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October 31, 2007

CAAF: Afternoon coffee

• Slate plays the excellent parlor game of asking authors like Amy Bloom, Laura Lippman and John Crowley to name "The Great Books We Haven't Read." Mark me down as having never gotten past page 2 of Swann's Way, which I remember (perhaps erroneously) as having something to do with lying awake in bed and which always puts me to sleep in mine. I've tried three times now -- I'm like the climber who shows up at Everest every spring amid great pomp and with lots of gear and never gets past base camp.

• Speaking of great books not yet read, I've also been enjoying Critical Mass's Critical Library series, which has convinced me to finally get a copy of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis.

Posted October 31, 2:00 PM

CAAF: Funnier if you've read the book.

On Sunday, Mr. Tingle and I had brunch with my parents. There was a brief lull in the conversation and then my mom said very brightly and apropos of nothing, "Gumdrop and Lillian are going to rob Snoopy."

I thought she'd suffered some sort of mental break until she reminded me she was reading my copy of Away.

Posted October 31, 1:59 PM

CAAF: 5x5 Books for a Spooky Halloween by Kelly Link

5 x 5 Books ... is a recommendation of five books that appears regularly in this space. As a special treat, today's installment is a two-parter. First up is a 5x5 of spooky Halloween books recommended by Kelly Link, author of the knockout collections Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners and a connoisseur of strange, creepy, marvelous books. Just below you'll find a second 5x5 of not-so-spooky alternative recommendations written by Gavin Grant, Link's husband and co-founder with her of one of my favorite imprints, Small Beer Press.

1. 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill. One of the best collections I've read in years. For Halloween reading, I particularly recommend the stories "Best New Horror," "My Father's Mask," and "Voluntary Committal."

2. Thirsty by M. T. Anderson. This young adult novel begins this way: "In the spring, there are vampires in the wind. People see them scuffling along by the side of country roads. At night, they move through the empty forests. They do not wear black, of course, but things they have taken off bodies or bought on sale. The news says that they are mostly in the western part of the state, where it is lonely and rural. My father claims we have them this year because it was a mild winter, but he may be thinking of tent caterpillars."

3. Novels by Robin Westall, stories by E.F. Benson, and some Aiken too. I don't know if Westall's young adult horror novels The Watch House and The Scarecrows are still in print, but you can probably track them down. Track them down! Westall also wrote several collections of ghost stories in the tradition of E. F. Benson and M. R. James. Speaking of Benson, Carroll & Graf put out The Collected Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson a few years ago, and I love this edition best of all because it includes a foreword by Joan Aiken. And if you're already a fan of E. F. Benson, then you ought to pick up Joan Aiken's short story collections. I could continue to cram recommendations into this paragraph, but then I'd never get to ...

4. Cruddy by Lynda Barry. This one's part Grimm's fairytale (starts grim and gets grimmer), part Grand Guignol, part Jim Thompson-style grifters on the road. Mud and blood by the buckets, sock monkeys stuffed with money, and a knife named Little Debbie. Pair this with Patricia Geary's Strange Toys.

5. Flanders by Patricia Anthony. Lastly, I'll recommend this wonderful WWI epistolary novel by Patricia Anthony. There are ghosts here, and a serial killer, and a mysterious figure in a garden. I've been waiting ever since for Anthony to write another novel, but in the meantime I reread this one every other year or so.

Posted October 31, 12:30 AM

CAAF: 5x5 Books For A Not-So-Spooky Halloween by Gavin Grant

Of course, not everyone who sees a haunted house wishes to enter. With some less ghoulish recommendations, here is writer Gavin Grant, who is the founder with Kelly Link of Small Beer Press. Gavin's list, you'll note, is 100 percent ghost-and-goblin-free. Or is it?

1. Liquor, Prime, and Soul Kitchen by Poppy Z. Brite. Brite's series of sort-of-mysteries set in New Orleans make a wonderful break from horror novels. Beginning with Liquor, she tells the story of two young cooks who, inspired by their own prodigious drinking, decide to start a restaurant where every dish will feature liquor of some sort. Great characters, great city, great fun.

2. Box Office Poison by Alex Robinson. This one's a perennial favorite recommendation and should help keep you from noticing the Halloween ghouls. Half the readers in the country seem to have worked in a bookshop at some point or other which will make the start of this brilliant graphic novel easily recognizable. But the real genius here is that the book collects a comic written over a decade so that none of the characters follows the paths you might expect.

3. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Slightly darker, but not in a ghosts'n'goblins manner is this novel by Diaz, a hilarious, tragic, immersive smashing together of many cultures. Oscar and Junior are college roommates who shouldn't get on with each other, and often don't. It's brutal and fantastic.

4. Red Spikes by Margo Lanagan. OK, this one might be just right for the holiday (although I'd argue it's right for any holiday). Lanagan's collections are mind-boggling things. Her first, Black Juice, won an amazing amount of awards. Published as a young adult book, Red Spikes is her third collection (after White Time) and contains enough timeless tales of terror (sorry!) to keep you up all night.

5. Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. Paul Farmer's a hard-working hero who has spent his life battling against poor health conditions all over the world. You could do worse than reading these five books from the library and sending $50 to Partners in Health.

Posted October 31, 12:30 AM

TT: Almanac

"I have a weakness for minor artists. But they must be genuinely minor, by which I mean that they mustn't lapse into minority through overreaching, want of energy, crudity, or any other kind of ineptitude. They must not be failed major artists merely. The true minor artist eschews the noble and the solemn. He fears tedium for his audience, but even more for himself. He sets out to be, and is perfectly content to remain, less than great. The minor artist knows his limits and lives comfortably within them. To delight, to charm, to entertain, such are the goals the minor artist sets himself, and, when brought off with style and verve and elegant lucidity, they are--more than sufficient--wholly admirable."

Joseph Epstein, In a Cardboard Belt!

Posted October 31, 12:00 AM

October 30, 2007

OGIC: Great Kate, and a nod to the Cod

I'm nearly to the end of Kate Christensen's latest, The Great Man, having last summer devoured her novels In the Drink and The Epicure's Lament. This one is good, too, and has me particularly impressed by Christensen's range with characters. In The Great Man these include the seventy- and eighty-something wife, mistress, and sister of Oscar Feldman, a recently deceased painter whose biographers have started in. It's hardly original to note that women of a certain age don't get a lot of nuanced or lively representation in fiction, but it's true. In Christensen's novel, each of them is fascinating company: Maxine, the headstrong sister whose art can give Oscar's a run for its money; Teddy, the proud mistress; and Abigail, the homebound wife who may not have suffered as much as you'd think in the face of her husband's infidelities. That goes for Teddy's best friend Lila, too. For those of us who aspire to be interesting old women someday, the novel is awfully reassuring.

The Great Man has also made me sit up and take notice of what, with this novel, no longer seems incidental in Christensen's work: food. As you might surmise, it plays a substantial role in The Epicure's Lament, whose title character Hugo is an able and exacting cook. In this novel sumptuous meals are everywhere, unattached to any particular character, and hungrily described. Teddy cooks, but Maxine and Abigail find themselves at a dinner party and restaurant, respectively, where the food is both prepared and described meticulously. It's almost enough to make me press the book on the Gurgling Cod, who does in fact have a birthday coming up.

Here's a taste: a dinner party scene that put me in mind of Tom Wolfe's famous satirical take on 1980s haute cuisine in Bonfire of the Vanities.

The soup bowls were whisked away and plates of summery salad replaced them: a Japanese woodcut sea of curly pale green frisee lettuce on which floated almond slice rafts, each holding a tiny, near-translucent poached baby shrimp as pink and naked as a newborn. Crisp blanched haricots verts darted through the sea like needle-nosed fish. Cerise-rimmed radish slices bobbed here and there like sea foam. The dressing was a briny green lime juice and olive oil emulsion. Maxine stared at the thing, trying to imagine the person who had so painstakingly made it. It would be demolished in three bites.

Just because it's absurd doesn't mean it wouldn't be delicious.

Posted October 30, 9:52 AM

TT: Going to North Korea

I'm still receiving e-mail--and lots of it--about my "Sightings" column discussing the New York Philharmonic's proposed visit to North Korea, which appeared in The Wall Street Journal on Saturday. Virtually all of the people who've written so far have agreed with the stance I took against the visit, though I did get one letter that made me smile, albeit grimly:

Why don't you get your facts straight about North Korea before engaging in your petty little smear campaign. Fat heads like you need to be slapped around and kicked in the groin.

I suspect that Kim Jong Il's staff would be more than happy to oblige, since they already do it for so many other people.

Of far more interest, however, is this (unedited) e-mail from one James Zhu, part of which he also sent to Greg Sandow, whose earlier postings on this subject I quoted in my column:

I was a bit unsettled by your article on New York Philharmonic visit to North Korea, 10/27/2007. You never lived in such a society ("Darkness at Noon", nothing less) and culture, how do you evaluate the impact of classic music to people "not familiar with Western composers"? I was first exposed to Mozart at a time when one of my school teachers was beaten to death on the street like a wild dog. I didn't quite understood what was going on, but through his Serenade I said to myself, "there are got to be a better world". I was timely punished and sent away to a camp for scavenging these Columbia 33 1/2 records and listening to them. After the same New YorK Philharmonic came to China (the audience was highly controlled but not telecasted), nobody over there thought it was a support to Mao, knowing you wouldn't be raided anymore if you listen to Duke Ellington, and knowing the better stuff was coming. I surmise the viewpoints in media like yours must be more vocal before NYPO did China. Alas, look at what happened.

I am not sure how to put it politely: you are really sounds out of your line of work to the last few paragraphs of the article. When we are opinionated out of our circle of competence, we just show off our back end.

He certainly isn't sure how to put it politely! (Greg either didn't receive or was too nice to post that second paragraph.) Nevertheless, Zhu's point of view is very much worth hearing, since it reflects, in Greg's words, "the ghastly experience of living under a totalitarian regime." This does not, of course, mean that his experience as a survivor of the Cultural Revolution is directly relevant to the situation in North Korea, about which he has as much first-hand knowledge--none--as I do.

Still, the point Zhu makes deserves to be taken seriously. It may well be that some contact between North Korea and the West, however narrowly restricted and closely monitored, is better than none at all. I hope he's right, too, since my guess is that the Philharmonic is going to go to Pyongyang in any case.

Yet I remain skeptical, and am far more inclined to agree with the op-ed piece by Richard V. Allen and Chuck Downs of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea that appeared in the New York Times the day after my column was published:

Any outsider who reaches out to the suffering millions in North Korea must be cautious not to worsen their oppression. Consider how the regime prohibits international food donors from verifying who actually gets the food. Food aid is distributed only to the military and the faithful, and denied to those judged unreliable or disloyal. This is just one reason why Doctors Without Borders withdrew from North Korea in 1998.

Normally, concerts in North Korea are limited to performances of music that Kim Jong-il himself is (falsely) credited with having written or at least approved. Merely to listen to radio broadcasts from other nations is to risk imprisonment. During a party on Christmas in 1992, one of the regime's former propaganda officers, Ji Hae-nam, made the mistake of singing a South Korean song. She was sentenced to three years in jail and, as she testified to the United States Congress after her escape, beaten so severely she could not get up for a month.

It would be wonderful indeed if the Philharmonic could expose an audience in Pyongyang to some of the West's great anthems to freedom, or at least demonstrate that excellent music has been written outside North Korea's borders--and that the outside world is not so threatening after all. But negotiations so far on the terms of a visit are not promising.

If, as some starry-eyed commentators have suggested, the dictator's willingness to let the Philharmonic perform demonstrates a new level of "openness," then the orchestra should be able to make reasonable demands: that the orchestra alone set its program; that the performance be broadcast on state radio for everyone to hear; that the concert hall be open to the public, not just the elite; and that the Western press be allowed to attend. If the regime refuses these conditions, the Philharmonic should, in the name of artistic freedom, decline to perform in North Korea.

We'll soon see what the North Korean government demands of the Philharmonic--and what the orchestra's management, not to mention the members of the orchestra itself, will agree to do in order to play there.

Incidentally, you may find this book to be of interest. (Be sure to check out the customer reviews!)

Posted October 30, 6:54 AM

TT: Almanac

"I packed a bag and was headed out. I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go."

Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men (courtesy of The Rat)

Posted October 30, 12:00 AM

October 29, 2007

CAAF: Good-bye, boys of summer ... and several weeks of fall

Baseball is done for the season -- sad, but also a relief as it had become like a vortex that sucked three to four hours out of each day. A side observation: If you're a writer who struggles with titles ("'Smoke.' No, wait: 'Revelation.'"), you might want to turn on a game. Over the past few weeks I noticed that good novel titles were just tripping off the tongues of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver (particularly McCarver's), and I began to wonder if generating novel titles is perhaps a natural gift of sports broadcasters, one that waits to be tapped by arty America.

Admittedly, Buck and McCarver's titles are a little repetitive in construction, but they show a good sense of the commercial market, and, if you're really blocked, Joe and Tim are even kind enough to sketch out a rough storyline that could be used as a starter to get you typing. Thanks to them, I now have an idea for a ranging baseball trilogy, along the lines of William Kennedy's Albany Cycle, composed of these titles:
• The Wildness of Fausto Carmona: A Thorn Birds-y saga of innocence lost at the ALCS.
• The Free Spirit of Jonathan Papelbon: They tried to tame him. They failed.
• The Unpredictable Strike Zone of Chuck Meriweather: A heavily philosophical novel, almost Eastern European in tone, exposing a universe where a capricious god rules from behind the plate.

I haven't yet watched a football game with this theory in mind, but I'm looking forward to hearing what novel titles Madden comes up with. With Vitale, of course, all you'd get is Diaper Dandy and everyone knows Dick Lit doesn't sell.

Posted October 29, 12:53 PM

TT: The middle of the journey

I flew back from Smalltown, U.S.A., on Saturday night, and was reunited with Mrs. T (whom I hadn't seen since our honeymoon, arrgh) shortly thereafter. This afternoon I'm headed for Washington, D.C., the last in a more or less nonstop series of out-of-town trips that got underway two days after our wedding.

I like travel, especially when I get to see good shows on the road, but right now I'm so tired of living out of a suitcase that I could just...well, unpack. I'm equally tired of blogging in departure lounges, writing columns in hotel rooms, and reading review copies on airplanes. I'm not exactly a homebody--I actually get a kick out of staying in hotels--but I miss sitting on my couch and looking at the art on the walls. I miss sitting in my nice black Eames chair and listening to mp3 files on my Bose speakers as I click away at my MacBook. I miss popping over to Good Enough to Eat in between deadlines. I miss Central Park. I even miss my gym.

Alas, I'm going to have to keep on missing these things until Friday night, for I have to attend a meeting of the National Council on the Arts in Washington. The good news, however, is as follows:

• Mrs. T has recovered from her virus and will be accompanying me.

• I'll be taking her to the Phillips Collection (it's her first visit!) and the National Gallery (we're going to look at the Turner and Hopper retrospectives) in between NCA sessions.

• Ms. Asymmetrical Information, whom we last saw at the wedding, is throwing us a small dinner party.

Would I rather stay at home--or, better yet, in Connecticut, eating Mrs. T's cooking and working on my Louis Armstrong book? You bet. But since we've got to go, we're going to make the most of it, after which I plan to stay in New York for two whole weeks.

More as it happens....

Posted October 29, 12:00 AM

TT: New wrinkles

"Do you happen to know the year when your father was born?" I asked my mother the other day.

"No, I don't," she said after a moment's thought. We then spent the next half-hour sifting through various stacks of papers in a vain attempt to pin down the date. My guess, though, is that he must have been born some time around 1900, since my mother, the fourth of six siblings, was born in 1929.

Here are some other things that happened in 1900:

• William McKinley was elected to a second term as president of the United States. (He beat William Jennings Bryan.)

• Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Sullivan died.

• Aaron Copland and the Ayatollah Khomeini were born.

• Carrie Nation smashed up twenty-five saloons.

• Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams.

• Joseph Conrad published Lord Jim.

• Giacomo Puccini's Tosca was premiered in Rome.

• Kodak introduced the Brownie, the first hand-held camera.

• Construction began on the New York subway system.

My mother's life, in short, is a bridge between two profoundly, almost unimaginably different worlds. A child of the Great Depression, she was raised on a farm and baptized in a river, and has lived long enough to watch me talk on a computer screen, though she's never owned a computer of her own. Cake mixes and air conditioning are more her speed. The most recent inventions of any significance that she embraced wholeheartedly were the answering machine, the ATM, and the VCR. (She has a DVD player but never uses it.)

I suppose we all reach a moment in our lives when we lose interest in the new, and I suspect that moment comes sooner for technology than for art. For now I seem to be staying fairly open to new things--my experience as a blogger suggests as much--but I have yet to send my first text message, nor does my somewhat superannuated cellphone contain a digital camera. On the increasingly rare occasions when I feel the need to take a picture of something, I buy a disposable film camera, the postmodern equivalent of a Brownie, at the corner drugstore.

I have, alas, no children to take pictures of, but I do have a nineteen-year-old niece, and I wonder whether her offspring (assuming that she has children and that my life overlaps with theirs) will be no less bemused to recall that they once met a man who was born in the same year that Elvis Presley recorded "Heartbreak Hotel." Somehow I doubt it, and it's by no means certain that they'll remember anything about me at all. My mother's father, after all, died when I was six years old, and I have only the vaguest and most shadowy memories of him. He played the banjo, but I never saw him do so, nor do I remember the sound of his voice. I wish I did, for my mother loved him very much and still speaks of him with a warmth undiminished by the passage of time.

Philip Larkin wrote a poem called An Arundel Tomb that reflects on such memories, and its last line often comes to my mind now that I'm middle-aged: What will survive of us is love. That is all that survives of Albert Crosno, my banjo-playing maternal grandfather: love, three living children, and a few faded photographs. I can think of worse legacies.

Posted October 29, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door). A felicitously turned sentence can induce it. Or a description. Or unexpected behavior. Or ordinary behavior raised to the nth degree. Or intolerable suspense, as with the second half of Conrad's Victory. Or the forward movement of prose that is bent only on saying what the writer has to say. Or dialogue that carries with it the unconscious flowering of character. Or, sometimes, a fact."

William Maxwell, The Outermost Dream (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Posted October 29, 12:00 AM

October 27, 2007

SERENADING A TYRANT

"In the Soviet Union under Stalin and Khrushchev, classical music was generally accessible and composers like Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich managed to write major works in spite of the rigid censorship to which they were subjected. North Korea, by contrast, does not have anything remotely resembling a serious musical culture--and what it does have is not available to ordinary citizens..."

Posted October 27, 9:06 AM

TT: Serenading a tyrant

The New York Philharmonic is currently discussing a possible visit to Pyongyang with the North Korean government and the U.S. State Department. I've been thinking about the matter for the past couple of weeks, and the result is the "Sightings" column that appears in this morning's Wall Street Journal. Should the Philharmonic perform under the auspices of what may be the world's most repressive government? The answer isn't as obvious as you might think--no matter what you think.

To find out where I stand, pick up a copy of the Saturday Journal, where you'll find my column in the "Weekend Journal" section.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has posted a free link to this piece:

What would you have thought if Franklin Roosevelt had encouraged the Philharmonic to accept an official invitation to play in Berlin in the spring of 1939? Do you think such a concert would have softened the hearts of the Nazis, any more than Jesse Owens's victories in the 1936 Olympics changed their minds about racial equality? Or inspired the German people to rise up and revolt against Adolf Hitler? Or saved a single Jewish life?

The New York Philharmonic and the Bush administration would do well to ponder these questions before consenting to put America's oldest orchestra at the service of the man who turned off all the lights in North Korea.

To read the whole thing, go here.

Posted October 27, 12:00 AM

October 26, 2007

CAAF: It was crisp, it was cold, it was October.

Playing in the gutters over at TEV, I came across this little gem, originally published in the Times Literary Supplement in 2001 and kindly reproduced by Mark in the comments to a recent discussion. I like Elmore Leonard novels but I hate rules for fiction, which so often read like instructions for making a polyester blend sweater: Follow them unswervingly and you will end up with something serviceable, yes, but a little slick and uniform and itchy.* So this was satisfying:

NB J.C. 27 July 2001 
The fashionable crime writer Elmore Leonard has published his ten rules for writing fiction. Here they are: 1. Never open a book with weather. 2. Avoid prologues. 3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. 4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said". 5. Keep your exclamation marks under control. 6. Never use the word "suddenly". 7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. 8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. 9. Ditto, places and things. 10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. 
The eleventh rule is: If you come across lists such as this, ignore them. The rules may sound sensible enough, but, with the exception of No 5, each could be replaced with its opposite, and still be reasonable advice. Leonard complains that, while reading a book by Mary McCarthy, he had to "stop and get the dictionary" - as if it were a form of pain (William Faulkner, who broke most of these rules whenever he wrote, complained of Hemingway that he "never used a word you had to look up in the dictionary"). And what is meant by "leave out the part that readers tend to skip"? If every writer tried to be as exciting as Leonard, there would be no Brothers Karamazov, no Anna Karenina (remember those exquisitely boring sections on agronomy?), and the shelf reserved for Dickens or Balzac would measure about a foot. Banish patois, and we lose a library of fiction stretching from Huckleberry Finn to Trainspotting. As for dialogue, if Leonard samples Henry James, he will find "remarked", "answered", "interposed", "almost groaned", "wonderingly asked", "said simply", "sagely risked" and many more colourful carriers (these from a page or two of Roderick Hudson). Should they all be ironed out into "said"?

As for the first rule, see the opening of Bleak House.

* As I prepare this post, a hyperbolic amount of ire keeps creeping in. I keep wanting to type things like "bane" and "vile" and "slavish devotion to mediocrity," like there is a tiny English countess inside me who really has it in for writing rules. (Her glittering opus rejected, her resplendent accounts of the weather unhailed.) I blame too many workshops spent across the table from adherents to the rule that the active voice is always better than the passive voice. The countess says: Their heads would be better off.

Posted October 26, 12:30 PM

TT: Small is beautiful

Chicago is hot! Read all about it in today's Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I review Chicago Shakespeare's revival of Stephen Sondheim's Passion and Strawdog Theatre Company's revival of Brian Friel's Aristocrats:

Chicago Shakespeare's revival of Stephen Sondheim's "Passion" gains immeasurably from being performed not in the company's grand Elizabethan-style theater but in its upstairs house, a black-box performing space that has been set up for this production in a compact three-quarter-round seating arrangement. Taking his cue from the space, Gary Griffin, the Chicago director best known to New York audiences for his work on "The Color Purple," has reconceived "Passion" as a chamber piece accompanied by five instrumentalists, with results as illuminating as were John Doyle's similarly scaled productions of "Sweeney Todd" and "Company."

Part of what makes "Passion" so well suited to such treatment is that it its scale is already modest--though the emotions it portrays are unabashedly operatic. One way to approach this 1994 Sondheim-James Lapine collaboration is as a trope on a couplet by W.H. Auden: "If equal affection cannot be,/Let the more loving one be me." Here the unequal partner is the sickly, unattractive Fosca (Ana Gasteyer), who becomes obsessed with Giorgio (Adam Brazier), a handsome soldier who is having an affair with Clara (Kathy Voytko), a beautiful but unhappy bride who cannot live with Giorgio save at the cost of losing her child. Fosca's passion is so violent and all-consuming that it threatens her life. It also proves seductive to Giorgio, who has never known the disorienting sensation of being loved without limit: "Loving you/Is not a choice/And not much reason/To rejoice,/But it gives me purpose,/Gives me voice,/To say to the world:/This is why I live."

Nothing in Ms. Gasteyer's oddly miscellaneous resume--among other things, she spent six years on "Saturday Night Live"--prepared me for her anguished performance as Fosca, a notoriously difficult role which she interprets as memorably as did Donna Murphy and Patti LuPone before her....

If you think Chicago Shakespeare's upstairs theater is snug, wait till you see the headquarters of Strawdog Theatre Company, an L-shaped black box in a dingy storefront walkup. Yet that company, which is celebrating its 20th season, has a reputation that lured me to its production of "Aristocrats," Brian Friel's great 1979 play about a family of Irish Catholics who have sunk from upper-middle-class comfort into desperately shabby gentility. Rarely have my expectations been more satisfyingly surpassed. Strawdog's "Aristocrats" is one of those revivals so excellent as to leave a critic with nothing much to do but order you to drop everything and go see it at once--and its excellence, like that of "Passion," is deeply rooted in its clarifying smallness of scale. I saw it from the front row of the theater, sitting within arm's length of a cast whose acting was so direct and unmannered that I felt as though I were dining with them....

No free link. Do it. (If you're already a subscriber to the Online Journal, the column is here.)

Posted October 26, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead."

Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New

Posted October 26, 12:00 AM

October 25, 2007

TT: Textbook case

I finally made it to Smalltown, U.S.A., where I found in my e-mailbox this communication from a woman who works in the permissions department of W.W. Norton:

I am writing in regards to a permission granted by you for use of your material in The Norton Reader, 12th Edition. The book has recently been published and I am attempting to pay permissions fees. Before our accounting department can issue a check, they require that we have a W-9 tax form on file for your organization. I have attached the form to this letter. If you would be so kind as to fill the form out and then either fax, email, or mail it to my attention, I will be able to mail your check.

Not only had I forgotten that one of my pieces was picked for the new edition of The Norton Reader, but I couldn't remember which one it was, and I spent ten minutes rooting around on the Web before I finally found a list of the book's contents. (It comes out in December.) It seems that I'm to be in fast company: The Beatles Now, an essay I published in Commentary last year, will appear alongside Aaron Copland's "How We Listen," William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Paul Fussell's "Thank God for the Atom Bomb," Zora Neale Hurston's "How it Feels to Be Colored Me," Vladimir Nabokov's "Good Readers and Good Writers," John Henry Newman's "Knowledge and Virtue," George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant," James Thurber's "University Days," Eudora Welty's "One Writer's Beginnings," E.B. White's "Once More to the Lake," an excerpt from Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, Virginia Woolf's "In Search of a Room of One's Own," and--wait for it--the Gettysburg Address.

This is, as it happens, my first appearance in a textbook, and though I confess to never having heard of The Norton Reader prior to being asked to give my permission to appear in it, the publishers describe the volume in impressive-sounding terms:

Read by millions of students since it was first published in 1965, The Norton Reader is the bestselling collection of its kind. With readings in a wide variety of genres, subjects, and styles, it offers the largest and most thoughtfully chosen collection of essays for composition students today. The Twelfth Edition has been carefully revised, with 25 percent of its readings new.

Alas, a closer look at the contents of the new edition reveals that some of the company I'm keeping isn't quite as fast as I'd like. Indeed, the more recent selections are so sharply skewed in a philosophical direction far removed from the one to which I incline that I wonder whether I might possibly have been included for purposes of tokenism. That, too, is a new experience, one I can't say I much care for, any more than I get all warm and fuzzy at the thought of snuggling up next to Garrison Keillor, Molly Ivins, and Alice Walker.

Nor am I altogether pleased to be represented by "The Beatles Now," Yes, it's a solid piece of work, and I stand by its contents, but had I been asked to pick an essay of mine for inclusion in a college textbook, it wouldn't have been that one. Of the various pieces I included in A Terry Teachout Reader, the ones I like best are "The Land of No Context," "Stephen Sondheim's Unsettled Scores," "That Nice Elvis Boy," "What Randolph Scott Knew," and (of the more explicitly personal essays) "Close to Home" and "The Importance of Being Less Earnest," all of which seem to me to be more representative of the way I write and think than "The Beatles Now."

Be that as it may, I don't mind admitting that it's kind of cool to be in a book whose previous editions have been "read by millions of students," voluntarily or otherwise. I wonder, too, if anybody is actually going to teach me. Needless to say, I've assigned pieces of mine in classes that I've taught, but so far as I know, no one else has ever done so. I'm trying to imagine what a teacher might say about me--or, better yet, a test question based on my work. Which of the following phrases does Terry Teachout overuse in his writing? (A) "Be that as it may." (B) "Needless to say." (C) "As it happens." (D) All of the above.

So yes, it's an honor--of sorts--to be in The Norton Reader. The trouble is that it also makes me feel less like a person and more like a personage, the same way I feel when someone goes out of his way to call me "Mister Teachout," or recognizes me in an elevator from having seen the (awful) picture that accompanies my Saturday columns in the Wall Street Journal. The only thing I find more disorienting is to be written about, however enthusiastically, by a total stranger. Who is this guy? I always ask myself when it happens--and I'm not talking about the person who's writing about me, either.

I'd like to meet this semi-public figure who looks just like me but (judging by what I read about him on occasion) doesn't always think what I think. I bet he gets tired of saying "T-E-A-C-H-O-U-T--just like it sounds" to operators, or telling earnest young things not to call him mister, for God's sake. I'd like to know who wrote his Wikipedia entry, and how he got into the twelfth edition of The Norton Reader. I bet it's a good story. Or maybe not.

To quote from another of my pieces:

I suppose it's possible for a playwright to write a good play about a writer, but the temptation to sink into a nice warm bath of self-serving self-indulgence is apparently too great for ordinary mortals to overcome. Harold Ross knew this so well that he turned it into an iron rule for contributors to the New Yorker: "Nobody gives a damn about a writer or his problems except another writer."

That means you, Mister Teachout.

Posted October 25, 12:00 AM

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)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)
• Pygmalion (comedy, G, suitable for mature and intelligent young people, 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)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY:
• Dividing the Estate (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

Posted October 25, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Charity in the theater begins and ends with those who have a play opening within a week of one's own."

Moss Hart, Act One

Posted October 25, 12:00 AM

October 24, 2007

TT: Picture this

My latest videoblog for The Horizon, Commentary's artblog, has just been posted. In it I talk about Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise, the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Pygmalion, two new books about postmodern architecture and the life of Shakespeare, the most memorable thing that happened at my wedding ceremony, and the latest addition to what I'm now calling the Teachouts' Museum, a lithograph by Toko Shinoda.

To view it, go here.

Posted October 24, 6:47 PM

TT: Orange juice for one

I love teaching, and one of the few things I dislike about my professional life is that it keeps me too busy for part-time classroom stints. Once a year, though, I work off some of my frustration by leading a hands-on seminar in journalistic criticism at the NEA's Arts Journalism Institute in Classical Music and Opera, which is where I was yesterday morning. I spent three very intense hours working with six very smart critics, and enjoyed myself enormously. The only problem was that I had to get up early to write the first half of my Wall Street Journal drama column, then rush home after the seminar to finish it up and send it off to my editor.

Now I'm in Minneapolis, where I'll be seeing Brian Friel's new play this afternoon, then flying down to St. Louis immediately after the show and driving from there to Smalltown, U.S.A., to spend a couple of days telling my mother all about the Big Event. On Saturday I return to New York, and the next day I'll be seeing Kevin Kline in the Broadway revival of Cyrano de Bergerac.

I could stand a day off, or even two. More important, though, I haven't seen Mrs. T for a week and a half, and I miss her sorely. She was supposed to be accompanying me on my latest sprint through the hinterlands, but illness intervened, so I'll be seeing The Home Place by myself, and listening to the car radio as I make my way from St. Louis to Smalltown instead of chatting happily about nothing in particular. It's funny how fast you get used to not being alone.

Of course I still have the best job in the world--I can't believe I'm getting paid to see two Brian Friel plays and a Stephen Sondheim musical in one week--but as Joni Mitchell once put it, The bed's too big/The frying pan's too wide. I'll be glad when both are full again.

Posted October 24, 1:45 AM

TT: Almanac

"A small town is automatically a world of pretense. Since everyone knows everyone else's business, it becomes the job of the populace to act as if they don't know what is going on instead of its being their job to try to find out."

Jeanine Basinger, A Woman's View

Posted October 24, 12:00 AM

October 23, 2007

CAAF: Morning coffee

• In the Times of London, John Carey reviews The Letters of Ted Hughes, edited by Christopher Reid, and makes me want to read it rather desperately. (Via Paper Cuts.)

Earlier this month The Telegraph ran a three-part serial of excerpts from the letters: Part 1; Part 2; and Part 3. Not surprisingly, the extracts focus on Hughes' letters to and about Sylvia Plath, a relationship that, for me, has long been picked clean -- I believe Gwyneth declaiming Shakespeare by candlelight marked the official end -- but it may be worth the occasional bite of carrion for lines like: "Sometimes I think Cambridge wonderful, at others a ditch full of clear cold water where all the frogs have died" (from a letter to his sister Olywn); and, from a letter to Plath, "Who does Salinger copy? or Eudora Welty? All the good ones have invented their own manner in their own private rooms. ... Just write it off, in your own way, and make it stand up off the page and jump about the room."

• The New York Times archives on Hughes are a trove, containing the first chapter of his Ovid translation as well as W.S. Merwin's review, in 1957, of Hughes's first book of poems. The review begins:

Ted Hughes is a young English poet; "The Hawk in the Rain" is his first book. Its publication gives reviewers an opportunity to do what they are always saying they want to do: acclaim an exciting new writer. There is no need, either to shelter in the flubbed and wary remark that the poems are promising. They are that, of course; they are unmistakably a young man's poems, which accounts for some of their defects as well as some of their strength and brilliance. And Mr. Hughes has the kind of talent that makes you wonder more than commonly where he will go from here, not because you can't guess but because you venture to hope.

Posted October 23, 8:30 AM

TT: Metapost

I don't have a problem with writer's block, but sometimes I do have a problem with laziness. Yesterday I traveled from a fancy hotel room in Chicago to an empty apartment in New York. (Mrs. T is still up in Connecticut--the doctor ordered her to stay in bed and take antibiotics.) I dropped off my bags, checked my e-mail, grabbed a sandwich, picked up nine packages and a bag of laundry, and returned home to finish writing a Wall Street Journal drama column about the two shows I saw in Chicago on Sunday...only I couldn't make myself write another word. Which is, of course, an evasive way of saying that I didn't want to write another word, having already cranked out two pieces in Chicago and part of a third on the plane yesterday. I love what I do, but that doesn't mean I want to do it all the time, or even any more than I can help.

I suppose I could have squeezed out the rest of the column, but I told myself that it wouldn't be as good if I forced it, and decided instead to get up first thing Tuesday morning and polish it off. Having successfully talked myself out of working, I heated up a can of soup, settled myself on the couch, and watched American Splendor for the first time since I saw it in the theater four years ago. It turned out to be ideal for a temporary bachelor looking to kill a little time: clever, slightly depressing, not too challenging. Afterward I looked up my 2003 review and decided that I'd hit the nail on the head:

American Splendor is a quirkily affecting screen version of the long series of autobiographical comic books that tells the story of Harvey Pekar's uneventful life as a clerk in a Cleveland VA hospital....

Aside from Hope Davis, what makes American Splendor so good is not its postmodern shifting between "Harvey Pekar" the character (perfectly played in the film by Paul Giamatti) and Harvey Pekar the bonafide on-screen weirdo himself (Pekar's intermittent presence in the film borders at times on the cutesy), but the clarity and humor with which writer-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini show us the grubby melancholy of lower-middle-class urban life....

I should point out, however, that the "Harvey Pekar" of American Splendor is a semi-fictional character, and that a movie about the real Harvey Pekar might well have been even more interesting, if less touching. Yes, Harvey the celebrated author of autobiographical comic books and "Harvey" the fictional author of autobiographical comic books both spent a quarter-century working at numbingly dull jobs, survived cancer, razzed David Letterman on camera, found love, and started a family. But the real Harvey Pekar is not simply a hapless record-collecting schlub from Cleveland who decided one day to write comic books about his working-class life. He is also a full-fledged left-wing intellectual--homemade, to be sure, but the shoe still fits--who reviews books for the Village Voice and does regular commentaries on NPR.

While all this information has been carefully scissored out of American Splendor, its absence does not invalidate the movie, which has its own expressive validity independent of the man whose story it purports to tell. Still, it should be kept firmly in mind that in creating "Harvey Pekar," the makers of American Splendor--not to mention Pekar himself--deliberately omitted inconvenient details whose inclusion would doubtless have caused the film to make a radically different impression on many viewers. "Harvey" is a weird but nonetheless convincingly common man whose plight really does come across as more or less universal. Harvey is...well, something else again. To put it mildly. And then some.

That's another thing writers do to avoid working: they sit around and read their old pieces.

Sooner or later, though, there comes a moment when further delay is impossible. For me that moment will be six-thirty Tuesday morning, when the alarm clock will ring and I'll descend grumpily from the loft, boot up my MacBook, and finish the damn review. Then I'll take a cab up to Columbia Journalism School, where I'm to spend three hours working with a half-dozen NEA Arts Journalism Institute fellows. At four I depart for Minneapolis and a Wednesday matinee of The Home Place, Brian Friel's new play, at the Guthrie Theatre.

Would all this go more smoothly if I'd finished writing my review on Monday night? Obviously. So why did I choose instead to write about why I didn't feel like writing? Benchley's Law, of course.

Are all writers crazy? Probably.

Posted October 23, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Travel is glamorous only in retrospect."

Paul Theroux (quoted in the Observer, Oct. 7, 1979)

Posted October 23, 12:00 AM

October 22, 2007

CAAF: Firsthand social notes

We're off to a murky gray morning here in the mountains. Last night my book club met, and we had a special guest, Katherine Min, author of Secondhand World. Katherine was inveigled to join us for the evening by one of our members who teaches with her at UNCA. As Tingle Alley readers will already know, my book club's been meeting about eight years and in that time we've grown a little loose and informal in our approach: Currently there's seven of us, and we meet at each other's houses every month or so to drink, eat, gossip, and sometimes (but not always) discuss the assigned novel. We've never once assayed the questions for reading groups provided by publishers at the end of books; and we sometimes skip reading a book altogether in favor of an article or short story, and there is nothing satiric you can say about any of this that we haven't already noted.

With Katherine as our guest, however, we mustered a slightly more on-point discussion, while also eating stew, crusty bread and plum crisp, and putting away serious amounts of red wine. I need to get some work done this morning, but wanted to point your attention to an excellent interview with Katherine at The Mumpsimus. She'll be reading at Malaprop's on Saturday, November 3rd -- and if you live in Asheville, you should attend.

Posted October 22, 12:26 PM

TT: Holding pattern

I'm sitting in a departure lounge at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, about which the best can be said is that if there is a hell, it will look much like this place, only somewhat nicer. Fortunately, my trusty MacBook makes it possible for me to work pretty much anywhere, so I'm clicking away industriously, surfing the Web and catching up with my e-mail.

I have much to tell about the past couple of weeks, and I'm looking forward to telling it, but I'll have to do so in dribs and drabs, rather than in the nice tight chronological narrative I'd originally planned to post. The truth is that for the moment, I simply don't have any spare time. I'm so busy that I had to write two pieces in my Chicago hotel room yesterday, one of which has already been posted, and I spent this morning's hour-long cab ride to O'Hare skimming today's Journal and going over a medium-sized pile of accumulated snail mail.

Later in the week I'll be telling you about:

• My honeymoon visit to Fallingwater.

• The opening night of William Bailey's new show at Betty Cuningham Gallery.

• Anthony Minghella's Metropolitan Opera production of Madama Butterfly, which I finally got around to seeing last Friday.

• A new addition to the Teachout Museum.

• My latest videoblog, which will be posted in the next day or two.

• The Letter, which is coming along very nicely.

All this and more...but now I have to catch a plane!

Posted October 22, 11:14 AM

TT: On the flying trapeze

I'm in Chicago--but not for long. I'll be returning to New York this afternoon, and once I make it back to my office, presumably in one piece, I'll check in with you at greater length.

Later.

Posted October 22, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it."

Russell Baker, introduction to The Norton Book of Light Verse

Posted October 22, 12:00 AM

October 21, 2007

PLAY

Pygmalion (Roundabout/AA, 227 W. 42, closes Dec. 16). George Bernard Shaw's greatest comedy, lavishly and immaculately revived for the first time on Broadway since 1987. Claire Danes makes her professional stage debut as Eliza Doolittle and belts it out of the park, with Jefferson Mays (I Am My Own Wife) giving a comparably dazzling performance as Henry Higgins, the fanatical phonetician who means to make Eliza a lady by erasing her Cockney accent. Great staging, great supporting performances, great sets, great lighting. Even the incidental music, all of it by Elgar, hits the bull's-eye. This one is already a tough ticket, but do your damnedest (TT).

Posted October 21, 12:00 AM

October 19, 2007

CAAF: ""Let's make it work, eh."

The fourth season of Project Runway premieres Nov. 14. In the meanwhile, episodes of Project Runway Canada are surfacing for brief intervals online. Before its sure evanescence, watch Episode 2 here. So far the show's been excellent, with stronger production than the British Project Catwalk, which had an improvised-on-a-shoestring feel to its first two seasons. (Link courtesy of Project Rungay.)

In this episode: Lincoln will break your heart Malan style, you'll be relieved Megan can't make fleurchons, and Kendra throws a few Wendy Pepper shadows of insecurity against the wall, a shame because, unlike Wendy Pepper, she makes beautiful clothes. And that Iman, fierce queen of the runway, eh?

Posted October 19, 10:23 AM

TT: Two tickets to paradise

I saw two fabulous shows this week, one in New York (Pygmalion) and one in Pennsylvania (Six Characters in Search of an Author). Both get the big rave in today's Wall Street Journal drama column:

With the prospect of a show-stopping strike by the stagehands' union casting a shadow over Broadway, the Roundabout Theatre Company pulled off a coup last night. It opened a solid-gold hit--in a strike-proof theater. David Grindley's extravagant, exhilarating production of "Pygmalion," in which Claire Danes is making her debut as a stage actress, is the best classical revival mounted by the Roundabout in recent memory. No sooner do the lights go down than it takes off like a supersonic skyrocket, powered by a cast that is strong from top to bottom....

Of course you'll want to know about Ms. Danes, and the news is good: If I hadn't known that this was her first straight play, I'd never have guessed it. Unlike so many movie and TV stars who dabble cluelessly in legitimate theater, she has mastered the elusive art of projection. Not only is she audible, but she is blazingly visible as well, lighting up the 740-seat American Airlines Theatre with the kind of space-filling energy that comes naturally or not at all....

Is there a regional drama company with a better name than People's Light & Theatre? This 33-year-old ensemble, which operates out of a two-theater complex in a suburb just west of Philadelphia, is putting on Louis Lippa's newly translated, freely adapted performing version of "Six Characters in Search of an Author," the 1921 play in which Luigi Pirandello beat the postmodernists to the punch a half-century before the fact. It's every bit as satisfying as the Roundabout's "Pygmalion," and a lot easier to get into....

Acting, staging, costumes, lighting, sound design: All sweep over you in a way so unified and involving that you'll feel disoriented when it's over, as though you'd just emerged from a funhouse in which truly scary things happen.

No free link. Once again, you know what to do, so get with. (If you're already a subscriber to the Online Journal, the column is here.)

Footnote for theater-savvy travelers: not only is PL&T's production of Six Characters terrific, but you can also dine at Places, the company's on-site bistro, where the food and service are both exceptionally fine and you're mere steps from the theater. Between Six Characters and the major Renoir landscape show now on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I can't think of a better time to visit the City of Brotherly Love. What's keeping you?

Posted October 19, 12:00 AM

TT: It's going to be a bumpy ride

Mrs. T is still shaking off the bug that bit her two weeks ago, so I'm going to Chicago alone (sorry that I can't take you!) tomorrow morning. Our Girl and I will be catching two shows on Sunday, Chicago Shakespeare's production of Stephen Sondheim's Passion and Strawdog Theatre Company's production of Brian Friel's Aristocrats. I'll be flying back to New York on Monday, then departing for Minneapolis et ux the following afternoon to see yet another Friel play, The Home Place, which is receiving its American premiere at the Guthrie Theatre. From there Hilary and I fly to St. Louis and drive to Smalltown, U.S.A., to give my mother a first-hand account of the Big Event. Then back to New York, then off to Washington, D.C. I forget what happens after that....

You get the message, right? The joint is jumping. Yes, I'm packing my iBook, and I plan to blog as often as I can, but I've also got to hit a string of deadlines while I'm on the road, so kindly expect no miracles. As always, OGIC and CAAF will do their thing in my absence.

More anon.

Posted October 19, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another."

George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

Posted October 19, 12:00 AM

October 18, 2007

TT: Still catching up

Forgive me if your recent calls and/or e-mails have gone unanswered. I'm struggling to deal with some pressing post-marital deadlines before leaving on Saturday morning for an out-of-town theater trip. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

Posted October 18, 9:06 AM

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)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, 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)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK:
• Dividing the Estate (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Oct. 28)

CLOSING SATURDAY:
• The Dining Room (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

Posted October 18, 12:00 AM

TT: Nuptial playlist

Hilary and I gave each of the guests at our wedding a custom-pressed CD called Autumn in New York: A Wedding Album (Mostly by Friends, Present and Absent). The cover is a reproduction of one of the pieces in the Teachout Museum, a fired tile called "View from My Studio" painted in 1966 by Nell Blaine. The album contains sixteen tracks:

• "Down a Country Lane," composed by Aaron Copland and performed by Leo Smit (Deidre Rodman played it as a processional).

• "Sonnet 49," composed and performed by Luciana Souza. It's an excerpt from Neruda, a song cycle based on the poems of Pablo Neruda and the piano pieces of Federico Mompou.

• "Autumn in New York," written by Vernon Duke and performed by Julia Dollison (from Observatory, her first album).

• "Ask," written by Stephen Morrissey and Johnny Marr and performed by the Lascivious Biddies (from Get Lucky). The Biddies--Deidre Rodman, Saskia Lane, Amanda Monaco, and Lee Ann Westover--also supplied the music for the post-wedding dinner party.

• "Slow Boat to China," written by David Cantor of Dave's True Story and performed by Mary Foster Conklin (from Crazy Eyes, her first album). Mary also sang Lucky to Be Me during the ceremony, accompanied by Deidre.

• "Hang Gliding," composed by Maria Schneider and performed by the Maria Schneider Orchestra (from Allégresse).

• "Black Butterfly," written by Duke Ellington and performed by Dick Sudhalter (from Melodies Heard, Melodies Sweet...).

• "Hedgehog," written by Amanda Monaco and performed by the Amanda Monaco 4 (from the group's self-titled debut album).

• "Gimme a Man," written and performed by Patty Tuite.

• "Fireworks," written and performed by Greta Gertler (from The Baby That Brought Bad Weather).

• "The Silence of a Candle," written by Ralph Towner and performed by Kendra Shank (from Reflections). Kendra also sang "One Hand, One Heart" during the ceremony, accompanied by Amanda.

• "Rock Skippin' at the Blue Note," written by Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington and performed by Bill Kirchner (from Some Enchanted Evening).

• "Sweet Airs," a movement from Tempest Fantasy, composed by Paul Moravec and performed by David Krakauer and Trio Solisti (from the Naxos recording of Tempest Fantasy).

• "Famous Potatoes," written by Deidre Rodman and performed by Deidre and Steve Swallow (a bonus track from Twin Falls).

• "One Hand, One Heart," written by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim and performed by Tuck & Patti (from Dream).

• "Two for the Road," written by Henry Mancini and Leslie Bricusse and performed by Nancy LaMott (from My Foolish Heart).

Bill, Dick, Greta, Julia, Kendra, Luciana, Mary, Patty, Paul, and the four Biddies are all friends. Nancy, who died in 1995, never knew Hilary, but I have no doubt that they would have liked each other very much. Copland is my favorite American composer, and "Down a Country Lane," a two-page miniature for solo piano written as a teaching piece for children and originally published in Life in 1962, is one of his loveliest pieces. Hilary chose "One Hand, One Heart" to be sung during the ceremony. I wrote the liner notes for Get Lucky, Neruda, Observatory, and Tempest Fantasy.

All of the albums from which these tracks are drawn can be ordered through amazon.com, and some of them are also available on iTunes. ("Famous Potatoes" is an iTunes-only bonus track.)

Happy listening!

Posted October 18, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"This music of yours. A manifestation of the highest energy--not at all abstract, but without an object, energy in a void, in pure ether--where else in the universe does such a thing appear? We Germans have taken over from philosophy the expression 'in itself,' we use it every day without much idea of the metaphysical. But here you have it, such music is energy itself, yet not as idea, rather in its actuality. I call your attention to the fact that is almost the definition of God. Imitatio Dei--I am surprised it is not forbidden."

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter)

Posted October 18, 12:00 AM

October 17, 2007

TT: Cultural ubiquity redefined

This site is not about politics, but I was nonetheless intrigued to read in the latest Gallup Poll that 23% of Americans claim not to have heard of Fred Thompson, while one out of three Republicans and 15% of all respondents say they don't know enough about Thompson to have an opinion of him.

May we take this as proof that, contrary to popular belief, some of us don't watch Law & Order? Mrs. Teachout does, but I'd seen a grand total of one episode prior to meeting her two years ago, and the only one of Thompson's films that I'd seen was In the Line of Fire, which is fourteen years old.

While all this says far more about me than it does about Fred Thompson, the fact that his name recognition falls considerably short of universal strikes me as...well, comforting. I'm no culture snob, but it's still nice to know that I'm not the only American who keeps a relatively safe distance from the massiest of mass media.

UPDATE: A friend writes:

I had to drop you a note because I just read your blog about Fred Thompson. As I am a diehard Law & Order fan (I feel people are either CSI or L&W fans...they can like both, but they really lean towards one. It's kinda like the Beatles-or-Elvis theory), I never knew what his name was till he announced he was running for president...and even then, it took me a few days to remember it. But no matter how much I adore L&W (or any show for that matter), I usually have no clue what the actors' names are.

Several other readers echoed that last observation. I guess that's the difference between a critic and a civilian!

Posted October 17, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The number of jazz musicians in this country who piece out their lives in the shadows and shoals of show business has always been surprising. They play in roadhouses and motel lounges. They play in country inns and small hotels. They appear in seafood restaurants in ocean resorts and in steak houses in suburban shopping centers. They play in band shells on yellow summer evenings. They sit in, gloriously, with famous bands on one-night stands when the third trumpeter fails to show. They play wedding receptions and country-club dances and bar mitzvahs, and they turn up at intense Saturday night parties given by small-town businessmen who clap them on the back and request 'Ain't She Sweet,' and then sing along. Occasionally, they venture into big cities and appear for a week in obscure nightclubs. But more often they take almost permanent gigs in South Orange and Rochester and Albany. There is a spate of reasons for their perennial ghostliness: The spirit may be willing but the flesh is weak; their talents, though sure, are small; they may be bound by domineering spouses or ailing mothers; they may abhor traveling; they may be among those rare performers who are sated by the enthusiasms of a small house in a Syracuse bar on a February night. Whatever the reasons, these musicians form a heroic legion. They work long hours in seedy and/or pretentious places for minimum money. They make sporadic recordings on unknown labels. They play for benefits but are refused loans at the bank. They pass their lives pumping up their egos. Some of them sink into sadness and bitterness and dissolution, but by and large they remain a cheerful, hardy, ingenious group who subsist by charitably keeping the music alive in Danville and Worcester and Ish Peming."

Whitney Balliett, Alec Wilder and His Friends (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Posted October 17, 12:00 AM

October 16, 2007

GALLERY

William Bailey (Betty Cuningham, 541 W. 25, up through Nov. 24). New table-top still lifes and nudes by the controversial American painter whose "realism" is tinged with subtle but unmistakable touches of abstraction. I wrote the introductory essay for the exhibition catalogue: "Today Bonnard is widely acknowledged as the major master he always was, and Morandi and Diebenkorn seem well on the way to achieving similar recognition. William Bailey will likely prove a harder sell, not just because of the American obsession with 'cutting-edge' art but also because his paintings never raise their voice....They give nothing away: you must come to them." Here's your chance to do just that (TT).

Posted October 16, 9:39 AM

CD

Sérgio and Odair Assad, Jardim abandonado (Nonesuch). A new CD by two brothers whose guitar playing is so virtuosic and mutually intuitive as to suggest a single musician with four arms and twenty fingers. The fare is ingeniously varied--Debussy, Jobim, Milhaud, Adam Guettel, even an idiomatic transcription of Rhapsody in Blue--and the performances breathtakingly sensuous (TT).

Posted October 16, 9:39 AM

DANCE

Mark Morris Dance Group, The Hard Nut. Finally on DVD, the 1992 TV version of Morris' modern-dance Nutcracker, a postmodern, pop-inflected rethinking of the Tchaikovsky ballet. Don't be fooled by the campy touches: The Hard Nut is funny, touching, deeply felt, and choreographically ingenious to the highest degree (TT).

Posted October 16, 9:38 AM

TT: The more things change

I returned from my honeymoon last night to find my apartment full of unopened mail and my e-mailbox full of unread messages. What else is new?

I'd have much rather stayed in Connecticut, where Hilary is doing battle with a brutal case of post-marital sniffles, but Mr. Think Denk and I promised long ago to make a joint appearance this morning before a group of NEA Arts Journalism fellows, so I'm in Manhattan and Mrs. Teachout isn't. Not until this weekend shall the twain meet again. Such are the lives of a busy married couple with two homes!

As for the events of the week just past, I'll share some of them with you after I finish opening my mail, which won't be today.

Later.

UPDATE: Some of the writers at this morning's colloquy told me that they'd read my stuff when young and found it inspiring. Talk about having mixed feelings about a compliment...

Posted October 16, 12:00 AM

TT: Not your ordinary press release

I've written a fair amount in this space and elsewhere about Chris Thile, lately of Nickel Creek, most recently when he and the band performed with Fiona Apple in Central Park. In March I penned the program notes for a Carnegie Hall concert in which Chris and his new group premiered a large-scale piece called The Blind Leading the Blind:

The Blind Leaving the Blind is a 40-minute suite in four movements for voice, mandolin, violin, banjo, guitar, and bass. That's the standard bluegrass lineup, of course, but The Blind Leaving the Blind doesn't fit into that familiar pigeonhole, or any other. It's not a medley-like string of songs, but a through-composed piece in which vocal passages and extended instrumental interludes are woven together into a tightly integrated whole that fuses the song-based structures of folk and pop with the large-scale, organically developed forms of classical music. If Chris were a classical composer, he might have called it a cantata, but that old-fashioned word suggests something far more formal in tone than the surprise-filled musical steeplechase that is The Blind Leaving the Blind....

For all these reasons and more, I was delighted to find the following press release in my e-mailbox when I got back to Manhattan:

Nonesuch Records has signed mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile as well as his new band, Punch Brothers: Chris Eldridge (guitar), Greg Garrison (bass), Noam Pikelny (banjo), and Gabe Witcher (fiddle). The band's label debut will be released on February 26, 2008.

Thile is perhaps best known as a member of the Grammy Award-winning trio Nickel Creek, with whom he had played since childhood. He formed the band now known as Punch Brothers for his 2006 Sugar Hill record, How to Grow a Woman from the Ground. In a review of that album, the Chicago Tribune said, "After wandering ever further from bluegrass with Nickel Creek and his own solo albums over the past decade, mandolinist/singer Thile charges back to home base with a modernist bluegrass grand slam. Strutting their stuff with the boss is Thile's cherry-picked crop of like-aged (mid-20s) acoustic virtuosi, including local boys Greg Garrison on bass and Noam Pikelny on banjo," and the Wisconsin State Journal

The new album will include Thile's four-movement composition, The Blind Leaving the Blind, which the band performed at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall earlier this year, as part of label-mate John Adams' In Your Ear festival.

Thile's solo records and collaborations also will be released by Nonesuch, beginning with an album with composer/bassist Edgar Meyer later in 2008.

"In the more than two decades I have been at Nonesuch, this is the first time we have made two signings at once. The combination of natural talent, deep musicianship, and hard work has rarely been more obvious in a musical group of any genre than it is with Punch Brothers," said label President Bob Hurwitz. "And regarding Chris--by the time I had heard him play a handful of phrases, I hoped that one day we might have the good fortune to work with him. He is the type of musician who comes around about once in a decade, and we are thrilled to begin a relationship with him now."

Thile adds, "I've been a Nonesuch fan for years. It seems like every other record I fall in love with has that little 'N' on the back. When I found out the boys and I were going to be working with them I felt like I had been drafted by the Cubs. And I can't imagine being more excited about a project than I am about Punch Brothers. The possibilities are endless with these guys!"

Review copies of the Punch Brothers album will be available later this fall, along with details of early-2008 performance dates.

I can't wait.

Posted October 16, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"When the shrivelled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly."

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Posted October 16, 12:00 AM

October 15, 2007

TT: Unclean sweep

I ran across the following remark while surfing the Web the other day: "I scandalized a dinner party twenty something years ago by offering the opinion that since the invention of photography, all art has been more or less consciously fraudulent. I still think I was right." Coming as it does in the wake of the release of Amir Bar-Lev's My Kid Could Paint That, I expect that this flat repudiation of all things modern will fall on more than a few receptive ears.

I commented on this attitude four years ago:

The world is full of rejectionists of various kinds--not so many as when I was younger, but still quite a few. I have a number of older musician friends who claim to hate all kinds of post-Sinatra pop music, for example, and I also get occasional letters from readers who want to know how I could possibly admire the music of Benjamin Britten or the paintings of Giorgio Morandi, or take a movie like Ghost World seriously. What nearly all these latter correspondents seem to have in common is that they really, truly don't like any modern art, a position which puzzles me. Now, I freely admit to having problems with large tracts of the modern movement, and I long ago brought in guilty verdicts on atonal music and minimalist art, but at no time in my life has it ever occurred to me to dismiss all modernism as a snare and a delusion.

Are these anti-modernists poseurs? Some probably are, but I can't imagine that many of them are merely playing at the old-fogy game. A greater number, I suspect, are rejecting something about which they know nothing, or at least not nearly enough to have an informed opinion.

I suspect that the man who made the aforementioned remark fits into the latter category. For his benefit, and that of anyone else who shares his view, I pose the following question: do you think the following works of art are "more or less consciously fraudulent"?

• Charles Demuth, Eggplant (painted in 1922-23)

• John Marin, Mt. Chocurua--White Mountains (painted in 1926)

• Milton Avery, Trees (painted in 1936)

• Lyonel Feininger, Waterfront (painted in 1942)

• Arnold Friedman, Landscape (painted in 1945-46)

• Edward Hopper, Cape Cod Morning (painted in 1950)

• Fairfield Porter, Wheat (painted in 1960)

• Richard Diebenkorn, Cityscape I (painted in 1963)

• Helen Frankenthaler, For E.M. (painted in 1981)

• Neil Welliver, Blueberry Burn Morey's Hill (painted in 1997)

• Alex Katz, Birches (painted in 2002)

• William Bailey, Turning (painted in 2003)

Unlike the creator of this quiz, I have no tricks up my sleeve. Each of these paintings is by a respected American artist, nine of whom are represented in the Teachout Museum. I'm just curious: does anybody out there honestly believe that all of these painters are frauds?

Posted October 15, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth; he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May."

William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor

Posted October 15, 12:00 AM

October 12, 2007

TT: Improper strangers

I'm not here, but my Friday Wall Street Journal drama column is. This week I review the Broadway revival of Terrence McNally's The Ritz and Paper Mill Playhouse's production of Garry Marshall's Happy Days: A New Musical:

I love farce, but "The Ritz" is a big, sloppy mess, a series of inconsistently amusing sketches loosely strung on a paper-thin pretext: Gaetano (Kevin Chamberlin) marries into a family of Brooklyn thugs. His brother-in-law Carmine (Lenny Venito) decides to whack him on general principles. In order to avoid becoming a whackee, he jumps in a cab and asks the driver to take him to a place where nobody would dream of looking for him. The driver drops him at the front door of a gay steambath, which Gaetano innocently assumes is an ordinary Turkish bath...and we're off to the races.

Needless to say, all this is the stuff of a high-speed mistaken-identity farce, and in the hands of a more disciplined farceur it might well have yielded up loads of laughs. The trouble is that Mr. McNally has failed to nail the pieces together with the scrupulous precision that farce demands, meaning that the second act of "The Ritz" fails to build up or pay off with the explosive comic force of such great modern farces as Joe Orton's "What the Butler Saw" or Michael Frayn's "Noises Off." Yes, it's funny--but not funny enough....

Garry Marshall and Paul Williams have come up with a musical version of "Happy Days," one of the most successful sitcoms of the '70s. Perhaps the proper word for this wan production, however, is meta-nostalgic, since it's a show about a show, a sentimental look back at a sentimental look back at America in the '50s. That's an awful lot of sentiment for one musical, especially one that doesn't contain a single memorable song. All Mr. Williams has to offer is carbon-paper pastiche, just as all Mr. Marshall has to offer is a plot bland enough to have been pinched from an episode of the sitcom he created in 1974, back in the days when most network TV series were as controversial as turkey on white with mayo.

No free link. You know what to do. (If you're already a subscriber to the Online Journal, the column is here.)

Posted October 12, 12:00 AM

TT: The Jets just keep on coming

West Side Story just turned 50 years old, and in my "Sightings" column in Saturday's Wall Street Journal I hold forth on the virtues--and vices--of one of the most important and influential musicals of the postwar era. (This is not a puff piece.) Pick up a copy of tomorrow's Journal to see what I have to say.

If you're a subscriber to the Online Journal, you can read my column after midnight tonight by going here.

Posted October 12, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"My grandfather Frank Lloyd Wright wore a red sash on his wedding night. That is glamour!"

Anne Baxter (quoted in Time, May 5, 1952)

Posted October 12, 12:00 AM

October 11, 2007

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)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, 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)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
• Dividing the Estate (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Oct. 28)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK:
• The Dining Room (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Oct. 20)

Posted October 11, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

Can even death dry up
These new delighted lakes, conclude
Our kneeling as cattle by all-generous waters?

Philip Larkin, "Wedding-Wind"

Posted October 11, 12:00 AM

October 10, 2007

CAAF: Weekly reader

• I spent last Saturday on the couch reading and bawling over Amy Bloom's Away. It's a marvelous novel, as good as the reviews promised. The novel was as psychologically acute as I expect from Bloom -- as a writer, she is both so comprehending and tender about the human animal -- but the prose seemed more charged than anything I've read of hers previously. If you haven't read it yet I don't want to ruin the best sections for you, so some incidental flourishes: A woman overheard embarking on a disastrous love affair has a laugh like "the sound of bells on a warhorse"; a man in the act is described as "soft as oatmeal"; a wife complains that her husband's labors over her during lovemaking were like "a man sawing wood." What I really want to share is a section that comes late in the book, a meditation on Prosperine in the underworld, that knocked my socks off, but that seems unscrupulous. Like revealing a movie's best bit in the trailer.

It's been a while since I bawled over a novel; it's such an odd thing when it happens. Sure, you expect to cry when Dickens gets an orphan on the slab but otherwise, what provokes it? With Away the leaking started somewhere in the first couple chapters and I just gave myself up to it. The last time a book made me cry was a Kleenex-strewn weekend, late in 2005, which stands out because it was a two-fer of tears, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Mary Gaitskill's Veronica, after which I looked like a soggy lump with pink-eye. (Or as my friend Hortense would say, "my eyes were puckered tight as a rat's a**hole.") With all three of those novels it wasn't necessarily specific events in the novel that triggered the waterworks, just an underlying tug of sorrow over wasted or lost chances. Middle-aged sadness. (OGIC and TT, any weepers for you?)

Ever since her collection A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, I've envied Bloom's gift for titles. In that vein Away has some excellent chapter titles, like "I've Lost My Youth, Like a Gambler with Bad Cards," "If I Had Chains, I Would Pull You to Me," and "Ain't It Fierce to Be So Beautiful, Beautiful?" Also a great first line: "It is always like this: The best parties are made by people in trouble."

• On Sunday my husband and I were turned away from a sold-out matinee of Ratatouille at Asheville Pizza, so we went to Malaprop's instead. I picked up the Best American Essays edited by David Foster Wallace and a copy of Walden, which I read and detested in college but hope to feel more beneficently toward now.

Also being read this week:
• Edith Wharton's The Reef, Henry James' favorite of her novels
• Allen Mandelbaum's translation of The Metamorphoses

Posted October 10, 2:20 PM

TT: Peekaboo

The newly minted Mrs. Teachout and I are spending the next couple of days here en route to here and here. I haven't tried out my voice yet this morning, but I trust it doesn't sound quite as bad as it did on Monday.

Tracey Jenkins, the adorable wizardess who designed milady's engagement ring, has posted some snapshots of the Big Event.

For a prose-only perspective on the proceedings, go here.

See you next week.

P.S. This is the "amazing band" to which Tracey refers in her posting. Also present and performing were Mary Foster Conklin, Julia Dollison, and Kendra Shank.

Posted October 10, 9:01 AM

CAAF: Morning coffee

• Crooked House gets all Shelby Foote on the Fairy Tale War of the '20s and '30s, a period when librarians went mano y mano in a heated debate over whether kids' lit should go mimetic or stay magical. A dark yet heady time: Warhorses ranged on one side of the battlefield, centaurs and unicorns on the other; the fierce yet oddly hushed clash of battle ...

If you're interested, Natalie Reif Ziarnik's From School and Public Libraries: Developing the Natural Alliance provides more background on the debate (see pages 10-14). If you're not interested, then I recommend pegging back to Crooked House for a discussion of "The Road as parenting book."

• "The Wild Swans" by Hans Christian Andersen.

Posted October 10, 7:30 AM

TT: Almanac

"We should be careful never to imagine, that the wedding-day is the burial of love, but that in reality love then begins its best life; and if we set out upon that principle, and are mindful to keep it up, and give due attention and aid to the progress of love thus brought into the well ordered well sheltered garden, we may enjoy I believe as much happiness as is consistent with the imperfection of our present state of being."

James Boswell, The Hypochondriack, No. XLIII

Posted October 10, 12:00 AM

October 9, 2007

CAAF: Morning coffee

• When I'm at loose ends at the library or a used bookstore I'll look through the stacks for the green spines that mark a Virago paperback; even if I've never heard of the author I know I'll go home with an interesting book. In a tribute to the series, Jonathan Coe makes some trenchant observations on the critical dismissal of female authors, then and now.

• The new issue of Virginia Quarterly Review is devoted to "South America in the 21st Century." Among the online offerings: A piece on the effects of ecotourism on the Galápagos and an excerpt from Roberto Ubiquibolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Posted October 09, 6:00 AM

TT: Almanac

Love and marriage, love and marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage
Dad was told by mother
You can't have one without the other.

Sammy Cahn, "Love and Marriage" (from Our Town, music by Jimmy Van Heusen)

Posted October 09, 12:00 AM

October 8, 2007

TT: All tied up in knots

In case you were wondering, the wedding came off without a hitch, except that the bride and I came down with bronchitis four days before the ceremony, and had to croak I do at one another in voices not greatly different from that of Charles McGraw at his grittiest. Otherwise, all was and is bliss.

You'll hear more about it in due course, but not today--I have to file Friday's Wall Street Journal drama column before departing on a much-needed honeymoon tomorrow morning. I'll be back in New York next week for a couple of days, and I'll check in with you then.

UPDATE: My voice has now failed completely. Somebody at the wedding brunch this morning said that I sounded like Satchmo on helium....

Posted October 08, 12:00 AM

TT: Blood will tell

Last Friday, in the midst of frenzied preparations for the big day, I was messengered a DVD of the trailer for Tim Burton's upcoming film version of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, a musical for which I have the utmost admiration. The film, which stars Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Alan Rickman, has already been much discussed in theatrical circles, and it would be an understatement to say that I've been curious to see what Burton would make of Sondheim's greatest musical.

A two-and-a-half-minute trailer is by definition nothing more than a hint, but judging by what I saw on Friday, I'm now more than a little bit concerned about what I'll be seeing come December 21. To begin with, the trailer is edited in such a way as to suggest that Sweeney Todd is not a musical. Only two or three lines in the trailer are sung--the rest of what you hear is spoken dialogue. In addition, Depp looks far too young to be credible as Sweeney, and the cinematography is alarmingly reminiscent of Moulin Rouge.

Needless to say, none of this necesssarily means that the film will be bad. The cast is wonderful, and Tim Burton certainly has the imagination necessary to translate Sondheim's show into specifically cinematic terms. But I don't much like the fact that the creators of the trailer clearly feel the need to apologize for the fact that Sweeney Todd is a musical. It is, in point of fact, an opera, and anybody who goes to the film expecting it to be something else is in for the shock of a lifetime.

I've got my fingers crossed.

To view the trailer, go here.

Posted October 08, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

What a day,
Fortune smiled and came my way,
Bringing love I never thought I'd see,
I'm so lucky to be me.

What a night,
Suddenly you came in sight,
Looking just the way I'd hoped you'd be,
I'm so lucky to be me.

I am simply thunderstruck
At the change in my luck:
Knew at once I wanted you,
Never dreamed you'd want me, too.

I'm so proud
You chose me from all the crowd,
There's no other guy I'd rather be,
I could laugh out loud,
I'm so lucky to be me.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green, "Lucky to Be Me" (from On the Town, music by Leonard Bernstein)