About Last Night
TERRY TEACHOUT on the arts
in New York City
(with additional dialogue by OUR GIRL IN CHICAGO)
Saturday, February 4, 2006
TT and OGIC: Just wondering
Do you find "Sites to See," our blogroll, too long to be manageable? Or is it useful to you at its present length? We've been contemplating a drastic pruning, but before we do anything so dire, we'd like to know what you think.
Write to either one of us at the mailboxes in the top module of the right-hand column. Thanks in advance.
| Friday, February 3, 2006
OGIC: I sing myself...if I must
So somebody cooked me dinner. That was nice.
I drank a couple of tankards' worth of red wine. Nice at the time, but now I'm good for nothing. So that was mixed.
But the cook also showed me a little book nicked from his parents called Poet's Choice and, when I became wholly absorbed in the book and not quite so fascinating or, um, at all responsive a guest, urged me to bring it home with me. For the sole purpose of regaling you with its contents. And politely correcting my manners. Again: very and entirely nice.
Poet's Choice was published in 1962 by Time-Life Books. Its editors asked more than 100 well-known poets to select one of their own works for the volume and to say something about their selection—a condition that many of them meet with reluctance, reserve, or outright obfuscation. In at least one instance, the poet compares his poems to his children, whom it would of course be unseemly to choose among. There's a surprising amount of creative evasion in play. Some of our bards you can just envision shifting from leg to leg uncomfortably and eying the exits.
Held to the task, some disdain explication: of "In the Night Fields" W. S. Merwin says, in toto, "If I had to use one as an amulet I hope this one would serve." Conrad Aiken answers with a fragment of a different poem.
Kingsley Amis, who chose "After Goliath," throws cold water on our expectations and then can't stop from hedging his bet anyway: "I wrote this poem three years ago and I can still read it without irritation (except perhaps at lines 4, 13, and 34)...."
Reed Whittemore, author of "Reflections upon a Recurrent Suggestion by Civil Defense Authorities that I Build a Bombshelter in My Backyard," seems to have been lying in wait for just such an occasion to say: "I like this one partly out of malice toward the editors of The New Yorker, who rejected it six or seven years ago...."
George Barker's articulate bark makes me continue to want to go back in time and somehow release Elizabeth Smart from the irresistible but corrosive spell he casts with his swaggering brain:
I don't have any favourite poems, not even anyone else's, let alone my own. (And I rather suspect this goes for a lot of poets—if there are a lot of poets. It's as frivolous to have a favourite person—imagine a menagerie full of those monsters.) So that in the circumstances I would like to offer a little verse which I like for its simple sexual irony. I also favour it because it is, I hope, opposite to much of the pretentious pseudo-poetastery parading about public places now.
Glad you asked, punk?
There are more riches where these came from. But it's late and, you know, the wine, so just one more: Philip Larkin on "Absences," which I can't immediately find on the information superhighway, so here's that, too.
Absences
Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs.
Fast-running floors, collapsing into hollows,
Tower suddenly, spray-haired. Contrariwise,
A wave drops like a wall: another follows,
Wilting and scrambling, tirelessly at play
Where there are no ships and no shallows.
Above the sea, the yet more shoreless day,
Riddled by wind, trails lit-up galleries:
They shift to giant ribbing, sift away.
Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!
And on why this poem rose to the top:
I suppose I like "Absences" (a) because of its subject matter—I am always thrilled by the thought of what places look like when I am not there; (b) because I fancy it sounds like a different, better poet rather than myself. The last line, for instance, sounds like a slightly unconvincing translation of a French symbolist. I wish I could write like this more often.
Incidentally, an oceanographer wrote to me pointing out that I was confusing two kinds of wave, plunging waves and spilling waves, which seriously damaged the poem from a technical viewpoint. I am sorry about this, but do not see how to amend it now.
That one I find wholly excellent, and a fine note on which to retire. Goodnight 'til next week.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Friday, February 3, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: That sinking feeling
It’s Friday, and I’m in The Wall Street Journal. (What else is new?) This week I report on a new Broadway play, Rabbit Hole, and one of the plays I saw two weekends ago in Chicago, the Court Theatre’s revival of August Wilson’s Fences:
What makes a play great? Sometimes the difference between high art and earnest mediocrity is less than obvious at first glance. Consider David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Rabbit Hole,” which opened last night on Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Biltmore Theatre, and August Wilson’s “Fences,” now playing at the University of Chicago’s Court Theatre. Both plays are homely kitchen-sink dramas about families in crisis. Both pivot on the death of an offstage character. Both productions are well cast and well designed—yet “Rabbit Hole” is dullish and “Fences” a masterpiece.
On closer consideration, though, it isn’t so hard to see why “Rabbit Hole” fails to measure up: It’s a family drama with punch lines, a genre that at best runs to glibness, and Mr. Lindsay-Abaire sweetens the loaf of his characters’ suffering with a double spoonful of sugar...
The Court Theatre’s revival of “Fences” is a theatrical experience of a wholly different order. Yes, August Wilson tucked a lot of laughs into his Pulitzer-winning 1985 play about the splendors and miseries of a working-class Pittsburgh family, but he didn’t pull any punches in portraying the kind of inter-generational agony Philip Larkin had in mind when he wrote his most famous poem: “Man hands on misery to man/It deepens like a coastal shelf.”...
As usual, no link. To read the full review (which contains much more about Rabbit Hole and Fences, plus a brief but laudatory mention of Sarah Jones’ Bridge & Tunnel), pick up a copy of this morning’s Journal and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instant access to the complete text of my review, along with lots of other worthy art-related coverage.
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TT: Visit to an empty museum
Here's a little taste of my next “Sightings” column, which appears biweekly in the “Pursuits” section of the Saturday Wall Street Journal:
"Welcome to the best-kept secret in Newark!” So said the smiling woman who took my $7 and admitted me last Saturday to the Newark Museum, whose superlative collection includes such marvels as a flawlessly installed Alexander Calder mobile, one of Arthur Dove’s pioneering abstract paintings of 1919, and "Laburnum II," a small Hans Hofmann canvas so outrageously vital that I longed to tuck it under my arm and cart it back to my Manhattan apartment. What’s more, you can admire these masterpieces in blessed silence when you go there—because there’s a good chance you’ll be all alone. I spent an hour touring the two floors of "Picturing America," the museum’s installation of its permanent collection of American art. During that time the only other people I saw were seven kids who breezed through the second-floor gallery....
As always, there's lots more where that came from. See for yourself—buy a copy of tomorrow's Journal and look me up.
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TT: Strummer
I’ve been listening to Erroll Garner
for some inexplicable reason (not that the desire to listen to him needs explaining!). Younger readers may not recognize Garner's name, or know him solely as the composer of “Misty,” but people of a certain age (i.e., mine) will at the very least remember his many TV appearances, if only because he was so short that he had to sit on a Manhattan phone book placed atop his piano bench in order to bear down on the keyboard with sufficient comfort.
Garner was hugely popular in the second half of his life, and because of that, many critics failed to take him seriously. I once wrote a piece for the New York Times that was intended to squelch this foolish notion:
In jazz as in the other arts, worldly success can be a decidedly mixed blessing. As the critic Max Harrison has pointed out, "People do not object to artists deserving success—only to their getting it." The bigger the triumph, the snarkier the reaction, at least among those who mistakenly believe there is an inverse relationship between accessibility and quality. From Louis Armstrong to Diana Krall, talented musicians lucky enough to crack the code of popular taste without compromising their art in the process have invariably found themselves fending off flying brickbats. Some are flung by prissy colleagues who think jazz should be packaged in plain brown wrappers, others by critics who review reputations instead of music….
Garner was a self-taught musician who could not read music. (Asked why he never bothered to learn, he famously retorted, "Hell, man, nobody can hear you read.") Though he worked almost exclusively with trios, his irresistibly buoyant playing had a near-orchestral feel. At medium and fast tempos, he brusquely "strummed" close-clipped chords with his left hand—four to a bar, just like the rhythm guitarist in a swing band—while his right hand, which often lagged tantalizingly behind the beat, alternated between bustling single-note lines and delectably squashy chordal riffs….
One of Garner’s albums was called The Most Happy Piano, and that sums him up very nicely. As Joseph Epstein wrote of H.L. Mencken, "He achieves his effect through the magical transfer of joie de vivre." You simply cannot listen to his best recordings without breaking out in an ear-to-ear grin. What's more, Garner was by all accounts as likable as the music he made. As George Avakian, his producer at Columbia, recalled, “He was really like a pixie or an elf. When you split with Erroll at the end of an evening you left with a happy smile and a good feeling. No worries at all. Off to bed feeling great. That's what Erroll did for people."
The trouble is that Garner recorded extensively and indiscriminately throughout much of his long career (he died in 1977). Many of his early records, which are now out of copyright and are constantly being reissued on fly-by-night European labels, fail to do him justice, and at least as many of the later ones are of lesser interest than the performances he recorded between 1950, when he signed with Columbia Records, and the mid-Sixties, when his distinctive style started to harden into mannerism. Alas, a comprehensive Garner-on-CD series on Columbia (now Sony) was aborted fifteen years ago after just two volumes, and the bulk of his recorded legacy has yet to be reissued systematically.
Someday—I hope—Sony will put out a carefully chosen two- or three-disc collection of Garner’s best Columbia recordings. (It damn well better include his stupendous eight-minute-long 1956 version of “The Man I Love,” which at present is available only as part of an obscure multiple-artist anthology called Gershwin Jazz that I only found out about last week.) Until then, I suggest you give a listen to Erroll Garner’s Finest Hour, a single-disc greatest-hits compilation from Verve (it contains "Misty"), and This Is Jazz: Erroll Garner, a fifteen-track Columbia sampler.
On second thought, just start with This Is Jazz, which contains the first two Garner recordings I ever heard, “It’s the Talk of the Town” and the 1951 remake of “Laura,” his first hit single. If it doesn’t ring your bell, I suggest you enter psychotherapy at once—you’re seriously depressed.
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TT: Almanac
"Artists are by nature versatile and precise; they only repine when involved with the monotonous and the makeshift."
Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One
| Thursday, February 2, 2006
TT: Holding forth
I’m the featured blogger on today’s Hotline Blogometer, which normally devotes its space to political blogs.
Here’s a sample:
What is your favorite television news program, either network or cable?
In the absence of hurricanes, terrorist attacks, or lawyer-led coups, I don't watch any TV news programs, and haven't for years. The last TV-news personalities I really liked were Harry Reasoner and Charles Kuralt.
To read the whole interview, go here (you may have to scroll down).
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TT: So you want to see a show?
Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.
Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.
BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG, some adult subject matter and strong language, reviewed here, closes Mar. 12)
• Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
• 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 July 2, 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)
• The Woman in White (musical, PG, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
OFF BROADWAY:
• Abigail’s Party (drama, R, adult subject matter, strong language, reviewed here, closes Apr. 8)
• Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
• The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Mar. 11)
CLOSING SOON:
• Mrs. Warren's Profession (drama, PG, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 19, reviewed here).
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TT: Words to the wise
DC Moore Gallery, one of my favorite midtown art galleries, is about to open a pair of shows that I mean to see as soon as possible, “Milton Avery” and “Jacob Lawrence: Mural Studies.” Both go up next Wednesday and run through March 11.
For more information, go here.
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TT: Almanac
"Artists are not, on the whole, intellectuals; they do not try to be particularly articulate and, when they do speak of their art, they do not do so in the terms of the critic or connoisseur. But that is not their job. They simply do it."
Peter Ackroyd, J.M.W. Turner
| Wednesday, February 1, 2006
TT: New kid on Broadway
I wrote yesterday about how much I was looking forward to Lincoln Center Theatre’s upcoming revival of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! Well, guess what? I’m looking forward to it even more today. Says Playbill:
Mark Ruffalo will star in Lincoln Center Theater's spring 2006 revival of Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing!, it was announced.
As previously reported, the show will also star Lauren Ambrose, Ned Eisenberg, Ben Gazzara, Jonathan Hadary, Peter Kybart, Pablo Schreiber, Richard Topol and Zoe Wanamaker.
Ruffalo, who will play Moe Axelrod, first garnered notice in the original Off-Broadway production of Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth Soon after, he was discovered by Hollywood, and has appeared in such films as "You Can Count on Me," "In the Cut," "Just Like Heaven," "Rumor Has It" and "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." This will be his Broadway debut.
Those of you who read my last film column for Crisis may recall that of all the films I wrote about between 1998 and 2005, Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me was my favorite:
Lonergan’s directorial debut [has] a novelistic richness that defies the simplifying art of the pitchman. To say that it is about Terry, an immature drifter (Mark Ruffalo), and Sammy, his stay-at-home older sister (Laura Linney), orphaned in childhood and desperately lonely as young adults, is to convey nothing of the moral complexity of Lonergan’s script, which pays the viewer the compliment of not making his mind up for him. Terry is never romanticized and Sammy is never treated with condescension: they are both treated as human beings, deeply flawed but not without virtue....
That was my introduction to Mark Ruffalo, who may not be a Hollywood star—yet—but whose on-screen presence has briefly brightened any number of movies (he also had a nice little bit in Collateral). I’ve never seen him on stage, alas, and for a time I feared I never would: he survived an operation for a benign brain tumor in 2001. So that’s all the more reason for me to look forward to Awake and Sing!, which goes into previews at the Belasco Theatre on March 24.
For more information, go here.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, February 1, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Time capsules
I once knew a man who saw Nijinsky dance, heard George Gershwin play, and was present at a recording session by Billie Holiday and Teddy Wilson. The party in question was B.H. Haggin, the famously curmudgeonly
music critic. He was in his eighties and I was in my thirties when we met, and the vast difference in our ages gave additional force to his memories: Gershwin, after all, died in 1937, while Nijinsky’s only visit to the United States was in 1916. Even more powerful, though, was the fact that Haggin’s memories were unique, since Nijinsky was never filmed and the only surviving sound film of Gershwin at the piano is a mere snippet.
Now that I’m on the verge of turning fifty, I find myself wondering what memories I’ll trot out to stun the youngsters of 2036. (Note the planted axiom in that sentence!) My last “Second City” column for the Washington Post was a list
of the ten most memorable events I covered for the column, which ran from 1999 to 2005. They were all extraordinary in their various ways, but this is the one I expect to still be talking about thirty years from now. It happened in 2001, three months after 9/11:
Of all the things I did in December, the one that best summed up the spirit of this wounded city was a midweek visit I paid to the Village Vanguard, New York's oldest jazz club, down whose narrow stairs I stepped gingerly one night to hear the Bill Charlap Trio. Imagine my astonishment when my eyes adjusted to the dimness and I spotted Tony Bennett sitting in the corner—and imagine my delight when he sauntered up to the tiny bandstand and sang "Time After Time" and "The Lady Is a Tramp." Yes, we're battered and bruised and living with the worst kind of uncertainty, yet there we were, drinking up our minimums and goggling at a living legend, after which we all rushed home to call up our envious friends and tell them what they'd missed.
The age of mechanical reproduction, alas, has sharply diminished the value of the eyewitness account: I saw Count Basie in concert a half-dozen times when I lived in Kansas City, for instance, but I also saw him on film and TV so many times that it’s hard for me to distinguish between my first- and second-hand memories. Still, I’ve seen plenty of amazing things at which no cameramen were present. What else measures up in sheer uniqueness to that unforgettable night at the Village Vanguard? Here’s my top-ten you-had-to-be-there list, arranged in rough chronological order and subject to revision without warning:
• I saw Mikhail Baryshnikov dance Spectre of the Rose—and I was sitting directly behind Lauren Bacall when I saw him.
• I saw Van Cliburn give a solo recital in 1978, the year he retired from the concert stage.
• I saw Carlos Kleiber conduct Der Rosenkavalier at the Met.
• I saw Jerome Robbins’ Broadway four times—once from the front row.
• I saw Suzanne Farrell’s last public performance.
• I saw the 1992 Matisse retrospective
at the Museum of Modern Art.
• I was in the studio when Diana Krall recorded All for You: A Dedication to the Nat King Cole Trio (and wrote the liner notes for the album a few weeks later).
• I’ve interviewed Paul Taylor
twice, once at his Manhattan home and once at his Long Island beach house (and was present at the performance of Taylor’s Piazzolla Caldera seen at the end of this documentary).
• I saw Bill Monroe play at the Grand Ole Opry, then met him backstage after the show. This is what I wrote about the latter experience in the Teachout Reader: “He stood six feet tall and looked at least seven, and his expressionless face might have been carved from a stump of petrified wood. He wore a white Stetson hat and a sky-blue suit with a pin in each lapel—one was an enamel American flag, the other an evangelical Christian emblem—and everyone in earshot called him ‘Mister Monroe.’ Never were italics more audible.”
• I saw the original off-Broadway production of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt.
Does anyone else feel a meme coming on?
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, February 1, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"There is no reason why an artist of genius should not also be an astute businessman."
Peter Ackroyd, J.M.W. Turner
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, February 1, 2006 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, January 31, 2006
OGIC: This morning's assignment
Just read Maud.
UPDATE: Also Outer Life. Then you can have a snack.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Tuesday, January 31, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: In lieu of an obit
Wendy Wasserstein died yesterday morning. I met her several years ago when I interviewed her for a story in Time about Central Park, a trilogy of one-act operas to which she had contributed a libretto. I liked her enormously—everybody did—and I was always pleased to run into her at New York City Ballet, which she frequented once upon a time. Then she dropped out of sight, had a baby, and more or less vanished from the theater world. Her plays were no longer being performed in New York by the time I became a drama critic, and it wasn’t until last October that I had occasion to write about her in The Wall Street Journal.
Alas, her last play wasn’t any good, and I said so. I hated to give Third a bad review, not least because I knew Wasserstein was sick, though I didn’t know she was dying. (One of the characters in the play had cancer.) In fact, I didn’t think much of any of Wasserstein’s plays, and I dreaded having to say so in print, since she was an exceedingly nice lady. I fudged the point in my review, calling her “one of our best theatrical journalists, a keen-eared social observer with a knack for summing up cultural watershed moments like the coming of age of the baby boomers and putting them on stage to memorable effect.” All true, and none of it incompatible with the fact that I considered her to be a glib, punch-pulling lightweight, a kind of feminist Neil Simon who never cut too close to the knuckle.
Needless to say, you won’t find such heretical sentiments in any of today’s obituaries. Even John Simon wrote affectionately about Wasserstein, making it clear that he liked her both as a writer and as a person. Might my own feelings about her work have been softened had I gotten to know her more than casually? It’s quite possible. George Orwell once wrote a letter to Stephen Spender in 1938 in which he made this wholly characteristic confession:
You ask how it is that I attacked you not having met you, & on the other hand changed my mind after meeting you….Even if when I met you I had not happened to like you, I should still have been bound to change my attitude, because when you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being & not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don’t mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met & spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel that I ought to, like the Labour M.P.s who get patted on the back by dukes & are lost forever more.
It is partly for similar reasons that I don’t mix much in theatrical circles. In addition, The Wall Street Journal is extremely fussy about conflicts of interest (as it has to be, seeing as how it devotes so much of its space to financial affairs), so I mostly keep theater people at arm’s length. If I did otherwise, I’d be a different kind of critic—not better or worse, just different. There are many ways to be a critic. I write about theater as an interested spectator. I write about the visual arts as a connoisseur and collector. I write about music as an ex-practitioner. I write about writing as a working professional. It’s always me—everywhere you go, there you are—but it isn’t hard to tell which me has the floor at any given moment.
In case you hadn’t guessed, I’m feeling a little guilty about my review of Third, which is one of the risks an honest critic runs. It isn’t the first time I’ve felt that way, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Criticism is a morally dangerous profession, and those who practice it without ever feeling guilty are…well, not very nice. As I wrote early in the life of this blog:
You don't review a college opera production the same way you review the Met. That's another reason why critics should ideally have hands-on experience in the areas about which they write: It teaches them proper respect for what Wilfrid Sheed calls "the simple miracle of getting the curtain up every night." It's hard to sing Tatyana in Yevgeny Onegin, or to dance in Concerto Barocco. It's scary to go out in front of a thousand people in a dumb-looking costume and put your heart and soul on the line. Unless you have some personal experience of what that feels like—of the problems, both psychological and practical, that stand in the way of getting the curtain up—then you may err on the side of an unrealistic perfectionism, and your reviews will be sterile and uncomprehending as a result.
None of this is to say that criticism should be bland and toothless. Sometimes it’s your duty—your responsibility—to drop the big one. But you shouldn’t enjoy it, not ever. And you should always make an effort to be modest when writing about people who can do something you can’t, even when you don’t think they do it very well.
That’s the hard part.
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OGIC: Hello Teatro!
Hey, ALN pal and local public radio impresario Edward Lifson has a new blog! It's called Teatro Lifson, is part of the website of his Sunday morning arts show Hello Beautiful!, and is off to a very auspicious beginning. Edward is a great arts polymath, though he's especially passionate and knowledgeable about architecture and design. In fact, he was responsible for one of the great moments of Terry's visit to Chicago last weekend. Following the Chris Thile-Mike Marshall mandolin concert at the Old Town School of Folk Music, we strolled with my friend David down Lincoln Avenue to indulge in what turned out to be one of the best cups of hot chocolate I ever have encountered. En route, we passed a striking storefront, but it wasn't until we retraced our steps that I discovered it was none other than Louis Sullivan's last building, the Krause Music Store. And the only reason that I, alone among us, knew of the significance of the Krause Music Store? Mr. Edward Lifson, natch.
Last summer Edward hosted a special live edition of HB! devoted to music and architecture, which I attended. I wrote about it only briefly here, holding back the best material as the show hadn't aired yet. (It has now, and you can still listen.) Edward's guest for that show, Chicago Cultural Historian Tim Samuelson, ended the episode with a story about the symmetry of the ends of two great careers, Scott Joplin's and Louis Sullivan's. By the end of his life, each man had outlived the fame and fortune of his earlier career and, around the same time, each pursued what would be his last projects in relative obscurity. The last building Sullivan designed was the facade of the modest Krause shop; he needed the money, if you can believe that. Joplin's last surviving composition was the luminous "Magnetic Rag." That evening at the Cultural Center, Tim Samuelson had brought with him a player piano reel of "Magnetic Rag" that recorded Joplin's own performance—his last known recording of his last surviving composition. We looked at slides of Sullivan's building while listening to Joplin play. I don't know when else I've been in an audience that was simultaneously so hushed and so electrified by a recording. It was an amazing thing to see and, especially, to hear. And that's why it was so cool to run headlong into the Krause Music Store last weekend, even without the benefit of the proper soundtrack. And that's one of the reasons we might kind of gush when we say, Hello Teatro!
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Tuesday, January 31, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Pigeons on the grass
Fame is intense but fleeting in a TV-driven culture, which is one of the many reasons why I love watching the old What’s My Line? kinescopes that air at three-thirty each morning on the Game Show Network. Most of the celebrities who appeared on the show between 1950 and 1967, when CBS cancelled it to make way for Mission: Impossible, are now dead, but a few are very much with us, though many of them are long forgotten. I saw an episode a couple of nights ago in which Mitch Miller
was the mystery guest. The audience all but tore the roof off when he came on stage—yet who now remembers him save for pop-music historians and retired oboe players? On the other hand, Jerry Lewis, a guest panelist on another of last week's episodes, is both alive and well remembered, so much so that I’m actually giving serious thought to reading his new book, unlikely as it may sound.
The difference, of course, is that Lewis was a movie star. As a rule, TV stars are remembered until their shows are cancelled, after which they fade away quickly. Sometimes they find work in the legitimate theater, but it’s been a long time since success on Broadway made anyone a household name. (Pop quiz for readers outside the New York area: who is Cherry Jones? Don't peek.) Yet the producers of What’s My Line? regularly booked stage stars, confident that the show’s viewers would know who they were. Sic transit gloria Broadway!
Ben Gazzara, the mystery guest on a 1961 What’s My Line? that I saw recently, is a case in point. He created the role of Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof before relocating to Hollywood, where he appeared in a hit TV series, Run for Your Life, in 1965. Alas, he never quite managed to parlay his short-lived small-screen celebrity into bonafide big-screen stardom, though he’s worked steadily ever since and turns up from time to time in choice little roles (he’s in The Big Lebowski). Still, Gazzara is far from famous, and the fact that he starred in the original Broadway production of a celebrated American play is scarcely more than the tricky answer to a better-than-average trivia question, especially since some other fellow was tapped to play Brick in the movie.
It happens that Gazzara is returning to Broadway this spring: he’s been cast in Lincoln Center Theater’s revival
of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing, which opens April 17 at the Belasco Theatre. Odets, who died in 1963, is another one of those half-remembered names who used to be really, really big. In the Thirties he was one of the best-known American playwrights of his generation, a red-hot fellow traveler who palled around with all the big left-wing names (he commissioned Aaron Copland’s wonderful Piano Sonata, for instance). Then, like Ben Gazzara, he moved to Hollywood, and now he’s better known, if at all, for Sweet Smell of Success than Awake and Sing, Golden Boy, or even Waiting for Lefty.
It happens, too, that I’ve never seen a production of an Odets play, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing Awake and Sing, about which I first learned from reading “Clifford Odets: Poet of the Jewish Middle Class,” one of Robert Warshow’s finest essays (it’s collected in The Immediate Experience, an essential book to which I paid tribute in the Teachout Reader). I’ve never seen Ben Gazzara on stage, either, though I remember watching Run for Your Life as a child, and more recently was impressed by the videotaped snippet of his stage performance as Brick that Rick McKay included in Broadway: The Golden Age.
I’m not going anywhere with this: I’m just rambling. It's the privilege of a blogger with a long memory who turns fifty next Monday. Believe it or not, I don’t live in the past. No working journalist does, especially one with so many young friends. Even so, I do enjoy rummaging around in my well-stocked memory, and I don’t mind admitting that there are times when I prefer communing with the increasingly distant past to grappling with the uncomfortably proximate present. Ben Gazzara, Clifford Odets, Aaron Copland, Robert Warshow, even Jerry Lewis: today they all seem far more real to me than the pretty people I’d be reading about in Entertainment Weekly if I read Entertainment Weekly. No doubt this has something to do with my recent brush with mortality. To borrow a line from Patrick O’Brian, I’ve been a bar or two behind ever since I got out of the hospital, and though I’m sure I’ll catch up sooner or later, I find it oddly pleasant to linger among ghosts.
I reread Brideshead Revisited last week, and found that Evelyn Waugh had once again summed up my mood better than I could myself:
My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.
These memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing certainly except the past—were always with me. Like the pigeons of St Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, single, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl.
I, too, am surrounded by pigeons this morning, and I'll be sorry when the noon gun booms.
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TT: Almanac
Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain.
Friedrich von Schiller, The Maid of Orleans
| Monday, January 30, 2006
TT: Who could ask for anything more?
I got up first thing Saturday morning, ate a whole-grain English muffin and a bowl of raisin bran, took a cab down to Integral Yoga in Chelsea, and spent a couple of hours twisting myself into heart-healthy positions. I came back to my Upper West Side apartment to take a shower, then picked up a Zipcar and drove to the Newark Museum of Art, where I spent a couple of hours looking at paintings like this and this.
Once I’d seen enough, I drove to Rutt’s Hut and dined on a pair of “rippers” slathered in Rutt’s secret relish, thereby satisfying to the fullest a long-standing wish. (No, they weren't the least bit heart-healthy, but ooooh, did they ever taste good!) I read the first chapter of Peter Ackroyd’s newly published brief life of J.M.W. Turner as I stood at the counter.
I popped a Fats Waller album into the CD player of my Zipcar as I drove home on the New Jersey Turnpike. At five o'clock on the nose I pulled off the exit ramp of the George Washington Bridge and onto the Henry Hudson Parkway. The sun was mere seconds from setting and the bright blue sky was flooded with Turneresque orange light (it looked something like this). Mr. Waller obligingly chose that precise moment to launch into It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie.
I dropped the car off at a garage around the corner from my apartment, picked up some oatmeal-raisin cookies and two bottles of lemon-lime seltzer at the neighborhood deli, and spent the evening watching Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait. As Laird Cregar leered diabolically at Don Ameche, I said to myself, I couldn’t possibly be happier.
I hope your weekend was as good as mine.
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TT: Book 'em, Sony!
Some of you may have read my Wall Street Journal column about the return of the e-book, in which I reported on the Sony Reader and speculated on the possible effects of the e-book on the culture of reading and writing. (If you didn’t see the column, it’s here.) In that column I made a point of saying that eventual popular acceptance of the e-book was inevitable:
So will it fly? I don't know. Still, I'm certain that something like the Sony Reader will catch on, if not this year then in a short time. The phenomenal success of the iPod strongly suggests that many, perhaps most, consumers are ready to start buying digital books on the Web and storing and reading them electronically.
I did this for three reasons. One was rhetorical: I thought it would make the column more effective to take the coming of the e-book for granted. One was practical: my “Sightings” columns are only 850 words long, and I preferred to devote my space to speculating on the long-term effects of the e-book rather than taking the time to explain why I thought it would become popular. And one was a simple matter of honesty: that’s really what I think.
I got an e-mail the other day from my friend Rick Brookhiser, author of many fine books about the founding fathers (I especially like this one), in which he begged to differ:
e-book = iPod? Same solution, different problem, so maybe not.
The iPod created a universe of immediately available songs—not in the order the Beatles laid the album out; not with the dumb songs included (don't like “Maxwell's Silver Hammer”? Skip it!). Glenn Gould's paradise had arrived, as you wrote in the Teachout Reader.
The DVD does the same thing for movies. Watch that car chase fifteen times!
But, unlike albums/CDs or movies, readers already enjoy immediate availability, in the form of pages. This was the book's great advance over the scroll, and the reciting bard. You can skip ahead, go back, read one paragraph over and over, etc. If you had been alive in the dark ages, or whenver scribes began writing in books, you would have commented on it in Ye Teachoute Reader (Gutenberg made reproduction faster).
The e-book will NOT increase immediate availability, because you must hit a control of some sort to move. Even a thumb click or a finger tap is as much of an effort as a page turn. (The e-book you showed doesn't even have two pages open at once, though that presumably is fixable.)
The great gain of the e-book is having several thousand books in one little machine. But apart from the psychotically inattentive—a large audience, given computers and the tempo of TV editing—people read one book at a time, or at most two or three. In that situation the e-book provides no advantages, or few.
What e-books will make wonderful is research—Grove, the encyclopedia, and all those bound volumes of the Atlantic Monthly may well be killed by them.
If your prophecy is fulfilled, and all books are sent to a landfill, in five years some geek in Bangalore will announce breathlessly his newest discovery—the printout, bound together with glue for easy live-ware accessibility.
These are all good points. The printed book, as I said in my column, is an “elegant” technology, meaning that it solves a great many problems in an attractive, simple, and economical way, and e-books will not catch on if they don’t solve the same problems with comparable elegance. But assuming they do, here are some of the further advantages of the e-book:
• It will allow you to buy books without going to a brick-and-mortar store and have them delivered to your computer more or less instantaneously.
• In theory, it will give you immediate access to a vastly larger number of books than even amazon.com can provide.
• You’ll be able to carry dozens of books with you wherever you go (unlike Rick, I think this is one of the e-book’s biggest draws).
• Books in bulk are heavy and awkward and take up a huge amount of space. E-books take up no physical “space” at all, thus freeing up wall and storage space—a major consideration for apartment-dwellers and other people with good-sized personal libraries. Yes, books do furnish a room, but I’d rather furnish my living room with more art—and I’d be more than happy not to have to box up my thousand-odd books the next time I move to a new apartment.
In addition, the e-book is a technology so powerful and far-reaching in its implications that I’m sure it will offer countless additional advantages I can’t even begin to foresee. Scott Walters, who blogs at Theatre Ideas, suggested two of them in this e-mail he sent after reading my column:
As a 47-year-old recent convert to the iPod (which I use for listening to books on tape from Audible.com), I am fascinated by the new Sony e-book hardware. As a college professor, I can see all kinds of opportunities. For instance, what if students could download all of their textbooks to their Sony e-book—no more huge backpacks filled with a dozen heavy textbooks! Also, it might help us disconnect from the pirates running current textbook publishers. I published a textbook with McGraw-Hill that is about 120 pages and lists for $30, which is ridiculous! I would certainly consider pulling the book from the publisher and selling it myself via download. This could be a real solution for the student!
All of which serves as a reminder that the coming of the e-book will trigger the law of unintended consequences. That’s what I was getting at in my column:
Best-selling novelists, for instance, will soon be in a position to "publish" their own books, pocketing all the profits—but so will niche-market authors whose books don't sell in large enough quantities to interest major publishers.
Might the e-book make the writing of serious literary fiction more economically viable? Consider the experience of Maria Schneider, the jazz composer whose CDs are sold exclusively on her Web site, www.mariaschneider.com. Ms. Schneider uses ArtistShare, a new Web-based technology that makes it easier for musicians to sell self-produced recordings online. Not only did she win a Grammy for her first ArtistShare release, "Concert in the Garden," but she kept all the proceeds as well. Several other well-known jazz musicians, including the guitarist Jim Hall and the trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, have since signed up with ArtistShare, which frees them from the need to compromise with money-conscious record-company executives. Will e-books have a similarly liberating effect on authors? I wouldn't be surprised.
I’m not saying, by the way, that the unintended consequences of the coming of the e-book will all be pleasant or desirable. Our Girl and I went shopping the other day at a well-stocked brick-and-mortar bookstore in Chicago. I bought three books for myself and a belated Christmas present for OGIC, and enjoyed the experience immensely. As we drove home afterward, we chatted about how delightful it is to browse the shelves of a good bookstore. But is it delightful enough to survive the coming of the e-book? I doubt it. To be sure, I had a lovely time—but it was the first time I’d done any serious in-person book-browsing in nearly a year. I now buy virtually all of my books online.
As I wrote in the Journal:
Yes, I miss the bookstores of my youth, and I'm sure I'll miss the handsomely bound volumes that fill the shelves in my apartment as well (though I won't miss dusting them, or toting them around by the half-dozen whenever I go on vacation). The printed book is a beautiful object, "elegant" in both the aesthetic and mathematical senses of the word, and its invention was a pivotal moment in the history of Western culture. But it is also a technology—a means, not an end. Like all technologies, it has a finite life span, and its time is almost up.
Am I right? We’ll see—soon.
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TT: Almanac
“Perhaps the strangest aspect of life is the sense it conveys of having a pattern—everything falling into place, nothing happening by chance; outward phenomena an image of the inward reality; and therefore inevitable in their relation to that inward reality.”
Malcolm Mugggeridge, Affairs of the Heart (courtesy of Christopher Porterfield)
| Friday, January 28, 2005
TT: Boundless
Last night I took two friends, a music critic and a jazz pianist, to watch New York City Ballet dance what George Balanchine’s admirers refer to as “the Greek program”: Apollo, Orpheus, and Agon, the three great Balanchine-Stravinsky collaborations. The pianist was seeing all three dances for the first time, and the critic had never seen any of Balanchine's ballets. They reacted pretty much the way I'd expected, and we went our separate ways after the performance looking as though we’d all had one too many. Or maybe two.
I got up at seven-thirty this morning, knocked out the last 850 words of an essay on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and shot the piece off to my editor in Washington via e-mail (the galleys are rolling out of my fax machine as I'm typing this sentence). Then I jumped in a cab and headed crosstown to meet my friend Bass Player at Knoedler & Company, where we spent an hour looking at Milton Avery: Onrushing Waves (the show closes on Saturday, so if you haven’t seen it yet, don’t wait!). From there we went to Tibor de Nagy to see Jane Freilicher: Paintings 1954-2004, she for the first time, I for the second. By then we were booming and zooming, so instead of hitting a third gallery, we decided to grab a bite to eat, after which we talked our heads off. (Bass Player and I are so closely in sync that we don’t really need to tell each other what we’re thinking, but we do it anyway.)
At length she went downtown to pick up her bass and take a lesson, while I returned home to do…nothing. I have no more appointments today, no deadline to hit, no work of any kind that can’t wait, no show to see tonight, and nowhere in particular that I need to be until 1:45 Saturday afternoon. Limitless luxury, in other words, made all the sweeter by the fact that it’s so bitterly cold outside. What do I care? My calendar is blank, my refrigerator full. Josh White is playing on my iBook, The Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob, and Kind Hearts and Coronets are cued up on the DVR, and a book I’m looking forward to reading awaits me in the loft. The only thing I have to do in the next twenty-three hours is keep the solemn promise I made with hand on heart to Bass Player at lunch today: I’m going to pop open my watercolor set and put brush to paper before I go to bed tonight.
I know exactly how lucky I am today, in part because I also know how it feels to be so busy that you can’t see straight. As a matter of fact, I’ve been feeling outrageously happy for the past couple of days. Whatever troubles the future may hold in store for me are currently being held in abeyance, and instead of worrying about them, or even thinking about them, I’ve been following the advice of the man who made the ballets my friends and I saw last night. “Why are you stingy with yourselves?” Mr. B used to ask his dancers. “Why are you holding back? What are you saving for—for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now.” And that’s where I've been all today: in the moment, and glad to be. Ecstatic, really.
I’ll see you Monday.
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OGIC: Fallow Friday
Nothing new from my corner today. Life insists on my active participation, besides which my modem connection has gone funky again. I'm expecting a big box of DSL sometime late next week or early the week following, but until that miraculous time I have to type with my hands suspended above the keyboard and holding my breath if I want not to disrupt the dial-up.
Should have lots to say next week, including a wrap-up of Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile at Dominican University Saturday night and possibly a report on what's so great about The Horse's Mouth.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Friday, January 28, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: And she can write, too
Time again for my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. This Friday I reviewed Little Women: The Musical and the off-Broadway revival of Hurlyburly, and I seem to have cut sharply against the grain of critical wisdom as regards the former:
Sutton Foster is a gawky, gamine version of the young Judy Garland whom the Great Producer Upstairs clearly intended for a revival of Jerome Robbins’ “Peter Pan.” Until somebody down here gets the message, though, I’ll make do with “Little Women: The Musical,” the immensely likable stage adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s much-loved 1867 novel that just opened at the Virginia Theatre. Ms. Foster, lately of “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” plays Jo, the bookwormy tomboy who “reminded one of a colt,” and gets her just right. She’s not an immaculate singer—her voice is raw on top—but her spunky charm and hell-for-leather energy are impossible to resist. I didn’t even try. Ms. Foster caught my heart on a short string the second the curtain went up, and I twitched at her command all night long.
Apparently I’m one of the few people in America who has neither read “Little Women” nor seen any of the countless stage and screen versions that preceded this one. A quick riffle through the book, though, made it clear that Allan Knee has not only slashed it to ribbons but modernized the dialogue extensively, if not egregiously (the punchlines are all his). In addition, he has turned “Little Women” into a meta-narrative about the writing of “Little Women”: Jo, an aspiring author who launches her literary career by churning out swashbuckling tales for the Weekly Volcano, decides to fictionalize her own family life, and the show reaches its climax when she takes pen in hand to write the first chapter of the story we’ve just seen played out on stage. It’s a clever idea, and if the result is more a filet than a full-fledged fish, it still zips along with confidence and skill….
I also had good things to say about Hurlyburly:
It’s a grimly funny tale of cocaine and its discontents, written and set in Hollywood in the early ’80s and horrifyingly reminiscent in every particular of what I now think of as the Age of Jay McInerney.
I didn’t see Mike Nichols’ 1984 production, which had an awesome cast—William Hurt, Judith Ivey, Harvey Keitel, Cynthia Nixon, Ron Silver, Jerry Stiller and Sigourney Weaver, believe it or not—but I can’t imagine how this one, directed with surgical precision by Scott Elliott, could be bettered. Ethan Hawke, for one, is breathtakingly fine as Eddie, the drug-sodden, woman-hating casting director on whose tortured soul the California sun has set, and Halley Wegryn Gross, Catherine Kellner and Parker Posey are nicely matched as the three women who skitter across his zigzag path....
No link—you’ve got to pay to read the whole thing. Why not shell out for today’s Journal and find out while you’re at it how we cover the other arts? Or go the whole hog by clicking here. Either way, you won’t be sorry….
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TT: Almanac
"'Good, that,' he said to himself, while her eyes rested upon him, black and impenetrable like the mental caverns where revolutionary thought should sit plotting the violent way of its dream of changes. As if anything could be changed! In this world of men nothing can be changed—neither happiness nor misery. They can only be displaced at the cost of corrupted consciences and broken lives—a futile game for arrogant philosophers and sanguinary triflers."
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes
| Thursday, January 27, 2005
TT: The momentary miracle
Most of my e-mail regarding what I wrote about Johnny Carson’s death has turned out to be unexpectedly favorable, but I won’t burden you with it. Instead, I want to pass on a thoughtful letter from a reader who disagreed.
* * *
I’ve been a daily visitor to your delightful blog for several months now. I’ve never written to you before and I am pained to find myself one of the people commenting about your Johnny Carson post….
I am truly sorry that you got some rude e-mails in response to your thoughts on Mr. Carson’s death. I agree that it is quite unreasonable of anyone to be offended by what you wrote. However, I do think that sort of personalized outrage is a common, if illogical, response when the worth of someone or something you love is being questioned. And I think a great many people loved Johnny Carson. Or rather, they loved what they saw him do.
You wrote: “Perhaps he knew how little it means to have once been famous....If he did, then he died a wise man.” I could not agree with you more. Almost all fame is ultimately meaningless. However, I don’t think it necessarily follows that what he did to achieve his fame is equally without meaning.
I must tell you where I am coming from, so you can understand why I would care enough to write to you about this. I grew up “in the theatre.” (Hope that doesn’t sound too pretentious). My father is the artistic director of a professional theatre. My mother and sister are both working actresses. As a child I spent my summer days watching rehearsals. As a teenager and young adult I worked backstage, on stage, and finally did some directing myself….
This theatre has been in continual operation for more than 35 years. Because we take no grants and are entirely self-supporting, most of our shows are of the “crowd-pleasing,” light comic variety (though occasionally we are able to do something “daring,” just for the fun of it). We have staged more than a hundred productions. Some of them have been truly great; most of them have been entertaining. Yet there is no lasting record of any of them. As a girl, I found closing nights wonderfully, horribly poignant because I knew that I would never see that particular show again. Even if Dad did the same play a few years later, it would never be exactly the same. And each of these productions, even the finest of them, is remembered by no more than a couple of thousand people. And my parents have given their lives to this. You said that Johnny Carson was engaged in “that most ephemeral of endeavors.” With respect, I think my family has Mr. Carson beat.
It is a cliché that comedy is difficult, but like so many clichés it is true. Johnny Carson’s comedy may not have been groundbreaking or revelatory; it may not be for the ages. But he was funny, consistently funny, day in and day out for thirty years. That is quite an achievement.
Escapism may not be high art, but I think that its value is often underrated. In fact, I think “escapism” is a misnomer. We are never truly able to escape from the problems of our lives. But we are able to put them aside, rest for a while, and then, refreshed, get on with things. And that, I think, is what Carson provided: some rest, amusement, and comfort to people who were dealing with stress, worry or grief. And surely that is a good deed. And from a religious perspective, of course, good deeds do leave a lasting record. Even those quickly forgotten by men are remembered by God.
Anyway, enough. Sorry to trouble you with such a long email. And again, thanks for the blog. My upbringing left me with an inherent dislike for the profession of critic, but I have found myself thoroughly enjoying your writing. Please don’t tell my parents!
* * *
While I don’t agree with my correspondent’s appraisal of Carson’s gifts as a comedian, that’s strictly a matter of opinion. What strikes me about her letter is the way in which she puts her finger on one of the most distinctive aspects of live theater, which is its radical evanescence.
A theatrical production comes together in the moment, exists there for a finite period, then vanishes, never to be seen again. Certain aspects of it may be retrievable (like, say, Jerome Robbins’ dances for the original production of Fiddler on the Roof, which have been reproduced for the current Broadway revival), but for the most part it’s gone for good. A skillfully made film or telecast may preserve some of its quality (once again, Robbins is the model—the TV version of Peter Pan conveys a remarkably clear sense of what the stage version must have looked and felt like), but never all of it, and in any case such documents are rare indeed.
In a way this is tragic, but it also explains the irresistible romance of theater, which is embodied in the phrase You had to be there. When it comes to a great production of a play, you do have to be there, and if you are, you become a witness to the ineffable. For the rest of your life you can say, “I saw Jefferson Mays in I Am My Own Wife, and it was soooo great…but you know what? You had to be there.” And that’s part of the magic—part of what makes theater so enduringly indispensable a part of the world of art, even though film and TV long ago pushed it to the cultural sidelines.
I hope what I wrote about Carson, by the way, doesn’t leave anyone with the idea that I don’t appreciate the not-so-simple joys of being entertained. Like Ed Wynn in Mary Poppins, I love to laugh, and though Johnny Carson didn’t make me laugh all that much, especially in his latter days, I owe an incalculable debt to the countless men and women who have, from Shakespearean buffoons to stand-up wizards. Nobody has to tell me that comedy is hard, or that it is a blessing. In fact, I think it’s wiser and more profound than tragedy. As I recently observed in an essay on the music of Haydn:
Just as Haydn the man was deeply religious, so was Haydn the artist a classicist of the highest seriousness—but one who did not assume his seriousness to be incompatible with humor. Like most (but not all!) of the greatest artists, he seems to have understood by instinct that “life is such an indissoluble mixture of heartbreak and absurdity that it might be more truly portrayed through the refracting lens of comedy.”
I originally wrote those words a few weeks after 9/11, at a moment when artists in New York City and elsewhere were turning their backs on comedy and succumbing to the temptation of portentousness. At such times we are at the mercy of those who confuse seriousness with solemnity—a mistake Haydn never made.
I hope I never make it, either.
(P.S. Most critics are halfwits.)
UPDATE: Another reader writes:
When I was in college I had the privilege of hearing Brendan Gill
speak. One thing he said has always stuck with me: we go to the movies by
ourselves because it's static, but we go to the theater because each
performance holds the possibility that there will be a disaster and we
don't want to be alone for that.
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TT: Extra large
I went to my framer yesterday afternoon and picked up the presidential commission for my appointment to the National Council on the Arts. It’s a splendidly old-fashioned document, about twice the size of a college diploma, printed in copperplate script on thick cream paper by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. It is, of course, a fill-in-the-blank form, starting with a space on top for the current president’s name, with the blanks filled in by a calligrapher.
Here's what it says:
To all who shall see these presents, Greeting:
Know ye, that reposing special trust and confidence in the Integrity and Ability of Terence Alan Teachout of New York, I have nominated, and, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, do appoint him as a Member of the National Council on the Arts for a term expiring September 3, 2010, and do authorize and empower him to execute and fulfill the duties of that Office according to law, and to have and to hold the said Office, with all the powers, privileges, and emoluments thereunto of right appertaining, unto him the said Terence Alan Teachout, subject to the conditions prescribed by law.
In testimony whereof, I have caused these Letters to be made Patent, and the Seal of the United States to be thereunto affixed.
Done at the city of Washington this twenty-ninth day of November in the year of our Lord two thousand four and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and twenty-ninth.
It’s boldly and illegibly signed at the bottom by the autopens of Secretary of State Rice (whose signature looks like "A.C. Pfft") and President Bush (his is a dead ringer for "Byurze").
The part I like best is the first blank. Reposing special trust and confidence in the—what? Are “Integrity and Ability” reserved for low-level appointments like mine? And if so, what do the presidential commissions of cabinet members say? Is the Secretary of the Interior also praised for his Integrity and Ability? Or does his commission contain doubly juicy superlatives reserved for the exclusive use of Washington’s really heavy hitters?
I kind of hate to admit this (well, no, I don’t), but I’m irresistibly reminded of a passage from Michael Collins’ wonderful Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys in which he describes one of the little-known steps a male astronaut must take when putting on his pressure suit in preparation for being shot into outer space:
Then it’s time to don a triangular yellow plastic urine bag by inserting the penis into a rubber receiver built into one corner of it. There are three sizes of receivers (small, medium, large), which are always referred to in more heroic terms: extra large, immense, and unbelievable.
Perhaps the bigger dogs get the equivalent of “extra large” or “immense” on their presidential commissions—though presumably not “unbelievable.”
As for those "emoluments," there aren’t any. Outside of my traveling expenses whenever I visit Washington on NEA business, this one’s on me, and I’ve been warned that I’ll be paying through the nose for the honor of hanging a presidential commission on my wall: I’ve already filled out enough paperwork to decimate a shady grove, and there’ll be plenty more to come before my six-year term expires. That’s all right by me. Aside from the fact that you don’t say no when the President of the United States asks you to do something for him, I consider it not merely an honor but a privilege to be able to give back something to the arts in America. Art has given special meaning to my life. Now it’s my turn.
All this notwithstanding, I figure I’m entitled to a little more than my train fare and the satisfactions of a job well done. Obviously the White House agrees, which I assume is the reason why presidential appointees are given such handsome-looking documents to hang on their walls. It went without saying that I’d put mine in a first-class frame, one identical to the ones I use in the Teachout Museum—but where to hang the damn thing? It’s too big to fit in any of the remaining empty spots (of which there are no longer very many) on the walls of my minuscule one-bedroom Upper West Side apartment, and when I considered taking down a piece of art to make room for my commission, my heart sank.
I thought and thought, and suddenly it came to me: why not the bathroom? Not only is it tastefully decorated in cornflower blue and yellow, but it’s next to the living room, thus allowing me to show off for my visitors by leaving the door discreetly ajar. But would it be disrespectful to hang a presidential commission there? Though a friend assured me that many actors keep their Oscars in the bathroom, I wasn’t satisfied. Such a gesture smacked of phony humility. (As Thomas Mann allegedly said to a fellow writer who was eating a bit too much humble pie, “You’re not great enough to be that modest.”) Then it struck me as I was giving a new acquaintance a tour of the Teachout Museum that my bathroom also contains a small lithograph by Pierre Bonnard, Le Soleil. If it’s good enough for Bonnard, I told myself firmly, it’s good enough for a presidential commission. So I took down my Suzanne Farrell poster and hung up my latest acquisition…and you know what? It looks pretty great. Besides, its presence will also help to remind me that no amount of good fortune relieves a man of the inescapable commitments of the flesh. Even a presidential appointee has to spend a certain amount of time in the bathroom each day, just like everyone else.
No doubt I’ll move in time to a somewhat larger apartment, and when I do I'm sure I’ll find a more appropriate spot for my Official Certificate of Integrity and Ability. For now, though, I like it just fine right where it is.
UPDATE: A friend who should know writes:
I do NOT think commissions are auto penned -- I am fairly certain they are not -- there are not enough of them to do that, and they really are a mark of honor. But I don't think the president's signature is real -- I think that is printed on the commissions at the beginning of each admin. But Condi's sig is, I am almost certain, Condi's sig.
Just so you know.
And another sharp-eyed reader points out that "A.C. Pfft" can't possibly be Condoleezza Rice, who wasn't confirmed until after my commission was signed: it must be Colin Powell. Now that's what I call illegible!
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TT: Almanac
“Never lie to a man with NEXIS!”
Glenn Reynolds, “Disclosure and Glass Houses” (MSNBC, Jan. 26, 2005)
| Wednesday, January 26, 2005
OGIC: Fortune cookie
"Gulley's old father in this book is taken from life and I, as a boy playing with paint in school holidays, remember very well the feelings of pity and surprise with which I looked at a gilt-framed canvas which he had brought out to show me, and propped against an apple tree among the weeds and cabbage stalks of a Normandy farm garden. I have an idea that it had just come back to him, rejected by the Academy which ten years before had been glad to hang his works. I remember my discomfort, as I realized that this man of fifty or so was appealing for sympathy from me, a boy of sixteen; that there were tears in his eyes as he begged me to look at his beautiful work ('the best thing I ever did') and asked me what had happened to the world which had ceased to admire such real 'true' art, and allowed itself to be cheated by 'daubers"'who could neither draw nor glaze; who dared not attempt 'finish.'
"I was myself in 1905 a devoted Impressionist, one of the 'daubers.' I thought that Impressionism was the only great and true art. I thought that the poor ruined broken-hearted man weeping before me in the sunlight of that squalid vegetable patch, was a pitiable failure, whose tragedy was very easily understood—he had no eye for colour, no respect for pigment, no talent, no right whatsoever to the name of artist.
"I don't know even now what that man's work was worth. I suspect from recollection that in these days it would be once more highly appreciated. For several schools have intervened, and having worked through Impressionism and Post Impressionism, the Fauves and the Cubists, we can look upon the late Victorians with a fresh eye and judge them, outside the passing fashion, for what they really were."
Joyce Cary, 1951 prefatory essay to The Horse's Mouth
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, January 26, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Too much information
I awoke a bit earlier than usual this morning, booted up my iBook, started my usual pre-breakfast surf of the Web, and suddenly it hit me...I soooo don't want any information today, except (maybe) the weather. I don't want to know the news, don't want to be in touch, don't want to read anybody's opinion of anything, don't care about the Oscar nominations, don't want to consider the short-term implications of the demise of the C train, don't give a damn about what's happening outside my front door. If I could, I'd cancel all my appointments, take the phone off the hook, ignore all incoming mail (including snail mail), skip my afternoon deadline, correct no proofs, blow off tonight's Broadway press preview, and spend the rest of the day and night in a state of elective mutism, communing with the contents of the Teachout Museum and listening to music about which I have no plans to write.
Alas, I can't do most of those things, or even very many of them. I have to schedule my days off well in advance, then defend them vigilantly against all comers. This isn't one of them. What's more, the mounting intensity of my desire to batten down the hatches suggests to me that I'm in severe need of more than just a day off. The world is too much with me, and I need to hole up and hide out for at least two consecutive days, preferably somewhere else. I can't hear myself thinking. I need some silence.
Like I said, none of that is on the menu, not immediately. But at least I can turn off the incoming information tap all day long, and that's my plan.
Now let's see if I stick to it.
(P.S. Read. Ponder. Shudder.)
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, January 26, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: That's all he wrote
Sorry, no postings today. I wrote a three-thousand-word piece from scratch Tuesday morning, just returned from two sets at a nightclub, and have another deadline this afternoon and a Broadway preview tonight. For the moment, I'm somewhat more than lightly toasted.
I leave you in the caring hands of Our Girl. See you Thursday. Or Friday.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, January 26, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"That was my favorite thing about playing England—all the girls looked like Brigitte Bardot, and all the guys looked like me."
Paul Desmond (quoted in Marian McPartland's Jazz World)
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, January 26, 2005 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, January 25, 2005
OGIC: Take my metaphor. Please.
It must be so stressful to be the designated pop culture obituarist at your publication when someone like Johnny Carson dies. Everyone, but everyone is going to run a competing piece. Not only every print publication in English, but now bloggers, too. Pesky never-sleeping bloggers, overcrowding the field. Everyone is going to pull out all the stops for this one. Everyone wants to turn out the single remembrance that will be remembered, that will be the beacon in an undifferentiated sea of "he was the man Americans went to bed with." How will you make sure your appreciation stands out among the multitude?
Answer: you will try. Really, really hard.
The formula that Carson perfected was beautiful. First came the stand-up routine, in which, as the audience sat at home, he stood erect as a needle, puncturing presidents, public figures, and celebrities. He was the Midwestern needle in a haystack, which no one could find and blunt, who emerged from the haystack every night to lash out at large, impersonal forces and then withdrew as sleep and morning beckoned.
Americans went to bed with a needle. All I can say is, ouch.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Tuesday, January 25, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Thumper's lament
We were flooded with visitors on Sunday and Monday, and they didn’t come to read about high culture, either. No, they wanted to see what Our Girl and I wrote about the death of Johnny Carson. It never fails to make me smile when one of our pop-culture posts causes the hits to pour in (posting about off-Broadway shows rarely has that kind of effect!).
Here’s something else that interested me: a not-insignificant percentage of our readers were actively offended by the fact that we didn’t join in the chorus of praise for Carson. You can’t post comments on this blog, but Roger L. Simon linked to what I wrote on Sunday, and a lot of people responded with angry comments. (Go here to read them.)
So far I’ve only received two sharply critical pieces of personal e-mail, one obscene, the other temperate but unequivocal:
The point is not that there were things to critique about the Carson style. No. The thing is, Johnny Carson was not an artist nor an intellect; he was a personality, and among people above a certain age, a fairly universally beloved personality.
Shame. Might you not have waited a few days to speak ill of the dead?
In addition, other bloggers are starting to weigh in, and this posting is fairly representative of what they're saying:
Terry Teachout, the esteemed art critic and in-house blogger for ArtsJournal.com, has a remembrance of the late Johnny Carson of note for its spectacularly negative view of the seminal comedian. It's all the more spectacular because it's done with the least emotional of tone.
Consider Teachout's closer, which comes perilously close to being contemptuous, something never seen in obituaries, especially hours-old obituaries….
Now look again at what I wrote about Carson. No, it wasn’t favorable, and yes, my tone was cool. I was reacting to the floodtide of unctuous celebrity comment in which we were immersed within hours of his passing. But I didn’t call him stupid or offensive or evil—in fact, I didn’t say anything personal about him at all. My point was that his comedy was inoffensive and ephemeral, and that I suspected it wouldn’t be remembered for very long. It isn’t obvious because I didn’t mean for it to be, but in a sense I was writing about Carson’s own celebrity from a religious perspective. “Perhaps he knew how little it means to have once been famous,” I said in closing. If he did, then he died a wise man.
I can think of a lot of plausible responses to what I wrote (one of which I’ve already posted). But why on earth would anyone be offended by it? And what possible difference would it have made for me to wait a day, or even a week, to post it? Johnny Carson didn’t read what I wrote, and I can’t imagine he would have cared if he had. De mortuis nil nisi bonum has never made any sense to me whatsoever, nor is it practiced by the infinitely more robust obituarists who write for English newspapers. For them, the statute of limitations on candor expires when the death certificate is signed. I think that's as it should be, though to be honest all along is better still. I like what Rex Stout made Nero Wolfe say in The Black Mountain when he had occasion to speak frankly about his recently murdered best friend:
I pay him the tribute of speaking of him and feeling about him precisely as I did when he lived; the insult would be to smear his corpse with the honey excreted by my fear of death.
It's also worth pointing out that I didn't go on Oprah and call Carson a talentless hack (which I don't think he was). Instead, I posted what I had to say on a blog, where it’s been seen by something like ten thousand viewers so far—not an insignificant figure, but trivial by comparison to the hundreds of thousands of people who presumably tuned in to one of the various TV tributes to Carson that aired on Sunday night. Exactly how is that shameful?
The funny thing is that I’m not known for being nasty. Most of the reviews I write are favorable, mainly because I’m an enthusiast who seeks out opportunities to write about things I like. I believe that silence is the most powerful form of negative criticism, and when I do feel obliged to drop the big one, I try to be careful to drop it only on those in a position to shoot back. I go out of my way not to slam little-known actors or musicians. A dead superstar, by contrast, seems to me fair game—yet it’s been quite a while since anything I wrote provoked such furious responses.
So what’s all the fuss about? I’m not altogether sure, but I’m not even slightly surprised, because I’ve been stirring up similar fusses all my life. I got my start as a critic in Kansas City, which is about as close to the center of the midwest as you can get, and I noticed early on that a great many readers of the Kansas City Star were actively averse to the frank expression of unfavorable opinion—any unfavorable opinion, however mild. These chronically agreeable people clearly agreed with Thumper’s mother in Bambi, who said, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.” Not surprisingly, they thought me rude, but more than that, they seemed to take what I wrote personally. It was as if they felt threatened by the mere existence of someone who disagreed with them.
This attitude puzzled me, and does to this day. I wish I could plumb it more deeply, but I can’t, possibly because I don’t share it. I don’t care what other critics think unless I know their work well and respect it, and even then I’m not threatened by their disagreement. Sometimes it may cause me to rethink my own opinion—there are a few critics with whom I don’t differ lightly—but what’s wrong with that? I don’t mind changing my mind. I’d rather be right than consistent.
Which brings us back to the late Johnny Carson. To those readers who didn’t like what I wrote about him, I say: what’s it to you? Why do you care? I’m just a guy with a blog. If you don’t like it, start one of your own. That’s the wonderful thing about the blogosphere—it puts all its participants on a potentially equal footing, something that was never true of the mainstream media. By all means feel free to get into the game. But let me give you fair warning: blogging isn’t for the thin-skinned. If you were offended by what I wrote about Carson, wait till you start opening your e-mail.
Here's something I posted last year:
These three words, when used in the same paragraph, automatically turn my ears off:
(1) Offended
(2) Demand
(3) Apologize
I'll stand by that.
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TT: Almanac
But whatever lies behind the door
There is nothing much to do
Angel or devil, I don't care
For in front of that door, there is you
Jacques Brel, “My Death” (translated by Mort Schuman and Eric Blau)
| Monday, January 24, 2005
OGIC: Cars and stars
The RSS feed alone from Ann Althouse's blog is providing quite a bit of drama today. Her post headings tell a story entire, and although it starts out dicey, it seems to have a happy ending. Here are the headlines in order from oldest to newest:
I just wrecked my car! -- 22 hours ago
After the wreck. --17 hours ago
The morning after the car wreck. --7 hours ago
Car shopping! --5 hours ago
The resiliency of the human spirit is a thing to behold. Thank goodness nobody was seriously hurt. And that in the end there was shopping.
Also at Althouse.com you'll find that the good professor has read Newsweek's pre-Oscar-nomination actor interviews so you don't have to. She shares all the good bits here, including this eyebrow-raiser from Ponce de Leonardo DiCaprio:
This art form is only 100 years old, and I am truly curious to see how the medium is going to change in the next couple hundred years.
And we're truly curious to see how you plan on doing that, Leo.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Monday, January 24, 2005 | Permanent
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OGIC: The temptation of Hockey Girl 1*
Some kindly intentioned emailers have been inquiring whether this news makes me hopeful. To be honest with you, it just makes me want to cry. I feel a little like a deflated punching bag after last week's ups and downs in the world of no-hockey. It's the same old story: we were led to hope just a little bit, knowing better. We found ourselves, at the end of the week and two bargaining sessions, smacked back down. Our own fault, I'm sure. Which is why this week I'm going to leave it at a mirthless "HA!" and get back to my reading.
You know, I think it is undeniable that this winter I have been a more productive and sociable member of society than usual. I believe, too, that I've had more time and mental space to attend to books, art, music, world news, my friends, blogging, and piles and piles of beauteous snow. And I know the winter has still been a little prosaic and joyless and dead. Such is my affliction.
* Yes, that's how I am known among a certain set of friends, I just discovered. I actually don't mind, but they should feel lucky it's not Hockey Girl 2 or 3. Verrrrrry lucky.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Monday, January 24, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Today's wildest posting by an artblogger
Don’t ask questions—just go here.
(P.S. You should read her on her not-so-wild days, too.)
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OGIC: Well-adjusted
Terry and a couple other helpful souls have written to answer my earlier question.
In 1978 Kenneth Tynan received $15,000 for his New Yorker profile of Johnny Carson. Today the equivalent would be a cool $43,501.85. Curiosity quenched.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Monday, January 24, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Beatrice, meet Beatrix
Litblogger Ron Hogan, who writes Beatrice, launched a new blog this morning under the auspices of artsjournal.com, our illustrious host. It's called Beatrix, and it's not the same as Beatrice. I'll let Ron explain the difference:
How did this season's hot books generate their heat? And why do other novels surrounded by buzz turn into duds? Beatrix openly speculates about these questions in the form of a "book review review." I'll watch the major book reviewers to discern patterns of taste and/or critical strategy, and sometimes I'll follow a book through the review matrix to see how opinions coalesce or wildly diverge. Occasionally, I'll get the reviewers themselves to answer a few questions so we can learn more about where they're coming from--maybe I'll even find an author or two willing to review their reviewers….
Beatrice continues as an author-driven blog; in addition to gathering news items about various writers, it also includes original insights from them in the form of interviews, blog excerpts, and guest articles. My hope is that Beatrice and Beatrix will each be a standalone blog worthy of your attention...and although you don't have to read them both, I hope you will.
We will. You should.
By the way, it’s been quite a while since I last explained the relationship of “About Last Night” to artsjournal.com, and we’re getting a whole lot of hits today on account of yesterday's postings about Johnny Carson (yikes!). So here goes:
"About Last Night" is hosted by artsjournal.com, a daily digest of English-language arts and cultural journalism—news stories, reviews, commentaries—drawn from newspapers, magazines, Web sites, and blogs around the world. Ever since it was featured in the New York Times in 2003, artsjournal.com has become essential daily reading for art-conscious Web surfers everywhere.
A year and a half ago, artsjournal.com began launching a series of arts-related blogs, most but not all of them subject-specific. Scroll down to the bottom of the right-hand column and you’ll find descriptions of and links to all of these blogs, of which “About Last Night” was the first. It’s quite a portfolio, and worth your regular attention.
If you read “About Last Night” but don’t look at artsjournal.com, you’re missing a big bet. I check it out every morning. It’s how I know what’s going on in the world of art. Take a look. And while you’re at it, say hello to Beatrix for me.
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OGIC: Anywhere but anywhere but here
That's where I'll be on this day next week (possibly wearing my large-lettered "OGIC" hoodie, à la Ray Nicolette). And I quote:
Film critic and historian David Thomson will discuss his new book, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, Monday, January 31 at 7pm at 57th Street Books, 1301 E. 57th St. in Hyde Park. For more information, call (773) 684-1300 or visit www.semcoop.com.
Film critic and historian David Thomson explores the entire ecology of Hollywood and American movies in his absorbing new history-cum-sociological study-cum-philosophical meditation. Thomson chronicles, analyzes and deconstructs Hollywood, exploring the personalities, the films, the business and the culture of the movies, as well as the place of the movies in American culture. He asks, and tries to answer, questions that would daunt most of his thumbs-up-thumbs-down colleagues: "What have movies done to us?" and "Do movies offer education or rather a lifetime of impossible desire?"
David Thomson is a teacher, critic and author, whose books include The Biographical Dictionary of Film.
Even if I weren't automatically sold on a talk by the author of my favorite movie tome, this press release might well have lured me there. Publicity materials are not, after all, customary lurking grounds for out-and-out snarkery like "thumbs-up-thumbs-down colleagues." That may be more of a little | |
