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About Last Night
TERRY TEACHOUT on the arts
in New York City
(with additional dialogue by OUR GIRL IN CHICAGO)
Friday, July 21, 2006
TT: Adventures of an uncle
Lauren and I went to the Empire State Building observatory today, an undertaking that entails standing in line for at least an hour (unless you pay extra for an “express” ticket, a newfangled piece of cash-and-carry privilege that sticks in my craw). The long line is set up in such a way that you spend much of your time shuffling forward, thus creating the illusion of progress. Most of the people waiting to board the elevators to the eighty-sixth floor were teenagers, and though they came from all over the world, most of them were dressed identically.
I hadn’t been to the Empire State Building for a number of years, and I’d all but forgotten how charming it is. It opened its doors in 1930, and the streamlined décor is as redolent of the Thirties as a Pullman sleeper or a Jimmy Cagney movie. The observatory itself is wonderfully tacky—the only thing missing is a dirty-water hot-dog cart—and the view is as spectacular as advertised. I talked Lauren’s ear off, pointing out every landmark I could think of: Central Park, Radio City Music Hall, Wall Street, the Brooklyn Bridge, the UN, Macy’s, even the dear old Flatiron Building. I also showed her the hole in the skyline that was created by the destruction of the World Trade Center. It’s easy to miss, so much so that you wouldn’t know where the twin towers once stood if you didn’t know where to look. I overheard a father pointing out Ground Zero to his son, and remembered the night I brought Lauren’s parents to Windows on the World for a drink, long before the sunny morning when the face of New York was changed utterly by the hand of evil.
In due course we descended to Fifth Avenue, rejoined the mere mortals, and took a cab to Tibor de Nagy Gallery, where we looked with great pleasure at a show of sweetly naïve urban landscapes by Rudy Burckhardt. Tiffany’s is across the street from the gallery, so we stopped by afterward to ogle the merchandise. (Memo to the folks back in Smalltown, U.S.A.: no purchases were made.)
Later on we went to Broadway to see The Wedding Singer, a show I liked far more than most of my colleagues. I’d been wondering whether I’d like it as much the second time around, so I’m happy to report that I continue to stand firmly and wholeheartedly by my Wall Street Journal review, in which I ranked it
among the most ingenious and amusing musical adaptations of a Hollywood film ever to reach Broadway....No, we’re not talking Adam Guettel, but The Wedding Singer is smart, handsomely designed by Scott Pask and sparklingly staged by John Rando, the director of Urinetown, who has an uncanny knack for underlining the comic nuances of a script….The Wedding Singer delivers what it promises, no more and no less, and if you long to laugh yourself silly, it’ll do the trick.
It’s a good thing I haven't changed my mind, since quotes from that review are plastered all over the front of the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. Like most of us, I have my little vanities, one of which is that my name occasionally appears in smallish type (“A KNOCKOUT AND A WOW!”—Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal) on the signs and posters hung in front of Broadway theaters for the purpose of wooing passers-by. Not often, for even my most enthusiastic reviews tend not to lend themselves to such treatment, but every once in a while I swing for the fences, and sometimes a publicist takes note of the fact. I’ve been a drama critic for three years now, so you’d think I’d be used to seeing my name on the Great White Way, but the truth is that I get a huge kick out of it, and probably always will. Tonight my pleasure was enhanced by the presence of my niece, who took a snapshot of me standing next to one of the Wedding Singer posters that bears my name.
Enough already. As soon as I inflate Lauren’s bed, which is set up in the middle of the Teachout Museum, I’m going to crawl into my loft, put out the light, and sleep deeply. Friday is her last full day in New York, and I’m sure it’ll be a hectic one. I have nothing planned for the weekend—and that includes answering the phone.
See you Monday, maybe.
UPDATE: John Rando talks about his directorial method in this Playbill interview about his latest production, Pig Farm.
Mr. Verging on Pertinence says that the preceding post “turned my stomach.” Here’s why:
I know critics play a vital role in a Broadway play's success...or failure. But they're not involved in any of the creative, directorial, financial, human resource related aspects of the play/musical. And yet credit is given to them. It's like showing up at your grandmother's for the Thanksgiving meal and being hailed the conquering hero for eating.
Except for the stomach-turning part, I don’t disagree with anything he says, all of which is worth reading. Nevertheless, I do think he’s coming it a teeny bit high! The kick I get out of seeing my name under a marquee is not to be confused—nor do I ever confuse it—with the justifiable pride a playwright or actor or director or producer takes in his work. It’s simply the forgivable (I hope) vanity of a small-town boy turned big-city critic who never imagined that such things would happen to him, and it’s a far cry from the vulturine posings of, say, Addison DeWitt. What’s more, I do take credit for having helped keep a number of worthy shows from closing, which obviously isn’t the same as having written them but is still better than nothing.
Might I suggest that Mr. Pertinence’s sense of humor is in need of a slight adjustment?
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TT: Shakespeare in flip-flops
Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column contains the first fruits of my recent trip out west, a review of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival:
In Idaho the license plates say “Famous Potatoes,” and the nickname of Boise, the state capitol, is “City of Trees.” Both statements are true as far as they go: Boise is as green as Dublin, while Idaho’s chief cash crop is so esteemed around these parts that you can even buy a tuber-shaped candy bar called the Idaho Spud. But Boise is also known, or should be, for the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, whose theater is an outdoor pavilion across the street from the foothills of the Rockies, which supply a spectacular backdrop for the five plays performed there each summer. The productions are unfailingly fresh and engaging, and the casual atmosphere is perfect for art-starved tourists.
Boise is a smallish city (pop. 190,117) with a low-rise skyline, a pedestrian-friendly downtown and amiable residents who make a point of saying hello to startled strangers. Its companionable air is mirrored in the dress-as-you-please code of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, where flip-flops, insect repellent and well-stocked coolers are all standard equipment. Most of the local playgoers pack a meal or buy one on site, and dining is encouraged during the shows. You can either eat at your seat or book a box equipped with a picnic table. Each performance is given to the bucolic accompaniment of chirping birds and croaking frogs, with occasional guest appearances by a skunk who lives beneath the stage. (Not to worry—if you leave him alone, he’ll leave you alone.)
Don’t let the informality fool you: Idaho Shakespeare is both artistically serious and theatrically adventurous, and the anything-goes production style does much to enliven the straightforward bill of fare….
No link. You know what you can do, and you know what you should do. So do it.
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TT: Put down your brush, pick up your pen
In my next “Sightings” column, to be published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I hail the reprinting by Princeton University Press of Louis Moreau Gottschalk's Notes of a Pianist, which I use as an occasion to discuss some of my favorite non-literary artists who write—and, nowadays, blog—on the side.
What can we learn from "practitioner criticism" and the autobiographies of working artists? For the answer, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Pursuits” section.
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TT: Almanac
"There is a school of painting called abstractionist or non objective which is derived largely from the work of Paul Cézanne, that attempts to create 'pure painting' that is, an art which will use form, color, and design for their own sakes, and independent of man's experience of life and his association with nature. I do not believe such an aim can be achieved by a human being. Whether we wish it or not we are all bound to the earth with our experience of life and the reactions of the mind, heart, and eye, and our sensations, by no means, consist entirely of form, color and design. We would be leaving out a great deal that I consider worth while expressing in painting, and it can not be expressed in literature."
Edward Hopper, letter to Mrs. Frank B. Davidson, Jan. 22, 1947
| Thursday, July 20, 2006
TT: Curiosity shop
Except for a noontime visit to Antonio Prieto Salon, which is far from my beaten path, my niece and I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary today. We brunched at Good Enough to Eat, visited the Metropolitan Museum, dined at Bright Food Shop, and saw Pilobolus at the Joyce Theater. Just another Wednesday in New York, in other words—except that this time around I saw Pilobolus and Times Square and Central Park and John Twachtman’s Arques-la-Bataille through Lauren’s eyes.
which made them as new to me as they were to her.
I was especially pleased by Pilobolus. Not only has it been a couple of years since I last saw them, but outside of a single performance
by the Mark Morris Dance Group in March, I haven’t seen any dance since my unexpected trip to the hospital seven months ago. It was a nice way to slip back into the swing of things, and what made it nicer still was that Lauren and I ran into Jonathan Wolken and Robby Barnett, two of the troupe’s founders, in the lobby. I hadn’t spoken to either one of them since I took part in the filming of Last Dance, Mirra Bank’s 2001 Pilobolus documentary, and we had a lot of catching up to do.
Now I’m sitting at my desk, eavesdropping as Lauren chatters away on her cell phone in the next room. She's telling a friend in Smalltown, U.S.A., all about Pilobolus’ Day Two, the hot, steamy fertility rite set to the music of David Byrne and Brian Eno that ended tonight’s program with a bang (and a splash). She sounds thoroughly impressed. So was I—not merely with Pilobolus, but also with the miraculous good fortune that makes it possible for me to take days like this for granted, even though I rarely do. May I never forget how lucky I am.
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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 either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). 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)
• Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 6)
• Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here)
• Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)
• The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)
OFF BROADWAY:
• Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)
• Pig Farm (comedy, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)
• Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON:
• Susan and God (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 30)
CLOSING NEXT SUNDAY:
• Susan and God (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 30)
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TT: Almanac
"It was hot. A few lost, cotton-ball bunches of cloud drifted in a brassy sky, leaving rare islands of shadow upon the desert's face.
"Nothing moved. It was a far, lost land, a land of beige-gray silences and distance where the eye reached out farther and farther to lose itself finally against the sky, and where the only movement was the lazy swing of a remote buzzard."
Louis L'Amour, Hondo
| Wednesday, July 19, 2006
OGIC: Public service announcement
By the way, all of the summer nominees for the Lit Blog Co-op are being introduced this week, including my nomination of Edie Meidav's daring and brilliant novel Crawl Space. Here's a bit of what I say:
Some antiheroes are more anti than others. Emile Poulquet, the antihero of Crawl Space, is a Vichy war criminal and an absolute of his kind. Poulquet is a man divided along seemingly a hundred internal fault lines, and so too will be the reader of Edie Meidav’s rich and troubling novel, a searching inquest into the banality of evil. A provincial bureaucrat during the French Occupation, Poulquet was complicit in the deportation of thousands to Nazi death camps. Now, decades later, his face surgically altered, his conscience rattled but intact, he is on the run from the authorities and drawn like a moth to a flame to his old prefecture of Finier.
Poulquet is not clearly remorseful; if guilt dogs him at all, it manifests itself in self-pity and what he calls a cousin to guilt, the desire for vindication. “What did that mean, anyway, ashamed,” he asks. “Shame depends wholly on others. Who cared if I toted shame around like some battered private trophy, proof of my inner good, my bewildered soul? Wasn’t it more heroic to wander the world lacking an audience, the society of brothers and sisters which shame and its absolutions automatically offer the renegade?” Indeed, his crimes are so great and his name so despised that it's hard to imagine anyone in his position could own them directly and fully. Poulquet's relationship to personal agency is so troubled that he carries around a small pendulum to decide everyday questions such as where to go and what to eat. His relationship to his hated name is similarly fraught; as the novel proceeds, he increasingly refers to himself in the third person and scrambles to remove instances of “I” from the last will and testament he carries around with him. Meidav depicts with authority—with virtuosity and unlikely beauty—the gnarled consciousness and wizened moral sense of this unrepentant war criminal, who loathes himself and his pursuers in equal measures but in different modes. It's a thoroughly haunting portrait.
There will be a week of discussion of Meidav's novel at the LBC site next week, including author and nominator podcasts. The group's Summer selection is Michael Martone's inventive Michael Martone.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, July 19, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: The usual chaos
My niece's timing was off: a power failure at LaGuardia caused her afternoon flight from St. Louis to be cancelled. Fortunately, American Airlines was able to book her onto a later flight, and she appeared on my doorstep a mere three hours behind schedule, minutes ahead of a thunderstorm. The weather in New York is still sickeningly hot. Nevertheless, we mean to have a good time or die trying.
I don't expect to check in again until Thursday, but you never can tell. Anyway, later.
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TT: Almanac
"Maybe I am not very human. What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house."
Edward Hopper (quoted in Lloyd Goodrich, Edward Hopper)
| Tuesday, July 18, 2006
TT: Ever so humble
It was hot in Manhattan on Monday, but not as hot as it was in St. George, Utah, last Friday. The bank thermometer read 110 degrees when I left the airport in my rental car. Fortunately, Cedar City, my destination, was considerably higher and somewhat cooler, and I got through my weekend at the Utah Shakespearean Festival in one piece. It helped that I ran into a long-lost friend with whom I had an unexpected and gratifying reunion, and I also profited from the advice contained in an e-mail from a fellow blogger:
If you have a free afternoon in Cedar City, take the 45-minute drive to Cedar Breaks National Monument. It's sort of like Bryce Canyon, only more colorful and without big crowds. Visitor facilities are so rustic you'll swear you've stepped into the 1930s. If you do decide to make that trip, don't forget that you'll be very high up (over 10,000 feet), where the air is thin and water—including the water in your radiator—boils quickly.
I took him up on it, and spent a considerable chunk of Saturday morning gawking at the view. As always, the trouble with scenery is tourists, and I felt sorely tempted to give a good hard push to a couple of noisy women at the Chessmen Ridge Overlook. Fortunately, the altitude silenced most of the other people I ran into (it really does make your head spin), who appeared to respond to the beauties of Cedar Breaks in much the same way as the raven-haired ranger to whom I paid my four-dollar toll. I told her I'd never seen anything like it, and she grinned at me and replied, "Oh, I'm in love with it. I have been ever since the first time I came here."
I was tickled by two signs I saw along the way:
WARNING EXPOSED CLIFF EDGES AND NEARBY LIGHTNING ARE HAZARDOUS
OPEN RANGE WATCH FOR LIVESTOCK
Sunday was…well, long. I arose at 4:30, drove back to the St. George airport just ahead of the sunrise, flew from there to Los Angeles, sat around the terminal for a couple of hours, flew from there to Newark, and was driven from there to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As I expected, it took me about thirteen hours to get from point A to point E, but I made reasonably good use of my time, writing part of my Wall Street Journal drama column in an LAX snack bar and reading most of Gail Levin’s Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography on the plane. (I’d read it years ago, but I know a lot more about art now.)
Now I’m back home again, writing my “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Journal and preparing to receive a houseguest, my niece Lauren from Smalltown, U.S.A., who arrives in New York for a visit later this afternoon. We’re going to ascend the Empire State Building, ride the Circle Line, and go see Pilobolus, the Metropolitan Museum, and whatever Broadway musical I can get us into on the cheap by paying a sweaty visit to the TKTS booth in Times Square, which will be a first for me. I expect I’ll be blogging about Lauren’s visit from time to time, but should you not hear from me as frequently as usual, it means I’m out showing her the town.
More as it happens.
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TT: Mike Hammer, R.I.P.
I wrote about Mickey Spillane in National Review three years ago, on the occasion of the paperback reissue of six of his out-of-print mysteries:
You remember Mickey Spillane, right? No? Not to worry—it’s an age thing. If you were born before 1960, his name will definitely ring a bell. He wrote six of the biggest-selling detective novels of the 20th century, and Mike Hammer, their tough-guy hero, was for a time all but synonymous with the genre. They spawned two TV series and several movies of widely varying quality, among them Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me, Deadly (1955), now regarded as a film-noir classic, and The Girl Hunters (1963), a curiosity in which Spillane himself played Hammer (ineptly, alas, though it’s a wonderfully wacky idea—try to imagine Dashiell Hammett swapping wisecracks with Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon). In addition, the “Girl Hunt” ballet in The Band Wagon is a Spillane send-up, with Fred Astaire as Hammer and Cyd Charisse as the leggy lady of mystery. That’s fame.
Back then, Spillane was considered the lowest of lowbrows, though he had his unlikely admirers, among them Kingsley Amis, who thought he was a better writer than Hammett or Raymond Chandler, and Ayn Rand, who said he was her favorite novelist since Victor Hugo. (I’m not making this up—it’s in her 1964 Playboy interview.) But most people who wrote about mysteries placed him several degrees beneath contempt. Chandler, not at all surprisingly, loathed Spillane, claiming that “pulp writing at its worst was never as bad as this.”...
And now? Well, it’s not quite right to say Spillane is forgotten, but the truth is even worse: he’s out of print. Though he continues to grind out an occasional novel, the early Hammer books, which between them sold some 130 million copies, have long been unavailable, even in paperback. At a time when American intellectuals are obsessed to the point of mania with pop culture, the most popular mystery writer of the postwar era has become an unperson, in spite of the fact that he is alive, well, and available for interviews….
The Mike Hammer series, launched in 1947 with I, the Jury, appears at first glance to share many of the major themes and preoccupations of postwar noir. Like countless other noir anti-heroes, Hammer is a World War II vet who comes home to find that the city of his youth (New York, not Los Angeles) has become a dangerous place, crime-ridden and profoundly corrupt. He, too, has changed, for the experience of combat has aroused in him a dark love of violence, which he uses in an attempt to restore order to the chaotic world around him: “I had gotten a taste of death and found it palatable to the extent that I could never again eat the fruits of a normal civilization….I was evil. I was evil for the good.”
Most noir characters are vigilantes of one sort or another—they have to be, since they are functioning in a radically corrupt society—so what was it that put this one beyond the pale? Part of the problem was Spillane’s blunt, inelegant prose style, which is unfailingly effective but in no obvious way “literary,” just as his frame of reference is deliberately, even aggressively anti-intellectual. Whereas Philip Marlowe drank gimlets and read Hemingway (or at least made well-informed fun of him in Farewell, My Lovely), Mike Hammer drinks beer and doesn’t read anything at all. He is a regular guy who happens to pack a rod….
Spillane was writing for a generation of fellow veterans who spent their off-duty hours thumbing through paperbacks—thrillers, westerns, even the odd classic. They were accustomed to taking pleasure in the printed word. Now their grandsons go to the movies, or watch TV. Novels, even mysteries, are overwhelmingly read by and written for women. This is not to say that nobody’s writing regular-guy books anymore: they’re just not being read by regular guys. A no-nonsense crime novelist like Elmore Leonard is far more likely to appeal to eggheads like me than the working stiffs about whom he writes—I’ve never seen anybody reading a Leonard novel on the subway—whereas Spillane’s books were actually read and enjoyed by men who weren’t all that different from Mike Hammer. He may well have been the last novelist of whom such a thing could be said….
Spillane died yesterday at the age of eighty-eight. If you're curious, these were his three best books.
To read his New York Times obituary, go here.
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TT: Almanac
"The birds are the opposite of time. They represent our longing for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant song."
Olivier Messiaen, program note for Quartet for the End of Time
| Monday, July 17, 2006
TT: Almanac
“It seems to me that music, generally speaking, is the proper language for philosophy."
Aleksander Wat, My Century (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)
| Friday, July 15, 2005
TT: Oh, the humidity!
This is one of those horrible days when nobody in Manhattan is out and about who doesn't need to be. Alas, I do. Not only am I seeing three performances tonight and tomorrow (Merce Cunningham's Ocean, Basil Twist's La bella dormente nel bosco, and another program by Pilobolus), but I have a houseguest arriving on Saturday afternoon and countless errands to run before I hit the road again first thing Sunday morning.
All this notwithstanding, I decided to visit an art gallery today, having learned from Ionarts that Salander-O'Reilly, one of my favorite New York galleries, is featuring several of my favorite painters, among them Milton Avery, Jane Freilicher, Arnold Friedman, Marsden Hartley, Albert Kresch, and John Marin, in its summer inventory show, “Scapes/Landscapes." I scooped up two dollars' worth of accumulated nickels, hopped a crosstown bus to 79th and Madison, and there discovered that the summer hours posted on the Salander-O'Reilly Web site are off by an hour. (Fortunately, the show is up through August 26, so I'll get another crack at it.) I wilted briefly in the sun, then noticed that a branch of my bank was right across the street, thus allowing me to do one of my essential pre-trip errands, which cheered me up no end. I returned to my air-conditioned apartment on the next bus, not much the worse for the wear.
As many of you will recall, my upcoming trip to Missouri is neither for pleasure nor business. My mother is undergoing spinal surgery on Monday, so I'll be spending the next two weeks in Smalltown, U.S.A., looking after her while she recuperates. Since I've got a couple of deadlines hanging over my head, I'm bringing my iBook with me, and I hope to be blogging at least intermittently. (I've already freshened the Top Fives in preparation for my departure.) I don't expect to be back on line until Tuesday at the earliest, though, so I thought I'd wave goodbye now.
If I were going to be posting an almanac entry on Monday, this'd be it:
“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace
See you next week.
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TT: 'We know this shame'
My drama column in today's Wall Street Journal is a tripleheader. First is Primo, Sir Anthony Sher's one-man stage version of Primo Levi's Auschwitz memoir:
"Primo" is a very great piece of theater, but the tale, not the teller, is what matters most, and it is to their credit that Sir Anthony and Richard Wilson, his director, have opted for stark simplicity in presenting "If This Is a Man" (originally published in the U.S. as "Survival in Auschwitz"). The set, designed by Hildegard Bechtler, consists of a few concrete walls, a shovelful of gravel and a single wooden chair. Into this cold, bare space walks the bespectacled Sir Anthony, wearing an old cardigan. "It was my good fortune," he says matter-of-factly, "to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944...I was 24, with little wisdom, no experience, and a tendency—encouraged by the life of segregation forced on me by the racial laws—to live in an unrealistic world of my own." Then, without further ado, he flings you into the bowels of hell….
Next up, the Mint Theater's wonderful revival of The Skin Game:
Despite the TV versions of "The Forsyte Saga," John Galsworthy is no longer widely remembered in this country as a novelist, much less a playwright, though he used to be world-famous in both capacities (he actually won the 1932 Nobel Prize for literature). None of his 27 plays has been seen on Broadway since 1931. Now the Mint Theater Company, a tiny off-Broadway troupe with a justly admired knack for exhuming what it calls "buried theatrical treasures," has revived "The Skin Game," a 1920 melodrama about the limits of upward mobility in England, and it proves to be a rattling good show indeed….
Lastly, Shakespeare in the Park:
After a dismaying string of fair-to-middling Shakespeare in the Park offerings, the Public Theater has brought a winner to its outdoor home, Central Park's Delacorte Theater. Mark Lamos's production of "As You Like It" is a summery romp played out on a giant map of the cosmos, with the trees of the park (and Belvedere Castle just beyond) supplying a lovely backdrop for romantic hijinks in the Forest of Arden….
My column for this week is one of the stories in Friday's Journal that's being made available on line in its entirety as part of the Journal's "Today's Free Features" Web page. To read the whole thing, of which there's far more, go here. If you're a blogger, link away!
As usual, you can also read the column on paper by shelling out a dollar for today's Journal or (better yet) going here to subscribe to the Online Journal, Web-based journalism's best deal ever.
UPDATE: The original London production of Primo was telecast and will be released on DVD in the U.S. next month by Kultur. To place an advance order, go here.
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TT: Words to the wise
Bill Kirchner, editor of The Oxford Companion to Jazz, writes:
In the fall of 2000, The Oxford Companion to Jazz
was published—864 pages long, with 60 essays by 59 distinguished musicians,
scholars, and critics. In 2001, the Jazz Journalists Association voted it "Best
Jazz Book" of the year. And it received over 50 reviews worldwide, about 90
percent of them positive. My favorite "review," though, came from composer-arranger Johnny Mandel,
who remarked: "Putting this book together must have been like being contractor
for the Ellington band."
I'm pleased to announce that this month, the Companion has just become
available in a new paperback edition, complete with a number of small additions
and corrections. It can be purchased in bookstores internationally as well as from a variety of Internet outlets. At, I might add, an even more reasonable price than previously: $29.95 U.S. (retail).
If you haven't yet checked out this book (which a number of schools have used as a textbook), I hope that the following list of essays and contributors will serve as encouragement.
• "African Roots of Jazz"—Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.
• "European Roots of Jazz"—William H. Youngren
• "Ragtime Then and Now"—Max Morath
• "The Early Origins of Jazz"—Jeff Taylor
• "New York Roots: Black Broadway, James Reese Europe, Early Pianists"—Thomas L. Riis
• "The Blues in Jazz"—Bob Porter
• "Bessie Smith"—Chris Albertson
• "King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, and Sidney Bechet: Ménage à Trois, New Orleans Style"—Bruce Boyd Raeburn
• "Louis Armstrong"—Dan Morgenstern
• "Bix Beiderbecke"—Digby Fairweather
• "Duke Ellington"—Mark Tucker
• "Hot Music in the 1920s: The 'Jazz Age,' Appearances and Realities"—Richard M. Sudhalter
• "Pianists of the 1920s and 1930s"—Henry Martin
• "Coleman Hawkins"—Kenny Berger
• "Lester Young"—Loren Schoenberg
• "Major Soloists of the 1930s and 1940s"—John McDonough
• "Jazz Singing: Between Blues and Bebop"—Joel E. Siegel
• "Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Billie Holiday"—Patricia Willard
• "Jazz and the American Song"—Gene Lees
• "Pre-Swing Era Big Bands and Jazz Composing and Arranging"—James T. Maher and Jeffrey Sultanof
• "Swing Era Big Bands and Jazz Composing and Arranging"—Max Harrison
• "The Advent of Bebop"—Scott DeVeaux
• "The New Orleans Revival"—Richard Hadlock
• "Charlie Parker"—James Patrick
• "Cool Jazz and West Coast Jazz"—Ted Gioia
• "Jazz and Classical Music: To the Third Stream and Beyond"—Terry Teachout
• "Pianists of the 1940s and 1950s"—Dick Katz
• "Hard Bop"—Gene Seymour
• "Miles Davis"—Bob Belden
• "Big Bands and Jazz Composing and Arranging After World War II"—Doug Ramsey
• "Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus"—Brian Priestley
• "John Coltrane"—Lewis Porter
• "The Avant-Garde, 1949-1967"—Lawrence Kart
• "Pianists of the 1960s and 1970s"—Bob Blumenthal
• "Jazz Singing Since the 1940s"—Will Friedwald
• "Jazz Since 1968"—Peter Keepnews
• "Fusion"—Bill Milkowski
• "Jazz Repertory"—Jeffrey Sultanof
• "Latin Jazz"—Gene Santoro
• "Jazz in Europe: The Real World Music...or The Full Circle"—Mike Zwerin
• "Jazz and Brazilian Music"—Stephanie L. Stein Crease
• "Jazz in Africa: The Ins and Outs"—Howard Mandel
• "Jazz in Japan"—Kiyoshi Koyama
• "Jazz in Canada and Australia"—Terry Martin
• "The Clarinet in Jazz"—Michael Ullman
• "The Saxophone in Jazz"—Don Heckman
• "The Trumpet in Jazz"—Randy Sandke
• "The Trombone in Jazz"—Gunther Schuller
• "The Electric Guitar and Vibraphone in Jazz: Batteries Not Included"—Neil Tesser
• "Miscellaneous Instruments in Jazz"—Christopher Washburne
• "The Bass in Jazz"—Bill Crow
• "Jazz Drumming"—Burt Korall
• "Jazz and Dance"—Robert P. Crease
• "Jazz and Film and Television"—Chuck Berg
• "Jazz Clubs"—Vincent Pelote
• "Jazz and American Literature"—Gerald Early
• "Jazz Criticism"—Ron Welburn
• "Jazz Education"—Charles Beale
• "Recorded Jazz"—Dan Morgenstern
• "Jazz Improvisation and Concepts of Virtuosity"—David Demsey
To order a paperback copy of the revised and corrected Oxford Companion to Jazz, go here. Even if you don't like my chapter (of which I'm actually quite proud), it's still worth every cent.
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TT: Almanac
"As uncommon a thing as true love is, it is yet easier to find than true friendship."
La Rochefoucauld, Moral Maxims and Reflections
| Thursday, July 14, 2005
TT: Almanac
“Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family—but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.”
Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock
| Wednesday, July 13, 2005
TT: After you get what you want
I spent Wednesday in Washington, D.C., attending two closed sessions of the National Council on the Arts. All fun, all interesting, and my fellow council members are as collegial as can be, but it was still a long, hot, humid day, and when it was over I knew I'd be coming back to a hotel whose air conditioning has proved unequal to the demands of Washington in July. (I've also been having troubles with the hotel's high-speed Internet service.) Hence I didn't care to spend the evening in my room, and it happened that all of my Washington-based friends were either busy or elsewhere tonight.
What to do? I treated myself to a good dinner, then went looking for a movie I hadn't seen, which turned out to be Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know. On my way to the theater, I tried to think of the last time I'd spent an evening watching a movie by myself in a city other than New York. When I go out of town, it's usually to visit a friend or cover a performance, so I tend not to be faced with the problem of what to do after dinner. At length I recalled that I'd seen Audrey Wells' Guinevere in Washington's Dupont Circle six years ago. I liked it very much, and I liked Me and You and Everyone We Know even more, but a few minutes into the film, it struck me that (A) I was watching a sad little comedy about the loneliness of postmodern urban life and (B) nobody in the world knew where I was.
Sitting in the sparsely peopled theater, alone with the characters and with myself, I thought of a remark A.J. Liebling made in my favorite of his books, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris:
Granted that in later life a man will have to learn to get along with other people—I learn with horror that the knack is now taught in high school as a “social study”—that is all the more reason there should be a period in his life when he has to get along with nobody but himself. It will be a sweetness to remember.
I think there's quite a bit of truth in that—up to a point. I don't spend too many evenings by myself: I'm in the company of friends far more often than not, watching performances or just hanging out. Sometimes I find myself hungering for solitude, and there are occasions when I'm almost painfully grateful to spend a night with my prints, my CDs, my iBook, and my trusty TV, watching What's My Line?, keeping my own counsel and staying up as late as I like. I've recently discovered, much to my surprise, that I even like vacationing alone. At the same time, I'm no hermit, and like most singletons, I find there are other times when being alone is no fun at all. One is when you finish watching a really good movie and, instead of chatting about it over a drink with a friend, retire to an empty hotel room in a city far from home.
My solitude, fortunately, will only last a single night. Tomorrow morning I'll be meeting my v., v. cool friend Ali for breakfast, after which I'll head over to the Old Post Office for one more NCA session. At twelve-thirty I'm lunching with a fellow newspaperman, then taking a mid-afternoon train to New York. In the evening I'm taking Bass Player, one of my favorite people in the whole world, to see Pilobolus at the Joyce Theater, after which we intend to have a late supper and talk until the waiters start giving us dirty looks. Friday and Saturday will be much the same, and by Sunday, when I fly home to Smalltown, U.S.A., I'll probably be thinking wistfully of my solitary trip to the movies.
Would we all be happier if we were capable of always enjoying to the fullest whatever we're doing at the moment we're doing it? Probably—but then we wouldn't be quite human, would we? Such contentment is not in our natures: we keep one eye on the horizon, and sometimes both, which leaves neither free to see the moments that pass before us in review, each one crying out, Look at me! Aren't I pretty? George Balanchine knew better. “Why are you stingy with yourselves?” he used to ask his dancers. “Why are you holding back? What are you saving for—for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now.” But, then, Balanchine was a genius, while I'm just a middle-aged critic, whiling away an idle hour in an overheated hotel room in Washington, hoping it cools down enough for me to get some sleep.
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TT: Almanac
"Whoever invented the meeting must have had Hollywood in mind. I think they should consider giving Oscars for meetings: Best Meeting of the Year, Best Supporting Meeting, Best Meeting Based on Material from Another Meeting."
William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade
| Tuesday, July 12, 2005
TT: Quite enough for one day, thanks
The last 24 hours or so have been, um, hectic. I went to Central Park last night to see As You Like It, arose early this morning to write, edit, and file my review, ran several thousand errands, jumped in a cab at the last possible minute and raced to Penn Station to take the last possible train to Washington, D.C., took another cab from Union Station in Washington to the National Endowment for the Arts, spent the next six hours in meetings (during one of which dinner was served), took yet another cab to my hotel, checked in, turned on and plugged in my iBook, read and responded to 67 e-mails, and now am blogging at last. Did I mention that ArtsJournal's blogging platform was down this morning, making it impossible for me to post prior to hitting the road? Or that the temperature in New York and Washington today was in the approximate vicinity of hellacious? Or that the air conditioner in my expensive hotel room is not adequate?
Anyway, I'm done, and I'm about to go to bed. I'll try to post something worth reading at some time or other on Wednesday, but I'm not good for anything more tonight. Do forgive me—I spent the whole day selflessly serving you, the American taxpayer. (If you're not an American taxpayer, I spent the whole day not serving you. Tough.) Now I shall sleep the sleep of the just.
Later.
P.S. In case you didn't notice, four of the Top Fives are new this week. Read 'em.
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TT: Almanac
“I'm not a genius. There's no room for genius in the theatre, it's too much trouble.”
Sir Laurence Olivier (quoted in Simon Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor)
| Monday, July 11, 2005
TT: Where we've been, where we'll be
I just got off the phone with Our Girl in Chicago. She, too, was elsewhere last week, but she can't tell you about it herself, because no sooner did she come back to the Big Windy than her hard drive started emitting black smoke, then went kaplooey and gave up the ghost. As of tonight she doesn't have an Official Estimated Time to Return to Blogging (or e-mail, for that matter—be patient). I'll keep you posted.
As for me, I'll be taking the Metroliner to Washington, D.C., on Tuesday morning to attend a three-day-long meeting of the National Council on the Arts. I'm thinking of taking my iBook with me so that I can blog from my hotel room (which means, of course, that I probably will).
A more extended absence is in the offing, however: I'm off to Smalltown, U.S.A., on Sunday. It isn't a vacation—my mother will be going into the hospital that day for an operation. Not to worry, it isn't anything life-threatening, but it'll be disagreeable at best, so I'm planning to stick around for a couple of weeks. I'll be blogging from there, and you'll hear about everything as it happens.
Given these distractions, don't be surprised if I should vanish unexpectedly and without warning for a whole day, or even two. It probably means I'm in transit, or emptying a bedpan. Whatever it is, wherever I am, I'll be back as soon as possible. Likewise OGIC. After two years' worth of steady blogging, I think it's safe to say that we aren't going anywhere. We like it here, and we like you.
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TT: One for the road
Last Tuesday afternoon, having seen too many plays and written too many pieces and desiring to break free of my life for a few short days, I shut my iBook, packed a small bag, picked up a Zipcar at a garage around the corner from my Upper West Side apartment, and drove over the George Washington Bridge, up the Palisades Parkway, past West Point, and across a twisty road cut into the side of Storm King Mountain. Within an hour I was well north of all my usual Hudson Valley haunts, and by suppertime I was rolling into Woodstock, New York, a town that time seems to have left behind—thirty-six years behind, to be exact. My destination was the Woodstock Inn by the Millstream, an old-fashioned motel lately converted into something not unlike a newfangled B&B. The simple yet attractive rooms are a few steps away from what the inn's Web site correctly describes as “a swimming hole gracefully carved from the rocky bed of the Millstream.” I sat at a table by the water until it was too dark to keep on reading De Kooning: An American Master. I tried to check my messages, but my cell phone was out of range, so I went to bed, read until I was drowsy, switched off the lamp, and fell asleep.
I returned to my brookside table in the morning to partake of what the modest proprietors of the Woodstock Inn are pleased to call a continental breakfast, though in point of fact it includes such tasty treats as smoked salmon and miniature quiches. My original plan had been to go more or less straight from there to my next stop, but ten minutes out of Woodstock I decided to improvise, turned right instead of left, threw open the windows and sunroof, cranked up Miles Davis' 'Round About Midnight, and drove all the way through the Catskill Park to the Pepacton Reservoir, a man-made body of water whose creation required the seizure, condemnation, and flooding in 1955 of four now-forgotten villages to whose former existence four small roadside signs pay tribute. (Donald Westlake once wrote a comic crime novel whose hapless protagonists sought to retrieve a buried stash from one of those underwater towns.) I felt as though I had come at last to the far side of the world, infinitely removed from the irritations of everyday existence.
I stopped for lunch in a mountain town with the quaint name of Roscoe. Spotting a B&B by the side of the road, I resolved on the spot to stay there one day, but since I had another place to be that night, I pointed my Zipcar southward and drove unhurriedly through the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, pausing briefly to take a roadside nap. No sooner did I exit the National Recreation Area than I found myself trapped in the hideous foothills of the Poconos, surrounded by tourist-trap attractions of the grubbiest sort. I drove by a huge sign directing me to Caesars Pocono Palace and declaring that Crosby, Stills & Nash
would be playing there in August. Only a week or two before, I'd been wondering whatever had become of Stephen Stills, one of the musical idols of my rock-and-roll youth. Now, mere hours after I'd spent a perfectly happy night in Woodstock, answer there came in the form of a bright neon sign: he plays casinos. To sing the blues you've got to live the tunes...and carry on, I thought, and shuddered.
Before long I was snaking down the Delaware River to Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania, the home of Bridgeton House On-the-Delaware, an inn about which I can't begin to say enough good things. It's on the river, the rooms are handsomely appointed, and most even have their own private riverfront balconies. After driving across the bridge to the Milford Oyster House, there to sup on Crab Norfolk and a garlic-laden salad, I retreated to my balcony to watch the river flow and the fireflies blink. It was a hot and humid night, but before 15 minutes had passed the temperature had plunged at least as many degrees, and the fireflies flew off to make way for a thunderstorm. The lightning exploded over Upper Black Eddy as I looked on, delighting in the gaudy detonations far overhead. A half-hour later the storm was gone, and I climbed gratefully into my soft bed to read February House: The Story of W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America and drift at length into yet another deep, untroubled sleep.
Another tasty breakfast, another unhurried drive across the river and along country roads, and in a couple of hours I had made my roundabout way to the rusty outskirts of Newark. Is there any other place in the world where beauty and ugliness alternate with such dizzying rapidity as in New Jersey? My midday destination was the Newark Museum, where I planned to spend an hour or two looking at “In the American Grain: Dove, Hartley, Marin, O'Keeffe, and Stieglitz,” a touring exhibition put together by the Phillips Collection, and inspecting the museum's own permanent collection of American art, about which I'd long heard great things, all of which are true. Alas, the Newark Museum has become yet another of those aging inner-city temples to art that has outlived its clientele and now behaves as though it's slightly embarrassed to display its paintings, hiding them upstairs and explaining their beauties away with the kind of hectoring, didactic wall labels that give art scholarship a bad name. (It says everything about the museum that its own shop sells not a single book or pamphlet describing the permanent collection.) I arrived halfway through a noontime jazz concert, passed up an exhibition called “Here Come the Brides: Fairy Tales, Folklore & Wedding Traditions,” and finally made my circuitous way to the upstairs galleries. Except for three stone-faced guards, I was the only living soul there. I oohed and aahed at Marsden Hartley's Still Life—Calla Lilies, Joseph Stella's Voice of the City of New York Interpreted, and Joseph Cornell's Les Constellations Voisines de Pôle, then reveled in a dozen fabulous John Marins and Arthur Doves that haven't been on view for the past couple of years. Yet I don't know when I've seen a sadder museum.
I fled Newark as fast as my Zipcar would carry me, roaring down the New Jersey Turnpike past mile after mile of industrial blight (And was Jerusalem builded here/Among these dark Satanic mills?), arriving in due course at the Jersey Shore, a place I'd heard about for years but never seen. Coming as I do from the middle of America, I find at the age of forty-nine that I can count on the fingers of both hands the number of nights I've slept by an ocean. Like everyone who falls in love with the sea in adulthood, I'm incapable of saying anything about it that hasn't been said a million times before: its ever-changing, self-renewing presence instantly reduces me to clichés. As I sat on the boardwalk and watched the waves that my beloved Fairfield Porter painted so well, I could do no better than to recall
the words of Jean de la Ville de Mirmont that Gabriel Fauré set to music with such exquisitely apposite simplicity in L'horizon chimérique, the most perfect of all his song cycles: The sea is infinite and my dreams are wild.
Would that the Jersey Shore were better suited to such romantic reflections! It is what it is, a strip of sandy beach overlooked by the balconies of a thousand tacky condos, crammed to overflowing with noisily joyous vacationers, and I was what I was, a middle-aged aesthete dressed in black, seated on a bench and gazing in silent wonder at the surf. Still and all, I liked it just fine, though I'm probably too old ever to feel what my friend John Pizzarelli
feels when he sings I Like Jersey Best:
Traveling down the Turnpike
Heading for the shore
A thought just then occurred to me
I never thought before
I've been a lot of places
Seen pictures of the rest
But of all the places I can think of
I like Jersey best.
I sat by the sea for a good half-hour before I thought to pull out my cell phone and call my mother back in Smalltown, U.S.A. “Listen, Mom,” I said, and held the phone up to catch the sound of the waves. “Can you hear the ocean?”
“No, not really...oh, yes! Yes, I can.” She paused. “I hate to tell you bad news in the middle of your vacation, but did you hear what happened in London today?”
“No,” I said, realizing in a sickening instant what it must have been. “I haven't seen a paper or turned on my car radio since I left New York.”
She told me of the four bombs that mere hours before had killed four dozen Londoners on the other side of the ocean by which I sat. All at once I remembered Auden's poem about how suffering “takes place/While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” On Thursday I was one of those someone elses.
The waves having briefly lost their savor, I gave up my bench and walked across Ocean Avenue to the Cashelmara Inn, my comfortable home for the night, on whose broad, inviting veranda I sat in a rocking chair for a peaceful hour, listening to my iPod, lapping up the sea breeze, and playing idly with the two golden retrievers who call the inn home. After dining at a cheerful restaurant a block away, I retired to my cozy dormered room on the third floor. I slept badly, awakened by a nightmare for whose origins I didn't have to look far.
My window was spattered with fast-falling rain when I got up the next morning. I knew there would be no more sitting on the boardwalk, so I packed my bag resignedly and went down to breakfast. The dining room was occupied by four families and an unattached woman, a bespectacled brunette with sharp, pretty features who read Good Housekeeping while she ate. I cast sidelong glances at the happy families that surrounded us on all sides. Don't be so sure of yourselves, I thought, feeling a wave of silent camaraderie for my fellow singleton. I was once as you are, and someday you may be as we are. Life is pandemonium!
An hour later I was driving back up the New Jersey Turnpike toward the George Washington Bridge, and an hour after that I was unlocking the door of my apartment. I greeted the etchings and lithographs on the walls as if they were my own family, then turned on my iBook for the first time in three days and found 205 pieces of e-mail awaiting me. I closed my eyes and thought of fireflies, smoked salmon, the smell of the ocean, and the half-recalled colors of a painting by Arthur Dove. “I can't wait to do it all again,” I said out loud. Then I dragged my chair a little closer to the cluttered desk and started answering my mail, and the tentacles of dailiness reached out and swept me back into their embrace.
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TT: Almanac
Ten things an older man must never say to a younger woman:
1) I'm dying!
2) I can't hear what you're saying!
3) How many fingers are you holding up?
4) Listen to my heart.
5) Take my pulse.
6) What's your name?
7) Is it cold in here?
8) Is it hot in here?
9) Are you in here?
10) What wings are those beating at the window?
Not that a man should stress his youth in a dishonest way
But that he should not unduly emphasize his age.
Kenneth Koch, “The Art of Love”
| Friday, July 16, 2004
TT: Resident artisan
A reader writes:
I'm curious, and it might be worth blogging about: what does your work space look like? I once saw a photo book of writers' studies, and I spent hours poring over photographs of desks, bookshelves, odd pieces of detritus thumbtacked to the walls, and I came away believing (perhaps wrongly) that I knew a bit more about each of them. We know some of what is on the walls, so what about the rest?
I work at home in a small office-bedroom whose third-floor window looks down on a quiet, tree-lined block of Upper West Side brownstones. The window is to my left, a clothes closet to my right, and over the closet is a sleeping loft. (The ceilings in my apartment are unusually high.) The walls are white, the furniture black, the rug black and tan. I sit on a cheap, creaky swivel chair. My desk is one of those Danish-style slab-and-tube jobs: four shelves, no drawers. The shelf on which I work holds my iBook, a pair of good-quality desktop speakers hooked up to the computer (I often listen to music while I write), a phone-fax-answering machine, an external zip drive, and a tall, sometimes shaky stack of review CDs. My printer is on the bottom shelf. The shelf immediately above eye level holds a few framed pictures, a flashlight (just in case),
and two short stacks of review copies and bound galleys of forthcoming books.
On the top shelf are:
• The Library of America's Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works
• Four hardbound Viking Portables: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Johnson & Boswell
• An old Modern Library collection of Montaigne’s essays
• Dostoyevsky’s Demons
• Kenneth Minogue’s Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology
• Arlene Croce’s Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker
• David Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film
• H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary of Quotations
• The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
• Fowler's Modern English Usage
• A Terry Teachout Reader
To my immediate left, below the window sill, are two neat stacks of books and papers. To my right is a small wheeled hutch that contains office supplies and other papers. Atop the hutch are two boxes full of Giorgio Morandi and Fairfield Porter notecards, a small rock from the shore of Isle au Haut, and a Cup of Chicha coffee mug full of pens and pencils. Beyond it is an electronic keyboard on a floor stand, and beyond the keyboard, next to the closet, is a case of books about music. Behind my chair are seven custom-made cases containing 3,000 CDs.
Hanging on the walls are:
• A framed gold record given to me by the members of Nickel Creek
• A Hatch Show Print poster
advertising a concert by Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys, printed from the original blocks
• A poster advertising a 1974 Hans Hofmann show at André Emmerich Gallery
• A blue-and-gold poster from New York City Ballet’s 1982 Stravinsky Centennial Celebration
Only one item in the Teachout Museum can be seen from my desk, a Joseph Cornell-like assemblage put together by Paul Taylor out of the original newspaper version of "The Importance of Being Less Earnest," one of the essays in the Teachout Reader. It hangs by the keyboard. My prints are all next door in the living room, where they can’t distract me from the day's work.
Now, what does all that tell you about me?
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TT: The reader over your shoulder
My posting about the potential embarrassments of reading in public has brought in some delightful responses, but none better than this:
Your reminiscences brought to mind some less-than-pleasant scenes from my
days as a pre-adolescent, adolescent and post-adolescent bookworm...and one
story you might find amusing.
It was back in '74 or '75, at Dumont High School in N.J.; one day,
standing outside the auditorium waiting to go into an assembly or something,
I had my nose stuck in Harold Pinter's "The Homecoming." A very perky, very blonde,
reasonably sweet cheerleader noticed what I was reading and said, "Oh,
that's so cool!"
Well, naturally I was kind of...flabbergasted. But hey, you never know with
people...and I did have one of those lusting-from-afar crushes on the young
lady, so I said something fairly lame, along the lines of, "Yeah it's really
something," to which she replied with an eager "Uh-huh."
Not knowing where to take this, I thought I would make a joke. "I think the
Drama Club ought to do this sometime." And she beamed and said, "Yes,
absolutely." And then she paused and said, "Who do you think should play
John-boy?"
It took me a few seconds before I put it together and realized that she was
under the impression that what I was reading was the script for the
television movie that served as the pilot for the series "The Waltons," also
titled "The Homecoming." I was bitterly disappointed for a second, and then
relieved to be returned to the reality I knew.
So be wary of that fantasy waitress....
Actually, all the waitresses at Good Enough to Eat, my neighborhood hangout, are maximally cool. Several are performers of various kinds, and when possible I go to see their shows. (Where are you now, Shannon Hope Lee?) As for the other restaurants in the immediate vicinity, though, I make no promises!
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TT: Starring Kristen Johnston
I’m back in The Wall Street Journal again this morning, reviewing the Public Theater’s Central Park production of Much Ado About Nothing and a one-woman off-off-Broadway show, Janine Squillari’s I Need a Guy Who Blinks.
Much Ado was slow to get off the ground, but Kristen Johnston was great right from the start:
The six-foot-tall alien of TV’s "Third Rock from the Sun" also has an impressive track record on stage, including a vital performance earlier this year in the New Group’s revival of Wallace Shawn’s obnoxious "Aunt Dan and Lemon," and though she’s a Shakespearean debutante, she clearly has great things ahead of her. As Beatrice, the hard-nosed bride-to-be of "Much Ado," Ms. Johnston bestrides the stage like a full-fledged star, seizing your attention with every word she speaks (and even when not speaking—I couldn’t take my eyes off her in the crowd scenes). Her dark-brown baritone voice cleaves the air like a well-honed knife, one that she not infrequently turns on herself. Not only does she have the happy knack of knowing how to be funny and rueful at the same time, but her handsome, wide-mouthed face, at once sexy and silly, was custom-made for comedy. When she orders her hapless suitor Benedick (Jimmy Smits) to "kill Claudio," you want to run right out and tie the noose.
The trouble with the first three-fifths of the play is that David Esbjornson, the director, has failed to create a convincing setting for Ms. Johnston’s magical presence. He has updated the play to Sicily circa 1919, but for no apparent reason other than to appeal to the "Under the Tuscan Sun" crowd, and his puzzling period references (including a bizarre scene set in a Futurist disco) shed no light on Shakespeare’s sufficiently luminous text….
Then came the wedding scene, and everything started to hum. Mr. Esbjornson shook off the confusing superfluities of the previous acts and homed in on the play’s emotional truths, and all at once the whole cast snapped to attention. It was like a helicopter taking off. Actors who had been slightly off target suddenly got the point: Mr. Waterston became frighteningly angry, Mr. Smits charmingly funny, and Brian Murray, who had hitherto fallen flat as Dogberry, the idiot constable, turned before our eyes into a gloriously plummy-voiced boob whose every polysyllabic malapropism brought down the house. Nobody on stage put a foot wrong for the rest of the night.
I Need a Guy Who Blinks may not be Shakespeare, but it’s hair-raisingly relevant:
An 80-minute monologue in which Ms. Squillari describes a disastrous string of bad dates, bad relationships and bad breakups, it is every Gen-X woman’s worst nightmare come to life—plus laughs. Ms. Squillari claims to have an infallible track record when it comes to dating: "Granted, I may not have always made the best choices in men. In fact, I’ve never made a good choice in men." Fortunately, she was taking notes as she lurched from bed to bed, and she tells her horror stories with a self-loathing glee guaranteed to make every man in the audience take stock of his own peculiarities. I especially liked the questionnaire she created in order to screen out losers up front: "How many people are involved in a monogamous relationship? (A) One. (B) Two. (C) Three."
No link, so if you want to read the whole thing (and if not, why not?), buy a Friday Journal, turn to the "Weekend Section," and look for my drama column right next to the Wall Street Journal/ZAGAT Theater Survey. Or subscribe to The Wall Street Journal Online by going here. That’s what I do.
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TT: Almanac
"Wearing a dinner jacket, Umfraville was otherwise unchanged from the night we had met at Foppa's. Trim, horsey, perfectly at ease with himself, and everyone around him, he managed at the same time to suggest the proximity of an abyss of scandal and bankruptcy threatening at any moment to engulf himself, and anyone else unfortunate enough to be within his immediate vicinity when the crash came. The charm he exercised over people was perhaps largely due to this ability to juggle with two contrasting, apparently contradictory attributes; the one, an underlying implication of sinister, disturbing undercurrents: the other, a soothing power to reassure and entertain. These incompatible elements were always to be felt warring with each other whenever he was present. He was like an actor who suddenly appears on the stage to the accompaniment of a roll of thunder, yet who utterly captivates his audience a second later, while their nerves are still on edge, by crooning a sentimental song."
Anthony Powell, At Lady Molly's
| Thursday, July 15, 2004
TT: Whoops, you missed me!
I appeared Wednesday afternoon on Soundcheck, John Schaefer’s daily radio show about the arts in New York City. We chatted about the Teachout Reader, middlebrow culture, and the first anniversary of "About Last Night." Alas, it slipped my mind that the show airs live each day on WNYC (it’s a good thing I got there early!), and so I forgot to post about it in advance of airtime.
If you’re curious, the program has already been archived, and you can listen to it by going here.
(The WNYC Web site, incidentally, describes me as a "serial blogger." Stop me before I post again!)
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TT: Our far-flung correspondents
You’d be surprised—or maybe not—by who reads "About Last Night." Bob Brookmeyer, the composer and jazz trombonist about whom I’ve blogged on several occasions, wrote the other day to comment on my approving link to a posting in which artsjournal.com blogger Kyle Gann declared that "the entire body of serialist music produced nothing that will ever mean much to anyone beyond composers and new-musicians interested in its technical aspects."
Says Brookmeyer:
2 cases in point put a dent in the "beyond my ken" reaction -- Berg's Violin Concerto (one of the most moving pieces I have ever heard) and Webern's Symphony Op. 21, which I -- at age 20 -- declared "the only perfect music I have ever heard" -- both of these date back to 1950, for me, and time has only increased my love and wonder at the beauty and clarity "organization" can bring to bear. Berg, who was always regarded as the connection to the past, was one of the most organized composers in history, yet much of his music sounds almost improvised. SOMETIMES the means justify the ends. Much the same, for me, with electronic music. It all depends on the composer.
I agree, at least in principle (though not about the Webern Symphony, which has never made sense to me except when used as a ballet score by George Balanchine). The Berg Violin Concerto, for instance, also strikes me as profoundly moving. It is, however, a very special case, a piece of serial music based on a tone row whose interlocking major and minor triads are manipulated by Berg to create quasi-tonal effects. I think its appeal is essentially theatrical, by which I mean it’s not so much pure music as a piece of "representational" art in which Berg uses the tension between tonality and atonality to portray an extra-musical emotional state. (He does the same thing in Wozzeck, though the fact that Wozzeck is an opera makes it more obvious.) That doesn’t mean the concerto isn't beautiful, though. Brookmeyer is right: like every other variety of art, music is an essentially empirical operation to which theory is ultimately irrelevant. What works, works. The fact that most atonal music doesn’t work says something relevant about the fundamental problems of atonality—but that doesn’t make it impossible for a genius to compose a piece of atonal music that does. In art, all definitions are slippery, which is one of the things that makes it so miraculous.
(If you’ve never heard the Berg Violin Concerto, by the way, I’m especially fond of this recording.)
Another reader of "About Last Night," Toni Bentley, rose to the bait I offered in a recent posting in which I announced that I’d finally bowed to her wishes and watched The Red Shoes. Not only was Toni delighted that I liked it so much, but she sent me a speech she gave at a recent West Coast screening of Michael Powell's 1948 film.
Here’s part of what she said:
On a more personal note I would like to comment as a former classical ballet dancer on the depiction of the dance world as portrayed in this film as demanding, difficult, and frequently physically painful—all of which is accurate. What is perhaps even more revolutionary now than in 1948 is that this film, while not denying the hardships and sacrifices, actually extols them as the worthwhile price of achieving great art. The dance world continues today to receive criticism as being a profession that demands too much of its young aspirants for a career that is brief, badly paid, elitist, undemocratic, and can be abruptly ended with an injury in the blink of an eye. I cannot in all honesty tell you that any of these complaints are not true. But more often than not these are the complaints of those who don’t actually dance, but those who observe—and, perhaps, covet the stage. What I can say, from the other side of the footlights, is that the reward of achieving some measure of transcendent beauty for those of us who pursued it, and for our appreciative audiences, was worth every bloody toe and every drop of sweat. And besides, democracy has never had much to do with making great art.
The movie that you are about to see is that rare work that argues that art is not only important but possibly the most important thing in life. "The Red Shoes," wrote Michael Powell in his autobiography, "is an insolent, haunting picture the way it takes for granted that nothing matters but art, and that art is something worth dying for." Ballet, in its deft defiance of gravity itself, is the ultimate metaphor for this transcendence of our wretched mortality. In our time of much meaningless death and much bad and boring art, The Red Shoes, 56 years after its premiere, feels like a breath of fresh air—and a call to arms—for Dedication, Beauty and Passion of the kind that helps the rest of us find meaning in something that surpasses our mere mortal selves.
I couldn’t have put it better.
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TT: An embarrassment of congratulations
Between "About Last Night"’s first anniversary
and my nomination
to the National Council on the Arts, our mailbox is bulging. Here are some e-letters that caught my eye:
• "Congratulations on your first anniversary as a blogger. I've more or
less been reading you from the beginning--I don't think I caught on
right away, but once I figured out what you were up to, I went back
and caught up with the first two or three weeks I'd missed. I was interested to see that you'd spent a happy afternoon scrolling
through your About Last Night archives, not long after your post
about not keeping keepsakes, and tossing out most of your old print
clips. Is a dust-free, spatially invisible archive somehow different
for you from a drawer full of yellowed clippings? Personally, if my
scribblings are available online, I don't bother with a printout, yet
I do still maintain a drawer of my older magazine articles and
increasingly brittle newspaper cuttings--just in case I need them for
quick reference, of course."
Well, "About Last Night" archives itself automatically with no additional effort from me! As for the old newspaper clippings, I feel considerably lighter for having consigned them to the recycling bin—but check back with me once I finish transferring my entire CD library to my iBook, which at this rate should happen early in the 22nd century….
• "My heartfelt congratulations on your first anniversary in the
blogosphere. Hope you have many more. By the time I discovered your blog some about eight months ago, I had
been a long-time reader of your essays in Commentary. It was your piece
on David Helfgott -- you were, I believe, the only critic not to have
been fooled by that spectacle and to have had the courage to say so --
that made me a permanent devotee. If your blog could have a sub-title, I would suggest: ‘Everything you
always suspected about art but were afraid to say.’ Those of us who
have always loved Chandler, Sinatra and Mitchum and have not had much
use for Brando, Larry Kramer or Phillip Glass, can now say so at a
Manhattan cocktail party without feeling like we're committing a grave
social sin. Thank you for that."
Somehow I doubt that regular consumption of "About Last Night" is likely to improve anyone’s comfort level at Manhattan cocktail parties. As for the essay in question, "The David Helfgott Show," I made a point of including it in A Terry Teachout Reader. I’m proud of it—not least because more than one practicing psychiatrist wrote at the time of its original publication to congratulate me for my honesty. That’s the kind of fan mail a writer remembers.
• "I am not sure exactly how long I have been reading
your blog, but it must be a while now, since I
recognized a number of the ‘greatest hits’ you
selected. It was interesting to read your childhood memories of
being considered an egghead and an odd duck. I also
spent a lot of time reading and following obscure
topics. I can certainly relate to feeling embarrassed
at being caught reading a book in public. And yet, I really didn't become much of an
intellectual. I like some jazz, mostly stuff like
Erroll Garner and Jimmie Lunceford, but am not terribly
knowledge. Oh sure, I like Miles, but who doesn't? I
liked Filles de Kilimanjaro and On the Corner, and
that's rather suspicious. Let's face it -- I'm just
much much more passionate and informed about hip-hop
and soul music. I've listened to some classical, the basic stuff
everyone knows. I like Charles Ives, but couldn't
begin to explain why. I don't know anything about
opera or ballet. There's a long list of great novels
I've never read; on the other hand, there's a longer
list of paperback mysteries I have. Point being, I find your blog to fill me in on things I
know nothing about. Occasionally, things go over my
head, but not due to your writing."
Whenever "About Last Night" has a high-traffic day, OGIC and I publish a pre-written posting for the benefit of first-time visitors. This is part of what it says:
Our interests are wide-ranging, and we think there are plenty of other people like us out there in cyberspace, plus still more who long to wander off their beaten paths but aren't sure which way to turn.
That’s why we’re especially pleased whenever we get letters like this one.
Thanks to all of you—and to all who've sent good wishes in recent days. Like I said yesterday, you are why we write this blog.
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TT: Almanac
What happened to Brie and Chablis?
Both Brie and Chablis used to be
The sort of thing everyone ate
When goat cheese and Napa Merlot
Weren’t purchased by those in the know,
And monkfish was thought of as bait.
And why did authorities ban
From restaurants all coq au vin?
And then disappeared sole meunière,
Then banished, with little ado,
Beef Wellington—and Stroganoff, too.
Then cancelled the chocolate éclair.
Then hollandaise sauce got the boot,
And kiwis stopped being the fruit
That every chef loved to included
Like quiches, or coquilles St. Jacques,
They turned into something to mock—
The fruit that all chic chefs eschewed.
You miss, let's say, trout amandine?
Take hope from some menus I've seen:
Fondue has been spotted of late
And—yes, to my near disbelief—
Tartare not from tuna, but beef.
They all may return. Just you wait.
Calvin Trillin, "What Happened to Brie and Chablis?"
| Wednesday, July 14, 2004
OGIC: I'll never be a poet laureate…
But bear with me. The anniversary of About Last Night sneaked up on me. Most days, I would probably give a little start if you reminded me we weren't always thus. I wasn't here at the beginning, but I was loitering just behind the scenes, interested as hell but still occupying some sort of limbo between ardent blog reader and bona fide blogger (my personal anniversary, not counting guest blogging, comes in October). As Terry says below and Sarah echoes here, the last year has been an explosive one for culture blogging. It's hard to imagine that when Terry started this site, I didn't yet know about TMFTML, Maud, Cup of Chicha, or Old Hag. And Elegant Variation, Pullquote, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, Return of the Reluctant—essential daily reads that seem like permanent fixtures—didn't exist. Golden Rule Jones was primarily a listings site. The cabal was not incorporated, not yet a splinter under Jennifer Howard's skin. And the fact that I can't remember the first time I noticed half these blogs is, I think, testament to the excellent openness of this world.
This landscape changes fast. About Last Night has itself undergone some semi-dramatic reinvention during the year of its existence. The two major changes: moving from a fixed daily posting to a looser, rolling schedule; and adding, ahem, a co-blogger. In retrospect, both of these seem natural if not inevitable developments, reflecting perhaps the two great distinguishing features of the technology: its instantaneity and the way it facilitates conversation and community. Michael Blowhard happened to reflect on the origins of his site this week, talking about how his and the now-retired Friedrich von B's traditional opening salutations were a vestige of their early practice of simply blogging their email. Although Terry and I don't often include the salutation here, much of our blogging is in that spirit, if not straight from our email. (Although our friendship began in person when I worked for his publisher, it was cemented through a robust email correspondence that began after I moved to Chicago.) Always a shy type, I sometimes still experience a paralyzing brand of stage fright when trying to put together a post; simply typing the words "Dear Terry" at the beginning of the draft is a reliable trick for shaking off my reticence and some of the stiff formality of my early drafts. So, a resounding yes to everything Terry said earlier today about the intensely personal nature of the medium. And, while I don't think the irrelevance of the print media is quite nigh, I do love the way blogs have made stories in publications like the New York Times no longer the last word on a topic, but a starting point for discussion, dispute, elaboration, and amplification from every point of view.
None of these thoughts are particularly original, but today I'll settle for being apropos. I second Terry's thanks to Doug McLennan, all our blogger friends, and especially everyone who reads us. Coattails can be a beautiful thing, and I may have come in on Terry's, but now you're stuck with me!
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, July 14, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: One and counting
"About Last Night," the first artsjournal.com blog to go live, made its debut a year ago today. Go here to read what I posted on July 14, 2003.
I was, so far as I know, the first widely read print-media critic to launch a daily blog about the arts, and my single-handed assault on the blogosphere didn’t exactly trigger an avalanche of imitators (though the artsjournal.com blogroster now contains a number of other familiar faces, and Alex Ross of The New Yorker, much to my delight, recently started a blog of his own). Instead, something far more interesting and significant happened: the blogosphere invaded the print media. Several of the artbloggers listed in the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column, many of whom started blogging before I did and most of whom were unknown before they started blogging, now write for newspapers and magazines. Yet they continue to blog as well. Why? Because blogging, which operates according to its own homegrown rules, has evolved into a brand-new style of journalism indigenous to the Web, one whose exciting blend of immediacy and informality has its own unique appeal to readers—and writers. I know I'm hooked.
A theologian I know once told me that technology is not merely neutral, but a positive good. I'm no Luddite, but I had trouble getting his point. Now, after a year of blogging, I understand it completely. Blogs are the 21st-century counterpart of the periodical essays of the eighteenth century, the Spectators and Ramblers and Idlers that supplied familiar essayists with what was then the ideal vehicle for their intensely personal reflections. Blogging stands in the sharpest possible contrast to the corporate journalism that exerted so powerful an effect on writing in the twentieth century. Instead of the homogenized semi-anonymity of a mass-circulation magazine, it offers writers the opportunity to practice the old-fashioned art of individual journalism, self-published, unmediated, and interactive. That's a good example of what my theologian friend meant: the highest purpose of the Internet, a seemingly impersonal piece of postmodern technology, has turned out to be its unique ability to bring creatures of flesh and blood closer together.
I started "About Last Night" because I'd come to believe that the print media were losing interest in the fine arts. I suspected that serious arts journalism was destined to migrate to the Web, which is the perfect medium for cultural niche marketing, and it struck me that as an arts journalist, I might therefore do well to investigate its possibilities. At the same time, I never meant for this blog to be devoted to high art alone. Of the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve posted here to date, I think these might be the most important:
I don’t think The Long Goodbye is as good a book as The Great Gatsby, and I believe the difference between the two books is hugely important. But I also don’t think it’s absurd to compare them, and I probably re-read one as often as the other.
The point is that I accept the existence of hierarchies of quality without feeling oppressed by them. I have plenty of room in my life for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler, for Aaron Copland and Louis Armstrong, for George Balanchine and Fred Astaire, and I love them all without confusing their relative merits, much less jumping to the conclusion that all merits are relative.
In case you hadn’t noticed, that’s part of what this blog is all about—a big part.
It sure is, and it still is.
To all of you who read "About Last Night" regularly, I want to express my deepest gratitude for your support. You are why I write this blog.
As for Our Girl in Chicago, who became my co-blogger last fall, I can’t say enough good things about her. "About Last Night" is a better blog—and infinitely more fun to write—because of her "additional dialogue."
And to the other bloggers out there in the 'sphere who have befriended and advised me, thanks for being so patient with a terminally unhip boomer who decided to get crazy and plunge head first into your brave new world. You’re teaching me a lot, every day.
Much else has happened to me in the year just past. I published a book, wrote another one, and had a third come out in paperback. The Teachout Museum, which started out as a couple of prints on my wall, became a serious and passionate pursuit, so much so that I’ll be giving a lecture about it next March at my favorite museum, the Phillips Collection (watch this space for details). I visited a Maine island, rode a roller coaster for the first time, consumed an enormous amount of art, and was investigated by the FBI. But of all the things I did, I suspect that starting this blog will prove in the not-so-long run to have been the most consequential. I’ve been present at the creation (well, almost) of a totally new journalistic medium, the first one to come along since the invention of TV, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.
So I’ll close by thanking Doug McLennan, the mastermind of artsjournal.com, who called me up out of the blue one afternoon and said, "How’d you like to write a blog for me?" Three weeks later—one year ago today—"About Last Night" was born. Since then, it’s racked up more than 430,000 page views and is now being read in thirteen time zones around the world. That's a start.
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TT: Down memory lane
Blogging is a fugitive medium, which is at once its charm and its flaw. I’ve spun some of what I’ve written for "About Last Night" into print-media pieces (and vice versa), but most of it has disappeared into the ether. On the other hand, everything posted on this blog is electronically archived, and I recently spent a sunny afternoon trolling through my postings of the past year. Here are some that caught my eye:
• "In the words of one of the gazillion e-mails I've received since opening for business on Monday, 'Do you realize that once you start blogging, you cease to have a life?' That's what a new blogger likes to hear at 1:18 in the morning as he wonders whether he remembered to put in all the serial commas." (Alias terryteachout.com, July 16, 2003.)
• "I’ve come to feel that as a rule, the thing I do best is point people in the direction of that which and those whom I love. Let somebody else ice Piss Christ—I’d rather spend my remaining hours on earth telling you how beautiful The Open Window is, especially if you’ve never seen it before. In the long run, silence may be the most powerful form of negative criticism." (Let’s drop the big one (and see what happens), August 6.)
• "If we think a house or painting or photograph or ballet is beautiful, we want it with us always. But the catch is that the more pieces of the past we succeed in preserving, the less space and time we have in which to display and contemplate the present. Too many lovers of art live exclusively in the past. I understand the temptation—I feel it myself—but it strikes me that we have an obligation to keep one eye fixed in the moment, and that becomes a lot harder to do when you’re pulling a long, long train of classics of which the new is merely the caboose. Needless to say, this is a problem without a solution. The only thing you can do is fiddle with the proportions and try to get them right, or at least righter." (Going, going, September 25.)
• "Somebody (me, I guess) oug | | |
