About Last Night
TERRY TEACHOUT on the arts
in New York City
(with additional dialogue by OUR GIRL IN CHICAGO)
Friday, November 17, 2006
TT: A spoonful of vinegar
Time once again for the Friday Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. It’s another three-play week, and for the first time in a month, all three shows, Mary Poppins, the revival of Les Misérables, and The Little Dog Laughed, are on Broadway:
Let’s cut to the chase: The special effects in “Mary Poppins,” Broadway’s new Disney musical, are wondrous to behold. Not only does P.L. Travers’ practically perfect nanny bring down the house by flying all the way from the stage to the balcony, umbrella clasped firmly in hand, but Bert, her jolly sidekick, strolls up one side of the proscenium arch and down the other, pausing at the top to do a feet-in-air tap dance. As for Mary’s bottomless carpetbag, from which she extracts, among many other improbable things, a full-length coat rack, all I can say is pretty much what the four- and seven-year-olds sitting next to me said: “Ooh! Aah!” I only wish I’d felt that way about the rest of the show. It’s spectacular, and not even slightly boring, but anyone familiar with Walt Disney’s 1964 film version of “Mary Poppins” is likely to come away asking what happened to the charm….
What struck me most forcibly about “Les Miz” is that its appeal is essentially operatic. Not only does it contain no spoken dialogue—every word is sung—but Messrs. Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, the authors, have crammed it full of surefire devices shamelessly pilfered from 19th-century opera. High notes, rousing choruses, a coincidence-crowded Victor Hugo plot, even a drinking song: All are present in profusion. The only thing missing is music. In its place, Mr. Schönberg force-feeds us three hours’ worth of chattery non-melodies that sound as if they’d been written by a woodpecker on a xylophone….
A friend of mine who saw a preview of Douglas Carter Beane’s “The Little Dog Laughed,” which has moved to Broadway after a sold-out 10-week Off-Broadway run, described it as “a gay sitcom.” Yes and no. The plot, in which a deeply closeted movie star (Tom Everett Scott) gets caught in bed with a hustler (Johnny Galecki) by his brassy agent (Julie White), is more like bad Kaufman and Hart with full frontal nudity. On the other hand, one aspect of “The Little Dog Laughed” reminded me of “Sex and the City,” which is that Mr. Beane’s women talk like campy gay men….
No free link. To read the whole thing, pick up a copy of today’s Journal and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section. Better yet, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instantaneous access to my review, plus loads of other interesting stuff. (If you’re already a subscriber, the review is here.)
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TT: Almanac
"Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration."
Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit
| Thursday, November 16, 2006
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)
posted by terryteachout @ Thursday, November 16, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it."
Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado
posted by terryteachout @ Thursday, November 16, 2006 | Permanent
link | Wednesday, November 15, 2006
TT: Kid stuff
Ms. Kate’s Book Blog has made up a meme and tagged the world. I’m game:
1. How old were you when you learned to read and who taught you? I taught myself to read at the age of three. Somewhere in the family archives is a snapshot taken by my father that shows me lying on my stomach in the living room of the first house I can remember, reading the Daily Smalltown Standard.
2. Did you own any books as a child? If so, what’s the first one that you remember owning? If not, do you recall any of the first titles that you borrowed from the library? I “owned” dozens of books, some of them confiscated from my parents’ shelves and others bought with my allowance. A few can still be found on the shelves of my old bedroom, including a complete set of Reader’s Digest Best Loved Books for Young Readers, a long-forgotten series of volumes to which my parents wisely subscribed on my behalf. It was the Best Loved Books series that introduced me to Beat to Quarters, Call of the Wild, Jane Eyre, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and the Sherlock Holmes stories, among many other good things. They were, to be sure, abridged versions, but what did I know? In addition, I went through a brief but intense period of youthful interest in comic books. My favorites were Batman, The Flash, and The Green Lantern. (I didn’t discover Spider-Man until much later.) I also owned several Peanuts paperbacks.
3. What’s the first book that you bought with your own money? Alas, I can’t remember—I was buying books from early childhood onward, and they piled up fast. The first book I clearly remember owning, though, was The Complete Sherlock Holmes, which my Uncle Jim gave to me as a Christmas present forty years ago. It traveled with me all the way from Smalltown to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where it disintegrated at long last, having given me half a lifetime (I hope!) of loyal service.
4. Were you a re-reader as a child? If so, which book did you re-read most often? I re-read all my favorite books regularly, but I especially liked Little Men, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and The Scarlet Pimpernel. I saw the 1935 film version of The Scarlet Pimpernel for the first time in January, and found it satisfyingly faithful to my fond memories of the Baroness Orczy’s book.
5. What’s the first adult book that captured your interest and how old were you when you read it? I started dipping into my parents’ Reader’s Digest condensed books at an inappropriately early age—I can’t have been more than ten. Again, I read so many of them that I don’t recall which came first, but the one I remember most vividly is Advise and Consent, Allen Drury’s 1959 Washington novel, which I still revisit from time to time, always with pleasure. I was also hugely impressed by Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, and so it tickled me no end to be able to review the Broadway revival of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial a few months ago, even though the production wasn’t any good.
6. Are there children’s books that you passed by as a child that you have learned to love as an adult? Which ones? Except for the Dr. Seuss books, I didn’t read any of the well-known modern children’s books as a boy. Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and several of the Little House books were read out loud to me in elementary school, though, and I loved them all. I read them for myself a few years ago and enjoyed them even more. I read and liked the first three or four Harry Potter books not long after they came out, but lost interest after the first Harry Potter film was released. Snobbery, I guess.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 15, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: The old-fashioned way
The media, not surprisingly, took comparatively little note of the recent death of Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, who was 98. (The New York Times eked out a nice obit last Monday, but it’s now safely ensconced behind the paper’s pay-to-play firewall.) For those who don’t recognize her name, she was the co-author of Cheaper by the Dozen, the perennially popular memoir of life with Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, the once-celebrated efficiency experts of the Twenties whose work is now mostly remembered by specialists. It was turned into a charming film in 1950, then “remade” to appalling effect a couple of years ago (nothing survived but the title).
Has the story of the Gilbreth family lost its charm for latter-day youngsters? I wonder. I read Cheaper by the Dozen repeatedly as a boy, marveling each time at the utterly mysterious and romantic prospect of living in a giant-sized family (I have just one brother). Somehow I doubt it seems as romantic to today's children as it did back in the Sixties. I looked up Cheaper by the Dozen on amazon.com the other day and found, among other things, this “kid’s review” of the book:
I did not like Cheaper by the Dozen because it did not grab my attention at all. I do not like reading about the life of a large family where the father ties to teach the kids everything, or showing off in front of a bunch of people. I also do not believe anything of this story is realistic. Do you think someone now of days can handle 12 kids? I do not think so. Now of days things are more expensive, so think how wealthy someone has to be to maintain a house, work, and still have time to spend with each child and buy things you need in the household. And do you think the dad has time, with work to teach each child all the different things. I think you would like this book if you are interested in stories about everyday life with a big family and the parents tutoring 12 kids and go on vacations. Or if you want to know what life was like back then and have 12 kids. Still how can they fit 14 people in a car, 9 kids in the back, 1 in the front, the mother in the passenger side with 2 babies in her lap, and the father driving the car? I was thinking how 2 adults keep 12 screaming kids under control. If you like the movie Cheaper by the Dozen with Steve Martin you might like this book even though they are really different, even the last names are different. I really did not like this book but if you want to read it go right a head.
That made me smile, though it also made me sad. Above all, though, it made me want to reread both Cheaper by the Dozen and its equally touching sequel, Belles on Their Toes. Perhaps I’ll poke my nose into them again once I get my upcoming spasm of Thanksgiving-related travel (about which more later) out of the way.
P.S. You can view several of the actual Gilbreth motion-study films whose making is described in Cheaper by the Dozen by going here.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 15, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"In a way he was the most abstract person I've ever met. That sounds wrong, it sounds as if I meant he was a philosopher or absent-minded. 'Plastically sensual,' which sounds like God knows what, would be closer. What I mean is, when he went to see a film he was so busy looking at the chiaroscuro he never saw the actors, and when he went to my theatre, he came out talking about my elbows."
Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 15, 2006 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, November 14, 2006
TT: Almanac
"It's difficult to explain, but I just somehow feel that I never really have lived; that I never really will live—exist or whatever—in the sense that other people do. I was terribly aware of it all those nights waiting for you in the Ritz bar looking around at what seemed to be real grown-up lives. I just find everybody else's life surrounded by plate-glass. I mean I'd like to break through it just once and actually touch one."
Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado
| Monday, November 13, 2006
TT: Still alive and well
Here’s what I saw, heard, read, and did during my week off from “About Last Night”:
• I saw four shows: Mary Poppins, The Little Dog Laughed, and the revivals of Les Miz and Suddenly Last Summer.
• I added a new piece to the Teachout Museum, a 1936 print by Louis Lozowick, a precisionist who specialized in lithography. A sharp-eyed art collector who shares my passion for prewar American modernism had suggested that I look into Lozowick, and I liked his style so much that I decided to bid on a copy of Storm Over Manhattan when it came up for auction last week. Now it hangs in my living room, directly beneath Alex Katz’s Late July II. They look beautiful together.
• I decided to check out the ambient music of Aphex Twin, about which I’ve been hearing interesting things. Two of the cuts I downloaded from iTunes, “Alberto Balsalm” and “Windowlicker,” are now in heavy rotation on my iPod. (When I told my trainer that I was listening to Aphex Twin, he looked at me as if I'd suddenly grown a horn and said, “You’re listening to techno?”)
• I read Gordon Forbes’ Goodbye to Some, a World War II novel suggested to me by a reader, and the galleys of Howard Pollack’s nine-hundred-page George Gershwin biography, which comes out next month. I also reread Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, one of Our Girl’s favorite novels.
• I knocked off two Wall Street Journal columns, revised the first five chapters of Hotter than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong, and wrote the outline of an opera libretto. (Yes, that’s a teaser—I’ll tell you more later if it pans out.)
• On Tuesday I took the train to Washington, D.C., where I spent three days in conference with the National Council on the Arts.
• The NCA plays a part in the selection process for National Medal of Arts nominees, so on Wednesday I dined with this year’s medalists, among them William Bolcom, Cyd Charisse, the members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and Ralph Stanley. In addition, I met Mrs. William Bolcom, better known as Joan Morris, whose singing of American popular songs I’ve admired extravagantly for at least a quarter-century. Most of the two dozen albums she's recorded with her husband at the piano are now out of print, but you can still get this one without difficulty.
I sat next to Cyd Charisse at dinner. She was wearing pants, so I can’t say whether her legs are as perfect now as they were a half-century ago, but I can assure you that she’s as nice as can be and that she remembers Fred Astaire with great fondness. She wanted to know if I’d seen any good musicals lately, so I told her about the Broadway revival of A Chorus Line, and had the pleasure of reminding her that one of the characters in the show mentions her by name:
From seeing all those movie musicals, I used to dance around on the street, and I'd get caught all the time. God, it was embarrassing. I was always being Cyd Charisse. Always.
• On Thursday I had breakfast with a friend about whose wedding I blogged two years ago, then
went to the White House to attend a reception for the recipients of the 2006 National Medals of Arts and Humanities, who met with President Bush in the Oval Office. The rest of us made do with the First Lady, who looked cool and composed in a simple greenish-beige suit. A sextet of military musicians played Debussy and Mozart (very prettily, too) as the crowd of gogglers jostled for position.
The whole first floor of the White House was open, so I skipped the buffet and gave myself a fat-free art tour instead. The reception rooms are elegant, serene, and immaculately kept, and the windows are so thick that you can’t hear any sounds from outside. The walls are covered with paintings, most of them presidential portraits of widely varying distinction. Two are first-class, Rembrandt Peale’s Thomas Jefferson and a museum-quality 1903 portrait of Theodore Roosevelt by John Singer Sargent that hangs in a corner of the East Room. Another Sargent, The Mosquito Net, is in the Green Room. (Alas, Childe Hassam’s Avenue in the Rain, the best painting in the White House’s permanent collection, is not hung in a public area.)
I was much taken with Aaron Shikler’s glamorously introspective paintings of John
and Jackie Kennedy, by far the best of the postwar portraits. The booby prize, by contrast, goes to this cartoonish study
of Lyndon Johnson by Elizabeth Shoumatoff, who is best known for the fact that she was painting Franklin Roosevelt at Warm Springs one spring morning in 1945 when a cerebral hemorrhage struck him dead. Also in the room was Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, FDR’s mistress. I bet the White House guards don’t tell that to visitors!
A year ago I was dying. I like this better.
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TT: Almanac
"It's amazing how right you can sometimes be about a person you don't know; it's only the people you do know who confuse you."
Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado
| Saturday, November 12, 2005
TT: You, too, can be a critic
Today in “Sightings,” my Wall Street Journal column about the arts in America, I write about how blogging is affecting arts journalism:
Sometimes the conventional wisdom turns out to be true—only with a twist. Most newspapers, for instance, really are devoting less space to the fine arts, but that's because newspapers themselves are growing smaller and smaller. Relatively speaking, says Columbia University's National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP), American newspapers allocate the same percentage of their space to the arts today that they did five years ago. The problem isn't the slice of the pie but the quality of the filling. Outside of a half-dozen or so major American cities, newspaper arts criticism has always been dismayingly uneven….
How to break these viciously interlocking circles? Since 2004, the NAJP has been running a series of two-week "institutes" for critics and writers from regional newspapers and other publications. I've taught at two of these institutes (the most recent of which took place last month in New York City), and though my students have varied widely in experience, they've worked impressively hard to strengthen their grasp of the art forms they'd been assigned to cover. I expect all of them to go home and do good things.
That's one approach. Another is to start a blog, a Web-based journal that can be read by anyone with a computer and access to the Internet. A couple of hundred bloggers now write about the arts on a fairly regular basis. I've been following their work since I started my own "artblog," "About Last Night," in the summer of 2003, and I believe the same technological revolution that has already transformed political journalism is about to have a similarly galvanizing effect on regional arts journalism….
Read the whole thing here. As was the case with Friday's drama column, the entire Online Journal is free all this week, the idea being that once you’ve tried it, you’ll want to subscribe (which I recommend).
posted by terryteachout @ Saturday, November 12, 2005 | Permanent
link | Friday, November 11, 2005
TT: Mission statement
“I was reading your drama column,” somebody said to me today, “and I’ve got to know—who are you, anyway? Where are you coming from?”
It was a serious question, asked seriously, and I thought about it for a moment before answering.
“You know what I am?” I finally said. “I’m a regular-guy aesthete. I like fancy sets, but I like bare stages, too. I like Stephen Sondheim and pretty girls. In fact, there’s only two things I never, ever like: pretentiousness and being bored.”
I think that sums me up fairly well, don’t you?
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TT: On Memorial Day
"During my time as a soldier in the First World War I was a member of a string quartet which served our commanding officer as a means of escape from the miseries of war. He was a great music-lover and a connoisseur and admirer of French art. It was no wonder, then, that his dearest wish was to hear Debussy's String Quartet. We rehearsed the work and played it to him with much feeling at a private concert. Just after we had finished the slow movement the signals officer burst in and reported in great consternation that the news of Debussy's death had just come through on the radio. We did not continue our performance. It was as if the spirit had been removed from our playing. But now we felt for the first time how much more music is than just style, technique, and an expression of personal feeling. Here music transcended all political barriers, national hatred, and the horrors of war. Never before or since have I felt so clearly in which direction music must be made to go."
Paul Hindemith (quoted in Geoffrey Skelton, Paul Hindemith: The Man Behind the Music)
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TT: Seasons' bleatings
Time now for my Friday-morning Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, in which I post excerpts from my reviews of two newly opened Broadway shows, Jersey Boys and Souvenir, and a touring production of The Winter’s Tale that played Brooklyn last week:
Yet another jukebox musical has come to town, and this time I don’t feel like arguing—much. For reasons not obvious to me, “Jersey Boys: The Story of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons” is not only giving pleasure to paying theatergoers (that part I get) but has also passed muster with certain critics who should know better. Contrary to anything you’ve read elsewhere, it’s nothing more than 32 songs performed on a cheap-looking set by a high-priced lounge band, strung together like dimestore pearls on the most vapid of all-tell-no-show books….
No doubt I’m the wrong person to review this show, seeing as how the hyped-up falsetto yelps of Mr. Valli (convincingly simulated here by John Lloyd Young) give me hi-yie-yives. All I can say is that it would be a lot simpler for everyone involved if they’d just move the whole thing to Newark....
If you know who Florence Foster Jenkins was, you know entirely too much about opera and should enter a 12-step program. Everyone else will need an introduction to the woman about whom “Souvenir” was written, so here goes: Jenkins was a wealthy New Yorker who suffered from the gross delusion that she was a great soprano. In fact, she sounded like a tone-deaf donkey who’d snorted helium, but each year she put up the money to give a recital at the Ritz-Carlton whose tickets were snapped up by opera buffs suffering from the equally gross delusion that it was amusing to watch her act like an idiot in public….
Now Stephen Temperley has turned Jenkins (Judy Kaye) into the butt of a two-person play narrated by Cosme McMoon (Donald Corren), her pianist and vocal coach….
Needless to say, the Tony-winning Ms. Kaye really can sing, which is part of the joke, since it isn’t easy to deliberately sing that badly. In fact, Jenkins’ singing wasn’t nearly as funny as Ms. Kaye’s wicked impression of it—but of course you’ll have figured out by now that I thought most of “Souvenir” to be the opposite of funny. Call me a prig, but there seems to me something fundamentally nasty about such sadistic spectator sports….
Edward Hall’s production of “The Winter’s Tale” has come and gone, having played its six scheduled performances at Brooklyn’s BAM Harvey Theater. Had it been around even a little longer, I would have tried to see it twice. Propeller, Mr. Hall’s all-male company, is my favorite touring theatrical troupe, a gaggle of magicians whose Shakespeare performances, played on the simplest of pack-it-up-and-hit-the-road sets, are briskly fanciful and endlessly imaginative….
Propeller has two more U.S. stops left before it returns to England. “The Winter’s Tale” is now playing through Sunday at the Zellerbach Playhouse in Berkeley, Ca., after which it moves to Washington’s Kennedy Center, where it will be seen next Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. If you happen to be anywhere near either of those two cities and can possibly wangle a ticket, start wangling.
To read the whole thing, go here. The Online Journal is free all this week, the idea being that once you’ve tried it, you’ll want to subscribe (which I recommend).
P.S. "Sightings," my biweekly column about the arts in America, will be appearing in the "Pursuits" section of Saturday morning's Wall Street Journal. Take a look.
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TT: Rerun
November 2003:
Ingmar Bergman has fallen from fashion, but I well remember when he was the very model of a Foreign Filmmaker, the man whose movies embodied everything that wasn’t Hollywood. Those, of course, were the days when Hollywood wasn’t cool: if you wanted to impress your date, you took her to a Bergman. (A little later on, it was O.K. to take her to one of Woody Allen’s ersatz-Bergman movies.) Now he belongs to the ages, and I know more than a few self-styled film buffs who’ve never seen any of his work….
(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)
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TT: Number, please
• Moss Hart’s share in 1930 of the average weekly box-office receipts for the original Broadway production of the Kaufman-Hart play Once in a Lifetime: $1,867
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $20,172.38
(Source: Steven Bach, Dazzler)
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TT: Almanac
"It is not music's function to express rational necessities."
Artur Schnabel, Music and the Line of Most Resistance
| Thursday, November 10, 2005
TT: Finish line
Deadline No. 4 is done, and so am I. Totally.
Unless Our Girl decides to poke her head in, don't expect any more posting (outside of the usual routine weekly stuff) until Monday.
See you later.
posted by terryteachout @ Thursday, November 10, 2005 | 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 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)
• Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult situations, strong language, 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)
• See What I Wanna See (musical, R, adult subject matter, explicit sexual situations, strong language, closes Dec. 4, reviewed here)
• Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
posted by terryteachout @ Thursday, November 10, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Number, please
• Total royalties earned in 1934 from combined sales of all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books: $58.34
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $832.76
(Source: Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur)
posted by terryteachout @ Thursday, November 10, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
A police car and a screaming siren—
A pneumatic drill and ripped-up concrete—
A baby wailing and a stray dog howling—
The screech of brakes and lamplights blinking—
that's entertainment.
A smash of glass and the rumble of boots—
An electric train and a ripped-up phone booth—
Paint-splattered walls and the cry of a tomcat—
Lights going out and a kick in the balls—
that's entertainment.
Days of speed and slow time Mondays—
Pissing down with rain on a boring Wednesday—
Watching the news and not eating your tea—
A freezing cold flat and damp on the walls—
that's entertainment.
Waking up at six a.m. on a cool warm morning—
Opening the windows and breathing in petrol—
An amateur band rehearsing in a nearby yard—
Watching the telly and thinking about your holidays—
that's entertainment.
Paul Weller, “That’s Entertainment” (music by Weller)
posted by terryteachout @ Thursday, November 10, 2005 | Permanent
link | Wednesday, November 9, 2005
TT: A guy who cain't say no
“You lead a really interesting life,” Ms. Pratie Place told me on Sunday afternoon, sounding a bit wistful as I described my daily rounds. I didn’t disagree. Whatever else I am, I’m never bored, except on the rare occasions when I find myself watching a really dumb play or listening to the kind of music Igor Stravinsky dubbed “an exercise in pure duration.” (He had Bruckner in mind—I’m thinking Philip Glass.)
The trouble with my life is not that it’s dull but that it sometimes becomes too interesting, at which point successive waves of beauty can start looking suspiciously like one damn thing after another. Experience has taught me the dangers of overscheduling myself, but though I’ve learned the lesson fairly well, it doesn’t always stop me from signing up for one event too many. Nor do I ever have total control over my schedule: press previews and deadlines fall where they will, not where I would, and every once in a while they become fused with the other parts of my life in such a way as to rob me of the ability to fall asleep. “Oh, God, I’m wired,” I find myself muttering grimly at three in the morning, knowing I’ll have to go on booming and zooming for several days past the last deadline before the adrenalin finally leaches out of my pores and I become my even-keeled self once more.
I’m still in the booming-and-zooming phase of my most recent tumble off the wagon of schedule-related sobriety, the bare outline of which I shared with you on Tuesday, and—you guessed it—I’m wired. I awoke without benefit of alarm at six this morning, my head already half-full of the drama column I was to deliver at eleven-thirty, and I knew even before I was completely awake that there was no point in trying to go back to sleep. I came down from the loft, wrote the column, sent it in, then went back to bed for a couple of hours. Then I got up and wrote another piece. I used to do that kind of thing all the time back when I was young and full of beans, but with the half-century mark a mere three months away, I know such spurts are deceptive: they mean I’m running on fumes and ready to crash.
I could probably knock off Deadline No. 4 tonight, or finish up that really long posting about my Manhattan-Washington-Brooklyn-North Carolina adventures. Instead, I’m going to switch off the iBook, go get dinner, return to the apartment, and watch some totally irrelevant TV. I have an old George Sanders movie tucked away on my DVR, which sounds like just what the doctor ordered. After that I’ll listen to some music and revel in the joys of the Teachout Museum, followed by (do I hear the earth moving?) an early bedtime. Such, dear readers, is the wild and crazy life of a Manhattan singleton-boulevardier.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with a hamburger….
UPDATE: Birds of a feather blog together.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 9, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Greetings...
...to our far-flung readers in Australia, Austria, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Great Britain, Greece, Israel, the Ivory Coast, Japan, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates!
(Translation: I arose early to write my drama column for Friday’s Wall Street Journal and took a quick peek at our world map before settling down to work.)
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 9, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Number, please
• Fee paid to Truman Capote by Paramount in 1958 for the film rights to Breakfast at Tiffany's: $65,000
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $426,394.11
(Source: Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography)
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 9, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
Let me love you,
Let me say that I do,
If you’ll lend me your ear,
I’ll make it clear
The way that I do.
Let me whisper it,
Let me sigh it,
Let me sing it, my dear,
Or I will cry it.
Let me love you,
Let me show that I do,
Let me do a million impossible things
So you’ll know that I do.
I’ll buy you the dawn
If you’ll let me love you today,
And if that’s not enough,
I’ll buy you the first of May,
And tomorrow I'll send you
Merrily on your way.
Bart Howard, “Let Me Love You” (music by Howard)
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 9, 2005 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, November 8, 2005
TT: Where were we?
Or, to be more exact, where was I yesterday? In an airport motel outside Greenboro, N.C., of course! Inclement weather prevented me from returning to New York on schedule, so I spent Sunday night dining in a sports bar and watching The Matrix on WTBS. Not having packed my iBook, I couldn't blog (which was probably a good thing).
And where was I before that? Well, life has been the least little bit hectic of late. To be exact, here's what I've been up to since last Wednesday night:
• I saw Jersey Boys on Broadway and Propeller's all-male version of The Winter's Tale at BAM Harvey (about which more in Friday's Wall Street Journal).
• I attended a meeting of the National Council on the Arts in Washington, D.C.
• I saw Carolina Ballet dance two performances of Robert Weiss' new version of Swan Lake in Winston-Salem.
• I took a young friend to see her very first performance of George Balanchine's Serenade, danced by the Washington Ballet.
• I brunched with an out-of-town blogger.
Had I gotten home on Sunday night, I would have written all this up for your delectation, but since I got home on Monday afternoon in a severe state of sleep debt, I took a nap instead. This is a four-deadline week, meaning that work must take precedence over reminiscence, but I promise to share some of my adventures with you in the course of the next few days.
For now, though, I think I ought to go back to bed….
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TT: Rerun
November 2003:
On the other hand, here’s a thought experiment: try to imagine a ballet like George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments ‘performed’ on a computer screen by a ‘company’ of articulated stick figures. All the movements, which are the essence of the dance, would be visible—but the viewer would experience them as a three-dimensional geometrical theorem, not an interaction between…well, souls. So long as we are on this earth, there can be no souls without bodies. That’s one of the reasons why I love ballet (it’s the ‘word’ made as flesh), and why synthesizers will never replace live orchestras….
(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)
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TT: Number, please
• Commissioning fee paid to Igor Stravinsky by the Boston Symphony in 1930 for Symphony of Psalms: $6,000
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $64,828.22
(Source: Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring)
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TT: Almanac
"The philosopher and the poet are 'unbourgeois' in so far as they preserve a deep and strong sense of wonder, and this fact naturally exposes them to the danger of losing their foot-hold in the everyday world. Indeed it might almost be said that 'to be a stranger in the world' is their occupational disease (though of course there could no more be a professional philosopher than there could be a professional poet—for as we said, man cannot live permanently at such heights). Wonder, however, does not make a man 'able'—it means, after all, to be profoundly moved and 'shaken.' And those who undertake to live under the sign and constellation 'wonder' (why is there such a thing as being?) must certainly be prepared to find themselves lost, at times, in the ordinary workaday world. The man to whom everything is an occasion of wonder will sometimes simply forget to use these things in a workaday way."
Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture
| Friday, November 12, 2004
TT: A little ahead of myself
I thought I'd be in the pink today, but no such luck. This damned flu bug (for that's obviously what I've got) doesn't seem to want to let go.
The bad news is that I have two shows to see, plus a speech to give, between now and Monday morning. The good news is that I don't have any urgent deadlines.
All things considered, I think I'll hang it up until Monday. Have a nice weekend. (Sniffle.)
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TT: Good enough for a laugh
It’s Friday, meaning that I’m in The Wall Street Journal, this time with a triple-barreled review of two off-Broadway openings and a Broadway cast change.
First is The Foreigner:
It says in the program that Larry Shue’s “The Foreigner,” originally produced in 1983 and revived this week by the Roundabout Theatre Company, is “one of America’s most popular plays.” That was news to me—I’d never heard of it—so I did a little nosing around and found out that “The Foreigner,” which survived tepid reviews to run for two years Off Broadway, has since become a staple item at regional and community theaters around the country. It figures. Like “Charley’s Aunt” and “Arsenic and Old Lace,” “The Foreigner” is a pleasant, undemanding farce built around an inherently silly situation, the kind of play that’s as actor-proof as a comedy can be. So long as they learn their lines and follow the stage directions, even a bunch of raw amateurs can put it on and expect to get laughs.
Why, then, is the Roundabout going to the trouble of reviving so provincial a show? Two words: Matthew Broderick. The erstwhile co-star of “The Producers” was born to play Charlie Baker, the mild-mannered, tightly wrapped Brit who pays a visit to a Georgia fishing lodge and is there induced (don’t ask how) to pose as a foreigner of unknown origin who can’t speak a word of English. Mr. Broderick gleefully hurls himself into the fray, tossing off meaningless mock-Slavic monologues (“Byottsky dottsky! Perch damasa baxa raxa”) and generally conducting himself like a lunatic on vacation from the asylum….
Next, Five by Tenn:
I was downright flabbergasted by “And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens,” the third part of “Five by Tenn,” the Manhattan Theatre Club’s too-cutely-named quintuple bill of previously unknown one-act plays that opened last night at City Center’s Stage II. Unlike the other plays on the program, this 1959 vignette about a flouncy New Orleans drag queen (Cameron Folmar) and the tough-guy sailor he picks up in a bar (Myk Watford) is concise, realistic, free of pseudo-poetry and wholly involving. Why does it work so well? Could it be because Williams, in a radical departure from his usual practice, chose for the first and only time to write a play whose characters and subject matter are explicitly gay? (That’s what the press release claims, anyway.) Whatever the reason, the results are memorable....
Finally, I went back to Wonderful Town after a year’s absence to see a familiar new face:
Brooke Shields, the latest celebrity non-singer to join the cast of a Broadway musical, has replaced Donna Murphy in “Wonderful Town.” I can’t think of a scarier act to follow: Ms. Murphy was stupendously fine as Ruth Sherwood, the wisecracking writer who knows a hundred easy ways to lose a man. The good news is that Ms. Shields is pretty damn fine herself, while her singing isn’t nearly as lame as I’d feared (though she crashed and burned in the two-part harmony of “Ohio”). A nifty physical comedienne, she mugs like a Marx Brother, and though she hasn’t enough vocal oomph to bounce her songs off the back wall of the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, I was happily surprised to see how much she managed to make out of her comic numbers.
Guess what? There’s a link! As OGIC mentioned a few days ago, this is the week when the Journal makes its online edition available for free in order to attract new subscribers. So if you want to read the whole thing, go here—then browse around at your leisure and see how you like the rest of the paper. I’m prejudiced, but I think the Journal Online is one of the best deals in journalism. See for yourself.
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TT: Almanac
"Barbara herself pretended to no illusions about Basil. Years of disappointment and betrayal had convinced her, in the reasoning part of her, that he was no good. They had played pirates together and the game was over. Basil played pirates alone. She apostatized from her faith in him almost with formality, and yet, as a cult will survive centuries after its myths have been exposed and its sources of faith tainted, there was still deep in her that early piety, scarcely discernable now in a little residue of superstition, so that this morning when her world seemed rocking about her, she turned back to Basil. Thus, when earthquake strikes a modern city and the pavements gape, the sewers buckle up and the great buildings tremble and topple, men in bowler hats and natty, ready-made suitings, born of generations of literates and rationalists, will suddenly revert to the magic of the forest and cross their fingers to avert the avalanche of concrete."
Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags
| Thursday, November 11, 2004
OGIC: Whither crit crit?
Did I get the same New York Times as everyone else today? I can't help feeling that some of my fellow book bloggers are waxing a bit Julavitian about Caryn James's group review of the National Book Award nominees (see next post down). James is pretty even-handed in her piece, offering persuasive praise for each book as well as critiques of what she seems to have soberly and reasonably—if, by other readers' lights, incorrectly—judged their limitations. Nothing in the piece seems to me remotely like an assault, like an attack, or angry (let alone angry, angry, angry). Sure, it had to have been a challenging piece, giving James such limited space to review five books as well as offer an overview. But despite the built-in limitations of the assignment, what she's written looks to me (and to CAAF) not like a declaration of war but like honest criticism.
I do tend to view these matters more from the perspective of a book reviewer than that of a reader. As a reviewer, I find that the most difficult thing to resist is the impulse to be too nice and therefore, critically speaking, useless. So I react particularly strongly to what I consider phantom snark sightings. I may have still more personal reflections on all of this, but at the moment I have to hurl myself into the shower and try to make it to a dinner for a poet at 6:00. About which you'll hear more tomorrow.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, November 11, 2004 | Permanent
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OGIC: Making a long story short
In the Times today, critic Caryn James has strong views about this year's crop of National Book Award fiction nominees.
When the fiction nominees were announced, there was much grumbling about their sameness—all women, all living in New York City, all little-known names. But the minor resemblances of sex and city are nothing next to what really makes this one of the least varied lists of nominees in recent years: a short-story aesthetic. Not one of these books is big and sprawling. And not one has much of a sense of humor.…
…all five are built on compressed observations that easily veer into precious writers' program language, too woozy and poetic for its own good.
That claustrophobic sameness doesn't help readers. Awards are inherently silly, but there's a method to their silliness. Whether it's the National Book Awards, the Tonys or the Oscars, contests become guides to what the public might want to catch up on, offering something-for-everyone choices. For the best-picture Oscar, there is an art house film and a popcorn movie, a "Lost in Translation" and a "Lord of the Rings." At last year's National Book Award ceremony, Shirley Hazzard's eloquent novel "The Great Fire," about memory and lost love in postwar Japan, won over T. C. Boyle's "Drop City," a raucous story of a 70's hippie commune. It was a mismatched contest, but a competition that suggested the breadth and vitality of the year's fiction.
This year's list serves readers who like only a certain style—the style, say, of Rick Moody, the novelist and short-story writer who is chairman of the five-person fiction panel and who has been known to write some woozily poetic prose of his own. Whoever comes out ahead when the winner is announced on Wednesday, it defies logic to think that five such similar books just happen to be the best of the year—a year in which Philip Roth's chilling historical fantasy "The Plot Against America" and Chang-rae Lee's understated story of a suburban man's life, "Aloft," deserved their extravagant critical praise.
In that infamous Believer essay by Heidi Julavits that is remembered principally, and ad nauseum, for decrying "snark" in book reviews, Julavits also advanced the corollary—to me more interesting and creditable—that critical snark is frequently deployed to punish just what should be encouraged: literary ambition. I note with interest the compatibility of this claim with James's misgivings about the set of novels nominated for the NBA. And it is as a set crowded into a narrow range that they give her pause. I found her essay honest, thoughtful, and especially informative if, like me, you haven't read any of these books. The only shred of knowledge I have of these writers is of a previous novel by Joan Silber, Lucky Us, which I reviewed some years ago. That novel also operated on a fairly small scale, but it impressed me utterly. Here's some of what I wrote then:
Seldom does a title encapsulate a book's tensions and revelations as well as Joan Silber's snappy, deceptively simple "Lucky Us." As a scrap of arch commentary on the truly malignant misfortune that befalls this novel's protagonist couple, "lucky us" is a pithy epithet that could have fallen from the lips of either of these congenitally irreverent New Yorkers. But Silber, deservedly celebrated as a vivid chronicler of modern manners and the urban everyday, gently strips away the irony from the title statement as her plot unfolds. By the end of the book, one of the main characters finds himself amazed to realize, "You can have good luck as well as bad." This strikes him as "a complicated new truth, a beautiful and irrefutable fact."
Ultimately, the apparently ironic "lucky us" proves just as true to the experience of this novel when read as a sincere statement of thanks for life and love. In Gabe and Elisa's Manhattan love story, most of the usual romantic conventions are overturned or at least tweaked. Romance is unchained from conventionality in their unlikely pairing. Ruminative, selfless, centered Gabe is 50-something, with the lightly checkered past of a year spent in jail for dealing drugs as a young man. Now content with the modest lifestyle of a camera salesman, he stands as the serene, solid center around which Elisa, half his age, flutters rakishly.
Alive with "dizzy, selfish sweetness," Elisa styles herself a bright young pro at desire—at cultivating and satisfying longings of her own and at planting them in others and basking in the attention that results. "I thought of myself as a lavish bit of bounty I was gifting him with," she says of her initial courting of Gabe. She's just self-aware enough to make a virtue out of vanity. The world is her oyster, and she finds it very much an aphrodisiac.
In he-said-she-said fashion, Elisa and Gabe narrate alternating chapters of their story. The first chapter is Elisa's, and she imbues it with all her sunny, lusty blitheness. So her diagnosis as HIV-positive near the end of the chapter, just as she and Gabe are planning their wedding, is a dark shock and the the first, most tremendous blow of bad luck that wallops the couple. It sets off a chain of reactions that threaten to sabotage her relationship with Gabe as Elisa struggles to see herself in the new light cast by the virus. Elisa is left picking up the pieces of a dismantled identity and inhabiting a body suddenly strange to her….
Why Lucky Us was never reprinted in paperback is beyond me. Perhaps the NBA nomination of Ideas of Heaven will change that.
UPDATE: I was curious whether googling a phrase from the above review would lead resourceful readers to my identity. A test run led instead to the delightful revelation that the review was lifted a short time after it ran, chopped in half, and was attributed to somebody named Lee Hall. Charming! OGIC, in case you are wondering, is not Lee Hall….
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, November 11, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: Come see me!
A boy must peddle his book, and I’ll be making two public appearances next week to flog All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, the first in New York City and the second in Connecticut.
Here's the scoop:
• I’ve mentioned this before and probably will again, but Robert Gottlieb and I will be appearing next Tuesday, Nov. 16, at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square (the address is 33 E. 17th St.) to discuss the life and work of George Balanchine with Robert Greskovic, the dance critic of The Wall Street Journal. Gottlieb, the dance critic of the New York Observer, is the author of George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, just out from HarperCollins. We’ll be conversing among ourselves, after which we’ll take questions from the audience and sign copies of our books. (If you’ve already bought All in the Dances, bring it along and I’ll be more than happy to do the honors.) All three of us are voluble and opinionated, which should make for a good time.
The show starts at seven o’clock. For more information, go here.
• On Friday, Nov. 19, I’ll be coming to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford to talk about Balanchine and his legacy with Francis Mason, dance critic of WQXR-FM and co-author of Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets.
The show starts at six o’clock, but come early so that you can see “Ballets Russes to Balanchine: Dance at the Wadsworth Atheneum,” a major exhibition that documents a great museum’s involvement with dance in the Thirties—an extraordinary tale in and of itself. The galleries close at five p.m., which will give you plenty of time to grab dinner, come back, and watch us perform.
For more information, go here.
posted by terryteachout @ Thursday, November 11, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: Be still, and know that they are shy
I’ve been rereading John Canarina’s Pierre Monteux, Maître, a biography of a great and wise French conductor who never quite became a celebrity (I blogged about him last year), and ran across an anecdote I wanted to share with you. Monteux had just conducted Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande at the Metropolitan Opera House, and was talking about the production with his fellow conductor Max Rudolf, who was then the company’s music administrator:
When Max Rudolf expressed concern to Monteux over the fact that the Pelléas performances were not well attended, he replied, “That’s all right, it is the same in Paris.” When asked if he thought Pelléas would ever be a popular opera, he said, “It was not meant to be.”
I think Monteux put his finger on something important, not to mention easily misunderstood. I once wrote an essay about Gabriel Fauré for Commentary in which I tried to explain why his music had never been popular and probably never would be. It’s called “The Shy Master”:
Is it likely that Gabriel Fauré’s music will ever speak to a wider audience? Not really. For all its beauties, it lacks a quality normally present in the work of romantic artists: It is not forthcoming. To appreciate Fauré, you must come to him, in the same way that you might open yourself up to a painter like Edouard Vuillard. It is as though you were talking with a shy person whose voice is only audible in a quiet room. If the room is too noisy—or if you insist on doing all the talking—then you will hear nothing at all.
George Balanchine’s Liebeslieder Walzer, an hour-long plotless ballet set to the music of Brahms, is another example of shy art. It’s intensely romantic, but if you’re not in a receptive frame of mind, it won't make much of an impression on you, which may explain why it’s never been especially popular with New York City Ballet audiences. And is there anything wrong with that? Balanchine didn’t think so. As I wrote in All in the Dances:
More than a few members of the ballet’s earliest audiences, bored by its unending succession of “love-song waltzes,” would slip out of the theater during the pause between acts. In an oft-told anecdote that may or may not be true, Balanchine and [Lincoln] Kirstein were watching a performance together. “Look how many people are leaving, George,” Kirstein moaned, to which Balanchine replied, “Ah, but look how many are staying!” Today, though New York City Ballet now performs Liebeslieder Walzer only infrequently, it is loved by connoisseurs for what Arlene Croce has called its “persistent note of melancholy and tragic remorse,” and there are those, myself included, who regard it as their favorite Balanchine ballet of all.
On the other hand, Balanchine’s retort to Kirstein suggested that he thought Liebeslieder Walzer would someday find a wider audience, which so far hasn’t happened. It is, indeed, beloved, but only by a comparatively modest number of people, just like the music of Fauré, the paintings and prints of Vuillard, John Twachtman, and Giorgio Morandi, the novels of Barbara Pym, and any number of other works of art that occupy a special place in my heart, perhaps because I myself am romantic in much the same way (though you probably wouldn't guess it unless you knew me very well).
Max Beerbohm, himself one of the shyest of artists, liked to call himself a “Tory anarchist.” Similarly, I think of myself as a democratic elitist. I know shy art isn’t for everyone, but I also know there are more than a few people out there who’d love it if only they knew about it. That’s why I write about shy artists whenever I get the chance, knowing that each time I do, a handful of readers whose curiosity is piqued by my praise will make the kind of life-changing discovery I described in “The Shy Master”:
And if you choose instead to listen, closely and carefully? Then you may find yourself responding with the fervor of a Copland or a Marcel Proust, who told Fauré that “I not only admire and venerate your music, I am in love with it” and went so far as to use him as one of the models for Vinteuil, the composer in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. It was a remarkable tribute from one great artist to another—but, then, Fauré had a way of inspiring such tributes. John Singer Sargent painted him. Maurice Ravel studied with him. “I know of no other music which is more purely and uniquely music,” Arthur Honegger said, “except, perhaps, that of Mozart or Schubert.”
As for Pélleas, it can take care of itself. Every major opera company in the world feels obliged to present it from time to time, as the Met will be doing in January and February, and it’s been recorded more than once (I especially like this version). No, it’s not for everyone. That’s why the Met is only giving four performances
of Pélleas this season. It wasn’t meant to be popular. It doesn’t have to be. All it has to be is beautiful.
posted by terryteachout @ Thursday, November 11, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: Feelin' tomorrow like I feel today
I woke up yesterday morning and realized that I’d finally gotten the better of the bug that bit me. Needless to say, that’s all the more reason for me to continue taking it easy for as long as I can, since I have a lifelong habit of jumping the fences. Still, I’m sure that I’ve turned the corner, and just in the nick of time, too: I went to see Brooke Shields in Wonderful Town on Tuesday night, and tonight I’ll be going to a press preview of ’Night, Mother, followed by The Good Body on Friday and Democracy on Saturday. Yikes!
Anyway, thanks to everyone out there in cyberspace for your comforting e-mails (all of which I’ve answered). I’ll try not to let myself get run down between now and the day before Thanksgiving, at which time I’m heading for Smalltown, U.S.A., to (A) eat turkey with my mother and (B) do as little as possible. Film-noir buffs will of course recognize the second of these as the recipe for a long, happy life. No doubt I’ll hew to it about as closely as J.J. Gittes did—though I hope not with similar results!
posted by terryteachout @ Thursday, November 11, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
“‘You know, being a Conservative is much more restful,’ Linda said to me once in a moment of confidence, when she was being unusually frank about her life, ‘though one must remember that it is bad, not good. But it does take place within certain hours, and then finish, whereas Communism seems to eat up all one’s life and energy. And the comrades are such Hons, but sometimes they make me awfully cross, just as Tony used to make one furious when he talked about the workers. I often feel rather the same when they talk about us—you see, just like Tony, they’ve got it all wrong. I’m all for them stringing up Sir Leicester, but if they started on Aunt Emily and Davey, or even on Fa, I don’t think I could stand by and watch. I suppose one is neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring, that’s the worst of it.’”
Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love
posted by terryteachout @ Thursday, November 11, 2004 | Permanent
link | Wednesday, November 10, 2004
OGIC: For big kids, too
If you're looking for some cinematic holiday spirit, it should be abundantly clear by now that The Polar Express is not the answer. May I recommend, then, the unjustly obscure classic Olive, the Other Reindeer?
Perhaps you are one of the lucky few who caught this hour-long animated Christmas special on Fox before they inexplicably stopped running it. If so, then you know it's savvy and goofy and sweet, the best in its genre since the Grinch. In fact, if you ask me, it's a good sight better; it's one of those blessed pieces of kiddie culture that aims to please the parents as well, not to mention random adults who don't have the face-saving cover of children to explain my, er, their deep familiarity with it.
Michael Stipe crooning soulfully as Schnitzel, Blitzen's nonflying cousin; Joey Pants playing a penguin who hawks phony Rolexes out of a briefcase; Drew Barrymore as a dog who thinks she's a reindeer: what's not to like? Trust me. I realize "animated holiday special" are not words likely to strike hope in the hearts of the aesthetically discerning. But every skeptical soul that I've tied to a chair and forced to watch Olive has thanked me for it in the end.
Bonus materials: the brilliant creators of Olive, J. Otto Seibold and Vivian Walsh, introduced her in this book. Seibold, who seems to have looked at a lot of Picasso, draws his penguins, dogs, and fleas on a Macintosh. Walsh and Seibold also wrote and illustrated the official children's guide to Going to the Getty Center in Los Angeles.
UPDATE/CLARIFICATION: Delicious of Delicious Pundit rightly points out that I wrongly imply that Seibold and Walsh are the only brilliant parties involved here. While credit for creating Olive and her universe is theirs, the television special itself is the fabulous work of television comedy writer Steve Young. Far be it from me to deny credit to someone whose work has pleased me so, well, deliciously. I'm grateful for the correction.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, November 10, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: Paranoia strikes deep
This is likely to be a somewhat dicey week for me. On Tuesday night I started ramping up to my usual performance-going schedule, even though I’m still a bit shaky from the bug that bit me last week. (Alas, Broadway openings wait for no man!) So in lieu of a freshly written posting, I’ve pulled another vintage essay out of my electronic hat, a column I wrote for Fi, the now-defunct audio magazine, a few years ago. I hope you find it interesting.
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The best thing written about classical music this past winter was, believe it or not, an essay by a music critic about another music critic. William Youngren's "Haggin," published in the winter issue of The American Scholar, is a remarkable memoir of the man most responsible for forming the tastes of postwar American record collectors. It is also a cautionary tale of how a great critic fell victim to the occupational disease of his profession—paranoia.
I doubt B.H. Haggin is especially well known to Gen-X audiophiles, but for those who came of age between the '40s and the '70s, his name will trigger vivid memories. Haggin was as influential as any American music critic who has ever lived, and he exerted much of his influence, unusually, through a book written for novice music lovers. The Listener's Musical Companion, published in 1956, was acquired by school libraries across America, there to be read by innumerable teenagers who swallowed whole its sternly compelling myth of interpretative rectitude, in which Arturo Toscanini was God and Wilhelm Furtwängler the Antichrist. More than a few critics who now publish in Fi, myself included, cut their teeth on The Listener's Musical Companion, and its echoes can be heard to this day in everything we write.
Haggin also shaped the face of American musical journalism in an even more unusual way: by answering his mail. Many of his readers wrote to him over the years, and he always wrote back—usually on a typed postcard—to defend or amplify his views. Those exchanges not infrequently led to face-to-face encounters, and sometimes to friendship. That was how I got to know Haggin, who later recommended me to Ted Libbey (then the editor of High Fidelity), the first editor ever to ask me to review classical recordings. If you don't like my stuff, you thus have B.H. Haggin to blame. And my experience was far from unique: indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if Haggin did more than anyone else of his generation to encourage young music critics.
But Haggin had a dark side, one described candidly by William Youngren. Though he affected to believe that "criticism does not, as some people think it must, offer the one possible and correct opinion," he was in fact dogmatic to a fault, and his penchant for writing bluntly and insultingly about other critics with whom he disagreed got him in hot water time and again. Starting in the '60s, he also picked fights with most of the writers and musicians he had befriended over the years, and by the time of his death in 1987, the people with whom he was still on speaking terms could probably have been numbered in single digits.
Haggin's violent contentiousness was no secret in the music business, and it led many to wonder if he was entirely right in the head. What was not generally known prior to the publication of Youngren's essay was that there was concrete reason to be concerned about his sanity: as early as the '50s, Haggin's psychiatrist put him on such major tranquilizers as Thorazine, a drug commonly used to treat schizophrenia.
Once I learned this fact, the weirdly aggressive tone of Haggin's post-1960 writings suddenly began to make sense to me in a way it never had before. We use the word "paranoia" casually nowadays, but in the context of mental illness it has a precise meaning: It is the overwhelming feeling of persecution experienced by schizophrenics whose delusions have loosened their hold on reality. Surely there can be no doubt that this was Haggin's problem: His own sense of reality was threatened when people—especially people he respected—disagreed with him about musical matters. Hence the queer outbursts of near-frenzy that mar such later books as A Decade of Music (1973) and Music and Ballet, 1973-1983 (1984). They are expressions not of anger, but stark terror.
Haggin's story is interesting both in its own right and as a reminder that all critics, great and small, are prone to paranoia. The reason is simple: we don't always agree. Especially in New York, where four daily newspapers cover the classical-music scene, it is an unsettling business to pick up the morning papers and read four different opinions about a concert—unsettling not just for readers, but also for the critics themselves. To be sure, I take some critics more seriously than others, but it always shakes me when a colleague loathes a performance I loved. (The converse is for some mysterious reason less disturbing.) If only for a moment, I feel what B.H. Haggin must have felt at all times: am I losing touch with reality?
I should add that this feeling, while it can be unpleasant, isn't necessarily unhealthy (unless you happen to be schizophrenic). Critics need constant reminding that criticism is not an exact science—or, indeed, any kind of science at all. As for those frustrated performers who find themselves on the receiving end of contradictory reviews, I can do no better than to quote from No Minor Chords, Andre Previn's wonderful memoir: "It is perfectly correct to disregard all the bad reviews one gets, but only if at the same time, one disregards the good ones as well." UPDATE: Alex Ross has some thoughts on this post:
As a critic, I'm obliged to describe musical reality precisely as I hear it; I can't sway in the breeze of intermission chatter. All the same, I want to write a review that will be of use even to a listener who had an entirely different experience. This entails writing with a certain humble awareness that my experience is not universal, that my account will never be carved in granite. Criticism is at its best where confidence meets generosity. It's a tricky business: the slide into fake omniscience is deliciously quick. But I'm working on it.
Read the whole thing here.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 10, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
“Terror takes all forms, but the worst form is compassion. When you love someone and feel compassion for him as well, you can be driven to do the most brutal things.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shadows on the Hudson
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 10, 2004 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, November 9, 2004
OGIC: Who writes this stuff?
And, more important, would somebody please pay me to write this stuff?
Yesterday the Hockey Hall of Fame inducted its three newest Honoured Members: Ray Bourque, Paul Coffey, and Larry Murphy. It's nice to have some feel-good hockey headlines for a change—or so I thought it would be, before I saw the likes of these:
Murph a Hall of a Defender
Bourque Has His Hall-iday
Oh, for heaven's sake. Hall and hell? Hall and hol? Puns aren't much, but do these even qualify? If so, here's my humble contribution to the punfest:
"Coffey Amounts to More than a Hall of Beans"
Allow me to go now and prepare for the horde of sports page editors who are no doubt beating a path to my door as I type—and, more realistically, start bracing myself for when Brett Hull gets in.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Tuesday, November 9, 2004 | Permanent
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OGIC: Fortune cookie
"Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation exhaust themselves on that."
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Tuesday, November 9, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: The unbearable arbitrariness of the muse
Journalists are deadline junkies. Even if they don’t start out that way, they soon find themselves needing the stimulus of a deadline in order to get anything done, and most of them find it all but impossible to write a piece before it’s due.
I’m no better than the rest of my colleagues, but at least I take my own deadlines seriously. If you tell me a piece is due on Tuesday, that’s when you’ll get it, absent some hugely compelling reason to the contrary. Illness qualifies, and the upper-respiratory bug with which I’ve been doing battle for the past week caused me to blow the deadline for a piece I was supposed to write about Bright Young Things, the film version of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. Fortunately, I knew this particular deadline wasn’t set in stone, so I warned my editor via e-mail, who wrote back to tell me that I could turn it in as late as Monday, when the magazine would be going to press. I needed all the rest I could get, so I decided to put off writing the piece until first thing Monday morning, hoping that by then I’d feel decent enough to turn out something sufficiently readable.
Even when I’m healthy, I often have trouble sleeping the night before an unwritten piece is due, and I felt perfectly frightful when I went to bed on Sunday. I tossed and turned throughout the night, sleeping for two hours at most, and awoke at six a.m., three hours ahead of the alarm clock. My head felt as though someone had pumped it full of budget-priced concrete, but there didn’t seem to be much point in trying to go back to sleep, so I crawled out of bed, turned on my computer, and went to work, grimly certain that I was in for a long day of pain and suffering. I was wrong. Two hours later the piece was finished, and even in my blurry state I knew it was good—perhaps one of my best.
Every writer can tell you a dozen stories like that. Some pieces come easily and others don’t, and you can’t tell in advance which way the coin will fall. In my own case, the mystery is heightened by the fact that I rarely suffer from writer’s block. My first professional gig was as a music critic for the Kansas City Star, and in those days we still filed our reviews at 11:30 for the next day’s paper (an old-fashioned practice that the New York Times has just revived). I was terrified the first time I had to hit that unforgiving deadline, but within a few weeks the fear had worn off, and ever since then I’ve trusted in my facility. Nowadays it’s not uncommon for me to turn out three pieces in a single week, some as long as five thousand words, and I never doubt that they’ll be of professional quality. What I don’t know is whether they’ll be any better than that. It’s strictly up to the muse.
Journalists aren’t exactly artists, but in this respect they resemble artists, who know that a professional can’t afford to wait for inspiration. Of the many George Balanchine quotes I tucked into All in the Dances, this one is my favorite:
Choreography, finally, becomes a profession. In making ballets, you cannot sit and wait for the Muse. Union time hardly allows it, anyhow. You must be able to be inventive at any time.
Note that Mr. B said “inventive,” not “inspired.” He knew what all artists know, which is that the only way you can ever hope to experience inspiration is to seek it regularly, ideally every day. It’s like a bus that doesn’t run on a regular schedule: the more often you come to the bus stop, the better the chances that you’ll be there when it arrives.
I’m used to this, as well I should be, but sometimes I get vexed at the muse when she pulls a fast one, the way she did yesterday morning. Of course I’m glad that particular piece came off so well—but why on earth did I have a good day when I was feeling so awful? It offends my sense of order. In a better-organized world, an artist would be able to earn inspiration. He'd get up bright and early after having gone to bed at a reasonable hour, eat a nutritious breakfast, sharpen his pencils, go out to walk the dog and help an old lady across the street, and return to his desk secure in the knowledge that the muse would descend at ten a.m. sharp. Fat chance. To be sure, regular habits are good for artists. They make it easier to be inventive on demand. But inspiration, unlike invention, won’t come when it’s called. It’s a cat, not a dog. If you can’t live with that knowledge, you’re better off pursuing some other line of work.
Those of you who are religious will doubtless see the analogy here: inspiration is like grace. You can make yourself more (or less) worthy to receive it, but Somebody Else is in charge of pushing the button that causes it to descend. This suggests that instead of grumbling about the arbitrariness of the inspiration that came to me early yesterday morning, I should have offered up humble thanks to the Muse of Journalism for choosing to cut me some slack on a bad day. But did I? No. “Gratitude,” Lord Chesterfield told his son, “is a burden upon our imperfect nature.” Unwilling to assume that burden, I e-mailed my piece to Washington, crawled back into bed, and slept until noon.
No doubt the muse will pay me back double one of these days. Or maybe not. Like I said, you never know.
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TT: Almanac
"After this, Lady Montdore set out to win my heart, and, of course, succeeded. It was not very difficult. I was young and frightened, she was old and grand and frightening, and it only required a very little charm, an occasional hint of mutual understanding, a smile, a movement of sympathy to make me think I really loved her. The fact is that she had charm, and since charm allied to riches and position is almost irresistible, it so happened that her many haters were usually people who had never met her, or people she had purposely snubbed or ignored. Those whom she made efforts to please, while forced to admit that she was indefensible, were very much inclined to say '...but all the same she has been very nice to me and I can't help liking her.' She herself, of course, never doubted for one moment that she was worshipped, and by every section of society."
Nancy Mitford, Love in a Cold Climate
| Monday, November 8, 2004
OGIC: Pocket jackpot
I just came back from the neighborhood used book store, where I was selling some books, thereby freeing up some much-needed bookshelf space and bringing in some not unwelcome cash. I was on my way out of the store with the cash in my hot little hand, on the verge of making a cleanly profitable getaway, when something caught my eye. It was a whole shelf packed with old Anchor and Vintage paperbacks illustrated by Edward Gorey. Ooh and ouch. Some were books I've long hoped to find. And there went twenty-five percent of my cash. Easy come, easy go.
As long-time readers know, I collect Gorey books and have an especially soft spot for his early oeuvre. Looking again at the gallery maintained by the folks at Goreyography.com, I see that I still have a long way to go before my collection is complete. But the highlights of today's haul, some of which can be viewed over there, are:
An Elizabethan Song Book, songs selected by W. H. Auden, bright green for the grass and yellow for the lute.
François Villon, D. B. Wyndham Lewis's biography of the medieval poet. The wall is dense black cross-hatching on a gunmetal gray background, the lady's dress a dramatic red streak against the gloom.
The Yellow Book: Quintessence of the Nineties, edited by Stanley Weintraub, a collection of stories and essays from the famous fin-de-siècle journal. The cover of this one features a strange little Max Beerbohm drawing framed by an ornamental design by Gorey, who also did the typography. An odd but successful marriage. Beerbohm must have been an influence on Gorey.
Happy as I am to have stumbled on this cache, I can't help wondering what brought the like-minded soul who put it together to letting it go. An heir who didn't know what he had, probably, and better for the books they come live with me. I look over my own newly expanded collection, and the words "when you pry it from my cold, dead hands" come to mind.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Monday, November 8, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: On the mend
It's been slow going, but the upper-respiratory bug that assaulted me last week is starting to loosen its chokehold on my windpipe, and I'm finally feeling a bit more like myself (though I don't yet sound like myself, or anyone else human). I'm sure it helps that I canceled an out-of-town trip, took the whole weekend off, stayed home, didn't answer the phone, talked as little as possible, and did no work whatsoever. Mostly I just lay on the couch like a threadbare afghan, gulped down hot fluids, and watched TV.
Alas, all of the above means I have to write a piece right this minute for a magazine that goes to press today. (I'm not completely sure I still remember how to write!) The good news is that I should be blogging again tonight. Our Girl advises me that she's still having web-browsing problems at her end, but she, too, will be back as soon as possible.
Until then, cross over into the right-hand column, where you'll find a new "Second City" column for your delectation, plus links to lots of other fine blogs that are worth a visit.
Thanks for your patience.
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TT: Bard of the electric ear
I don’t want to leave you completely bereft of fresh reading matter, so I dipped into my electronic archive and pulled out a favorite essay that inadvertently got left out of the Teachout Reader. It’s one of my old “Front Row Center” columns from Civilization, a magazine for which I used to write long ago. Nobody I knew read Civilization, so the chances are better than even that you haven’t seen this particular piece, a profile of the radio playwright Norman Corwin. I’m a radio buff from way, way back, and meeting Corwin was one of the high points of my professional life.
I hope you enjoy this souvenir of the afternoon we spent together back in 1996.
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Once upon a time there was radio, and it was beloved. Nobody loves TV: we take it for granted, like air or water. Radio was different. America is a big country, so big that newspapers and express trains did little to shrink it, and for most of its long history it was intensely provincial, simply by virtue of its vastness. Unless you were rich enough to travel, you knew only your town and the places nearby; the rest you read about in books, or visited once in a blue moon. But then radio came along, and all at once Americans could hear each other, no matter where they lived. You twisted a knob on the Atwater Kent in the living room in Dubuque or Diehlstadt, and suddenly you could hear Fred Allen cracking bone-dry jokes in a studio in Manhattan—or Ed Murrow standing on a London rooftop, listening to the German bombers roar through the night sky. And all of it was live: it happened and you heard it, just like that.
The hold of radio on the imagination of America in the '30s and '40s was so strong that even now, people too young to have experienced it at first hand can somehow feel its seductive tug. Though I was born in 1956, I always loved the idea of radio, so much so that I read shelves of books about it, collected crackly cassettes of ancient Jack Benny broadcasts, and in time even became a part-time disc jockey on a college station, though the duties weren't precisely what I'd had in mind. (Where were the glossy studio orchestras? Where were the sound-effects men, miraculously conjuring up galloping horses and collapsing buildings?) So when I heard Norman Corwin was writing and directing a brand-new series of plays for National Public Radio, I knew I had to meet him.
Don't be embarrassed if you've never heard of Corwin: it | |
