« September 2006 | Main | November 2006 »

October 31, 2006

TT: Almanac

"As of now at least, more good people are to be encountered in America than in Europe. Theirs is, however, a somewhat coarse and seemingly careless goodness because there is a low level of psychological intensity in human exchanges here, both of the good and the bad."

Czeslaw Milosz, foreword to Aleksander Wat, My Century

Posted October 31, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Where's OGIC?

For the last two weeks, sick as a dog and huddled hermitlike in my bed. Before that, there was a truly fabulous and entirely computer-free Vegas junket plus the requisite week to prepare and week to recover. Add it all up, and you have one absurdly long absence from this blog, for which I apologize.

Though I'm now on the mend and making public appearances, i.e., at my workplace, I'm not completely recovered. From time to time the coughing up of a lung still seems imminent, and I'm still on my delightful but soporific cough medicine, which seems to come down to an expectorant heavily cut with vicodin. (Which reminds me: new episodes of House return tomorrow, so set your DVRs.) Since the possibility of a secondary pneumonia was raised by my doctor, I'm playing this one conservatively. I'll be posting this week, but in all likelihood my contributions will be brief and few as I aim for early bedtimes and a reclining rather than upright posture whenever possible. Still and all, it's nice to be back.

Posted October 31, 1:15 AM

October 30, 2006

TT: En route

I'm on the way back from Seattle. See you Tuesday!

Posted October 30, 12:00 PM

TT: West Coast story

I'm writing from Seattle on Sunday night, having finally come to the end of a long, hectic weekend of theater-related travel and adventures.

On Thursday I flew to Portland, Oregon, where my traveling companion and I picked up a rental car, headed for Hayden Island, and there took up residence on a yacht. That makes our accommodations sound a bit fancier than they really were: the Grand Ronde Place, the yacht-and-breakfast where I spent my two nights in Portland, is a thirty-four-foot sailboat whose interior is comparable in size to a motor home. The "stateroom," not surprisingly, was a bit on the snug side, but I'd always wanted to sleep on a boat, the owner-host was wonderfully considerate, and all in all we couldn't have been happier. Should you find yourself in Portland and feel like staying somewhere out of the ordinary, I recommend the Grand Ronde Place very enthusiastically.

On Friday morning we drove south to the Gordon House, the only Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building in the Pacific Northwest that's open to the public. Designed in 1957 and built seven years later, it's a two-story Usonian house that came within weeks of being torn down when a Philistine with too much money bought the lot on which it stood and decided that he'd prefer living in a McMansion. Thanks to a last-minute rescue effort by the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy, the house was dismantled in 2000 and moved twenty-four miles to the Oregon Garden, where it can now be viewed by interested visitors. We spent an hour and a half touring the house and grounds, and--as always--I came away wishing I could live in so perfectly conceived and executed a building. In the evening we saw Portland Center Stage's production of West Side Story, performed in the company's brand-new Gerding Theater, a 599-seat proscenium-stage house located in what used to be the Portland Armory.

At noon on Saturday we took the Amtrak Cascades to Seattle, an afternoon-long train trip through Oregon and Washington that left us with just enough time to dine on crabcakes at the Dahlia Lounge. Sunday, by contrast, was a triple-header: brunch with Mr. Rifftides, a matinée performance of Native Son at Intiman Theatre, and an evening performance of Steve Martin's The Underpants at ACT Theatre.

I'm in transit all day Monday, at the end of which I'll reclaim the Teachout Museum from Ms. in the wings, who's been housesitting for me. (She flew to New York from San Francisco last week to give a couple of concerts, staying at my apartment while I was on the West Coast.) I'll be spending Tuesday and Wednesday hitting a pair of deadlines, opening my mail, and recovering from the events of the past few days. Our Girl, who's been under the weather, will post if she feels up to it, but don't expect to hear from me again until Thursday.

Have a nice week!

Posted October 30, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"The soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance that he goes, the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign and not like an interloper or a valet."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

Posted October 30, 12:00 PM

October 27, 2006

TT: Don't go once, it's all bad

I review three shows in this morning's Wall Street Journal drama column. Two are on Broadway--The Times They Are A-Changin' and Butley--while the third, No Exit, is currently playing at Hartford Stage in Connecticut:

The buzz on "The Times They Are A-Changin'," the new Twyla Tharp-Bob Dylan jukebox musical, was devastatingly negative. Such omens of impending doom are usually right, but I hoped for the best anyway. Mr. Dylan is one of the greatest songwriters of the postwar era and Ms. Tharp one of its most admired choreographers, so how bad could it be? Now I know: "The Times They Are A-Changin'" is so bad that it makes you forget how good the songs are....

Alan Bates won a Tony for his performance in the original production of "Butley," which was by all accounts spectacularly memorable. Now Nathan Lane is starring in the first Broadway revival of Simon Gray's harrowing 1971 play about a seedy, self-loathing professor of a certain age whose life is falling apart. I never saw Mr. Bates in "Butley," whether on stage or in Harold Pinter's 1974 film version, thus making it possible for me to view Mr. Lane with an innocent eye. It's a show he's wanted to do for years, so I'm sorry to say that his interpretation of the title role is an honorable failure....

Have you heard the one about three unhappy people locked in a small room for all eternity? Most theatergoers know the premise of "No Exit," Jean-Paul Sartre's 1940 play about life in hell, and can probably even quote its best-remembered line, "Hell is other people." But "No Exit" is more talked about than performed--it hasn't been seen on Broadway since 1946, when John Huston directed the American premiere--so it's worth paying a visit to Hartford to see Jerry Mouawad's wonderfully imaginative production....

No free link. To read the whole thing, go out and buy a copy of today's morning's Journal, then turn to the "Weekend Journal" section. Better yet, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you on-the-spot access to the complete text of my review, plus a plethora of other good pieces.

Posted October 27, 12:00 PM

TT: A challenge to Martin Scorsese

In my next "Sightings" column, to be published in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I take a look at Martin Scorsese's recent announcement that he wants to devote himself to directing small-scale, low-budget films: "I think I am finding that when there are very big budgets there is less risk that can be taken." Is there any possibility that he means what he says--and if so, is there any chance that he'll be any good at it?

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

Posted October 27, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something."

George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara

Posted October 27, 12:00 PM

October 26, 2006

TT: In transit

I am now officially on the fly. If you're trying to get in touch with me, I probably won't be seeing my e-mail again until Saturday evening, so call my cell phone instead.

See you Monday!

Posted October 26, 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 favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal or on "About Last Night" 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:
- A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
- 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)
- Heartbreak House* (drama, G/PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, extended through Dec. 17)
- Jay Johnson: The Two and Only (one-ventriloquist show, G/PG-13, a bit of strong language but otherwise family-friendly, 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:
- The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)
- Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (drama, R, adult subject matter and nudity, reviewed here, closes Dec. 9)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
- In Public (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Saturday)

Posted October 26, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Literature should never be at war."

George Bernard Shaw, letter to Henry Newbolt (July 25, 1920)

Posted October 26, 12:00 PM

October 25, 2006

TT: Elsewhere

Tomorrow I fly to the West Coast to see plays in Portland and Seattle, and I'm frighteningly busy preparing for the trip. (If you've trying to get in touch with me, please don't be surprised by unexpected delays--it's been a long time since I was this swamped.)

In lieu of original thought, here are some fugitive gleanings from the blogosphere:

- Ms. twang twang twang summarizes the ups and downs of her life as a professional harpist:

I have asked a tramp to hold my harp at 2am outside a casino while I clamber into my car boot to unjam it from the inside. I have been dressed as a fairy, a mermaid, a 1920s burlesque dancing girl complete with red sequinned cigarette holder, been asked to play topless (no, I didn't), been asked to wear a sailor's outfit (no, I didn't--although that was more because the orchestra requesting it wasn't supplying the gear, and I don't have a sailor's outfit hanging next to my long black), and played behind a screen in case I gave the 100 dining Arab men wrongful thoughts. I have done countless youth concerts in a variety of silly hats, although fortunately not a WW2 gasmask, which was once given to the principal double bass. I've done pubs, clubs, casinos, cruises, discos, orgies, supermarkets and public lavatories. I've also played in private lavatories, when no ground floor warm-up rooms have been arranged. I have performed My Heart Will Go On 75 times accompanied by bagpipes, kit and a Wurlitzer Organ--together.

Jeepers, how come that kind of stuff never happened to me when I played music?

- Ms. pretty dumb things has a bone to pick--but not her usual one:

In general, things don't happen in real life as they do in movies. That palpable difference is, after all, one of the reasons why we love cinema. Our lives do not finish in a neat narrative moment that resolves as it fades to black. We do not, in general, experience our lives as a grand unfolding of plot points that crescendo-culminate in some grandiose happening, whether dramatic or comedic or both.

Rarely do we have that succinct pointed epiphany. And it doesn't matter whether it's a love story, a war story, a family story or a personal story; the real defies any narrative framework, perhaps because rarely is anything in real life just one story.

Which is why cinematic reproductions of therapeutic moments give me a huge pain in the ass....

You'll never guess where she goes from here.

- Mr. Anecdotal Evidence enunciates a credo:

In art, fortunately, one is not compelled to choose sides, one poet at the expense of another. Milosz and Larkin are not mutually exclusive loves. Aesthetic love is promiscuous without being unfaithful. I feel no compulsion to be rigorously consistent in matters of artistic taste. I can love Proust and Raymond Chandler, Schoenberg and Johnny Cash. Only in that sense, I think, is art democratic....

What he said (except for the part about Schoenberg).

- If you didn't see this story in Publishers Weekly, read it right now. The subject is the decline of newspaper book reviewing:

With newspapers under increasing financial pressure, however, is it reasonable to expect them to give extensive coverage to an industry where they get relatively little support? Among the remaining Sunday review sections, only the New York Times Book Review receives a significant number of ads. The Washington Post Book World has seen very little publisher support throughout its history. "It's been a real problem," said Book World editor Marie Arana. The situation is much the same at the San Francisco Chronicle, where, said editor Phil Bronstein, the section gets few ads. "It gets harder and harder to justify something that has no ad support," said Bronstein....

That's laying it on the line. Yikes.

- Meanwhile, Mr. Parabasis is concerned about the constricting cultural effects of copyright law:

I don't think an artist should have ownership of their work in the conventional sense of the term. I believe that art is a gift we give the world. Cheesy, I know, but think through the implications of the metaphor. When you give a gift, you don't own it anymore. The receiver of the gift owns it. So if art is a gift we give the world, the world owns that gift, not us.

Now I'm not saying people shouldn't be paid for their work. They should. They just perhaps shouldn't have as much control over what happens to it once it's out there in the world. Because as artists, the giving activity is the useful, helpful, growthful one. Having control over that gift once it's out there is selfish....

I know just what he's talking about, and if I had time to weave it together with my recently published thoughts about YouTube, I would. Instead, I'll let you connect the dots yourself.

- Mr. Lileks goes to a suburban party in Minneapolis and finds it reassuringly tame:

If this had been a Peter DeVries novel or Cheever story, someone--usually a failed but charming intellectual becalmed in the suburbs--would be canoodling with someone else's wife in the kitchen, who responded to the classical allusions floating on the seducers winey breath with a sharp mocking retort that would end in a brisk cynical coupling seventy pages later. Sitting around the living room tonight I realized that the middle-aged overeducated vaguely alcoholic East-coast suburban adulterer is no longer the cultural archetype he used to be. Pour some Cutty on the curb for the dead homey. Or the dead homey-wrecker....

- Speaking of life in New Yorkerland, Ms. Emdashes has posted the latest edition of "Ask the Librarians," her monthly Q-&-A with that magazine's head librarians. As always, it's a must.

- Finally, Ms. Tinkerty Tonk points to a site called How Many of Me that allows you to search the U.S. Census Bureau's database to find out how many people share your first and last names. It seems there are 586,439 Americans named Terry, 1,560 Teachouts, and three Terry Teachouts.

Where do my two namesakes live? Are we related? What do they do for a living? I wonder....

Posted October 25, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Without music we shall surely perish of drink, morphia, and all sorts of artificial exaggerations of the cruder delights of the senses."

George Bernard Shaw, "The Religion of the Pianoforte"

Posted October 25, 12:00 PM

October 24, 2006

TT: The enemy of the good

Last Monday I paid a visit to the press view of Americans in Paris, 1860-1900, which opens today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's a comfy, crowd-pleasing blockbuster exhibition that contains such familiar show-stoppers as Sargent's Madame X and The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, Whistler's Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, Eakins' The Cello Player, and Cassatt's The Tea, surrounded by a sea of competent canvases by turn-of-the-century American painters who went to Paris in their youth and learned their lessons well, sometimes quite wonderfully so.

Were "Americans in Paris" the only large-scale show currently on view at the Met, I have no doubt that it would be jammed with delighted viewers. But it happens that the museum is also playing host to From Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, a resplendent compendium of nearly two hundred paintings, works on paper, and sculptures by Bonnard, Cézanne, Degas, Derain, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Renoir, Vlaminck, and Vuillard that passed at one time or another through the hands of the legendary French art dealer. After strolling through "Americans in Paris," I slipped down the hall to take a peek at "From Cézanne to Picasso." The Met is closed to the public on Mondays, so I had the show pretty much to myself. I found it absurdly excessive--no one can possibly take in that much great art--but staggering all the same.

Returning to "Americans in Paris" after spending a half-hour wandering through "From Cézanne to Picasso" is a sobering experience. I yield to no one in my admiration for American art, and the best paintings on display in "Americans in Paris" really are exceptional. Yet how many of the thirty-seven American artists represented in the show managed to say something truly individual? Sargent and Eakins, yes--they were definitely their own men--but Whistler now seems etiolated and Cassatt sentimental when compared to the Frenchmen from whom they drew their inspiration.

Look at "Back in the United States," the last gallery in "Americans in Paris," in which we see how some of the American painters who visited Paris dealt with native subjects after they returned to the United States. Three of their paintings, John Twachtman's Brook in Winter, Childe Hassam's Allies Day, May 1917, and Maurice Prendergast's Central Park, seem to me to pass the test of individuality. The rest reminded me of a story that Oscar Levant, the pianist and raconteur, used to tell on himself. It seems that Levant spent a lot of time traveling with George Gershwin on passenger trains. One evening he griped to Gershwin that he always got stuck with the upper berth. According to Levant, who wasn't above embroidering an anecdote, Gershwin supposedly replied, "Upper berth and lower berth--that's the difference between talent and genius."

* * *

Visitors to "From Cézanne to Picasso" can view a two-minute clip from a silent French newsreel that shows Ambroise Vollard chatting with his friend and client Auguste Renoir, after which Renoir is briefly seen at work on an unidentified painting. This was in 1919, by which time arthritis had turned Renoir's hands into shrunken, twisted claws. It's jolting to watch him slash his brush against the canvas brusquely, almost angrily, then glare at the camera with the fiery eyes of an exhausted master determined to work to the very end.

Why the Met hasn't posted this astonishing peep into the past on its Web site is beyond me, but should it ever be made available in streaming video, I'll hasten to add it to the blogroll.

Posted October 24, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; thats the essence of inhumanity."

George Bernard Shaw, The Devil's Disciple

Posted October 24, 12:00 PM

October 23, 2006

TT: Living-room theater

A whole year has gone by since I last saw a film in a theater, and I can't say I feel any great urge to break my fast--I'm simply too busy. But I do watch old movies on TV, and in the past week and a half I saw two that disappointed me, albeit for very different reasons.

I wouldn't have bothered with The Seventh Seal had it not been for a houseguest who, like me, had never seen Bergman's 1956 "breakthrough" film and longed to get her cultural card punched. I took a shot at Wild Strawberries three years ago and found it underwhelming for reasons that I set forth in this space:

When I was young, Wild Strawberries struck me as exactly what old age must be like. (Had it been a novel, I would have scribbled neatly in the margin of the last page, "This is true.") Now that I'm middle-aged--and eight years older than Bergman was when he made it--I know better. It's far too benign, albeit gorgeously so. It reminds me of what an old music critic once said to me about Der Rosenkavalier: "It's by a young man pretending to be an old man remembering his youth."

The Seventh Seal, by contrast, is utterly preposterous, an atheist parable stuffed full of symbols so transparent that the densest of viewers can see them coming a mile down the track. I found it so boring that I was forced to resort to amusing myself by trying to imagine how Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca might have spoofed it on Your Show of Shows back in the days when TV comedians were smart enough to do such things. I suppose it's a matter of clashing sensibilities--or maybe not. Sibelius' music, for instance, doesn't make me giggle, but Bergman's ever-so-Scandinavian films remind me of what Guy Davenport is supposed to have said about Goethe: "Sometimes, on reading Goethe, one has the paralyzing suspicion that he thinks he's being funny."

Richard Brooks' 1967 film of In Cold Blood has an eerie verisimilitude arising from the fact that Brooks shot it on many of the actual locations where the horrific events described in Truman Capote's book took place: the Clutter farmhouse, the courtroom where Perry Smith and Dick Hickock were tried, even the gallows on which they were hanged. The casting of Robert Blake as Smith gives the film an extra dollop of retrospective reality. Alas, Brooks' painfully literal-minded script consists of half-digested, barely dramatized chunks of the book disgorged at enervating length by the actors, most of whom, Blake excepted, are no better than competent (though it's nice to see Charles McGraw, the tough guy with the buzzsaw voice, in a brief but memorable cameo).

As I've said before, the only way to successfully translate a first-class work of art from one medium to another is to subject it to a complete imaginative transformation. Otherwise the new version will be (A) tautological and (B) superfluous. (That's a joke, son.) Good example: George Balanchine's masterly ballet version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Bad example: André Previn's pointless operatic version of A Streetcar Named Desire. Bennett Miller's Capote covers much of the same ground as In Cold Blood, but it approaches the material from a different point of view--it's about Capote, not the Clutters--and so escapes the trap of tautology. Not so the film of In Cold Blood, an attempt to pictorialize the book as faithfully as possible, which foredooms it to artistic failure.

It doesn't help, of course, that Quincy Jones' score is trite, or that Brooks has turned the famously fey Capote into a dour, middle-aged reporter (played by Paul Stewart, the sinister butler of Citizen Kane) who beats you over the head with platitudes every time he opens his mouth. But it's the script that kills In Cold Blood stone dead. If I taught film, I'd use it as an example of how not to adapt a book for the screen--and The Seventh Seal as an example of how you can fool most of the critics most of the time.

Posted October 23, 12:00 PM

TT: Sunday-morning workout tape

- Andy Laverne, "Maximum Density" (from True Colors)

- Buck Owens and His Buckaroos, "Memphis"

- The Police, "Miss Gradenko" (from Synchronicity)

- Billie Holiday and Teddy Wilson, "Miss Brown to You"

- Steely Dan, "Monkey in Your Soul" (from Pretzel Logic)

- Fats Waller, "Moppin' and Boppin'"

- Donald Fagen, "Morph the Cat"

- Red Norvo Trio, "Move"

- Hank Williams, "Move It on Over"

- Bud Freeman and His Famous Chicagoans, "Muskrat Ramble"

- Woody Herman and the First Herd, "Non-Alcoholic"

- Del McCoury Band, "Nashville Cats" (from The Family)

Posted October 23, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"The 18th century had more ideas about the past than it had facts: archeology and philology were infant sciences. (The 21st century has more facts than ideas.)"

James Buchan, Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment (courtesy of Joseph Epstein)

Posted October 23, 12:00 PM

October 21, 2006

TT: Oh, arrgh, apologies!

I recently raved about George Hunka's In Public in this space, but somehow I got the closing date wrong. In fact, it runs through next Saturday.

To find out more, go here.

Posted October 21, 6:47 AM

October 20, 2006

TT: Bulldozed by naïveté

In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I cover two off-Broadway productions, My Name Is Rachel Corrie and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie:

Politics makes artists stupid. Take "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," the one-woman play cobbled together from the diaries, emails and miscellaneous scribblings of the 23-year-old left-wing activist who was run over by an Israeli Army bulldozer in 2003 while protesting the demolition of a Palestinian house in the Gaza Strip. Co-written and directed by Alan Rickman, one of England's best actors, "Rachel Corrie" just opened Off Broadway after a successful London run. It's an ill-crafted piece of goopy give-peace-a-chance agitprop--yet it's being performed to cheers and tears before admiring crowds of theater-savvy New Yorkers who, like Mr. Rickman himself, ought to know better....

The cancellation of last season's New York Theatre Workshop production of "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" triggered a noisy row in the New York theater community, many of whose members jumped to the not-unreasonable conclusion that the producers were cravenly bowing to backstage pressure from donors who found the play's politics obnoxious. As a result, the belated opening of "Rachel Corrie" at the Minetta Lane Theatre has had the predictable result of bringing it far more attention than it would otherwise have received.

That's the only lesson to be drawn from this exercise in theatrical ineptitude....

If you want to see real artists turning complex ideas into compelling theater, pay a visit to the New Group's revival of Jay Presson Allen's stage version of "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," a slicked-up, simplified version of Muriel Spark's darkly comic 1962 novella that nonetheless manages to suggest more than a few of the book's multiple layers of moral ambiguity. The play ran for a year on Broadway but hasn't been seen there since 1968--the film, for which Maggie Smith won a best-actress Oscar, is much better remembered--so it is good to welcome it back to the New York stage, especially in so intelligent and incisive a production....

To be sure, Cynthia Nixon is miscast as Miss Brodie, the high-handed Scottish schoolteacher whose romantic streak leads her to embrace fascism. Imperiousness is not in Ms. Nixon's line, and she has opted instead to play Miss Brodie as a coquette, an interpretation no more plausible than her Scotch accent. Nevertheless, she's a fine actress, and even though her performance isn't at all right, she mostly manages to make it work....

No free link. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of this morning's Journal and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to the complete text of my review, plus many other good things. (If you're already a subscriber, you'll find it here.)

P.S. Maud went to see The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with me. To find out what she thought of it, go here.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has posted a free link to the first half of this week's drama column, in which I discuss My Name Is Rachel Corrie. To read it, go here.

Posted October 20, 12:00 PM

TT: Much obliged

Hugs and kisses to the many readers who responded promptly to last week's queries, much obliged. Herewith, the answers.

- Did Art Blakey really say this?

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.

He sure did. The source is the interview with Blakey published in Art Taylor's book Notes and Tones.

- Did Betty Comden and Adolph Green really write a song whose lyrics succinctly summarized famous books? Yes, indeed. It's a revue number called "Reader's Digest." Nobody came up with the complete lyrics, but here are some pertinent excerpts:

Les Misérables:

Jean Valjean, no evildoer,
Stole some bread ‘cause he was poor.
A detective chased him through a sewer.
The end.

Henrik Willem Van Loon's Story of Mankind:

The rule was eat or you'll get ate.
Man came along and stood up straight.
The end.

Gone With the Wind:

Scarlett O'Hara's a spoiled pet,
She wants everything that she can get.
The one thing she can't get is Rhett.
The end.

For the record, the other books "digested" in the song are Romeo and Juliet, War and Peace, Mein Kampf, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, and the complete works of Sigmund Freud.

Posted October 20, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"A man cannot forgive being made to look foolish."

Graham Greene, Travels With My Aunt

Posted October 20, 12:00 PM

October 19, 2006

TT: Those who can do, blog

George Hunka (a/k/a Mr. Superfluities) and Isaac Butler (a/k/a Mr. Parabasis) are two of the smartest theater bloggers around. They are also gifted theater professionals, and I just got back from the opening night of their latest collaboration. In Public is a play written by George and directed by Isaac. This is its second off-off-Broadway production. I saw the premiere a year ago and was impressed. I found it even more impressive this time around.

In Public is the dark, discomfiting tale of two uneasily married couples whose lives become entangled. George describes it this way:

In Public is a play about two married couples over a long weekend in which desires may or may not be fulfilled; we don't know, since it's played out in public spaces; we're not allowed into their private spheres, either of the couples or of the individual characters themselves. So we interpret: We decide what we can know about them based on their very stylized, self-consciously constructed public characters. Sometimes the persona doesn't match the true self (which is always undergoing renovation) at all; sometimes it matches the self to a considerable depth and extent. It's also about how much we choose to open ourselves to our closest partners and to near-complete strangers, and the personal risks involved in each kind of contact.

That's a very intellectual-sounding statement, as well it should be, George being a very serious intellectual. Yet one of the most striking things about In Public is that it's really funny--but in a way that makes you snicker and squirm at the same time. This is a play full of unnerving silences that crackle with unspoken anger, then are filled by uncomfortable laughter. Isaac has staged it with cool, crisp simplicity, and the five superb actors who make up the cast each give sharply individual performances that stick in the mind. Best of all is Jennifer Gordon Thomas, a remarkable performer who has great things ahead of her.

In Public is the first production of theatre minima, a new ensemble founded by George Hunka with "the intent of stripping the theatre to its essential elements--the living body and the spoken word." It runs through next Tuesday at manhattantheatresource. I recommend it enthusiastically.

For more information, go here.

Posted October 19, 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 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:
- A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
- 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)
- Heartbreak House (drama, G/PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Dec. 10)
- Jay Johnson: The Two and Only (one-ventriloquist show, G/PG-13, a bit of strong language but otherwise family-friendly, 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:
- The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)
- Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

Posted October 19, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"'All the world's a stage,' of course, but a metaphor as general as that loses all its meaning. Only a second-rate actor could have written such a line out of pride in his second-rate calling. There were occasions when Shakespeare was a very bad writer indeed. You can see how often in books of quotations. People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations."

Graham Greene, Travels With My Aunt

Posted October 19, 12:00 PM

October 18, 2006

TT: Almanac

"Understand once and for all that I am not interested in economy. I am over seventy-five, so that it is unlikely I will live longer than another twenty-five years. My money is my own and I do not intend to save for the sake of an heir. I made many economies in my youth and they were fairly painless because they young do not particularly care for luxury. They have other interests than spending and can make love satisfactorily on a Coca-Cola, a drink which is nauseating in age. They have little idea of real pleasure: even their love-making is apt to be hurried and incomplete. Luckily in middle age pleasure begins, pleasure in love, in wine, in food."

Graham Greene, Travels With My Aunt

Posted October 18, 12:00 PM

TT: Fraught

Too much to do! Not enough time! Yesterday was bad, today will be worse, and I'm leaving town tomorrow, not for fun (though I expect to have some anyway).

Expect no postings today. Not from me, anyway. Are you out there, OGIC?

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Anyone whose job is writing and who has time and energy left over to do this blogorama needs to have his Check Engine codes read out. On the other hand, anyone who likes the 1943 recording of Wild Bill Davison doing "That's A-Plenty" can't be all that bad.

You got me, pal. I think I'll knock off for twenty minutes and go listen to some righteous jazz.

Posted October 18, 7:18 AM

October 17, 2006

TT: For the record

Here's a line from Thursday's Wall Street Journal that caught my eye. The author is referring to the announcement of the finalists for this year's National Book Awards:

Judges chose, and presumably read, from 1,259 books submitted by publishers.

Readers with long memories won't need to be reminded of the reason for that skeptical "presumably," but for the benefit of those who have better things to do than read everything Michael Kinsley writes, he's to blame.

As for me, I was one of the judges for the 2003 nonfiction award, and wrote about the selection process here:

We considered 436 books (some of them very, very briefly, but they all got talked about at some point in the past few months). We never raised our voices, never argued with one another, never got angry. Our deliberations were civilized, collegial, and great fun. When we met yesterday afternoon to make our final selection, it was the first time all five of us had been in the same room at once--we mostly deliberated via e-mail and in conference calls--and the atmosphere, far from being tense, was positively festive.

In case I didn't make myself clear, let me say unequivocally that I read some of all 436 books. I don't claim to have read all of them, or all of most of them, or very much of some of them--but, then, anyone who's reviewed a book knows that you don't have to read very far in certain books to know that they're no damn good.

I might add that I haven't read a single one of this year's finalists, though two of them are on my list of books I'd like to read. (In fact, I hadn't even heard of most of them.) Alas, those who write for a living must ration their literary intake severely! Besides, now that I no longer review books other than occasionally, I find it an incredible luxury to be able to read only what interests me, and nothing more. Time is a lovely thing to waste--so long as you get to decide how to waste it.

Posted October 17, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccessful, not money or even power."

Graham Greene, Travels With My Aunt

Posted October 17, 12:00 PM

October 16, 2006

TT: Travels with my laptop

I spent most of last week deep in the woods of Connecticut, where I worked on Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. When not clicking away at the laptop, I watched In Cold Blood (about which more later in the week), Journey into Fear, The Lady from Shanghai, and Our Man in Havana, read Simon Callow's Orson Welles: Hello Americans, Graham Greene's Travels With My Aunt, Chester Himes' Blind Man With a Pistol, Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and Patrick Süskind's Perfume, and ate a bisonburger at a bikers' hangout called (incongruously) the Vanilla Bean Café where the yuppie-style food is tasty and the clientele...er, unlikely.

I emerged from hiding long enough to make a side trip to Amherst College, where I gave a lecture called "The Critic as Moralist" in which I varied a few of my favorite themes:

In writing about art, I don't moralize, nor do I look with favor upon artists who do. In fact, I regard it as a major part of my job to be on the lookout for people who prefer moralizing to beauty, no matter what disguise they may happen to be wearing. Such folk are ever and always with us, perhaps never more so than at the present moment, when beauty is besieged the world over by a two-pronged army of totalitarians and utilitarians, the first of whom wish to enlist art in the service of politics and the second of whom seek to seduce its creators with the promise of profit beyond the dreams of avarice.

While at Amherst I visited the Mead Art Museum, a teaching museum whose best-known piece is Robert Henri's Salome. The permanent collection isn't all that striking, but the Mead makes the most of what it has, especially the first-class Joseph Cornell box displayed in a vitrine placed next to a floor-to-ceiling window through which you can see a slice of the Berkshire Mountains, a real-life landscape that contrasts delightfully with Cornell's imaginary world. I went there to check out George Bellows: A Ringside Seat, a smart little exhibition devoted mostly to lithographs and works on paper, though I was no less impressed by "Gifts from the Ebb Tide" and the World of Kitagawa Utamaro, which made me feel--not for the first time--that I really need to start teaching myself about Japanese art.

I would have been more than happy to spend another week in Connecticut--I never have enough time to spend on Hotter Than That in New York--but duty called, so I dutifully returned home to catch a preview of My Name Is Rachel Corrie and prepare for the coming week. This morning I'm off to the Metropolitan Museum for the press view of Americans in Paris, 1860-1900. (Will you be there, CultureGrrl? If so, peel an eye for me.) On Tuesday I'll be talking to the fellows of the NEA's third annual Arts Journalism Institute about the new media and the fine arts. On Thursday I head back up to Connecticut to poke my head into the Wadsworth Atheneum and see Hartford Stage's production of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit, about which I hear very interesting buzz. On Sunday I return to New York for a press preview of Butley, Nathan Lane's new show. Whew!

That reminds me: I dreamed last Friday that I lost $214,000 playing poker with Nathan Lane, who promptly sold my marker to the mob. Go figure.

Posted October 16, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books."

Graham Greene, Travels With My Aunt

Posted October 16, 12:00 PM

October 13, 2006

TT: On a sinking ship

I review two Broadway shows in this morning's Wall Street Journal, the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Heartbreak House and the Manhattan Theatre Club's production of Losing Louie:

George Bernard Shaw used to be a near-constant presence on Broadway. Now he's history. The Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of "Heartbreak House" is only the second Shaw play (not counting "My Fair Lady") to be seen there since 1993. Could it be that American audiences have finally tired of the garrulous Irishman who devoted his long life to telling the world how to fix itself? Perhaps--but I hope not. Though Shaw could be a frightful bore, his best plays have remained vibrantly stage-worthy, and "Heartbreak House," the oddest and least characteristic of them, has grown ever more contemporary in the 86 years since it was first performed on Broadway. This production features some fine acting, and if the overall results are no better than goodish, Shaw's intentions still come through clearly.

Shaw called "Heartbreak House" "a fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes," by which he meant to suggest a resemblance to the rambling, atmospheric plotlessness of the plays of Chekhov. (Most of Shaw's own plays, by contrast, are linear to a fault.) It starts off, however, in the cozy manner of a good old-fashioned weekend-in-the-country comedy, the kind in which unsuspecting visitors to an English country house find themselves swept up in amusing romantic hijinks. But Captain Shotover (Philip Bosco), the octogenarian sailor whose living room looks strangely like the stern gallery of a sailing ship, is half-senile--or seems to be--and the other members of his family turn out to be as amusing as a basketful of unfed snakes....

If you think Broadway doesn't produce enough unfunny comedies of its own, you'll be happy to hear that Simon Mendes da Costa's "Losing Louie" has made its way from London to the Manhattan Theatre Club's Biltmore Theatre, where it came perilously close to putting me to sleep....

No free link. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of today's paper and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to the complete text of my review. (If you're already a subscriber, you'll find it here.)

Posted October 13, 12:00 PM

TT: Broadway gets real

In my next "Sightings" column, to be published in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I consider the wider implications of the revival of Grease that opens on Broadway in June. The stars of this production will be chosen not by the director or producers, but by the viewers of You're the One That I Want, an NBC reality-TV series that makes its debut later this season. Yes, it's a gimmick--but I have a sneaking feeling that when all is said and done, You're the One That I Want will prove to have been a very significant episode in the history of commercial theater in America.

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

Posted October 13, 12:00 PM

TT: Not-so-random music notes

- I was interviewed by the BBC last week for Pods and Blogs, a radio series on which I discussed my recent Wall Street Journal column about YouTube and the fine arts. The interview aired on Tuesday. To listen via streaming audio, go here. (If you're in a hurry, my segment starts roughly forty-four minutes into the hour.)

- Doug Ramsey, a/k/a Mr. Rifftides, reported the other day on a fascinating concert by the Bill Mays Trio (a group I admire without reserve) that blended jazz and classical music to what sounds like brilliant effect. To read what he wrote, go here. I mention it because Doug is now reporting that part of the concert will be broadcast in streaming audio via the Web this coming Sunday at four o'clock Eastern. For further details, go here.

Should the broadcast not fit into your schedule, you can get a taste of the Bill Mays Trio on its own by purchasing this CD. I commend it to your attention.

- A reader reports that Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times recently delivered himself of this one-sentence summary of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungs:

Wotan, the king of the gods, driven by lust and power, makes bad bargains and then is forced by his wife to contend with their consequences, losing control of the world in the process.

That is, if I do say so myself, pretty damn neat. I seem to remember a Comden and Green lyric that dealt no less efficiently with the plots of a number of classic novels, but I'm away from my library this week and so can't check it out for myself. Can anyone out there oblige me?

- Another reader passes on this quote from the great jazz drummer Art Blakey:

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.

No source, alas--I've done a bit of surfing to try and track it down, but everyone cites it without identifying the occasion on which Blakey said it. Having spent more than a little bit of my spare time running down alleged remarks by H.L. Mencken that turned out to be apocryphal, I'm reluctant to accept it as authentic without a source. Once again, I'd appreciate a steer in the right direction.

Posted October 13, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it."

Thornton Wilder, interview, The Paris Review, Winter 1956

Posted October 13, 12:00 PM

October 12, 2006

TT: For Britten fans (and foes) only

Mr. Something Old, Nothing New, a/k/a Jaime J. Weinman, has found and posted a link to a YouTube clip of Little Miss Britten, Dudley Moore's knowing spoof of a Benjamin Britten folksong arrangement as sung by Peter Pears. (It was part of Beyond the Fringe, the now-legendary 1960 revue written and performed by Moore, Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, and Jonathan Miller.) Jaime correctly describes it as "the greatest classical-music parody of all time." I sent it to an opera coach who plays a lot of Britten, and she promptly wrote back, "This is the funniest thing I've ever, ever seen." I might add that she loves Britten's music. So do I--and so did Moore, who claimed that he wrote "Little Miss Britten" "out of absolute love and admiration for Britten and with no malice aforethought at all." Alas, it won't make any sense unless you know the original, but if you do, you'll laugh so hard as to run the risk of self-injury.

I love parody and wish in vain that I had a gift for it. As I wrote a couple of years ago, I believe it to be "one of the most powerful and illuminating forms of criticism." Fortunately, the complete text of the greatest of all literary parodies, Max Beerbohm's A Christmas Garland, is now available online via Project Gutenberg, and I commend it to your attention.

The best-known of the Christmas Garland parodies is "The Mote in the Middle Distance," Beerbohm's lethally exact sendup of H*nry J*m*s' late style:

It was with the sense of a, for him, very memorable something that he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively, left it.

It's splendidly wicked, but I confess to preferring "P.C., X, 36," in which R*d**rd K*pl*ng gets his:

I had spent Christmas Eve at the Club, listening to a grand pow-wow between certain of the choicer sons of Adam. Then Slushby had cut in. Slushby is one who writes to newspapers and is theirs obediently "HUMANITARIAN." When Slushby cuts in, men remember they have to be up early next morning.

For those of you who weren't reading "About Last Night" back in 2004, here is Hugh Kingsmill's parody of A.E. Housman, which is equally good--and equally cruel.

(For more about Beyond the Fringe, go here.)

Posted October 12, 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:
- A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
- 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)
- Jay Johnson: The Two and Only (one-ventriloquist show, G/PG-13, a bit of strong language but otherwise family-friendly, 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:
- The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)
- Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
- Seven Guitars (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sunday)

Posted October 12, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"The Devil lays eggs in idle palms."

Julian Jebb (quoted in Robert Hughes, Things I Didn't Know: A Memoir)

Posted October 12, 12:00 PM

October 11, 2006

TT: Elsewhere

Here are some gems gleaned from my recent voyages into cyberspace:

- Mr. Modern Art Notes holds forth on the genius of Richard Diebenkorn, making an important point in passing:

A few weeks ago I was chatting with a chief curator about a Richard Diebenkorn painting in one of his galleries. "You know," I said. "It's remarkable that there's never been a full, comprehensive Ocean Park survey exhibit."

The curator paused. "Are you sure about that?" he said, less asking than implying I should double-check Diebenkorn's exhibition history.

"Completely sure," I said. "There's never been a Berkeley show either. It's bizarre. It's probably the contemporary art show most in need of being done."

The curator was still disbelieving, but allowed me my fervor. It's true. There's never been a museum (or gallery, for that matter) exhibit surveying the paintings, the drawings, the paintings-on-paper, or the three together....

Or, I might add, the related prints. You won't find one in the Teachout Museum, alas--I haven't got that kind of money to throw around--but I am the proud owner of an etching by Diebenkorn, who would be universally acknowledged as one of the greatest American artists of the twentieth century had he not made the fatal mistake of living and working in California. Even now, far too many New Yorkers suffer from the wildly mistaken notion that the West Coast is an aesthetic desert. I don't know where they picked it up--probably from Woody Allen.

- Speaking of the West Coast, Mr. Anecdotal Evidence serves up the best capsule description of Raymond Chandler's special gifts I've read, my own feeble attempts included. Here's part of it:

Chandler's literary conscience was bothered by the genre in which he had chosen to work. Part of him wished to write "heavy novels." We can be grateful he never did, because the hard-boiled detective story enabled him to indulge his strengths, minimize or ignore his weaknesses and create great books that continue to give dependable pleasure to readers. "All of which is to say that gusto thrives on freedom, and freedom in art, as in life, is the result of a discipline imposed by ourselves," as Marianne Moore once wrote in a very different context....

Read the whole thing. It won't take long.

- The Little Professor has sailed off the deep end:

It's official: I share the house with six thousand books...

Alas, I have also exhausted my supply of downstairs walls. (As I live in a Cape Cod, upstairs walls are in somewhat short supply. Or, rather, the upstairs walls are both short and in short supply.) My parents have already suggested building stacks--not to mention another room--but I think that there may be other, more creative, alternatives....

I especially like her idea for "floating, inflatable bookcases," which reminds me of my favorite line from Mark Helprin's Memoir from Antproof Case: "I had had wonderful ideas all my life--the antigravity box, the camel ranch in Idaho, artillery mail--but I had never been able to translate them into reality."

- Why aren't blogbooks selling? Brenda Coulter, a romance novelist who blogs on the side, offers some sensible observations, accompanied by this amusing aside:

Publishers haven't been offering big-name bloggers contracts for novels. And rightly so, because wit and erudition on a blog aren't reliable indicators of talent for fiction-writing....I'm an effusive admirer of Terry Teachout's writing. But even this fangirl doesn't assume he'd make a brilliant novelist. For all I know, he'd stink at fiction.

Alas, I would and do, as I confessed in this space two years ago.

- Ms. Light Reading draws a distinction:

In English English clever seems to be a clearer term of praise, for something like what Americans would just call "smart," but often when I use "clever" it is not a compliment....

Ditto.

- Mr. Jerry Jazz Musician asked a cast of very interesting characters, including Ahmad Jamal, Roger Kellaway, John Pizzarelli, and Nancy Wilson, to name "the five greatest albums (LP or CD) of all time." The answers he got are--to put it mildly--illuminating.

- By way of Ms. Althouse, here's Alice Cooper on politics:

"You won't find any political songs, excepted for ‘Elected,' which is a satire, on my records. You're never going to find me promoting this candidate over that candidate because I'm sitting there going, ‘Why should people who like my music...vote for the guy I'm voting for?'" Cooper said. "Asking me who to vote for is like asking the guy who makes your pizza who to vote for."

- Frank Sinatra or Perry Como? You decide:

When I became a drummer and moved from New Jersey to Las Vegas to live and work full time, the first thing my dad and uncles would ask me when I would come home to Jersey on visits was: "So, Ron, are you screwing those showgirls silly?" Or, "So, Ron, have you gotten to see Frank and Dino in Vegas? I'll bet there's tons of gorgeous cooze hangin' around them all the time, begging to screw them--am I right?"

On the other hand, when they discussed Perry, the men were equally reverential but about his sound family values. My father and my uncles all said, more than once in one form or another: "You know Ron, Perry Como, he goes to church with his family every week and he doesn't fool around on his wife. He's a good man. He used to be a barber you know, so underneath he's like us, a working man. He doesn't let his success go to his head."

So what does an impressionable young man do with these conflicting moral positions?...

I recently presented this Frank versus Perry ethical dilemma to one of my cousins. I concluded my story by asking him: "So, what do you make of this?" He thought for a moment, and then with a silly grin on his face, said: "I think the solution is to be a barber and screw a lot of beautiful women."

Again, read the whole thing.

- Finally, did you know that The New Yorker has only one subscriber in Albania?

Posted October 11, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"I was just thinking the other day that I was born in 1939 and so, all my life, people I don't know have been trying to kill me. The Germans dropped bombs on my house in London and I remember my mother saying: better sleep under the stairs. Then it was the Russians, then the Irish, now another lot of terrorists. I'm starting to accept that I'm a marked man."

Alan Ayckbourn, interview, The Guardian (Oct. 4, 2006)

Posted October 11, 12:00 PM

October 10, 2006

TT: Make me smile

As I was soaring through the skies of Pennsylvania the other day, my iPod served up Leopold Stokowski's 1937 recording of Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice (not currently available on CD, alas). You may know it as the piece to which Mickey Mouse nearly drowned in Fantasia. No sooner did it start playing than I broke out in a broad grin. The Sorcerer's Apprentice always does that to me--and did so long before I ever saw Fantasia. It's one of the many pieces of music that has the mysterious power to make me happy.

Readers of this posting will recall that I've been reading Daniel J. Levitin's This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Among the many tasty tidbits of research-derived fact tucked into its pages is this delicious nugget:

The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is the center of the brain's reward system, playing an important role in pleasure and addiction. The NAc is active when gamblers win a bet, or drug users take their favorite drug. It is also closely involved with the transmission of opioids in the brain, through its ability to release the neurotransmitter dopamine. Avram Goldstein had shown in 1980 that the pleasure of music listening could be blocked by administering the drug nalaxone, believed to interfere with dopamine in the nucleus accumbens....

The rewarding and reinforcing aspects of listening to music seem, then, to be mediated by increasing dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens, and by the cerebellum's conribution to regulating emotion through its connections to the frontal lobe and the limbic system. Current neuropsychological theories associate positive mood and affect with increased dopamine levels, one of the reasons that many of the newer antidepressants act on the dopaminergic system. Music is clearly a means for improving people's moods. Now we think we know why.

To which I reply: I thought so. I've always found music to be one of the most potent means of attitude adjustment known to man, and now science has proved it. Ha!

All of which inspires me to pass along this list of things to which I listen whenever I feel the urgent need to upgrade my mood:

- Debussy's L'isle joyeuse
- Stan Kenton's recording of Gerry Mulligan's "Young Blood"
- Bernstein's Candide Overture
- Wild Bill Davison's 1943 recording of "That's A-Plenty" (turned up very loud)
- Luciana Souza's "Doce de Coco" (from Brazilian Duos)
- Noël Coward's "Uncle Harry"
- Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Lookin' Out My Back Door"
- The Band's "Up on Cripple Creek"
- Elgar's Cockaigne Overture
- The finale to Fauré's incidental music to Shylock (George Balanchine used it in Emeralds)
- The John Kirby Sextet's "It Feels So Good"
- Buddy Rich's 1966 live recording of "Love for Sale"
- Booker T. and the MGs' "Hip Hug-Her"
- Gershwin's An American in Paris
- Shostakovich's Festive Overture
- Johnny Cash's "Hey Porter"
- Deidre Rodman and Steve Swallow's "Famous Potatoes"
- Copland's "Buckaroo Holiday" (from Rodeo)
- Jelly Roll Morton's "Wolverine Blues" (with Baby and Johnny Dodds)
- The Who's "Shakin' All Over" (from Live at Leeds)
- The finale of Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber
- Blossom Dearie's "If I Were a Bell" (the version on Winchester in Apple Blossom Time
- The Dixieaires' "Joe Louis Was a Fighting Man"
- Donald Fagen's "Morph the Cat"
- Sidney Bechet's 1932 recording of "Maple Leaf Rag"
- Doc Watson's "Let the Cocaine Be"
- Lee Wiley's "You're a Sweetheart"
- Sergio Mendes' 1966 recording of "Mais Que Nada" (not the icky hip-hop remake, eeuuww!)
- Wesla Whitfield's "Lucky to Be Me"
- Mendelssohn's Rondo capriccioso
- The Dominoes' "Sixty Minute Man"
- Stephen Sondheim's "A Weekend in the Country" (from A Little Night Music)
- The first movement of Mozart's A Major Piano Concerto, K. 488
- Frank Sinatra's "Witchcraft"
- Steely Dan's "My Old School"
- Walton's Crown Imperial (as played by Frederick Fennell and the Eastman Wind Ensemble)
- Flatt and Scruggs' "Farewell Blues"
- Stan Getz and Bob Brookmeyer's "Open Country"
- The first movement of Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto
- R.E.M.'s "Radio Free Europe"
- The Beatles' "Revolution"
- Bill Monroe's "Rawhide"
- The first movement of Sibelius' Fifth Symphony
- Johann Strauss's Fledermaus Overture
- Gilbert and Sullivan's "Three little maids from school are we" (from The Mikado)
- Django Reinhardt's "Swing 42"
- Pretty much anything by Count Basie, Erroll Garner, Fats Waller, Haydn, or John Philip Sousa
- The sound of Louis Armstrong's voice

I don't guarantee results, but all of the items on this list can be counted on to give me a cheap, easy high--with no side effects.

Posted October 10, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"For of course I am completely an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the esthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it's an expert gardener at work, or a good carpenter chopping dovetails, or someone tying a Bimini hitch that won't slip. I don't think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unless the latter is a friend or a relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn't matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental, and boring stuff that saturates culture today, more (perhaps) than it ever has. I hate populist kitsch, no matter how much of the demos loves it. To me, it is a form of manufactured tyranny. Some Australians feel this is a confession of antidemocratic sin; but I am no democrat in the field of the arts, the only area--other than sports--in which human inequality can be displayed and celebrated without doing social harm."

Robert Hughes, Things I Didn't Know: A Memoir

Posted October 10, 12:00 PM

October 9, 2006

TT: Freshly set gems

I just added a very large number of new YouTube clips to the fine-arts/historical video-on-demand "network" about which I wrote in my recent Wall Street Journal column about YouTube. To view them--and hundreds of other equally interesting video and audio clips--go to the right-hand column and scroll down until you see Satchmo's name. The latest links are marked with asterisks.

As always, feel free to send me the URLs of any video or audio links of comparable quality that you'd like to see me post. (Also, be sure to let me know if any of the existing links have gone dead since I posted them.)

Enjoy!

Posted October 09, 12:00 PM

TT: Beyond the pigeonhole

Supermaud dangled a tasty bit of bait in front of my nose the other day:

Colin Burrow argues, while reviewing a new biography of John Donne, that "literary biography is intrinsically pernicious." I wonder how biographers, including my friend Terry Teachout (who penned a biography of H.L. Mencken, and talked a bit about the experience here), would respond.

I'll see you and raise you, Maudie.

First, though, here's the context for that nose-thumbing sound bite:

Literary biography is one of the background noises of our age. It's a decent, friendly sort of hum, like the Sunday papers or chatter on a train. It gives the punters a bit of history and a bit of literature, and perhaps a bit of gossip, and what's more it saves them the trouble of reading history. And poems too, for that matter. Not to mention the ordeal of ploughing through a load of literary criticism. But there are two respects in which literary biography is intrinsically pernicious, however well it's done. The first is that literary biographies need a thesis in order to catch the headlines. This can turn what ought to be a delicate art into a piece of problem-solving or a search for a key to a life....The other problem is that even the best examples can't entirely avoid the naive reduction of literature to evidence or symptom--epiphenomena which are brought about by, and potentially reducible to, biographical origins.

Yeah, well, O.K., I get the idea, and I even agree with it, sort of. Far too many new biographies--including a forthcoming book about a famous filmmaker that I read last week and will be reviewing later this year--are rigidly and reductively thesis-driven, an approach that never fails to remind me of what Earl Long, Huey's brother, said about Henry Luce, the founder of Time and Life: "Mr. Luce is like a man that owns a shoestore and buys all the shoes to fit himself. Then he expects other people to buy them."

I loathe biographers who nudge you in the ribs every few pages, sticking in pointed little reminders that the deeply suppressed sadomasochistic tendencies (or whatever) of Flannery O'Connor (or whoever) permeated her life and thought and insinuated their way into every page she wrote, blah blah blah. Who among us hasn't thrown up his hands in despair at the prospect of reading another such book, especially when it's nine hundred pages long? Repeat after me: show, don't tell. Let the reader draw his own conclusions. Or, as Our Lord and Master Henry James instructed us, Dramatize, dramatize!

On the other hand, I don't think my biographies are like that, and even if you beg to differ, I'm sure you can think of any number of biographies that fail to fill Colin Burrow's bill of attainder. Most people, after all, are complicated, and the biographer's job is to give literary shape to that complexity. Of course we simplify--every human utterance more elaborate than a wordless howl is an act of simplification--and on occasion we pocket pieces of the puzzle that don't fit our story line. Nevertheless, the smart biographer never papers over or tries to explain away his subject's inconsistencies. Instead, he treasures them, for they are the salt that gives savor to the story of a life.

For what it's worth, here are five first-rate biographies that in my opinion succeed in presenting clear, coherent accounts of their subject's lives without stooping to rigid reductiveness:

- W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson
- Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life
- Tim Page, Dawn Powell: A Biography
- Justin Spring, Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art
- Anthony Tommasini, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle

I will be sinfully proud if Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong ends up being half as good as any of these books.

Posted October 09, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Do you know the best service anyone could render to art? Destroy all biographies. Only art can explain the life of a man--and not the contrary."

Orson Welles (quoted in Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu)

Posted October 09, 12:00 PM

October 7, 2006

TT: On the job, 24/7

Sidle over to the right-hand column and you'll find lots of fresh stuff, including several new Top Five and Out of the Past picks and a number of additions to "Sites to See." (The new blogs are marked with asterisks.)

Alas, I've been too busy to hunt for new YouTube links, but I'll get around to it in the next couple of weeks. As always, I welcome your suggestions. In addition, please let me know if you should run across any dead links so that I can knock them off the list.

Posted October 07, 4:38 AM

October 6, 2006

TT: Gypsies in our souls

This has been a busy theatrical week, and so The Wall Street Journal kindly gave me extra space sufficient to review four revivals, two in New York and two in Minneapolis.

For most readers, the big news will be the return to Broadway of A Chorus Line:

Is it time to start feeling nostalgic for the '70s? The producers of the first Broadway revival of "A Chorus Line," which opened in 1975 and ran for 6,137 performances, clearly hope so. I'm part of their target market, for I saw the original road-show production some 30 years ago. It was my very first touring Broadway musical, and I remember it with undimmed affection. Alas, I didn't see "A Chorus Line" again until two nights ago, when I caught a preview of the current revival. Naturally, I wondered how such show-stoppers as "Dance, Ten; Looks, Three" and "What I Did for Love" had held up. I rejoice to say that they're as fresh as ever--and that they profit from the sumptuous singing and dancing of a superlative cast....

Would that Eric Bogosian's subUrbia had held up half so well:

First performed in 1994 and filmed two years later, "subUrbia" is the story (not that there's much of a story, but you know what I mean) of five suburban slackers who spend their days and nights hanging out in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven, getting high and/or drunk and wallowing in alienation. Unlike the half-crazed freaks whom Mr. Bogosian portrayed with feral intensity in his one-man shows, their dialogue fails to ring true--it sounds scripted, not overheard--and the melodramatic hoops through which their creator puts them don't add up to a plot....

The news from Minneapolis, by contrast, is largely good, though I didn't much care for the brand-new headquarters of the Guthrie Theater:

I'm not an architecture critic, but I do spend a lot of time in theater lobbies, and this one didn't do a thing for me: The low-ceilinged public areas are dark, oppressive and laid out with irksome illogic. Rarely can there have been a theater whose interior was less well suited to the purpose of making its occupants feel festive and expectant. The process of getting from the street to the Wurtele Thrust Stage, the largest of the three performance spaces, is so protracted--not to mention confusing--that I briefly had trouble focusing on the revival of Neil Simon's Lost in Yonkers that had lured me to town. Once I forgot the building and started thinking about the show, though, I very much liked what I saw....

Last year's Tony Award for regional theater went to Minneapolis' Theatre de la Jeune Lune, an avant-garde troupe with a zany sense of humor. Its off-center adaptations of the classics are performed in a crumbling turn-of-the-century downtown warehouse that the company has converted into a flexible, characterful performance space full of the charm that somehow got left out of the new Guthrie.

This fall Jeune Lune is presenting in alternating repertory its much-praised versions of two Molière plays, The Miser and "Tartuffe" (which opens Oct. 19). David Ball's hotted-up transformation of "The Miser" is so naughty that I don't dare quote any of the best lines verbatim, but the results are still basically true to the sardonic spirit of the 1667 play on which it is based. Likewise Dominique Serrand's staging, which is crammed full of baggy-pants mugging executed with the explosive energy of a ten-door farce....

No free link. To read the whole thing, pick up a copy of today's paper and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to the full text of my review. (If you're already a subscriber, you'll find it here.)

Posted October 06, 12:00 PM

TT: R.I.P.

Gene Janson died on Wednesday, twenty minutes into a matinée performance of Remy Bumppo Theatre Company's wonderful revival of Gore Vidal's The Best Man. (The Chicago Sun-Times story is here.) I saw the show, in which Janson played a terminally ill ex-president, during my recent visit to Chicago, and praised it extravagantly in last week's Journal.

Such deaths are far from unknown. I was sitting on the aisle at the Metropolitan Opera ten years ago when Richard Versalle collapsed and died during the opening night of a new production of Janacek's Makropulos Case. Still, they're rare--Versalle's onstage death was the only one I've seen--and I have a feeling that their extreme rarity has something to do with the show-must-go-on ethic that infuses the theatrical profession. Nothing short of the physical equivalent of a bolt of lightning will stop most actors from finishing a performance once the house lights go down and the curtain goes up. This iron determination is a sign of their passionate belief in the enduring importance of theater. To the civilian it must seem a bit crazy, but it is out of such craziness that beauty is born.

Our Girl in Chicago and I offer our condolences to Janson's family, friends, and colleagues. We hope they find consolation in the knowledge that he died in the line of duty.

Posted October 06, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"There is no way to connect with simplicity when how complexity feels has been forgotten."

John Maeda, The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life

Posted October 06, 12:00 PM

October 5, 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)
- Jay Johnson: The Two and Only* (one-ventriloquist show, G/PG-13, a bit of strong language but otherwise family-friendly, 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:
- The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)
- Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
- Seven Guitars (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, extended through Oct. 15)

Posted October 05, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Wanda, do you have any idea what it's like being English? Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of, of doing the wrong thing, of saying to someone ‘Are you married?' and hearing ‘My wife left me this morning,' or saying, uh, ‘Do you have children?' and being told they all burned to death on Wednesday. You see, Wanda, we'll all terrified of embarrassment. That's why we're so...dead. Most of my friends are dead, you know, we have these piles of corpses to dinner."

John Cleese, screenplay for A Fish Called Wanda

Posted October 05, 12:00 PM

TT: Up to the nanosecond

I got tagged with this meme on Tuesday. Turns out that I already answered it two months ago, and so did OGIC!

Never let it be said that we're not on our toes around here....

Posted October 05, 11:30 AM

TT: Uncommonly hopeful

I'm getting a lot of e-mail about this posting. So far, this is is the letter I've liked best:

I'm always a little amused when I catch someone--including myself--lamenting the supposed demise of "common culture." I think we all feel a sense of loss when younger generations don't recognize things we thought were important and lasting when we were their age. But we tend to take for granted the amazing amount that does get passed on. I'd bet, for instance, that a higher percentage of college kids recognize "West End Blues" today than in 1978...or 1938.

I'd also bet that a very high percentage of contemporary high school kids could recognize over half of Levitin's list--probably way more than half if even a little prompting was provided.

This is just anecdotal evidence, but about five years ago on a trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I heard a class of black second graders on a field trip provide perfect, spontaneous accompaniment for the Isley Brothers "Who's That Lady" when it came over the loudspeakers. Later the same day I saw two twelve-year-old white girls walking along singing "Stop In The Name of Love" and doing those old Supremes' hand motions while they walked. Granted those kids were in a museum, which implies that somebody cared about passing this stuff on, but then again, most kids have SOMEBODY in their life who fills that function. In the case of pop music, the general culture helps out more than usual, but even in areas like literature, painting, etc. it happens a lot more than we think.

On the other hand, if somebody actually could kill off common culture, it would be the sort of person who is asked to explain rock and roll with six records and uses one of his picks on "Wonderful Tonight."

(...Though I would love to know which record or six "explained" Elvis to the octogenarian scientist and therefore placed him well beyond the level of collective understanding thus far obtained by three generations of rock critics.)

Anyway, long time reader who's never e-mailed before. It's a fun topic so I hope you get lots of feedback.

How nice to find a ray of hope in my mailbox!

Posted October 05, 3:28 AM

October 4, 2006

TT: Uncommonly tuneful

How many of these songs do you know well enough to whistle?

- "All My Ex's Live in Texas"
- "Back in Black"
- "Blowin' in the Wind"
- "China Girl"
- "Hot Fun in the Summertime"
- "Hotel California"
- "Instant Karma"
- "Jailhouse Rock"
- "Jolene"
- "Light My Fire"
- "Maria"
- "Money"
- "My Favorite Things"
- "Over the Rainbow"
- "Roxanne"
- "Satisfaction"
- "Sheep"
- "Superstition"
- "That'll Be the Day"
- "We Will Rock You"

No, this isn't a test. Here's why I'm asking: Daniel J. Levitin uses these songs as illustrations in the opening chapters of his new book This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession ("For example, the main accompaniment to ‘Superstition' by Stevie Wonder is played on only the black keys of the keyboard"). Obviously, he's assuming that most of his readers will know most of the songs he cites. Is he right to do so?

As I read This Is Your Brain on Music, I remembered the ear-training class I took thirty-one years ago as a freshman music major, in which we learned to recognize the various musical intervals by associating them with well-known pop tunes in which they figure prominently. That list of songs, like the ones found in Daniel Levetin's book, assumed the existence of a common stock of musical reference--the musical equivalent of what E.J. Hirsch has dubbed "cultural literacy."

It happens that two of the songs used by my old teacher are also on Levetin's list. I suspect that "Over the Rainbow" (octave) is still a safe choice in 2006, and I sincerely hope that "Maria" (tritone) is as well. But tastes have changed greatly since 1975, and I doubt that a modern-day ear-training instructor would be likely to use "Bali H'ai" to teach his charges how to recognize a major seventh.

On the other hand, what would he use? Now that the common culture in which I grew up has been fractured beyond repair by postmodern multiculturalism, is it still possible to come up with a list of twenty pop songs that are familiar to a majority of Americans between the ages of fifteen and fifty?

(For the record, I know fifteen of the songs on Levetin's list well enough to hum them more or less accurately--but I'm not saying which ones.)

While we're on the subject, allow me to pass on another list gleaned from This Is Your Brain on Music. An octogenarian scientist who knew nothing about rock asked Levitin to "come over for dinner one night and play six songs that captured all that was important to know about rock and roll....The night before he called to tell me that he had heard Elvis Presley, so I didn't need to cover that."

These are the songs he brought to dinner:

- "Long Tall Sally," Little Richard
- "Roll Over Beethoven," the Beatles
- "All Along the Watchtower," Jimi Hendrix
- "Wonderful Tonight," Eric Clapton
- "Little Red Corvette," Prince
- "Anarchy in the U.K.," the Sex Pistols

I don't know what I think of his list, but it inspired me to ask myself a related question: what six records would I play for someone who'd never heard any jazz and wanted to know what it sounds like? Back in 1999 I published a list of sixty-five "recorded masterpieces" of jazz in Commentary. I'd stand by it today--but six?

Naturally, I had to try, if only for fun, though in the end I found it impossible to get the job done without throwing in a seventh side. Here are my picks:

- "West End Blues," Louis Armstrong (1928)
- "King Porter Stomp," Benny Goodman Orchestra, composed by Jelly Roll Morton and arranged by Fletcher Henderson (1935)
- "A Sailboat in the Moonlight," Billie Holiday with Lester Young (1937)
- "Shaw 'Nuff," Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker (1945)
- "'Round Midnight," Miles Davis with John Coltrane, composed by Thelonious Monk and arranged by Gil Evans (1956)
- "Ramblin'," Ornette Coleman (1959)
- "Unquity Road," Pat Metheny (1975)

I invite your comment.

Posted October 04, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Shakespeare's plays are works of philosophy--philosophy not argued but shown."

Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life

Posted October 04, 12:00 PM

October 3, 2006

TT: Stiff competition

Earlier today I sat on a rowing machine at the gym and watched with mounting amazement as the plasma TV screens above my head flashed the latest bulletins about Mark Foley and the shootings in Pennsylvania. The thought occurred to me that these must be hard times for the aspiring novelist, what with life constantly upping the ante on imagination, and no sooner did that thought flash through my mind than I found myself recalling these words of advice to the writer of fiction:

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make them appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock--to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures.

Flannery O'Connor said that--forty-nine years ago. Plus ça change....

Posted October 03, 12:21 PM

TT: The best we can do

It occurred to me after writing this posting that I'd used the phrase "Man cannot live by masterpieces alone" in print before, so I Googled it. Sure enough, I found it in a review of Spider-Man that I published in Crisis four years ago. Some of what I wrote then is very much to the point now.

* * *

Criticism, it seems, is a risky business. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, several reviewers who panned Star Wars: Episode II--Attack of the Clones received death threats via e-mail, along with sundry other communications of somewhat lower voltage. This one caught my eye: "The mere fact that you actually get payed [sic] to write movie reviews is the last shred of proof I need to rule out the existance [sic] of God."

Not wanting to shake anybody's faith, I decided I could live without seeing Attack of the Clones, but I went out of my way to catch Spider-Man. The tug of nostalgia proved irresistible: I have fond memories of reading "Spider-Man" comic books as a boy. More recently, I taught a course in criticism at a large Eastern university this past year, and I was struck by how many of my students were interested in writing about today's comics and had smart things to say about them. Having praised Ghost World last year, I figured I should give Spider-Man at least as fair a shake.

On top of all this, I felt it was time to make a preemptive strike on snobbery. The other day I gave a talk about movies to a roomful of priests, one of whom asked me if I reviewed only "highbrow" movies. Considering that I'd just showed them Comanche Station, a Randolph Scott Western, the question seemed a bit odd, but I happily explained that I liked and wrote about all kinds of movies. In fact, my guess is that I've spent more time watching popular movies than art films--and gotten more pleasure out of them, too....

Spider-Man is a movie to which you can safely send the kids, and even accompany them without sentencing yourself to two hours' worth of agonized squirming. But I'd never pretend for a moment that it's anything more than a piece of pretty good, morally unobjectionable trash, and as I left the theater, I couldn't help but ask myself: is unobjectionable trash really the best we can hope for out of American popular culture circa 2002?

"As if you could kill time without injuring eternity," Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, a book I judged to be a masterpiece not long after I put aside my comic books. I know better now, and I also know that there is a great deal to be said for pure frivolity. Man cannot live by masterpieces alone, not even bona fide ones.

On the other hand, take a look at this list of non-highbrow movies released a half-century ago: The African Queen, The Bad and the Beautiful, The Big Sky, Five Fingers, The Greatest Show on Earth, High Noon, Hangman's Knot, Kansas City Confidential, The Lusty Men, Monkey Business, The Narrow Margin, Pat and Mike, The Quiet Man, Ride the Man Down, Singin' in the Rain, and Son of Paleface. The only things these films have in common are that they were all made in Hollywood and that I happen to like them. Not one opened in an art house (though several are now regarded as classics and can be seen on museum series). If they are representative of what Americans regarded as routine movie-house fare in 1952, then what does that say about America in 2002? Nothing very good, I fear.

Posted October 03, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"An important part of every writer's task is to use proper names judiciously. Shakespeare's names--Ophelia, Prospero, Caliban, Portia, Bottom, Titania, Malvolio--summon character and plot, and also seem to light up regions of the human psyche, so that we can say, knowing what we mean and without other words to express it, ‘I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.' And what poem makes greater use of a name than the one from which I have just quoted?"

Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life

Posted October 03, 12:00 PM

October 2, 2006

TT: WhoseTube? ArtsTube!

In case you missed it, The Wall Street Journal posted a free link over the weekend to my "Sightings" column about YouTube and the fine arts:

YouTube, like the other new Web-based media, is a common carrier, a means to whatever ends its millions of users choose, be they good, bad, dumb or ugly. You can use it to watch mindless junk--or some of the greatest classical and jazz musicians of the 20th century....

To read the whole thing, go here.

If you've followed the Journal's link to this site in order to check out my list of YouTube fine-arts links, go to the right-hand column and scroll down until you see Satchmo's name.

Posted October 02, 12:00 PM

TT: Points north

I went to Minneapolis-St. Paul for the first time two years ago to give a lecture at Minnesota Public Radio, but I had to fly back to New York the next day. Last Friday I returned at last, this time to see plays at Theatre de la Jeune Lune and the Guthrie Theater, and I made a point of staying for two nights, which gave me a bit of time to look around. (I would have had still more time were it not for the fact that the streets of Minneapolis appear to have been designed for the purpose of repelling boarders and confusing tourists.)

I started things off with a repeat visit to Minnesota Public Radio, where I had lunch with a roomful of producers from American RadioWorks, the documentary unit of American Public Media, whose programs include A Prairie Home Companion and Saint Paul Sunday. They wanted to talk to me about the possibility of doing a show based on my Louis Armstrong biography, so I spent an hour regaling them with Satchmo stories. I don't know what will come of it--maybe nothing--but they sure are smart.

Afterward I drove across town through appallingly heavy traffic to a anonymous-looking suburban office building that houses one of the most remarkable corporate art collections in America. As regular readers of this blog won't need to be reminded, I have a special affection for American modernism--that's what the Teachout Museum is all about--and a collector who shares my interest in what I think of as Phillips Collection-style art arranged for me to be given a private tour of the headquarters of the Regis Corporation, on whose walls hang hundreds of museum-quality paintings by such artists as Paul Cadmus, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Arnold Friedman, Marsden Hartley, Alfred Maurer, Fairfield Porter, Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella, George Tooker, John Twachtman, and Neil Welliver. Seventy-five of the best pieces are currently on display at Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in a show called Villa America: American Moderns, 1900-1950, but there was plenty of equally good stuff left behind for me to see, and I spent two and a half ecstatic hours poking my head into offices and goggling.

I had almost as much fun visiting the Minneapolis Institute of Arts on Saturday afternoon. The permanent collection lacks the focus and consistent excellence of, say, Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum or the nonpareil Cleveland Museum of Art, but it's still pretty damned impressive. I was delighted to make the acquaintance of Rembrandt's Lucretia, Chardin's Attributes of the Arts, John Peto's quietly haunting Reminiscences of 1865, Sargent's Luxembourg Gardens at Twilight, a lovely double portrait by Berthe Morisot, one of John Twachtman's most subtle landscapes, a spectacular pair of large-scale paintings by Bonnard and Vuillard, and an exquisite little 1942 Morandi still life of whose existence I was previously unaware.

I also drove out to the University of Minnesota's Weisman Art Museum, but that was a waste of time. The stainless-steel building, which opened in 1993, is one of Frank Gehry's celebrated exercises in postmodern rococo, pointlessly flamboyant on the outside and unexpectedly unmemorable within. The friend who put me in touch with the Regis Corporation had assured me that the permanent collection of American modernists was worth seeing, but next to none of it was on display, so that was that. I came away with the decided impression that the Weisman, like so many of the showy temples to art designed by starchitects in recent years, is less a museum than a hollow outdoor sculpture whose interior decoration is of secondary importance.

I had dinner with Lileks before heading over to Jeune Lune to see The Miser. We'd never met, but I felt at once as though I'd known him for years, a now-familiar byproduct of blogging. (I felt the same way when I met Maud.) He's shorter than I expected--for some reason I thought he'd be tall a