« TT: Almanac | Main | TT: Madly industrious »
March 12, 2007
TT: Saddled up
It took longer than I expected for me to shake off whatever bug it was that laid me low two weeks ago. Nothing short of an ambulance ride is enough to shut me down completely, though, and I've been keeping fairly busy despite my intermittent absences from this space.Among other things, I saw two plays, one of them in the company of Mr. My Stupid Dog, who was in New York for a few days and kindly consented to accompany me last Friday to the Signature Theatre Company’s off-Broadway revival of August Wilson’s King Hedley II. I also gave him a tour of the Teachout Museum, which I’m sure he’ll describe in due course on his own blog.
On Saturday afternoon I took in Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio, which impressed me so much when I saw it at the Public Theater in 1987 that I went back to see it again a few weeks later. Talk Radio was one of the very first plays I saw on stage after moving to New York, and my memories of Bogosian’s ferally intense performance as Barry Champlain remain clear and vivid to this day. (Liev Schreiber is playing the part in the new Broadway revival, which opened yesterday.)
For the most part, though, I stuck close to home, resting in between deadlines. I watched a couple of movies on TV, including Shane, which I hadn’t seen for a couple of years. It’s an old favorite, not least for its supporting cast, which includes the immortal Elisha Cook, Jr., though I do have certain lingering reservations that I would have tried to sum up here had Brian Garfield not beaten me to the punch in his insufficiently appreciated Western Films: A Complete Guide:
It calls attention to itself as self-conscious Myth: one can imagine producer-director [George] Stevens and novelist-screenwriter [A.B.] Guthrie (The Big Sky) sitting down together and saying something like, “Now we’re going to make the definitive Western.” There’s something too studied about the panoramic imagery; it’s always splendid but sometimes boastful—the calculated contrived perfection militates against its integrity: it lacks the easy grace of, say, the seemingly casual artistry of John Ford, whose camera seemed to just happen upon beautiful compositions….Shane strives too hard for its effects: the mannered deliberate dignity of pace; the grand epic photography with its seemingly painted, or at least hand-retouched, colors, and the patent symbolism of the lonely, gorgeous Grand Teton locations; the magnificent symphonic score by Victor Young; the measured editing of Tom McAdoo and William Hornbeck; the isolation of the rustic three-building town; the black costume worn by [Jack] Planace and its contrast with Shane’s golden hair and pale buckskins.
All true—but I love it anyway.
I also read the galleys of the American edition of Zachary Leader’s thousand-page Kingsley Amis biography, which Pantheon is publishing next month. I’ll be writing about it then, so I’ll withhold comment for now. Instead, let me direct you to a review of Paul Fussell’s The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters that I published in the New York Times Book Review in 1994. I’d forgotten about it until I read Leader’s book, and it happens to be available online, unlike "A Touch of Class," the essay about Amis that I wrote for The New Criterion back in 1988. I like that piece a lot, but I left it out of the Teachout Reader because that collection is restricted to essays about American artists. (You can find it, however, in an obscure 1998 volume called Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis.)
Finally, I made a purchase that I hope will make Our Girl the least little bit jealous: I bought a copy of The Lavender Leotard, Edward Gorey’s very rare 1973 book about New York City Ballet. (OGIC is a longtime Gorey collector.) The inside jokes in The Lavender Leotard are unintelligible to anyone who doesn’t know a fair amount about the history of NYCB and the ballets of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, but I’m pleased to say that I got all but a couple of them.
All this was more than enough to keep me busy, as well as to tire me out. Though I’m basically well again, the steam in my boiler is still low and I have a lot of work to do this week, so I’ll sign off for now. It’s nice to be back!
Posted March 12, 2007 12:00 PM
