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July 31, 2006

TT: Almanac

"Offhand one would expect that the mere possession of power would automatically result in a cocky attitude toward the world and a receptivity to change. But it is not always so. The powerful can be as timid as the weak. What seems to count more than possession of instruments of power is faith in the future. Where power is not joined with faith in the future, it is used mainly to ward off the new and preserve the status quo. On the other hand, extravagant hope, even when not backed by actual power, is likely to generate a most reckless daring. For the hopeful can draw strength from the most ridiculous sources of power--a slogan, a word, a button."

Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

Posted July 31, 12:00 PM

TT: In transit

I've been on the road all weekend and only just got back. More soon, including an extensive report on my latest misadventures.

Posted July 31, 6:58 AM

July 28, 2006

TT: Hard at it

My next Commentary column, in which I hold forth at length on the life, music, writings, and posthumous reputation of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, is taking a bit longer to polish off than I'd expected. One reason for this is that I put my trusty iBook to sleep on Thursday afternoon and took a subway down to the studios of WNYC-FM, where I chatted about Miles Davis' Kind of Blue for an upcoming episode of Studio 360. It seems that a producer there ran across an "About Last Night" posting in which I discussed that classic album and thought it might be fun to have me do the same thing on the air. I don't know whether she had fun, but I sure did. I love talking on the radio. It's a good thing nobody's ever offered me a full-time radio gig, because I doubt I'd write another word if that were to happen.

Anyway, that's where I was all afternoon, and that's why I'm still at my desk at midnight, doing my damnedest to finish my Gottschalk essay. I'd better go back to work--I'd really like to get some sleep tonight. See you Monday.

Posted July 28, 12:00 PM

TT: Theater for tourists

In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I report on my recent visit to the Utah Shakespearean Festival:

To get to the Utah Shakespearean Festival, I flew into a small airport perched atop a bluff and stepped out of the plane into shockingly hot weather (the temperature was 110 when I arrived two weeks ago). Then I drove north through the most spectacular countryside imaginable, a gaudy parade of red cliffs, mesas and buttes so redolent of the films of John Ford and Budd Boetticher that I half expected to see Randolph Scott riding over the next hill. At the end of the trip was Cedar City, a college town near the mouth of a canyon, home since 1962 to one of the biggest Shakespeare festivals west of the Mississippi.

The Utah Shakespearean Festival, which runs from June to October, puts on four Shakespeare plays, three revivals and two musicals each season. The company, which performs on three different stages on and around the campus of Southern Utah University, won a Tony in 2000 for outstanding achievement in regional theater. No doubt because its audience consists in large part of tourists who come to the area less for Shakespeare than the scenery, the festival is unabashedly conservative in both programming and production style. Big-city visitors may well find its Ye Olde Renaissance Faire atmosphere a bit on the twee side--the snack bar actually serves turkey legs and Cornish pasties--but most of the onstage offerings I saw were solidly entertaining....

As usual, no link. To read the whole thing, pick up a copy of the Journal at your neighborhood newsstand, or be smart and go here to subscribe to the online edition.

Posted July 28, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"I know nothing more ill-bred than a fashionable Englishman, unless it be two fashionable Englishmen."

Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Notes of a Pianist

Posted July 28, 12:00 PM

July 27, 2006

TT: Exterminate all the brutes

Via Household Opera, a pet-peeves meme:

- Grammatical pet peeve. Misplaced apostrophes. My father, God rest his soul, once commissioned a huge sign that read Season's Greetings From The Teachout's. I secretly attempted to paint out that damned apostrophe, but to no avail. It caused me years of annual adolescent embarrassment, though I'm pleased to say that I wasn't enough of a smartass to tell my father about it.

Orthographic runner-up for jazz musicians only: if you can't spell Thelonious Monk's first name correctly, write about somebody else.

(I was irked by the increasingly indiscriminate use of the singular "their" until I ran across this Web page. Enough already--I give up!)

- Household pet peeve. Guests who don't close lids completely. May they be forced to walk barefoot over kitchen floors littered with shards of broken Mason jars.

- Arts and entertainment pet peeve. Over to you, Mr. Superfluities.

- Liturgical pet peeve. Two words: crappy music.

- Wild card. Logorrheic quarterwits who jabber on their cellphones while walking down the street--especially those who use handless headsets. The garrote is too good for them, but it's a start.

Posted July 27, 12:43 PM

TT and OGIC: Read all about us

The co-proprietors of "About Last Night" were interviewed over the weekend by Bloggasm. To see what we had to say, go here.

Posted July 27, 12:00 PM

TT: Smack dab in the middle

My trip to the Village to hear Julia Dollison was the fourth time I'd set foot in a nightclub since getting out of the hospital last December. I can remember when I went to hear live jazz at least twice a month, and usually more.

It's not just jazz, either. Just the other day I read Jay Nordlinger's New Criterion chronicle of his favorite classical-music concerts and operatic performances of the 2005-06 season, and was startled to realize that I hadn't attended any of them. Since December I've heard two concerts, seen two dance performances, and gone to the opera once. Nor have I been to a single movie, even though I very much wanted to see Art School Confidential and Nacho Libre (not to mention The Lady in the Water, in which an actress I know has a featured role). And with the exception of my regular Wall Street Journal and Commentary columns and the postings on this blog, I've published only one piece.

At first my semi-sabbatical was motivated by an understandable desire to stay out of the hospital. Then I got wrapped up in writing Hotter Than That, my Louis Armstrong biography, which failing health had forced me to put aside for several months. After that the theater season started its downhill run to the announcement of the Tony nominations, and all at once I was seeing a minimum of three shows each week, which didn't leave me much time to do anything else. Now I'm hitting the road once or twice a month to cover regional theater companies.

My plate, in short, is full. I'm no invalid. Yet I feel restless and out of touch, not so much with the world of art--I've got a pretty good idea of what's out there--as with the steady flow of immediate artistic experience on which I've been nourishing myself for the past couple of decades. To put it another way, I used to be a boulevardier, and now I'm not.

Might that be a good thing? It's no secret that I'm a workaholic, and the frequency with which I once spent my nights on the town was a symptom of what finally turned into a life-threatening problem. Two years ago, at the height of my performance-going frenzy, a fellow blogger posted this cautionary item:

Critic Terry Teachout
Consumes Too Much Art,
Violently Explodes

MANHATTAN--In news that has the arts world reeling, Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout exploded yesterday after consuming too much art.

In New York, art lovers are asking whether the fatal tragedy could have been prevented.

According to one art historian, "Most critics don't eat art. But it has been known to happen from time to time. What's surprising in this case is that Teachout actually wrote about his strange proclivities on the Internet."

Now that I'm well again, I have no intention of returning to my past state of life, not merely for the sake of staying alive but also for the sake of my soul. I used to fill my waking hours with so much aesthetic experience that it left next to no room for the contemplation without which the mere accumulation of experience can have no meaning.

On the other hand, I'm not cut out to be a full-time contemplative. I don't claim to have any original ideas of my own. I was born to celebrate other people's ideas, both as a critic and as a biographer. As Kenneth Tynan put it:

I see myself predominantly as a lock. If the key, which is the work of art, fits snugly into my mechanism of bias and preference, I click and rejoice; if not, I am helpless, and can only offer the artist the address of a better locksmith. Sometimes, unforeseen, a masterpiece seizes the knocker, batters down the door, and enters unopposed; and when that happens, I am a willing casualty. I cave in con amore. But mostly I am at a loss.

In order to be unlocked with sufficient regularity, I have to be out and about. What's more, I want to be, so long as I don't kill myself in the process. The trouble is that striking balances doesn't come naturally to me. I'm a head-first guy, an enthusiast who jumps first and looks on the way down. Right now I'm not doing enough. Next month I may be doing too much. Somewhere in between manic activity and paralytic passivity lies the point of equipoise that I seek--in vain, of course. Equipoise is for teeter-totters. Real life is full of earthquakes. The trick, I've decided, is not to bounce around too much, or get knocked off too soon, and I think I can manage that without staying home five nights a week.

To this end, I put down my tools Wednesday afternoon, jumped in a cab, and headed over to Salander-O'Reilly Galleries to see a pair of exquisite small paintings by Albert Kresch, then down to the International Center for Photography for a long-deferred look at Unknown Weegee. After a healthy bite to eat at a noodle shop, I walked to Madison Square Park and took in a free outdoor concert by Fred Hersch and Kate McGarry, two jazz musicians whom I admire greatly and hadn't seen for at least a year. As if to express approval of my venture, a cool breeze blew the cloying humidity out of the park just as Fred struck up "At the Close of the Day," one of his most beautiful compositions. Not too shabby for a boulevardier emerging from temporary semi-retirement--and I even got home by nine!

I think I can live with that.

Posted July 27, 12:00 PM

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:
- Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
- 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)
- Pig Farm (comedy, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
- Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 6)
- Faith Healer* (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 13)

CLOSING SUNDAY:
- Susan and God (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

Posted July 27, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"William Shakespeare, who liked magic and liberally employed ghosts and spirits as persuasively and meaningfully as you could wish, understood not only magic's dazzling effects, but also--and this is what's important--the power of its source in the human heart. We all wish for things with a passion that feels powerful enough to warp matter itself. We fear things we can neither see nor name. We want things we know logically we cannot have. And we are all haunted by demons and visited by grace. The power of magic, in fiction as in life, is its ability to draw us near the tempting and sometimes terrifying threshold of possibility."

Carrie Brown, Creating Fiction (courtesy of Litwit)

Posted July 27, 12:00 PM

July 26, 2006

TT: Elsewhere

- Mr. Parabasis, one of my favorite stagebloggers, begged to differ vigorously with Charles Isherwood's panning of Pig Farm in the New York Times. So did I, but he did something about it: he talked a bunch of other bloggers into going to the show and writing about it. His report on Pig Farm's "blogger night," with links to the various online reviews, is here.

For what it's worth, here's what I wrote about the show in The Wall Street Journal:

If, like me, you relish the lowbrow foolery of such anything-for-a-laugh movies as "Airplane!" and "There's Something About Mary," then Greg Kotis' "Pig Farm," in which three bumbleheaded, sex-crazed pig farmers run afoul of the Environmental Protection Agency, is the play for you. Mr. Kotis, who wrote the book of "Urinetown," is a parodist who works exclusively in primary colors, and "Pig Farm" is a crazy-quilt pastiche stitched together out of bits and pieces of "Tobacco Road," "The Postman Always Rings Twice," and God only knows how many other half-remembered films and TV shows. It's as subtle as a whoopee cushion--a really, really loud whoopee cushion--but it kept the audience laughing pretty much continuously, which is, after all, the point.

Nobody directs comedy better than John Rando, who undoubtedly deserves most of the credit for much of the laughter. The four characters, whose names are Tom, Tina, Tim and Teddy (it's that kind of show), are played by John Ellison Conlee, Katie Finneran, Logan Marshall-Green and Denis O'Hare, all of whom are very clearly having a very good time. So did I. So will you.

- Ms. Culturegrrl has risen to the bait I dangled on Monday when I posted at length about the Web sites of regional theater companies, complete with links to good and bad sites. I invited her (and Mr. Modern Art Notes, from whom I haven't yet heard) to share their thoughts on the Web sites of prominent museums. The first installment of her response is here.

By the way, Ms. Culturegrrl has now officially joined the roster of artsjournal.com bloggers. Welcome aboard!

- Kate's Book Blog asks a question: "Which authors dominate your bookshelves?" She defines domination as owning "five or more books by or about" the author in question.

Here's my list:

Kingsley Amis
Louis Armstrong (but not H.L. Mencken!)
Max Beerbohm
Richard Brookhiser
Willa Cather
Raymond Chandler
Colette
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Joseph Conrad
Noël Coward
Joseph Epstein
M.F.K. Fisher
Clement Greenberg
Alec Guinness
Jon Hassler
Gertrude Himmelfarb
Henry James
C.S. Lewis
A.J. Liebling
Laura Lippman
Somerset Maugham
François Mauriac
William Maxwell
Vladimir Nabokov
V.S. Naipaul
Patrick O'Brian
Flannery O'Connor
George Orwell
Anthony Powell
Dawn Powell
Marcel Proust (by definition)
Barbara Pym
William Shakespeare
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Rex Stout
Igor Stravinsky
Me (naturally)
Anthony Trollope
Evelyn Waugh
Karen Wilkin
Edmund Wilson

Care to play, OGIC?

- Many thanks to British blogger Clive Davis for his flattering shoutout in the Times (London, not New York).

Posted July 26, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

The first night after guests have gone, the house
Seems haunted or exposed.

Robert Frost, "In the Home Stretch"

Posted July 26, 12:00 PM

July 25, 2006

TT: Man at work

I'm writing a long piece for Commentary (and recovering from my niece's visit to New York last week). You won't hear from me again until Wednesday, or maybe Thursday. In the meantime, go visit some of those other nice blogs in the right-hand column.

Posted July 25, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Two kinds of person are consoling in a dangerous time: those who are completely courageous, and those who are more frightened than you are."

A.J. Liebling, "Paris Postscript," The New Yorker, Aug. 10, 1940

Posted July 25, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Young critics in love

"Every time we pick up a book, we expect to fall in love; but after a certain number of disappointments, our expectation turns to mere hope; and eventually we give up even that. But no true reader ever gives up entirely. We still want to be moved deeply; we are still looking for books that, as Orwell put it, will burst the thermometer."

Lots of interesting critical self-reflection is afoot lately. The quotation above comes from a piece linked seemingly everywhere, Ruth Franklin's half-essay, half-review of Black Swan Green, published in the New Republic and reprinted at Powell's Books, addresses some of the pitfalls of positive reviewing. Positive reviews are harder to write well, she claims, for any number of reasons. For one, the well-pleased critic finds herself in unintentional competition with a book's jacket copy and associated hype--all of the productions of the publishing house's publicity machine--and it's not always easy to avoid sounding like part of that machine herself. "We damn not with faint praise, but with hyperbole." she writes.

I entirely agree with Franklin's sentiments about overly nice reviewing, which only makes me part of a large chorus. The Believer's Snarkwatch was a trial balloon, as she notes, that quietly but quickly sank. But, as someone who reviews ten or twelve books a year, I'd say the problem is less that many bad books are being given glowing reviews, and more that there are a lot of pretty good books out there. Quite good books. Blown kisses to my editors, but it is a rare thing and thus, frankly, some fun, to receive a book for review that's truly bad--in large part because it happens so seldom. The great majority of the novels and short story collections I review are pretty good--but not essential. In the long run, they probably won't be remembered as important. In the short run, though, they'll give the right readers some considerable pleasure and perhaps enlightenment. As a critic, then, my job as I see it is to set aside that perpetually recurring dream of making a great discovery--and all of the attendant overblown adjectives--send out some sort of signal to the readers who I think will appreciate this particular book, and describe the book using verbs instead of adjectives as much as possible--not what the book is like, but what it does. The hardest thing is to maintain an honest sense of proportion in describing what a book achieves. (And for the record, I basically agree with Franklin's high assessment of Black Swan Green).

Meanwhile, A. O. Scott had a piece in the New York Times last week (warning: the link may expire today) that tries to parse the yawning difference between the critical and popular receptions of a movie like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. As you might imagine, plenty of film and culture bloggers have had something to say about that. It was the always sharp Peter Suderman, though, who pointed out that nowhere in his piece does Scott venture an answer to a key question: "What is the job of the movie critic?" In lieu of anything along these lines from Scott, Suderman graciously obliges with some thoughtful musings.

The subquestion, I suppose, in Scott's essay was about what, if any, responsibility a critic has to the general moviegoing public. This is a tough question for many critics, and for someone like me especially. Most critics would bristle at the thought of having to serve the masses. Pandering, they'd call it, and dismiss the whole idea. As a firm believer in the usefulness of markets in determinging value, however, I'm not as sure. Now, while I have no love for the inscrutable non-taste of the moviegoing masses, I find myself wondering if a critic doesn't have some obligation to them. Newspapers and magazines are businesses, after all, and they have an obligation to sell papers. A critic without a public is hardly worth whatever investment--however tiny--his or her publication has made in his or her writing.

In the end, he lands on a close analogue to what he tries to do as a critics: "it seems to me that the best description of a film critic is as a public teacher, one whose job is to be interesting, helpful, available (answer those emails!) and knowledgeable. One hopes that film critics are also film enthusiasts who enjoy not just the entertainment part of film but the intellectual side as well." One does.

Posted July 25, 3:05 AM

July 24, 2006

TT: Information, please

I keep an eye on the Web sites of more than a hundred American theater companies. Many of them are well designed, but at least as many are thoroughly exasperating to anyone looking for information about a company and its schedule--especially a journalist with a deadline who doesn't have time to root around for basic facts.

If you want to keep traveling critics like me happy, make sure that the home page of your Web site contains the following easy-to-locate information:

- The title of your current production, plus its opening and closing dates
- A link to a complete list of the rest of the current and/or upcoming season's productions
- A "CONTACT US" link that leads directly to an updated directory of staff members (including individual e-mail addresses)
- A link to a page containing (1) directions to your theater and (2) a printable map
- Your address and main telephone number (not the box office!)

An elegantly designed home page that conveys a maximum of information with a minimum of clutter tells me that you know what you're doing, thus increasing the likelihood that I'll come see you. An unprofessional-looking, illogically organized home page suggests the opposite. This doesn't mean I won't consider reviewing you--I know appearances can be deceiving--but bad design is a needless obstacle to your being taken seriously by other online visitors.

Two examples of good design:

- Steppenwolf
- Paper Mill Playhouse

Seven examples of bad design:

- This is an informative but cluttered home page.
- This is an uncluttered but insufficiently informative home page.
- This is an informative but amateurish-looking home page.
- This home page gets just about everything wrong--and it also contains a hugely irritating sound bite that plays each time you go there.
- This is a textbook example of unattractive, eye-resistant design.
- So is this.
- This superficially attractive site is so poorly organized that it's hard to use.

(You don't have to spend a fortune on an effective Web site, by the way. Remy Bumppo's bare-bones home page gets the job done.)

All this free advice applies equally well to other arts organizations, by the way. Any specifically museum-related suggestions, Mr. Modern Art Notes and Ms. Culturegrrl?

Posted July 24, 12:00 PM

TT: It's my party

I made my will last week. Not to worry--I'm as healthy as a middle-aged horse--but in light of my recent illness, it seemed prudent to ensure that my worldly goods, such as they are, will be properly distributed should my cardiologist turn out to have been wrong about my future prospects.

Making a will is an uncomplicated affair for those who, like me, are neither rich nor overly endowed with possessions. I do, however, own forty works of art (not counting my cel set-up from The Cat Concerto), and at one point I considered leaving them en bloc to some small regional museum whose permanent collection is weak on the American moderns. In the end, though, I decided it would be more appropriate for me to share some of the vast pleasure I've derived from living with art. I'm leaving two of my most treasured objects, Milton Avery's March at a Table and John Marin's Downtown. The El, to the Phillips Collection as a gesture of gratitude to my favorite museum. The rest will go to friends and family members.

It took me two days to figure out who was to get what. By the time I was done, I felt so ceremonial that I started drawing up a list of music to be played at my funeral. At that point my sense of humor finally kicked in, and I found myself recalling this passage from Boswell's Life of Johnson:

I have known him at times exceedingly diverted at what seemed to others a very small sport. He now laughed immoderately, without any reason that we could perceive, at our friend's making his will; called him the TESTATOR, and added, "I dare say, he thinks he has done a mighty thing. He won't stay till he gets home to his seat in the country, to produce this wonderful deed: he'll call up the landlord of the first inn on the road; and, after a suitable preface upon mortality and the uncertainty of life, will tell him that he should not delay making his will; and here, Sir, will he say, is my will, which I have just made, with the assistance of one of the ablest lawyers in the kingdom; and he will read it to him (laughing all the time). He believes he has made this will; but he did not make it: you, Chambers, made it for him. I trust you have had more conscience than to make him say, ‘being of sound understanding;' ha, ha, ha! I hope he has left me a legacy. I'd have his will turned into verse, like a ballad."

Mr. Chambers did not by any means relish this jocularity upon a matter of which pars magna fuit, and seemed impatient till he got rid of us. Johnson could not stop his merriment, but continued it all the way till we got without the Temple-gate. He then burst into such a fit of laughter, that he appeared to be almost in a convulsion; and, in order to support himself, laid hold of one of the posts at the side of the foot pavement, and sent forth peals so loud, that in the silence of the night his voice seemed to resound from Temple-bar to Fleet-ditch.

Is there a more revealing anecdote in all of Boswell? Better than anyone else, Dr. Johnson understood the vanity of human wishes, so it was wholly typical of him to find the blackest of humor in so grave an undertaking as the making of a will. I know just what he had in mind when he laughed uncontrollably at the puffed-up presumptuousness of poor Mr. Chambers, the TESTATOR--yet even so, I felt the need to do as Mr. Chambers did. Anyone who thinks knowledge leads to wisdom hasn't lived long enough.

I don't claim to be wiser than the next man, but my sense of humor is at least as healthy as my heart, so I've scrapped my plans for the Terry Teachout Memorial Concert. Should a pianist happen to be present when the time comes, I'd like her to play Aaron Copland's Down a Country Lane. (Remember that, Heather.) The rest I'll leave to whoever is in charge of disposing of my earthly remains, with the caveat that she keep it simple. I've never cared for funerals, nor do I wish to burden my friends with the chore of attending an elaborate one.

Neither did H.L. Mencken, whose bald, uncomforting obsequies I described in The Skeptic:

The next day, a small band of family, friends, and colleagues joined August, Gertrude, and Charlie [Mencken] in the chapel of a Hollins Street funeral parlor to say goodbye. Hamilton Owens led a delegation from the Sunpapers; Alfred Knopf and James Cain represented the world of literature; a sprinkling of Saturday Night Club members was on hand, including Ed Moffett, the oldest surviving member, and Louis Cheslock, who had seen more of Mencken in the past eight years than anyone other than August and his servants. In 1927 he had issued a "clarion call to poets" for an agnostic funeral service that was "free from the pious but unsupported asseverations that revolt so many of our best minds, and yet remains happily graceful and consoling," but none having obliged, his final instructions to August were passed on to Hamilton Owens. "August asked me to stand up for a few minutes," Owens told the mourners, "and repeat what most of you already know. His brother Henry, orally and in writing, said he wanted no funeral service of any kind. All he wanted was that a few of his old friends gather together and see him off on his last journey. That we are doing."

It did little to ease their sorrow. "Somehow, we were made to subserve a gag," Cain recalled, "and the effect wasn't so much bleak as blank." Cain, Owens, Knopf, and Frank Kent went straight from the funeral parlor to Marconi's, there to drown their sorrows in loud reminiscence, while August and Charlie accompanied the coffin to Loudon Park Cemetery, where it was cremated and the ashes placed in the family plot next to those of Sara. Mencken had gone there in 1945, ten years after her death, and gazed at the lone white marble stone that bore the family coat-of-arms and the names and dates of the dead. "There is room left for all the rest of us," he wrote in his diary that day. "My own name will be there soon enough."

That's carrying simplicity a bit too far. What I'd like is for the thirty-odd friends to whom I'm leaving the Teachout Museum to gather at my apartment, drink a toast, strip the walls, then go home and hang up their booty. That's my kind of funeral--complete with party favors.

Posted July 24, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"I believe that the great painters, with their intellect as master, have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions. I find any digression from this large aim leads me to boredom."

Edward Hopper, "Notes on Painting"

Posted July 24, 12:00 PM

TT: Words to the wise

Jazz singer Julia Dollison is in town for a one-nighter this Tuesday at Sweet Rhythm. I wrote the liner notes for her debut CD, Observatory, and what I said then still goes:

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

Here's the answer.

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

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

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

The band includes Geoff Keezer on piano, Ben Monder on guitar, Ted Poor on bass, and Matt Clohesy on drums--remarkable players all.

For more information, go here.

Posted July 24, 11:27 AM

OGIC: Standing in the shadows

I'm under the radar but not entirely inactive. Check out the Top Five and Out of the Past, in the right-hand sidebar, for a couple of brand-new picks from me. And wander over to the Lit Blog Co-op, where sometime today I'll be posting more on my nomination for this season, Edie Meidav's Crawl Space. I'll contribute something more robust to this blog after work, though I won't be helped by a sprained, swollen left ring finger. Ah, the joys of learning to skate. I'm down a knee and a finger and I haven't even picked up a hockey stick yet.

Posted July 24, 2:33 AM

July 21, 2006

TT: Adventures of an uncle

Lauren and I went to the Empire State Building observatory today, an undertaking that entails standing in line for at least an hour (unless you pay extra for an "express" ticket, a newfangled piece of cash-and-carry privilege that sticks in my craw). The long line is set up in such a way that you spend much of your time shuffling forward, thus creating the illusion of progress. Most of the people waiting to board the elevators to the eighty-sixth floor were teenagers, and though they came from all over the world, most of them were dressed identically.

I hadn't been to the Empire State Building for a number of years, and I'd all but forgotten how charming it is. It opened its doors in 1930, and the streamlined décor is as redolent of the Thirties as a Pullman sleeper or a Jimmy Cagney movie. The observatory itself is wonderfully tacky--the only thing missing is a dirty-water hot-dog cart--and the view is as spectacular as advertised. I talked Lauren's ear off, pointing out every landmark I could think of: Central Park, Radio City Music Hall, Wall Street, the Brooklyn Bridge, the UN, Macy's, even the dear old Flatiron Building. I also showed her the hole in the skyline that was created by the destruction of the World Trade Center. It's easy to miss, so much so that you wouldn't know where the twin towers once stood if you didn't know where to look. I overheard a father pointing out Ground Zero to his son, and remembered the night I brought Lauren's parents to Windows on the World for a drink, long before the sunny morning when the face of New York was changed utterly by the hand of evil.

In due course we descended to Fifth Avenue, rejoined the mere mortals, and took a cab to Tibor de Nagy Gallery, where we looked with great pleasure at a show of sweetly naïve urban landscapes by Rudy Burckhardt. Tiffany's is across the street from the gallery, so we stopped by afterward to ogle the merchandise. (Memo to the folks back in Smalltown, U.S.A.: no purchases were made.)

Later on we went to Broadway to see The Wedding Singer, a show I liked far more than most of my colleagues. I'd been wondering whether I'd like it as much the second time around, so I'm happy to report that I continue to stand firmly and wholeheartedly by my Wall Street Journal review, in which I ranked it

among the most ingenious and amusing musical adaptations of a Hollywood film ever to reach Broadway....No, we're not talking Adam Guettel, but The Wedding Singer is smart, handsomely designed by Scott Pask and sparklingly staged by John Rando, the director of Urinetown, who has an uncanny knack for underlining the comic nuances of a script....The Wedding Singer delivers what it promises, no more and no less, and if you long to laugh yourself silly, it'll do the trick.

It's a good thing I haven't changed my mind, since quotes from that review are plastered all over the front of the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. Like most of us, I have my little vanities, one of which is that my name occasionally appears in smallish type ("A KNOCKOUT AND A WOW!"--Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal) on the signs and posters hung in front of Broadway theaters for the purpose of wooing passers-by. Not often, for even my most enthusiastic reviews tend not to lend themselves to such treatment, but every once in a while I swing for the fences, and sometimes a publicist takes note of the fact. I've been a drama critic for three years now, so you'd think I'd be used to seeing my name on the Great White Way, but the truth is that I get a huge kick out of it, and probably always will. Tonight my pleasure was enhanced by the presence of my niece, who took a snapshot of me standing next to one of the Wedding Singer posters that bears my name.

Enough already. As soon as I inflate Lauren's bed, which is set up in the middle of the Teachout Museum, I'm going to crawl into my loft, put out the light, and sleep deeply. Friday is her last full day in New York, and I'm sure it'll be a hectic one. I have nothing planned for the weekend--and that includes answering the phone.

See you Monday, maybe.

UPDATE: John Rando talks about his directorial method in this Playbill interview about his latest production, Pig Farm.

Mr. Verging on Pertinence says that the preceding post "turned my stomach." Here's why:

I know critics play a vital role in a Broadway play's success...or failure. But they're not involved in any of the creative, directorial, financial, human resource related aspects of the play/musical. And yet credit is given to them. It's like showing up at your grandmother's for the Thanksgiving meal and being hailed the conquering hero for eating.

Except for the stomach-turning part, I don't disagree with anything he says, all of which is worth reading. Nevertheless, I do think he's coming it a teeny bit high! The kick I get out of seeing my name under a marquee is not to be confused--nor do I ever confuse it--with the justifiable pride a playwright or actor or director or producer takes in his work. It's simply the forgivable (I hope) vanity of a small-town boy turned big-city critic who never imagined that such things would happen to him, and it's a far cry from the vulturine posings of, say, Addison DeWitt. What's more, I do take credit for having helped keep a number of worthy shows from closing, which obviously isn't the same as having written them but is still better than nothing.

Might I suggest that Mr. Pertinence's sense of humor is in need of a slight adjustment?

Posted July 21, 12:49 PM

TT: Shakespeare in flip-flops

Today's Wall Street Journal drama column contains the first fruits of my recent trip out west, a review of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival:

In Idaho the license plates say "Famous Potatoes," and the nickname of Boise, the state capitol, is "City of Trees." Both statements are true as far as they go: Boise is as green as Dublin, while Idaho's chief cash crop is so esteemed around these parts that you can even buy a tuber-shaped candy bar called the Idaho Spud. But Boise is also known, or should be, for the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, whose theater is an outdoor pavilion across the street from the foothills of the Rockies, which supply a spectacular backdrop for the five plays performed there each summer. The productions are unfailingly fresh and engaging, and the casual atmosphere is perfect for art-starved tourists.

Boise is a smallish city (pop. 190,117) with a low-rise skyline, a pedestrian-friendly downtown and amiable residents who make a point of saying hello to startled strangers. Its companionable air is mirrored in the dress-as-you-please code of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, where flip-flops, insect repellent and well-stocked coolers are all standard equipment. Most of the local playgoers pack a meal or buy one on site, and dining is encouraged during the shows. You can either eat at your seat or book a box equipped with a picnic table. Each performance is given to the bucolic accompaniment of chirping birds and croaking frogs, with occasional guest appearances by a skunk who lives beneath the stage. (Not to worry--if you leave him alone, he'll leave you alone.)

Don't let the informality fool you: Idaho Shakespeare is both artistically serious and theatrically adventurous, and the anything-goes production style does much to enliven the straightforward bill of fare....

No link. You know what you can do, and you know what you should do. So do it.

Posted July 21, 12:00 PM

TT: Put down your brush, pick up your pen

In my next "Sightings" column, to be published in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I hail the reprinting by Princeton University Press of Louis Moreau Gottschalk's Notes of a Pianist, which I use as an occasion to discuss some of my favorite non-literary artists who write--and, nowadays, blog--on the side.

What can we learn from "practitioner criticism" and the autobiographies of working artists? For the answer, pick up a copy of tomorrow's Journal, where you'll find my column in the "Pursuits" section.

Posted July 21, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"There is a school of painting called abstractionist or non objective which is derived largely from the work of Paul Cézanne, that attempts to create 'pure painting' that is, an art which will use form, color, and design for their own sakes, and independent of man's experience of life and his association with nature. I do not believe such an aim can be achieved by a human being. Whether we wish it or not we are all bound to the earth with our experience of life and the reactions of the mind, heart, and eye, and our sensations, by no means, consist entirely of form, color and design. We would be leaving out a great deal that I consider worth while expressing in painting, and it can not be expressed in literature."

Edward Hopper, letter to Mrs. Frank B. Davidson, Jan. 22, 1947

Posted July 21, 12:00 PM

TT: Pre-weekend grin

This made me laugh out loud.

Posted July 21, 10:37 AM

July 20, 2006

TT: Curiosity shop

Except for a noontime visit to Antonio Prieto Salon, which is far from my beaten path, my niece and I didn't do anything out of the ordinary today. We brunched at Good Enough to Eat, visited the Metropolitan Museum, dined at Bright Food Shop, and saw Pilobolus at the Joyce Theater. Just another Wednesday in New York, in other words--except that this time around I saw Pilobolus and Times Square and Central Park and John Twachtman's Arques-la-Bataille through Lauren's eyes. which made them as new to me as they were to her.

I was especially pleased by Pilobolus. Not only has it been a couple of years since I last saw them, but outside of a single performance by the Mark Morris Dance Group in March, I haven't seen any dance since my unexpected trip to the hospital seven months ago. It was a nice way to slip back into the swing of things, and what made it nicer still was that Lauren and I ran into Jonathan Wolken and Robby Barnett, two of the troupe's founders, in the lobby. I hadn't spoken to either one of them since I took part in the filming of Last Dance, Mirra Bank's 2001 Pilobolus documentary, and we had a lot of catching up to do.

Now I'm sitting at my desk, eavesdropping as Lauren chatters away on her cell phone in the next room. She's telling a friend in Smalltown, U.S.A., all about Pilobolus' Day Two, the hot, steamy fertility rite set to the music of David Byrne and Brian Eno that ended tonight's program with a bang (and a splash). She sounds thoroughly impressed. So was I--not merely with Pilobolus, but also with the miraculous good fortune that makes it possible for me to take days like this for granted, even though I rarely do. May I never forget how lucky I am.

Posted July 20, 12:00 PM

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:
- Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
- Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 6)
- 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)
- Pig Farm (comedy, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
- Susan and God (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 30)

CLOSING NEXT SUNDAY:
- Susan and God (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 30)

Posted July 20, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"It was hot. A few lost, cotton-ball bunches of cloud drifted in a brassy sky, leaving rare islands of shadow upon the desert's face.

"Nothing moved. It was a far, lost land, a land of beige-gray silences and distance where the eye reached out farther and farther to lose itself finally against the sky, and where the only movement was the lazy swing of a remote buzzard."

Louis L'Amour, Hondo

Posted July 20, 12:00 PM

TT: Unsolicited endorsement

The only thing I don't like about my beautiful white iPod is the crappy little set of earbuds that came with it. Now that I'm spending so much time in the air, I decided the time had finally come to spring for a better set of headphones. After much research and careful consideration, I ordered a set of Ultimate Ears super.fi 3 in-ear monitors. They arrived in today's mail, and so far I'm blissfully happy with them. To be sure, I may feel differently once I've subjected them to the acid test of listening to Morph the Cat at 30,000 feet, but I have a feeling that they're keepers.

Posted July 20, 7:07 AM

July 19, 2006

TT: The usual chaos

My niece's timing was off: a power failure at LaGuardia caused her afternoon flight from St. Louis to be cancelled. Fortunately, American Airlines was able to book her onto a later flight, and she appeared on my doorstep a mere three hours behind schedule, minutes ahead of a thunderstorm. The weather in New York is still sickeningly hot. Nevertheless, we mean to have a good time or die trying.

I don't expect to check in again until Thursday, but you never can tell. Anyway, later.

Posted July 19, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Maybe I am not very human. What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house."

Edward Hopper (quoted in Lloyd Goodrich, Edward Hopper)

Posted July 19, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Public service announcement

By the way, all of the summer nominees for the Lit Blog Co-op are being introduced this week, including my nomination of Edie Meidav's daring and brilliant novel Crawl Space. Here's a bit of what I say:

Some antiheroes are more anti than others. Emile Poulquet, the antihero of Crawl Space, is a Vichy war criminal and an absolute of his kind. Poulquet is a man divided along seemingly a hundred internal fault lines, and so too will be the reader of Edie Meidav's rich and troubling novel, a searching inquest into the banality of evil. A provincial bureaucrat during the French Occupation, Poulquet was complicit in the deportation of thousands to Nazi death camps. Now, decades later, his face surgically altered, his conscience rattled but intact, he is on the run from the authorities and drawn like a moth to a flame to his old prefecture of Finier.

Poulquet is not clearly remorseful; if guilt dogs him at all, it manifests itself in self-pity and what he calls a cousin to guilt, the desire for vindication. "What did that mean, anyway, ashamed," he asks. "Shame depends wholly on others. Who cared if I toted shame around like some battered private trophy, proof of my inner good, my bewildered soul? Wasn't it more heroic to wander the world lacking an audience, the society of brothers and sisters which shame and its absolutions automatically offer the renegade?" Indeed, his crimes are so great and his name so despised that it's hard to imagine anyone in his position could own them directly and fully. Poulquet's relationship to personal agency is so troubled that he carries around a small pendulum to decide everyday questions such as where to go and what to eat. His relationship to his hated name is similarly fraught; as the novel proceeds, he increasingly refers to himself in the third person and scrambles to remove instances of "I" from the last will and testament he carries around with him. Meidav depicts with authority--with virtuosity and unlikely beauty--the gnarled consciousness and wizened moral sense of this unrepentant war criminal, who loathes himself and his pursuers in equal measures but in different modes. It's a thoroughly haunting portrait.

There will be a week of discussion of Meidav's novel at the LBC site next week, including author and nominator podcasts. The group's Summer selection is Michael Martone's inventive Michael Martone.

Posted July 19, 9:33 AM

July 18, 2006

TT: Almanac

"The birds are the opposite of time. They represent our longing for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant song."

Olivier Messiaen, program note for Quartet for the End of Time

Posted July 18, 12:01 PM

TT: Ever so humble

It was hot in Manhattan on Monday, but not as hot as it was in St. George, Utah, last Friday. The bank thermometer read 110 degrees when I left the airport in my rental car. Fortunately, Cedar City, my destination, was considerably higher and somewhat cooler, and I got through my weekend at the Utah Shakespearean Festival in one piece. It helped that I ran into a long-lost friend with whom I had an unexpected and gratifying reunion, and I also profited from the advice contained in an e-mail from a fellow blogger:

If you have a free afternoon in Cedar City, take the 45-minute drive to Cedar Breaks National Monument. It's sort of like Bryce Canyon, only more colorful and without big crowds. Visitor facilities are so rustic you'll swear you've stepped into the 1930s. If you do decide to make that trip, don't forget that you'll be very high up (over 10,000 feet), where the air is thin and water--including the water in your radiator--boils quickly.

I took him up on it, and spent a considerable chunk of Saturday morning gawking at the view. As always, the trouble with scenery is tourists, and I felt sorely tempted to give a good hard push to a couple of noisy women at the Chessmen Ridge Overlook. Fortunately, the altitude silenced most of the other people I ran into (it really does make your head spin), who appeared to respond to the beauties of Cedar Breaks in much the same way as the raven-haired ranger to whom I paid my four-dollar toll. I told her I'd never seen anything like it, and she grinned at me and replied, "Oh, I'm in love with it. I have been ever since the first time I came here."

I was tickled by two signs I saw along the way:

WARNING EXPOSED CLIFF EDGES AND NEARBY LIGHTNING ARE HAZARDOUS

OPEN RANGE WATCH FOR LIVESTOCK

Sunday was...well, long. I arose at 4:30, drove back to the St. George airport just ahead of the sunrise, flew from there to Los Angeles, sat around the terminal for a couple of hours, flew from there to Newark, and was driven from there to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As I expected, it took me about thirteen hours to get from point A to point E, but I made reasonably good use of my time, writing part of my Wall Street Journal drama column in an LAX snack bar and reading most of Gail Levin's Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography on the plane. (I'd read it years ago, but I know a lot more about art now.)

Now I'm back home again, writing my "Sightings" column for Saturday's Journal and preparing to receive a houseguest, my niece Lauren from Smalltown, U.S.A., who arrives in New York for a visit later this afternoon. We're going to ascend the Empire State Building, ride the Circle Line, and go see Pilobolus, the Metropolitan Museum, and whatever Broadway musical I can get us into on the cheap by paying a sweaty visit to the TKTS booth in Times Square, which will be a first for me. I expect I'll be blogging about Lauren's visit from time to time, but should you not hear from me as frequently as usual, it means I'm out showing her the town.

More as it happens.

Posted July 18, 9:05 AM

TT: Mike Hammer, R.I.P.

I wrote about Mickey Spillane in National Review three years ago, on the occasion of the paperback reissue of six of his out-of-print mysteries:

You remember Mickey Spillane, right? No? Not to worry--it's an age thing. If you were born before 1960, his name will definitely ring a bell. He wrote six of the biggest-selling detective novels of the 20th century, and Mike Hammer, their tough-guy hero, was for a time all but synonymous with the genre. They spawned two TV series and several movies of widely varying quality, among them Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me, Deadly (1955), now regarded as a film-noir classic, and The Girl Hunters (1963), a curiosity in which Spillane himself played Hammer (ineptly, alas, though it's a wonderfully wacky idea--try to imagine Dashiell Hammett swapping wisecracks with Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon). In addition, the "Girl Hunt" ballet in The Band Wagon is a Spillane send-up, with Fred Astaire as Hammer and Cyd Charisse as the leggy lady of mystery. That's fame.

Back then, Spillane was considered the lowest of lowbrows, though he had his unlikely admirers, among them Kingsley Amis, who thought he was a better writer than Hammett or Raymond Chandler, and Ayn Rand, who said he was her favorite novelist since Victor Hugo. (I'm not making this up--it's in her 1964 Playboy interview.) But most people who wrote about mysteries placed him several degrees beneath contempt. Chandler, not at all surprisingly, loathed Spillane, claiming that "pulp writing at its worst was never as bad as this."...

And now? Well, it's not quite right to say Spillane is forgotten, but the truth is even worse: he's out of print. Though he continues to grind out an occasional novel, the early Hammer books, which between them sold some 130 million copies, have long been unavailable, even in paperback. At a time when American intellectuals are obsessed to the point of mania with pop culture, the most popular mystery writer of the postwar era has become an unperson, in spite of the fact that he is alive, well, and available for interviews....

The Mike Hammer series, launched in 1947 with I, the Jury, appears at first glance to share many of the major themes and preoccupations of postwar noir. Like countless other noir anti-heroes, Hammer is a World War II vet who comes home to find that the city of his youth (New York, not Los Angeles) has become a dangerous place, crime-ridden and profoundly corrupt. He, too, has changed, for the experience of combat has aroused in him a dark love of violence, which he uses in an attempt to restore order to the chaotic world around him: "I had gotten a taste of death and found it palatable to the extent that I could never again eat the fruits of a normal civilization....I was evil. I was evil for the good."

Most noir characters are vigilantes of one sort or another--they have to be, since they are functioning in a radically corrupt society--so what was it that put this one beyond the pale? Part of the problem was Spillane's blunt, inelegant prose style, which is unfailingly effective but in no obvious way "literary," just as his frame of reference is deliberately, even aggressively anti-intellectual. Whereas Philip Marlowe drank gimlets and read Hemingway (or at least made well-informed fun of him in Farewell, My Lovely), Mike Hammer drinks beer and doesn't read anything at all. He is a regular guy who happens to pack a rod....

Spillane was writing for a generation of fellow veterans who spent their off-duty hours thumbing through paperbacks--thrillers, westerns, even the odd classic. They were accustomed to taking pleasure in the printed word. Now their grandsons go to the movies, or watch TV. Novels, even mysteries, are overwhelmingly read by and written for women. This is not to say that nobody's writing regular-guy books anymore: they're just not being read by regular guys. A no-nonsense crime novelist like Elmore Leonard is far more likely to appeal to eggheads like me than the working stiffs about whom he writes--I've never seen anybody reading a Leonard novel on the subway--whereas Spillane's books were actually read and enjoyed by men who weren't all that different from Mike Hammer. He may well have been the last novelist of whom such a thing could be said....

Spillane died yesterday at the age of eighty-eight. If you're curious, these were his three best books.

To read his New York Times obituary, go here.

Posted July 18, 9:04 AM

July 17, 2006

TT: Off-road vehicle

I'm back in New York after a thirteen-hour trip from Utah. No, I am not ready to start blogging yet. I'll see you after I (A) unpack and (B) get some sleep.

Later.

Posted July 17, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"It seems to me that music, generally speaking, is the proper language for philosophy."

Aleksander Wat, My Century (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Posted July 17, 12:00 PM

July 14, 2006

TT: All Synge, all the time

This week my entire Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to DruidSynge:

In Ireland John Millington Synge is considered a great playwright. In America, however, he has vanished into the pantheon of half-remembered masters--none of his plays has been seen on Broadway since 1971--and even the Irish long preferred respecting him to performing him. It wasn't until the Druid Theatre Company of Galway City started reviving his work in the '70s that the author of "The Playboy of the Western World," who died in 1909, once again became a hot ticket in the land of his birth.

Now Americans are getting a fresh chance to grapple with Synge. "DruidSynge," a marathon presentation of his six major plays, just opened at the Lincoln Center Festival after a week-long run at Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater. The plays, which run for a total of eight and a half hours (including a 90-minute dinner break), are staged by Garry Hynes, founder of the Druid Theatre Company and the first woman director to win a Tony Award. All six are performed on a powerfully evocative set designed by Francis O'Connor, a fog-filled, dirt-floored hut whose dead gray walls stretch upward to infinity. The results are a mixed bag, but the best parts are so good that you'll forget the rest well before the long day closes....

No link. You know what to do: be cheap and buy today's Journal, or be smart and subscribe to the online edition by going here.

Posted July 14, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"'I hate music.' His voice rises, and for the first time this evening he speaks with a hoarse intensity. 'I hate this incomprehensible, melodious language which select people can understand and use to say uninhibited, irregular things that are also probably indecent and immoral. Watch their faces and see how strangely they change when they're listening to music. You and Krisztina never sought out music--I do not remember you ever playing four-handed together, you never sat down at the piano in front of Krisztina, at least not in my presence. Evidently her sense of tact and shame restrained her from listening to music with you while I was there. And because music's power is inexpressible, it seems to carry a larger danger in that it has the power to arouse the deepest emotions in people who come together to listen to it and discover that it is their fate to belong to each other.'"

Sándor Márai, Embers (trans. Carol Brown Janeway)

Posted July 14, 12:00 PM

OGIC: My eleventh Altman

Last week a friend took me to see Prairie Home Companion on a free pass. I went somewhat against my better judgment. Like anyone, I'm a fan of Robert Altman at his best. And like many, I'm a Garrison Keillor detractor. At the time we made the plan, I knew Keillor had written the script but wasn't clear about whether I'd actually have to look at him. My friend, who as far as I can tell is neutral on the subject of Keillor but does hail from Lake Wobegon country, confirmed that Mr. Lawsuit would appear onscreen. "Oh well," I wrote back, "we can bring tomatoes." In the blink of an eye he responded: "I don't throw tomatoes at Minnesotans." A principled position that I had to respect, though I'm not at all sure there aren't several Michiganders I would gladly pelt, given the opportunity, with whatever happened to be handy.

At the outset, I disliked the movie. Michael Blowhard has written with infectious enthusiasm about its meandering charm:

Weak on storyline and action, it's nonetheless focused and controlled -- more a "Tempest"-like poetic picture of life than a narrative: We live among spirits and archetypes; death and beauty are never more than a few steps away; gallantry, generosity, humor, and belief carry us through ... It's a jewelbox and a metaphysical romance, yet it's fully inhabited and embodied, and it never stops rolling along.

This gets at the trademark naturalism of many Altman films, but in the early going of Prairie Home Companion that signal quality struck me as terribly staged. The scene backstage at the radio show (a fictional, small-time version of "Prairie Home Companion") as on-air time approaches is barely controlled chaos, a classic Altman occasion. As in more persuasive such scenes in Altman's oeuvre, we get overlapping conversations, a dozen subplots unfolding at once, and lots and lots to look at. In the midst of this cheerful frenzy, both the cheer and disorder seem centered on the singing sisters played by Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep, who clatter in like a squall at the last minute. Sweet and tart, blithe and barely holding things together, they more than any other characters encapsulate the reigning mood and aesthetic of the radio show and of the movie itself. What a drag, then, when they start uttering gobs of exposition while doing their makeup. The genius of Altman's naturalism, when it's on, is that it doesn't press explanations on you but lets you put things together gradually: who people are, what their relationships are to one another, what stories they trail behind him. When Tomlin and Streep launched on this character-establishing and backstory-telling torrent almost as soon as we'd met them, my heart sank. I thought the movie was going to be really bad--and guessed the culprit would be the script. I reached for my tomato. But I hadn't brought one.

Good thing too, because the film eventually won me over--for the most part. The on-stage musical performances loosened things up considerably: they themselves are pure pleasure, and by virtue of the balance they provide, they make the more contrived backstage action more interesting. But even as the film grew lovelier and more absorbing, the mote that I kept wanting to flick away was the weirdly flat performance by Virginia Madsen as an angel of death or something. I shouldn't blame Madsen; it was probably an unsalvageable role, though it is true that Kevin Kline spun another undercooked part into a little bit of incidental charm, at least, as Guy Noir.

Now to help me understand why Madsen's angel was so objectionable, along comes Odienator at the group film and television blog The House Next Door with a great essay on angels of death in Prairie Home Companion and Bob Fosse's All that Jazz. To his mind, Altman is soft-pedaling death, he's not buying it, and it makes him miss the Altman of years past:

Later in the film, Dangerous Ginny comments that "the death of an old man is not a tragedy," which led me to holler out, "Bullshit, Mr. Altman." When Lola asks if he is concerned that this is the last show, G.K. says "every show is your last show. That's my philosophy." "Thank you, Plato," Lola's sister Yolanda (Lily Tomlin) sarcastically replies, saving grumps like me the trouble of talking back to the screen again.

...I am closer to 52 than 80, and more attuned to Broadway than Lake Woebegone; I know more about sex and self-destruction than the wisdom of age and the sense of entitlement one feels for living a long life. Most importantly, though, I also know something about being a grouch, and from that vantage point, Prairie's subtle exhortations to go gentle into that good night seem a false comfort from Altman to his fans--a reassurance that displaces his usual blunt honesty. For a movie whose cast includes a sexy reaper, Prairie is too smug and passive about dying. The mortal coil is unraveling from the show and its participants, yet Altman chooses to deflect a universal fear by pretending that death is a mere nuisance.

This is why Madsen is so terrible; her air-headed angel's platitudes ring hollow in the Altman universe we've come to know. Would the younger Altman have let a character get away with such bullshit? This artist has never felt the need to embrace and console his audiences in the past, so why start now? Nashville's final number, "It Don't Worry Me," was about willful denial; the whole of Prairie is about acceptance, yet it feels like a denial as well. The palpable fear that this is Altman's last movie is never honestly dealt with by the director's stand-in, Keillor, nor the film itself. It seems almost as if Prairie thinks it holds the monopoly on dying, and that the show-within-a-movie is noble--and its demise a tragedy--simply because it's been around for so long. Altman's onscreen representative G.K. keeps pooh-poohing the distress his colleagues feel throughout their last show, going so far as to state that he doesn't want to tell people how to feel about his legacy; but his relaxed attitude never feels true. Altman throws out a hopeful, interesting curve when dealing with the fate of Tommy Lee Jones' character (a fantasy of how to deal with one's enemies). Here is the mean Altman we know and love, lashing out at his critics, informing you of his perceived greatness and how much it'll be missed once he's gone. But the film treats it as a throwaway; as quickly as it arrives, it defers back to that transparent, dishonest lulling. If Prairie weren't so concerned with coddling us, we'd deduce that it's OK to acknowledge Death--just don't go looking for it; wait until it shows up to pull your number.

Yes. Read the whole thing, and bookmark that blog because they are always posting something good.

Incidentally, my first ten Altman films, in (rough) order of preference: The Long Goodbye, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, California Split, MASH, Short Cuts, Gosford Park, Cookie's Fortune, The Player, Thieves Like Us, The Gingerbread Man. I've only seen half of Nashville, sad to say, and half a movie never sticks.

Posted July 14, 4:05 AM

TT: Which way is the airport?

I spent much of Thursday driving around the highlands of Boise in my rented car, then made my way to the Boise Art Museum for a sneak peek at Frank Lloyd Wright and the House Beautiful, which opens Saturday. As I drove I listened to Twin Falls, the new Deidre Rodman-Steve Swallow CD, and I couldn't have made a better choice: Rodman comes from Boise, and Twin Falls is a sequence of lyrical duets for acoustic piano and electric bass in which she and Swallow evoke with great subtlety the stony landscapes among which I wandered all afternoon.

Once I got back to the hotel, I turned on my iBook and plugged into the Web, where I ran across a New York Times story about Jack Larson and Noel Neill, who played Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane a half-century ago in the Superman TV series. Not only are they both alive and well, but it seems that Larson, who later wrote the libretti for operas by Virgil Thomson and Ned Rorem, lives in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Brentwood, California. Charmed by the coincidence, I did a bit of Googling and quickly found a photo of Larson's home, a gorgeous Usonian built in 1939. (It's S. 272 in the Wright catalogue, if you're interested.)

Later on I dined at the Milky Way with Dana Oland, a smart young ex-dancer who covers the arts for the Idaho Statesman. Should you ever find yourself in Boise, I strongly suggest you make a point of eating there, too. After dinner I headed out Warm Springs Avenue to the Idaho Shakespeare Festival to see Love's Labour's Lost, which ends with my favorite curtain line in all of Shakespeare: The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way: we this way.

Now I'm packing my bag and regretting my imminent departure from Boise, with which I find myself much taken. Tomorrow morning I fly to Salt Lake City, change planes for Saint George, pick up another rental car at the airport, drive to Cedar City, and see three shows at the Utah Shakespearean Festival. I wish I could stick around for another day or two, but I can't. I never can. No sooner do I find my bearings in one town than I'm off to the next one, looking for another aisle seat and another tasty meal. You that way: I this way.

Posted July 14, 1:52 AM

July 13, 2006

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:
- Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
- Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 6)
- 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)
- Pig Farm (comedy, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
- Faith Healer (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 30)
- Susan and God (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 30)

Posted July 13, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"I am thinking that people find truth and collect experiences in vain, for they cannot change their fundamental natures. And perhaps the only thing in life one can do is take the givens of one's fundamental nature and tailor them to reality as cleverly and carefully as one can. That is the most we can accomplish. And it does not make us any the cleverer, or any the less vulnerable."

Sándor Márai, Embers (trans. Carol Brown Janeway)

Posted July 13, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Evelina and me

"I HAVE a vast deal to say, and shall give all this morning to my pen.

"As to my plan of writing every evening the adventures of the day, I find it impracticable; for the diversions here are so very late, that if I begin my letters after them, I could not go to bed at all."

That is the opening of one of Evelina's early letters to her guardian, the Rev. Mr. Villars, in Fanny Burney's 1778 novel Evelina, Or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World. I find myself much in the same situation trying to blog this week, forced to choose sleep over blogging in the interests of self-preservation. But I have a vast deal to say, and shall give all this evening to my keyboard. So look for updates then.

Posted July 13, 11:15 AM

TT: Long day's journey

I arose at four-thirty Wednesday morning in New York City. Twelve hours later I checked into a hotel in Boise, Idaho, having first flown west to Phoenix, Arizona, where I changed planes and headed north. Five hours after that I was sitting down to see the Idaho Shakespeare Festival's production of Major Barbara. Now, twenty-one hours after my alarm clock last went off, I'm back in my hotel room, getting ready for bed.

I could complain about the length of my day, as well as certain disagreeable things that happened to me along the way, but I won't, because I've been reading Notes of a Pianist, the newly reprinted travel diaries of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, in which America's first important concert pianist (and one of our most original composers) tells in excruciatingly frank and funny detail what it was like for a musician to go on the road in nineteenth-century America. No, I'm not fond of snatching a hasty breakfast in between flights, but once you learn what it was like to pay an overnight visit to Springfield, Illinois, in 1863, you're likely to come away with a greatly enhanced appreciation of the Egg McMuffin:

St. Nicholas Hotel (!!!!) Each one of these exclamation points, if it could speak, would tell you a story of tribulations, of all kinds of mortifications that should render the St. Nicholas Hotel, Springfield, forever celebrated! First, the legislature being in session, the house is full, which is the same as saying that the beefsteaks are leathery, the eggs too hard....We are cooped up, six of us, in a little room hardly large enough to hold one bed comfortably. The water to wash with is as black as ink. The proprietor charges us for a supper that we have not eaten, and, upon a timid observation that we make respecting it, looks at us as if he wished to crush us and, addressing the porter, throws out this memorable phrase, which seems to me not to speak very highly in favor of the honesty of the travelers with whom he is in the habit of dealing: "Billy, take care that the trunks are not taken away before the bills are paid!"

In any case, the truth is that I love traveling, even the ordinary parts. I love being whisked through the streets of Manhattan before sunrise. I love gazing out the window of a plane at clouds and deserts and mesas and mountain ranges. Above all, I love to explore a city that's new to me, then spend the evening watching Shaw or Shakespeare or Lynn Nottage. What could be more fun?

So yes, I had an excellent day--but enough is enough. I get to sleep in tomorrow, after which I'll be paying a visit to the Boise Art Museum, dining with a local arts journalist, going to see Love's Labour's Lost, then flying to Cedar City, Utah, to do the whole thing over again. That being the case, I think I'll eat an Owyhee Idaho Spud (no, it's not a potato product) and hit the sack. It's midnight in Boise, and even a drama critic deserves a good night's sleep.

Posted July 13, 2:04 AM

TT: For the road

Accompanists tend not to get the credit they deserve, especially in the field of pop music. Unless you're in the business or on its fringes, for instance, you probably won't recognize the name of Bill Miller, who died on Tuesday at the age of 91. As of this morning, the New York Times hadn't yet published an obituary of Miller. Nevertheless, you've probably heard him play piano, because he spent nearly a half-century, from 1951 to 1995, backing up Frank Sinatra. It was a difficult task that he discharged with supreme tact and taste, steering clear of the spotlight, finding fulfillment in making his boss sound good.

The best evidence of Miller's gifts is the 1958 performance of "One for My Baby" that closes Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely. Most of it is a duet for voice and piano, with Nelson Riddle adding discreet touches of orchestral support here and there. It is Sinatra's greatest recording--and it wouldn't have been the same without Bill Miller. Listen to it as you bid him farewell.

Posted July 13, 1:17 AM

July 12, 2006

TT: Almanac

"Passion has no footing in reason. Passion is indifferent to reciprocal emotion, it needs to express itself to the full, live itself to the very end, no matter if all it receives in return is kind feelings, courtesy, friendship, or mere patience. Every great passion is hopeless, if not it would be no passion at all but some cleverly calculated arrangement, an exchange of lukewarm interests."

Sándor Márai, Embers (trans. Carol Brown Janeway)

Posted July 12, 12:00 PM

July 11, 2006

TT: Away I go

I depart very early on Wednesday morning for the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, from which I'll be traveling directly to the Utah Shakespearean Festival. I plan to bring my trusty laptop with me and to blog as often as possible, but I'll be spending a great deal of time in transit--I'm flying home from Utah by way of Los Angeles, for example--so don't be surprised if my postings for the rest of the week are a trifle irregular.

The good news, as you may have noticed last week, is that Our Girl is back on the blog and full of stuff to say. No doubt she'll be filling in some of the empty spaces.

See you in the wild, wild West!

Posted July 11, 12:00 PM

TT: Brush up your Shakespeare

A reader writes:

Having come late in life to the wonders of Shakespeare myself, I read your post today with interest. I totally agree with you that the plays must be seen to be fully appreciated. Sadly, being neither a critic nor resident of a city, I lack opportunities to see as many as I would wish. You offered an interesting alternative, however: "I've learned in the process that no matter how many times you may have read a Shakespeare play, you don't really know it until you've seen it on stage (though the very best Shakespeare films, of which there are a dozen or so, can go a long way toward plugging the gap)." I wonder if you might list some of the ones you think qualify?

Gladly. According to Wikipedia, 420 feature-length films have been made out of Shakespeare's plays. Of the ones that are actually full-fledged movies (as opposed to telecasts or film records of a stage production), these are a few of my personal favorites. Many of them--especially the ones directed by Orson Welles--are flawed in significant ways, but all are absolutely worth watching:

- Max Reinhardt, A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935). With Jimmy Cagney as Bottom and a score adapted from Mendelssohn's incidental music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. A bit slow-moving and overblown, but still charming.

- Laurence Olivier, Henry V (1944). The quintessential Shakespeare film. William Walton's score is worth the price of admission all by itself.

- Laurence Olivier, Hamlet (1948). Heavily cut but highly effective, not least because of Olivier's own performance.

- Orson Welles, Macbeth (1948). A fascinatingly eccentric low-budget take on the Scottish play.

- Joseph Mankiewicz, Julius Caesar (1953). Hollywood Shakespeare, produced by John Houseman and played straight down the center by Marlon Brando, James Mason, and John Gielgud. The superlative score is by Miklós Rózsa.

- Orson Welles, Chimes at Midnight (1965, adapted from Richard II, Henry IV, and The Merry Wives of Windsor). Welles' greatest and most personal Shakespeare film.

- Franco Zeffirelli, Romeo and Juliet (1968). Lush and lavish, à la Zeffirelli. I saw it in junior high school--it was my very first Shakespeare--and was knocked flat. I now find it a bit goopy, but my guess is that modern-day youngsters will respond to it the same way I did.

- Kenneth Branagh, Much Ado About Nothing (1993). After Olivier's Henry V, the best traditional Shakespeare movie ever made.

- Al Pacino, Looking for Richard (1996, based on Richard III). Part documentary, part performance, with striking performances by Pacino, Kevin Spacey, and Winona Ryder. Odd and wonderful.

Posted July 11, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"One never forgets what is important. I learned that only later, when I was somewhat older. Nothing secondary remains--it gets thrown away along with one's dreams."

Sándor Márai, Embers (trans. Carol Brown Janeway)

Posted July 11, 12:00 PM

July 10, 2006

TT: YouTube's greatest hits

In the past year YouTube has evolved from a curiosity into a major online resource. If you're interested in seeing rare film and video clips by a fast-growing number of great performers of the past, you'll find them there--but only if you have the patience to sift through the innumerable postings of nitwits who think the world is waiting with bated breath to see their homemade music videos.

From time to time I've passed on links to interesting videos that I've found on other blogs, but it never occurred to me to try making this blog a one-stop portal to the wonders of YouTube--until now. Take a look at the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column and you'll find that it ends with a brand-new roll of selected culture- and history-oriented video links, most (but not all) of them to YouTube. So far as I know, this is the first such list to appear anywhere on the Web.

In addition to blogrolling the links I've already mentioned on "About Last Night," I recently spent several hours trolling through YouTube in search of still more buried treasure. The results are now available for your amusement and edification. Most of the videos to which I've linked are familiar to specialists, but my guess is that you'll find quite a few that are new to you.

This is an experiment. You're invited to take part by sending me any choice culture-related links that you run across in the course of your own YouTube explorations. As you'll see, I've tried to be selective, so keep in mind that for the moment I'm more interested in increasing the total number of artists represented than in posting additional links to videos by those artists already included on the list--though I'll be more than happy to make room for something that's really good. (In addition, please let me know if any of the existing links have gone dead since I posted them.)

Have fun!

UPDATE: I've also added a similar list of links to RealAudio and QuickTime files of spoken-word recordings by artists and other historical figures.

Posted July 10, 12:00 PM

TT: Democracy in action

I was sitting on a rowing machine at the gym the other day when I looked up at the bank of television sets just above my head and saw Peri Gilpin (remember her?) chatting earnestly with Tony Danza (remember him?) about her latest venture, a Lifetime TV movie about child abuse. It was as if I'd inadvertently glanced through an astral portal into a parallel universe inhabited exclusively by second-tier ex-celebrities. I thought of Andy Warhol's oft-quoted vision of a future in which "every person will be world-famous for 15 minutes," and I recalled the piece I wrote for The Wall Street Journal on the seventy-fifth anniversary of his birth in which I argued that "Warhol did as much as anyone to shape the culture of pure, accomplishment-free celebrity in which we now live."

Looking back at that piece now, I realize that neither Warhol nor I gave any thought to the question of what happens to celebrities after their fifteen minutes are up. A.E. Housman, at a time when it was a good deal harder to become famous, wrote a poem about an athlete whose "solution" was to die young:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

And what happens to such a person these days? Now I know: he makes a TV movie about an Important Issue and goes on The Tony Danza Show to hawk it.

Two sets to the left, CNN was hawking with identical fervor an upcoming appearance by President and Mrs. Bush on Larry King Live. That made me feel even older than remembering Tony Danza, for I'm just old enough to have seen the very first prime-time TV interview by a sitting president of the United States. The president in question was John Kennedy, and the interview, which took place in 1962, was broadcast by all three TV networks and conducted by their White House correspondents. (You can read a transcript here.) If memory serves--and I'm pretty sure it does--Kennedy required that the interview be videotaped, not aired live, and that the networks allow him to review the tape prior to broadcast so that he could edit out anything he wanted suppressed.

I'm not one of those people who thinks everything was better when he was young, nor do I suffer from excessive respect for politicians, but I do have sharply mixed feelings about the process that brought us from Jack Paar and After Two Years: A Conversation With the President to Peri Gilpin on The Tony Danza Show and George and Laura on Larry King Live. I was tempted for a moment to say that TV did it to us, but of course we did it to ourselves: America is a democracy in the deepest and most far-reaching sense of the word, a truly popular culture whose citizens believe devoutly that they're as good as anyone else, and who for this reason prefer their celebrities and politicians to be just like everyone else.

That's one aspect of the democratic experience. Here's another. Last week I watched Kevin Costner's Open Range, which is set in 1882. In the scene immediately preceding the climactic gunfight, Robert Duvall's character goes into a general store and purchases two bars of Swiss chocolate and three Havana cigars. The total cost of these rare items, we're told, is five dollars. I've no idea whether Craig Storper, who wrote the screenplay, made any attempt to get that figure right, but operating on the assumption that he did, I went to Inflation Calculator and learned that what cost Duvall's character five dollars in 1882 would cost $95.57 in 2005.

It happened that I was reading Madame Bovary on the same day I watched Open Range, and I was no less struck by a scene early in the book in which Flaubert tells of how Emma Bovary liked to listen to the music of a hurdy-gurdy whose operator sometimes stood in the street below her parlor window and cranked his machine in the afternoon:

The tunes it played were tunes that were being heard in other places--in theatres, in drawing rooms, under the lighted chandeliers of ballrooms: echoes from the world that reached Emma this way. Sarabands ran on endlessly in her head; and her thoughts, like dancing girls on some flowery carpet, leapt with the notes from dream to dream, from sorrow to sorrow. Then, when the man had caught in his cap the coin she threw him, he would pull down an old blue wool cover, hoist his organ onto his back, and move heavily off. She always watched him till he disappeared.

A little later on Emma has this exchange with a similarly frustrated clerk:

Emma went on: "What is your favorite kind of music?"

"Oh, German music. It's the most inspiring."

"Do you know Italian opera?"

"Not yet--but I'll hear some next year when I go to Paris to finish law school."

Much of American literature portrays small-town folk like Madame Bovary and Monsieur Lèon, unhappy creatures with immortal longings in them who either moved to the city to chase their dreams or lived lives of fast-increasing frustration. But by the time my mother was born in the smallest of small midwestern towns in 1929, she no longer had to settle for the visits of an itinerant hurdy-gurdy player. The phonograph, the movies, and the radio had already started to open up the outside world to her generation. I was born twenty-seven years later in a town a few miles away from the one where my mother grew up, and TV gave me even more of what the other modern media had given my mother. As for today's Emma Bovarys, if there are any, they have access to infinitely more powerful tools by which they can put themselves in touch with the world of art and culture. They can even buy imported chocolate bars on line for the tiniest fraction of what a cowboy with a sweet tooth would have paid in 1882.

I draw no conclusion from these fugitive observations: I merely offer them for your consideration. To be sure, I wish the postmodern world were classier than it is, but I also know that it gives each of us the opportunity to be as classy as we care to be. On a recent visit to Storm King Art Center, I rode the tram in the company of a group of tourists who chatted loudly, incessantly, and knowledgeably about the sculptures with which the five-hundred-acre park is filled. One of them actually took a call on her cell phone as we drove past Mark di Suvero's Mozart's Birthday. Had I thought to bring a garrote with me, her conversation would have been terminated abruptly. Yet I couldn't deny that she knew more about modern art than most people, and she probably knew more about di Suvero than I did.

Such is life under democracy. We can use our TV sets to watch Peri Gilpin and Larry King, or The Light in the Piazza. We can pay a visit to a sculpture park, and chat on our cell phones while doing so. We can use our computers to communicate with fellow aesthetes halfway around the world, or to download kiddie porn. To a greater extent than at any previous time in the history of the world, our lives are up to us--and we're on our own.

Posted July 10, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Like the lover, the friend expects no reward for his feelings. He does not wish the performance of any duty in return, he does not view the person he has chosen as his friend with any illusion, he sees his faults and accepts him with all their consequences. Such is the ideal. And without such an ideal, would there be any point to life?"

Sándor Márai, Embers (trans. Carol Brown Janeway)

Posted July 10, 12:00 PM

July 9, 2006

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"There is this myth that I was formed on Henry James. I had hardly read anything of him when I started to write. It must be because I take more trouble, perhaps, with words than authors usually do these days. James is a consummate writer, but you do feel it's like the needle on the old gramophone, that it's got stuck and you want to move it on. Also, I have to say, I think I'm funnier than Henry James."

Shirley Hazzard (thanks to Sarah for the link)

Posted July 09, 11:03 AM

July 7, 2006

TT: A peach of a festival

I'm in between theater-related trips today, giving me just enough time to post the weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser before hitting the road again. Most of my column is devoted to a report on the Georgia Shakespeare Festival, followed by a capsule review of Pig Farm:

Unless you live in Georgia, you probably don't think of Atlanta as a center of American regional theater. Yet it's home to a dozen serious companies, enough to keep a good actor working year round--and to allow the Georgia Shakespeare Festival, the city's best-known summer theater, to put together an ensemble of Atlanta-based artists instead of importing itinerant out-of-towners. In some cities that would be a guarantee of mediocrity, but there's nothing provincial about Georgia Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," a blunt, bawdy romp directed by Karen Robinson that leaves just enough room for romance in between the slapstick.

No production of Shakespeare's dizziest comedy of mistaken sexual identity can take wing without a Viola who looks smashing in pants, and Courtney Patterson, who spends the greater part of the evening decked out in riding togs, fills the bill. Gangly, big-eyed and touchingly eager, she serves as the play's emotional center, and her affecting performance frees the rest of the cast to chase uninhibitedly after laughter....

"Pig Farm" is a crazy-quilt pastiche stitched together out of bits and pieces of "Tobacco Road," "The Postman Always Rings Twice," and God only knows how many other half-remembered films and TV shows. It's as subtle as a whoopee cushion--a really, really loud whoopee cushion--but it kept the audience laughing pretty much continuously, which is, after all, the point....

No link, of course, so be so kind as to buy a copy of Friday's Journal, or go here to subscribe to the paper's online edition--an unbelievable bargain, if I do say so myself.

Posted July 07, 12:00 PM

TT: The kid who writes symphonies

In my next "Sightings" column, to be published in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I consider the case of Jay Greenberg, the fourteen-year-old classical composer featured two years ago on 60 Minutes whose Fifth Symphony has been recorded by Sony BMG Masterworks for release this fall. Not only has he has been signed to an exclusive contract by Sony BMG, but he's now being represented by IMG Artists, one of the biggest talent agencies in the world. The publicity engine is starting to grind, and in a matter of months Greenberg will be famous. Is this the chance of a lifetime--or bad news for a gifted boy?

For the answer, pick up a copy of tomorrow's Journal, where you'll find my column in the "Pursuits" section.

Posted July 07, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"When a person stands ready to offer his life for another, he obviously knows what he's doing. I wouldn't have believed you capable of such a sacrifice, but you never know what a human being is capable of. Not that those who make the sacrifices are always saints. People sacrificed themselves for Stalin, for Petlura, for Machno, for every pogromist. Millions of fools will give their empty heads for Hitler. At times I think men go around with a candle looking for an opportunity to sacrifice themselves."

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shosha

Posted July 07, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Roughed up

This week has been a little rough on me. I have a bum knee, infected corneas, and no captain. The knee is from ice-skating a bit too ambitiously when I was in Detroit last weekend. Until the crash, things were dreamy. It was a perfect, cloudless Saturday afternoon and so, other than the guard, my dad and I were the only people crazy enough to be spending it indoors on a sheet of ice. That translated into a lot of open ice for us--open ice for me to colossally screw up a forward-to-backward transition on. I've never had such a disorienting, catastrophic crash. I gathered my wits and kept skating, though; about a dozen skaters joined us over the course of the session--about the number that play in a hockey game--so we still had tremendously open ice, an opportunity not to be wasted. But at the end of it my knee was swollen up like a grapefruit. It was only later that I discovered that two of the knee's most basic functions were functioning painfully: bending and bearing weight. Whoops. I'll be seeing a doctor shortly.

Moving along to bad corneas, while I don't recommend them, they are pretty easy to come by. Simply wear the same pair of daily wear contact lenses for about eighteen months, marveling at all the money you are saving. A mere fourteen or fifteen months might even do the trick! Of course, you will then not be able to wear contacts for ten days or so while treating your eyes with $150 eye drops (I advise you to have a prescription drug plan), but think not of that--think of all the cash you saved over the previous year and a half, and savor the memory, for from here on out your optometrist will prescribe only disposable lenses for your sorry self. For added adventure, be sure the glasses you are resigned to wearing while your eyes heal are at least eight years old. Drive carefully.

As for the captain, it's a painful goodbye but one tha