About Last Night
TERRY TEACHOUT on the arts
in New York City
(with additional dialogue by OUR GIRL IN CHICAGO)
Friday, September 1, 2006
TT: The perfect musical
For those of you who read my recent posting about going to see The Fantasticks, my Wall Street Journal review of the revival I saw is in this morning’s paper, coupled with a review of the Irish Repertory Theatre’s production of Mr. Dooley’s America:
The Snapple Theater Center, a new two-auditorium complex a few steps away from Broadway, has revived “The Fantasticks” in a small-scale production similar to the one that ran from 1960 to 2002 at Greenwich Village’s Sullivan Street Playhouse. I never saw it there—I must be the only middle-aged playgoer in Manhattan who didn’t—but I can’t imagine that it was any better than this lovely revival of a show that has lost none of its guileless freshness after half a century of hard use.
In calling “The Fantasticks” guileless, I don’t mean to suggest that it is anything other than impeccably crafty. Part of what makes it so effective, in fact, is that Tom Jones’ book takes all the stock devices of the Broadway musical, strips away their superfluities, and transforms them into timeless archetypes: two young lovers, two quarreling parents, two blundering stooges and a tall, dark stranger who appears from out of nowhere to set the simple plot in motion. Back in 1960 such extreme economy of means was rarely to be found in American musical comedy, which is part of what made “The Fantasticks” seem so fresh. Nowadays the miniature musical is an Off Broadway staple, but Mr. Jones’ concise book remains exemplary—and unlike the increasingly tuneless shows of today, “The Fantasticks” is blessed with an equally excellent score….
Finley Peter Dunne, who died in 1936, is one of those writers whom everybody quotes but nobody knows. He created Mr. Dooley, the Chicago bartender whose sly observations about politics and its practitioners (“The Supreme Court follows the election returns”) are forever being recycled, usually without credit, by op-ed columnists in search of a pithy way to restate the obvious.
Dunne’s own columns are forgotten, not because they’ve lost their point but because they were written in a porridge-thick stage-Irish dialect (“Thrust ivrybody, but cut th’ ca-ards”) that is impenetrable to the contemporary eye. To make sense of his witticisms, you have to read them out loud—or hear them read. Enter Philip Dunne, a veteran Hollywood screenwriter and the son of Mr. Dooley’s creator. Working in tandem with Martin Blaine, Dunne the younger quarried a two-man play out of his father’s best columns. First performed in 1976, “Mr. Dooley’s America,” was an eminently logical candidate for revival by the Irish Repertory Theatre, the best of all possible Off Broadway companies, and Charlotte Moore, the Irish Rep’s artistic director, has revived it with skill and sympathy….
(I should add, by the way, that The Fantasticks is the most child-friendly show currently playing in the New York theater district. It’s lively, squeaky-clean, and not too long, and anyone old enough to watch a love story without squirming in his seat or going Eeuuww! is old enough to enjoy it.)
No free link. Buy the damn paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to my review. (If you’re already a subscriber, the review is here.)
|
TT: Serendipity, R.I.P.
In my next “Sightings” column, to be published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I take a look at the financial woes of Tower Records and the wider implications of music downloading. One frequently overlooked effect of downloading on the culture of music is the extent to which it discourages in-store browsing, and the serendipitous discoveries that can only be made by wandering at will up and down the aisles of a deep-catalog record store.
Or can they? Is it possible for an online store to replicate the experience of browsing—and if not, does it matter? To find out, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Pursuits” section.
|
TT: Burnham's Laws
Some of you have inquired about the source of the piece of advice proffered by James Burnham that I occasionally like to quote. It's one of a set of maxims that Burnham handed down many years ago to his colleagues at National Review:
1. Everybody knows everything.
2. Who says A must say B.
3. Just as good, isn’t.
4. You cannot invest in retrospect.
5. Wherever there is prohibition there’s a bootlegger.
6. In every project there’s a Schlamm.
vii. You can’t divorce yourself.
viii. Every member must pay his dues.
ix. No excuse, sir.
10. If there’s no alternative, there’s no problem.
According to Burnham’s son, these were “a series of observations about the world that provided the basis for living honestly.” The first law “centers on the notion that the way in which one conducts oneself in personal relationships or business or politics can never be a secret from those who matter.” The sixth law refers to Willi Schlamm, a journalist who was briefly and unsatisfactorily involved in the launching of National Review, of which Burnham was a founding editor. (The seventh, eighth and ninth “laws” are numbered differently because they are exhortations, not universal principles.)
I like the first and last ones best, but they’re all exceedingly provocative, as was Burnham himself. If you don’t know who he was, you can read about him here. In addition, you can read “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” George Orwell’s 1946 essay, by going to this page on a Russian Web site that contains, among other things, downloadable online versions of Orwell’s writings.
|
TT: Almanac
“If only he could be a little ironical, many fresh topics would be thrown open to him. But Hilda did not like irony; to her it was a form of shirking, and writing to her Eustace was often conscious of being a shirker. He was apt to slip from one sorry pose to another, which was unfair between two people who loved each other, and stranged, because he did not feel self-conscious when he was with her. But his pen created a literary prsonality with whom he felt she was out of sympathy.”
L.P. Hartley, Eustace and Hilda
| Thursday, August 31, 2006
TT: Middle-aged elephant crawl
Is there anything more pathetic than a houseguest with the sniffles? I caught my current cold while visiting a woman with a chronic illness of considerable gravity who nonetheless went out of her way to make over me. As she brought me my umpteenth mug of hot tea, I was seized with a convulsion of guilt and told her, “You must think it’s pretty lame of me to be lying on the couch and whining like this, considering how sick you are.”
“Actually, it feels worse to have a cold, at least in the short run,” she replied. “When you’re really sick, your point of view changes—it gets easier to cope, somehow. So shut up and drink your tea.”
This reminded me of how I felt when I was in the hospital last December. I was desperately scared until I picked up the phone and dialed 911—and then, all at once, I wasn’t. It was like throwing a switch. From that moment on, I was completely calm. You may not understand what I’m talking about unless you’ve had a similar experience, but as soon I told the operator to send an ambulance, I knew things were out of my hands, and for the first time in weeks, I relaxed.
Needless to say, my host's reassurances didn’t make me feel any less guilty, but they didn’t stop me from drinking my tea, either. Alas, I couldn’t indulge myself for very long, even with her wholehearted approval, for this was one of my three-deadline weeks. On Monday I wrote a four-thousand-word essay on John Hammond for Commentary. On Tuesday I returned to New York, writing my drama column for Friday’s Wall Street Journal on the train from Hartford to Penn Station. Yesterday I wrote my “Sightings” column for the Saturday Journal. All this was a bit much for a middle-aged man with a bad cold, but I had to grin and bear it, so I did. As James Burnham liked to say, if there’s no alternative, there’s no problem.
I spent Wednesday evening slumped on the couch, swilling tea and watching Howard Hawks’ Hatari! It’s not one of the master's best movies: the plot is all but nonexistent, and the way Hawks handles his female characters tips over into full-fledged self-parody. One of them is named Brandy, the other Dallas, which tells you just about everything you need to know. Be that as it may, Hatari! turned out to be well suited to my modest aesthetic demands, for it jogs along amusingly for two and a half hours, the Tanganyikan scenery is soothing to the eye, and Henry Mancini’s score, which makes extensive and imaginative use of African percussion, is great fun. (This is the film for which “Baby Elephant Walk” was written.) No sooner had I shipped “Sightings” off to the Journal than I sent out for a pizza, turned on the TV, and left the rest to John Wayne. Thanks, Duke!
I don’t have to go anywhere or do anything today, and I'm not gonna. Friday, alas, is different: I’ll be catching a train to Washington, D.C., first thing in the morning, picking up a Zipcar at Union Station, and driving from there to Staunton, Virginia, where I’ll spend a day and a half watching Shenandoah Shakespeare perform Othello, As You Like It, and Macbeth. On Sunday I return to Washington (stopping along the way at the Pope-Leighey House) to see the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s new production of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. I’ll be back in New York on Monday night.
That, if I may say so, is one damn long weekend, so if you don’t hear from me between tomorrow and next Wednesday, do not adjust your set. I know, I know, it’s only a cold, but in the immortal words of Lili von Shtupp, I’m not a wabbit—I need some west!
|
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 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 THIS WEEKEND:
• Indian Blood (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Saturday)
• The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here, closes Sunday)
• Pig Farm (comedy, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Sunday)
• Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sunday)
|
TT: Almanac
“It was sad how the fact of not being able to share a joke separated one from people. Separated, of course, was too strong a word, but it created a frontier, a water-shed for experience, instead of a valley. Failure to see the same things as funny often meant a general failure to see eye to eye, because humour was common ground where the high-brow and the low-brow, the rich and the poor, could meet without self-consciousness.”
L.P. Hartley, The Sixth Heaven
| Wednesday, August 30, 2006
OGIC: Excuses, excuses
So Terry's got laryngitis and I've got my parents in town. Advantage Ms. OGIC, by a very large margin, but in terms of blogging output, nobody wins. I'll leave you, however, with a few good links:
• Robert Archambeau is very acute, not to mention downright hilarious, dissecting audiences at poetry readings. Poetry readings get a bad rap, he admits; but "what if a big part of the problem with poetry readings isn't a matter of what's up on stage, but a matter of what's down in the seats?" (Via Dan Green).
• Peter Suderman argues that "classic TV" is not just a myth, and that the DVD medium overcomes the precise obstacles previously cited by my illustrious co-blogger to even the best series television attaniing the status of bona fide narrative art.
• Not a link but an observation. There's been much ado about Marisha Pessl's cause célèbre of a first novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, so I purchased a copy. Waiting one day for the oil to be changed in my car, I picked it up and read a few dozen pages. When my car was ready, I put it down. I'm not sure I'll pick it up again—it struck me as too clever by half, more than a little exhausting, and inferior to the book its breathless press reports kept reminding me of: Brian Hall's Saskiad, which is narrated by a younger precocious teenage girl but a vastly more compelling one. It's grossly unfair, I know, to pass judgment based on 44 pages of reading—but since I don't expect to get very much further anytime soon, I may as well report why not. (I will say, though, that I vastly prefer the book itself to its fatuous back-cover blurb from Jonathan Franzen: "Beneath the foam of this exuberant debut is a dark, strong drink.")
• Have we mentioned lately how much we love Outer Life? Nobody chronicles This Californian Life quite so well. Docents! Read the piece and you too will be repeating that word to yourself wonderingly for the rest of the day.
Happy Wednesday! (Docents!)
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, August 30, 2006 | Permanent
link |
TT: In two words
Laryngitis.
Later.
(Imagine a big sick frog intoning those two words and you'll get the idea.)
UPDATE: My condition has evolved. I now sound like the subject of my next book.
|
TT: Almanac
“He played Franck’s Prelude, Aria and Finale. The noble, declamatory music with its military stride and confident accent marched through the room, filling it with flags and cheering crowds, a gallant expedition setting out in the morning of life to win a spiritual prize. Eustace thought he knew why Victor chose this piece; not only was it, superficially at any rate, the very breath of encouragement, but it expressed all those sentiments which he, Victor, so sedulously kept out of his daily manner. Here, at the piano, protected by the anonymity of art, he could walk in old heroic traces without being betrayed. Sir John was right to say that he played like a professional. He had the evenness of touch, the restrained, impersonal approach to emotion; he did not hurry when the music was easy, and slow up when it was difficult. He could let go without letting himself go.”
L.P. Hartley, The Sixth Heaven
| Tuesday, August 29, 2006
TT: Almanac
"Cramer said, 'I'm not a fool.'
"Wolfe nodded again. 'We all feel like that occasionally. The poison of conceit. It's all right if you keep an antidote handy.'"
Rex Stout, Over My Dead Body
| Monday, August 28, 2006
OGIC: Movies we never started seeing
I sometimes do too much fieldwork before seeing a movie, building up a whole structure of preconceptions that I then have to trundle into the theater with me and crane my neck to peer around at the thing itself. Long ago I recognized that this sport was spoiling perfectly good movies for me, or even preempting me from seeing some of them. So I stopped giving more than a skim to reviews of new movies until after I'd seen them. But at the prospect of an older movie, I still head straight to the bookshelf and, typically, David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary and Pauline Kael's 5001 Nights at the Movies: two critical voices that are always compelling to me if not infallible.
I didn't make it this weekend to Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol, written by Graham Greene from his own story and starring Sir Ralph Richardson. It's playing in a new print through Thursday at the Music Box. Despite being busy this week, I still have a chance to catch it on its final night. (The Music Box is always an added draw, as there's live organ music on weekends and real butter for the popcorn all of the time.) Beyond the obvious appeal of the Graham Greene/Carol Reed partnership, which later produced The Third Man, I'm drawn to this one by what the bookshelf critics say. Kael sounds like she never really made up her mind:
The plot is just about perfect.... There are terrifying, tense moments, too; the whole movie is very cleverly worked out. Maybe it's too deliberate, though, with its stylized lighting and its rigid pacing—you wait an extra beat between the low-key lines of dialogue. It's too deliberate and too hushed to be much fun. It's a polite thriller—which is close to a contradiction in terms.
I'm not sure what, but something about that makes me think she did have fun, then talked herself out of it. In any case, it's an interesting criticism that does nothing at all to dampen my wish to see the film. Thomson, on the other hand, has no such ambivalence, and says "The tone may be straight Greene—that drip of mortification, of agony vindicated—but Reed served it with understanding." Nice precis of Greene there, one which will no doubt please my friend who spent all last week emailing me mordant quotes from Greene's novels—just randomly trying to break my spirit, I guess—and whom I'm trying to get to accompany me to The Fallen Idol on Thursday. (People seem to love going to the movies alone, but I really don't. In my life, I've seen one movie alone in the theater, a good one: California Split. That was five years ago, and not an uplifting experience.)
Then Thomson has this from Greene himself:
When I describe a scene, I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-camera rather than with the photographer's eye—which leaves it frozen. In this precise domain I think that the cinema has influenced me. Authors like Walter Scott and the Victorians were influenced by paintings and constructed their backgrounds as though they were static and came from the hands of a Constable. I work with the camera, following my characters and their movements. So the landscape moves. When I turn my head and look at the harbor, my head moves, the houses move, the boats move, don't they?
And that's part of the reason Greene gets a two-page spread in the Biographical Dictionary. I like the quotation, and I know what he means. But, to nitpick only because he's possibly my favorite painter, the choice of Constable as a painter of static images is a little strange: whose clouds move more than Constable's? Nobody's, that's whose.
If I do find a victim...er, date, and do see The Fallen Idol Thursday, you'll be the first to hear about it.
|
TT: To the sticking place
Few things in life are more disagreeable than coming down with a bad cold when you have three deadlines staring you in the face. The human brain is a miraculous organism, but it doesn’t much care for being asked to generate stylish prose between sneezes. Instead of writing, I’ve spent the past four days watching TV, reading comforting books, sucking down endless mugs of hot tea, sleeping as much as possible, and waiting impatiently for my lungs to dry up.
Among other things, I watched Dumbo, which I hadn’t seen since childhood, and Twelve O’Clock High, which I’d never seen. Dumbo turned out to be even better than I remembered, and the pleasure I took in it was greatly enhanced by the fact that I watched it in the company of a nine-year-old boy whose sense of wonder has yet to be impaired by the onset of adolescent selfconsciousness. Not only is it wonderfully concise (sixty-four minutes, the shortest of all the classic Disney features) and animated with enduring freshness and charm, but the score is full of fetching details (I especially liked the Hammond organ in “Pink Elephants on Parade”).
What impressed me most about Twelve O’Clock High, by contrast, was the climactic bombing raid, which consisted for the most part of actual footage of aerial combat shot by American and German military photographers and assembled with skill and intelligence by Henry King. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that all old war movies are euphemistic: Twelve O’Clock High, like John Ford’s They Were Expendable, is startling in the frankness with which it portrays the hard choices that must be made by men in combat.
What books did I take with me to my sickbed? Rex Stout’s And Be a Villain, Prisoner’s Base, and Over My Dead Body, three of C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels, Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers, and Victoria Glendinning’s 1992 biography of Trollope. Only the last of these was new to me—I prefer twice- and thrice-read books when I’m feeling low—and I got much more pleasure out of it than a middle-aged man with a summer cold has any right to expect. I ran across so many fetching quotations in its pages that I thought at one point to devote all five of this week’s almanac entries to Trollope, but I’ve changed my mind. Instead, I’ll empty the bag in one fell swoop:
• “The getter-up of quotations from books which he has never read,—how vile he is to all of us!” (Travelling Sketches)
• “There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a well-established grievance; a feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood from hour to hour, allowing him to plead his own cause in his own court, within his own heart,—and always to plead it successfully.” (Orley Farm)
• “God is good to us, and heals those wounds with a rapidity which seems to us impossible when we look forward, but which is regarded with insufficient wonder when we look backward.” (The Bertrams)
• “Can it be that any mother really expects her son to sit alone evening after evening in a dingy room drinking bad tea, and reading good books?” (The Small House at Allington)
• “He would use the simplest, plainest language, he said to himself over and over again; but it is not always easy to use simple plain language,—by no means to easy as to mount on stilts, and to march along with sesquipedalian words, with pathos, spasms, and notes of interjection.” (Framley Parsonage)
On the whole, it was a pleasant weekend—or would have been had I not felt so lousy—and the cherry on the sundae was a phone call from my brother in Smalltown, U.S.A., who reported first thing Sunday morning that my mother has profited enormously from a recent operation to relieve her chronic back pain. “She’s standing four inches taller,” he told me. I stood a bit taller myself when I heard the news.
I’m still under the weather, but deadlines wait for no man. On Sunday I made myself start writing again, and I’ll be spending the first part of this week doing the work I had to put aside last week. Come Friday I’ll be back on the road again, traveling to Virginia and Washington, D.C., to see plays by Shakespeare and Ibsen and paying a visit along the way to one of my favorite Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, the Pope-Leighey House. I’ll be blogging, too, but don’t expect anything too ambitious until next Monday. A busy blogger boileth no pots.
Later.
|
TT: Almanac
“Pieces of music are wormholes, which we can enter to escape our normal experience of time.”
Robert Spano, quoted in Justin Davidson, “Measure for Measure” (The New Yorker, Aug. 21, 2006)
| Friday, August 26, 2005
TT: Snapshots from the Fringe
I reported on this year's New York International Fringe Festival (which runs through Sunday) in today's Wall Street Journal drama column. The most talked-about show I saw was Bridezilla Strikes Back!:
For those who don't keep up with reality TV, “Bridezillas” is the series that follows a group of increasingly demented brides-to-be as they plan their Must…Be…Perfect Weddings. Cynthia Silver, now a faculty member at New York's Atlantic Theater Company, was approached to take part in the first season and jumped at the chance for network TV exposure, taking for granted that it was a straight documentary and not realizing that the producers would edit the cinema-verité footage to make their subjects look as bitchy and neurotic as possible. Co-written with Kenny Finkle, “Bridezilla Strikes Back!” is the story of how she descended into the double-barreled maelstrom of a wedding and a hit TV show and emerged sadder but wiser.
I assumed Ms. Silver would tell her tale with the wised-up detachment of a media-savvy Manhattanite, but the tone of “Bridezilla Strikes Back!”—frankly confessional, rough around the emotional edges, unexpectedly poignant—is nothing like what I'd expected…
No link, so to read more about this and the four other Fringe Festival I reviewed, buy a copy of today's Journal. (Alternatively, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, where you can read me every week and lots of other good stuff every day.)
|
TT: Maintenance man
I spent an idle hour (yes, I do have them from time to time, every month or two) trolling through "Sites to See," our blogroll. I added several new blogs and sites that caught my eye in recent weeks, as well as dropping a few old ones that had become inactive or tedious. Our Girl, who writes the blogreviews that appear from time to time in the Top Five module, is doing the same. Our goal, as always, is to make "Sites to See" as useful to you as possible, so if you run across a new or little-known blog that you think we might like, drop us an e-mail.
New blogs and sites are marked with an asterisk. Give them a look—along with any of the old blogs and sites you've yet to visit. In the twenty-first century, the 'sphere is the place to be.
|
TT: My all-time favorite verse from a rock song
I'm Lester the Nightfly
Hello Baton Rouge
Won't you turn your radio down
Respect the seven second delay we use
So you say there's a race
Of men in the trees
You're for tough legislation
Thanks for calling
I wait all night for calls like these
Donald Fagen, "The Nightfly"
|
TT: Number, please
• H.L. Mencken's weekly salary in 1899 for his first job as a Baltimore newspaper reporter: $8
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $177.24
(Source: Terry Teachout, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken)
|
TT: Almanac
To avoid the clichés
Of the obituary writers,
Die in obscurity.
A fine bed in a light-filled room
Someone who adores you is at your side
And vowed to silence.
Kenneth Koch, "Aesthetics of Obituary"
|
OGIC: Wrapping up rants
Let me share a few last cinematic heresies, with some annotations this time because it's 8:00 and I'm fresh as a daisy compared with my recent blogging sessions:
American Beauty. I know, you picked it, too, but I couldn’t resist. From Kevin Spacey, playing the single role he always plays, to Annette Bening, as a gay screenwriter’s idea of a castrating hag; from the ridiculously worshipful depiction of a teenage pothead to the implication that a Marine World War II vet is a repressed homosexual Nazi (it was people like Spacey, Alan Ball and Sam Mendes, of course, who actually stopped the Nazis from conquering the world), this breathtakingly mendacious picture of American suburbia takes the cake.
Thank you. I've been really gratified to see how many people actively dislike this movie. I saw it in less than ideal conditions: in a promotional preview on a college campus with Spacey, Mena Suvari, Thora Birch, and Wes Bentley in attendance. The starstruck college kids in the audience hooted and clapped through the whole thing, egging on Spacey's character. My alienation from my surroundings was complete. I've avoided the movie ever since. But judging from what many of you had to say, I wasn't simply swayed the unfavorable circumstances—there was a kernel of discernment at work, too.
Leaving Las Vegas. It seemed like an exercise in piling on the gratuitous misery and despair, and I've realized of late that I think gratuitous despair is much worse than gratuitous sex and violence. (I'm of the Jane Austen "let other pens dwell on guilt and misery" school of thought.) Watching it, I got the feeling that all the critics who praised it were congratulating themselves for being brave and
tough-minded enough to watch something that depressing. Blech.
Not having seen this one, I'm not qualified to comment. But what the hell: Blech!
The Natural. Here's the movie I hate that most people like and it usually ends near the top of best sports movies. Honestly, I can never forgive Redford for what he did to this story. Roy Hobbs doesn't hit that home run, he doesn't win the game; no, he fails and everyone thinks he was paid off by gamblers.I don't expect a movie to be 100 percent faithful to its source material, but there has to a point where someone says "You know that story we're making into a movie? This is no longer that story." Yeah, I know Malamud himself seemed OK with it, mainly because he said the movie would cause him to be thought of as something other than a Jewish writer. Sorry, can't find the exact quote. Robert Redford is one of those people I thought would have more respect for the story. For me, his reputation is forever sullied and I'd just like to ask, "WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING? JUST GO MAKE SOME OTHER FREAKIN' BASEBALL STORY YOU HACK!"
Reading this struck an deep chord in me. I read Malamud's novel as a teenager, right around the time the Detroit Tigers had their Cinderella season. Being caught up in baseball made me especially attuned to Roy Hobbs's plight, and I was devastated; it was one of my first truly intense encounters with a truly bleak literary vision. Close on the heels of that, the movie felt like the worst kind of betrayal, and continues to stand as an all-time low in my movie-viewing history.
This next one also loudly rang a bell.
About Schmidt. Look, I grew up in Palo Alto, California, and go through a tin of flavored hummus a day, but the sneering condescension that pervades every shot in this film had me yelling to my friends about the elitist values of Hollywood on the way out of the theater. Oh, look at those poor people in Omaha with their bleak, meaningless lives. I've heard people talk about how sympathetic this movie was, but is there one character who isn't presented as either an asshole or a desperate loser? And does anyone actually still think that Jack Nicholson is a serious actor?
Well, I'm not sure it's Jack Nicholson's fault that for a while now he hasn't been able to play anyone but Jack Nicholson. It probably is. But more to the point, this movie vexed me no end because I was such a fan of Election and Citizen Ruth (and, more lately, Sideways, though—don't write—I'm fully aware of the case against; I'm not convinced, however, that this case, or the one against Lost in Translation, would have gathered so much steam absent the movies' success). I was fully prepared to like Schmidt. I loathed it. Coming from a director who is usually such a precise ironist, the false note of the final scene, especially, left me shocked and disgusted. And yet I suspect that the tonal difference between this film and Election was a matter of millimeters—millimeters that just happened to fall across some crucial line separating lampoon from contempt. (Speaking of Election, Quiet Bubble mentions in passing that it's one of his cows. I'm curious why, but in a way I don't want to know since QB has great taste and I wouldn't want to be talked out of my love for it.)
Next, two brave souls dissent from the common wisdom on a film that I personally have never heard a heartfelt negative word about, Waking Life:
• Earlier this week the Onion A.V. Club blog tossed out the question of what movies have inspired people to walk out of the theater, which got me thinking about this kind of stuff. So I thought I'd mention Richard Linklater's atrocious Waking Life. When it came out, I was in the middle of an extremely rigorous self-imposed academic hell at the University of Chicago, so the sight of Ethan Hawke or Julie Delpy standing on a pseudointellectual soap box spewing out "chicken soup for the soul"-brand political and social philosophy made me physically ill. I think this is a controversial choice, not because I've gotten into arguments about it with my friends (in fact, I haven't allowed any loved ones to see it if I could help it), but because of the rapt expressions of those around me when I was stumbling over them to get myself out of the theater as quickly as possible. I am sure they wouldn't agree with my assessment.
• When I read your post about attacking movies that everyone else loves, I immediately thought of Waking Life. I am alone among my friends who have seen this movie in thinking that it is 90 minutes of repetitive, self-impressed, pseudo-intellectual tripe. For some reason, the pretty pictures and elementary analyses blind the rest of my friends to its shallowness.
Conveeeeeniently, I haven't actually seen the movie and can't take a side. I'm a fan of Linklater, though that principally means I'm a fan of Dazed and Confused (as is the friend who wrote the first of these comments). So this should have been a natural choice for me, but something kept me from seeing it. Now—perhaps—I know what.
Next is another movie I've never seen. In this case, however, I've been congratulating myself on my judgment from the get-go.
Forrest Gump. The idea of the novel (I'm told) is that the generation of American history from, say, 1960 to 1980 is best rendered as a tale told by an idiot. The book was ironic, get it? Like most of the movies on this list, FG shows no awareness of the possibility of irony. A movie so bad as to constitute a small ethical catastrophe.
There are moments when I feel a shred of curiosity to check in on old Forrest. My idea of this movie's badness is so extreme as to make me think sometimes that it must have been misunderstood somehow. Then the moment passes.
Finally, I wanted to share this ultimate exercise in counter-intuition:
I haven't seen Citizen Kane for many years, perhaps an older me would like it more, but I found it uninvolving when I saw it many years ago. Some of the critical praise seems to emphasize technical accomplishments (camera movement, focus things) which is pretty much not of
interest to the average movie goer.
I first saw Citizen Kane in my late twenties. I was a teaching assistant in a course where it was on the syllabus. I had to be ready to field questions and grade papers about it, so I was watching it in large part out of duty, and looking at it in large part as a work of art whose greatness was beyond doubt. (Which didn't really distinguish me from anyone watching it for the first time with an awareness of this reputation.) So it was decided ahead of time that I would find it a masterpiece. Under these circumstances, it can feel very much as though your own discernment, rather than the object of your scrutiny, is what's actually under scrutiny. And yet I think this effect is more pronounced for some acknowledged masterpieces than others. Watching, say, Grand Illusion or All About Eve for the first time, any self-consciousness I might have felt about my responses was soon extinguished by absorption. Not so for Kane.
As I told the reader who sent it, the Kane comment also reminded me of a memorable scene in The Sopranos, when Carmela gets her lady friends together for a movie club in the Sopranos' cushy home theater. For the kickoff, they watch Citizen Kane. It's Carmela's pick; she opens the evening with some critics' comments about the greatness of the movie, and the lights go down. When they come up again, everyone looks at each other rather blankly, halfheartedly attempts to discuss the movie's merits and flaws ("So it was the sled? He shoulda told somebody"; "That guy was so conceited"), and moves on eagerly to neighborhood gossip. Apart from any parallels between Kane and Tony Soprano, the scene appeared to mock the mob wives crowd for emerging from a masterpiece so pristinely unmoved. Hell, I laughed at them. But since my experience of the movie was so heavily weighed upon by its elephantine reputation, I'm not certain, in retrospect, I should have felt quite so superior. At the very least, I'm envious of their opportunity to view the movie relatively baggage-free.
| Thursday, August 25, 2005
TT: Down the road
Up and coming on my calendar:
• SEPTEMBER 14: “Jules Olitski—Matter Embraced: Paintings 1950s and Now” opens at Knoedler & Company
• SEPTEMBER 20: Street date of Trio da Paz's Somewhere (Blue Toucan)
• OCTOBER 11: Street date of Hilary Hahn's first violin-piano CD, a set of four Mozart violin sonatas accompanied by Natalie Zhu (DG)
• OCTOBER 20: “Marks of Distinction: Two Hundred Years of American Watercolors and Drawings from the Hood Museum of Art” opens at the National Academy Museum
• OCTOBER 25: Street date of Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume Three (Warner Home Video)
|
TT: When size doesn't matter
My friend and colleague John Rockwell, the chief dance critic of the New York Times, has published a column called “Has Mark Morris Made Only One Masterpiece?” which is so wrong-headed that I felt I had to say something about it at once.
Here's part of what John wrote:
Mark Morris is rightly regarded as the finest modern-dance choreographer of his generation, and his "L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato," a richly varied, deeply moving evening-length setting of Handel's oratorio to Milton's text, is widely believed to be his masterpiece.
But if "L'Allegro," which was created in Brussels in 1988 and concluded its fifth New York run since 1990 at the New York State Theater on Saturday, is Mr. Morris's masterpiece, what's he done since? Should we, as dance lovers and Morris admirers, be concerned that a choreographer still in his prime—he's just shy of 49—and celebrating the 25th anniversary of his company has not produced a comparable triumph in the last 18 years? And if not, why not?...
Size and success are not synonymous. Scattered through the shorter dances that make up the typical mixed-repertory programs of the Mark Morris Dance Group are innumerable gems. But grandeur of scale does make an impact; it stretches out the canvas to allow more room for the rich emotional range and teeming variety of detail that enliven "L'Allegro."
(Read the whole thing here.)
Fudge the point though he does, John is not so implicitly arguing that size and success are synonymous, or something close to it. He remarks in passing, for instance, that “Mr. Morris has delivered eminently serious work in recent years. Like 'V,' set in 2001 to Schumann's E-flat Piano Quintet.” Yet that unforgettably compelling one-act dance, together with many other post-L'Allegro works of comparable weight and significance that John neglected to mention, is apparently as nothing when placed next to the full-evening L'Allegro, which to John's way of thinking is Morris' sole and only “masterpiece.”
How shall I start dismantling this argument-by-assertion? With the most appropriate possible comparison. Mark Morris is about to turn forty-nine. How many full-evening dances had the greatest of all choreographers, George Balanchine, made by the time he was forty-nine? Er, one. He made The Nutcracker in 1954, shortly before his fiftieth birthday, and while it is an indisputably great and miraculous ballet, I don't know anybody over the age of ten who'd be likely to call it his masterpiece. Too bad poor Mr. B piddled away the remainder of his first five decades on such comparatively minor jobs of work as Apollo, Prodigal Son, Serenade, Concerto Barocco, Ballet Imperial, Symphony in C, Orpheus, The Four Temperaments….
You see my point, of course. Yes, L'Allegro is a masterpiece, probably Morris' greatest achievement to date, and its scope is part and parcel of its greatness. To quote what I myself have written about it, L'Allegro is “a whole world of dance in a single evening, everything from childlike pantomime to knockabout comedy to complex groupings reminiscent of George Balanchine in their control and clarity.” This all-encompassing generosity of inspiration is one of the reasons why we respond to it so powerfully. But it's not great because it's long, nor are long works of art necessarily greater than short ones. In my opinion, the greatest ballet of the twentieth century—perhaps the greatest ever made—is Balanchine's half-hour-long Four Temperaments, which contains whole universes of thought and emotion. Jerome Robbins never made a single full-evening dance. Merce Cunningham has made only one, Ocean, and it's no masterpiece. To date Paul Taylor has made two, neither of which has remained in his company's repertory. And as for Morris, I can think of any number of his post-1988 dances which I and many other critics and dance lovers believe to be as good as L'Allegro, even if they're not as long. Dido and Aeneas, Love Song Waltzes, Grand Duo, Rhymes With Silver, The Office, The Argument, V: that's what Mark Morris has “done since,” just for starters. So unless you define “masterpiece” as “a person's single greatest achievement,” which John is obviously not doing in this context, then what he's written makes no sense at all.
Could it be that John has confused greatness with ambition? Or was he simply spinning out a big idea in haste and without sufficient forethought, as journalists, myself included, have been known to do on occasion when a deadline beckons? Beats me. But I wish he'd left this particular idea in the oven to bake a little longer before he served it forth in the New York Times.
|
TT: So you want to see a show?
Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.
Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.
BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex)
• Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
• Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content)
• Fiddler on the Roof (musical, G, one scene of mild violence but otherwise family-friendly)
• The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene)
• Sweet Charity (musical, PG-13, lots of cutesy-pie sexual content)
• 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)
OFF BROADWAY:
• Orson's Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language)
• Philadelphia, Here I Come! (drama, PG, closes Sept. 25)
• Sides: The Fear Is Real… (sketch comedy, PG, some implicit sexual content)
• Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly)
CLOSING SOON:
• Glengarry Glen Ross (drama, R, adult subject matter, copious quantities of spectacularly strong language, closes Sunday)
|
TT: Number, please
• Fee paid by Cosmopolitan in 1932 for U.S. serial rights to Thank You, Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse's first full-length Jeeves novel: $50,000
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $607,551.90
(Source: Robert McCrum, Wodehouse: A Life)
|
TT: Almanac
"We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects."
William Hazlitt, "On the Pleasure of Hating"
| Wednesday, August 24, 2005
OGIC: This won't hurt a bit
So I'm hatching this crazy scheme over here that just might work: to get six whole hours of sleep tonight. I've been working fifteen-hour days and am in a pretty pitiable state, so I'm going to make this quick. Here are a handful of my favorite skewerings from the recent Ebert-inspired open call—which doesn't mean I agree with them…necessarily. But there's an art to doing this swiftly and fatally, and these readers have it down.
• Collateral. Oh God. Can we please just agree that it's time for the existential hit-man character to get two in the back of the head in a quiet Italian restaurant? Wised-up, amoral people don't decide to become hit-men because they don't see anything better to do, they become lawyers or lobbyists and make twice as much money without having to run from the police. Being a hit-man is necessarily an unpleasant and short life, and people who go into contract killing generally don't have a lot of other options, so let's just stop it with these Mephisto characters. And if you are going to use one, please don't have him be Tom Cruise talking about jazz.
• Eisenstein's October has been known to induce epileptic seizures in small children. They're the lucky ones.
• State and Main. OK, it's Vermont—get a couple old actors who've never been east of the Valley, put them in flannel shirts and rocking chairs and give them some really. stupid. lines. The part of this which was a send up of Hollywood types was funny, but the "real down home America" part was worse than painful and insulting. And I hate that ingenue with the squinty eyes, Julia Stiles.
• Rear Window. A man fears he may be a witness to a murder. Everyone else tells him he's nuts. They're wrong. That's a plot? Everything Jimmy Stewart's character thinks is happening IS happening. Not a single twist, surprise, or discovery. Dreadful. And the moment where he blinds the beefy murderous assailant with...a camera flash? Woeful. The only reason to watch: The glorious women. Thelma Ritter gives a perfect performance. And was anyone ever more beautiful than Grace Kelly is here? So gorgeous, it hurts.
• My sacred cow is "Reds," Warren Beatty's 1981 ode to John Reed. I saw it then and remember it like it was yesterday. Clocking in at 200 minutes, the movie just dragged, on and on and on. Around the 60 minute mark, people started stirring, heads bobbing and turning, the realization dawning that we're not even a third of the way through. After the intermission, fewer than half of my fellow theater-goers returned. I sat in an aisle seat, one foot wandering left to the aisle, the other uncertainly planted in front, as the seats around me continued to empty out, frustrated theater-goers muttering to themselves as they all but ran up the aisle. As the movie slowly ground its way into its third hour, I stopped debating whether to leave, the whole thing having become a weird sort of endurance contest, one of those things you do just to say you did it, no matter how excruciating the pain.
And then, of course, Beatty won an Oscar for best director.
Googling "Reds" just now I was heartened to note that no less an authority than Paul Schrader, the writer of "Taxi Driver," among many others, had a similar experience:
"Paul Schrader likes to talk. Fortunately for his listeners, he is a very good storyteller. 'I remember I was over at Paramount, and Warren Beatty and I had been fooling around, doing this Howard Hughes thing. He had made the film "Reds" and he was showing it on the lot, and he wanted me to come. I was so tired. I thought, "Well, I'll sit way in the corner, way in the back. If I fall asleep, I'll fall asleep, and nobody will know." Nobody told me there was an intermission. So the lights come up, everybody from Barry Diller on down is in the room, all of Warren's friends, and I am sound asleep. Afterward, one of Warren's minions came over to me and said that Warren had expressed his displeasure. And I said, "Look, I know it took Warren 10 years to make this movie, but it took me three hours to see it, and I can guarantee you that three hours of my life mean more to me than 10 years of Warren's.'"
Hee. More where these came from tomorrowish. Sleep well!
|
TT: Strict observance
Sorry, folks, but that crackling noise you hear in the middle distance is the sound of me burning out. I'm driving up to Connecticut this morning to see a show, which I consider more than sufficient reason not to blog again today. Though I do finally seem to be on the verge of licking this damn cold—I actually took a two-hour nap yesterday afternoon that was blessedly rich in Rapid Eye Movement, something on which I've been severely short since last Thursday....
Anyway, see you tomorrow. Or maybe Friday. (And don't ask me which Friday.)
|
TT: Number, please
• Total cost in 1937 of the 1,340-square-foot Herbert and Katherine Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin, including Frank Lloyd Wright's architect's fee of $450: $5,500
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $73,341.81
(Source: Doreen Ehrlich, Usonian Houses)
|
TT: Almanac
Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.
Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders come
Which only makes you eloquent.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Habit of Perfection"
| Tuesday, August 23, 2005
TT: Price was right
I'm in The Wall Street Journal today with a piece about…well, you've kind of got to read it:
As of yesterday, "Atelier de Cannes," a 1958 crayon drawing by Pablo Picasso, was still on sale at www.costco.com. Price: $129,999.99. You'll find it listed under "Gadgets, Gifts & Art," along with art prints by the likes of Chagall, Dufy, Miró, Modigliani and, er, Peter Max. The quality of these latter works is fairly modest (the Picasso isn't very good, either), but the fact that you can buy them on the Web has brought the warehouse chain reams of free publicity. Yet no one seems to remember that what Costco is doing is nothing new. Forty years ago, Sears, Roebuck & Co. was selling Picassos and Chagalls, not to mention Rembrandts, Dürers, Goyas, Whistlers, Mondrians and Wyeths, all of them bearing the imprimatur of a celebrated connoisseur who was better known for making such grisly movies as "The Fly" and "House of Wax."
Vincent Price is now best remembered for his supporting role in the classic 1944 film noir "Laura," but in the '60s he was a full-fledged movie star, albeit one who never got the girl—at least not while she was still alive. An elegantly campy gent who in his later years specialized in playing pardon-me-sir-while-I-cut-off-your-head psychopaths, Price was also one of Hollywood's most passionate art collectors, a former student at the Courtauld Institute of Art who had been well on his way to becoming an art historian when he abruptly changed course, went on the London and Broadway stages and became an overnight success.
In 1962 Price was approached by George Struthers, Sears's vice president of merchandising, who believed his company could sell fine art to the American public the same way it sold lawn mowers and ladies' underwear. Price agreed to pick the pieces and serve as spokesman, and the Vincent Price Collection of Fine Art was off and running, first in Sears's Denver store, then in other stores across the country, with a mail-order line added the following year….
OpinionJournal.com, the Journal editorial page's Web site, has posted a free link to this piece, so you can read the whole thing by going here. Not that I'd dream of discouraging you from buying a copy of today's paper and turning to the Leisure & Arts page (or, better yet, subscribing to the Online Journal by going here).
|
OGIC: "Good" Movies You Hate
Here's the raw list of sacred cattle proffered by our readers, presented in clever subdivisions. Starting tomorrow I'll share some of the actual reviews, which were delightfully bitter and bilious. Ebert who?
THE EVER POPULAR
American Beauty (5 mentions)
Lost in Translation (3)
Breaking the Waves (2)
Platoon (2)
Waking Life (2)
Dances with Wolves (2)
Pulp Fiction (2)
CAPITAL-S SACRED
Citizen Kane
The Third Man
Rear Window
Nashville
I RESPECTFULLY PROTEST!
Rushmore
Barcelona
Last Picture Show
Goodfellas
I HEARTILY CONCUR
About Schmidt
Immortal Beloved
Good Will Hunting
As Good as It Gets
The Natural
A FEW PAIRINGS
Schindler's List and Life Is Beautiful
Fahrenheit 9/11 and Passion of the Christ
2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind
THE CRUISE FACTOR
Vanilla Sky
Magnolia
Collateral
WHO EXACTLY IS GENUFLECTING?
Cheaper by the Dozen
Independence Day
Cabin Boy
Troy
…AND THE REST
Ordinary People, Primary Colors, The Vanishing, The English Patient, The Crying Game, Talented Mr. Ripley, Million Dollar Baby, A Letter to Three Wives, Reds, Short Cuts,
Forrest Gump, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happy Endings, Love's Labour's Lost, The Goodbye Girl, Talk to Her, State and Main, Andrei Rublev, Gandhi, Z, Dersu Uzala, October,
Mississippi Burning, Dead Man, Everything Quentin Tarantino Has Ever Done, A Clockwork Orange, The Piano, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Ferris Bueller's Day Off
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Tuesday, August 23, 2005 | Permanent
link |
TT: Elsewhere
Don't think I'm not still sick! I'm mostly better, but not entirely. I had to cover the Fringe Festival last night, and my Wall Street Journal drama column is due this morning. So in lieu of original content, I offer you this snapshot of my recent reading:
• Robert Birnbaum interviews Camille Paglia:
CP: I'm on a crusade—it's to say to the poets and the artists, “Stop talking to each other. Stop talking to coteries. I despise coteries in any form. You are speaking to a coterie, OK. Stop the snide references to the rest of the world who didn't vote with you in the last election.” This is big. Because we have all separated again. After 9/11, everyone was united. We are separated again thanks to what has happened in politics. People in the art world are full of [a] sanctimonious sense of superiority to most of America. But they must address America, learn to address America. Yes, have your friends, have the people who support what you are doing in the art world, but you have to recover a sense of the general audience and the same thing I am saying to the far right, get over the sneering at art, the stereotyping—
RB: They started it.
CP: Wait a minute. The far right wouldn't have any opinions about art if it weren't for those big incidents in the late '80s to the '90s when some stupid work was committing sacrilege.
RB: You're referring to Andrés Serrano?
CP: Yeah, some 10th-rate thing. It's always Catholic iconography, I might point out. I am atheist, by the way. It's never Jewish. It's never Muslim. So I am saying this is a scandal. The art world has actually prided itself on getting a rise out of the people on the far right. Thinking, “We're avant-garde.” The avant-garde is dead. It has been dead since Andy Warhol appropriated Campbell's Soup labels and Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe into his art. The avant-garde is dead. Thirty years later, 40 years later, people will think they are avant-garde every time some nudnik has a thing about Madonna with elephant dung, “Oh yeah, we are getting a rise out of the Catholic League.”…
Read the whole thing here.
• Speaking of countertakes, Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post offers this unexpected slant on The Aristocrats:
For the comics, life is lived onstage, in the limelight, to the love and applause of anonymous crowds. It involves a great deal of travel, friendships with other gifted, crazed people but just as frequently, bitter rivalries, endless feuds, treachery and betrayal. If you win, you win the power of fame, which after the second day gets you nothing but good tables in restaurants where rubes bother you for autographs as you suck down your linguini, the right to fail with a better class of woman and, of course, the emptiness of being unconnected to anything larger than the self.
Boy, that's some act. Whadaya call that act?
The losers….
• And speaking of critics, Mr. Something Old, Nothing New proposes a high-camp grudge match:
Who would win in a fight between the two meanest, cruellest, wisecrackiest critics in the history of movies: Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) in Laura or Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) in All About Eve?
I'm going with DeWitt. Lydecker may be more dangerous in certain respects, but DeWitt has the size advantage, and a cooler head, and more strategic ability. His decision to blackmail and form a weird alliance with Eve (making them, according to some interpretations, 1950's original Ambiguously Gay Duo), is a far sounder strategic decision than Waldo's Pygmalion act with Laura. Addison in three rounds unless Waldo has something stashed in his old clock.
However, if it's a question of who's better at wisecracks, then Lydecker obviously wins….
The title of this posting, by the way, is “Battle of the Evil Critics.” I myself would have pleaded not guilty were it not for my most recent Wall Street Journal review, which I fear may have been a touch on the evil side. (Not that there's anything wrong with it!)
• The Little Professor, one of the 'sphere's more obsessive bibliomanes, offers an alarming list of “signs that the books have taken over.” Item No. 1:
Your parents send you an article from the L.A. Times that describes the lengths to which people will go to house their personal libraries—converting a garage, for example. It's not clear if this article is meant to be prophetic or admonitory.
Yikes!
• Mr. Jubilation Rising, a blogger new to me, bids a lovely farewell to Vassar Clements, one of the all-time great country fiddlers:
Vassar was a fiddler, plain but not so simple. To borrow part of a line, the violin is a harsh mistress. In symphony halls, it is revered and somewhat feared. In shade-tree string bands, it is just feared. Playing a violin is like spending time with a beauty. Even a virtuoso performance gains only passing admiration, the object of affection usually in a hurry to return to the mirror. But every so often a suitor comes along with the ability to tame. That was Vassar.
It sure was. I spent part of the summer of 1974 kicking around Nashville, playing in broken-bottle joints and looking for Vassar Clements—but that's another story….
• Ms. DevraDoWrite goes to a way scary gig:
It was a sad night. Sad to see an old friend who no longer has what it takes, surrounded by second or third rate musicians. He wears a suit jacket that looks slept in and no one on the bandstand smiles. He wanders on stage alone, and starts to play. I wonder if he begins his program solo, then works up to duo and builds on—then I realize he's just warming up almost as if unaware he's on stage. The pianist arrives, as does the sax. The drummer gets seated. He counts off and they begin just as the bassist walks on stage. They've begun anyway….
(No, I don't know who it was, and I'm glad I don't. I've been to gigs that were just like that.)
• Ms. Searchblog, who blogs about her struggles with chronic depression when not reflecting on other aspects of life, love, and art, waxes especially eloquent in this posting:
If anyone told me nearly two years ago that I would still be fighting to regain my mental health in August 2005, I would have dismissed such projections as delusional, or at least laughable.
Yet here I am—still struggling, still trying so hard to get better, still fighting the good fight.
Each morning when I open my eyes, my first thought is, “OK—I can make it through today. I can do it.” Although I've repeated this mantra every morning for almost two years, I don't feel sorry for myself—not at all. It's simply the way my life is lived now: a highly internalized struggle that yields inconsistent results. My major depressive episode led to a terrifying mental breakdown, which resulted in chronic depression. That's the way it is….
Read this one, whether you've been there or not. And be sure to take the test at the end—it's very good for a laugh.
• Mr. CultureSpace does the job on Sin City:
Corruption contrasts with the men's hearts of gold. But this sort of yin-yang balance, this universal dualism, is the type of clichéd, glib sensibility of a twelve-year old, or someone who thinks life is really this simple. I loved Miller's comics when I was young, to be sure. But I grew up….Sin City is devoid of color, but not the kind you see. Rather, it's devoid of the kind you feel, and this is the worst sin of all.
Haven't been. Won't now.
• Lastly and conversely, the adorable Cinetrix posted about Me and You and Everyone We Know back in June, but for some reason it slid past me. Catching up with her thoughts now, I'm struck by her astute and subtle comparison to another of my favorite films:
At the end of Me and You, I felt the way I did after seeing Trust for the first time, or The Dreamlife of Angels: I had been somewhere new and strange and was reluctant to come back to the "real" world; I had fallen in love.
I also can't remember the last time I saw a film so gentle. The narrative ebbs and flows, exerting a tidal pull on the characters, exposing their glistening idiosyncrasies to our gaze for a moment before sweeping them away. I can't wait to see it again….
I wish I'd said that. (I will, I will.)
|
TT: Number, please
• Amount Scott Bradley was paid in 1954 to compose the musical score to a Tom and Jerry cartoon for MGM: $1,000
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $6,904.77
(Source: Daniel Goldmark, Tunes for 'Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon)
|
TT: Almanac
"Even a great performance can't spoil a fine composition."
Erich Wolfgang Korngold (quoted in Louis Kaufman, A Fiddler's Tale)
| Monday, August 22, 2005
TT: Eleven things I've learned while sick
(1) The computer is the worst enemy of a workaholic with a chest cold.
(2) The iPod is his best friend (especially if he sleeps in a loft).
(3) Don't watch Red Rock West when you have a fever.
(4) Good movies for invalids: Barbershop, Clueless, Defending Your Life, Speed. (Did you realize that Clueless is now ten years old? Wow.) Also good: Nero Wolfe, Patrick O'Brian, twice- and thrice-read theatrical biographies.
(5) Soup gets tiresome.
(6) Insofar as possible, don't let unwashed dishes pile up in the sink. The resulting spectacle is depressing and inhibits recovery.
(7) If you have to choose between staying dirty and taking a cold shower, take the shower.
(8) There is no truer friend than the one who offers to run errands for you.
(9) When buying groceries under the influence of antihistamines, don't just look at the pictures—read the labels.
(10) All cabbies are sadistic psychopaths. Show no weakness!
(11) Yours is not the only blog in the 'sphere.
|
TT: Inside tracks
• Gene Bertoncini, who plays for happy eaters on Sundays and Mondays at Le Madeleine, is appearing this Thursday at the Jazz Standard in a “celebration” of the release of Quiet Now, his second CD of unaccompanied solos for acoustic guitar. As I wrote in the liner notes for its predecessor, Body and Soul, Gene is
one of those musicians whom I seek out, no matter where they're working. That's the nice thing about living in New York—you can really keep up with great artists like Gene—and that's why I can say with certainty that his playing has gotten better with every passing year. The emotions grow steadily deeper, the harmonies richer and more oblique, the textures more eloquently spare. He was never one to throw around his technique, but now he doesn't waste any notes at all: every one rings true….
For more information, go here.
• Last Dance, Mirra Bank's 2002 cinema-verité documentary about Pilobolus, is playing on the Sundance Channel tonight at 9:30 p.m. EDT. It's a startlingly frank backstage look at how Pilobolus collaborated with Maurice Sendak to create A Selection, a dance about the Holocaust. I can personally testify to its candor, for I happened to be visiting Pilobolus' rehearsal studio when it was filmed (I was reporting on the making of A Selection for a New York Times story) and ended up becoming one of the film's on-camera talking heads. It is, if I do say so myself, a damned fine piece of work, and since it has yet to be released on DVD, I commend it to your atttention.
For more information, go here.
• Check out all the new Top Fives, O.K.? I may be sick, but I'm still consuming art....
|
TT: Number, please
• Weekly salary paid to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1937 for screenwriting duties in Hollywood: $1,000
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $13,334.87
(Source: Steve Chagollan, "F. Scott Fitzgerald Gets a Second Act After All," New York Times, Aug. 21, 2005)
|
TT: Almanac
"To have no pride as an actor is fatal. To have the right amount is almost impossible. It gets in the way of good work; the lack of it prevents your taking chances, daring to go further than you have before, risking whatever reputation you have—not with the public, but with your director or playwright. You need to know they will allow you to rehearse awkwardly, embarrassingly, in your search for certain elements in the play. Not carelessly, but with the kind of abandon that only comes with real love.
"Our happiest theatre memories are those when that love exists in equal measures for the actors and the audience. When the play is received as love is received, with trust, unquestioningly. Because it is being given with confidence and truth and, yes, pride. Beautiful pride."
Marian Seldes, The Bright Lights: A Theatre Life
| Friday, August 27, 2004
OGIC: The half-million
A few hours ago, About Last Night logged its 500,000th page view. From my perspective especially, this is a humbling and amazing figure—far more amazing, I daresay, to we bloggers than to you readers. The only thing I really want to say on this subject is simple but very deeply felt: thanks. For reading, for linking, for writing, and for blogrolling us. I'm sure that all goes double for Terry.
The weekend is now officially on, and any stray cocktails that might happen to cross my path as it proceeds will be drunk to you, dear readers.
|
TT: Signoff
I just got back from Theater Row, where I thought I was going to see the budding young actor who doubles as my trainer carry a sword in a studio performance of Terence’s The Eunuch. (Keep the jokes to yourself, please.) Alas, the studio door was locked and the box office unhelpful, so I hailed a cab and headed uptown to my apartment, which is currently in a fleeting state of grace, the cleaning lady having come and gone. All surfaces are dusted, all corners straightened, all flowers watered. A fellow blogger poked her head in to see the Teachout Museum yesterday afternoon and said, "It looks…monastic!" Well, maybe not quite, but ’twill serve, ’twill serve.
I have one more piece to finish before I shut the shop down, a Commentary essay on Jerome Robbins, and on the way home I tried to decide whether to stay up late or get up early. As the cab picked its way north, I saw that the night sky over Manhattan was full of alien presences—low-flying blimps and helicopters hovering in all the wrong places—so I decided to knock off for the evening, watch Cary Grant and Leslie Caron in Father Goose, and leave Robbins for tomorrow morning. If the bad guys are planning to pay a visit, I’d prefer not to be writing about West Side Story when they come. Besides, I don’t often get to spend a quiet evening in my apartment when it’s neat and tidy, and I’d just as soon spend it sitting in the living room, alternately watching TV and communing with the contents of the Teachout Museum. You don't really appreciate your surroundings when you're hunched over a hot iBook, tapping away.
Of course I don’t really think there’s trouble afoot, at least not imminently. I’m mainly just beat to the socks—it’s been a long, long week—and happy to have an excuse, however far-fetched, to down my tools. I took a nap this afternoon and dreamed I was editing a paragraph from my Robbins essay. It’s bad enough when you dream about the piece you’re writing, but when you dream about editing the piece you’re writing, you know you need to take a break. This, needless to say, is exactly what I’m planning to do. You won't be hearing from me again until September 6. Like the cleaning lady, I’ve done my best to make things neat and tidy for Our Girl in Chicago. In fact, I just finished updating the Top Five module of the right-hand column, which now contains four brand-new postings for your edification. I was briefly tempted to check my e-mailbox one last time before signing off, but I decided against it, so if you wrote to me today in the hopes of getting an immediate reply, you’re out of luck.
Me, I’m in luck. Not counting Christmas, it’s been a year since I took a whole week off, and I can already taste it. In the meantime, Cary Grant awaits, followed by rapid eye movement, followed by a couple of thousand words on the iBook, followed by…but that’s a secret. I’ll tell you what I did after it’s done.
For now, have fun with Our Girl. I see that people in thirteen time zones are reading "About Last Night" as I write these words. May all of them, and all of you, wish me well.
|
TT: Who was that masked man?
Regular readers know that I’ve been putting the pedal to the metal for most of the summer, both here and in my various day jobs, and it struck me that I’d earned a little time off. The Republican convention seemed like a perfect opportunity for a Manhattan-based aesthete to shut up shop, so I went to The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, hat in hand, and asked if I could skip a couple of deadlines. They said yes (not, I hope, with relief!).
Even though I write "About Last Night" for love, not money, it’s still hard work, and I need a break from it no less than from my paying gigs. So starting at midnight tonight, I’m going up the spout for a week. In spite of all temptations, I won’t be posting or checking my e-mailbox again until Monday, September 6. Until then, the blog belongs to Our Girl in Chicago, who is all freshened up after her recent hiatus and has scads and piles of things about which she longs to write.
What will I do? Where will I be? I’m not telling. Perhaps I’ll don a false mustache and walk the streets of New York incognito, eavesdropping on conventioneers. Perhaps I’ll flag a freight train and let it whisk me off to parts unknown. All I can say is that I plan to do no writing of any kind between now and September 6, except for a few hastily scrawled words on the odd postcard. Otherwise, I’m standing mute.
Have fun while I’m gone. Send lots of nice mail to Our Girl. Check out all those other cool blogs listed in the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column.
Not to worry—I’ll be back.
|
TT: Is seeing believing?
Friday again, and I’m back in The Wall Street Journal with my weekly drama column. Today’s centerpiece is Guantánamo: "Honor Bound to Defend Freedom," which I found problematic for a whole welter of reasons:
"Guantánamo" is a dramatization by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo of material drawn from interviews, letters, transcripts of public hearings and other documents. It asserts that several British nationals currently detained at the U.S. naval base on Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay are innocent—and that all 585 detainees, whom the Pentagon claims are terrorists with ties to al Qaeda or the Taliban, are being treated like "animals."
Theatrically speaking, the trouble with "Guantánamo," which opened last night at 45 Bleecker, is that it isn’t really a play. The script consists of undigested slabs of talk, coarsely woven together and staged by Nicolas Kent and Sacha Wares in the manner of a political cartoon, with some actors addressing the audience directly and others miming in the background on a sketchy prison-camp set. Though the performers, including Kathleen Chalfant ("Wit"), do their best to give it life, the first act is dull, and while the second act is more compelling, it’s still dramatically inert. (The audience response at the preview I saw was tepid.) But "Guantánamo" isn’t a debate, either. Instead, it’s more like a reading of the court record of a show trial in which only one side was allowed to speak….
I also reported on six New York International Fringe Festival plays, all of them favorably. Since five of the six shows are still open (Chris Earle’s brilliantly polished Radio :30 has ended its run), I’ll reprint my capsule reviews here, with a strong recommendation that you try to catch at least one of them between now and Sunday:
• "The Bicycle Men," written and performed by a lunatic quartet of Chicago-based comedians, is a zany mini-musical about a nerdy American tourist (Dave Lewman) whose bicycle breaks down in a French village. Deliciously Francophobic mayhem ensues, interrupted at random intervals by totally irrelevant songs. A hoot and a half (Players Theatre, Saturday at 4:45 p.m.).
• Negin Farsad’s "Bootleg Islam" is an eye-opening I-was-there monologue by a second-generation Iranian-American woman who went to Tehran for her cousin’s wedding and saw more than she bargained for. More a stand-up routine than a fully developed one-person show, but smart, funny and fascinating all the same (Paul Sharpe Contemporary Art, Friday at 9:15 p.m. and Saturday at 7 p.m.).
• "Go Robot Go," written by and starring Julie Shavers, is a school-of-"Avenue-Q" play with music (the band does most of the singing) about late-capitalist alienation among the twentysomething cubicle dwellers of New York. Philip Carluzzo’s score needs to be built up, but the script, staging and performances—especially Ms. Shavers’ sweetly gawky star turn—are ready for prime time (Our Lady of Pompeii Demo Hall, Saturday at 9 p.m.).
• Colin Campbell’s "Golden Prospects: A Los Angeles Melodrama" is a postmodern boo-and-hisser about dirty work in the orange groves and oil fields of sunny California. Lively, unpretentious fun (Linhart Theatre, Sunday at 2:45 p.m.).
• Rolin Jones’ "The Jammer: A Roller Derby Love Story" is a charmer about a nice Catholic boy from Coney Island (Kevin Rich) who skates his way to the small time. Though the script is a bit too thin to stand on its own, it’d make a fabulous book for a rock-and-roller-skate musical. Outstanding direction and choreography by Greg Felden and Tim Acito (Players Theatre, Friday at 5 p.m.).
No link. You know what to do.
|
TT: Guest almanac
"I hate my deafness; it's a comic infirmity as opposed to blindness which is a tragic infirmity."
David Lodge, quoted in the Daily Telegraph, Aug. 23, 2004 (by way of MoorishGirl)
| Thursday, August 26, 2004
TT: Mid-afternoon pick-me-up
Do this:
(1) Go here.
(2) Scroll down to the link that says "Northwest Passage."
(3) Read what Lileks says.
(4) Click on the link, which will cause your computer to download an mp3 file containing Woody Herman’s 1946 recording of "Northwest Passage."
(5) Crank up the volume really loud.
(6) Enjoy yourself.
Optional extra-credit assignment:
(7) Read "Elegy for the Woodchopper," the chapter about Herman in A Terry Teachout Reader.
|
OGIC: Essentialism
On one leg of my delightful recent vacation (about which more soon) I was close enough to the northern border to be able to listen to CBC Radio One, where I heard an installment of a miniseries called "50 Tracks". Proceeding one decade at a time, the show's host Jian Ghomeshi and his guests are picking the fifty essential songs of the 20th century. Last week's show covered the 1980s, which yielded:
1. "Billie Jean" [Michael Jackson]
2. "With or Without You" [U2]
3. "Message" [Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five]
4. "Fight the Power" [Public Enemy]
5. In a tie, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" [Joy Division] and "When Doves Cry" [Prince]
The runners-up were Eddy Grant's "Electric Avenue" and "Hungry Like the Wolf" by Duran Duran.
Now, I'm a child of the 80s, and it's the popular music from this decade that stirs up the strongest raw feeling in me. The music I love from these years, and the music I hate, rings up equally high readings on the nostalgia meter. All of it, the good and the bad, sounds affectingly like my life once upon a time. Somebody, I can't remember who, said "memory is the key to everything, but with it comes nostalgia, which is the key to nothing," a dictum I sort of loathe but grudgingly credit—although, then again, I don't think my own attachment to nostalgia is an illusion that it will unlock or illuminate anything. To flip-flop yet some more, maybe nostalgia is the key to lists like this. In other words, it's the key to something—just not something meaningful.
It turns out that "essential" is a tricky criterion to pin down, though not a bad one if you take it, as I do, as connoting influence and quality in roughly equal parts, along with a soupçon of, you know, je ne sais quoi (this is where the nostalgia comes in). By these standards, there's nothing on the Radio One's 1980s list that absolutely begs to be lopped off, and yet it's an oddly unsatisfying laundry list. Is it trying to be too representative? Is it too focused on including essential artists at the expense of great songs? Surely Michael Jackson and Prince need to be there, but the panelists' cases for including these particular songs from their respective 1980s oeuvres carried a whiff of compromise and overthinking, as though the songs were bundles of abstract qualities that needed to be checked off.
And though it may be awfully lowest-common-denominator of me, I have to question how Joy Division ended up in the top 5 while Duran Duran, a single well-chosen chord of whose music elicits a positively Pavlovian response in everyone I know who hit 16 during the 80s, didn't make the cut. A friend raised the similar question of Madonna (if she cracked our list, we agreed, it would be with "Material Girl").
And so the CBC's list does its proper work: starting some good snarling brawls. (OK, I'm not much of a snarler, but you get my drift.) Take a look at the whole list here and send some fighting words. I'll also accept predictions for the top five from the 90s, a decade that sounds altogether fuzzier to my by-then-post-teenage ears. I'll go ahead and shoot the fish in a barrel that is "Smells Like Teen Spirit," but beyond that I'm stumped.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, August 26, 2004 | Permanent
link |
OGIC: Wish I were there
Cinetrix is recommending to New Yorkers a BAM film series that starts today, I Can Hear the Guitar: Selected by Olivier Assayas. You should, of course, always heed the Cinetrix's directives. Much like Dr. Science, she knows more than you do. But in this case even more than usual.
The series slate includes a movie I adore and long to see again, Assayas's own Cold Water. Alas, it's a hard movie to get your hands on. Originally made for French television as a sort of after-school special pour sophisticates, it's a compact, eloquent, and utterly affecting little mood piece. Here's BAM's précis:
Made as part of a series produced by French television depicting autobiographical stories of filmmakers at age 16, Assayas’ contribution takes place in 1972. Young lovers Gilles and Christine are separated after she gets caught during a robbery attempt. She is committed and he drifts aimlessly, until a rendezvous at a party in the country. Cold Water features the most celebrated sequence in any Assayas film, an astounding set piece scored to 60s rock-n-roll playing, and often repeating mid-song, from a turntable.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Terry will be at one of the four screenings next Friday, September 3d: 2:00, 4:30, 6:50, or 9:15. (I'm planning on hounding him into it.) So be sure to say Hey, Terr!
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, August 26, 2004 | Permanent
link |
TT: They lost it at the movies
I’m in The Wall Street Journal today, a special midweek appearance—I wrote a piece for the Leisure & Arts page, a short tribute to Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, and David Raksin, all of whom died recently. Here’s part of what I said:
Three important American composers died this past month. Had they written operas or symphonies, their deaths would have been front-page news. Instead, Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith and David Raksin scored Hollywood films, and so they never got the respect they deserved. (Raksin’s New York Times obituary, for instance, was written not by a music critic but by Aljean Harmetz, an entertainment reporter.) Yet their best work was fully deserving of critical attention….
Why weren’t these talented men more widely known in their lifetimes? Because the art they practiced was long treated as an ugly stepchild by classical music critics, most of whom took it for granted that anyone who chose to work in Hollywood had sold his soul to the devil of commercialism for the highest possible price. Even a distinguished, solidly established European composer like Miklós Rózsa was written off by narrow-minded highbrows after he wrote the music for such box-office smashes as "Double Indemnity" and "Ben-Hur."
As a result of this bigoted attitude, few major American classical composers dared to moonlight in Hollywood (except for Aaron Copland, who scored "Of Mice and Men," "Our Town" and "The Heiress," the last of which won him a well-deserved Oscar). Instead, most of the outstanding film composers of the 20th century were full-time specialists who rarely if ever wrote concert music. Nor is it likely that they would have had much luck with it, since the vast majority of them were traditionally inclined, tune-prone artists who adhered wholeheartedly to the natural law of tonality at a time when their classical counterparts were bowing to the iron will of the atonal avant-garde—and alienating audiences in the process.
Now that the stranglehold of late modernism has given way at last to the deliberate accessibility of minimalism, so has movie music come to be widely regarded as an idiom worthy of closer critical scrutiny. The yearningly romantic scores of Bernard Herrmann, who worked with Orson Welles ("Citizen Kane"), Alfred Hitchcock ("Vertigo"), François Truffaut ("Fahrenheit 451") and Martin Scorsese ("Taxi Driver"), are well on the way to becoming concert-hall staples, and the finest work of Bernstein, Goldsmith and Raksin can’t be far behind….
No link, alas, so if you want to read more, buy a copy of today’s Journal, or go here to subscribe to the online edition. I recommend the latter.
| |
