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February 28, 2007

TT: Life is unfair

I seem to have caught a cold. No doubt I picked it up last weekend in an airplane cabin, which doesn't make me any happier about it. How could I possibly have gotten sick just when I have to spend the whole day writing about Tom Stoppard for Commentary, followed by a trip to the theater district to see Alfred Molina in Howard Katz? Damn, damn, damn.

Ah, well, the hell with it. In the immortal words of James Burnham, if there's no alternative, there's no problem. Back to work.

Posted February 28, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

“I am pretty sure that, if you will be quite honest, you will admit that a good rousing sneeze, one that tears open your collar and throws your hair into your eyes, is really one of life’s sensational pleasures.”

Robert Benchley, “Hiccoughing Makes Us Fat”

Posted February 28, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Twinvalids

So what are the chances? Like Terry, I've been stricken with a vicious cold. Like Terry, I can't miss any work this week. Ergo, blogging cedes ground to sleeping this week. I'm about to knock myself out cold with some Theraflu and stay that way as long as the alarm will allow. Talk to you when I can sit up straight again.

Posted February 28, 11:19 AM

February 27, 2007

TT: In the barrel

As always after a long absence, I find my desk piled high with accumulated work that can't be put off. I spent Monday chipping away at it and expect to spend the rest of the week doing the same. Count on the usual almanac entries and theater-related postings, and Our Girl will hold forth as usual on Wednesday, but otherwise I have no immediate plans to hold forth in this space other than briefly.

See you when the smoke clears.

Posted February 27, 12:00 PM

TT: Springing eternal

Apropos of Monday’s posting about my visit to Los Angeles, a friend who now lives in New York writes:

I'm from California, and had a close college friend who lived in Santa Monica, but other than strolling along the Palisades—the romance of palm trees, and they really are so ridiculous as to have to be romantic—I never really spent any time in LA until a few years ago, the coldest winter, when a close friend and I took off for LA with some sort of pipe dream of leaving everything and moving—really, anywhere. Anywhere that was absolutely elsewhere. And LA, from what we knew (nothing, really), seemed like a pretty good fit.

It felt just like you said: where was the there? Avenues extended for miles and miles and then a tiny huddle of shops and cafes that the natives thought counted as a neighborhood. I suspect all the action happens indoors. Did you go inside any of the Spanish-style homes? They're laid out in such a luxurious way. Ample square rooms with windows on all sides and the palm trees leaning in. The rents are low. You can have space. I think people don't mind getting in their cars and driving to one another's houses because when they get there, they get to stretch their legs. Here we live in closets, which takes some of the appeal off spending an hour driving around in one.

The one thing, though, I really loved (vain creature that I am) is that whenever we would stop driving and go into some funky cafe, everyone would look up. The neighborhoods, such as they are, are so isolated from one another and at the same time so possible to get to—and people will drive—that anyone walking in the door could be someone you want to know. As a Californian, I loved that. I loved all that misplaced hope....

And I love that last sentence.

Posted February 27, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Certainly for us of the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, so many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of unity with ourselves in blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for the Greek within the simple terms of antique life. Yet, not less than ever, the intellect demands completeness, centrality."

Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance

Posted February 27, 12:00 PM

February 26, 2007

TT: Forget it, Jake

“I kissed him, but I never knew him,” Ingrid Bergman is supposed to have said about Humphrey Bogart. That’s sort of how I feel about my first visit to Los Angeles: I spent three days there, but I still don’t quite know what I saw.

Los Angelenos, I gather, are sensitive to stereotypes, especially the ones they come up with themselves. Now I understand why. I saw enough of their home town to know that it would take me a lifetime to see the rest of it, and though one cliché turned out to be painfully self-evident—the traffic is really, truly awful—I can’t say I found any of the others useful. I’ve never seen a city that was more resistant to generalization, not even the one in which I live.

Raymond Chandler famously claimed in The Little Sister that Los Angeles had “no more personality than a paper cup,” but that oft-quoted sideswipe deserves to be cited in context:

“I used to like this town,” I said, just to be saying something and not to be thinking too hard. “A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hills and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good hearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn’t that, but it wasn’t a neon-lighted slum either.…

“Now we get characters like this Steelgrave owning restaurants. We get guys like that fat boy that balled me out back there. We’ve got the big money, the sharp shooters, the percentage workers, the fast-dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago and Detroit—and Cleveland. We’ve got the flash restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them. The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the Lesbian dress designers, the riffraff of a big hardboiled city with no more personality than a paper cup….”

So quote Chandler if you will—I do it all the time—but remember that he was expressing the point of view of a grumpy, middle-aged nostalgia merchant who hated Los Angeles in 1949 because it wasn’t Los Angeles in 1919.

A better description of the city as it is now, or at least as it appeared to me last week, is to be found in Ted Gioia’s West Coast Jazz:

Los Angeles has no true neighborhoods—instead its distinctive cultures stretch out horizontally along specific streets. Hollywood Boulevard, Sunset Strip, Mulholland Drive, Olvera Street, Rodeo Drive, La Cienega—these are to Southern California what Greenwich Village and Soho are to New York. They are Los Angeles’ linear neighborhoods, its criss-crossing geometry of local colors. Each of these Southern California streets boasts a unique sensibility, one that defies city limits and zoning laws—a Sepulveda, a La Cienega might cut through a half-dozen separate townships without losing its special aura, although a couple blocks on either side of these thoroughfares city life collapse back into the faceless anonymity of cookie-cutter car culture. Travelers from other parts of the globe, faced with this specifically West Coast phenomenon, can see only urban sprawl—looking for village geography, they miss the stories encrusted alongside the pavement, the flora and fauna of the LA city street.

That’s the Los Angeles I saw, or thought I saw, and it’s so complicated that it’d be presumptous for me to say that I liked or disliked it. How can one affect to like or dislike a place so incorrigibly miscellaneous? Nothing there seems to fit together, just as nothing looks quite like you expect it to look. No sooner did I walk into the lobby of the Geffen Playhouse than I said to Stephanie Steward, the friend who showed me around town, “This place doesn’t look like a theater—it looks like an Italian restaurant.” The truth turned out to be even stranger: it was originally a Masonic clubhouse, just as my fancy boutique hotel had once been a Holiday Inn.

So what can I tell you about the City of Angels? Only what I saw with my own eyes. I saw two plays, both of them performed by well-established professional theater companies, of which Los Angeles and its environs have a goodly number. I saw Sunset Boulevard, Beverly Hills, and the Capitol Records building at Hollywood and Vine. I visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House and the Getty Museum, the second of which is less a museum than a site—everybody who goes there comes away talking not about the paintings but the view, with good reason. I lunched at Pink’s, California’s most famous hot-dog stand, and dined at the Westwood In-N-Out Burger and Hamburger Mary’s, a West L.A. restaurant and karaoke bar in which I saw Jane Lynch get up and sing “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” much to the delight of the jumbo drag queen who introduced her. (That was my only celebrity sighting, unless you count Alicia Silverstone's performance in Speed-the-Plow at the Geffen.) I shopped at Record Surplus, which was like Championship Vinyl on steroids. I went to bed late each night, woke up against my will at five-thirty each morning, and wrote and edited several thousand words of prose in between my various appointments.

By the time I left for San Diego on Saturday morning, I was so tired that I barely knew my name, and I'd seen and done so much that I was no longer capable of taking in anything but the play I flew there to see, Itamar Moses' The Four of Us. All I can tell you about the final stop on my whirlwind tour of the Golden State is that Balboa Park is pretty. The rest will have to wait for my next visit.

As for Los Angeles, I hope to go back there soon, though I don't expect to understand it any better the second time around, or even the third. I’m too old to figure it out. All I can do is relax and enjoy the ride, then go back home and shake my head in puzzlement at its antinomian inexplicabilities. Some things—perhaps most things—are meant to be experienced, not understood.

Posted February 26, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

“Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like—Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything—but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there.”

Clive James, Flying Visits

Posted February 26, 12:00 PM

TT: No, I didn't watch the Oscars

Not having seen a new movie for the past year and a half, why would I bother? The only impact this year’s award ceremony had on me was that I had an unexpectedly tough time finding a hotel room in Los Angeles last week—it took me three tries.

Which reminds me: Manhattan looked awfully gray when I got back home late Sunday afternoon. Now it looks awfully white. The contrast between the heaps of dirty snow that line the streets of the Upper West Side and the blindingly blue San Diego sky beneath which I walked to the theater on Saturday afternoon was instructive, not to mention depressing. But I still love New York. Really!

Posted February 26, 9:41 AM

February 23, 2007

TT: I was going to blog about last night...

…but my body is still on New York time and I’m dead on my feet. If you want to read about my low-grade celebrity sighting in a semi-gay West L.A. karaoke bar, you’ll have to wait until Monday. (How’s that for a teaser?)

Later.

P.S. LA Observed has taken note of my presence in the City of Angels. The blogosphere is a very small place….

Posted February 23, 12:00 PM

TT: Utopia is its name

I may be in Los Angeles, but that didn't stop me from reviewing two Broadway shows in this week's Wall Street Journal drama column. Today I comment on Salvage, the final installment of Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia trilogy, and a revival of Journey’s End, R.C. Sherriff’s once-famous 1928 play about trench warfare in World War I.

My review of Salvage is more in the nature of a preliminary summing-up of The Coast of Utopia:

I am in no doubt whatsoever about the merits of Jack O’Brien’s production. It is a sublime work of theatrical art, a commingling of play and performance so complete that no one lucky enough to see it will ever again read Mr. Stoppard’s words without remembering how Mr. O’Brien and his colleagues brought them to hot-blooded life. Small wonder that Lincoln Center has carried off the dazzling trick of making a box-office smash out of a sequence of plays about a cabal of obscure intellectuals who talk at intimidating length about ideas of considerable complexity. “The Coast of Utopia” is many things, but first—if not foremost—it is a rattling good show….

I confess to wondering whether I would have been quite so impressed with “The Coast of Utopia” had I first seen it in a less memorable production, and it may also be that I responded to it so strongly because I share its author’s anti-utopian vision of the tragedy of modernity. But countless other viewers who feel otherwise have been no less deeply moved, suggesting that Mr. Stoppard has succeeded in transfiguring the unpromising raw material of politics and turning it into high art….

“Journey’s End” was last seen on Broadway in September of 1939, when it ran for just 16 performances. (I suspect that American audiences didn’t much care to be reminded of one world war just as another was getting under way.) Back then it was considered a landmark in theatrical realism, one of the first attempts to portray combat on stage in something like a reasonably honest way, and we have no shortage of testimony indicating that its impact on those who first saw it was overwhelming. But eight decades of increasingly frank and grisly war movies—many of which have drawn, wittingly or not, on the dramatic devices originally used by Sherriff—have leached away its harsh immediacy.

No free link. Go buy a paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal so that you can read all of the Journal’s Friday arts coverage, my column included. (If you’re already a subscriber, my column is here.)

Posted February 23, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"The people won't forgive when the future custodian of a broken statue, a stripped wall, a desecrated grave, tells everyone who passes by, 'Yes—yes, all this was destroyed by the revolution.' The destroyers wear nihilism like a cockade—they think they destroy because they're radicals. But they destroy because they're disappointed conservatives—let down by the ancient dream of a perfect society where circles are squared and conflict is cancelled out. But there is no such place and Utopia is its name. So until we stop killing our way towards it, we won't be grown up as human beings. Our meaning is in how we live in an imperfect world, in our time. We have no other."

Tom Stoppard, Salvage

Posted February 23, 12:00 PM

February 22, 2007

TT: This isn’t the city

I’m sitting in a room on the fourteenth floor of a boutique hotel in Brentwood, looking at a deceptively familiar skyline and seeing…nothing. I’ve only been in Los Angeles for one day, not nearly long enough to pierce the haze of half a lifetime’s worth of representation. The Long Goodbye, Chinatown, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, L.A. Confidential, L.A. Story, even Dragnet: all these fictional portayals of the Unreal City stand between me and the thing itself, preventing me from seeing what I’m seeing.

Not that I’ve seen all that much. I arrived at noon yesterday, picked up my rental car, and went straight from LAX to the Hotel Angeleno, a short, anonymously ugly drive. “Did you know that O.J. in the Bronco exited at Sunset and the 405 and made a left past your hotel?” a local friend e-mailed me when I told him where I was staying. “It was a Holiday Inn until its recent refurbishment. You can catch a quick glimpse of it in Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi.” That’s Hollywood for you—if it’s been in a movie, it’s real.

I’d already been struck by how flat and uninviting Los Angeles looks when viewed from the window of an airplane, but I’m hoping that my tour guide will help me see the beauty of this strange place. Stephanie Steward is a California girl who came east to college, took a course in criticism from me, worked as a research assistant on my Louis Armstrong biography, and in due course became a close friend. She loves Los Angeles and wants me to love it, too:

LA is a great town and has a very different beauty than San Fran. When traveling between the two cities I always think back to something I read in an interview with The Doors. I think it was Ray Manzarek talking but I can't remember exactly since I read it so long ago. The point is that he was talking about how the band was lumped in with the whole 1960s psychedelic rock scene and that, while this was probably the best way to categorize their music, they were very different from the flower-power bands from the SF Bay area. The Doors, coming from Venice Beach and Sunset Strip, were darker and grittier than, say, Crosby, Stills, & Nash, Jefferson Airplane, and that "Aquarius" sound. Anyway, I've been mulling over that contrast all day while thinking of you flying in this morning….

Steph and I launched my visit to the City of Angels by dining at the Westwood In-N-Out Burger (mmmm!) and seeing the Geffen Playhouse’s revival of Speed-the-Plow, David Mamet’s ferociously satirical play about the movie business, in which Alicia Silverstone has been cast in the role created on Broadway in 1988 by Madonna. I’d say that was a real Los Angeles evening, wouldn’t you?

Now I’m headed for bed. I’ve been waking up at five-thirty every morning since arriving in San Francisco, not because I want to but because my body still thinks it’s eight-thirty. Today I swore off alcohol, which tends to keep me awake, and my eyelids are drooping. Here’s hoping they’ll stay that way for the next eight hours. I’m eager to see more of Los Angeles, but it can wait a little longer.

Posted February 22, 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:
• Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• Shipwreck (The Coast of Utopia, part 2)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 12)
• Translations* (drama, G, too complicated for children, 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)
• Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, part 1)* (drama, G, too complicated for children, reviewed here, closes May 12)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)
• The Madras House (drama, G, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Mar. 25)
• Room Service (comedy, G, reasonably family-friendly but a bit complicated for youngsters, reviewed here, closes Mar. 25)
• The Voysey Inheritance (drama, G, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Mar. 25)

CLOSING SOON:
• The Last Word… (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Mar. 11)
• The Vertical Hour (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Mar. 11)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
• Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes Sunday)

Posted February 22, 12:00 PM

TT: Tunecheck

• “Because I Told You So,” from Jonatha Brooke Live

(Do you have this CD, OGIC? If not, you should.)

Posted February 22, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"The most obvious fact about knowing works of art is that direct apprehension is the final adequate knowledge that we want."

D.W. Prall, Aesthetic Analysis

Posted February 22, 12:00 PM

February 21, 2007

TT: Almanac

"False modesty was a bourgeois vice."

William Haggard, The Hardliners

Posted February 21, 12:00 PM

TT: Under the rainbow

I’ve fallen hard for San Francisco. Needless to say, it didn’t hurt that my blogfriend Heather Heise, who showed me around town, was the ideal guide, funny and fey and unpredictable in the nicest possible way. Still, the city itself proved to be no less to my liking, and though I can’t add anything to the reams of prose that have been written about its physical beauty, I can tell you that the observation tower of the new de Young Museum is the perfect vantage point from which to get a sense of its satisfyingly intimate scale.

The de Young is a fascinating place in its own right, a really remarkable piece of art-friendly architecture whose spacious galleries are full of happy visual surprises. The curators have done right by the de Young’s spotty, arbitrary permanent collection—I can’t think of another museum that gets more out of fewer first-class paintings—and the Charles Sheeler retrospective currently on display there is one of the best museum shows devoted to a modern American artist that I’ve seen in ages.

In addition to visiting the de Young and driving all over town, Heather and I lunched with Rachel Howard, the San Francisco Chronicle’s dance critic, at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, whose members quizzed me aggressively and extensively about artblogging. In the evening we met Chloe Veltman, SF Weekly’s theater critic, for dinner across the street from the American Conservatory Theater, where we saw Hedda Gabler (about which more in next Friday’s Wall Street Journal).

As if to remind me of what a good time I'd had, I looked out the window of the car that drove me to the airport this morning and saw that the cloudy sky was cloven by a perfect rainbow. Now I’m about to board a plane for Los Angeles. I can’t wait to get there, but I wish I didn't have to leave here. It's a nice problem to have.

Posted February 21, 11:52 AM

OGIC: Call and response

A couple of weeks ago, on one of the most inclement and frigid days of the year, I threw out a question about how to read a phrase in a Philip Larkin poem about spring. I was in a hurry and asking about it was something of an afterthought. But I was genuinely curious what our sagacious readers made of the line. Several of you wrote, for which my sincere thanks and promise to write back soon.

Now Aaron Haspel, who excels at just this sort of exercise, has mostly graciously—whether on purpose or not, he doesn't quite skirt the implication that I'm a dullard—responded with a typically intelligent and informed reading of the poem in question. He's doubtless right that I should have provided the entire poem instead of the closing sestet; reports from readers indicate that it proved harder to google forth in full than I expected. I won't reproduce it now since he has done so and you can and should read the whole thing, his analysis included, by hopping over there. You should also bookmark God of the Machine while you're at it; Aaron's right-column linkade alone is a mighty resource of high-quality internet-assisted diversion, and primary material like this post can make life seem worth living again. Hey, at least I got off easier than that Strunk chump.

Oh, and Megan, I think this means you owe me one.

Posted February 21, 1:06 AM

February 20, 2007

TT: Over here

I haven’t spent much time in California: just two brief trips to San Francisco and a week at SummerFest La Jolla. I’ve never been to Los Angeles, except for a couple of hours spent in the airport between flights. Thus my current visit is in the nature of a get-acquainted tour, and I had a terrific tour guide yesterday. I arose at five a.m., went to Newark Airport, boarded a transcontinental flight, and spent most of the next six hours writing, after which I was picked up at the San Francisco airport and shown around town by my friend Heather Heise, a pianist and blogger who recently retrofitted herself as a composer of avant-garde music that she “plays” on her iBook. (It’s good stuff, too.)

Heather took me to the Ferry Building, where we grabbed a bite to eat, sat in the sunshine, and paid a memorable visit to Recchiuti Confections. Then, since she's the organist at Mission Dolores, the eighteenth-century church to which Jimmy Stewart followed Kim Novak in Vertigo, she gave me a private tour of the chapel, basilica, and cemetery. After that we went straight to the Musée Mécanique and spent a happy hour popping quarters into player pianos, orchestrions, and other coin-operated music-making devices.

I also had my fortune told by a mechanical wizard:

Being practical is very good in some matters but not in affairs of the heart. Toss logic and reasoning to the winds and enjoy the thrills of romance when it comes your way. Cultivate romance in your marital relations for a happier, richer life. Enlarge your circle of friends and social activities. You may safely increase your scope of interests instead of concentrating too much and long on a single project. There’s hardly a possibility that you will scatter your forces to your detriment. Don’t permit disappointments to affect you to the extent that you adopt the “world-is-against-you” attitude. Many opportunities cross your path but if you fail to recognize them and lay the foundation for your future, place the blame where it belongs. After much travel in your early life, you may be quite content to settle down and literally “take root.” You are qualified to form a strong love partnership.

In the evening we drove out to Berkeley and dined superlatively well at Chez Panisse, after which I returned to my home-away-from-home, a cute little boutique hotel not far from the theater where I’ll be seeing Hedda Gabler. I asked the desk clerk for an Ethernet cord to hook up my iBook to the Web, and he asked me what color I wanted.

Now I really, really need to get some sleep. More as it happens, or at some point thereafter....

Posted February 20, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"It was a dreadful thing to give advice since people sometimes took it."

William Haggard, The High Wire

Posted February 20, 12:00 PM

February 19, 2007

TT: Into the wild blue yonder

By the time most of you read these words, I’ll be in San Francisco, there to begin a week-long visit to four theaters in four different California cities, stopping along the way at a couple of museums and a Frank Lloyd Wright house. I plan to do some blogging from the West Coast, but I’ll be on the move and frighteningly busy, so don’t be surprised if you don’t hear as much from me as usual.

Later.

Posted February 19, 12:00 PM

TT: Pinned down

Today’s almanac entry (see below) is a quotation whose source I've been trying to locate for more than a decade. Last week I put out a call for help, and two of my Francophone readers responded with alacrity. Alfred Wallace was first past the post at 4:54 a.m. on February 14, informing me that Gustave Flaubert said it in a letter to Louise Colet. He even gave the original French version of the quote: “À force de nous inquiéter des imbéciles, il y a danger de le devenir soi-même.”

A day later Nick Williams e-mailed me the same information, adding a useful gloss on Flaubert’s neatly worded remark, which I had first encountered in a 1928 essay by Irving Babbitt:

Babbitt's translation is approximate; one might translate also: "If we keep troubling ourselves with imbeciles, we run the risk of becoming imbeciles ourselves." But of course Babbitt's adaptation is more elegant than that. The French sentence itself has an exquisite compactness and balance that is hard to preserve in English (especially those delightful infinitive constructions).

What amazed and delighted me is that both of my readers found the text of Flaubert’s letter on the Web. (I had no luck tracking it down because I don’t speak French and thus searched for “idiots” instead of “imbéciles.”) We are growing ever closer, it seems, to the day when anyone with a computer will be able to sit at his desk and do the kind of research that was previously only possible by going to a library.

Indeed, more and more highly specialized information that used to be available only from specific libraries can now be found on the Web. Just the other day, for instance, I was reading a collection of essays about Aaron Copland in which I learned that all of Copland’s surviving letters to Leonard Bernstein can be viewed on the Web. Having spent the better part of a decade making regular train trips to Baltimore to sift through H.L. Mencken’s papers in order to write his biography, I find this nothing short of staggering.

No doubt the digitization of libraries will sharply diminish the number of serendipitous discoveries made by those of us who spend hours sifting through stacks of ill-sorted documents in search of gold. I found the manuscript of A Second Mencken Chrestomathy on the top shelf of a dusty closet in the Mencken Room of the Enoch Pratt Free Library that was illuminated by a fifteen-watt bulb. I also had an experience there that I described with great glee in the Mencken Day lecture I delivered at the Pratt a few years ago:

I got to know that room well during the years I spent working in it. In fact, I grew to love it. It’s comfortable and quiet, like the library of a slightly shabby but distinguished club. When you’re working in the Mencken Room, you’re usually the only person there, which means you can hear yourself think—and, if you listen closely enough, you can almost hear Mencken thinking. He never set foot in the Mencken Room, so far as I know, but most of his personal library is there, and nearly all his private papers, and even one of his typewriters, an ancient Corona portable with the black enamel worn off the space bar from years of constant use. He probably wrote a couple of million words on that typewriter, all of them pounded out with two fingers….

One afternoon I was sitting in the Mencken Room, transcribing a column in which Mencken talked about religion. It had been raining for the past couple of days, and though I didn’t know it, there was a leak in the roof of the library, and water had been silently dripping into a chandelier hanging over my head. I was clicking away on my laptop, inputting an exceptionally naughty paragraph. Just as I typed the last words, the hollow brass ball on the bottom of the chandelier came unstuck and fell to the table, six inches from the laptop and a foot from my head, spilling dirty rainwater all over my papers. I’ve never been able to decide who did that—Mencken, or God.

Such adventures are not available to the stay-at-home researcher, and now that I’m writing a book about Louis Armstrong, I’m having them all over again. To hold one of Armstrong’s scrapbooks in your hands, as I do each time I pay a visit to the Armstrong Archives at Queens College, is an experience I wouldn’t trade for any amount of convenience.

As I wrote a year ago:

Not surprisingly, the scrapbooks are perilously fragile, and they have yet to be scanned, so anyone who uses them has to put on a pair of protective white gloves and handle them with the utmost care. I found it impossible to type with the gloves on, meaning that I had to take them off in order to make notes, then put them on again each time I turned a page. It was a nuisance, but it was also a small price to pay. To be sure, microfilm and its successor technologies are (mostly) unmixed blessings, but any scholar can tell you that there’s no substitute, emotionally speaking, for handling the thing itself, be it a scrapbook or a holograph manuscript. Though constant use has drained the word awesome of much of its meaning, I don’t know any other way to describe what it feels like to turn the crumbling pages of the personal scrapbooks of the greatest of all jazz musicians. How amazing that such things exist—and that they've been made accessible to researchers.

Be that as it may, I can't wait for all of Satchmo’s papers to be digitized. Life is short, too short to spend too much of it running from library to library in search of information when you can find out what you want to know by clicking a few keys on your laptop—or posting a request for help on your blog. Postmodernity isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be, but it definitely has its moments.

Posted February 19, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

“By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming idiotic oneself.”

Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, June 28-29, 1853 (trans. Irving Babbitt)

Posted February 19, 12:00 PM

February 16, 2007

TT: Back in Mint condition

It’s another off-Broadway week for my Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I review The Madras House and The Last Word…:

Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: Two of Harley Granville-Barker’s plays are running Off Broadway. To fully appreciate the unlikeliness of that coincidence, you have to know that Granville-Barker, who died in 1946, was a British playwright and director whose once-popular “problem plays” about Edwardian England and its social discontents are mostly long forgotten. “The Madras House,” for instance, was last seen in New York 86 years ago. Now the Mint Theater Company, whose smartly mounted revivals of neglected but worthy plays have put it on the map, has given “The Madras House” a staging of the highest possible quality, and guess what? It’s a terrific play.

The only reason why this doesn’t surprise me is that I’m one of the many New York theatergoers to have been thrilled by the Atlantic Theater Company’s similarly impressive and hugely successful revival of “The Voysey Inheritance,” Granville-Barker’s best-remembered play, which opened in December and has since been extended three times (it closes Mar. 25). “The Madras House,” written in 1909, is another school-of-Shaw play of ideas about a stageful of talkative characters who have come to question the cast-iron moral certitudes of their Victorian forebears. This time around, the parties in question are the well-heeled owners of a family-run department store in London, and the nagging doubts with which they find themselves beset prove to be the stuff of high drama—and much laughter….

Oren Safdie first caught my eye three years ago with “Private Jokes, Public Places,” a bristlingly intelligent, madly funny comedy about the aesthetic follies of celebrity architects (Mr. Safdie is the son of one, Moshe Safdie) that had a memorable downtown run. He then vanished without trace, leaving me to wonder what had become of so promising a debutant. Now I know: Mr. Safdie has been running Malibu Stage Company, a California troupe whose production of his latest play is currently being performed Off Broadway. “The Last Word…” (the ellipsis is Mr. Safdie’s) is a two-man comedy about an uncomfortable encounter between a pair of bad playwrights, one old, blind and grumpy (Daniel J. Travanti) and the other young and painfully earnest (Adam Green). It’s as clever as “Private Jokes, Public Places,” and Messrs. Travanti and Green sail through it with aplomb….

No free link. Go out and buy the Friday Journal, or do as hundreds of thousands of happy readers are doing and go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instantaneous access to my column and the rest of our Friday arts package. (If you’re already a subscriber, my column is here.)

Posted February 16, 12:00 PM

TT: The mystery man of modernism

Who was Lincoln Kirstein? The co-founder of New York City Ballet is now mainly remembered by aging dance buffs, few of whom know anything about him save that he brought George Balanchine to America. Yet Kirstein was one of the most important figures in the history of American modernism between the wars, and his other achievements (which will be chronicled in Martin Duberman's forthcoming biography) deserve to be remembered and celebrated.

To find out who Kirstein was and why it matters, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Pursuits” section.

Posted February 16, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"For the first time in my life I know what getting old is. It's wanting to be able to call for a time-out."

Richard Stark, Butcher's Moon

Posted February 16, 12:00 PM

February 15, 2007

TT: A little list

I love fictional lists, so I thought I'd pass on a particularly good one. It's from Richard Stark's The Jugger:

Parker went through his pockets. Nothing in the jacket at all but that lavender handkerchief, which turned out to be scented. In the pocket of the orange shirt was an unopened five-pack of plastic-tipped little cigars. In the right-hand trouser pocket was a Zippo lighter inscribed FROM DW TO SF, neither set of initials having any connection with Tiftus. In the left-hand trouser pocket were fifty-seven cents in change, his hotel room key, and a rabbit's foot. In his hip pocket was his wallet, and in the wallet were a Social Security card made out to Adolph Tiftus, a Nevada driver's license, four black-and-white photographs of horses, a photo of Tiftus himself from a coin-operated photo booth, sixty-four dollars in bills, a clipping from a Daily Telegraph column that mentioned his name as present at the opening of Freehold Raceway one prewar season, a small torn-off piece of adding-machine paper with two telephone numbers written on it in pencil, and an obscene photograph in color of a Chinese couple standing up.

I especially like the lighter.

Posted February 15, 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:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• Shipwreck (The Coast of Utopia, part 2)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 12)
• Translations* (drama, G, too complicated for children, 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)
• Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, part 1)* (drama, G, too complicated for children, reviewed here, closes May 12)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)
• Room Service (comedy, G, reasonably family-friendly but a bit complicated for youngsters, reviewed here, closes Mar. 25)
• The Voysey Inheritance (drama, G, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Mar. 25)

CLOSING SOON:
• Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes Feb. 25)
• The Vertical Hour (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Mar. 11)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
• Meet Me in St. Louis (musical, G, very family-friendly, reviewed here, closes Sunday)

Posted February 15, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Things I've seen make me doubt if anyone but an old man can really put himself in an old man's place. Values seem to be different—I suppose; less and less matters to you. I hope so."

James Gould Cozzens, By Love Possessed

Posted February 15, 12:00 PM

February 14, 2007

TT: Almanac

"If all hearts were open, all desires known; and if no secrets were hid—each of us, I think, might do well to consider just where that would leave him personally, whether he'd still be quite so well regarded as he may be now."

James Gould Cozzens, By Love Possessed

Posted February 14, 12:00 PM

OGIC: The wrong horse

So you’re Claudette Colbert, you’re cute as all get out, and you have a taste for the finer things in life: the couture, the cocktails, the coifs. You have a handsome and adoring husband who has some very grand business plans, but unfortunately few backers. Saved from a humiliating eviction on the sole strength of your personal charms, you resolve to fly the coop for Palm Beach, where you hear they grant a quick and easy divorce. You’re doing it for the sake of your hubby, mind you, who will have a quicker road to success without the burden of a wife whose domestic talents are restricted to winsome lolling about the apartment and quickly dispensing with any unanticipated funds that happen to alight on the household. It’s for his benefit that you pack your bags and set out to find a more able provider.

After batting your eyelashes into a first-class ticket on a Florida-bound train, you make the acquaintance of a sweet, nearsighted young fogy who turns out to be one of the richest men in the world. And this is where Preston Sturges’s Palm Beach Story had me torn, because though I could see where things were headed and that Rudy Vallee’s winningly stiff John D. Hackensacker III was not destined to get the girl—I could even see why he wasn’t—I couldn’t stop rooting for him. Maybe it was his inexhaustible reservoir of replacement eyeglasses, which Colbert’s Geraldine and a pack of baying hounds (don’t ask) have him repeatedly reaching for in the sleeper car scene where the two meet cute; the hapless millionaire, we get, has recognized himself early on as a man whose glasses routinely get stepped on and crushed—while they’re on his face—accepted this lot, and planned accordingly. Maybe it was the dogs’ unbridled, unanimous beeline for him and the equanimity with which he receives their slobbery respects. Certainly his shopping spree on Geraldine’s behalf once they arrive in Jacksonville had something to do with it; he's ten times giddier than she is about it, grinning dreamily as he adds up every last penny.

Oh, Geraldine. What were you thinking, going back to the vaguely sketched Tom (Joel McCrea)? As in Sturges’s greater picture The Lady Eve, the calculating dame handily hooks her feckless prize fish. Unlike Barbara Stanwyck’s Jean/Eve, however, Geraldine throws her catch back into the sea. Of course, married from start to end of the film, she has never been truly free to keep him. But the picture treats divorce lightly enough that her existing marriage never feels like very much of an obstacle. Still, the logic of the movie demands a reconciliation. It's a satisfying one, too, and Hackensacker does lose some of his appeal once his progress is complete from initial lovestruck bewilderment to pompous determined courtship.

He's still unflappably cute, though, and still my choice for Geraldine. In what books or movies, romantic comedy or otherwise, did you find yourself backing the wrong horse? The only other one I can think of off the top of my head is Steve Martin's L.A. Story, in which Martin's character holds out for the slightly dour if age-appropriate Brit over the pure spun-sugar confection that is Sarah Jessica Parker's SanDeE*.

Posted February 14, 10:58 AM

OGIC: Oh, and...

Happy February 14th! I bet you thought I'd forgotten. What, forget you on Valentine's Day? Never!

Every day, but today especially, the Acme Heart Maker is at your command. (Credit where credit is due: originally brought to my attention by the Cinetrix, who also has Sturges on her mind today.)

Posted February 14, 1:05 AM

February 13, 2007

TT: Speak now

I’ve written about Le Madeleine many times, both on this blog and in my Washington Post arts column. It’s my favorite theater-district bistro, a friendly, comfortable place where you can get an excellent meal without spending yourself into bankruptcy. It’s also the home away from home of the great jazz guitarist Gene Bertoncini, who can be heard in its main dining room most Sunday and Monday nights, playing solo and with whatever friends happen to drop by.

I can’t imagine Manhattan without Le Madeleine—but it seems I may have to. According to the management:

Le Madeleine has been in this location at 403 W. 43rd St. for 27 years, and, as of Jan 1, 2007, we will have 3 years left on our lease with an option to renew for another 8 years. But, we've received an EVICTION NOTICE from our landlord stating that he wants to DEMOLISH THIS BUILDING.

We don't believe that our landlord has the legal right to demolish our restaurant, and we're fighting this in court with everything we have….

I’m no lawyer, but I’d hate to lose Le Madeleine, and so would the other 2,144 people who’ve signed an online petition urging Mark Scharfman, the restaurant’s landlord, to think twice about tearing it down. To sign the petition, or to learn more about Le Madeleine’s increasingly urgent plight, go here.

Posted February 13, 12:00 PM

TT: Consider the source

I have a sneaking suspicion that my main contribution to the sum total of human happiness is the fact that I go well out of my way to provide a traceable source for this blog’s daily almanac entry. Cyberspace is cluttered with millions of pithy quotations, most of which are unsourced and thus unreliable. Not infrequently a bit of sophisticated surfing will allow you to pin down their sources, but too often they remain firmly rooted in the realm of conjecture.

Off the top of my head I can think of only two favorite quotations that I’ve never been able to trace to their original sources, and last week I finally pinned down one of them: “All knowledge is a descent from the paradise of undifferentiated sensation.” R.P. Blackmur said it, but prior to last Friday I only knew this brilliant apophthegm by way of Arlene Croce, who quoted it without source in one of her out-of-print collections of essays on dance. Now I can give it to you in the original:

For most minds, once doctrine is sighted and is held to be the completion of insight, the doctrinal mode of thinking seems the only one possible. When doctrine totters it seems it can fall only into the gulf of bewilderment; few minds risk the fall; most seize the remnants and swear the edifice remains, when doctrine becomes intolerable dogma. All fall notwithstanding; for as knowledge itself is a fall from the paradise of undifferentiated sensation, so equally every formula of knowledge must fall the moment too much weight is laid upon it—the moment it becomes omnivorous and pretends to be omnipotent—the moment, in short, it is taken literally. Literal knowledge is dead knowledge; and the worst bewilderment—which is always only comparative—is better than death. Yet no form, no formula, of knowledge ought to be surrendered merely because it runs the risk in bad or desperate hands of being used literally; and similarly, in our own thinking, whether it is carried to the point of formal discourse or not, we cannot only afford, we ought scrupulously to risk the use of any concept that seems propitious or helpful in getting over gaps. Only the use should be consciously provisional, speculative, and dramatic. The end-virtue of humility comes only after a long train of humiliations; and the chief labor of humbling is the constant, resourceful restoration of ignorance.

That thought-provoking paragraph is to be found in a 1935 essay by Blackmur called “A Critic’s Job of Work,” which was originally collected in Language as Gesture (1936) and is now more readily available in Selected Essays of R.P. Blackmur, a 1986 collection edited by Denis Donoghue. I feel better!

The only unsourced quote that continues to nag me is a remark allegedly made by Flaubert which I first ran across in Irving Babbitt’s Rousseau and Romanticism and later had occasion to cite in my Mencken biography:

More important, though, Babbitt was the first of Mencken’s critics to suggest that his noisy war against the booboisie had at last reached the point of diminishing returns: “One is reminded in particular of Flaubert, who showed a diligence in collecting bourgeois imbecilities comparable to that displayed by Mr. Mencken in his Americana….Another discovery of Flaubert’s may seem to him more worthy of consideration. ‘By dint of railing at idiots,’ Flaubert reports, ‘one runs the risk of becoming idiotic oneself.’”

Alas, Babbitt never gave his source for this beautifully balanced sentence, and despite making a public plea for help back in 2003, I’ve yet to be able to trace it. Anyone who can do so now will earn my permanent gratitude.

Posted February 13, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Son, when you can, always advise people to do what you see they really want to do. So long as what they want to do isn't dangerously unlawful, stupidly unsocial, or obviously impossible, you can, and you should. Doing what they want to do, they may succeed; doing what they don't want to do, they won't succeed."

James Gould Cozzens, By Love Possessed

Posted February 13, 12:00 PM

February 12, 2007

TT: Once removed

I stay in close touch with current events, mostly by way of my trusty iBook. The editors of The Wall Street Journal expect me to be both aware of what’s going on in the world of art and ready to write about it on short notice. For the most part I revel in this requirement, but sometimes it becomes a burden. The world was too much with me a week and a half ago, and I knew I had to let go of it for a few days.

Experience has taught me that this is all but impossible for me to do without getting out of town, so last Tuesday I packed a bag, rented a Zipcar, and headed south to Cape May, the island at the southern tip of New Jersey where I spent a reflective holiday last year. I brought along a half-dozen books, a short stack of DVDs, and some traveling music. It takes three hours to drive from Manhattan to Cape May, and I spent them listening to Blind Blake, Nat Cole, Hot Club of Cowtown, Mitchell’s Christian Singers, and Jimmy Yancey, about none of whom I had any plans to write a piece.

In case you’re wondering, I left my laptop behind. I made a point of warning my editors at the Journal that I wouldn’t be bringing it along, and while I’ve been known to cheat on such promises, I followed through on this one. I was out of touch with the world from Tuesday morning to Friday afternoon. I sent no e-mail and wrote no pieces, and the only person I called was my mother. I learned of the arrest of Lisa Nowak because I happened to be sitting in a Cape May bar whose TV was tuned to a NASA press conference, but that was the only piece of news I heard.

Instead of immersing myself in the fast-moving stream of postmodern life, I drove around Cape May and looked at old houses, ate three good dinners, spent several happy hours reading Bleak House, James Gould Cozzens’ By Love Possessed, and a book about Aaron Copland, and watched a couple of sunsets. Having found out in middle age that I love to be beside the seaside, I spent as much time as possible gazing at the ocean, which was conveniently located across the street from my front door.

Did I manage to keep my mind off my work? Mostly. I watched The Best Years of Our Lives and promptly started writing a piece in my head about Hugo Friedhofer’s Copland-like score, but at length I forced myself to shut off the flow of words and attend solely to the immediate experience. From time to time I thought of the deadlines that awaited me in New York, though not too often to wreck my holiday. Somewhere along the way I recalled the epigraph by Henri de Régnier that Maurice Ravel affixed to his Valses nobles et sentimentales: “…the delicious and always new pleasure of a useless occupation.” In recent weeks too many of my occupations have been useful, and it was good to be reminded that such need not always be the case.

Friday morning came too soon, and I drove back up the Garden State Parkway to New York, stopping along the way to eat a pair of rippers at Rutt’s Hut. I turned on my dormant iBook as soon as I got back to my apartment and found 278 e-mails waiting for me, one of which made my heart sink. It was from the anonymous author of a wonderful new blog I recently discovered:

Unfortunately, a mean-spirited blogger amused herself (and only herself) by revealing the place of my employment and posting a photo of it. Someone at my workplace was notified of this. Obviously, the intention of my anonymity was to preserve my job.

Since the blogger has ignored all of my E-mails, I'm left with no choice but to remove The Hotel Pianist blog….If you have linked to my blog, please delete the link as there is no longer a blog!

Sighing for the umpteenth time at the ceaseless folly of the inconsiderate, I turned to the news I’d missed since Tuesday, and discovered that Jules Olitski, the abstract artist whom I added to the Teachout Museum two years ago, had died at the venerable age of eighty-four. I also learned of the unexpected demise of Anna Nicole Smith, though I can’t claim to have been moved by it, not having previously known anything about her beyond the mere fact of her fame. (I still don’t know why she was famous.)

Within an hour or so I was back up to speed, and on Saturday I saw a press preview of The Madras House and started writing Friday’s Wall Street Journal drama column. I was glad to be back in harness, though my mind kept wandering back to Cape May, and to the delicious and always new pleasure of doing nothing in particular. I suppose even that would eventually grow tiresome—everything does—but I doubt I’ll ever find out how long it would take.

Posted February 12, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

“I once inhaled a pretty full dose of ether, with the determination to put on record, at the earliest moment of regaining consciousness, the thought I should find uppermost in my mind. The mighty music of the triumphal march into nothingness reverberated through my brain, and filled me with a sense of infinite possibilities which made me an archangel for the moment. The veil of eternity was lifted. The one great truth which underlies all human experience, and is the key to all the mysteries that philosophy has sought in vain to solve, flashed upon me in a sudden revelation. Henceforth all was clear: a few words had lifted my intelligence to the level of the knowledge of the cherubim. As my natural condition returned, I remembered my resolution; and, staggering to my desk, I wrote in ill-shaped, straggling characters, the all-embracing truth still glimmering in my consciousness. The words were these (children may smile, the wise will ponder): ‘A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.’”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Mechanism in Thought and Morals”

Posted February 12, 12:00 PM

February 9, 2007

TT: We are all hypocrites now

Courtesy of Our Girl, who is tending the blog in my absence, here’s the weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I review two new plays in this morning’s paper, Alan Ball’s All That I Will Ever Be and Yasmina Reza’s A Spanish Play. Neither one, alas, did much for me:

Broadway is for big-budget musicals, celebrity revivals and the annual snob-friendly British import. If you want to see new American plays, you pretty much have to go Off Broadway nowadays. Even an author of such demonstrable commercial appeal as Alan Ball, the creator of “Six Feet Under” and the author of the screenplay for “American Beauty,” opened “All That I Will Ever Be,” his first stage play in a dozen years, not on Broadway but way downtown at the New York Theatre Workshop. Not that it deserves an uptown run, though I won’t be surprised if it gets one. Like all of Mr. Ball’s work, “All That I Will Ever Be” is glib, pretentious and very well made, a sure-fire recipe for success….

I’ve never much cared for Yasmina Reza’s brand of what I think of as boulevard surrealism, and “A Spanish Play,” her latest effort, strikes me as an especially wan specimen of that clever-clever genre. It’s a pretentious play about a pretentious play, meaning that the real-life actors play made-up actors who are acting in a play-within-a-play whose progress they periodically interrupt to give imaginary interviews about the art of acting. Or something like that: I was so bored that I lost track, especially when it turned out that one of the characters in the play-within-the-play (Linda Emond) is an actor who is rehearsing a play-within-the-play-within-the-play. Did I mention that “A Spanish Play” is two hours long, with no intermission? I checked my watch five times, wondering at one point whether I might possibly have died over dinner and awakened in hell….

No link. Go buy a paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you access to my column and the rest of the Journal’s Friday-morning arts package.

Posted February 09, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

“Literature is insight and synthesis, which means that poetry, ultimately, is heroic. Naked, weak, hungry, trembling, endangered by all the elements, all the beats and demons, the cave men performed that act of heroism for consolation, in the deepest sense of the word.”

Aleksander Wat, My Century (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Posted February 09, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Blame it on Spam

It's come to my attention (thanks, Dad) that I've let my OGIC mailbox fill to overflowing again, and this in a week when I threw out a question to the webosphere. I've cleared some space now and long to hear from you, so if you wrote and had your message bounce back, please, please send again!

Posted February 09, 11:17 AM

February 8, 2007

OGIC: Not to be missed

From The House Next Door comes word that Charles Burnett's wondrous 1977 shoestring-budget film Killer of Sheep will be distributed to theaters for the first time ever this spring. It's been seven or eight years since I was lucky enough to see Burnett's haunting masterpiece, which was selected for the National Film Registry in 1990, part of its second crop of inducted titles. The film's distributor, Milestone Films, describes it this way:

Charles Burnett’s films focus on everyday life in black communities in a manner unseen in American cinema, combining incredibly lyrical elements with a starkly neo-realist, documentary-style approach that chronicles the unfolding story with depth and riveting simplicity.

In KILLER OF SHEEP, the protagonist, employed at the slaughterhouse, is suffering from the emotional side effects of his bloody occupation to such a degree that his entire life unhinges. His refusal to become involved in the similarly destructive, but human-focused occupations of his more affluent friends and acquaintances becomes the odd obstacle to the family’s well being. Burnett once said of the film, "[Stan’s] real problems lie within the family, trying to make that work and be a human being. You don’t necessarily win battles; you survive."

Oscar schmoscar; as far as I'm concerned, this will be the cinema event of the season. Expect more harassment from my corner leading up to its release, and remember: I only have your best interests in mind. Killer of Sheep will open in New York and Los Angeles April 6. I presume it will open in Chicago sometime thereafter, but just in case—Terry, will your Aerobed be free that weekend?

Posted February 08, 12:40 PM

TT: So you want to see a show?

Courtesy of Our Girl, who is managing the blog in my absence, 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:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• Shipwreck (The Coast of Utopia, part 2)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 12)
• Translations* (drama, G, too complicated for children, 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 Vertical Hour (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Apr. 1)
• Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, part 1)* (drama, G, too complicated for children, reviewed here, closes May 12)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)
• Room Service (comedy, G, reasonably family-friendly but a bit complicated for youngsters, reviewed here, closes Mar. 25)
• The Voysey Inheritance (drama, G, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Mar. 25)

CLOSING SOON:
• Meet Me in St. Louis (musical, G, very family-friendly, reviewed here, closes Feb. 18)
• Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes Feb. 25)

Posted February 08, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

Now I shall speak of evil as none has
Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
The white-hosed moron torturing a black
Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;
Primitivist folk masks, progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets, swimming pools;
Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,
Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Posted February 08, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Spring and all

Two matching takes on spring, which seems in this city, this week, impossible—a wild fiction.

First, the copious:

Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,
Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water,
Is earth's most multiple, excited daughter;
And those she has least use for see her best,
Their paths grown craven and circuitous,
Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest.

(Philip Larkin, "Spring")

And the succinct:

Spring is nearly here,
and I want.

(Rachel Ries, "Sad Saturday")

That's a fantastic full stop.

A nice essay on Larkin, including reflections on receiving "Spring" for publication in the author's poetry magazine, lives here. I don't know that I'm very satisfied with its reading of the lines above, however. It doesn't account for what seems to me the most interesting phrase in these lines: "their needs immodest." Who are these needy creatures, and why are they useless to her? This has bothered me for some time and, since I was born on the vernal equinox and have always put some vague stock in the coincidence, I hold something of a personal stake in understanding it better. Please write to me if you have a reading.

Meanwhile, Rachel Ries plays tonight at Chicago's Hideout, where I saw her perform splendidly before the holidays. I'm going to try to be there, but it might prove a little late for me on a school night.

Posted February 08, 1:53 AM

February 7, 2007

TT: Almanac

“Life admits not of delays; when pleasure can be had, it is fit to catch it: Every hour takes away part of the things that please us, and perhaps part of our disposition to be pleased. When I came to Lichfield, I found my old friend Harry Jackson dead. It was a loss, and a loss not to be repaired, as he was one of the companions of my childhood. I hope we may long continue to gain friends; but the friends which merit or usefulness can procure us, are not able to supply the place of old acquaintance, with whom the days of youth may be retraced, and those images revived which gave the earliest delight.”

Samuel Johnson, letter to Boswell, Sept. 1, 1777 (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Posted February 07, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Amuse-bouche and a promise

This post begins identically to almost every non-business email I write lately: "Long time no talk to. My fault entirely."

Oh, I'm bad, here and there. And believe me, I do suffer for my sins. I miss the heady days when email was new and almost exclusively a mode of diarizing and dishing to friends both far and near (sometimes across the very room) and I had oodles of energy for long, sprawling, lovingly composed e-epistles. Terry and I, cementing over the internet what was still a nascent friendship, wrote to each other what seem, in retrospect, like chapters of autobiographies. Doubtless those few years are the best documented of my life, even if the documentation now exists only in files on Zip disks, and me without a working Zip drive.

Back to the less thoroughly chronicled here and now, however. I owe you some blogging, big time. And I plan on honoring my debt this evening and tomorrow. In the meantime, I couldn’t wait even that long to share something you’ll have seen if you’re an Arts & Letters Daily reader: this tremendously smart and entertaining Clive James review of the endless new Kingsley Amis biography by Zachary Leader. If you saw it but didn't read it, perhaps you were daunted by its length. Don't be. By the time I'd read a quarter of it, I was wishing it were longer. James's piece is more than a review, really; It has its own forceful ideas about the life, work, and reception of Sir Kingsley, all of them well considered, sparklingly put forth, and strikingly humane, especially at their most contrarian. I’ve had Amises on the brain lately, about which more later; for now, treat yourself to this happily lengthy, end-to-end diverting piece.

Posted February 07, 1:16 AM

February 6, 2007

TT: Another landmark

Today is my fifty-first birthday, an occasion I didn’t expect to be celebrating a year and a half ago. Instead of dying, I lived, and in honor of that glorious fact I’m blowing town for a few days. My destination is Cape May, the island at the southern tip of New Jersey where I went exactly one year ago, there to reflect on my close encounter with the Distinguished Thing.

This time around my mood is considerably brighter, but I’m worn out from the nonstop deadlines of the past couple of weeks, so I intend to leave my iBook behind. Our Girl will be putting up my usual almanac entries and theater-related posts for the rest of the week, along with any other thoughts she may feel like sharing with you.

See you next Monday.

Posted February 06, 12:00 PM

TT: Elsewhere

I’ve been too busy of late to keep more than half an eye on the blogosphere, but here are a few things I’ve noticed that might interest you:

• Mr. Anecdotal Evidence, one of my favorite blogging eggheads, was tempted to read a Richard Stark novel as a result of all the praise that pseudonymous master receives in this space, and found it good:

I don’t read mysteries, except for Raymond Chandler. Their prose usually is tone-deaf and awful, and I don’t care who done it. Stark, based on the one-half of a Parker novel I’ve read, is a pleasant exception.

His prose is without fat yet his economy of means doesn’t call attention to itself in an astsy-fartsy way. It’s without pretensions, yet intelligent, minus the reverse pride of a “literary” writer gone slumming. Stark, like his protagonist, is a professional who, above all, values competence. Parker is cool, aloof and malevolent only in a practical way, when he needs to be. He takes little pleasure in being bad and hurting people, but neither does he lose sleep over it. His code is pragmatism. Like another one-named character, Odysseus, Parker survives by his cunning. So does Stark….

What he said.

• Attention, jazz buffs: the only surviving performance film of Clifford Brown, the great trumpeter of Brown-Roach, Inc., has surfaced on YouTube. It’s a 1956 kinescope from an old Soupy Sales TV show, and you can view it by going here.

• Some of you may recall my posting from last year about the music of Cy Walter, the great cocktail pianist. Now Ethan Iverson of the Bad Plus, another Walter fan, has reviewed The Park Avenue Tatum, the CD that inspired my original tribute. The review is in Downbeat, but Iverson has also posted it here:

Walter is probably best understood not in the context of either jazz or Broadway, but in the tradition of classical composer/pianists like Leopold Godowsky and Ignaz Friedman, both virtuosos who loved to transfigure Viennese waltzes and other light fare into complicated piano music. Walter’s beautiful chorus of “All the Things You Are,” with the melody singing chastely in the middle-register, decorated on top and bottom with delicate slides and runs, sounds considerably like a Godowsky treatment of a Schubert song.

That is a very smart observation, and a typically Iversonian one as well.

Incidentally, there is now a fascinating Walter Web site started by his family. It contains, among gazillians of other good things, a page of downloadable Walter sound files. Check it out.

• Speaking of hotel pianists, an anonymous member of the breed has started a blog called, logically enough, The Hotel Pianist. It is simultaneously funny, wry, snarky, and self-deprecating:

Tonight, a 40-ish man, while playing chess with his son (and losing), sang every word to a song I was playing. Unfortunately, I was playing a song from the Top 2000-2005 Hits book, and he was singing a song from the 1970s.

I commend it to your attention.

• Lileks has been collecting “psychedelic” records from the Sixties:

You can imagine the band members sitting down to hash out (sorry) the overarching themes of the album, how it should like start with Total Chaos man because those are the times in which we live with like war from the sky, okay, and then we’ll have flutes because flutes are peaceful like doves and my old lady can play that part because she like studied flute, man, in high school. The lyrics are all the same: AND THE KING OF QUEENS SAID TO THE EARTH THE HEIROPHANT SHALL NOW GIVE BIRTH / THE HOODED PRIESTS IN CHAMBERED LAIRS LEERED DOWN UPON THE LADIES FAIR / NEWWWW DAAAAY DAWNNNING!

I bought some of those, too, back in 1967….

• Ms. CultureGrrl, who (like me) is a Frank Lloyd Wright buff, has posted a link to an excellent news story about a smallish Wright house in the Puget Sound area that has just gone on the market:

Many ideas here could easily translate into contemporary homebuilding: the quality of the daylighting, the efficiency of the built-in furniture, the richness of interior textures in the concrete block and honest wood paneling. But the most important point is that a house's square footage is irrelevant to the quality of life that it engenders. Wright himself proclaimed that "a house is more a home by being a work of art." That can be taken as elitist, but it also can be an argument for small, unpretentious, quietly beautiful buildings just like this….

By the way, I’m pleased to report that I just booked myself an overnight stay in a Chicago-area Usonian house that is now run as a bed and breakfast, one of four Wright houses that are available for short-term stays. (I’ll be spending the night there when I go to the Windy City in May to visit OGIC and see a couple of shows.) This will be my third such stay—I wrote about the first two here—and I can’t wait.

• I blogged a couple of months ago about a visit to the White House during which I saw John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, which was hanging in the East Room. Now Catesby Leigh has written a fascinating Wall Street Journal essay about presidential portraits in which the Sargent/Roosevelt canvas receives prominent and penetrating mention:

Sargent's wonderfully effective use of middling tones in this portrait's otherwise blank background casts Roosevelt into bold relief. Left hand assertively perched on hip, he faces us squarely, full of authority and executive energy. And yet the portrait is very much an optical record, devoid of symbolic content. A quite noticeable penumbra that follows the outline of Roosevelt's head and left shoulder, combined with Sargent's fluid handling of the figure itself, conveys an almost eerily dynamic sense of the act of perception. It's as if T.R. were coming into focus before us. He squints out at us through his spectacles, and we find ourselves squinting back at him.

The rich color harmonies and attention to finish evident in this and other Sargent portraits may link him to the Old Masters, but he fully subscribed to the modern notion that reality lay in perception and that the artist's duty was to accurately transcribe natural appearances as they appeared to him or her. This concept may not have originated with photography, but it was vastly reinforced by it. And when we see the National Portrait Gallery's rather depressing trove of "traditional" portraits of our postwar presidents, from Greta Kempton's Truman (begun in 1947, completed 1970) to Nelson Shanks's Clinton (2005), it is obvious that photography has completely displaced classical sculpture as the conceptual model….

Read the whole thing, please.

• Now, some unintended comic relief: I had a vague memory of reading long ago about a novel in which the letter “e” is never used. Guess what? It turns out that the complete text of Gadsby has been posted on the Web. Here’s how it starts:

If youth, throughout all history, had had a champion to stand up for it; to show a doubting world that a child can think; and, possibly, do it practically; you wouldn’t constantly run across folks today who claim that “a child don’t know anything.”A child’s brain starts functioning at birth; and has, amongst its many infant convolutions, thousands of dormant atoms, into which God has put a mystic possibility for noticing an adult’s act, and figuring out its purport….

Preposterous, of course, but fascinatingly so.

• Finally, here’s the best list I’ve seen in ages...

• …and the best t-shirt.

Remind me to do this more often, O.K.?

Posted February 06, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had?”

Henry James, The Ambassadors

Posted February 06, 12:00 PM

February 5, 2007

TT: Landmark

Our Girl and I received our two millionth page view at 9:05 yesterday morning. (The lucky viewer, in case you're curious, was from Lee's Summit, Missouri, Pat Metheny's home town.) That’s small potatoes by the high-flying standards of such heavily trafficked political blogs as Instapundit or Daily Kos, but a pretty respectable total for an artblog sneaking up on on its fourth anniversary.

I put up our first posting on July 14, 2003. Since that day we’ve watched artblogging evolve from a rarity into a commonplace. I wrote about the process in a long essay called “Culture in the Age of Blogging” published last year in Commentary. Here’s how it ended:

It may be that blogging will encourage the creation of a new kind of common culture, exerting something of the same unifying force as did the old middlebrow media (and as About Last Night seeks to do). Or not: if the experience of political blogs is any indication, blogging may be more likely to foster discrete subcultures of shared interest, larger and more cohesive but nonetheless separate….

One thing of which I am sure is that the common culture of my youth is gone for good. It was hollowed out by the rise of ethnic “identity politics,” then splintered beyond hope of repair by the emergence of the web-based technologies that so maximized and facilitated cultural choice as to make the broad-based offerings of the old mass media look bland and unchallenging by comparison. For all the nostalgia with which I look back on the days of the Top 40, the Book-of-the-Month Club, and The Ed Sullivan Show, I prefer to make my own cultural decisions, and I welcome the ease with which the new media permit me to do so.

At the same time, however, I still feel the need for a common space in which Americans can come together to talk about the things that matter to us all. And so my hope is that the blogosphere, for all its fissiparous tendencies, will evolve over time into just such a space. No doubt there will always be shouting in the blogosphere, but it need not all be past each other. When the history of blogging is written a half-century from now, its chroniclers may yet record that the highest achievement of the Internet, a seemingly impersonal piece of postmodern technology, turned out to be its unprecedented ability to bring creatures of flesh and blood closer together.

The jury is still out on the larger question of whether blogging as a whole is more divisive than unifying, but I think by now it’s perfectly clear that artblogging is becoming an important and increasingly significant aspect of world culture. In the eight hours leading up to our two millionth page view, we received visitors from Australia, Bulgaria, France, India, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Poland, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and (I especially like this one) Elmers End.

As for Our Girl and me, we’ve poured a considerable amount of time, energy, and (occasionally) grief into this site, all of it for free, and we don’t regret a bit of it. In the process we’ve made some close friends, and we’ve also made the acquaintance of a legion of readers whose continuing interest in what we do is the main reason why we continue doing it.

To all of you from both of us, our heartfelt thanks for stopping by. And don’t worry—we’ll still be here tomorrow.

Posted February 05, 12:00 PM

TT: In case you didn't notice

Take a look at the right-hand column and you'll see that the "Top Five," "Out of the Past," "Teachout in Commentary," and "Teachout Elsewhere" modules have been extensively updated.

Enjoy!

Posted February 05, 12:00 PM

TT: Dark delights

A friend writes:

I've been interested in exploring films noir further, and have been meaning to ask if you could suggest the ten (or twelve, or whatever) essential movies that fall under that category. I saw that you included a couple of them on your list last month of the “best sound films made in Hollywood prior to the coming of the New Wave,” but which others would you recommend? Several noir boxed sets have come out recently, and it would be helpful to have some direction here.

Strangely enough, I’ve never drawn up a list, so here goes:

• Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)
• Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945)
• Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945)
• Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)
• Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948)
• Pitfall (André de Toth, 1948)
• Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949)
• Criss Cross (Robert Siodmak, 1949)
• The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950)
• In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950)
• Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950)
• The Narrow Margin (Richard Fleischer, 1952)
• On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952)
• Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953)
• Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)

My friend also asked for my thoughts on “why noir flowered when it did, starting during WWII and ending pretty much in the early '50s, save for sporadic hommages later on.” That’s an even better question—good enough, in fact, to be answered in print, for money. I’ll do that one of these days….

Posted February 05, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

The things that were coming to be talked about
Have come and gone and are still remembered
As being recent. There is a grain of curiosity
At the base of some new thing, that unrolls
Its question mark like a new wave on the shore.

John Ashbery, “Blue Sonata”

Posted February 05, 12:00 PM

February 2, 2007

TT: On the air

I appeared on WNYC-FM’s Soundcheck today to chat with John Schaefer, the program’s host, about the music of Ennio Morricone, whom I interviewed earlier this week. If you missed it, you can listen via streaming audio by going here.

In addition, The Wall Street Journal has posted a free link to my profile of Morricone. To read it, go here.

Posted February 02, 12:53 PM

TT: Famous father, furious family

It’s Friday! Yes! Today I wrap up a more than usually hectic week on the job (about which more below) with a Wall Street Journal drama column in which I review the New York premiere of Frank’s Home and file the last of three reports about my recent trip to Washington, D.C., this time discussing the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s King Lear:

Frank Lloyd Wright, like so many great artists, was a lousy family man. This amply documented fact inspired Richard Nelson’s “Frank’s Home,” a play about the master architect who designed the Guggenheim Museum, invented the carport and conducted a love life complicated enough to fuel a miniseries or two.

Mr. Nelson’s play, first seen earlier this season at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in a production now being presented in New York by Playwrights Horizons, is partly a domestic drama and partly a meditation on the meaning and significance of art. The second part is better than the first. I see more than my share of plays about uncaring parents and their resentful children, and while “Frank’s Home” covers that oft-trod ground plausibly enough, I didn’t find Mr. Nelson’s rendering of the old, old story to be especially original or memorable. Far more interesting are the scenes in which Wright (Peter Weller) talks about his work, seeking to persuade his angry son (Jay Whittaker) that its quality redeems his failings as a father and husband…

The nation’s capital is playing host to a city-wide, season-long Shakespeare orgy. “Shakespeare in Washington,” which runs through June, consists of 100-plus presentations by 60 arts organizations—drama companies, dance troupes, opera houses, symphony orchestras, museums—celebrating the life and work of the greatest of all English-speaking playwrights. I dipped my toe into the stream by paying a visit to the Folger Shakespeare Library, where the Classical Theatre of Harlem, about which I’ve been hearing terrific buzz, is midway through a six-week run of “King Lear.” The company proved to be every bit as good as its reputation, and its “Lear,” previously seen in New York and Miami, is a highly impressive piece of work.

Alfred Preisser’s production is set in ancient Mesopotamia, and the program contains some fancy talk about how he conceives of the play as “a fairy tale in which Lear’s family is analogous to the universe.” Ignore it, please: Mr. Preisser’s “Lear” is a straightforward, colorfully costumed staging full of high-flying rhetoric and flamboyant physicality…

No free link, so do do that voodoo that you do so well, or get smart and go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, a sound decision that will give you instant access to my column and the rest of the Journal’s Friday arts package. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

P.S. I ran into Mr. My Stupid Dog at the production of Into the Woods that I reviewed in last Friday's Journal. To read his thoughts on the same show, go here.

Posted February 02, 12:00 PM

TT: Old (toe) shoe

Yesterday was…well, a bit much.

I arose at seven to meet a composer friend with whom I may be collaborating on an opera. (More as it happens.)

I returned to my apartment an hour later, then spent the next four hours writing today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, finishing at noon.

A few minutes later I received an e-mail informing me that Whitney Balliett had died, so I wrote a tribute and posted it while waiting for the drama column to be edited. I signed off on the column at one p.m.

At two-thirty I received an e-mail from the Journal advising me that Gian Carlo Menotti had died and asking whether I wanted to write a “Sightings” column about his life and work for Saturday’s paper. I thought about it for thirty seconds, then replied, “O.K. By what time do you need it?” The answer: six p.m. I took a deep breath, cleared off my desk, put on the 1947 original-cast recording of Menotti’s The Medium, and started writing. At 5:59 I finished editing the piece, and by 6:03 it was on its way to the Journal via e-mail.

Half an hour later I went out to grab a quick bite to eat, and by 7:45 I was sitting next to a blogger friend in row K of the New York State Theater, where New York City Ballet was about to dance George Balanchine’s Square Dance, Liebeslieder Walzer, and Stars and Stripes. It was the first time I’d seen NYCB in two years, and the first time I’d seen Liebeslieder Walzer in at least five.

I wrote about Liebeslieder Walzer in All in the Dances, my brief life of Balanchine:

The dancers drift outdoors into a moonlit garden and the curtain falls for a breathless moment. When it rises again, the ballroom itself is flooded with moonlight, the women are wearing tutus and toe shoes, and the decorous ballroom dancing of the first act is replaced by the heightened gestures of ballet. At the end, the women reappear in their party gowns, and the couples listen in stillness to the last waltz, whose words, sung in German, are by Goethe: Now, Muses, enough!/You strive in vain to show/How joy and sorrow alternate in loving hearts./You cannot heal the wounds inflicted by love;/But assuagement comes from you alone. “The words ought to be listened to in silence,” Balanchine wrote, surely thinking of the joys and sorrows of his own complicated life.

The costume change midway through Liebeslieder Walzer is a stroke of fantasy as stunning in its quieter way as the climactic flying lifts of The Four Temperaments. Balanchine revealed its meaning to Bernard Taper: “In the first act, it’s the real people that are dancing. In the second act, it’s their souls.” But more than a few members of the ballet’s earliest audiences, bored by its unending succession of “love-song waltzes,” would slip out of the theater during the pause between acts. In an oft-told anecdote that may or may not be true, Balanchine and [Lincoln] Kirstein were watching a performance together. “Look how many people are leaving, George,” Kirstein moaned, to which Balanchine replied, “Ah, but look how many are staying!” Today, though New York City Ballet now performs Liebeslieder Walzer only infrequently, it is loved by connoisseurs for what Arlene Croce has called its “persistent note of melancholy and tragic remorse,” and there are those, myself included, who regard it as their favorite Balanchine ballet of all.

I wondered as I waited for the curtain to go up whether I would still feel the same way about Liebeslieder Walzer as I had when I wrote those words. Fifteen minutes later my face was wet with tears, and in the brief pause between the two halves of the ballet a stranger sitting next to me touched me on the arm and whispered, “You really love that ballet, don’t you?”

“I sure do,” I said.

* * *

To read what I wrote about Menotti, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Pursuits” section.

Go here to read Alex Ross’ brief but thoughtful tribute.

Bernard Holland’s New York Times obituary is here.

Tim Page’s Washington Post appreciation is here.

Posted February 02, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"I don't see dancing. I start with the music. I listen to a lot of music, a lot of the time. Loads of Bach. But for me to want to choreograph a piece, there's got to be some twist to it, something odd. A certain weirdness. It could be rhythmic, or something about the orchestration, or some wrong chord nobody ever notices that makes me crazy. And the concept of 'danceable' music doesn't mean much to me. A lot of music I choose is the opposite of what people would choose to dance to."

Mark Morris (quoted in A Terry Teachout Reader)

Posted February 02, 12:00 PM

February 1, 2007

TT: Composer with a harmonica

As promised, my profile of Ennio Morricone is in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:

If film music is the invisible art form, then Ennio Morricone is one of its least visible giants. To be sure, no one familiar with Mr. Morricone's work is in the slightest doubt of his immense stature. He has scored more than 400 movies since 1959, many of which, like "The Untouchables" and "In the Line of Fire," were box-office smashes. The long list of his famous fans ranges from Yo-Yo Ma and Renée Fleming to Pat Metheny and Bruce Springsteen. Mention his name to Mark Morris, the iconoclastic choreographer whose eclectic musical interests are a byword in the world of modern dance, and the response is both prompt and fervent: "Oh, God, don't you just love him? I love him."

But Mr. Morricone, like most film composers, is not nearly so well known in America as is his music. The wailing harmonicas and twangy electric guitars with which he accompanied the "spaghetti Westerns" of Sergio Leone remain instantly recognizable four decades after those still-controversial films were made—yet you will not find his name anywhere on the cover of the DVD version of Mr. Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West," the 1972 film for which he wrote one of his most innovative scores….

No free link. If you want to read more, pick up a copy of today’s Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to my piece. (If you’re already a subscriber, you’ll find it here.)

Posted February 01, 12:00 PM

TT: Consumables

The list for Wednesday:

• BOOK: Barbara Milberg Fisher, In Balanchine’s Company: A Dancer’s Memoir.

• MUSIC: (1) Willie “The Lion” Smith, “Passionette,” from That Devilin’ Tune: A Jazz History 1895-1950, Vol. 3. (2) The Untouchables (original soundtrack album).

• PLAY: Yasmina Reza, A Spanish Play.

Posted February 01, 12:00 PM

TT: For ailurophiles only

A friend writes, apropos of yesterday’s posting about my late, lamented cat Blossom:

“Exasperated affection” is a great way to describe the way most people feel about their cats, dead or remembered, but my feelings tend more toward the unconditional. Somewhere along the line (he's 14 now) my own cat traded in his cat diffidence for a desperate affection. He used to be desperate and disappointed and diffident all at once. But in his tottery old age, he decided to love me. So he follows me into the bathroom and follows me out, and if I spend too many hours out of the apartment , he shows up at the door with a look of such despair—you know, the way humans look after they've been crying all day—that I never want to leave again.

I used to feel embarrased about how much I adored him back—he's only a cat, I'd kept thinking, but it wasn't what I felt. I felt that I was was reaping the pain and benefit of his having traded in a chunk of his catness—why he did or how, I don't know; that it was possible to love him without exasperation, and so finally I let myself.

That’s more or less how I felt about Blossom.

Posted February 01, 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:
• Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• Shipwreck (The Coast of Utopia, part 2) (drama, PG-13, nudity an