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August 31, 2006

TT: Middle-aged elephant crawl

Is there anything more pathetic than a houseguest with the sniffles? I caught my current cold while visiting a woman with a chronic illness of considerable gravity who nonetheless went out of her way to make over me. As she brought me my umpteenth mug of hot tea, I was seized with a convulsion of guilt and told her, "You must think it's pretty lame of me to be lying on the couch and whining like this, considering how sick you are."

"Actually, it feels worse to have a cold, at least in the short run," she replied. "When you're really sick, your point of view changes--it gets easier to cope, somehow. So shut up and drink your tea."

This reminded me of how I felt when I was in the hospital last December. I was desperately scared until I picked up the phone and dialed 911--and then, all at once, I wasn't. It was like throwing a switch. From that moment on, I was completely calm. You may not understand what I'm talking about unless you've had a similar experience, but as soon I told the operator to send an ambulance, I knew things were out of my hands, and for the first time in weeks, I relaxed.

Needless to say, my host's reassurances didn't make me feel any less guilty, but they didn't stop me from drinking my tea, either. Alas, I couldn't indulge myself for very long, even with her wholehearted approval, for this was one of my three-deadline weeks. On Monday I wrote a four-thousand-word essay on John Hammond for Commentary. On Tuesday I returned to New York, writing my drama column for Friday's Wall Street Journal on the train from Hartford to Penn Station. Yesterday I wrote my "Sightings" column for the Saturday Journal. All this was a bit much for a middle-aged man with a bad cold, but I had to grin and bear it, so I did. As James Burnham liked to say, if there's no alternative, there's no problem.

I spent Wednesday evening slumped on the couch, swilling tea and watching Howard Hawks' Hatari! It's not one of the master's best movies: the plot is all but nonexistent, and the way Hawks handles his female characters tips over into full-fledged self-parody. One of them is named Brandy, the other Dallas, which tells you just about everything you need to know. Be that as it may, Hatari! turned out to be well suited to my modest aesthetic demands, for it jogs along amusingly for two and a half hours, the Tanganyikan scenery is soothing to the eye, and Henry Mancini's score, which makes extensive and imaginative use of African percussion, is great fun. (This is the film for which "Baby Elephant Walk" was written.) No sooner had I shipped "Sightings" off to the Journal than I sent out for a pizza, turned on the TV, and left the rest to John Wayne. Thanks, Duke!

I don't have to go anywhere or do anything today, and I'm not gonna. Friday, alas, is different: I'll be catching a train to Washington, D.C., first thing in the morning, picking up a Zipcar at Union Station, and driving from there to Staunton, Virginia, where I'll spend a day and a half watching Shenandoah Shakespeare perform Othello, As You Like It, and Macbeth. On Sunday I return to Washington (stopping along the way at the Pope-Leighey House) to see the Shakespeare Theatre Company's new production of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. I'll be back in New York on Monday night.

That, if I may say so, is one damn long weekend, so if you don't hear from me between tomorrow and next Wednesday, do not adjust your set. I know, I know, it's only a cold, but in the immortal words of Lili von Shtupp, I'm not a wabbit--I need some west!

Posted August 31, 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 gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. 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 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)
- The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
- Indian Blood (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Saturday)
- The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here, closes Sunday)
- Pig Farm (comedy, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Sunday)
- Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sunday)

Posted August 31, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"It was sad how the fact of not being able to share a joke separated one from people. Separated, of course, was too strong a word, but it created a frontier, a water-shed for experience, instead of a valley. Failure to see the same things as funny often meant a general failure to see eye to eye, because humour was common ground where the high-brow and the low-brow, the rich and the poor, could meet without self-consciousness."

L.P. Hartley, The Sixth Heaven

Posted August 31, 12:00 PM

August 30, 2006

TT: In two words

Laryngitis.

Later.

(Imagine a big sick frog intoning those two words and you'll get the idea.)

UPDATE: My condition has evolved. I now sound like the subject of my next book.

Posted August 30, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"He played Franck's Prelude, Aria and Finale. The noble, declamatory music with its military stride and confident accent marched through the room, filling it with flags and cheering crowds, a gallant expedition setting out in the morning of life to win a spiritual prize. Eustace thought he knew why Victor chose this piece; not only was it, superficially at any rate, the very breath of encouragement, but it expressed all those sentiments which he, Victor, so sedulously kept out of his daily manner. Here, at the piano, protected by the anonymity of art, he could walk in old heroic traces without being betrayed. Sir John was right to say that he played like a professional. He had the evenness of touch, the restrained, impersonal approach to emotion; he did not hurry when the music was easy, and slow up when it was difficult. He could let go without letting himself go."

L.P. Hartley, The Sixth Heaven

Posted August 30, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Excuses, excuses

So Terry's got laryngitis and I've got my parents in town. Advantage Ms. OGIC, by a very large margin, but in terms of blogging output, nobody wins. I'll leave you, however, with a few good links:

- Robert Archambeau is very acute, not to mention downright hilarious, dissecting audiences at poetry readings. Poetry readings get a bad rap, he admits; but "what if a big part of the problem with poetry readings isn't a matter of what's up on stage, but a matter of what's down in the seats?" (Via Dan Green).

- Peter Suderman argues that "classic TV" is not just a myth, and that the DVD medium overcomes the precise obstacles previously cited by my illustrious co-blogger to even the best series television attaniing the status of bona fide narrative art.

- Not a link but an observation. There's been much ado about Marisha Pessl's cause célèbre of a first novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, so I purchased a copy. Waiting one day for the oil to be changed in my car, I picked it up and read a few dozen pages. When my car was ready, I put it down. I'm not sure I'll pick it up again--it struck me as too clever by half, more than a little exhausting, and inferior to the book its breathless press reports kept reminding me of: Brian Hall's Saskiad, which is narrated by a younger precocious teenage girl but a vastly more compelling one. It's grossly unfair, I know, to pass judgment based on 44 pages of reading--but since I don't expect to get very much further anytime soon, I may as well report why not. (I will say, though, that I vastly prefer the book itself to its fatuous back-cover blurb from Jonathan Franzen: "Beneath the foam of this exuberant debut is a dark, strong drink.")

- Have we mentioned lately how much we love Outer Life? Nobody chronicles This Californian Life quite so well. Docents! Read the piece and you too will be repeating that word to yourself wonderingly for the rest of the day.

Happy Wednesday! (Docents!)

Posted August 30, 2:19 AM

August 29, 2006

TT: Fugedaboudit

Man at work. Totally swamped. Still coughing (but getting better). See you Thursday.

Posted August 29, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Cramer said, 'I'm not a fool.'

"Wolfe nodded again. 'We all feel like that occasionally. The poison of conceit. It's all right if you keep an antidote handy.'"

Rex Stout, Over My Dead Body

Posted August 29, 12:00 PM

August 28, 2006

TT: To the sticking place

Few things in life are more disagreeable than coming down with a bad cold when you have three deadlines staring you in the face. The human brain is a miraculous organism, but it doesn't much care for being asked to generate stylish prose between sneezes. Instead of writing, I've spent the past four days watching TV, reading comforting books, sucking down endless mugs of hot tea, sleeping as much as possible, and waiting impatiently for my lungs to dry up.

Among other things, I watched Dumbo, which I hadn't seen since childhood, and Twelve O'Clock High, which I'd never seen. Dumbo turned out to be even better than I remembered, and the pleasure I took in it was greatly enhanced by the fact that I watched it in the company of a nine-year-old boy whose sense of wonder has yet to be impaired by the onset of adolescent selfconsciousness. Not only is it wonderfully concise (sixty-four minutes, the shortest of all the classic Disney features) and animated with enduring freshness and charm, but the score is full of fetching details (I especially liked the Hammond organ in "Pink Elephants on Parade").

What impressed me most about Twelve O'Clock High, by contrast, was the climactic bombing raid, which consisted for the most part of actual footage of aerial combat shot by American and German military photographers and assembled with skill and intelligence by Henry King. Don't ever let anyone tell you that all old war movies are euphemistic: Twelve O'Clock High, like John Ford's They Were Expendable, is startling in the frankness with which it portrays the hard choices that must be made by men in combat.

What books did I take with me to my sickbed? Rex Stout's And Be a Villain, Prisoner's Base, and Over My Dead Body, three of C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower novels, Caleb Carr's The Alienist, Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers, and Victoria Glendinning's 1992 biography of Trollope. Only the last of these was new to me--I prefer twice- and thrice-read books when I'm feeling low--and I got much more pleasure out of it than a middle-aged man with a summer cold has any right to expect. I ran across so many fetching quotations in its pages that I thought at one point to devote all five of this week's almanac entries to Trollope, but I've changed my mind. Instead, I'll empty the bag in one fell swoop:

- "The getter-up of quotations from books which he has never read,--how vile he is to all of us!" (Travelling Sketches)

- "There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a well-established grievance; a feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood from hour to hour, allowing him to plead his own cause in his own court, within his own heart,--and always to plead it successfully." (Orley Farm)

- "God is good to us, and heals those wounds with a rapidity which seems to us impossible when we look forward, but which is regarded with insufficient wonder when we look backward." (The Bertrams)

- "Can it be that any mother really expects her son to sit alone evening after evening in a dingy room drinking bad tea, and reading good books?" (The Small House at Allington)

- "He would use the simplest, plainest language, he said to himself over and over again; but it is not always easy to use simple plain language,--by no means to easy as to mount on stilts, and to march along with sesquipedalian words, with pathos, spasms, and notes of interjection." (Framley Parsonage)

On the whole, it was a pleasant weekend--or would have been had I not felt so lousy--and the cherry on the sundae was a phone call from my brother in Smalltown, U.S.A., who reported first thing Sunday morning that my mother has profited enormously from a recent operation to relieve her chronic back pain. "She's standing four inches taller," he told me. I stood a bit taller myself when I heard the news.

I'm still under the weather, but deadlines wait for no man. On Sunday I made myself start writing again, and I'll be spending the first part of this week doing the work I had to put aside last week. Come Friday I'll be back on the road again, traveling to Virginia and Washington, D.C., to see plays by Shakespeare and Ibsen and paying a visit along the way to one of my favorite Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, the Pope-Leighey House. I'll be blogging, too, but don't expect anything too ambitious until next Monday. A busy blogger boileth no pots.

Later.

Posted August 28, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Pieces of music are wormholes, which we can enter to escape our normal experience of time."

Robert Spano, quoted in Justin Davidson, "Measure for Measure" (The New Yorker, Aug. 21, 2006)

Posted August 28, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Movies we never started seeing

I sometimes do too much fieldwork before seeing a movie, building up a whole structure of preconceptions that I then have to trundle into the theater with me and crane my neck to peer around at the thing itself. Long ago I recognized that this sport was spoiling perfectly good movies for me, or even preempting me from seeing some of them. So I stopped giving more than a skim to reviews of new movies until after I'd seen them. But at the prospect of an older movie, I still head straight to the bookshelf and, typically, David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary and Pauline Kael's 5001 Nights at the Movies: two critical voices that are always compelling to me if not infallible.

I didn't make it this weekend to Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol, written by Graham Greene from his own story and starring Sir Ralph Richardson. It's playing in a new print through Thursday at the Music Box. Despite being busy this week, I still have a chance to catch it on its final night. (The Music Box is always an added draw, as there's live organ music on weekends and real butter for the popcorn all of the time.) Beyond the obvious appeal of the Graham Greene/Carol Reed partnership, which later produced The Third Man, I'm drawn to this one by what the bookshelf critics say. Kael sounds like she never really made up her mind:

The plot is just about perfect.... There are terrifying, tense moments, too; the whole movie is very cleverly worked out. Maybe it's too deliberate, though, with its stylized lighting and its rigid pacing--you wait an extra beat between the low-key lines of dialogue. It's too deliberate and too hushed to be much fun. It's a polite thriller--which is close to a contradiction in terms.

I'm not sure what, but something about that makes me think she did have fun, then talked herself out of it. In any case, it's an interesting criticism that does nothing at all to dampen my wish to see the film. Thomson, on the other hand, has no such ambivalence, and says "The tone may be straight Greene--that drip of mortification, of agony vindicated--but Reed served it with understanding." Nice precis of Greene there, one which will no doubt please my friend who spent all last week emailing me mordant quotes from Greene's novels--just randomly trying to break my spirit, I guess--and whom I'm trying to get to accompany me to The Fallen Idol on Thursday. (People seem to love going to the movies alone, but I really don't. In my life, I've seen one movie alone in the theater, a good one: California Split. That was five years ago, and not an uplifting experience.)

Then Thomson has this from Greene himself:

When I describe a scene, I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-camera rather than with the photographer's eye--which leaves it frozen. In this precise domain I think that the cinema has influenced me. Authors like Walter Scott and the Victorians were influenced by paintings and constructed their backgrounds as though they were static and came from the hands of a Constable. I work with the camera, following my characters and their movements. So the landscape moves. When I turn my head and look at the harbor, my head moves, the houses move, the boats move, don't they?

And that's part of the reason Greene gets a two-page spread in the Biographical Dictionary. I like the quotation, and I know what he means. But, to nitpick only because he's possibly my favorite painter, the choice of Constable as a painter of static images is a little strange: whose clouds move more than Constable's? Nobody's, that's whose.

If I do find a victim...er, date, and do see The Fallen Idol Thursday, you'll be the first to hear about it.

Posted August 28, 2:46 AM

August 25, 2006

TT: (Sniffle)

I'm still sick. Arrgh.

Have a nice weekend. One of us ought to.

P.S. Check out the new Top Fives. (I may be sick, but I'm not dead.)

Posted August 25, 12:00 PM

TT: Yucked-up Brecht

I wrote about two plays in today's Wall Street Journal drama column. The first is Mother Courage and Her Children, directed by George C. Wolfe and starring Meryl Streep:

The New York stage has been infested by movie and TV stars this year, with wildly variable results: Ralph Fiennes was memorable, Julia Roberts and David Schwimmer memorably awful, while Cate Blanchett was a bit extreme but flamboyantly watchable. Now at bat is Meryl Streep, the star of the Public Theater's outdoor production of "Mother Courage and Her Children." Unlike Ms. Roberts, she knows her way around a theater, but her performance is a mess--though she's probably not at fault....

Bertolt Brecht's masterpiece is set during the Thirty Years' War, which was fought between 1618 and 1648. The Public, however, is performing it in a new "translation" (it's really an adaptation) by Tony Kushner, who has put a thick coat of comic varnish on the blunt ironies of the original German text in order to make them more palatable to modern viewers. While some of his renderings are nicely pointed--he translates "Necessity knows no law" as "Necessity trumps the commandments"--the overall effect is too slick, and it doesn't help that he's littered the script with such anachronistic Americanisms as "It's a go," "Point taken" and "Butt out."

I'm not opposed in principle to modernized versions of the classics, and Mr. Kushner's gloss on "Mother Courage" might have been more effective in a less showbizzy staging, but Mr. Wolfe has glitzed it up to an enervatingly spectacular degree. I'm not exaggerating--this big-budget production contains fire, rain, snow, an onstage Jeep and flying by Foy, the "Peter Pan" people. Presumably Mr. Wolfe is also responsible, at least in part, for Ms. Streep's bizarre decision to deliver her lines in the side-of-the-mouth manner of a take-my-wife-please comedian....

The second is the Berkshire Theatre Festival's revival of Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles:

Like most of Wasserstein's plays, "The Heidi Chronicles" is a soft-centered pseudosatire that pulls its punches, most of which are thrown at feminism, to which the play's female characters subscribe unreservedly (if not unquestioningly) in spite of the fact that the play's ostensible subject is the unhappiness it brings them. Instead of probing this apparent contradiction with the take-no-prisoners candor of the true satirist, Wasserstein settles for poking safe fun at such easy targets as consciousness-raising groups. As for the glib children of urban privilege with which "The Heidi Chronicles" is exclusively peopled, they all talk like escapees from the set of "Annie Hall" and appear never to have met anyone who disagreed with them about anything....

No free link. Go buy a paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to my review. (If you're already a subscriber, the review is here.)

Posted August 25, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Very roughly, the drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion; what is left is theater. Drama is immensely durable; after a thousand critical disputes, it is still there, undiminished, ready for the next wranglers. Theater is magical and evanescent; examine it closely and it turns into tricks of lighting, or the grace of a particular gesture, or the tone of a voice--and these are not its substance, but the rubbish that is left when magic has departed. Theater is the response, the echo, which drama awakens within us when we see it on the stage."

Robertson Davies, A Voice from the Attic

Posted August 25, 12:00 PM

August 24, 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 gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. 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 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)
- The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEKEND:
- Indian Blood (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Sept. 2)
- The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)
- Pig Farm (comedy, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)
- Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)

Posted August 24, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong."

Vita Sackville-West, Passenger to Teheran

Posted August 24, 12:00 PM

August 23, 2006

TT: Talking a bad game

A reader writes:

Apropos your post on Günter Grass, here is a question for you: are there any circumstances under which an artist's personal failings must require him to forfeit his art? Extreme example: what if Tristan and Isolde had been written by Hitler himself--should it ever be performed? And if not, where is the line to be drawn?

This is a provocative question, and one to which I've given much thought over the years, though I have yet to think it all the way through, perhaps because it can't be answered. To be sure, the Israelis have "answered" it in two specific instances--the music of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss is not publicly performed in that country--but I'm not aware of any other comparable examples.

If I may, I'll reframe my reader's question as follows: is there any act so absolutely heinous that the works of a great artist who commits it should be permanently banned from circulation? Asked in that way, the question admits of a wide and interesting range of possible answers, but what I find even more interesting is the fact that it's impossible to come up with a real-life case that fills the bill.

It's not that artists are an especially well-behaved class of people. (Two words: Stan Getz.) But their misbehavior tends as a rule to fall into two broad categories, which for the sake of brevity I'll refer to as statement-signing and wife-beating. Artists dearly love to shoot their mouths off about politics, perhaps as a way of compensating for the spectacularly single-minded selfishness with which so many of them habitually treat their loved ones, friends, colleagues, and creditors.

While neither type of behavior is edifying, it's highly unusual for a major artist to go further than that. To be sure, I wouldn't recommend marrying a great artist, much less loaning him money, but when it comes to the actual commission of capital crimes, such folk are woefully underrepresented. So far as I know, the only classical composer ever to have committed murder was Gesualdo, who killed his first wife and her lover. Though Richard Wagner was by all accounts a first-class bastard, he didn't send letter bombs to music critics, and his anti-Semitism, gross and despicable though it was, never led him to advocate the use of Zyklon B on European Jewry, or anything remotely approaching it.

As for their political crimes, I'm not inclined to be forgiving of anyone who plays pattycake with totalitarianism, but if there's been a truly great creative artist whose sins against humanity amounted to much more than first-degree talk, I'm unaware of it.

Mind you, I have no illusions about the ennobling power of art. I've spent too much time around artists not to know better than that. Daily megadoses of beauty won't make you a better person unless you were a good person to begin with. What keeps great artists out of trouble is that they're too busy making art to do much of anything but talk. It's the second- and third-raters who end up working for the Ministry of Truth, where they burn off their frustrations by rejecting the grant applications of their betters (or sending them to concentration camps).

Having said all this, let me return to the thought experiment originally proposed by my correspondent: I wouldn't have any objection to placing a permanent ban on performances of Tristan und Isolde if it were to be revealed tomorrow morning that Hitler, not Wagner, had composed it. I wouldn't support such a ban, but I wouldn't actively oppose it, either, any more than I oppose the informal Israeli ban on public performances of Wagner's music. (It's been broken once or twice in the past, but never without an outcry of public disapproval.)

A few years ago I discussed that ban on NPR's Performance Today. This is part of what I said:

There will probably always be heated arguments over whether Wagner's operas contain anti-Semitic symbolism--but there can be no arguing about the hateful mind of the genius who composed them. He made sure of that. He wanted us to know exactly what he thought, and to do what he said. And that's what the ban is really about. It's not about the music of Wagner--the notes on the page. It's about the man who wrote them--the man and his ideas.

My predecessor at Commentary, the late Samuel Lipman, once said something very interesting about Wagner and Israel: "In the state of Israel there still are people who care about Wagner; indeed, they care so much that they won't let his music be played. Because for the Israelis, Wagner the man, Wagner the anti-Semite, is still alive, they take him seriously." Sam wrote those words eighteen years ago, and they have stuck in my mind ever since.

Yes, Wagner was a great composer, one of the most important and influential figures in the history of Western music. You don't write people like that out of the history books--you can't. Like it or not, his music will always be played. But I don't think music is the most important thing in the world. Music doesn't inspire people to commit mass murder--it takes ideas to do that. And for that reason, I think it's fitting that in at least one part of the world, Wagner's music is rarely played in public because of the ideas of the man who wrote it. What's more, I think Wagner himself might have understood. After all, he took his own ideas seriously, and he of all people would surely have appreciated the fact that so do the Israelis.

It's not illegal to play Wagner in Israel: the Israeli Supreme Court has actually ruled on that point. Nor, obviously, is it illegal to listen to his music, or to buy records of it, or play them on the radio. Nor should it be. And when the last survivor of the Holocaust has finally passed on, a day will probably come when the Israel Philharmonic will at last feel free to play it. But that day is not yet here--and I, for one, am glad.

I still am.

Posted August 23, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance."

Françoise Sagan, A Certain Smile

Posted August 23, 12:00 PM

TT: A code id by dose

If you're trying to get in touch with me, forget it. I've been laid low with a summer cold and am temporarily dysfunctional.

See you tomorrow, maybe.

Posted August 23, 4:44 AM

August 22, 2006

TT: In a strange land

Art doesn't have to be true to life to be good, but when a work of art is true to your life, it strikes a special chord. On occasion music has this effect on me: I can think of any number of pieces that appear to embody my feelings about the world so precisely that I feel as though I might have written them. Much of Aaron Copland's music has that effect on me, as does the streetlights-at-dusk melancholy of Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, Charles Mingus' elegy for Lester Young.

My guess is that most people are more likely to respond in this way to works of art that make use of words, and in particular to movies, which at their best are capable of creating an impression of reality so total as to be overwhelming. For my part, though, I haven't seen many movies that seemed true in any significant way to my personal experience. Only three spring to mind, and two of them, not surprisingly, are about music. Steven Kloves' The Fabulous Baker Boys and Tom Hanks' That Thing You Do both remind me so strongly of episodes from my own life that I can't watch them without being plunged into autobiographical reverie.

The third is Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count on Me, and there the identification is even more complete, for I don't know of another film that captures so perfectly the look and feel of life in small-town America (except for Junebug, which comes very close). In Hollywood, ordinary middle-class life is a state to be escaped, not examined. Unlike their novel-writing counterparts, American filmmakers are almost never willing to set a serious drama in a believable-looking small town, or even a medium-sized city located anywhere other than on the East or West Coasts. To them, the vast expanse of terra incognita known in New York and Los Angeles as "flyover country" is little more than a breeding ground for cross-burners, serial murderers, and Republicans. You Can Count on Me is utterly different from such films. It's not that Lonergan idealizes the town in which his characters live: he is completely honest about the narrow limitations of their world. Yet he still gives them their due, sketching them with a novelistic richness of detail that defies the simplifying art of the pitchman.

Another film that penetrates deeply into the byways of flyover country is Robert Duvall's The Apostle. Religion in the movies has typically meant either Going My Way or Inherit the Wind, with next to nothing in between. How much more daring, then, for Duvall to have made a film about the culture of southern Pentecostalism that doesn't seek to expose anybody or anything, but opts instead to portray in a straightforward, uncondescending manner the transformation of charming Sonny Dewey, a hard-drinking womanizer from Texas who makes an easy living as the upwardly mobile pastor of the Temple of the Living God, into the painfully earnest Apostle E.F., who preaches every Sunday at the One Way Road to Heaven Holiness Temple of Bayou Boutte, Louisiana, and spends the rest of the week working as a grease monkey and short-order cook. To see the Apostle E.F. standing in the aisle of a sweltering clapboard church stripped of all ornament but a cheap chromo of Jesus, hoarsely stuttering spiritual platitudes and waving his Living Bible like a blunt instrument, is to behold a spectacle at once absurd (if tragically so) and thrilling.

I thought of The Apostle and You Can Count on Me as I watched the Berkshire Theatre Festival's revival of Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles, a play that is greatly admired for the similar precision with which it portrays the lives of a group of bright young men and women of upper-middle-class privilege. What struck me most forcibly about its characters was the near-complete extent to which they were insulated from anyone unlike themselves. Needless to say, I live in their world, but I was born and raised in a different one, and I never need reminding that most Americans neither talk nor think like the members of the urban verbal class with whom The Heidi Chronicles is populated.

Of course it's perfectly possible to make serious and memorable art out of the lives of such folk. (Whether or not Wasserstein succeeded in doing so is another matter, one that I'll be taking up on Friday in my Wall Street Journal drama column.) Besides, it's a truism that authors write best when they write about what they know, and given the transformation of America's elite universities into instruments of meritocratic change, it's increasingly less likely that our college-educated artists will know much about anybody else. Back in the days of John P. Marquand and Louis Auchincloss, these institutions served as finishing schools for the northeastern upper class. Now they act as search engines that locate and recruit young men and women of promise from all across America, then indoctrinate them with the cultural assumptions of the New Class. Instead of going back where they came from, there to leaven the cultural loaf and in turn to be influenced by local opinions and customs, the successful products of the meritocratic machine are more likely to migrate to New Class-dominated cities and suburbs, where seldom is heard a contradictory word.

This being the case, I expect it's a fairly safe bet that the plays and films of the coming decade will look less like You Can Count on Me or The Apostles than The Heidi Chronicles. Nor is that the worst thing in the world: I like witty repartee as much as the next critic. Yet I can't shake the lingering feeling that such plays are written in a foreign language that I speak fluently but in which I do not dream. And I still cling to the hope that I'll someday get to review a play with which I identify as closely as I do with, say, Tom T. Hall's Homecoming, a country song about a traveling musician who pays a brief visit to his admiring but uncomprehending small-town father:

I guess I should have written, Dad,
To let you know that I was comin' home.
I've been gone so many years
I didn't realize you had a phone.

I saw your cattle comin' in,
Boy, they're looking mighty fat and slick.
I saw Fred at the service station,
Told me that his wife was awful sick.

No, we don't ever call 'em beer joints,
Nightclubs are the places where I work.
You meet a lot of people there,
But no, there ain't no chance of gettin' hurt.

Posted August 22, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"I was a conformist: it never occurred to me that because I suffered there was something wrong with the system, or with the human heart."

L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

Posted August 22, 12:00 PM

August 21, 2006

TT: Ghost world

I can't tell you how the average drama critic (if such a peculiar creature exists) gets his start in life, but I have a feeling that my own resume is a bit on the unorthodox side. I started out as a classical-music critic, then began covering the other arts as well. I occasionally wrote about plays in Second City, the arts column I used to write for the Washington Post, but I didn't put in any time as a working drama critic until three years ago, when The Wall Street Journal tapped me to launch its theater column.

I did do quite a bit of theater in high school and college, but even then I wasn't the sort of kid who bought original-cast albums with his lunch money. Though I've always loved show tunes, I first got to know them through the recorded performances of the great jazz and pop singers. Most of the classic Broadway musicals struck me as hopelessly square, and I didn't change my mind until I moved to New York and saw my first Stephen Sondheim show, Into the Woods. That opened my eyes to the expressive potential of the form, and before long I'd come to love it passionately, if never uncritically.

No doubt it helped that I was exposed early on to two of the best-made musicals of the postwar era. The Smalltown Little Theatre produced The Fantasticks and Fiddler on the Roof when I was in high school, and I played in the pit for both shows, doubling as the onstage violinist in Fiddler on the Roof (I wore a fake beard). I had the time of my life, and in retrospect I find it puzzling that the experience didn't cause me to become more interested in musical comedy. On the other hand, those were the days when I was deep into rock and roll, and I suppose it would have been hard for a geeky egghead who longed to be popular to turn his back on the prevailing cultural winds of the early Seventies.

All of which brings us to Saturday night, when I went to the new Snapple Theater Center at Fiftieth and Broadway to see a press preview of the new revival of The Fantasticks. As anyone who knows anything about theater can tell you, the original production of The Fantasticks opened in 1960 at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, a 153-seat off-off-Broadway theater down in Greenwich Village, where it ran until 2002, racking up 17,162 performances before it finally posted its closing notice. (The building has since been sold and is about to be converted into a luxury apartment house.)

As I walked into the theater, I realized that it had been thirty-four years to the day since I'd last seen a performance of The Fantasticks. I always meant to catch it at the Sullivan Street Playhouse but never got around to doing so, just as I've never been to Radio City Music Hall or the Central Park Zoo. Like most New Yorkers, I figured it would run forever, and so took its existence for granted until it was too late.

When the show was over, I remembered that I'd written about the Smalltown Little Theatre production of The Fantasticks in City Limits, the memoir I published in 1991. I looked it up as soon as I got home:

The only thing wrong with The Fantasticks was that it contained no role suitable for a clumsy teenage boy with a newly changed voice. Having just talked my parents into buying me a bass guitar, I chose instead to offer my services as bassist for the three-piece "pit orchestra." Gordon Beaver, director of the Smalltown High School Concert Choir and my beloved piano teacher, and Richard Powell, director of the high school orchestra and my equally beloved violin teacher, had always accompanied Little Theater musicals, but both men were too busy that year. No other bass players volunteered, so I got the job....

Adolescence had me firmly in its moony grip by this time, and I spent a lot of time imagining what it would be like to be in love with "the kind of girl designed to be kissed upon the eyes," that being the way in which Luisa, the fey heroine of The Fantasticks, describes herself. No such girl turned up, but The Fantasticks gave me something almost as good: a chance to make music with a small group of my peers. "Making music" seems the wrong way to put it, for a musician doesn't make anything, and when he stops playing, nothing is left behind. But he is a craftsman all the same, for the object he "makes," though it vanishes in the air, lingers in the memory, and he lavishes on it the same intensity and skill and respect for the tools of his trade that a carpenter lavishes on a mahogany cupboard. I had spent the better part of my life doing my best to make little clay mugs and hit line drives, and my best had never been good enough. Now I had found a craft of my own, and I quickly grew to love it with a fierce passion. I had discovered the incomparable joy of doing something really well.

The Fantasticks was the first play to be performed on the tiny stage of the Smalltown Activity Center, which started life as the First Baptist Church of Smalltown, built in 1915 and deconsecrated in 1971. I worshipped there as a child, worked on two shows there as a teenager, and eventually saw it turned into a juvenile courthouse. The building was razed not long ago, and now it's a vacant, grass-covered lot.

What remains of the fierce passion awakened during the many nights I spent rehearsing there? Nothing but memories. A thief broke into my station wagon in Kansas City a quarter-century ago and stole my battered bass guitar, and though I bought a new one, I stopped playing soon afterward. Richard Powell died last year, and Gordon Beaver followed suit six months later. It's been years since I last saw any of the people with whom I worked in The Fantasticks. (Where are you now, Bonnie Harris?) I still have a faded copy of the printed program, though, into which I tucked a clipping of a newspaper story about the production that ran in the Smalltown Daily Standard on August 17, 1972. It was accompanied by a black-and-white photograph of our little three-piece orchestra. I'm sitting on a high stool picking a Fender bass, wearing a flowered shirt and looking very, very serious.

And what of The Fantasticks? It, too, is full of ghosts. Jerry Orbach, who sang "Try to Remember" in 1960, died in 2004. The obituary writers all led with Law & Order, though most of them made a point of mentioning The Fantasticks as well. Rita Gardner, the first in the long, long string of girls designed to be kissed upon the eyes, is still working on Broadway, playing a foul-mouthed grandmother in The Wedding Singer. Tom Jones, who wrote the book and lyrics of The Fantasticks and played a non-singing role in the original production, directed the performance I saw last Saturday, casting himself as Henry, the same part he played at the Sullivan Street Playhouse on opening night.

As for me, I'm the gray-headed drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and a resident of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, none of which I anticipated when I was sixteen. Back then I planned to marry my high-school sweetheart and spend the rest of my life teaching English in Smalltown, but a funny thing happened on the way to the future, and I ended up sitting on the aisle of a New York theater, watching The Fantasticks with a friend who had yet to be born the last time I saw it.

Small wonder that I felt my throat tighten as I listened to the show's very first words:

Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow.
Try to remember, and if you remember,
Then follow.

I didn't have to try very hard.

Posted August 21, 12:00 PM

TT: Dirty laundry revisited

My "Sightings" column in Saturday's Wall Street Journal took as its point of departure the ignominious confession of Günter Grass:

Günter Grass became famous--and won a Nobel Prize--by giving free advice to his countrymen. Now it turns out that he preferred not to take his own medicine. After spending half a lifetime insisting that the German people had an absolute moral obligation to own up to Hitler's atrocities, the 78-year-old novelist is publishing a memoir in which he admits that he lied about his wartime service. The author of the much-admired 1959 novel "The Tin Drum," a symbolic portrayal of life in Nazi Germany, Grass now acknowledges that he was a member of the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of the Nazi paramilitary force that carried out the Holocaust. "It weighed on me," he says....

To be sure, few major artists have been known for their goodness, but nowadays we seem quicker than ever to render summary judgment on their failings. Should we be more careful about throwing stones? The next time you're tempted to do so, consider these five caveats:

- Be historically aware. Judging the sins of the past by the standards of the present can be a shortcut to self-righteousness. Make sure you have all the facts--and that you understand their historical context--before passing sentence....

- Don't lose your sense of proportion. Yes, Mark Twain used the word "nigger" in "Huckleberry Finn." So what? It's still the great American novel--as well as a powerful indictment of racism. To criticize it because it contains a once-common word now considered offensive is a prime example of political correctness run amok.

- Remember the Golden Rule. As Somerset Maugham said, "I do not believe that there is any man, who if the whole truth were known of him, would not seem a monster of depravity." When you read about the alleged misconduct of an artist, ask yourself how you'd look if your private life and thoughts were put on public display.

- The work is what matters most... Pablo Picasso treated women like dirt--but does that make "Three Musicians" a bad painting? Richard Wagner hated Jews--but does that make "Tristan und Isolde" a bad opera?

- ...but artists are human beings, too. George Bernard Shaw was a loyal supporter of Soviet Communism who looked the other way when Stalin started piling up corpses. That doesn't justify a ban on performances of "Pygmalion," but it does mean--and should mean--that there will always be a blood-red asterisk next to Shaw's name in the literary record book....

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

Posted August 21, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

Posted August 21, 12:00 PM

August 18, 2006

TT: Conduct unbecoming

Today's Wall Street Journal drama column contains good news (about the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey) and bad news (about Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me). In reverse order:

Make way for the first train wreck of the season. "Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me" is that most embarrassing of disasters, a toothless spoof of a tired subject. It isn't exactly stop-press news that we live in a celebrity-obsessed culture, and though I suppose the phenomenon is still absurd enough to be milked for fresh laughs, Mr. Short and his collaborators have none to offer. Instead, they spend a squirm-making, intermission-free hour and a half shooting dead fish in a tiny barrel.

"Fame Becomes Me" is a parody of such confessional shows as "Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life" and "Elaine Stritch at Liberty" ("Another curtain goes up/On a one-man show/Another chance for an ego/To say hello") in which Mr. Short purports to tell his own tale, hotting up the humdrum facts with a gaudy collection of spurious crises. No, he didn't toot cocaine and humiliate himself on network TV in the middle of the Oscars, then seek absolution at the Betty Ford Clinic. His target is our prurient interest in the famous folk who do such things, but the satirical lance he wields is so blunt that it never draws blood....

Instead of blowing your hard-earned entertainment dollar on "Fame Becomes Me," why not see something really good? If you live in New York, you won't have to go very far to catch the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey's exuberant production of "The Rivals," which is comparable in quality to the splendid revival of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's classic 1775 comedy that Lincoln Center Theater put on two seasons ago....

No link. Buy a paper, or go here and get smart.

Posted August 18, 12:00 PM

TT: Dirty laundry (a user's guide)

In my next "Sightings" column, to be published in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I consider the case of Günter Grass, the Nobel-winning novelist who recently admitted to (A) having been a member of the Waffen-SS during World War II and (B) lying about it for six decades. Grass' belated admission, coming as it does in the immediate wake of the death of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, has inspired me to draw up a list of five principles worth keeping in mind when sitting in retrospective judgment on major artists who get caught with their moral pants down.

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

Posted August 18, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"When I was a child, art seemed like a tunnel to me. At the end of that tunnel I could see light where the world opened up, waiting."

Jerome Robbins, interview with Robert Kotlowitz (Show, December 1964)

Posted August 18, 12:00 PM

August 17, 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 gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. 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)
- The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)
- The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
- Indian Blood (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Sept. 2)
- Pig Farm (comedy, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)
- Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)

Posted August 17, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"I used to think that being mad might be rather fun. Inconvenient, of course, and awful, but quite exciting, with visions and things, and thinking the Russians were after you, and doing marvelous paintings. But it isn't at all really, not my sort anyway. Nothing ever happens. And the other people are such bores. Those first...weeks I suppose they were, it was like being on holiday in a lousy hotel with it raining all the time and you can't speak the language and let's say you've lost your glasses and can't read."

Kingsley Amis, The Anti-Death League

Posted August 17, 12:00 PM

August 16, 2006

TT: Almanac

"‘This is music, you fool,' said Hunter in his ordinary tone. ‘Worthless by definition. I remember sitting down to listen to a whole piece of it once. Somebody's symphony in four movements, it was. I couldn't make out what it was supposed to do for me. It seemed to be inviting me to run about, lie down and go to sleep, rush about, and then run about again. But I didn't want to do any of that.'

"‘You were using it for the wrong purpose,' said Dr. Best. ‘Except for martial airs and such, and in a rather different way music for dancing, the art is not concerned with action. It moves us to contemplation, which assists us in resolving our various conflicts. Through harmony we progress toward harmony.'

"‘Well, I didn't, the time I was telling you about. I progressed in the opposite direction, thank you. That's another thing I've got against it. It introduced me to conflicts I didn't even know I had.'"

Kingsley Amis, The Anti-Death League

Posted August 16, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Elsewhere

Around and about the internets (a list prone to updates throughout the day):

- Peter Suderman scratches his head at some critics' favorable comparison of World Trade Center to United 93:

[Slate Senior Editor Bryan] Curtis sums up his feelings about WTC by saying that, in comparison to United 93, Stone's movie is simply more "bearable," and that's why he could recommend WTC but not United 93.

This strikes me as exactly wrong. That Stone's movie is bearable is what is most problematic and most disturbing about it. The day that his movie depicts was unbearable, terrible, gut-wrenching--it's a day that should never be made "bearable" by the tidy formulas of Hollywood. Greengrass' movie, indeed, was unbearable, a horror to watch. I'm glad I saw it, but I never want to watch it again. But it was the dread that Greengrass conjured, the impossible, sickening futility of 9/11 that made the movie so effective, so powerful, and so utterly right. Stone's movie, in its lame adherence to convention, trivializes a day that was not and never will be even remotely conventional. There are many words one might use to describe 9/11 or representations of it, but bearable should never be among them.

- Tyler Green notes that Rockefeller Center is set to get its own Anish Kapoor sculpture. It's pretty, but it's no bean.

- Lizzie Skurnick, aka the Old Hag, talks poetry writing and reading in an interview at Blue Poppy:

I periodically re-memorize "Leda and the Swan", "The More Loving One," and Sir Thomas Wyatt's "They Flee from Me...", because, in my old age, the words do flee from me. Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper" I like to recite, especially the first stanza. ("My mother died when I was very young/and my father sold me while yet my tongue" is a great rhyme.) My primary regret is that I was not an English boy born in 1906, forced to memorize reams and reams of poetry while declining Latin verbs. If there is a semi-sadistic teacher with one last Mr. Chips-y semester in him/her, I can pay.

I had a somewhat sadistic fifth-grade public school teacher, actually, who made us memorize everything from "The Walrus and the Carpenter" to the Declaration of Independence to "The Highwayman." He made a little money on the side by selling popsicles after school, but only to the kids who had earned the right to buy one by successfully reciting that day's passage from memory--weird guy, great experience. A few decades later, I'm still memorizing poetry, and I'll memorize a good poem for nothing. (My all-time favorite hockey quote was uttered by the late great Red Wing Sid Abel, who once said "We play hockey for money, but we'll play the Toronto Maple Leafs for nothing.")

- Girish started it:

There are movies we encounter at certain points in our appreciation for the medium that become, almost by accident, little breakthroughs in our viewing life. They may not be great masterpieces--though they well might--but the important thing is that we have the fortune of meeting up with them at just the right juncture in our development. I think of them as "signpost films": they take a territory that was previously foggy or unmapped to us and they suddenly make us see and learn something revelatory about this art-form that we love. These encounters make us exclaim, "So, that's what this movie's doing!" And it's a lesson we take with us, carry over and apply, to hundreds of other films we will see in the future.

And now they're talking about signpost movies at 2 Blowhards too, and other sites as yet undiscovered by me, I'm sure. This question will bear some thought before I can officially submit my own, but a couple of titles spring to mind right away: Jacques Rivette's Céline et Julie vont en bateau, which made the funkiest use I've ever seen made of Henry James and was the most fun I'd ever had at a French new wave film, admire others though I might; and Three Kings. But I'm mightily tempted to cheat here and just cite the movies of 1999 en masse. That was a signpost year.

(We don't have a comments box but, as always, feel free to email with your own selections.)

Posted August 16, 2:03 AM

August 15, 2006

TT: Almanac

Maybe someday we can live on the moon
Because we can doesn't mean we have to
Rockets may come, astronauts go
Nothing so precious as what we don't know

Erin McKeown, "Life on the Moon"

Posted August 15, 12:00 PM

August 14, 2006

TT: Just passing through

In case you're curious, I wrote a good-sized chunk of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong last week, and I plan to do the same thing this week. I also have two Wall Street Journal deadlines to hit and five plays to see, one in Connecticut, one in Massachusetts, and three in New York.

Get the idea? See you later. Over to you, OGIC.

Posted August 14, 12:01 PM

TT: Forgotten but not gone

I posted earlier this year about the plight of Richard M. Sudhalter, a distinguished jazz musician and scholar whose health has betrayed him:

Dick (he's a friend) suffered a stroke three years ago. Though he subsequently recovered from many of its effects, he has now fallen victim to a rare, equally debilitating illness of the nervous system called multiple system atrophy. It's hitting him hard, and his medical bills are piling up.

Alas, good works don't always reap financial rewards, and Dick has spent the whole of his long, productive life laboring in important but unrenumerative cultural vineyards. He is the author of such essential works of jazz and popular-music scholarship as Lost Chords and Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael. In addition, he co-wrote Bix: Man and Legend, one of the first truly scholarly jazz biographies, and has played on any number of fine recordings, including two of my favorite jazz albums, The Classic Jazz Quartet: The Complete Recordings and his own Melodies Heard, Melodies Sweet. Needless to say, Dick didn't make a whole lot of money out of any of these undertakings, but he thought they needed doing, so he did them anyway.

The terrible irony of Dick's condition is that while he can no longer talk intelligibly, he can still read--and write--as well as ever.

What can you do to help?

- If you're a friend who's fallen out of touch with Dick, don't call--send him an e-mail. He'd love to hear from you.

- If you're an editor, Dick needs work. Don't be scared off by the fact that he's unable to talk. Check in with him via e-mail and give him an assignment. You won't be sorry.

- If you've got a few bucks to spare--or more than a few--send him a check. Dick is scheduled to go to the Mayo Clinic in two weeks, and he needs immediate assistance in order to pay for the trip (among many other urgent things).

- If you want to hear what promises to be one of the most exciting jazz concerts of the year, mark your calendar for Sunday, September 10, when Dan Levinson and Randy Sandke will be putting on an all-star benefit concert at St. Peter's Lutheran Church in New York. The bill includes (among others) Harry Allen, Dan Barrett, Eddie Bert, Bill Crow, Jim Ferguson, Dave Frishberg, Wycliffe Gordon, Marty Grosz, Becky Kilgore, Bill Kirchner, Steve Kuhn, Dan Levinson, Marian McPartland, Joe Muranyi, David Ostwald, Nicki Parrott, Bucky Pizzarelli, Scott Robinson, Randy Sandke, Daryl Sherman, and the Loren Schoenberg Big Band. That's what I call a big bunch of very heavy hitters.

The address is 619 Lexington Avenue at 54th Street and the music starts at seven o'clock sharp. Admission is $40, plus whatever else you care to chip in.

To order a ticket to Dick's benefit concert--or if you simply want to contribute to the cause of keeping him alive--send a check made payable to RICHARD SUDHALTER BENEFIT CONCERT to the following address:

Dorothy Kellogg
P.O. Box 757
Southold, NY 11971

You can also order tickets online with a credit card by visiting PayPal and using this account:

danlevinson@aol.com

As I said in June, I don't make a habit of posting appeals like this, but Dick's case is special. Even if you aren't familiar with his indispensable work, take my word for it--he deserves your help.

Pass the word.

Posted August 14, 12:00 PM

TT: Ink not included

Having written a biography of H.L. Mencken, who is, like Abraham Lincoln and Dorothy Parker, one of those people who gets credited with having said a great many things he didn't actually say, I've long been suspicious of the provenance of a quote that is almost always attributed to A.J. Liebling, usually in this form: "Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one." (Not surprisingly, I've also seen it credited to Mencken.) It's a great line, and it's the sort of thing Liebling would have said if he'd thought of it--but did he?

I thought of asking the New Yorker-obsessed proprietor of Emdashes if she could shed some light on the matter, but then it hit me that as a happy owner of The Complete New Yorker, I might be able to use that unwieldy but nonetheless invaluable tool in order to pin down the quote. So I popped in a CD-ROM and started clicking away, and within minutes I had the facts in hand.

Sure enough, Liebling really did say it, or something very much like it: "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." The remark was a parenthetical throwaway tucked into a "Wayward Press" column called "Do You Belong in Journalism?" published on May 14, 1960, and his subject, it turns out, was the rise of the one-newspaper town.

Here's part of what he wrote:

A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and evening newspaper under the same ownership, is like a man with only one eye, and often the eye is glass....

What you have in a one-paper town is a privately owned public utility that is Constitutionally exempt from public regulation, which would be a violation of freedom of the press. As to the freedom of the individual journalist in such a town, it corresponds exactly with what the publisher will allow him. He can't go over to the opposition, because there isn't any. If he leaves, he ends his usefulness to the town, and probably to the state and region in which it is situated, because he takes with him the story that caused his difference with the management, and in a distant place it will have no value. Under the conditions, there is no point in being quixotic....

In any American city that I know of, to pick up a paper published elsewhere means that you have to go to an out-of-town newsstand, unless you are in a small city that is directly within the circulation zone of a larger one. Even in New York, the out-of-town newsstands are few and hard to find....The news magazines--without going into their quality, which would explode me--carry little news, in the course of a year, of any one particular state or city, and what they do carry is usually furnished by a stringer who works on the local paper. News broadcasts offer even less, because often the newspaper owns the radio station, and because television and radio have been pulling steadily out of the news field and regressing toward the animated penny dreadful.

Plus ça change! God only knows what Liebling would have thought of today's newsmagazines and network newscasts, but the remainder of his lament has been superannuated virtually beyond recognition by the rise of the Web, which not only brings every newspaper in the United States (including the one in Smalltown, U.S.A.) within the reach of anyone with a computer, but renders moot the most frequently quoted sentence he ever wrote, though it continues to this day to be cited constantly and irrelevantly by backward-looking press critics.

As I wrote in Commentary last year in an essay about culture in the age of blogging, "The day of the information middleman is not yet over, but it is drawing to a close." With today's Web-based delivery systems, consumers can get their information wholesale, as well as making and selling it themselves. They need not buy a newspaper or watch the evening news to know what is happening in the world. They need not write for the mainstream media to make their own views known to the public at large. They need not go to a record store to purchase CDs by their favorite artists. They can do it all themselves--not tomorrow, but now.

Liebling's press criticism is grossly overrated--he was an ideologue who liked to pretend otherwise--but at least he made an effort to attend to the changing realities of the world around him. He certainly wouldn't have made the mistake of publishing anything as embarrassingly supererogatory as "Amateur Hour," the recent New Yorker essay about Web-based journalism in which poor Nicholas Lemann spent a couple of thousand words belaboring the obvious, mere days before he applied an axe to the budget for CJR Daily, the Columbia Journalism Review's online edition, simultaneously (1) demonstrating that he's determined to miss the new-media boat and (2) causing the two top editors of CJR Daily to quit in protest. One of Lemann's ex-employees, Steve Lovelady, laid it on the line in an interview with the New York Times: "Nick has decided to spend the money on a direct-mail campaign for the magazine, in hopes of saving subscription revenue. To me, that sounds like something out of the 19th century. He's taking the one fresh, smart thing he has and gutting it."

As for A.J. Liebling, what a difference a half-century makes! Nowadays anyone can own his own press, including a middle-aged old-media fart like me. Needless to say, that doesn't guarantee that anyone else will read what you "print" on it, much less that you'll make money doing so, but the fact remains that you're free to use it as you please, and if you have something interesting to say, you might just be surprised how many people will pay attention.

I now spend more time reading blogs than magazines. Maybe it's just me--but I doubt it.

P.S. For the latest last word on the subject of whether most middle-aged old-media farts will ever figure out what blogging is all about, go here and chuckle wryly.

Posted August 14, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries."

Rex Stout, Murder by the Book

Posted August 14, 12:00 PM

August 11, 2006

TT: WASP nest

I review two shows in today's Wall Street Journal drama column, one in New York, one out of town, both favorably.

A.R. Gurney's new play, Indian Blood, just opened off Broadway at Primary Stages:

Like most of Mr. Gurney's plays, "Indian Blood" is peopled with white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who are variously conscious of their loss of cultural ascendancy. Here as in "Ancestral Voices," the 1999 play to which it is a companion piece, the WASPs in question are actual members of the Gurney family, and the story is a wry semi-autobiographical vignette in which Eddie (Charles Socarides), the youthful narrator, draws a dirty picture, passes it around to his classmates, and promptly runs afoul of the Law of Unintended Consequences when a priggish relation (Jeremy Blackman) threatens to show it to his genteel grandmother (Pamela Payton-Wright).

Unlike "Ancestral Voices," which began as a book and evolved into a staged reading, "Indian Blood" is a full-fledged play performed, like "Our Town," without a set or props, a self-evident fact that the narrator (Charles Socarides) calls to our attention so often that it becomes annoying (once would have been more than enough). Save for this sole lapse of taste, it's a sweet little tale with overtones of rue that recall the novels of John P. Marquand....

No less pleasing was my visit to the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival:

When the thermometer closes in on the century mark, wise New Yorkers head north. I recommend a day trip to the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival to see Terrence O'Brien's joyously dotty outdoor production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," staged in the style of "3rd Rock From the Sun," complete with space invaders and a flying saucer. Mr. O'Brien, the festival's founder and artistic director, isn't overly concerned with thematic consistency, and his "Midsummer Night's Dream" also contains such interpolations as a dance routine choreographed by Lisa Reinhart in which Titania (Nance Williamson) leads the cast in a frenzied mambo, lip-syncing to the music of Yma Súmac, the mad diva of Peru.

Don't let any of this scare you off: It's all funny, and Mr. O'Brien's cast hurls itself into the maelstrom with happy abandon....

No link. Act accordingly.

Posted August 11, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"A kind of horror came over the master of Georgetown then, a sudden chilling intimation of the underlying ruthlessness of the native character. Ireland had all the cosy warmth of the reptile house in a zoo, he thought: you were lapped in blarney and butter until the moment your means of livelihood were seized or your father was shot."

Honor Tracy, The First Day of Friday

Posted August 11, 12:00 PM

August 10, 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 gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. 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)
- The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)
- The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
- Pig Farm (comedy, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)
- Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)

CLOSING SUNDAY:
- Faith Healer (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

Posted August 10, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"'I am only to be a reporter,' Henry assured him. 'I shall simply write what I see.'

"'Then I don't suppose they will print it,' the Rector said shrewdly."

Honor Tracy, A Number of Things

Posted August 10, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Updates

Erin O' Connor has further thoughts on Gilbert White:

There is a special relationship between the words here--minimal, sharp, observant but not effusive, descriptive but not lingering or self-conscious--and the experience they describe, which is not only essentially non-verbal, but elementally impersonal. The pleasure evoked by these descriptions is not a linguistic pleasure, or even a particularly thoughtful one, though it is a knowledgeable and aware one. You might call it a modest pleasure, or at least one that is not in the least ego-centric. There is no self in White's entries, though there is an outlook; he reduces himself to a pair of eyes and impartially records what they see.

And Delicious Pundit throws in another Larkin birthday selection, "Essential Beauty."

Posted August 10, 10:50 AM

August 9, 2006

TT: Almanac

"He had previously had no idea of the difficulties and frustrations of a correspondent's life. All one did, he had believed, was to collect the facts from people anxious and willing to give them accurately and then, after due reflection, to write the piece. Now he had to learn about the different kinds of lying, that of the official, that of the press relations officer, the lies of men with grievances or axes to grind or something to conceal, or who simply preferred lying to the truth."

Honor Tracy, A Number of Things

Posted August 09, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Larkin's birthday

Frank Wilson reminds us all that today is Philip Larkin's birthday. He commemmorates it by linking to "Church Going." I'll link to the uncharacteristically happy "Coming" (here with a comment from the poet), where failure of understanding is a condition of the happiness on offer--but in Larkin we take whatever happiness we can get.

Posted August 09, 2:12 AM

OGIC: Selborne, August 1771

When the world is too much with me, I reach for Gilbert White. The eighteenth-century naturalist made 10,000 daily records of the flora and fauna, weather and harvests of his Hampshire village, Selborne. These are his notes from August 1771.

Aug. 5. Young partridgers, strong flyers. Soft showers. Swifts. Pease are hacking.
Aug. 6. Nuthatch chirps; is very loquacious at this time of the year. Large bat appears, vespertilio altivolans.
Aug. 7. Rye-harvest begins. Procured the above-mentioned specimen of the bat, a male.
Aug. 8. Rain in the night, with wind. Swifts. Sultry & moist: Cucumbers bear abundantly. Showers about. Procured a second large bat, a male.
Aug. 10. Flying ants, male & female.
Aug. 11. Heavy clouds round the horizon. Lambs play & frolick.
Aug. 16. Rain, driving rain, dry. Four swifts still.
Aug. 18. No dew, rain, rain, rain. Swans flounce & dive. Chilly & dark.
Aug. 19. Swifts abound. Swallows & martins bring out their second broods which are perchers. Thunder: wind.
Aug. 22. Bank-martins [sand-martins] bring out their second brood. Swifts. No swifts seen after this day.
Aug. 23. Young swallows & martins come out every day. Still weather. Wheat-harvest becomes pretty general.
Aug. 25. Wheat not ripe at Faringdon. Winter weather. Oats & barley ripe before wheat.
Aug. 26. Nuthatch chirps much. No swifts since 22nd.
Aug. 28. Dark, grey, & soft. People bind their wheat.
Aug. 29. Fog, sun, brisk wind. Sweet day. Wheat begins to be housed.
Aug. 30. Young Stoparolas abound. Swallows congregate in vast flocks. Wheat housed.

I really do bliss out reading these journals. The above, for me, is a story, a poem, and a picture all at once, minimally wordy but maximally expressive, piquing every sense.

Posted August 09, 1:46 AM

August 8, 2006

TT: Almanac

"Dame Polly required but two things from the novelist's art, a rattling good yarn or a jolly good laugh. She declined to read books by girls of fifteen, proletarians or aliens, subtle evocations of childhood were thrown at cats in her garden, exquisitely sensitive portrayals of lunacy served as fuel for the boiler and a whole literature of protest by crazy mixed-up kids of forty-two lay cemented beneath the Chinese pagoda on the bank of her stream."

Honor Tracy, A Number of Things

Posted August 08, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Iliadish

The Little Professor is spluttering incoherently, and with good reason! I can't believe they said "pesky."

Posted August 08, 11:12 AM

OGIC: Blue-pencil blues

Grammar sticklers, be vindicated. (Thanks to Coudal for the tip.)

Posted August 08, 11:01 AM

OGIC: Writers in amber

In between novels in A Dance to the Music of Time, I'm reading around in Anthony Powell's captivating Memoirs. As in the fiction, the portraits here are sharp and indelible, and several are of notable writers. For instance, F. Scott Fitzgerald at the MGM commissary in 1937:

He was smallish, neat, solidly built, wearing a light grey suit, light-coloured tie, all his tones essentially light. Photographs--seen for the most part years later--do not do justice to him. Possibly he was one of those persons who at once become self-conscious when photographed. Even snapshots tend to give him an air of swagger, a kind of cockiness, which, anyway at that moment, he did not at all possess. On the contrary, one was at once aware of an odd sort of unassuming dignity. There was no hint at all of the cantankerous temper that undoubtedly lurked beneath the surface. His air could be thought a trifle sad, not, as sometimes described at this period, in the least brokedown.

...Fitzgerald took a pen from his pocket, and a scrap of paper. On the paper he drew a rough map of North America. Then he added three arrows pointing to the continent. The arrows showed the directions from which culture had flowed into the United States. I am ashamed to say I cannot now remember precisely which these channels were: possibly the New England seabaord; the South (the Old Dominion); up through Latin America; yet I seem to retain some impression of an arrow lancing in from the Pacific. The point of mentioning this diagram is, however, the manner in which a characteristic side of Fitzgerald was revealed. He loved instructing. There was a schoolmasterly streak, a sudden enthusiasm, simplicity of exposition, qualities that might have offered a brilliant career as a teacher or lecturer at school or university.

Not only that, but the day Powell lunched with him, Fitzgerald began his scandalous affair with Sheilah Graham. Next is Ford Madox Ford:

Another Duckworth author, though only intermittently, was Ford Madox Ford. As the work of an old acquaintance, Gerald Duckworth was prepared to publish Ford's books from time to time, but they were not popular with Balston [a Duckworth director], who did not regard their small sales as redeemed by the author's undoubted interest in literary experiment. Ford's novels usually deal with a similar social level to those of Galsworthy, though Ford is far more aware of the paradoxes of human nature, the necessity, at that moment, of exploring new forms of writing. An immense self-pity--in general an almost essential adjunct of the bestseller--infected Ford adversely as a serious novelist, while at the same time for some reason never boosting his sales. His misunderstandings and sentimentalities on the subject of English life (half-German himself, he very nearly opted for German nationality just before 1914) make him always in some degree a foreigner, marvelling at an England that never was.

And, at length, George Orwell:

Orwell was in his way quite ambitious, I think, and had a decided taste for power; but his ambition did not run along conventional lines, and he liked his power to be of the éminence grise variety.That preference was no doubt partly owed to a sense of being in some manner cut off from the rest of the world; not allowed, as it were by an irresistible exterior influence, to enjoy more than very occasionally such few amenities as human existence provides. This did not prevent his strong will and natural shrewdness from making him an effective negotiator. Indeed, his genuine unworldliness--in the popular sense--was used by him with considerable effect when handling those who were rich or in authority. He would somehow unload on them the whole burden of his own guilt, until they groaned beneath its weight. He was not at all afraid of making himself disagreeable to persons whom he found, in their dealings with himself, disagreeable. "If editors, or people of that sort, tell you to alter things, or put you to a lot of trouble," he used to say, "always put them to trouble in return. It discourages them from making themselves awkward in the future."

It is interesting to speculate how Orwell's life would have developed had he survived as a very successful writer. The retirement to Jura, even at the preliminary warning signs of financial improvement, was probably symptomatic. Orwell, I suspect, could thrive only in comparative adversity. All the same, one can never foresee the effect of utterly changed circumstances. Prosperity might have produced unguessable alterations in himself and his work. It would inevitably have invested him with more complex forms of living; complications which, in accordance with his system, would have to be rationalized to himself, and weighed in the balance.

Orwell's gift was curiously poised, as suggested earlier, between politics and literature. The former both attracted and repelled him; the latter, close to his heart, was at the same time tainted with the odor of escape. He once said that he could not write a line without a specific purpose. On the other hand, so far as day to day politics were concerned, he could never have become integrated into any normal party machine....

He was easily bored. If a subject came up in conversation that did not appeal to him, he would make no effort to take it in; falling into a dejected silence, or jerking aside his head like a horse jibbing at a proffered apple. On the other hand, when Orwell's imagination was caught, especially by some idea, he would discuss that exhaustively. He was one of the most enjoyable people to talk with about books, full of parallels and quotations, the last usually far from verbally accurate....

The Orwell myth, now substantially launched in a shape scarcely amenable to modification, presents on the whole a tortured saint by El Greco (for whom Orwell would certainly have made an admirable model), a figure from whom all human qualities have been removed. Periodically fierce arguments rage as to precisely where he stood politically. I am not here concerned with that side of him, although it is worth remembering that it took courage--in that now largely forgotten post-war period, when Stalin was still being held up by the Left as a genial uncle--to fire an anti-Communist broadside like Animal Farm that placed a permanent dent in the whole Marxist structure; especially courageous on the part of a writer, himself of the Left, laying his professional reputation open to smear and boycott, which those he so devastatingly exposed hastened to set about.

Posted August 08, 10:15 AM

OGIC: Just as I thought

The lovely Cinetrix took herself to see Little Miss Sunshine and confirms my strong preconception based on a viewing of the trailer: not so much indie-rific or indie-lightful as indie-rivative. (And. Can we talk about those terribominable Snickers ads that are dumbing up our freeways this summer and apparently causing me to write stuff like that? I mean, honestly: "Satisfectellent"? Tear them down now, please.)

Anyway, not only does the Cinetrix remove any lingering doubts I might have had about my summary dismissal of Little Miss Sunshine, she gives a welcome nod to a TT and OGIC fave from way back, The Daytrippers. We both liked this movie on general principles, but that Hope Davis-Parker Posey combo really hits Terry where he lives. Understandably enough--they're both wonderful actresses, and casting them as sisters was a truly inspired move.

UPDATE: Jan Freeman of the Boston Globe is on the case of Snickers' recent crimes against the English language:

Satisfectellent, similarly, is a monster mashup of an adjective. If it's satisfaction plus excellent, then what's the fect? And where's the X that excellent so badly needs? Fectellent sets the analogizing mind adrift in the realm of infection, repellent, and other not-so-XLNT associations. Still not salivating here!

Yep, I had insect repellent rattling around in my head after seeing that one, too. Messaging mission unaccomplished, I'd say.

Posted August 08, 1:30 AM

August 7, 2006

TT: Memoirs of a gym rat

Now that I spend so much time on the road, I have to take my workouts where and when I can find them. That's why I went straight from Penn Station to my Upper West Side gym last Friday at eight-thirty, an hour when I'm usually sitting on the aisle of a Broadway theater. It felt more than a little bit weird. Manhattan is full of busy people whose schedules oblige them to operate at oblique angles to the clock, but even so, a gym still isn't the sort of place where most of us care to be seen on a Friday night. I caught myself looking out of the corner of my eye at the other refugees from normal life who were taking exercise after hours, and wondered whether they in turn were looking at me and muttering to themselves, Poor guy, he can't get a date! Smiling wryly, I inserted my Ultimate Ear in-ear monitors, fired up my iPod, and withdrew from the world for the next forty-five minutes, tugging violently at the handle of a rowing machine in order to defer for as long as possible my ultimate appointment with the distinguished thing.

I spent Saturday and Sunday chewing through a mountain of piled-up mail, straightening out my reviewing calendar, dining with Supermaud, and going to a couple of plays, one in Manhattan and the other in New Jersey. I was pleased to find in the mail a copy of the bound manuscript of Somewhere, Amanda Vaill's forthcoming biography of Jerome Robbins, and promptly set to reading it in between appointments. One of the pleasures of my line of work is that I get to read books like Somewhere prior to publication and listen to CDs in advance of their street dates. (In recent weeks I've been sampling a stack of preview copies of soon-to-be-released albums by Ani DiFranco, Bill Frisell, Roger Kellaway, Diana Krall, Audra McDonald, and Chris Thile.)

Just as I was getting ready to pick up a Zipcar on Saturday and drive out to Madison to see the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, I got a call from a TV producer who wanted to know whether I'd seen World Trade Center and would come to the studio to chat about it. "No and no," I told her. As I mentioned in this space the other day, I haven't gone to the movies since I got out of the hospital, and I saw no good reason to break that record for a movie about 9/11, no matter how fine it may be, and least of all in order to talk about it on TV. Most TV "conversations" are semi-staged pseudo-debates whose participants are picked with the intention of generating heat rather than shedding light. Me, I prefer radio, where you're occasionally allowed to speak without interruption for more than ten seconds in a row and there's a pretty good chance that your interviewer doesn't already know what you're going to say.

Truth to tell, though, I didn't really want to be doing much of anything at that particular moment. I love flying from city to city to see new shows, but I also like to spend a certain amount of time curled up on my living-room couch, looking at the Teachout Museum and thinking about nothing in particular. I've learned how to get things done on planes, trains, and buses, but they're always going somewhere, and sometimes I prefer to be going nowhere.

I'm definitely going somewhere today: I have an appointment with my cardiologist, after which I'm headed for Connecticut, where I'll spend the middle part of the week working on Hotter Than That. (Reading the manuscript of Somewhere whetted my creative edge.) I'll be leaving the blog in the capable hands of Our Girl until Friday, so don't be alarmed by my disappearance. On Friday it's back to New York for The Fantasticks, Mr. Dooley's America, and Fame Becomes Me. That's my life, and I like it, usually.

Just in case you're wondering, you'll find me at the gym in between shows. Dead men write no books, nor do they get to curl up on their living-room couches and look lovingly at their lithographs. Given the alternative, I prefer sitting on a rowing machine and listening to my iPod. The Teachout Museum will keep.

UPDATE: Maud just blogged about her latest visit to the Teachout Museum. And my cardiologist (bless him) says I'm in the pink.

Posted August 07, 12:00 PM

TT: The Terry Teachout Workout Tape

Here's what I listened to at the gym last Friday:

- Woody Herman, "Your Father's Mustache" (with Buddy Rich on drums)

- Tommy Dorsey, "Well, Git It!" (ditto)

- Mel Powell, "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise" (with Benny Goodman on clarinet)

- Lou Reed, "White Light/White Heat" (the live version)

- Del McCoury Band, "What Made Milwaukee Famous"

- Warren Zevon, "Werewolves of London"

- Steely Dan, "What a Shame About Me"

- The Band, "We Can Talk"

- Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, "Walkin' One and Only"

- The Bangles, "Walk Like an Egyptian" (courtesy of Gilmore Girls)

- Metronome All-Stars, "Victory Ball" (with Charlie Parker on alto sax and Lennie Tristano on piano)

- Pat Metheny Trio, "Unquity Road" (with Jaco Pastorius on bass)

- Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Up Around the Bend"

Posted August 07, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"He had plenty more drinks and then supped and retired early to bed, where for the first time for many many nights he enjoyed the kind of deep, refreshing slumber that little children have, and the very good, and the very wicked."

Honor Tracy, The Straight and Narrow Path

Posted August 07, 12:00 PM

OGIC: That meme

I know, the One Book meme is sooooo last week, but here I go anyway...

- One book that changed your life. I've blogged about it a lot already, but I'm going to say Shirley Hazzard's Transit of Venus. Maybe to say it changed my life is a little melodramatic, but I can say that it changed my sense of the possibilities of the realist novel. No, it changed my sense of the possibilities of language. Yes, language. I kept pinching myself while reading it--not literally, but you get the idea.

- One book that you've read more than once. A friend recently told me that he's reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time, and I realized that this is a condition I aspire to. In other words, I wanted for a second to claw his eyes out, but the second passed and I masked my jealous rage nicely, I thought. It used to be every Christmastime that I read P&P. Now my readings are further spaced out, every three or four years instead of every single one as I try (without hope) to regain a state of innocence vis-à-vis this particular book. (Note: I'm in good company on this count.)

- One book you'd want on a desert island. I know what you think I'm going to say, but I'll take a fat blank book (and a supply of pens).

- One book that made you laugh. Randall Jarrell's campus satire Pictures from an Institution always makes me laugh, again and again, savagely. See for yourself: "If you had given a Benton student a pencil and a piece of paper, and asked her to draw something, she would have looked at you in helpless astonishment: it would have been plain to her that you knew nothing about art. By the time a Benton artist got through exploiting the possibilities of her medium, it was too dark to do anything else that day; and most of the students never learned that there was anything else to do." Etc., etc., ad infinitum.

- One book that made you cry. The Furies by Fernanda Eberstadt. The tragedy that ends this novel is shocking and sad, but what pushed me to tears was the terrible logic of it. (In addition, this book not being reprinted in paperback makes me want to cry. It's worth the price of the cloth edition, though.)

- One book that you wish had been written. A novel by Alice James. Don't you think she'd have given Henry a run for his money?

- One book that you wish had never been written. Just one? I'll get back to you on this. It may require a whole post.

- One book you're currently reading. I'm still reading Anthony Powell, as reported here, and will be for some time. But for variety's sake I'll say that I'm also reading another Powell: Dawn Powell's Angels on Toast. After reading half and inexplicably putting it down a few years ago, I'm starting again at the beginning. This is no reflection on the book; I did the same thing with Anna Karenina three times before I finished it!

- One book you've been meaning to read. Proust's book. You know the one. And in French, no less. (I'm on page 3, so I'll still count this as an intention rather than underway.)

Posted August 07, 3:01 AM

August 4, 2006

TT: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, R.I.P.

I wonder how kindly Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who died yesterday at the age of ninety, will be treated by posterity. In her lifetime she was widely--if by no means universally--regarded as one of the greatest sopranos of her generation. Yet even at the height of Schwarzkopf's career, there were plenty of critical naysayers who found her singing fussy and mannered to the point of archness, and since her retirement in 1975, it's my impression that their point of view, which I share, has come to prevail.

Schwarzkopf was also a great beauty, which doubtless contributed to the effect she had on live audiences. Alas, I never saw her on stage or in recital, only on film, so I can't say whether she made a stronger impression in person. I've heard most of her major recordings, though, and I find that I rarely return to any of them save to listen to her colleagues. For my money, Herbert von Karajan's first recordings of Falstaff and Der Rosenkavalier are the best things she ever did in the studio, and her singing is by no means the most memorable aspect of those deservedly admired performances.

As for her private life, suffice it for now to say that she was a Nazi, that she lied about it for as long as she could get away with it, and that she admitted her youthful affiliation with the Nazi Party grudgingly, evasively, and only when confronted with incontrovertible documentary evidence. Sooner or later a frank, fully informed biography of Schwarzkopf will be written, and my guess is that it will prove devastating to her reputation. (Alan Jefferson's 1996 book didn't fill the bill, but it was a start.)

Such things may not matter to you, but they do to me, all the more so in light of the fact that Schwarzkopf was so gifted and admired an artist. As I wrote in Commentary a few years ago apropos of those French artists who collaborated with the Nazis:

One thinks, for instance, of Colette, who blithely published in anti-Semitic magazines during the German occupation, or of the great pianist Alfred Cortot, who went so far as to serve as Vichy's High Commissioner of Fine Arts and to perform in Nazi Germany....Indeed, the most troubling thing about Colette, Cortot and their fellow collaborationists is that they were not second-tier figures but creative and recreative geniuses whose work remains to this day representative of the quintessence of French art.

On the other hand, none of that stops me from reading Colette's novels or listening to Cortot's recordings. We are all flawed creatures, and one of the impenetrable mysteries of beautiful art is that it can be made by ugly souls. So feel free to mourn the death of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and to speak admiringly of her artistry--but when you do so, remember that there was more to her than the music she made.

As Clement Greenberg told an interviewer in 1969:

There are, of course, more important things than art: life itself, what actually happens to you. This may sound silly, but I have to say it, given what I've heard art-silly people say all my life: I say that if you have to choose between life and happiness or art, remember always to choose life and happiness. Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.

UPDATE: Anthony Tommasini's New York Times obituary, which is both lengthy and candid, is here.

For a sympathetic but equally candid appreciation by Tim Page of the Washington Post, go here.

Posted August 04, 12:10 PM

TT: The ultimate stage mother

Here's my first official report from last weekend's voyage to the outskirts of hell, a review of Shakespeare & Company published in this morning's Wall Street Journal. As you can see, I didn't let my manifold travails interfere with the pleasure I took in what I saw on stage:

Western Massachusetts has long been a center of classy summer theater. In the past two seasons I've seen Barrington Stage Company and the Berkshire and Williamstown Theatre Festivals, and last week I made it to Shakespeare & Company, where I saw back-to-back performances of "Hamlet" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor," two Shakespeare plays that have about as much in common as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Nor were the productions alike save for their excellence--a sign of the adventurousness of the 29-year-old Lenox-based company, which more than lived up to its reputation.

I admit to having had my doubts about Eleanor Holdridge's staging of "Hamlet." To begin with, Jason Asprey, who is playing the title role in Shakespeare & Company's first-ever production of that most familiar and formidable of tragedies, just happens to be the son of Tina Packer, the company's founder and artistic director, who in turn is playing Queen Gertrude, Hamlet's mother. As if that weren't suspicious enough, Ms. Packer's husband, Dennis Krausnick, is playing Polonius. Having digested all this information, I opened my program and found a note explaining that the production "centers the play in the electrical synapse impulses of Hamlet's dying brain." This is a family newspaper, so I won't tell you what I muttered to myself as I read those words, but it wasn't optimistic.

All at once the theater went dark, followed by an explosion of chilly fluorescent light and a mega-decibel electric-chair zzzzap! Young Hamlet started reciting "To be or not to be." Then the rest of the cast appeared, bedecked in stylized modern dress with mod touches à la Austin Powers. "Oh, hell," I said, this time out loud--but stayed to cheer....

No link. You know what to do, right? So do it.

Posted August 04, 12:00 PM

TT: A tale of two budgets

In my next "Sightings" column, to be published in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I take note of two developments in Atlanta:

- The Atlanta Ballet has fired its orchestra and will henceforth dance to recorded music.

- The Atlanta Opera is selling its midtown headquarters and moving to a new suburban arts center, in which it will give all of its performances.

Both companies are in financial trouble--but whose fix is smarter? For the answer, pick up a copy of tomorrow's Journal, where you'll find my column in the "Pursuits" section.

Posted August 04, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"I have never thought that painting a picture has anything to do with self-expression. It is a communication about the world to someone else. After the world is convinced about this communication, it changes. The world was never the same after Picasso or Miró. Theirs was a view of the world which transformed our vision of things. All teaching about self-expression is erroneous in art; it has to do with therapy. Knowing yourself is valuable so that the self can be removed from the process."

Mark Rothko (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Posted August 04, 12:00 PM

August 3, 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 gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. 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, closes Sept. 3)
- 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 Aug. 13)

CLOSING SUNDAY:
- Bridge & Tunnel* (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here)

Posted August 03, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Andrew had never had any first-hand experience of the majestic frivolity of the law; and his attitude towards it was rather more that of the man in the street than might have been expected in a person of his intelligence. He believed that lawyers everywhere were a pack of rogues, but that once a cause was delivered into their hands, somehow or other the Right must inevitably triumph. At the same time, the mere thought of becoming involved in its processes filled him with horror. The sight of even the most innocent legal document would induce in him a melancholy frame of mind."

Honor Tracy, The Straight and Narrow Path

Posted August 03, 12:00 PM

TT: Satchmo and me

Tomorrow is the one hundred and fifth anniversary of the birth of Louis Armstrong, so Michael J. Bandler of the U.S. State Department interviewed me about Satchmo's life and work (and about Hotter Than That, my biography-in-progress) for U.S. Life and Culture, one of the many Web pages produced by the State Department's Bureau of International Information Programs.

To read a transcript of our conversation, go here.

Posted August 03, 4:14 AM

August 2, 2006

TT: Almanac

"We dare more when striving for superfluities than for necessities. Often when we renounce superfluities we end up lacking in necessities."

Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

Posted August 02, 12:00 PM

TT: In full retreat

I'm still in Connecticut, hiding out from the heat wave and working on my Journal columns and, appropriately enough, Hotter Than That. It's hot here, too, believe me, but not like it is in Manhattan!

I'll continue to blog with reasonable regularity, but not always at my regular times, so watch this space and see what happens.

Later (but not too much later).

UPDATE: I just posted a couple of new Top Fives.

Posted August 02, 8:34 AM

TT: I wish I'd said that

From Stephen Holden, my favorite New York Times critic:

A quintessential Tony Bennett moment comes at the end of "It's a Wonderful World," the tender duet he recorded with K. D. Lang for their 2002 Louis Armstrong tribute album, "A Wonderful World." After they swap greeting-card doggerel celebrating "trees of green," "skies of blue" and "clouds of white," Mr. Bennett remarks with a boyish enthusiasm, "Don't you think Satchmo was right?"

Ms. Lang responds by crooning a final, dreamy "what a wonderful world," whereupon her partner, speaking in the quiet, choked-up voice of a man visiting the grave of a beloved father figure, declares, "You were right, Pops."

This gentle burst of affirmation melts your heart and reminds you that sincerity, a mode of expression that has been twisted, trampled, co-opted and corrupted in countless ways by the false intimacy of television, still exists in American popular culture. It can even salvage "trees of green," "skies of blue" and "clouds of white" from the junk heap of pop inanity....

Read the whole thing here.

It reminded me, by the way, of a paragraph I read earlier today in Elmore Leonard's Cat Chaser:

How many people did she know who spoke or looked at anything with genuine feeling? Without being cynical, on stage, trying to entertain. Without puffing up or putting down. She wanted to know what he felt and, if possible, share the feeling.

That's the way I'd like my writing to make people feel.

Posted August 02, 2:42 AM

TT: One at a time

Courtesy of the increasingly invaluable Kate's Book Blog, here's a "one-book meme" that tickled my fancy:

- One book that changed your life. W. Jackson Bate's Samuel Johnson. It showed me how to write a biography, and opened my eyes to the possibility that I might someday want to do such a thing.

- One book that you've read more than once. I read every book I really like more than once--usually several times. I suppose, though, that the book I've read most often, unlikely as it may sound, is Flannery O'Connor's The Habit of Being.

- One book you'd want on a desert island. Montaigne's Essays, which by contrast I haven't read nearly often enough.

- One book that made you laugh. Kingsley Amis' Girl, 20.

- One book that made you cry. Books almost never make me cry, even those that move me deeply. I'm much more likely to cry in the theater or while listening to music. I'm sure there's an exception, but I can't recall one off the top of my head. (If I think of one, I'll let you know.)

- One book that you wish had been written. Paul Desmond's How Many of You Are There in the Quartet? He claimed to be working on it for years and years, but all he ever published (except for a half-dozen liner notes) was a lone autobiographical essay for Punch about the Dave Brubeck Quartet's worst gig ever. It's reprinted in Doug Ramsey's wonderful Desmond biography.

- One book that you wish had never been written. I was going to say Mein Kampf, but on further reflection I realized it was probably good for the world that Hitler set down his plans for world conquest in so unguarded a way. (Oh, that mine adversary had written a book!) This being the case, I'll opt instead for sheer pissiness and pick Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, which I read in high school and found so time-consumingly awful that I swore I'd never read another word of Wolfe again. Nor have I.

- One book you're currently reading. Honor Tracy's The Straight and Narrow Path. It's a total hoot.

- One book you've been meaning to read. Brace yourself: Anna Karenina. If Oprah can do it, so can I.

As always, I tag OGIC. Go for it, Girl!

Posted August 02, 2:24 AM

August 1, 2006

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"It is hard for a writer to call an editor great, because it is natural for him to think of the editor as a writer manqué. It is like asking a thief to approve a fence, or a fighter to speak highly of a manager. 'Fighters are sincere,' a fellow with the old pug's syndrome said to me at a bar once as his head wobbled and the hand that held his shot glass shook. 'Managers are pimps, they sell our blood.' In the newspaper trade, confirmed reporters think confirmed editors are mediocrities who took the easy way out. These attitudes mark an excess of vanity coupled with a lack of imagination; it never occurs to a writer that anybody could have wanted to be anything else."

A. J. Liebling, "Harold Ross--The Impresario"

Posted August 01, 12:03 PM

OGIC: Home again, home again

Racing to get out of town last week, I neglected to leave word that I was going. Sorry about that. It was my fourth annual sojourn to the utterly involving, continually surprising, and most excellently populated National Puzzler's League convention, this year held in San Antonio, where the heat outside is smothering and the AC inside is headsplitting. Despite climatic challenges, I had a more than wonderful time.

Having arrived back home yesterday, I am faced with a back-breaking beginning of the work week, which was kicked off with a three-hour meeting today and more accumulated emails than I could count or, certainly, answer. After work I went to break the cat out of kitty jail, otherwise known as boarding at the veterinarian's. Anyone one who knows her will attest that this is one ridiculously gorgeous cat, a long-haired butterscotch tabby with golden eyes. Well, after five days at the vet's, being brought out in her kitty caddy, she looked every bit like Bill the Cat--grizzled, askew, and pretty much demented. By now she's close to normal again, and we both need some sleep in a comfortable place. More blogging later this week.

Posted August 01, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business."

Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

Posted August 01, 12:00 PM

TT: Philadelphia, there I went

I boarded a train for Connecticut at Penn Station last Friday afternoon to embark on a long weekend of playgoing. A half-hour later the engine failed, and we crawled back to the station to get a new one. I arrived in Hartford three hours late, having spent the preceding five hours sitting in a jam-packed Amtrak car without benefit of air conditioning.

From that moment on, things started going wrong, and kept going wrong. I presented myself at a rental-car counter in a suburban mall the following morning--and spent fifteen increasingly frustrating minutes waiting for a clerk to materialize. The overworked, well-meaning clerk considerately upgraded me to a convertible--and by the time I got where I was going, I had a nice rosy sunburn. I went looking for lunch in Lenox, Massachusetts, home of Shakespeare & Company--and discovered that there is nowhere to park within the city limits on Saturday afternoons. (No, I'm not exaggerating for a laugh. When I say nowhere, I mean nowhere.) I showed up for a matinee of The Merry Wives of Windsor that I'd mistakenly thought was supposed to start at two o'clock--and found out from the friendly young lady at the box office that it actually started at three.

When I awoke the next day and realized that I had begun the lengthy, exasperating process of passing a kidney stone, it occurred to me for the first time that I might possibly be in a Philadelphia. Anyone familiar with the one-act plays of David Ives will know what I'm talking about, and tremble with awestruck sympathy. In The Philadelphia Ives describes with sadistic relish the kind of day in which "no matter what you ask for, you can't get it." This unhappy circumstance, a character explains, is a metaphysical state of mind known as "being in a Philadelphia." Had I fallen all unknowing into such a dire condition? I nervously swallowed a handful of Tylenol, drove north to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown--and saw as I approached the museum grounds that hundreds of children were playing on the front lawn. It was Family Day. Now I knew: I was in a Philadelphia.

Once I accepted my fate and prepared for the worst, I wondered if perhaps I might only be in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where you get half of what you ask for. Yes, the Clark was jammed--but admission is free on Family Day, and The Clark Brothers Collect: Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings, the show I'd come to see, was every bit as eye-popping as its reviews had promised. Yes, I spent the evening sitting under the Hudson Valley Shakepeare Festival tent, watching the company perform A Midsummer Night's Dream in ninety-degree weather as I squirmed in discomfort--but I got a good dinner beforehand, and the kidney stone exited my person after the show without further incident. Yes, the air conditioner in my hotel room was on the blink--but the staff of the Hudson House Inn installed a new window unit while I was watching the play, and thereafter I slept deeply and well. Yes, I'd seen three Shakespeare plays in thirty hours--but seeing Merry Wives, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Hamlet back to back is its own reward.

I arose on Monday, breakfasted on a sunny porch overlooking the Hudson River, and drove back to Connecticut along green country roads, certain that I was on my way out of the suburbs of David Ives' metaphysical city of frustration. Only time will tell, but as of Tuesday morning, I haven't experienced any further disasters or half-disasters. On the other hand, I've still got to write my review, the country home where I'm staying this week has yet to install a high-speed connection to the Internet, and it's going to be even hotter than it was last week....

Posted August 01, 10:11 AM

TT: The last word on Mel Gibson

Regarding Mel Gibson's drunken encounter with a Malibu cop, Christopher Hitchens nailed it:

One does not abruptly decide, between the first and second vodka, or the ticks of the indicator of velocity, that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion are valid after all.

Here endeth the lesson.

Posted August 01, 10:11 AM