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About Last Night
TERRY TEACHOUT on the arts
in New York City
(with additional dialogue by OUR GIRL IN CHICAGO)
Friday, August 11, 2006
TT: WASP nest
I review two shows in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, one in New York, one out of town, both favorably.
A.R. Gurney’s new play, Indian Blood, just opened off Broadway at Primary Stages:
Like most of Mr. Gurney’s plays, “Indian Blood” is peopled with white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who are variously conscious of their loss of cultural ascendancy. Here as in “Ancestral Voices,” the 1999 play to which it is a companion piece, the WASPs in question are actual members of the Gurney family, and the story is a wry semi-autobiographical vignette in which Eddie (Charles Socarides), the youthful narrator, draws a dirty picture, passes it around to his classmates, and promptly runs afoul of the Law of Unintended Consequences when a priggish relation (Jeremy Blackman) threatens to show it to his genteel grandmother (Pamela Payton-Wright).
Unlike “Ancestral Voices,” which began as a book and evolved into a staged reading, “Indian Blood” is a full-fledged play performed, like “Our Town,” without a set or props, a self-evident fact that the narrator (Charles Socarides) calls to our attention so often that it becomes annoying (once would have been more than enough). Save for this sole lapse of taste, it’s a sweet little tale with overtones of rue that recall the novels of John P. Marquand….
No less pleasing was my visit to the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival:
When the thermometer closes in on the century mark, wise New Yorkers head north. I recommend a day trip to the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival to see Terrence O’Brien’s joyously dotty outdoor production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” staged in the style of “3rd Rock From the Sun,” complete with space invaders and a flying saucer. Mr. O’Brien, the festival’s founder and artistic director, isn’t overly concerned with thematic consistency, and his “Midsummer Night’s Dream” also contains such interpolations as a dance routine choreographed by Lisa Reinhart in which Titania (Nance Williamson) leads the cast in a frenzied mambo, lip-syncing to the music of Yma Súmac, the mad diva of Peru.
Don’t let any of this scare you off: It’s all funny, and Mr. O’Brien’s cast hurls itself into the maelstrom with happy abandon….
No link. Act accordingly.
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TT: Almanac
"A kind of horror came over the master of Georgetown then, a sudden chilling intimation of the underlying ruthlessness of the native character. Ireland had all the cosy warmth of the reptile house in a zoo, he thought: you were lapped in blarney and butter until the moment your means of livelihood were seized or your father was shot."
Honor Tracy, The First Day of Friday
| Thursday, August 10, 2006
OGIC: Updates
Erin O' Connor has further thoughts on Gilbert White:
There is a special relationship between the words here--minimal, sharp, observant but not effusive, descriptive but not lingering or self-conscious--and the experience they describe, which is not only essentially non-verbal, but elementally impersonal. The pleasure evoked by these descriptions is not a linguistic pleasure, or even a particularly thoughtful one, though it is a knowledgeable and aware one. You might call it a modest pleasure, or at least one that is not in the least ego-centric. There is no self in White's entries, though there is an outlook; he reduces himself to a pair of eyes and impartially records what they see.
And Delicious Pundit throws in another Larkin birthday selection, "Essential Beauty."
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, August 10, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: So you want to see a show?
Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.
Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.
BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here)
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)
• The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)
OFF BROADWAY:
• Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)
• Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON:
• Pig Farm (comedy, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)
• Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)
CLOSING SUNDAY:
• Faith Healer (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, August 10, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"'I am only to be a reporter,' Henry assured him. 'I shall simply write what I see.'
"'Then I don't suppose they will print it,' the Rector said shrewdly."
Honor Tracy, A Number of Things
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, August 10, 2006 | Permanent
link | Wednesday, August 9, 2006
OGIC: Selborne, August 1771
When the world is too much with me, I reach for Gilbert White. The eighteenth-century naturalist made 10,000 daily records of the flora and fauna, weather and harvests of his Hampshire village, Selborne. These are his notes from August 1771.
Aug. 5. Young partridgers, strong flyers. Soft showers. Swifts. Pease are hacking.
Aug. 6. Nuthatch chirps; is very loquacious at this time of the year. Large bat appears, vespertilio altivolans.
Aug. 7. Rye-harvest begins. Procured the above-mentioned specimen of the bat, a male.
Aug. 8. Rain in the night, with wind. Swifts. Sultry & moist: Cucumbers bear abundantly. Showers about. Procured a second large bat, a male.
Aug. 10. Flying ants, male & female.
Aug. 11. Heavy clouds round the horizon. Lambs play & frolick.
Aug. 16. Rain, driving rain, dry. Four swifts still.
Aug. 18. No dew, rain, rain, rain. Swans flounce & dive. Chilly & dark.
Aug. 19. Swifts abound. Swallows & martins bring out their second broods which are perchers. Thunder: wind.
Aug. 22. Bank-martins [sand-martins] bring out their second brood. Swifts. No swifts seen after this day.
Aug. 23. Young swallows & martins come out every day. Still weather. Wheat-harvest becomes pretty general.
Aug. 25. Wheat not ripe at Faringdon. Winter weather. Oats & barley ripe before wheat.
Aug. 26. Nuthatch chirps much. No swifts since 22nd.
Aug. 28. Dark, grey, & soft. People bind their wheat.
Aug. 29. Fog, sun, brisk wind. Sweet day. Wheat begins to be housed.
Aug. 30. Young Stoparolas abound. Swallows congregate in vast flocks. Wheat housed.
I really do bliss out reading these journals. The above, for me, is a story, a poem, and a picture all at once, minimally wordy but maximally expressive, piquing every sense.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, August 9, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"He had previously had no idea of the difficulties and frustrations of a correspondent's life. All one did, he had believed, was to collect the facts from people anxious and willing to give them accurately and then, after due reflection, to write the piece. Now he had to learn about the different kinds of lying, that of the official, that of the press relations officer, the lies of men with grievances or axes to grind or something to conceal, or who simply preferred lying to the truth."
Honor Tracy, A Number of Things
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, August 9, 2006 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, August 8, 2006
OGIC: Writers in amber
In between novels in A Dance to the Music of Time, I'm reading around in Anthony Powell's captivating Memoirs. As in the fiction, the portraits here are sharp and indelible, and several are of notable writers. For instance, F. Scott Fitzgerald at the MGM commissary in 1937:
He was smallish, neat, solidly built, wearing a light grey suit, light-coloured tie, all his tones essentially light. Photographs—seen for the most part years later—do not do justice to him. Possibly he was one of those persons who at once become self-conscious when photographed. Even snapshots tend to give him an air of swagger, a kind of cockiness, which, anyway at that moment, he did not at all possess. On the contrary, one was at once aware of an odd sort of unassuming dignity. There was no hint at all of the cantankerous temper that undoubtedly lurked beneath the surface. His air could be thought a trifle sad, not, as sometimes described at this period, in the least brokedown.
...Fitzgerald took a pen from his pocket, and a scrap of paper. On the paper he drew a rough map of North America. Then he added three arrows pointing to the continent. The arrows showed the directions from which culture had flowed into the United States. I am ashamed to say I cannot now remember precisely which these channels were: possibly the New England seabaord; the South (the Old Dominion); up through Latin America; yet I seem to retain some impression of an arrow lancing in from the Pacific. The point of mentioning this diagram is, however, the manner in which a characteristic side of Fitzgerald was revealed. He loved instructing. There was a schoolmasterly streak, a sudden enthusiasm, simplicity of exposition, qualities that might have offered a brilliant career as a teacher or lecturer at school or university.
Not only that, but the day Powell lunched with him, Fitzgerald began his scandalous affair with Sheilah Graham. Next is Ford Madox Ford:
Another Duckworth author, though only intermittently, was Ford Madox Ford. As the work of an old acquaintance, Gerald Duckworth was prepared to publish Ford's books from time to time, but they were not popular with Balston [a Duckworth director], who did not regard their small sales as redeemed by the author's undoubted interest in literary experiment. Ford's novels usually deal with a similar social level to those of Galsworthy, though Ford is far more aware of the paradoxes of human nature, the necessity, at that moment, of exploring new forms of writing. An immense self-pity—in general an almost essential adjunct of the bestseller—infected Ford adversely as a serious novelist, while at the same time for some reason never boosting his sales. His misunderstandings and sentimentalities on the subject of English life (half-German himself, he very nearly opted for German nationality just before 1914) make him always in some degree a foreigner, marvelling at an England that never was.
And, at length, George Orwell:
Orwell was in his way quite ambitious, I think, and had a decided taste for power; but his ambition did not run along conventional lines, and he liked his power to be of the éminence grise variety.That preference was no doubt partly owed to a sense of being in some manner cut off from the rest of the world; not allowed, as it were by an irresistible exterior influence, to enjoy more than very occasionally such few amenities as human existence provides. This did not prevent his strong will and natural shrewdness from making him an effective negotiator. Indeed, his genuine unworldliness—in the popular sense—was used by him with considerable effect when handling those who were rich or in authority. He would somehow unload on them the whole burden of his own guilt, until they groaned beneath its weight. He was not at all afraid of making himself disagreeable to persons whom he found, in their dealings with himself, disagreeable. "If editors, or people of that sort, tell you to alter things, or put you to a lot of trouble," he used to say, "always put them to trouble in return. It discourages them from making themselves awkward in the future."
It is interesting to speculate how Orwell's life would have developed had he survived as a very successful writer. The retirement to Jura, even at the preliminary warning signs of financial improvement, was probably symptomatic. Orwell, I suspect, could thrive only in comparative adversity. All the same, one can never foresee the effect of utterly changed circumstances. Prosperity might have produced unguessable alterations in himself and his work. It would inevitably have invested him with more complex forms of living; complications which, in accordance with his system, would have to be rationalized to himself, and weighed in the balance.
Orwell's gift was curiously poised, as suggested earlier, between politics and literature. The former both attracted and repelled him; the latter, close to his heart, was at the same time tainted with the odor of escape. He once said that he could not write a line without a specific purpose. On the other hand, so far as day to day politics were concerned, he could never have become integrated into any normal party machine....
He was easily bored. If a subject came up in conversation that did not appeal to him, he would make no effort to take it in; falling into a dejected silence, or jerking aside his head like a horse jibbing at a proffered apple. On the other hand, when Orwell's imagination was caught, especially by some idea, he would discuss that exhaustively. He was one of the most enjoyable people to talk with about books, full of parallels and quotations, the last usually far from verbally accurate....
The Orwell myth, now substantially launched in a shape scarcely amenable to modification, presents on the whole a tortured saint by El Greco (for whom Orwell would certainly have made an admirable model), a figure from whom all human qualities have been removed. Periodically fierce arguments rage as to precisely where he stood politically. I am not here concerned with that side of him, although it is worth remembering that it took courage—in that now largely forgotten post-war period, when Stalin was still being held up by the Left as a genial uncle—to fire an anti-Communist broadside like Animal Farm that placed a permanent dent in the whole Marxist structure; especially courageous on the part of a writer, himself of the Left, laying his professional reputation open to smear and boycott, which those he so devastatingly exposed hastened to set about.
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OGIC: Just as I thought
The lovely Cinetrix took herself to see Little Miss Sunshine and confirms my strong preconception based on a viewing of the trailer: not so much indie-rific or indie-lightful as indie-rivative. (And. Can we talk about those terribominable Snickers ads that are dumbing up our freeways this summer and apparently causing me to write stuff like that? I mean, honestly: "Satisfectellent"? Tear them down now, please.)
Anyway, not only does the Cinetrix remove any lingering doubts I might have had about my summary dismissal of Little Miss Sunshine, she gives a welcome nod to a TT and OGIC fave from way back, The Daytrippers. We both liked this movie on general principles, but that Hope Davis-Parker Posey combo really hits Terry where he lives. Understandably enough—they're both wonderful actresses, and casting them as sisters was a truly inspired move.
UPDATE: Jan Freeman of the Boston Globe is on the case of Snickers' recent crimes against the English language:
Satisfectellent, similarly, is a monster mashup of an adjective. If it's satisfaction plus excellent, then what's the fect? And where's the X that excellent so badly needs? Fectellent sets the analogizing mind adrift in the realm of infection, repellent, and other not-so-XLNT associations. Still not salivating here!
Yep, I had insect repellent rattling around in my head after seeing that one, too. Messaging mission unaccomplished, I'd say.
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TT: Almanac
"Dame Polly required but two things from the novelist's art, a rattling good yarn or a jolly good laugh. She declined to read books by girls of fifteen, proletarians or aliens, subtle evocations of childhood were thrown at cats in her garden, exquisitely sensitive portrayals of lunacy served as fuel for the boiler and a whole literature of protest by crazy mixed-up kids of forty-two lay cemented beneath the Chinese pagoda on the bank of her stream."
Honor Tracy, A Number of Things
| Monday, August 7, 2006
OGIC: That meme
I know, the One Book meme is sooooo last week, but here I go anyway...
• One book that changed your life. I've blogged about it a lot already, but I'm going to say Shirley Hazzard's Transit of Venus. Maybe to say it changed my life is a little melodramatic, but I can say that it changed my sense of the possibilities of the realist novel. No, it changed my sense of the possibilities of language. Yes, language. I kept pinching myself while reading it—not literally, but you get the idea.
• One book that you’ve read more than once. A friend recently told me that he's reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time, and I realized that this is a condition I aspire to. In other words, I wanted for a second to claw his eyes out, but the second passed and I masked my jealous rage nicely, I thought. It used to be every Christmastime that I read P&P. Now my readings are further spaced out, every three or four years instead of every single one as I try (without hope) to regain a state of innocence vis-à-vis this particular book. (Note: I'm in good company on this count.)
• One book you’d want on a desert island. I know what you think I'm going to say, but I'll take a fat blank book (and a supply of pens).
• One book that made you laugh. Randall Jarrell's campus satire Pictures from an Institution always makes me laugh, again and again, savagely. See for yourself: "If you had given a Benton student a pencil and a piece of paper, and asked her to draw something, she would have looked at you in helpless astonishment: it would have been plain to her that you knew nothing about art. By the time a Benton artist got through exploiting the possibilities of her medium, it was too dark to do anything else that day; and most of the students never learned that there was anything else to do." Etc., etc., ad infinitum.
• One book that made you cry. The Furies by Fernanda Eberstadt. The tragedy that ends this novel is shocking and sad, but what pushed me to tears was the terrible logic of it. (In addition, this book not being reprinted in paperback makes me want to cry. It's worth the price of the cloth edition, though.)
• One book that you wish had been written. A novel by Alice James. Don't you think she'd have given Henry a run for his money?
• One book that you wish had never been written. Just one? I'll get back to you on this. It may require a whole post.
• One book you’re currently reading. I'm still reading Anthony Powell, as reported here, and will be for some time. But for variety's sake I'll say that I'm also reading another Powell: Dawn Powell's Angels on Toast. After reading half and inexplicably putting it down a few years ago, I'm starting again at the beginning. This is no reflection on the book; I did the same thing with Anna Karenina three times before I finished it!
• One book you’ve been meaning to read. Proust's book. You know the one. And in French, no less. (I'm on page 3, so I'll still count this as an intention rather than underway.)
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TT: Memoirs of a gym rat
Now that I spend so much time on the road, I have to take my workouts where and when I can find them. That's why I went straight from Penn Station to my Upper West Side gym last Friday at eight-thirty, an hour when I'm usually sitting on the aisle of a Broadway theater. It felt more than a little bit weird. Manhattan is full of busy people whose schedules oblige them to operate at oblique angles to the clock, but even so, a gym still isn’t the sort of place where most of us care to be seen on a Friday night. I caught myself looking out of the corner of my eye at the other refugees from normal life who were taking exercise after hours, and wondered whether they in turn were looking at me and muttering to themselves, Poor guy, he can’t get a date! Smiling wryly, I inserted my Ultimate Ear in-ear monitors, fired up my iPod, and withdrew from the world for the next forty-five minutes, tugging violently at the handle of a rowing machine in order to defer for as long as possible my ultimate appointment with the distinguished thing.
I spent Saturday and Sunday chewing through a mountain of piled-up mail, straightening out my reviewing calendar, dining with Supermaud, and going to a couple of plays, one in Manhattan and the other in New Jersey. I was pleased to find in the mail a copy of the bound manuscript of Somewhere, Amanda Vaill's forthcoming biography of Jerome Robbins, and promptly set to reading it in between appointments. One of the pleasures of my line of work is that I get to read books like Somewhere prior to publication and listen to CDs in advance of their street dates. (In recent weeks I’ve been sampling a stack of preview copies of soon-to-be-released albums by Ani DiFranco, Bill Frisell, Roger Kellaway, Diana Krall, Audra McDonald, and Chris Thile.)
Just as I was getting ready to pick up a Zipcar on Saturday and drive out to Madison to see the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, I got a call from a TV producer who wanted to know whether I’d seen World Trade Center and would come to the studio to chat about it. “No and no,” I told her. As I mentioned in this space the other day, I haven’t gone to the movies since I got out of the hospital, and I saw no good reason to break that record for a movie about 9/11, no matter how fine it may be, and least of all in order to talk about it on TV. Most TV “conversations” are semi-staged pseudo-debates whose participants are picked with the intention of generating heat rather than shedding light. Me, I prefer radio, where you're occasionally allowed to speak without interruption for more than ten seconds in a row and there’s a pretty good chance that your interviewer doesn’t already know what you’re going to say.
Truth to tell, though, I didn’t really want to be doing much of anything at that particular moment. I love flying from city to city to see new shows, but I also like to spend a certain amount of time curled up on my living-room couch, looking at the Teachout Museum and thinking about nothing in particular. I’ve learned how to get things done on planes, trains, and buses, but they’re always going somewhere, and sometimes I prefer to be going nowhere.
I'm definitely going somewhere today: I have an appointment with my cardiologist, after which I'm headed for Connecticut, where I’ll spend the middle part of the week working on Hotter Than That. (Reading the manuscript of Somewhere whetted my creative edge.) I’ll be leaving the blog in the capable hands of Our Girl until Friday, so don’t be alarmed by my disappearance. On Friday it’s back to New York for The Fantasticks, Mr. Dooley’s America, and Fame Becomes Me. That’s my life, and I like it, usually.
Just in case you’re wondering, you’ll find me at the gym in between shows. Dead men write no books, nor do they get to curl up on their living-room couches and look lovingly at their lithographs. Given the alternative, I prefer sitting on a rowing machine and listening to my iPod. The Teachout Museum will keep.
UPDATE: Maud just blogged about her latest visit to the Teachout Museum. And my cardiologist (bless him) says I'm in the pink.
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TT: The Terry Teachout Workout Tape
Here’s what I listened to at the gym last Friday:
• Woody Herman, “Your Father’s Mustache” (with Buddy Rich on drums)
• Tommy Dorsey, “Well, Git It!” (ditto)
• Mel Powell, “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” (with Benny Goodman on clarinet)
• Lou Reed, “White Light/White Heat” (the live version)
• Del McCoury Band, “What Made Milwaukee Famous”
• Warren Zevon, “Werewolves of London”
• Steely Dan, “What a Shame About Me”
• The Band, “We Can Talk”
• Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, “Walkin’ One and Only”
• The Bangles, “Walk Like an Egyptian” (courtesy of Gilmore Girls)
• Metronome All-Stars, “Victory Ball” (with Charlie Parker on alto sax and Lennie Tristano on piano)
• Pat Metheny Trio, “Unquity Road” (with Jaco Pastorius on bass)
• Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Up Around the Bend”
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TT: Almanac
"He had plenty more drinks and then supped and retired early to bed, where for the first time for many many nights he enjoyed the kind of deep, refreshing slumber that little children have, and the very good, and the very wicked."
Honor Tracy, The Straight and Narrow Path
| Friday, August 5, 2005
TT: You don't have to be Irish
Friday again, and time for my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser (posted by remote control from Chicago with the help of OGIC—I'm still on the road). I devoted most of this week's column to a rave review of the Irish Repertory Theatre's superlative production of Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come!:
Mr. Friel's play is, of course, a modern classic, one of the outstanding English-language plays of the postwar era. Written in 1964, it's a textbook example of how to take an over-familiar situation—the inability of a bright young man to communicate with his stolid, emotionally closed-off father—and make it blazingly fresh and immediate. In a stroke of ingenuity that only seems obvious in retrospect, Mr. Friel has split Gar, who is leaving “the land of the curlew and the snipe” to seek his fortune in far-off Philadelphia, into two people, one public (Michael FitzGerald), the other private (James Kennedy) and invisible save to his flesh-and-blood companion. It is the private Gar who gives voice to the public Gar's interior monologue, a “Lucky Jim”-like stream of frustrated, coruscating mockery directed at the hapless residents of the village in which he lives, and above all at his father, S.B. “Screwballs” O'Donnell (Edwin C. Owens), a gloomy widower who cannot bring himself to express his love and pride for the son he is about to lose….
I could go on and on about the cast, each member of which deserves a separate paragraph of lavish praise (though I mustn't fail to make particular mention of Mr. Owens, who triumphs in the daunting task of illuminating the soul of an all-but-inarticulate man). David Raphel's shabby décor is impeccably exact, right down to the cardboard suitcase into which Gar stuffs his earthly goods. As for the staging of Ciarán O'Reilly, the company's co-founder and producing director, it's so subtle as to be invisible: all you see is the play itself….
No link. To read the whole thing (which also contains a review of Lincoln Center Festival 2005's now-closed production of Yukio Mishima's Modern Noh Plays), buy a copy of Friday's Journal and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, where you'll find all kinds of good stuff about matters artistic and cultural. Or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which I strongly recommend—it's one of the best deals in electronic journalism.
Now, back to the woods. See you Monday.
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TT: Almanac
“A while to work, and after, holiday.”
William Shakespeare, Richard II
| Thursday, August 4, 2005
OGIC: Fortune cookie
Things I Learned Senior Year
1. A dinner coat looks better than full dress.
2. There is as yet no law determining what constitutes trespass in an airplane.
3. Six hours of sleep are not necessary.
4. Bicarbonate of soda taken before retiring makes you feel better the next day.
5. You needn't be fully dressed if you wear a cap and gown to a nine-o'clock recitation.
6. Theater tickets may be charged.
7. Flowers may be charged.
8. May is the shortest month in the year.
Robert Benchley, "What College Did to Me"
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, August 4, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
“Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.”
Susan Sontag, On Photography
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, August 4, 2005 | Permanent
link | Wednesday, August 3, 2005
OGIC: Fortune cookie
Things I Learned Junior Year
1. Emerson left his pastorate because he had some argument about communion.
2. All women are untrustworthy.
3. Pushing your arms back as far as they will go fifty times each day increases your chest measurement.
4. Marcus Aurelius had a son who turned out to be a bad boy.
5. Eight hours of sleep are not necessary.
6. Heraclitus believed that fire was the basis of all life.
7. A good way to keep your trousers pressed is to hang them from the bureau drawer.
8. The chances are that you will never fill an inside straight.
9. The Republicans believe in a centralized government, the Democrats in a de-centralized one.
10. It is not necessarily effeminate to drink tea.
Robert Benchley, "What College Did to Me"
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, August 3, 2005 | Permanent
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OGIC: Too hot to blog...
In complete sentences, anyway. But check out Elizabeth Gaffney on my favorite novel, Outer Life on book recommendations, William Grimes following Terry's lead with a rave about Rachel Howard's new book, and Hilary Spurling on being Matisse's biographer.
I'll try to check in tomorrow, and to answer my email too. Thanks for your patience in the meantime—the computer and air conditioner are in different rooms.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, August 3, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Wired
I got up very, very early yesterday morning to write my Washington Post column for this Sunday, went to the gym, then staggered back home to write a piece about Me and You and Everyone We Know. I wrote four hundred words, then fell asleep at my desk. A few minutes later (at least I think it was a few minutes) I woke up and took a peek at the screen of my iBook. This is what I saw:
For the moment, though, American filmgoers remain trapped in a transitional perioddddddddddddddddddddddddddd
The funny part is that the first four hundred words were actually pretty good....
Never before have I fallen asleep in the middle of writing a piece, but in every other way the events of the past few days have been all too typical. This is what happens when I have too much to do in not enough time: I stay up too late, get up too early, and blog compulsively in between deadlines. That's the weird part. You'd think I wouldn't blog at all under such dire circumstances, but as soon as the adrenalin starts to flow, I reach for my iBook, and the only thing that will turn off the tap is sheer exhaustion.
I'm not done yet—I still have to finish the Me and You piece, write and file my Wall Street Journal drama column for this Friday, and correct the galleys of the Commentary essay I wrote on Monday morning—but at least the end really is in sight. The rest is silence: I have a rendezvous with a Zipcar. (I even remembered to buy sunblock for my left arm!) Our Girl will post my Friday drama-column teaser and such almanac entries as I manage to upload before hitting the road. Otherwise, you won't be hearing from me again until Monday.
See you later—and when you speak of me, speak well.
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TT: Almanac
"An artist should be worldwide in his thinking, but implacably national once he begins to create."
Maurice Ravel (interview with Olin Downes, New York Times, 1928)
| Tuesday, August 2, 2005
TT: Weekday update
I knocked out nearly three thousand words for Commentary yesterday morning. One piece down, three to go, and then I'm soooo out of here...but I didn't forget about you, not even in the general welter of cash-generating activity. In addition to all the lovely bloglinks to be found immediately below, take a peek at the Top Fives and you'll find four brand-new picks. (I also put up a new "Teachout Elsewhere" item.)
Now, back to work. The Zipcar beckons!
P.S. I reviewed Rachel Howard's The Lost Night: A Daughter's Search for the Truth of Her Father's Murder in this morning's Wall Street Journal. No link, but the Top Five entry will serve as a teaser. Buy the paper. Then buy the book.
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TT: Elsewhere
Two weeks with a dialup connection left me starving for a nice long high-speed blogtroll as soon as I got back to New York. I just pulled my line out of the water, and here's some of what I fished up:
• To start with, I stumbled across two very different responses to my recent postings from Smalltown, U.S.A., penned by a pair of preferred bloggers.
• Mr. Gurgling Cod quotes one of my favorite passages from one of my favorite books:
I have eaten bouillabaisse at Marseilles, its cradle and its temple, in my youth, when I was easier to move, and it is mere belly-fodder, ballast for a stevedore, compared with its namesake at New Orleans!
Guess who? (Hint: his favorite color is yellow.)
• Jonathan Yardley reconsiders another of my favorite books, and finds it better than ever. Me, too:
I came back from my trip with enough money to order me another pair of swans. They are on their way from Miami and Mr. Hood, the incumbent swan, little suspects that he is going to have to share his feed dish. He eats out of a vase, as a matter of fact, and has a private dining room. Since his wife died, he has been in love with the bird bath. Typical Southern sense of reality.
No one else but the party in question could possibly have written that paragraph.
• Speaking of southerners, Mr. Godsbody takes the TCCI and has a belated epiphany: Johnny Mercer really is better than Cole Porter. (Told you so.)
• Everyone I know who cares about the state of American film is talking about this interview with David Thomson, the best of all possible film critics:
I think what we're talking about here is a much bigger, much sadder problem, which is that the mainstream of American movies has been terribly disappointing in recent years. The question that faces anyone who loves the medium is whether this is a cyclical thing—a passing dip, so to speak—or whether there might be something much more worrying. I notice that the business itself is beginning to get quite anxious about declining attendance: There has been a big drop-off [in ticket sales] this year. And God knows how much bigger it would have been but for the final Star Wars film. If we didn't have that film—which I think gives a sort of artificial boost to the figures—the first six months of this year would be pretty gloomy. There's a lot of evidence to suggest two things—which could, in fact, be working [in tandem]: that films don't mean as much to audiences anymore, and that they don't mean as much to filmmakers anymore, either….
• On a cheerier note, stop the presses—drive-in theaters are back! Read all about it here.
• Messrs. 2 Blowhards start off with foie gras and end up with this trenchant meditation on an irritating aspect of the American national character:
Perhaps what drives some Americans around the bend is our native tendency to ignore, repress, or deny the aesthetic dimension of life. We debate it. We politicize it. We get literal-minded and pretend not to know what's being talked about.
Being a gung-ho, hard-charging people, we sometimes exploit the aesthetic dimension. We often seem to want to use the promise of satisfaction and/or transcendence to spur ourselves on. We often prefer not-quite-attaining satisfaction to the actual experience of satisfaction. We take our legitimate yearnings and channel them into self-help, into new products that promise to solve problems, into hard-driving ad campaigns, into fantasies of stardom, and into crazy beliefs ranging from New Age cults to the conviction that somewhere there's a job that will make me happy. It's as though we're determined to frustrate ourselves. We doom ourselves to not making it to where we say we want to be….
I think this also explains a lot about some of the deficiencies of American art at its message-driven worst. Our Puritan strain is never very far below the surface.
• Mr. Playgoer explains why there's no point in fixing Broadway, least of all by starting a National Theatre...
• …Mr. Modern Art Notes explains how to avoid crowds at the Metropolitan Museum of Art…
• …and Jeff "BuzzMachine" Jarvis (who understands new media better than just about anyone) explains why TV Guide's decision to drop local listings is “an important moment in the history of TV, pop culture, and publishing."
• Speaking of the end of the world, Greg Sandow tells off a classical-music advocate:
A while ago, I heard someone give a keynote speech about classical music, and why it deserves a bigger audience. He was lively, smart, impassioned, witty, a master (among much else) of unstoppable one-liners.
And yet nearly everything he said was wrong. He talked about the superiority of classical music, and about how much our culture needs it. “Everything else is loud!” he said (or words to that effect). We're mezzo-forte music in a fortissimo culture.” Only classical music, he said, gave people room for thought and reflection.
Which of course isn't true….
Read the whole thing here, please. It's a must.
• The apocalypse continues: Ms. Killin' Time Being Lazy proves her literary snobbery by turning up her nose at amazon.com's Top 25 Authors. (Talk about depressing lists!)
• Finally, Mr. Rifftides describes a great CD you've never heard...
• ...and Alex Ross pays a tribute to the late David Diamond, one of America's least sufficiently appreciated composers, that is a miracle of journalistic compression. It says everything that needed to be said in two crisp paragraphs. Read, then listen.
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TT: Almanac
“To write what you are interested in writing and to succeed in getting editors to pay for it, is a feat that may require pretty close calculation and a good deal of ingenuity. You have to learn to load solid matter into notices of ephemeral happenings; you have to develop a resourcefulness at pursuing a line of thought through pieces on miscellaneous and more or less fortuitous subjects; and you have to acquire a technique of slipping over on the routine of editors the deeper independent work which their over-anxious intentness on the fashions of the month or the week have conditioned them automatically to reject.”
Edmund Wilson (quoted in Louis Menand, “Missionary,” The New Yorker, Aug. 8 and15, 2005)
| Monday, August 1, 2005
OGIC: Fortune cookie
Things I Learned Sophomore Year
1. A good imitation of measles rash can be effected by stabbing the forearm with a stiff whisk-broom.
2. Queen Elizabeth was not above suspicion.
3. In Spanish you pronounce z like th.
4. Nine-tenths of the girls in a girls' college are not pretty.
5. You can sleep undetected in a lecture course by resting the head on the hand as if shadng the eyes.
6. Weakness in drawing technique can be hidden by using a wash instead of black and white line.
7. Quite a respectable bun can be acquired by smoking three or four pipefuls of strong tobacco when you have no food in your stomach.
8. The ancient Phoenicians were really Jews, and got as far north as England where they operated tin mines.
9. You can get dressed much quicker in the morning if the night before when you are going to bed you take off your trousers and underdrawers at once, leaving the latter inside the former.
Robert Benchley, "What College Did to Me"
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TT: I couldn't have put it better
From Louis Menand's essay on Edmund Wilson in the current New Yorker:
Wilson did not engage well with literature at the level of the text. He was also not at ease or reliable at the meta-level. He had a journalist’s suspicion of abstractions, and he did not think theoretically. When he tried for the broad view—when he undertook to explain the demise of verse as a literary technique, or to describe the alternation of periods of realism with periods of romanticism in modern literature, or to interpret art as compensation for a psychic “wound”—his criticism got reductive very quickly. But he was unsurpassed at the level of the writer and the work. When he gives his tour through “Das Kapital” or “Finnegans Wake” (a book he was excited by) or “Doctor Zhivago” (which he also admired extravagantly), it is as though the book’s interior had suddenly been lit up by a thousand-watt bulb. Even readers who thought they already knew the book can see things that they missed, and they realize how partial and muddled their sense of it really was. And the hyper-clarity of the description is complemented by a complete grasp of the corpus, each of the writer’s strengths and flaws laid out with juridical precision, no matter how large or problematic the body of work. The result is something better than microscopic analysis; anyone can look through a microscope. The result is a satellite picture....
One of the reasons why I like this description so much (other than that it's perfect) is that it also sums up some of the things I try to do in my own writing, which was deeply influenced by Wilson's back in the days when I was setting up shop as a critic a quarter-century ago. I don't read him much anymore, partly because I once read him so closely that I remember his work too well. But Menand's essay has created in me a fresh appetite for revisiting Wilson, which strikes me as one of the essential attributes of a great piece of literary journalism.
Read the whole thing here, by all means.
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OGIC: Fortune cookie
Things I Learned Freshman Year
1. Charlemagne either died or was born or did something with the Holy Roman Empire in 800.
2. By placing one paper bag inside another paper bag you can carry home a milk shake in it.
3. There is a double l in the middle of "parallel."
4. Powder rubbed on the chin will take the place of a shave if the room isn't very light.
5. French nouns ending in "aison" are feminine.
6. Almost everything you need to know about a subject is in the encyclopedia.
7. A tasty sandwich can be made by spreading peanut butter on raisin bread.
8. A floating body displaces its own weight in the liquid in which it floats.
9. A sock with a hole in the toe can be worn inside out with comparative comfort.
10. The chances are against filling an inside straight.
11. There is a law in economics called The Law of Diminishing Returns, which means that after a certain margin is reached returns begin to diminish. This may not be correctly stated, but there is a law by that name.
12. You begin tuning a mandolin with A and tune the other strings from that.
Robert Benchley, "What College Did to Me"
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OGIC: Big and orange and read all over
So the big orange bible, otherwise known as the Chicago Manual of Style, has its own Web site, complete with questions answers from the editors. Which raises the question: how big a blue-pencil-wielding geek am I? Sizable enough, it turns out, to have read through the entire archive of questions and answers during the last week like a junkie. Yes, it's exactly that bad. But the CMS editors made it easy on me; they address everything thrown at them with clarity, good grace, and considerable wit, making for some surprisingly diverting reading—if, you know, you're a giant blue-pencil-wielding GEEK. Say it with me: One of us! Gobble Gobble!
Send them your burning style question, or just browse the archives for some excellent advice:
Although the sign was incorrect, I’m not sure you should annoy the person who provides the enchiladas.
Words to live by.
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OGIC: Out of Sight in mind
I'm a huge fan of and proselytizer for the Elmore Leonard-Steven Soderbergh match-made-in-heaven Out of Sight. If someone enters my home not having seen this movie, they find it a tricky thing to leave in the same pure state. My own capacity to watch it has shown no signs of shrinking. So I was gratified to see Quiet Bubble's smart appreciation (thanks to CultureSpace for the pointer). Quoth Bubble:
All of the dialogue, in fact, sings. Since the movie is based on an Elmore Leonard novel, this isn’t a surprise. Soderbergh plants great running jokes that build on themselves, so that the payoff for a joke often comes twenty minutes after its inception. Narrative twists and character revelations percolate, so that you have a firm sense of a character’s nature and the space s/he takes up in the movie. Even Zahn, the clear buffoon of the movie, is introduced through a hilarious phone conversation between Clooney and his ex-wife (Catherine Keener)—we’re prepared for him long before we actually see him.
And:
The Miami of the movie’s first half is drenched in sunlit oranges and pastel yellows, and the camera saunters like the overcooked populace. As the plot gets (slightly) darker in tone, so does the color tone. Out of Sight’s Detroit, cast in sludgy brown ice and stark blue hues, feels cold and foreboding. The contrast between the two cities is striking, and the film blessedly doesn’t try to make them move in visually similar ways.
When Clooney and Lopez sip bourbon and flirt wantonly in a hotel bar, however, the two strains come together beautifully. Lopez’s honey-skinned face, candlelit and lovely, looks out a window at white snowflakes and their pale blue reflections on the glass—they blend into the city’s night lights so that I can’t tell the difference between the two. It’s a gorgeous scene, most of all because it shows that Soderbergh could have made Detroit look warm and friendly, but decided not to.
Check, check, and check. What a luxury to have one's own taste validated and explicated.
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TT: Saddle sores
I slept for nine hours Saturday night—the first really good night's sleep I'd had in two weeks. Outside of going to see Yukio Mishima's Modern Noh Plays at the Lincoln Center Festival, I spent the whole day digging myself out from under two weeks' worth of accumulated mail, finishing at one-thirty in the morning. Then I set to the agreeable task of returning my Upper West Side apartment to its normally pristine state. By the time I finally climbed into the loft and turned out the light, the two dozen pictures that hang on my walls were straightened and the piles of Louis Armstrong-related books on the floor of my office neatly squared off (my cleaning woman doesn't believe in right angles). My drama calendar was up to date and the incoming mail had all been read, sorted, and filed, save for a beautifully penned, much-appreciated letter from the West Coast that I put aside to savor at my leisure. It was pure pleasure to arise the next day knowing that the natural order of things had been restored.
Now comes the greater challenge of completing the work I left undone during my visit to Smalltown, U.S.A. I managed to do a certain amount of writing while I was home, but not much. As of this moment I have to finish three and a half pieces and see a play and an art exhibit between now and noon on Wednesday, when the last piece, my drama column for this Friday's Wall Street Journal, comes due. Then I'll pick up a Zipcar
from the garage around the corner and vanish for three days. I know where I'm going, but nobody else does, and I mean to keep it that way. The world is too much with me, a disorder for which I've prescribed the best of all possible cures, the sound of running water. I hate to wish time away, but I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to picking up that car and driving over the George Washington Bridge to parts unknown (except to me and my innkeepers).
Like I said, I'll be around between now and then, and I'll probably even do some blogging, though not right away—today is likely to be a trifle hectic. But come Wednesday at noon, I'm shutting the shop down and handing the keys to OGIC. If I pass you on the highway, don't tell anybody you saw me.
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TT: Almanac
The day that some old friend
Said something sad about you,
I knew right then
I was no longer mad about you.
For I'd always gone to pieces
At the mention of your name,
But all that I could say this time was,
"Isn't that a shame?"
David Cantor, "Mad About You"
| Sunday, July 31, 2005
Friday, August 6, 2004
OGIC: Because the television is on the fritz?
Why do we read? "General principles!" my dad would say. Can't argue with that. But over at Erin O'Connor's Critical Mass, they're getting a little more specific. Erin and her readers are having a lively discussion about some issues raised in Mark Edmundson's New York Times Magazine essay from last week, "The Risk of Reading." Edmundson's is the latest, and I think the best, of a recent flurry of big-media articles springing from discontent with the more insipid varieties of book boosterism. (Christina Nehring's NYTBR piece last month was another.) In the process of addressing the issues Edmundson raises—principally, "Why read?"—Erin recalls a great scene from Cynthia Ozick:
I am reminded of a passage from Cynthia Ozick's Puttermesser Papers, in which the eponymous heroine dreams about a heaven that consists of an eternity spent reading an unending stack of books while consuming an inexhaustible supply of chocolate. It's an image of consumption without consequence (Puttermesser's teeth will never rot, she will never grow fat), cost (in paradise, the books are free, chocolate is free, and there is all the time in the world), or return (Puttermesser never aims to talk about what she reads, or to share her books with others, or to write something herself, or even to stop consuming long enough to digest what she has read). Ozick's portrait of a reader's paradise is a picture of indiscriminate gobbling, and as such it is both profoundly anti-social and massively regressive: book as breast. It's a funny image—but in its sheer extremity it reveals a lot about how readers, and reading, are often regarded in a society that is as wrapped up in the display of work and work-related social performances as ours is.
Erin then raises the following questions for her readers:
How social is reading? Is it an isolating, anti-social activity, or is it, in its quiet way, a profoundly communal act? Is there a value merely in the act of reading, independent of content? If so, how would you describe that value? Why read? Why do you personally read—or, why do you personally not read?
Their answers are illuminating. Hop on over and put your two cents in.
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OGIC: What the fly on the wall saw
A Boy at the Hogarth Press is Richard Kennedy's slender, unassuming memoir of the time he spent working at Leonard Woolf's publishing house in 1928, when Kennedy was sixteen. As the flap copy has it:
He provides a delightful glimpse into the everyday comings and goings of the Bloomsbury Group and an affectionate recollection of Leonard and Virginia Woolf at work; and, like Lely's portrait of Cromwell, this record does not omit the warts.
"Affectionate" may be going a bit far. Both Woolfs come off here as more than a little cold, self-absorbed, and even absurd. Bevis Hillier, who provided the book's brief introduction, notes:
[Kennedy] was of no consequence to the paladins of Bloomsbury. There was no reason to exercise their wit and charm on him. He saw them at their most unguarded and least artificial. That is what makes his account so fascinating.
And it is, both as a irreverent sketch of Leonard and Virginia and as a glimpse of coterie publishing in 1920s London. It takes the form of a diary, despite having been written forty years after the fact, and Kennedy nicely captures the breezy capriciousness that can characterize both diary-writing and sixteen-year-old boys.
Here's a taste:
I went to supper with the Woolfs. We had strawberries and cream. Mrs W was in a very happy mood. She said she had been to a nightclub the night before and how marvellous it was inventing new foxtrot steps. I thought LW's back looked a bit disapproving as he was dishing out the strawberries. The other guest was George Rylands, a very good-looking young man who had worked for the Woolfs before going to university. We were publishing a book by him called Words and Poetry and McKnight Kauffer had done a design for the cover. George Rylands egged Mrs W on to talk about how much she enjoyed kicking up her heels. I couldn't help feeling a little shocked.
Some people came in with huge bundles of flowers to give her. They had been commissioned to write an article about dirt-track racing. As they were very hard up, they were very anxious to get the job, but the editor had turned down their manuscripts. Mrs W had come to their rescue and written a description of the sport, in which she had compared the roaring machines and the arc lights to a medieval tournament.
Some more people came in after supper. Mrs Woolf started rolling her shag cigarettes. She gave one to an American lady who nearly choked to death.
She started talking about the Hogarth Press in a way that I thought didn't please LW very much, saying it was like keeping a grocer's shop. I think she is rather cruel in spite of the kind rather dreamy way she looks at you. She described Mrs Cartwright as having the step of an elephant and the ferocity of a tiger, which gives a very false impression as Ma Cartwright has no ferocity at all, although she does charge about everywhere. She also described her sliding down the area steps on her bottom, during the frost.
I consider it bad form to laugh at your employees.
All goes well enough until the young Kennedy makes a mistake that gums up Hogarth's plans for a uniform edition of a Very Important Author: Virginia Woolf herself.
LW had returned from Rodmell in a towering rage. Apparently the whole Uniform Edition project has been ruined by me because I have unwittingly instructed Spalding & Hodge to cut the paper the wrong size.
LW brought back a number of sacks of apples and potatoes from Rodmell and I tried to help him hump them up the stairs, but he would not accept any assistance from me. He refuses to speak to me. He had Gossling in and gave him a terrific tongue lashing. Gossling's cheeks went quite pale.
I suppose I have really got the sack. LW says I can't be trusted to do anything but wrap up parcels and that I am the most frightful idiot he has ever had the privilege of meeting in a long career of suffering fools.
I know, I know: beware the testimony of bitter, sacked employees. What made me trust Kennedy's account, though, is that he doesn't pretend to have been better than his famous employers. His faults and foibles are less magnified than theirs because they aren't indulged by everyone around him. But the narrator of this diary is generally callow, petty, insecure, and just plain clueless. Because Kennedy is not at all invested in making his younger self seem very likable or reliable, it's paradoxically easier to credit his unsparing portraits of others. When I finished the book I wasn't thinking "Oh, nasty Woolfs" so much as "Oh, foolish humans." A Boy at the Hogarth Press is a nifty little book, and of course a must-read for Bloomsbury fans.
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TT: Where my mouth is
As I mentioned yesterday, Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes posted a list of his ten favorite painters as of that moment, and invited other artbloggers to do the same. (Here’s the followup posting.)
I usually jump at the chance to make lists of this kind, but for some inexplicable reason I found this one paralyzing. My ten favorite painters of all time? Ever? No sooner did I start typing names than I clutched—but I still wanted to play. So I decided instead to do something that is both easier and, in a way, potentially more revealing. Here’s a complete list of the artists represented in the Teachout Museum:
• Milton Avery (drypoint)
• William Bailey (aquatint with hard ground etching)
• Max Beerbohm (drawing with watercolor wash)
• Nell Blaine (one color lithograph, one painted tile)
• Pierre Bonnard (black-and-white lithograph)
• Stuart Davis (color serigraph)
• Helen Frankenthaler (color serigraph)
• Jane Freilicher (aquatint with hard ground etching)
• Arnold Friedman (black-and-white lithograph)
• Wolf Kahn (monotype)
• Alex Katz (color lithograph)
• John Marin (etching)
• Joan Mitchell (color lithograph)
• Fairfield Porter (four color lithographs)
• Paul Taylor (assemblage)
• John Twachtman (etching)
• Neil Welliver (woodcut)
• Jane Wilson (pastel)
In my mind, there’s also a space for the Morandi etching that got away. (Sigh.)
What do I long for most that isn't there? A Vuillard color lithograph, a Hans Hofmann print (that one got away, too), a Kenneth Noland monoprint, and something good (but affordable) by Richard Diebenkorn. As of this moment, anyway.
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TT: Travels of a critic
As regular readers know, I saw two out-of-town plays last week, Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, performed at Washington’s Kennedy Center, and Noël Coward’s Design for Living, performed at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. I wrote about both in this morning’s Wall Street Journal—enthusiastically.
First, The Glass Menagerie, in which everything and everybody was good:
The Kennedy Center’s "Tennessee Williams Explored" festival, which struck out last month with an unevenly cast "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," has covered itself in glory with Gregory Mosher’s spare, unmannered production of "The Glass Menagerie." It’s a winner in every way—not least because of Sally Field. Miscast movie stars have killed many a promising show, most recently last year’s Broadway revival of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," in which Ashley Judd crashed and fizzled. But Ms. Field, brief though her stage resume may be (she made her Broadway debut just two years ago in Edward Albee’s "The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?"), plays the famously difficult role of Amanda Wingfield not in the overbearing fashion of a slumming celebrity but with the simplicity and directness of a true artist.
It helps, of course, that "The Glass Menagerie" is Williams’ best play—to my mind, the only first-rate thing he wrote—and that Ms. Field is but one part of an evenly matched ensemble. I wish I had three times as much space in which to rave about Jason Butler Harner (Tom), Jennifer Dundas (Laura) and Corey Brill (the Gentleman Caller), each of whom brings something uniquely personal to Williams’ autobiographical portrait of three lost souls trapped in a shabby St. Louis apartment, longing to change their pinched, cramped lives. For that matter, I’m half tempted to say that John Lee Beatty’s set, a desert island of dark-brown drabness fenced in by rusty fire escapes and lit by the glaring neon signs of movie houses and dance halls, is as much the star of the show as any of the actors….
Design for Living had one weak link, but otherwise it was a delight:
Campbell Scott, who hasn’t been seen on Broadway since 1988 (he’s been busy making such fine films as "The Secret Lives of Dentists"), gives a performance worthy of Alfred Lunt, who created the role of Otto in 1933. Cracker-crisp and coolly witty, he hits the bull’s-eye with every punch line. As Leo, Steven Weber makes no attempt to imitate Coward, opting instead for a Bertie Woosterish silly-ass tone that plays off nicely against Mr. Scott’s suavity. Marisa Tomei, alas, is never quite right as Gilda—she seems at times to be doing Katharine Hepburn, and not very believably, either—but she’s sufficiently decorative and doesn’t get in the way. Stir in suitably elaborate sets by Hugh Landswehr and a solid supporting cast (Jack Gilpin is especially good as Ernest) and what do you get? Pure pleasure….
No link, so if you want to know what else I had to say, either buy today’s Journal or subscribe to the online edition by going here.
Both shows close Sunday.
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TT: Memo from the maintenance department
I just added several new blogs to the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column. Check 'em out. If you can't figure out which ones are new, check 'em all out. Think what you could be missing!
P.S. I think I may also have accidentally deleted one blog whose name begins with "S." If you're the victim, please send me an e-mail.
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TT: Almanac
"He is a man who has lied and dissembled, and a man who has crawled. He knows the taste of boot-polish. He has suffered kicks in the tonneau of his pantaloons. He has taken orders from his superiors in knavery and he has wooed and flattered his inferiors in sense. His public life is an endless series of evasions and false pretenses. He is willing to embrace any issue, however idiotic, that will get him votes, and he is willing to sacrifice any principle, however sound, that will lose them for him. I do not describe the democratic politician at his inordinate worst; I describe him as he is encountered in the full sunshine of normalcy. He may be, on the one hand, a cross-roads idler striving to get into the State Legislature by grace of the local mortgage-sharks and evangelical clergy, or he may be, on the other, the President of the United States. It is almost an axiom that no man may make a career in politics in the Republic without stooping to such ignobility: it is as necessary as a loud voice."
H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy
| Thursday, August 5, 2004
TT: There's no knowledge, but I know it
A reader writes:
I'm a lawyer—I don't believe anything anyone says about themselves or anything else. This world view was confirmed by last night's viewing of the superb Out of the Past.
That one I had to pass on!
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TT: Almost missed it
Parabasis took part in the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, and has now posted on his blog a long report about his experiences there. It’s a must-read for anyone with a serious interest in the state of American theater.
I especially liked this item:
Writers and directors are slowly starting to be more honest about their antipathy towards each other. It sort of seems to break down like this—directors feel shackled by writers and writers feel exploited by directors. To directors, a production is just one production and the text is a living document not a closed system, so doing something other than what’s in the stage directions or the writers’ head is not only okay but might be devoutly to be wished. To writers, a play might be alive, but the writer is the only one who has to live with it after the director and actors are done with it. One visiting artist put it best when he said, "When you’re doing the first production, you should do make the playwright’s vision come to life. But after that, you shouldn’t be constantly reviving the same version of a show. Then the show is dead. Like how Streetcar is dead because everyone is essentially doing Kazan’s version." I think I’m growing to agree with that assessment. The problem is, so many directors’ visions are bad.
Ay, there's the rub!
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TT: It's just a cigar
Thank you, Lileks:
Medved had on his show a fellow who wants people to make new sex partners promise not to vote for Bush in exchange for hot monkey love. Or something like that. He insists that this is just a means of "starting the conversation," which I hear from artists all the time. As if we’re all just standing here making mute gestures and shrugging, unable to discuss something unless the idea is put forth in Handy Art Form. He also wanted to "remind us of the connection between politics and sex," which officially made him the most dreary fellow I’d heard so far this week. These people always want to remind us of the connection between politics and everything. Politics and hot dogs. (Work conditions in the slaughterhouse!) Politics and lawn mowers. (Illegals keep our grass short!) Politics and Smurf fetishes. Politics and nose picking. It all goes back to that phrase I hated the first time I heard it - the personal is the political. No, the personal is the personal. I remember sitting in a booth at the Valli arguing with someone about the political implications of Mozart – he made music for the ruling class, ergo you had to see it in the context of 18th century Esterhazy intrigue, etc. etc. What an impoverished view of the world. These people can’t play "Chopsticks" on the piano without worrying whether they’re feeding into some Yellow Peril stereotype from the gilded age. Hey! It’s a pentatonic tune! Chinese music is pentatonic! Chinese culture uses chopsticks! It’s OKAY!…
(For further thoughts on this subject, see yesterday’s almanac entry.)
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TT: Antepenultimate
On Monday I was thinking out loud about how an art-loving New Yorker might seek to profit from the knowledge that terrorists were planning to attack his home town in the near future:
It happens that my life was turned inside out in all sorts of ways in the immediate wake of 9/11, but no matter what fears I found myself facing, I almost always managed sooner or later to slip out of the fearful present and immerse myself in the blessed world of art, responding all the more passionately because of my renewed consciousness of life’s brevity. Strange that it so often takes a catastrophe, whether personal or public, to make you face a fact that was no less true on 9/10, or 9/12.
So what did I do when I heard the news on Sunday afternoon? I threw myself into correcting the page proofs of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, which had arrived in the mail shortly before I left town for a long weekend of playgoing in Massachusetts and Washington. In a sense, I didn’t have much choice—the corrections were due on Monday—but it still struck me as odd that I should have been pouring so much mental energy into so mundane a task in the midst of an orange alert. Granted, it wasn’t as if I’d just been told that I’d be hanged the next day, but even so, correcting my proofs somehow seemed an unsuitable response to the news I’d just received.
On the other hand, what should I have been doing? Listening prayerfully to Das Lied von der Erde or the Schubert Cello Quintet? Reading a never-before-read classic—or, alternatively, rereading an especially beloved one? Looking at and meditating on the contents of the Teachout Museum? What would you do if you knew you had only a day to live? A week? A year? If a piece of unfinished work rested reproachfully on your desk, would you feel obliged to finish it? If you knew you couldn’t get it done in the time remaining, would you try to do as much as you could? Or would you put it aside, smiling wryly at the vanity of human wishes, and spend your last hours communing with better minds than your own?
I wish I could say I stopped to ask myself one or more of these questions, but I didn’t. When duty calls, philosophy must wait. I rolled up my sleeves and went to work, and at some point in the middle of the night I corrected the last page of All in the Dances, e-mailed my changes to the San Diego office of Harcourt, Inc., put the proofs aside, and fell into bed, there to sleep fitfully for what remained of Sunday night and Monday morning.
Needless to say, no truck bombs exploded in Manhattan on Monday, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time since then reflecting on first and last things. It occurred to me somewhere along the way that I’d just learned a valuable lesson about my personal priorities, one neither good nor bad but simply revealing. After all, I don’t have any illusions about All in the Dances. It’s a short critical biography of a great choreographer, not a philosophical treatise, and while I do think it’s a damned good book, I can’t imagine that it’ll be read a hundred years hence, nor would I dream of suggesting that its publication will help make the world a significantly better place. So why did I work so hard on it at what might reasonably have been thought to be an inappropriate time? Because I believe deeply in the ennobling sanctity of craft. Because I agree with Ecclesiastes’ preacher: Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might. Because it’s mine.
I was watching Howard Hawks’ Red River yesterday afternoon, a film in which John Wayne has occasion to "read from the Book" over the grave of a man he has just shot to death. He says what movie cowboys usually say on such grim occasions: "We brought nothing into this world, and it's certain we can carry nothing out." As the Duke spoke those words, I looked up from the TV screen at the prints hanging on the wall of my living room. I can’t take them with me, either, and though I’ve arranged to leave them to friends in the event of my death, those well-laid plans would very likely go awry if terrorists struck anywhere near my Upper West Side apartment. Were I to flee for my life, I might possibly think to cram my smallest work of art, a painted tile by Nell Blaine, into my shoulder bag—but probably not. More likely I’d lock the door, run like hell, and never see any of the Teachout Museum again.
Is it, then, a foolish vanity for me to be correcting proofs and collecting art at a time like this? Or is it a pledge of allegiance to the dual republic of beauty and craft? "Art, which resists decay, and the summer lightning of happy love, are all that we can cling to in our lives." So said Alexander Herzen, and I think he was pretty close to the mark. Perhaps nobody will care to read All in the Dances a hundred years hence, but now that I’ve finished correcting the proofs, Harcourt can and will bring it out even if I get blown up by a truck bomb or choke on a piece of steak, thereby making it possible for somebody, somewhere, to read my posthumously published words and be inspired to go see his first Balanchine ballet. That's a good thing, don't you think? And as for the Teachout Museum, it may indeed be destroyed by fire or picked over by looters, but until that dread day it will continue to give pleasure to me and to my guests—and, should it survive me, to my heirs and assigns.
At any rate, I’m finished with All in the Dances. Or, to be exact, almost finished. I still have to write the dust-jacket copy and sign off on the photo insert. Just two more things to do, both of which could be omitted in a pinch, and my next book can go to press. Ecclesiastes’ preacher had something to say about that, too: And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. He sure got that right.
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TT: Blog-o-rama
It’s been way too long since I conducted a tour of the blogosphere. Even when I was feeling thoroughly crappy (i.e., yesterday), I continued to surf the Web and bookmark cool stuff I found along the way. Here's some of it:
• Eat your hearts out, film buffs: Celluloid Eyes has a great list of "movies I am dying to rent/own on DVD and cannot" because (gnashing of teeth) they aren’t available on DVD. As she remarks in passing:
Many of these hard-to-find movies are my favorite kind of movie: those delightful, witty, frothy, often surprisingly relevant, sometimes surprisingly naughty American movies from the 1930s.
Why hasn’t anybody told me about this blog?
• Zoilus gleans this Elvis Costello quote from the New York Times:
"You're kidding yourself if you believe it when people say, `Oh, that's a political song,' " Mr. Costello said. "No. A political song is one that if you played it to Donald Rumsfeld, he would give up his career and enter a monastery. That would be a political song — one that affected him so deeply that he would renounce his view of the world. I don't think anybody alive is capable of writing that song. So all you're doing is writing things that matter to you."
To which he appends numerous disagreements, concurrences, and amplifications, among them:
Costello's right, though, that some sort of potentially transformative experience should at least be nosing around the edges of a properly political song - political speech is primarily persuasive, right? And I think…that in art the best mode of persuasion is empathetic, to bring the audience through the experiences that shape the point of view rather than to argue the point of view. (Does arguing ever do anything ever?)
Timely.
• From the Daily Telegraph by way of artsjournal.com, our invaluable host, a smart interview with Stephen Sondheim on the latest London revival of Sweeney Todd:
I remember when I was at college, one of the English professors made what seems an obvious point, but it wasn't obvious to me at the age of 17, that one of the things that keeps Hamlet alive is that every generation brings something new to the performance. It isn't just the poetry; it's that every time you do Hamlet you can take a different view of it - and that's what keeps theatre alive.
With musicals, the audience tend to want to see what they've seen before. Whereas people who go to Hamlet want to see something different.
• I love smart lists, and my super-smart artsjournal.com colleague Tyler Green, who blogs at Modern Art Notes, has published a fine one:
Here are my ten favorite artists. Or at least my ten favorite artists as of when I typed this. And to make this an even sillier exercise, I'll give a one-word summary of what I like best about each artist….
Go see for yourself. Four of Tyler’s listees would either make my list or come damned close. One of them makes me run screaming from the room.
• Speaking of lead-with-the-chin lists, Alex Ross, the classical music critic of The New Yorker, has posted a list of 20 non-classical albums he loves (or, as he says, "an irrational series of powerful attractions") on his blog, The Rest Is Noise. I like or love 11 of them. One of these days I’ll see Alex and raise him….
• And speaking of The New Yorker, did you see John Updike’s essay about Philip Larkin? It contains this beautifully balanced pair of clauses: "Larkin, though modest in manner and production, achieved major eloquence and formal perfection…"
Yes, exactly.
• Advertising can be deceptive—both ways. On my recent visit to the Williamstown Theatre Festival, I spent the night at the Porches Inn, which is located right across the street from MASS MoCA (the too-cute acronym for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art). I loved Porches and intend to stay there again whenever I return to the festival, but had I read this description on the inn’s Web site, I might well have thought twice, or maybe even three times, about checking in:
Porches is the most visible manifestation, to-date, of the changes sparked by MASS MoCA. Its 50-plus rooms of retro-edgy, industrial granny chic ambiance make a spirited lodging statement in New England and beyond.
That’s got to be a prime candidate for Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner.
• Memo to Frank Lloyd Wright buffs: have you stayed here yet?
• The Buck Stops Here has a lovely little tribute to the sheer niceness of classical guitarist Christopher Parkening. I suspect—I hope—that a lot of us have similarly sweet stories about similarly thoughtful celebrities. I know I do.
• Not to beat a dead horse, but several hundred thousand bloggers published their own versions of the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index. Of them, I liked this one best.
• One of the participants in Michael Dirda’s recent Washington Post online chat turns out to have been a fan of this blog and several of its brethren. Dirda thinks the Web is incompatible with "bookishness." The chatter begged to differ:
One of the most delightful and unexpected developments on the WWW in the last year or so is the development of a community of literary blogs. These are creating a very real conversation about serious books, including many of those serious books that only infrequently are reviewed in the WP and NYT (and even then are often confined to the genre-ghetto roundups).
Some of my favourites: Terry Teachout occasionally takes a break from reviewing art and plays to write about the very particular joys of reading Donald Westlake. Teresa Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor books has a long-standing blog covering inter alia publishers' slushpiles, pygmy mammoths and sf fandom. It's a small gem -- well worth browsing the archives. Jessa Crispin's Bookslut is an indispensable source of literary gossip and astute judgements on the merits of recent releases. Maud Newton's taste in literature is eclectic but unfailingly good, while her writing style is both direct and elegant. Scott McLemee -- an authority on obscure Marxist sects, Dale Peck and the MLA. All considered, there's never been a better time to seek out good, interesting conversation about books.
To which Dirda, a columnist for Washington Post Book World, replied:
I'm glad you disagree with me, and your tastes in blogs is certainly discriminating, if only because I'm a great Westlake fan (having reviewed him frequently and interviewed him onstage at the Smithsonian). But, despite this chat, I personally find that the Internet sucks up too much time. I enjoy doing this for an hour a week; indeed, might enjoy it for an hour a day. But I'm fundamentally a loner and my communing tends to be with books and their authors rather than my fellow readers.
But this is just me. I'm perfectly sociable and charming, but my streak of puritanism is so strong that I can't help but see online discussions as simply fooling around. For a writer it even feels like throwing away good material. But then I probably don't have as many ideas as most bloggers and need to carefully marshal the few I do have.
I of course think otherwise. More than that, I suspect Dirda doesn’t look at enough blogs to know what they’re really like. For me, "About Last Night" is occasionally a burden (at which times I hand over happily to OGIC), more often a stimulus. As for blogs "sucking up too much time," I wonder if Dirda would say the same thing about magazines….
• Lastly and leastly: O.K., Mr. TMFTML, I laughed at this one, too.
UPDATE: Don’t miss Ed’s whirlwind tour of the blogosphere, all done in a single paragraph of sentence fragments. Whoosh!
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TT: We aim to please
A reader writes:
A man who on the same day can quote
Cardinal Newman and Paul Goodman (an unfairly neglected good poet) can be assured I will keep reading him daily.
Not only did I get a kick out of that e-mail, but it occurred to me as I read it that my correspondent had come up with a pretty good mission statement for "About Last Night." Between us, Our Girl in Chicago and I specialize (or try to) in unexpected juxtaposition. We love all the arts, and within each art form we love a large and varied assortment of artists and artworks. It’s never seemed to either of us that such things are best appreciated in isolation. Hence the curve balls we throw as often as we can, some big and some, like this one, little. Nor do you have to know anything about Newman or Goodman to enjoy the fun. Nothing pleases me half as much as knowing that something I’ve written inspired somebody who read it to go read a book he’s never read before by an author he’s never heard of—or, better still, to go see his first ballet or visit his first art gallery or jazz club. Or whatever.
Maybe that's the best way of describing our specialty here at "About Last Night": whatever, and lots of it.
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TT: Help a critic out!
I'm going to be covering the New York International Fringe Festival for my Wall Street Journal drama column later this month. This year's festival, which opens August 13, is presenting shows by 197 "emerging theatre troupes and dance companies." That is, how you say, an impossible task, there being only one of me and I having only enough time to go to a dozen shows at most. What's more, the hardest job is picking the shows. Every once in a while the buzz on a particular performance becomes overwhelming, but for the most part I find myself sifting through a stack of press releases in search of inspiration, wondering if I might do better to use a dart board.
This time around I've decided to enlist the help of those "About Last Night" readers with an interest in theater. So if you know of a particular Fringe show that you expect to be good, either because you're in it or you know somebody who's in it or you've simply heard good things about it, please make haste to send me an e-mail saying so. Be brief, but not too brief (i.e., tell me in a sentence or two why I should see it). I don't promise to take your advice, especially if I get a lot of it, but I do promise to pay attention to it and be grateful for it. Besides, who knows? You might be responsible for my writing a rave of a show I wasn't planning to see as I write these words. Wouldn't that be cool?
Don't delay—I'll be scheduling and booking my Fringe visits early next week.
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TT: Almanac
"There is one piece of advice, in a life of study, which I think no one will object to; and that is, every now and then to be completely idle,—to do nothing at all."
Sydney Smith, Lectures on Moral Philosophy
| Wednesday, August 4, 2004
Tuesday, August 3, 2004
TT: Time out
You didn't really think I could keep on blogging like that for two whole days in a row, did you? I'll be spending most of today hammering away at my Wall Street Journal drama column for Friday, but I'll be back at some point with a Festival of Cool Links accumulated during my two-week intermittent absence from "About Last Night," plus whatever else the spirit moves me to post. Keep an eye peeled.
In the meantime, check out the "Second City" and Top Five modules of the right-hand column, both of which have been updated with the very latest stuff.
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