About Last Night: May 2006 Archives

TT: Almanac

Ah, there ain't no gentlemen
To open up the doors
There ain't no ladies now,
There's only pigs and whores
And even kids'll knock ya down
So's they can pass
Nobody's got no class!

Fred Ebb, "Class" (music by John Kander)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 1, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Everywhere you go, there we are

I've been peeking at the "About Last Night" world map, which shows that in recent days we've been visited by readers from the following places:

- Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
- Urmston, Trafford, United Kingdom
- Parow, Western Cape, South Africa
- Yehud, HaMerkaz, Israel
- Vaihingen an der Enz, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany
- Gilan, Keyhan, Islamic Republic of Iran
- Merville Subdivision, Rizal, the Philippines
- Jordanville, Victoria, Australia
- Franco da Rocha, Sao Paulo, Brazil
- Bovolone, Veneto, Italy
- Jaipur, Rajasthan, India
- Seoul, Seoul-t'ukpyolsi, Republic of Korea

Hello out there! Come back soon! (And forgive the missing diacritical marks!)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 1, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Lost artist

Cy Walter, who died in 1968, specialized in a style of popular piano playing for which there has never been a satisfactory name. Because he and others like him spent most of their lives working in the lounges of high-priced hotels, most people now refer to their kind of music as "cocktail piano," which is accurate as far as it goes but fails altogether to suggest the elegance and technical wizardry of Walter's own playing.

I suppose one might call it "cabaret piano," since he was closely associated with singers like Mabel Mercer, whom he accompanied with exquisite taste, and it's certainly no coincidence that he figures so prominently in the pages of James Gavin's Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret. Walter himself didn't much care for labels, but when pressed he would call himself "a specialist in show tunes." For my part, and even though I don't much care for neologisms, I like to think of the genre in which he worked as "New Yorker music." Needless to say, the New Yorker I have in mind is the one founded and edited by Harold Ross, a rough-hewn newspaperman from Colorado who by some miracle of grace contrived to bring into being the most sophisticated magazine in the history of American journalism. It didn't survive him for long, at least not in its original form: William Shawn took it in directions that proved alien to Ross' tutelary spirit, and today's New Yorker, for all its virtues, is greatly different in tone and approach from the magazine Ross edited between 1925 and his death in 1951.

Among many other things, Ross' New Yorker promoted the kind of music performed by the artists chronicled in Intimate Nights. Rogers Whitaker, who covered cabaret (though it wasn't yet called that) for the magazine, loved Walter's piano playing and plugged him regularly in the "Goings On About Town" section. Alec Wilder, a New Yorker-endorsed songwriter who also wrote wisely and well about American popular song, contributed a set of liner notes to one of Walter's albums in which he remarked that "anyone who has heard his own songs played by Cy immediately has a greater respect for his own work." That is one hell of a compliment, and there were plenty of equally illustrious folk inclined to echo it. The mailing list of fans to whom Walter sent postcards announcing his gigs (it's preserved in his papers) includes Tallulah Bankhead, Leonard Bernstein, Marlon Brando, Katharine Cornell, Lynn Fontanne, Elia Kazan, Frank Loesser, Agnes De Mille, Arthur Miller, Cole Porter, Jerome Robbins, and Tennessee Williams.

Walter recorded extensively from the Forties on, but until now none of his albums had ever been reissued, meaning that his name is virtually unknown today save to those lucky New Yorkers who once upon a time heard him live. Now Shellwood, an independent record label in England, has produced the first Cy Walter CD, a compilation of the pianist's Liberty Music Shop 78s called The Park Avenue Tatum. All twenty-eight tracks are show tunes, among them "Begin the Beguine," "Body and Soul," "I Can't Get Started," "Liza," "'S Wonderful," and medleys from such half-remembered Broadway shows as Jerome Kern's Very Warm for May, Cole Porter's Panama Hattie, and Richard Rodgers' By Jupiter.

Except for the last two cuts, on which Walter is joined by Gil Bowers, all of the performances on The Park Avenue Tatum are unaccompanied piano solos, though the casual listener could be forgiven for suspecting that there might have been a second pianist lurking in the shadows of the studio. Peter Mintun's superb liner notes reprint a 1940 thank-you note that Richard Rodgers sent to a friend who had given him a copy of one of Walter's records:

Who are these fellows, Cy and Walter? For you're certainly not going to stand there and tell me one man plays all that piano. I resent the whole experience, anyway. Here I've been yelling with pain at the way the "stylists" kick hell out of [my] original harmonies and you have to send me a record that stinks with style and still manages to leave all the harmonies intact. Further, I have never heard better taste. Why don't you leave a man and his hates alone?

It'd be hard to describe Walter's style more wittily, or exactly, than that. He plays a song the way the songwriter wrote it, embedding the tune in a richly textured accompaniment from which it shines forth like a well-lit, well-framed painting. Though his playing often recalls the similarly virtuosic style of Art Tatum, his good friend and favorite pianist, Walter rarely indulged in the iridescent substitute chords Tatum loved to pull out of his hat, nor does his playing swing the way Tatum's did. He generally sticks to bouncy, danceable medium-brisk tempos, and his most staggering feats of technical prestidigitation, unlike Tatum's, are tossed off with the unobtrusive discretion of a gentleman's gentleman: you can listen and marvel if you like, or you can sip your drink and chat.

Such playing is typically appreciated more by musicians than critics, who are so put off by the imagined taint of commercialism that they too often throw out the baby with the bathwater. It didn't surprise me, for instance, that Ethan Iverson, who plays piano with The Bad Plus, that quirkiest and least predictable of jazz bands, should have sent me an e-mail in response to the posting of last week in which I mentioned that Shellwood had offered to send me a review copy of The Park Avenue Tatum. "I have heard Cy Walter solo," he wrote, "and it was amazing. You will be glad to get that one!" It figured that Iverson, who blithely disregards stylistic pigeonholes in his own bedazzlingly eclectic playing, would appreciate Walter. No, he wasn't a jazzman, at least not in the ordinary meaning of the word--but who cares? As any number of wise musicians have been credited with saying, there are only two kinds of music, and Walter's was the good kind.

Rogers Whitaker called cocktail piano "a minor art, but one of the more important ones." I like that, and I like The Park Avenue Tatum enormously, not just because it's so beautiful but because listening to it fills my mind's eye with fetching pictures of a classier world, the same great good place that is chronicled in Intimate Nights, Rick McKay's Broadway: The Golden Age, and The Complete New Yorker. My older friends, the ones who rail against rock and roll whenever you give them half a chance, are forever telling me how much nicer New York was in the Forties and Fifties. Me, I love it just as it is, especially when I saunter into the Algonquin Hotel's Oak Room or stroll into a Broadway theater and plant myself on the aisle, notebook in hand. Every once in a while, though, I catch myself thinking, Yes, I have the greatest job in the world--but I still wish it was 1947 again. That's how listening to Cy Walter makes me feel.

* * *

To purchase The Park Avenue Tatum, go here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 1, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise."

Paul Klee, diary entry (1908)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 2, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Words to the wise

- If you've been following the latest plagiarism scandal and feel the need for a bit of historical context, I strongly recommend that you read Stolen Words, Thomas Mallon's 1989 study of literary plagiarism, which is not only full of fascinating stories but (like all of Mallon's books) wonderfully well written to boot.

- Jazz vocalist Nancy King and nonpareil pianist Fred Hersch are performing together May 9-11 at the Jazz Standard. It's a CD-release gig: MaxJazz is about to release a live album recorded at their last Jazz Standard engagement.

Hersch is, of course, a known and much-admired quantity, but King, who lives and works in Oregon, is virtually unknown save to her colleagues and a small but ardent band of admirers. I only know about her because she performed at the wedding of a musician friend of mine a couple of years ago, and blew me right out of the water. She is a major, major talent deserving of the widest possible recognition, a warm-voiced contralto whose gifts are nicely summed up in Hersch's liner notes for Live at the Jazz Standard:

Nancy King epitomizes to me what real jazz singing is all about: fearless risk-taking; a pround connection with the words she is singing; using the many colors in her voice to put a new spin on old chestnuts; a flawless harmonic sense; off-the-hook improvisational skills; and complete openness to interplay. Add to the above her amazing sense of swing and rhythm (and the wisdom and experience that comes from more than more than forty years of singing) and you have one of the greatest jazz singers ever.

I second all that, fervently.

For a little taste of Nancy King's singing, go here and click on any of the links. Then go here and place an advance order for Live at the Jazz Standard, which will be released on May 9. Then go to the Jazz Standard and hear for yourself.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 2, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Alone in a crowd

Everybody likes Paul Klee. He is the most approachable of the major modernists, I suspect because his paintings are not only modest in scale but contain the kind of verbally paraphrasable content that makes them easily describable, if not explicable. (They are in fact utterly and wonderfully mysterious.) You don't have to know anything about art to talk about a Klee painting. All you have to know is the title: Magic Garden. Ancient Sound. Twittering Machine. What's not to get--or to like? Yet for all his accessibility, few have questioned his stature, not even the notoriously picky Clement Greenberg, who at first thought Klee provincial, "an eccentric but respectable bourgeois," but ended up deciding that he was "major...in his funny way. In a pamphlet I called him a keinmeister [small master]. But he's major all the same."

The Neue Galerie, which I last visited five months ago in the company of my favorite blogger, is currently putting on a retrospective called "Klee and America," mounted in collaboration with the Menil and Phillips Collections. It consists of paintings and works on paper drawn from American museums and private collections. That's a smart idea. Klee has long been widely collected in this country, with good reason, though there was a time when many dismissed his art as the scribblings of a lunatic. Take a look at what Time wrote about the first American exhibition of Klee's work to be held after his death in 1940:

Last week Manhattan's Buchholz and Willard Galleries gathered together the largest Klee exhibition ever placed on view. The 100-odd drawings and canvases in the exhibition ranged from mad, wire-worky diagrams to basket-textured abstractions....All had a look of quiet, pastel-shaded insanity. The show was posthumous: short, sharp-faced Artist Klee had died at his Swiss home four months before. It was also posthumous in another sense. To the red-cheeked, goose-stepping Nazis who after 1933 scrubbed individualism from Germany's art galleries, Paul Klee had been the most degenerate of degenerate artists. Some day history will have to decide whether Hitler was right--about Artist Klee.

Times have changed, and "Klee and America" is drawing noisy crowds, not of blockbuster magnitude but obtrusive nonetheless, especially seeing as how Klee's intimate, confidential art all but begs to be viewed in silence. The Phillips Collection, which owns a goodly number of Klees, usually hangs them together, a half-dozen or so at a time, in a small side gallery that is invariably quiet, just as it should be. Perhaps that's the best way to look at a Klee, short of actually owning one--and it strikes me that it would be frightfully immodest to own more than one or two. I read on a wall panel at the Neue Galerie that Clifford Odets, the left-wing playwright who wrote Awake and Sing! and Waiting for Lefty, owned sixty Klees at one time in his life. Somehow that strikes me as vulgar, not to mention incongruous.

I should also mention that the Neue Galerie is piping music into the galleries where "Klee and America" is hanging, a practice for which vulgar is not even close to the word. Yes, I like Schumann's Carnaval, but I'm damned if I know why anybody thinks the paintings of Paul Klee profit from being viewed with Carnaval playing in the background.

To be sure, "Klee and America" is marvelous, very well chosen and by no means too big for its britches. Even so, I was distracted by the talkative crowd and the canned music, and so I walked briskly through the show, lingering longingly in front of four or five extra-special paintings. Then I went back downstairs, bought a copy of the excellent catalogue, and hit the road. I crossed Fifth Avenue and plunged into Central Park, where I spent a blissful hour wandering through the Ramble and down the bridle path. It never ceases to amaze me that you can be alone in Central Park, not just at odd hours but pretty much any time you want, simply by departing the main thoroughfares and heading down an unbeaten path.

I thought about Klee all the way home, where I opened my mailbox and found a review copy of Nancy King's new CD (about which more below). I popped it in my stereo and plopped down on the couch with the "Klee and America" catalogue, all alone and happy to be.

* * *

"Klee and America" is up at the Neue Galerie (86th St. at Fifth Ave., closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays) through May 22. For more information, go here. To purchase the catalogue, go here.

After closing in New York, "Klee and America" will travel to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (June 16-Sept. 10) and the Menil Collection in Houston (Oct. 6-Jan. 14).

* * *

UPDATE: A reader writes:

I LOVED the Klee, but LOATHE the Neue Galerie. It had such potential. However they have made it such an unpleasant place to experience art. There are too many guards and they are WAY too intrusive. I was once stopped THREE times in one visit and told to display my little badge more clearly by three different guards. Also, they don't just look in your purse/bag, they root around in it. My handbag and I are rarely as threatening as we seem to be on Fifth and 86th.

The trick, I've found is to go a half an hour before closing. The guards are busy with text messaging their afterwork plans and other visitors are unwilling to fork out the admission price for 30 minutes. But the music, well, no way around that. When I was there, they had looped the overture to The Magic Flute. How many times in a row can you listen to that and not succumb to museum-rage?

Apply hammer (A) to head (B) of nail (C).

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 2, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Guess who?

Here's a pop quiz. What well-known actor is being discussed by his director in this excerpt from a current interview?

On some level, when he'd say, "Ah, that's a wonderful idea," and get that smile on his face, I'd think, "Oh boy, he hates my guts."

But I'd tell him what I wanted, and he'd do it instantly. He's incredibly accomplished.

I'll publish the answer, with a link, before bed tonight. In the meantime, send your guess. I'm curious whether the degree of difficulty will prove to be what I suppose.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 3, 2006 4:10 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps."

Jorge Luis Borges, "Creation and P.H. Gosse"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 3, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: The future, ahead of schedule

I've been playing with Pandora, the new Web-based streaming-audio "music discovery service." Based on a week's worth of hands-on experience, I've decided that (A) it works and (B) it's going to be a Very Big Thing.

To use Pandora, you start by inputting the name of a pop artist or song that you like. This creates a "station" that you can "tune in" on your computer at will. The station then plays a record by that artist, followed by similar-sounding songs by different artists. You respond in turn by telling Pandora whether or not you like each song it plays. At any time you can input additional artists or song titles, which automatically increases the size of your station's playlist. The more information you supply about your tastes, the more accurately Pandora can analyze them and select new songs you're likely to enjoy.

How does Pandora work? It has access to 300,000 songs available through iTunes and amazon.com (you can use either service to purchase the songs you hear). According to Pandora's Web site, these songs have all been analyzed in the following manner:

We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song--everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records--it's about what each individual song sounds like.

Over the past five years, we've carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists--ranging from popular to obscure--and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.

Believe it or not, this isn't just hot air. When I "asked" Pandora why it was playing The Band's "Look Out Cleveland," for instance, it responded as follows: "Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features country influences, a subtle use of vocal harmony, mild rhythmic syncopation, acoustic rhythm piano and mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation." All true. Of course, it was also playing "Look Out Cleveland" because I'd already told Pandora that I liked The Band, but the very next song it played, Albert Lee's "The Victim," contained the same musical features, and I liked that one, too.

Once I'd inputted the names of a dozen artists and given thumbs-up and thumbs-down responses to the songs Pandora was playing in response, it became clear to me that the analytic algorithm it uses to choose new songs was sufficiently sophisticated to second-guess my musical tastes with an accuracy that bordered at times on the eerie. As I write these words, Pandora is playing me Frank Sinatra's live recording with Count Basie of "The Shadow of Your Smile." Why? Because it features "swing influences, smooth vocals, romantic lyrics, a horn ensemble and" (wait for it) "acoustic guitar accompaniment." Sure enough, Freddie Green's rhythm guitar is very prominent in the mix on the Sinatra-Basie recording of "The Shadow of Your Smile." Needless to say, that's not a detail a casual listener would be likely to notice, but it happens to be one of the aspects of this particular recording that I find most engaging.

All this points to the accuracy of another claim made by Pandora:

Together our team of thirty musician-analysts have been listening to music, one song at a time, studying and collecting literally hundreds of musical details on every song. It takes 20-30 minutes per song to capture all of the little details that give each recording its magical sound--melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics...and more--close to 400 attributes!

Allowing for a certain amount of what Joseph Epstein calls "blurbissimo," I'd say this self-description is more than mere self-praise.

Pandora is a two-tiered system: you can use it for free by agreeing to listen to occasional advertisements, or you can skip the ads by paying a very reasonable fee. I'm not sure the company has started selling air time yet--I'm a free user, and I have yet to encounter any commercials--but presumably ads will start to appear as soon as a sufficiently large number of listeners are using the service. I can already tell you, though, that should I find them obtrusive when that time comes, I'll definitely subscribe.

What I find most attractive about Pandora is that it offers the best of two worlds. I like choosing my own music--that's why I have three thousand songs on my iPod--but when you do that, you're never surprised by what you hear. Shuffle play is a way of getting around this problem, but only within a realm of choice predetermined by you; satellite radio offers a much greater degree of surprise, but only within one musical genre at a time. Pandora, by contrast, allows you to mix genres at will. By telling Pandora that I like (for starters) Louis Armstrong, The Band, Count Basie, Donald Fagen, Robert Johnson, Lyle Lovett, Nancy LaMott, Erin McKeown, Aimee Mann, Pat Metheny, Nickel Creek, and Luciana Souza, I've ensured that it will play a very wide variety of music--but never anything I know I don't like. Radio Teachout plays no heavy metal or hip-hop. Within the parameters I've specified, though, it is constantly surprising me, usually in good ways--and when it plays something I don't care for, I simply give that song a thumbs-down, thus ensuring that I'll never hear it again.

Like blogging, Pandora is easier to experience than it is to explain, so I suggest you give it a hands-on try, bearing in mind that you'll need to spend twenty minutes or so interacting with the program before it knows enough about your taste to start making intelligent music choices. Don't let that throw you: the Pandora interface is both user-friendly and fun to use. My guess is that within a half-hour or less, you'll be addicted.

A couple of years ago I came to the conclusion that terrestrial radio, as conventional broadcast radio is now known, was doomed, at least in its historic capacity as a mass medium for the dissemination of recorded music. Judging by this story, I'd say I was right on target. After spending a few days playing with Pandora, I now think the demise of music-oriented terrestrial radio will come even sooner than I expected. What's more, I think Pandora could conceivably threaten the emergence of satellite radio as a major player on the home-music scene (unless some genius at XM or Sirius figures out a way to make satellite radio interactive, which seems highly improbable).

Yes, these are strong words, but wait until you've tried Pandora before you dismiss them as technophilic hype. I have no doubt--none at all--that it's the most potentially significant music-delivery system to come along since the introduction of iTunes and the iPod. You heard it here first.

UPDATE: Sarah tried Pandora, and is impressed.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 3, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Adolescence is a foreign country

My review of David Mitchell's Black Swan Green appeared in last weekend's Baltimore Sun. I loved it, here's why:

The time is 1982 in the English Midlands, the era of Margaret Thatcher, Chariots of Fire, the Falklands War, and Talking Heads. Jason Taylor is about to turn 13 when the novel opens, and at the mercy of the mob of Wilcoxes, Redmarleys and Broses. In an adolescent jungle where hardness reigns, Jason is heartbreakingly soft. He's plagued by a capricious stammer he personifies as an inner villain called Hangman, who wreaks gleeful havoc with his confidence. He doesn't know what certain popular epithets favored by his peers mean and is afraid to ask. He unfashionably cares about people, beauty, and, worst of all, poetry. If his peers knew this, he recognizes, "they'd gouge me to death behind the tennis courts with blunt woodwork tools and spray the Sex Pistols logo on my gravestone." So he writes poems under a pseudonym and publishes them in a local journal.

It's convenient for Mitchell that Jason is a budding poet and an instinctive naturalist to boot, a sort of English Wendell Berry in the making. Jason's poetic leaning makes plausible all kinds of verbal flourishes and fine observations that might otherwise be a stretch coming from a 13-year-old. But Mitchell takes the liberty and makes the most of it; in fact, one of the most striking and beautiful things about his novel is the entirely plausible and disarming way in which Jason's voice blends the resourceful and calibrated expression of a poet - "some way-too-early fireworks streaked spoon-silver against the Etch-A-Sketch gray sky" - with the occasionally colorful but essentially rote slang favored by a kid. The rich hash that results is, on just about every page, ordinary and extraordinary and ravishing.

Though Mitchell is best known for his previous novel, Cloud Atlas, he began building a following with his earlier books Ghostwritten and Number Nine Dream. Black Swan Green both cements and complicates his reputation as a painstaking formalist and a writer's writer. On one hand, it is narrated more traditionally than any of the previous works, and dwells, more conventionally, on the inner life of a single character. Black Swan Green is an unapologetically realist novel and a hugely satisfying one. On the other hand, for all the naturalism of its effect, the book is every bit as elaborately stitched together as Mitchell's more formally showy books. It has intricate patterns to reveal that might not surface on a first reading.

The whole thing can be read here. As you see, I found the novel generally excellent. But it also found an inside track to my heart in its preoccupation with Alain-Fournier's enigmatic 1913 wonder of a novel Le Grand Meaulnes--a book that, if read at the right age, permanently enters the bloodstream. I read it as a high school senior, which seems to have been just young enough. Reading Alain-Fournier's and Mitchell's novels together would be a very cool small-scale reading project for the summer, no matter one's age.

For a smart dissenting view on Mitchell's novel, see Jenny Davidson's generous-minded but ultimately lukewarm assessment at her blog Light Reading.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 4, 2006 1:09 AM | Permalink

TT: Blanket denial

No, I did not have anything to do with this....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 4, 2006 3:12 AM | Permalink

TT: Procrastination meme

Courtesy of the ever-readable Little Professor, here goes nothing:

- I am getting ready to go downstairs and catch a cab that will take me to a midtown recording studio, where I'll be taping an episode of a new radio show hosted by John Pizzarelli.
- I want a Morandi etching.
- I wish I lived by a river, a lake, or the sea.
- I hate cell phones used in inappropriate places and fashions.
- I love my family, my friends, my work (and the art it requires me to consume), and the Teachout Museum.
- I miss my home town.
- I fear death. (Why beat around the bush?)
- I hear the faint sound of traffic on Columbus Avenue and the soft purr of my iBook.
- I wonder if the weather will be nice when I take a couple of days off next week and head for one of my Secure Undisclosed Locations.
- I regret not having spent more afternoons in Central Park.
- I am not quite as patient as I wish I were.
- I dance under no circumstances whatsoever.
- I sing in tune, but in an uninteresting bass-baritone voice.
- I cry fairly often, usually for no good reason.
- I am not always considerate (though I try to be).
- I make with my hands the occasional omelet.
- I write in a near-micrographic hand that my friends claim is attractive-looking. (To me it looks like a scrawl.)
- I confuse...er, nothing that comes immediately to mind, though I find that the names of good friends slip my mind from time to time. Such is middle age!
- I need to take a shower and eat a little something before I head for the studio. (It might also be a good idea to put on some clothes.)
- I should start writing the sixth chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong--but not yet!
- I start reading more books than I finish.
- I finish writing Hotter Than That eleven months from now (D.V.!, D.V.!).
- I tag Our Girl, of course.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 4, 2006 10:45 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"He was a prisoner of his belief in realities rather than appearances. He had never cared what anyone thought of him, only what he thought of himself."

Brian Garfield, Hopscotch

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 4, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: A clock without a key

I take six pills a day and a seventh every other day. If I don't, I'll die, not right away--my cardiologist says I'm in great shape--but considerably sooner than I'd like. I don't resent so modest a regimen, especially since I know lots of people who have to take two or three times as many pills as I do. When I think about it, I'm mainly grateful that six and a half pills a day, plus regular exercise and a sensible diet, are all it takes to keep me out of a coffin, at least for the present. Nevertheless, I'm having a certain amount of trouble adjusting to the fact that I've joined the ranks of those who can no longer take their health for granted.

For years I abused myself, though not in any of the more immediately devastating ways. Overwork and overeating were my tipples of choice, and whenever I indulged to excess, I simply laid off for a couple of days, after which I became my normal self once again. Or so I thought. Like most of us, I preferred to ignore the signals of impending doom that were starting to show up on my screen with increasing frequency, and on the morning when the roof fell in and I was forced to call an ambulance in order to save what was left of my life, it had been at least two years--maybe more--since I'd last seen a doctor of any kind.

In short, I used to think I was bulletproof, and now I know I'm not. The best I can say is that I somehow managed last December to dodge a bullet aimed at my heart, and should I stop following doctor's orders, the next one will almost certainly hit its target. So I take my pills twice a day, and each time I do, I hear the words Remember you must die in my mind's ear.

Dame Muriel Spark, who died a couple of weeks ago after a long and artistically fruitful life, wrote a remarkable novel in 1959 called Memento Mori. It's about a group of old people who, for no apparent reason, start to receive anonymous telephone calls from a person who says "Remember you must die" to them, then hangs up. The novel tells how each of the recipients of these mysterious calls is affected by them. Toward the end one of the characters makes the following remark, which has been much on my mind of late:

If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.

I don't think my life was insipid prior to last December, but I'm pretty sure that I was taking large parts of it for granted, and I know I'd been abusing the work I love, in much the same way that a drunkard abuses the nectar that once added savor to his daily rounds. Yes, there were times when I pierced the veil and awoke to what Mr. Anecdotal Evidence calls the thisness of things, but those times were too rare, perhaps in part because I took for granted that I would be around for a long time to come.

Needless to say, I hope and expect to be around for a very long time to come. But twice a day, just like clockwork, I open my medicine cabinet, take out my seven-day pillbox, and swallow the tablets that remind me, whether or not I care to be reminded at that particular moment, that my clock, just like yours, is running down. I know there will always be stretches of my life that I take for granted--that's in our nature--but until I die there will also be those twice-daily visits to the medicine cabinet to warn me, if I care to listen, that the night cometh, when no man can work. Or listen to music, or take a walk in Central Park, or linger over dinner with a friend and talk idly and happily about nothing in particular.

That's a good thing to keep in mind, if not exactly a comforting one.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 4, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Below the radar

Many of you who read yesterday's posting about Pandora, the new Web-based streaming-audio "music discovery service," have already written to tell me that you tried it and liked it, for which much thanks.

One well-informed reader, however, told me quite a bit more:

i just figured out how pandora got itunes and amazon to let them run wild. it's genius really and i've used the same strategy in marketing projects for corporations.

pandora gets to use whatever it wants (within limits, of course) and in exchange, they are feeding demographic data to itunes and amazon. if you don't sign up, the demo data is raw. in other words, itunes learns what types of music is favored with other types as well as mismatches. this helps them market to those who download.

so, for example, if you download prez, you may be interested to learn that a stan getz disc was also favored by most people who dug prez. it gets better. those who do sign up is where the real action is. when you log in and indicate what you like and dislike. in short, you are telling itunes and amazon exactly what terry teachout likes.

so, when you log in at itunes or amazon, cookies read it's you and itunes and amazon tempt you with stuff you may have listened to and liked or similar stuff that the data says you should like. it's brilliant. the end user gets free music, pandora gets ad revenue and a percentage of each vote from itunes/amazon and itunes/amazon get database gold.

not bad eh?

Not bad at all--though I'm sure that certain readers will bristle at the thought of such data being mined without their explicit permission, even if the process does lead to their musical horizons being expanded for free.

To these people I say, Better disable your cookies and hide in the root cellar! That's the future of marketing, cultural and otherwise, and unless you go off the new-media grid altogether, you can't escape it. For better and worse--in proportions that have yet to be made fully manifest--it's already here.

UPDATE: Another reader writes:

I tried it. I wasn't happy. Not because of the choices, but because they didn't know even one of the people/groups I was suggesting to give me any choices. Granted, these were not your usual American bland artists, they were Belgian, French, Quebecois, Algerian and Lebanese. And not one of the 15 made it into their list.

Still, it seems to me that if you're even slightly adventurous, you might not do so well with this service because it won't give me (for example) someone like Liane Foly or Rachid Taha that I might enjoy.

Given the diversity of musical tastes and cultures here, I'm surprised that they're not broader in selection.

Er, well...yikes!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 4, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

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. (No, there aren't any asterisks this 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)
- 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)
- The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, 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 SOON:
- Defiance (drama, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes June 4)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 4, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Question answered

Nobody got it! Though there were some good guesses: Jack Nicholson, Kevin Spacey, John Hurt. I really thought the guy would be a little easier to identify. Answer can be found in this interview.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 4, 2006 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"In Hello, Dolly! the movements and the jive with the audience clapping--aw, it's all in the fun. The people expect all that from me--coming out all chesty, making faces. That's me and I don't want to be nobody else. They know I'm there in the cause of happiness. And I don't worry what anybody thinks. There's an old saying. �I'll be the horse's head--and you be yourself.'"

Louis Armstrong, interview with Richard Meryman (Life, April 15, 1966)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 5, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Acquisition

When I was a boy, my father bought me a statuette of W.C. Fields. I liked it fine and managed to hang onto it for a number of years, though I remember wishing even then that he'd given me the Louis Armstrong statuette from the same series. They were made by a company called Esco (which still exists, as I recently discovered). Needless to say, the statuettes long ago became collectors' items, but I forgot about them until I saw a photograph of the Satchmo model in Gary Giddins' Armstrong biography. As soon as I saw it I knew I wanted one of my own, and the desire grew stronger when I started writing Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong.

A Satchmo statuette turned up on eBay the other day, and I bought it on the spot. Those who know what Armstrong looked like in the flesh won't need to be told that it is an extremely faithful depiction of the way he appeared on stage, with only a slight, self-evidently affectionate dash of caricature added by the anonymous artist. (It's considerably truer to life than the po-faced, hyper-respectful Armstrong statue erected a few years ago in New Orleans' Louis Armstrong Park.) It turns out that Esco's Satchmo is coveted by collectors of black memorabilia, and I can see why: I've never seen a rendering of Armstrong that did a better job of conveying his irrepressible joie de vivre.

I've placed my latest acquisition on the corner of my desk, where I expect it to fill me with inspiration from now to the day next March when, God willing, I finish Hotter Than That and ship it off to Harcourt. No, it isn't art, not in the Teachout Museum sense, but it does make me smile, for which there is ever and always much to be said. As I wrote in my last "Sightings" column for The Wall Street Journal, apropos of the so-called "Mozart effect":

Maurice Ravel put at the head of his Valses nobles et sentimentales this lovely epigraph by the French poet Henri de R�gnier: "...the delicious and always new pleasure of a useless occupation." Ravel knew that in the end it doesn't matter whether or not art is "good" for you, so long as it gives you pleasure.

Even in the most elegantly decorated of homes, there should always be room for a little bit of fun. This is mine.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 5, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Flashback

I just finished reading Peter Richmond's Fever: The Life and Music of Miss Peggy Lee. I wish it were better--it is, like most pop-music biographies, gushingly overwritten and musically underinformed--but at least it's thorough, and when you finish reading it you'll know a whole lot more about Peggy Lee than you did when you first picked it up.

I suppose it's possible that some readers of "About Last Night" have never heard a Peggy Lee album. If you're among them, try this one, which is a pretty good and fairly wide-ranging complilation of some of her best-known records. Among other things, it contains Lee's greatest hit, "Fever," about which I wrote for the New York Times four years ago, the Sunday after she died. I didn't include this piece in A Terry Teachout Reader because it's too short, but I like it anyway, even though I was fighting a frighteningly tight deadline and didn't have any time for second thoughts. I hope you like it, too.

* * *

Peggy Lee taught me all about sex. I was twelve at the time, and had just made the earth-shaking discovery that my father's record collection was of more than merely historical interest. This was in 1968, the year of the White Album, and I was still trying to figure out how to play "Rocky Raccoon" on my brand-new guitar, but I was also chewing my way through the selected works of Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton, Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, whose recording of "Fever" was--shall we say--instructive.

Not that she was obvious about it, or anything else. If a Hitchcock blonde could have raised her voice in song, then Peggy Lee, who died last Monday at the age of eighty-one, would have sounded pretty much like that, cool and self-possessed and...amused. But even at twelve, I got the message, and then some: what the lady on the record had in mind was pretty much what I had in mind twenty-four hours a day, except that her point of view was more informed. That was when I realized my father knew a thing or two about music.

Thirty-four years later, I know a lot more about Peggy Lee, the English division of EMI having finally deigned to transfer the best of her albums to compact disc. I now know that "Fever" was the least of her. She was exquisite--there is no other word for her. She floated atop a rhythm section like a soap bubble on a warm breeze, never raising her alto-flute voice a decibel more than absolutely necessary in order to get the exact effect she intended. She was a smart singer, the very opposite of all the cruel jokes some jazz instrumentalists like to tell about the women with whom they so often grudgingly share a bandstand. She chose her material with painstaking care, writing some of the best of it herself, and when she sang a song, it usually stayed sung. Other people do "Don't Smoke in Bed" and "I've Got Your Number" and "You Came a Long Way from St. Louis," but when I hear them in my mind's ear, hers is the voice I hear.

I know all that--and yet when I learned of her death, the first thing that popped into my head was a dirt-plain bass-and-drum riff and a soft, sly voice half-whispering "Never know how much I love you/Never know how much I care/When you put your arms around me/I get a fever that's so hard to bear." I didn't need to go looking for that record on my shelves: it was burned into my memory, together with a mental picture of the beautiful woman who sang it. I remember how sure of herself she sounded, sure enough--and strong enough--to smile at the thought of playing with fire. Is this really what women are like? I wondered, and decided I'd better find out.

That's quite a lesson to have learned from a three-minute single--but, then, Peggy Lee was quite a teacher.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 5, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Bliss comes to Broadway

In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I bang the gong for one new show, The Drowsy Chaperone, and grumble about two others, Hot Feet and The Importance of Being Earnest:

At last--at last!--a new musical that is both utterly frivolous and entrancingly clever has opened on Broadway. "The Drowsy Chaperone," an affectionate, encyclopedically knowing send-up of the who-cares-if-the-plot-makes-sense musicals of the '20s, is funny, brainy, tuneful, concise (one hour, 40 minutes, no intermission) and performed with bewitching skill. You'll love it even if you don't know Jerome Kern from Jerome Robbins, though you'll get more of the inside jokes, of which there are several thousand, if you do. Either way, "The Drowsy Chaperone" is deservedly destined for a long, profitable run....

Maybe I was simply grateful not to be seeing "Lestat" again, but "Hot Feet," Maurice Hines' dumbed-down, funked-up jukebox-musical version of "The Red Shoes," turned out to be not quite as bad as I'd feared....

I couldn't be more surprised to find myself saying so, but the Theatre Royal Bath/Peter Hall Company's touring production of Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest," now playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's BAM Harvey Theater, is a slow-moving bore....

No link. Buy the paper, or subscribe to the Online Journal by going here, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 5, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Disproportion

I just read James Wood's review of Frederick Brown's Flaubert: A Biography, which appeared in this week's New York Times Book Review. It is 3,250 words long, of which only three hundred make any mention of the book Wood is allegedly reviewing, from which he quotes only a half-sentence, though he finds room to refer to Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and hip-hop. Am I the only person out here in the 'sphere who considers this the wrong way to go about reviewing an important new biography of a major author in a widely read publication?

I'm not saying I haven't committed the same critical crime on occasion--I'm sure I have, and I'm sure somebody will be pointing that fact out to me in fairly short order--but this piece strikes me as an especially egregious case in point. Brown's Flaubert is a remarkable biography, maybe even a great one. It doesn't deserve to get lost in the shuffle of its own reviews.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 7, 2006 11:18 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Meme in, meme out

Having been tagged, I hasten to fulfill my obligation:

I am writing this in longhand.
I want Steve Yzerman to put off retiring.
I wish I were ice-skating NOW.
I hate drivers on cell phones.
I love northern Michigan (Michigancentrically, "up north").
I miss the Clinch Park bears.
I fear speaking in front of an audience.
I hear a train, distantly.
I wonder what will happen on House next week. (In the first-season reruns on USA; do not send spoliers and nobody will get hurt.)
I regret not taking up ice-skating sooner.
I am not a credible liar.
I dance with Baryshnikov in my daydreams.
I sing at full volume when alone in the car or the kitchen.
I cry after double-overtime sudden-death playoff games that end badly.
I am not always conscious of how old I've gotten.
I make with my hands ice cream! Most recently, oatmeal ice cream (no raisins for me, thanks).
I write in longhand when practical, which is seldom.
I confuse being nice with giving undue encouragement sometimes. (Don't worry, I don't mean you. You I like.)
I need strong coffee every morning, iced during summer.
I should return my moldering Netflix discs and stop ordering movies that are good for me.
I start innumerable blog posts I never finish.
I finish basic skating lessons in two weeks and start looking for hockey lessons.
I tag Mr. Quiet Bubble and Ms. Bookish Gardener.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 8, 2006 1:39 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"The spot was charming, and Lily was not insensible to the charm, or to the fact that her presence enhanced it; but she was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company, and the combination of a handsome girl and a romantic scene struck her as too good to be wasted. No one, however, appeared to profit by the opportunity; and after a half hour of fruitless waiting she rose and wandered on. She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips."

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 8, 2006 2:10 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap."

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (courtesy of such stuff)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 8, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Also present

I blogged a couple of weeks ago about Carl Van Vechten, the photographer-boulevardier-enthusiast whose portraits of famous people were recently exhibited at an Upper East Side bookshop. Since then I've had occasion to re-read an out-of-print biography of Van Vechten, and I confess to being envious of what you might call his achievements in the field of propinquity. Among many, many other things, he attended both the Armory Show in New York and the Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring, at which he shared a box with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who subsequently became his lifelong friends, joining a troupe that also included Ronald Firbank, George Gershwin, Zora Neale Hurston, H.L. Mencken, Eugene O'Neill, and Bessie Smith.

Van Vechten was born in 1880, died in 1964, and in between was intensely curious about everything to do with the arts. I had forgotten when I wrote my previous posting, for instance, that he was not merely a dance critic but the very first American dance critic, and that he lived long enough to see and admire both Anna Pavlova and New York City Ballet. Van Vechten preserved his curiosity well into his old age: among the subjects of his later photographs were Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, over whose music he "swooned," writing with special admiration of "those long Rossini-like monotonous crescendos that stretch out endlessly like the moon of my delight in the orient." (I'd bet money that this is the album he had in mind.) He even set down his opinion of Elvis Presley for posterity:

I heard him with amazement and I am convinced that his appeal is purely (or impurely) sexual. And as he does not appeal to me on that basis, I have discarded him forever, unless he comes around with his hand-organ to sing at my door.

"To me," Van Vechten wrote, "discovery is nine-tenths of the interest in life." Not a bad motto for someone in my line of work.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 8, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: In your ear

While we're on the subject of how blacks were portrayed by the American mass media at the turn of the century, allow me to direct your attention to Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1891-1922 (Archeophone, two CDs), an anthology containing fifty-four of the earliest commercial sound recordings made by black performers and public figures.

You can order Lost Sounds here, and you can also listen for free to streaming-audio samples of every track included on the set, including speeches recorded by Booker T. Washington in 1908 and by Jack Johnson in 1910. If, like me, you're interested in early spoken-word recordings, I guarantee that you'll find these particular snippets fascinating in the extreme.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 8, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: It's history

Virtually nobody watches D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation anymore, even though it was one of the half-dozen most influential films in the history of the medium. Much of the lingua franca of cinematic storytelling was invented by Griffith, and The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, was the laboratory in which he brought his ideas to fruition. It was also one of the most racist movies ever made, a shameless glorification of the role played by the Ku Klux Klan in the reconstruction of the postbellum Old South.

Or so, at any rate, we're told. Never having seen The Birth of a Nation, I only "knew" it was racist because that was what I'd always heard and read. So when Turner Classic Movies aired the film last week as part of a month-long series called Race and Hollywood: Black Images on Film, I decided it was time to see for myself.

In case you're wondering--or worrying--this isn't going to be a revaluation of The Birth of a Nation. Somewhat to my surprise, it turned out to be every bit as appalling as everyone says, a near-encyclopedic compendium of racial stereotypes of the grossest, most offensive sort. Small wonder that TCM prefaced and followed it with an on-camera discussion by Robert Osborne and Donald Bogle, the author of Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. (I'm a bit surprised that the network didn't run on-screen disclaimers during the film itself.)

None of this, however, interested me half so much as the fact that The Birth of a Nation progresses with the slow-motion solemnity of a funeral march. Even the title cards stay on the screen for three times as long as it takes to read them. Five minutes after the film started, I was squirming with impatience, and after another five minutes passed, I decided out of desperation to try an experiment: I cranked the film up to four times its normal playing speed and watched it that way. It was overly brisk in two or three spots, most notably the re-enactment of Lincoln's assassination (which turned out to be quite effective--it's the best scene in the whole film). For the most part, though, I found nearly all of The Birth of a Nation to be perfectly intelligible at the faster speed.

Putting aside for a moment the insurmountable problem of its content, it was the agonizingly slow pace of The Birth of a Nation that proved to be the biggest obstacle to my experiencing it as an objet d'art. Even after I sped it up, my mind continued to wander, and one of the things to which it wandered was my similar inability to extract aesthetic pleasure out of medieval art. With a few exceptions, medieval and early Renaissance art and music don't speak to me. The gap of sensibility is too wide for me to cross. I have a feeling that silent film--not just just The Birth of a Nation, but all of it--is no more accessible to most modern sensibilities. (The only silent movies I can watch with more than merely antiquarian interest are the comedies of Buster Keaton.) Nor do I think the problem is solely, or even primarily, that it's silent: I have no problem with plotless dance, for instance. It's that silent film "speaks" to me in an alien tongue, one I can only master in an intellectual way. That's not good enough for me when it comes to art, whose immediate appeal is not intellectual but visceral (though the intellect naturally enters into it).

As for The Birth of a Nation, I'm glad I saw it once. My card is now officially punched. On the other hand, I can't imagine voluntarily seeing it again, any more than I'd attend the premiere of an opera by Philip Glass other than at gunpoint. It is the quintessential example of a work of art that has fulfilled its historical purpose and can now be put aside permanently--and I don't give a damn about history, at least not in my capacity as an aesthete. I care only for the validity of the immediate experience. I'm with A.E. Housman:

A year or two ago, in common with others, I received from America a request that I would define poetry. (America is the source of much irritation of this kind, to be sure.) I replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognised the object by the symptoms which it provoked in us. One of those symptoms was described in connexion with another object by Eliphaz the Temanite: "A spirit passed before my face: the hair of my flesh stood up." Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes; and there is a third which I can only describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keats's last letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny Brawne, "everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear." The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach.

This famous passage is from Housman's 1933 lecture The Name and Nature of Poetry, and even after making due allowance for the personal prejudices of the practicing artist, it pretty well sums up my view of things. Thrill me and all is forgiven. Bore me and you've lost me. That's why I think it's now safe to file and forget The Birth of a Nation. Yes, it's still historically significant, and yes, it tells us something important about the way we once were. But it's boring--and thank God for that.

UPDATE: Mr. Parabasis has cleverly turned the sixth paragraph of this posting into a meme. Care to play, OGIC?

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 8, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Critical liberties

An informal catalogue of cardinal critical sins, with fresh and glaring illustrations from some of today's Most Favored Critics, seems to be underway this month. Just yesterday Terry tagged James Wood for devoting a mere ten percent of his prime NYTBR real estate to the new Flaubert biography he was purportedly reviewing there. Commandment the first: You shall not overlook the book under review.

Meanwhile, last week, James Marcus rightfully zapped John Banville for finding Philip Roth's new novel insufficiently, well, Banvillesque:

This is transparently the recipe for a John Banville novel--the infinite nuances, the atomized perceptions--and the biggest boner a critic can commit is the insistence that all writers should do what he does. It's embarrassing.

Thus, Commandment the second: You shall not critique a tulip by wishing it a rose, especially if you grow roses. (Sorry, tulips on the brain these days--they are everywhere, and god bless 'em.) Marcus considers Roth's book on its own aesthetic terms here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 8, 2006 12:18 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Feast your eyes

Kentucky Derby photos, replete with characters, wit, and color, color, color.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 8, 2006 12:28 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Punctuality is the virtue of the bored."

Evelyn Waugh, diary, March 26, 1962

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 9, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Survivor

On Saturday afternoon I saw my last show of the 2005-06 season, Tarzan. The New York Drama Critics Circle, of which I am a member, votes this Thursday on the best plays of the year, and the names of the winners will be released immediately after the ballots are tallied (the news will be posted here).

All this means that Broadway is quiescent until August, when Martin Short's new musical comes to town. I have a couple of weeks to catch my breath before I hit the road and start seeing out-of-town shows, and I'm going to need it. It's been a long, grueling season, full of the good, the bad, and the ugly, though I suppose in the long run that I'll remember it above all for the fateful night when I had to be helped into a cab by a kindly press agent, followed a few hours later by my admission to Lenox Hill Hospital.

Amazingly enough, I only skipped a single drama column last December, and I was back on the aisle two days after coming home from the hospital, marveling at the Irish Repertory Theatre's revival of Mrs. Warren's Profession. In retrospect I suppose it was stupid of me to get back on the horse so quickly (though I left New York the very next day to spend a couple of weeks convalescing in Smalltown, U.S.A., which was a bit smarter). Nevertheless, I did it, and I'm not sorry: I had something to prove to myself, and I managed to prove it without doing any damage to my weakened heart.

Having done so, though, I scaled back my playgoing, restricting myself to two shows a week. It wasn't until the spring rush started that I opened up the throttle, and even then I took care to husband my energy. As regular readers of this blog are well aware, I stopped going to nightclubs, and I haven't been to a single movie since I got out of the hospital.

So has the time come for me to resume normal activities? Yes and no. I have no intention of reviving the Old Me, the fellow who never spent an evening at home when he could be anywhere else. I was already growing more reflective in the weeks just prior to my collapse, and I mean to stay that way. On the other hand, I'm feeling better than ever, and now that I've survived the spring rush, I'm inclined to test myself still further--within limits. The past six months have taught me a number of valuable lessons, the most important of which is to be unafraid of doing nothing.

Just the other day I spent the morning writing my Wall Street Journal drama column, then decided on the spur of the moment to stroll across Central Park to the Guggenheim Museum to see the David Smith retrospective. It was an eat-your-spinach self-assignment: I've never warmed to Smith's welded sculptures, but every art critic I respect says he's the real deal, so I figured I ought to give him yet another try and hope that the scales would fall from my eyes.

I hadn't yet eaten lunch, so I bought a couple of dirty-water dogs from the pushcart at Eighty-First Street and Central Park West, then perched myself on a convenient rock and dined al fresco. After that I headed east--but not for long. No sooner did I pass under Winterdale Arch than I spotted an empty park bench, and in an instant my high-minded resolve evaporated. Instead of spending the afternoon with David Smith, I spent it sitting on the bench. The sun warmed my skin, the breeze cooled it, and though I gave brief thought to taking an improving book out of my bag, I ended up doing nothing at all but listening to the birds and looking at the passers-by.

Midway through my reverie, an anxious-looking pedestrian politely interrupted me. "Pardon me for bothering you," she asked, "but will I get to the East Side if I stay on this path? These roads are awfully curvy, and I seem to be going in circles."

"I know what you mean," I replied, "but if you go this way and keep an eye on the skyline, you're bound to end up on the East Side sooner or later."

She thanked me and moved on, leaving me to ponder the lovely implications of the phrase sooner or later. I make my living by going to performances and hitting deadlines, so when I'm off duty, I try to let things happen when they happen instead of insisting that they happen at this time or that. I doubt the Celestial Accountant really means for us to account for every second of wasted time, but should it turn out that He does, I intend to tell Him that I couldn't think of a better way to spend a cloudless summer afternoon than sitting on a park bench, reveling in the passing moment. I didn't spend enough afternoons that way in the first part of my life, and now that I know better, I have every intention of wasting every second I can spare.

* * *

I've decided to play hooky for the rest of the week. I'm leaving you in the capable hands of Our Girl, who will post my regular theater-related items on Thursday and Friday, along with whatever else she may have in mind. See you Monday!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 9, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"As soon as he'd discovered that the object of bowling was to learn how to do exactly the same thing every time, he'd lost interest."

Brian Garfield, Hopscotch

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 10, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"The Evening Pulpit was supposed to give daily to its readers all that had been said and done up to two o'clock in the day by all the leading people in the metropolis, and to prophesy with wonderful accuracy what would be the sayings and doings of the following twelve hours. This was effected with an air of wonderful omniscience, and not unfrequently with an ignorance hardly surpassed by its arrogance. But the writing was clever. The facts, if not true, were well invented; the arguments, if not logical, were seductive."

Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (courtesy of Clive Davis

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 11, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: So you want to see a show?

Courtesy of Our Girl in Chicago, 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. (Once again, there are no asterisks this 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 Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
- The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, 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)
- The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, 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 SOON:
- Awake and Sing! (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, extended through June 25)
- Defiance (drama, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes June 4)
- The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes July 2, reviewed here)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 11, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Due to circumstances beyond our control

If you've been wondering why "About Last Night" looked a little funny today, the reason is that our server went kaplooie on Thursday night. We weren't able to publish any of our regular Friday postings for the same reason. They're up now, so if you missed them, scroll down and you'll find them in the usual place.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 12, 2006 11:27 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"To an extent the theater will always be a magnet for hobbyists, people who are drawn like trainspotters or matchbox fans to compare different performances of Hamlet. They form, if you like, a core audience, who survive over the years. Their overriding interest is in the maintenance and improvement of their collections, and so they will direct their attention not so much at what is said, as to the skills which are being used to say it."

David Hare, Obedience, Struggle and Revolt

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 12, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Shuffle-play music

In my next "Sightings" column, to be published in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I take a look at a freshly coined name for the "new eclecticism" of such contemporary musicians of polystylistic inclination as the Bad Plus, Theo Bleckmann, Julia Dollison, Adam Guettel, Osvaldo Golijov, Michael John LaChiusa, Nickel Creek, Luciana Souza, and Maria Schneider.

Might the phrase "shuffle play" be taking on broader cultural significance? To find out--maybe--pick up a copy of tomorrow's Journal, where you'll find my column in the "Pursuits" section.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 12, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Tarzan has two mommies

The Broadway season is now officially over, and I'm sweeping up the debris in my Wall Street Journal drama column. This week I lower the boom on Tarzan and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial:

You guessed it: "Tarzan," the new Disney musical, is chockful of actors who swing around the theater on artificial vines. Talk about easy calls! But, then, there aren't many surprises in this leaden stage version of the 1999 cartoon version of the 1912 novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs about a shipwrecked foundling raised by apes. The only surprising thing about "Tarzan," in fact, is that so much of it is so tiresome....

Culprit No. 1 is Phil Collins, whose score, some of which is new and some recycled from the movie, is a plodding bore, monotonously paced and unenlightened by the faintest glimmer of wit....

Culprit No. 2 is David Henry Hwang, the author of "M. Butterfly" and a notorious purveyor of PC. His book is a seemingly unending string of ham-handed Disney-style public-service announcements for tolerance, lightly sprinkled with flat punch lines. Jane: "Tarzan's not a gorilla, he's a human being. Honestly, that's not even his real family." Daddy: "Do you know of any families that aren't real, my dear?" I bet you didn't know "Tarzan" was a parable about non-traditional families, did you?...

Herman Wouk's 1953 stage adaptation of the last part of his blockbuster World War II novel is a nuts-and-bolts courtroom drama that all but plays itself--if you let it. Jerry Zaks, familiar on Broadway for his stagings of such musicals as "Little Shop of Horrors" and last year's short-lived revival of "La Cage aux Folles," evidently thinks otherwise, for he has directed the first act of this thoroughly grim play as if it were an episode of "Hogan's Heroes," pumping up the occasional moments of comic relief and encouraging the cast to resort to noisy caricature....

No link. Your alternatives remain unchanged: (1) Buy a copy of today's Journal. (2) Subscribe to the Online Journal by going here, which will give you immediate access to the full text of my review and lots of other good stuff.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 12, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: The joint is jumping

ArtsJournal's group blog on the future of criticism in the age of new media (about which more here) has already come to a rolling boil. It's even attracting the attention of other bloggers. What's more, the comments are as interesting as the postings.

Go here to jump in.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 15, 2006 11:34 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"I believe the great human change into a new world should be expressed, but I also believe that when the Soviet arbiters say that Hamlet is foolish, they are talking nonsense, and destructive nonsense at that. And I hope the human race will never be purged of those types, who, like Shakespeare, are victims all their mature life of the most dreadful form of morbid jealousy, or of unconscious homosexuals like Hopkins and Housman, or of perfectly batty people, who drive themselves into extreme fits over the fact that the landlady looked at them sideways, like Beethoven. God keep me from a world, even without poverty and human degradation, in which there were no delicate sensibilities that could produce a remark like Margaret, are you grieving; or An expense of spirit in a waste of shame; that could not feel horror over mutability and an excess of joy over the facts of perfectly physical passion, or pity for the maladjusted or horror over the senseless cruel."

Louise Bogan, letter to Rolfe Humphries, July 6, 1935

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 15, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Group grope

Douglas McLennan is the resident genius behind ArtsJournal. In addition to providing an indispensable daily digest of English-language news stories and commentaries on the arts, ArtsJournal also hosts "About Last Night" and a dozen other artblogs (all of which you can visit by scrolling down to the bottom module of the right-hand column). Now Doug has put together a special group-discussion blog called "Critical Edge: Critics in a Critical Age."

Here, in his words, is what "Critical Edge" is all about:

Everyone's a critic. And now that anyone has access to an audience through the internet, our computers have become a cacophony of people with opinions. Clearly not all opinions are equal. Traditionally, the influence of an opinion was closely tied to the venue in which it was published--how widely it was disseminated or how prestigious the publication was thought to be. With a growing flood of opinions available to all, some suggest that the influence of the traditional critic is waning, that the opinions of the many will drown out the power of the few. But in a time when access to information and entertainment and art seems to be growing exponentially, more than ever we need ways to to sort through the mass and get at the "good" stuff. The question is how? Where is the critical authority to come from? Some suggest that new social networking software that ranks community preferences and elevates some opinions over others will supplant the formerly powerful traditional critics. So what is to be the new critical currency? Stripped of traditional legitimacies, how will the most interesting critical voices be heard and have influence?

Doug has put together a wide-ranging list of participants, many of whose names will be familiar to you:

- Misha Berson, theatre critic, Seattle Times
- Larry Blumenfeld, jazz critic, The Wall Street Journal
- Caryn Brooks, writer
- Jeanne Carstensen, managing editor, Salon.com
- Anthony DeCurtis, contributing editor, Rolling Stone
- Enrique Fernandez, critic, Miami Herald
- Tyler Green, art critic, Modern Art Notes
- Joseph Horowitz, author/orchestra consultant
- Chris Lavin, arts editor, San Diego Union Tribune
- Ruth Lopez, art and design editor, Time Out Chicago
- Maud Newton, book critic, MaudNewton.com
- Claude Peck, fine arts editor, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
- Inga Saffron, architecture critic, Philadelphia Inquirer
- Andras Szanto, former director, National Arts Journalism Program
- Jerome Weeks, book critic, Dallas Morning News

I'm participating, too.

"Critical Edge" is now open for business and will be up and running through Wednesday. To read our collective discussion of the prospects for criticism in the age of the Web, go here and start scrolling.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 15, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Simultaneity

In my biweekly "Sightings" column, which appeared in the "Pursuits" section of Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I played Bill Safire avant la lettre--sort of:

Not long ago I was chatting with three gifted musicians who were looking for a new way to describe what they do. All are widely thought of as "jazz musicians," even though that venerable phrase is no longer a good fit for the increasingly uncategorizable music they make. Luciana Souza, who came to this country from Brazil, sings everything from bossa nova to American pop standards to her own settings of the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Pablo Neruda. Maria Schneider leads a big band for which she writes large-scale compositions structured along classical lines into which she weaves flamenco, Latin American music and jazz improvisation. Theo Bleckmann is an uncompromisingly avant-garde vocalist whose latest album, "Las Vegas Rhapsody: The Night They Invented Champagne," is a collection of show tunes accompanied by the Basel Chamber Orchestra.

How do you sum up such artists in a well-chosen word or two? You don't--and that's one of the problems with which they grapple as they try to find an audience for their music. This is why I was so struck when one of the three musicians (I can't remember who) casually used the phrase "shuffle play" in an attempt to describe the stylistic multiplicity of their work. The others agreed at once: That's what they do.

I wouldn't have been nearly as impressed by their on-the-spot consensus were it not for the fact that I'd already heard the same phrase used in the same way by other artists of like inclination. Suddenly it hit me: I'd been watching a new cultural metaphor take shape....

The new music I have in mind isn't random, but it definitely goes out of its way to take the listener in surprising directions. The Bad Plus, for instance, specializes in bracingly quirky jazz versions of such decidedly unjazzy tunes as Blondie's "Heart of Glass" and the theme from "Chariots of Fire." Nickel Creek plays bluegrass-flavored music that owes as much to the synthesized technopop of Radiohead as it does to the high, lonesome sound of Bill Monroe. "Observatory," Julia Dollison's debut CD, contains songs by Jerome Kern, Duke Ellington and Rufus Wainwright, sung in a richly imaginative, pigeonhole-eluding style that lies somewhere in the no-man's-land separating jazz from pop.

Michael John LaChiusa's See What I Wanna See and Adam Guettel's The Light in the Piazza are operalike "musicals" whose kaleidoscopic scores reflect their composers' passions for an extraordinarily wide variety of music. Osvaldo Golijov writes "classical" music into which he stirs Afro-Cuban percussion, gospel-style choral writing, even the keening wail of a klezmer clarinet.

What to call this new kind of music-making? At first glance it resembles postmodernism, but the self-consciously wide-ranging eclecticism of postmodern artists is always tinged with irony, whereas the musicians of whom I'm thinking embrace many different styles in a wholehearted way that has nothing in common with the cool detachment of the postmodernist. Their new approach thus requires a new label, and "shuffle-play music" might be in the early stages of catching on....

No link, so if you want to read the whole thing--of which there's a good deal more--I suggest you avail yourself of one of these alternatives:

(1) Head for the nearest library, where you'll find a copy of the Saturday Journal and (presumably) a comfy chair.

(2) Subscribe to the Online Journal by going here. Doing so will give you immediate access to the full text of this week's "Sightings" column, plus a plethora of other good stuff.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 15, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: A little traveling music

Here are the CDs I took with me on my trip to Barryville:

- The Best of Blind Blake (Yazoo)

- Whiskey Is My Habit, Good Women Is All I Crave: The Best of Leroy Carr (Columbia/Legacy)

- Paul Desmond, Pure Desmond (CTI)

- Donald Fagen, Morph the Cat (Reprise)

- Lyle Lovett, Joshua Judges Ruth (MCA/Curb)

- Mitchell's Christian Singers, Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, Vol. 1: 1934-1936 (Document)

- Weslia Whitfield, Lucky to Be Me (Landmark)

If you've never heard of Mitchell's Christian Singers--and most people haven't--go here to read what an anonymous critic for Time wrote about them in 1939. It is, not surprisingly, more than a little bit condescending, but I bet it'll pique your curiosity anyway.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 15, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Escape artist

I flew the coop last Wednesday morning, having seen too many plays and feeling the urgent need to be somewhere else. By mid-afternoon I was sitting on the terrace of Ecce Bed and Breakfast in Barryville, a microscopic river town not far from the spot where New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania meet. Longtime readers may recall my previous visit to this refuge, located on a wooded bluff some three hundred feet above the Delaware River. It's one of the most relaxing places I know: the scenery is gorgeous, the hosts considerate, the food delicious, the d�cor not even slightly chintzy. Rarely is a B&B as satisfying as its Web site so enticingly promises, but every time I go to Ecce, it turns out to be even better than advertised.

What did I do there? Just about nothing. I listened to music, I read Alice Goldfarb Marquis' Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg and Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, I watched a bald eagle swoop lazily over the river, and I drove to Narrowsburg, another small town fifteen minutes up the road, where I ate a superlative dinner at a brand-new restaurant that I commend to your attention. Peter Schott, the chef and owner of Restaurant 15 Main, used to cook in Manhattan but has now set up shop in the country, where he turns out such sumptuous dishes as green garlic soup with frogs' legs and the best gnocchi I've ever tasted, the latter accompanied by locally grown, lightly sauteed fiddlehead ferns. Yum. (The 15 Main Web site is still under construction, but should you find yourself anywhere near Narrowsburg, call 845-252-6562 to make a reservation. You won't be sorry.)

I would have been content to spend the rest of the week driving between Barryville and Narrowsburg. Instead I returned to New York on Friday afternoon, unpacked my bags, and headed for Joe's Pub, where Deidre Rodman and Steve Swallow were celebrating the release of Twin Falls, their new CD, with a gig at which they played so beautifully that I wasn't sorry to have come back home. When not making pellucidly lyrical music with Swallow or her own quintet, Rodman is the pianist for the Lascivious Biddies, about whom I've written from time to time in this space (as well as in my liner notes for their latest CD, Get Lucky). All three of her fellow Biddies showed up to cheer Rodman on, and I was as pleased to see them again as I was to hear her.

The next morning I awoke at nine-thirty and remembered that two museum shows I'd been meaning to see, Goya at the Frick Collection and David Smith at the Guggenheim, were about to close. I threw my clothes on, jumped in a cab, and went straight to the Frick, where I found a line of hopeful art lovers stretching halfway around the block. The word on the street was that I'd have to wait two hours to get in. Not caring to fritter away so pretty a morning in so tiresome a fashion, I walked up Fifth Avenue to the Guggenheim, where I stood in line for fifteen seconds before being admitted.

Needless to say, David Smith isn't as popular as Goya, nor do I claim to like his welded-metal abstract-expressionist sculptures as much as Goya's paintings. In fact, I've never liked Smith very much at all, but most of my fellow critics think him a master, so I felt obliged to take him on yet again, though I didn't change my mind this time around. Except for the "Cubis" sculptures, which rarely fail to bowl me over, I continue to find most of Smith's work a fussy, derivative amalgam of surrealism and ill-digested biomorphism (though I did like Steel Drawing I, one of the smaller pieces in the show, very much). So be it. You can't like everything that's good, and you shouldn't pretend to like anything. In the wise words of Kingsley Amis, "All amateurs must be philistines part of the time. Must be: a greater sin is to be coerced into showing respect when little or none is felt."

I left the Guggenheim with my bell unrung, crossed Fifth Avenue, and plunged into Central Park, where the Great Lawn was packed with ecstatic children taking advantage of a lovely day. No show tonight! I told myself happily, and took my sweet time strolling home.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 15, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: For what it's worth

This year's Tony Award nominations were just announced. Here are the major categories. My personal picks are in bold, followed by my predictions:

- BEST PLAY:
Rabbit Hole
Shining City
The History Boys
The Lieutenant of Inishmore

I'm not with the majority on this one: The History Boys is a sure thing.

- BEST MUSICAL:
Jersey Boys
The Color Purple
The Drowsy Chaperone
The Wedding Singer

A tough call. My guess, though, is that Jersey Boys will beat out The Drowsy Chaperone, if only because it's the only crowd-pleasing superhit of the season that also got good reviews, my furious pan excepted. (The Drowsy Chaperone is doing very well, too, but it's so idiosyncratic that critics and theater buffs are sharply divided over its merits.)

- BEST REVIVAL OF A PLAY:
Awake and Sing!
Faith Healer
Seascape
The Constant Wife

An easy call: Faith Healer has this category sewed up tight. (Yo, where's The Odd Couple? Do I detect a whiff of Lane-Broderick-Mantello backlash among the electorate?)

- BEST REVIVAL OF A MUSICAL:
Sweeney Todd
The Pajama Game
The Threepenny Opera

Oh, wow, beats me. Sweeney Todd was definitely the critics' choice, but then we all loved The Pajama Game, too. If I had to bet on the winner, I'd probably go for Sweeney Todd, but I wouldn't put up a whole lot of money either way.

- BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTOR IN A PLAY:
Ralph Fiennes, Faith Healer
Richard Griffiths, The History Boys
Zeljko Ivanek, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
Oliver Platt, Shining City
David Wilmot, The Lieutenant of Inishmore

Probably Fiennes, but Griffiths is a contender, and should be.

- BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTRESS IN A PLAY:
Kate Burton, The Constant Wife
Judy Kaye, Souvenir
Lisa Kron, Well
Cynthia Nixon, Rabbit Hole
Lynn Redgrave, The Constant Wife

This is the weakest category overall, though Cynthia Nixon will doubtless win for all sorts of reasons, none of them relevant. (Note the conspicuous absence of J-l-- R-b-rts from the roster.)

- BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTOR IN A MUSICAL:
Michael Cerveris, Sweeney Todd
Harry Connick, Jr., The Pajama Game
Stephen Lynch, The Wedding Singer
Bob Martin, The Drowsy Chaperone
John Lloyd Young, Jersey Boys

No contest--it's Connick. Sometimes star power counts, and sometimes it should, if not necessarily in this case. (Martin's performance is delightful, but it's a non-singing part.)

- BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL:
La Chanze, The Color Purple
Sutton Foster, The Drowsy Chaperone
Patti LuPone, Sweeney Todd
Kelli O'Hara, The Pajama Game
Chita Rivera, Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life

Everyone was good, the first three nominees exceptionally so. I can see La Chanze winning, if only because none of the voters will want to shut out so successful and Oprah-certified a show, lame though it was. (Me, I would have given it to Nellie McKay for The Threepenny Opera.)

- BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTOR IN A MUSICAL:
Samuel Barnett, The History Boys
Domhnall Gleeson, The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Ian McDiarmid, Faith Healer
Mark Ruffalo, Awake and Sing!
Pablo Schreiber, Awake and Sing!

McDiarmid had the better part, but Ruffalo is deserving, too. Not to worry--his time will come.

- BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTRESS IN A PLAY:
Tyne Daly, Rabbit Hole
Frances de la Tour, The History Boys
Jane Houdyshell, Well
Alison Pill, The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Zo� Wanamaker, Awake and Sing!

Houdyshell might as well go ahead and dust off her mantlepiece.

- BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTOR IN A MUSICAL:
Danny Burstein, The Drowsy Chaperone
Jim Dale, The Threepenny Opera
Victor Dixon, The Color Purple
Manoel Felciano, Sweeney Todd
Christian Hoff, Jersey Boys

Dale. They've got to give Threepenny something.

- BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL:
Carolee Carmello, Lestat
Felicia P. Fields, The Color Purple
Beth Leavel, The Drowsy Chaperone
Megan Lawrence, The Pajama Game
Elisabeth Withers-Mendes, The Color Purple

Lawrence deserves it, and with Fields and Withers-Mendes splitting the vote for The Color Purple, she'll probably get it.

- BEST DIRECTION OF A PLAY:
Nicholas Hytner, The History Boys
Wilson Milam, The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Bartlett Sher, Awake and Sing!
Daniel Sullivan, Rabbit Hole

Hytner or Milam, probably the former.

- BEST DIRECTION OF A MUSICAL:
John Doyle, Sweeney Todd
Kathleen Marshall, The Pajama Game
Des McAnuff, Jersey Boys
Casey Nicholaw, The Drowsy Chaperone

All are worthy, Doyle most likely, especially if The Pajama Game wins for Best Revival of a Musical.

- BEST CHOREOGRAPHY:
Rob Ashford, The Wedding Singer
Donald Byrd, The Color Purple
Kathleen Marshall, The Pajama Game
Casey Nicholaw, The Drowsy Chaperone

Byrd. (See "Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical.")

- BEST ORIGINAL SCORE (MUSIC AND/OR LYRICS) WRITTEN FOR THE THEATRE:
The Color Purple
The Drowsy Chaperone
The Wedding Singer
The Woman in White

The Drowsy Chaperone, definitely, as a consolation prize for Jersey Boys' Best Musical win.

- BEST BOOK OF A MUSICAL:
The Wedding Singer
Jersey Boys
The Drowsy Chaperone
The Color Purple

Likewise, I'm sure.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 16, 2006 9:55 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Anybody can write a short story--a bad one, I mean--who has industry and paper and time enough; but not every one may hope to write even a bad novel. It is the length that kills."

Robert Louis Stevenson, "My First Book: Treasure Island" (courtesy of Kate's Book Blog)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 16, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Isolationist

Ten things I haven't done in 2006:

- I haven't bought a copy of an ink-on-paper magazine or newspaper.
- I haven't watched a first-run episode of a TV series.
- I haven't been to a movie theater (though I'm planning to break my fast by seeing Art School Confidential).
- I haven't rented a DVD.
- I haven't read a new novel.
- I haven't seen a ballet.
- I haven't been to an orchestra concert.
- I haven't written a book review.
- I haven't gone to a party.
- I haven't visited my home town.

Not yet, anyway.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 16, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Re: person I knew

Lileks read my recent posting on The Birth of a Nation, and had this reaction:

The inexhaustible Teachout on Monday had a few notes about silent movies, and how they don't speak to him. One of those instances of art that's lost its language, even though the genre remains. Me, I love the stuff, but I understand the impatience, and sometimes I find myself enjoying the films not as a drama or comedy but an unintentional documentary. What suburban street is that? Is that sapling now a towering oak? Who belongs to those ghostly faces that slide past in the streetcar, and what became of them? Is everything in this image of a city street now gone? Surely inside those windows were men and women going about their lives, chewing on a pencil, digesting a sandwich, worried about a lump or a lover, wishing the person on the phone would shut up so they could use the lav.

It's like getting a satellite photo of ancient Rome--it would tell us so much, but it would leave out 99 percent of what we really want to know.

But that one percent still tantalizes and teaches, doesn't it? If nothing else, it tells you what people found funny or sad or shocking....

I think about such things all the time when watching old movies, with or without sound. Even when they're not especially artful--perhaps especially when they're not--they are through-a-glass-darkly windows on the past. Every film shot on location, whether in whole or in part, is a home movie in which bits and pieces of history are embedded, and I find myself growing increasingly fascinated by these snippets of lost time. I can't watch North by Northwest, for instance, without thinking about how Grand Central Station has (and hasn't) changed, or how the Plaza Hotel will never be again as it was.

This is, I suspect, as much a function of my increasing age as anything else. Just the other day, for instance, Backstage Books sent me a copy of the newly revised and updated edition of James Gavin's Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret. (It'll be out May 31.) The earlier edition was one of my favorite books, but I found this version even more interesting, in part because it's the first time I've read a work of history in which someone I used to know well figures prominently. That sort of thing doesn't start happening to you until you've achieved a certain degree of seniority, and I'm there.

The person I knew was, of course, Nancy LaMott, whose all-too-brief reign as the shooting star of cabaret in Manhattan began a few years after the publication in 1991 of Intimate Nights. Alas, I missed out on the scuffling that Nancy endured so bravely and Gavin describes so vividly. I didn't meet her until the spring of 1994, by which time she was already singing at Tavern on the Green and the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel. I entered her life just in time for us to become close friends, though, and our friendship endured until her death in December of 1995, a few weeks after the release of her last studio album, Listen to My Heart.

I've written about Nancy more than once, both on this blog and in a 1996 essay collected in A Terry Teachout Reader. So far as I know, Intimate Nights is the only other book in which Nancy is mentioned, and it was a strange, almost disorienting sensation to read about her in someone else's words:

Nancy LaMott seemed like such a delicate bird that one wondered when she might break. A waiflike, all-American blonde, she sang with the earnestness of a lovestruck teenager who was smiling through tears. People wanted to take her in their arms and protect her--especially when they learned that her struggle for recognition coincided with her fight against Crohn's disease, an intestinal disorder with horribly debilitating side effects. It had struck her in her teens, and would take her life in 1995, when she was forty-three. By then she had recorded six CDs, sung at the White House, and appeared on Regis & Kathie Lee. All this, through her no-frills singing of standards. In LaMott's [New York] Times obituary, Stephen Holden would remember her as "a singularly unaffected voice...in a field typified by showy histrionics."

All true, though I never thought of her as "delicate," perhaps because we shared so many meals. (She knew her way around a kitchen.) Nancy was much tougher than she looked. Still, Gavin has gotten her right in every other particular, which is hugely important, since his revised version of Intimate Nights, which ends in 2005, will undoubtedly replace the first edition as the standard history of cabaret in New York.

It is, as I say, exceedingly strange to read about an old friend in the kind of book that can properly be described as a "standard history," if only because no book, however detailed, can tell the whole story of a human being. History, like biography, is an attempt to tell that which can only be remembered. I know a great deal more about Nancy than you'll find in Intimate Nights, including certain things you won't read in anything I've written about her. I might share them with a biographer someday, or I might not. I just watched a PBS documentary about John Ford and John Wayne, who once made a film together in which one of the characters famously declares that "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." I wouldn't go that far--I am, after all, a serial biographer myself--but I don't think the public has an absolute right to know everything about anyone, no matter who they were or how important they might have been.

Be that as it may, I'm glad that James Gavin did such a good job of sketching Nancy's essential character, though it goes without saying that I don't need to read about my old friend in order to bring her immediately to mind. Stephen Sondheim wrote a song about the persistence of memory called, appropriately enough, "Not a Day Goes By." Nancy recorded it a couple of years before she died, and I listen to her performance from time to time, trying whenever I do to imagine all the years of friendship her death stole from me:

As the days go by,
I keep thinking, "When does it end?
Where's the day I'll have started forgetting?"
But I just go on
Thinking and sweating
And cursing and crying
And turning and reaching
And waking and dying
And no,
Not a day goes by,
Not a blessed day
But you're still somewhere part of my life
And you won't go away.

I'm old enough now to know how true that is.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 16, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Still boiling

"Critical Edge," ArtsJournal's group blog on the future of criticism in the age of new media, continues to percolate vigorously. Here's a snippet from my latest posting:

A critic who holds himself at arm's length from the artistic community whose activities he covers is a eunuch in the harem....

Go here to join the fray.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 16, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Sign of the times

Earlier today I participated in a public meeting of the National Council on the Arts. It was a teleconference chaired from Washington, D.C., by Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. The other participants were scattered across the country. I took part in the first half of the meeting via cell phone from the Jackson Hole on Eighty-Fifth Street and Columbus Avenue, where I was wolfing down the fast-cooling remnants of a medium-rare hamburger that had arrived at my table ten minutes later than I expected. For the second half, I removed my cell phone and myself to a bench in Central Park, basking in the sunshine as the council went about its collective business.

I'm too old to take cell phones for granted. I still remember the first time I received a call from a car phone, back in the days when such things were far from commonplace. Not long after I moved to New York some two decades ago, I made a special point of calling my mother in Smalltown, U.S.A., from a pay phone on a subway platform, and she was impressed. Now I can't remember the last time I used a pay phone. (In fact, I can't remember the last time I saw a phone booth.)

Technology is part wonderful and part terrible, which means it's really neither. It makes it possible for me to sit in Central Park on a sunny May day and talk to anyone in the world who has a phone. Whether or not that's a good thing is, of course, another matter.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 17, 2006 3:28 AM | Permalink

TT: Listen up

I recently taped an episode of Radio Deluxe, the new classic-pop radio series hosted by John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey. Among many other things, John, Jess, and I listened to and talked about records by Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Mary Foster Conklin, Bing Crosby, Nancy LaMott, Joe Mooney, George Shearing, and Fats Waller (as well as John himself). It's a nice mix of chat and music, if I do say so myself, and we had a lot of fun putting it together. You'll even get to hear me sing!

This episode hasn't yet aired on terrestrial radio, but you can already hear it on line in streaming audio. Go here, scroll down until you see my name, then click on the successive links (each segment of the show is a separate mp3 file) and listen.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 17, 2006 10:17 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"I too am not getting enough done, and what I do always seems to require so much time and effort. For the past few days, I don't think I've done anything worthwhile. Believe me, to feel this way at my age is quite sad, since each time we begin, we always think we've understood, that we have all the answers, but we're always starting over again from the beginning."

Giorgio Morandi (quoted in Janet Abramowicz, Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 17, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- Our Girl's second critical commandment, You shall not critique a tulip by wishing it a rose, especially if you grow roses, echoes a widespread sentiment in the cultural quadrant of the 'sphere. I incline to agree, but not always, and only up to a point.

People are forever telling me that a work of art should be "criticized on its own terms." (Mr. Parabasis, one of my favorite bloggers, got after me a few weeks ago on precisely this count.) Fine--but exactly what does that mean? To extend the metaphor, what if the particular breed of tulip you prefer to cultivate happens to smell like horse manure? Don't I have a right to point that out, and to suggest that roses might possibly smell better?

I'm not a relativist (surprise, surprise!). I think some works of art are better than others, and I think that issues of quality are of the highest relevance to any criticism worthy of the name. At the same time, I don't think I get hung up worrying about the dangers of encroaching relativism, nor do I let my unswerving belief in quality prevent me from enjoying the fruits of popular culture. I draw your attention to something I wrote early in the life of this blog:

I don't think The Long Goodbye is as good a book as The Great Gatsby, and I believe the difference between the two books is hugely important. But I also don't think it's absurd to compare them, and I probably re-read one as often as the other.

The point is that I accept the existence of hierarchies of quality without feeling oppressed by them. I have plenty of room in my life for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler, for Aaron Copland and Louis Armstrong, for George Balanchine and Fred Astaire, and I love them all without confusing their relative merits, much less jumping to the conclusion that all merits are relative.

In case you hadn't noticed, that's part of what this blog is all about--a big part.

It still is.

- Just the other day I was listening to Pandora as I blogged. Allison Moorer's "One On the House" gave way to a single piano chord, and a light instantly flashed in my head: it was Bill Evans playing "Here's That Rainy Day." I didn't have to look at the screen to be sure I was right, any more than I had to think twice in the first place. I knew.

I'll be the first to admit that there once was a time when I was disgustingly vain about my fastest-ear-in-the-west abilities, but subsequent experience has taught me that the world is full of people who can recognize Bill Evans' playing as quickly as I can. That says a lot about Evans, but it says even more about the human brain and its stupendous capacities. To be sure, I do happen to know a little bit about a lot of things (including the life and work of the woman who wrote that line). Put me in a museum without my bifocals and I won't have any more trouble picking out a Stuart Davis or a Kenneth Noland at a hundred yards than I did spotting Bill Evans. Yet such drop-the-needle aptitude, as I say, borders on the commonplace, and that's the real story. How is it possible for so many of us to store so much aesthetic information in our heads, and to retrieve it so quickly and unhesitatingly? If that doesn't strike you as miraculous, then you don't believe in everyday miracles.

I can't help but recall this almanac entry from two years ago. The speaker is the great French composer Olivier Messiaen:

I admit that it would never occur to me to ask a question of an electronic brain, chiefly because I'd be incapable of it. The interrogated electronic brain very quickly generates thousands, if not millions, of responses, and among those thousands of millions of responses, only one is right. Rather than bother with an extremely burdensome apparatus and spend months formulating a question, isn't it quicker to have a stroke of genius and find the right solution right away?

Nice.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 17, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: The hits just keep on coming

"Critical Edge," ArtsJournal's group blog on the future of criticism in the age of new media, grows livelier by the hour. Here's a snippet from my latest posting:

Good writing justifies its own existence. If you can find people capable of writing stylish, trenchant reviews of blockbuster movies, by all means hire them and let 'em rip--but don't settle for anything less. If, on the other hand, you have to choose between publishing mediocre criticism and solid, informative feature writing...well, there's no choice, least of all nowadays.

Go here to join the fray. The comments section is wide open!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 17, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Fair warning

If you missed last night's PBS American Masters documentary on Nat King Cole, don't even think about catching a replay. Not only was the script a dumbed-down, once-over-lightly account of one of the most significant careers in the history of American popular music, but the show contained next to no uninterrupted footage of Cole in performance. In between the snippets was a numbing succession of talking-head interviews with such irrelevant celebrity interlopers as Whoopi Goldberg and Carlos Santana. Rarely have I endured so witless a piece of junk. Avoid it at all costs.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 18, 2006 1:35 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"A moment occurs (or should occur) when the growing artist is able to bequeath his tricks to his imitators. The mature writer rejects the treasured 'originality' and the darling virtuosities of his apprenticeship in art, as well as the showy sorrows and joys of his apprenticeship to life, often just in time. 'How they live at home in their cozy poems and make long stays in narrow comparisons!' Rilke once said, speaking of the run of versifiers who never change or grow. Once youth's embroidered coat is cast aside, what is left? Only imagination, ripened insight, experience, and the trained sense of language, which are usually enough."

Louise Bogan, review of The Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden (1945)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 18, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

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. (For the third week in a row, however, there are no asterisks.)

BROADWAY:
- Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
- Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content)
- The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
- The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, 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)
- The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
- 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 SOON:
- Awake and Sing! (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes June 25)
- Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 9)
- Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter and implicit sexual content, reviewed here, closes July 2)
- Defiance (drama, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes June 4)
- The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes July 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
- I Love You Because (musical, R, sexual content, reviewed here, closes Sunday)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 18, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Elsewhere

It's been far too long since I've trolled the 'sphere, so here goes:

- Firstly, let me introduce you to Ms. Culturegrrl, the most interesting new blogger to come along in ages. Mr. Modern Art Notes calls her blog "an automatic, daily must read." I agree.

- Mr. Playgoer compared the Tony and Obie nominations:

Within 12 hours of each other, the alternate (not even parallel) universes of B'way and "theatre" announced their season's honors. Granted the Tony "awards" proper are still to come. But Obies thankfully don't bother with the two-stage process, so their multiple nominations are in fact their awards.

To compare these lists is (as it is every year) an object lesson in the incredible gulf between theatre as experienced by those who practice and follow it devotedly, and those for whom it is well... tourism, frankly. Or hobby, or industry.

Read the whole thing. It's very tough, and very smart.

- The Mumpsimus speaks words of wisdom:

Theatre audiences and critics have been conditioned to expect plays to deliver messages, and many good playwrights have mangled their art by bowing down to this condition. One of the problems with the messages delivered by most contemporary plays is that they're predictable and shallow--war is bad, love is good, people should be nice to other people who aren't exactly the same as they are, etc. One of the results of ticket prices being so phenomenally expensive is that audiences expect what they see to give them either a lot of spectacle or some sort of education, though if you've just paid $85 for a seat, what you probably most want is a reinforcing of your current ideas under the guise of education, so that way even if you aren't entertained, at least you feel smart and righteous. (Yes, I'm generalizing horribly.)

- I really, really wish I'd written this:

Finishing a great novel is one of those voluminous experiences; your heart races as the pages thin, you struggle to move your eyes faster, to soak it all up more quickly. It's the final lap, and the object is to finish without a drop of energy left. When the last page nears, the temptation to skip sentences, paragraphs, entire pages, pulls like some watery undertow. The final page comes in a rush, the last words arrive like a trampling stampede, there and gone before you can comprehend what's happened. Unlike the end of a movie or a television series, novel time is fluid; you can repeat sentences, skip around on the page. So maybe you read the last line several times, or read it first and then go back and read the paragraph leading up to it. But at some point it hits you: This thing you've lived with for a day, a week, a month--these people and places and words you've submitted yourself to--they're over. There's nothing left to tell....

- Recognize this?

When Sauni�re pulled down the Caravaggio, the iron gate slammed down and the alarm began to ring. He turned and looked back. The albino was already there, on the other side of the barricade, gun in hand.

It has a Starkly familiar ring, no?

- If you don't read anything else about the publishing business this week, make a point of reading this.

- Speaking of blind items about interesting art-related statistics, take a look at these, please.

- Who is this guy, anyway? He's smart:

Happy endings are not all alike. In fact, they're not always happy. People have many strange ideas about Hollywood movies, and it's not always clear what folks mean by the term. "Hollywood" often seems to mean any movie in English, not the product of a certain system in a certain factory town. Also "Hollywood" is often pejorative, a shorthand for whatever criticism one cares to imply without examining it.

But one of the strangest cliches to plague us is that Hollywood movies have happy endings. This idea leads to contempt, derision and satire. I recall one witty article that imagined Hollywood remakes of classic stories, such as having a centurion ride up to Calvary and announce that Jesus has been pardoned. He and Mary embrace.
There are probably more happy endings today than in the past, and it's because studio executives live under the burden of this false idea--that Hollywood purveys happy endings. Let's disprove this notion once and for all....

- For those who wonder why I'm always raving about Budd Boetticher's Westerns, go here for confirmation of my good taste.

- Speaking of good taste, Mr. Girish pays tribute to one of my all-time favorite movies:

The Fabulous Baker Boys changed my life. Sounds like a hoary old clich�, no? But it's true. I saw it three times the week it opened in 1989, and without ever having touched middle C, walked into a music store and signed up for piano lessons. The piano has been an integral part of my life since; I can't imagine living without it....

I may have said it before, but if so I'll say it again: The Fabulous Baker Boys is the only film I've ever seen that is true to my own experience of playing music (except that I never got to sleep with anybody who looked even slightly like Michelle Pfeiffer).

- In case you've been wondering what Whit Stillman's been up to since The Last Days of Disco, here's the answer--in his own inimitable words.

- Courtesy of Mr. Something Old, Nothing New, here's a fascinating interview with one of the people who puts together DVD box sets of TV shows. Yes, he sounds like a bit of a geekazoid, but so, too, do I....

- Speaking of geekazoidishness, this terrific Washington Post feature story is the absolute last word on stage blood and its makers.

- Ms. Althouse has been listening to Bob Dylan's new satellite-radio show, and thinks it brilliant. I can't wait to rent a car and hear for myself.

- Ms. twang twang twang plays her harp for a brainy audience of Oxfordians, and has an epiphany:

A very clever woman shows it in her face, usually more than a powerfully-minded man. The portraits that line the walls of LMH daily impress this on the students walking by; the first seven minds to penetrate nine hundred years of dreaming ivory towers. Playing the Britten Suite to many such faces today, I suddenly thought, I spend half my life being told to be light, crowd-pleasing, easy on the eye, reassuringly familiar. This is all right (there's a time for everything), but I am never going to apologise for attempting to use the mind I'm lucky enough to have had well-educated, again.

- Mr. Alicublog holds forth on the splendors of demotic speech:

I had a North Carolina girlfriend once, and her mother had no end of lovely expressions. She once referred to spoiled fish as smelling "right boo-booey." Could that be from the French "boue," somehow? In any case I consider myself improved by having heard it. Also by hearing my old Italian landlady say of meeting her husband, "He look at me anna I fell like a pear." And, Texican this, "he got a wild hare," variously "wild hair up his ass"--or "wild hare" up same--never have got that straight....

Me, neither.

- Lastly, I thought you might enjoy seeing a picture of my brother. We look nothing alike, nor are we at all similar, but he's way cool anyway.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 18, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"'They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris,' chuckled Sir Thomas, who had a large wardrobe of Humour's cast-off clothes.

"'Really! And where do bad Americans go to when they die?' inquired the duchess.

"'They go to America,' murmured Lord Henry.

"Sir Thomas frowned. 'I am afraid that your nephew is prejudiced against that great country,' he said to Lady Agatha. 'I have travelled all over it in cars provided by the directors, who, in such matters, are extremely civil. I assure you that it is an education to visit it.'

"'But must we really see Chicago in order to be educated?' asked Mr. Erskine plaintively. 'I don't feel up to the journey.'"

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 19, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Great play, great player

The 2005-06 Broadway season is now officially over (whew!). In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I review the last two new shows I saw, Faith Healer and Shining City:

If Brian Friel isn't the finest of living playwrights, then he certainly belongs on the shortest possible list of candidates for that supreme honor. We don't get to see his work often enough in New York, but the season just ended has been bracketed by superlative stagings of two of his strongest scripts. Last summer the Irish Repertory Theatre mounted a perfect production of "Philadelphia, Here I Come!," the 1964 play that put him on the map, and now Broadway has imported the Dublin Gate Theatre's revival of "Faith Healer," first seen in this country in 1979.

Unlike the big-name revivals of "The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial" (with David Schwimmer) and "Three Days of Rain" (with Julia Roberts) playing next door on 45th Street, though, "Faith Healer," which stars Ralph Fiennes and Cherry Jones, is a winner. In fact, I'll go a giant step further: It's the best show on Broadway....

I came away humbled by the collective mastery of the artists who are bringing "Faith Healer" to blazing life each night. Gifted as they are, though, it is Brian Friel who deserves the highest praise of all. Once again he has proved art's power to narrow the fearful gap that separates soul from soul. Like every great writer, he reveals us to one another--and to ourselves.

Contrary to appearances, Irish playwrights are not infallible. I place in evidence Conor McPherson's "Shining City," which has just been given its American premiere by the Manhattan Theatre Club. Most of my fellow critics raved about this four-character play, but despite the acting of a crack cast led by the irreproachable Br�an F. O'Byrne, last seen on Broadway in "Doubt," I found "Shining City" tenuous to the point of nullity....

No link. Those who care to read the whole thing (and please do!) can always buy a copy of today's Journal, or (better yet) go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to the complete text of my review, plus a plenitude of similarly readable stuff.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 19, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Friendly skies

I'm out of here. In a few hours I'll be in Chicago, where Our Girl and I plan to hang out in extenso (we haven't seen each other since January). Among other things, we'll be seeing Chicago Shakespeare's Henry IV marathon and the Court Theatre's production of Peter Shaffer's Lettice and Lovage, and we might catch a movie or two while we're at it. Weekend updates are possible but not promised.

I'll be flying back to New York on Monday, so don't be surprised if I fail to post anything that day. In fact, blogging next week is likely to be light--I have three back-to-back deadlines, yikes! Didn't I give you enough to read this week?

I'll kiss the Girl for you. See you soon.

P.S. If you want to hear OGIC's Actual Speaking Voice, go here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 19, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Rain's only value, for Miss McGee, was that it reminded her how precious was good weather. She despised rain. But she knew that to the earth, rain was as necessary as sunshine. Could it be, she wondered, that the vice and barbarism abroad in the world served, like the rain, some purpose? Did the abominations in the Sunday paper mingle somehow with the goodness in the world and together, like the rain and sun feeding the ferns, did they nourish some kind of life she was unaware of?"

Jon Hassler, Staggerford

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 23, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Words to the wise

- "Arnold Friedman: The Language of Paint" opens tomorrow at Hollis Taggart Galleries. Curated by William C. Agee, who also wrote the catalogue, this show is the first full-scale retrospective of Friedman's paintings to be seen anywhere since 1950.

I last wrote about Friedman in a Washington Post review of a 2003 exhibition of Tommy LiPuma's collection of modern American art:

If you've never heard of Friedman, who died in 1946, you're not alone. So far as I know, none of his work is currently hanging in any museum (though the Museum of Modern Art owns a good Friedman, "Sawtooth Falls"), and he almost never gets written up nowadays. Clement Greenberg, long the top handicapper of American art, praised his late paintings to the skies, calling them "an important moment in the history of American painting." Strong words, coming from the critic who put Jackson Pollock on the map--yet even his fervent advocacy wasn't enough to keep Friedman's name alive.

To understand how good Friedman was, take a long look at "Still Life (Petunias)," the prize of the LiPuma collection. In the foreground is a vase of flowers whose vibrantly colored petals all but burst off the canvas. (The thick, crusty surface was heavily worked with a palette knife.) Hanging on the wall immediately behind the vase is the lower half of an abstract painting--Friedman's way of underlining the subtle relationship between abstraction and representation. The juxtaposition of the two genres is both witty and thought-provoking, unveiling fresh layers of implication at every glance.

I was amazed to learn that "Still Life (Petunias)" was owned by Tommy and Gill LiPuma. If their names ring a bell, it's because you probably know Tommy in a different guise: He's a big-time record producer, the man who helped put Diana Krall on the charts. I've met him once or twice, but I had no idea that he and his wife were interested in art, much less that they were true connoisseurs whose independent-minded taste has inspired them to assemble what is almost certainly the largest private collection of Friedmans in the world....

"Sawtooth Falls" and "Still Life (Petunias)," the second of which you can view by going here to read the complete text of my Washington Post piece, are two of the forty-seven paintings included in "Arnold Friedman: The Language of Paint," which is up through June 30.

For more information, go here.

- Roger Kellaway opens Thursday at the Jazz Standard, where he'll be performing through Sunday with an East Coast version of the King Cole Trio-style piano-guitar-bass trio heard on his latest CD, Remembering Bobby Darin. In addition to Russell Malone on guitar and Jay Leonhart on bass, he'll be joined by the splendid vibraphonist Stefon Harris.

Kellaway is one of my all-time favorite jazz pianists. I've written about him many times, most extensively in a 1995 Wall Street Journal profile in which I called him "the greatest unknown pianist in jazz." (You can read that piece here.) That's still true, alas, but a trip to the Jazz Standard will leave no doubt of why Kellaway is universally and extravagantly esteemed by his colleagues.

Sets start at 7:30 and 9:30 each night, with a third set at 11:30 on Friday and Saturday. For more information, go here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 23, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Not too much the worse for wear

Thanks to the vagaries of modern-day air travel, I spent far more time than necessary going to and from Chicago, and am feeling a bit dilapidated as a result. For this reason, I'll leave it to Our Girl to tell you all about our action-packed long weekend, which we spent dining on Chicago-style encased meats (elk sausage, mmmmm!), sitting on the aisle at Chicago Shakespeare and the Court Theatre, and watching the Stanley Cup playoffs and a half-dozen reruns of House, to both of which OGIC thoughtfully introduced me.

Now, if you'll be so kind as to excuse me, I need to do some work for hire. See you tomorrow.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 23, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"'There is no intermediate existence, Barbara. Short of death, there's no alternative but life.'

"No reply. Barbara was busy at the stove.

"Returning to the kitchen, he said, 'And short of despair, there's no alternative but hope.'"

Jon Hassler, Simon's Night

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 24, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Weekend at OGIC's

Everything you've heard is true. There were fancy-pants hot dogs, there were plays, and there was lots and lots of House, viewed with a hunger. Let's look at a few highlights.

Saturday: Brunch at Hot Doug's Sausage Superstore and Encased Meat Emporium. I was actually trying to keep this place a secret until the next time the Gurgling Cod pays a visit to Chicago, but the cat's out of the bag now. At Hot Doug's the line on a Saturday afternoon bends around the southwest corner of California and Roscoe and practically out of sight, but I've seldom stood in a more cheerful long line. It's as if the length of the wait guarantees the transcendent goodness of the meal to come, and the patrons take an added pleasure in being part of a little community of good taste and adventure. Of course, the culinary adventures offered at Hot Doug's come with all the comforts of the familiar, presented in the usual trappings of the most quotidian of Chicago foods. Beyond the casing, bun, and toppings, though, anything goes--last weekend it was bacon-cheddar elk sausage with spicy bourbon mustard and stripey jack cheese for Terry and saucisse de Toulouse with anchovy aioli and fromagier d'affinoise for me. The blue cheese pork sausage with pear cr�me fraiche and toasted hazelnuts was a close second that still has me wondering what could have been, delicious as the saucisse truly was. Hot Doug's is all about the hard choices.

The afternoon was sunny and mild, and we brunched at a booth set up in the narrow alley between Hot Doug's and the apartment building next door, feeling like we were at a city cookout. Did I mention that on Saturday's Doug offers silky french fries cooked in duck fat?

Saturday: An hour or so at the Art Institute. We arrive and wander off half-cocked trying to find our way to the modern painting. But we find ourselves heading backwards in the time machine, from Seurat to Manet to Millet. With the eighteenth century beginning to loom, I ask a lady guard to point us toward modern. "You know that rainy day painting?" she says. Oh, we do. "Turn left there and go through the door behind it." Never thought about it before, but its size, iconic status, and placement at a crux on the second floor of the museum indeed make the Caillebotte picture as good as a trail of bread crumbs. We find modern, and a few surprises.

I have to go to work, folks. Coming soon is Saturday: The longue, bonne dur�e at Chicago Shakespeare. As well as Sunday: cutting up at Court Theatre.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 25, 2006 10:18 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"The reader must sit down alone and struggle with the writer, and this the pseudo-scholar will not do. He would rather relate a book to the history of its time, to events in the life of its author, to the events it describes, above all to some tendency."

E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (courtesy of Kate's Book Blog)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 25, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

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)
- Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content)
- The Drowsy Chaperone* (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
- Faith Healer* (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
- The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, 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)
- The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
- 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 SOON:
- Awake and Sing! (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes June 25)
- Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 9)
- Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter and implicit sexual content, reviewed here, closes July 2)
- Defiance (drama, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes June 4)
- The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes July 2, reviewed here)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 25, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: On the town

Our server was out of commission yesterday, making it impossible for OGIC to post her account of our fun-filled weekend in Chicago. (Yes, it's coming.) I couldn't post anything, either, so I spent the day planning and booking theater-related travel instead. It seems I have quite a complicated summer ahead of me. I'll be seeing a couple of shows in Philadelphia and Baltimore this weekend, followed shortly thereafter by trips to Georgia, Idaho, Oregon, and Utah--and that's just in June and July!

Once my calendar was neat and tidy, I headed over to Hollis Taggart Galleries for the opening of the Arnold Friedman retrospective about which I posted earlier this week. It is a truth universally acknowledged that nobody goes to gallery openings to look at art, but I actually managed to pay close attention to a couple of dozen canvases in between sips of Veuve Clicquot. I also chatted with an interesting assortment of interested parties, including Tommy LiPuma (who collects Friedman's paintings, though he's better known as a record producer), William Agee (who curated the show and wrote the catalogue essay), and Friedman's grandson (who told me that he remembered seeing a copy of Skater and Dog, a Friedman lithograph I bought last year, hanging over the artist's bed). Best of all, I ran into Albert Kresch, another chronically underappreciated American artist about whom I blogged enthusiastically a couple of years ago. Needless to say, I plan to go back again and see "Arnold Friedman: The Language of Paint" under more favorable (i.e., less crowded) circumstances, but I had a good time anyway.

From there I went downtown to 55 Bar, a low-ceilinged Christopher Street hangout where good jazz can frequently be heard, and caught a set by Amanda Monaco's quartet. When not playing guitar with the Lascivious Biddies, of whom she is a charter member, Monaco performs her own very interesting compositions with a tight little band that's always worth hearing (I commend their CD to your attention).

What next? I'll be spending most of Thursday writing a Commentary essay about the new Clement Greenberg biography, after which I plan to meet the beauteous Sarah at the Jazz Standard to hear Roger Kellaway.

Yes, I'm back in business again, and it feels great--but now I need some good old-fashioned shut-eye. See you later.

UPDATE: Here's an online interview with Albert Kresch that's very much worth reading.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 25, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"There has been a certain amount of self-deception in School of Paris art since the exit of cubism. In Pollock there is absolutely none, and he is not afraid to look ugly--all profoundly original art looks ugly at first."

Clement Greenberg, The Nation, Apr. 7, 1945

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 26, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Proud uncle

My niece graduated from high school on Tuesday. I couldn't be there, but I sent flowers, and spent the evening marveling at how time flies. Only yesterday she was a baby, and now she's a tall, poised young lady about to go off to college. How can such things be?

I am immensely proud of Lauren Teachout, and of my brother and sister-in-law, who raised her right. Nothing I will ever do in my life will be as difficult--or honorable--as that.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 26, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Memo from the Department of Acquisitions

Envy is the lot of the unwealthy art collector. I picked up a price list at the opening of Hollis Taggart Galleries' Arnold Friedman retrospective on Wednesday, and it reminded me that any hopes I have of owning one of Friedman's oil paintings--even a very small one--are contingent on my selling Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong to Hollywood, or something at least as implausible.

I returned home feeling both elated (having just looked at four roomfuls of exquisite paintings) and depressed (knowing that none of them would ever be mine). Then it occurred to me to see if any Friedman-related bargains were to be found on the Web. I searched for "Arnold Friedman lithograph," and what did I find? This. A few more keystrokes revealed it to be a pencil-signed 1940 Friedman lithograph for sale by the Philadelphia Print Shop for the unlikely-sounding price of $225. "That I can afford," I muttered hopefully, and fired off an e-mail asking if it was still available. Answer came there eight hours later, and now the latest addition to the Teachout Museum is en route to my door via UPS.

The moral? You can't always get what you want, but if you try some time, you just might find something (A) close enough for jazz and (B) a whole lot cheaper. And yes, I'm feeling incredibly smug....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 26, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Unrisky business

In my next "Sightings" column, to be published in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I ask whether "safe art" (to borrow a phrase used recently by a friend of mine) is ever worth experiencing. My answer? You better believe it.

To find out what I have in mind, pick up a copy of tomorrow's Journal, where you'll find my column in the "Pursuits" section.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 26, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Putting Falstaff in his place

In today's Wall Street Journal I report on my recent visit to Chicago, where I saw Chicago Shakespeare's production of Henry IV and the Court Theatre's revival of Peter Shaffer's Lettice and Lovage. Both are smashing:

Next month Chicago Shakespeare Theater takes "Henry IV," staged by Barbara Gaines, the company's artistic director, to Stratford-upon-Avon, the Bard's home town, where it will be performed as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company's year-long RSC Complete Works Festival. In preparation for that trip, Chicago Shakespeare is presenting a month-long run of "Henry IV" on its home turf. I rank it among the best Shakespeare productions I've seen in recent years, though it will be interesting to see how Ms. Gaines' no-nonsense approach fares with English critics, most of whom seem to prefer their Shakespeare smothered in political sauce and dished up with a garnish of gimmickry....

Patricia Hodges is best known for having replaced Mary Tyler Moore two seasons ago in Neil Simon's "Rose's Dilemma," an ungrateful task that she brought off with the utmost panache. She is no less satisfying in "Lettice and Lovage," investing her larger-than-life part with a vibrant, stage-filling physicality that pulls laughter out of you like a magnet. Ms. Reiter is equally good as Lotte, the mousy bureaucrat who unexpectedly finds in Lettice a kindred spirit. I don't know whether she and Ms. Hodges have ever acted together before, but they're definitely in tune, and their palpable rapport has much to do with the production's appeal....

No link, of course (megasigh). If you care to read the whole thing, of which there is much, much more, go out and buy a copy of today's Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with immediate access to the full text of my review, along with Joe Morgenstern's Pulitzer-winning film column and plenty of other worthy art-related copy.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 26, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Monsters, Inc.

I just got back from the Jazz Standard, where Sarah and I heard Roger Kellaway's first set. It was stupendous.

Kellaway is currently fronting a piano-guitar-bass trio, which he claims to be the fulfillment of a "childhood dream." Oscar Peterson led just such a group in the Fifties, and Kellaway, a lifelong Peterson fan who has always enjoyed playing without a drummer, knows how to make the most of the elbow room afforded by that wonderfully flexible instrumentation. Russell Malone is the guitarist, Jay Leonhart the bassist. The three men opened the set with a super-sly version of Benny Golson's "Killer Joe," and within four bars you knew they were going to swing really, really hard. So they did, with Kellaway pitching his patented curve balls all night long, including a bitonal arrangement of Bobby Darin's "Splish Splash" and what surely must have been the first time that the Sons of the Pioneers' "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" has ever been performed by a jazz group.

Everybody in the band (including vibraphonist Stefon Harris, who joined the trio for "Cotton Tail," "You Don't Know What Love Is" and "52nd Street Theme") was smoking. Kellaway, though, was...well, I really don't have words to describe the proliferating creativity and rhythmic force of his piano playing. Sarah did pretty well, though: "Did you see my jaw drop?" she asked me when it was all over. Russell Malone, with whom I chatted between sets, put it even more tersely. "That man is scary," he said, shaking his head.

After I came home, I looked up my Washington Post review of the last time I heard Kellaway in person, a two-piano gig in 2004 with Bill Charlap at the second keyboard:

I was lucky enough to be at Birdland when Roger Kellaway and Bill Charlap gave the best live two-piano jazz performance I've heard in my entire life. The bedazzlingly eclectic Kellaway, who has been holed up on the West Coast for years, finally decided to head east and show the rest of the world his formidable stuff. For his long-delayed return...he joined forces with Charlap, who usually prefers suave understatement to single combat. Not this time: Kellaway was loaded for bear, and Charlap rose to the occasion. Their version of "Blue in Green" suggested an off-the-cuff collaboration between Bill Evans and Maurice Ravel, while the ferociously competitive "Strike Up the Band" with which they set the evening in motion sounded like two guys shooting roman candles at each other in a locked room. ("Lotta black notes on that page," Charlap said to me afterward, grinning slyly.)

This set was that good.

Kellaway and his colleagues will be at the Jazz Standard through Sunday night. If you're anywhere near New York City between now and then--and I'm talking about a five-state radius--do your damnedest to come hear them. If not, fear not: IPO, Kellaway's new record label, is taping the engagement for release on a forthcoming live CD. In the meantime, go out right this second and get a copy of Remembering Bobby Darin, the first album by the West Coast edition of Kellaway's Peterson-style trio.

What are you waiting for? Get moving!

UPDATE: Here's a link to my Washington Post review of the CD reissue of Roger Kellaway Cello Quartet. Buy that, too.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 26, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"I love the infantry because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can't be won without.

"I wish you could see just one of the ineradicable pictures I have in my mind today. In this particular picture I am sitting among clumps of sword-grass on a steep and rocky hillside that we have just taken. We are looking out over a vast rolling country to the rear.

"A narrow path comes like a ribbon over a hill miles away, down a long slope, across a creek, up a slope and over another hill.

"All along the length of this ribbon there is now a thin line of men. For four days and nights they have fought hard, eaten little, washed none, and slept hardly at all. Their nights have been violent with attack, fright, butchery, and their days sleepless and miserable with the crash of artillery.

"The men are walking. They are fifty feet apart, for dispersal. Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion.

"On their shoulders and backs they carry heavy steel tripods, machine-gun barrels, leaden boxes of ammunition. Their feet seem to sink into the ground from the overload they are bearing.

"They don't slouch. It is the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their appalling tiredness. Their faces are black and unshaven. They are young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion make them look middle-aged.

"In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory--there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else.

"The line moves on, but it never ends. All afternoon men keep coming round the hill and vanishing eventually over the horizon. It is one long tired line of antlike men."

Ernie Pyle, Scripps-Howard dispatch from Tunisia, May 2, 1943

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 29, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Revelations about a writer's life should not affect our independently formed critical assessment of his work. They may, however, confirm or explain reservations about it."

David Lodge, "The Lives of Graham Greene" (courtesy of Kate's Book Blog)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 30, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Fair play

I spent a good-sized chunk of last week writing a lengthy essay for Commentary about Alice Goldfarb Marquis' Art Czar, the new biography of the art critic Clement Greenberg. Eight years ago I reviewed an earlier book about Greenberg, Florence Rubenfeld's Clement Greenberg: A Life, and it occurred to me that it might be useful for me to revisit my earlier piece. For the most part I stand by what I wrote about Greenberg (and Rubenfeld) in 1998, but there was one passage that jumped out at me:

Greenberg became closely identified with a group of painters known as the "color-field abstractionists," whose work he believed to be the culmination of modernism. He praised the work of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski in disconcertingly lavish terms, curtly dismissing all competing artists as minor....

Greenberg's critics were right about one thing--his history-driven theory of modernism was too neat by half--just as he himself was mistaken about a great many things, not least the long-term importance of the color-field painters, whose work he loved.

Eight years later, with Olitski's Forward Edge and Noland's Circle I (II-3) hanging on the walls of my living room, I find myself in a what-was-I-thinking mood. Such drastic changes of mind do happen to me on occasion, most recently in the case of the playwright August Wilson, of whom I thought poorly until I was lucky enough to see a very good production of what I'm told is his best play. Whenever that kind of thing happens to me, I try to come clean about it, in public if at all possible.

As I explained in The Wall Street Journal four years ago in a column called "The Contrite Critic":

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

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

Brooks Atkinson, for example, panned the original production of Rodgers and Hart's "Pal Joey" in the New York Times, calling it "drab and mirthless." When he saw the 1952 revival, he knew he'd been wrong, and said so in print: "In 1940 �Pal Joey' was regarded by its satellites as the musical that broke the old formula and brought the musical stage to maturity. There was a minority, including this column, that was not enchanted. But no one is likely now to be impervious to the tight organization of the production, the terseness of the writing, the liveliness and versatility of the score, and the easy perfection of the lyrics."

More common, alas, is the case of the great art critic Clement Greenberg. In 1945, Greenberg dismissed Monet's late paintings as "mere instances of his style but not works of art." Twelve years later, he proclaimed their revolutionary significance, adding that "the righting of a wrong is involved here, though that wrong--which was a failure in appreciation--may have been inevitable and even necessary at a certain stage in the evolution of modern painting." Excuse me? That's like a politician saying Mistakes were made instead of I blew it.

I yield to no one in my admiration for Greenberg, but I also think the world of art would be a better place if we critics made a point of eating crow from time to time.

(You can read the whole thing here.)

If Clem Greenberg ever sat down to such a dish in his long lifetime, I'm unaware of it. I, on the other hand, try to eat it whenever circumstances warrant. So, if you'll excuse me, I have some chewing to do....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 30, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Coming and going

I spent Memorial Day weekend in Philadelphia and Baltimore, seeing Arden Theater's production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and CenterStage's production of Crumbs from the Table of Joy, a 1995 play by Lynn Nottage. I caught up with Nottage (along with most of the rest of the New York critics) in 2004, when two of her later plays, Intimate Apparel and Fabulation, were premiered in the same season. Seeing them in such close succession made me a fan, which is why I went out of my way to catch Crumbs from the Table of Joy in Baltimore.

My travels began with a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where I took in Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic. Wyeth is an odd case, a self-evidently gifted artist whom few art critics take seriously save as a technician. I am, for the most part, one of their skeptical number, though I do like his splendidly accomplished drybrush watercolors, a few of which are to be found in this crowded (in all senses) retrospective. I don't care at all for the large-scale paintings, which have always struck me as essentially false, all but quivering with an embarrassed romanticism poorly concealed beneath a cloak of pretended austerity. It's the paintings that most people love, though, and I wish I could agree with them. Dr. Johnson said of Gray's Elegy that "I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours." I agree--but not when it comes to Wyeth.

From there I took myself to Old Town, Philadelphia's historical district, which is full of excellent sights to see, most of them very close indeed to the Arden (it's next door to Christ Church, where Ben Franklin and Betsy Ross worshipped, and around the corner from Elfreth's Alley, the oldest residential street in America). It's also full of excellent restaurants, and I had an unusually good meal at one of them, a place called Fork that I commend to your attention should you find yourself in that famous part of town. Alas, I spent an exceedingly disagreeable night at the Independence Park Hotel, which put me up in a room that was hot, stuffy, and noisy, then served me a continental breakfast that bordered on the inedible. I won't be back, save at gunpoint.

As for the two shows, you'll have to wait until Friday to hear about them. In the meantime, I'll be off again very early Wednesday morning, this time to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where I'll be seeing five plays in two and a half days and partaking of whatever other delights the city of Ashland, Oregon, may have to offer me. I plan to bring along my trusty iBook, so it seems fairly likely that I'll be blogging at some point or points during my stay, but don't be surprised if my postings are erratic between now and week's end.

Till...whenever!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 30, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Alas, how miserable their good looks made him! The pain of watching beautiful young girls, the isolation of desire! They reminded him of the figures in one of those pictures by Watteau that are instinct with the beauty of the moment, the fugitive distress of hedonism, the sadness that falls like dew from pleasure, as they stand, fixed in the movement of the dance, beneath the elms, beneath the garlanded urn."

Cyril Connolly, The Rock Pool

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 31, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Theory of relativity

My new Arnold Friedman lithograph arrived yesterday, just in time for me to drop it off at the framer before leaving for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this morning. It was even more beautiful than I'd expected, so much so that I gasped when I took it out of the package, as did my houseguest.

"Can you believe I only paid $225 for it?" I asked her.

"Omigod," she replied, looking slightly embarrassed. "I've paid more than that for shoes."

Posted by Douglas McLennan on May 31, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink