his 1936 study of Bessie Smith, remain among the best-remembered images of their subjects. Yet few art critics have had anything to say about his work save in passing, and though I know a reasonable amount about him--one of his portraits of H.L. Mencken is reproduced in The Skeptic--it wasn't until yesterday that I finally saw an exhibition of his photographs.

It happens that I recently had occasion to mention Van Vechten in the fourth chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong, so he was already on my mind when I heard that James Cummins Bookseller, an Upper East Side dealer in rare books, was putting on a show of Van Vechten portraits. I dropped in to take a look, and was--not to put too fine a point on it--dazzled.

"Carl Van Vechten Portraits" consists of sixty-four photographs, virtually all of them of artists whose names are known to this day, including James Baldwin, Marlon Brando, George M. Cohan, Aaron Copland, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Gielgud, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes, Sinclair Lewis, Joe Louis, Henri Matisse, Somerset Maugham, Joan Mir�, Laurence Olivier, Eugene O'Neill, Jerome Robbins, Gertrude Stein, Alfred Stieglitz, Virgil Thomson, Evelyn Waugh, and Orson Welles. (The show also features the same Mencken photo I used in The Skeptic.)

The catalogue contains an introduction by Rachel Cohen that includes this revealing passage:

And this, I think, is one of the nicest ways to see Van Vechten's photographs--as parties. At a party, one person leads to the next--in each individual photograph there is the constant sense of the social scene, almost as if the party is going on in another room and Van Vechten and the subject have just stepped in here for a minute so that they can make themselves heard. It's this quality that makes the collected body of work absolutely unlike that of any other photographer I know--it is a world of hundreds upon hundreds of relationships, of people who were neighbors and friends and artistic collaborators, who signed one another's petitions, and smashed furniture at one another's parties and cheered for one another's achievements. You could begin with almost any photograph in this catalogue, or in the whole exhibition, and trace your way through the lives of almost everyone included.

Nice--and yet you don't come away with the impression that Van Vechten was an especially serious artist, which I think is just about fair enough. His portraits lack both the personal stamp and the ultimate intensity of high photographic art. I don't know that I'd be likely to recognize any of the ones I didn't already know as "Van Vechtens" simply by looking. He was no more (and no less) than a gifted amateur with a good eye and access to a lot of very famous people. Yet there is something, maybe even quite a bit, to be said about the comparative stylistic anonymity of his approach. What you see when you look at his 1940 portrait of Charles Laughton is the man himself, tortured and unsure, with no glossy overlay of self to confuse the issue. What you see when you look at, say, Irving Penn's wonderful 1947 double portrait of George Jean Nathan and H.L. Mencken is--well--Irving Penn.

I suspect it makes more sense, then, to approach Carl Van Vechten's portraits as historical documents rather than art objects. But however you choose to see them, they're definitely worth seeing.

Alas, Van Vechten seems never to have photographed Louis Armstrong, which is too bad: I would have loved to include one of his portraits in Hotter Than That. As I was leaving the building, though, I walked past the Margo Feiden Galleries, in whose show window I saw a gorgeous Al Hirschfeld caricature of Satchmo. It was exactly the kind of serendipitous moment that New York offers in daily profusion--the reason why, in spite of everything, I live here and wouldn't dream of leaving.

* * *

"Carl Van Vechten Portaits" is up at James Cummins Bookseller, 699 Madison Avenue, through Saturday. For more information, go here.

TT: Almanac

"But like all well-bred individuals, and unlike human anarchists, the cat seldom interferes with other people's rights. His intelligence keeps him from doing many of the fool things that complicate life. Cats never write operas and they never attend them. They never sign papers, or pay taxes, or vote for president. An injunction will have no power whatever over a cat. A cat, of course, would not only refuse to obey any amendment whatever to any constitution, he would refuse to obey the constitution itself."

Carl Van Vechten, The Tiger in the House

April 26, 2006

TT: One life to live, many to tell

A reader writes:

I was disappointed, to say the least, when I read a while back that the title of your new book would be Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Why, you say? Do I hate subtitles? Do I hate Louis Armstrong?

No, it's because you're using that ridiculous phrase A Life of -----. When I first saw that in a subtitle a few years ago, in something like (to make up a book), America's Poet: A Life of Robert Frost, I immediately thought, what a silly use of language--did the man have several lives? No, he had one. Someone's writing about it, therefore it should be The Life of Robert Frost.

Now, Armstrong may have done enough with his to fill up two or three normal lives, but he, too, had only one. So I say it should be Hotter Than That: The Life of Louis Armstrong.

And yes, I think I know how it must have started. When my make-believe Frost book was submitted to its editor, he, in a fit of political correctness, said, "Oh, we can't use that title. 'Life' means biography in the literary world. Someone might think we're saying that this book is the biography of Frost--the one, the only, the best. No, no, no, we can't do that, it might hurt someone's feelings." And silliness won another small victory.

I know that it's currently a popular way to phrase it, but that doesn't make it right (and thank God, many authors are still using The Life of -----, for example, John Szwed's excellent So What: The Life of Miles Davis). "Life," in the title of a biography, means just that, someone's life, the time they spent on earth. It doesn't mean "biography," at least not in the real world.

So I'm begging you, man, change it back to the phrase that's worked fine for hundreds of years--it's not too late! Strike a blow for common sense!

Alas, my subtitle has what I regard as an impeccable and dispositive precedent, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, written by yours truly. I explained in the preface why I gave it that name: "This is a life of Mencken, not the life. I have made no attempt to be exhaustive, so as to avoid being exhausting." As you see, it had nothing to do with political correctness (don't make me laugh!). I simply felt--and feel--that every biography is by definition one person's interpretation of another person's life, a selection from and arrangement of the available facts, and that since multiple interpretations of the same facts are not only possible but inevitable, the title should indicate as much.

As for the larger question of the meaning of "life," The New Shorter Oxford defines it as, among other things, "A written account of a person's history; a biography." That usage dates back to Middle English.

Here endeth the lesson. (Nice try, though.)

Posted April 26, 12:53 PM

TT: My day

- 6:30 a.m. I wake without prompting, having slept for just five hours--not uncommon for me on days when I have a morning deadline. I descend from the loft, fix and eat a low-fat multi-grain English muffin and a bowl of cereal with skim milk, and start writing my drama column for Friday's The Wall Street Journal, a review of The History Boys, Lestat, and The Wedding Singer.

- 10:35 a.m. The column is done. I e-mail it to my editor, change clothes, and go to the gym for a session with my trainer.

- 12:05 p.m. Dripping with sweat, I return to the apartment and check my e-mail. My editor isn't finished with the column, but I find in the box an e-mail from Shellwood, a new British record label based in Surrey whose Web site says it is "dedicated to recording light music, mostly from the 1920-40s." To my amazement, they've released a Cy Walter CD called The Park Avenue Tatum and want to know if I'd like a review copy. I respond in the aggressive affirmative. Walter was a legendary cabaret pianist who is now remembered (if at all) for having played two-piano accompaniments with Stan Freeman on a couple of albums recorded in the Fifties by Mabel Mercer and Lee Wiley. I've never heard any of his solo recordings, none of which has previously been reissued in any format, and I'm curious, to put it very mildly.

- 12:35 p.m. No word yet from the Journal, so I take a shower and go out a second time. I stop by the post office (where I hear a man use the expressions "Hel-lo?" and "I don't think so!" in consecutive sentences) to mail my mother a souvenir menu from the White House mess, at which I dined last month. Next comes lunch at Good Enough to Eat (where I hear a woman use the words "condescending," "colonialist," and "eco-variety" in a single sentence). Then I go to the bank, the drugstore, and the grocery store. My hands twitch as I stroll past a short stack of three boxes of Mallomars, to which my attention is drawn by a handwritten sign: "Last batch of the season!!" The spasm passes and I fill my cart with low-calorie foods instead, feeling virtuous as I pay the cashier.

- 2:25 p.m. Back to the apartment again, where Tuesday's snail mail (none of it worth reading) has arrived, as has the edited version of my column, lightly salted with the usual editorial queries, all of them helpful. I make the necessary fixes and e-mail the revised column back to the Journal.

- 2:45 p.m. I decide to spend the rest of the afternoon looking at art. Acting on a tip from an "About Last Night" reader, I take a crosstown bus to the Metropolitan Museum to see a small but choice-sounding show of Stieglitz-period American works on paper. Alas, it's no longer on display (though the signs are still up) and I'm not in the mood to look at anything else. Even a wallful of mostly unfamiliar Arthur Doves fails to do the trick. I depart in a state of moderate dudgeon, immediately dispelled by the beautiful spring weather (it was supposed to rain today, but didn't).

- 4:20 p.m. I watch a BBC documentary on Bette Davis stored on my DVR. What on earth do people see in her? I mean, I like All About Eve as much as the next guy, but who cares about those other movies she made in the Thirties and Forties? I'd take Ida Lupino any day. In search of insight, I consult David Thomson, who answers my question with his usual pithiness: "Davis was a vulgar, bullying actress, who made mannerism a virtue by showing us how it expresses the emotion of the self."

- 5:50 p.m. No show tonight! I wrestle briefly with the compulsion to spend the evening tinkering with Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Inspired by Thomson, I choose instead to pop a Mikl�s R�zsa CD into the stereo and curl up on the couch with American Movie Critics, Philip Lopate's new Library of America anthology, about which I'll be writing in a couple of weeks.

- 7:45 p.m. I call my mother in Smalltown, U.S.A., as I do most nights. She had all her teeth pulled last week, but is doing amazingly well, especially for a woman of seventy-six. ("Your mother is a tough old bird," the dentist told my brother after the surgery.) We chat happily about nothing in particular.

- 9:30 p.m. I toast and eat a second English muffin, this one accompanied by smoked salmon. As I dine, it hits me that my spirits have finally bounced back from the vague funk that settled on me around the time of my fiftieth birthday in February. No doubt the arrival of spring has something to do with it. About time, too.

Last on the agenda: a good night's sleep. Another Journal deadline awaits me at noon tomorrow. A writer's work is never done.

Posted April 26, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"In this country, you never pull the emergency brake, even when there is an emergency. It is imperative that the trains run on schedule."

Friedrich D�rrenmatt, The Visit

Posted April 26, 12:00 PM

April 25, 2006

TT: Words to the wise

- Spanierman Gallery is about to open a major exhibition of the works of John Henry Twachtman, the greatest of the American impressionists. "John Twachtman (1853-1902): A �Painter's Painter,'" which will include eighty-one of Twachtman's paintings and works on paper, is the first large-scale New York retrospective of his work in recent memory. My own feelings about Twachtman can be inferred from the fact that the Teachout Museum contains one of his etchings, "Dock at Newport." (A unique artist's proof of this exquisite etching is part of the Spanierman show.)

For more information, or to view the other works in the exhibition, which will be up from May 4 through June 24, go here.

- Mark your calendar: Adam Guettel's The Light in the Piazza, the best musical of 2005, will be telecast on PBS' Live From Lincoln Center on June 15. Here's part of what I wrote about the show in The Wall Street Journal last year:

Adam Guettel, the most gifted and promising theater composer of his generation, has returned to the stage after a nine-year absence with "The Light in the Piazza." To call it the best new musical I've reviewed in this space, "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee" included, is to understate the case. It is, in fact, the best new musical to open in New York since "Passion," and Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater has done itself proud by bringing so important a show to Broadway....

The score, radiantly orchestrated by Mr. Guettel and conductor Ted Sperling for a fifteen-piece chamber ensemble built around a harp, is a shimmering evocation of Italian sunshine, dappled with touches of sorrow. Comparisons to Stephen Sondheim being inevitable, I should say at once that Mr. Guettel resembles Mr. Sondheim only in the richness of his imagination. His harmonic language is more astringent and wide-ranging, his lyrics more conversational (you won't go away talking about his rhyme schemes). He is, in short, his own man, and in "The Light in the Piazza" he has written a musical directly comparable in seriousness of purpose to "Passion" or "Sweeney Todd" without sounding anything like either of those shows.

The New York production closes on July 6, with a U.S. tour set to begin in August. To purchase the original-cast CD, go here.

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- One of the travails of writing a biography of a great artist is that you find yourself returning repeatedly to certain words and phrases--especially superlatives. The nice thing about word processing is that it's possible to search your manuscript for repeated words. The bad thing is that if you're not careful, you become compulsive about it.

A couple of months ago I started keeping a list of words and phrases I suspected I was using too frequently in Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. In the past week or two I've been going over the first five chapters of Hotter Than That with the proverbial fine-tooth comb, looking for redundancies and personal clich�s. It occurred to me (that's one of the latter, in case you haven't already noticed) that it might amuse you (there's another one) to see the list:

already
at least
astonishing
brilliant/brilliance
by now/by then
claim/claimed
countless
crisp
dazzling
doubtless
expansive
from then/now on
glowing
golden
great
henceforth
himself/itself
hurtling
in fact
irresistible
major
mentor
no doubt
no less
nor did
not that
of course
protege
recall/recalled
remember/remembered
small wonder/no wonder
soaring
spectacular
striking
surprise/surprising
thereafter
to be sure
virtuoso/virtuosic

- Writing one-sentence summaries of movies is surely one of life's more thankless tasks (though it can be done, like everything else in life, with flair). Be that as it may, I confess to having giggled when the following pr�cis of The Station Agent popped up on my TV screen yesterday: "Two people try to befriend an anti-social dwarf."

That seems just a bit on the bald side, don't you think?

TT: Unopened sacks in the mailroom

The "About Last Night" e-mailbox has been discovered by art-world publicists, who are flooding it with press releases. I suppose that's an improvement on the Viagra-type spam I used to get by the carload, but it's still irritating.

I'm doing my very best to keep up with all the bonafide reader mail (I just answered a ton of it). If you should fail to hear back from me more or less promptly, though, that's the reason why. Apologies.

TT: Almanac

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order--willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living."

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

April 24, 2006

TT: On the fly

The spring rush continues. Last week I saw five plays, four of them in a row. This week I have two new musicals on my plate, Hot Feet and The Drowsy Chaperone, and three deadlines to hit between now and Thursday. It's all a bit much, frankly, but I'm staying afloat--and I even managed to finish editing the fifth chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong in between last week's shows.

Could I use a rest? You bet, and I've got one planned: I'll be heading for one of my favorite undisclosed locations as soon as I file my last pre-Tony drama column, where I plan to spend a couple of uncomplicated days doing nothing even slightly gainful and thinking no theater-related thoughts. Until then, though, the joint will be jumping, so please continue to bear with me.

For the moment I'll leave you with a freshly written snippet of Hotter Than That to chew on. See you tomorrow!

* * *

In 1927 Aaron Copland, soon to emerge as America's leading classical composer, declared that jazz might someday become "the substance not only of the American composer's fox trots and Charlestons, but of his lullabies and nocturnes. He may express through it not always gaiety but love, tragedy, remorse." But he later changed his mind, deciding that jazz "might have its best treatment from those who had a talent for improvisation." By then the symphonic-jazz craze of which Copland was briefly among the most prominent exponents had started to dry up, and he had put his finger on the reason why. For jazz to reach its fullest expressive potential--as well as a truly popular audience--it would first need to find embodiment not in a composer, however gifted, but in a soloist of genius with a personality to match, a charismatic individual capable of meeting the untutored listener halfway.

Such a man existed, and there were those who had an inkling of his potential. When Bix Beiderbecke and Hoagy Carmichael first heard Louis Armstrong playing with the Creole Jazz Band in 1923, they were staggered. Carmichael set down his reaction in his memoirs: "'Why,' I moaned, �why isn't everybody in the world here to hear that?' I meant it. Something as unutterably stirring as that deserved to be heard by the world." Five years later it was being heard by the patrons of Chicago's Savoy Ballroom, the buyers of race records, the fortunate listeners who happened to tune into Carroll Dickerson's broadcasts from the Savoy--and no one else.

Musicians, to be sure, received Armstrong's records as life-changing revelations. When Artie Shaw first heard them, he became "obsessed with the idea that this was what you had to do. Something that was your own, that had nothing to do with anybody else....I realized I was no longer playing music, I was playing an art form, something bigger than music." But even if the Armstrong-Hines recordings of 1928 had circulated more widely at the time of their release, it is still doubtful that they would have made much of an impression on the public at large, consisting as they do of jazz and blues tunes unevenly played by a scrappy little band dominated by two titans. Even on the sides that featured Armstrong's appealing voice, he was restricted to wordless scat vocals, vaudevillian novelties, or blues-drenched laments like "St. James Infirmary," the mournful folk ballad about a man who goes to the morgue to behold his lover on a slab: "I went down to St. James Infirmary/Saw my baby there/Stretched out on a long white table/So sweet, so cold, so bare."

In order for the rest of the world to hear and embrace Armstrong, he would need a more accessible repertoire and a more flattering setting--both of which were close at hand....

Posted April 24, 12:11 PM

TT: Almanac

"As peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy."

Samuel Johnson, The Idler (April 15, 1758)

Posted April 24, 12:00 PM

TT: Action in the right-hand column

Check out the new Top Five picks. I told you I'd be back....

Posted April 24, 5:34 AM

April 21, 2006

TT: Death of a debutante

It's Friday! This week's Wall Street Journal drama column contains my thoughts on three newly opened Broadway shows, Three Days of Rain, Awake and Sing!, and The Threepenny Opera:

"Three Days of Rain" is one of those trick plays in which (A) the members of the cast play two parts apiece, themselves and their parents, and (B) the action runs backward in time. In the second act, set in 1960, we meet Ned and Theo (Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper), a pair of budding young starchitects about to build their first house, and Lina (Julia Roberts), the Woman They Both Love. In the first act, set in 1995, we watch their grown children quarreling over who gets the now-famous Janeway House. This being a Richard Greenberg play, they all spend the evening foaming at the mouth with glib one-liners that aren't half as clever as the author thinks ("My mother would be with us too, of course, but she's, um, like, well, she's sort of like Zelda Fitzgerald's less stable sister"), while we spend it trying to guess which one of them will turn out to be gay.

Mr. Greenberg's plays bore me silly, but they sure are popular: "Three Days of Rain" is the second of three to be produced in New York this season. This one puts Ms. Roberts on stage for the better part of two and a half hours, which is asking too much of someone who's never done any live theater, much less a Broadway show. She's not bad in the first act, in which she plays a haggard Boston matron with two kids and a dull husband, but as for the second...well, you can still see the smoke wafting upward from the crash site....

Seventy-one years ago this February, the Group Theatre, a preternaturally earnest ensemble of Stanislavsky-worshipping leftists, set up shop at the Belasco Theatre, where they presented a new play by an up-and-comer named Clifford Odets. On Monday "Awake and Sing!" returned to the Belasco in its first Broadway revival since 1984, just in time for the Odets centenary, in a flawed but sumptuously well-acted production whose defects do not conceal the play's enduring excellence....

The Roundabout Theatre Company has just opened a production of "The Threepenny Opera" aimed at theatergoers who'd rather be seeing "Cabaret." Alan Cumming, who played the emcee in the Roundabout's much-admired 1998 revival of "Cabaret," is back again, this time as Mack the Knife, the toughest thug in Soho, who has been magically transformed into a bisexual punk whose "girlfriends" include a drag queen (Brian Charles Rooney). Most of his colleagues are dressed in leather, and the d�cor is 100% neon. Did I mention that this "Threepenny," like "Cabaret" before it, is being performed at Studio 54, once the most decadent disco of the '80s?

All these oddities notwithstanding, it strikes me that Scott Elliott, the director, has made a good-faith attempt to update "Threepenny" while remaining faithful to the spirit of Bertolt Brecht's ferocious parable of capitalism run amok. Wallace Shawn's new translation, if not nearly so poetic (or singable) as the now-standard Marc Blitzstein English-language adaptation, successfully conveys the acrid flavor of Brecht's German text, and Mr. Elliott's staging is unmistakably Brechtian in style (albeit in an occasionally self-conscious way)....

No link, so get thee to a newsstand, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with on-the-spot access to the complete text of my review, plus plenty of extra art-related coverage.

Posted April 21, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being 'somebody,' to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen."

John Updike, Self-Consciousness

Posted April 21, 12:00 PM

April 20, 2006

OGIC: One to watch

If you should happen to find yourself within reach of the 1996-2005 Best of the South collection of short stories, for goodness sake, pick it up and read the last story, Stephanie Soileau's "The Boucherie." It's only cricket for me to disclose that I knew the author way back when, and it's only true to say that way back then I already loved her writing, eagerly devouring any I could get my hands on, and foresaw great things for her. Her voice is fresh and easy and intoxicatingly funny in a way that's both sharp and gentle. Here are the opening paragraphs of this entirely wonderful story:

Of course it would be exaggerating to say that Slug had so estranged himself from the neighborhood that a phone call from him was as astonishing to Della as, say, a rainfall of fish, or blood, or manna, and as baffling in portent. Still, as Della stood, phone in hand, about to wake her husband, Alvin, who was sleeping through the six o'clock news in his recliner, she sensed with a sort of holy clearness of heart that what was happening on the television--two cows dropping down through the trees and onto somebody's picnic in the park--was tied, figuratively if not causally, to the call from Slug. "Mais, the cows done flew," she thought.

The anchorwoman for the Baton Rouge news announced that a livestock trailer carrying over a hundred head of cattle on their way to processing had plunged over the entrance ramp's railing at the Interstate 10 and Hwy 110 junction that morning. The driver had been speeding, possibly drunk, though definitely decapitated. More than a dozen cattle were crushed outright. Several others survived the wreck only to climb over the edge of I-110 and drop to their deaths in the park below, while the remaining seventy-or-so, dazed and frightened, fled down the interstate or into the leafy shelter of the surrounding neighborhoods, followed by a band of cowboys called in for the impromptu roundup.

As for the rest of the story, let's just say that one of those cows brings a neighborhood together in the most unexpected way, and that you should read it. "The Boucherie" originally appeared in StoryQuarterly, where it was spotted by Shannon Ravenel and selected for New Stories from the South 2005 before being selected by Anne Tyler from among the last ten volumes of New Stories for this super-anthology and earning the anchor position therein. Brava! We'll hear more from Ms. Soileau, I'm certain.

Posted April 20, 12:56 PM

TT: So you want to see a show?

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 Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here, now in previews for a Broadway reopening on May 3)
- 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 June 4)
- I Love You Because (musical, R, sexual content, reviewed here)
- Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK:
- A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop (one-woman show, PG, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes April 30)

Posted April 20, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"One must know the masters by heart, idolize them, strive to think like them, and then separate oneself from them forever."

Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet (Sept. 25, 1852)

Posted April 20, 12:00 PM

April 19, 2006

TT: Almanac

"Of all possible debauches, travel is unsurpassed by any I know. It's the one invented after all the others have ceased to excite."

Gustave Flaubert, letter to Ernest Chevalier (April 9, 1851)

Posted April 19, 12:00 PM

TT: Start your engines

The spring rush has started. I saw three plays last week, and this week I have four more on my plate: The Importance of Being Earnest tonight, Lestat on Thursday, The History Boys on Friday, and The Wedding Singer on Saturday. In between I've been chipping away at the fifth chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong (the rough draft is finished, but I've only edited about half of it so far) and reading the newly arrived second volume of Stephen Walsh's Stravinsky biography, which will be published on April 25. Next week I have three pieces to write and two more shows to see.

None of this is especially surprising. May 10 is the cut-off date for Tony Award eligibility, meaning that Broadway producers are cramming in lots of big-ticket opening nights between now and then. Having been The Wall Street Journal's drama critic for the past three years, I'm used to it, or ought to be. It is, however, my first spring rush since my recent illness--or, to put it more precisely, since I recovered from my recent illness--and even though I've never felt better, I'm also more aware than usual of the potential dangers of running myself ragged, especially given the fact that I'm going to be doing more out-of-town reviewing this summer than ever before. (Look out, America, here I come!) To this end I've been husbanding my energies in between previews, deadlines, and visits to the gym: I'm staying home whenever possible and, as you've doubtless noticed, blogging less frequently.

Today is so beautiful, though, that I can't very well ignore the blandishments of the weather, so I'm planning a picnic in Central Park with a friend, after which we might just stroll across the park to a museum and look at paintings. Or not: I'm in an improvisational mood. I don't have any more deadlines until next Tuesday, and so long as I make it to Brooklyn by 7:15, it doesn't matter what else I do. That's a nice feeling.

Anyway, all this is simply a roundabout way of letting you know why you haven't been hearing from me lately. I'm still here, I'm just fine, and I'll be back.

Posted April 19, 10:36 AM

April 18, 2006

TT: Almanac

"Happy are they who don't doubt themselves and whose pens fly across the page. I myself hesitate, I falter, I become angry and fearful, my drive diminishes as my taste improves, and I brood more over an ill-suited word than I rejoice over a well-proportioned paragraph."

Gustave Flaubert, letter to Maxime Du Camp (October 1847)

Posted April 18, 12:00 PM

April 17, 2006

TT: In a yellow wood

On Saturday afternoon I went to Studio 54, where I saw Alan Cumming and Nellie McKay in The Threepenny Opera. Then I strolled down to Penn Station and boarded a train that whisked me away to New Jersey, where I spent most of the rest of the weekend visiting another country, the land of babies and backyards and Weber grills, whose citizens commute to "the city" and work at nine-to-five jobs, then come back to the suburbs and their families. Except for the commuting part, it might almost have been Smalltown, U.S.A., the place where I grew up.

Once I expected to live a life like that, and even after I moved to Manhattan I thought I would someday return to a world not greatly dissimilar to the one into which I was born, the same way that so many of the people I met in my first years as a New Yorker ended up doing. It didn't occur to me that I was committed to a radically different way of living, or that by the age of fifty I would have traveled so far down another road that it was no longer possible to go back.

It's been a long time since I paid an overnight visit to suburbia, and I happily admit to having found it pleasant. I sat on a patio yesterday morning, sipping a drink, basking in the sun, and looking at a pair of robins. Then I came back inside the house, where two small children were sitting patiently in front of the TV, waiting for their mother to pop Alice in Wonderland into the VCR. I glanced at the screen and saw the quivering, slightly fuzzy image of a half-dozen ballet dancers.

"Huh," I said out loud. "That's 'The Unanswered Question.' It's from George Balanchine's Ivesiana."

"How's that again?" my hostess asked.

"Oh, nothing," I answered. "It's just a ballet I like." It was as if I'd been handed a telegram: COME HOME ALL IS FORGIVEN. She started up the movie and I drifted into the kitchen. A couple of hours later I made my way to the train station, full of home cooking and feeling unexpectedly wistful.

I suppose it's within the realm of possibility that I might move away from Manhattan someday, and it's even possible that I might take up residence in the suburbs, but neither course of action seems at all likely at this point. It appears that I've found my niche: I am a boulevardier, a middle-aged aesthete who lives in an art-crammed apartment half a block from Central Park and spends his weekends sitting on the aisles of Broadway theaters. Instead of raising a family, I write books. Would I have it any other way? No, though it might be more exact to say that I can't imagine it any other way--except when I catch a glimpse of the the life I might have lived. I doubt that very many of us are unselfconscious enough to be altogether free of second thoughts at times like that.

Even Louis Armstrong, a profoundly unselfconscious man who loved his life and had every reason to do so, sometimes wondered what it might have been like had he gone down a different road:

I'm always wondering if it would have been best in my life if I'd stayed like I was in New Orleans, having a ball. I was very much contented just to be around and play with the old timers. And the money I made--I lived off of it. I wonder if I would have enjoyed that better than all this big mucky-muck traveling all over the world....You know you don't have no fun at all if you get too famous. I mean, for a lot of years now, I don't have but a few nights off, and I can't go no place they don't roll up the drum, you have to stand up and take a bow, get up on the stage. And sitting in an audience, I'm signing programs for hours all through the show. And you got to sign them to be in good faith. And afterwards all those hangers-on get you crowded in at the table--and you know you're going to pay the check.

If Satchmo could think such thoughts on occasion, surely I can be forgiven for admitting to harboring similar ones after spending a weekend in deepest New Jersey. But even though they crossed my mind yesterday afternoon, I still took the 3:50 back to Penn Station and returned in due course to the Upper West Side, where I spent the evening curled up on my couch, reading about Bertolt Brecht and listening to the Schumann D Minor Piano Trio.

That's my life, and I'm sticking to it, even if I never mow another lawn or own another car. You can't have everything--and I have enough.

Posted April 17, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives."

No�l Coward, Private Lives

Posted April 17, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Intuition

My current read is Allegra Goodman's Intuition, which is proving hard to put down. Here's a nicely crafted, gently damning paragraph in which Dr. Sandy Glass tries to comfort himself about his daughter's decision not to go to medical school:

So she'd get her master's degree in the history of science, Sandy mused. She'd finish up her little project and apply for medical school the year after. Robert Hooke was fine; he was eccentric; eccentricity was all the rage in med school applications. English majors, musicians, writers. Sandy had served his time on the committees. Harvard loved that kind of thing. She would be a doctor in the end. He knew it. Louisa was no soft-spoken library researcher. No math-fearing patsy. She was his son.

I love Goodman because she gives a character like this (father of three daughters, in case you hadn't guessed) every chance, really she does, and when they waste their chances, she so cleanly severs the jugular.

Posted April 17, 9:34 AM

April 14, 2006

TT: Happy tidings

I finished writing the rough draft of "It's Got to Be Art," the fifth chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong, yesterday afternoon. It takes Armstrong up through the end of 1928. (That's five chapters out of ten.) I'm going to polish it today, then put the book aside for a couple of weeks.

Really.

See you Monday.

TT: St. Colin the Cautious

Time once again for the regular Friday-morning Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, in which I have mixed tidings to report. I liked some parts of Stuff Happens, but no part of Festen:

Like so many British artists, David Hare is drunk on politics, and believes the world is waiting to know how he thinks it should be run. At the same time he is, or can be, a talented playwright, acutely sensitive to the demands of the stage. These two impulses are at odds in "Stuff Happens," which had its New York premiere last night at the Public Theater. In fact, "Stuff Happens" is two plays in one. The first is a Shakespeare-style history play in which Mr. Hare tries to imagine how George W. Bush and his advisers might have decided to go to war with Iraq. It's pretty good--at times quite good--and on occasion almost convincing. The second is a documentary play about the Bush administration's conduct of the war. It's a flop, full of coarse caricatures and stiff with smugness.

The star of Play No. 1 is Colin Powell (Peter Francis James), whom Mr. Hare portrays as a "tragic hero" (his phrase) who knows the war is a mistake but lacks the courage of his convictions and so crumbles into tight-lipped pusillanimity when put to the test by President Bush (Jay O. Sanders). This is a dramatically promising situation and Mr. Hare makes much of it...

Oh, dear, incest again: David Eldridge's "Festen," a stage version of Thomas Vinterberg's 1998 film "The Celebration," is another of those extravaganzas in which the members of a dysfunctional family get together for dinner and suddenly start blurting out long-suppressed truths....

No link, so buy the damn paper, O.K.? I'm tired of telling you. And if you're really feeling ambitious, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instantaneous access to the complete text of my review, along with loads of additional art-related coverage.

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

TT: The uselessness of art

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

Remember the "Mozart effect"? That was the shorthand phrase for a group of studies purporting to show that playing classical music to children raised their IQs in later life. The actual research made no such claims, but such was the simplified version that found its way into the public domain, achieving such wide circulation that Zell Miller, then the governor of Georgia, actually proposed in 1998 to earmark $105,000 to buy a classical album for every child born in that state. Alas, later research left the original findings in doubt, and though the phrase entered the language, the actual concept went into the scientific wastebasket.

Even so, there remains something irresistibly seductive about the notion that listening to Mozart might actually make you smarter. William Safire, who gave up political punditry to become chairman of the Dana Foundation, a private philanthropic group (the Web site is dana.org) with an interest in brain research, gave a speech last month in which he reported on the latest studies into the relationship between arts education and brain function. That may not sound sexy, but it is--at least potentially--a public-policy bombshell....

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

TT: Elsewhere

I may be quiescent, but I'm not altogether inert. Here's some of what I've collected while trolling the blogosphere during the past few weeks:

- Further proof that I'm soooo behind the curve: it took an Indianapolis-based art blogger to clue me in to the coming release of Terry Zwigoff's new movie, Art School Confidential, starring John Malkovich. (To view the trailer, go here.)

- In other film-related news, Mr. My Stupid Dog reports on the Criterion Collection DVD of John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln:

The Lincoln of this film seems more a product of the 1930s than the 1830s--and in that respect, more like the sainted Democrat FDR than his own Republican self. In Trotti's script, the rail-splitter has nothing whatsoever to say about race, and the closest he comes to acknowledging the reality of slavery is a not-quite throwaway line: Lincoln states that his family had to leave Kentucky because "with all the slaves comin' in, white folks had a hard time making a living." Except for an occasional servant, African-Americans are completely invisible in Ford's Springfield. Class displaces race in the film's mythic universe--to the point that when the title character, played by a startlingly young Henry Fonda, faces down an angry lynch mob, both participants and intended victims are White. Like Fritz Lang, who famously used lynch mobs as a metaphor for fascism in his film Fury Ford suggests a parallel between thuggish leaders who goad a mob to violence and equally grotesque forces poised to plunge Europe into a second world war. That Lincoln is singlehandedly able to quell the angry mob points to one of the film's deepest contradictions: In Young Mr. Lincoln, democratic society is saved from fascist control through the actions of a single Great Leader. (Lang didn't let America off the hook so easily.)

- Speaking of race, Mr. Something Old, Nothing New has found an online-viewable video of Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs, a miniature masterpiece of animation which is nonetheless banned from TV broadcast on TV because it's jam-packed with racial stereotypes. See for yourself.

- Mr. Think Denk eats a plate of dumplings and reflects on the meaning of the opening bars of Beethoven's "Kreutzer" Sonata:

I have a hard time seeing where the opening of the Kreutzer "comes from." There are no easy sources for its particular beauty. The sort of question I feel it asks is Why Do I Exist? or How Did I Come Into Being? And that is what gives it, for me, a kind of surreal beauty: an oddly certain question, a fragment that is strangely and prematurely complete. The piece is mature beyond its measures....

My favorite recording of this wonderful work, incidentally, is a live performance from 1940 by Joseph Szigeti and B�la Bart�k (yes, that B�la Bart�k). You can purchase it by going here.

- Mr. Delicious Pundit reminds us of Dwight Eisenhower's rules for political success, formulated not by Eisenhower himself but by Murray Kempton. Here are the first four:

1. Always pretend to be stupid; then when you have to show yourself smart, the display has the addtional effect of surprise.

2. Taking the blame is a function of servants. When the orange is squeezed, throw it away.

3. When a situation is hopeless, never listen to counsels of hope. Fold the enterprise.

4. Do nothing unless you know exactly what you will do if it turns out to have been the wrong thing. Walk not one inch forward onto ground which has not been painfully tested by someone else....

- My favorite blogger offers a defense of pastiche:

Pastiche is not satire. Pastiche is not homage. Pastiche is a matter of preference, a way of making and creating. Pastiche combines elements of like and dislike: by placing my personal tastes, my favourites, with and against material that I might otherwise avoid, I perceive counterpoint and contrast and am often forced to reevaluate. The annoying sometimes becomes likeable while something I love dearly appears boring....

- Am I the last person in the universe to hear about Rory's Book Club?

- Ms. Pratie Place proves that a picture is worth at least a thousand words. (This image reminds me of one of H.L. Mencken's best sayings: "There is always an easy solution to every human problem--neat, plausible and wrong.")

- I can't remember from whom I pinched this link--apologies in advance--but here's a fascinating Bookforum article about how Dorothy Parker left her copyrights to the NAACP, and how Lillian Hellman, her literary executor, did her best to screw up the bequest:

Hellman refused to admit defeat, continuing to slug it out until a court ruled for the NAACP in 1972. In an interview with the New York Times Book Review, Hellman was still lashing out: "It's one thing to have real feeling for black people, but to have the kind of blind sentimentality about the NAACP, a group so conservative that even many blacks now don't have any respect for it, is something else. She must have been drunk when she did it."

What a pig La Hellman was.

- Mr. BuzzMachine, whose heart was out of order for a month, found out what it was like to be a Disabled Person, and filed this report:

I now stood on the right on escalators, rather than rushing up on the left. I now sought out elevators even for short, one-floor hauls. In the PATH station in New York, I stood there with old people, sick people, and mothers with baby carriages, waiting for a lift. I was embarrassed. I wondered whether they looked at me thinking, "What a lazy SOB: he looks fit and healthy and the exercise of a few stairs would be good for him: Get moving and don't take up space on our elevator." Of course, it's New York: Nobody really pays that much attention to anyone else. But I heard that echo in my head....

- Want to waste a little time? Play with this collection of dialect maps. You won't be sorry.

- Great Moments in Jazz on TV, No. 1: Billie Holiday singing Fine and Mellow in 1957, with Lester Young, sick unto death but still a giant, backing her up. (Thank you, Mr. House of Mirth.)

- Great Moments in Jazz on TV, No. 2: Art Tatum playing Yesterdays in 1954. I assume this is a kinescope from the old Tonight show with Steve Allen. Regardless of where it comes, though, it's amazing-and-a-half. (Thank you, Messrs. Do the Math.)

- Finally, just watch this, O.K.?

TT: Almanac

"'I did think I could have trusted Boko not to make an ass of himself just for once,' she murmured with a wild regret.

"'I doubt if you can ever trust an author not to make an ass of himself,' I responded gravely."

P.G. Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning