About Last Night
TERRY TEACHOUT on the arts
in New York City
(with additional dialogue by OUR GIRL IN CHICAGO)
Friday, November 10, 2006
TT: Dirty laundry
It’s time for the Friday Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, which is a bit jaundiced this week. I reviewed three shows—the New York premiere of The Clean House, the Broadway transfer of Grey Gardens, and a Seattle production of Steve Martin’s The Underpants—and didn’t like any of ’em:
Sarah Ruhl is officially trendy. Not only did the 32-year-old playwright just win a MacArthur “genius grant,” but she’s making a high-profile New York debut: “The Clean House,” which has been staged at the Yale Repertory Theatre and numerous other top regional houses and was a Pulitzer finalist last year, has now come to town in a glossy production starring Blair Brown and Jill Clayburgh. As if that weren’t enough buzz for one human being to generate, Ms. Ruhl says she’s working on a new play about the history of…the vibrator.
If I sound skeptical about Ms. Ruhl, there’s a reason. It’s possible to be both trendy and talented, and I suppose it might be possible to write a good play about vibrators, too. I can even think of a few genuine geniuses who’ve won MacArthurs. But when all these suspicious-looking items turned up on the same resume, the red light on my Faux-O-Meter started blinking, which is why I wasn’t surprised when “The Clean House” failed to live up to its own hype. It’s clever—too clever by at least half—but scrape away the postmodern trickery and it’s nothing more than a soap opera for pseudointellectuals….
“Grey Gardens,” the cultiest show of the 2005-06 season, has transferred to Broadway, and though it’s been tweaked and tightened, I don’t like it any better now than when it opened Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons back in March.
In case you missed it the first time around, “Grey Gardens” is a musical version of the 1975 cinéma-vérité film documentary about Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter “Little” Edie, two impoverished but spunky high-society ladies who spent their declining years holed up in a decaying Long Island summer house. The cast is exemplary, especially Christine Ebersole, and the direction of Michael Greif and Jeff Calhoun is very fine, but the show itself doesn’t add up to much….
When not making movies, Steve Martin writes plays. “The Underpants,” his adaptation of “Die Hose,” a six-character, one-set farce written in 1911 by the German playwright Carl Sternheim, was produced Off Broadway in 2002 and has since been making the regional rounds. I caught up with “The Underpants” in Seattle, where ACT Theatre is giving it a noisy production whose hard-working actors do their best to obscure the fact that Mr. Martin is no farceur….
No free link. To read the whole thing, pick up a copy of today’s morning's Journal and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section. Alternatively, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to the complete text of my review, plus lots of other good stuff. (If you’re already a subscriber, the review is here.)
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TT: Almanac
"Sometimes I think nobody ever really gets to understand anybody else. Which is a horrible thought. At least, to me it is. We're locked up inside our own bodies for life. Solitary confinement for life. We scream inside ourselves, but nobody seems to hear. We're born alone, we try to communicate with other people all our lives, and fail mostly, and then we die alone. It's crazy."
Buddy Rich (quoted in John Minahan, The Torment of Buddy Rich)
| Thursday, November 9, 2006
OGIC: The rest of the quote, and then some
Regarding yesterday's quiz, the quote continues like this:
…Who among novelists ever more instantly recognized the absurd when she saw it in human behavior, then polished it off to more devastating effect, than this young daughter of a Hampshire rectory, who as she finished the chapters enjoyed reading them to her family, to whom she also devoted her life?
So yes, as many of you guessed (and some tracked down via Amazon's Search Inside), the subject is Jane Austen. The author was trickier, but a couple of readers knew: it's Eudora Welty, from her 1969 essay "The Radiance of Jane Austen." Most interestingly, one correspondent guessed that Welty was the subject of the passage! Showing, perhaps, that whatever we're writing about, we're also writing about ourselves.
I urge upon you the entire essay, which leads off this collection. I love Welty's canny use of Austen's biography in this passage:
Reading those chapters aloud to her own lively, vocative family, on whose shrewd intuition, practiced estimation of conduct, and seasoned judgment of character she relied almost as well as on her own, Jane Austen must have enjoyed absolute confidence in an understanding reception of her work. The novels still have a bloom of shared pleasure. And the felicity they have for us must partly lie in the confidence they take for granted between the author and her readers—at the moment, ourselves.
Just one more taste:
Think of today's fiction in the light of hers. Does some of it appear garrulous and insistent and out-of-joint, and nearly all of it slow? Does now and then a novel come along that's so long, arch, and laborious, so ponderous in literary conceits and so terrifying in symbols, that it might have been written (in his bachelor days) by Mr. Elton as a conundrum, or, in some prolonged spell of elevation, by Mr. Collins in a bid for self-advancement? Yes, but this is understandable. For many of our writers who are now as young as Jane Austen was when she wrote her novels, and as young as she still was when she died, at forty-one, ours is the century of unreason, the stamp of our behavior is violence or isolation; non-meaning is looked upon with some solemnity; and for the purpose of writing novels, most human behavior is looked at through the frame, or the knothole, of alienation. The life Jane Austen write about was indeed a different one from ours, but the difference was not as great as that between the frames through which it is viewed. Jane Austen's frame was that of belonging to her world. She could step through it, in and out of it as easily and unselfconsciously as she stepped through the doorway of the rectory and into the garden to pick strawberries. She was perfectly at home in what she knew, as well as knowledgeable of precisely where she was on earth; she even believed she knew why she was here.
The beginning of that makes me laugh: Just put the pen down, Mr. Collins, and nobody will get hurt. And makes me wonder just who deserves the Mr. Collins Award for Recent Long, Arch, and Laborious Fiction. The rest is a nice refinement of the notion that the past is a foreign country, with the point about different frames driven straight home by the paragraph's last line—an understatement in good aim, one might call it.
Thanks to everyone who wrote in about the quiz! The stream of mail really enlivened my workaday day.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, November 9, 2006 | Permanent
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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 gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.
Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.
BROADWAY:
• A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• Heartbreak House (drama, G/PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Dec. 17)
• Jay Johnson: The Two and Only (one-ventriloquist show, G/PG-13, a bit of strong language but otherwise family-friendly, reviewed here)
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)
• The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Dec. 31)
OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)
• Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (drama, R, adult subject matter and nudity, reviewed here, closes Dec. 9)
• Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
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TT: Almanac
"Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison
| Wednesday, November 8, 2006
OGIC: Rivette everywhere
This week the Museum of the Moving Image in New York begins a Jacques Rivette retrospective. The bloggers at The House Next Door have been doing a fantastic job over the last week or so of prefacing the series with a cascade of links to stories, interviews, and critical considerations of the French director, whose 1974 movie Céline and Julie Go Boating—very loosely based on two Henry James novellas—is one of my personal landmark films and simply a joy to watch (Céline and Julie will be shown at MOMI this Saturday at 6:00 and Sunday at 4:30).
Another devotee of this film is David Thomson, who, in the New Biographical Dictionary of Film, declares:
It is a generous reconciliation with literature through fiction, and whereas Kane was the first picture to suggest that the world of the imagination was as powerful as reality, Céline and Julie is the first film in which everything is invented.
Today Keith Uhlich at The House Next Door links to a newer piece of writing by Thomson on Rivette, an essay that appeared in the Guardian last April. This is a glorious little piece of work; in it Thomson hits on a handful of really vivid and lucid ways of identifying what’s distinctive about Rivette’s filmmaking and its relation to film’s affiliated art forms, especially literature. This piece should hold up to a reading by anyone interested in film or literature, whether they’ve seen a frame of Rivette’s stuff or not. Try it:
It is just that Rivette thinks the cinema runs the risk of turning vulgar and foolish if it starts to stress the visual over everything else. The visual is a given; it is the norm; it is the world, or its engine—and Rivette, without reservation, loves that world even when it frightens him. I doubt he has ever composed a shot without seeking both grace and an austere absence of all those signs that say: "Here is grace." Just look at Céline and Julie Go Boating, which, apart from anything else, is one of the most inspiring films about the way Paris looks in the summer, and about the illusion that we can catch its fragrance. (You can find the same compositional severity, the fierce effort to restrain beauty, in Bresson and Buñuel.)
So it is not that you can put your eyes away with Rivette. But you may need to rediscover them if they have become habituated to shock cuts, fancy camera angles and special effects. What is special for Rivette is cinematography, so revolutionary that it needs no editorialising.
The next key to his world is the passion for characters and stories, and the concomitant belief that once you start filming anyone then, gradually, storyline and character will seep up, like moisture in the ground. We cannot look at a shot of a person without asking: "Who is that?" We cannot take in a following shot—of a sea-shire, say—without assuming, "Ah, that person is at the sea, or going there? Or what?" We allow for mystery, but we cannot do without meaning. Above all, the characters will become actors, and they and their stories, as they build, become increasingly tests on our belief.
Rivette estimates that story is like weather. It is always there, but we don't always notice it: thus a dull day may turn sinister late in the afternoon, and the girl you met in the park may seem to be less a chance acquaintance than a figure in a story that now contains you.
This captures beautifully how the narrative style feels in Céline and Julie: the film is rife with moments that feel like possible stories in the making, but that suspend you in uncertainty for a time—a waiting period that proves not only surprisingly tolerable but positively engaging and productive. In the last half of the movie, this suspense finally has an enormous payoff in the form of a gripping story (straight out of James), which the movie lets you really savor by replaying it again and again, revealing more pieces in each iteration.
But even beyond these local observations about Rivette and movies, I think, Thomson gets at something more basic here about our appetite for stories, so insatiable it approaches a will to find them and draw them out—“like moisture in the ground,” indeed. The essay ends:
So there we are—what are Rivette's films about? Women, the light, place, and the way a story begins to slink from a woman's feet across the space and through the light—just like one of the cats Rivette is always ready to show us, watching the story as if it were a mouse. He has remained loyal to a belief not much in fashion now—that the movies are the natural extension of theatre, literature and the study of story. The human condition, he has no doubt, is that of audiences always surprised when they have to become actors.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, November 8, 2006 | Permanent
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OGIC: Pop goes the quiz
Little lit quiz to ponder over your coffee this morning. Whose work is the subject of the following quotation?
Each novel is a formidable engine of strategy. It is made to be—a marvel of designing and workmanship, capable of spontaneous motion at the lightest touch and of travel at delicately controlled but rapid speed toward its precise destination. It could kill us all, had s/he wished it to; it fires at us, all along the way, using understatements in good aim. Let us be thankful it is trained not on our hearts but on our illusions and our vanities.
For bonus points and to really knock my socks off, name the critic too. Now, as far as I can tell this quiz is not self-checking via Google. But there may be tricks of the trade I'm not taking into account. If you want me to check your work, drop a line to ogic@artsjournal.com, or just sit tight and I'll post the answers on Thursday.
The blogging forecast predicts continued fluff and diversions through the end of the week. It's just that kind of week around here.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, November 8, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"There was something dangerous and remorseless in her optimism."
Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 8, 2006 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, November 7, 2006
TT: Almanac
"It has always been hard for me to think of extraordinarily handsome people ever being very intimate with one another."
Gordon Forbes, Goodbye to Some
| Monday, November 6, 2006
OGIC: Monday update
So the Rachel Ries show Friday night was a lot of fun, though far shorter than I would have liked. There were highlights: despite forgetting to bring along her banjo, Ries soldiered on and performed on guitar one of my favorite of her songs, a simple but brilliant little song-poem about falling in love with a place. That place would be Valentine, NE, which sits on the Nebraska map like a trap—like an engraved invitation for someone to write a bad earnest or bad ironic song about it. Thank goodness, then, that in this case a greatly gifted songwriter took the bait. To wit:
Valentine, NE
Hey I found my home last night
On my way through Valentine.
Nebraska said, hey how you been,
Cause you've been gone for so long.
Hey how you been my sweet valentine?
Well, I've been in the concrete palace
Singing for rocks and dimes.
Wondering just how long I'd last
Living in the city on fire.
Hey how you been my sweet Valentine?
There's a man down Chicago way
Thinking I'll be home by suppertime.
But he's no prairie, ain't got no sky.
So goodbye my old valentine.
Hey I found my home last night
On my way through Valentine.
Nebraska said, hey how you been,
you've been gone for so long.
Hey how you been my sweet Valentine?
I love that the personification of the place in the first verse ("Nebraska said, hey how you been") is mirrored in the third verse by the (unflattering) comparison of a person to a place. I love that she leaves this metaphor deliberately rough, likening apples to oranges without apology. And the understated way she juxtaposes valentine with Valentine in trading the man for the place.
But this song is better heard than read. You can listen to some of it at Amazon.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Monday, November 6, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"In a rain forest in Borneo the realities are so different. The popular cause is simply life and the reigning prejudice is death. Words are dust and without them we shall probably all find out what kind of men we are."
Gordon Forbes, Goodbye to Some
| Friday, November 4, 2005
TT: Fresh blood on Broadway
It’s Friday, and I’m in The Wall Street Journal, reviewing Sweeney Todd, See What I Wanna See, and Cathay: Three Tales of China. I’m out of town and computerless, but OGIC has been kind enough to post this week’s drama-column teaser:
The greatest musical of the past half-century has returned to Broadway in a staging of the utmost force and originality, an event theatergoers will be talking about for years to come. John Doyle’s single-set version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd,” in which the ten-person cast doubles as the on-stage orchestra (yes, Patti LuPone really can play the tuba), is as far removed as possible from the all-encompassing splendor of Harold Prince’s 1979 production. Instead, it’s modest and intimate, so much so that you’ll feel as though the murderous barber of Fleet Street is personally giving you the closest of shaves.
Michael Cerveris gives the performance of a lifetime in the title role, one all the more potent because of the production’s bare-bones simplicity. With next to no scenery to distract you—not even a barber’s chair—it’s easy to lose yourself in the mad intensity of his demonic stare. Mr. Cerveris, whose head is as smooth as a cueball, looks like an apostate monk on the prowl, and when he proclaims that “they all deserve to die,” you know he means to slit every throat within razor’s reach….
I had to toss a coin to decide whether to lead this column off with “Sweeney Todd” or “See What I Wanna See,” Michael John LaChiusa’s new musical, which opened Sunday at the Public Theater. It’s his strongest piece of work to date, a little powerhouse of a show whose sheer intensity will knock you flat—and make you think….
His stagecraft is sure, his edgy, pop-flavored score commandingly individual (if not conventionally tuneful). Like Adam Guettel, Mr. LaChiusa is thinking hard about the future of the post-Sondheim musical, and in “See What I Wanna See” he has gone a long way toward showing us what it will look like….
It is with a mixture of amazement and horror that I must report the utter unsuitability for viewing by children of “Cathay: Three Tales of China,” a puppet play produced by Ping Chong & Company and performed by China’s Shaanxi Folk Art Theatre.
The New Victory’s season brochure explains in small type that the show is appropriate for children nine and up. I’m not a father, but I can’t even imagine taking a nine-year-old to a show that contains graphic portrayals of violence (including a hanging so vivid that you can hear the breaking of the victim’s neck), explicit mentions of rape, and a smattering of language this paper will not print. I heard gasps from some of the kids at the performance I saw, and I expect some of their parents were gasping as well….
No link. To read the whole thing, of which there’s even more than usual (the Journal gave me extra space this week to write about Sweeney Todd and See What I Wanna See), buy a copy of this morning’s paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, the best deal in Web-based mainstream-media journalism.
UPDATE: The Journal posted a free link to this review while I was out of town. Read the whole thing here.
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TT: Almanac
"Living in New York is like being at some terrible late-night party. You’re tired, you’ve had a headache since you arrived, but you can’t leave because then you’d miss the party."
Simon Hoggart, America: A User's Guide
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Friday, November 4, 2005 | Permanent
link | Thursday, November 3, 2005
TT: So you want to see a show?
Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. 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:
• Absurd Person Singular (comedy, PG, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 18, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
• Dirty Rotten Scoundrels* (musical, R, extremely vulgar, reviewed here)
• Doubt* (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)
• The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)
• Sweet Charity (musical, PG-13, lots of cutesy-pie 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:
• Orson's Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language, closes Dec. 31, reviewed here)
• Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
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TT: Almanac
"Did you ever get to know a man better by asking him questions?"
Arthur Miller, screenplay for The Misfits
| Wednesday, November 2, 2005
TT: Number, please
• Average cost of a movie ticket in the U.S. in 1929: 35 cents
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $3.78
(Source: Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams)
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 2, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"Leisure is not the attitude of mind of those who actively intervene, but of those who are open to everything; not of those who grab and grab hold, but of those who leave the reins loose and who are free and easy themselves—almost like a man falling asleep, for one can only fall asleep by 'letting oneself go.' Sleeplessness and the incapacity for leisure are really related to one another in a special sense, and a man at leisure is not unlike a man asleep. Heraclitus the Obscure observed of men who were asleep that they too 'were busy and active in the happenings of the world.' When we really let our minds rest contemplatively on a rose in bud, on a child at play, on a divine mystery, we are rested and quickened as though by a dreamless sleep."
Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (trans. Alexander Dru)
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 2, 2005 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, November 1, 2005
TT: Call me Sisyphus
Sorry, folks, that's all for today. I had to get up at four on Monday morning to write a piece, and I expect to be up pretty early this morning doing the same thing. No blogging until the smoke clears, or at least thins out a bit.
For now, enjoy the balmy weather, and check out some of those other fine blog overs in the right-hand column.
I'll be back in a day or two.
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TT: Playlist
Yesterday's listening, unexpurgated:
• Flatt and Scruggs, “Ground Speed”
• Reynaldo Hahn, “Offrande” (played and sung by the composer in 1909)
• Stan Getz, “Hershey Bar”
• Jimmy Rowles, “Grooveyard”
• Hal Kemp, “Got a Date With an Angel” (vocal by Skinnay Ennis)
• Steely Dan, “Green Earrings”
• Bing Crosby, “Sweet Leilani”
• Bing Crosby and Connie Boswell, “Basin Street Blues”
• Johnny Cash, “Hey, Porter”
• Farah Alvin, “Breathing Each Other In”
• Hot Tuna, “Hesitation Blues”
• Bernard Herrmann, Concerto Macabre (from the soundtrack of Hangover Square, performed by Joaquin Achucarro, Charles Gerhardt, and the National Philharmonic)
• Stephen Sondheim, “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” (from the original Broadway cast album)
• Count Basie Sextet, “Stan Shorthair” (with Joe Newman, Paul Quinichette, and Buddy Rich)
• Doc Watson, “Let the Cocaine Be”
• Paul Hindemith, Flute Sonata (played by Jean-Pierre Rampal and Robert Veyron-Lacroix)
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TT: Number, please
• Total one-time flat fee paid to Fats Waller and Andy Razaf by Mills Music Company in 1929 for all rights to the musical score of Connie's Hot Chocolates, including the songs "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Black and Blue": $500
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $5,402.35
(Source: David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, Spreadin' Rhythm Around)
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TT: Almanac
"Wisecracks still ricochet off movie soundtracks, but too often they are severed from their roots in actual harsh or bitter experience. They are zingers offered for the sake of the zing, not for the hard truths and obdurate realities that we otherwise could not bear to hear of outright. The smart talkers of today's movies, mimicking the monologism of stand-up comedians or the one-liners of sitcoms, rarely aspire above the level of the put-down."
Maria DiBattista, Fast-Talking Dames
| Monday, October 31, 2005
TT: Still in the barrel
I remain severely overpressed with sail, and that's not likely to change anytime soon. Not only do I have to hit three deadlines this week, but I'll be going to five performances, one of them in Washington (where I'll also be attending a meeting of the National Council on the Arts) and two in North Carolina (where I'll be seeing Carolina Ballet). Hence blogging is likely to be sporadic and fragmentary between now and next Monday. From me, anyway: Our Girl is hoping to pick up some of the slack, which will be nice, since she's been in the barrel herself and is only just starting to emerge.
You'll find an "Elsewhere" posting immediately below and a couple of new Top Fives in the right-hand column. I also expect to be updating "Sites to See" in my spare time, such as it is. Otherwise, keep your eyes peeled for this and that, and wish me luck!
P.S. In case you haven't guessed, I'm still way behind on answering my e-mail and will remain so for the next couple of days.
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TT: Elsewhere
In lieu of original Monday-morning content, here's a peek at my recent Web-based reading:
• I’ve been meaning to blog this “Talk of the Town” item for weeks:
Turn to page 1,850 of the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia and you’ll find an entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, fountain designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled “Flags Up!” Mountweazel, the encyclopedia indicates, was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to die “at 3 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.”
If Mountweazel is not a household name, even in fountain-designing or mailbox-photography circles, that is because she never existed. “It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright,” Richard Steins, who was one of the volume’s editors, said the other day. “If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d stolen from us.”…
In German, this kind of entry is known as a nihilartikel, about which you can read much more here.
For more information about the now-legendary Dag Henrik Esrum-Hellerup nihilartikel that was spirited into the first edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, go here.
• Department of Constructive Criticism: Mr. Modern Art Notes offers a list of “five things museums do that I like.”
• Mr. Modern Kicks reports on the Neil Welliver retrospective at the Portland Museum of Art:
Welliver painted Maine for a reason. His works offer an exceptionally direct intuition of the feeling of woods. In some paintings, where trees and branches lay fallen in the marsh and dark clouds gather above, one can almost sense the exact temperature of the fall afternoon, how muddy the ground is, the smell of earth and decaying wood in the chilled air and the promise of rain….
Oh, how I wish I could see it…
• …and how I wish I could afford this. (Needless to say, any wealthy blogfans who’d care to present me with a token of their overflowing gratitude may feel free to do so by clicking on the link.)
• Speaking of art, I seem to be in a work of it...
• ...and speaking of me, I recently joined the Bad Plus, James Carter, Jason Moran, Dan Morgenstern, and various other musical types in contributing to a Jerry Jazz Musician symposium on “the greatest saxophone solo in the history of jazz.” Here’s part of what I wrote:
It's so concise, so completely to the point: he gets on, he gets off, and when it's over you know exactly what he meant to tell you and feel the way he wanted you to feel, all in three lapidary minutes. "Grace comes," Merce Cunningham said, "when the energy for the given situation is full and there is no excess." If a record can do that, this one does….
Care to guess which record I’m talking about?
• Finally, this story from my hometown newspaper filled me with the most powerful nostalgia imaginable…
• …as did my discovery of this primitive but nonetheless wonderful Web site, through which you can purchase the product about which I rhapsodized here.
Happy chewing!
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TT: Rerun
November 2003:
In New York City, drama critics don’t usually attend opening-night performances of plays. We go to press previews instead, meaning that we rarely see Famous People in the audience—they generally come to the official first night. Alas, I have a celebrity disability, meaning that I almost never recognize them in the flesh. My companion for the evening, however, was a virtuoso celebrity-spotter, and everywhere she looked she saw famous faces…from the distant past. Jack Klugman, Arlene Dahl, Joan Collins, folks like that. (I kept waiting for her to point out Walter Winchell.)
Where were all the under-70 celebrities? Or do they even come to Broadway shows anymore?...
(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)
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TT: Number, please
• Bing Crosby's estimated total income in 1936: $508,000
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $6,841,857.61
(Source: Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams)
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TT: Almanac
“It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of ‘culture.’”
John Cage (courtesy of oboeinsight)
| Friday, November 5, 2004
TT: Budapest, N.J.
I’m in today’s Wall Street Journal, reviewing two shows, both excellent, albeit in very different ways.
The first is a revival of She Loves Me that runs at at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse through Dec. 5:
For those unhappy souls as yet unfamiliar with “She Loves Me,” it’s based on “Parfumerie,” a comedy by Hungarian playwright Miklós László that also spawned three popular Hollywood films, “The Shop Around the Corner” (1940), “In the Good Old Summertime” (1949) and “You’ve Got Mail” (1998). The farce-like plot is played for charm: Georg Nowack (George Dvorsky) and Amalia Balash (Michele Ragusa), two romance-starved members of a lonelyhearts club, have been sending one another anonymous love letters without ever having met….
What makes “She Loves Me” worthy of “The Shop Around the Corner,” the still-unsurpassed Ernst Lubitsch film on which Joe Masteroff’s book is closely and skillfully based, is the operetta-flavored score by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick. Their songs, all woven into the action with uncanny deftness, are kaleidoscopically varied in tone and approach. None became a standard (the title tune came closest), but several should have, and if “Days Gone By,” “Tonight at Eight,” “Vanilla Ice Cream,” “Will He Like Me?” and “I Resolve” are new to you, get ready for an evening-long treat.
First produced in 1963, “She Loves Me” hasn’t been done in New York since the Roundabout Theatre Company revived it 30 years later. I didn’t see that much-admired version, but I can’t imagine how it could have been better than this one, directed with untricky flair by James Brennan and cast to something approaching perfection. Not only does Ms. Ragusa do some of the best singing I’ve ever heard on the musical-comedy stage (her role, created for the legendary Barbara Cook, actually contains a timber-shivering high C), but she’s a sweetly winsome actress to boot….
Though it had two respectable Broadway runs, “She Loves Me” is obscure by comparison with “Fiddler on the Roof,” the show that made Messrs. Bock and Harnick rich and famous. Don’t ask me why, since it’s just as good. Perhaps its intimate scale fails to please those who expect musicals to be big and noisy. Perhaps there’s too much music and not enough jokes. Perhaps the first act, which clocks in at just over 90 minutes, is a trifle too long for impatient theatergoers. All I can tell you is that Paper Mill’s production leaves nothing whatsoever to be desired….
The second is Mario Cantone's Laugh Whore:
“I hate to sound really gay,” Mario Cantone proclaims in “Laugh Whore,” a one-man show written by Mr. Cantone, directed by Joe Mantello (“Wicked”) and playing through Jan. 2 at Broadway’s Cort Theatre. Seeing as how the very next thing he does is impersonate Judy Garland, having previously impersonated Liza Minnelli and Carol Channing, I’d say he’s wasting his breath. “Laugh Whore,” like Mr. Cantone himself, is really, really gay. It’s also rib-splittingly funny—the funniest show on Broadway, in fact, give or take “Avenue Q.” I can’t remember when I laughed so hard at anything, anywhere.
Mr. Cantone is a New York-based actor-singer-comic best known to TV watchers for his recurring role on “Sex and the City” and to theatergoers for his jarringly vivid cameo in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins” (he played Samuel Byck, a wannabe Nixon-killer). He looks like a gay version of Al Pacino, sounds like a gay version of Jerry Lewis and does impersonations like…well, just like. His Garland, done minus drag, is downright spooky, while his impression of Jim Morrison doing a Christmas special, accompanied by the Doors, is positively demented….
No link. Buy a paper, or go here and do as you’re told.
I expect that's the last you'll hear from me this week. My swollen uvula and I are headed back to bed. See you Monday.
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TT: Almanac
“The long way is the short way.”
Wayne Shorter (quoted in Michelle Mercer, Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter)
| Thursday, November 4, 2004
OGIC: Communication breakdown
Justine Larbalestier cuts right to the way I am feeling this week in a lovely essayette. An excerpt:
I'm all for different perspectives, different ways of living, of seeing the world. One of the glories of being in other places is seeing how varied the world is. I'm so relieved Buenos Aires isn't exactly like Sydney. That there are places where people don't know who Elvis is. Spending time in the US I am thrilled every time I discover pop cultural memories the yankees have that I don't. Growing up in Australia I always thought I knew all about the USA, I could name all the states, knew a tonne about its music and movies and literature, but I didn't, not even close. I still don't really know this country, I probably never will. That makes me happy.
But the gulfs. All those Bob Evans people and Baristas people living in the same towns, same cities, sometimes shopping in the same stores, or going to the same churches, who can't talk to each other, or if they do, can't make any sense of what the other says. Whose different worlds are so completely incompatible there's no room for each other in them. That makes me sad.
Read this musing, too. Oh, just go ahead and bookmark her already!
(Thanks to lovely CAAF for the link. A girl with a 4-letter acronym can't be wrong.)
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, November 4, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: With apologies to David Ives
1. No, not even slightly.
2. Mostly by grunting.
3. Yes, out of a can, acccompanied today by peanut butter and jelly and a pint of warm tap water.
4. The Godfather, Bad Day at Black Rock, and several episodes of What’s My Line? Next up is Pushing Tin.
5. Not a one—I’m too tired to hold them up in bed.
6. Like I swallowed a small sausage that got stuck halfway down.
7. Trust me, you don’t want to know.
8. Tomorrow, I hope, but don’t count on it.
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OGIC: Prelude to more posting
Things have changed in my life this week, and I've been a bit slow to devise new routines for myself. Of course, in many ways this has been a less-than-routine week for all of us. But today is the day I embrace normalcy again, even if I have to make up "normal" as I go along. In short: more (real) posting soon! Very soon! In the meantime, a couple of salient points:
• I no longer have an up-to-the-minute computer with a high-speed connection regularly at my disposal. While I work on making my home computer a meaner, leaner machine, I'm going to be especially slow answering email. I seem to need a system update to be able reliably to access ALN's web-based email. Patience, please.
• Turns out that one of my favorite dishes, Jambalaya, is easy and quite fun to make! I adapted this recipe according to what I had in the house: two ribs of celery and a jalapeno pepper, all finely diced, in place of the parsley. Also: no cloves in my jambalaya, thank you very much. Results: delicious.
We will shortly return you to your regular arts blogging.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, November 4, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"He was a dangerous man—a convinced man."
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes
| Wednesday, November 3, 2004
TT: The cone of silence
I continue to feel...well, crappy. Earlier today I went through with a face-to-face interview with a guy who'd set it up weeks ago and had come from out of town just to see me. I didn't have the heart to blow him off, so I talked until what was left of my voice gave out. Since then I haven't uttered a word, and outside of a couple of e-mails I haven't generated any written ones, either. I've blown a deadline (not fatally, but it's badly bruised). I cancelled my longstanding plans for dinner with four very attractive women—a good idea, too, since it's not even eight o'clock and I can barely hold my head up. After I quaff some hot soup and NyQuil, I hope to become deeply unconscious and remain so until tomorrow morning.
That was my day. How was yours, OGIC?
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 3, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: An unclearable throat
My cold seems to have given me a swollen uvula, which is one of life's more comical complaints. It's helping me concentrate on my writing, though, since I can't really talk. On the other hand, I'm still feeling moderately crappy!
Once I get Today's Piece written, drink several gallons of gently warmed fluids, and rack up a hard-earned nap or two, I might well feel moved to blog some more. But don't count on it.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 3, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: Alternative medium
"About Last Night" is currently being viewed in thirteen time zones. Obviously, somebody wanted to read about something else tonight.
And now I am soooo going to bed....
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 3, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
“The only moral to be drawn is that honourable causes are seldom advanced by the employment of lawyers.”
Auberon Waugh, Will This Do?
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 3, 2004 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, November 2, 2004
TT: Deus ex machina
My copy of Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume Two, preordered months ago from amazon.com, arrived this morning. If that isn’t perfect timing, I don’t know what is, especially since my nose is now stopped up so firmly that it’d take a stick of Acme Dynamite to blow it open.
So…that’s all, folks! I’ve got two deadlines to hit, plus an important errand to run just around the corner at P.S. 9, where I hear the lines are long and getting longer. See you tomorrow.
UPDATE: I'm back. The crowd was no more than medium-sized, and that only because several voting districts had been reshuffled since the last election, meaning that many people had to stand in a single, slow-moving line to be told where to vote. I went straight to my district table and was out in under a minute.
To bed again, I think. I've got to work up the steam to finish my Washington Post column for this coming Sunday, which is due (sneeze, sniffle, grumble) at day's end.
Later.
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TT: Art for power's sake
Who wrote this? (Don’t peek.)
I took Anna Karénine along on the trip and have read it through with very great interest. I hardly know whether to call it a bad book or not. There are two entirely distinct stories in it; the connection between Levine’s story and Anna’s is of the slightest, and need not have existed at all. Levine’s and Kitty’s history is not only very powerfully and naturally told, but is also perfectly healthy. Anna’s most certainly is not, though of great and sad interest; she is portrayed as being a prety to the most violent passion, and subject to melancholia, and her reasoning power is so unbalanced that she could not possibly be described otherwise than as in a certain sense insane. Her character is curiously contradictory; bad as she was however she was not nearly as repulsive as her brother Stiva; Vronsky had some excellent points….Tolstoi is a great writer. Do you notice how he never comments on the actions of his personages? He relates what they thought or did without any remark whatever as to whether it was good or bad, as Thucydides wrote history—a fact which tends to give his work an unmoral rather than an immoral tone, together with the sadness so characteristic of Russian writers. I was much pleased with the insight into Russian life.
The author in question was Theodore Roosevelt, writing in 1886. I found this passage in the new collection of his letters and speeches that Louis Auchincloss recently edited for the Library of America. My friend Rick Brookhiser had been reading the same book and e-mailed me a quotation that piqued my curiosity, so I bought a copy the next day and have since found it impossible to put down.
That Roosevelt was a good writer is no secret. I mentioned him last year when I had occasion to blog
about American presidents who were articulate on paper. But what interests me even more about this particular passage is that it’s a rare example of a prominent American politician saying something specific on paper about an important work of art. Never mind what Roosevelt was saying about Anna Karenina (we’ll get back to that). Ask yourself this: can you recall a similar example? No doubt Lincoln makes mention of Shakespeare in his letters, and I think it fairly likely that Harry Truman, who was a pianist with a serious interest in classical music, must have written somewhere or other about Chopin. But who else? Outside of Justice Holmes, a literary connoisseur but not a politician in the strict sense of the word, no names come immediately to mind.
This lack of aesthetic interest isn’t unique to politicians, of course. I know of very few American men of affairs (to exhume a wonderfully musty old phrase) who have much of anything to do with art other than as collectors, in which capacity they not infrequently develop considerable sophistication over time. But ask them to talk about the art they own and they have a way of coming up short. This doesn’t necessarily mean they get no aesthetic pleasure out of their art—intellectuals have a nasty habit of regarding verbal dexterity as a virtue, invariably to their cost—but it does make you wonder.
I wrote
the other day about Anthony Powell, in the course of which I quoted one of my favorite passages from A Dance to the Music of Time:
Whenever Powell informs us that one of his characters takes no pleasure in drink or the arts, or that he prefers power to love, it's a safe bet that unsavory revelations are just around the corner. Herein lies the theme of ''A Dance to the Music of Time,'' stated explicitly in ''A Buyer's Market'' (1952), the second volume, in which Jenkins remarks that ''the arts themselves, so it appeared to me as I considered the matter, by their ultimately sensual essence, are, in the long run, inimical to those who pursue power for its own sake. Conversely, the artist who traffics in power does so, if not necessarily disastrously, at least at considerable risk.''
I think this is true, which is another reason why I’ve gotten so wrapped up in Roosevelt’s letters. He wasn’t an aesthete by any stretch of the imagination, but he was clearly responsive to beauty, though his responses were cramped by his Victorian mindset. (He told the same correspondent a couple of months later that War and Peace “does not seem to me to be in the least conducive to morality.”)
On the other hand, would one want to be ruled by an aesthete? Last year I wrote a Commentary essay about Adolf Hitler whose title, “The Murder Artist,” pretty well sums him up:
Hitler was more than merely an artist manqué, using art-derived techniques for propaganda purposes. Instead, he saw art as the end to which politics was merely the means. For him, the whole point of ruling Germany and conquering Europe was to be able to make them over again in a different image—one in which the fine arts would have pride of place….Hitler, in short, was a deranged idealist, a painter of old churches and picture-postcard landscapes who sought power over others in order to make his romantic dreams real, then grew ever more bloodthirsty when the human beings who were his flesh-and-blood medium resisted his transforming touch.
Does this mean the only alternatives are philistinism and homicidal mania? I certainly hope not, but I don’t know that I’d trust the average artist to be able to tell the difference between a politician who loved art and one who, like John Kennedy, merely pretended to. We’re all subject to the siren call of wishful thinking, never more so than when a man of affairs engages in the modern-day equivalent of taking us up on the mountaintop and saying, All this could be yours.
Which brings us back to Theodore Roosevelt, a politician who not only read books but wrote them, and who was clearly a good deal more complicated than most of us are aware. When I reviewed Theodore Rex,
the second volume of Edmund Morris’ Roosevelt biography, it never occurred to me to mention Roosevelt’s aesthetic interests, for the good reason that Morris didn’t have much to say about them, even in the generous compass of an 864-page biography. That's why I’m so grateful to Louis Auchincloss, a greatly gifted novelist whose interest in turn-of-the-century American life made him, surprising as it may seem at first glance, the perfect person to edit a volume of Roosevelt’s selected letters. More novelists should cultivate such interests. Scholarship is too important to be left to the scholars.
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TT: Almanac
"A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker."
H.L. Mencken, Life interview (1946)
| Monday, November 1, 2004
OGIC: Smitten
I saw Sideways this weekend, a perfectly marvelous movie. I'll write about it in detail later, but for the moment lazily point you to my capsule notice in the TT-OGIC TOP FIVE.
Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200. Grab ten bucks and sprint to your friendly neighborhood cinema.
That is all.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Monday, November 1, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: This, that, these, those
OGIC and I spent a few idle hours tweaking the right-hand column this past weekend. Not only are the Top Fives updated, but we undertook a radical reorganization of “Sites to See,” our blogroll, in the course of which we added some new blogs and dropped some old ones. Scroll down and take a peek.
You’ll also find something fresh in the “Teachout Elsewhere” module, a link to an essay about Anthony Powell that I wrote for Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. If you haven’t read it yet, click here to do so.
Today, by the way, is the official publication date of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, which is already humming along very nicely, thank you, though I did take a hit the other day in the Los Angeles Times (no free link, heh heh heh). The reviewer actually accused me of political correctness, which has to be a lifetime first….
More interesting, and far more readily available: Maud Newton
interviewed me for her blog! We “talked” at length via e-mail about all sorts of things having to do with my work as a critic and biographer.
Here's a taste:
How often do you find yourself modifying your initial critical perspective on a work of art?
Not infrequently, at least over the course of the life cycle, and sometimes with breathtaking speed. I occasionally quote on my blog a great line by the music critic Hans Keller: “As soon as I detest something I ask myself why I like it.” But you’re talking about something else, something different, and I think it has a lot to do with growing older. If you’re paying any attention at all, increasing age brings with it the shedding of youthful illusions, along with a detachment that also affects your aesthetic requirements. It’s harder to be romantic in middle age—you’ve seen too much death, too much failure, too much injustice—and you also lose your taste for a certain kind of effusiveness. At 48, for instance, I now find that my favorite opera is Verdi’s Falstaff. I would never have said that at 28. By the same token, I think I also appreciate certain authors more, in some cases much more. I liked Conrad when young; I love him now. I would never have appreciated a novel like Death Comes for the Archbishop when I was in my twenties. And I didn’t get Mauriac at all back then, whereas I’m now quite passionate about him....
Read the whole thing here.
I’ll try to post more today, but this is a three-deadline, three-show week, so if I should fail to deliver the goods, please be kind.
UPDATE: Go to the “Teachout in Commentary” module of the right-hand column to read my newly posted essay for Commentary, in which I talk about the life and lyrics of Johnny Mercer.
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TT: More on the "S" word
My posting on schadenfreude pulled a lot of e-mail.
A Los Angeles cabaret singer wrote:
Just a theory: you are, of course, aware that there
is a song in the Sesame Street parody musical Avenue Q
called “Schadenfreude.” Perhaps our friends at the
Times think that is reason enough to suspect it is now
part of the popular lexicon. (They did the same thing
a couple of years back with “tsunami,” if you recall.)
She was the first to remind me of what I should have known, seeing as how I gushed all over Avenue Q in The Wall Street Journal last year. Several others wrote immediately thereafter to point out the same thing, including a New York actress:
Last October, I came across the word for the first time in my "Word Of The Day" calendar (it was a gift!) and took special notice of it because this calendar had, up until then, had the habit of introducing me to such exotic and challenging terms as "espresso" and "pseudonym." Here, at last, was a word I hadn't seen before.
Two nights later, I went to see "Avenue Q" on Broadway and Voila! there was the word as the title of a song!
Since then, I can't stop seeing the thing and I've never quite decided if it was always used so much or if I just noticed it more because of my handy calendar. Maybe I missed out on not having one for 2004. Probably not.
Oh, so the theory is, maybe the show affected a bunch of people or maybe a lot of those calendars were on sale.
Minutes later, I heard from the polyglot critic Bruce Bawer, an old friend who follows this blog from his home in Norway:
Interestingly, of the other Germanic languages I'm
familiar with, Norwegian and Danish also have a word for this concept
("skadefryd"), as does Swedish ("skadeglädje"). In Dutch, the equivalent
word would be "schadevreugde," but I don't find it in my Dutch-English
dictionary, and when I google it, only one instance of it turns up (in a
posting on Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, which is described as having
"well brought out schadevreugde as in the Pink Panther movies"). It's
interesting that English, the most word-rich of all the Germanic languages,
doesn't have a word for this. Does this tell us anything, perhaps, about
Anglo-Saxon culture or the Anglo-Saxon character?
At least in Norway, the word in question is by no means obscure or academic.
I have actually heard "skadefryd" used several times in conversation since
moving to Norway. The first time I heard it, it took me a second or two to
realize it was "Schadenfreude" with a Norwegian accent. I was delighted to
realize Norwegian actually had its very own word for the concept. It has
been a bit disconcerting, however, to see just how often the word comes up.
My own theory is that the redistributionist welfare state engenders an
excessive concern with, and envy of, what others have - not just money but
talent, looks, health, love, happiness, anything – so that when somebody has
"too much" of something and suddenly loses it, skadefryd is inevitable. (Just a theory.)
All of which is further proof that I have the smartest readers in the known universe.
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TT: Words to the wise
Here’s something you shouldn’t miss:
Ben Katchor and Mark Mulcahy will present “The Rosenbach Company,”
their new music-theater production, Tuesday, November 9th at 7:30 p.m. at the Harry De Jur Playhouse
in The Abrons Arts Center of The Henry Street Settlement,
466 Grand Street, Manhattan.
One performance only.
Running time: 2 hours, 15 min.
Katchor and Mulcahy’s new sung-through pop-musical chronicles the life
and times of Abe Rosenbach, the world’s preeminent rare-book dealer in
the first half of the last century, and his brother Philip, a savvy
dealer of decorative arts. Their collection ranges from James Joyce's
manuscript of “Ulysses” to John Tenniel's original illustrations for
“Alice in Wonderland.”
Mixing projected animated images with live actors, singers and
musicians, the show explores such issues as the obsessive nature of
collecting, the relationship between cultural and commercial pursuits
and the men's historical significance as the owners of some of the
world's greatest literary treasures.
“...a sung-through biodrama? a chamber rock opera? a meeting of the
museum establishment with the music underground?—it is thrilling,
charming, and altogether a knockout.” – Variety.com
Earlier this year, Katchor and Mulcahy premiered their first
collaboration, “The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island,” at the Kitchen in
New York City.
Ben Katchor (projections, text and direction) is best known for his
comic-strip series “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer,” “The
Cardboard Valise,” “Hotel & Farm” and “The Jew of New York.” He
produces a monthly strip for Metropolis Magazine and his drawings
appear in The New Yorker. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim
Foundation Fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
Mark Mulcahy (composer and singer in the roles of Abe Rosenbach) has
released two critically acclaimed albums (“Fathering” and
“Smilesunset”) and performs in the USA and Europe. Mr. Mulcahy also
composed the music for the television series "The Adventures of Pete &
Pete" with his fictional tv band, Polaris. He has written music for the
films “Spring Forward,” “The Crush,” and “A Matter of Degrees.” Mr.
Mulcahy is featured in the new Nick Hornby collection, “Songbook.”
Singers: Katie Geissinger, Ryan Mercy and Mark Mulcahy.
Musicians: Ashley Grella, Brian Marchese, Henning Ohlenbusch and Dave
Trenholm.
Tickets are $20. Please purchase your tickets in advance with a credit-card or Paypal here. The reserved ticket(s) will be held in your name at the door and can be picked up 1/2 hour before showtime. (If you purchase your ticket at the door it must be with cash.)
Alas, I’ve got a Broadway preview that same night, one I can’t possibly wiggle out of. Seeing as how I’m the biggest possible fan of Katchor’s "picture stories," I’ve been gnashing my teeth ever since I got this press release. You go, and tell me how good it was, and I’ll eat my heart out. And if for some reason my Broadway show should blow up, look for me on the aisle.
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TT: Almanac
“What a bore it is, waking up in the morning always the same
person. I wish I were unflinching and emphatic, and had big,
bushy eyebrows and a Message for the Age. I wish I were a deep Thinker, or a great Ventriloquist.
“I should like to be refined and melancholy, the victim of a
hopeless passion; to love in the old, stilted way, with
impossible Adoration and Despair under the pale-faced Moon.
“I wish I could get up; I wish I were the world's greatest
Violinist. I wish I had lots of silver, and first Editions, and
green ivory.”
Logan Pearsall Smith, Trivia (courtesy of James T. Keating)
| Sunday, October 31, 2004
TT and OGIC: New around here, stranger?
If you've dropped in for the first time after having seen the www.terryteachout.com URL mentioned in today's New York Times Book Review, welcome to "About Last Night," a 24/5 blog (today's posting is a special exception) hosted by artsjournal.com on which Terry Teachout writes about the arts in New York City and elsewhere, assisted by the pseudonymous Our Girl in Chicago, who writes from...Chicago.
(In case you're wondering, this blog has two URLs, the one you're seeing at the top of your screen right now and the easier-to-remember www.terryteachout.com. Either one will bring you here.)
All our postings from the past seven days are visible in reverse chronological order on this page. Terry's start with "TT," Our Girl's with "OGIC." In addition, the entire contents of this site are archived chronologically and can be accessed by clicking "ALN Archives" at the top of the right-hand column.
You can read more about us, and about "About Last Night," by going to the right-hand column and clicking in the appropriate places. You'll also find various other toothsome features there, including our regularly updated Top Five list of things to see, hear, read and otherwise do, links to Terry's most recent newspaper and magazine articles, and "Sites to See," a list of links to other blogs and Web sites with art-related content. If you're curious about the arty part of the blogosphere, you've come to the right site: "Sites to See" will point you in all sorts of interesting directions, and all roads lead back to "About Last Night."
As if all that weren't enough, you can write to us by clicking either one of the "Write Us" buttons. We read our mail, and answer it, too, so long as you're minimally polite. (Be patient, though. We get a lot of it.)
The only other thing you need to know is that "About Last Night" is about all the arts, high, medium, and low: film, drama, painting, dance, fiction, TV, music of all kinds, whatever. 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.
If you're one of the above, we're glad you came. Enjoy. Peruse. Tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com. And come back tomorrow.
| Saturday, November 8, 2003
TT: Purely for my pleasure
I mentioned in a posting
the other day that I’d been using my fancy new cable box to record episodes of an old black-and-white game show called What’s My Line? For the past few years, the Game Show Network has been airing WML reruns at 4:30 every morning. (To see a schedule, click here.)
I watched What’s My Line? as a child, and its return to the small screen inspired me shortly after 9/11 to write a piece for the New York Times of which I’m particularly fond. I didn’t include it in A Terry Teachout Reader because it didn’t seem to fit, so in the interest of boosting the show's audience, I’d like to make this first-hand reminiscence of the Age of the Middlebrow available to the readers of "About Last Night." Here are some excerpts:
The basic premise of "What’s My Line?," which made its debut in 1950, was elegantly simple. The first two guests each week were ordinary people with odd jobs: professional egg-breakers, dynamite manufacturers, makers of square manhole covers. John Charles Daly, the avuncular host, invited them to "sign in, please," whereupon they would scrawl their names on a blackboard, take a seat, and submit to yes-or-no questioning by four panelists who tried to guess what they did for a living, with each "no" answer winning them five dollars. After the middle commercial, the panelists put on blindfolds and sought to identify the Mystery Guest, a celebrity who disguised his voice in an attempt, usually but not always unsuccessful, to fox his inquisitors.
The fun came partly from the contestants, who were chosen whenever possible for their intrinsic incongruity—the dynamite maker, for example, was a distinguished-looking woman of a certain age—but mostly from the droll byplay of the panel and guests. Of the three longest-serving regular panelists, Arlene Francis, a stage actress turned small-screen personality, exuded unfeigned warmth, while Dorothy Kilgallen, a bite-the-jugular newspaper reporter and columnist, and Bennett Cerf, the gentleman president of Random House, played the game to win. The wild-card fourth panelist was sometimes a nimble-witted comedian (Fred Allen and Steve Allen both had long runs on the show), sometimes a celebrity of another sort (Van Cliburn, Moss Hart, John Lindsay, and Gore Vidal were among the more surprising occupants of the fourth chair).
As for the Mystery Guest, "What’s My Line?" was so hot in its heyday that it was able to book pretty much anybody it wanted: Frank Sinatra, John Wayne, even Eleanor Roosevelt. Stars with ultra-familiar voices would struggle mightily but vainly to disguise them (Louis Armstrong never had a chance), invariably reducing the studio audience to a puddle of laughter. Trickery was encouraged—Jack Paar lisped his answers through a bullhorn, Paul Muni played his on a violin—and on one never-to-be-forgotten Sunday evening, Bob Hope succeeded in persuading the panel that he was really Bing Crosby….
Much of the charm of "What’s My Line?" arises from the fact that it is so palpably of another era. The pace was slowish and agreeable, the repartee good-humored but unabashedly urbane. The host and panel all wore formal evening dress; John Daly addressed his female colleagues as "Miss Arlene" and "Miss Dorothy." The set was penny-plain, the guests signed in on a dimestore blackboard, and Daly kept score by flipping cards. The contestants, who were treated with the utmost courtesy, were clearly content to earn a mere $50 for stumping the panel. Even though all 876 episodes were originally broadcast live, it never occurs to you for a moment that anyone on stage would have dreamed of saying anything naughty.
Perhaps most strikingly, the collegial bonhomie of the participants leaves you with the distinct impression that the show is taking place in a parallel universe of famous people who all know and like one another and probably stroll over to the Algonquin for a drink afterward. Or so, at least, it seemed to myself when young, sitting in front of a black-and-white TV in the living room of a small house in a small town in southeast Missouri....
To read the whole thing, go here.
After this piece ran in the Times, I received a letter from a Hollywood agent who collects old TV shows, and who through means too complicated to recount here acquired a complete set of videocassettes of every surviving kinescope of What’s My Line? From time to time he hears from aging former WML guests (or their children), and whenever possible he sends them a copy of the episode on which they appeared. He’s also dubbed more than a few WML reels for me. The world is full of lovely people who like nothing better than sharing their pleasures, and this kind gentleman (who now reads "About Last Night" regularly) ranks high among them.
| Friday, November 7, 2003
TT: Elsewhere
Courtesy of Bookslut, an article by a black writer from Cleveland who wondered whether Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor portrayed blacks in a racist way. Then he met Pekar on the street one day:
I confronted him about his use of language, the way the black workmates he wrote about read as ghetto-style and under-educated. White people had goofy accents in his comic, but didn't seem to get that treatment in his book. He took the criticism real well, listening attentively. Finally he interjected.
"Y'got a few minutes?" he asked. "Cuz if ya do, I wanna take ya to my job and introduce ya t' some a' those people. You'll meet 'em and see for yerself — I ain't givin' them a hard way t'go. I just write 'em as I hear 'em."
Off to his gig we went, and as it turns out, the people he wrote about were exactly as he wrote them, and the writer in me tuned my ears to the music in their voices. I began to hear people in a whole other way — Pekar was taking risk with the written language I hadn't seen or heard before….
Go here to read the whole thing—which you absolutely must do.
You might be surprised to learn who wrote this (scroll down to find it). Or maybe not:
Several readers have complained about my dissing of 2001. I stand my ground. There's one point a couple readers have made though I will concede. They say if I'd seen it when it first came out I would think differently. That is undoubtedly true. But some movies -- and books and bands and art -- are significant because they break new ground and some are significant because they are timeless….it seems to me that 2001 was pathbreaking but it wasn't timeless. I feel the same way about Citizen Kane, by the way. I watched it in film class in college so I know all about the groundbreaking techniques used in the film. But those techniques have now been absorbed by the trade. What's left is a pioneering movie which is more interesting as a historical document in the history cinema than as a movie. Just as the Model T was a great advance in the history of automotive innovation, but there are plenty of other cars I'd rather drive, there are plenty of "great" movies I wouldn't choose seeing again over the chance to watch Road House one more time. There are plenty of music videos I'd rather watch than Un Chien Andalou, even though Un Chien Andalou is their artistic father.
What I want to know is, which Road House does he have in mind? I have a sinking feeling it’s not this one.
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TT: Choosers aren't beggars
Speaking of letters, Jeff Jarvis, who blogs at BuzzMachine, sent me one about yesterday’s posting describing my experience with digital video recording—then decided to post it on his blog, along with some further reflections:
The remote control caused a populist revolution, I've long said, because once we had choice, we proved that we had taste. (I mark the golden age of TV, the real golden age, not the nostalgic vaudeville age, from the mid-80s, when viewers had choice, watched the good stuff, and let the bad stuff die; the age of the Beverly Hillbillies died; the age of Hill St. Blues emerged thanks to our control.) Seeing that is what made me such a populist; it gave me faith in the taste, judgment, and intelligence of the people….
Go here to read the whole thing.
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TT: We get letters
Here are four recent letters to "About Last Night" that caught my eye:
- "I doubt there'll be a time when ‘the printed book gives way, as in time it surely must, to the hand-held electronic book-reading device.’ A printed book gives tactile pleasure—the heft of it, the texture of the pages, the feel of turning them one by one—that an electronic book never could. I'm reminded of the entire-meal-in-a-pill in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the one that turns Violet into a huge blueberry. Such a pill would never become popular, because there are elements to eating other than flavor, elements that the pill couldn't reproduce. I'd make a parallel argument for the printed book over the electronic one….
"You're right about the end of the record album, though."
- "I think it's entirely right and proper to be concerned about the public's willingness to pay attention to anything for very long—I know more than enough teachers to see the problem frequently
illustrated. And yet...
"Peter Jackson and his crew are packing them into theatres with movies more than three hours long, and then selling them (by which I mean ‘us’, since I'm part of this crowd) DVDs that take the running time up to four hours. The brothers Wachowski aren't having any problems with public interest in movies well over two hours long. Nor are directors as diverse as Bryan Singer, George Lucas, and Ang Lee.
"But it's not just a matter of the movie pendulum being way over toward the side marked ‘will sit long hours for movies we like’. Boxed sets are doing great business in music and DVDs. Complete Anything collections move well. Likewise, the boom in manga is the result of a bunch of teenagers finding that they're quite willing to commit to many, many volumes of series that hook their attention….
"The passing of the album in music therefore seems less than inevitable to me, and less than a harbinger of general doom in spite of that crabbed little part of my soul eager to say ‘Ha ha, I knew it, the kids are NOT all right.’ It's just that, for whatever reason(s), the way albums are put together doesn't seem to grab the attention or sympathy of enough listeners. There's presumably room for someone to do what's been done in film and graphic storytelling and make long works engaging again."
- "I read what you wrote in the WSJ [about The Producers] and I have to say, I think you're wrong. I'm 21, and my friends and I constantly watch older comedies. To be perfectly honest, they're funnier than anything that comes out now. The Producers, Blazing Saddles, History of the World Part I.....they're a different kind of funny than movies that come out now. It’s more solid, something you're going to remember after you get out of the theater, something you'll quote to someone or think to yourself and laugh at random….
"The fact that they don't make movies like that anymore is a reflection of the poor taste of the current generation of Hollywood people. Don't
go pinning their poor taste on the rest of the country."
- "Your essay about The Producers reminded me of something sad. In the days after September 11, when Rudy Giuliani was on TV, he was trying
to encourage people to come to New York City.
As a joke he said ‘You can even get tickets to The Producers.’ That will probably be part of the history of that show, forever.
"When The Producers first came to Broadway, I always thought that what was nostalgia for my generation was actually part of my parent's victory celebration. After a long horrible war, this was the final insult to the Nazis. I was too young to understand what my parents were laughing at. But they were happy and that was fine with me."
"How strange that this show, in the movies and on stage should mark the end of one world war and the beginning of another."
In case you didn’t know it, smart people read this blog.
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TT: Due to circumstances beyond our control
OGIC and I weren't able to post for most of Thursday afternoon. According to artsjournal.com, our invaluable host, the server that handles all the artsjournal blogs, including "About Last Night," experienced "catastrophic disk failure." Everything finally got fixed, but not before Our Girl and I went to our respective evening appointments (she to 21 Grams, I to the press preview of the Roundabout Theatre's revival of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker). I just now got home, posted the backed-up items, and wrote some new stuff. We trust all will be normal from now on, or at least for a few more minutes.
The amazing thing is that even though we couldn't update the site for much of the day, we still pulled in an impressive amount of traffic: just over 2,100 page views, twice our previously normal figure. It begins to look as if at least some of the folks who visited "About Last Night" for the first time as the result of this week's link orgy might just be sticking around. That's very good news indeed.
Fridays can be hectic in both New York and Chicago, but we'll do our damnedest to give you as many piping-hot entries as possible. In the meantime, please tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com, the 24/5-to-7 arts blog. It's been a great week for us. Let's have another.
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TT: Short but sweet
I reviewed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in this morning's Wall Street Journal. Here's how it starts:
Ashley Judd. Jason Patric. Ned Beatty. Tennessee Williams. What’s wrong with this picture? Plenty, as you’ll learn if you visit the new Broadway revival of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," which opened Sunday at the Music Box. But there’s nothing even slightly wrong with Mr. Beatty, who breathes fire as Big Daddy. He is as exciting as Ms. Judd and Mr. Patric are dull—and as fresh as Williams’ play is stale....
Unlike most camera-pampered Hollywood types, Mr. Beatty knows what to do in front of a live audience. His beautifully placed bass-baritone voice, complete with bottled-in-bond Kentucky accent, bounces effortlessly off the back wall of the Music Box. Though he’s the shortest man in the cast, he turns his modest stature into a towering advantage, playing Williams’ wealthy plantation owner as a shrewd, scrappy underdog who chewed his way to the top of the heap and now revels in making taller people look small. You’ll gasp when he first totters on stage, seemingly wan and yellow from the cancer that is eating Big Daddy alive—and you’ll gasp again when he breaks into a maniacal jig to celebrate the news that he isn’t dying after all. But his hope is false, and as he faces the inescapable fact of his imminent demise, Mr. Beatty seems to grow a foot or two before your astonished eyes. Such are the mysterious ways of great actors, and this is great acting.
There's much more, including brief but pungent notices of Richard Greenberg's The Violet Hour and Paula Vogel's The Long Christmas Ride Home...but there's no link, for reasons explained at length here.
What to do? Easy:
(1) Extract one dollar from your wallet.
(2) Take it to the nearest newsstand and purchase a copy of this morning's Journal.
(3) Turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, over whose first page I'm plastered.
(4) Read the whole section, not just my review.
(5) Report back at once.
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TT: Letters to the blogosphere
Dear artblog.net: Not only are you one of my favorite arts bloggers, but you turn out to be a damn fine painter to boot. Who knew?
Dear Jolly Days: You are very smart on Pauline Kael (whom I admire greatly, albeit with strong reservations):
She was the safe outlaw - attracted to and provoking the naturally restrained. She liked tweaking the power structure, but was securely part of it and identified with it.
Dear Laura Lippman: RSI or no RSI, God meant for you to be a blogger. Get with the program.
Dear Felix Salmon: You are the first person ever to make me think I might possibly have slightly underrated Marc Chagall.
And, finally:
Dear Old Hag: You rock. Totally.
| Thursday, November 6, 2003
OGIC: Excuses, excuses
Sorry for the slow day around here! We have been stymied by technical problems, and as for your GIC, she is in the foulest of moods today, quite apart from server snits. I wish I had it in me to channel my ill humor into something as hilariously misanthropic as this (when did the Chronicle of Higher Education get a sense of humor, anyway?), but I have vast expanses of other peoples' prose to edit, and no time to waste venting. Come to think of it, though, editing and venting don't have to preclude one another, do they…oh, pity the poor manuscripts.
I'm counting on the healing, or at least distracting, powers of art to snap me out of this funk: in a few hours I'll be attending a preview of 21 Grams, for which I have the highest hopes. I'll let you know how they pan out.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, November 6, 2003 | Permanent
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TT: A visit from Pandora
New Yorkers who subscribe to Time Warner digital cable TV now have the option of acquiring a fancy new cable box containing a built-in digital video recorder (DVR) designed to interface directly with Time Warner’s on-screen TV guide. Translated into English, this means you can record any TV program, or every episode of any TV series, simply by pushing a couple of buttons on your remote control, all for a ridiculously small monthly fee. I got a DVR a couple of days ago, and since then I’ve had to discipline myself severely in order to get any work done at all.
My new cable box does all sorts of cool stuff. Among other things, I can pause a TV show while it’s being broadcast live, then pick up right where I left off. (Please don't laugh if all this is old hat to you. For me, it's still a novelty.) But the most important part of the box is the DVR. You don’t have to read the admirably terse manual to figure out how it works: the menu-driven controls are intuitive to a fault. After fiddling with the remote for about 30 seconds, I was merrily clicking my way through the Turner Classic Movies schedule for the rest of the week.
If you own or have read about TiVo, the stand-alone home DVR system, none of this is news. The only difference is that Time Warner hooks its DVR up for you, and the whole shebang costs (as the old commercials used to say) just pennies a day. For this reason, given the ubiquity of cable TV and the rapid spread of digital systems, I can’t imagine that TiVo has much of a future. Everybody to whom I demonstrate my new cable box wants one—right now.
I have no doubt that the introduction of the cable-box DVR will have a massive and immediate effect on TV viewing habits, probably even greater than that brought about by the introduction of the VCR. Not only does the on-screen TV-guide interface make time shifting infinitely more convenient, but it encourages you to view TV programs whenever you please—and to skip the commercials, which is far easier to do on a DVR than a VCR.
I don’t care for the word "empowerment," but I can’t think of a better way to describe what it feels like to use a DVR for the first time. I wrote the other day about how CBS’s decision to scrap The Reagans was really a new-media story that demonstrated the declining ability of Big Media to unilaterally shape the cultural conversation. Digital video recording is not a new medium per se, merely a technology, but it does have a quintessential new-media effect: it gives the viewer greater power to control the way he experiences network TV. In that sense, you might compare it to the way bloggers use links to cherry-pick the contents of Big Media Web sites, reshaping them into new on-line information packages over which the original publishers have no control—save by shifting to subscription-only access models, and thus taking themselves out of the new-media loop altogether. It’s an impossible choice: do you surrender control to the consumer, or do you walk away from the possibility of reaching younger viewers who are already deserting Big Media in droves?
The more you think about it, the more clearly you’ll see how hard it is to choose between these alternatives, not only in this context but in others as well. One of the Big Media publications for which I write, The Wall Street Journal, charges for on-line access to most of its daily contents. From the paper’s point of view, this model "works": the Journal Web site turns a profit. From my point of view, however, it doesn’t work. Why? Because no one on the Web can link to my Friday drama columns, meaning that they don’t have nearly as significant a presence in the buzz-generating blogosphere as do, sa | |
